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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.'"
why spend more on the moon? put more funding into asteriod detection so we can save our asses! :-)
Go Illini!!!
Hell yeah. Just what we need.
A frickin' Moon Base!
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Which raises an interesting question.. when will countries start claiming territory on the moon?
Man always wondered if the moon was made out of cheese.
In 1969 man landed on the moon, and found out it was not cheese.
Since then, no one has returned.
Behold the power of cheese.
Are we now going back to double check our findings?
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?
... This time when setting up the soundstage, add a little color, hell maybe even have them pixar guys whip up a couple of "aliens" ... because we all know that going to the moon and aliens are part of a governmental conspiracy ... And that the moon is just part of a "Death Star" with a giant "Laser" ... next you'll tell me there's plans to go to mars, I would argue that mars doesn't even exist!
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
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?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Stevenson: I have no objection to man walking on the moon.
Narrator: By 1964, experts say man will have established twelve colonies on the moon, ideal for family vacations. Once there, you'll weigh only a small percentage of what you weigh on Earth... Slow down, tubby! You're not on the moon yet!
The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?
Of course NASA wants to get a robot up there. It'll be on an important mission...
It's got to go stick a flag in the ground and stamp out some fake footprints.
The conspiracy theorists are wrong. Apollo really happened. For them to be right requires to many highly intelligent, principled people involved in the missions to be either conned or coerced into lying. Not to mention the fact that the fakery would have had to fool the Russians, who at the time would have just loved to expose America's triumph as a fake and who undoubtedly tracked the position of the radio signals from the Apollo craft precisely.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Go to this link to buy an acre on the moon!
Could the Slashdot crew fix this "security hole"?
A super-long URL ending in *http://www.goatse.cx/ at the end of a URL should be detectable.
Looks like Yahoo, but really it's Google...
Curiously, vice-versa doesn't work...
--LP
Ban the burial of *any* holy people on the moon. I don't want to risk another future "holy land" fight up there.
Even say a nutball who claims to be Jesus II. If he dies up there, send his fricken ashes back to Earth.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, only one of those spacecraft will be first. The others will lay claim to terms like 'second', 'third' and so on. In fact there are many words that are intended just for the possibility that there will several, one after the other.
Though it's nice to see a wave of missions that have the look of gearing up for future utilisation. Hope something comes of it.
"Imagine if Christopher Columbus had returned from the New World, and no one had returned in his footsteps."
-Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell in Apollo 13
Idealism has its place. Standing in front of rampant commercialism would mean that it's place will shortly be a very thin blot on the landscape. Esoteric UN pronouncements sound good, so let's hear about the reality, whall we?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
(* So we may yet uncover that weird black monolith under the Moon's surface. I had assumed that NASA already discovered it, but chose to tell us the Moon was a boring, desolate place to divert our interest... *)
Monoliths *are* boring.
"Interesting" would be alien chicks with 6 breasts and an attraction to geeks.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA claims to have learned from its mistakes in the 1998 Mars failures, but if we start talking about sending people far away (like the moon), we'd better make sure things are really fixed.
No quick bailout from the moon like they have on the ISS in case something goes wrong.
and if you believe that... i've got some land on the moon to sell you... err...
To say the moon landing trip nuts will ever be satisified is like saying the JFK assasination nutballs will every be satisified. But, at any rate, for anybody who has the slightest inclination to believe these nutballs here is a link to Phil Blait's badastronomy page on the moon landing 'hoax': Here.
And, just for shits and jiggles, here is a link about Buzz Aldrin punching a man who did an ambush interview claiming he never landed on the moon here, or for you lazy people here is the summary:
It certainly did with Buzz Aldrin. Mr. Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, was ambushed by Mr. Sibrel with the Bible trick. On September 9, 2002, Mr. Sibrel jumped out at Mr. Aldrin with the Bible, daring him to swear on it. told Mr. Sibrel to go away repeatedly, and even asked for the police. When Mr. Sibrel physically blocked his path, Mr. Aldrin (who is 72, 5'10" and 160 pounds) punched Mr. Sibrel (37, 6"2" and 250 pounds) in the face.
