"Marc Ramsey" wrote in message
...
"Mike Borgelt" wrote...
On a non SF note I think at least having an official policy of return
to the moon and on to Mars beats not having one.

Yes, but you won't have to pay for it.

They have that nice shiny space station, if they were serious (rather than
just trying to win an election), I should think it a lot more sensible to
put together a Mars expedition there, and skip the moon altogether...

Marc


I would disagree. The moon has real advantages over the ISS.

First, there is lots of real estate for manufacturing a mars mission and you
can work under 1/5th G which appears much easier than 0 G. Like the ISS,
there is lots of cheap vacuum - building and testing spacecraft components
takes lots of expensive vacuum chambers here on earth. There is lots of
soar energy with Lunar days 336 hours long and no atmosphere to dilute the
sunlight.

Most space qualified metals are "Vacuum melt" alloys that could be smelted
from Lunar materials. There is very likely water ice in the polar regions
from which rocket fuel and life support consumables can be made.
Subsurface "storm cellars" could shelter crews from Solar storms. Finally,
launching an interplanetary mission for the bottom of a 1/5th G gravity well
is a lot more practical than from Earth's 1 G well.

There would likely be little objection to nuclear reactors on the Moon since
it is pretty radioactive environment anyway. (It lies only 93 million space
miles away from the unshielded core of a thermonuclear reactor, i.e. the
Sun) Nuclear rockets (Google: "Project NERVA" or "Nuclear-Electric drive")
make manned Solar System exploration much more realistic.

I wish we had gone for the Moon base instead of the ISS.

Bill Daniels