Hi Ken!

A pleasure as always...

--Besides the dust, you have to look at rocket exhaust –

__My thinking was that the solar wind may actually help in that regard, blowing away the leaked gasses. I don't know, we don't really have a whole lot of experience out past LEO and the cocoon of the magnetosphere and Van Allen belts. ___

"I don't know" - Exactly - no preliminary engineering experiments have been done for either approach - but one or the other of them has to be better - my gut feeling is that the Moon based instruments are the way to go, and usually I'm pretty good with these things...

__Besides, at a crewed station you can send someone out with a big giant Lens Pen to clean off any optics. An instrument can be unbolted, brought inside, properly discharged, sensors cleaned, and then reinstalled outside.__

Same thing for man tended Moon based facilites.

--Great summary, Ken, but you have to add into this mess the particularly vicious tactics some of the “Mars Enthusiasts” have used over the last several years.--

__Well, I think their numbers have stabilised a bit. There was a quick run up in membership after Pathfinder amongst the most interested, but eventually the audience becomes too broad too increase numbers too much without diluting the message. Some have compared some Mars enthusiasts to fervored extremists. A bit of a stretch, but the word fervor does capture some of the essence of it.__

Have you ever read "The Winged Gospel", a book about the aviation utopianists? I think we're looking at something similar here...

__I think a certain fear of the mission not happening before the public loses enough interest for funding to whither away has driven some of their tactics.__

Not too many people still think that Mars is like the desert southwest of the United States, but these folks do. My expectation is that after the Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Express, their delusions will become right clear to just about everyone.

__The policy of Mars uber alles alienates constituencies that may provide cash flows. Sort of like what you're doing with deep space astronomers.__

I considered that, but that was before I met a number of these "cosmologists". These 'efing bastards are not going to give up a dime used to pay for their toys until their grubby little fingers are forcibly pried from the honey pot.

(In trying to get the NEO astronomers off the back of the funding bus, I want to be like Frederick Douglas, but I'm turning into Stokely Carmichael - and I do not want to see Baltimore burning...)

__One gets the feeling that any consensus is fine so long as it's the Mars consensus. Everything's fine so long as you focus. Don't worry, we're smart, we'll tell you what to think. Just don't look behind that curtain, unorthodox thinking isn't good for you.__

It's amazing - any other approach to Mars than Zubrin's is treated like heresy, complete with burnings at the stake and dunkings.

--Nice thing about man tended Moon based facilities is that the other countries on this "globe" of ours can pick up their share of the cost--

__Abso-freakin'-lutely. I've always thought of this globally. _

Personally, I guess I'm just really really cheap...

__If we'd known 150 years ago of the incredible trillions that would have to be invested in the oil economy, our forefathers would have freaked out and likely never undertaken it; there's no way they could have imagined the incredible wealth that that accrued thereto. Except for Jules Verne.__

I don't know - Verne liked electricity, not petroleum. The big constraint is protable liquid fuels, and so far the political process appears to have actually stopped much of the conversion instead of enabling it...

--Expected fatilities due to starvation through climatic collapse via cometary dust loading could be set minmally at about 1,000,000,000 people. Expected fatalities due to impact mega-tsunami could be set at around 70,000,000 people. The units in this estimates here are "people".--

__Yeah, but what we were talking about was the odds of something actually arriving and smacking us. We can make guesstimates, but in the end they're guesses, even if educated ones. We've done some preliminary research, I think that preliminary research says "Yes, this is definitely something worth paying more attention to".__

The known impact data is pretty much as I set out. Nearly everyone working through the data is pretty horrified by what comes up. It's worth paying a whole lot more than $3.5 million per year on - and since the ultimate benefit in the cost/benefit anaylsis is preventing the extinction of mankind, Moon based facilities look like a good buy to me...

It's truly amazing, but besides not having accurate impact rate estimates, NASA has not figured out solar induced variations in climate... leaving the Congress to try and guess their way through what to do about CO2 emissions...

I think that something is wrong with the way NASA has set its space science research priorities, and this problem goes a lot deeper than the recent associate administrators and the current mess... there is something functionally wrong with NASA's process here... we can't get the science needed for the national weal done...

--Hubble has required what, 5 trips, 5 shuttle launches, just for that simple system? What is needed for impactor detection is high precision rapid pointing, large CCDs, large power supplies, large computational capabilities, high bandwidth communications – too much for EML--

__Yes, but it was a really good learning experience for us. I don't believe that it was a wasted capital investment. I've seen the payoff when I see the sparkle in a kid's eye when I give them a Hubble print. You've responded to my reference to the Discover article, you know what kind of workhorse the Hubble has been for the astronomical community, especially with regards to popularizing astronomical concepts.__

GRBs, to take one... still, we need those NEO funds, and we need them yesterday... excuse me for a second, I need to go jump up and down on some fingers right now...

