These pages chronicle the work and ruminations of Carolyn Collins Petersen, also known as TheSpacewriter.

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I am CEO of Loch Ness Productions. I am also a producer for Astrocast.TV, an online magazine about astronomy and space science.

For the past few years, I've also been a voice actor, appearing in a variety of productions. You can see and hear samples of my work by clicking on the "Voice-Overs, Videos and 'Casts tab.

My blog, TheSpacewriter's Ramblings, is about astronomy, space science, and other sciences.

Ideas and opinions expressed here do not represent those of my employer or of any other organization to which I am affiliated. They're mine.

Visit my main site at: TheSpacewriter.com.

**Comments are welcome; I do moderate them to weed out spam.

Contact me for writing and voice-over projects at: cc(dot)petersen(at)gmail(dot)com

I Twitter as Spacewriter

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Mars Needs Moon Bases

April 16, 2010 at 12:47 pm | 5 Comments

Practice Makes Perfect

So, the new NASA plan, according to our president, is head for Mars and not necessarily stop at the Moon first. I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I don’t have a problem with cancelling the Constellation program, and I certainly LOVE that NASA will get a bunch more money. It only gets just around one HALF of one percent of the federal budget, and with that little bit, NASA does a lot of good work that we need to have done. So, I’m happy to see NASA get more money. That money gets spent here on Earth, for jobs, tech devopment, and so on. For that, I salute President Obama. He’s doing a darn sight more for NASA than the previous occupant of his seat ever did.

But, I think it’s pretty important that we return to the Moon as part of a long-range plan of increased exploration, including going to Mars. Here’s why.

Going to Mars is a long trip. When you get there, there are no backups — no convenient repair shops if something goes wrong. Mars has a pretty hostile environment and we don’t really know what it takes to survive there. However, if we start on the Moon, we can solve problems that crop up when a rescue team is only a couple of hundred thousand miles away, somewhere between 36 million and 250 million miles away. I pretty much guarantee you that if we fling people out to Mars without the proper safeguards and “space colony building” experience, and a disaster happens, it’ll be pointed out forcefully that we should have learned our lesson in near-Earth space first.

So, hell yes, we should go back to the Moon! Take advantage of its closeness to learn how to live in a hostile environment. Please.

This blog a wholly pwnd subsidiary of Carolyn Collins Petersen, a.k.a. TheSpacewriter.
Copyright 2008, Carolyn Collins Petersen
Inama Nushif!
Image of Horsehead Nebula: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

“It is by Coffee alone I set my day in motion. It is by the juice of bean that coffee acquires depth, the tongue acquires taste, the taste awakens the body. It is by Coffee alone I set my day in motion.”

TheSpacewriter

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