Say what?
Decades ago, when I was an AIAA Congressional Science Fellow, a group of AIAA industry representatives met with my then-boss, Sen. Adlai Stevenson, III, and asked what real influence I had exercised while doing staff work in Congress. Sen. Stevenson smiled and replied, “This is Washington. Not even the President has any influence.” It was meant as a joke, but the experiences of three presidents who proposed human space initiatives prove that it was no joke. George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative was killed by NASA coming up with an unaffordable plan. George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration was hijacked by ideologues who wanted to create US control of cislunar space with a permanent lunar base.
Emphasis mine. That’s sure not what happened on my planet. On my planet, the VSE always contained a lunar base, but Mike Griffin and Scott Horowitz came up with an awful plan to implement it that never had a chance of succeeding in any affordable way. Not sure what planet Lou posted that from.
Minor issue. He got the big issue right. No SLS.
It’s just so common for people to believe things that are ridiculous. “Space is the common heritage of mankind”… no it isn’t, it’s rocks floating around each other that nobody owns.
I hope people can get past the stupidity and start making and defending their [reasonable and distributed] claims.
On my planet, the VSE always contained a lunar base
Maybe your vision of space exploration contained a lunar base, Rand, but the Bush Vision of Space Exploration did not. Or, at least, not necessarily.
Bush didn’t specifically call for a lunar base. He merely called for “extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods of time.”
The Bush White House never defined “extended.” That word could interpreted to mean anything from a few days longer than Apollo to a full-blown lunar colony.
The idea that Bush had committed NASA to building a lunar base, mining colony, etc. was wishful thinking on the part of the Moonies.
On the other hand, equating a lunar base with “US control of cislunar space” is a bizarre example of Friedman’s anti-military paranoia. Establishing control over cislunar space would obviously require a lot more than one (unarmed!) lunar base.
Mike Griffin and Scott Horowitz came up with an awful plan to implement
Rand, you shouldn’t forget where that plan originated. It came from a study that Mike Griffin did for the Planetary Society, which Lou Friedman headed at the time, and Lou Friedman actively promoted the plan. Like Paul Spudis, he didn’t turn against it until his personal ox got gored.
I just checked the Aldridge Commission Report. I found one painting by Pat Rawlings that showed what looked like a mining colony, but the text does not contain any references to a lunar settlement, colony, or base. The word “base” is used only in reference to things like industrial base.
I might be mistake, but I seem to recall it was Mike Griffin who first officially stated that Bush’s “extended lunar missions” would mean a lunar base.
(Also note that the term “lunar base” is extremely vague and does not necessarily mean a permanent station. Even the Apollo 11 landing site was referred to as a base.)
There’s nothing wrong with the lunar base concept.. there’s plenty wrong with NASA’s ability to do anything affordable in space.
Rand
Lou Friedman is and and always has been a Marsy for scientists advocate. Those dirty people who actually want to do things on the Moon, in his direct words to me were “deux aux machina”.
Space is for scientists only in Lou’s mind.