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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?"
The article makes a very good case for just the opposite -- the moon seems like it will be a much harsher locale for future astronauts, despite its closer location.
my my my ... poor grammar. "unlike mars, water does not exist"? what the hell kind of statement is that? does that mean mars exists, but water does not?
The moon has atmosphere now?
What a truely magnificent age we live in.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
NASA is calling for help from the public in designing and building a lunar base entirely out of popsicle sticks and paper clips.
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.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Yes, the atmosphere is much less harsh--in fact, in simulations, no one who has taken off their helmet and sampled the moon's simulated atmosphere has ever complained. Ever.
I am certainly glad it is less harsh than the atmosphere of Mars, since I still have that image of Shwarzenegger's eyeballs popping out of his head in "Total Recall" when he is exposed to the pre-terraformed atmosphere.
Perhaps hybrid Man-Beasts will be able to farm water on the Moon. I am looking forward to them filling some craters with farmed water, so I can go sailing there. The trade winds are always nice around the Sea of Stoopidity.
You're right, it's not astonishing. Thanks to the Apollo missions and more recent studies it was determined that our moon and many others in the solar system actually have very faint atmospheres. Though the Moon's gravity is very low it's just enough to hold a thin concentration of gas molecules very close to the surface:
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/moonI do see your point, common sense would make it seem that it's just a vacuum. What with all the impact craters and the sky being always black over there.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Near vacuum is "less harsh" than thin C02? How so? And even though water does exist on the moon, its absence would be a minus, not a plus. The "weather" on the moon may be marginally less objectionable (it depends on your tastes, I suppose) but you're not going to be out in the weather much on either of them. And as for the distance, the real question is the depth of the gravity well, on which standard I'll grant that the moon is somewhat nicer.
Even so, an Earth-crossing asteroid would probably be a better choice, or something in one of the L-points (from which you could use the superhighway for cargo that wasn't marked "Rush").
-- MarkusQ
"...However, Russell Kerschmann never forgot. He is a pathologist at NASA Ames studying the effects of mineral dust on human health. Both the Moon and Mars are extremely dusty worlds, and inhaling their dust could be bad for astronauts, says Kerschmann.
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"The real problem is the lungs," he ex-plains. "In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease." Formerly known as "stone-grinder's disease," silicosis first came to idespread public attention during the Great Depression when hundreds of miners drilling the Hawk's Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia died within five years of breathing the fine quartz dust kicked into the air by dry drilling--even though they had been ex-posed for only a few months. "It was one of the biggest occupational health disasters in U.S. history," Kerschmann says...."
"...Quartz, the main cause of silicosis, is not chemically poisonous. "You could eat it and not get sick," he continues. "But when quartz is freshly ground into dust particles smaller than 10 m (for comparison, a human hair is 50+ m wide) and breathed into the lungs, they can embed themselves deeply into the tiny alveolar sacs and ducts where oxygen and carbon dioxide gases are exchanged." There, the lungs cannot clear out the dust via mucus or coughing. Moreover, the immune system's white blood cells commit suicide when they try to engulf the sharp-edged particles to carry them away in the blood-stream. In the acute form of silicosis, the lungs can fill with proteins from the blood. He adds that it is as if the victim slowly suffocates from a pneumonia-like condition.
Lunar dust, which like quartz is a compound of silicon, is (to our current knowledge) also not poisonous. But like the quartz dust in the Hawk's Nest Tunnel, it is extremely fine and abrasive, almost like powdered glass. Astronauts on several Apollo missions found that it clung to everything and was almost impossible to remove. Once it was tracked inside the lunar module, some of the dust easily became airborne, irritating lungs and eyes...."
http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_moondust_060
Mars ~ 1/100 of earth atmosphere at sea level and mainly CO2
Moon pressure (none or nearly none)
Less harsh is a kind of misnomer. You would probably have the same kind of problem between a wall separating 1 atm air and 1/100 atm CO2, as with a wall separating 1 atm air and 0, nada...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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some feel the challenges presented on the moon will be less than Mars.
They feel do they? I'm glad we have people willing to know with their hearts rather than think with their heads.
-CGP
Finally a place far enough to go when my ex comes to town.
Fortunately, the article isn't quite so silly, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason why this article should take up space on the front page. It's not news. It's a very vague and somewhat scattered compilation of miscellaneous details that have been discussed over the past couple of years, with a sprinkling cheesy analogies and meaningless opinions on top. This fits better in the category of "Tidbits for people who don't care. Stuff the BBC wrote about last year"
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Meanwhile, we're becoming dramatically better at robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and long-distance communication. What we can do in 2020 that we couldn't do in 1968 is to send good, smart and relatively cheap robots to the moon, and actually have them build something useful.
If we don't have to worry about human safety and frailty, we can get big projects done for relatively little money. I'm talking about satellite-steered bulldozers, a nice big nuclear powerplant, and a real industrial-scale mining operation. We don't need humans to be there, the moon is close enough for fly-by-wire with reasonable ping times. Sure, once our robots build a reasonably shielded and equipped hotel, we can launch people who can say "been there". But let's first figure out what our goals are and then make sure we're acting to fulfill our goals! I'm almost sure that we're better served by some serious robots than by astronauts on the Moon.
