Back to the Moon?

An anonymous reader writes "This BBC story discusses the prospects of probes returning to the moon. The article first mentions the ESA's SMART-1 probe, which will overfly the Apollo landing sites during 2003, and then talks with US scientists about why NASA should send probes back."

Comments

Quit being Pussies, build a moonbase

[sam_handelman]

Mining the moon for use on Earth is never going to be a winning proposition. Re-entry into earth's atmosphere is just too expensive.

However, we should to move our space fabrication facilities to the moon. That's the way to lower our launch costs, in the long run. It is a lower G environment, it provides an additional slingshot for launches into the rest of the solar system, and, given a sufficient initial capital investment, energy on the moon will be cheaper than energy on the surface of the earth.

Before that's practical, we need a thorough, ground based, resource survey of the whole sattelite. In order to do that, we need a permanent base with facilities to fuel, service and repair all of the robots doing the lunar surveys.

We have the technology. We should stop dinking around, pony up the cash, and do it.

Moon base may make more sense than the ISS

[ike42]

The jury may still be out on the International Space Station (ISS), but the primary problem with all zero-g environments its that they really screws up human physiology. On the moon you don't have this problem, making long term habitation a much better prospect.

NASA does not like to publicize the extent to which even short space flights negatively effect an astronaut's health. We evolved in gravity and our bodies depend on it to function properly ... and no amount of research is likely to change this fact. However, low gravity environments (like the moon) are thought to be ok.

The moon is not that hard to get to, and once there its much easier to get into a zero-g environment, if thats what you want (for research, manufacturing, etc). If the goal is to have long term habitiation off Earth, then going back to the moon is a very good idea.

Not so fast...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it was posted anonymously, how do you know it was plagiarized? Its quite possible the person who wrote it is the same person who posted it.

The url you cite just happens to host "The /. troll HOWTO", which curiously enough says, "Because you're posting as an AC..."

All that is beside the point, because there are plenty of people who don't give a shit about getting (or giving) "credit". If you wrote it, fine, bitch all you want.. otherwise go preach your IP ideology elsewhere.

Sometimes I Despair

[Peahippo]

I read articles like that one on BBC News, and thus know that space programs are always in serious jeopardy from misdirection and emotional decisions.

The word "manufacturing" wasn't used even once in the article, and only the main-picture caption had the word "industry". The main picture doesn't even show any equipment that can be identified as for manufacturing -- it just looks like a mission base.

Manufacturing -- the activity of a real economy -- must be the main point of sustainable space development. Anything else is the masturbatory fantasy of the academic class. The academics (as unwitting dupes of the aerospace contractors) are clearly unfit for directing space programs, given their propensity for spending billions to get some kilograms of rock and megabytes of data back. As far as a space program is concerned, academics should be used as skilled labor, not managers.

Well, what will these non-academic managers aim for? The Moon is an ideal site for space manufacturing. There's enough gravity to hold things down and keep Human bones from decaying too much -- while also being light enough to make it 22 times easier to deliver a load of material to LEO (low Earth orbit) than from Earth. There's plenty of solar power -- for heat and electricity -- due to no clouds, and no weather either to disrupt activity. The regolith is a fine powder that itself is a very useful ore, being oxygen, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, calcium, iron and then other trace elements. Scoop it up into foundries; melt it with your free solar energy; then use whatever extraction techniques are required to obtain materials. The vacuum even at the surface of the Moon (note that within ~30 feet of the surface, there is a dim but measurable "atmosphere" of sorts involving dust influenced by static charges) is finer than usually obtained on Earth in labs. Imports from Earth will be the qualitative counterpart (people, parts, volatiles) to the quantitative exports (aluminum, oxygen, steel) from the Moon. (Note the exports are for building Earth's orbital facilities.)

The only things making the Moon a real problem for manufacturing are the hostilities of vacuum and radiation toward lifeforms. There is basically an inverted paradigm, where on Earth you live freely but undergo constraints in work environments, but the Moon requires constrained living methods while the work environment is everywhere. If only Earth-based manufacturing problems were so simple.

Do we really want to throw more billions of dollars at socially-inept types to spend, to get JUST some rock and data in return? Why not spend the billions making an industry that returns products and investment margin, and then those academic types can charter themselves flights, housing and equipment. They can go out and do all the science they want while a real economy churns away at their backs, making it sustainably possible for them to do it in the first place. Necessities before luxuries, folks.