Will Someone Please Wake Up ARC PAO?

Is it not only science? Is this amount of water anything an engineer can handle? Officials will know this.

Why would any PAO officially express interest in the human exploration implications of anything beyond LEO when that's all we're going to be doing for the next thirty years? Human exploration of space is contrary to an Earth centered NASA policy. The President and Ms. Garver have made that evident.

I think there are two main reasons why this made it to the NY Times as an Op-Ed piece.

1) It's timely, coming on the heels of the controversy about "bombing the Moon", followed by the announcement about water being found.

2) It's well written and perfectly targeted for an intelligent general audience.

- he starts with an appeal to the imagination

- provides a brief historical perspective

- explains why water is present and why it's been difficult to find

- gives a simple one sentence explanation of how it was found

- gives a clear explanation of how the water can be used

- notes the importance to humanity of not putting all the eggs of our species in one fragile place

- wraps up by noting why, with all the problems we have here on Earth, this is important

Well written, to the point, perfectly aimed, and not a bit of techno-babble that would turn off and confuse the average reader.

Nice going, William S. Marshall!

Laura

Ironic, in a way.

Leaving aside the genuine importance to both space science and especially ISRU, it seems that the entrenched "Ares uber alles" forces at NASA are trying to use these findings as an excuse to ram through the budget for Cx-Ares (which ain't gonna happen) and yet it is the commercial space architectures that are the ones that would benefit the most from the presence of water.

Please remember. Half a glass of water on 2 tons of gravel is nothing any spaceflight will benefit from.

"(Discovering water on Mars was not quite as significant because the major hurdle to establishing permanent settlements there is the eight-month journey.)"

Is this a secret pinhole view into the minds of NASA employees? Do they actually think the major hurdle to establishing anything on Mars is the time to get there? Because last I heard the major hurdle is THE COUNTRY DOESN'T CARE.

Nevertheless, if you have nuclear feed electric propulsion, you need not follow Hohmanns orbits. Than it could be about four month to reach mars!

"Please remember. Half a glass of water on 2 tons of gravel is nothing any spaceflight will benefit from."

Assuming that your figures turn out to be accurate, that's still just as meaningless as "enough to launch a space shuttle every day for 2000 years."

Neither figure takes into account human industrial processes... and the scaling up of those processes due to exponential growth.

For either statement to have value in longe-range planning an overlapping set of time frames for differing exploitation needs and an accurate budgeting of the extant water and its rate of replenishment is needed first.

"Do they actually think the major hurdle to establishing anything on Mars is the time to get there?"

Actually, chances are they are referring to the fact that at best, with current shielding, a human will exceed their level of allowed maximum lifetime exposure to radiation during a round trip.

And then there's the stay on Mars.

And at worst... that's not even counting solar particle events.

Radiation. Unless VASIMR and/or Polywell really can drop the trip time to 45 days... we probably ain't going.

Strange how little that gets talked about.

If we ain't going anywhere, why we will need a space agency anymore?