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Dreams of the Moon
Iron Sun writes "The Mars Institute has an interesting overview of past studies into sending people to the Moon, ranging from pre-Apollo plans by Werner von Braun to NASA studies just a few years old. Timely, given the continuing speculation as to whether the US is going to go back."
My personal favourite is the One Way Manned Space Mission scheme from 1962 that would involve putting a man on the Moon and then launch supplies to him for the several years needed to develop a two-way retrieval system. All in the name of planting a flag first.
So, hands up. Who would accept this mission if it was offered?
Now that they are reaching for the stars
This isn't technically a plan, but pretty entertaining and fascinating considering when it was written
I find it interesting that these old plans are being dusted off and re-evaluated. I remember seeing an article on Space about how NASA was going to scrap their "Space Plane" research in lieu of another Apollo style vehicle. I wonder how this makes today's spacecraft designers feel with the potential of being overridden with plans older than themselves...
crazy dynamite monkey
I think we need to ask what are we going to do with the International Space Station. Ever since NASA grounded all space flights, the load has kind of fallen to the Russians, right?
I think we need to finish what we started, and then figure out what we are going to do with the Moon.
Also, let's pretend for a minute that we do go back, what would be the point? The cost of running an installation would be far to great of a cost to make it worth it. In the 60's & 70's we forked over the money to prove something to the Soviets -- which is no longer a valid goal...
Unless I'm mistaken, the moon, like most celestial bodies of that size, does have an atmosphere. While no where near as dense or as large as our own, it is quite possible to use it in aerobraking. It'd be interesting to know just how much this actually increases the efficiency of their lander...
Let's imagine a hypothetical situation 50-100 years in the future. Will it be America that controls all access to the moon, and housing properties there.
What WILL housing facilities be like on the moon once we're there? As human beings, we've always been very territorial with our property. Will there be a war between Americans and the American "colonists" that now inhabit the colonies of the Moon? Will they want sovereignty, do to the oppressive nature of the Americans? Doth history repeat itsself everytime we find new bits of land and opportunity to overtake?
A little more morbid and twisted to think about; I'm guessing there would be some sort of master controls for the moon's life support, etc, that Mission Control would have down on the planet. Just shut off life support for 2 hours and choke the bastards, or what? Also, nukes wouldn't be so much an issue to us, as it wouldn't be on the planet. It'd also make one hell of a light show.
Suddenly I think of The Time Machine. Hmmmmm...
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The movie Destination Moon was released in 1950, before anything on the Mars Institute's list, and tried to accurately show what a trip to the moon would be like. It is based on a novel by Heinlein, and he was also the technical director of the movie. Not a great movie, but very interesting since it was made 20 years before we actually went to the moon.
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Personally, I believe that NASA should be split into two separate organizations. One would concentrate on space science and adding to human knowledge. The other would focus on putting men in space.
;-)
We'll call it the orbital transportation administration. Heck, they could even merge that with Amtrak
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I would be interested in hearing examples of historical undertakings, that were done on the basis of hope and progress
No problem.
It's an unanswerable question, carefully written to exclude any example that does not evoke it's own counter-argument.
The point is these kinds of projects do not measure their importance in quarterly earnings.
The economic benefit of the moon landings and the entirety of the international space programs of the 60s and 70s is immeasurable. The medical benefits alone are unmatched in all of history.
Six months is a Really Short Time for an interplanetary trip, actually. It's probably actually around the minimum for any real missions, since shots further out can't take a direct route and have to do silly shit like go to Saturn via Mercury, Uranus and Sirius.
Any long-duration trip is going to have to be self-sufficient anyway. Unless you want any offworld presence to be gone and back in a month or something like that, it's simply a fact that people are going to have to work around. It'd be difficult but not impossible, especially if you start working in stuff like resupply if your hypothetical crew's sticking around on Mars for awhile. If you get the groundwork for an almost-entirely self-sufficient presence and start firing, say, three years' worth of spare parts in a multishot train every eighteen months (the turnaround time for direct Mars-shots), you can start doing neat stuff.
There are alternative propulsion methods going on right now, though. We're slowly starting to move away from straightforward "light off this oxygen and hydrogen to go forward" stuff, which is about as ineffecient as you can get - you only have a few seconds' or minutes' worth, even on a tremendous fuel tank like the Shuttles'.
Spacecraft coast for the large majority of their travel time because of this limitation. What you need is something that can produce a higher delta-V with less fuel so you can coast more effectively. To do this, you need a constant accelleration - a small one will do - relative to a short, massive boost. Ion propulsion is one of the ways of doing this. It's still shooting stuff out the back to make you go forward, but it can do so for a lot longer. The accelleration is comparatively minute, but since you're in a vacuum it's all adding up.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but those kiloliters of fuel used to toss the Shuttle up into space are burned out in about five to seven minutes, at which point the Shuttle is coasting along at roughly 25 kilometers per second. With ion-drive propulsion, that same fuel load could last a ridiculously long time - or you could use a smaller one and save mass, leading to better accelleration...
Look at it this way. Say you're accellerating at a measly one percent of g on such a drive. We'll call that 0.1 meters per second squared because there's so little propellant being used, even if it is going at an extremely high velocity to give your impulse. Any self-respecting ship using this engine will keep it running probably for days. After your first day of accelleration, you're travelling at 8.6 kilometers per second. After your first week, 60 kilometers per second. Let's say you've got enough reaction mass to go for two weeks on your heading-out and coming-back phases, which isn't terribly unreasonable. 120 kilometers per second! Only one spacecraft we've built so far has pulled off that kinda speed, and that was after a sequence of gravity slingshots which spanned years!
Incidentally, after that first week of accelleration you've travelled almost two million kilometers, at a merest fraction of the cost and time of earlier methods...
That's what we'll have to use to get people further afield in this system. It's there, already, just waiting for someone to start backing a project to use it..
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
But when I read about manned journeys to the moon I feel like those people.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Speaking as somebody who was actively watching (and in a tiny way involved in) the space program in the early eighties, that, in fact, is just about what happened.
It was actually partially a manifestation of a tendency that we, as fellow geeks, must watch out for. A belief spread and has never dispersed since within NASA that congresscritters are brainless scum and the public is a bunch of childish twits.
Thereby all programs are designed to appeal to an audience for which they have contempt.
Kinda as if sysadmins simply decided to give up once and for all on educating CEOs/COOs, etc. and went ahead and bought and built BOTH a stack of M$ boxen and a stack of open source boxen, putting big M$ stickers on all the open source gear and giving up on any project that couldn't be so concealed.
When techies have contempt for the people who sign off on their projects but they don't have the balls to leave or stand up for themselves or route around, their results will be, well, contemptable.
Think about the memory bus design of the original Mac. As the story goes, Steve J. was being a pain in the ass (again), they knew he wouldn't pay attention to every little detail, so they routed around and built a better design then specc'ed. When it came time for expanded memory to come on stage, well skippy! Cut one lead and there ya go.
Can't do that on a moon lander.
So we got a bunch of "will this keep you idiots happy?" designs from a bunch of round-shouldered organization men.
Just more proof that it's time to privatize space.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.