Learning From The Past

A really interesting comparison! I agree with Wingo's assertion that an economic basis for deep space exploration is key to sustained effort. But I think we have to be careful in what we take away from the comparison beyond that. It's not clear to me that the Moon will be as easy to open up as the West. While the West required a huge capital investment, the resources of the West were well known by the 1850s, there were other ways of accessing this territory (by clipper ships passing around S America), there was a steady supply of available labor (European migrants from the East, Asian migrants from the West), and life support systems (food, water, oxygen, shelter) did not have to be brought en route. As much as I applaud Wingo's view in principle, I do not think the moon or Mars will yield such treasures in practice. At least not any time soon.

P.S. for another comparative view from history see: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1181/1

Folks:

Well put! My thoughts exactly Dennis:

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/08/spacex-gives-a.html#comment-38861

History supplies us with a very good lesson here.

tinker

While the West required a huge capital investment, the resources of the West were well known by the 1850s, there were other ways of accessing this territory (by clipper ships passing around S America),

You underestimate the value of cutting the trip from six month to six days. As early as the 1870's the true gold of California, oranges and other produce began moving west to east, something that was simply not possible via the shipborne or overland route.

do not think the moon or Mars will yield such treasures in practice. At least not any time soon.

If not now when? I have never understood this argument as it has little basis in reality. While in the past our understanding of the extent of the water was less than today, today we know it is far richer than the earlier speculations and we have a different mechanism for its emplacement.

In terms of other resources, the simple experiment of Larry Taylor from the University of Tennessee to microwave regolith, bringing it to 2000 degrees C in tens of seconds. This provides the initial means for many ISRU processes to operate to obtain metals. Metals such as Magnesium, iron, silicon, and aluminum, all in oxide form on the Moon, are obtainable. The key is energy.

How much energy is needed to seed an industrial enterprise? It is my estimation that this is no more than a megawatt and if the activity is done in the lunar north a wide area of the Moon is available for exploitation. The North pole has several areas of near permanent sunlight that are directly adjacent to shallow craters where water and other volatiles are located.

None of this presupposes large caches of water or meteoric Ni/Fe, though that is present in up to 1% quantities in the regolith and can be made into forms by simple solar heating and poured into sintered molds on the surface in a manner not that different to what mankind has done for thousands of years.

If we abandon the primitive notion that we need to bring absolutely everything with us we can get away from this unreasonable demand that we must have a heavy lift vehicle before we can do anything. That is an obsolete idea and must be consigned to the dusbin of history.

We have a space station as a place to aggregate payloads, we can move outwards from there, to L1, then down into the gravity well of the Moon. Solar electric propulsion is viable today, and the designs for these systems are ready to be built.

I have yet to find anyone, that when truly pressed can deny that we can move out to the Moon today. When we can make industrial products on the Moon, and make large quantities of fuel, even if it is only oxygen, we can then move outwards from there in a sustainable fashion to Mars.

To get to that megawatt we do not need nuclear power, we can do it with solar power.

These problems are far easier to solve if we are not trying to simultaneously solve the Mars problem at the same time and send everything from this damn 9.8 km/sec gravity well.

Thank you for a thought provoking and timely (it never seems to be out of vogue, much as others would wish it to be so).

Your essay brought to mind a piece written in 2007 and published in Astropolotics.

VIEWPOINT: THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT
OF THE MOON ECHOES OF THE PAST, SYMPHONY
OF THE FUTURE

http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/strategic.htm

[A strategic framework for the Moon must weave together the economic, social,
scientific, national security, and civil aspects that have evolved largely in isolation
since the inception of the space age. The United States—based on its historical
dependence upon space assets, exploration heritage, and global leadership position,—
has the most to gain and lose by the tenor of its leadership in this framework’s
development and implementation. A permanent presence on the Moon,
combined with the use of lunar and space resources, offers the means to create
a new space age. Lunar exploration offers many scientific and cultural benefits
and has significant historic implications. In addition, this extension of human
reach beyond low Earth orbit, and the ability to regularly access and use cislunar
space is critical for addressing emerging national, economic, and scientific challenges.
An analogy to this strategic moment is the development of United States
maritime policy at the beginning of the 20th century.] - By Tom Cremins and Paul Spudis

A Falcon 9 and smaller Atlas V can place 10 metric tons in LEO. So a reusable solar electric tug able to take 10 mT of cargo to EML1 or lunar orbit would be useful. New ion engine designs have reliability problems so picking engines that has been tested for at least 2 years in a vacuum chamber would be advisable.

