Someone did.

Your questions presuppose that the NASA status quo must be preserved at all costs. I contend instead that if we want a space program that produces value for money, we need to decide to strive for that and re-budget accordingly. $18 billion per year is a non-trival amount of money. Although not as much as we space buffs would like, it’s not chicken feed. The nation needs to decide what it wants from its space program — lasting value for the money spent and a return on its investment or stupid stunts designed for a TV reality show.

Primarily economic capabilities must mature if there is to be some advance of humanity beyond Earth. A day when NASA and other space agencies have exploratory crews anywhere in the solar system, the Moon or beyond, pre-supposes a level of accomplishment that can’t just gloss over how that happens with vague arm waving about NASA budgets.

At some point, someone has to define how incremental advance lives inside a real NASA budget. Such a plan has to address difficult questions, looking at many scenarios. To find money, do we cancel a program, SLS and/or Orion? What are the programmatics of redirecting all those funds for what, and to which centers to manage? Barring that, suppose an extra $250M or $500M a year were added to just human spaceflight. How would an efficient use of such funds avoid being caught up in interactions and delays (and budget vultures) from already existing programs? How might such an addition upset the decades long balance of NASA funds between human spaceflight and science? Commercial options have to be explored not as far term, but as near term –in cislunar. When do we stop making this odd-ball assumption too about budgets that keep up with inflation (dream on with that one)?

Before we think the first step is the Moon, let’s back-track a bit to getting the cost of the step to LEO down even further, and to a point where a mature, competitive industry there can stand on its own. Similarly, before we think a first step is something out in the middle of cislunar no-where, lets assure space stations after the ISS are a thriving business NASA can buy time on, cheap, and by the yard.

Once all the steps into cislunar space are economically vibrant, getting to LEO, and making money there, and likely as some existing programs end as well, pain and disruption and all, NASA can focus its spaceflight budget on more steps beyond with some chance it will add up.

Figure 10 page 23 tells the whole story. This infographic should get an award.

There has to be a compelling reason to go to the Moon and for Mars no such reason exists. Three industries lunar resources can revolutionize are communications, defense, and energy. But to make that happen will require a public works project in the style of the Panama Canal or Hoover Dam. That means a multiple of 8 billion- and I would add the public really has no comprehension of what a trivial amount that is compared to….I won’t go there. So though I identify with you as a brother space enthusiast Marcel, I cannot support your conclusions at all.

https://iceonthemoon.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/seven-steps-to-space-travel/

The author actually addressed most of my issues with the novel and film during a rather entertaining lecture he gave at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in September:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfh6OUUYUw

Marcel

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151002103306.htm

Like reusable rockets, fusion reactors are a scam that have been around for a half a century. The rocket equation and the fantastic temperatures and pressures required to sustain fusion mean both these items are not in the near, or probably even the far future.

Stephen Hawking has warned of the dangers of contact with sentient life. I tend to listen to really smart people like him, Freeman Dyson, Eugene Parker, and a few others.

Not “fundamentally irrational.”

What is silly is the mass marketing of unobtanium, wishalloy, and that old sci-fi standby handwavium. I commented a few months back on the actual existence of a couple forms of unobtanium and wishalloy but there is no handwavium (violations of physics) being reported that can be taken seriously and I do not expect any. Handwavium includes “solutions” to heavy nuclei radiation exposure that include miraculous magnetic shields. Call me conservative but my universe does not include the possibility of going faster than light or teleportation.

Here is the unobtainium (Am-242) and wishalloy (scandium alloy):

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010103073253.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141210140840.htm

Money is really not at the core of NASA’s problems, IMO, since I continue to believe that an $8 billion a year human spaceflight related budget is plenty of money for NASA to return the Moon in the 2020’s and then use lunar water resources to go on to Mars in the 2030s– if both goals are prioritized.

And I actually believe that NASA would receive a little more funding if Congress finally saw that NASA was progressively proceeding in logical direction towards the Moon and Mars.

The problem is that the current administration has banned NASA from returning to the Moon, publicly criticizing any human lunar return by NASA and even publically ridiculing the idea of a lunar outpost.

I have no problems with a long term goal of sending humans to Mars– as long as it not an Apollo style stunt.

NASA needs to return to the Moon to stay in the 2020’s in order to proceed towards Mars in the 2030s to stay. Establishing permanent water producing outpost on both worlds is the cheapest and most sustainable way for NASA to continuously explore the surfaces of both the Moon and Mars.

Roving microwave water extraction robots, IMO, would probably be the most efficient way to exploit water resources at the lunar poles and on most of the surface of Mars. And the more nuclear and solar power units humans deploy on the surface of those worlds, the more water they will be able to produce.

Marcel

After Avatar it looks like space movies are going stay closer to reality in the coming years and this means some valuable P.R. opportunities will present themselves in my opinion. It would be a good thing if Dr. Spudis signed on as a “technical advisor” for some of these projects. Really good.

So far the string of movies over the last few years have been extremely disappointing for me personally. I shut Gravity off 15 minutes in and did not even bother watching Interstellar after my daughter gave me her opinion on it. The problem with being a space buff is the nonsense portrayed on screen is profoundly dissatisfying.