Lunar surface crews will have to contend with a dusty & radiation-filled environment virtually identical to that which would be encountered during both a to-Mars transit & a Martian surface setting. New human lander-craft technology, new orbiter-craft technology, techniques for ferrying & landing base-module components, will all put space travel engineering to its greatest test. The play-book for how to eventually get humans to Mars, will be typed in using the data obtained during a Lunar interlude of daring expeditions.

You all gripe about how “over-loaded, too big & heavy” the Orion craft is——as presently conceived. But the Orion’s original purpose was to serve as lunar transport/lunar orbital vehicle, so of course it was supposed to be as strongly designed as the old Apollo CSM. It was freaking Obama & his minions who did the vast damage to NASA! Under the Constellation plan, we were to’ve gotten a lunar ferry & eventually a new lunar lander. A tall multi-stage, hydrogen-fueled rocket—–the Ares 5—–was to have utilized an earth-departure-stage, for the first time in 41 years!

The only portion of the plan that could have used a bit of better luck, was the plan for the smaller rocket—–the Ares 1—-for primarily launching the manned Orion. I still think that with better patience, the difficulties with this Space Shuttle-derived rocket, could’ve been overcome. But there were always other smaller rocket options, for launching a single manned capsule, into a parking orbit; and NASA could very well have man-rated a replacement rocket, if that’d turned out to be a more viable idea.

The Moon was the correct destination to re-send humans to, all along! Every single technological obstacle to future crewed interplanetary travel would’ve been solved there! Orion was an ideal craft for getting a second round of astronauts Moonward. It was only after the Plan got demolished by Obama, the Mars zealots, & the deluded commercial-space people that all this ludicrous talk comes up, about the Orion not being able to do this or that adequately. Guys, we were NOT going to do Mars or asteroids yet! The focus was on the Moon. Getting past those first few sorties, then moving onto the outpost missions. The only thing I could dislike about Griffin now, is that he’s putting his support behind this sure-loser & stinker of the Inspiration Mars Fly-By! He should be smart-enough of an engineer to see thru all the glittery hype in this latest scheme——and just how THIS really is a ticket to nowhere!!

Nope. With regard to ISS and the understanding of human factors in space, having humans there is what counts. You can’t gain that understanding by an “automated mission”. THAT is what having humans on ISS is teaching us.

“You will always learn more by doing than by studying, and human spaceflight is no different than anything else in that respect.”

That statement reveals your lack of any science background or perspective, and pretty clearly answers my final question above. If we outfitted Orion with radiation sensors, and used that data to assess the radiation burden to astronauts who might be in it, that counts to you as not “doing”?? Why, we should get particle physicists into the Large Hadron Collider with catchers mitts because, well, if a human doesn’t really catch a Higgs boson in their hands, they’re just “studying” rather that “doing”! In fact, we should put humans inside rocket nozzles to explore the pressures and temperatures there. You know, you go in their with your barometer and thermometer. We wouldn’t want to just “study” that stuff, would we?

I’m sorry, but your arguments are pretty pathetic. I can see a human ARM mission as having some value traceable to an eventual human trip to Mars (which is what Gerst would argue) though what we’d learn from that exercise sure doesn’t need a rock!

I will agree with you that the ultimate purpose of human spaceflight is to colonize the solar system. (As noted above, “exploration” — as an activity of inquiry, rather than adventure — is better done robotically, at least compared to boots-on-the-ground exploration.) Robots won’t colonize the solar system. Of course the question then becomes whether colonizing the solar system is worth doing. Congress has never established colonization of the solar system as a national priority. Until they do, human spaceflight is frankly not conspicuously in the national interest.

Sure, such a mission might be an great test of manned spaceflight technology. A way to test systems before going much further out in the solar system, but there are no compelling reasons to do so.

“If the ultimate purpose of spaceflight is to explore and colonize the Solar System, than we have to do that.”

The ultimate purpose of spaceflight is not to do that. Unmanned spaceflight has proven it’s worth via communications satellites, weather satellites, resource monitoring satellites , Navigational satellites, and spy satellites. Unmanned spaceflight has given us large amounts of information about the universe and how it works.

Manned spaceflight on the other hand has been lacking. Has gotten too wound up in supporting jobs in key states and appearing to wave the flag. It has not advanced near enough perhaps because we spend so much money and get so little out of it. We don’t need manned spaceflight to explore. We have probes for that. Heck we know more about the surface of the moon than our own ocean.

We do need it to colonize, but until the cost comes down that won’t happen. Current systems are incapable of supporting colonization. There is still a lot of work to be done in LEO and an lot of work to be done on the ground (like re-usability of rockets). Colonization won’t happen until private citizens can afford to go or there becomes some compelling reason for the Government to send people(and so far there are none).

hatred at work here is, the most powerful element, I think is.

You say you like Bigelow but what you really like is a stalinist, big government, cost plus fixed fee, no bid, single source FAR extravaganza that the congressional Porkonauts would lie and commit every known fallacy of logic to get spending in their district or state regardless if in the long run it ever produced a working piece of hardware.

The focus of NASA should be technology and working the TRL (technology readiness level) then shoveling it into the private sector as soon and possible and turn that tech into COTS, commercial off the shelf technology.

Sticking with the radiation example, I am not suggesting that we test active radiation protection by simply exposing human beings and seeing what happens. But, if you are sending a spacecraft to an asteroid (or any other deep space destination) anyway, you can learn more about the radiation environment and protecting against it than you will by sitting at home and reading measurements or by tying to model it. You will always learn more by doing than by studying, and human spaceflight is no different than anything else in that respect.