“Poor analogy, sailing/oceanic navigation and boat construction were well known science and arts in 1492.”
Sorry you don’t like the analogy. But exploration beyond coastlines was viewed in 15th century Europe as a death sentence. No private trading company was willing to take the ecomonic risk, even if they could have found crews or maps (maps were the ultra classified, eyes only state secrets of the time). Just as today no private company is willing to go beyond LEO they do not have access to the classified lunar maps (cf USN Clementine mapping mission), nor the funds or tech to go in the first place.
“Nerva is the propulsion system and Orion is the vehicle IIRC, neither are ready to scale up for a trip to Mars and back IMO.”
NERVA was a planned propulsion system specifially designed for long space voyages and had nothing to do with Orion.
Orion was to use small nuclear charges (once clear of the atmosphere) for propulsion. Ist version payoad was 10,000 tons, crew compliment was 150. 2nd version was 40,000,000 ton payload.
There was no worry about radiation, since there was no practical weight limit on the amount of water on board (to be used as sheilding), and no worries about bone loss, as ship was designed to generated its own by rotation.
“As far as mining on the Moon, that’s an awfully expensive proposition for what gain right now? What did we find there last time that makes the project imperative?”
If you wait until the Chinese begin moon mining ops, then it will be too late. The moon and later Mars will belong to them. H3 is what we found - the key to sustainable thermonuclear power generation. Also the only place that highly efficient, cheap, solar panels can be mass produced from the abundant silicon on the surface.
“I am not against inter-planetary exploration per se, I just dont think we’re there yet.”
We are there. It is simpily that everytime someone comes up with a realistic means of manned sapce travel, someone else quashes it for one reason or another. All realistic means of long term space travel involves nuclear power - either by fission or by fusion. Everything else is just theory. A workable Orion could be built today.
“Other, more fanciful nuclear propulsion ideas were proposed, too. One, Project Orion, would have been powered by nuclear bombs. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked on the project, told The New York Times Magazine he saw it “as the solution to a problem. With one trip we’d have got rid of 2,000 bombs.”
“Orion was a delightful scientific exercise, but not very feasible,” McDaniel said.”
If it was remotely doable there would have been at least some political will for it in at least one administration since Kennedy's.