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“MOON FIRST”?: This article covers the “Return to the Moon” conference held last week in Houston, in which it was asserted (as the name suggests) that we must return to the Moon before we can think about heading for Mars.

The road to Mars must first include a return to the moon, where technologies and techniques for a trip to the red planet can best be tested, according to engineers and scholars attending a lunar development conference.

I think a case can be made for returning to the Moon in the near future. Particularly (or perhaps only) if it is in the context of permanent presence and commercial development, rather than just another Big Program. And it’s reasonable to expect that, some time down the road, a sufficiently developed lunar outpost will eventually serve as a support and logistics base for ongoing voyages to Mars. However, the Moon is not a “must” for Mars, and the serial linkage of these two separate goals creates a great risk to the prospects of going to Mars at all.

First, there is the matter of what the Moon could really teach us about Mars that we couldn’t learn much more cheaply on Earth (or in the ISS, for that matter). The available resources and the environments are quite different — how could one test extraction of water from soil, for example, or ISRU propellant production using atmospheric carbon dioxide, two technologies of critical importance to human visits to and settlement of Mars? If it’s worth going to the Moon for reasons intrinsic to the Moon itself, I have no problem with that. But it’s hard to make the case that we should go back only (or even primarily) because it will teach us about living and working on Mars.

Second, if the return to the Moon is sold as a stepping stone to Mars, it also becomes a potential roadblock. ISS is a perfect example of this: it was to serve as a laboratory for space medicine and technology development in support of a return to the Moon and eventual trips to Mars, but its frequent redesigns, rescopings, budget crises, near-cancellations, and delays delays delays have put those follow-on goals on hold indefinitely. Because the ISS was sold as the sine qua non for lunar and planetary expeditions, NASA is politically unable to commit to the latter goals until the project is completed — and so, we go around and around in Earth orbit. Making humans-to-Mars serially dependent on a full-scale, big-NASA-program return to the Moon, one which can’t even be begun until ISS is complete in another five years or so, guarantees that another twenty or thirty years will pass before voyages to Mars become a reality.

Returning to the Moon is a desirable goal, but are we willing to put our prospects of near-term missions to Mars at risk to do so?

“There is excitement about going to Mars. We have to develop technologies on how to get to and from Mars. Those can be conducted on the way to the moon,” said Rick Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, a California-based group which held its annual “Return to the Moon” conference last week in Houston.

Right; right; true, but not a requirement.

The three-day event, held at a hotel located near the Johnson Space Center, is a gathering of space industry professionals, astronauts, scholars and space enthusiasts interested in developing plans to return to the moon, setting up operations there such as mining facilities and using the moon as a springboard for further exploration of space.

Noble goals, but how long will it take you to set up this springboard? And do we all have to wait for decades while you do so?

The moon can be a realistic classroom for astronauts to learn how to use equipment and test out theories that will be utilized on an excursion to Mars, Tumlinson said.

And so can Antarctica. Or Haughton Crater. Or the Utah desert. Or the ISS (which was built for that purpose, right?)

I will agree that the Moon is a good potential target for dry runs of certain aspects of Mars missions, much as LEO was used for rendezvous and docking experiments during Gemini. But only up to a point. For one thing, landing on Mars will be quite different from landing on the Moon, due to the presence of an atmosphere which both helps and hinders the process. For another, Mars-type ISRU propellant production won’t work on the Moon. For another, greenhouses for growing food on the Moon would be vastly different than those on the Earth or Mars, due to the day/night cycle, the radiation environment, lack of a CO2 atmosphere, etc. These exceptions (just a few off the top of my head) can be dealt with more accurately and more effectively in laboratories or analog environments on Earth, without the expense and questionable traceability of a Moon-specific Big Program.

Going back to the moon will also help clear up the country’s vision for human exploration of space, which has become unfocused the last 30 years, said George Abbey, a former director of the Johnson Space Center and the current senior assistant for international issues at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Well, George, maybe we should never have abandoned the Moon in the first place. If the country’s vision for human exploration of space has become unfocused, maybe it’s because those to whom we’ve entrusted the focusing for the past forty years have not been doing a very good job of it, and have instead endeavoured to make space “safe” (ie:”challenge-free”) and “routine” (ie: “boring”).

