The distance from the earth to the moon is a mere quarter of a million miles. The distance from the earth to Mars averages around 300 million miles. Building a base on the moon would require enormous resources and a lot of time. And you would still have to go 300 million miles. The moon may be smaller than the earth. It may have less gravity, but it's still a world. Much larger than an asteroid.
Some asteroids are miles across. Some are made from water. Water can be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen.
We've been using the same old chemical rockets since the 60's. We need to develop new technology. Rocket fuel won't get us very far. It burns too fast. The rocket have to be huge. Remember, we are talking 300 million miles. We used enormous rockets to get us to the moon and back and didn't even have enough fuel left to land. We had to splash down.
I think the right wing has difficulty understanding "innovation" and "new technology". Even here, they still want to do things the old fashioned way. They are not "forward thinkers". They are always "looking backward".
NASA's on board with this. They are excited about it and they are the ones that went to the moon.
As you said the distance from the Earth to the Moon is a mere quarter of a million miles, and that is a few short days away, Mars is 1,200 times more distant on average. The gravity well of the Moon is a fraction that of Mars. Escape Velocity from Mars is 34.1 km/s and from the Moon only 1.4 – that’s just 1/24th the energy requirement if the two are interchangeable. At present we do not have the technology to land human beings on Mars, at least as far as NASA is concerned; we do have that for the moon.
On Mars, we either come in too fast and hot, or we have to use thrusters to brake and land. We have brake/thrust technology for moon landings, and that can be developed to a higher degree on the moon before going to Mars; contrariwise, an asteroid operation is not good practice for a Mars operation. The distance/journey time to asteroids approaches that of a Mars mission, and requires the development and applications of technology that will not benefit us for Mars missions– the Moon does. If we are training for long duration tolerances for crews, then asteroid missions would be good for those, but the moon offers that too.
To state there is nothing useful on the moon to justify a base or bases there (and I don't say you said that) is not accurate. There is plenty there, including water (we can take hydrogen for fuel), and Oxygen is abundant (lunar crust is 40 percent oxygen by mass) as a fuel compenent, and there are others yet to be discovered. Just recently our lunar explorer revealed that the large bulge on the near side and a much smaller one on the far side, just around the limb, named the “Compton-Belkovich Thorium Anomaly” (C.B.T.A.) is abundant in the element
thorium. Thorium is on the surface there, and like uranium, is excellent for producing nuclear energy, and in the process does not create Plutonium. Thorium would be excellent for use in breeder reactors. I’m not suggesting bringing it to Earth; I’m suggesting that it has use there for powering any energy intensive operation, such as a complete base. We do not know of any similar deposits on Mars. There is ample Uranium on the Moon too, fifty-eight pct. by elemental composition, but uranium is not in known concentrations like the thorium in the C.B.T.A.
It seems to me that a trip to an asteroid, while no doubt useful and potentially rewarding, is full of the potential for disaster that if it happened would stop in its tracks any forward movement of our manned exploration of space. The time frames for trips to asteroids approach those of Mars missions. There is no quick trip back for any trip-compromising-medical-emergency, as would be the case with the moon. The only benefit I see in an asteroid mission is that it would give us some information that would be useful for eventually tapping them or comets for resources; therefore they may provide an economic incentive to go beyond the Earth/Moon complex, out to Mars, (or even beyond) where volatile assets are accessible in concentrations, but that is hugely long range.
So the justification for going to asteroids is if we discovered a wealth of accessible resources on asteroids, then that would incentivize basing on Mars where we’d have Deimos, Phobos, and the asteroid belt all in close proximity, for a grand scheme for development. But the primary one offered by NASA seems to be that of
“mastering techniques that could prove useful if a space rock ever took aim for our planet.”
Those are NASA’s words In those quotes.
The moon, is a very accessible as a base, and as such would help develop and accelerate our skills and expertise for manned operations. In either environment we will be operating in a virtual vacuum. I maintain we are much better positioned for a trip to Mars after developing skills and technology on the Moon than spending another quarter century visiting asteroids, a technology and skill-set that seems unrelated to a journey to Mars, other than practicing long, boring, trips with humans in close-in, difficult, and stress-inducing conditions.
You, Rdean, you say that NASA has bought into the asteroid phase of our Mars endeavor, but what choice do they have, really? Their search for justification is in bold 3-pargraphs above.
My post which you quoted mentions the ILEWG. They don’t buy into the new Obama/NASA/Bureaucracy plan. They are scientists, engineers, space industrialists, most likely not driven by conservative idealism, and they are not on board.
The Planetary Society (not an organization of "Luddites" - I’ve been a paying and charter member of since 1980) sees a real problem with the new plan. In the most recent issue (June 2011) of the Planetary Report:
“Join your voice with those of your fellow members as we fight to get politicians to support space exploration. If we don’t act now, damage will be done. We may lose the grand missions of discovery that we had hoped to see and that we hoped would inspire our children to achievements even greater than those of their parents and grandparents. It’s up to us to put space exploration back on course to the best possible future for this planet among other worlds.”The source material for my quotes of the ILEWG (in my post >>>
HERE) came from the same issue of the June Planetary Report.
None of this has anything to do with innovation and your suggestion that only liberals have a lock on that. Using an ion drive to power a craft to Mars will no doubt be done unless our progress exceeds that making it obsolete; no doubt that will happen – for example look what happened to fixed wing air flight between 1906 (Wright Bros Biplane) and 1969 (Boeing 747s). That was just 53 years, the same amount of time as between Vanguard with its repeated explosions on the launch-pad and the present moment.
Why are we taking so long?
Read here >>>
How We Can Fly to Mars in This Decade—And on the Cheap?
The technology now exists and at half the cost of a Space Shuttle flight. All that's lacking is the political will to take more risks.
By ROBERT ZUBRIN
BTW: and FYI, the liberal demography is much more heavily composed of Luddites than the conservative . . . .
Holy shit, but rderp's stupid. 
