We could build truly immense telescopes that would tell us infinitely more about the universe we live in. We could probably build particle colliders the likes of which the world has never seen. We could probably send unmanned probes to every planet in the solar system. For research? For the cost of supporting a couple of scientists on Mars, you could send enough robots to absolutely scour the planet.Īnd it's not like we couldn't do anything else more useful or interesting with the insane pile of cash it would take. What's the point? To support people? It'd be a far more reasonable venture to plant a city in the center of Antarctica.

I don't know if I agree that setting up a base on Mars is necessarily a good idea. We just differ on the path we take there. Posted by Malor at 9:24 PM on December 4, 2006īrundlefly: smoothvirus, I don't think anyone here disagrees with the idea that setting up a base on Mars is the ultimate goal, and should be. (Pay attention to replies, this is very much off-the-cuff. China or India may be able to make this happen, but I don't think the United States will ever be able to build a working Luna complex. I don't think the United States has the technical moxie left to do this, and it definitely, definitely doesn't have the money. But getting a working manufacturing complex up on the Moon will be exceedingly difficult and unbelievably expensive. it will make interplanetary exploration somewhat feasible. If we're doing a lot of launching, that will pay for itself right quick. Add the extra to get out of the Earth-Luna system (not that much, since we can most likely do an Earth slingshot), and we'd probably get into the 1/30th range. one sixth the gravity should be something like one thirty-sixth the fuel required to attain escape velocity. I don't know this for sure, but I think it's probably a square-law function.

because the gravity is so slight that it doesn't take that much push to get going. Almost all the fuel is spent getting the rest of the fuel high enough to be useful.īy coming out of the Moon's gravity well instead of the Earth's, we can have tiny rockets with huge payloads, relatively speaking. That is, despite having a GIGANTIC rocket, we can lift only a tiny payload. if we can assemble the resources to build craft on the Moon (which would likely be a gigantic investment, one to make the ISS look like pocket change), the energy required to go from there to Mars should be on the order of a thirtieth as much.Įarth is at the bottom of a very steep gravity well, and we have this big problem of needing to use large amounts of fuel to lift the rest of the fuel into the right spot. Also, it takes much more fuel to get to Mars from the Moon that it does to get straight from Earth to Mars.Īre you sure? As far as I know, that's very untrue.

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