Yeah but they retracted that one pretty quickly
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
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
Item: India can (has) put a tonne into geosynchronous orbit or 3 tonnes into LEO for $12M, about the same cost (according to this article) as getting one DoD microsatellite to the moon as a hitchhiker.
Item: A shuttle launch costs about $300M, representing 29 tonnes to LEO for roughly $11M/t
Conclusion: India can loft cargo for roughly 1/3 the price of the Shuttle.
Item: An unmanned return Moon mission (also ex the article) costs about $600M.
Conclusion: Estimating roughly half of this cost to be launch, if India did the launches, the missions would cost $400 apiece.
Item: The cost of putting up a space elevator has been set at $10G; a space elevator would drop launch costs (measured against the Shuttle) about a hundredfold (ie, to roughly $100k/t).
Conclusion: This would, in theory, involve a single Shuttle launch, making the $200M saving realised by having India loft it probably not worthwhile against the added complexity of a segmented load and the added flexibility of a Shuttle.
Conclusion: If instead of America doing 18 return Moon missions for $10G (or 25 missions if India lofted them), they were to put up a space elevator for $10G, they would achieve payback before the 40th mission. This is on return automated Moon missions alone. DoD could probably then toss cans at the moon for under $5M apiece.
Speculation: The additional space infrastructure which an elevator implies would probably hasten payback. The availablility of cheap ($100/kg, compare that with the price of, say, caviar - vs $10,000/kg now) steadily deliverable supplies would even further reduce the cost of manned missions. Payback from other items like solar power satellites (to say nothing of the reduction in pollution etc) would probably make an elevator worthwhile anyway.
Summary: leave the moon alone for a decade. Put up an elevator instead. Then you can have all the moon you want for a fraction of the price.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
While I'm all for anything that gets the human race back in space, the Moon shouldn't be our first destination. It's gotta be Mars.
The Moon is a harsh environment (some would say mistress), and colonies there will likely never be able to support themselves with native resources alone. Surface temps on the Moon are scorching, water is nearly impossible to find (despite the optimistic tone of the article), there's no atmosphere to speak of, there's a lack of important metals, and the nights are two weeks long. Lunar industry and colonists will probably always need help from Earth just to stay alive.
But not Mars. Mars has water, soil, sunlight, 25 hour days, and summer daytime temps that reach almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And did I mention the sunsets?
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.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
As simply wrong. The Soviet Union did very poorly by its own citizens, but its military posture was always defensive, and even conservative US military analysts will largely agree. Taking over the world was not their goal. Extending their "sphere of influence," on the other hand, was - as it is that of the US.
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'
The mission to Jupiter will be interesting. First of all the gravity is much stronger than the Earth's. Second, there are contant lightning storms throughout the entire planet like nothing we see on earth. Then there's the fact that the surface of Jupiter isn't even solid.
So I suppose, after decades of technological improvements, we COULD get someone there, but what then?
"That's one small step for... AGGHHHHAAHHHH!"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Without the Van Allen radiation belts...
Van Allen's radiation pants would fall down.
(Yeah, it's off topic, but it had to be said).
-- Terry
Why start with distant Mars, to re-learn the ropes?
The Moon and Mars are two vastly different environments, and the skills of colonizing these environments probably won't have much overlap.
Our goals on both will be very different. Going to the Moon won't teach us how build greenhouses from Martian elements, for instance, because natural light greenhouses aren't a part of Moon colonization. Looking for water ice hidden in deep crater shadows is a skill we'll try to perfect on the Moon, but on Mars we'll be drilling to find water. We'll learn different things from each environment, and we'll need different skills for each environment, so I think the argument that we should explore the Moon first so we'll be ready for Mars is based on a false premise. You could just as well say the reverse.
But don't get me wrong! There are lots of good reasons to colonize the Moon, too, including using it as a base for astronomy, or even better, for lunar solar power which can be beamed back to Earth via microwave.
If I thought we could do both simultaneously, I'd be for it. But my hunch, based on history, is that the winner takes all. And I don't think lunar exploration is politically financially sustainable. Since a Martian colony could reasonably be expected to support themselves, while a lunar colony can't, I've gotta support putting our energies into Mars first.
