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Speculations on a Moon Colony
Buggernut writes "As reported by the BBC, humans could be living on the Moon within 20 years, according to a leading lunar scientist."
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Just after I get my flying car!
Fourty years ago, when the Americans were graring up for their first moon missions, the 'pundits' made exactly the same predictions.
Today it's the Chinese, but it all seems very similar.
Sure we've got better technology now, but will that really make the difference? Lunar colonisation will only happen when there's political will to see it happen, and frankly, I can't see the conditions being right for that for some time.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Can I buy some land there? :)
I think it would be technologicly feasable to have people living on the moon in 20 years, but I don't think there will be a financial inscentive for the huge cost.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
it will be China or India. The United States seriously lacks the resolve (or the infrastructure) to go to the Moon.
Maybe 20 years from now, we'll be surpassed in space and get shamed into exploring again.
no thanks
according to a leading lunar scientist
That was supposed to be "loony" scientist.
Best Windows Freeware
Why couldn't we have had humans living on the moon 20 years ago? Is there a technological reason? Afterall we could keep humans alive on the moon for a matter of days, all we'd have to do is launch frequent resupply missions and they'd be just dandy up there. Not really much different from the space station, except you get the added bonus of SOME gravity so maybe your bones won't complete decalicfy while you're up there. But there really are not pending technological obsticals to a moon base.
Now, weather a moon base is practical, usefull, or economically feasable is a whole another ball of wax, and the answers are probably all "no". What the hell are you going to do up there? I would like to have a ham radio linear transponder up there, but other than that what is the moon really good for? It can't be a RELIABLE communications satellite because it's only in the sky half the time and is very far away with a very high latency. It's got some rocks and minerals but nothing that would be worth flying back down to earth. Scientific research I suppose, but what could you do on the moon that you can't do on the space station for a lot less money, due to it being so much closer? Yea yea, a jumping off point for a Mars mission. See above, what is really the point to going to Mars? We still don't have the propulsion technology to make frequent Mars trips a practical reality.
One thing that could be a lucritive source of income for a moon base would be moon tourism. Perhaps the science could use it to fund itself, a la the russions and the space station.
IMO, before we even think about a moon base, we need to think long and hard about what the fuck we're going to do with it. Send more probes, shit send a thousand probes. Don't send big dumb expensive probes, send little cheap insectiod probes. Do the same to Mars. If there's something interesting there, we'll find it that way.
I know I know, if people said what I've said about the new world the US wouldn't be here. But the analagy with space is a little different. The "new world" was just another continent on earth. It had air, water, arible land, native people for which to enslave and abuse. Mars is a giant inhospitible desert with some frozen CO2 at the poles. Its possible we've overlooked something, but again it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to send probes.
If someone wants to squander their personal fortune on manned missions to Mars/Moon, go for it, but I'd rather my tax dollars be spent more efficiently.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
"...acording to a leading Lunatic Scientist"
somehow I don't think there is going to be a colony on the moon by 2023, I say we are lucky if we get a man back to the moon by then....
sigh....
--meh--
The article mentions: "The craft will make an x-ray map of the moon" in regards to the probe being sent by tht ESA. How, praytell, are they going to do that? You have to have a receptor on the other side of the x-ray beam, don't you? I mean, it's not like *radar* is it? Not the last time I looked...
So, what are they going to do, beam x-rays through the moon down to a receptor on earth or vice-versa? Somehow I doubt they'd get very accurate pictures.
Are they going to have the craft drop a plate off on one side of the planet, zoom across to the other side and take the picture?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Is the "15 months" trip due to the ionic propulsion method ?
I believed that "traditionnal" engines could send people on the moon in two days.
Anyone can explain ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
The article just says it's technologically feasible. How boring.
In the movie The Right Stuff, and, IIRC in the book,a congressman says to an astronaut "What makes your rockets go up?" The astronaut starts to saying something about reaction masses and exhaust velocity, and the comgressman cuts him short and says, "No. What makes your rockets go up is funding."
Of course a Moon base is technologically feasible. Goodness, if we're just talking technological feasibility we should be able to be a lot more imaginative than that. (Project Orion, anyone?).
But unless someone "salts" the Moon with gold nuggets (I believe it's in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes in which someone starts a rumor that there's gold on the Moon, and so many people start heading for the Moon that the person who started the rumor figures there must be something in it after all and joins them) I don't see how it's going to happen.
(Another nugget from The People, Yes "Another baby in Cuyahuga County, Ohio--why did she ask: 'Papa, what is the moon supposed to advertise?'" I'd give a nickel to know whether Heinlein read that before writing "The Man who Sold the Moon.")
