To be sure you'd need to build a launch facility. However the gravity well is 1/6 that of earth meaning you'd need 1/6 the fuel storage to reach escape velocity. If all you're going to send is robots that's one thing, if you want to send human beings to interesting places like Jupiter's moons or Mars being able to store more of things that aren't fuel might not be a bad idea.
I don't see NASA saying that about either of these problems. I agree that cost is a very real problem. The cost of a human mission to Mars would cost enough that without congress actually providing a separate cash stream it could wipe out a huge amount of NASA science. And, a manned mission to Mars may be an engineering wonder, but it really wouldn't contribute anything to science.
In that case, these stored things should be stored in space where they don't have to be launched out of a gravity well. There really isn't much of anything good about the Moon. I lke China's use of the Moon as a body to protect telescopes from Earth's electromagnetic noise.
In my view, there is nothing on the moon to launch. Launching satellites from Earth only to have them land on the moon and then relaunched can not POSSIBLY involve an advantage that we need. There ARE advantages we need, but they don't exist on moons or planets. Launching stuff is a serious problem today due to the shaking, acceleration and size constraints of launches. The best example of this is the GIGANTIC problem of getting the James Webb telescope deployed. The orgami required to fit it in a nose cone along with the shaking of launch is something that has been stupendously expensive to solve. Once built, shake tests keep showing that it can't reliably survive even ONE launch, let alone two. James Webb was originally designed as a $500M instrument that would be a huge upgrade to Hubble. That was 1997. The problem of folding the multiple sunshades, solar pannels, the tesecope pannels, the communications antennae, the kequipment for station keeping and propulsion, the actual operation of the telescope, etc. required major efforts to create ways to fold it all into a nose cone. And, the result has to work perfectly in all dimensions or the telescope is useless garbage. Like for many satellites (that aren't just in low Earth orbit) the place it needs to be is a place where we can't reach it if it needs fixing. And, telescopes of this class simply don't work when these parts don't work. For examle, an otherwise perfect James Webb without properly unfurled sunshade isn't worth turning on. Newer telescopes include other parts that need to unfurl with accuracy down to less than a milimeter tollerance. That goes for the kind of shading needed to view planets that orbit other stars. Obviously those stars are monumentallly brighter than are those planets, and the manipulation of the light coming from those distances is a gigantic problem that all modern telescopes that detect heat and light do need to solve. The result is that we will be spending at least $10 BILLION to get the Webb telescope launched in a way where NASA believes it will successfully unfold and deploy after launch. We can't be doing that with our science budget anymore. The moon offers ZERO opportunity for help with that problem. IMHO, we need space based assembly so that reliable components can be launched and then assembled before deployment. That way, the completed satellite doesn't need to have been folded to a fraction of its acutal size, isn't going to undergo the extreme shaking of launch, etc. It actually soves a family of well known problems. I'd go farther than that. I see little evidence of the need for humans to be on our moon, or any other moon, planet or asteroid. China is putting a telescope on the far side of the moon, because the moon will then shield it from the electromagnetic noise from Earth. But, they aren't going to leave people there. It may be that astronauts won't be involved at all. Design teams associated with NASA have shown ways where we could turn a lunar crater into a telescope without humans being there - which would be a GIGANTIC cost savings, obviously. If we want to dig holes, bring back samples, etc., we don't need humans for that. The best analysis equipment is on Earth, not on the moon or Mars. And, robots can do the work - thank god, given the number of ways that these places are equipped to kill humans and the cost of trying to keep our guys alive.
Not talking about low earth orbit Or earth orbit at all. Talking about sending stuff and potentially people to place like Mars or Europa where every pound you don't have to allocate to fuel is a pound you can use for some thing else. I agree launching from the moon is no help for earth orbit. It would be even better if we could expand the ISS for that purpose because that would require even less energy.
It tokk 6 years to fly to Europa. A 12 year commute? We see significant human health damage after just 1 year in the ISS, which is reasonably protected from radiation and within constant resupply and rescue possibility. And, there isn't anything we want to do on Europa that requires a human. More to the point, launching from the Moon for ANY destination is not an advantage - unless it is bringing something back to Earth from the moon. The problem isn't the poundage or fuel. The problem is the multiple launches. Launching stuff to the moon for the purpose of launching to some OTHER destination is not a solution to ANY problem we have. None of the extra $9.5 billion overrun of the James Web is due to fuel or poundage. Yes, we could add space based assembly to the duties of ISS. One benefit is that low Earth orbi is protected to some degree by our magnetosphere so the space station doesn't require as much radiation protection to keep astronauts alive. But, I think the ISS is already fairly oversubscribed. It's direction seems to be headed for allowing private enterprise to add modules for corporate uses such as proprietary science. Also, the ISS is probably not designed in a way that is best suited for space based assembly. And, it is in an orbit that decays. So, once every month it has to be lifted to a higher orbit so it doesn't just fall to Earth. And, of course it is threatened by the garbage we've added to Earth orbit. Maybe the cleaner space around the Moon, or a substantially higher Earth orbit, would be a better place to station a space based assembly plant specifically designed for that purpose. My own view is that it's certain that there won't be a a real justification for humans to spend any time on any moon, planet or asteroid during the rest of this century at least. Our ability with robots is accelerating. The dangers to humans are not solved. Missions are growing LESS in need of astronauts. Having a human present is getting harder to justify, even if one ignores the fabulously higher costs and human health risks to humans.
