What exactly are these four people going to be doing on the moon?

If the purpose is to get experience and to develop infrastructure on the moon, with the goal of reducing the cost of operating there and providing logistical support for other space activities, then I think four is too few. They won’t be able to do significant mining or processing of ET material (and certainly not with anything except bench scale equipment); they won’t be able to maintain much more than their own living quarters. It’s going to be ISS all over again, except even more expensive.

If the purpose is to ‘explore’, then four is obviously inadequate. Could four people explore the Earth?

Obviously, you’re right.

And just as obviously, Bubba ‘n’ Hillary Clinton sabotaged the X-33 program in order to make their successor in the White House look bad. Ummm-hmmm.

…

Karen, can you state any, y’know, reasons why four people on the Moon aren’t enough?

How many simultaneous lunar explorers are needed, in your analysis?

If they’d included crew size in their trade study a new launcher or two would have fallen off the “needed” list and Griffin could have gotten a much faster and cheaper CEV. Heck, they may even have been able to kick off ESAS while maintaining the other obligatory jobs programs.

When I evolve something in the lab I start with a cheap and quick version (an 80% solution). If it takes years of detailed design to get it right then I have doubts about its evolution potential. Unlike the other CEV competitors, T/space built a mock-up and started drop-testing it. But NASA chose another path, and it wasn’t evolutionary…

http://www.aiaa.org/aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/AA_Jan06_SIE.pdf

By making the system modular, and throw away, it is much easier to make incremental changes/improvements in future production elements rather than having to redesign the entire reusable vehicle as in the shuttle. Also, assuming we get to the Moon, what we discover there — water, sources of oxygen, other critical resources — are going to dramatically change the entire equation. For example, if there is water in significant amounts we can presumably produce not just drinking water (rather than sending it from Earth – a huge weight savings) but also make fuel. If we can make fuel there, we can refuel landers rather than throw them away — huge weight savings in fuel and materials that we can use for other things. If we can reuse and refuel landers and possibly orbiters on the Moon end, it is a short step to building a form of reusable orbital Moon “bus” that would ferry people and cargo from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit and would not need to be launched from earth and thrown away on every mission. Another huge opportunity to change what we send up on the HLV to materials that will extend our reach, not simply be thrown away. What we learn has the potential — in my view the likely hood — of changing our entire approach to exploring the Moon and the planets beyond.

Certainly NASA isn’t the only player and, like you, I have high hopes that others will make a serious commitment to move the ball forward. However, each of these has a long way to go before they come close to matching or exceeding NASA’s accomplishments. I like alt.space, but it is much more talk or press release exploration than real accomplishments. Even the sub-orbital component is, I think at least, very dubious as a long range money maker. Actually, I think their best chance — short term at least — is to start to move on the opportunities that Griffin has mentioned in terms of cargo, fuel, passengers to LEO for the station. If the shuttle gets its wings clipped, this could be a huge opportunity for them, but again there is nothing certain there yet.

Regarding the military, I have always hoped they would take an important initiative in the manned space area, but they seem to focus all of their money and effort on increasingly elaborate and disfunctional satellite programs and have ignored the manned component almost completely. Perhaps that will change, but with declining defense budgets I think they will be preoccupied protecting their pet weapons systems — not spending money on manned space.

The prospect that other countries will launch a serious manned space exploration effort is always an intriguing prospect. However, I think they may make their biggest contribution to space exploration by scaring the stuffing out of Congress and the White House about the prospect of “fill in the blank” powers dominating space while we sit on the ground twiddling our collective thumbs. Hey, that kind of clear thinking got us to the Moon, why not?

I think small and permanent are mutually exclusive with moon bases. Permanent requires use of local resources and local food production which won’t be done for a handfull of people and probably can’t be done by a hand full of people.

I don’t agree that VSE the way it is being executed is better than nothing. The way it is going in 30 years we will have spent 100 billion dollars and be right where we are with ISS with the moon base. And all we will have to show for the effort is a few more more rocks.

What a waste. We could do it right for about the same amount of money. If we spent some time using what we already know to come up with a well planned first generation moon base. Instead of ignoring the existing lunar knowledge base, very little of which is at NASA, and using only NASA’s ideas about how to do space to build the first moon base.

I do hope NASA are able to adapt and improve VSE architecture & hardware as they go along, but if ISS is any guide it will only be descoped, and if Shuttle is any guide there will be only painfully slow baby steps in evolving the hardware.

VSE may be all NASA’s got, but we’ve got much more than NASA.

I am looking past NASA to other more promising avenues of advancement in the alt.space, military and foreign sectors. Given all the other developments possible outside NASA, I expect ISS, Shuttle and VSE (what we know of it so far) to be on technology branches that die off.