I agree with most of what you say, Jose, but I am not sure your assesment of the cost of manned space flight is entirely correct. It is true that manned spaceflight so far has been extremely expensive. However, I would dispute that it is necessarily prohibitively expensive. I agree with…well, with the huge armada of people who realise that government organisations, NASA in particular, have done more to hinder the manned exploration of sapce tha promote it. The way I see it, it’s not space travel that demands enormous budgets and huge national programs, but monolithic government agencies. Certainly, if Scaled Composites success with low cost space flight is any indication, you can get there on the cheap…I would certainly be very interested to know how much NASA would have spent on developing the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination. I’m also fairly certain that, at least in the case of the US, the defence and intelligence communities are horrified at the prospect of a (relatively) cheap SSTO or similar that they would have no control over, that could launch and land from anywhere in the world. It was enough of a nightmare for them that Russia could overfly the continental US with Sputnik, so imagine the reaction to the idea that anyone with a few million buck could buy that kind of access…

Hello, Jose,

I’ll let my forthcoming article stand for itself, but two corrections of fact.

First, the Hubble Space Telescope is not part of the automated space program. If it were, we would not be fighting over whether to repair it. HST is a human-tended astronomical facility, supported by the Shuttle, and as such its remarkable accomplishments should be included on the human side of the equation.

Second, in your cost comparison, you are comparing the operations cost of robotic missions (only the cost of the mission itself) with the full cost of flying and developing human missions. For example, the operations costs of the Mars Excursion Rovers is well over $1 billion to date. For that, we have proven that there probably was standing water on Mars at some undetermined date in the past. However, that does not include any of the development costs — all the billions spent over the decades developing, maintaining, and upgrading the Delta launch vehicle plus learning how to do automated interplanetary flight.

NASA’s current estimate for the total cost of returning to Earth’s moon is circa $104 billion, but the operations cost of each mission is estimated to be somewhat over $2 billion. Let’s be generous and double that figure, saying that each lunar expedition will cost $4 billion.

That is four times the operations cost of the Mars rovers, but look at what you get for your money. You place three geologists and astronauts on the lunar surface for weeks to months at a time, with the equipment to do long “Luis and Clark” class traverses across the landscape.

With that capability, you can do things like provide exact dates for each volcanic flow and impact. (To this date, the only absolute dates for any place in the Solar System were obtained from Apollo; all other dates from Mercury to Neptune’s moons are little more than educated guesses based on crater counts compared to the absolute lunar dates.) Or, you might find samples of the ancient terrestrial continents splashed up to the moon in early meteor impacts; these may well have a preserved record of the early atmosphere, oceans, and the origin of life. If so, such samples will be small, hard to find, and probably deeply buried — beyond the reach of any foreseeable robot. Or, you can study the ancient environment in our region of the Solar System from the remains of more recent impacts. Or, you can do asteroid resource surveys by studying what has struck the moon in the last few thousand years.

Most importantly, you can start to learn to live off the land mining oxygen from lunar regolith. Since oxygen is the heaviest consumable needed by every person and facility off the planet — for rocket oxidizer, drinking water, and growing food — this is a tradable commodity. I can foresee trading lunar oxygen with Space Station crews, as oxidizer for applications satellites, and as consumables and oxidizer for future expeditions heading deeper into space.

Once trade gets started, you have the beginnings of an economy.

All of that is paid for with operations costs a few times that of the Mars rovers. Is the science per unit dollar really cheaper when you spend a billion dollars wandering on Mars less distance than two geologists could walk in an afternoon — and without sufficient equipment to accomplish more than a few tens of measurements or to obtain a single absolute date?

For more thoughts on these subjects, see my Op Ed piece scheduled for Monday’s Space News.

– Donald

Donald F. Robertson
San Francisco

donaldfr@speakeasy.net
http://www.speakeasy.net/~donaldfr

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. — Thomas Huxley.