Given the capability for autonomous robotic driving (not teleoperation) of wheeled vehicles at high speeds in the most difficult conditions, as demonstrated in the DARPA off-road challenge and the Google car that can drive in traffic, there is no need for teleoperation of vehicles, or at any rate there would not be if NASA can keep up with the technology.

There are real challenges in developing artificial intelligence capable of performing autonomous planetary exploration, but the advantages of intelligent robotics over biological humans in missions to really deep space, decades or centuries in transit, are so great that NASA should be making a major effort in artificial intelligence.

Goosaw:

“The standard means of transportation during those decades (and for many millenia before among those natives) was the canoe.”

Costal Ron

“ A canoe was only used when on the water, they didn’t use canoe’s on land. Which means you are making my case for mixed mode transportation.”

The reason why the Canoe and all forms of sailing were invented is because moving cargo over water is (esp. back then) the cheapest way to do so. It still is the cheapest way to send items, just not the fastest or most flexible (i.e. must be near a large navigable body of water and large bodies of water do not make easy crossings). Rivers were natural highways. It takes less energy to move a load over water than to do so over land. So the smart move if you wanted to send something somewhere was to send all your stuff to the nearest river and boat it near your destination(if you could). In short mother nature provided part of the infrastructure(water ways) and man the other(boats). On land rail is the cheapest pound by pound per amount of energy needed and likewise not the most flexible(time table, stuck on rails) or fastest.

Cars, Trucks, Busses, aircraft are more flexible forms of land transport and the airplane is the fastest one. They are the reason why private Rail in the US is limited to freight operations because a trip across country by train would take days instead of hours. And although Cars, busses, and Trucks can be slower than trains they have more flexibility about departure time as well as ability to pull an items right to its destination.

A similar situation is true for space.

In general for space travel people need a fast trip. A faster trip reduces consumable needs and radation exposure. Cargo on the other hand does not. By breaking cargo that can take a slower trip away from people and cargo that need a faster trip you gain savings. We do it all the time on earth. You don’t fly automobiles from Japan you ship them by boat. Conversly you usually don’t board a ship to Japan, you fly. This is one of the reasons why your beloved unmanned spacecraft can be cheaper…they are much more flexible time wise(who cares if you send the probe to the moon on a slow, non free return trajectory that takes a year(smart 1)).

In the case of space there are Trajectories that could take you to the moon but could take much longer. There are weak stability boundary trajectories that can reduce the delta V by 25% and almost double the payload you can send to the moon. Only problem is they take three months to do it. There are technologies like SEP that likewise can take months to reach their destination, but can carry more cargo than per mass of propellant than a chemical rocket as well as potentially be reusable(SEP could return to LEO or from mars orbit to earth orbit on a single tank of propellant while carrying cargo.).

These methods are inappropriate to use to send people to the moon. An SEP craft could depart and return to LEO carrying crew but the slow trip through the van Allen belts and the month’s worth of food and consumables means that this is probably not the best way to send people. A smaller SEP carft however could send enough cargo such as food, clothes, water to enable a mission to last months. Things that could withstand a three month trip, they could be packed to the brim volumewise(people need space), they only need pressure, temperature control and maybe some humidity control rather than full life support(ie.CO2 scrubbing, oxygen ect..).

It is cheaper to send the cargo ahead to l1/l2, your moon, base whatever separately and via slow boat methods than to try to put it in with your crew. DCSA’s freeze dried shrimp could easily handle a three month trip to the moon. The crew on the other hand would not and would prefer to use Apollo’s 3-4 day Hoffman transfer instead.

“The standard means of transportation during those decades (and for many millenia before among those natives) was the canoe.”

Swing and a miss again.

A canoe was only used when on the water, they didn’t use canoe’s on land. Which means you are making my case for mixed mode transportation.

What you forget to mention too is that to get across rivers providers sprung up offering ferry services, since even our pioneers liked to travel in comfort sometimes. And as the loads they were carrying became bigger, the canoes were replaced by rafts which could also be used by more than one person.

“What in fact were our pioneers focused on? Supporting themselves economically, whether growing their own food, selling food to others, or trapping furs for the fashionable city-slickers in Europe.”

And where did they sell their extra food? In a marketplace, which is also known as a distribution node.

You just keep bolstering my arguments. The only thing so far that is right is that there currently is no traffic going to the Moon. What a brilliant observation by the way (just brilliant). However when the time comes we decide to leave LEO, putting a waystation at EML-1/2 makes sense if we’re going to be going back and forth on a regular basis.

Time for you to move on to another topic.

At least it would be adorable if these weren’t adults lobbying to take billions of dollars from the taxpayer and out of the mouths of our children to try to build their simultaneously elaborate and useles celestial shrines for their diapered dolls.