For the generation of lunar electricity local manufacturing of the power station will reduce launch mass. We may be several years away from making solar cells on the Moon. Fortunately the radiators and pipes for a Stirling converter can be made of any thing providing it is air tight and does not melt. Mirrors can be made from ISRU metal. The inert gas may need exporting, although CO2 may work.

A nice 'close' analogy Dennis.

However, businesses in the post civil war 1800's could clearly see a market enabled by a unified rail system. They knew that once built the intercontinental railroad would provide a steady stream of 'non government' business.

Not so today with Human Space Flight.

The possibility of ISRU as a 'market' for business has not yet propelled anyone to generate business plans, or seek capital, etc. etc. that I am aware of.

Having said that, I'd love to see a Space Railroad Act of 2011.

Dennis Wingo makes some interesting points in this essay. His description of the failure of VSE implementation is dead-on. But there is a degree of historical simplification in what follows.

The transcontinental railroad was developed as an efficient transportation corridor that connected the eastern half and Pacific coast of the nation. The railroad served to bolster the economy of the colonies on the Pacific coast by giving a route for goods that was vastly faster than stagecoach or ship.

But the point is that the railroad was developed to spur an existing economy with an existing colony, for which the products were already in some demand. No economy or colony presently exists on the Moon, and no products from the Moon are presently in demand.

No question that such an investment is likely to be critical to the creation of an interplanetary economy, but that's not where we are right now. To the extent that such an economy is important, it's the colonization that has to happen first, whether those colonies are populated by people or robots. We're not there yet. We're not even close.

All that being the case, Mr. Wingo makes the excellent point that commercialization is a key component to such economic development and expansion of civilization into space. LEO and GEO have been commercialized, with great success. That has happened because the product and its costs are well understood. Efficient communication via LEO and GEO were a product whose technologies were pioneered by government investment. Much like for colonization, however, we've got a ways to go before we can say that lunar products and their costs are well understood.

The way the past will summon the future isn't so much in tax breaks right now, but in government demonstration of ISRU capabilities which, right now, are based on questionable products (He3?) for questionable costs.

By and large I agree with Mr. Wingo's reasoning behind how the moon can be opened up, but with one caveat. What would be the product or resource returned to Earth (or LEO) that would make spending _any_ money on a lunar base worth while?

Allowing that ISRU and a step-wise development program #even without a heavy lifter, could produce a lunar base for significantly less than is currently envisioned, what would the people there do? The infrastructure implies that there are a number of long term uses for lunar presence, but what are they? Certainly not scientific exploration because business couldn't care less for science. Business needs a product, to generate a retun on their investment.

I know in the past you have posited PGMs and/or He3, but neither of these currently have a market, one because there is no actual reactor to put it in and the other because the current metal costs are restricting the development of sufficient fuel cells to get a real business going.

What, today, would be the product or salable good that a lunar base could produce to justify the businessman's long term investment in lunar infrastructure?

On a related note, does the current legal environment of potential lunar business provide an adequate environment for business to feel that their interests can be dealt with? How would disputes be litigated? Which jurisdictions would provide enfocement of legal claims? Who does one obtain a resource land grant from? Where do you pay taxes to? Whose cops protect your claim from claim jumpers?

I think this infrastructure is at least as important to corporations looking to invest in any long term project and I'm not sure that they are in place for Lunar business opportuinities.

Paul

I know in the past you have posited PGMs and/or He3, but neither of these currently have a market, one because there is no actual reactor to put it in and the other because the current metal costs are restricting the development of sufficient fuel cells to get a real business going.

It is not cost alone that is the limiting factor for PGM's here on the Earth but availability. There simply are not enough PGM's to support the global switchover from internal combustion engines to fuel cells. The South African government already admits that the Merinsky Reef deposits are almost exhausted and the SA resource base represents 60% of the global inventory. On top of that Russia and SA are controlling the release of the metals (the Russian company Norlisk also controls the U.S. company Stillwater mining) to the market to keep the price high.

PGM's alone will not support the effort but they come closer than anything else that I have ever seen and they are far more available on the Moon than any asteroid.

