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Comment by Ankaios | Hacker News Reader

  “This is completely against the established common wisdom
  of how to go to Mars, which is a straight shot to Mars,
  carry everything with you,” de Weck says. “The idea of
  taking a detour into the lunar system … it’s very
  unintuitive."

and later...

  “Assuming you can extract these resources, what do you
  do with it? Almost nobody has looked at that question.”

Give me a break. People discuss this sort of approach all the time. They don't necessarily publish their conclusions, though.

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This topic was very much discussed on campus during my grad school days (10 years ago now). I'm quite sure that Dr. Gary Flandro discussed it with many people at great length. But then, that's one thing he's always done -- figure out how to get to new and exciting places in the solar system. He was very much in favor of using the Moon as a base for expansion into the rest of the solar system for exactly this reason. Once you set up a beach-head there with facilities for extracting materials and manufacturing goods, it's much easier to launch onward into the rest of the solar system. This, I recall, was a major theme of the Quick-Goethert lecture that Dr. Flandro gave in 2005. It was a great pleasure to attend that lecture.

So yes, just from that one example, I'll grant you that people discuss this sort of approach all the time. Dr. Flandro certainly wasn't the first, even then.

Yep. Even President Bush's 2004 NASA proposal included a return to the moon ("as early as 2015") and permanent moon base, specifically to "take advantage of lunar resources" and serve "as an eventual springboard to Mars". See:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3950099/ns/technology_and_science-...

They do sometimes; a lunar resources conference, in the aftermath of Apollo missions, had discussions regarding use of Moon regolith for things like refueling.

Yeah, there's loads of great analysis of lunar resource use from that era, and propellant for use beyond the Moon is a major motivation for the current interest in lunar polar volatiles. For them to act like the notion that lunar resources could be valuable for trips elsewhere is a major revelation is ridiculous.

A Lunar base & ISRU effort was not just a theory that existed, but the predominant conventional wisdom in NASA's planning, ten years ago.

And it was a bit silly even before they did the typical NASA thing of underfunding and cancelling essential bits in the bureaucratic infighting. ISRU on Luna is likely to be an effort with comparable scale to a Mars mission, with questionable amounts of translatable techniques. Most anything we can do on Luna other than ISRU, we could do in LEO. Luna is seen as a sort of cheaper prize than Mars by Lunar proponents who don't advocate 'stepping stones', but the cost of operating on Luna via Constellations is higher than the NASA HSF budget today, and would likely prevent serious attempts at Mars planning in the same way the ISS/Shuttle is doing today.

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