Everyone’s missing something important: I have yet to see any talk of the economic and national security risks associated with China or Russia mining Helium 3 from the moon, in the absence of U.S. presence, in light of the current race for the moon.

You will hear it said that H3 will be used for peaceful use of clean nuclear power, but that means Earth will have a far more deadly dual-use nuclear technology to try to control.

H3 will enable far more compact and powerful nuclear bombs. Not much need for China, or rogue countries, to develop more capable rockets to deliver nuclear warheads to us or our allies, once H3 is used for nuclear bombs.

There’s a moon resource alternative that would provide electricity to Earth at a cost far lower than today’s rates, beginning in less than ten years, using existing technology, not using nuclear energy, that would make nuclear power generation far too expensive – thereby eliminating the feasibility of any dual-use nuclear technology. It’s called the Lunar Solar Power System, as promulgated by Dr. David Criswell, Director, Institute of Space Systems Operations, University of Houston, and University of Houston Clearlake.

Links:
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-2/p12.pdf
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-5/p28.pdf

World Energy Council, 18th Congress, (includes detailed analysis/comparison with all other alternatives)
http://www.highfrontier.org/Archive/Jt/LunarSolarPowerSystem_Criswell.pdf

China isn’t going to the moon for vanity’s sake.

China’s power needs outstrip its ability to supply present use and growth – and their options on earth are limited. There’s legitimate need for them to be looking to the moon options. In addition, this week, Google turned over information to the U.S. government, implicating the Chinese government in the hacking of U.S. Financial, Chemical, Technology, and Mobile Communication companies, as well as the theft of Google’s own intellectual property.

It’s pretty clear that China’s control of resources on the moon would be a huge economic and security threat.

It should be clear that keeping the Shuttle program in place is of major U.S. economic and national security importance. Couldn’t the shuttle program be used to leverage the International Space Station, in cooperation with our ISS partners, to reach the moon and implement a Lunar Solar Power System? Alternatively, couldn’t the U.S. use the Shuttle within an exclusive national program, as a payload and assembly asset to transfer equipment, supplies and personnel to and from low earth orbit, with moon missions launched from low-earth orbit to the moon on a more appropriate system? We could bootstrap the process considerably, using current infrastructure and assets, saving valuable time and billions of dollars.

It’s apparent the economic and national security benefits to participants in the LSP program will be significant, and ongoing.

The alignment of this particular human spaceflight program with U.S. priorities is obvious, but unfortunately, most of our public and elected representatives are still in the dark on this issue. The shuttles must not be grounded.

Phil Albee

The Augustine report made no such determination as to that being the overriding factor.

IMHO, the most important issue is cost, and also the creation of a commercial industry. Under that light, the EELV derived option makes much more sense.

Either way, whether the overriding factor is gap reduction, or cost, that is a personal judgment call. The Augustine report made no such judgment – it merely offered a variety of important criteria, and said the resulting situations

Your statement is correct again, however, in my understanding of the report (perhaps this is a personal intepretation), the Direct architectures are presented in the most favorable light, especially through the pespective of reducing the gap. In addition, there are SSME assets already available and paid for.

To these major outstanding questions, I’d add:

What sort of technology development program will NASA have – an ambitious one required to meet our long-term goals as suggested by Augustine, a water-down one limited by HLV development, or a near-destroyed one like we’ve been given as a result of ESAS and Shuttle?

If there is a significant NASA budget increase, how much will be used to at least partially repair losses in recent years in areas like Aeronautics, Earth Observation, and Heliophysics? How much will go towards HSF areas that have had similar post-ESAS experiences like ISS use and robotic precursors and assistants in support of HSF missions?

Will there be broad participation by commercial space, or will the main partnership be just for ISS cargo, or just for ISS cargo and crew?

On this excerpt from the article:

“”I think (Obama) is going to take us exploring. I think he’s going to take us beyond low Earth orbit. And he’s going to allow us to develop an architecture that can go anywhere,” said KSC Director Robert Cabana.”

We don’t need to go exploring – we need to go exploring and do other things in space that return tangible benefits (economic, security, science, education, disaster preparedness and response, environment, energy, health, etc) to the nation. We don’t need to go beyond low Earth orbit. We need to do things in low Earth orbit and possibly beyond that return benefits to the nation. We don’t need an architecture that can go anywhere. We need an approach (not an architecture) that is affordable, and that allows us to return benefits to the nation. The benefits need to be on a scale that roughly matches or exceeds the taxpayer investment.

On Jeff’s question on commercial space, the article does say “NASA will invest in commercial means of launching cargo, and ultimately astronauts, to the output.” Of course it would be good to know more details about that.

NASA can’t get much leaner than it already is.

yes if by lean you mean “actual results”. The NASA of today has lots of people doing lots of things launching not a lot of spacecraft.

During a recent “SLEP” to the Big E (CVN65) they cut the number of people in the engineering spaces (they run nuclear reactors) by half. how? Automation.

When was the last time NASA cut any group concerning human spaceflight in “half”.?

Robert G. Oler

Most of the romance you attribute to human spaceflight is not appreciated by the American people. The pictures from human flights only matter because of the moment and the effort that was caught up in the moment they got a lot of PR.

Most Americans (and you included) could not tell a picture taken by a robotic camera on ISS from one taken by the astronauts…and most Americans really are “picture overloaded”.

If human spaceflight does not at some point start paying for itself, it is on a short trip to extinction.

Robert G. Oler

In the case of the EELV-derived, what they found was that it was likely the most lowest life-time costs. Thats a major find.

You are correct, in the current configuration, Ares V will be powered by slightly modified RS-68’s. My comments referred to the fact that in my understanding of the report, the EELV derived concepts (also based on RS-68’s) are possible but not recommended.