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Another Small Step Before the Giant Leap
Armchair Anarchist writes "Over at Futurismic, a new column proposes that NASA's plans to establish a lunar colony are an attempt to run before we can walk properly, and that developing orbital habitats first would be a wiser and more realistically attainable project. From the article: "... it seems to me that the trump card is with the orbitals; orbit is closer, cheaper and easier to get to, and offers more flexibility as a long-term outpost. Sure, let's put men back on the moon, mine it for helium-3, research its history and origins. But it makes more sense to launch missions of that type from an already-established colony in orbit.""
Let's put some more junk into orbit!
Step 1: Ask for big moon base budget
Step 2: Forget the moon: Build stuff in orbit of Earth
Step 3: Profit!!!
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
They could call these orbital habitats "Space Stations". Perhaps the international community could come together to build it?
... to establish colonies in Science Fiction books and on NASA proposals. Seriously. I grew up with the dream of colonies in space, and cheap space flight. Space flight has only gotten more expensive, and our national will to make this dream come true has dropped to near zero. After hearing about plan after plan, and seeing nothing come of it, you get jaded.
I hope I am wrong, but am willing to bet we won't have anything except the ISS (if we have even that) by 2020. The only possible exception might be if the Chinese put up something similar to ISS... but even that will be a far cry from anything we are talking about today (or twenty years ago).
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I think they have a good point here. We've been working on a 'space station' for quite some time and barely have anything to show for it yet. How much planning could they possibly put into a moon base yet? The basics are pretty much like earth bases, and the long-term effects of no/low-gravity are not really known. So it'd be like designing a regular earth base with airlocks, and huge gaping holes where they are going to put the unknown things they'll need once they understand non-earth living.
Just a bit premature.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Well, it's nice to doubt the decisions made by NASA, but one would hope that if they announce a project of this scale they would have thought through their plan and considered other options first. Hopefully they know what they're doing with their next project if they've decided to funnel a few billion dollars into it?
... what 'great leap' is this? The only leap, really, is the change in vehicle. The moon is well-defined: we had the lunar prospector mission which gave us a detailed survey of the moons surface and we've been there several times in the Apollo era. Sticking around in LEO is just wasting time. Building satellites around the earth is completely different than building habitations on Mars or the Moon, structurally and in the complications faced ( micrometeoroids, gravity fields, dust and static charges, etc)
Sending people anywhere in space requires incredible amounts of infrastructure to provide safe habitation, food, oxygen and so on. For the cost of getting people to the moon and keeping them their for any significant period of time, you could send probably dozens of unmanned expeditions all over the solar system. Not to mention that the capabilities of robots will inevitably come close or even overtake humans. Investing that money in better robotics would probably be much better for space exploration.
If nothing else, going to the Moon serves as a motivation. "Lingering in Earth orbit" sounds depressing and boring (although it isn't) compared to "going to the Moon and beyond". We should press forward, it will be easier to work in orbit in parallel to Moon efforts. Think Skylab - how easy it was to put 283 cubic metres of habitable space up there after Moon landings.
Yeah, I wonder what Joe Blow the Plumber has to say about the latest NASA projects. If it's stupid enough, I bet he should make a blog about it, it might even make it to slashdot.
Never fails. Any story about space gets flooded with juvenille rants about how we should waste our time sending a handful of people to Mars so a bunch of retards can sit around cheering over someone planting a flag...
Thank god grownups are in charge at NASA.
The ISS is as big of a money pit as the Shittle. It servers little to no purpose and is detracting from he ultimate goal of Humans in Space in any kind of useful manor.
A Lagrange Point for the ISS should have been the bare minimul requirement. But instead, NASA had to justify the use of the pissant shuttle. UGH!!!! The shuttle killed human spaceflight and they still use it as an excuse to F up future projects.
I wish I could go back in time and shoke the shit out of the person who came up with the idea of the shuttle.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
What you want an ISS 2?
ISS is already up there and should be much more mature by the time we plan on landing on the moon again.
They're trying to establish a lunar base, rightly recognizing that a lunar colony (or an orbital colony, for that matter) would currently be beyond their reach.
There are actually still a few advantages to stopping at an orbital base on the way to the moon, but all you need at the base is an insulated fuel depot and a robot arm, not a massive spinning habitat. Even once it's a good time to build massive spinning habitats for their own sake, we'll want to mine lunar resources or captured NEO asteroids to do it, and learning how to make a lunar base more self-sufficient is one small step on the way there.
More nations are now joining the space-race and land is being sold on the Internet. If those "certificates of property" are actually worth more than the piece of paper is another discussion, but it is quite possible that the US government recognizes the danger that other nations such as China, Russia, or the EU (not a nation, but many) will be able to put a vessel on the moon and hence claim the surrounding land.
The one who settles first obviously will have the first pick in land, and this might be a heavy weighing factor in their decision. Plus, of course, that the ISS already exists and perhaps it is not popular enough for the masses, but a moon colony, on the other hand, is something different. Perhaps NASA just wants this to market themselves better.
Difficulty of a mission isn't perfectly proportional to the distance from the center of Earth to the spot of colonization.
Let NASA know a little bit about space missions than bloggers do, but even without this, common sense says that's easier to establish a colony on a solid surface, and with some gravity (much easier to build tools, handle daily activities and so on, even the safety of having some ground below your feet), versus a colony in a ship in open space.
But you know, universe has its ways... , I mean, if it didn't, bloggers would by making colonies in space and NASA would be teaching them how to write articles.
I'd rater see something on the moon than in orbit...
There's actually mineable material on the moon, I don't know how useful it is, but at least theres a chance the moon can produce resources as well as research.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
I'm sure it's gotta be substantially cheaper to shield people on the Moon than it is to shield them in cans in space.
You need to set extended goals to make the intermediate steps possible. It was the goal of sending people to the moon "ready or not" that made it possible in the first place. It is not the purpose of the national agencies to make permanent habitats... just make the proof of concept habitats. That has been done as far as the space stations are concerned. It is not up to the rest of us, private industry etc to make permanent habitation a reality. Bigelow is set to do this for the space stations.... the role of NASA is now to tackle the difficult task of setting a lunar base and publish the information as to what to do and what to avoid for those who will actually make permanent homes there in the future. The reason that space exploration has made so little progress since Apollo, is that national agencies were expected to do it all. Well they should not. The role of national space agencies is to build the prototypes, show that it can be done, and how it can be done, and then let the private sector get into the business of incremental improvements and actual settlement. You need an economy built around any new colony... it must grow on its own.
no it doesn't make more sense.
it was the distraction of the shuttle and ISS that cost us the last few decades.
Mr President! We must not allow there to be a mineshaft gap!
Yeah right. It makes so much sense to launch a lot of stuff into orbit, just to use a small amount of that stuff to go to the moon.
