More on Moon Water

I definitely agree with the point in the article that we should be sending landers and rovers to the lunar poles. Sample return would be good too.

As for the moon vs. Mars issue, the unmanned Mars program looks to me like it's already in danger of stagnating, no matter what happens with the moon. The mission tempo has already dropped off. Adding to MSL's problems, if the problems that MRO is having can't be fixed, then there's a risk that the amount of data returned will be further reduced. My understanding is that MSL data returns have already been scaled back from what they would have been if the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter had been launched. A loss of Odyssey or Mars Express would further constrain MSL.

Wingo is right, but he should differentiate between SMD now and SMD in 2007-2008. Under Stern, SMD started lunar LADEE and the International Lunar Network, and approved GRAIL's lunar interior mission as a Discovery mission. In total, SMD under Stern started 7 lunar missions focused on lunar SCIENCE. Now Weiler plans to kill off all lunar flight missions in SMD after GRAIL. It's a shame. The barrier to entry at the Moon is low, and as we study it, we find more and more interesting surprises.

Mars as a destination for humans is just not possible given our current propulsion technology. The Moon and other near-Earth objects are the only viable destination given our capabilities. Mars is a suicide mission and anyone who abdicates such a venture is just simply not intelligent enough to have a serious voice in the debate.

I think the rift is more along the lines of a manned presence on the moon vs Mars. ie, should we take people back to the moon or should we take people to Mars. I don't think anyone here or anywhere in the space community would be against Dennis' suggestions with regards to rovers and ISRU methods on the moon. Indeed, I, a manned Mars advocate (for many years) think that, and extended robotic industry plans, is the best course of action for the moon! :)

But I maintain that Mars, from a manned, person on the ground perspective, is the next best place for us to explore.

Let me echo Dennis' call for increased lunar robotic exploration missions-beginning with a drilling robot at the Moon's polar regions. Is there a way to conduct such a mission by a commercial space firm if NASA resists or cannot get such a mission funded? Must we wait decades or until a foreign nation does it for us?

I think the question of "what else haven't we found?" is one we should ponder long and hard before we start a lunar gold rush for it's water.

What else it there? Is there anything more valuable? What discoveries will we destroy in strip mining large areas of the lunar surface for water that is easily obtainable on earth?Let's build experiments to harvest lunar water, but put ten times more into finding what else is there. Let water be a discover that ignites us, but don't let it stop there!

Here in the western US, we've damed up all the rivers for cheap power and water, (which we still don't have enough of, BTW!) and in the process killed off huge salmon runs and changed other natural processes that may have had equal or greater value than cheap water. Let's take the time to do thing better this time as we look to exploit the moon. Let's not use the promise of water as a reason for a uncontrolled and unconsidered race to the moon.

Instead, let's focus on "what else haven't we found?" This is why many of us want to go back. Going in search of the unknown is exciting to scientist and non scientist alike. Let's capture the public imagination and no be afraid to say there is a ton we don't know about the moon (and Mars!) but we want to find out! Let's build a robust architecture that lets us go find the answers with manned and unmanned resources, and put producers from the History and Discovery channels in charge of telling the story to the public. If Deadliest Catch and Ghost Hunters have captured the imagination and generated legions of followers, why can't space exploration? NASA needs to be more open and let the engagement of the public be a important goal, and one which can be achieved by simply giving access to producers and camera crews, and not sitting on scientific results for the sake of a few researchers.

If we're going to be explorers space, then let's follow the paradigms that modern explorers follow, where publicity and engaging the public through entertainment is a vital part of keeping the stakeholders engaged and interested. The Apollo moon landings were compelling because people could watch them in real time and feel a part of it not through NASA PAO, but by content generated by media outlets from around the world! Engaging the public has to happen in near real time because they are not engaged by a trickle of difficult to understand peer reviewed science that can take years or decades to come out! NASA needs to realize that for most of America, watching the explorers doing the science is as or more interesting than the peer reviewed conclusions!

Let's go back, let's go back in a big way, let's go back for good, and let's let water just be the start of the journey, not the destination!



Ad astra!

It amazes me how many in the aerospace community, and in our government, while debating the merits of going back to either Luna or Mars, or any other celestial body in our solar system, are missing the whole point of going:

Exploration of the unknown = discoveries which propel our civilization forward.

Did anyone in Europe or Asia of the 1300 / 1400's AD do a cost versus benefit analysis before they set sail for the unknown in the West?

If we did some sort of economic calculation of the cost of Columbus' voyage of 1492, versus the value of the civilization which exists in the Western Hemisphere of Earth in late 2009, would anyone in Europe, at that time, have believed in roughly 500 years, descendants from the pioneers who made the subsequent voyages would walk on the Moon?

What is the value of their investment of over 500 years ago?

I have said it dozens of times in this forum, and I will say it once more: failure to push past the boundaries of knowledge, and the frontiers of the unknown, guarantees the failure of a civilization. This "law" is built into the fabric of our existence.

Any of us can dodge it, fake it out, ignore it, but the fact remains this "law" will catch up to us sooner or later, and if as a species we do not continue to explore, we will die.

This is the argument that needs to be made. Everything else discussed about "whether we should or we shouldn't" is secondary in importance to the primary law I have advocated in this post.

Think about it. Our resources as a planet are stretched thin. We have over six billion inhabitants on this planet, and the number is growing faster than the natural resources of the planet can sustain. The message is so excruciatingly simple, yet so difficult to understand, that we as a species and a civilization are dooming ourselves to annihilation for no other reason that an overt willingness to ignore what existence is telling us.

