(no subject)

I wish I could believe you, but I don't. NASA seems to be in the midst of
constant planning and re-planning for new Mars missions. Meanwhile, a
central question of prime importance to the future direction of space
industrialization and settlement ---- How much water if any is *really* at
the Lunar poles, and is it in a readily-extractable form? --- goes
unanswered. And we know more about black holes and quasars than we do
about NEAs, despite the facts that NEAs
a.) Have bombarded the Earth before with catastrophic effects; and
b.) Will figure prominently as resource mining sites in our move to space,
within the lifetimes of many people alive today.

It seems that Mars is sexy, whereas the Moon is passe' and NEAs just don't
seem to have crowd appeal (despite the magnificently successful NEAR
Shoemaker mission). Sexy seems to get the money.

Why is it that we spend money on ever-finer resolution pictures of Mars
today, when our entire civilization could be toasted by an asteroid
collision tomorrow? There are approximately 1300 known NEAs, and I've
read that there may be a total of 200,000 of them, meaning that we've so
far discovered less than 1% of the total. Of course, no one really knows
for sure how many there are. What a great tragedy it would be if we
learned all sorts of neato-keen things about Mars, Pluto, black holes,
quasars, and all manner of other heavenly objects, only to wake up one
morning that London had been erased from the map by a 21st-century Tunguska
experience.

We've had oodles of Mars orbiters and landers. We know a tremendous
amount about Mars already. We need to put further Mars exploration on ice
for the moment while we fill fundamental gaps in our knowledge of the Moon
and NEAs. What we need to know now is:
a.) Assessment of Lunar polar ice.
b.) How many NEAs are there, what are their orbits, and what are their
compositions

There's a limited space budget. A dollar spent on further Mars
exploration is a dollar less spent towards answering the basic questions
critical to future space industrialization and settlement. Mars **is**
in competition with the Moon (and with NEAs, for sure).

Ron Menich

MarsCity1@...
11:21 AM
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The Moon Is not in competion with Mars. We should explore both, ultilize
both and colonize both. They're both part of the new & final frontier of
space.

Rick L. Sterling-Member-The Mars Society