There's nothing in orbit that can be used by the colony, apart from solar energy. Everything else has to be shipped up there, or generated, or simply isn't available (gravity, anyone ?).
On the moon, there's at least a chance to use some local resources (Oxygen, building material, maybe water). And gravity. There's a lot of difference between pratically zero-G and 0.16 G. In the latter, stuff will start acting somewhat like on earth (things/liquids fall on the floor, people can actually walk and distinguish between up and down). You could have an actual kitchen on a moon base - unthinkable in zero G.
If we had waited for a space station to land on the moon, we'd still be waiting. We walked on the moon before the first human powered flight. I say walk and crawl at the same time. We can drag a space station over there after they are perfected here.
One reason: Gravity. They have it on the moon. They don't have it in orbit. Makes showering, sleeping, eating, everything more comfortable. Plus the fact that you don't have your colonists dying of accidentally bumping into something and breaking all their bones.
A colony implies people living there for longer than 10 years. Zero gravity is a bitch at 10+ years.
--Blerik
Why would we want another space station? What extra knowledge would that give us? For example, you can do geology at a moon base, I'd like to see you do that from a space station. A moon base could be a useful exercise in setting up planetary colonies. You won't get that knowledge from another space station.
If we send humans anywhere, it should be the moon. But personally, I'd prefer sending robots elsewhere in the solar system.
I would guess that it's easier to build something when you've got ground to stand on (even in low gravity). A solid foundation lends itself to a structure that will last.
Getting material out there may be more costly at first, but a moon base should be more cost effective over the long haul, especially if future expansion can utilize some of the resources the moon has to offer (even if it's just shelter).
Considering how long these projects take to complete I would say we've got the Orbiter, lets do the moon next.
I know the article doesn't mention public vacations, but wouldn't it be awesome if this led to being able to have a honeymoon on the moon? Imagine, going to the moon for a few weeks after getting married...
SamSure, manned space exploration is romantic and exciting, but manned missions to the moon accomplished nothing beyond nationalistic PR that culdn't have been done better by machines, and the ISS has produced no science worthy of its staggering cost. We will inhabit space one day but for now current talk of manned Moon bases and Mars missions are not like trying to run before we can walk, they're like trying to fly before we can stand up. There are two little machines working away on Mars still that would agree with me. Read Bob Park http://www.bobpark.org/ for detailed, expert reasoning.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
Because everyone knows the best way to make great strides is not to attempt bold strokes but to take small, incremental steps.
Right?
Right?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I think it was Zubrin who said that there is nothing useful to do in orbit. Well, besides solar power. Whereas on the moon there is mining and other activities.
Why aren't we sending a manned mission to Mars? That would be much more interesting...
Actually, I think I know the answer. This administration has consistently show that it doesn't care much for science. This is all really about providing a publicly acceptable spin on weaponizing space, and a mission to Mars doesn't make much sense it that context.
we have some serious problems going on right here at home that need tending first.
If the economy was in the condition it was before Bush went into office, I might be for something like this, but at the moment, we're sinking into debt up to our noses and the last thing we need to do is spend a fortune going back to the moon. We ought to get a little fiscal responsibility in place first. I know these things take years to work out, and had Clinton pushed it, I would have been all for it because I would have thought, "How could this enormous surplus possibly be squandered so quickly?" And yet, Bush pulled it off in record time.
I do think, however, if you take the economics out of it, that a moon colony is a much better next step than another orbital station, for various reasons, not least of which is, a station just isn't really a step forward. It's a step sideways. We need to move forward and we need to take grander steps. There will be failures (and sadly, some will probably cost lives), but it's the steps forward that make the big impact on the public and help build further support for the program.
The public was excited early in the Apollo program. They wanted to see us go to the moon and they watched it every step of the way. But then we just kept going back, picking up a few rocks and coming back (this is from a public perception point of view), and quickly support diminished. When NASA isn't moving forward, they don't get support, and people simply won't support another station, especially after the disaster that ISS has been from a PR point of view. It's been a money pit and as far as the public is concerned, it's not much more, fascination-wise, than a big, expensive Skylab.
Getting man into space is a project that will require hundreds of years of development before we have feasible and fully developed space travels. Problem is that if you're working and dedicating your whole life into something, you sure as hell want to be alive when they announce a moon base, a base on Mars and so forth.
I guess the reason mankind is rushing this out is because we simply can't start a project we won't be able to finish in our lifetime. Sad thought, isn't it?
Full Tilt
I've always had a huge interest in space. The sooner we're able to permanently and independently live in space, the better.
But a permanent, independent manned presence in space isn't likely to happen within our lifetimes. Why? Because:The bottom line is that an independent permanent manned presence in space simply is not going to happen. Earth-based governments won't allow it because they want to maintain their power. And a dependent manned presence in space is too costly to maintain. The only way such a presence will ever happen is through a power struggle between governments. The presence will thus last only as long as the power struggle continues.
As a big fan of hard science fiction, I find this to be very depressing. But reality always wins in the end, and reality in this case is that it looks like we're going to be stuck here on earth for a very, very long time. :-(
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
As much as I want us to return to the moon and get to Mars and beyond, I think we're going about it all wrong. We're sending people up on top of insanely expensive fireworks. It's just plain too expensive. It's not practical or sustainable.
Instead of blowing insane amounts of money on the space station and on unreasonable shuttle launches, we should be pouring those exact same dollars into RESEARCH on better and cheaper means to reach space. Whether it is beamed energy launch vehicles, rail-gun like ground launch facilities, a space elevator, scramjet engines, or who-knows what other tech, we will be far better off if we (temporarily) sacrifice the manned space program to sink the up-front dollars into cheaper access to space. Once you have that cheaper access, then future dollars will provide vastly greater dividends in future practical sustainable manned space development. Then and only then can we establish practical and sustainable oribtal facilities and a moon base and even a SUSTAINED Mars base presence.
As much as I would like to see us get people to Mars, I don't want a replay of the Moon joke. Over-priced impracitical throwaway missions... and we haven't been back there in THREE DECADES. I do not want a throwaway mission to Mars. As nice as it would be to get people there and get dome decent science out of it, it's just NOT WORTH IT to do a tera-bucks throwaway mission to land a couple of people for a holliday vacation and then abandon Mars for two or three of four decades.
I'd rather wait a while for that first mission to Mars and then see it done right. Do it when it makes sense to do it. Shift the current spending to more robitic missions and probes across the solar system, and shift the spending to development of more efficent space access technology.
So I am opposed to our current manned program and I am opposed to the various proposals for more manned missions... and I do so out of my deep desire and support for manned space projects.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Like an aging actor, NASA needs makeovers. Like any corporate giant NASA likes to tell success stories. NASA has an apparent target demographic of kids, students and educators. However, their real target demographic is the parents and grandparents of school aged children and adult science geeks. NASA must convince them, the voting public, that they're doing useful science. This market is similar to that faced by most educational toys.
