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."

Comments

Good

[Prophetic_Truth]

The more the merrier. Man Spaceflight is sorta like Chess, its no fun playing by yourself. This will foster competition and everyone wins!

Re:Good

[Rei]

57 billion is no small sum... but 57 billion every how often? I'm guessing that's a one-time increase to be phased in over the next 15 years or so.

I'm most interested in the new craft, because we need to get costs down, Before people start bashing the notion of a "shuttle-like craft", please remember that the shuttle wasn't supposed to be this way. The original shuttle would have been a titanium frame design without external boosters; however, most of the way through the design process, its budget was almost halved without a decrease in its capability requirements. A titanium frame, while more expensive up front, gives a significant payload boost (I've seen numbers at around 30-40%) and decreases maintainence costs (you need a much simpler TPS, and it doesn't fatigue like aluminum). And, of course, we know the problems that they've had with the boosters.

When it comes down to it, fuel is incredibly cheap. If a low-maintainence reusable is developed, it will clean the market up. The problem is maintainence. Some people argue instead for mass-produced disposables, but just the amount of raw materials needed and the difficulty in producing engines seems to make it unlikely that mass production costs (if you could convince governments/companies to mass produce rockets when there's not a market) could, in the long run, compete with reusable launch costs. If your costs end up being little more than your fuel costs, space travel will be incredibly cheap.

The shuttle has really been a research project (one that was forced to take an essential role, unfortunately). Many people don't realize that the cost for operating the shuttle is calculated by looking at its annualized operating costs and dividing by the number of launches; however, the operating costs of the shuttle not only include administrative overhead, but a lot of research on ways to improve reusable craft. Whoever designs the next generation will not only have the benefit of hindsight, they'll also be standing on the shoulders of giants, technologically.

Besides... if some of the new titanium manufacturing costs come online, not only will titanium be much cheaper than it is now (which is cheaper than it was in the 60s/70s), but could approach aluminum in costs. One interesting one is that they've discovered that they can do direct electrolysis on titanium oxide without having to dissolve it in a solution first.

Re:What's the propertie status of the moon?

[Ed_Moyse]

Not that anyone outside of the US gives a flying fuck about UN resolutions.

PLEASE tell me you're joking!?!?! Somehow the concept of the US being the only defender of the UN (or its resolutions) is making me giggle and wince at the same time.