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

Re:NASA Wants Fast Moonbuggies

[C0rinthian]

Only if it's called The Crushinator.

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

[Rei]

This poster is dead-on. There's a "long tail" for almost everything produced by human society today, things ranging from consumable parts or fluids for mining and processing equipment to all sorts of random chemicals that can be involved in the process. And each of those parts and chemicals has their own long tail.

Look at aluminum. The above poster was kind enough not to mention all of what you need to convert aluminum ores like bauxite into aluminum. Let's assume bauxite. First, you have to mine it, then crush it, likely in multiple stages, down to powder (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then wash the powder in a solution of sodium hydroxide (Insert Long Tail Here) to produce soluable AlOH. You then filter out the other components (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then cool it (on the moon, this would involve extensive radiators) to preciptate out the AlOH. You then filter out the precipitate (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then heat the AlOH to 1050C (Insert Long Tails For Heat And Furnace Maintenance Here) to drive the water off (Insert Long Tail For Water Recovery Circuit Here). You then cycle the alumina out. The alumina then gets deposited in a hot bath (Insert Long Tail For Heat And Crucible Maintenance) of molten cryolite (Na3AlF6). The cryolite is steadily consumed (Insert Long Tail Here), as is the carbon anode (Insert Long Tail Here); the anode is consumed rather quickly. A tremendous amount of electricity is consumed (Insert Long Tail Here) in the electrolysis. The aluminum settles to the bottom, where it can be drained and sent to casting (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). I'm not even going to bother with casting and forging.

Just from a more fundamental standpoint, ignoring the tails of manufacturing the chemicals/products associated with each, where are the consumed Na, F, and C supposed to come from? The moon is very poor in them, especially C and F. You can try for a more closed process (more massive, complex equipment and more maintenance), but you'll never do that great, especially concerning F and C (in the form of various gasseous carbon/oxygen/fluorine compounds). And there's a *lot* more energy needed, too.

It's easy to not see the forest through the trees when considering colonization of moons and planets. Unfortunately, the "forest" in this case is how tightly interlinked almost all of modern human industry is. And you can't just bootstrap it on other planets; you're dependant on it for your survival. You can't just go out with picks and expect to produce enough product to even maintain your survival, or expect to make products in a clay-brick forge that burns charcoal from a nearby forest. Bootstrapping, as we did on Earth, simply can't work there. You need modern industry, and hence have to deal with its limits.

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).

Re:Better than that, what they need

[DerekLyons]

Tech in these areas is much less advanced than you assume it to be.
 
Do I really need to point out that lab trials are a very long way from actual equipment? And that we haven't got any equivalent machinery on earth that functions like this - despite decades of trying?
 
In so far as weight goes - the bare structure (which is all than can be expected to be produced, even with hurricane strength handwaving) is the lightest part of the base. The equipment you'll have to launch to produce it will weigh at least two orders of magnitude more than the material they will produce. That is, unless you want to spend a couple of decades building the base... but equipment reliable enough to do that without manned intervention isn't anywhere on the horizon. Getting the equipment reliable enough to last a month is going to take an incredible effort.

Re:Better than that, what they need

[SETIGuy]

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.
If it's so easy, let's see you do the same thing on earth.

You do realize you're talking about dissociating alumina and storing the molten aluminum, right? Inside a lightweight vehicle? 1.7 MJ/mol binding energy? Melting point of 2054C? (There is a reason that Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold.) Even the commercial aluminum extraction process requires dissolving the alumina in molten cryolite (sodium hexafluoroaluminate) at 980C and requires pre-extraction of the aluminum oxide from the other minerals present (which usually involves a multistep process using a sodium hydroxide solution) How much cryolite, sodium hydroxide, and water are you transporting to the moon?

At best you are talking 50 MJ/kg (14 kW hours/kg) for an industrial scale plant. I doubt you could achieve anywhere close to that in small scale. So if you were willing to pay the cost to get the international space station's solar arrays to the moon, you could extract a block of aluminum a foot on a side each day. Assuming you didn't want to do anything else with that power, of course. Like extract the oxygen (which formed an oxide with elements in the cryolite during the aluminum extraction process). Or the silica (which is disolved in the sodium hydroxide solution).

But as I suggest, do try this at home so you can show us how easy it is.

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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...

Rims & Ground FX

[Rob T Firefly]

Also a really good sound system for blasting the theme to "2001" at all hours of the night.

No room for Bender, huh?

[Big_Monkey_Bird]

Fine then. I'm going build my own lunar lander. With blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack. Ah, screw the whole thing.

Apologies to the Simpsons.

