Set aside this ISS waste for a few moments and seriously ponder…
In all this time and mega-trills of money…squandered on
conditioning Humans for Interplanetary Travel.

The end result…Humans arriving on another Planet, entropic and weak and,
this human represents planet earth?
No…I’m sorry….I’m so very sorry.

A Space Wheel is splendid and beautiful……and compliments the Blue Danube.

Your friend Ladd

That even Phil was shocked is a bad sign. Phil, I know your voice is very influential. I think it would behoove you and your readers because you can sway readers and inform their views to be more on top of this kind of thing. It must be hard with your schedule, but still if you are going to weigh in, I think its only fair.

FYI: The last two lines of that mock sea shanty are :

So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.

But I think I like your version better!

Apparently, in the low lunar gravity with sufficent space to fly in and a pair of strapped on wings, Humans can run, jump, flap their arms and actually fly like birds. I’d love to see – & do – that. All we need is a large enough space on the Moon and ..wow! I kid you not.

I read about this possibility in at least one Isaac Asimov story. (Maybe more?) I think Arthur C. Clarke and a few other writers may have mentioned & used this idea too.

Asimov also noted in a short story about the … umm .. romantic delights offered by low gravity – specifically for Mars but this could work (play?) better yet on the Moon! (Not in zero-gee though where Newton’s “every action has an equal & opposite reaction” law probably makes things more awkward.) In essence, just imagine holding your favourite girl (or guy) in your arms at one sixth or one sixteeneth gee..

Not that this latter advantage would be a reason to go in itself – more an extra bonus but still…

Asimov’s low gee romance pleasures story by the way was titled “I’m In Marsport Without Hilda” & is included in several of his anthologies such as ‘Nine Tomorrows.’ (Pan, 1982.) Its a great story and one I’d heartily recomend being bright and funny and quite romantic and, esp. for Asimov, somewhat risque!

Pardon my ignorance, but what exploitable resources are there on the moon?

Here’s a list of five possibilities for you – just for starters :

1. Helium three which could be a fuel of the future.

2. Possibly water ice, possibly minerals – we may find that extracting ores from the Moon works cheaply and easily and, of course, won’t have the environmental or social issues we get on Earth. Uranium mining on the Moon, for instance, could help stop the worries about radioactive elements being launched from Earth, avoiding the sort of protests that Cassini for instance suffered with its RTG component. Maybe we could actually build such spacecraft and launch them from the Moon itself?

3. The Moon also offers a low gee, hard vacuum environment which is could have its advantages for some industrial processes – and a wide range of temperatures. Ditto. The Moon would also be an ideal place for using solar power : long days, no clouds (or air) in the way, huge tracts of land available and some locations with permanent sunshine – polar craters.

4. The opportunity to practice colonisation and artificial ecological sustainability techniques and learn how to create artificial biomes (think the “Biosphere II” experiment) more rigourously than on Earth and perhaps more accurately – for planetary environments than space stations but in a way that may be more ethically responsible than on Mars – *if* Mars has some life forms of its own.

5. Dare I suggest tourism? No seriously, if places like Antartica and Mt Everest are becoming tourist sites of sorts (& they are) then why not the Moon too?

Now all we need is to get the fungineers designing the Lunar theme park…

—–
We’re whalers on the Moon,
We carry our harpoons
But there ain’t no whales
So we sing tall tales
And (? act like drunk baboons?)

- ‘Futurama’ Lunar epsiode (Ok I forget the last line there .. )

I hadn’t thought of mass drivers. Excellent point!

Pardon my ignorance, but what exploitable resources are there on the moon? I’ve read lots about Mars (The Mars Trilogy and others), but know next to nothing about our nearest celestial neighbor. And could you or someone explain how power sats work, i.e. how the power gets to earth? I’ve heard something about microwave beams directed toward earth. Is that what you’re talking about?

