I've been evolving the idea of America's return to the lunar surface in my head over the past few days to setup a permanent lunar laboratory as well as the eventual further commercialization of space to get humanity into the sky.
As in my previous post; there are a lot of people who believe that the Moon is a distraction from going to Mars. I don’t disagree. As mentioned, the problems you solve for the Moon aren’t going to be translatable for the problems you solve for Mars. Many people want to see humanity as a multi-planetary species, and if you’re Elon Musk you want to get to Mars within your own lifetime.
I find these as admirable goals, but I’m afraid that the leap from Earth to Mars doesn’t allow us enough time to properly study the effects of humanity in low G and high radiation environments. To be clear, I fully believe that there’s enough smart people to solve all the problems of creating a Martian colony. I am simply just afraid of the logistics of the problem.
I personally find it much more appealing that we try and put our reach on a more familiar body and within reach of problem solving quickly. The communication time between Earth and the Moon is within seconds. The communication time between Earth and Mars at worse is around 40 minutes round trip. If there are supplies that need to be launched, or rescue missions to be staged – with the right infrastructure you can do so from Earth. Apollo took 3 days to get to the moon. On the trip to Mars there will be no “quick” option. SpaceX is proposing a trip time of 6 months.
For human spaceflight, the stakes are always higher than with robotic spaceflight. Everyone laughs or ridicules engineers and scientists when money is “wasted” sending probes to distant locations and things don’t work out right. But if some human dies in space I feel that would be catastrophic to pushing the public into believing that we should put humans on other celestial bodies.
To that end, I’m continuing my arguments that we should push America to go Moon and establish a lunar base to increase our understanding of how humans live in space as well as to get research and discoveries back much more quickly than with a manned Mars mission.
I don’t think that we need to do one or the other by the way. I think we can do both concurrently. Is there enough funding for both? I think so – and I think that just as SpaceX is pushing to lower costs of spaceflight, I think that if we work towards putting more humans on the lunar surface that in time we will learn how to lower the cost of building livable structures for humans on celestial bodies. Then we will be furthering our chances of getting to Mars.
What should we do?
I’m no expert at all on any of these things, but my personal view is that we should have at least multiple launch options both for human and cargo flight to the lunar surface. Right now, as of 2017 the only way to get humans into space is from a Soyuz spacecraft – I would prefer that we have multiple options for a lunar base. Following the US governments current policy of having at least two launch providers; I would want to continue to have two options for launching missions to the moon. Be it NASA’s SLS and/or SpaceX’s BFR, I think we should ensure that there are concurrent development processes and multiple options. Perhaps a CRS style program to ensure that commercial space is still able to exist alongside government vehicles to the lunar station. I am not sure.
As well, I’m of the thought that perhaps with a big enough rocket such as SpaceX’s proposed BFS that we may be able to down scope some of the needs of the ISS. My thought is that the ISS should eventually be turned over to commercial interests; and the station should be reduced to a smaller orbiting laboratory if research can be done through other vehicles like SpaceX’s proposed BFS serving as an orbital laboratory. I am not sure if this would allow for more funding to be put towards a lunar base.
As stated, I am not an expert and am evolving this thought for its pros and cons.
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