Lunar and Asteroidal Water Enables Human Exploration

Hmmm....but I thought Barack and Buzz said there was no reason to go back to the Moon? Been there done that, left a footprint, got the t-shirt....

Water on the moon! Do you realize what that means for human exploration, exploitation and colonization in space???!

OH wait, we've been there before.

Nevermind.

Hey this could do away with all the scheming, talk and arm waving from the rocket science wannabees about how orbiting fuel depots, psycadelic space frisbees and other BS is necessary for moving beyond LEO.

Oh wait, I forgot, Apollo on steroids spam in a can, coupled with ISRU development on the moon would not only be a step backward but would not spur any technological advancement. Certainly not in keeping with Obama's vision.

Nevermind!

To clarify, Buzz has never said we should not go back to the moon; he has said we should join in an international partnership to do so, and not rerun a race against other nations with a focus solely on returning to the moon a la "Apollo on steroids".

I don't recall exactly what Buzz said but I know the President said we've already been there and he wants to leapfrog the moon and go straight to Mars.
Of course, after we spend the next 5-10 years thinking about it.

roflmao@everybody above!

hmmmmmm:

"creating a new public-private partnership to develop the Moon. I call it the Lunar Infrastructure Development Corporation (LIDC). The purpose of the LIDC would be to enable the nations of the Earth joint together and return to the Moon as an international cooperative venture. The LIDC will pool the financial, technical and human resources of its member nations to build the lunar communication, navigation and transportation systems needed for human exploration of the Moon. It would be a public/private global partnership to make the Moon accessible to all humanity"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/a-different-kind-of-moon_b_317786.html

and let me guess, Goldman Sachs will be the market maker and shorter? or the government? or both?

note to the idealogically gullible: public/private "partnerships" are a marketing scam to get your foot in the door and trust 'em, yeah - deep water drilling, that's the ticket, BP says while Pickens the BP oil bigillionaire publicly promotes wind farms

then, when the safety first checks and balances NASA oversight culture inevitably flunks because of parallel cost & schedule squeezes from OMB/CEO types - the safety bubble strange attractor bursts somewhere and.....

the gulf/moon is demolished but the CEOs make money anyway because of shorts?

Anakin: "I sense Count Dooku."
Obi-Wan: "I sense a trap."
Anakin: "Next move?"
Obi-Wan: "Spring the trap."

All that's to come and everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon

Under Obama's plan, we'll go to an asteroid before Constellation would have a chance to go to the Moon, and now they've discovered water on an asteroid as well. That's water you don't have to mess with a big gravity well to get.

Of course, we'll go back to the Moon, too, probably with international support to reduce the cost of all those extra gravity fighting systems. Once we develop BEO transportation, we can go anywhere. It just costs a lot more if we choose to go down into and back out of any of the larger gravity wells.

Johnny, you need to get your facts straight. President Obama did not say go straight to Mars. He called for a stepping stone approach beginning with an asteroid encounter then the moons of Mars followed by Mars itself.

I think the ISS clearly shows that international efforts do exactly the opposite of reducing cost-- especially when international partners expect America to pay most of the tab.

We could have built a larger and cheaper space station ourselves if we had originally invested ISS funds into developing a heavy lift vehicle. Then we could have launched a huge station with just one to three launches. And we also would have created a lot more high paying jobs right here at home!

Marcel F. Williams

When President Obama makes a statement like:

"Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before."

then I think its pretty clear that the President has, unfortunately, failed to understand the logic of establishing a permanent presence on the surface of our closest neighbor in space.

Marcel F. Williams

If the Obama plan survives to fruition I have no doubt we can find water on the right sort of asteroid.
But then we'll still have to confront the problem that its on an asteroid (which is a poor target for long term development) and the places we really want to visit are at the bottom of gravity wells.

Which means all the work we shortcut now comes back to bite us in the rear. More so if we find out the resources we needed for an indefinite stay in space were on the moon all along.

This side quest will likely be remembered as the kind of flag and footprints mission we wanted to avoid.

Marcel,

Regardless of what anyone said in a sales pitch, the purpose of the international partnership in ISS was never to reduce costs. International relations were always the first purpose. With the original partners, an additional purpose was adding capability. The US portion would have cost pretty much the same without them, being driven more by constantly changing requirements and design revisions under cost plus contracts than by anything else. Note that the European and Japanese labs do add capability, so the program succeeded in that sense.

Adding the Russions was really never about saving money; it was about finding a way to subsidize the new Russian government and employ as many of their engineers as possible so they didn't go to work for someone like the Iranians. ISS shows nothing about using an international partnership to reduce costs because it never tried to do that.

