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NASA's New Mission to the Moon
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new, in-depth preview of NASA's Orion spacecraft, tracking the complex challenges facing the engineers of the CEV (which NASA chief Michael Griffin called 'Apollo on steroids') as America shifts its focus away from the Space Shuttle and back toward returning to the moon by 2020. After yesterday's long op-ed in the New York Times concerning NASA's about-face, Popular Mechanic's interview with Buzz Aldrin and podcast with Transterrestrial.com's Rand Simberg raise perhaps the most pressing questions here: Is it worth going back to the lunar surface? And will we actually stay there?"
Is it worth going back to the lunar surface?
What do you mean "going back"? That assumes we were there a first time.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The initial estimates are that this time around the mission is going to be far less expensive. One NASA official, who wished to remain anonymous, said, "CGI has really matured to a point where shooting a return to the moon is now viable. Instead of a sandy soundstage we'll simply have our guys in front of a greenscreen. In fact, some of the more optimistic estimates posit that by 2020 we won't even need live bodies in the studio."
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
NASA's mandate, overt or not, is also to help the Department of Defense fulfill its goals in space.
True enough, but there's plenty of research to do on the lunar surface.
Some directly related to habitation of the Moon and exploration of Mars -- long duration life support, techniques for harvesting lunar resources, etc, -- and some of the more "pure research" category. Lunar farside is probably one of the most radio-quiet places in the solar system, with 2000 miles of rock shielding it from Earth, so it'd be great for radiotelescopes, for example.
Also a good place for doing large scale experiments that might have, uh, adverse environmental impact if something goes wrong.
-- Alastair
who cares about the MOON!
The boston police?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Modern space ships don't have to be docked in water.
Wasn't sure if you knew that or not.
They fly around in the sky.
What for? Surely this is just another presidential exercise in sticking it to the Commies?
True, but there are other benefits. Learning how to colonize space would be a biggie in my book. Besides, if we can't go to the moon, we don't stand a chance at going to Mars, Europa, Titan, or possibly beyond our solar system. The moon is the first step.
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Lol. Many, many reasons.
Yes, there's the lifeboat argument.
There's doing research and rehearsals for manned exploration further out. I certainly wouldn't want to venture to Mars or the asteroids without technology tested a little closer to home first.
Raw materials -- He3 (as fusion fuel) is one possibility. As a source for raw materials (silicon, aluminum, etc) for building solar powersats is another.
Astronomical research -- lunar farside is the best place in the solar system for radio telescopes, it's shielded from Earth's noise. It's also a pretty good place for telescopes at all other wavelengths, especially if there's a manned base to swap out instruments, repair cameras, etc.
A frontier. People need one, even if only a few actually pioneer it. Earth will go crazy even faster without one.
Whole books have been written on "why", a Slashdot comment isn't going to do it justice.
-- Alastair
As the folks at Goddard expained it during the Moon Math student competition, "When you go camping, isn't it a good idea to try setting up the campsite in your backyard first, 600 inches away, so you can try out everything, or run back in the house if you forgot your flashlight, make sure you remember to bring everything, and *THEN* go camping for real to somewhere 600 miles away?"
That's a largely non-obvious reason for using the same basic vehicle for both mission sets.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I wonder if a roll of duct tape might be prudent as well.
Absolutely. Duct tape was essential to saving Apollo 13, when they had to rig an adapter for the square CM lithium hydroxide canisters to the circular LM canister ports. (CM and LM were built by different contractors, each with their own design for lithium hydroxide (part of the CO2 scrubbing system) canisters.)
Also comes in handy for keeping stuff from drifting around if there's no Velcro handy. Standard equipment on every Shuttle mission.
-- Alastair
I agree completely with Prof. Hawking--We need to establish life outside of Earth.
Deep space scientific observation is nice, but until we have a self-sustaining colony off of earth, manned space technology should be our #1 priority.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
They also had a couple of failures - and the failures/sucesses were dotted pretty evenly across the attempts. Zond was a percursor to a Soviet attempt to perform an Apollo 8 flyby to steal NASA's thunder - in fact, it was the Zond tests that lead to Apollo 8 being a lunar mission rather than a high earth orbit mission so as to steal the Russians thunder!
Before the budget cuts of 65/66 and the Fire, NASA planned on as many as *6* manned flights in LEO and an indeterminate number of lunar flights before committing to a landing attempt. Those budget cuts, the time lost after the fire, and the growing realization that the Soviets might be able to trump them forced their hand.
So much for the myth of Apollo-era NASA being the brave and bold agency they are so often portrayed as of late. Until forced, they were just as conservative as they are today.
