Return to the moon a good thing?

"Dr. O" dr.o@xxxxx wrote in message
...

"Mike Rhino" wrote in message
...
"Dr. O" dr.o@xxxxx wrote in message
...

And, a moon base will have
a huge number of resupply issues, which may leave plenty of room for
a
variety of commercial companies to participate. In other words,
NASA
might be a good first customer to help these commercial space
companies
survive.

As a subcontractor maybe, but no commercial company will be involved
in
the
resupply of any moon base.

Some people are interested in commercial space flight, but that isn't
the
only option. Suppose we build a colony with 75 people on the moon.
Private
companies can provide all sorts of services to the colony. If you have
5
launches a year with 3 people per launch, you can build up to that
number
in
5 years. I think that we can get the cost of moon launches down below
the
cost of shuttle launches, so such a program wouldn't be all that
expensive.

Again, it won't be a private enterprise. The moon base will be property of
the U.S. government and the commercial company will merely be a
subcontractor.

I can envision a situation where Caterpillar owns a bulldozer and Lockheed
Martin owns a an aluminum mine and China owns a tool shop and Joe likes to
repair things and Harvard has a professor up there. If you have enough
people and companies up there, they will start contracting with each other.
Instead of one big corporation owning the moon rockets, I would rather see
many small companies owning many small objects on the moon. Caterpillar
would need NASA to get its bulldozer up there, but once the bulldozer is up
there, they don't need NASA anymore.

"Bruce Sterling Woodcock" wrote in
m:

I'm more curious who, if anyone, is going to vote for Bush now
that weren't going to vote for him before, because of this
proposal.


Besides the aforementioned FL and TX votes, I think that he may going for
the physics geek vote.

(TKalbfus) wrote in
:

Then why the Ban on human cloning? Big Business would surely like to
do that? A truly valueless president wouldn't care one way or the
other so long as he is in office

He places his Christian beliefs above his support for business.

(Henry Spencer) wrote in :

Cost reduction is the big key. Today's NASA appears to be incapable of
doing anything about progress toward *that* goal except hindering it.

This is true, and I'm going to play the devil's advocate by saying that
NASA *is* doing something about it, with it's "smaller, cheaper, faster"
philosophy. However, this doesn't seem to apply to major efforts, like the
ISS, only to planetary science missions, so Bush's Moon base may fall
victim to the same runaway costs.

Dave Bol writes:

LOL... although to me, Zubrin made a great deal of sense in his recent
Senate speech: http://www.marssociety.org/content/Zubrin102903.PDF


Sounds like more Blither From Bob.

Note that Zubrin is happy argue that the Apollo era was better because it
launched more unmanned missions, in spite of the fact that Mars Global Surveyor
told us more about Mars than the entire Mariner program.

On the other hand, shuttle era NASA flew far more manned missions, for more man
hours in space, than Apollo era NASA. This fact is avoided, since it is
inconvenient to his thesis.

Surely, the correct measure isn't number of missions or number of programs, but
value provided. On that basis, I would argue that the comparison favors the
shuttle era.

The high point of the Apollo era was probably Apollo 17.

Against that, the shuttle era has given us Hubble, Chandra, Galileo, Mars
Global Surveyor, Pathfinder and Spirit. So far.

Will McLean

"McLean1382" wrote in message
...

Against that, the shuttle era has given us Hubble, Chandra, Galileo, Mars
Global Surveyor, Pathfinder and Spirit. So far.

.... I'd put Voyager high up there too, with Opportunity, Cassini, and
Huygens (hopefully!) to follow soon on the list of successes.

I find it useful to look at things as manned vs. unmanned. By and large, I
think our unmanned missions have been very successful over the last few
decades, and I don't think a major change is warranted. Our manned missions
seem to draw the most fire - justifiably so, IMHO.

---
Dave Boll
http://www.daveboll.com/

"Dave & Janelle" writes:


"McLean1382" wrote in message
...

Against that, the shuttle era has given us Hubble, Chandra, Galileo, Mars
Global Surveyor, Pathfinder and Spirit. So far.

... I'd put Voyager high up there too, with Opportunity, Cassini, and
Huygens (hopefully!) to follow soon on the list of successes.

I'm pretty sure both Voyagers were launched from Titan-Centaurs before
the Shuttle was flying payloads.

--
Phil Fraering
http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com

In article ,
"Dr. O" dr.o@xxxxx wrote:

So who in this NG supports the new U.S. drive to return to the moon, and
possibly Mars (irrespective if it will become reality because since there
isn't any real NASA budget increase that's still very iffy)? I'm still not
too sure about it; what we're gonna do there and why to have a permanent
base there. It will just be an extremely expensive outpost of humanity.

I would rather see NASA being forced into a supportive role for commercial
space enterprises, developing cheap access to space capabillity which is
also relatively safe (i.e .hybrid rockets with manned capabillity, SSTO).

Um, why does NASA need to be "forced into a supportive role for
commercial space enterprises"? Did Detroit or the Wright Brothers need a
tame government organisation to provide support?

Mars is an interesting target but I would rather see movement on the
terraforming front, both politically (dividing up the land between Earth
nations) as well as more research on how best to do this (i.e. machines or
biotech).

Terraforming is so far down the track it's little more than a paper
concept at the moment. It's still not clear whether we'd even want to
terraform Mars.

--
Stephen Souter

http://www.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/

"Mike Rhino" wrote ...
When it comes to immigration, Bush seems to be a Surrender Monkey. I'm
hoping that the Democratic candidate moves to the right of Bush on this
issue. The Wall Street Journal is also strongly pro-immigration. They're
so addicted to the stock market that they just don't care about American
workers.

If they get to immigrate they will _be_ American workers paying American
tax to the American government and buying American goods from American
shops supporting the American economy.

Given the declining birth rate immigration of people of working age may be
exactly what the US needs. Try a little less knee-jerk protectionism and
a little more thought.

Paul Blay wrote:

"Mike Rhino" wrote ...
When it comes to immigration, Bush seems to be a Surrender Monkey. I'm
hoping that the Democratic candidate moves to the right of Bush on this
issue. The Wall Street Journal is also strongly pro-immigration. They're
so addicted to the stock market that they just don't care about American
workers.

If they get to immigrate they will _be_ American workers paying American
tax to the American government and buying American goods from American
shops supporting the American economy.

Sending money out of the US, importing their families to live largely
off welfare, and continuing the third-worldification of much of the US.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
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