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Japan Considering Moon Base, Shuttle Projects
ScentCone writes "A brief article at Newsday mentions a Monday report that JAXA, Japan's counterpart to NASA, is looking at robotic probes on the moon by 2015, and construction on a solar-powered manned research base starting there by 2025. The (very) big bump in the agency's budget will also get spent on tsunami warning technology and other terrestrial communications technology development."
Israel and India also have a pact to reach the moon by 2008 with an unmanned probe (and for a mere $83 million US dollars!) . Maybe reaching the moon is becoming the new "it" thing to do for goverments, much like becoming a nuclear power once was (or is)?
There's the 1979 Moon Treaty - see wikipedia.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Not on the Peak of Eternal Light.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
I remember that back in the 1980's it was said that the United States was planning to have a moon base by the year 2000.
Look where that ended up.
So, as for the Japan's plan for a moon base, I'll have to see the thing actually under construction before I believe it. I find the robotic probe plan to be much more realistic. I think they have a pretty good chance of succeeding there.
it would probably be "mu-n beisu" or something
Wow, if the US really cares so much about UN resolutions that it will go to war for them, these countries are therefore, most definitely, next on the list. Who wants to remind them what happens to countries that violate UN resolutions when the US is still around?
Yes, titanium sponge is a lot harder to work with than aluminum. It pushes the difficulty to the initial costs. You still get the lower maintainence and greater payload, however. Plus, the new method of direct electrolysis can easily produce titanium metal powder for powder metallurgy.
Good quality titanium welds are doable; you just need people properly trained and with proper equipment - you need to weld in very pure argon (applied both front and back), you need to clean the area with good solvents beforehand, you need to keep the argon flowing until the metal is relatively cool, etc. Plus, at all times, you want to use gloves when handling the titanium to be worked (to prevent chlorine corrosion from perspiration) and avoid contamininating it by using aluminum tool surfaces (frictional heat from working with tools can cause localized alloying). In short, you need to use clean conditions and use good tools - something NASA excells at.
Also, a nice thing about titanium is that impurities produced marked discolorations, making a poor weld or corrosion easy to spot. This is a whole lot better than aluminum fatigue, which you need specialized equipment to determine.
T
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
As an American, all I have to say is, "leave it to the Japanese to take massive steps towards furthering the human race while the rest of us are stuck here fighting amongst ourselves."
Please be sure to pass that along to the Japanese troops that are in Iraq right now. Because they, like us, know that things like space exploration, and liberating places like Iraq from corrupt regimes are not mutually exclusive. Read the damn news, why don't you? The Japanese are still embarassed by the last war they started, but they understand the need to get involved the "fighting amongst ourselves" so that it can be stopped. Doing so, just as ending the Soviet rule of Eastern Europe, brings huge peace dividends: which we can spend in space (I hope!). Less turmoil, and fewer crazy tyrants with pet oilfields in the world is crucial if we want to really focus on things like space. But we can work on both at the same time.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Osama Bin Laden listed the starvation of the Iraqi children under US sanctions as one of the top 5 motivations for persuing terrorism. I agree some violence is beyond a question of subsistence. Yes many terrorists come from wealthy backgrounds too I guess. The only point I'm trying make on this note is that frequently if life doesn't seem like its an expendable commodity then its a lot harder to convince someone to perhaps give that up through any number of ways. Please read the next thread as I don't want to post more (volume) off topic as I realize I've already taken this thread. :)
Mike
There is a reason's Columbus' home country of Portugal refused to fund his voyage. (Portugal was a major power at the time, they had the money, perhaps more than Spain) In fact, it is the same reason Spain's King refused to fund the mission until his wife got interested.[1]
The kings were well aware that the earth was round, and they knew how big the earth was. This was calculated about 200BC(IIRC). Columbus calculated the earth's size at about 1/4th the correct size. With the correct size it isn't worth sailing around the world to get to Asia, with Columbus' size it was.
When Spain finally gave Columbus sponsorship they gave him junk ships and essentially prisoners as crew. As they watched him leave they were fully expecting that he would starve to death on the trip. (And if you read the accounts it is clear they came close) Spain was surprised when he came back reporting he found land.
[1]Those who are married can understand why you would pay for a stupid mission if you wife was interested.
The problem with disposable boosters is that there's not much potential for further cost reductions. A properly build reusable could theoretically launch hundreds of times and have to pay little more. The problem thusfar is maintenance; if maintenance can be reduced, you get a huge increase in efficiency.
Furthermore, disposables can't use superalloys nearly so extensively because they're tossing the contents away. Superalloys can give major boosts to payload and safety/reliability.
In short, disposable boosters means giving up on drastic price reductions for access to space. I, personally, hope for more than that. Things like colonization or "affordable" space tourism (among many other things) will not be commonplace until we can get major price reductions.
As to your specific criticisms, I'd like a cite of X33 TPS panels. I've only read summaries, but they've made it sound like the X33's very low maintenance panels, combined with the rest of the TPS, was ligher than the shuttle's TPS comparatively. Could you provide a cite?
