Don’t get me wrong. I would love to see man return to the moon. I would practically go coo coo for cocoa puffs to see mankind reach Mars. But heck, if I’m going to put together a wish list I’d like to see people go to Europa to look for possible life in its deep oceans, or land on Titan and check out its strange liquid methane weather.
But let’s be practical. NASA’s current plans for both the moon and Mars are one-shots. You build a big-assed space craft here on Earth and send it off to your target. None of what you develop can be used for anything else. And little if any of what they would build would be re-usable. End result: Billions of dollars spent. Megatons of equipment and people sent off into space. Tiny amount of non-reusable equipment and, if all goes well, your people returned. This simply is not a very efficient method for space exploration folks.
I am therefore glad to see that NASA has essentially dropped all of these plans. Because there’s a better way to do it.
Make it cheaper, easier, and safer to get to Earth orbit. And don’t try to mix apples and oranges this time, like you did with the Space Shuttle, OK? We need one craft for people and a different one for equipment. This is for the simple reason that safety is the top priority for moving people. Whereas with equipment, we can make allowances for the occasional failure. Fortunately this appears to be exactly the direction NASA is taking, having already awarded money for cargo delivery to companies like SpaceX. Hopefully manned space craft will follow.
Why is Earth orbit so important? Because once you’re there you’ve got options you didn’t have on the planet. Want to go to the moon? Send up the parts for a Moon Shuttle and a Moon Lander. Assemble it in orbit and you now have a space craft and lander that can be used indefinitely. A further plus is that this new shuttle did not have to be designed to withstand the extreme stresses of dealing with Earth’s gravity and atmosphere. After assembly all you have to send up from earth is fuel and occasional spare parts. Sure, the initial up-front cost would be more than a single-shot moon mission, but once built you can now send people back and forth to the moon for a fraction of that initial cost!
The same thing with a Mars mission. You send up the pieces and assemble your craft in orbit. That way, once again, the space craft itself does not have to be designed to deal with aerodynamics and handling the extreme temperatures of reentry. That is one hell of a design savings right there.
And once things like that have been accomplished and we engineers experienced at actual deep space vehicle design and a work force that’s actually out there then things like missions to Jupiter and Saturn become real possibilities.
It’s 2010. We were already supposed to have thriving colonies on the Moon, Mars and the asteroid belt. We should have heard back from the Gnaridians on Alpha Centauri III about forming a Federation. There’d be a fleet of guard ships to keep the Titan slugs from causing trouble again. New research into fuels should mean that a kid would NEVER have to leave his robot pal behind on Ganymede.
I hate the 70′s for killing all of that.
actually, it’s possible to get to the moon in 6 months using nothing but the gravitational forces between the earth and moon with a very minimal amount of fuel. not ideal for manned missions, maybe, but would not require using cargo space for fuel on shipments up to your drop point in orbit.
I very much agree with that sentiment. IMHO (FWIW) it was the space shuttle that slowed down space exploration to a crawl. It was the wrong vehicle at the wrong time. By trying to be so many things at once it’s overly complex, which has led directly to 14 deaths. They should have kept development of their crew launching vehicle and cargo vehicle separate back in the 70′s — we’ve wasted more than thirty years on that damned shuttle.
Yeah, I could never quite get the shuttle. It just seemed like a plane that could fly really high, but it didn’t have the same kind of sexiness that the Moon missions had. I think the main reason it was used was that it was “recyclable”
A space station, a big working one rather than the experimental one up there now, would be perfect. As you point out, trips to the Moon and back are nothing when you don’t have to fight to get to orbit. Once you’re in orbit, Robert Heinlein said you’re halfway to anywhere, not just the Moon.
However, I have no faith in the bureaucracy. Ships that could easily be designed for interplanetary (non Earth landing) use would still be over-designed for every conceivable event and hence over-built, and you’re back where you started. I have absolutely no problem with “safety first” but it’s the “What if it fell into the Sun?” thinking that gets us $500 hammers in the military.
Burnt-out already?