Building a ship in the desert: Just say No to the proposed Earth-

> Some of you may receive the Moon Miners' Manifesto, a periodical of the
> Moon Society.

First a plug (and disclaimer) - you can subscribe/join and get access
to back issues online at http://www.moonsociety.org/ (and I was
recently elected to the board of directors there...)

> The MMM advocates building both in parallel,
> but this is sheer fantasy --- no foreseeable budget is going to be able to
> support both a Moon base and an L1 station.

I don't think the vision is to start with an ISS-scale station
at L1 (though I have yet to hear whether that's what NASA is thinking or
not). Going through L1 has always been a good option for
lunar travel though, because it allows a lot of flexibility in
timing and landing location. So I think the main idea is to drop
things off at L1 on the way to and from the Moon, building up
capacity there as we go. If the two efforts were integrated,
cost should not be much greater than to just do one of them,
and flexibility for the future would be much greater.

From what I've heard, the whole idea of the new "NEXT" strategy
at NASA is to take incremental steps that build on one another,
rather than doing things that don't have a long-term purpose.

L1 provides a reason to use lunar resources in a location close to the Moon,
and reciprocally, a way to take advantage of near-Moon space to help
get lunar development moving. I love Charles Radley's idea for
a SPS demonstrator at L1, for example - this gives us a step-by-step
approach to real, large-scale SPS's built with lunar materials.

> [...]
> We have to get to the Moon first and do a lot of things
> there before we should consider building an L1 station. To do it before
> or contemporaneously with going to the Moon would be folly.

I agree that the focus should be the lunar base, not an independent L1
station. It makes no sense to build at L1 without using lunar resources;
on the other hand, I think they could easily grow up together. At least
I hope that's part of NASA's vision...

Arthur