President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond

I respectfully disagree. A moonbase is close enough to allow remote control and close monitoring, and self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire solar system within a reasonable timeframe, IMHO, holds the key to the future of the exploration of space, and any other approach would be very short-sighted and short lived by comparison, with a fraction of the benefits self replicating system would bring.
Just consider that once whatever the current program is completed, you would be left with a fully functional system that will be able to produce vital equipment for other mission, orbital power stations, and the further colonisation of the moon and in the long run the entire solar system.

> [...comment to Moon, Mars & beyond commission...]
> I encourage you to consider the benefits that a well
> developed base on the moon would offer to visiting
> astronauts - especially if it was built for them in
> advance by robots.

If we have robots capable of building a moonbase, we have robots
capable of doing most of the exploration a human could do. I think you
overestimate the usefulness of robots. We should send robots to make
sure humans won't be killed by something obvious and then send humans.
If we really want robots, we'll need to have humans in the neighborhood
to fix them anyway. Look at the Mars rovers - they are so worried
about damaging them that they move them only a tiny amount at a time.
If there was someone there to fix problems the rovers could afford to
take risks. Machines can extend human capabilities, but they simply do
not have the necessary flexibility to replace humans.

I suspect that the commission is going to get hundreds of letters from
technophiles pushing their pet idea, be it nanotech, space elevators,
scramjets, robots, whatever. I hope they ignore all of these ideas.
Simple, pedestrian, boring, reliable technologies should be used at
every step of the way. If we let this turn into yet another technology
development project, we'll never get anywhere. Exploration is hard
enough without adding needless complexity.

......Andrew