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Sorry to be so late to this discussion... it's been busy around here!
But no one seems to have answered this question, so I figured I'd
take a shot.

Kay said:
>I'm still confused by how going to the moon will help us go to Mars.
>
>As Jonah pointed out:
>  >No offense, but this still seems a little science fiction-like to me. [...]
>
>The launch is only cheaper for materials actually mined from the Moon--and
>then only after making up the deficit of sending equipment, personnel, and
>life support systems from Earth. I have trouble seeing how the balance
>sheet can come out in our favor. Would we really be able to use enough Moon
>material to be worth it?
>
>I love the idea of going back to the Moon and having humans live and work
>there, but this seems like a squirrelly way to do it. Can anyone explain
>what I'm missing?

My understanding/speculation is that one of the ideas behind using
the moon as a launching pad is that you can be much more flexible in
how carefully (and, therefore, expensively) you launch stuff off of
the earth.  You can separate out the delicate parts of the payload
for a Mars mission -- the humans, for example -- and launch them with
great care, in an expensive vehicle with full life support,
exhaustive safety equipment, low acceleration factors, smooth landing
capabilities, the works.  Then you can take the rest of the stuff and
just fling it at the moon in big, dumb, cheap, violent rockets, let
it crash-land or bounce around with airbags, do non-human-friendly
things to it.  Probably send up a couple of copies of everything in
case some of it gets damaged.  Then assemble everything on the moon
(by remote control, presumably), man the ship, push off gently and
drift toward Mars.

The other (less colorful) angle of this argument is that it would
make things much simpler to remove "able to be launched from earth,
in one piece" from the design criteria for an interplanetary
spaceship.  "Launching from earth" and "traveling nine months across
the solar system in microgravity" are two completely different design
problems, and trying to make one vehicle to do both of them would
make it exquisitely expensive, it seems.

This makes sense to me, anyway.  Hope it makes sense to anyone else.


--
~~

Allan Ayres
Exhibit Developer
Lawrence Hall of Science
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-5200
[log in to unmask]
510-642-1254

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