Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Life Support Myth

Re: Life Support Myth
gbaikie — (archived)

"In short, you can learn to improve life support systems on the Moon and ISS, but
you don't need to."

I would say you need to. If you didn't need to consider the political aspect, it might not be a necessity. But the "political aspect" is the "main problem".
Apollo was unique, not the norm, but even if you had the "Apollo situation", it's quite possible that going to Mars would be more costly, than compared to first going to the Moon, then going to Mars. This would similar to why you first build any prototype- you do this to lower costs. A prototype should be something you can build much cheaper, but has enough elements in it in which you learn how you will go about building the real thing.
Now going to the Moon is a "real thing", but a secondary purpose of going to the Moon to explore for minable water, could be to pave the way for a Manned Mars. With a Lunar program, you would focus on finding minable water, and doing this as cheaply as possible (as long as it actually get it's objective: determine if, where, and how much, water is available on the Moon to mine commerically). The Lunar water exploration program would keep it's focus, but at same time NASA would be focusing on what is next, which might be similar to NeXT plan. The NeXT program could be *supportive* for commerical lunar minning and Mars Manned.

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