As a corporate entity, NASA must look to the future. NASA cannot focus on boundad, workable, and term-limited projects such as the IIS, there will rapidly become no NASA. Such projects aren't as fundamentally entertaining, even if they may be more scientifically useful. NASA must continue to make plans to enhance future revenue by continuing to entertain their apparent target demographic, and appear to educate them in the eyes of their true demographic. NASA may be able to complete the IIS, but the IIS story has played out. They need something new and exiting, and they know it.
This is not written to slight NASA in any way. Every entity has its own economics. It's just that when I read stupid statements like the one made in the essay, I feel as if the author doesn't understand the fundamental economic position of NASA. NASA's primary job isn't human spaceflight, or spaceflight. It's to entertain while it educates. That's what brings in the money.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
is that if we set up operations on the moon, we won't have an exit strategy. Surprise, surprise.
1.) Radiation. Burial of a proposed colony underground would make it significantly cheaper to reduce the colonists exposure to radiation. Astronauts took cover this past weekend to avoid solar storms. Depending on the type of rock simple excavation could allow expansion of the base.
2.) Materials. It makes little sense to mine the moon and ship the materials to orbit.
3.) Gravity. It's easier and healthier to work and live in a low-gravity environment than a no-gravity environment
4.) Storage. We can store our waste and extra materials safer on the moon without expending energy to keep them in orbit. Any tinkerer knows the value of having a wide variety of spare parts lying around for emergencies. This could include storing enough oxygen and fuel for several years of life on the moon in case of problems with access to the earth.
It seems that if we can put 100+ men on a nuclear sub in a more hostile environment than outer space, 1000 feet down, for up to 90 days at a time, why can we not use the same technology to build a Moon base. Build the parts on Earth and brute force move them to the moon then using deep sea divers who are used to working in ultra hazardous environment to put it together.
To service it use 'a space bus & lander that uses the ISS as a bus depot. Never having to land on the earth.
To get to the ISS use the Soyuz and Progress to ferry cargo and people up and down.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Since Yucca Mountain looks like it is going to mothballed and all the waste that would stored in a safe, secure location will be stored in multiple open areas where there is no way for companies to profit from, they will push that we use the moon base as a way of removing the waste.
If we ship all that nuclear waste up to the moon in new shuttle type vehicles it could be stored on a crater in the moon with no worries about unknown people getting access to it and any fears of lunarquakes or water tables would not be a problem.
Without a moonbase this could not be done and for companies to profit from it, which is why you can expect to see alot of theses companies to make thier science people to come out and say we should build this thing.
I have been preaching this for years. Glad raises the topic.
:)
Actually, a year ago I wrote a song inspired by some concept art from the 70s:
Here it is, for your convenience, hope you like it.
ARTIFICIAL SUMMER BREEZE (BERNAL SPHERE)
Have you heard the news my dear?
Were moving in our Bernal Sphere
I read the brochure, it was clear
the futures here within a year.
I bought a semidetatched place
close to the zero G estates.
well work on earths first SPS
a giant maser, whod have guessed?
REFRAIN:
We will wake up every morning
under our acacia tree
life looks just like california
at the end of history
A Bernal Sphere, a Bernal Sphere,
a Bernal Sphere, my dear!
Ohhh...Were moving in...
Our kids will attend junior high
first generation born in sky
everyone will life in peace
in artificial summer breeze
Happy hour 24
everything you dream and more
interstellar travel tickets
outdoor family spacewalk picnics
REFRAIN:
We will wake up every morning
under our acacia tree
life looks just like california
at the end of history
A Bernal Sphere, a Bernal Sphere,
a Bernal Sphere, my dear!
Ohhh...Were moving in...
---
BRIDGE:
Well go jogging on the riverside
breakfast on our own terrace
floating high above the earth
well go and surf the skies.
REPRISE:
Come take my hand and have no fear
our future is the Bernal Sphere
but then again on second look
just sketches from a 70s book.
Yea, like playing golf...
.
Robert Zubrin in The Case for Mars feels that launching from a lunar base or an orbital hab would just add unnecessary complexity to the mission plan.
If NASA uses the lunar base as the launch site, then we're wasting fuel by putting the vehicle in the Moons gravity well. Granted it's 1/6th the Earth's gravity, but why bother? Since we're not capable of nuclear fusion (less a lightweight fusion reactor, much less nuclear fusion using He3), we're not exactly using the Moon as a refueling stop. There might be ice at the poles, but we're ignoring the exploration, mining, and processing of the ice for fuel. These are non-trivial.
But the article seems to gloss over some serious issues with orbital habitats. To call them "beachheads" is stretching it. If NASA uses the orbital hab as the launch site, then we're adding more weight to the vehicle (either fuel to rendezvous with the station or equipment for docking with it). To keep it sustainable as a habitable depot, there will have to be constant resupply launches to the habitat.
Seems like we're trading terrestrial infrastructure for orbital infrastructure. Instead of a heavy launch vehicle, we'll be making an orbital colony. Instead of assembling the Mars vehicle on Earth, we'll be doing it in space. Instead of one (or a few) very large launches, we'll be making many smaller ones.
Which Lagrange point would be most appropriate for doing something like this? Once that is decided, how difficult is it to put something either on a Lagrange point, or at least into some sort of stable orbit around one? Would it be easier to try to orbit one or try to be stationary on one (or am I even understanding correctly that is is possible to orbit a Lagrange point)?
Assuming we could build a space station at a Lagrange point, how easy or difficult would it be to get stuff there? Would it be more or less difficult than getting things to the moon? Would it require more or less fuel to get there (and would the difference be significant)?
Would it be wise to build something at a Lagrange point, so far from any source of resources (as compared to LEO or a base on the moon)?
Finally, once at a Lagrange point or in orbit around one, how difficult is it to escape? i.e. on a moon base, you have to fight the moon's gravity to get into orbit and/or get back to earth. In LEO, you have to increase velocity to escape the Earth's gravity to get anywhere else. Since a Lagrange point is essentially a balance point between multiple sources of gravity, it seems to me that it would be easier to escape, but then again, common conceptions don't often apply to rocket science and orbital mechanics...
Anyway, this inquiring mind is curious. :D
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I agree with this completely. Those who lived through the Sputnik-to-Apollo era remember just how carefully and incrementally NASA proceeded. Suborbital flights before orbital flights, circumnavigating the Moon before trying to land on it, and so forth.
Engineering is an incremental process. You scale things up 20% and 30% at a time, and see which things are flexing too much or developing cracks or failing. Or you take something known, working, and reliable, and you add one new thing to it.
