Green Cheese? No.

deran9ed writes "The Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory present their latest findings from NASA's Lunar Prospector mission at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. The Los Alamos studies include data on Moonquake activity, further confirmation of the presence of water-ice on the moon, and mapping of iron and titanium using gamma-rays emitted when cosmic rays slam into the lunar surface. Here's the story on spacer.com."

Comments

Re:Nice argument for going back to the Moon

[Vuarnet]

I wasn't aware that plant seeds and bacterial cultures were expensive equipment.
Well, obviously they're not. But look at how many farmers are asking for grants and stuff. It's not the grains that are expensive, it's the rest of the stuff you need for planting that is. From tractors to fertilizers to pesticides. The costs revolve around the infrastructure you need to get a decent plantation going, not the seeds themselves.

To do this you need enough people there to set up and run the gear to make glass, build structures and so forth. It's a task many times bigger than Apollo, agreed. But if they are going to be there for long, doing this preliminary work to make the area habitable would pay off in vastly reduced shipping costs down the line.
As I said before, in the long run it's better to grow your own food than to ship it from Earth. But it's all a matter of how much you're gonna produce, and how many people you're gonna feed. I read somewhere that you need a really huge piece of land in order to be self-sufficient, growing your own food and keeping your own livestock.

It's cheaper to grow food in the moon for a hundred people than to send it from Earth. It's cheaper to send food for a couple of guys in the moon than to grow it there.

I'm all in favor of having human colonies in the moon, and all, but that's still far down the road.

Re:Nice argument for going back to the Moon

[Spamalamadingdong]

Actually, if what you're thinking about is having some kind of closed ecological system (a la Biosphere 2), I suppose there would be lots more things to import than mere CO2.

The biggies are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON). If you can get all of those from the environment, you are 95% of the way there. I know that lunar regolith also has calcium, potassium and so forth, so even some of the rest could be derived from native sources. It's really low on sodium, though, and I haven't seen anything on elemental abundances that so much as mentions halogens.

Besides, you're thinking really long-range. On the short run, I'd bet it would be more expensive to bring to the moon all the equipment required to process those basic elements, than it would be to simply bring them along.

I wasn't aware that plant seeds and bacterial cultures were expensive equipment. If you consider what one tomato seed can turn into (many pounds of fresh tomatoes, plus stem, roots and leaves for composting to make soil for other things) you'll get an idea of how much cheaper it could be to send the equipment to make greenhouses and dig ices than it would be to send food. A tomato seed is what, about a milligram? Think about it.

To do this you need enough people there to set up and run the gear to make glass, build structures and so forth. It's a task many times bigger than Apollo, agreed. But if they are going to be there for long, doing this preliminary work to make the area habitable would pay off in vastly reduced shipping costs down the line.
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