3 thoughts on “Lunar Exploration And Enduring National Interest”
Long yes, inspiring no. After skimming this I began to think that smaller countries best bet would be to form an alliance to put retrograde ball bearings in as many orbital inclinations as possible to deny any access to space, thereby saving them and all other nations huge amounts of money that would otherwise be wasted on dead-end socialist space projects.
Dr. Pace seems to suffer from something common to the larger space advocacy community, and that is an ability to articulate concrete reasons for going either to the Moon (of which there are many) or on to Mars (which, why again?). And lord, all that talk about the poor little homeless samples on Mars waiting for a ride to Earth. As if they haven’t always been on Mars, or that there is any shortage of fresh samples to be had.
It’s as if NASA and GovSpace is a loosely corralled herd of different cats all sort of headed tactically in a space-ward direction. But there is no real apparent over-arching strategy to their efforts that would offer more coherence to a broader audience as to why this stuff is in fact important, or build confidence that we’re taking a solid approach worth supporting to heading out there into the Solar System (and on to Mars, of course).
I will listen when I have the time. But I’ve been skeptical of anything Pace says since his ludicrous OpEd that boiled down to the following.
“Falcon Heavy is like a cargo ship. SLS is like an aircraft carrier. So that’s why SLS is so much more expensive.”
Long yes, inspiring no. After skimming this I began to think that smaller countries best bet would be to form an alliance to put retrograde ball bearings in as many orbital inclinations as possible to deny any access to space, thereby saving them and all other nations huge amounts of money that would otherwise be wasted on dead-end socialist space projects.
Dr. Pace seems to suffer from something common to the larger space advocacy community, and that is an ability to articulate concrete reasons for going either to the Moon (of which there are many) or on to Mars (which, why again?). And lord, all that talk about the poor little homeless samples on Mars waiting for a ride to Earth. As if they haven’t always been on Mars, or that there is any shortage of fresh samples to be had.
It’s as if NASA and GovSpace is a loosely corralled herd of different cats all sort of headed tactically in a space-ward direction. But there is no real apparent over-arching strategy to their efforts that would offer more coherence to a broader audience as to why this stuff is in fact important, or build confidence that we’re taking a solid approach worth supporting to heading out there into the Solar System (and on to Mars, of course).
I will listen when I have the time. But I’ve been skeptical of anything Pace says since his ludicrous OpEd that boiled down to the following.
“Falcon Heavy is like a cargo ship. SLS is like an aircraft carrier. So that’s why SLS is so much more expensive.”