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"As reported by the BBC, humans could be living on the Moon within 20 years, according to a leading lunatic scientist."
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
Wait until I tell Alice!!
On Earth 1 or 2 people die and we start inventing things to keep more from dying.
The Sol system is a little less friendly. A comet or other planet wide disaster is more likely to kill a very large portion of the planet, and totally destroy it's manufacturing infrastructure.
It would be far better to have a self sustaining economy away from Earth, one that could help rebuild our planet if BAD THINGS were to happen to it.
Before we can have a s.s. economy in space, we need to take first steps. We need to put people up there and find out what they need based on the circumstances, then we invent it and move on to the next thing.
The moon hopefully will provide enough resources for those living there to create what they feel they need.
As to your tax dollars, c'mon man, wouldn't you say your grand children being able to take a shuttle trip or elevator ride to the moon would be a good thing?
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's uppin me. Cuz Whitey's on the moon?
I was already givin' him fifty a week but now Whitey's on the moon.
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
The junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special....
to Whitey on the moon.
-- Gil-Scott Heron (1972)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
talk about US Centric
hey the moon is in the sky *the whole goddam time*
well not the sky because that is part of earth
We should have been on the moon 20 years ago. Right now, we should be focusing on colonizing and mining the asteroid belt. I for one am glad other countries are bragging about what they're going to accomplish. maybe that'll finally get the US off its butt.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
...that I saw several gammaspans ago (a moon unit of time, roughly equivalent to your Earth-year):
Amazon Women on the Moon!
"This is just a hunch, but..."
"Steve! What are you doin'?! You're committin' suicide!"
"Ahhhhh. Seems the moon has an atmospere similar to Earth's."
"Good 'ole H2O!"
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
The moon is a great place to send criminals. Send 'em there for life as involuntary colonists. Let 'em dig big caves.
As they dig those big caves they can grind the rock up for soil, melt pockets of ice that they find and use the water to grow wheat.
You put the wheat in big metal capsuls and you use a magnetic catapult to chuck the wheat down the gravity well to good ol' earth.
don't you read?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Actually, this guy named Dennis Hope claims to own the moon. Pack your bags, NASA, he's not selling. http://www.webee.co.jp/southpaw/cx/htm/wwwboard/me ssages/170.html
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
For one reason: He3.
Read Enterning Space.
1KG of He3 is worth $6 million.
Transportation costs to space and manufacturing processes need to come together...oh yeah, and we need to figure out that whole fusion thing. But once we're there, science knows of no better energy source (outside of anti-matter).
Good enough reason for me.
A speech...
and very timely:
Getting power from the moon.
More details at Space.com.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
If everything goes according to plan, I'll be around 55 when all this happens. Will I be too old to visit the moon, just to say I was there? Will I have to shell out 20,000,000 just to visit like Lance Bass? I hope not.
I hope to one day visit the moon, and maybe Mars, but I fear the $$ will keep me here, on the good olde Earth.
What, me Tweet?
Solution to second problem is left as an exercise to the /. reader. Several hints may be found on google.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Yup! I got mine right here! It's approved by Dennis Hope (the owner of the moon) and all! Wooo!
What about launch bases on the moon? Escaping the moon's gravity to get to other locations has gotta be way cheaper than escaping earth's gravity.
In order to get to the moon in the first place, you need to have almost completely escaped the Earth's gravity, so it doesn't help for launch of things that are originally from Earth. Best approach for that is to launch them to as _low_ an orbit as you can (so as to minimize delta-v required of high thrust, low-Isp drives), and to spiral the rest of the way out over a period of months using a low thrust, high-Isp drive.
A network of these on the moon, maybe on one of mars's moons or mars iteself. I know, supplies need to come from somewhere, but shipping water from mars's icecaps to the moon might be cheaper than shipping water from earth to them moon.
This turns out not to be the case, as you need a lot of delta-v to travel from Mars's orbit to Earth's (the sun's gravity well is deep).
If a moon base was constructed, the best way to supply it in the short term would be to lift water and other hard-to-get commodities from Earth, and do your best to conserve them at the base. For long-term supply of extensive lunar or near-earth colonies, you'd probably tow an ice asteroid into one of the stable Earth/Moon Lagrange points, and mine that.
FWIW, a better supply chemical to lift from Earth would be ammonia. You can react it with oxygen from lunar rock to get water, and you can also use the nitrogen as a fertilizer component. Methane would also be a good choice. The moon has lots of oxygen, silicon, and metals, but lacks carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen (which are all needed in fairly large quantity for earth life).
