Jim Oberg ably makes it. I wish he wouldn’t use the stupid and inaccurate “look but don’t touch” phrase, though (he does it twice in the article) — it undermines his argument, and it will only encourage other journalists to do so.
4 thoughts on “The Case For The Flexible Path”
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I liked the article (and I’m a fan of both Jim Oberg, and of the Flexible Path approach), but I thought Oberg was obscuring important challenges in his one sentence description of how it would be easy to make the trip from Phobos to the Martian surface because Mars allows aero-breaking… I also thought the challenges involving Vasimir and tethers were not sufficiently acknowledged. If it was easy to do (and fund) Vasimir and tethers,people wouldn’t be considering the flexible path. Finally, I thought his reasons for going to Sun-Earth L2 were not developed enough. He gave two reasons: observing the Earth’s atmosphere, which could be done by unmanned instruments, and servicing telescopes (which is good, but is it cost-effective compared to launching a new telescope?).
On the other hand, I was blown away and amazed by Chris Bergin’s article on ULA’s new master plan for returning to the moon and beyond via EELVs, propellent depots, horizontal lunar landers, converting fuel tanks to habitats, and more. I’m sure Transterrestrial readers won’t want to miss this, and Rand, if you have time, it would be very interesting to hear what you think of it. Maybe it deserves a blog posting of its own?
Here’s Bergin’s article:
“http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/09/ula-claim-gap-reducing-solution-via-eelv-exploration-master-plan/”
Btw, I think “reducing the gap” misses the point — the interesting part is how the gap is reduced.
Here the discussion forum on the article:
“forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=18752.0“
I liked the article (and I’m a fan of both Jim Oberg, and of the Flexible Path approach), but I thought Oberg was obscuring important challenges in his one sentence description of how it would be easy to make the trip from Phobos to the Martian surface because Mars allows aero-breaking… I also thought the challenges involving Vasimir and tethers were not sufficiently acknowledged. If it was easy to do (and fund) Vasimir (including its power source) and tethers (all the way to the lunar),people wouldn’t be considering the flexible path. Finally, I thought his reasons for going to Sun-Earth L2 were not developed enough. He gave two reasons: observing the Earth’s atmosphere, which could be done by unmanned instruments, and servicing telescopes (which is good, but is it cost-effective compared to launching a new telescope?).
On the other hand, I was blown away and amazed by Chris Bergin’s article on ULA’s new master plan for returning to the moon and beyond via EELVs, propellent depots, horizontal lunar landers, converting fuel tanks to habitats, and more. I’m sure Transterrestrial readers won’t want to miss this, and Rand, if you have time, it would be very interesting to hear what you think of it. Maybe it deserves a blog posting of its own?
Here’s Bergin’s article:
“www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/09/ula-claim-gap-reducing-solution-via-eelv-exploration-master-plan/”
Btw, I think “reducing the gap” misses the point — the interesting part is how the gap is reduced.
Here the discussion forum on the article:
“forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=18752.0”
I too liked the Oberg article. I was disappointed though that he seems to assume that some form of ultra heavy lift / shuttle derived vehicle is needed to go to the moon. That assumption seems all too widespread.
I’m a convert to Augustine 2. I can give up on Project Moonbase (1959) with its teleoperated supply ship landing on the Moon by operators on the Moon now that we have Musk doing teleoperated docking of Dragon from operators on the government Space Station. Destination Moon and Mars are sexier, but not easy enough to hold bureaucrats accountable for failure. This, of course, means that NASA will continue to drift as it Ames for destinations. Other actors–US private parties, foreign governments and US military–may be first to innovate.