The point is that it is not the government's role to do commerce but to enable commerce. The problem that we have on the government side is that this is not even on the table. The government is still thinking Lewis and Clark type expeditions, this is what must be changed at NASA for the development of infrastructure. There is some hope that this is happening but it is time for private enterprise to come in as well but that is stifled by the large perceived risk versus gain. Anything that can be done to lower the risk and provide a means for increased return will do good things.

There is a LOT of money sitting on the sidelines these days for want of good investment opportunities. Elon, Bigelow, and Bezos alone are not going to be able to do this, we must have more money input into the system. It is not for the internet Monday morning quarterback club to decide whether or not this is viable. What is expressly evident is that what has happened up till now is not working in a sufficient manner to open this new economic realm.

Addendum

Responders talk about the lack of well defined economic activity that is already known as a reason that we cannot make the comparison between the national railroad and a cislunar infrastructure. I have read basically everything written about the development of the railroad and in not one of the treateses have I read about oranges and other agricultural products from the San Joquin valley coming to dominate American agriculture. The development of this industry, by far the largest in California, was first enabled by the railroad.

Just because we all sitting around our computers this morning cannot forsee the full scope of what this will mean in the future does not preclude us from taking the steps necessary to provide the circumstances for this to develop.

Expected Return on Investment is essential for any enterprise to succeed and a ZGZT regime is an essential facet in enabling such a development. It was good enough for the development of the Internet, it should be good enough for space as well.

People are fishing for something for the manned spaceflight program to do, but any use of humans radically inflates the cost here.

I can invision a chain here with teleoperated robotics, refuellable lunar landers\launchers, ion tugs and an unmanned shuttle.

I don't buy for a second that we can't do it with robotics and I suspect that arguments against them are rooted in the desire to see boots on the ground again.

If you really need a human's touch, I don't buy that we couldn't develop a useful RC android for a sliver of the cost of manned flights.

Double AMEN !! Probably the best and most succinct piece I've seen written on the problem.

There is a role for NASA, but not in implementing operations and space vehicle manufacturing. We need to be doing everything possible to let industry and commerce lead. Bureaucracies just get in the way.

Another analogy worth considering is Pan Am's development of the cross-Pacific air routes. No aircraft had the capability to fly across the Pacific in a single jump, and there were no cities, outposts, or airfields on the islands they wanted to use. Pan Am started out by emplacing a series of pre-fabricated hotels along with fuel and other stores required to establish the bases and then develop the routes. In time most of the places became tourist destinations in their own right, and during WWII they became bases from which to build US military capability.

"Constellation ignored the $100 billion dollars that American, European, Russian, and Japanese taxpayers had invested in the International Space Station (ISS). Technical challenges became manifest early on....It was only a matter of time before Constellation collapsed"

One of the things that has bothered me most over the last 15 years, and it started in the ISS Program where I heard this statement from many senior managers, and then I heard the same statement several times from many senior Constellation managers: "we don't want your experience; we are going to do it a new way, differently, and better than before".

Both programs ignored the successes and lessons learned in the programs that preceded them.

The NASA management needs to learn some lessons in management.

Excellent point. If you want to exploit the moon's resources, a robotics program gets you there MUCH faster and much cheaper. Even with manned presence on the moon, robotic assisted exploration, construction, mining, etc., will be required to expedite the process of lunar habitation otherwise you'd either have to launch an army of astronaut workers (and their astronomical ECLSS requirement costs) or you'd spend YEARS trying to accomplish with meager crews what robots can do in less time. I see a two-step process here - first investment would be to get rovers and robots to the lunar surface to do surveys, soil tests, surface condition monitoring, etc. and construct the first habitats. Then when your manned launch/lunar vehicle capabilities are up and running, you have the astronauts enter the picture, having incorporated the knowledge gained from the initial robotic exploration.

Sounds like a great idea, lets remotely build a habitat on the moon and then send humans there to live. It is like building a vacation house 1000 miles away from your home and when the house is finished go for a visit.

"I have read basically everything written about the development of the railroad and in not one of the treateses have I read about oranges and other agricultural products from the San Joquin valley coming to dominate American agriculture"

I don't think anyone is talking about citrus. (Is this an apples and oranges thing?) The inception of the idea for the transcontinental railroad in the U.S. was to efficiently connect the east coast with products from the Orient. Those products (tea being an important one) would otherwise have gone around the Cape or hauled across Panama. Both of those transportation strategies were woefully inefficient. There was an existing demand to serve, and an existing population of colonists on the west coast who could act as intermediaries -- taking stuff off the boats, and putting it on the trains.