As for things to do on the moon itself, it's useful as a materials supply yard, but only if the materials are going to be used in space. Given the cost of building a lunar mining facility vs. the cost of lifting material from Earth, we'd only build a mining facility if we were building something Really Big in space for other reasons.
can we call it a repeat even if it's "new"?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
The writers and producers of the science-fiction classic, "Space 1999", were off the mark by about 25 years. "Space 1999" was broadcast by NBC in 1975 and dealt with the lives of colonists on a moonbase called "Alpha". The series began with an episode where a nuclear explosion hurls the moon out of the earth's orbit. Each succeeding episode of the series descibes the dangers that the colonists face in space.
Quoth the poster:
Wrong. Getting to the moon is about as expensive as getting to Mars, more or less, largely because Mars has an atmosphere that you can use to brake against for free. Only a fool would go to the Moon, stop there, then launch off again to go to Mars; for one thing, you're much more efficient doing your boosting near the bottom of a gravity well rather than at the top of one (em vee squared, dude).The Moon is largely made up out of minerals we are quite familiar with here on ol' Terra, and nature has done us a favor by differentiating them using water-based sorting processes which don't exist on Luna. You should do some studying of the subject; not only might you learn something, you might put yourself in a position to actually contribute something useful.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Let's just hope they never have to say, "We're sitting on the biggest bomb man's ever made."
(Yes, I'm seriously dating myself. No, not in that way.)
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
(that word in the subject means "talking down to somebody," in case you were wondering. But I don't expect you to know that.)
+1, recursive
Indeed, I own several thousand acres on the moon and on Mars - complete with deeds, mineral rights, and platts of the property. Check out lunar property and other info at http://www.lunarrepublic.com/info/toward.shtml Just because it CAN be done doesn't mean it WILL be done - but I'll rent them a site to put their dwellings on ... or under...
The delta-V is a function of the path; the required delta-V for a typical ion-drive trajectory is actually a bit higher than a two-impulse elliptical transfer.
Let me clarify - you shave 4 km/sec off the delta-v you need to produce using chemical rockets.
An ion drive with an Isp of thousands or better can use even an inefficient transfer scheme and use only a little fuel. Adding 4 km/sec using a rocket with an Isp of 300 gives you another factor of 3+ on the fuel:cargo ratio.
Seriously though, there would be huge benefits if we could arrange a permanent outpost on the moon. It's certainly possible to do so within 20 years, hell the US sent a man to the moon after ten year research. The problem? Designing and building any form of outpost would require international cooperation. The ISS is a good example of what's possible and what can go wrong.
Sure we can stick a few people into the ISS for 6 months, but the moon is another matter. It's unprotected by Earth's magnetic field, so radiation is a huge problem. It's too far away for us to do anything if something serious happens accidentwise. We don't yet have any economic reason to bother sending a permanent outpost there.
The moon will eventually be colnised for its resources, but not in the next twenty years, probably not in the next 40 yrs either. I expect to be dead and buried long before the international community discover a reason for sending people out to live there permanently or semi-permanently.
"Take the prisoner downstairs," Tom said condescendingly.
Getting to LEO from the ground requires roughly 5 miles/second of delta-V, about 8 km/sec. Getting to escape velocity requires about 7 miles/second, or 11.2 km/sec. If you chop 4 km/sec off the delta-V for escape, you're down to 7.2 km/sec and you will not even achieve orbit.
You're right about the mass-ratio, so I suspect that you're just fumbling the expression of the concepts. A forum like Slashdot isn't a good place to do that; there are too many people out there who accept any authoritative-looking thing as gospel. While they may well deserve what they get, I think it's incumbent upon those of us who actually know something to try to help the public understand things rather than obfuscate them.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Backscatter can be used for imagery, in many cases for imagery that transmission X-rays are unsuitable for.
/. article on backscatter X-ray imagery being used to detect weapons at airports/contraband at border checkpoints that transmission X-ray scans would miss.
Recall a few months ago a
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
A moon base is possible, but not in the sense that most ppl think . .
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Sending ppl up there is just cost prohibitive
But if you think a little like Isaac Asimov, then sending
robots makes perfect sense
You send small robots up there that can be remotely controlled
from earth, and have Xmit/Rcv stations at different locations
around the globe
You bring in several countries and even companies on the project,
split the costs, and write a agreeable charter
One country footing the bill imght be high, but if 10 did it ???
