Did they now. And who was on this comittee...?
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I have friend who has been trapped in a mostly underground research facility at the South Pole since early winter. She recently broke her foot, which is just tough luck because nobody gets out of there until spring, which is, I think, in October.
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Today: July 20th, 2009. The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The very first time mankind walked on the Moon. From liftoff,
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Would this happen to be the same panel that decided poor Pluto was to be demoted?
But I thought NASA was not going to consider advice from committees made up of people who were biased by funding concerns? Yet, a bunch of scientists who all work on the moon, and will no doubt get lots of funding for lunar mission science, came up with this report. It almost makes the appearance that NASA is fishing for the answers they want.
I'm not much for going to the Moon for Science reasons. That is, i'm not much for sending people there for Science. It'd be real cool if people dug up fossils while on the moon, true enough. Some have said we should archive human knowledge there, in case the Earth gets wiped. These things can also be done cheaper with robots, assuming they make sense at all. Some of the goals bandied about can be accomplished on Earth, for cheap.
The only thing robots really can't do for us (yet) is, well, if the goal is to spread humanity across the cosmos, then, people have to go, right? Yet, for interstellar colonization, it would still be cheaper to send robots. What? The robots would carry the instructions to create us at the destination. That, and all the other life we depend on. And, we could send updated information while the robots are enroute (which will take awhile, even for nearby stars). I see the biological infection of the Universe as a very good goal for humanity.