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NASA Considers Mobile Lunar Base
colonist writes "During the Apollo missions, astronauts explored on foot or in rovers. The next astronauts on the moon may move the entire base instead. Marc Cohen, from NASA's Ames Research Center, proposes a lunar base on wheels or legs, such as the habot (robotic habitat) or the mobitat (mobile habitat). Cohen considers mobile bases superior to rovers: 'To avoid life-threatening or other compromising situations that might occur with only one rover traveling to a remote place, a second rover might travel with the first. But what if the second rover runs into a problem, too - the same or a different problem? Well, that means a third rover. So, why not make the entire base mobile, so that all the resources, reliability and redundancy of the lunar mission move with the excursion crew?' Of course, mobile bases are nothing new. Terran buildings have been lifting off for years."
That's just the ticket, ain't it. Winnebago finally becomes a NASA vendor. Mobile base, spare wheel on the back with a "Good Sam" wheel cover, towing a couple of electric Honda Quad-Runners as mini rovers. I can see it now. Space tourism will be huge.
Start a happiness pandemic
As long as we've discovered Doctrine:Mobility beforehand, we'll be fine.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
It's been something of a dream to see us go back to the Moon. Mostly on the basis that we need to support space exploration and without people getting interested, that won't happen. However, with new and unique ideas in contrast to the moon, much like this one, it may ignite even more people to support space travel. On a different note, it would be interesting to see how a mobile base would work let alone fair in some large disaster. Instead of one or two deaths, we now have ten.
:-)
- P.S.: I know I just contradicted myself in some fashion, but so be it.
read that as mobile laser base?
Land trains without tracks, sounds like the trains in the Amtrak wars books by Patrick Tilley. As you may or may not know those books featured a mobile base/habitat on wheels that was set up like a trackless train.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
By making the base mobile, it would obviously need to be above ground (er, regolith, I suppose). One of the major problems with this is shielding from cosmic radiation. By placing a base a few meters under the lunar regolith, expensive (either due to manufacturability or weight) shielding need not be used... the regolith is good enough. However, with a mobile lunar base, that expensive shielding must be employed and transported along with the mobile base.
I'm sorry, but this is just one of the many reasons why a mobile lunar base is infeasible (as of now). The sheer coolness of it is astronomical (haha, get it?), but the costs are simply too high.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
If we want to go back, send a mars type rover first and put it near one of the previous landing sites. It would be nice for planning purposes to know how the lower part of a lander has held up for thirty years or more. Might help plan the construction of something permanent.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The mobile habitat runs into the same problem that toasted the rovers. It may suck crashing your moon buggy off a crater lip, but imagine wrecking your entire mobile-Moon-house.
Mobile homes on the freaking moon. Dale Earnhardt commemorative posters and a car on cinderblocks are all that's left.
...I have a cheaper solution than NASA. It would cost 80 billion less, too.
Only for astronauts who demand better things in life.
For a truly practical design, NASA will need to add front and top mounted lasers, as well as the ability to hop over craters. If Moon Patrol taught us nothing else, it taught us that.
But, would AAA honor my membership card off-planet for when my mobile habitat needs a tow?
What if the mobitat (or whatever) runs into the same problem the rover[s] ran into? In general what if the mobitat runs into any problems? This page shows a mobitat that also acts as a lander. I'm guessing it would also act as the return vehicle. Do you really want to put your ticket back home into more jeopardy than absolutely necessary? For example, by having it move around, possibly through difficult terrain and such. Of course one would have to weigh the benefit of not having to travel to get back to your return vehicle over the mobility of this type of habitat and the equipment-carrying capability it implies.
...the author of a post tries to pass a StarCraft strategy guide off as a legitimate news source.
In keeping with the Bush doctrine of only
supporting applied science (as opposed to
pure science), the mobile lunar base will
be used as a replacement penal colony for
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ashcroft has adviced
that it will be the only way to keep the
Red Cross, ACLU, and Amnesty International
away from his "boy toys" in detention there.
"Shouldn't they first set up a permanant base on the moon before worrying about a mobile one? That plus a vehicle would provide good coverage until they can learn a little more about driving on the moon."
Shouldn't they first set up a mobile base on the moon before worrying about a permenant one? That plus a vehicle would provide good coverage until they can learn a little more about establishing a base on the moon.