[jellomizer]

Can you name the Moonbuggie with four wheel drive,
Smells like a steak, and seats thirty five?
Lunorero! Lunorero!
Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down
It's the country-fried Moonbuggie endorsed by a clown
Lunorero! Lunorero!
Hey, hey!
Twelve yards long, two lanes wide,
Sixty five tons of American pride!
Lunorero! Lunorero!
Top of the line in Lunar works,
Unexplained fires are for the managers of the dorks!
Lunorero! Lunorero!
She blinds everybody with her super high beams
She's a rock-crusin', sand-spuin' drivin' machine
Lunorero! Lunorero! Lunorero!
Whoa, Lunorero! Whoa!

It's about time

[Cathoderoytube]

Finally, it looks like NASA is investing serious resources into researching sweet jumps in low gravity.

Domo-kun mouth and giant pink ears

[lbmouse]

Like this one?

Airlocks?

[jbeaupre]

Dust is going to be a big problem for these designs that's going to require a different idea about airlocks. Aerospace engineers have gotten pretty good at designing equipment that operates in vacuum, extreme temperatures, etc. But they spend a lot of effort to keep them clean. You can try to seal all the systems, probably with good success. But astronauts are going to bring a lot of dust indoors every time they reenter. Apollo astronauts were filthy at the end of missions.

The designs I've seen for this don't really use airlocks . Suits similar to Soviet designs dock with the capsule or buggy. Astronauts climb in from the back and undock to work outside. Samples and equipment go through a smaller lock. Makes for some funky looking craft.http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/09/rvs-in-space-lu.html

Fast buggies and low gravity

[IBBoard]

So NASA want fast buggies? On the moon? Where the gravity is low? And no-one pointed out the potential problem of astronauts flooring it, leaping over a big ridge and crashing it worse than the Mars lander?

Oh well, at least the UK gets to share its space funding with the rest of Europe, so we don't spend only our money hot-rodding cars for low gravity :)

Solid Lunar Lander

[jmichaelg]

Gosh! I'm glad they finally got that spec'ed right. The fluid landers were just piss down the drain.

Re:It's all about scale...

[iamlucky13]

Am I the only one who sees a self-sustaining materials and manufacturing infrastructure on the moon as being worth any cost today? Without it, we'll never realize our sci-fi dreams of colonizing off the planet.

This is true. I agree with this part. However, everytime the topic of ISRU comes up, I see plenty of armchair engineers talking lightly about applying it from the get-go at very, very advanced levels, and it's clear they haven't given any real thought to what it takes to achieve the sort of results they're talking about. One of the posters above, for example, dismisses building a pressure vessel for a habitat as fairly elementary. That first of all neglects the point about structural mass actually being a minority of the payload needs for a moon base, and secondly shows an ingorance of the large and specialized tooling needed to build such components here on earth. How much can that infrastructure actually be shrunk down, made lightweight, or made multipurpose by simply sacrificing productivity?

As I said, I agree if we're going to live in space truly long term, we need to learn to use the resources out there. Once we reach the trade surplus point, we'll have reached that dream of the lunar-industrial age. But it seems like everyone is assuming with a little clever engineering we can do that right now. That's not so. It will take a herculean amount of engineering, testing, re-engineering, failing, succeeding, and taking baby steps to get there.

That's why the first resource utilization will be simple things. Once you've established a baseline competancy, it's easier to add on to it than to do the whole thing all at once. It also leaves you in a better and less expensive position to react to problems or unanticipated supply or demand changes.

On the point about sending unmanned missions first. That is actually part of the plan. NASA decided last year they should identify several targets on the moon of scientific interest and send short "sortie" mission similar to the Apollo program there. At the same time, they would also pick a site for a permanent base and land equipment there in advance of a crew. Right now it looks like two missions to send power, basic supplies, and a basic habitat. Then short manned mission to get everything set up. This would be followed by a longer missions with stuff like ISRU equipment, a pressurized rover for long exploration missions, and additional living/science facilities.

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.

A couple of things

[WindBourne]

The first is that this not really just a stepping stone. W. and DOD are pushing this. The reason is that China has been building up their military at a rate not seen since WWII. In light of how China's conducted their anti-sat test, it was more a warning to us that we need to back off (there were other ways to test their "hit" without hitting a sat. Like it or not, But both China and US will be putting up military bases there. I am guessing that USA will do mostly lasers. With the solar, and recent deal with EEstor, it will give us the ability to hit sats.

Second, even though mars is not really the same as the moon, they are trying to make this hardware work for both planets. For example, the original orion's last stage and the lander's primary called for using methane/LOX engines. The idea was that on mars would be easily able to generate methane and even O2. But the current orion went to using the J2 on the upper stage of the orion. It remains to be seen what the lander will use. But parts of the habitat, any rover/shuttle, and automated manufacturing will be made to work for both.

I am guessing that by 2016, the private companies will already be on the moon, and gearing up for mars. The mars trip will probably be a 1 way mission that is funded by a couple of billionaires. They will expect the team to live their natural lives there, or return them after 5-10 years. The idea of sending a team for a couple of months or even 2 years makes NO sense what so ever.