If anything, I think the argument works in reverse: if we have a sustained colony on Mars, we're going to be constantly being brought back into thinking about space and its possibilities, but if we have a lunar colony that goes bust, we'll be much more likely to ignore those possibilities, the same way we have been for the past 30-odd years.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I'd deliberately cause a bunch of fake-looking stuff to occur on camera. Just for fun.
Evil is the money of root.
...rescue is not in the *cards.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
lasers are bounced off of the reflectors left by the astronauts by independent, civilian laboratories on a regular basis. now shut the fuck up.
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.
Congratulations! You have been chosen to be an explorer on NASA's maiden voyage to Jupiter. All expenses paid!
Then we stick them in a ship run by WindowsXP, DRM and Trusted Computing hardware ("It looks like you're trying to replicate a sandwich. Your replicator is secure. To unlock it, please register by calling..."). If they ever do reach Jupiter, they'll be flattened and we'll be free of spam. I really put way too much thought into this.
think again [warning: this link points to a huge PowerPoint file].
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Funny how the article doesn't even mention the only company to yet have actually got permission from the US Government to launch to the moon, TransOrbital Inc.
:v)
Vik
IIRC, dense secondary radiation from sparse high-energy impacts in the hull is more of a worry than direct exposure.
And if radiation does trouble you, sacrifice 1000km/hr and launch from a polar pad. Cool.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Everyone else can do what they want pretty much. Oh yeah, except its a good idea to just tell the American nuclear defense guys anyway so they don't think WWIII has started by mistaking you for an nuclear ICBM.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"that until there are exploitable economic resources, and permanent residents there, it's not an issue. When people try to economically exploit the moon, it will become an issue then and will be settled by normal political means (ie international treaties, popular movements, shady underhanded deals, wars...).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Get Hollywood to the Moon. They could make some badass movies there. Call Ronnie Howard - he could probably shoot a sequel to Apollo 13 there, they'd have closer to real weightlessness.
Yeah, but I doubt a movie of Apollo 14 would have the same dramatic tension...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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...
This mentality is exactly why Mars ought to be colonized first. We can't count on having the political or economic will to support regular supply lines indefinitely. The political and economic climates on Earth change rapidly. What happens when the political winds have shifted, and the Moon isn't pulling its economic weight? We cut back. Maybe, like the Russians did with Mir, we end up abandoning our investments altogether, after we've damaged them through lack of continuous maintenance.
Colonizing Mars brings with it a different mindset and different possibilities. It brings with it the mindset of self-reliance instead of trade reliance, for example. And it brings with it the possibility that even when we fail to maintain our political will, Martian colonization can survive and even grow with minimal intervention from us for long periods of time.
We had the chance to colonize the Moon once before, and we blew it. We couldn't maintain the momentum. Let's not allow ourselves to make the same mistakes again.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
First, an obligatory link to Robert Zubrin's books The Case For Mars and Entering Space. Sure, he has an agenda, but he presents some compelling facts about why the moon isn't that hot of an idea.
Secondly, I have, big surprise, lost faith with NASA (largely due to reading the above two books). The description of the cost plus accounting used by government contractors alone is enough to realize why we aren't, at least, watching The Mars Colony Channel on TV.
The best hope for opening up space is commercial exploitation or prize money. What if the government (any government) said, we have $20 billion sitting in a trust fund. The first company to send a manned crew to the moon (or mars) and back gets the money and an exclusive contract with the government?
The second best hope is that China, Japan, India, the EU, or any combination of the above starts kicking our butt and making money in space. They've already shown that they can launch satellites cheaper. When there is a Chinese space hotel or a Japanese moonbase (and especially if they are making money), there will be a new "space race". When someone makes a suborbital jet and FedEx realizes they can send packages from North America to China in a couple of hours and the Concorde crowd realizes that a few $K more will let them orbit around the earth on their business and pleasure trips (and each trip drops off a few rocket assisted satellites while they are 100 miles or so up), then we should be seeing some real effort being put into planetary exploration and colonization.
