How about that coolant system on the space station?

You cannot explain away turning wrenches.

If you thought I was referring to your post, I was not. I was referring to a post by Ron where he said to Paul Spudis:

Ron says: April 30, 2013 at 9:36 pm

“Your posts have amply shown that the national human spaceflight program is a huge political cluster-****. It’s irretrievable. So dump it for now. Forget about human spaceflight for the moment. “

What he meant is pretty clear. I do not doubt your good intentions. Ron is another matter entirely.

Secondly, if you two guys were to reread my post, you will see that I am saying nothing about the entire mission being dependent upon the initial telerobots working flawlessly forever. I clearly specified that humans would follow shortly to fix any hardware that has irretrievably stopped functioning. All I am saying is that it is quite sensible to send telerobotic equipment on the same landers that the human maintainers will follow on later and to see how far one can get harvesting water on the Moon before the humans arrive.

With this approach, you are not trying to do telerobotic repair something as complex as a helicopter engine:
http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/111239995/engine_TV2_117A_for_helicopter_MI_8.jpg

rather, for example you would replace a malfunctioning robotic arm with a complete spare part:

http://www.textualcreations.ca/Robotic%20Arm%20&%20Hand%20Tutorial%20%5BISO%201%5D.jpg

The private space advocates are pretty consistent on their ultimate fantasy; a Martian libertarian utopia for atlas shruggers. The “entrepreneurs” scamming our tax dollars manipulate this gullible cannon fodder into backdoor promotion of their only real objective; LEO space tourism for the ultra-rich. Sarah Brightman being the most recent space clown wannabe to sign up.

A hobby rocket docking with a blow-up tent is all they need to cash in. But even this cheap and nasty minimum requires far more money than they can charge for there to be any profit left over. The solution is to get rid of any other space concern sucking up “their” money. Not only get rid of the competition but use the organization they are trying to destroy to fund their business plan and for nearly free research and development-all the while demonizing that same enabling resource as wasteful and unnecessary. What a deal!

And they are getting away with it.
No one is saying a word about it except for the very few people like you and Dr. Spudis. And while certain boy wonders get tv coverage and magazine interviews, the truth get’s buried deeper and deeper under the hype.
Unlike me, the good Doctor has to be polite and careful about what he says. You should know that I submit alot to this site and Dr. Spudis will not put most of my comments up because they are far too blunt and corrosive to pass any civility test. It is good therapy for me though.
I am mad as hell about what is happening to my space program. When a trained engineer like you pays me a compliment it removes whatever doubts I had and I just get more upset.

“There’s soooo much that could be done with existing launchers-”

“-if commercial entities eventually provide working equivalents, do you expect that the need for the “government option” will no longer exist-”

“-having redundant commercial HLVs is probably not realistic.”

“-NASA could be landing multiple “human precursor” missions per year to the Moon starting 2017, courtesy of Golden Spike.”

The rationale behind these comments is to promote an irrational faith in private space companies IMO. After years of reading the same infomercial it is fairly easy to detect.

The SLS as enemy of private interprise is the underlying theme and is divorced from the pursuit of any alternative path.

Any path to retrieve our future in space begins with an HLV IMO Dr. Spudis.

I am an engineer who spent eight years working EVA operations for ISS assembly/maintenance and have tried several times to make the same points, but without much success. But I have to admit I never said it half as well.

Proposals to end human space flight for some unspecified period of time while trying to determine if robots can do everything are an action plan to cause a “train wreck”. It will certainly end American Human Space Flight for a generation or more (perhaps the intent of the proposal) because you cannot just turn something like that back on like flipping a light switch. But it will do more than that when a “frozen nut” occurs or a “single piece of hardware” falls into some crevice etc. it (in absence of human intervention) will bring an entire operation to a halt. That high profile failure will end any attempt at extraterrestrial resource utilization for a generation or more as well.

I do not believe that it is irretrievable. If I did, I would not write posts supporting it.

Now, however, it’s all speculation. Your posts have amply shown that the national human spaceflight program is a huge political cluster-****. It’s irretrievable. So dump it for now. Forget about human spaceflight for the moment. Focus on the first 15 flights of the Spudis-Lavoie plan. Let’s get that done.

My take is the exact opposite. We can initially establish with humans and then automate as much as possible to minimize radiation exposure.
There is no cheap; try cutting costs by using smaller rockets and robots without people on site and minor problems turn into showstoppers because there is no one to stick a screwdriver in a hole. Witness the ISS crew struggling for days to loosen up a frozen nut on EVA’s for a supposedly simple maintenance task. It happens and will continue to happen. I have seen others and have personally struggled for HOURS to retrieve a single piece of hardware that fell into some crevice in a helicopter engine or other compartment. The only other way to get it is to pull the engine or gearbox or some other major assembly. You cannot design this away; it is the nature of the beast. Depth perception, the nerves in fingertips, fishing with magnets and dental mirrors, body contortion and using tools in combinations and for purposes they were not designed for; maintenance requires all of this and years of experience and novel solutions that come from years of experience. And it is required ever day on the job. Mechanics and technicians may seem dumb compared to rocket scientists and phd’s but one cannot do what the other does.
Robots will not be good enough.
That is reality.

So, the initial value of humans on the lunar surface in such a setting would be to maintain the telerobotic workforce. They can do this by having the disabled equipment brought into their shielded habitat so that the humans are not exposed to the GCRs. Then later, the humans can begin to produce the bulky metal parts of an expanding telerobotic workforce so that only the small precision or high-tech parts need to be delivered from Earth.

But humans on the Moon will have economic value beyond being repairmen. They could secure life-support production, learn how to grow food, learn how to repair habitats, conduct biologic experiments, and the other things needed to become a spacefaring civilization. For these reasons, ice found at the lunar poles is of tremendous value.