

Scientists Petition U.S. Congress for Return to the Moon - bane
http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-petition-u-congress-return-moon-191838421.html

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hobbes78
Definitely scientists have an opinion far from unanimous, as Stephen Hawking
finds the idea "Stupid. Robots would do a better job and be much cheaper
because you don't have to bring them back."

[http://www.todayinsci.com/H/Hawking_Stephen/HawkingStephen-Q...](http://www.todayinsci.com/H/Hawking_Stephen/HawkingStephen-
Quotations.htm)

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bradleyjg
If you look at the justification it is totally circular -- "we need to send
people to the moon to learn how to send people to Mars".

Much much more science can be done for the same price if you omit the humans.
The commercial viability threshold is much much lower if you omit the humans.
The one and only reason to send humans up to space in the foreseeable future
is patriotic chest thumping. Well that and to stroke the adolescent fantasies
of those who grew up on science fiction.

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logfromblammo
Think of a manned Moon mission as more of a propaganda piece for the Mars-
exploration party.

The Moon is days of travel time, whereas Mars is months of travel time. Round-
trip communication delay to the Moon is seconds. Delay to Mars is minutes.
Pieces of the Moon can be returned as souvenirs. Delta-v for returning bits of
Mars is ridiculous. People can SEE the Moon with the naked eye, even in urban
light pollution. Mars requires a map of the sky and a pair of binoculars, at
least.

The Moon is important because it motivates the nonscientific people of Earth
to support more productive forms of space exploration research. It reminds
people that this is not only a very small world, but the only one we have. And
it creates a seed economy with a shorter possible cycle of iterations than a
few missions clustered around the same 3-month launch window every 780 days.
There is some merit to having regular shorter missions to a closer target, so
that when that window comes around, you have people with steady jobs and
experience around to run the longer missions.

It isn't just about the scientific benefit. You also have to consider the
human factors. Nobody wants to train for years to be unemployed 90% of the
time, waiting around for the next time someone needs some specific skill. The
thing about Moon missions is that they can be done with resources that would
otherwise be mothballed and rusting, or used once and discarded.

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bradleyjg
You're engaging in the same question begging as the scientists in the linked
piece. If we accept for the sake of argument that manned moon missions further
the cause of manned Mars missions, that still leaves us without a
justification for manned Mars missions.

Manned Mars missions aren't any more "productive" than manned Moon missions.
Both are terribly inefficient from any scientific or commercial perspective.

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logfromblammo
There is no commercial perspective that does not include humans somewhere. The
economy IS humans. Manned missions to other planets are exciting. Robot
missions to anywhere are slightly more emotionally engaging than watching your
Roomba sweep your kitchen floor.

Star Trek succeeded as a television show because it had human actors telling a
story, to the point that this fiction is more popular as an entertainment
franchise than actual space exploration? Why? Actual space exploration has
only produced a handful of biplanetary pedestrians, and only John Glenn has
made any kind of a big deal about it.

In my view, the end goal of space exploration is to transplant Earth-origin
life to other planets--not just humans, but (at minimum) thousands of species.
That goal is not served by ignoring the transporting-the-biologicals portion
of space exploration. That means I am completely unwilling to fund with my
dollars any scheme that allows other people to fritter away money on pure
science that will never become applied science, specifically science applied
to my personal lifestyle. Multiply me by the six billion people who will
likewise never escape our gravity well, and you had darned well better start
thinking about the politics and the economics along with the science.

In short, I don't give a fig about whether it would make the boffins happier
to do something else. Humans in space is what I am willing to pay for. If they
don't want to play along with my non-optimal prejudices, I'd prefer that they
be cut off from tax-derived funds entirely, and go with exclusively private
funding. Ask for public money; act in the public's interest. The public is
interested in seeing people in space.

It IS stupid, and doesn't make sense. What else would make it a uniquely human
endeavor?

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Anon84
I'm a scientist (although not currently living in the US) and I definitely
think we (the US in particular and humanity in general) should go back to the
Moon and eventually Mars.

Yes, we can (probably) do more science and for cheaper with robots. Yes, we
can (probably) develop the same technologies we would other wise by focusing
just on automated exploration but there is one very important thing only human
exploration can do:

 __ _Inspire generations of future scientists_ __

Never underestimate the power of seeing someone personally going where no one
has ever gone before or doing something that has never been done before.
Thousands of people cross the straight between England and France everyday,
but when someone swims across it makes the news. Thousands of people skydive
everyday, but when Felix Baumgartner jumped from higher and faster than
anybody before it made the news. How many of the older generation of
scientists and engineers chose (at least initially) that carrer path because
they grew up watching Neil Armstrong bounce around on the Moon? Or watching
the now defunct Space Shuttle take people to the edge of space and dreamt of
doing the same? A big project similar to the space race could make science and
engineering sexy again, and would have one other advantage that only giant
projects with clearly defined goals have:

 __ _It focuses research in one direction, speeding up technological
evolution_ __

The reason why a bunch of nerds in the middle of the New Mexico desert were
able to build an atom bomb in practically record time was because everyone had
a clear idea of what the goal was and it was immediately clear when progress
was being made towards it and when it was achieved. The same thing applies to
the Space Race. When Kennedy first said "we choose to go the moon in this
decade" it was far from clear that it would even be possible. But it gave
everyone a clear and inspiring goal to strive for. "We choose to send a bunch
of circuits to the moon" wouldn't have nearly the same effect. This is the
reason we now talk of "moonshot projects" (and google has a whole division for
them). They are almost impossible but the goal is sufficiently clear and
inspiring to make people work hard until they are accomplished.

