“The total water resources now believed to be available in Shackleton Crater alone is 6 Million metric tons. To deliver that amount of water at even the total estimated expense…”

The need for water from the Moon is one of those chicken-and-egg situations. Until there is a large enough demand, then it’s far less expensive (and more readily available) to source it from Earth.

The Spudis/Lavoie plan, while well laid out, would take 17 years to unfold, plus $87B or so, before you could start depending on the Moon for water or propellant. What does NASA do in the mean time? Source the water and propellants from Earth, which creates an established market that sources on the Moon will have to compete with. Why not stick with market-based supply & demand?

I don’t know if anyone is advocating a U.S. Government monopoly of propellant in space, so market forces will determine where to buy their water & water-derived propellants. If the Moon ends up costing 10% more, would the government sell at a loss? That’s why the $87B is really a government bet on a future need, which again begs the question of whether the government should be involved in what seems to be a market decision.

– Does our government need to get involved?
– Is that the best use of $87B in taxpayer money?
– What happens if the U.S. Government doesn’t get involved?
– No one in Congress seems interested in this so far – will Newt be able to change that?

Lots of questions.

I am not sure what numbers you are using, but if you are making your comparison to the 150 metric tons per year for the initial demonstrator plant (which they describe in the paper as an arbitrary end point) you are certainly correct. But that is the beginning of the capability not the end.

The development of the lunar resources capability would be a capital investment in a long range space faring capability that can probably only be supported by a government program (the capital investment that is).

The total water resources now believed to be available in Shackleton Crater alone is 6 Million metric tons. To deliver that amount of water at even the total estimated expense (much less a fraction of it) of their plan ($87 Billion) would require a reduction in launch costs (to the lunar surface not LEO) to about $6.59/lb. I do not think even SpaceX is promising that. Once the initial capability was established, attempts could be made to privatize the operations (as per the COTS program).

Note that if someone could reduce lunar launch costs to $6 or $7 per pound that would also drastically reduce the cost of building the lunar mining installations. The economics will always favor ISRU (at sites where the appropriate resources are available) if your intent is to establish a long term growing capability as opposed to a short term set of missions.

if you are the incumbent it really is not that far. Attitudes are pretty much set on Obama…now there might be the “last quarter miracle” where all of a sudden the economy starts growing at a pretty good clip (the unemployment numbers recently might indicate that)…and if that happens then its sort of a Clint Longley moment at the Dallas Cowboys game…

then the argument is over whose economic plan made it happen and I think Obama gets the better of that. But absent that…it is done for him. All he is can do is point out the flaws in the other persons thoughts, do some serious negative campaigning and hope that the other person appears worse then him. This is what got Bush reelected in 04…so it can work.

AS for the space rollout…I dont think it was handled all that badly. There isnt any real way to handle firing a lot of people well Ask Romney RGO

yeah we are in agreement. I would be curious if Dennis or whoever would give an explanation of how they think a prize would accomplish some of the goals that they are setting.

I am not beating on his ideas…but if a prize was given for say 100 pounds of the precious metals from the Moon…assuming someone took up that effort I dont see how it is even politically viable. One would probably have to do the math…and I have not but the questions would be like Paul Spudis water idea…in Pauls case we spent 80-100 billion for some lunar water when one could get it to the Moon for a fraction of that from Earth.

Now I can see shortly how (if any of the commercial launchers pan out and the price to orbit starts coming down) a simple “go back to the Moon” and restage Apollo 11 might work…there is some not so hard out of the box thinking that makes that happen for not all that much money (ie probably less then 5-10 billion) but again I dont know what the political value of that would be.

anyway its interesting…RGO

Actually, not quite– you didn’t quite get it- particularly whe he reference the uprisings at the moon mines in quadrant four- or whatever- to “President Gingrich” dressed in moon king garb, or whatever. The whole point of it was the abusrdity of it all- the loon Gingrich, repository of bad ideas on life-support, and the incompetence of Romney for missing the more down to earth ‘differences’ espoused by Newt by going for one that was out in left field. Reagardless, it does nothing for spaceflight when it becomes a focus of ridicule or a punchline. Colbert did a much better job of projecting support for spaceflight on his show with self-depricating humor BTW, and got the ISS treadmill named after him. Suggest you revisit the wincing when the ‘whole country was laughing at us’ as Bill Dana aka Jose Jimenez did his astronaut routine (hence the reference – ‘you’re on your way, Jose’ by Slayton to Shepard as he finally lifted off aboard Freedom 7) and Mel Brooks did his ‘astro-not’ bit with Carl Reiner back in the Mercury days.

Got a link to the video, would really like to see it.

That pretty much sums up the conundrum.

If there were a Lunar Base then a narrowly defined set of requirements could be detailed for a transportation system to support it. Whether that was done by prizes (assuming the prizes were sufficiently large) or COTS/CCDev like support would not matter.

But there is no Lunar Base and will not be unless and until there is a new lunar transportation system. This requires a coordinated systems like approach that is not compatible with prizes (or for that matter the COTS/CCDEv approach).

On resources I agree with RGO. Spaceflight must have a market. NASA has been looking for resources that could be brought back to earth at a profit, but at current launch prices this is impossible. That was why we built Shuttle. It did not work as well as we hoped, but the logic was sound. Today we do not a better Apollo. We need a better Shuttle.

Well, first they laugh at you. At least mining the moon has now broken into the national media.