There's a lot of talk about Europa on this thread about new toys for the moon. <img src="/images/icons/laugh.gif" /><br /><br />Thanks for those links, dreada5. I have to admit that upon reading them I can see why no one gets excited by lunar exploration. Most of it is talking about 8 years out or longer.<br /><br />Cooperation and competition. Those are two interacting forces we find at work in all of mankind's progress. <br /><br />All those links point to increased cooperation. But I think what is needed is more competition. Specifically, private industry needs to go to the moon sooner, cheaper and more focused on industrial technologies.<br /><br />The scientists want to put every last and latest and greatest sensing instrument on their probes and learn lots of important but rather esoteric scientific facts. Good for them, but the rest of us should not be held back from learning the answers to specific questions.<br /><br />While the scientists prepare their <b>demonstrator</b> <img src="/images/icons/rolleyes.gif" /> for 2015, and their Mars sample return precursor, and their sub-surface investigation, and their magnetic shields, and the forming of a new organization to even get started at all of it, others should move forward with more practical investigations.<br /><br />Great Britain should, IMO, take their smallsat expertise and provide lunar bandwidth. They should fly lunar landers early and often, stripping the expensive instruments off and instead flying small factory precursor experiments. Buy the landers from Armadillo, save a bunch of money, but be the first with new, practical, <b>marketable</b> technologies.<br /><br />Sell the bandwidth to lunar robotic entrepreneurs. Build it and they will come.<br /><br />Learn how to idenify and prepare regolith feedstocks for LUNOX and glass production. <br /><br />Pioneer in-situ manufacture of solar panels using in-situ glass production, 'printing' the pure silicone brought from Earth to create cells of whatever efficiency, seeki <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>