Moon first?

You state that "I don't see the Moon as competing with Mars."
I disagree. I agree with the central premise of the Space Studies Institute, as expressed on the home page of its Website:
"Is the surface of the Earth really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" --- Gerard K. O'Neill
(Replace "surface of the Earth" with "surface of a planet" in that sentence.) O'Neill had a vision, one he supported technically, that free-floating stations and colonies were preferable to planetary surfaces for the purposes of space industrialization and settlement.
Sure, I like pictures from Mars as much as the next guy. And learning whether or not Mars has/had life would be really neat to know. But consider the task of transforming the $60 billion/year space sector into a multi-trillion dollar per year economy. Mars will not help us do that (perhaps Phobos and Deimos might, but not Mars itself). Rather, resources from the Moon and/or NEAs are our best bet for providing the engine for space industrialization. The surface of Mars is at the bottom of a bigger gravity well than the Moon, is much harder to reach and takes more time, and the surface has far less solar energy available for usage (note how Zubrin's proposals mention politically-infeasible nuclear power).
If the U.S. and partners were to dump billions of dollars into some human exploration of Mars, that would amount to billions of dollars not spent on utilizing the resources of the Moon and/or NEAs. Since the U.S. and its partners can fund only one big program at a time, I feel very much like manned Mars exploration would compete negatively with our ability to industrialize space. (In the same way that ISS Alpha sucks money away from other more useful space ventures.)

ThomasKalbfus@...
03/19/2001 05:03 PM

...
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