I emphatically disagree with this. Even in the unlikely event that it did provide the most valuable information (my understanding was that Apollo-14’s success in finding a piece of the original crust, a clear prerequisite to your chemical analysis, was the most valuable discovery), that is hardly the kind of “exploration” that I want to pay for with my tax dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I want that to happen, but only as part of a wider project to find out what the totality of the moon’s environment is really like.

Wow, you’re saying that the putative advantage of having astronauts there doesn’t require the astronauts actually be there?

Not at all. What I did say (or meant to say) is that, once the up-front transportation costs are are paid for, the on-going costs of sending robots and humans to the moon are not all that different. (While you do have to supply life support consumables, you don’t have to pay for re-developing astronaut’s brains every time you send them, which we do with robots.)

If the incremental costs are similar, than continuing the Apollo program and continuing to send astronauts would not have cost vastly more than developing and sending robots. If that is true, than the number of astronaut crews we could have sent would not have been dramatically less than the number of robots we could have sent. (In reality, of course, we did neither.)

— Donald

What you did was take a subset of the results where astronauts were most useful (stratigraphy, IIRC), define those results to be the most important, and draw your conclusion. I consider the overall geochemical results — which did not require human presence — to have been more fundamental.

> The supposed advantage of having astronauts there doesn’t help if the sites aren’t visited at all.

This is pure speculation, and probably not true.

Wow, you’re saying that the putative advantage of having astronauts there doesn’t require the astronauts actually be there? Let’s leave the astronauts on Earth, then, while they explore the moon. It’ll save boatloads of money.

who discovered polar hydrogen?

While I grant that it wasn’t, this could have been done by Apollo at low marginal cost. If Apollo had continued to a second generation, higher-energy polar orbit missions probably would have been on the agenda, and, as I argued in last week’s Space News, Command Modules waiting in polar orbit can carry instruments essentially for “free.” Meanwhile, astronauts would have continued the kind of detailed geological surveys that cannot effectively be automated.

Unmanned missions would have visited much more of the moon. The supposed advantage of having astronauts there doesn’t help if the sites aren’t visited at all.

This is pure speculation, and probably not true. Once again, you are ignoring the sunk costs in the automated program (development of the launch vehicles you are using) while you are billing development of the infrastructure to human exploration. That is comparing Apples to Oranges. Once the capability of returning humans to the moon is re-developed, NASA’s estimate for the marginal costs of each mission is about $2 billion, essentially twice the estimated cost of the automated lander. (Note that continuing Apollo would have cost far less than having to re-create the infrastructure today, and would certainly have been more cost effective for science than either an automated program or the VSE.)

Do you seriously argue that $2 billion for four astronauts for a week or two costs less per unit science than a $1 billion robot lander, even if it is operational for months or years? I suppose you do, but you are undbountedly wrong.

— Donald

Moreover, as I’ve said before, I consider unmanned lunar missions to have been capable of answering the most important questions answered by Apollo. Again, you disagreed with that, but you are wrong, in my opinion.

Apollo was much more expensive than unmanned sample-return missions of comparable scope would have been

A robotic mission that achieved everything that Apollos-14 through -17 achieved probably would not be possible. If it were, it would not be significantly cheaper. Sure, placing something like the Martian rovers on the moon would be cheaper than putting astronauts there. But there is no way these vehicles, or anything comparable, could do the comprehensive survey that, say, Apollo-17 accomplished at Taurus-Littrow in only three days.

Whenever we have seriously studied or tried an “apples to apples” automation of a complex set of tasks — from repairing the Space Telescope, to automating Air Force spy plane operations — it has proved to be more expensive than doing it with humans in the loop. Why do scientists insist that automating a far more complex set of tasks — like a geological survey — would be cheaper?

The reason is that, rather than comparing a human geological survey to an automated geological survey of similar complexity, they are comparing a human geological survey to a far more simple automated reconnaissance.

— Donald

At the same time, I have no problem with the proposition that in the absence of men-to-the-moon sizzle, such unmanned missions either wouldn’t have happened or would have happened only over a much longer period.

Few knowledgeable people would argue that the moon does not hide a number of valuable scientific secrets. (See my article in this week’s Space News for a partial list.) But, Mars appears more familiar, and therefore more interesting, so scientists naturally want to study Mars first. (This is true even though, in fact, the somewhat modified regolith of most of Mars’ surface is a lot more similar to the moon’s surface than that of the Earth.)

The unfortunate fact is that the moon is closer than Mars. We can do field work with geologists on the moon in the immediate future; we cannot do that on Mars in the next couple of decades. Therefore, we should send geologists to the moon and (a few) robots to Mars. When transportation to Mars gets easier, we should send gologists there, and so on.

— Donald

I can provide the names of several score geologists and planetary scientits I knew (out of hundreds if not thousands more) who put in a hell of a lot of work on the lunar discoveries in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m sorry that what happened didn’t live up to your expectations, but the assertion above is simply nonsense.