A lunar base with full time accommodation isn’t just about science value; it’s about industrialization and resource exploitation. Luna is a big hunk of rock, with all the construction materials we need to build solar power sats and space colonies. We don’t, in the long term, require LOX or H2 for such projects. Mass drivers work great in that environment(remember, no air resistance during launch), which is what Gerard O’Neille proposed in The High Frontier. 90% of the mass required for a power sat is available from lunar resources. The remaining 10% MIGHT have to be lifted from earth, unless we are able to build the complex control systems in situ on the moon.

For all this, workers on Luna have 1/6th G to help maintain bone mass,etc. They’re right where they need to be to control tele operated robots(which is what we’d use for the actual vacuum construction process). Science is ONE rationale for return to Luna, but PROFIT is the reason we’ll stay, and with earths energy needs requiring us to invest over 500 billion dollars a year for new energy generation, even a fifth of that invested in lunar construction of power sats would be enough to keep the space ball rolling for the next several centuries.

GAry 7

It seems that you’re in the “go back to the moon” crowd. I honestly don’t understand the whole purpose of a moonbase. It seems like an incredibly expensive venture — far more expensive than the ISS, and I’m not sure what kind of return we could get in terms of science. The original motivation for going to the moon was to beat the Soviets in the space race. And that yielded a lot of collateral benefits for all of us. Apart from building an observatory on the far side of the moon, I really don’t see the benefit of an actual moon base, especially in terms of a launch platform for Mars and elsewhere, as is often argued. The moon is still in earth’s gravity well, so, we don’t get much fuel savings by launching from the moon. Oh, also, anything that’s to be launched from the moon must first be sent there. From Earth, so, add that launch cost to the launch from the moon, and the “savings” disappears, no? (forgive my Inconsistent capitalizations — my grammar cop is off-duty today). Plus, providing life-support for a moon colony/base would be incredibly expensive, as there is very little in the way of indigenous (right word??) resources on the moon that can be mined to support a base. So, life-support resources will also have to be periodically replenished from earth. Additional costs.

Now, why not go straight to Mars? Skip the moon altogether! It won’t cost much more in terms of fuel to launch to Mars, and if we do it right, the transit time to Mars would be about six months. People have lived that long in Earth orbit, so there’s no reason they couldn’t survive that long on a trip to Mars. I like Zubrin’s plan to send a habitat unit/return vehicle two years before sending humans, so that by the time humans arrive on Mars, they’ll have a fully fueled, survivable habitat module ready and waiting for them. Granted, this is a gross oversimplification of the Mars plan, but I think Zubrin has the right idea.

Now, I’m not a rocket scientist, so I’m sure there are many things I’m not taking into consideration, so I’m open to being “schooled” by you science-types, but my gut feeling (I’m like Stephen Colbert — I trust my gut more than, you know, “research”) says that going to the moon is an expensive, and possibly dangerous, diversion in the human colonization of space. Any thoughts?

I even had a picture book *aboard* that as a toddler!

make that “about” … & now I’m going to bed.

I think having the Chinese space program *alongside* an American or European or International one would be great – with them either as a partner with us or in friendly rivalry.

I think, in retrospect, the Russian-American space race was a good thing in motivating both sides to push further into space and developing the capability to land on the Moon among other things. A new peaceful space race between America & the People’s Republic of China would similarly, I think, be a good thing goading both sides into pushing the envelope and achieving more than either nation alone may if just left to themselves.

I’d even be happy to see China beat the US / West back to the Moon as long as the USA and Western nations weren’t too far behind them – maybe at most two or three years.

What really worries me and makes me uncomfortable though, is the idea of having only China on the Moon and only China controlling space with the PRC having a huge gap and technological and politico-military superiority over us Westerners.

China has a rich and interesting history and culture and most Chinese people I know (& I do know – & even lust after – quite a few ) are great individuals but I have an issue with their government which I do consider, to be honest, downright evil.

Not because its Chinese but because its currently a totalitarian dictatorship – which is always a nasty, brutal, tyrannical form of government – whether that totalitarian State is located in and culturally inspired by Germany, the old Muslim Caliphate or China – or for that matter, the USA or Australia.