It turned out that the California citrus industry was strongly helped on the west coast by the railroad, but this wasn't a product that was otherwise unavailable to those on the east coast.

With regard to existing demand and colonists to serve it, we don't have that situation now with the Moon, though one might envision it in the far term.

What precludes us from taking the necessary steps to provide the circumstances for this to develop is simply money. The expected return on investment, in this case, is pretty hazy.

PGM's alone will not support the effort but they come closer than anything else that I have ever seen and they are far more available on the Moon than any asteroid.

Well, that's pretty key, isn't it? Even in 1860 people in the East knew that there were lots of people (cities, even) in the west and that transport of standard goods to that number of people would enable them to make money. Certainly once the railways were in place many, many more ways to make money from the rapid transportation were created than had been envisioned prior to finishing the railway, but certainly there was an expectation going in that there were sufficient markets for good to make it a go.

The point is that it is not the government's role to do commerce but to enable commerce.

Very true. In this case, thuogh, I think the two things the government could do to most enable commerce is to fund a series of prospectors and, most of all, put in place a legal environment that would enable a corporation to legally profit from their work and to establish ownership of what they find. Without that environment, I can't see corporations spending the large (yet completely reasonable) amounts of money needed to expolit lunar resources.

BTW, don't think I am against your ideas here, I like them a lot and feel they are the kernal of doing things right once a viable reason has been established to go back to the moon repeatedly (notice I didn't say necessarily by people). I just happen to think there are other steps that the government can do first to get corporations actually thinking abuot making money on the Moon that would be of more immediate use.

Paul

There are other twists to this fascinating historical connection. E.g., the Union Pacific east and west lines finally connected at Promontory, Utah in 1869, one hundred years before the first human moon landing. Railroads came into development in the twenty years preceding the Civil Year, and alternative routes were explored for the east-west connection. My own great-great grandfather, Duff Green, a historical figure of the Jacksonian antebellum era, was particularly engaged in acquisition of rights for a southern route through what is now Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico that would have connected the southern Atlantic coast to San Diego. That was all worked out well before and then of course interrupted by the war. Ultimately, all the original routes conceived by Duff and many others were eventually implemented, but at a crucial time in U.S. history the southern route was not taken, although it would have avoided the need to pass through mountainous terrain of the northern route and could therefore have been completed long before 1869, except for the war. I will leave to others to speculate whether this somehow maps to the current alternatives for pathways to space through a southern route, e.g. the Space Coast and Constellation, versus other routes. But since Duff, like today's Keith, was also an outspoken journalist and editor, perhaps Keith can follow this tradition to explore these alternative pathways to space. By the way, Promontory is also known today as an operational site for Thiokol and testing of solid rocket boosters, a path taken for the space shuttle and as also planned for Ares 1 and Constellation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Railroad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiokol

Ten years ago, Dennis addressed how a commercialized ISS might be used as a construction place for flight BEO among other things.

" A single loss of a launcher would kill the entire Mars Manned program for years. If we take the tact of allowing NASA the flexibility to do on orbit assembly of Mars system components at ISS we can avoid single point failures such as the Mars Direct launcher. In addition, with the advent of near heavy lift vehicles such as the Delta IVH, the Atlas V, the European Ariane V, and the Russian Zenit, a Mars mission assembly could happen within a short period utilizing the ISS as the base for this effort.

This is the direction that we seek to help NASA go. NASA is our nation’s exploration agency. The astronauts time and effort should be going into the far frontier of Mars not in the near frontier of going around in circles watching bug eggs hatch. We want NASA to succeed. This paper is not to bash NASA but to help free NASA from the constraints imposed upon it with the death of Apollo to justify every thing it does in some politically correct fashion."

For the rest of his quite long and detailed article:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000820140740/www.spacepolicy.org/page_dw0500.html

For the whole SPD archives: http://web.archive.org/web/20001118204200/www.spacepolicy.org/page_archive.html

Excellent point. If you want to exploit the moon's resources, a robotics program gets you there MUCH faster and much cheaper. Even with manned presence on the moon, robotic assisted exploration, construction, mining, etc., will be required to expedite the process of lunar habitation otherwise you'd either have to launch an army of astronaut workers (and their astronomical ECLSS requirement costs) or you'd spend YEARS trying to accomplish with meager crews what robots can do in less time. I see a two-step process here - first investment would be to get rovers and robots to the lunar surface to do surveys, soil tests, surface condition monitoring, etc. and construct the first habitats. Then when your manned launch/lunar vehicle capabilities are up and running, you have the astronauts enter the picture, having incorporated the knowledge gained from the initial robotic exploration.

