It can be done and it should be done. Actually, it should HAVE been done by now. The fact that we haven’t even been back for 40 years is mindblowing, in a very bad way.

ErisArcticWolf (113) said:

It can be done and it should be done. Actually, it should HAVE been done by now. The fact that we haven’t even been back for 40 years is mindblowing, in a very bad way

JR Powell (20) said:

To those who question the value of human space flight, I have this question:

What’s the use of studying space… if we never go?!

ErisArcticWolf (113) said:

To those who question the value of human space flight, I have this question:

What’s the use of studying space… if we never go?!

@ ErisArcticWolf -
Are you parroting or sock-puppeting? I find it hard to imagine that it is coincidence that you make the same points as were made earlier in the same words that were used earlier. Either you are the same person using different names or you have plagiarised the earlier comments without citation.

Either way, you seem to have missed all of the responses to the earlier comments that used exactly the same turn of phrase you use in #113. If you disagree with those responses, then explain why – address the points raised to counter the original points in #17 and #20.

What makes you think the same argument carries more weight now than it did back at #17 and #20?

I pointed out the bogosity of that argument back in message #36.

What’s the use of studying space… if we never go?!There have been 7 paying passengers to orbit, at around $20 million a ticket, certainly that’s more than I could afford, but knock a couple of zero’s off and I’m in, and so are thousands of others.
It can be done and it should be done. Actually, it should HAVE been done by now. The fact that we haven’t even been back for 40 years is mindblowing, in a very bad way. Almost half a century.
And no, it’s not a waste of money. It’s an investment, both in the long and the short term. Cube-sat, the first (relatively) cheap satellite was put into the air. It’s the first satellite for kids. THERE SHOULD BE a MANNED space exploration class for young people. Can’t there at least be a simulator??? There was a Mars one. I mean, the moon is easier than Mars!!

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/sci/watch-snl-fun-newt-gingrichs-plans-moon-base.html

I agree with this:
“This attitude, I suppose, accurately illustrates just why America no longer makes the effort to get into space anymore.”

I think everyone is missing the most important outcome of Apollo, though. Without Apollo, the UK’s National Space Centre would not have a chunk of moon rock for me to have seen up close and personal some 30-odd years after it was picked up from the moon.

It’s an interesting question: what science could have been done with just small sample returns, if Apollo had not occurred?

I claim many major results of Apollo would still have been obtained.

– That the lunar surface is evolved, not primitive (this was actually determined by Surveyor).

– That lunar oxygen isotope ratios fall on the “SMOW Line”

– That the moon is depleted in volatile elements and siderophiles.

– The europium anomaly and the inference of the existence of a magma ocean.

What would probably not have been obtained would be detailed stratigraphic information.

Also, if an unmanned program had been conducted, we might have had landers in the polar regions, and learned about conditions there decades before we did. If we can use the constraints of unmanned performance to criticize the robots, it’s only fair to use the landing constraints on the Apollo missions to similarly criticize it.

Also, there is sufficient 3He available on Earth to develop D-3He reactor technology, just not enough to fuel commercial D-3He reactors. The real issue is that D-3He is something like a factor of 50 less reactive than D-T. Building a reactor that can burn D-3He is a much harder problem than building one that can burn D-T, and even the latter is at best marginally economic.

But would not the HST’s orbit have got rather crowded over time?

Not really. Also, if we give up on servicing, space telescopes can be placed in higher orbits, where they are easier to operate and not subject to atomic oxygen and cyclic thermal stress. This was done with SIRTF and Chandra and will be done with the JWST.

What is the main reason we don’t have a He3 capable technology right now? Because we don’t have access to sufficient raw material!

Er .. . no, not really.

Irrespective of how much He-3 we could get our hands on, we can still only contain a 10,000,000-degree plasma for about a minute. We can expect ITER to take this further, but we are still a long way from a commercial fusion reactor, whether fuelled by isotopes of hydrogen or He-3.

The potential of 3He is vastly overhyped. The amount of regolith that would have to be processed is enormous. Worse, it’s not even clear the energy return from processing that regolith would be positive! Even if it were, it would likely be totally uneconomical to have to build a (say) 100 MW reactor on the moon to fuel a 1 GW reactor on Earth.

And all this ignores the unfortunate reality that we don’t know how to build an economical fusion reactor, even if we had 3He available for free.

These seem like good points. I did wonder why so many people were getting so excited about He-3.

[Nigel said:]

The Hubble is a particularly good example given the repair jobs the astronauts did to fix and maintain it so many times.

And yet, it would have been cheaper to just build a series of HSTs, and launch a new one on an expendable rocket every few years. Amortize the engineering and support cost over multiple units and reuse the tooling/testing infrastructure.

But would not the HST’s orbit have got rather crowded over time?

Slight nitpick; the Apollo samples didn’t lead to the proposal of the impact theory of the origin of the Moon. That was proposed in 1984, from independent astronomical evidence, and was then found to be supported by the composition of the Apollo samples.

You are right, of course. I realise with re-reading my comment that I accidentally implied that the analysis of the Apollo rock samples led to that theory, which it did not.

Discussion of the facts: that all countries who give up the high ground, loose, economically and otherwise.

Wait, what?

What are you saying here?

That – for example – India and China are developing at the rate they are because of their space programmes? Or what, exactly?