Imagine what would be possible if Obama were to say "we choose to go to Mars
before the end of the decade" and actually provided NASA and private
contractors with the funds to do it? What technologies wouldn't be developed
and commercialized that we haven't even dreamt of?

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tesseractive
Suppose we set a goal to build a dirigible the size of a small town that could
float up in the air and people could live on it and it would have an expected
lifespan of at least 30 years? It would be enormously expensive and I have
little doubt that some new technologies would have to be pioneered to produce
something so audacious. But at the end of the day, it's still reasonable to
ask why that's a goal we should spend so much to achieve, and the fact that we
would invent a bunch of cool technology along the way seems insufficient as a
response. There are lots and lots of things that we could spend tons of money
on that would produce a bunch of spin-off technology -- how would we decide
which of these things we should dump truckloads of money into, and which ones
we shouldn't?

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eudox
Robert Zubrin has spent a large chunk of his career[1] arguing that going to
the Moon is absolutely worthless. Go to Mars instead, it's not orders of
magnitude harder. Why the Moon? There is nothing of value. Some ice embedded
in rock, extremely diluted He-3. Really, it's just useful as a megascale solar
panel.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm34Muv6Lsg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm34Muv6Lsg)
is a good summary.

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peter303
Neither party particularly likes funding NASA (save if they have them in their
home district). The Dems prefer to expand social spending over government R&D.
The Repubs thinks government funded R&D is a deficit-rasiing frill. Thats whty
they both were quick to shut down the shuttle program.

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cshenoy
It'll be interesting to see if and how those positions will change once other
countries like China and India make major advances in space technologies and
discoveries.

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fit2rule
This is going to end up being a race to build the first helium-3 reactor on
the moon, I just know it. After that happens - wow! We may well just enter the
new Space Era after all.

Trouble is, its also highly likely that it'll be the Chinese leading the way.
If they didn't have such a violent history of human rights abuses as a nation,
I'd be a little less concerned, but as it stands right now I can't see Chinese
domination of space-based industry being a good thing.

Then again, it might just solve the pollution problem if we can just push
China up into space, and use clean technologies for deliveries back to us here
on Earth. Here's hoping it happens within the next 50 years, anyway!

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Retric
About 1 in 10,000th of earth bound helum is H3 which makes it several orders
of magnitude cheaper to extract on earth than on the moon.

PS: For scale the US reserve was over 1 billion kg of helium last I checked
which works out to something like 100,000+kg of H3. At 20% effecency it takes
~260kg of H3 to run a 1GW power plant for 1 year. So, we might want to start
mining H3 on the moon, but after getting 10+ H3 reactors running for 20+ years
which is going to take a long time. However, I suspect where going to ignore
designing H3 reactors for similar reasons as we are ignoring thorium basically
the fuel is no the expensive part of nuclear reactors.

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fit2rule
Send robot to moon.

Robot #1: locate he-3!

he-3 robot finds he-3 on moon!

Send 2 more robots to moon.

Robot #2: build he-3 reactor!

reactor robot starts to build reactor ..

Robot #3: build little factory for making: robots!

robot-building robot builds robot-building factory ..

reactor robot is finished! Just Plug In!

robot-building robot is finished! Plugged In!

ROBOTS in SPACE!!

(Edit: to answer this - "the fuel is not the expensive part of nuclear
reactors", yes the most expensive part of all this is doing it on Earth.)

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bayesianhorse
If it was this easy, there should already be robots building He-3 reactors on
the moon. No, not from Earth. From other civilizations that built van Neumann
drones millions or billions of years ago!

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nationcrafting
Seems a bit 20th century to ask Congress for money to do it, when people like
Elon Musk have shown you can do pretty much anything NASA can do privately at
a 10th of the cost.

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philwelch
Anything? Really? So Musk built a space station, landed men on the moon, and
launched a massive space telescope? He's landed robotic rovers all over the
surface of Mars? He hasn't even put a human being in orbit yet.

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nationcrafting
No, he hasn't done all those things. That's kind of the point here: this is
about going back to the moon i.e. doing things that have already been done.
The point now is to do them in such a way that you can generate wealth while
doing it. So, when private companies go to the moon, they will do it better,
at a fraction of the cost, and generate wealth while doing it.

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squozzer
Been there, done that.

It might be worthwhile to use Earth-to-Moon travel as a benchmark -- such as
we used "crossing the Atlantic" or "New York to LA". Otherwise, what's the
use?

1) I suppose we could build factories to make stuff too dangerous or difficult
to make on Earth. But LEO would probably work just as well more cheaply. 2)
Build a "Super Guantanamo" where "life without parole" has some real teeth.

We might find LEO, Sealabs, and near-Earth asteroids more useful. Going to
Mars would be more difficult and more imaginative.

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maaku
So once Lindberg crossed the atlantic, that was it? Been there, done that, no
need to ever make a nonstop flight across the atlantic again?

