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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?
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
My late uncle, who I cannot name,
left me an inheritance of $50Bn
(yes, fifty billion USD) worth of
diamonds which are unfortunately
trapped in a space capsule on the
surface of the moon. I am seeking
investors who will help me recover
this capsule, and in return for
their investment I will be able to
reward them richly. A trusted
friend gave me your address and I
hope you will be discrete with my
message. The budget for a small
one-man expedition to the Lunar
Surface is approximately $30m, or
$18m if a Chinese rocket is used.
I am therefore inviting you to
join in this unique opportunity
with a guaranteed return of %1000
on your investment, which can be
as little as $1m. Yes, if you
will provide me with just one
million USD, I will on recovery
of the lunar diamonds, repay you
with TEN MILLION USD. We are
also selling one excursion trip
to the Moon, a round trip with
unlimited stopovers, for the low
low price of $12m.
Yours sincerely,
Abubakar_Ibrahim@yahoo.ng
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Timely, given the continuing speculation as to whether the US is going to go back.
Of course no one with the power to make it happen is thinking of going back to the moon. All the speculation is based on what the USA's reaction might be if the Chinese space program looks like it could credibly establish a permanent manned presence.
So far a space race is only impetus that has pushed man to make those giant leaps. But is that a good thing ?.
Yes, go back. The mainstream media has been doing pieces on this for months now.
All of which presently reside inside a Hollywood soundstage.
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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They were able to accomplish the entire trip over a single weekend, including building the rocket.
Of course, the best reason for going is the replentish our supply of Cheese!
In case you didn't see before, a previous Slashdot article on returning to the moon.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Can't go back to the moon. Nobody can make a "business case" for it. The skeptics and cynics will whine "what do we need THAT for?" and since nobody can demonstrate a 20% cash ROI in the latest version of Excel, complete with pie charts and a "whoosh" sound in PowerPoint, it won't happen.
In other words, nobody has written an elevator pitch.
Hope and progress are quaint notions which have no place amongst the cubicles. Now get back to work. Rent is due.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
So you mean we're really going to send people to sneak into the Beijing soundstage that the Chinese are gonna use and plant this stuff there?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Reading through the rest of the article, it seems the aerobrake would be used at the end of the return journey, to get the LOS into a similar orbit to the ISS - i.e. in Earth's atmosphere.
I suppose they could try using aerobraking to adjust the orbit around the Moon, but given the extremely low density of its atmosphere (someone more knowledgable can provide numbers ...), it's unlikely that it would have a noticeable effect.
The ISS serves no current purpose other than to wrap a little bit of U.S.-Russian diplomacy in a patina of pseudo-research. In other words, it is a make-work project.
It ought not to be.
The only reason -- a compelling reason --for people to be in space is to Go Somehere Else. That's why it's called "Space Travel, not "Space Science Lab". The purpose of a space statoin in low-Earth orbit is this: Serve as a way station on the way to Somewhere Else: fuel depot, construction yard, launch and rendevous point.
We've spent billions of dollars, pounds, yen, euros, rubles, etc., building a station that helps us accomplish nothing. It's time to change things.
It is now more than 40 years after the first human flew to low-Earth orbit and returned. Having a space station go in the same low-Earth orbit pretending to do research is akin to having no aircraft flying in 1943, save for one flying in circles over Kitty Hawk.
(Kennedy's impetus re: Apollo may well have been to thwart the Soviets, but the accomplishment transcended that, and will again, when we return. It's also worth recalling that sound strategic and military reasons existed to prevent Soviet dominance in space.)
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When are we going to learn that these tax dollars are not being spent wisely? The private market, if left uninhibited by tariffs, regulations, and restrictions, could do a better job of getting us to the moon. NASA is just a government stamping agency that shovels money to the protected few -- mercantilism at its "finest."
I'd like to see other reasons to get into space. Scientific altruism is not in my pocketbook, so I'm sick of my dollars being forced from me through coercion and wasted on NASA.