The last time a person walked on the moon was during the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

And well I recall, having watched it on television…when I was three. Apollo 17 steered me into science and engineering, even from that early age, so imagine what human exploration of Mars could do to motivate young people. Could the return to the Moon do that? Or would it be met with sighs of “been there, done that”?

What a shame we’ve wasted the three decades since.

“The moon is really a crossroads, a transition point,” he said. “If we go beyond Earth orbit, it’s the first step. We have not sent a person out of Earth orbit the last 30 years. That’s not a good situation. We really have to do something now.”

Better late than never, I suppose.

While the United States is the only country to have sent men to the moon, a burgeoning Chinese space program has set its sights on mining the moon and eventually exploring Mars.

And this will become a motivating factor for NASA on the day that they actually do these things (Sputnik), and not before.

Abbey said international cooperation on a return to the moon or a trip to Mars will be needed, in part to share the high cost of such endeavors.

Oh, that old crock. International cooperation on the ISS model is not required for cost sharing, so much as it is for ensuring the Big Program’s longevity. If it’s a national program, national priorities can change, and funding can be cut off if you are unable to make a persuasive case for continuing it (Apollo). But if you get other countries to sign on, and make it a matter of international agreements and diplomacy, the program becomes politically immortal. (Unfortunately, this immortality is that of the undead rather than the more lively gods for whom space programs used to be named).

And one has to ask whether the high cost of an international program like ISS is due to the international cooperation in the first place.

While a partnership between the public and private sector will also be needed to pay for these projects, only the U.S. government can bear the costly burden of creating the propulsion system, said John Young, an astronaut who went to the moon on Apollo 16 in April 1972.

Public/private partnerships? Like X-33?

Right now, yes, it would be a costly burden to Mars exploration to develop an exotic propulsion system like nuclear thermal or VASIMR or the like…but Young’s point wrongly implies that such propulsion systems are necessary up-front. What is so special about the propulsion requirements for early Mars missions that they can’t be satisfied with existing or modified existing engines? To use the typical analogy, Columbus didn’t wait for the Queen Mary to be invented before he went exploring. He made the best of what ships he had available, and the discoveries he made as a result made it both necessary and economically viable to develop new vessels tailored to crossing open ocean at ever-increasing speed.

“I think the moon is really in our future. It is a step to opening space exploration for human beings. And that’s what exploration is all about, the long term survival of the species,” said Young, who now oversees technical and safety issues for all programs at Johnson Space Center.

The Moon should be in our future, and it should be a step towards space exploration. It should not be regarded as a vital next step before anything further can be done in space.

And as for species survival…The species evolved on an Earth-like planet (Earth, in fact). Mars is significantly Earth-like. The Moon is not at all Earth-like. On which body do you suppose the species would stand a better chance of securing its long-term survival?

Others at the conference also saw the moon serving a multitude of other uses, including as a center that can efficiently and cleanly collect solar power and then beam it back to Earth and as an optimum location to set up telescopes that can track asteroids and comets which could impact the planet.

Ah, trotting out the solar idea again. Well, more power to you.

The Moon is a fine place for telescopes, period, without gilding the lily with the threat of asteroid impacts (which trivializes both considerations by sensationalizing them).

Tumlinson said a return to the moon, coupled with an eventual trip to Mars will reinvigorate a U.S. space program no longer seen as vital by the public.

“The reason NASA doesn’t get great (public relations) is because it is currently doing operational activities, which aren’t that exciting,” he said. “When they get back to work on exploring, the attention will come back.”

Which begs the question of whether a reinvigorated “space program” is even a desirable thing…versus rapidly expanding commercial activity in space, including space tourism. Watching a highly-trained professional carry the flag on a difficult and dangerous mission was heroic and inspirational, but once the heroic struggle on which the program was marketed was won, there was no longer a reason to watch. But if the public sees (more-or-less) ordinary people going to space, it makes the experience more personal and accessable, generating sustainable interest: “If he can do that, why can’t I?” Not everyone can be a Neil Armstrong, after all… but anyone can be a Dennis Tito or a Mark Shuttleworth or a Lance Bass. Heroism has a less alluring call than hedonism.

It’s true that public attention would return (however briefly) to space exploration were NASA to resume human activities beyond LEO. But Tumlinson seems to have his priorities messed up here, as he seems to be suggesting that NASA should resume exploration in order to perk up public interest in space exploration…instead of, you know, exploring to gain knowledge or something like that.

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