I sincerely hope that this no longer becomes an issue in the future – that the Chinese People themselves change and reform their system of government to one that is .. Well, plain nicer. You know, one that doesn’t crush thousands of its own people under tanks and persecute a group for a style of exercise and lets everyone vote and have a say in running things if they want to whether their Party Helmsmen or not.

I like to think competition – and even better co-operation – in space can make the world better. I like to hope that, for instance, an Iranian or Arab space program might inspire Israel to go into space too and then that seeing their dispute from the vantage of, say, the ISS (or Space Station ‘Harmony’, ‘Babylon-1′ or Colbert or whatever they might make peace more easily. (Yeah some hope I know!)

Incidentally, it’d be great if we could get China to buy into the ISS too. Why not?

But a situation where only China – or really only one nation whichever it is – holds all the capability and territory and power strikes me as unbalanced and generally a bad thing. Especially if that country is a totalitarian brutal state that oppresses even its own people and has committed utterly sickening atrocities in Tibet and Xinjiang and would clearly like to commit those against Taiwan given half the chance. (Personally I’d like to see China accept that if Taiwan or Tibet or Xinjiang wants to go its own way then let ‘em – China will still be more than big enough in every sense of the word! )

So I’ve nothing against China being powerful or going into space *other* than that I especially dislike the idea of putting my fate or my children’s’ or their children’s in the hands of the current Chinese rulers or their ideological successors who I really don’t trust with anyone’s future.

@ 70 Elmar : Sounds like a good plan. I’m with you.

Not sure where we disagree really. Unless I’m very much mistaken (always a possibility! )then my point and yours are both that we should have followed up after the Apollo program better.

I guess you’re saying we should have gone to the Moon later where I think the time we went is fine..

(Hey, when is it too early to do something really awesome that improves and adds knowledge & wonderment to everyone’s lives? Besides if the US hadn’t landed then Soviet Union wasn’t too far behind … )

The failure to “walk” in those giant steps was not doing something major afterwards – colonising the Moon or going on to Mars or both.

Cheaper reusable spacecraft bringing us closer to the world imagined by SF – good idea. That’s what the shuttle was meant to be, but really wasn’t – or not entirely anyhow.

Space station -> lunar shuttle -> Lunar base =excellent idea. I even had a picture book aboard that as a toddler! I kid you not. I forget the title, author & everything – its long since disappeared but it had a small boy taking a fictionalised ride on that exact plan. Lift off in something like a Saturn V rocket, a space station stop over then a ferry to the Moon and ending with looking at red dot inthe lunar sky – Mars.

You missunderstood me. This giant leap was a great achievement, but it was a more or less exclusive event, with no follow up whatsoever. It would have been better to go ten years later and then bring an infrastructure that would have allowed us to build a moonbase and keep it runing. What we did was go there hop arround a bit and then leave for at least 50 yars because itwas way to expensive to return. That is a very, very bad way of doing it! Ther is no point in doing this all over again. We did it once to proof that we can. Next time we should do it better. Doing it better means that the mission architecture needs to be financially sustainable. This is impossible with the cost of space launches today.
NASA sometimes seems to toy the notion that space flight is something exclusive and that it has to be expensive so only NASA can do it and noone else. Some kind of space county club mentality or something.
Anyway, first goal has to be: Make it cheap to go to orbit, then make it cheap to go places from there.
I am not an engineer, but to me this approach is more logical. So one would build a fleet of inexpensive RLVs, use those to first build a “half way” station in orbit. There you construct a lunar shuttle, which would be a space ship going from earth orbit to lunar orbit and back.
So your astronauts go from the earth to the orbital station. There they switch to the lunar shuttle. That shuttle would go to lunar orbit and there would dock with a spacecraft that shuttley between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. Each craft would be built for a very specific purpose, thus be much simpler. All of them would be fully reusable.
I imagine the lunar shuttle to get refueled at the earth space station whenever it arrives to pick up new personell for the moon base.
One might want to make it nuclear powered since it will never land on earth or the moon. That way you dont need an oxidizer and can save quite a bit of mass that you need to bring to orbit, making the whole system even cheaper.
I am not to sure about the potential fuel sources on the moon. So far they have still not found any water (for LOX and LH2), so one might have to bring fuel from earth in cargo transports. If we are lucky and finde some source on fuel on the moon, we might not need that anymore either.
Anyway this is an architecture that would be much less expensive. Of course it would take longer.
At the beginning of all this stands RLV- development. We need to get into orbit without throwing away half the spaceship.
Also, having a really fully reusable spaceship that does not loose more than 50% of its parts on the way up and that makes space travel affordable to a larger part of the population, would be very exciting to a lot of people. After all lots of people like science fiction and spaceships in sciencefiction are fully reusable. So that would bring scifi closer to reality, which is something the public can be excited about if it is sold well.

