U.S. House Wants 'Sustained Human Presence On the Moon and the Surface of Mars'

I want to see mankind spread out into the solar system, and ideally I'd like to see the USA at the head of it all. So I'm not unsympathetic toward the idea.

But I really want to see the space program get done correctly. So far, every trip to the moon has been via a single-use rocket, completely used up for the one trip. It made sense when we were trying to win a race, but it also meant we hadn't built out the infrastructure.

The right way to do things: build a truly reusable space vehicle, often called a "space pickup truck". Proposed heavy lift vehicles are more like a "space moving van", and they will have their uses, but what we need more than anything else is a spacecraft that can fly and fly and fly some more with minimal maintenance.

We want a craft that can fly to orbit, return, and then go again tomorrow. It might need some maintenance overnight but it should be as little as possible. The space shuttle needed man-centuries of work between flights... we can do far better than that.

Single-stage would be ideal, but two-stage might be easier to get going... just make sure both stages are reusable and don't need too much maintenance. Cargo capacity need not be huge... it would be cheaper to fly things up in multiple small loads on a truly reusable craft, than to build, launch, and use up a single heavy-lift vehicle.

Once we have the "space pickup truck" we need to build a transportation hub in Earth orbit. It would have emergency Earth return vehicles docked, would have lots of supplies (fuel, water, oxygen, food, etc.) and would have staff on board all the time.

Once you have all the above? The moon becomes trivial. Build a "moon shuttle" that could be basically a couple of fuel tanks and engines bolted to a frame, with some sort of shielded crew compartment and a lunar lander docked to it. It need not be pretty and it need not be tough because it will never land anywhere.

Ideally, also we should build a "space cannon" system that can shoot things into space. This would be the cheapest way to send up inert things like oxygen and fuel, or even dried food and tough electronics. And humans living in space will need serious radiation shielding... the cannon could possibly send up lots of shielding mass.

Imagine how expensive it would be to deliver cargo from America to Australia if we had to do it by building a single-use cargo missile. With modern aircraft the dominating factor is fuel costs. If we could get space travel costs down to chiefly the cost of fuel that would be a massive reduction in costs.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/EBgt-L-_yy4/story01.htm

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