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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday June 08 2016, @09:17AM
from the build-a-space-elevator-on-the-moon dept.
from the build-a-space-elevator-on-the-moon dept.
NASA seems hell bent to go to Mars, but can't afford to on its own.
Its international partners have no stomach for that — they would would rather return to our moon and build a base there for further exploration.
Doesn't going back to the moon make more sense? Build a base on the moon, and use its low gravity and possible water at the poles as propellant for further space exploration?
Why not the moon first?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11868840/moon-return-journey-to-mars-nasa-congress-space-policy
Links:
From NASA itself, in 2008: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/series/moon/why_go_back.html
The all-knowing, ever-trustworthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_Moon
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Should We Skip Mars for Now and Go to the Moon Again?
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Nice guys don't finish nice.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 08 2016, @09:22PM
Good list, except for the shipping costs. For everything other than transporting people (where radiation exposure time is more critical) distances in space are more meaningfully measured by delta-V than distance. And in terms of delta-V, getting from Earth to orbit is about half the cost of getting anywhere in the solar system, from there Mars isn't necessarily *that* much more expensive than the Moon. Shipping colonists to Mars would be more expensive, but they'll likely be only a small fraction of the total payload.
As for soft landings on Mars - we're getting rapidly better. Proper sci-fi landable rockets appear to be just about worked out, and Martian weather is so radically much weaker than Earth's that, visibility aside, landing in the middle of a howling dust storm should be easier than landing on Earth in a light breeze. And really it's only that last little bit that has proved any sort of difficulty, considering that all the Mars probes already had to shed 99.9...% of their interplanetary velocity before impact to avoid vaporization. Plus, SpaceX has been successfully testing hypersonic retro-propulsion in Mars-comparable atmospheres with every landing attempt, which should simplify things considerably. The big question at this point would seem to be whether hypersonic parachutes can be made light and reliable enough to be more attractive for slowing from orbital speeds than hauling enough fuel to do the job.