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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.'"
Conspiracy theorists say the Van Allen radiation belts pose a serious threat to human life and suggest that as one piece of reasoning that the moon trip in 1969 was faked.
Forget that. But do any of you physics/biology-knowledgeable folks care to comment on the truth/falsity of whether Van Allen radiation is a serious risk/challenge for a moon trip today?
Well.. if Russia makes going into outer space a favorite vacation trip.. why not make the moon a favorite vacation spot?
I for one would like to see a return trip be it robot or human, just to put all the conspiracy theories to rest. I have no opinion either way, but if it were proven that it never happened, imagine what it would do to NASAs reputation. That would be one nasty "prank" to play on someone.
I for one, doubt that it could be a hoax, but at the same time, would love some hard evidence to hush up the theorists.
Hopefully a non US sponsered trip will be planned so that there will be no bias.
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
But which moon? ;-)
Personally, I want to see who's the first to land on our SECOND moon. IIRC, the third was proven to be space junk?
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Well I am in favour of humans returning to the moon. Society has put so many resources into making space travel more reliable and cheaper than it was over 30 years ago, so the true cost to society isn't nearly as much as the ney-sayers claim it is. If they are looking to feed the hungry, then they can take the money from the industries that truely don't benefit mankind, like the tobacco industry, and leave our space programs to improve our knowledge of the universe.
The possibilites of a new moon shot are endless. Everything from corporate sponsorship [put your ad on the Moon first...], to scientific, to personal interest. We can have telescopes that are unhindered by earth's atmosphere, and studies done on how we can construct a successful colony on another world. We would be foolish to try first on Mars, where the chance of rescue, or delivering supplies is a pain in the butt.
Best of all, another Moon race might make people excited about space exploration again. Enterprise is great, but it is hard to imagine us ever developing warp, much less walking on the moon again when governments are setting a Mars exploration mission before a Moon one.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It's about freaking time. The moon is a great place to do all sorts of stuff and it is just sitting there a few days trip from us. For thirty years no one has done anything about it. There's been no refining of technologies to get us there, the Saturn project was pretty much scrapped and the last rockets were used to send Skylab up.
If we'd kept with the game plan we could have had at least a semi-permenent base on the Moon which I think is a bit more useful than the craptacular ISS we've been wasting money on. If anything a large radio interferometer array on the far side would have a pretty damn clear view of the entire microwave spectrum, and not the relatively small window available in the New Mexico desert. H2 is a good SETI frequency by all guesses but there's plenty of other frequencies that ought to be searched as well. It makes sense a spacefaring culture would send signal on a frequency that proves they've managed to get off their Earth-like world (outside the H2 band).
The same goes for optical telescopes, you don't have the problem of atmospheric drag or ionizing influence on your imaging system. The Hubble is a great system but a couple smaller systems on the Lunar surface wouldn't be too shabby of a setup. They could be a combination stellar/solar observatories. They spend two weeks observing the stars while they're shaded and two weeks watching the Sun.
Human habitation isn't needed to use the Moon for reseach, a couple of automated systems would do nicely. That's my opinion. So nyeh.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Better watch out, Buzz Aldrin might kick your ass.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
You know what I would like to see done with some of those? just one out of ten even: Rather than sending it to the moon, You pack this tiny space ship with spoors of sulphur & heat loving bacteria, point them at venus, and let them go! Have it break up into smaller packets when it gets close, burning that last of it's fuel as a brake before doing so, then having each packet deploy several sets of chutes on the way down, an start releasing the spores once a certain altitude is reached. If even one strain of these microbes is able to survive in the harsh enviroment of Venus, our first terraformaion project will have begun. Sulphur will be slowly leeched out of the atmosphere, and 02 will slowly begin to ocur more often. In a few thousand years, if we have managed to not kill ourselves, we might be able to start sending in other bacteria, and maybe even lichen. Of course, the moe strains we start off with, and the more often we send them, the more likely they are to take hold and start doing work for us. Now there's an idea for colanization.. we find a suitable planet hat has no life, we just start sending packets in waves designed to auto-deploy, while we continue to fill our solar system. Whn we want to go fill up those other planets, we start building Generation Ships. By the tme humans get there, baceria & plantlife should have made the planet at least close to hospitable. Of course, my ideas require looking out or the good of our species of incredibly long periods of time that we will not live to see. I'm jus a True Survivalist: I want my desendants to be prosperous and continue to have kids forever.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
Our frenzy for space exploration, and our willingness to fund it, seems to come and go in waves. What happens when the current wave passes? Do we want a stranded lunar outpost which will rely on Earth for most of its supplies, or do we want a Martian community which can largely sustain itself when we start pinching pennies again? It's the difference between colonizing Virginia or Antarctica. We really ought to make our money count.
The difference in this case is that Antarctica is close enough for us to send help if a disaster strikes and to set up regular supply lines, but Virginia is about as far away as the moon by comparison.
The ideal scheme for lunar colonization is to have one (or more) permanent stations in LEO acting as supply depots, one (or more) permanent stations in low Lunar orbit acting as supply depots, and a transfer network of ion tugs shuttling material back and for in a regular schedule. The lunar-orbit stations have the equipment to do a rescue or resupply or anything else needed on the ground, and if anything happens on the stations, the next ion tug will be by in half a day or so.
The lunar environment isn't hospitable, but it's no worse than space. Underground is better, as it's shielded and temperature-regulated. If a space station can operate on a more or less closed material cycle for months, so can a lunar colony.
The moon is a great place for manufacturing facilities. Its crust is aluminosilicates; you'd be amazed at how much of really large spacecraft or space station can be built out of aluminum and glass fiber cables. Launch of refined materials requires one twentieth the energy of an Earth launch, with no atmosphere to get in the way of launches on tangents, making things like magnetic launching feasible.
In short, I think the moon is an easy, relatively safe, and lucrative place to colonize, and should be colonized first.
>The Moon is a harsh environment, and colonies
>there will likely never be able to support
>themselves with native resources alone.
We simply don't know that. There's strong evidence for water ice at the lunar poles, and there may be other sources of hydrogen elsewhere on the moon (for example, underground ice or hydrogen-rich gasses). Since there's plenty of oxygen in the lunar crust, it's entirely possible the moon has all the materials it would take to manufacture air and water for the support of thousands - or even millions - of colonists.
>Surface temps on the Moon are scorching,
Portions of the lunar surface are in constant shadow. They're always extremely cold, and we have plenty of experience building structures for use in space that are well-insulated from the cold. Indeed, most of our spacecraft have issues with radiating waste heat, especially manned platforms with all their electronic and mechanical equipment, so being in permanent shadow would be ideal for them. It also gets around the need to deal with wide extremes in temperature - going from broiling hot to freezing cold as day turns to night.
Some of these shadowed spots are close to areas in almost permanent sunlight too, making it possible to run a power cable from an always-lit solar panel to an always-shaded colony.
>there's no atmosphere to speak of
The atmosphere on Mars is so thin it might as well not be there, either. It provides virtually no protection from the hard radiation environment of space, the solar wind, or solar UV, x-rays or gamma rays. It's comprised mostly of carbon dioxide too, which is certainly not a resource humans living in a sealed space colony would need - we produce enough of it ourselves, thank you very much. You'd die in either location after a minute or so on the surface unprotected.
>there's a lack of important metals
For a space colony? Which metals? The moon is iron poor, but is rich in titanium and aluminum, both extremely useful if you're trying to build spaceships. And how much metal do you need on the moon? Structures can be impossibly delicate by earth standards, since the force of gravity is so low. Or better yet, kill two birds with one stone and burrow underground or live in natural caves. Gets around having to use much metal to build your habitat, and provides you with shelter from the radiation and temperature extremes on the surface.
>and the nights are two weeks long.
There are portions of the lunar surface near the poles where the sun shines almost continuously. Colonies that require continuous sunlight could be setup there. Colonies in other locations could easily survive off of fuel cells or, better yet, nuclear reactors. As the moon is rich in helium 3, lunar colonies might also be able to take advantage of nuclear fusion.
Quite frankly, if we can't build a self-sustaining lunar base, a self-sustaining Martian base is an impossibility. The cost of launching men, equipment and materials to Mars is many times greater than the cost of launching them to the moon, and a Mars base would be far too distant to rely on mother Earth for support in the event of trouble. It would take them a lot of fuel just to get back home again if something went seriously wrong, and months of travel time. With the moon, a small amount of fuel could get unlucky colonists back to earth (or possibly no fuel at all if we build a magnetic rail launch system).
We don't even know the exact composition of the Martian surface yet. It's possibly loaded with highly toxic peroxides that would pose a significant contamination risk for Martian colonists and their equipment. Lunar dust presents some mechanical issues, but at least we know it's not highly toxic and corrosive. Likewise, Martian ice could also be contaminated with corrosive toxins. Would be a bitch to get something like 350 million kilometers from earth only to discover Martian ice corrodes your oxygen manufacturing and water purification equipment until it's worthless.
And what are Mars colonists going to do for power? Solar panels will be that much less effective twice as far from the sun as they'd be on the moon, and would have to contend with getting covered with Martian dust over time. What happens to their power supply when one of those global Martian storms whips up the dust and blocks out some of the sunlight for weeks on end? And if temperature extremes are a problem for a lunar colony, they'll be just as much a problem for a Mars colony - it plunges to more than 100 degrees below zero centigrade on Mars at night, after reaching as high as 17 degrees during the day.
I say perfect the technologies needed for space colonization somewhere close by like the moon before spending hundreds of billions sending people to live on Mars. I'd much rather we make the inevitable mistakes for less money somewhere close enough that evacuation or rescue becomes feasible.