Earth's Groundhog Days Continue Thirty Years Later (Apollo moon mission)

Spacedaily ^ | 12/19/02 | John Carter McKnight

[NonZeroSum]

No, the ISS has no value as a lunar staging point. It's at too high an inclination, and too expensive to get to.

[Cincinatus]

I posted the following to another "Oh, dear! What a lousy space program"- article a few days ago. It apples to this one as well:

Interesting article, but the author completely misses the point about Apollo.

Apollo was not about the Moon, not about exploring the universe, and not about boldly going where no man had gone before. Apollo was about, purely and simply, beating the Soviets to the Moon!. Once that goal was reached, we stopped going there. Put another way, what happens when you win a battle? You stop fighting it.

Space enthusiasts (and I'm one of them) cannot seem to comprehend this simple fact of life. We are doing nothing of any significance in space because there is no national imperative to do so. Thus, 30 years of stop-gap programs, the entitlement Shuttle, and make-work ISS.

Want to conquer the Solar System? Find something out there that'll make millions for somebody. Then, get financing and go do it. Quit thinking of Apollo as a template for the future -- it wasn't a plan to explore space; it was a battle in the Cold War (and one that we won, thank God!).

And stop moaning about our "lousy space future." The only ones responsible for that are ourselves.

BTW, Happy Anniversary, Apollo 17.

[Brett66]

I guess if the decision is ever made to go back to the moon or Mars we'll have to build another facility at an optimal orbit for assembling the spacecraft in orbit. I seem to remember NASA billing the space station as a staging point for Lunar or Mars missions. That must have been before the toon decided to include the Russians and change it's orbit to accomodate them.

[NonZeroSum]

That's what NASA's NeXT plan is all about. They want to establish a staging point at L1.

[Archangelsk]

I'm for private industry in space.

I agree, but I hope that private industry can think of something beyond "space tourism" and other non-value, entertainment venues for space.

[KevinDavis]

Agreed. There is gold in them hills! To me any nation that has a space industry economy is going to be rich. Check out 1000planets. I'm part of that group.

[KevinDavis]

I believe the Gipper prosposed the space station to do that.

[Oberon]

let's draw some conclusions and get on with building a spacefaring civilization.

Not with chemical rockets, thanks. We've got to achieve some kind of propulsion breakthrough before we can even think of going beyond Mars.

[John Jamieson]

The ISS is of no use in going to the moon. What are you reading?

Dump it in some ocean now and stop spending money on it.

[Brett66]

I think there would be a fair chance of it being used as a staging point for a return to the moon. I can envision the conversation with the president going something like this:

President: I've decided were going to make a major push to go back to the moon, the Chinese seem to have plans that would establish a military capability there, we can't allow that to go unanswered.

NASA administrator: So are we going to set up a base at a Lagrangian point to facilitate the construction of a base there?

President: What the hell is the ISS for? Can't we use that?

NASA admin: Well, ummm no. It's in an orbit that makes it terribly expensive to get to and isn't really equipped to service spacecraft.

President: %$^&*%$ ! You mean to tell me that I'm going to have to explain to the American people that we've wasted our time and tens of billions of dollars on that thing and it won't even help us get to the moon? Hell no! We'll use the ISS, it's gotta be better than launching from the ground! Now get out of my office!

[ContentiousObjector]

Shut down Houston, send the space shuttles to the Smithsonian, let the russians play with the international space station, let them call it Mir II.

Give the entire NASA budget to JPL, and let them send more probes to Jupiter's moons and Saturns moon Titan.

What is more productive, experiments looking for new ways for people to pee in zero gravity on the space shuttle, or sending probes to Europa, which offers the best chance at finding life in the solar system?

[ContentiousObjector]

Some how I managed to clip off part of my message, could a moderator paste this into my last post?

I would bet anything we have learned more from Pioneer, Voyager, Magellan, Galileo and (will learn from) Cassini than we have from the space shuttle, and I will bet those unmanned programs cost less than 10% of what has been wasted on the Space Shuttle program up to this point

[SamAdams76]

I think the wakeup call for the U.S., in regards to a revitalization of our space program, will be when the Chinese put a man on the moon.

I think you are right. After all, it was the Russians initial success in space that prodded us to accelerate our space program. America always seems to need a push. But once we set our minds to doing something - look out!