

NASA-funded study reduces cost of missions to Moon and Mars by 90% - anigbrowl
https://spacefrontier.org/2015/07/alliance-for-space-development-press-release-nasa-funded-study-reduces-cost-of-human-missions-to-moon-and-mars-by-factor-of-10/

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stephengillie
Interesting proposal. The 90% number comes from an estimated $100 billion
price tag for another moon shot - in short, the study estimates we could land
humans on the moon for just $10 billion. It's unclear if that's $10 billion in
addition to NASA's current budget.

> _Enabled by public-private partnerships, NASA’s current human spaceflight
> budget is sufficient to return humans to the surface of the Moon and develop
> a permanent lunar base._

Does this mean repurposing NASA's entire budget? Doesn't the current budget
include maintenance/monitoring for many long-term projects including Hubble,
NuSTAR, New Horizons, STEREO, etc? So we'd have to choose to abandon all
current research to fit another moon trip into the budget?

> _Mining fuel from lunar poles and transporting it to lunar orbit for use by
> other spacecraft reduces the cost of sending humans to Mars and other
> locations beyond low Earth orbit. These commercial fuel depots in lunar
> orbit have the potential to cut the cost of sending humans to Mars by more
> than $10 billion per year._

This second bullet point is a somewhat longer reach. Once we have fuel depots
constructed in lunar orbit, we can more cheaply mine spaceship fuel from the
moon's poles, and refuel ships in orbit instead of landing them on a gravity
well.

First, this assumes the lunar poles will have the specific material we're
using for fuel, something which is unknown to myself. Secondly, this assumes
we have already constructed the orbiting fuel depots. This will definitely be
the way to go once we have these constructed, but for now they don't reduce
the price for lunar or Mars trips.