Yes, alcohol-LOX would have cost more. So? Even if you were to cut 1% of the costs per flight, it would justify ~300 million dollars worth of research on them. I seriously doubt you'd claim that developing a TPS would cost anywhere close to that. That's the beauty of reusable systems: your capital costs get *greatly* distributed.
As for the APU, it *was* the best they could do. It's not any more. With an all-electric system, you can make another serious cut in the maintenance and reliability of a next generation reusable craft. And, if you distribute your batteries around the craft, you could, say, have a piece of debris slice right through the power line to a wing and still have a degree of access to control surfaces and whatnot.
In short, I agree wholeheartedly with the parent: There are a *lot* of things that can be done with a next-generation reusable to dramatically lower costs. Seriously: in the following situation (yes, high capital costs, but they get spread out over a hundred or more launches):
* Titanium frame, designed to run hot
* +30-40% payload
* Simpler TPS
* Greatly reduced TPS maintenance
* Greater reliability
* Reduced fatigue
* Longer craft life, reduced part maintenance
* Lower operating costs
* Electric APU
* No hydraulics (pumps, fluid, temperature sensors, heaters, etc)
* Lower maintenance
* Greater reliability
Etc.
You'd be left with a tiny fraction of the maintenance, and maintenance is your only serious cost. What's not to like?
Of course, take it *another* generation down the line and use a scramjet, and then you can use a much smaller craft and SSTO it while still keeping a nice payload fraction. It would be another order of magnitude payload cost reduction.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
On Columbus (actually "Colon" - he was not Italian), he had been part of Prince Henry's navigation school (an evolution of the Portugeuse Templars - the Order of Christ), Colon learned the new sailing skills and also saw maps that the prince collected. Colon also took part in a 1477 trip from Norway (royalty linked to Portugal), to Iceland and probably beyond. Colon probably heard northern seamen's tales of vast land beyond the "land of cod" that we now call the Grand Banks. The Vikings and later Scandinavians had been travelling the whole northern arc of the Atlantic from at least 800AD onward, with fishermen from Bristol, the Shetlands and Orkneys, Norway, Bremen and Basque following from at least the 1300s. Supposedly the permission letter from Ferdinand and Isabella granted him to go claim the lands he had already discovered (past/present tenses being important in Spanish). Colon's calculation of the size of the Earth and his brother's maps were largley political, IMHO - they were trying to sell this trip any way they could.
Colon wasn't the only southern European traveller to the Americas in the late 1400s, either. The whole Atlantic had been a Portugeuse pond from the 1450s onward. The settlement of the Azores and Madieras spawned plenty of journeys that included possible settlement in Puerto Rico and the discovery in the 1470s of "Lavrador" by Juan Corte Real, sailing a privately funded mission. Maps from the 1400s (based on Ptolemy even) show the Americas as a third peninsula hanging off China - the oldest sometimes just show Mexico and isthmus of Panama, the later ones (1448 Walsperger, IIRC) have complete maps of S. America rivers and coastal N. America labelled as "India Meridionalis".
What Columbus/Colon did was not original but part of a spectrum of trips that were taking place at the time. The Portugeuse contibution is obscured because of the Lisbon earthquake and the fact that much of the School of Navigation's work was a state secret. An argument could be made that the only thing Columbus did was commit an act of supreme treason against the Portugeuse Crown.
ObSpace: we can draw VERY important lessons from exploration and frontiers of the past - but the new situation is equally different in nature. "Space" still needs to pay for any of us to be able to go - so NASA, JAXA, ESA are only going to be bit-players in a truly space-faring future.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
There is plenty of food produced on earth to feed everyone. The 81 billion is just the price that it would take to move it.
But would it get there? Food supplies rotted on the docks in Ethiopia because the petty warlords wouldn't let it move to the interior where people were starving.
Stalin and Mao used transportation (or I should say BLOCKED transportation) of food in order to starve many millions of their own citizens.
The problem is not food, it's government. In an environment of actual freedom, entrepreneurs would gladly step in and find innovative and inexpensive ways to move food to where it is needed. And it wouldn't cost you a dime, much less 81 billion dollars.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Mike, you're absolutely right. I marvel every time I go into the grocery store to see the variety and prices. Strawberries, grapes, good citrus, in February, at affordable, if still higher than when-in-season-locally, prices.
And that's the fresh food that is time sensitive in transportation. Someone is making a profit moving fruit from Chile to Kentucky quickly at a price even I can afford.
The comment that "Greed is good" was addressing exactly what you're talking about. In order to make a profit, someone will step into ANY available business, even if it's as seemingly mundane as transporting food to where no one else is doing it right now.
And there will always be some shmuck in the wings watching for where the profits are high, ready to undercut the price and still make a profit without having to do all the leg-work of discovering the market in the first place.
If that shmuck is, as you say, some really nasty person like Sam Walton, he'll undercut everybody he can to make his buck, so that the products are delivered not only where they have never been delivered before, but at as low a price as possible to keep out competition. The lowly consumer makes out like a bandit!
That is, unfortunately, until Government steps in and "levels the playing field", thereby punishing only the people at the bottom of the economic scale who cannot afford to pay the tariffs.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics