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Worldwide Focus On Going To The Moon
MojoT writes "There's an interesting piece over at Space.com regarding the current renewed interest in returning to the Moon. Quoting: 'Earth's scuffed up and trampled Moon is once again targeted for high- tech visitors. Robotic spacecraft from several nations, as well as NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, will be first to chalk up lunar return mileage.'"
Which raises an interesting question.. when will countries start claiming territory on the moon?
The U.N. has specifically declared space to be "the province of all Mankind". Since all of the space capable nations are members of the U.N., my answer would be not anytime soon.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Radiation causes damage to an organism's cells based on the probability of it interacting with molecules in your body. You can get the same risk of negative effects by sitting in heavy radiation for a short period of time, or by sitting in light radation for a very long period of time.
(Which is you always encounter a seemingly contradictory situation when you have X-rays done at a doctor's office: the medical personnel always tell you that the amount of radiation you'll be recieving is not enough to hurt you... then they put a lead shield over your nuts and walk into the next room before they turn the thing on! The amount of radiation being sent IS very small, and so it has a very small chance of hurting you, but if they stayed in the room and were exposed to it multiple times a day every day for years in a row, it would be the same as recieving a heavy dose once or twice. They cover your gonads because although the risk is very small, it's not zero, and a mutation in your nuts is far more catastrophic to your ability to survive and pass on your genes than it would be in any other random cell in your body.)
The radiation in the Van Allen belts is more than a human body would normally experience on Earth. So I guess if you were for some reason spacewalking out there all day, you'd not be feeling too well. However, the astronauts are never just sitting around there playing zero-G frisbee with each other. They are always travelling thru it at very fast speeds (and so are not exposed for very long), and they are also riding in a SPACESHIP, which blocks some of it out. Some will still get thru, but not enough to be sterlizing anything. I've seen some people do calculations and figure that at the speed the Apollo astronauts were travelling through it, they would absorb about 1-2 rems. You don't start seeing symptoms of radiation poisoning until you get near 25 rems.
If you rode a subway thru the Van Allen belts for 45 mins every day for years on your commute to work, then yeah, you're going to see some premature cancer popping up, regardless of whether or not the bum next to you is blowing secondhand smoke in your face. But astronauts travelling thru it for about 2 hours once up and once back are not going to be turned into microwave popcorn or anything.
Fact: the materials to build the space elevator don't exist yet. Carbon nanotube composites might, but nobody has yet demonstrated one, let alone demonstrated that the material can be produced in quantity and at a realistic cost. Until they are, and the exact properties of the proposed material are known, estimates of the cost and timeframe of a space elevator is just speculating.
Until those nanotube composites become a lot closer to availability, abandoning conventional exploration on the grounds that a space elevator might at some uncertain future time make space travel much cheaper is silly.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)