Bill's Notebook

President Obama laid out an ambitious vision for American space exploration that included missions to an asteroid and to Mars while opening up routine launches to low-Earth orbit by private industries.  It is a great vision and I especially like the mission to an asteroid because of the vast mineral wealth from Near-Earth Objects and to develop an ability to protect against asteroid impacting on Earth.  It also appears that the plan has widespread support in the space community.

I do disagree with leaving out a mission to the Moon.  The Moon is a great base for launching missions to the asteroids and to Mars.  We know we can reach it within a few days, it has mineral resources, water, and an energy source for fusion.  The Moon’s gravity well is much smaller than the Earth’s gravity well and thus it easier to build bigger craft and launch them with less fuel.  Building a base on the Moon allows us to test out technologies and methods that can help us explore Mars.

This is not an argument for reestablishing the Constellation program.  Canceling Constellation was the right call as is the push to leave Low-Earth Orbit.  But skipping past such an obvious asset in our mission to Mars just doesn’t make sense.

Tags: Mars, Moon, NASA, Obama, space program

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 8:36 PM and is filed under opinion, public administration, public policy, science, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.