As Petrosky pointed out in To Engineer is Human, failure is a normal part of the engineering process and the process needs to be managed so that the failures are not catastrophic. Or at least so that the catastrophic failures are not seen as imperilling the entire project.
I can only imagine what would have happened if NASA had tried to go directly from Project Vanguard to a manned moon landing.
The problems of surviving in low gravity for extended periods of time are part of what needs to be solved in any case. If long periods of zero-G are hazardous to your health, I'll bet that long periods of 0.16-G are, too, and it's easier to spin a space station than a Moon colony.
The Manhattan Project probably did a good deal of conceptual harm, because while it was a brilliant success, not too many other programs have succeeded in the same way. Of course, not too many people have been allowed to throw around such enormous resources so freely as Groves did. The approach of immediately going full-speed-ahead on every available possibility is not one that's been tried very often. And, come to think of it, I'm not quite sure what happened to Groves, but he was apparently not perceived as a brilliant success and he sort of vanished into the mists when the project was over.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Listen Slashdot- please stop with the "witty" story titles. For those of us using live bookmarks or news feeds- it really sucks to have to click over to a story just to find out what the hell it is. Geez!
Look back at exploration prior to the 17th century. These trips were made in small ships that were marginally self-sufficient. They sailed with extra crew because they _knew_ they were likely to return fewer in number, if at all, and had to have a minimum number of people left to sail. They were equipped to sail for intermediate lengths of time, but not well suited to long-range exploration. They sailed with pretty much only the materials they were expected to need, and if they ran out of something important, they tried to limp along until they could get back to a port.
Compare this with later ships that circumnavigated the globe on multi-year expeditions. The ships tended to be larger and more self-sufficient. They included things like portable blacksmith shops that could repair and fabricate unknown articles as needed, manufactured from stock materials that were also brought along.
Now that private companies are showing some proficiency with tasks that were previously only the domain of government (e.g. launch capabilities, manufacture of orbital habitats and facilities), NASA should concentrate on the next step in exploration. If they want to explore (which I fully support doing), they should concentrate on developing things which support exploration that nobody has done yet. Support tasks, such as launch capability, habitats, etc., should be farmed out in competitive contracts or Grand-Challenge style contests.
A moon base is a logical step, but it is really just a support role. NASA should farm this out or indicate willingness to purchase capabilities and participate in evaluation, but should focus on creating long-range exploration capability. After all, even Columbus's trip was government financed. Once people became aware of the investment potential, they financed new ventures themselves and eventually opened up what had been exploration efforts into commercial enterprises and settlements.
science is a religion
ISS isn't a proper space colony, though. 1. It isn't remotely self-sufficient. ISS 2 (or whatever) probably won't be fully self-sufficient either, but it'll let us work on the logistics issue first. 2. It is strictly a space lab. [want a space craft garage]... 3. It is very low orbit.
Low earth orbit, inside Earth's magnetic protection, is where space stations have to be but self sufficiency will only come from beyond orbit. The only resources available in Earth orbit are zero G growing conditions and position. Self sufficiency requires either drastically reduced costs of transport or real resources. Without infrastructure beyond orbit, there's little need for a space based garage. Without resources to trade, the positional value is limited.
Consider the world's oceans and America as examples. There are plenty of resources there but no one has bothered to make any off shore colonies. It took five hundred years to build the American economy but it now dominates the world. All the world's rockets and shuttles are more like Kon-Tiki or Greek triremes than the Hispanola. They can get us there but they will never establish a profitable trade. Much more needs to be done and none of it will be profitable for a long time. My wild projection that it will take two hundred years for the space based economy to equal Earth's. At that point, everything will look obvious.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's not much of a prediction (although as someone else pointed out Bigelow might prove you wrong). Currently, NASA's plan is for a lunar base in 2024. Therefore, even an optimist shouldn't expect one before then. A realist might guess 2030, and a pessimist might guess not in this century. Of course, by definition, I'm a realist. :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
At least this time it is extremely blatant and right out there in front, instead of a being a mildly blatant ruse as such things have been done in the past.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Rather than going to the moon to figure out how to have a airtight, self-sustainable eco-system and colony, why not try it in the ocean first?
Yes there have been above-ground attempts (why did they stop). Underwater makes it harder to cheat and would be closer to moon isolation for much less cost.
One of the big reasons for the altitude of the ISS is radiation shielding. It is close enough to the earth that the earth's magnetic field keeps out a lot of the radiation it would encounter further out. The amount of shielding needed to bring down to acceptable levels is pretty significant. A moon base can theoretically get around this by burying the habitats under regolith. La Grange points are useful for really long-term projects like telescopes and the like. However, I do think it is time to step beyond LEO.
science is a religion
All we have to do is to make sure we do not have a major accident and blast the Moon out of orbit.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Exactly. The moon has potential resources which can be used to maintain a colony. ISS-type orbitals don't.
The author of this article seems to have forgotten that the Moon is an orbital body of the Earth, too.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Am I the only one who is amazed that NASA hasn't done the obvious and used zero G for living quarters? This is _not_ a new idea, but nobody seems to talk about it any more, much less have any plans to use it.
science is a religion
"we have to learn to walk before we can run". "we have to learn to crawl before we can walk" "trying to fly before we can stand up"
The above are all commonly said and assumed to be true when in fact, they may not be.
1. Several of my younger siblings were able to run before they could walk. The MIT media lab ran had the same experience with their "waliking" robots-some were able to run more easily than walk.
2. I've seen a few babies that didn't learn to crawl until after they were walking. They had a short period where they sort-of scooted around, then went straight to walking/running without learning to move on all fours.
3. Loons (the Minnesota state bird) never learn to walk. Their center of gravity is so far forward that they are unable to stand and can only push themselves around on land (although I've heard some people claim they can land in trees). However, they are fully capable of flight.
Doing stuff in space is not a "natural progression". Just like in rock climbing, dynamic moves (i.e. jumping to the next hold) are sometimes called for because there are some places you can't get to by taking incremental steps-there comes a point when you just have to go all out and hope that you hit your target. Small steps got us the Shuttle and the ISS. We are overdue for a dynamic move.
science is a religion
NASA has already consider the points made by this article. They considered doing a orbital habitat, but the value to the ultimate mission of going to Mars was minimal. Think about it- what lessons do you learn from putting a habitat in orbit around a planet? They are completely different from the lessons learned about landing on a body and building structures on that body. So you can waste your efforts in making an orbital habitat which is simple, yet time consuming, or you build on the moon where you learn lessons from long distance space flight and remote planet habitation. NASA made the right choice. If they had chosen an orbital habitat, we'd still be on this planet in 50 years because we'd lose focus on the mission.
And yes, they might have built it in the space between the earth and moon, but again you have no opportunity to try out necessities such as mining.
