Just to be clear, on this forum, I’ve been critical of the potential (or lack thereof) of lunar ice based on the amounts that have been found so far. It’s a resource that certainly warrants more investigation to see if concentrated deposits can be found. But I wouldn’t make decisions about human space flight targets and architectures based on what we know about lunar ice today. So far, it looks like a very poor resource that wouldn’t compete with shipping propellant and water from Earth.

Liberating other resources from lunar regolith depends on the resource in question, the amount needed, and the extraction technique used. I’m not critical of the potential of all lunar resources — there’s simply too many variables at play to make such a blanket statement. But I wouldn’t make decisions about human space flight targets and architectures based on lunar resources until the relevant extraction techniques have been demonstrated on the lunar surface at a level of efficiency and duration necessary to make those resources competitive with shipping the alternatives from Earth.

I would say the same thing about resources from asteroids, the Martian moons, or Mars.

“I expect it’s going to take us a lot of time on the ground before we’ve figured out how to do Lunar ISRU in a way that’s economically useful”

“[Lunar ISRU] can lower the cost of lunar transportation a lot, I don’t think it can lower it enough to really make things sustainable without significant investments in other pieces of space infrastructure first (depots, tugs, RLVs, orbital habitats, possibly even space nuclear reactors).”

“I just keep coming back to the absurdity that we haven’t even really tried as a country to do cryogenic propellant transfer or depots, even though 98% of the technology to implement them was available in the late 60s/early 70s.”

“This continual mad dash to the next destination while neglecting or at best anemically funding the R&D that can truly change the game is just astounding.”

“ISRU is an important part of the puzzle, but we need the rest of the equation in place too.”

All good points from Mr. Goff, as usual.

FWIW…

just make sure your lifetime is “long enough” (grin). YOu are a smart person and a good thinker.

Robert G. Oler

I think that ISRU is important, and when we are ready to go back to the Moon, it will be an important part of that venture. I’m not as pessimistic as Major Tom about the potential for lunar ISRU. We just don’t have a ton of data and experience yet, but the hints of water and organic compounds produced by LCROSS do at least show that there is something interesting going on there after all. We haven’t yet scratched the surface, and I’m still pretty convinced that in the long term, lunar ISRU is going to be an important part of any exploration effort or economic activity beyond LEO.

That said, I think that trying to do a rush to the Moon with the technology we have today would be only slightly less of a disaster for Lunar development as trying to do a mad-dash to Mars would be for Martian development. While ISRU, once it’s debugged and working (and contra Spudis and Wingo, I expect it’s going to take us a lot of time on the ground before we’ve figured out how to do Lunar ISRU in a way that’s economically useful), can lower the cost of lunar transportation a lot, I don’t think it can lower it enough to really make things sustainable without significant investments in other pieces of space infrastructure first (depots, tugs, RLVs, orbital habitats, possibly even space nuclear reactors).

I guess I just keep coming back to the absurdity that we haven’t even really tried as a country to do cryogenic propellant transfer or depots, even though 98% of the technology to implement them was available in the late 60s/early 70s. This continual mad dash to the next destination while neglecting or at best anemically funding the R&D that can truly change the game is just astounding.

ISRU is an important part of the puzzle, but we need the rest of the equation in place too. But alas, I think the odds of something sensible coming out of the DC policy sausage factory is almost nil.

We’ll get there. In my lifetime. It’ll just take far longer than it ever ought to take.

Back to the trenches.

~Jon

All the lunar advocates Spudis is one as is Wingo have one overriding flaw in their logic. It is that using lunar resources is going to be something that “happens” in a time frame that is consistent with public support and public funding.

The later seems ridiculous because I dont think that anyone has any real estimate on what the “funding” ramp is going to be to get to where lunar resources are not a drain but a plus to space operations. Major Tom has done some good (what I call back of the envelope) analysis of what it would take to make lunar water work in terms of the effort, but there is in my view no idea to figure out the cost.

Second since the cost is unknown the public support for the effort is unknown.

All this ignores the fact that to be fair we do not at this time have a really good idea of a catalog of lunar resources.

After that major flaw the rest collapses quickly not the least of which is that to even attempt to do what Spudis and company cannot quantify in terms of cost…NASA has to completly change its method of doing business, getting out of the big program mentality, and yet learning to use lunar resources is one of the biggest programs I can imagine.

Flexible path is to me the vehicle to break the big program mentality. Spudis arguments about spinning asteroids etc is nuts. Clearly we would do a lot of “remote” looking at whatever target is tried…and a one time asteroid mission is in my view just the sort of lever to change how NASA does business…

These folks are passionate about their views (as is Zubrin about his) but once one gets past their passion that is aboutall they have. Spudis runs out of gas pretty quickly in any sort of semi serious discussion.

And besides all of this is likely mote. I think the decision has already been made.

Robert G. Oler

nope

There is a difference between US products being competitive around the world…and the federal deficit.

I concur that something needs to be done with health care in the US and I support a single payer system.

But that wont make American products more competitive around the world nor will it cure the deficit.

American products are “less” competitive around the world for some reasons, not the least of which is that we as a nation have more or less adopted a one way free trade policy. We allow virtually anything to be manufactored in “favored countries” and brought back into The Republic with little or no customs duties. And almost no other country allows that.

In addition most American companies have far higher rates of compensation then foreign companies do..because we have something most countries do not have…a middle class.

The problem with competing with foreign countries has never been a problem while our markets were essentially closed to foreign goods which meant that things sold in the US were manufactored in the US…the cycle was closed. It is not now. Today the vast majority of US consumer power goes to buy things which are not manufactored in Lima Ohio but somewhere in China…and that includes Boeing airplanes.