In WWI, air power was fledgling and we played catchup.

Catchup to whom?

If one side had had air supremacy, they would have won easily.

In WWII it was dominant, and we still played catchup.

Again, catch-up to whom?

Surely the P-45 and the Spitfire were the preeminent fighter craft of WWII? Or have you not heard the famous quote from the head of the Luftwaffe, “Geben-Sie mir Spitfeuer!” (“Give me Spitfire”)?

And what bomber outclassed the Lancaster and the Flying Fortress? Oh, yeah – that would be the B-29 Superfortress.

I think a case can be made that the war in the Pacific was won through a combination of the superiority of allied aircraft and the US’s capacity to out-produce any other nation on the planet at the time.

So what exactly are you trying to say here?

And in 1958 it was obvious that if we were not dominant, we would be dominated and overcome.

Yeah, this was what the propaganda said, and it led to the stand-off of Mutually Assured Destruction. I think you must make a stronger case than that “it was obvious” if you want to make a point.

We are at a crossroads again.

Says who?

What crossroads, and why is there a choice (as you seem to be implying) between only two options?

And its obvious which choice we need to make, go back to the moon.

No, it is not “obvious”. This word you keep using – I do not think it means what you think it means.

If you have a point to make, make your case, but don’t start from the point of “it’s obvious”.

And we may not get a chance to play catchup again before we get dominated and dictated to.

It seems to me that this is based on a whole heap of assumptions. Are they justifiable? If so, let’s see them justified.

The extraction of H3 from the moons surface would be a game changer.

I’ll say!! Tritium (H-3) only has a half-life of about 12 years, so to find large quantities on the moon would be extraordinary indeed.

Or did you mean He-3?

[ . . . ]

The technology that took the apollo modules to the moon in the sixties now fits in the average cell phone.

Not really. While a typical smart phone has orders of magnitude more raw computing power than the computers in the Apollo space craft, the Apollo machines were built only for the purpose of navigating the Apollo space craft to the moon and back, rather than being general-purpose computing machines with needlessly-bloated, memory-hungry operating systems such as those in smart phones and other modern computers.

The Apollo computers had most of their instructions hard-wired in.

We have much lighter plastic and metal technologies to make going back to the moon much easier and safer.

Maybe. Although the aluminium of which the Apollo spacecraft were made was a pretty reasonable compromise between lightness and radiation protection. Don’t forget that any space vehicle that leaves near-Earth orbit will be exposed to the solar wind. Carbon composites don’t provide anything like as much protection thickness-for-thickness as do heavier materials such as aluminium.

Also, because we have a different attitude to risk than pertained in (say) 1969, we would need whatever spacecraft we end up using to be not merely safer than Apollo, but safer by a large margin than Apollo if it is to be used for manned space flight in the long-term.

Sure it takes more launches, but I think that since it involves using cheaper rockets, it might drive down their cost per flight.

Of course, we could always use Atlas V Phase 2 Heavy to simplify things. And it’s not that difficult to make that upgrade, aside from the uphill political challenges……

And you can’t keep coughing up the same ol’ same ol’… What is the main reason we don’t have a He3 capable technology right now? Because we don’t have access to sufficient raw material! How are we going to develop ANY technology if we refuse to consider the possibilities first? “Heavier than air flight is impossible” “What’s the point of an aeroplane?”…. Refer to the Og/Nog conversation earlier.

Fortunately for us all, every empire that ever rose and fell found that giving up the high ground (tactically and strategically speaking, as well as metaphorically) ended up with themselves on the bottom of the resulting pile. Perhaps you’d give up your job to someone less fit to prove the vacuous sloganeering wrong? No, I think that, like me, you’d prefer to be at the top of the heap – or at least trying for it!

“…before the end [1] of my second[2] term, ….

Yep, IF you vote me in, AND you keep me in, THEN if someone doesn’t forget about it in the perfect storm of terrible healthcare decisions, disastrous privatisation schemes, and the never-ending spend on the far east quagmire(s), we MIGHT put the question to Congress. If I’m not impeached by then.

Still, that’s almost black-and-white talk from a polly!

And yet, it would have been cheaper to just build a series of HSTs, and launch a new one on an expendable rocket every few years. Amortize the engineering and support cost over multiple units and reuse the tooling/testing infrastructure.

The extraction of [He3] from the moons surface would be a game changer.

The potential of 3He is vastly overhyped. The amount of regolith that would have to be processed is enormous. Worse, it’s not even clear the energy return from processing that regolith would be positive! Even if it were, it would likely be totally uneconomical to have to build a (say) 100 MW reactor on the moon to fuel a 1 GW reactor on Earth.

And all this ignores the unfortunate reality that we don’t know how to build an economical fusion reactor, even if we had 3He available for free.

Discussion of the facts: that all countries who give up the high ground, [lose], economically and otherwise.

This is vacuous sloganeering. There is no product that we could make on the moon that would be profitable, never mind one that would lead to economic domination. The moon also has no military utility. If you disagree with those assessments, point out the specific product or military benefit.

JFK made a promise – and he kept it. “Before this decade was out” Apollo had landed men on the Moon and had returned them safely to Earth again.

If anything, it was Lyndon Johnson who delivered on JFK’s promise. JFK set things in motion (at Johnson’s suggestion), but without Johnson’s drive they would have come to naught.