Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
... 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
All your base..
Oh, screw it.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.