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| Re: European Space Agency wants a Village on the Moon (1325171) | |||
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Re: European Space Agency wants a Village on the Moon |
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Posted by WillD on Tue Nov 10 04:32:05 2015, in response to European Space Agency wants a Village on the Moon, posted by Olog-hai on Mon Nov 9 13:41:09 2015. The only slightly amusing thing here is that this is just the latest example of the ESA making overtures to the US after a decade of cozying up to the Russians. They attempted to build a manned space capsule with the Russians, which failed. They attempted to push a lunar landing with the Russians, which failed. They're now launching the Soyuz from French Guiana, but the savings ascribed to launching Russian rockets from an equatorial location has proven ephemeral.That's not to say we're doing much better than the Europeans. We've now spent more than a decade on a pair of "exploration" programs which does nothing more than funnel tens of billions of dollars to Red States. We've gone exactly nowhere with those programs. But in spite of that handicap, the interest in our space program by the Europeans is a direct reflection of the success of what little remains from NASA's manned spaceflight budget after the SLS is done with it. The only bright spot of our space program at this point is the ISS and its accompanying Commercial crew and cargo programs, and even those are under constant threat from Congressional Republicans who'd prefer we keep supporting Russia's space program. International partners are the only way we're ever going to accomplish anything in space exploration. The commercial space program created by NASA to support the ISS is creating the infrastructure necessary to supply a moonbase. Both ULA and SpaceX are just about in a position to launch manned lunar missions provided they were supplied with funding for payloads. The Space Review's Jeff Foust had a good write-up on the proposal. I'm not sure why the ESA official is pushing for a base on the Lunar farside, but other than that its a very worthwhile proposal. Bigelow has a proposal for a manned lunar base landed as a monolithic unit after being assembled in orbit. With a fairly modest investment from NASA and the ESA we could have astronauts from around the world flying on rockets owned by US companies, in spacecraft owned by US companies, to lunar bases owned by US companies. How is that not a win for the US? |
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