Reality check folks: there is in actual reality no commercial traffic to and from the moon. There are no passengers of any sort going from the earth to the moon or beyond, nor have any so gone for four decades, when there was an ephemeral extravaganza under extremely odd circumstances at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to the taxpayers. Nor is there any realistic prospect of political funding for any such thing in the foreseeable future, nor even if there were would any such Apollo repeat require any more elaborate infrastructure than it did last time.

Reality check folks: there were hundreds of thousands of natives, fur trappers, and farmers living and working along the Mississippi River many decades before there were port facilities. The standard means of transportation during those decades (and for many millenia before among those natives) was the canoe. The standard means of offloading cargo off that canoe was to pull it onto any reasonable beach and for the passengers or nearby inhabitants to come take it off.

What in fact were our pioneers focused on? Supporting themselves economically, whether growing their own food, selling food to others, or trapping furs for the fashionable city-slickers in Europe. These were practical people focused on provide benefits to themselves and their customers. Children in adult bodies who spent their time writing letters to Congress to subsidize their grand fantasy “infrastructure” wouldn’t have survived a year.

That’s how real frontier settlement works: the explorers, businesses and technology and (in old frontiers, but not space) on-site people come first. The infrastructure comes much later when there is actual real world demand for it.

“For SEP NEO missions not lugging the capsule saves mass and the capsule again is only useful for the emergency return in the early and late parts of the trip.”

I don’t think many people realize that once you have a waystation at EML, you no longer need a capsule as a lifeboat on trips beyond Earth. Your lifeboat is your 2nd or 3rd vessel in your exploration flotilla, or one of the smaller “boats” like the proposed Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV).

That’s why the MPCV has such a limited usage, in that it’s really only needed as a transport or lifeboat in between Earth and the Moon. And even then it’s a really expensive one.

More control over when and where you land your earth return spacecraft. Apollo had very little control over that. From L2 you have anytime return to earth (which you don’t have with LLO like Apollo) and the station allows the volume to preposition supplies and has less mass, volume and power constrained life-support systems.

Ease of reuse of lunar lander. It is easier to bring a lunar lander to L1/l2 in terms of delta V than to park it on the moon not to mention the propellant that would be spent attempting to land propellant on the moon to enable early reuse.

A place to park the space capsule for NEO and MARS trips. For Mars trips a space capsule(which you need to return to earth) is dead weight most of the trip. It would only be useful for a relatively short amount of time and there are questions about directly reentering with people at those velocities (higher G force esp. on a deconditioned crew). In addition instead of needing to develop a capsule that can be stored for 3 years (Mars and back) you could use current tech (capsules with 6 month to maybe 2 year lifetimes in space)—just rotate the capsule.

For SEP NEO missions not lugging the capsule saves mass and the capsule again is only useful for the emergency return in the early and late parts of the trip. Sure you could do without a station, but that puts more demand on the capsule’s systems from longer term storage.

It allows you to break the missions into more managable pieces instead of being forced to lug everything for every mission all at once.

Cart before the horse goosaw, On earth cities often are found where modes of Cargo and passenger transport switch.

In the case of shipping boats built for Ocean going (or even the great lakes) are often too big to pass up and down rivers. The cities of Chicago and New Orleans share this in common. In the case of Chicago a network of rivers snake around the area plus the great lakes plus the Chicago River (which was near rivers that lead to the Mississippi river basin was connected to it)—in short you could sail from Chicago to New Orleans (and many places in between and around).

Rail came later which allowed you to switch from boat to train and if you are on the train switch rail roads and to this day Chicago still is a major rail hub. Highways and Air travel later O’Hare and Midway also handle freight. In short destinations like New York, New Orleans, Boston, and Chicago were and are places where modes and routes of travel are swicthed (i.e. Ocean going Ship to river barge to great lakes shipping in the case of a New Orleans to Chicago leg). Bus, Rail and domestic or international Air travel in the case of Chicago passengers. Truck, rail, air freight, river barge or great lakes ship(or Ocean going vessel by way of the St. lawrence seaway) in the case of Chicago freight traffic.

How does this connect with an LEO or L2 station?

In theory while you could launch directly to the moon, you need a HLV to do it with and such a rocket need systems, staff, and manufacturing that isn’t shared with anything else. There is a reason why Soyuz and Proton are still in use but Saturn V is not. A reason why Atlas and Titan out lived Mercury and Gemini. Those rockets have or had other users than HSF.

Let’s say you had a station in LEO. LEO station crew and tourist as well as L2 station crew and tourist could share the first leg up. In the case of something like commercial crew they all hold a crew of 7. Given 1 pilot, that leaves 6 seats to split between ISS(or Bigloew) and BEO usage. Some could be NASA staff, some could be touristst. You could preposition Orion(or Dragon to the ISS) the use a stage lifted by Delta Heavy or FH to push you to L2. Orion could also carry crew up if launched on a big enough rocket.