Actually, the shuttle started off as a good plan. It was smaller, and had less of a payload. However, NASA whored itself out to the US Air Force to gain access military dollars. The Air Force required that the shuttle be able to handle bigger payloads, and different orbits, than originally intended. So the shuttle grew heavier and more complicated, and more expensive. Instead of a jet engine driven booster and internal fuel tanks, the shuttle now needed an external fuel tank and booster rockets. The manned booster was cancelled. Eventually, the Air Force all but pulled out, leaving NASA with a "white elephant" shuttle, and a much smaller budget.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It seems like public support started to wane about the same time that the science program started taking over. After all, the first scientist on the moon was also the last.
People are interested in exploration more than science. People like stories of discovery-modern science is a lot more about cataloguing, analysis, and duplicating experiments. They know science is important, it just isn't as interesting. What is behind the next bend in the road/trail? What is over that hill? What is that cave? Discovery is something people in general can relate to and is therefore something they are more interested in.
Remember, ADD is a given in entertainment. How many people are going to be interested in "Will I get the same result this time as the last 43 times?" that science often addresses? People just don't have the attention span for careful observation-they'll take the "Cool! Did you see that!" any day.
science is a religion
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." - John F. Kennedy You see, I don't buy into the 'small step' stuff - it seems to me that the focus of NASA since the Apollo era has been on the small steps, and it's time we look for more. So often, we cry that the only time our nation(s) push themselves is to destroy. The 60s space race, while political in some ways, was one of the rare times we rose above ourselves to do something other than make war.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
If NASA is going to consider building orbitals first, then they should start looking at the errant asteroids flying around our solar system. The benefits are twofold: You get a large rocky body that can help support and protect the critical portions of an orbital colony, and you get to mine its insides for whatever valuable ore there is.
Who knows, if we get lucky with the mineral and metal composition we might be able to start manufacturing processes in space. Once we're over the first hurdle of getting that equipment up there, it's pretty much free running - just need to ship up fuel so we can grab some more asteroids. Then mine those asteroids out, build new colonies in them, and fuel more expansion. In fifty or sixty years we might end up with a colony on Ceres instead of Mars.
Call me crazy, but I think 20anything is waaaaaaaaaaay off the mark. I can't imagine how long NASA would take to assemble something as massive as a mining/base operation on the moon. It takes a shuttle crew a 7 hour procedure to remove and replace an IC board in space, how the hell are they going to get anything built on the moon?
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
http://www.uncwil.edu/aquarius/
"the reason that spinning stations aren't used is because engineering such a system turns out to be quite a bit more difficult than at first glance."
NASA needs to get out of its "not invented here" mindset and go talk to some midway ride designers.
Seriously, though, I see where there are issues in creating a non-vibrating, rotating, airtight interface between a rotating section and a non-rotating section of a spacecraft/space station. But why can't the astronauts just have a nearby habitat that they do shift changes with once a week? The center hub of the spinning habitat would have small effects that could still be useful for some experiments that only need low gravity. A separate, free-flying lab in close proximity could be used for experiments that require minimal gravity. Then, you could even leave the experiments untended for longer periods with reduced vibration from human activity.
As things are, the Russians regularly move around the Soyuz from one docking port to another to accomodate cargo craft and the Space shuttle. What difference would it make if they were moving to a free-floating habitat instead? As a bonus, they have a safe-haven in case something catastrophic happens to the habitat.
science is a religion
We are here to protect you
Pushing will protect you
Pushing will protect you
From the terrible secret of space
I use geothermal heating and cooling in my home. It is amazing what efficiency you can get with big loop of buried coolant lines and a heat pump. I don't know what the subsurface temperature of the moon is, but I bet it is pretty cold. As a bonus, you can use the waste heat and a heat exchanger to heat your habitat.
I don't really see an alternative to nuclear power if we are serious about space development. Hopefully fusion will be available soon, but with a track record of nearly 50 years, researchers are saying it will likely be at least another 40 years before it is commercially available (i.e. sometime after they retire and it is someone else's problem).
I'm not a big fan of fission in the way it is implemented on earth in most places (e.g. no realistic plan for fuel disposal), but there are a few promising technologies that don't require off-site disposal (one idea floated involves a city-scale plant that is essentially solid state and gradually looses output as its fuel decays). Systems such as the Casini RTG have demonstrated relatively safe systems of boosting fuel into orbit. Such systems could/should be used to meet power requirements for exploration craft and bases, at least until on-site manufacturing can support other types of power generation/collection.
science is a religion
First, lose the 'gold plating" over-engineering mentality. I can see where, if a shuttle costs billions and each flight cost a billion dollars - it makes sense to spend tens of millions training and testing and practicing each move on the flight, and have hundreds of engineerings pore over every aspect of the flight.
The shuttle was supposed to turn this to routine. If the next-gen really does (ha ha) then maybe this will reduce the cost a lot. Mass produce these rockets!
NASA needs a real space station. Again, not the gold-plated, over-engineered thing up there now. Design a modular system where chunks of station (and power supply wings) can simply plug into a back-bone. Now you have a terminal where people can wait to go back and forth from the moon. Not every flight is a well-timed leap of 250,000 miles. You just "shuttle" people back and forth from earth.
You can add other modules - a big oxygen tank or 10, hydrogen tanks (for water, for fuel, for fuel cells, whatever - heck, you can even cycle back and forth with spare solar power. Allow it to accomodate Bigelow hotel modules for large-scale habitation. An observation bubble or 5 for recreation. A telecom module or 10 for transmission to and from the earth.
Next, you need an orbit transfer vehicle - a tugboat capable of freighting cargo and people from point A to B, provided both are in orbit. You could even have a small orbiting module collection (similar to station A above) going around the moon, as a disembarking point for the OTV. The passenger module would be a variation on the station modules.
In its spare time, the OTV tugboat could shuttle people to stationary orbit to repair large satellites; or remote control repair bots; or even the satellites themselves. It's probably cheaper to launch a heavier box to Low Earth orbit and then transfer it to stationary orbit using the tugboat. Heck, with the human/repair capability, you might even start to see those telecom satellites become much larger, much more modular and upgradeable. We might then see true live-from-orbit broadcasts that don't need a 2-foot dish.
The tugboat technology lets us solve the problems of refueling and storage (and vehicle maintenance) in orbit, required also to produce similar vehicles that can shuttle from mooon-surface to moon orbit, taking cargo and people to the point on the moon where they can establish a station. The same technology would allow you to hop to anywhere on the moon for exploration purposes...
From there, you establish the technology for smelting and refining on the moon, to obtain materials that are cheaper to collect and orbit from there than from earth. Thicker metal shells for orbiting stations come to mind. Silica-foam insulation for inside those shells? You can cast panels and loft them into orbit. It takes a bit of fuel to get them there, but once there, they can be arc-welded into habitat containers larger than what is possible to loft from Earth. (Especially if you are building shells for the Lunar base itself - no orbital fuel required.)