Narrator: No one really knows when, where, or how man landed on the moon... ...but our Fungineers imagine it went something like this.
Fry: I do!
Narrator:
[Animatronic whalers emerge from a lunar lander]
Animatronic whalers: [singing] We're whalers on the moon.
Animatronic gophers: We carry a harpoon.
Animatronic gophers, Animatronic whalers: But there are no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune.
Fry: That's not how it happened.
Leela: I don't see you with a Fungineering degree.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
Big deal. The Grateful Dead played From The Mars Hotel more than 30 years ago.
Stolen towels and soap from the lunar hotel would be the pinnacle of my collection!
The space race was merely a way to put a pretty public face on the development of rockets powerful enough to boost nuclear weapons into a ballistic arc from which they could strike other continents, otherwise known as ICBMs. As with all "epic" war programs, this one primarily enriched the defense contractors involved, although it did actually create several usable weapons systems, unlike bigger boondoggles such as the Star Wars missile defense system.
The space race was ignited by Cold War hysteria on both sides, and perpetuated by politicians and defense contractors. The purpose of the space race was not to land on the moon, or orbit the first human, or any other such milestone. It was a way for the Soviets and Americans to very publicly show off the lift capacity of their rockets, demonstrating exactly how many megatons of destruction they would be capable of raining down on the other. American politicians had the added benefit of being able to bring jobs and prestigious facilities to their districts (ever wonder why most of NASA's major facilities are in the south? That's where the powerful politicians of the day hailed from.)
"Why don't you interface with my ass...by biting it!" -Bender B. Rodriguez
Two words:
space prostitute
You must be young. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. NASA has done the groundwork for at least seven or eight systems since it became clear the shuttle would never live up to its billing in the early 1980s. They never happen because the shuttle employs 20,000 people, and while the next program, whatever it is, may employ the same number of people, they won't be the same people in the same congressional districts.
Look at CEV. Instead of using cheaper, lower performance (but certainly adequate) boosters, the current plan is to use SSME. Why? So all the current shuttle workers can work on the next project, and the same contractors can stay on the gravy train working under the same NASA project managers. Without that CEV would never happen either.
NASA has become an agency all about self-preservation. It doesn't matter who's in Congress or the White House, the first priority of any established bureaucracy is to grow. Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle calls it "Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: Those whose interests are in furthering the organization rather than its goals always get in charge of any bureaucracy."
NASA has done some good work in the past, and until very recently NASA made progress with robotics and even scramjets. But the manned space program is the one that's easiest to sell to the public, so it's become "the monster that ate the budget". Over the next few years manned spaceflight will become the only thing NASA does.
Unfortunately, real progress will have to happen under the USAF as black projects the bureaucrats at NASA don't know about, and thus can't kill.
I hear they are buying up lunar roadside realty already
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Oh I think I'd love to visit there some time!! Low- and zero-gravity sex has been on my list of things to do for quite some time. Could it be possible in the next 10 years? I hope so!! Guess I better start saving now.
They also have to take into account possible moonquakes. They seem to be quite common and are powerful enough to move furniture.
from the to-stupid-for-words dept.
You can't tell me that NASA is planning something major such as this in all seriousness.
Sure, they're talking. Talk is cheap. They're drawing pretty pictures, writing nice things... but I'd bet a rather large sum of money that they'll not build anything at all on the moon for the next twenty years.
They will get several more budget cuts and generally become even more bureaucratic and immobile. There will be less and less useful things happening, and (except for all the top-secret military stuff) will be able to do less and less.
Pity about the SPACEX problem, but I'd give them much higher chances of actually getting anywhere.
Besides, hey, nobody outside the USA expects the USA to carry on like they do now. They'll collapse economically in a major way withing a few years - we just hope that they'll do it without killing everybody else. The russians set a nice example, only ruining themselves in the process.
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In one word: no.
There were certainly ill effects from their experiments, such as fairly significant loss of bone mass and muscle mass. Whether those ill effects were serious enough to be a problem, that's another issue.
Right now, Mars is a folly. Other than "because it's there" there's little reason to go, and the current technology means huge times and costs (carrying a years food, dealing with issues like someone getting seriously ill a month into the mission, taking 2 years out of your life). If we look at the great human journeys, the drivers were far more than "because it's there". Columbus sailed the atlantic seeking a short trade route, the space race was about cold war propaganda.
FTL and the like are the next thing, what we should be putting research money into. It's the only way we will find a planet with a genuine possibility of colonization or other life.
If we track the first 50 years of manned air travel, mostly outside of governments, we went from people experimenting, to having scheduled air trips. The massive advances that took place were because of individual experimentation and profit motives. Space has gone nowhere. The state-of-the-art is the shuttle and the Soyuz, both 20+ year old technologies that put very few extra people into space than they did 20 years ago (and maybe less). We need the Bransons of this world to get competitive space travel going, something that will create innovation.