How to go to the Moon the right way

There is finally a new moon program and it is worthy of support but I worry about the goal. Hopefully, it will not be another look around and go home program. The goal set by President Kennedy was wrong! His goal was to send men to the moon and bring them back alive. This was a $200 billion publicity stunt in today’s dollars. There is immense physical wealth to be gained from permanent access to the Moon. IT is made of stuff and has ample solar energy available as well as being a much safer location for the use of nuclear energy than the Earth. With today’s technology we need only dirt and energy to make everything we need. There are trillions of dollars of new wealth to be gained form utilizing the moon. Everything we do on the Earth hurts it while everything we do on the Moon is an improvement. It would have been so much better to have followed up on the original Moon program rather than develop the space station.

In the first Moon program we should have established a permanent base first and then looked around. Supplies could have been sent ahead so that the astronauts wouldn’t have to carry all their supplies with them. This would have required being able to hit the same general spot more than once and perhaps such precision was difficult with the technology available at that time. We are going back using updated versions of the systems employed 40 years ago. These include expendable rockets with even the lunar lander being a bigger version of the original units. They are designed backwards. The rocket is on the bottom so that the crew and cargo are on the top. For the larger new unit this means that the astronauts will have to climb down a rather long ladder to reach the surface. Not falling will be one of the major challenges of the process. Carrying down materials to the surface will be even more difficult. The rockets should be on the sides or top so that the cargo will be close to the surface and can be deposited in a way similar to that used for ship containers today.

What we really need is a reusable orbiter that works. The shuttle should have been canned long ago and a new orbiter using knowledge gained from the shuttle created. A new orbiter with the capacity of a 747 freighter should come from a contest in which the winner receives 50 billion dollars when the orbiter has proven its practicality. It would be designed and built with venture and private money. The prize would minimize the commercial risk to make such an investment attractive. The prize money would be to cover the design costs and those of the first unit(s). Then purpose is to create an industry selling orbiters whose per unit cost is a few billion dollars to businesses and other countries. If we don’t do this soon we may loose the talent and infrastructure that would make such a program possible. The economic good news is that many nations around the world are becoming more prosperous with the bad news being that they are now very effective competitors. As a country we need something to sell that will not be done cheaper and better in a few years in China and India. The U.S. needs an effective space program.