As for "logic of establishing a permanent presence on the surface of our closest neighbor in space," the one who doesn't understand is you. It's illogical to develop the ability to get out of a gravity well (the Earth) and immediately spend another fortune building a completely new set of systems to go into and out of another gravity well (the Moon), when there are plenty of useful and spectacular things you can do outside the large gravity wells. Asteroids and the moons of Mars are easily more spectacular destinations than returning to the Moon and at least as useful.

On top of that, we can't afford a permanent Moon base under current costs and budgets. If you want a Moon base, you absolutely must have commercial space succeed first. That's why support for commercial space is arguably the most important investment in the new plan.

"It's illogical to develop the ability to get out of a gravity well (the Earth) and immediately spend another fortune building a completely new set of systems to go into and out of another gravity well (the Moon), when there are plenty of useful and spectacular things you can do outside the large gravity wells. Asteroids and the moons of Mars are easily more spectacular destinations than returning to the Moon and at least as useful."

1. The Moon's gravity may actually be an advantage if humans can live there and remain healthy under it's hypogravity environment.

2. The Moon's gravity well is still substantially lower than the Earth's. So it will be a lot cheaper to supply oxygen and water to space depots from the Moon than from the Earth--- especially if lunar cannons or catapults are utilized to launch materials to the Lagrange points.

3. While these other destinations are several months away, the Moon is only a few days a way. This makes it an excellent destination for the emerging space tourism industry-- unlike Mars or the asteroids.

4. It would be a lot cheaper to send a light sail out to grab a small asteroid utilizing NASA's Asterant concept and bring it back to a Langrange point than to go through the risk and the expense of mass shielding a manned space vehicle to an asteroid.

5. The Moon is close enough that machines can be remotely operated from the Earth in almost real time. So it is likely that any colonization effort that follows a lunar base would probably create a lot more jobs on Earth than on the Moon.

6. Our children and grandchildren could look up at the Moon at night and see their future and the future of humanity on a world where they know humans live and work.

Bravo! These are all arguable points and worthy of reasoned debate. We should, indeed, explore and develop the Moon as soon as we can get costs and budget to align, with the burden necessarily on getting costs down. In the mean time, the BEO transport system we need to get to the Moon can (if we design it that way) also get us to an asteroid and the moons of Mars with much less additional time and money for system development, so let's be about it.

Even if we end up maneuvering asteroids with light sails, we'll want to explore them in situ first.

Remember that President Obama has not cancelled long-term plans to go the Moon. Just like in HSF Option 5B, and as detailed in break-outs on April 15th, it works out that going BEO before the Moon works out to be better, in terms of funding curves.

As folks say, we can teleoperate on the Moon. That's a strong reason not to send humans there in the near future, but send them where we need close human presence. The CxP plans has extremely small amounts of time where humans would be on the surface compared to when robotics and other systems would be hanging around (being operated or just left for the next mission). Effectively, a few days to two weeks on, and six months (or more) off. With advanced networking, advanced robotics, etc, the exploration of the moon, by humans on the surface of the Earth is a real possibility, year round.

However, all the major resources, in a usable form, are out in the belt and on the smaller moons of the Solar System. Usable in that they enable things on Earth, and enable exploration. Colonization, as Sagan and others pointed out decades ago, is a different matter, and hard to rationalize, even in the very long-term. Exploration and Exploitation, however, are far easier to see in the next few decades.

We need to go find out how our Solar System is put together, and understand what our future can be out there. Then we can plan for how, and whether, we send out large amounts of humanity.

Humans on NEOs, and in the Mars system, will let us explore in a far deeper way than we can with robots. This isn't true on the Moon - the big jump in costs, low human/robotic time factor, etc, etc, all push in the wrong direction. You choose the best machine (human or robotic) or combination (human and robotic) for the corresponding set of environmental constraints.

Once we get NEOs and the Mars system humming with exploration activity, we've then got the tools for the Belt, and building up the infrastructure that may get us to the Stars one day.

People aren't going to colonize asteroids.

They're going to colonize *worlds*.

Large numbers of people could live and work on the moon and commute back and forth to Earth.

Moon wins easily in my view between the two.

Where would you rather live and work?

Moon with gravity and three days from home?

Or some podunk asteroid in some goofball far from earth orbit?

I dunno, turn an asteroid into a spacecraft?
I can't think of big reasons to go to one myself other then that. If you want to mine them fine, but it's not a colonization goal that is for sure.