OK, so we shouldn't be testing things that could end up with a grey goo on the moon any more then on earth. We shouldn't try to build a bomb that could crack a world. But it really takes an effort to destroy a big rock in space in any meaningful way. What about experiments with bacteria and viruses that could (if we mess up *and* they escape) could kill everyone, or fusion power or exotic elements and crap like that? What if you wanted to use a virus to kill cancer but you weren't sure if it could easily mutate and kill regular cells as well. A nice place like the moon could prevent accidental genocide while you did some long term tests.
The nice thing about the moon is that if accidentally release a huge cloud of radiation we just get a green moon instead of a black moon when it isn't lit by the sun, whereas on earth we would have hundreds of miles of radioactive wasteland that could otherwise be a nice place to live. I mean it would still kinda suck long term if we teraformed the moon (in the long term), but it would still not be nearly as bad as on earth.
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This could be considered slightly offtopic, but I would add one more benefit of NASA Moon mission: the resurrection of public interest in space science (in general) and Space Science Fiction (in particular). Did you notice that during recent decades the theme of science fiction shifted significantly from space exploration plots to fantasy and alternative history? As a big fan of space science fiction, I feel my favourite trend is neglected. The reason is obvious - the whole space research both in USA and Russia/Europe fell into stagnation and public interest was lost. Remember how excited the science fiction writers were about space technology back in 60s? They were expecting humans to fly around solar system by 2000 and to distant stars in the beginning of this new century. Where are their hopes? Ruined. Now I really hope NASA mission will bring back the long-forgotten public excitement about space exploration, and the science fiction will once again picture the starships instead of dragons and elves. I hope.
The moon is the first step.
Why? Colonizing the moon is a drastically different undertaking from colonizing Mars. The moon is essentially a vacuum. It's cold. It has no useful resources to speak of (and no, He3 won't be useful any time soon). 1/6th Earth's gravity. And it's fairly close.
Meanwhile, Mars has water. And abundance of minerals. A thin atmosphere containing useful gases. A surface temperature that actually breaks the freezing point occasionally. Double the gravity of the moon. And it's so far away that getting there has proved to be a surprisingly difficult undertaking.
Honestly, the idea that colonization of the Moon will tell use anything useful about colonizing Mars is, frankly, silly. The methods that would be used for the two projects are *completely* different. Meanwhile, we can't even build a self-contained biosphere on *Earth*! Maybe we should try tackling that drastically simpler task before we start planning Moon bases.
"Can somebody better acquainted with the mechanics of sending a vehicle to the Moon and back please explain why Buzz Aldrin recommends taking a sextant?"
Because Aldrin previously demonstrated that you could maneuver in orbit using a sextant if your computer failed? On one Gemini flight he used the sextant to perform the rendevouz rather than the computer and radar, if I remember correctly.
Well, maybe not fuel, but you can make all the oxidizer you could ever need, and that's the more important half.
72% by weight of a typical Kerosene/LOX rocket engine is oxygen. And the soil/dust/regolith on the Moon is mostly oxygen. We just need to perfect automated methods of extracting the oxygen from the soil, but that's an engineering problem, and not a showstopper.
Not exactly. You burn some fuel to bring a small amount fuel from Earth to the Moon, and don't bother to bring oxidizer. Then you combine the fuel you brought with LOX you harvested from the surface of the Moon, and launch to Mars with that. Since you're only leaving a 1/6g gravity well, you will need far less fuel to leave the moon and go to Mars than you would to leave Earth and go to Mars, assuming you left during the launch window when the Moon has a higher orbital velocity with respect to Mars than the Earth does (which happens about once a month). All this adds up to an energy savings.
Of course, this all requires some sort of infrastructure to work, like a moonbase, and that will be expensive to build. But once the infrastructure is in place, the long-term energy savings are substantial, especially if we start doing things like harvesting objects outside the Earth's gravity well for the other half of the fuel/oxidizer ratio. There's water in comets--that's a hydrogen source. Most asteroids have the same composition as Carbonaceous chontrite meteorites, which are chock full of organic compounds--these can be cracked open to collect both hydrogen and nitrogen. Hydrogen can be burned by itself or combined with oxygen to make hydrogen peroxide (a low-energy monopropellant used in some thrusters). Nitrogen can be combined with oxygen to form dinitrogen tetroxide (a decent rocket fuel that requires an oxidizer) or with hydrogen to form hydrazine (a high-energy monopropellant). I'm sure people with more experience in chemistry and astronomy can suggest many other possibilities as well.
The bottom line is, there's lots of fuel available out in the solar system, outside the big gravity wells, and taking advantage of launching from a small gravity well using fuel harvested from other small gravity wells will result in a substantial energy savings.
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