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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Curious that none of these previous plans to reach the Moon mention utilizing a space elevator for most of the journey to orbit.
I suppose that this demonstrates one of the more fundamental problems with most proposals to go to the Moon: they clearly aren't sustainable, at least with today's prices for rocket propulsion. One of the earliest draws for moneymaking on the Moon will clearly be tourism, which cannot flourish at current launch costs.
On the other hand, a space elevator would make it not only very possible to go back to the Moon cheaply, but also just about anywhere else in the Solar System!
As many other comments have pointed out, there is little immediate financial impetus to go back to the Moon. If NASA were to permanently ground the Shuttle fleet, and suspend their manned spaceflight program, would the money they would save be enough to accelerate the development of space elevators to the point of useability?
My favorite plan
audio discussion of the project
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
...and this is a very bad thing. Yes. For YOU. For me also. And for our children, those of us who have, or intend to have them.
Unless one of the worlds space programs starts to show some genuine progress and stop fsck-ing around, the governments of the world are going to pull the plug. Why should they not? Expensive, largeley fruitless and frought with schoolboy errors in calculation and execution. The fate of space programs around the world currently hangs in the balance, in the aftermath of the latest in a long series of these unforgivable multi-billion dollar errors.
I have been a geek, a nerd, a propellerhead, call me what you will, for most of my life. My views on many things have developed in accordance with this. As a child, and as an adult I have read the novels of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others, as I am sure that most of you will have. As the vast majority of us also have, I have been exposed to successive variants of Star Trek, and Babylon 5. These fictitious sagas, and many others have shaped my mind through the years, and they have instilled a belief that to go out and visit the stars, and to interact, whether peacefully or otherwise, with those who may live on distant planets is nothing less than the manifest destiny of humankind. These stories could be described as cheesy, corny, cliched melodramas, and it would not be untrue, but they are also an expression of their writers beliefs in the nobility of such endeavour.
It fills me with genuine, heartbreaking pain to think that our efforts to make these dreams a reality are subject to the political agendas of men who have no concept of magnificence in their soul. It makes me weep to see the ruins of NASAs once glorious space program. Oh, to have lived in those days, when the men who went to the Moon genuinely had 'The Right Stuff'. It's time that the politicians of the world forget their differences, and finally deliver on the promises of yesteryear. I may be misquoting, but I believe that the phrase was, "We come in peace, for all mankind."
Imagine what we could acchieve if all mankind were to work together! I believe that furthering our progress into space is the only way that we can progress as a species. If we don't progress, then what else is there to do, but retrogress. Oh, I forgot, most of the population of this planet have already chosen the latter option!
I am fully aware that not only is this little rant of mine somewhat off-topic, but is unlikely to provoke agreement. On the other hand, I for one, am sick of being though of as a crank for endorsing the value of space exploration.
Thank you all for listening while I have unloaded a lot of pent-up feelings.
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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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First there is a matter of 4 Billion 1960's US dollars, of which only 4 to 10 Million was actually used. Where did the rest of this money go?
Source? Besides even were it true the rest went to funding Area 51.
The abundance of all kinds of unfriendly radiation, inluding extraordinary heat, exists outside the earth's protecting magnetic field requiring a suite to contain many protective layers, which would make it quite bulky.
you mean as bulky as space suits are? They're not exactly speedos.
What is well known from the MIR and International Space station it that the body slowly starts turning into slush the moment it is in a weightless environment, so even if they could get a man to the moon (1st hurdle), develope a adequately protective suite (2nd hurdle) they need to provide an artificial gravity on the body of the travellers to maintain bone and muscle density (3rd hurdle) so that they have enough strength to crawl, let alone walk on the moon even though the moon has eight times less a gravitational pull than the earth!
They wen't for a week. People have lived in space for over a year.
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.
If you go to a space station now, there's no guarantee that the return flight won't be months late. People have been stuck on both Mir and the ISS due to budget cuts.
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.
Short answer; No
Long answer; Read this excelent artcle about the various soviet lunar programs.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.