If another nation sends astronauts to the Moon – it will be a modest PR boost, if it is also a nation that holds feats of engineering in high esteem. (Like China. Not like America. )

Don’t you mean ‘when’ not ‘if’…? (The way things are going.)

Then looking those few years or decades further along as other nations – like China – continue to progress & establish space stations and Lunar bases and colonies on the Moon then maybe Mars and /or Near Earth Asteroids while the West continues to decline, barely bothering to look up as others take the space high “ground” until one day …

Surprise! We wake up and see that China has its nukes and more in orbit. China says who gets to travel in Low Earth Orbit even.

Then if we’re not kow-towing very prettily and quickly to them, the People’s Republic of Crushing its peacefully protesting People under its “People’s Army” tank treads and incinerating their piled up corpses with their flame-throwers China quite literally has the power to smash us down and grind us to dust.

Don’t think they would hesitate to do so .. Their leadership is a *lot* less squeamish about human lives and rights than we are.

Nightmare scenario? Bad SF? I hope so – for all our sakes.

I’m not the USA’s greatest fan but I sure would prefer the flawed representative democracy of the United States that pays at least *some* attention to Human rights and freedoms to have a controlling position in the world over the totalitarian one-party “communist” (now in name only) dictatorship of China.

By surrendering the idea of exploring space – of progressing into and pioneering beyond what Carl Sagan termed the “Sacred Black” (‘Sacre Noir’ actually I think -in ‘Pale Blue Dot’ the US surrenders more than just its initiative and spirit – it also surrenders real power and influence, real global leadership along with the wealth of scientific and engineering knowledge and military & political capability.

If the USA gets to colonise the Moon & Space generally; I’m pretty sure our collective future will be a lot brighter than any of the alternatives – with the possible exception of a joint co-operative international effort. If China alone, OTOH, gets to control space – I fear we will all really regret it.

PS. I’m an Australian NOT a (United States of) American. I do however more broadly consider myself a Westerner & I do value human life and human rights – which I do NOT think China does. I do remember the Tiananmin (spelling?) Square Massacre of 1989 and know a bit about how China has been treating its Tibetan and Uighur minorities. Brutal repression would be putting it too nicely.

ISS is doing good on the long duration of micro-g effects on humans. That’s pretty important for missions to Mars.

Call back when an ISS citizen matches the record for days in microgravity set by Mir cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov (437.7 days). But what really matters is the ability to spend years of spaceflight outside the Van Allen belts.

We really need to get back to the moon and I get giddy thinking of the day that we witness another moon landing.

When Americans return to the Moon, the overwhelming majority of Americans – and much of the rest of the world – will think: “That was so 50 years ago.” (And it will have been at least that long.) It will not be inspiring to most people. Much the opposite. It will strengthen the impression that manned space flight has achieved almost nothing since the moon landings. When the landing occurs more than 10 years after G. W. Bush’s barely famous pronouncement – the public image of human spaceflight will be further damaged by the impression that the second set of Moon landings took longer to occur. It will be a PR debacle for American space flight.

If another nation sends astronauts to the Moon – it will be a modest PR boost, if it is also a nation that holds feats of engineering in high esteem. (Like China. Not like America. )

Do I recall someone ages ago here suggesting the name ‘Horton’ for it after the white elephant from Dr Suess?