As there is almost no atmosphere on the moon, so Solar works
VERY well up there
As it is VERY cold on the dark side of the moon you can use
that for refridgerant purposes, ie. cooling
Once a LARGE Solar array is built, air scrubbers similar
to what was in the old space capsules of the 60's could
be built and an underground network or redundant tunnels
could be dug . Better tech is now available
Make all the equipment electrically powered, and excess
electricity can be used to process mined ore
Not enough electricity , then the ore sits around awhile
Trying to fly all the materials to the moon is crazy,
have the raw materials there built into what we need
I think China is thinking this, thus there comment
they intend to mine the moon
It is not going to be easy, that much is sure, but alot
of our manufacturing here on earth has already alot of
robotic elements
Auto worker unions fought against the further invasion
of robots into car plants
This tech and this mindest could build the moonbase
and make it inhabitable prior to humans ever setting
foot in there
If the chinese are smart they will do it this way, and
to be real honest, this way nobody dies
Once the moonbase has run on automated systems and taken
a meteor or asteroid hit without being destroyed , then
it is considered safe for a large scale move in of scientists
Shielded by 100's of feet of moon dirt, ppl could live and work
there to build space stations, space craft, more solar arrays,
build a truly GIANT low gravity telescope on the moon
Think zero light pollution on the dark side of the moon,
think of a radio antenna twice the size of the Aericebo array
Alot of truly GREAT things could be done on the moon
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
For shielding, the human inhabitants once they arrived .
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would need to largely live underground
Several hundred feet underground in circular tunnels
similar to those going under the english channel
The cost of tunnelling has dropped due to projects
and tech derived form it like "The Big Dig" in Boston
The moon base should be built by robots running off
a Solar array set up on the moon, by said robots
The robots need to be able to diagnose and troubleshoot
each other, and repair each other
Like a linux cluster if a percentage of them goes down,
then it just functions at lower capaciy, but progress
is still made
Every so often spare parts are sent up and land similar
to the air bag landing used for the mars rover
Solar power is much stronger on the moon as it nearly
has no atmosphere
Feeding, Breathing, Sleeping humans would be too expensive
to put up their initially and the Biosphere here in the
US failed in its testing
Have the robots work the kinks out
Humans can go up there once the moonbase is finished and
testing is complete
Several nations should join together to shoulder the
burden and share the rewards
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
He3 for fusion is worth probably as much as gold, if not more .
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Several other posters on here have mentioned it
The dark side of the moon would make a great place for
a Telescope roughly 3 or 4 times the size of the
Keck telescope in Hawaii
The solar power on the moon would be very plentiful, and
we could build the majority of this with robots and remote
control systems
Yes, there is a 2 second dealy, but we have a further dealy to
mars and use the rovers there in a similar manner
Build the moonbase underground for insulation , and for
shielding against cosmic rays
Have humans show up only after extensive testing proved
the moon base was safe for humans
Have redunant power and life support systems to keep
it that way too
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
One Asteroid 500 miles long is nearly solid nickel .
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I think it would be alot easier to have robots land on it,
mine it, and rail gun it to the moon
Then use it to build space craft or whatever on the moon
If the earth is wiped out due to disease, nuclear war,
or some other human engineered disaster, we need a backup
plan , and the moon is the closest one to us
A moonbase is a good idea, all the He3 up there is a good idea
We can use the MUCH stronger solar power up there to make it work
We have robots build it around the clock 24 x 7 not needing air,
food, water or rest, just spare parts
We send spare parts up in a air bag delivery system similar to
what we sent the mars rover in
The asteroid belt may hold more mineral wealth then we could
feasibly mine here on earth
It is easier to move tons of the sutff around in zero gravity too
I think robots are the way to do it, humans would die, and
would cost alot more than robots would
We form a group of concerned countries and co-fund it
10 major nations funding it could bring it in collectively cheap
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Maybe they could, but where is the demand? I know that there will always be some pioneers who will do anything...But how does it make life better. There would be less to do, and there really wouldn't be anywhere that you could really have some room Sure they say they could have gardens, but that just is not enough when somebody wants to get out in the open..... They can also say that the colonies might provide suits to roam the outside, but the fact that people are in the suits seems claustrophobic
I guess it was persecution, but not in the way you probably mean - the first settlers in what's now the USA were Seperatists, who wanted to be able to persecute everyone else...
It could happen, but won't. Maybe that's a big call to make - things are advancing at an exponential rate and all that... who can really say what will or won't be done in 20 years time? But I don't see it happening. For one thing it would be too vulnerable a target. We'd need to be pretty seriously close to some sort of worldwide peace. Ah well.
Every 90 seconds, somewhere in the world, a woman is gving birth.
She must be found, and stopped.