Why?
Name one problem of the magnitude you’re describing that can be solved with a mere 500 billion. Global warming? Nope. Overfishing? Nope. The mythical “overpopulation”? Nope.
May as well put it to use doing something that may help in the long run.
For example, I guarantee that we’ll learn new and better ways to recycle and conserve resources on a Lunar Base.
Do we all at least agree that the ultimate goal of the space program are generation ships?
Be it by our own hand or by the sun going nova, the Earth is coming to an end.
The question then when weighing alternative current space program goals is which one is moving us closer to that ultimate goal.
Or is it such an absurdly faraway goal that our current short term projects are indifferent with respect to that?
Unfortunately there does not seem to be general agreement on that point, as you’ll see if you review this thread from the beginning.
OTOH, this cartoon is worth a chuckle.
We landed on the moon in 1969. It is a disgrace that we don’t already have an operational moon base.
I’m all for it. But we have got to keep Congress out of it. Let them allocate the money and then stand back. The fiasco with the space station was caused solely because Congress kept dicking with the money and forced NASA back to the drawing board time and time again.
I am all for space exploration but I really have something against the ISS. It seems to me that it is just a bus stop invented to provide a destination for a fleet of buses (shuttles) that had nowhere to go. Now that it is time to retire the shuttles, we are stuck with the problem of needing new buses to go to our brand new bus station. Repeat.
I am sure there is good science coming out of the ISS but I doubt it was the best way to do that.
The moon is an objective that really excites the mind of the crowd (and ten times more so for Mars, of course) and it takes the vote of the crowd to keep those programs going.
I am always one to say that democracies don’t build pyramids but we need a really faraway goal to galvanize support for space exploration. The ISS is just not cutting it anymore (if it ever did).
I will insist that our ultimate goal of space exploration is to provide us with a way out for when Earth stops being livable. But a ladder this tall needs many short rungs that we can climb to provide a feeling of progress that keeps attention on the program. (plus, we still have to develop the technologies that will give rise to the technologies that will make space colonization feasible, we are nowhere near yet)
Is a moon base a better next rung to the ladder than a Mars base? Are we wasting too much energy to give too small a step instead of just going for Mars in one shot? I guess everyone’s answer would be a measure of their aversion to risk more than anything else.
Imagine a mission to Mars (if it were a single launch) blowing up on launch! that would end up support for space exploration in an instant.
We need a stepped program where we can “hide” failures without killing the entire project.
Maybe repurposing the ISS as a Mars mission launch pad would not only justify the expense on it already incurred but also make a Mars mission a stepped process where minor blowups would be better tolerated. That could do away with a Moon Base.
There has to be a better reason for the Moon Base than being a stepping stone for Mars. If there is reasonable hope of mining something useful out of there, then fine. The possibility of science that can’t be carried out in orbit, excellent. Otherwise it will just be another ISS with all its shortcomings amplified (expense, accessibility, escape options, etc). And another reason to justify the space contras in asking for the end of the space program.
There is, unfortunately. I’ve been exchanging e-mails with Spider Robinson (see post #118).
I think he meant “arms race” instead of “detente,” which means almost the opposite, but otherwise, he’s right. A Lunar military installation, with an unlimited supply of rocks to throw, would be an even more formidable threat than those proposed “Rods From God” sattelites. If China has a foothold on the Moon for ostensibly scientific purposes (regarding their announced plans, see here), just the possibility it might also be used for military purposes requires the U.S. to keep up.
Welcome to: Space Race, Version 2.0!
For more on China’s plans, see here, here, and here.
And now we might live to see this thread acquire some real-life relevance . . .
They seem to be a bit behind schedule:
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
It would? How so? There might be unlimited rocks up there, but will there be free rockets there to launch the rocks to earth? And what would the Chinese do when the US is facing away from the moon? An orbital weapons platform would be faster, easier, more accurate, more useful, and far, far cheaper than anything on the moon. I bet we could drop 50-100 rods from space for the cost of each single rock anyone could launch from the moon.
