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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (23678)	1/10/2004 3:31:06 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793672

I'm all for the Heinlein approach Bill. But there's a snag. No private property rights in space. Ain't gonna get nowhere without that. Private property rights require an assertion of sovereignty by a state as guarantor, and that's already been decided with that pesky space treaty. No one else would recognize a US assertion of property rights to the moon or anywhere, which would be a definite Too Big Risk to Bother With for business. Until that changes, at best we can hope for a public-private coop. I'd love to see human footprints on Mars in my lifetime. With the modifications NASA made to the model plan after Zubrin showed them how it could be done, the cost of a Mars Direct mission is around 60 billion. Say 100 billion for insurance. And that's doing it the expensive way. Mars is still the luxury mission however. I've become more convinced of the advantages of a moon base over the years. First of all, its close. No one seriously suggests anymore that a moonbase would "support a Mars mission" by landing and relaunching spacecraft from the Moon. The Moon is the perfect, 3-day away testbed for Mars mission technology. Any reasonable Mars mission is going to leave astronauts on a far away planet for up to 2 years. Better to do the proof of concept on the moon than a couple million miles away. Second, there are obvious research advantages to the moon as contrasted with the white elephant in orbit we currently waste money on. Moon based telescopes and a near-zero gravity environment. Third, one of the reasons for the high cost of getting tonnage into orbit is the lack of economies of scale. There simply aren't enough launches to spread cost out over. I would imagine that having to make regular, frequent supply and taxi runs to the moon, with the prospect of contracting such launches out to private firms, would bring down the cost of getting tonnage into space, further opening up the space frontier. Fourth, I'm a proponent of moon-based or orbital solar power generation. The surface of the moon is stable, sunlit, and has almost all the elements in situ to build solar panels, and no atmosphere. The profit motive is pretty obvious, here. I've been thinking about this, as you see. :) Derek

To: LindyBill who wrote (23678)	1/10/2004 3:59:10 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793672

My initial reaction is that Bush has lost his mind. It's time for the XXVth Amendment. Let's see. We've had a tax cut bill passed and have a ballooning deficit. We have an expensive but indeterminate cost war going in Iraq with real potential for a widened conflict. But we're going to spend $1T to go to Mars. Right. I believe Derek said Mars could be done for $100B. If he really believes that, he should step up to pay the excess over $100B, including selling his wife and children into slavery if necessary. I think he needs to re-study and refamiliarize himself with Murphy's and Brook's Law. And Long's Law, which states that to estimate the cost and schedule of an engineering project, take your worst, worst case estimates and triple them and you might be in the ballpark, although possibly still low. The upside may be technology developed as a result of the effort. Still, $1T is a whole lot of technology. I have seen statements that the Apollo moon effort more than paid for itself with technological spin offs from the space program, although I have yet to see any calculations to prove that statement. I suspect they fail to take account of the fact that the technology would have been developed anyway later without the program and their supposed credits should stop at that point. The technologies I have heard mentioned are Teflon, solid state electronics, and communications and weather satellites. THese actually could amount to $1T or more- -assuming they wouldn't have been developed till much later anyway. How do you prove history that didn't happen? And, of course, there's the Beat the Kennedys theory: JFK did it. Why not me? Maybe GWB should take a closer look at the Kennedy clan. He might change his mind.