Well, Roald Amundsen didn’t have military transport aircraft, and he and his immediate successors did some nice Antarctic exploration without them. Granted, the polar station would not have been anywhere near as fully developed were we still using sledges and dogs, but what we’ve gotten out of Antarctica in no way shape or form would have justified the development cost of military transport aircraft.

Which brings us back to the Moon. I’d have no trouble with developing Exploration architecture to get people back to the Moon were there a strong case to justify that return. In the absence of lunar property rights and national territorial claims, ISRU resources might be the only way to justify that, as opposed to doing other things in space with humans and robots. But using relatively inexpensive robots to assess that lunar ISRU opportunity seems like the first thing you’d want to do before signing large checks.

As many here will happily point out, there is little truly new technology in this effort.

— Donald

And how is that different from leveraging pre-existing Shuttle components to assemble the infrastructure to return to the moon? Or, the Air Force’s pre-existing EELVs (the strategy I prefer, but which would not have been dramatically less expensive than the current plan)? Of course, we should have leveraged the pre-existing Saturn-V, but we didn’t do that.

Granted, the analogy is not exact, but the VSE has always been about trying to leverage existing capabilities to return to the moon with measurably greater capabilities.

Now, let’s assume there had not been World Wars-I and -II and that large military transport planes had not been developed. Would you then argue that we should not develop those capabilities (or a comparable set of capabilities) and never explore Antarctica? Or, that we should lob clock-work robots over there with the Naval guns that were the military state-of-the-art before WW-I and forgo all the science that you can’t do with those?

This analogy is exact.

— Donald

“When we started our trips to Antactica, Doug, it wasn’t “falling off a log simple” and $400 million was a much larger percentage of our smaller economy.”

That doesn’t make any sense. We weren’t spending RY$400M per year back when the US polar station was established. Not hard to look it up, but my guess is that as a fraction of GNP, we’re probably spending more now on Antarctica than when we first started our trips there.

Also, it wasn’t the going to Antarctica that eventually made the trip relatively easy. It was leveraging investments in pre-existing large military transport planes.

Well, maybe they could outfit the planes for autonomous or robotic operation, but it’s not clear that would be worth the effort, if you did a value-added trade study.

Now, given that they are carrying human passengers in the back, and the dangers are quite low, it seems a little odd that one would even consider removing people from the cockpit.

Doesn’t seem like that would be something that would merit intense curiosity, but diffrent strokes for different folks!

The point is, if we had waited to send missions to Antactica until “we could afford it” or “it was falling off a log simple” or until we can “let robots could do it without risking people” we never would have gone. Or, we would have done the science that robots could do in a century of effort or so — which is only a very tiny percent of what has actually been achieved.

and it needs humans as pilots anyway, as it turns out

Indeed? Please elaborate. I’m intensely curious. . . .

— Donald

Primarily, it’s international cooperation, astronomy, meteorites, and ice cores. It’s climate science and solar system composition. It has little or nothing to do with exploration. That’s why we have satellites.

As it turns out, decades old aeronautics technology gets you to Antarctica (and it needs humans as pilots anyway, as it turns out). That’s kinda handy, compared with developing a whole Exploration architecture. The “getting there” part for Antarctica is (with due respect to the fine ops people who do it) like falling off a log compared with lunar trips. Why should we develop robots to do that?

And while we do have a sustained presence there, it’s a quite stretch to call it a “settlement”. By that reasoning, we have a “settlement” in Bagdhad, I guess, and lots of others on ocean oil platforms. Big whiz. Would I be happy to see robots used for those? You bet. But it isn’t going to happen.

You’re falling back into the the humans-versus-robots fight. That’s an old and tired argument, and not really what this is about. The issue is how best to use humans in space to fulfill national needs.