Actually, the best hope is that all of that Middle East oil money goes into the funding of the Islamic State of Luna. That would get the Americans off their ass and into space.
We are right at the 100 year anniversary of the first airplane flight and flying is now ubiquitous and commonplace. We are at the 40 year anniversary of manned space flight and there hasn't been that much improvement. Yeah, the shuttle is cool, but the fleet is old and it is waaay too expensive.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
William Mook is offering lunar tours for $60 million apiece, starting 2007, with a planned flight rate of 4 per year. Of course the schedule may lag if demand doesn't meet expectations...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Sorry, but this sort of selective taxing is completely unfair (to both industry and consumers),
...
why, oh why should the government be "fair" to a certain industry ? Politics is, in it's very essence, the process of deciding what is worthy of the tax-payer's money and what isn't. Your notion of fairness is a notion of equality-of-industries. but some industries are beneficial, some are hurting society, why treat them equally ?
economically ungrounded,
economy is a part of the human society interplay, it is not the only metric by which an idea should be judged.
and designed to benefit only special interest groups.
so according to you:
"public health" == special interest group
"tobbaco-lords profits" != special interest group
interesting interpretation of language.
The tobacco industry, as much as you may despise it, is providing the supply of a product -- on a voluntary basis -- which is in demand and always will be. Thus the tobacco industry, like it or not, does indeed "benefit mankind"
when you are talking about consenting adults, I agree. However, tobbaco companies, indeed like their unlawful siblings, the addicting-drug industry, makes it a strategic habit to influence the weaker, more succeptible parts of society, the children and adulescents. This the pushers do in full, cynical knowledge that they need to create the addiction before a rational, adult person, able to make an informed, rational decision is formed.
Your argument for "existing demand" is therefore the moral equivalent of saying that there's an "existing need" for child prostitutes in thailand, and that therefore if the children (most of which are sold w/o understanding the consequences) do it "voluntarilly" (usually because they need to eat), so there's no moral problem in being a child pimp, and anyway, one shouldn't be unfair to the child-prostitution industry.
In my view, one of the functions of society is the need to protect it's weak parts from brutal exploiters like the companies you protect. This is why I pay my taxes, so that pushers and other children-abusers will not get access to our children, at least not before they are grown enough to stand on their own mental feet.
Now wether or not outlawing tobacco or other addicting drugs is effective, that's a different question, but saying that pushers "fulfil a need" is like saying the rapist "fulfils the need" of the child victim, which is too young to say no (so it means he/she wanted it, doesn't it ? => there exists a demand, doesn't it ? and anyway, one shouldn't be unfair to the child-mollesting industry ).
I hope this will make you reconsider your values
Working for necessity's mother.
People who talk about self-sufficiency on Mars and being able to do without supplies from Earth are either (1) living in a dream world where closed economies like Albania or North Korea are wildly successful or (2) talking about colonies of millions of people. Take a look at the data in the US Economic Census and you'll see the scope of manufacturing, agricultural production, industry, and services required to have a fully functioning modern economy. Or perhaps you think you could live on Mars with the technology of a 15th century feudal village?
Energy: time to change the picture.
TransOrbital didn't said any representatives to the next steps meeting at Los Alamos, so they get no mention. The odd way these things work in the space business (everybody ignores everybody else unless they're staring you in the face).
Energy: time to change the picture.
actusal, its postur was mostly defensive towards the US, there number 2 enemy. however, against china it was more agressive.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No. It certainly was not "cancled". Development was stopped so that funds could be dirverted elsewhere to the war effort. Given more time, they certainly would have developed it first.
Although, it's true that had Hitler made any one of a handful of decisions differently, the tide of war may certainly have turned.
Cracking the Enigma is a good example of what I'm talking about. So is radar, and US/Brittish Jet fighters.
You can claim that the Russian winter was what stopped Hitler an the Russian front, but I'd say it was mostly a matter of millions of Russians dying in opposition forces... Technology has provided a means of sustaining less casualties, with more victories.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Now we can rescue the Lonely Astronaut!