Not disputing at all that robotics are a key enabler and the rapid advance in them that is in process right now will be a major force multiplier. I just don't think that it is possible to do with an all robotic system, else we would have already seen 100% robotic factories. The requirements for humans is not that bad, that is unless you demand a heavy lift launch vehicle, and humans are much more easily programmed and reprogrammed than a robot (:)

I do think that the government should fund some precursors that have explicit economic resource development goals. These are not much different than for a science mission and the two are compatible. This is why the name Lunar Prospector was chosen back when we were doing this back in the late 80's.

I think that manufacturing on the Moon will become a major industry and a major boon to the further development of the solar system, at least for the next 50-100 years. People like to discount this but with ISRU that obtains metals, and there is a lot of aluminum there, we will be able to build true spaceships, that could never ever be lifted from the Earth.

That is another market beyond PGM's and that, along with fuel for extending the life of large GEO platforms is another market.

"The requirements for humans is not that bad"

I'm sure you know better than me - which is why I'm asking - but what about the load it puts on infrastructure?

You can't use these solar-electric tugs to shuffle humans to and fro because of the radiation belts and the more basic problem of spending 18 months or more in deep space (I include the stay on the Moon). You'd need a high thrust upper stage or tug, which would require either an HLV or many fuel launches both on Earth and the Moon.

Ignoring the wear and tear this would put on the lunar transorbital shuttles to loft the fuel and astronauts, you still need to either lift the empty vessel all in one go (may need an HLV?), build them in space, you need to fuel them...

I'm sure there's a few shortcuts here such as not having it return to Earth orbit but instead drop an Orion style capsule in, or use cyclers (need HLV for a capsule to catch up with them!)...

Then there's the failure-is-not-an-option feel at every link in the chain.

It's OK to lose a few shipments of metal in the first few decades, but avoiding losing humans and actually losing humans are both very expensive.

"humans are much more easily programmed and reprogrammed than a robot"

The whole purpose of a teleoperated android is to be able to tell a team of operators "do X" and they'll guide the hands.

This is a user interface issue and even if it takes a team of operators per bot, you're still saving money.

I just want to add one more thing. I'm not at all hostile against humans in space and the reason the ideas about Moon mining excite me is that the infrastructure necessary to mine the Moon would basically open up the Solar System to Humans, especially Mars; you need cheap, reliable up & down cargo and you have the ability to bring arbitrary quantities of material (like reaction mass) from the Moon. I'm absolutely pro human.

You say "I just don't think that it is possible ... else we would have already seen 100% robotic factories", but I see no reason to assume that.

Our need for PMGs is new. We weren't chowing down on these things when Apollo was cancelled, nor did we know there was readily available water to fuel the cryolox engines we need. This knowledge is new, discovered in '94 with Clementine and confirmed just last year. You might as well have said in 18whatever that if a railroad was useful, there'd already be one.

No disrespect of course.

discovered in '94 with Clementine and confirmed just last year. You might as well have said in 18whatever that if a railroad was useful, there'd already be one.

I would suggest reading up on the early history of the space age. In 1965 Neil Ruzic wrote an incredible book about the things that could be done upon the Moon related to manufacturing. He even gained a patent for the cryostat from his work on the book. As early as Apollo 15 and 16 NASA put a Gamma Ray Spectrometer on the Apollo CM that took data in the nearside equatorial region and confirmed many elemental constituents of the lunar surface.

As early as the Acta Astronautica's of late 1969 we were beginning to understand the base level of the resource potential of the Moon. NASA had planned a big orbiter for the Moon that was as big as the Viking bus to do a more thorough job of remote sensing. Something similar was only launched last year.

Jim Arnold as early as 1979 put forth the arguments and basic physics of the cold trap water potentials. It turns out that we are well above his 300 million ton minimum water level.

