Word: lunar
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...fact that some of these early experiments could take place with existing technology on future rovers is one reason mission advocates question Bush's long time frame for his Mars flights. "Johnson Space Center was a cow pasture when we started the lunar program," says Humboldt Mandell, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas who managed the last Mars initiative, "and still we got to the moon in seven years from a cold start...
...more head scratcher for at least some people in the space community is the Bush proposal's heavy reliance on the moon as a stopping point on the way to Mars. The President calls for NASA to establish a lunar base first, learn to live and work there, and then use that extraterrestrial space center as a launch facility where Mars craft shipped up from Earth in pieces could be assembled and relaunched...
...true too that the moon may be an appealing launchpad because lunar gravity, just one-sixth that of Earth's, makes payloads a lot lighter and launching them a lot easier. But things aren't quite that simple. An Apollo astronaut confessed that after his lunar module landed on the moon, he had the sobering realization that before he could return home, he would again have to get the ship moving very, very fast. As any astronaut knows, the two most challenging tasks in operating a spacecraft are starting and stopping it. If it's possible to avoid additional stops...
...some dreamers, the presence of silicon, especially, suggests a way to make a return to the moon pay--and maybe even save the environment back home. If you could set up automated lunar factories to extract the silicon and turn it into solar cells, says David Criswell, director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston, the moon could become a solar power station, beaming clean energy via microwaves back to Earth. "If you want to provide sustainable energy for 10 billion people by 2050," he says, "there is no other...
...fact that solar power isn't yet cost effective on Earth makes this high-tech scenario seem a bit farfetched. The same goes for another energy-producing idea: extracting helium-3, an isotope rare on Earth but relatively abundant on the lunar surface, and shipping it back to fuel nuclear-fusion power plants. First, though, somebody would have to demonstrate that fusion reactors actually work...