>Now, if you design a vehicle that has a 6 km/s dV capability you can:
-get to GEO and back (LEO) from ISS
-service most MEO and HEO orbits (some LEO?)
-get to EML-1 and back.
-get from EML-1 to GEO and back
-get to the Moon's surface and back
-get to Mars (or anywhere else in deep space)
If you have fuel stockpiled/available at each of ISS, EML-1, and the Moon you only need 4 km/s dV capability to do all of the above.<

--This is what Mazanek called for his Moon based mission architecture – but I still like my architecture better.--

__Well, I think the issue really is to start thinking in terms of capabilities instead of requirements. __

Actually, I think in terms of requirements.... but if much greater additionaly capabilities and other missions can be acquired at small marginal cost, okay...

__The Mars mission is designing to minimum dV requirements to save on fuel. It's not a question of what the craft is capable of, but rather what's the least we can give it to get us there. What you'll end up with is a vehicle that's really only good for going to Mars and back. __

Nobody looks at modular components launched by medium lift launchers. No one looks at solar thermal propulsion... No one looks at different orbits. No one looks at different transfers... etc., etc. etc.

__When you think in terms of capabilities, you can address multiple missions with the same vehicle. Rather than producing lots of different vehicles you're producing lots of the same vehicle. Economies of scale. Definitely a good thing.__

Having a hard requirement drives good engineering. But if we can get multiple missions and economies of scale, great...

>The planet hunters will probably be some of the easiest to sell on Lunar facilities.<

--Considering that the Congress killed NASA SETI moneys several years ago, I would not bring it up as a consideration.--

__I mean the folks that are using the scopes right now to look for planets around other stars. Not the SETI folks, but the ones that look at the wobbles and red/blue-shifting in spectrum to try to figure out if there're planets traveling around it. A nice stable atmosphere-free platform like the Moon should be just right for their purposes.__

Strange how since SETI got creamed, and we now have "the search for life elsewhere" as a NASA goal. They can't just be honest about it - ball-less, gutless...

<<Periodicity >Well, I'm figuring that they're going to have to actually go out and date real samples<

--This dating can be done robobtically, but right NOW we need to increase NASA crater counting money, for Chapman and group in Arizona – if they can’t do it fast alone, MIT, Princeton, or Carnegie Mellon AI image analyst teams should be brought in, perhaps via the net supporting all current NASA crater counting efforts--

__A slight increase perhaps, but you know how I feel about statistical methods. Good, but I want ground truth.__

I recently wrote a small piece about meteorite accretion on Mars as a method of dating surface features... that's ground truth.

--The cross counting for the different solar system bodies will allow the “planetary accretion” (impact) rate to be determined right fast--

__Yeah, but that can come much later. __

NO. These counts on the different planets and moons, and all of them, are needed immediately. Cassini data will also start in shortly, and the techniques need to be in place, and required previous work done, by the time it starts...

__I'm concerned primarily with the environment history of cislunar space. __

The Moon clearly does affect Earth impact rate, and no one knows how. Does it increase it? Does it decrease it? No one knows.

__The rest can come later__

Nah, I want all the science money right now (excpeting of course the solar/ climate money)... like the 3 year old demanded ... gimme ALL the candy... :P)

--Final point. If we could get NASA to sell one day exclusive data (image) rights for the 2 Mars Exploration Rovers to either NBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, or CBS (Viacom) media conglomerates, plus maybe limited overseas media conglomerates.--

__I seriously doubt such a thing will ever happen.__

It has come very close to happening before, and with a littel pressure, it will happen. Compare the capiotal costs and revenue stream from movies and television, and do a side by side with say a Mars rover ... now if you could show more than guesstimates, you could sell it... We need some pressure put on NASA, and some explicit "enabling" legislation if they need a real kick in the pants to get them moving on this...

__The better play is to auction off space for a camera on the next round of Mars ground probes. __

Ah, those classy UK boffins. They want to sell comercial rights for Beagle, but NO, we can't really sell 2 or 3 day exclusives, it wouldn't be scientific, ahem, and it might seem a little too money grubbing, and after all, we can't really be seen to be earning something so base as money, after all, we're academics, etc..etc...etc...

__It would be a good thing if such a thing did happen, because at least the business and investment community would get a benchmark to value that sort of thing. __

100% there, Ken

__It may turn out that a CD of sounds recorded on Mars could be a huge bestseller (file under "ambient new age").__

Nah, visual sells better than audio - sight plus sounc. Mars wallpapers via large screen plasma displays, off live feed.. think secondary sales of DVDs, VR's from the datasets (say The Mars Express Dataset for Microsoft Flight Simulator), etc..

__Cheers, __

And have one for me...
ep