US Plans Lunar Motel

OffTheLip writes "The US is planning to build a permanent lunar base which will support future visits to Mars. The living conditions on the moon presents a variety of challenges from medical to construction. Contingency planning would be critical but some feel the challenges presented on the moon will be less than Mars. The moon is closer to Earth, the atmosphere is less harsh and, unlike Mars, water does not exist. Is this the start of the next space race?"

Comments

Space Race

[DarthChris]

"...Is this the start of the next space race?"

Wouldn't it be nice if we could all work together instead of wasting billions on competing?
Of course, that's not gonna happen any time soon.

Re:Space Race

[mcc]

Wouldn't it be nice if we could all work together instead of wasting billions on competing?

Didn't we try that with the International Space Station? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that "all working together" only really worked until such time as the question of who was going to pay for all of this working together came up, at which point the Russians wound up sticking America with the bill for most of the Russian contribution, then started renting stays on the ISS to wealthy millionaires.

Now, the ESA and Japan and whatnot seem to be a lot more responsible about their portions of the project-- hell, maybe more responsible than NASA even-- but maybe we can say there's some downsides to collaboration when we're talking about multi-year public projects that cost many billions of dollars, downsides that don't exist when we're talking about I dunno world diplomacy. The heads of governments and even corporations change from time to time, and when (as with the ISS or a lunar base) the benefits of the project are indirect, every time this happens there is a risk of the new leadership going "wait... why are we paying for this again?". The more countries or entities you have involved, the more chances you wind up with for this risk to come to pass...

Re:Less challenges on the moon?

[Ardanwen]

I was also thinking. How come having water on a planet makes things more difficult. I know life on earth (70% water surface) is tough ;), but based on that last sentence, I'd say mars is the better place to be.

Don't think so...

[Reality Master 101]

The US is planning to build a permanent lunar base which will support future visits to Mars.

Nothing is "permanent" that doesn't pay for itself. I'm sure everyone thought in 1969 that we were permanently on the moon, but it didn't quite work out that way, did it?

It's like Magellan. You send them off, and maybe they come back, maybe they don't,

Magellan et al were looking for PROFIT. They weren't risking their lives for the hell of it.

Re:Space Race, with standards?

[taiwanjohn]

I agree with both you and the parent comment. Competition is healthy, but working together could save a bundle. How about agreeing on a few standards, such as the size and shape of airlocks, so that different countries' vessels could dock with each other? That would allow easier cooperation, while preserving the competitive environment. It would also allow private companies like SpaceX to interoperate with everyone else in the game.

Maybe somebody at NASA will write an RFC...

--jrd

Re:Less challenges on the moon?

[cmowire]

Ah, but convection doesn't work, so you increase the possibility of any fluxes not properly floating to the top. You also have to wory about the flux evaporating and causing the solder to be propelled away from the workpiece. Also, some soldering and welding processes are designed to work inside the atmosphere, others are designed to work outside of the atmosphere.

But, no, nothing on the ISS is being welded in space. It is sent up in large chunks and is bolted together, often times with motorized screws so that the astronauts just have to manuver the pieces towards each other and then command the berthing mechanism to grip. They have been doing some limited soldering experiments in the ISS, but never as repair work, just as tests for eventually doing repair work.

The biggest problem is that a spacewalk takes too much effort to set up. You have to plan it out. You have to pre-breathe oxygen. You have to replace all of the relevant consumables. The people doing them are scientists, not bridge workers.

You can only get so far with merely bolting stuff together. Eventually, you need to start doing fabrication work. Sure, it's easier to send up 1 ton of easy-to-fab raw materials, but it's even easier to grab a 100 ton iron asteroid and not bother calling back to Earth at all. :) Remember that some of the iron asteroids are basicly steel with sufficent levels of purity that you could slice 'em up with a cutter and use them as building materials with nay but a quick metalurgical assay.

Some things will be much much easier in space. Ovens for example. A nice parabolic reflector to focus the sun's heat on a lump of metal can be made out of aluminised mylar and (titanium) chickenwire. You can use a refractory blowpipe to blow a bubble out of the lump once it's melted. Taking this to a logical extension, I could see large structures being manufactured using something akin to a glassblower's lathe.

But the problem is, on both the how-do-we-repair-things-and-build-new-things-in-sp ace front and the how-much-gravity-do-we-need-to-not-die-young-in-sp ace front, we've done... ehrm... almost nothing since the 60s.