2 thoughts on “Rings, Geysers, and Plumes”

  1. a crime against the Earth, humanity included.

    What is it about Berkeley?

    Starfleet: “Captain, we’ve decided your survey ship will remain in LEO while we spend decades sending probes with the wrong instruments to the wrong places.” Because everyone knows that one of a kind instruments are less expensive than a small fleet of generalized spaceships. That’s the [wrong] lesson we learn from I.S.S., SLS and govt. operations.

    That small fleet should be the third step. Step 2 is to get a consumable infrastructure in space starting with water. Step one, today, is to put our 1st generation of general purpose ship in orbit. At it’s core a 10 ton Bigelow module (the BA330 at 23 ton is too big) as storm shelter for six. Surround that with the lightest and most voluminous inflatable. Expect it to require maintenance patching because it’s not designed to protect from high velocity dust hits. Spray foam takes care of that.

    Going into the inflatable volume can be done in shirtsleeves but should be treated as a semi-EVA. Both high thrust and high efficient engines will be part of the design, a solar sail would be a good idea as well.. Instruments on short range probes and sample returns would be modules chosen by the crew depending on what they find. Human eyes to direct exploration beats robots 100 fold. Length of mission would extend as we learn how to keep people healthy on longer and longer missions. We just keep getting incrementally better by doing rather than just talking about it.

    Make the budget $100m per year (no more but include COLA) and let commerce bid on milestones.

    1. To hope for lobster and sushi is probably getting too hopeful!

      There may still be a chance here.

      I don’t necessarily disagree with what you are saying but as costs come down, either through what you describe or through terrestrial innovations, it should be possible to send more robotic/satellite missions to more destinations.

      The hyper specialization of current planetary science missions have great reasons for being that specialized but it also comes with some drawbacks. Considering the cost of JWST it should be possible to build a fleet of science missions that we can send to all of the planets by embracing standardization to some degree.

      This isn’t even something we would need to wait for in orbit construction facilities.

      On the human front, you are right. We need an actual space ship(s). If it can operate in cislunar space, that would be great. It would also be great if it was robust enough to send to Mars. A COTS like approach would give markets several options and companies could sell their services while NASA focuses on learning (the human factors) by doing.

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