“Want to go to Mars and operate on its surface for a while? You need to learn that stuff in a space environment. Best place is only 240K miles away.”

An airless moon with 1/6 Earth gravity is not the best place to learn how to operate on the 1/3 Earth gravity atmospheric surface of Mars. Mars is the best place to do that.

The Moon can let us test a number of off-Earth technologies and techniques that we’re going to need for Mars and space in general. But I would think that hardly any equipment designed for the Moon will be used as-is for Mars – there are too many differences in the operating environments.

And as a note, although I think Crawley has a number of things right, I don’t know of too many people that can accurately predict the future of technology, or the market forces in markets not yet created. So I think if we look after today (creating a commercial space industry), tomorrow will look after itself (public/private exploration).

“sooner or later, the political pressure will be there for boots on the ground. Because to get ready for Mars, as Crawley points out in his presentation, you’ll need to learn surface operations, rover ops-both robotic and human, ISRU, habitats, and so on.”

I hope so. And maybe I’m being pessimistic about this, but the costs are going to have to come down quite a bit for NASA to afford the Moon, much less Mars. Industry involvement helps to lower costs, as does other nations participating. I hope the combination is eventually found – within my lifetime…

“If it was up to me, I’d have several lunar orbit missions, of increasingly greater length, doing such things as learning how to operate a rover from orbit, practicing deep-space EVAs, using Orion’s SM bays a la Apollo for cameras and other instrumentation that are astronaut-operated, and so on.”

Sounds good to me. I like the combination of operating away from home on an extended basis, and practicing local tele-robotics.

“You could have a Lunar orbit series, and the NEO mission. Or two. Then do the L points. But there will soon be pressure for boots on the ground.”

Probably true, but I’m not sure if the price equation for doing stuff ON the Moon will have changed at that point, but as you point out, a political consideration could provide the incentive.

“I agree that lunar exploration will likely be sorties, rather than a base…”

There are so many combinations of possibilities, but I think there could be a bunch of “low cost” robotic landers that could capture the interests of both the public and companies. I think this is the more likely scenario, and who knows, maybe some of them would be tele-operated from lunar orbit?

You can send a lot more robots down to the lunar surface without people than you can with cost-wise, and 10 years from now the sophistication of those robots will be a lot better. As with consumer electronics, trends for many fields are hard to predict, so I guess we’ll have to wait…

I agree that lunar exploration will likely be sorties, rather than a base, until the budgetary picture improves, but that time will come eventually. There are sites that were on Apollo’s wish list, but had to be dropped (Tycho, for example) or were the targets of the two cancelled Apollos that had crews assigned-18 and 19, (I’ve heard that Marius Hills and Schroter’s Valley were the likely targets). And at least one Apollo site (Hadley, on Apollo 15) was felt in ’71 to be the first site to be revisited on the moon when the time came.
Then there’s the lunar poles. To quote Dave Scott (CDR, Apollo 15) “There’s still a lot to be seen and done up there.”

I, like Ron, was nodding my head in agreement, to a point. If NASA is allowed to, once again, create a huge launch infrastructure for a luna program it will be just the same ole’ ole’ as vested political and commercial interests associated with that program will block any moves that would interfer.

I used to beat this dead horse about where and how to approach our next moves in space but laid off as other options were presented by various writers, bloggers and space groups.

In both jounalism and criminal investigations the old addage is “follow the money”. The same should be done for space exploration. We can talk about routine missions to Luna, asteroids and Mars but where is almost 90% of all space assets and where are the most routine launches taking place? If you follow the money, GEO is the next logical place for ROUTINE human travel.

The point I repeatedly tried to make was if we can’t build and operate a simple “gas & go” space craft, based in LEO, and fueled at an orbital fuel station to the closest next destination, GEO at 25,000 miles, why the hell are talking about mars?

Following the money to geo and the hundreds of billlions of assest there would mean orbital satellite STATIONS. Starting with man tended space platforms that are routinely visited with the ablity to plug in a Bigelow hab as research, maintaince and tourist station. Once we can make 25,000 miles routine with LEO2GEO space craft, gas stations, and human tended geo operations we will gained the knowledge we need for so many of the problems we face moving out from earth.

We can do anything past geo because ownership as not been decided like it has been done for leo and geo. You can “own” a slot in GEO but you can’t commercially own anything past geo. So follow the money to geo with LEO2GEO gas and go capability and it would do more to open the further reaches of space then any 200 ton heavy lift.

“The mere fact that the very mention of people exploring and working in space gets some in a verbal lather, speaks to their biases.”

Or their budgets. People in space are expensive, and if you keep them there, that is a huge ongoing expense. As always, I don’t see NASA able to support people on the Moon on a sustained basis, and so far there has not been a business reason for any companies to pony up money to go either.

Maybe it’s a matter of the time scale we’re talking about here. If I had to guess, with my most optimistic commercial crew hat on, I think that it will be at least 5 years after commercial crew is established before the full realization of that service is starting to be utilized.

Give another 10 years to get commerce going in LEO and starting to spread out a little, and so we’re at least 20 years out before we start needing water or other supplies from the Moon vs Earth. Now that’s just from a supply standpoint, not an exploration one.

I also hope during this time that we start robotic precursor missions to the Moon, but this is also where the commercial world can step in and start doing contract exploration for NASA. That could be a huge cost saver for NASA, and it would open the door for commercial exploitation efforts.

As you well know, some exploration companies on Earth can spend a long time mapping out their future production opportunities, and robotic exploration would allow speculative exploration by many deep-pocketed corporations – ones that hold a long view on business operations.

With the whole economic situation in the U.S., I just don’t see NASA able to afford much. And because of that, the Moon can only be visited, not colonized, for a very long time.

My $0.02

Robotics are important. They have NEVER been unimportant or dismissed in a lunar return.

I don’t know how talking about humans on the Moon translates to robotics people as people will be going to the Moon now. The mere fact that the very mention of people exploring and working in space gets some in a verbal lather, speaks to their biases.

I do not see a demand until government has made the case for private money to come on board. So we can just sit here and type back and forth or we can enable private enterprise by sending PROBES to the Moon with the PLANNED, eventual and necessary follow-on of humans. A large block of the science community will be content to send probes and study returned data, happy to avoid “losing” any funding to human exploration and migration.