Forget Mars! Let's go to Titan

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First of all, we've already been to the Moon and we know for certain there is no life there. Secondly, we need MUCH more powerful spacecraft propulsion technology to ship the materials needed to set up a regolith mine and a manufacturing plant on the Moon and this technology does not yet exist at the present. Keep in mind this will cost a lot more than sending another robot probe to Titan.

At the present time we HAVE the technology to send more unmanned missions to Titan and there are just so many reasons why Titan deserves further exploration more so than the Moon, and even Mars.

I guess its a matter of priorities. I just don't see how finding life is going to make space exploration any more feasible.

ironically consdiering the realtively small distance of the moon and the capabilties to use a vasimr based moon tug for heavy lifting by 2015 means that it would probably be much cheaper fuel wise to dump small self contained and automated mines on the moon, compared to the interplanetary distances and burn times required for any sort of manned mission beyond mars.

if we are talking probes i dont see why we shouldnt invest in more advanced long term drones on new bodies.

once you have a space based refueling stations and manufacturing on the moon it would be so cheap to do that one could literally spam hundreds of probes all over the solar system in short order,
in earnest i havent looked at the full material needs of a space probe since it probably requires quite a bit of exotic material, i know that RTG's are a must beyond mars if one wants any sort of longevity.

Why mine the Moon when we can mine here on Earth for far less money?

First thing that comes to mind is that in the long run, getting resources into space would be far easier, and cheaper if they are already there. The real cost is in getting an infrastructure set up, once that's done, it's a simple matter of freeing them from the moons gravity, which is a lot easier then getting them off of earth. Not to mention that if you could build a means of essentially shooting raw materials at the moon (at velocity greatly exceeding what humans or sensitive electronics could withstand), then turning them into whatever thing you needed, it would be a lot cheaper then building it on earth, then using a rocket to get it itno orbit (again, an infrastructure would still have to be built).

I see no reason why the (solar powered)VASIMR technology can't be used to more cheaply, efficiently, and quickly transport an interplanetary probe to Titan for further exploration.

At the present time, the US government is not planning to spend the billions of dollar to create a lunar mining infrastructure. Leave that to private space companies like Ad Astra to do if they can manage to figure out how to make it profitable. You really are grossly underestimating the actual cost of routine flights to the Moon and back as well as the R&D needed at the present time for Lunar mining.

This idea was tried in the latter half of the 20th century by Dr Gerald Bull. It turned out not to work very well, in part because the G forces were so enormous that they destroyed the payload. If you want to transport mining equipment, shooting things into orbit via a super-cannon would crush them into useless space junk once they got there.


Lastly, manned interplanetary missions will most likely require nuclear engines to make the trip quickly and efficiently enough using the least amount of fuel possible.


Lastly: WHY go to Titan you ask me?


Besides the prospect of extraterrestrial life there, Titan is by far the most similar planet in our Solar System to Earth. The major difference is that Titan is much colder. Not only does Titan have an atmosphere and a landscape with mountains, desert dunes, and surface liquid(lakes, rivers, and streams of liquid methane), it also has weather(unlike Mars).

Good point.

We have robots to do our explorations for us. They can be built to withstand vacuum, radiation, and temperature extremes. They won't go stir-crazy from months or years of separation from their homeworld. If they do fail, however, there may be a few tears shed, but no next-of-kin suing for damages and making endless demands to have the bodies returned home for proper burial.

By the time the robots have determined that life on other worlds will do us no harm, we should be ready to go there.

Glad you acknowledge this. So what I wonder is why NASA chooses to plan future robot missions to Mars but has no plans yet for any future missions to Titan..... *shrug*

solar power beyond mars orbit is very low popwer compared to the wheight of the panels,

it would indeed require nuclear power to go beyond, something that currently is a decade out ro more, whereas a lunar base could be built within that time using tech we already have.
that in turn would make it much easier to get further.

that said as long as we are talking unmanned()as i have said throughnout this thread) then there really is no reason not to send missions to a more varied selection of bodies.

BTW Oodain, VASIMR technology does not produce enough specific impulse to life cargo into orbit! That still requires expensive chemical rockets. Until we have nuclear propulsion, this is really just a pipe dream.

Does VASIMR develop enough specific impulse to attain orbit from the surface of Luna? That was what was mentioned, after all.

Personally, I think I'd rather use an O'Neill-style railgun (just as long as we don't staff it with life-sentence prisoners, a la The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress). Get your cargo to orbit, to Earth orbit, wherever, no problem.

Still no good way around using chemical rockets to leave Earth, at least as long as people are irrationally terrified of NERVA - but we're still working on ways!

Oodain, what do you mean nuclear powered spacecraft are "a decade out or more"? What do you think provides power to the two Voyager probes and the Cassini mission? (That was part of the green objection to Cassini - to develop the momentum to climb out of the Sun's gravity well as far as Saturn, it had to do slingshot maneuvers around Venus and Earth, and there was some fear that the probe might somehow crash into Earth and scatter plutonium about. Didn't happen, obviously.) They use plutonium decay, which isn't enough to provide the 200kW output that a manned VASIMR-powered mission would require, but should be plenty for a longer-term, lower-acceleration mission to the outer planets. And one benefit of constant-thrust ion engines is that unlike their chemical predecessors, they don't need to develop all their momentum at once, so it should be possible to avoid having to slingshot anywhere.