Moon first?

In a message dated 3/19/01 11:24:07 AM Eastern Standard Time, apsmith@...
writes:

<< Not to mention accidentally losing power at a critical moment and crashing
the thing into Earth...

Anybody who is interested in going to the Moon first should consider
joining the Moon Society (http://www.moonsociety.org/). It formed last year,
I think as a bit of a counter to the influence of the Mars Society. It
absorbed the membership of the Artemis Society which has more of a specific
vision of how to do things. They're still looking for a bit of direction
and some primary officers (definitely an executive director; the current
president has indicated he might need to be replaced soon too).

Arthur Smith (apsmith@...
>>

I don't see the Moon as competing with Mars. You need some of the same
equipment to go to both places, the only difference is that you can go to the
moon more frequently. A trip to Mars implies building a space station. Zubrin
says you don't need to build a space station first to go to Mars, but the
space station I'm talking about isn't the one being constructed in low Earth
orbit. The space station I'm talking about is the one that will be home to
the astronauts for 9 months as they travel from Earth to Mars and from Mars
back to Earth. The vehicle Zubrin proposes has to be a space station to
support astronauts for that amount of time, although it is a disposable one.
Zubrin may call it a space station, but what it really is is a space station
capable of changing orbits around the sun and aerobraking in Mars'
atmosphere. Travel to the moon doesn't require a space station, no long term
stays in space are required. I think the Space Shuttle could be modified to
make the trip to Lunar Orbit if given a bottom stage underneight the external
tank. Another idea is what if we either enlarge the solid rocket boosters or
double their number and have 4 attacked to the ET instead of two. The Space
Shuttle could be replaced with a Shuttle C, but then we would lose
reusability. What I would like is to have trips to the Moon as frequent as
trips to low Earth orbit are today, that means I don't want another Apollo.
What I don't think we need is a dedicated vehicle that simply goes from Low
Earth Orbit to Low Lunar Orbit without landing on either We would then need
to encapsulate that vehicle to return it to Earth for repairs, repair it in
orbit, or use it for a number of times without maintenance and simply replace
it without knowing whether its good for another trip to the Moon or not. The
two vehicle system should be the sort where the larger vehicle would launch
from Earth and bring the Lunar lander to the moon. The lander would then land
on the Moon, take off again and the larger vehicle would bring the lander
back to Earth. I see no reason why a lunar lander couldn't use NERVA rockets
to land and take off from the moon in one stage. Hydrogen is scarce so the
NERVA could use oxygen as its reaction mass.

Tom Kalbfus