About the time scale, I was thinking of something I could possibly see in my own lifetime.

The problem with industry in the moon is, that it’s going to be really, really expensive to set up and keep running, despite of the “free” energy and greater abdundancies of eg. aluminium and titanium. It’s a long production/logistics chain from mining the ore to building space hardware. Not to mentioning finding and manufacturing of silicon, arsenium, gallium and halons for semiconductors, not to mention wafer factories. Copper for wires (aluminium would do in many cases), making hydrocarbons, eg. polyethene or mica for dielectrics, etc. Just think about, what’s eg. in your house or car to keep it running, down to the material level, what is needed for eg. an electric dc motor.

And no, I’m not trying to be a wet mop and say that it can’t be done But it’s much more complicated, that people normally thinks.

For Mars mission, I don’t see any benefits for going to the moon, except for training. And I really agree, that the goal is getting way beond Mars. Ultimately all the way to the stars. Unless we discover some totally different way to escape our Sun’s expansion.

Yes, I do recall that. A giant, donut shaped . I have read VonBrauns “WeltraumAtlas” (translated to Finnish, of course) when I was a kid. Got the interest for astronomy from there. And from my late, great-uncle, but he was more of the UFO side…) Ahh, the memories….

That moon race was actually a close call, but Russians chief scientist Sergei Korolev died, they were delayed too much. But, as you said; no space station…

That’s how it goes, politics, politics, politics. Good intentions ruined for getting elected again… I can’t help much about the US congress, as I live in Finland

And yes, sadly, anything atomic is a red flag to many.

Wow, this MUST be my longest post to anywhere. Let’s see what happens tomorrow Cheers: Jari

You may recall that when von Braun first started talking about space exploration his first step was the construction of an orbital space station from where outgoing spacecraft would be constructed.

Unfortunately , the Space Race led us down the path of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. We beat the Russians (and without a Space Station), but there was no Space Station left over to proceed from.

Now if we play the same game with Mars, we’ll eventually reach Mars. Some astronauts may die in the process and then a Congress will get elected thinking the money could be better spent giving Federal subsidies to panhandlers (sorry, I live near Atlanta).

It would also be politically impossible to restart Project Rover and develop the NERVA engine.

What you say may be true for initial, Lewis and Clark type of expiditions to Mars. But in the long run, it will be far more efficient to have the extended space program be Moon-based. The only thing you would need to lift out of Earth’s gravity well is people themselves. You wouldn’t need the extreme weight-cutting that is required now when you lift space hardware from a 1/6 gravity. No need for composites at all–with an unlimited supply of aluminum oxide and solar power on the Moon with which to refine aluminum, we could build everything from aluminum. Assemble the large space hardware in Lunar orbit and be that much better off going interplanetary.

We will have a permanent Lunar presence, not for exploration but for industry.

Not quite. As of 2007 the cost for both wars was $700 billion. http://middleeast.about.com/od.....80225b.htm

The search arguably can be defined as having occurred between 2003 & 2004 http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1056839.html

Hmm, pulling numbers out of thin air…now we see how urban legends start.

The Cash for Clunkers program spent (up front) $2.9 billion between July 1 and August 25 of this year.

Which program has a better cost-to-benefit ratio, and which program has the longest-term benefit for humankind?

Mr. Aldrin is a firm believer of manned space exploration. He just doesn’t think that manned lunar exploration is an essential step towards Mars. But there is a big reason to look for water on the moon–cost. It would be cheaper to launch a long-term spacecraft from Earth without a full water supply, and “tank up” in Lunar orbit with water lifted from the Moon’s 1/6 gravity well rather than Earth’s full gravity well. http://spacespin.org/article.p.....n-the-moon

LCROSS was a piggyback mission, riding along with the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission. The Centaur stage would have been expended anyway, and the structure of LCROSS was a structural support ring between Centaur and LRO which would have been expended anyway. From the following article, the net cost of dedicated hardware that was crashed on the Moon was about $1 million:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw.....100910.xml

And even the flight instruments were modified versions of commercial, off-the-shelf instruments.

The bulk of the $79 million program expense stayed right here on Earth (largely right here in the USA), paying salaries of hard-working engineers and scientists and other personnel.

LCROSS is a brilliant example of NASA’s new “faster, cheaper, good-enough” (to quote a scientist from last night) approach to unmanned space probes.

I say RIGHT ON!

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pla.....mpact.html

I was almost yelling at the monitor for him to speak up…

Jari & Randy, excellent points as well. Credit to the forum!

The clumps of galaxies that puzzled them so in this article have now been explained by the effects of gravity in an expanding universe.

An interesting thing is the discussion about the shape of the universe. Their instruments of the time were only sensitive enough to detect light from about 2 billion light years away. That would not change until the 1970′s. Mathematically the universe should be curved. The WMAP satellite has measured the universe as being flat. Our current instruments can now detect objects out to 12 billion light years in every direction. We know that we are not in the center of the universe and that we can only possibly see half way across the universe. It many be that the universe is many times bigger than we can measure.

As for the “age of the Universe” problem, Richard Feynman talks about this in one of his books. It turned out that there were two kinds of Cepheid variable: some were brighter than expected, and so gave the impression that they were nearer, and the Universe smaller and younger, than was really the case.