Space Review article

Ryan Z wrote:

>Thought you all would be interested in this essay on
>O'neill's high frontier in this week's space review:
>
>http://www.thespacereview.com/article/317/1
>

"It is an enticing future that ONeill offers. There may be a way to
salvage it. Looking backward along the critical path of new technologies
and capabilities required to achieve success you see a viable Lunar
technology, space industry and culture base. The Moon, unlike L5, is
much more amenable to scalable technology."

"Lunar settlement is also more scalable since habs and capabilities can
be built piecemeal. There is also a near-term opportunity of science,
technology, national pride, and space tourism that pays for Lunar
exploration. Since this is already the path we are on with the Vision
for Space Exploration, so much the better."

Sounds somehow reasonable to me. You may be allowed to throw the dice
more often than once in engineering, but the more often you have to
throw, the more you go over budget. If you have a 200 billion dollar
program and enough political support to get some more billions if
necessary, the original plan is the highway to space. 30 years ago with
Apollo in mind this was a reasonable plan. Today we have to consider
doing it the hard way, step by step.

Even if the moon will be a minor playground for a spacefaring humankind
in a thousand years, it still is the size of a continent, and a good
stepping stone into space. But if progress keeps the pace of the last 30
years, the next 300 years won't see much progress either. "Return to the
moon - to stay" to me seems a valid slogan for everybody advocating
O'Neills vision.