Ed,
re>It's
difficult to perceive any tangible economic benefit. <
This is not a defensible allegation. Do you have any idea how much cheaper it would be to launch a satellite to Earth orbit from the Moon than from Earth? Granted it would take awhile to build the infrastructure on the Moon to support building satellites but that is just a matter of engineering and time. A mass driver on the lunar surface powered by solar power arrays would launch to lunar orbit whatever you want for essentially free. To go from lunar orbit to Earth orbit takes a little more than a butterfly sneeze but not much. And as is often said Getting to Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System in terms of energy expenditure. A huge part of the cost of doing anything in space is simply getting there from here. Getting there from the surface of the Moon is practically free. Imagine how much cheaper a trip to Mars or anywhere else would be if everything except the people came from the Moon. Water in the pole craters would supply the fuel,water and oxygen, the minerals to make everything else are abundant. Heck, even the people could come from the moon if we had stayed in the first place. The first human born on the Moon could be old enough to have the second generation of humans born off planet already if we had established a permanent colony in the late seventies or early eighties.
You mentioned fusion as an alternate use of the funds. The moon contains vast quantities of a form of helium (my memory isn't great, it may be a hydrogen compound) that would make the perfect fusion fuel. It is produced by the effect of the solar wind on lunar soil which is why we don't have it here. I have read claims that an amount of this helium compound that would constitute one shuttle load would be enough to create a year's worth of electricity for the whole country. Miniscule amounts of this helium substance have been produced (again according to my less than perfect memory) in labs at great expense but enough to use for fusion experiments would be hugely expensive. A trip to the moon to get a couple hundred pounds of this stuff for experiments might even be a profitable undertaking.
As to Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase the comparison is accurate. Many opposed spending the money because the Country was deep in debt, war with Britain was possible at any time, pirates were harrassing our ships, widow's and orphans needed help, etc. ad nauseum. Many complained that the land to be purchased was a wilderness wasteland that was full of wild animals and wild natives bent on murder. Today LEO is alot closer to Washington than the Mississippi was to Philadelphia then. Jefferson didn't listen to the naysayers then, Bush shouldn't listen to you now.
re> If you're correct I can only conclude that political considerations
prevailed over good science.<
I can only conclude that you are too young or weren't paying attention when these projects were being considered in Congress because anyone who was watching knows for a fact "that political considerations prevailed over good science."
re >If the U.S. wants useful technological innovation then how about a reusable space
craft that can take off and land like a regular airplane?<
Why bother if all we are gonna do is circle the Earth in low orbit? If we are not expanding beyond the home planet to the Moon, Mars and beyond we don't even need a space station at all much less a way to get there. If we are going to expand beyond Earth than settling the Moon is the obvious first step. It is a fact of nature that life grows or dies. Life on Earth will end if it remains limited to the home planet. Sometime between the next few minutes and a few million years an asteroid will wipe out civilization and possibly humanity, possibly all life on Earth. This is not a possibility, not a probability, it is a beyond any doubt hard and fast INEVITABILITY. Look into the effects of the comet or asteroid that flattened hundreds of square miles of forest in 1908 in Tunguska in Siberia and then imagine such an occurance over Chicago, Paris, Tokyo or anywhere with a population. Such an occurance over the ocean would lead to devastating tsunamis travelling at high speed in every direction. Wouldn't want to be in Hawaii, LA, San Francisco, Hong Kong, the Phillipines... when a small one hits anywhere in the Pacific basin. The fossil record suggests that a civilization killer hits the Earth about every ten million years on average, it has been 14 or 15 million years since the last one if I remember correctly. You do the math. How much is stopping the next asteroid worth? How much is the life of every human alive at the time worth? But you can't see any tangible economic benefit????? Please look again.
I choose survival, I choose growth, I choose to support going back to the moon, then to Mars and beyond, I choose to insure survival of not just the Human species but the survival of at least part of the genetic heritage of life on Earth. If we don't go Earthly life will not survive long term. If nothing else in a few billion years the sun will expand as it nears the end of its hydrogen supply and the Earth along with Mercury, Venus and possibly Mars will be within the atmosphere of the Sun. Talk about global warming. Hopefully long before then we will have colonized not only the outer planetary systems and the Oort cloud but will have actually reached other star systems. I hope that when the last shred of the Milky Way is sucked up by the black hole at the center at least one colony ship with a large complement of humans (whatever we may look like in a few billion years), plants, animals (mostly in the form of frozen ova and seeds no doubt) will be striving to reach Andromeda or another nearby galaxy. The next step on that road is a return to the Moon to stay.
AD ASTRA VIA LUNA!!! |
