This is a paper that I wrote a couple years ago, and that I never really found a place to publish. But then, I remembered that I’m a bloggist, and have a place to publish things that no one else wants to publish. It seems like it’s a useful discussion right now, given that NASA has announced their lunar architecture plans, and things seem to be somewhat in ferment.

Background

The choice of transportation node location is strongly driven by both near-term and longer-term architecture requirements, which are in turn driven by overall exploration program goals and their phases. More specifically, the choice of whether and how to utilize the Earth-Moon L1 location is largely driven by our reasons to go to the moon. For this reason, it’s not possible to recommend a specific location for lunar transportation staging operations, but we can do analysis that can help NASA or private entities make such a decision in the context of other agency choices as the program evolves.

There are at least four schools of thought on the purpose of a human return to the moon prior to human expeditions to Mars.

• The first, favored by proponents of early Mars missions, is that there is no purpose to a lunar return in actual furtherance of the long-term goal, that it is politically driven by the president