Each step paves the way for the next, each technology is designed to last and be reused, not for throw-away one-shot purposes. That's how we get there...
Countries like the US and Australia came about from a multitude of separate ventures. I think NASA has shown it has difficulty trying to do too much at the same time, but this shouldn't limit what other entities try on their own.
science is a religion
Have you noticed how that all terrestrial colonization has been targeted at land masses? There were no initial offshore colonies. The ships went to islands but nobody considered building a permanent floating colony. Why not?
There are big problems with floating colonies, be they offshore or offworld. There's nothing there to build with nor to build upon. All shelter, all living space, and all defensive fortification would have to be imported, even dirt. It would be inherently more dangerous than anything on solid ground because land bases don't crash into things. Without any large mass to use as a shield, floating platforms are at the mercy of the storms, atmospheric or solar.
So I think that an orbital colony is not as practical as a lunar colony. At the very least, they'd be able to dig in and use the surface matter as a shield against radiation. It just seems like a tremendously bad idea to try establishing a "colony" in a location with no natural resources.
We've become a race of frightened mice - afraid to venture out of our cozy little gravity hole for fear that "something bad" will happen. And when something bad *does* happen, the media play it up as a huge disaster. Millions of people die in accidents on Earth every year - is worse to die doing something really incredible?
For those who claim we have to crawl before we walk before we run - what is it you think you don't know, that we haven't already learned from operating the ISS and landing on the moon and getting back to Earth? What can a moon base teach us about a Mars base, that we couldn't learn and deal with just as easily on Mars?
We should skip the moon and go directly to Mars.
Not for flags and footprints and rocks. Make it a one-way mission to establish a permanent colony. Follow Zubrin's plan, but take it further. Send ahead several habs and several nuclear reactors to make fuel for vehicles. But instead of sending earth return ships, send far more equipment to insure the long term survival of a Mars colony, and to assist in their exploration and exploitation of Mars resources. Send more colonists and supplies every 2 years. Eventually build a Mars cycler, allowing people to return to Earth if they wish.
That is incorrect
Shoving will protect you
From the terrible secret of space
Do not trust the shover robot
Shoving is the answer
We are here to protect you
I entirely disagree.
s .jpg) To build at these points is MORE energy because you don't have the (minimal) gravity assist of the moon "downhill" leg.
First, long term habitats (I'm not even going to discuss the stupidly-low-orbit ISS) have to be at a Lagrangian point. L5 is typically mentioned. (nice map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lagrange_point
Further, both have to be built of SOMETHING. Either you lift it out of earth's gravity well and built it at an L-point (or lift it from the moon). Or you can plant a minimal structure on the moon and either use lunar materials (for free) or burrow into the surface. For a space station, every cubic cm of anything has to be lifted from somewhere. For a lunar base, if you need to expand (we all hope) you just dig further or use more moonstuff.
Arguably, a lunar base is safer for the inhabitants. The best protection against cosmic rays and meteorites (barring an atmosphere) is mass. Lots of feet of lunar dirt over ones' head is a hella better protective barrier than some inches of aluminium or kevlar-fabric. The only negative here is that the moon's gravity WOULD attract more micrometeors than a free-floating structure with insignificant (on the scale of planets) mass. Yes, a station is gravitationally neutral so it's conceivable that a 'lifeboat' pod could essentially coast from L5 or L4 to earth entirely unpowered. That's a reasonably heartening idea for anyone wanting a final "all systems have failed, how do we get home" fallback. A lunar base's 'send me home pronto' system would be much more complex with more points of failure. But the "unpowered" route to earth is only reassuring until you start to figure out what happens when you arrive at earth. Screaming into a deep gravity well in an unpowered system is asymtotically identical to 'certain death' anyway.
For humans specifically, a lunar base is probably better as well. 1/6 earth gravity is far easier psychologically and physiologically than weightlessness. We don't, as far as I know, have a good understanding of the long-term effects of the coriolis effects of a spinning station on human equilibrium. Basic human assumptions about how things work around us (convection, etc.) would operate at least somewhat normally on the moon, if somewhat slower.
No, I see no cost savings at all for a station, and when you weigh all the other factors a station makes little sense compared to a base.
Personally, I see the base as a precoursor to the station, where you'd build your interplanetary craft. But that's just me.
-Styopa
People are missing the point of a US manned moon station. Public opinion. People don't care about robots. They don't care about L5 stations. They DO care about manned missions. Note that a few years back, public opinion was in the camp of Robots are cheaper... and with NASA failed Mars missions, this was pervasive. But things change. When China announced manned moon and Mars missions; NASA (Bush) policy did a 180. The Chinese CANNOT be the first to have a permanent colony anywhere because that would mean Communist China > Democratic America. So the space race is on again. In my opinion, the right thing for the wrong reason...
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Normally when you drop something you expect it to fall, but when you're already moving so fast that you fall around planets instead of into them, whatever you drop will just continue falling in the same orbit right next to you. To get to the moon from lunar orbit, you still need to decelerate enough that your orbit impacts the surface, and then to land on the moon you still need to decelerate enough to make the aforementioned impact non-fatal.
Of course, the same applies to Earth orbit. The advantage of a base in Earth orbit isn't that it lets you just drop back to Earth, it's mostly that it lets you assemble your mission from small Earth launches before sending it out, rather than using a behemoth rocket to launch everything in one big chunk. If you want to go to the moon and back, most of what you need to put in orbit to get there is fuel, and so it makes practical sense to put fuel in orbit with the cheapest launchers possible.
It definitely makes sense to leave part of a round-trip lunar mission in orbit rather than sending it down to the surface. Much of your weight will be fuel and heat shielding for the return trip, and it's almost certainly not worth it to waste more fuel landing that and then launching it again. But I don't see how a base permanently in orbit would be a major improvement over just leaving equipment in orbit temporarily like Apollo did. In fact, I'm not sure how "permanent" lunar orbits can be. I seem to remember that perturbations from Earth's gravity and from uneven density in lunar rock make low lunar orbits likely to intersect the moon eventually whether you intended them to or not.
You're talking about shipping some of the heaviest, most hazardous stuff imaginable on top of the equivalent of a giant bomb (IIRC, the energy stored in a Saturn V was approximately the same as Hiroshima). If people got bent out of shape over the launch and flyby of Casini with a small RTG that was _designed_ to survive such an explosion, there is no way people will put up with launches of nuclear waste, which includes all sorts of materials (old coolant, fuel cores, reactor bodies, etc.) that are just not designed to withstand that situation.