The salary level of the middle class is declining almost daily for those very reasons…and as long as that happens, the deficit is going to keep getting worse.

As I pointed out in the example of Ares and Falcon the trick is to get the manufactoring base restarted with products that stay in the US and are used by Americans.

Robert G. Oler

It specifically prevents NASA from building a lunar outpost that requires continuous human presence. Congress is trying to avoid the ISS experience. With enough resources, the outpost could be manned permanently. But that’s clearly not Congress’s intent, and absent different direction from the White House, Congress controls the resources.

“Paul Spudis wrote an excellent column…”

The argument in the article is weak and contradictory. Unsustainable NASA implementation is not an issue that’s unique to the Flexible Path options. It’s been a problem on the program of record, and it’s just as likely to be a problem with the Moon First options. Dr. Spudis admits this in the comments section beneath the article.

In fact, if the real, underlying issue is unsustainable NASA implementation, then the Flexible Path options, by making a more dramatic break with Apollo, offer the greatest hope for change towards sustainability.

And specifically, if the issue of unsustainable NASA implementation revolves around heavy lift (which Dr. Spudis cites in his article), then Option 5B: Flexible Path – EELV Heritage offers the greatest hope for breaking the back of horrendously expensive, NASA-unique launchers for which the agency bears all the costs. NASA would finally divest all the Apollo overhead that Shuttle inherited and be free to develop a heavy lifter (or other launch vehicles) only if and when it’s actually needed.

“I meant to include this article with above comment from Paul Spudis, Dennis Wingo, and Gordon Woodcock”

I have great respect for Woodcock and the article is a nice summary of “how” to go about establishing a lunar outpost (or space outpost in general) differently in the future. But it’s very weak on the “why”.

The article talks about a new “economic frontier”, but spends the bulk of the article describing in detail various aspects of building an initial lunar base. It provides no path for creating or developing new markets.

It talks about today’s “major concerns”, including “energy, resources, sustainability of our civilization, and environmental quality”. But the article describes no products that would come from the Moon to address these issues beyond some vague technological spin-offs.

I agree with a lot of the article, but it’s basically another architectural discussion devoid of policy justification for why taxpayers should spend what would probably be hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars building a lunar base of the scale necessary to achieve the article’s stated self-sufficiency. Building solar arrays and structure for the base on the Moon, mining propellant and consumables, etc. are all great techniques, but they’re not a reason for public dollars to be spent on such an undertaking.

(I’d also note that, in terms of human factors, the article only addressed solar storms, which are not the biggest two or three threats to human health on Moon. But that’s another discussion.)

FWIW…

Again, so what? Small size relative to the federal budget is not a reason to spend taxpayer dollars on anything.

I’d like the federal government to subsidize back massages for me. They’re only $25-100 per hour of massage. That’s very small relative to our multi-trillion dollar federal budget. But I don’t think you’ll find one voter who thinks that one red cent of his taxes should go to my back massages.

You need a real policy justification for your argument and you’re not providing one.

“that actually creates wealth”

There is no definitive proof that NASA spending creates wealth, certainly not at a rate greater than other federal R&D spending and definitely not at a rate greater than private R&D spending or tax cuts. And, in fact, there is also evidence that NASA spending destroys wealth.

For example, in a review of economic studies of civil space spending, a former NASA economist writes “[these] studies, conducted mainly in the mid-1970’s… were not sufficiently accuate or complete to be definitive for policy decisions.” See:

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=942&page=265

Also from that era, there are GAO reports like “NASA Report May Overstate the Economic Benefits of Research and Development Spending”, Report of the Comptroller General of the United States, PAD-78-18.

Fast foward a couple decades, and a 1990 German econometric analysis of supposed space spin-offs found that:

“… the spin-off rate is very low in highly specialized space projects — a conclusion which coincides with the finds of other investigations. The concept of a decisive spin-off in the narrow, real sense of the term cannot therefore be validated on the result of these findings… many standard examples of spin-offs may be traced back to the first R&D boom in the Sixties… only in the rarest of cases do the spin-offs prove to be identifiable as classic cases in which the source can be associated exclusively with space technology and the diffusion be associated with a sector unrelated to space technology. In the majority of cases, both source and diffusion can be associated with multiple purposes both within and outside space technology.”

And a comprehensive review paid for by NASA (Chapman Research Group, “An Exploration of Benefits From NASA ‘Spinoff'”, June 1989) of the impact of NASA technology benefits to the commercial sector during the years 1978-1986 found that “A total of over $21 billion in sales and savings benefits were identified as resulting from NASA activities.” But the U.S. taxpayer spent $54 billion, more than twice the amount, on NASA’s budget during the same period. That’s wealth destruction, not creation.

“If NASA had been properly funded then private industry would probably already be sending tourist into space and to the Moon with a budget dwarfing that of NASA’s tiny budget.”

Simply not true. No matter how much had been spent on NASA over the past 50 years, the agency was never tasked to supporting the creation of a private space tourism industry, and certainly not to the Moon.

It’s not a question of how much we spend on NASA. It’s a question of what the agency is tasked to do and how well the agency follows that tasking.

“There would be no emerging private commercial space programs if it weren’t for US and Soviet government investments in space.”

Simply not true, in the past or today. The U.S. launch vehicle industry grew out of military, not civil, space spending. The military contracted for communications satellites before NASA did. Today, the commerial suborbital human space flight industry exists in spite, not because, of NASA. NASA had no role in emergence of the the X PRIZE, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Blue Origin, etc.

FWIW…

I guess that doesn’t sound too unreasonable.