I’ll support a moon base when someone tells me just what we could do on a moon base that we can’t do in a space station.
I like Spider and all, and I’m the biggest Heinlein fan ever, but Heinlein’s threat of rocks being launched from the moon is the closest thing to fantasy to come out of “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. To make it work, Heinlein had to come up with a complex scenario of subterfuge, underground construction of a huge catapult, and he had to ignore a whole bunch of ways such a catapult could be detected.
There is zero chance that a catapult like that could ever be constructed on the moon in secrecy. Our detection hardware is simply too good. And it would be the ultimate in asymmetric folly to try - building something that big would be a job expensive enough to bankrupt a nation, and destroying it would take a couple of hundred million bucks at most. Long before it ever became operational you’d know exactly where it was.
It couldn’t happen even in Heinlein’s universe, and Heinlein’s universe already had a thriving colony of millions of people on the moon.
If Bush’s decisionw was at all affected by the Chinese, it would be more about worrying about a loss of prestige by having the Chinese get better than space travel than us, or a worry that the Chinese might find very valuable things on the moon - then use their superiority to deny it to everyone else by threatening to destroy any other missions that went there. And even that scenario is far-fetched.
You don’t use rockets, you use a magnetic-railgun catapult. No fuel needed, only electric power (see below).
Dunno about them, but our base is planned for one of the Moon’s poles. Ostensibly because at that location you get an unlimited supply of solar power. But it also means the station is never “facing away from” the Earth . . .
Who says it has to be constructed in secrecy? Announce it proudly, and say its purpose is to launch shuttles to Earth and exploratory ships throughout the Solar System. 
And it would be the most-watched installation in history. There would be lunar-stationary satellites photographing every little thing that went on there. There would be analyists measuring the exact tonnage of material going in and out, and following the inventory chain to see if what was being built matched what was claimed to be built. And there would be probabaly be a demand for international inspectors to be stationed there to verify what was being loaded into the catapult.
And if a payload was launched at Earth, the catapult would be destroyed before the first rock ever landed.
Really, it’s a fantasy. At least for the forseeable future. Maybe in 500 years, something like will happen. But we don’t even know which nations will still be around in 500 years, or even remotely what they would look like.
It’s going to take everything the Chinese can muster just to put a little tin can on the moon with a couple of people in it. In fact, I think it’s going to be a huge stretch for them to even be able to put a man on the moon at all. Do you have any idea how far away they are from being able to construct a kilometers-long mass driver on the moon and stock it with multi-ton projectiles?
Answer: Far enough away that attempting to plan for that now is idiotic. That’s simply not what’s going on.
As long as there’s the fear the Chinese are up to something cooler than we are, it’ll do wonders for our space program. Bush as already spent $500 billion on rumors coming out of Iraq, why shouldn’t he spend at least that much on suspicions the Chinese are going to throw rocks at us?
Ermmm . . . because there’s no oil on the Moon?
Uhh…time the assault just right? Your target might go around a few times between launch and landing if launch was at the moon and target was the earth. You don’t just throw when Disneyland is in your sights.
Do we have any of those now? Or any other observing platform capable of monitoring the moon’s far side?
Personally, I agree with Walt Kelly, who always thought the baddies would be after our cheese mines. Rally 'round the flag, boys! Our mozzarella could be in danger!
BrainGlutton, it doesn’t matter if the base is at the poles: the moon is tidelocked; the same side is always facing the earth. That doesn’t mean the moon can launch an attack on the US at any time. The earth still spins, and one side always faces away from the moon. If you can’t see the moon in the sky, the moon can’t see you, either.
And Musicat, thanks for pointing out another problem–what good is an attack system that not only has to be timed perfectly, but takes several hours to strike? Long before the rocks get here, their trajectories will be plotted, cities evacuated, anti-moon rock systems armed, and China glowing in the dark thanks to our conveniently Earth-located ICBMs.
How is that better than either terrestrial or orbital platforms?