I was precisely thinking about that
cartoon while considering whether to reply to this post:
Hmm, don't be so certain about what he understands. It seems it was only last week that he understood the law of conservation of energy. See
his last column and compare with what he said on TopGear (something like: there is hydrogen everywhere, it is just a matter of engineering to split it from other atoms).
In the case of the moon buggy it seemed to me a bit unrealistic, due to its large mass. But if the
Ares V would have been built, its payload was planned to be 71 metric tons to the Moon, so it seems more possible.
The only question has always been,
which president would cancel the Moon program. You might not be familiar with the comments about Ares I and V, Orion, etc., but years ago various commentators were criticising those programs (you can find those criticisms on the net, for instance in the newsgroups sci.space.*) because:
- It was supposed to be fast, cheap and with minimal technical risk by reusing components from the Space Shuttle. But in fact, those components needed significant modifications (e.g. 5-segment SRB, versus 4-segment), so it was in fact slow, expensive and risky.
- the mass margins were low (later they got negative). This is important, because the easy way to solve many problems is to add a system, reinforce a part, etc., all things that add mass. But if you don't have mass margin, then you need to redesign everything in the hope of shaving enough mass elsewhere so that you have some to deal with the original problem.
- the large majority of the costs involved in NASA's space operations are the development (billions) and fixed maintenance costs (more billions, I think). Relatively to that the marginal cost of each launch is "small" (few hundreds of millions, IIRC) and fuel costs are very small. As such, although it looks wasteful, it would be cheaper to only develop Ares V and use it (with water ballast if necessary) for the missions intended for Ares I than to develop both rockets, specially as the total number of flights is low (tens, not hundreds, IIRC).
These problems (and probably others which I don't remember) were so obvious and significant that, in 2006 (that is nearly 5 years ago and more than 2 years before Obama), some NASA engineers made an alternate proposal (in their spare time) called
Jupiter Direct .
Of course, technical problems are solvable. The successful programs of 50's and 60's didn't work the first time either. But at the time there was enough funding. For instance, I read the book about the X-15 and one thing that impressed me was the amount of redesign (and the budget overruns caused by that) that happened.
Constellation was supposed to be made in a flat budget using mostly the money saved by terminating the Shuttle without big increases in NASA's total budget.
As such many people were very skeptical that the money for building Ares V would ever appear and so expected the Moon missions to be cancelled sooner or later.
Go (re-)watch/read Apollo 13. By only the 3rd moon landing attempt the (American) public had got so bored/uninterested by the missions that the TV networks did not broadcast live from the capsule until the accident.
And although Mars is more interesting than the Moon, the difficulties (technical, medical, seriously risky in a very risk-adverse society) and the expense are so great that is doubtful that it will happen in the foreseeable future.
Don't get me wrong. I am interested in (manned) space exploration and I would love to see it restart. But I think it is unlikely (in my lifetime?).
