We cannot keep playing this stupid game of “lets do whatever the public likes to click on” without losing everything sooner or later. Mars has been a P.R. scam since H.G. Wells. It seems just close enough to get to on the cheap but that is an illusion. It is not close enough. The Moon is close enough to get to using chemical propulsion and probably a half a century after we set up shop there we might be launching nuclear missions and those will be the first human crewed interplanetary voyages.

Not before.

The harsh reality. If we have true atomic spaceships capable of going to Mars they will of course bypass that rock in favor of the ocean moons of the gas giants. Even Ceres is a far more desirable destination than Mars.

I agree with you about some of the sloppy “news reporting” that seems to be directly derived from SpaceX press releases. That is (unfortunately) not limited to print, it exists in television programing as well.

Its the early part of the 21st century, yet we still don’t have any specific details on the relative quantities of elements contained in the regolith at the lunar poles or on the surfaces of Deimos and Phobos.

Understanding the regolith components of these extremely important strategic and commercial areas in the solar system should have been prioritized by NASA way back in the 20th century– and we should have had an ample amount of sample returns from all of these regions a long time ago.

Marcel

At some point it will become glaringly obvious NewSpace is primarily a façade to justify donating tax dollars to private satellite launch companies as hobby projects for billionaires- with the secondary goal of providing space clown tourism for their uber-wealthy buddies. What then? Is anybody going to throw the B.S. flag and expose the whole sordid saga of space exploration since a certain entrepreneur made a certain campaign contribution?

There’s lots of interest in the lunar community, but the wheels of NASA bureaucracy grind exceedingly slowly. All attention and most of the money in the Science Directorate is focused on Mars and they do the minimum amount of lunar work necessary to claim that they are pursing a balanced exploration strategy. That won’t change unless there are some high-level changes in the agency.

In a way, it is comforting to know that additional discoveries flesh out but do not overturn the idea that the poles are about as good as we’re going to get in the way of a toehold for industrial investment. Let’s get started! Penetrators, orbiters and rovers first, to survey promising locations in successively greater resolution. Then follow that with a robotic mission to actually dig, process and “refine” some water.

Back to the medium range surveys, and the penetrators Dr. Spudis has mentioned before. Has there been any interest in the lunar scientific community about pursuing this strategy, of multiple copies of a fairly inexpensive probe released at once, in order to take measurements across a wider range than one rover could handle?

Additionally, their guru has recently: (1) Abandoned the Red Dragon (a Mars lander), (2) De-scoped the ITS (his proposed Mars Vehicle), and (3) Endorsed – wait for it – establishing a Base on the Moon.

Their new talking points should be amusing.

I’d like to see a mixture of solar photovoltaic and nuclear fission utilized at a lunar outpost.

It shouldn’t be difficult for battery powered mobile microwave water extraction vehicles to operate in the shadowed areas at the poles, periodically recharging their lithium batteries throughout the day.

Marcel