Feb
17
Written by:
admin
2/17/2010 7:19 PM
The title of this post is a pun, because the topic is about travelling to other celestial bodies, not to explore for a few hours and come home, but to stay. This is a topic that has been discussed by several people in the past year, including physicist Lawrence Krauss' op-ed piece in the New York Times advocating for a one-way mission to Mars. Eric Berger referenced Krauss' opinion piece in his article for the Houston Chronicle in the same vein.
Rocket scientist Jon Goff advocates for a one-way mission to a body a little closer to home: the Moon. And making the topic more interesting to us here at GTFH is that Jon makes a relatively solid business case for the one-way-to-the-moon mission.
Personally, I think that one-way to the Moon is more realistic, for a number of reasons:
- It doesn't have to be permanent. You could easily rotate crews every few years if somebody wants to come home. You operate it as a business, as Jon suggests, but contract with each employee for a period of time. When that time is up, if they wish to remain, they can sign a contract extension. Otherwise, you hire a replacement and rotate crew. Just don't have all of your crew rotating at the same time (stagger the contracts).
- Better commercial opportunities, at least initially. Considering that our first venture in Getting There From Here is a media business, we have to consider that colonist-employees on the Moon could do live broadcasts and sell commercial rights with a communications delay of only a few seconds, as opposed to Mars, which would have a delay between three and 22 minutes, and would sometimes be blocked by the Sun.
- Easier to evacuate if something goes wrong. Let's face it... Mars and the Moon are both incredibly dangerous places to live, especially with our current technology level. Something could very easily go wrong (the facility's doctor suddenly comes down with appendicitis, say). Crazy Russian doctors notwithstanding, nobody wants to perform surgery on themselves, so in a case like that where we could either get a doctor up there in an emergency or get the patient back to Earth would be ideal. Neither would be an option on Mars.
In general, I suspect that a one-way commercial mission of the type Jon describes is the most likely scenario for an initial "permanent" base on either of these bodies, as long as a solid business case can be made (likely with sponsors, advertising rights, publishing rights, contract research done for national governments, etc.).
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