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.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

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!

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

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.

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.