Leaving something permanent.
One of the saddest things about the Apollo missions is that they didn’t leave anything permanent that made future missions any easier. When Apollo was canceled, all that was left were museum pieces, pictures and a few hundred kilograms of rocks. But the nice thing about ARM is that once the asteroid sample has returned to lunar DRO, it’s there. It doesn’t require continued expenditures from NASA for it to stay there. Until we’ve mined every last bit of it, it’s going to be there orbiting the moon, close enough that almost any spacefaring country or business in the world can reach it if they want to. It doesn’t need an ongoing “standing army” that can be defunded. It doesn’t need a mission control to watch over it 24/7. It doesn’t need a sustaining engineering contract that’s going to suck up significant portions of NASA’s limited human spaceflight budget on an ongoing basis. It’s just there. Having something that accessible and permanent out there is worth something, at least to me.
This may be one of the best rationales in the whole ARM mission plan. If we want to have a permanent presence in space, we have to do permanent things. I am an absolute fan of the Apollo program, for a number of reasons, be it political, entertainment, inspiration, or technological and scientific. It was a great period in our nation’s history, and has importance beyond itself as a political tool. But Goff is right: it didn’t last. With significant funding, it could have been built to last, but it was primarily a political program, and when the holders of the purse strings had wrung what they wanted out of it, they moved on. All big programs face such a peril.
But ARM? It has the real potential to develop an infrastructure that can endure, and has practical reasons for why it should endure. We would be building a space exploitation milieu that is focused on resource development, as a product and a way to expand human activity to the solar system in an understandable way. If you want to create something that really lasts, you have to make it of practical value to as many people as possible. You have to show that practicality in a clear, unspun way. We can do that with a strong ARM.