"Derp de derp."
The USSR landed several rovers on the moon. Big rovers. The first, Lunokhod 1 worked for eleven months, exploring far more territory than the short-duration American manned missions. This vehicle was the size of an SUV, so it is clearly the first "mobile lunar base".
MOBITAT
HABOT
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Habot? Mobitat? E-gads! What horrid names!
Hell, even Lunabago would be better than those monstrosities!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I would certainly tend to hope that people at NASA read large amounts of sci-fi. Many of the most useful concepts in spaceflight have come from science fiction, e.g. geosynchronous satellites.
In this particular case though, I'm not so sure. It just seems that you would take too much of a hit on cost and reliability to make up for any possible benefits. For one, a mobile base can't be built into the regolith for insulation, a feature one hopes a lunar base would have.
I haven't seen them linked to yet, so here's some info pages with pics of this:
"Habot" mobile lunary base
Mobitat (mobile lander?)
Does anybody know if scientists in Antartica use mobile habitats? If they do, then this would seem much more plausible.
Oh My God!
Don't you see the real point of this.
The US creates a trailer park on the moon and ships up all their trailer trash.
Leave 'em for a few years and let natural selection work things out. Pretty soon the moon will be overrun with mutants that can shoot a stop sign with deadly accuracy from a mile away.
It Science gone mad I tell you.
No matter how you try to arrange things to be perfectly safe, there's going to be risk, and the explorers will be the type of people willing to take them. NASA has long viewed its mission to be "the exploration of space with zero risk." Everything they design is over-engeneered to make it as close to 100% safe as possible, with the result that everything takes longer to build, is exorbitantly expensive and far more massive than it needs to be. I'm beginning to believe that NASA is more interested in keeping its workforce busy and getting bigger budgets with which to do less. Maybe we need to tell them that enough is enough already, and that they need to get off the stick and get us back to the Moon.
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Now if you are moving your whole base around, if an axle breaks, you are now stuck in that spot until/if repairs are made, but you still have your food, water and air generating/recycling equipment with you. everyone lives. Big plus.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Sheilding!
You don't have the earth to protect from all those evil sunspots, misc radiation sources, and micrometorites. A mobile base would have to manufacture it's sheilding on earth and ship it (at extrodinary cost) to the moon.
A static base can just pile up moon dirt on it's self. (or just give the astronots a shovel!)
I always loved the reason that Joss Weadon gave in fire fly for why the future looked more like a western. It's the frontier stoopid. Resources are rare, machines break down, and simple works just fine. If you ship 2 motor bikes to a remote planet you will only have 2 motor bikes, but if you ship two horses... Of course this is the moon, not the wild wild planet, however the basic idea aplies. KISS
I would rather be ashes than dust!
This is the height of foolishness. For the mass of the drive system for the entire base, you could fly ten rovers to the moon. This would give much better redundancy than a single base-like vehicle. About the only advantage I see is using the same base to explore physically disparate locations.
Maybe it is time to retire this relic of the cold war or just admit that it is primarily for military purposes and re-allocate the funds for science elsewhere.
I really don't know why people perpetuate the myth that NASA is a branch of the military. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think NASA has launched a military satellite since the Challenger explosion. All military satellites are currently launched by expendable boosters, built by Lockheed and Boeing, from Air Force Bases (Cape Canavaral and Vandenberg).
NASA missions, on the other hand, have all been about the ISS, Earth science, and the effects of weightlessness on humans. I'm not even sure NASA is involved with cutting-edge military-based aerospace research (most of that happening out in Nevada now).
Can anyone expand on this?
Is it just me, or does this guy seem a little low on the common-sense scale? I mean, his logic is this:
.5%; it's .01%. And as I said above, at some point you just need to accept that being an explorer on this level is dangerous stuff, and shit will happen. Also, any event big enough to nail both rovers at the same time (meteor strike, or solar radiation enough to overwhelm any protection the rovers have?) would nail three as well, so that kind fo risk isn't limited by this approach at all.
1. Unpressurized rovers can't go too far because the astronauts will be limited by the air supply in their suits, so pressurized rovers that can go further are better.
Okay, good so far. On to the next part of the idea.
2. If something goes wrong with the rover, the guys inside are screwed. Being stranded on the moon with no AAA roadside assistance really sucks, so there should be two rovers.
