[ExI] What happens to US space programs after November?

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:14 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> John, I am not talking of "a totally self-sufficient colony" on the Moon
> or Mars, not yet. I am perfectly OK with letting these things take the time
> they must take.*


I am perfectly OK with waiting until the time is right, that is to say
until we have the technology to make a extraterrestrial colony
self-sufficient. People seriously interested in human space colonization
should be pushing for a proof of concept, a self-sufficient colony in
Antarctica would be a great prototype.
>
>
* >I am talking of a small lab on the Moon, permanently occupied by
> astronauts. Like an ISS on the Moon. *


That's exactly what I'm worried about, it would be like a ISS on the Moon
only even more horrendously expensive, a place where astronauts spend 80%
of their time just making sure they stay alive and the other 20% performing
science-fair level experiments that are never written up by Nature or
Science or any top journal. What little scientific output that has come
from the ISS has come from automated equipment that does not need the help
of astronauts, like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and the Cold Atom
Laboratory. Such instruments are on the ISS not because they need people to
operate them but because they need lots of electrical power and the ISS
with all its solar panels has lots of that, they only thing they need from
the astronauts is for them to stay out of the way and not to touch anything.


>
> *> I am talking of the smallest and least ambitious moonbase that we can
> build and operate with the money and the technology we have.*


The ISS cost $150 billion to build and it costs $4 billion a year to keep
operational, a permanent moon base  would cost much more to build and if it
was not self-sufficient it would cost vastly more to keep resupplied.

> I think re-igniting the human spirit is a top priority.


Such a moon base would make the ISS look cheap and would ignite the human
spirit for about one week, but after that people would get tired of
watching reruns and want something new. If you were willing to spend
between 10 and 100 times as much as a Moon base cost you could have a Mars
base, and that would buy you one additional week's worth of human spirit
ignition. And then they'd get tired of watching that rerun too.

John K Clark
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