I think nuclear power in space is a good idea, but it is a lot easier to deal with launching individual cores (that are armored to withstand anything) and a bunch of non-radioactive reactor components that can be sent up separate launches than it is to deal with similar items designed for earth use and after they have already been assembled and become contaminated (people can assemble components with their bare hands until they become hot; old cores have to be handled only be robots, which can be quite difficult).
Unless we see some "miracle" breakthrough in physics, I don't see launching nuclear waste for disposal in our future.
science is a religion
Let's start with a community of settlements on really tall stilts.
// This is not a sig.
We'd still be in Europe.
Because once we start sending 'only robots' like you want, you'll then move on to 'why are we wasting money on this? It's not like we're going to send people!'
Just remember, that if a robot had been flying the Eagle, it would have crashed on the moon. Armstrong had to override the system and manually land it because the 'robot' was about to crash it into a boulder.
I find it ironic that America is in favour of the colonisation of new territories in Space. A cursory examination of history before the Declaration of Indepedence indicates the reasons for colonising America were nearly all commercial, and not founded in nebulous notions like "Because it's there" or "Because it's difficult". And in the end, things didn't work out too well for the colonising authorities, IIRC. If you want to spend billions of tax dollars colonising planets only to have the ungrateful curs set fire to your tea supply, go right ahead. I mean, by colonisation, you're talking about taxing Martian settlers for their natural resources; I find it hard to believe they'll be given representation (i.e. keeping the resources for themselves) the minute they ask for it. Or will they be given representation with Diebold voting machines?
In addition to the obvious fact that we already have built an orbiting habitat, reading NASA's lunar architecture study report makes some advantages of a lunar habitat obvious. Of course, statements like, "With an orbital platform, materials that make it out of the Earth's gravitational pull are right where they need to be," show the author doesn't really know what he's talking about. There's also long-standing fallacy that an LEO stopoff at a space station is inherently better for exploration, and the irrelevancy of comments about mining Helium-3 when we haven't even mastered D-T fusion yet.
For those not familiar with the study, it basically looked at a variety of approaches for returning to the moon, based on the capabilities of the Orion capsule, Ares launch systems, and Lunar Surface Access Module designs and recommended the best one.
The conclusion they reached was that the most sustainable approach was to start by landing several missions in the same location in a nearly permanantly lit region near one of the poles (avoids the problematic 14-day night). Each mission would be brief, but leave behind equipment that could be used by the next. The somewhat modular concept for the LSAM (likened to a lunar pickup truck) means it could easily bring different payloads down on each mission. After 5 missions, there would be enough equipment to support extended visits, and begin research into In-Situ Resource Utilization and other long term experiments; things you flat out can not do on the ISS.
The beauty of an outpost with the capability to be permanently manned on the moon is threefold:
1.) It doesn't need to be constantly manned, or even constantly maintained. Unlike the ISS, which at the least needs periodic orbital boosts and constant power to it's orientation control gyros, you can simply "winterize" a lunar outpost and leave it for a while. If you have budget constraints or some other program setback and have to abandon it for a time, it just sits there waiting for you to come back. The ISS deals with gravity just as a lunar outpost would, but the lunar outpost actually turns it into an asset.
2.) It enables long term investigation of a piece of lunar soil, and does not interfere with exploring other parts. NASA recognizes that the LRO may find other interesting sites on the moon to send manned missions to, and the proposed architecture still supports that. At the same time, they can get an in depth look at lunar geology and practice techniques that will hopefully be used in a Mars mission.
3.) It provides a wide range of options for contributions. A criticism of the ISS is that it has been constantly hamstringed as nations, including the US, have been slow to contribute pieces...all while it continues consuming resources. The US would develop the launchers capable of putting large payloads on the surface and create an infrastructure that can support a human presence, then welcome contributions from partner nations in the form of equipment, experiments, and astronauts above and beyond the basic goals as they see fit to contribute. Among the many possible contributions NASA has identified are ISRU experiments, alternate power sources, astronomy equipment (a radio telescope would have find effectively unprecedented low level of noise), and a pressurized rover for long distance EVA's.
Of course, the author did get right the concerns over the fact that the moon is much harder to get to than the ISS, and there are more things that can go wrong getting there and back, but so many more of his criticisms are off base. Even the concern about meteoroids strikes me as wrong. I can think of no reason why the moon should encounter a greater meteoroid flux than the earth (a noted threat to the ISS), and in fact, might even be safer for the lack of space junk.
The US has built two space stations. The Russians have built three, counting their ISS contributions. Private industry is even getting in on the game (Bigelow). Honestly, how long should we wait before re-extending our presence to the moon? How much more does low-earth orbit really stand to contribute to our understanding of how to go places in our solar system?
so the moon comes crashing down into the pacific ocean...
But to build a proper orbital habitat, the most cost effective way, we need a few thousand people working on gathering lunar and or asteroidal materials and delivering them to Earth orbit. I'd say the next step is most certainly improving our lunar survey data with the establishment of a permenant moon base.
e ttlement/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceS
For those of you nay sayers who think the money is better spent on social programs, get bent! I want my kids off this rock asap before clowns like you trap us all here for extinction.
We need CHEAP transport into space for cargo. NOT people. Robots will be better than humans for nearly all space work. It will be a long time before this stuff is built and robots are good enough for much of the work TODAY.
By the time they get a moon base, robots will be doing far more than they are doing today. Spend the money on better things-- how about launching that grounded sat for helping with global warming? Or at least give it to japan or EU to launch it if bush won't launch it!
We payed to have it built!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is nonsense and you should know that. ISS is a great achievement, it has demonstrated and tested many things which just *have* to be done for any longer duration space mission. It is in fact the most successful achievement in manned spaceflight yet and even the much critisized international aspect of it has helped to get at least some notation of standards noone would care for with short-lived missions like Apollo.
There's absolutely no reason to belittle ISS. In fact it is the *only* major new thing in manned spaceflight that has been done (as opposed to "planned" or "designed" or "dreamed of") in decades. We should really prepare for a future in which things like Moon bases or Mars missions are either done ISS-style or not done at all. Not the least factor being the fact that international cooperation and contracts are just the best insurance against any single entity pulling the plug when the thing gets more expensive than expected (or the other party wins an election).
Do you really want to hinge our future in space on who wins an election or how NASA has to bent to get its budget approved? In my (humble) opinion ISS has shown how to handle spaceflight and this is not a small achievement at all.
Uh, no. A moon base is pretty much the same as a space station, just a bit harder (abrasive dust and hefty temperature changes).
Remember where the idea of the moon base originated. It was Bush's speech. He wanted to establish a moon base as a step toward sending a man to Mars. That's a seriously retarded idea because an orbital base is far more useful for that.