We must Boldly Go. We have two choices:

1) Self - destruction
2) Survival

It is long overdue that we choose option 2.

@Keith Vauquelin:

"Did anyone in Europe or Asia of the 1300 / 1400's AD do a cost versus benefit analysis before they set sail for the unknown in the West?"

I think you will find that they did. Profit was the primary motivation for the explorers and their sponsors. Gold, spices, and slaves. Finding new trade routes and lands to conquer/colonize were a means to acquire wealth.

FWIW... I'm reading about US history right now.

Apparently, nobody bothered making colonies until many, many decades after the first expeditions.

There were failed colonies.

These were also a bit easier than the Moon would be, even taking into account "technological inflation", since they weren't so much "frontiers" as they were well populated places where we mooched off the locals, bought land for beans, then killed them.

Some of the early colonies probably would have failed if it wasn't for the local help.

People love American frontier analogies.

If that's our measuring stick, and we start building bases only 60 years after Apollo, we'll be going pretty fast, and if our first colony of a few hundred people doesn't mysteriously vanish, we can safely say it was less dangerous too.

The only way to end the Moon vs. Mars debate is to finally establish permanently manned bases on the Moon. Once that's achieved, the only debate left will be whether or not we establish permanent space stations in Mars orbit first before we establish habitats on the Martian surface.

If we had put a base on the Moon back in the 1970s,80's or 90s, we'd probably already be on Mars.

More examples, in the long held human preoccupation with deserts...

Is it a sad or funny comment on our culture when someone accusing opponents in a debate of a lack of intelligence uses the word 'abdicates' for 'advocates'?

C'mon, folks. Please use the English language properly while we still have it around to use...

"More examples, in the long held human preoccupation with deserts..."

Who's talking about deserts???

Mars has water ice all over the place, and if the Moon has water ice too, we're just a few cheap probes away from knowing that.

Actually, with all the outer planet moons that are practically made of water ice, and places like Ceres that may have more freshwater than Earth, and all the ice hidden under Martian dirt, the sky is starting to look pretty wet IMHO.

"Mars is a destination of romance, the moon of utility"

Nicely said and undeniably true.

People love American frontier analogies.

It is interesting that in the early selling phase of the Apollo program that this meme was central to the sale. It has only been in the post Apollo era that NASA has tried to sell the science as the justification.

How's that going?

The science will come as a companion to exploration.

Humans don't engage in wide-ranging exploration because they want to. They do it because they are forced to do so through necessity. They look for other hunting grounds because they can't exclude others from the grounds they've worked in the past. They propose a hair-brained scheme to traverse the Atlantic in a caravel because they're in debt or otherwise in legal trouble and need an escape. Or they've fallen out of favour with the court and want to be the golden boy again so they propose a scheme of exploration, and the monarch lets them go because to do so is a good way to be rid of them. Or they're persecuted because of their beliefs and the flee the society of their birth in a fanatical, crazy bid to reach a place where they can start over. Who wants to hurl themselves into the void if things are warm and cozy and plentiful at the bottom of this gravity well? That said, I could imagine a shortage of strategic metals as a driver to go out there.

I really think we should explore a planet with a molten core or make one.

such as it is with spectrometers you can see what you wish to see.

Exploration and discovery are excellent reasons for visiting the Moon and Mars, with humans and with robots.

But making a path to Mars is still a poor justification for visiting, inhabiting, and exploiting the Moon. We do not yet know enough about the resources and how to exploit them to even begin to say how those resources are useful, much less essential, to the Mars program. The technology challenges e.g. dealing with lunar dust on fabric and airtight seals, are not necessarily comparable to the corresponding problems on Mars.

If we're going to treat the Moon like our new Plymouth, we should do it right -- with thorough non-destructive scientific study before large-scale in-situ resource utilization. To me that means treating the Moon at least as delicately as the US treats its National Parks, and setting aside any concept of exploiting lunar resources for 50-100 years. That in turn means basing the initial Mars HSF program on earth's resources alone.

Said another way, I don't think we are ready to treat the lunar poles like the Athabasca oil sands region of Canada.

@ Stasis -

And right behind them will be lawyers to represent them and politicians to tax their labor!
Before long business and science ventures will take hold. Civilization will move into the universe.
Exploration is good. Growth is good. A healthy economy is good.

Extinction is bad.

"Let me echo Dennis' call for increased lunar robotic exploration missions-beginning with a drilling robot at the Moon's polar regions. Is there a way to conduct such a mission by a commercial space firm if NASA resists or cannot get such a mission funded?"

Well, LunaCorp tried to get CMU-designed IceBreaker off the ground at some point.
http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.ri.cmu.edu+cmu+icebreaker

Also, Astrobotics the Google Lunar X-Prize contender, with Red Whittaker on board again is trying to get there now again.
http://astrobotictechnology.com/activities/future-missions/

There WAS a NASA ice-searching lander planned, called RLEP2, but MSFC screwed it up and Griffin cancelled it later.

Columbus' voyage to the New World might not have happened if the King's Treasurer hadn't opined that the return on investment could be huge. Jamestown was also a business proposition; while investors hoped gold would be returned, agriculture turned out to be America's product.

I'm not against the exploration of Mars. But it should be plain to see that the Moon can be brought into Earth's economic sphere much more readily than Mars can be. Closer proximity and a much smaller gravity well are the Moon's big advantages.

However, in order to really understand the resource potential of the Moon, we need instruments on the lunar surface. We need to do ground truthing of satellite data and we need to look under the surface to see what's there. This doesn't require humans; what it requires is the fervent desire to determine whether and how lunar activities can bring benefits to Earth, a planet that is already experiencing wars over resources.