NASA Wants Fast Moonbuggies and Solid Lunar Lander

coondoggie writes "NASA may have its eyes on the Sun and Mercury this week but it is clearly focusing on the moon for the future. NASA is soliciting proposals from the scientific and aerospace communities for design ideas for its next lunar lander. NASA officials said the Altair spacecraft will deliver four astronauts to the lunar surface late during the next decade. According to NASA Altair will be capable of landing four astronauts on the moon, providing life support and a base for weeklong initial surface exploration missions, and returning the crew to the Orion spacecraft that will bring them home to Earth. And while they won't be flying to the moon but rather flying around the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., the space agency has set April 4-5 as the dates for 'The 15th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race'. The race is for high school and college teams where they build and race their lightweight, two-person lunar vehicles. More than 40 student teams from 18 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada and India have already registered." My proposal just features a domo-kun mouth and giant pink ears attached to an El Camino. Money please!

Comments

Better than that, what they need

[ByOhTek]

Is an automated drilling/mining/processing plant. There are mineral deposits up there. If we could go up there and have the materials made on site, so we only needed to set up the base, a long term moon base would be fairly cheap.

Energy certainly wouldn't be a problem, with every day sunny.

Re:Better than that, what they need

[iamlucky13]

Unfortunately, such things are not as easy in real life as they are in star trek. Have you seen even small processing operations here on earth? Even when you know exactly what you're working with, it has a high percentage of what you want, and the wheat is easily separated from the chaff, it takes a large piece of rather expensive machinery to accomplish it. Wheat and chaff case in point: a typical John Deere combine weighs about 12 tons. All it does it cut wheat, seperate the kernels from the heads, and dump the straw out the back. And it needs gas and air in sufficient quantities to produce about 200 hp to operate. Obviously that's a high volume farm implement, not an optimized space tool, but I stand by the basic point.

Think about what that extensive mineral utilization entails. You're limited by what's up there. The lunar regolith is mostly aluminum oxide, silica, and some calcium, with trace amounts of various gasses like hydrogen and helium. Suppose then you want fiberglass. That's an easy one. You suspend the regolith in a liquid and separate the silica from the alumina based on density. Then you melt the silica and blow it out of a fine nozzle to form strands. Unless you can figure out how to do it in a vaccuum, however, which is plausible, you need a gas to blow it, either brought from earth or boiled out of the regolith.

That right there is five primary subsystems:
1.) Power
2.) Regolith collector
3.) Silica separator
4.) Furnace and fiber machine
5.) Gas storage and/or production.

But fiberglass is all but useless without epoxy, and making fiberglass parts is a messy, complicated job here on earth. You'd be crazy to stake the success of your lunar base on the ability for a self deploying robot to produce useful and quality controlled parts on the moon. Not to mention, all you've got at that point is structural parts, which are only a fraction of the mass of supplies you need.

You could look at the same needs for producing aluminum. It gets really interesting when you start looking at the mass of equipment needed to produce sheet aluminum out of cast ingots. The raw aluminum itself is very energy intenstive to produce, requiring 7.5 kW-hours of electricity per pound to reduce from alumina in high volume smelters.

And I'm not even going to get started on what it takes to make complex shapes like a pressurized habitat or a seal for an airlock.

All of this is why NASA is looking at landing all the needed supplies on the moon and practicing the techniques with human involvement from the start. The first supplies produced will probably be oxygen (which can be electrolytically separated from the silica, alumina, or small amounts of ice present on the moon), and bricks for radiation protection and insulation sintered from the raw regolith.

Start simple. As you show you can make useful items from simple processes, then you add complexity.

Re:Better than that, what they need

[ByOhTek]

Too many people see problems as insurmountable: While things certainly aren't as easy as in Star Trek, special case solutions can be productive:

> a typical John Deere combine weighs about 12 tons.
Yes, but how many tonnes per day does it output? If you don't need that kind of output, it can be smaller.

> And it needs gas and air in sufficient quantities to produce about 200 hp to operate.
Due to that being the cheapest method to get it functioning on earth. With more reliable solar energy, you could skip the gas and air on the moon for any processing task which electricity is physically capable of handling.

> Think about what that extensive mineral utilization entails. You're limited by what's up there. The lunar regolith is mostly
> aluminum oxide, silica, and some calcium, with trace amounts of various gasses like hydrogen and helium.