It doesn't have to be 900 meters across to simulate _some_ gravity. Any kid on a playground will tell you that a merry-go-round is big enough to feel it. I'm suggesting a "stick" consisting of a central hub with modules that are similarly sized to the current ISS modules. You could keep extending the length of the "stick" as needed, but slow down its rotation to prevent excessive g's.
science is a religion
People get confused and say things like 'no gravity' in orbit; what they mean is 'no weight'. There's nearly as much gravity in orbit as there is on the surface of the Earth; there's also nothing pushing you up to give you weight. That's why astronaut training can be done without leaving the atmosphere in the 'vomit comet'; the pilot takes the plane very high, then puts it into a dive where the engines are producing exactly enough power to overcome atmospheric drag.
Centrifugal 'force' isn't. It's an apparent force only in a rotating frame of reference, to explain the net zero force on the rotating things that clearly are subject to centripetal forces. It's also known as 'inertia'.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I am in Europe.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
I don't get this. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
Why would the moon have a significantly greater meteoroid flux than low earth orbit? Yes gravity bends trajectories inward, but the difference in gravitational force at 150 miles versus on the surface is less than 10% on earth, which has a much stronger field to begin with.
In fact, I'm inclined to think the danger in low earth orbit is higher. In addition to yanking more objects in close, the increased gravity means they're moving faster and thus can do more damage. Plus there's space junk, both charted and uncharted.
So solar activity is a logical concern, but I think people are getting overly hyped about the meteor impacts, perhaps because of the recent study finding rates of noticeable impacts are 3-4 times what they were previously thought to be.
The one difference I do see is that in LEO, a miss is as good as a mile, while on the moon, you get "splash damage."
I rest my case.
One of the reasons free hydrogen and helium are so scarce on earth is because they're so light (being the two lightest elements) that they tend to escape to space rather easily. The Moon can't even hold heavier molecules like O2 and N2 for any length of time; what makes anyone think there will be significant levels of helium there? Yeah, solar wind. I don't buy it. If it's there in levels concentrated enough to "mine" practically by heating it out of the lunar soil as some propose, it's probably outgassing pretty quickly too, so it won't be there long. But let's assume the castle-in-the-air builders are correct for a moment.
The (generous) estimates I see say about 1 million metric tons of He-3 scattered across the surface of the Moon. Given the Moon's surface area is about 38.5 million square kilometers (diameter = ~3500 km, radius = ~1750 km, surface area of a sphere = 4(pi)r^2), we're looking at moving and heating 38.5 square kilometers of soil to a depth of some meters (let's say 2 to be conservative). That's close to 80 cubic kilometers (80 billion cubic meters) of soil to process per ton of He-3.
For comparison, the largest earth-moving project I am able to find on Earth is the building of the artificial island for the new Hong Kong airport -- 350 million cubic meters of material moved in two and a half years. So now we have to go to the Moon and build the Hong Kong airport island over 200 times (220 times if my numbers are correct) for each metric ton of He-3. Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper and faster to just collect the solar wind directly?
-- Old Man Kensey
The moon HAS NO ATMOSPHERE! What did you expect?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's not just about getting people there and saying, "Yay, we made it." It's about trying to see if we can perform some of the manufacturing on the moon. If we can build the components for the next step in our exploration there, we can launch them that much more cheaply.
Valuation and creation of our currency should be a direct function of our government. Why are private organizations in control of U.S. wealth? Our economy would be better off without them. Congress should abolish the Federal Reserve.
Your best chance makes a close pass in 2029 and a really close pass in 2036. Plan:
1. Spend the next 23 years working out how to divert an asteroid (we should be doing this anyway).
2. Use 2029 pass to watch closely and attach all kinds of monitoring and research materials to Apophis. Land some huge-ass rockets on it.
3. At the right moment, kick that SOB into a gravity-assist or even (!) aerobraking maneuver to put it in high orbit (~3000 miles up).
4. You now have a space station with a mass of about 46 million tons in an orbit that will last thousands of years without maintenence. Feel free to start digging it up and refining it's metals any time.
5. Take some of the valuable metals (Platinum group, Gold, Silver, Copper, Uranium etc) and send them back in return capsules. PROFIT!
6. Avoid the same mistakes they made in Red Mars (ie when the nice people in the 40-million-ton orbiting projectile ask for independence, grant it).
Possible problems with this plan:
1. Apophis is a rubble-pile and can't take the acceleration needed to put it in orbit.
2. People afraid of orbital insertion maneuvers.
3. Their fears come true.
And plus, when we're done with the "build a colony in orbit" phase, going to Mars is as easy as strapping some big honking rockets onto Station Apophis.
[If anyone doesn't know, I'm talking about asteroid 2004-MN4 / Apophis / The one that'll almost hit in 2036]
Recently NASA removed "to understand and protect our home planet" from its mission statement. According to the NYTimes, the change was "an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the ''understand and protect'' phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities."
Many argued this was an administration-backed move to make it harder to use NASA funding for climate change-related research. But please note that NASA is no longer required to protect the Earth. In light of the administration's backing of a moon base, I have a darker suggestion for the reason behind this change: kinetic bombardment weapons. These are typically dismissed as too expensive in comparison to conventional strike weapons because of the expense of creating an orbiting system that can perform the task, and the expense of materials.
But the moon is already orbiting, provides an excellent launching pad, and had plentiful throwing material in the form of rocks. A lot of large boulders from the moon could devastate a country which attacked the US, regardless of the lead time. You might have a bunker designed to withstand kinetic weapons, but there are bunkers designed to withstand nuclear attacks as well, and nuclear power is still seen as a deterrent. The biggest expense: setting up the base, and the fuel launching the rocks.
Anyone attacking a country with a kinetic weapons platform on the Moon, even if they destroy that country utterly, could expect at best a few days' grace before being likewise obliterated.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
Contrary to your belief, Comedy films do not accurately portray American History.
Also, Stripes is not an accurate depiction of the US Army either. Just FYI.
Yup, another Chinese agent just spoke up. The Chinese have stated an aim to go to the moon to mine helium3. What part of 'we are already in a space race and the aim is the moon' do we not understand? We waste time building a microwave oven for our astronauts to get fricasseed by the next solar flare while the Chinese go to the moon, establish a colony, and lay territorial claim to it. They lay a claim to it and nobody will ever go there without their permission. It would be real easy. They set up a lunar colony underground on the moon in a real shielded location. They power it with nuclear of solar energy....does not matter which. Then they set up a gigawatt laser on it and tell the world that the moon is now there's, and off limits to the rest of the world. Anybody that tries to go there will get fried at the speed of light by the lunar planetary laser. Any terrestrial answer to it will get scattered by the atmosphere. Then the Chinese will have the whole human race by the short hairs. And the above useful fool will collect his twenty peices of silver from the nearest Chinese embassy. Too bad he will not enjoy it as the Chinese will probably lace it with polonium.