I was a science PI on the Lunar Resource Mapper mission in 1992 that would have done 99.5% of the work that LRO did this year in finding the extended resources. Congress took the money back after the contract was awarded just to piss off G Bush sr and stop the SEI program.

Serious ISRU work was done in the 70's with very little progress since that time.

So excuse me if I am not that impressed with arguments that we have only found this out this year.

Our need for PGM's has been recognized for decades, but only now is it reaching the tempo where off planet GPM's can literally make the difference in allowing us to get beyond the entire hydrocarbon energy era.

I am quite sure that I am the first person to attempt to quantify the extent of the resources of PGM's in my 2004 book but Ruzic suggested in 40 years earlier. It's not just the PGM's for export, it is the iron, nickel, and cobalt for localized uses. These metals make very nice buildings, railroads, mass driver hardware, truck bodies, bulldozer blades, and a plethora of other things and we have known about their minimum extent since the early 70's.

What we have not had is a NASA that has economic development as a core value. There has been a heck of a lot of work by NASA and we are deeply indebted to those individuals such as Wendell Mendell, Mike Duke, and others who have carried the torch for this for decades but it is simply untenable to state that everything that we know is somehow new. This is where having a historical cast of mind (and the archives at the NASA Technical Reports Server) is invaluable to us today in crafting our plans for a true cislunar infrastructure that will enable us to break out of our cradle.

You basically said that if such things were possible, they would already be done.

But there are multiple glaring issues with that.

First, we couldn't do the same kind of robots back then as today. The only point I'm trying to make is that an astronaut is someone who can do arbitrary handiwork on site. Today we can build such a machine for less money. Could we build an RC android in the 1970s?

Second, who was going to do it? The exact same argument applies to manned spaceflight, and you went on to explain exactly the kind of Washington politics that trashes such efforts over and over again. As you put it, "we have not had is a NASA that has economic development as a core value."

For it to have already happened, you need private capital to fund these efforts. Are you suggesting one could make a business case in the 1970s to bring back basic metals or PMGs who's usage was not very high yet? To develop the up & down space flight infrastructure, the ion tugs, the landers, the ISRU and all the robotics in the 1970s?

If humans don't add anything to the cost, why wouldn't it have just happened with humans?

I actually am well aware that these resources were speculated long before Clementine and that PMGs have been around. I also know about your LRM work. I didn't think I needed to pack all that in to "impress" you.

I simply thought that actually finding the resources, and having the price actually go up a fair bit, as has happened starting in the 90s, before anyone could hope to make a business case. Or else it's all up to Washington, who yourself describe as more than ready to trash any effort to get back at so and so. You yourself just said "I am quite sure that I am the first person to attempt to quantify the extent of the resources of PGM's in my 2004 book."

I am not so impressed that you spent several paragraphs sniping at how much trivia I packed into a post written to someone who everyone knows already knows it.

Still don't see any reason it has to be a live person on the ground or that such a thing wouldn't radically pump up the cost.

I am not so impressed that you spent several paragraphs sniping at how much trivia I packed into a post written to someone who everyone knows already knows it.

Joe I apologize if I am seeming to snipe here.

What I don't understand about people who advocate space is that we don't actually sit down and consider what might be right about what we are doing rather than doing all we can to point out what is wrong with what people are attempting to do. It may be just the nature of the internet and its way of communicating between people.

I don't know you or how much you know about what is in the literature so we all have to make some assumptions.

What is important is that we start to put the idea out there that the time is right to begin to enable activities such as this and not at some amorphous point in the unknown future. The future is now.

I personally think that it is unlikely that we are going to make the big jump all at once and my own business case is more stepwise and incremental in nature, beginning with business in GEO, which in energy terms is more than halfway to the Moon.

One problem that we all have is that politicians have to be led toward some goals rather than providing leadership. If you read the book "Empire Express", about the development of the Intercontinential railroad you see this at work.

It simply boggles my mind that something that is as conceptually simple as ZGZT is not more generally supported in the advocacy community. It is company neutral and helps to lift all boats. If you, or I, or Joe Blow down the street has a good idea, the likelyhood of raising capital is exponentially improved.

This was the case not only with the railroad, but with the Erie Canal, the first steamship, and the canals that helped to industrialize England. With such tax incentives the Internet would have had a far more difficult time being established as well.

How about we try and agree what can be done to help enable commerce rather than pursue the modern equivalent of how many rockets can dance on the head of a pin.