And several areas with notable high quantities of other elements, including but not limited to potassium, carbon, iron, and magnesium. There are places where the high concentrations of these are actually fairly close even.

> Suppose then you want fiberglass. That's an easy one. You suspend the regolith in a liquid and separate the silica from the
> alumina based on density. Then you melt the silica and blow it out of a fine nozzle to form strands. Unless you can figure out
> how to do it in a vaccuum, however, which is plausible, you need a gas to blow it, either brought from earth or boiled out of
> the regolith.

Spin the container, quickly. There are many ways to apply pressure.

> That right there is five primary subsystems:
> 1.) Power
Solar
> 2.) Regolith collector
Plenty of machines would work for this, being a generic digging tool, possibly with some instrumentation to ascertain rough
composition.
> 3.) Silica separator
This could probably be automated, but I wouldn't know the specific process.
> 4.) Furnace and fiber machine
Again, run it on electricity, the process shouldn't be that hard.
> 5.) Gas storage and/or production.
Why? Not necessar at all.

Here's a good example of what *COULD* be done.

A small solar "digging" rover. It doesn't need to be fast, just reliable. It diggs regolith, and puts it in a bin.
The bin, once sufficiently full, will close up and heat up. The aluminium and oxygen can be separated. The aluminum, melted, could then be released (possibly through a mechanism designed to pump out plates.
The oxygen? Bring up some high tolerance balloons to store it.

Similar processes could be used to make glass.

Given the regolith composition will be known, a couple simple visual and pressure sensors should be sufficient to get the aluminum out reliably. Next time up, the astronauts just need enough material to assemble the (preferrably thick) aluminum sheeting into a shelter. It doesn't completely eliminate the weight requirements for a shelter of that size (they'll need nitrogen, heating mechanisms, food, etc.), but it will greatly reduce the required weight to make it.

Not knowing exact compositions up there, other things could potentially be made as well. A lot of simple, but heavy-lift work should be automatable.

Re:Better than that, what they need

[DerekLyons]

Is an automated drilling/mining/processing plant. There are mineral deposits up there. If we could go up there and have the materials made on site, so we only needed to set up the base, a long term moon base would be fairly cheap.

Actually, we don't know if there are mineral deposits on the Moon, as it hasn't been explored in enough detail to even make a reasonable guess. Anything below the top couple of centimeters is pretty much a complete mystery. On top of which, it is not clear the Moon has gone through the tectonic procesess that create ore bodies on Earth.
 
Insofar as automation goes - let's just say the relevant processes are essentially undeveloped and the known problems quite staggering. It's a sure bet that beyond the known unknowns lies a minefield of unknown unknowns.
 
 

Energy certainly wouldn't be a problem, with every day sunny.

It's only sunny for half the time - the other half is complete darkness. Storing enough energy to keep any significant amount of machinery warm enough during the night, let alone operating, is one of those unsolved staggering problems mentioned above.

Re:Better than that, what they need

[ByOhTek]

True, but we've gotten tech where we can deal with a surprising amount of mess. There are more than a few easily locatable projects that have gains some success in lab trials for automated processing in lunar conditions.

The point is not to have it build everything (requires a lot of handwaving), but to prevent us from having to move a lot of heavy stuff from the earth to the moon (thus saving a lot of cost, and not really requiring handwaving).

Go Team Canada!

[saskboy]

The Shuttle has our first arm, the ISS our second, and the Moon will have Canada's Buggy. Heaven knows we know how to make vehicles for extreme temperatures...

Why human-powered buggies?

[Dutch Gun]

Anyone know why NASA is specifying human-powered moon buggy designs?

"stepping stone to mars"

[moosesocks]

Since the return to the moon is in effect supposed to be a stepping stone to Mars, why not send out proposals for a Mars lander that could easily be scaled back for a moon landing?

Then, plan to keep the astronauts up there for at least a month so that we can start planning for long-term habitation.

Am I crazy to be suggesting this? It would certainly reduce redundancies, and free up funds and time to focus on the other issues we'd have with a Mars mission (ie. the intermediary vehicle that would take the lander from Earth's orbit to Mars or the Moon and back)

Actually, come to think of it, I'm not seeing how a moon mission would be *that* much less difficult than a Mars mission, apart from the return journey.