Seems to me, the ISS has the fundamental problem of just being ..well boring.

Everyone remembers the Apollo 11 Moon landing and where theywere that day – even its skeptics know and care about Neil Armstrong, Buzz and co but the ISS is just so … meh.
Will anyone remember where they were – or care – when the ISS crew were up there fixing their blocked toilet? I doubt it. No pays any attention to it now let alone years from now.

NASA needs public support for getting funding and getting on with things. The ISS is plain dull – having it burn up in the atmosphere would be about the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to it.

What gets the publics attention? Reality TV and disasters – like Apollo 13 – boring when it was successful but such an adventure when it failed and lives were at risk.

Hmm .. I know – lets hold the next ‘Biggests Loser” reality on the ISS then “accidentally” send them them all plummeting disasterously out the skies to a fiery end!

Its shallow but you know its true!

Indeed, we’ ve metaphorically “walked” when it comes to space stations too – Skylab and Mir and the Salyuts – the International Space Station is basically just a larger version of those.

I wonder how much more support the ISS might have had if it looked like the wheel shaped space station from Space Odyssey 2001 or Deep Space Nine. If it had been more ambitious, more imaginative, more different and innovative might it also have fired people up more perhaps?

Still to lose it now would be a waste & I favour doing something smarter than just deorbiting it and burning it up. Boost it to a higher orbit, shield it, modify it, send it to L1 or L2 or whatever else but lets use it and not just waste the effort and money already committed, please!

Oh & for pity’s sake NASA & Co give it a decent name – the whole thing that is & not just the modules! ISS is so bland and uninspiring besides being a merely description and not a proper name. The International Space Station is going to be a home for heroes and a part of history – clunky, dull, acronymns like ISS just don’t cut it. Call it ‘Harmony’, ‘Serenity’ or even “Colbert” but name it something!

Hey Phil, are you not covering the longest total solar eclipse of the century? (visible today in the Eastern Hemisphere)

Seems not.

Nor does the BA seem at all interested in covering the Endeavour mission or the plumbing problems with the ISS’es blocked dunny – just when there’s a record thirteen folks in space. Pity.

I know its his blog & the BA can choose what to cover but some of us do like getting our news re: space and astronomy & Phil’s take on * all* that’s going on – & yes I’m disappointed these haven’t been discussed by him a bit more. I know your busy BA but still … Sigh.

@ 63 Elmar_M : We need to learn how to walk first before we can learn how to run.

But we did learn! We took that one giant step … forty years ago. Have we forgotten how to walk? You take one step – and then you take another then another each time going further out. Until you’ve perfected walking and are running and growing and developing further. The Moon was one giant totteringstep, the next was mars then an asteroid then Mercury or maybe Ceres and some more asteroids. But instead of taking thos esteps and truily learning towalk then run, post-Apollo we’ve metaphorically fallen flat on our butts and cried and gone absolutely no further. That’s sad and lame and people looking back from a future perspective will wonder what the blazes was wrong with us.

Hopefully they won’t be condemning us for throwing away our future and putting the Western democratic free world under a totalitarian Chinese Moon – and Mars and asteroids and thereby losing our childrens & /or grandchildrens options for liberty, pursuit happiness and the ability to have some control of their destiny.

ISS is doing good on the long duration of micro-g effects on humans. That’s pretty important for missions to Mars.

We really need to get back to the moon and I get giddy thinking of the day that we witness another moon landing. I just hope it’s the United States (what’s wrong with a little pride? . Granted whoever makes the first steps since Apollo will have gained my utmost respect.

The most important thing in all of this is public interest. People need to be into it and excited about it. I do my best to get my kids into it and when we watch launches on TV I really try to emphasize on how important all of this stuff really is. Hopefully it’ll rub off on them and they’ll take their turn at science.

I’m merely a web/graphic designer but the one thing I have in common with spacecraft designers is that a lot of times, you have to go back to the drawing board!