Following @RealDonaldTrump‘s tweet, “NASA should NOT be talking about going to the moon,” Bridenstine talked to POTUS, who agreed the US has to go to the moon 1st, but wants “generational achievement that will inspire all Americans” – planting the American flag on Mars pic.twitter.com/xNedN8Fe1M
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 14, 2019
Transcript: NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on “Face the Nation,” July 14, 2019, CBS
Bridenstine: “We also want to keep our eye on what is President Trump’s goal – what is his vision? He wants to put an American flag – on Mars. So we go to the Moon to learn how to live on another world.”
CBS: “So the first steps [on the Moon] in 2024 will be by a woman?”
Bridenstine: “That’s the goal.”
Yes, the Moon is about the Industrialization of space, Mars is about the exploration of space.
Still nearly 14 million square miles left of the lunar surface to explore. Industrialization would be overrated at this point.
Industrialization is what going to sustain the real exploration of those 14 million square miles. Scientists at best will just sample a few points as they did during Apollo, write their papers and move on, just as in the Old West, where they took their fossils and went back East while the fur traders. prospectors, and settlers actually mapped out the land and cataloged its resources.
Because there’s so much money to be made in shipping powdered basalt back to Earth? There’s nothing there..,
That nothing is selling for around $400,000/gram. The price will drop of course, but like beaver fur, there are markets for exotic goods. Indeed, NASA could probably pay for Artemis, at least using a commercial approach, by just selling off a small portion of properly branded lunar samples.
You are quite right, of course in context. Though we’ve been talking about the industrialization of low earth orbit for the last few decades and that hasn’t really happened yet either. The Moon may take even longer though I’d be deliriously happy to be wrong about that. Still plenty of science to be done there, though – and don’t expect that to be very fast either.
The basic problem is that there is really nothing of industrial value in LEO except microgravity, and you need cheap commercial HSF to make use of it. There were some promising experiments in the 1980’s, but working with NASA and its long research cycles didn’t mesh well with industry.
The goal is Mars – today. That could change at any minute, have you checked Twitter lately? Bridenstine might have been fired in the last few minutes.
Augustine said the same, the ultimate goal is Mars. However there are still some things we need to learn before we are ready to send humans there, at least the NASA way. If we had an advanced propulsion system to send people there a lot faster, and an artificial G vehicle to eliminate the physiological concerns of zero-G, and knew how to produce a force field to limit the problem of cosmic rays and radiation, and we knew how to make all of our systems last for the duration of the mission out and back with no fear they would collapse on the way, then we could go tomorrow. Some of those things we are working on. Some we are not. In the meantime the ISS and the Moon are the proving grounds.