Hm. Maybe, but you've just doubled the resources needed to go look into something. If this logic had been followed before, we'd never have made it to the moon in the first place. At some point you need to just accept that setting up a base of operations on the moon HAS to involve risk. Why not have redundant systems on the rover instead of two rovers? But it really goes off the tracks here...
3. But what if something happens to both rovers? You really need three!
Wait, now...someone didn't pay attention in statistics class. If there's a 1% chance of the first rover failing, then the chance of two rovers failing isn't
4. So just get rid of the rovers, and stick with one big mobile moonbase!
Okay, so now what you've done is gotten rid of the rovers, only to make the whole base just one big rover itself, or a whole group of interdependent rovers? And this is more reliable HOW? It seems to me that it takes the challenge of a moonbase and adds complexity to it. Not only do the pieces have to fit together to form a secure and reliable habitat, now they have to withstand coupling and uncoupling, as well as the challenge of mating when the respective pieces might not be exactly aligned due to terrain. So I'm thinking this guy is a little more into astrophysics and a little less into simple common-sense engineering than he should be. Thoughts, anyone?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
No, it's not about technical limits, it's about financial limits. NASA does a lot of continuous research, both alone and with other agencies, such as NOAA. It's all stuff we take for granted now, kind of like sending the shuttle up three or four times a year. It's not sexy anymore just to get to orbit.
The problem is that the "next big thing" costs a lot of money. Think in terms of $1E12 to $3E12. Thats where preliminary Mars Mission estimates hit. Bush announced his plans for the Mars mission, then offered to give them an extra $1E7 to $1E8 over the next ten years to pull it off. I see no less than 3 orders of magnitude shortfall.
Think that number is out of line? Wiki mentions $1E10 as the 1994 cost of Apollo. Though not listed at Wiki, I would expect the Shuttle program cost somewhere in the $1E11 range. Given inflation of both costs and expectations, $1E12 is a good target for the next likely Big Thing.
With the retaliatory action in Afghanistan and the personal vendetta persued in Iraq, along with a not-red-hot-bubble-driven-economy tax base, we're back in the red by $5E11 a year, and still owe $7E12.
NASA doesnt seem to have vision because there's really no money to do a marquis program properly. They're trying to start a high profile program, funded by scraping the sides of the financial pudding bowl. It just isn't going to work. Gee Whiz is expensive - it always has been. Now that we pay for overhead and profit of corporations in addition to the research and development, its even more expensive than it used to be.
NASA hasn't lost it focus, it's been beaten out of them. How much would you expect to spend for the next Hollywood super-blockbuster? I'll give you a budget of $750,000. And I want three films. And amazing special effects - stuff never done before. Throw in a couple of name actors, too - that'll help the marketing. You'd start putting together Blair Witch Project ideas, too, faced with that kind of scenerio.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't care how NASA is pitching it - one of those designs is a burly rover and the other is an unstable tinkertoy. Neither design is a "mobile base" - they are both large rovers.
A base should, by any reasonable designation hold at least a dozen people, these units look like they each hold 1-3 people, max. So they have a docking tunnel, big deal. They are still rovers, not mobile bases. A fleet of mobile bases (like in the Habot pic) will need a shirt-sleeve environment for maintenance, guaranteed. Hence, any schema like this will end up basing from a buried garage/base of some kind. The units might make sense for exploration, especially if the units can lift, fly to a new area to explore, then fly back to a main base.
Others have already mentioned it, but shielding on the moon is a critical issue. Even with the tanks mounted above, a user of one of these steroid-Rovers is going to get an unhealthy dose of radiation. This kind of setup would probably require a buried, rad-safe base to retreat to.
The Mobitat uses a modified version of the Mars rover "rocker-bogey" suspension - it's good to see that NASA will keep using what has turned into a very successful design.
The Habot is, IMHO, totally impractical. The "walker" legs would be a maintenance nightmare in the lunar environment. The fines (very small particles) on the moon are abrasive and static-charged. The particles find their way into anything - the Apollo suits were breaking down after a few days exposure. Sealing the joints on those legs is going to prove futile - wheels have similar problems but not nearly as complex.
Cute viewgraphs, I'm waiting for a private base.
Build lunar base.
do something.
profit!
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.