I apologize if I sounded like I was picking your ideas apart with the comment that we don't need humans.

I felt like I was just throwing an idea out. It doesn't really matter right now and of course I don't want to argue with you; I respect your work a lot and it's shaped my thinking on these issues.

Of course NASA should be working towards utilizing the resources of the Moon.

The Moon can provide a tangible, material benefit to society while at the same time creating & sustaining the cheap up & down infrastructure to allow the space geeks to do all the thing we've ever dreamed of.

It is a small point, but those who cite history should get it correct. JFK announced his decision to go to the Moon on May 25, 1961 before a joint session of Congress, not on September 12, 1962 at Rice. Many people make this mistake.

Although there has been a fair bit of debate throughout the comments in this post, I'm pleased to see that there has also been considerable agreement on some of the basic questions, such as the "commerce" aspects. It's a start.

On the issue of requiring humans in addition to robots, I feel compelled to point out that humans will be needed on the Moon sooner, rather than later, to repair the robots, etc. Because you just know that the robot contract will be awarded to the lowest bidder!

Steve

jml

Thanks for the correction but some of the dates are arbitrary as the Pacific Railway act had several milestones and the timing of the one that I picked was merely interesting.

Steve

Priceless comment.

Joe

The Internet is an imperfect medium of exchange. If you read the history of the railroad, the equivalent philosophical debate started in the 1830's. I just hope that it is not 30 more years until we move on the subject.

I don't bash NASA on this one as at the end of the day they are the agency of execution, the direction must come from our political leadership. Since the political leadership supposedly answers to us, it is our duty as citizens to bring these things to their attention. We have some incredibly difficult problems confronting us as a civilization and the economic development of the solar system can solve a large number of them.

That is the message.

Understanding completely that you are making a bit of a joke, Steve, one should also understand that the job to design & build lunar robotics would be very unlikely to go to the lowest bidder. That implies a firm fixed price contract. Working for a space robotics company, the unknowns in such a program would be very high and would be far mose suited to a cost plus type of program. Add in the possibility that international partners may take this opportunity to earn a place on the lunar surface by gifting the robotics to NASA in exchange for visits to the moon (as happens now with the ISS & Shuttle) you then get a program that is an expression of another nation's desire to go to the moon. As someone who might concievably work on such a program, I can tell you that it would be approached with the greatest sense of dedication and would be executed with the best engineering that could be mustered.

The result is more likely to resemble the Mars Rovers than anything else. Somewhat overdesigned with room for greatly increased capability.

Paul

Washington doesn't seem to take it seriously at all; the cycle of stupid here could be broken by either Congress or the Executive but it doesn't happen.

Sometimes there are attempts from the Executive, like VSE and "ObamaSpace", to fix it, then Congress starts mandating who they buy rockets from (IIRC the 2005 NASA Authorization act mandated the "Shuttle Derived" parts?) and the President never really sticks up for NASA because he doesn't take it that seriously.

But you're saying that the Moon does need to be taken a lot more seriously as it can solve real issues we have today; that there should be more pressure in Congress to do it correctly, that Congressmen who aren't from space states should care, and that the Executive should fight for it like it fought for Health Care.

Is that close?

Thanks for your comments Paul. You're right, it was partly a joke. But not entirely. I agree with everything you said, but you and I don't get to make the final decisions.

From an engineering standpoint, I've always insisted on modular and incremental designs. From a project management standpoint, I would want to do the robotics as a set of incremental programs/projects, where each project includes developing the detailed requirements of the succeeding project(s). This allows for much more realistic budget and schedule proposals for each of the subsequent tasks. Also, that way, what's learned at each step is integrated into the whole as part of the project plan, not as a series of mid-project major engineering changes (with all of the inevitable politics, cost increases and schedule extensions). And I think it's inescapable that there would be major "things learned" along the way that would alter the original game plan.

My fear though, is that the undertaking would not be as either of us has stated. Rather, the powers that be would make it yet another extremely huge, do-everything program which can not possibly be managed (even with appropriate, experienced managers) and will be changing week-to-week, so that it doesn't stand a chance of succeeding (sound familiar?). If a robotic precursor plan is to happen and succeed, which we agree it should, it needs to be done in ways completely foreign to the ways that both NASA and Congress have been thinking for the last 30+ years. This is just my opinion, of course.

Sorry to be so long winded.

Steve