Soon after Earth’s life first touched the Moon, NASA promised to make spaceflight routine and inexpensive, and I began studying the prospects for space as a genuine frontier.
Geologists had analyzed the new, hard-won lunar samples, and I read up on the results in the local college library. Not nice: almost no carbon, nitrogen, or hydrogen, and no obvious promise of a decent mineral ore. Asteroids, by contrast, had been delivering samples for free in the form of meteorites, year after year. Much nicer: Lots of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen, along with nickel-alloy steel, a substantial dash of platinum metals, and (of course) a little or a lot of everything else.
I summarized the case for bypassing the Moon in favor of asteroids in a 1983 advocacy piece written partly about resources and engineering, and partly about cognitive biases favoring the Moon.
The biases held, though, and the Groundhog vision has been Back to the Moon!— until recently, culminating in last week’s Presidential statement announcing a plan to
…abandon another landing on the moon, and develop new technologies to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025….
In terms of relative priorities, I like it.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
In your “1983 advocacy piece”, in your master’s theses etc., you have given a lot of emphasis on Light Sail Technology. Have you noticed significant improvements in material science required for this in nanotech or conventional material science areas over the years? Do you think light sails could play a role in the Obama Plan?
Advances in thin-film fabrication have applications to this, since free-standing thin films are central to the concept. The technology that has lagged is at the space operations end. (Wikipedia gives a brief but accurate description of the concept I investigated.)
A deployable, radically sub-scale demo (~ 3 meters?) would be practical and give striking results (~ 10 x acceleration). The payload, however, would be so small that a passive design with optical tracking might be the best that could be done.
Hello, you talked about fabricating Light Sails in space. Is that something you still think about today?
Thanks.