Advantage is now you don’t need a special lunar HLV like Saturn V to lift everything at once or need to deal with attempting to launch 2 rockets in short order (boil off problem with lox/loh) and with very limited crew supplies in the LEO to L1 transfer vehicle.(Orion can only support a crew for 21 days….ISS much longer that and you need 8 days to L2 and back with a launch window that opens every ten days) . If manned you must use FH or Delta heavy to lift Orion, but if unmanned you could lift it with Atlas (which is cheaper than Delta).

In theory FH could do it directly (if you added a stage but now way could FH push both a capsule and lander fully fueled to the moon at once! It might push a lighter version of Dragon there directly—but having the ISS was what enabled dragon in the first place!) If you go through the space station FH would be able to lift a full 50MT or so to LEO increasing the amount of cargo that could be carried to L2 with your crew or conversely you could possibly trade that mass for propellants that are easier to store than lox/loh. Also, you don’t need to man rate FH or Delta heavy if unmanned and just use the cheaper and more trustworthy Atlas(and by then Falcon 9) to lift your crew to LEO.

If you develop aero breaking the station in LEO offers a place to return the crew. The LEO to L2 craft could be serviced and restocked (however you probably need to develop a better earth to LEO tech to be worth the trade. )

Those are some of the advantages a way station in LEO offers for trips further out like L2.

“Von Braun and his NASA bosses, on the advice of their engineers, sidelined his idiotic way-station idea for Apollo because that’s what you have to do if you want to actually get a deep space mission done in a reasonably efficient manner.”

It’s good to see you’re hearing something I say, even if you can’t understand WHY.

“Since, in sharp contrast to the distributed sources of cargo and passengers that make ports and stations often desirable on earth, everything and everyone is being launched from earth anyway, way-stations in space are a barrier and a diversion, substantially adding to the costs and bureaucracy of a mission, which far outweighs the miniscule and occasional benefits.”

Oh, you’re so close here. Just a little further and you might have actually have had a “light bulb” moment.

“Which is why all the many dozens of other missions to deep space that you have so studiously ignored have made the very same decision, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space stations during the same period.”

Swing and a miss. More of your driving using the rear-view mirror again.

So quick lesson here in logistics (cargo, people, whatever). If you don’t have significant volume then you don’t need transportation nodes (waystations, distribution points, passenger terminals, etc.), unless you need more than one type of transportation system.

Getting from the surface of Earth to the surface of the Moon can be broken down into three transport segments, being 1) Earth to LEO, 2) LEO to lunar orbit (or a Lagrange point), and 3) lunar orbit to lunar surface. No one has ever done that with one vehicle, and Apollo did it with the Saturn V, CM/SM, and Lunar Lander stack, which threw away parts along the journey. So if you don’t need a reusable transportation system, that works.

But the question is no longer can we get to the Moon or beyond, but how to do it on a regular basis for the least practical cost. For that we’ll need reusable transportation systems, which means they will be specialized for each particular transportation segment.

Go ahead and rant about zombies and space ghosts dictating how we will do things in space, but that won’t change what will actually happen. We didn’t create transportation nodes by accident, we create them because they are necessary here on Earth, and they will be in space too.

“let’s stick rigidly to dogmas conceived seven or more decades ago.”

Let’s not. We now know that stuff from space hits the Earth.

More immediately, we know that the Earth will be in the debris field of Comet SW3 in 2022.

You’ve tried to explain it for a grand total of one out of the many dozens of kinds of actual missions to deep space. Every single one of which made the same decision, the decision that defies your dogma. Yet you fell far short of a plausible explanation for even that one.

Kennedy didn’t plan on staying on the Moon

Neither has any other important politician, save for a poor fellow named Newt who had the fatal misfortune of getting his space advice from a sci-fi-addled astronaut cultist. You utterly fail to grasp the astronomical gulf that lies between the dogmatic hallucinations of the von Braun worshippers and the political, economic, and technological realities of actual space development.

Von Braun and his NASA bosses, on the advice of their engineers, sidelined his idiotic way-station idea for Apollo because that’s what you have to do if you want to actually get a deep space mission done in a reasonably efficient manner. Since, in sharp contrast to the distributed sources of cargo and passengers that make ports and stations often desirable on earth, everything and everyone is being launched from earth anyway, way-stations in space are a barrier and a diversion, substantially adding to the costs and bureaucracy of a mission, which far outweighs the miniscule and occasional benefits. Which is why all the many dozens of other missions to deep space that you have so studiously ignored have made the very same decision, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space stations during the same period.

Like von Braun, until he had to actually fly things into deep space, you completely fail to grasp the economics at work here, but instead dogmatically cling to a preposterously bad analogy to transportation in a network of dispersed sources and destinations of cargo and passengers.