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What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There?
MarkWhittington writes "For the first time in over thirty five years, the Moon has become the next frontier. The United States has committed to returning human astronauts to the Moon by the end of the next decade. China has hinted that it intends to do this also. A variety of countries, including the United States and China, but also India, Europe, and Japan, have either sent robotic probes into lunar orbit or are on the verge of doing so." Contribute your favorite moon ideas below; I'd like to see it used as the set to film The Moon is a Harsh Mistress .
Call me critical but I think if you don't actually have anything new to say on a topic then you shouldn't write about it. And people shouldn't post the link to Slashdot.. did you even read it first?
YAWN
How we know is more important than what we know.
It looked better in the brochure.
What else?
will serve the same purpose in the near future that it has in the past: a nationalist chest thumping exercise
1. it demonstrates to other nations technological prowess. don't mess with us, we have the tech to go to the moon
2. it demonstrates to citizens how wonderful the usa/ china/ india is. they forget their earthly concerns
there is absolutely no other valid purpose besides that, for the short term
as for the long term, i won't pretend to know there might not be a more long term purpose, if you don't pretend to know of a specious long term purpose
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is the perfect set, don't let it go to waste.
Death ray?
Save that for Mimas.
Um, isn't the dark side of the moon the side opposite the SUN, not earth? (thus the DARK reference) The earth facing side is a mix of the light and dark sides of the moon, most of the time, the exceptions being when there's a full moon (all light side) and a new moon (all dark side).
Why do want to go to the moon? Because the Chinese are going?
... but it's otherwise an utterly worthless dick-swinging contest.
Let's see... why did we want to go last time? Oh, because the Russians were going. Aha.
Putting a man on the moon may be inspiring and make for great geopolitical drama, and it's fun to touch the moon rock at the Air and Space Museum
It's extremely expensive to get there, and the fact that we still have no idea what to do with it (as evidenced by this very article!!) suggests it ain't worth it. Until there's some compelling economic or scientific reason for a moon visit, I believe it's simply a boondoggle for the things-we-can-do-by-wasting-enough-fossil-fuel industry.
My bicyles
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You use an emotionally charged (for many anyway) description to say that we should not treat it emotionally. Excellent.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The valuable materials are refractory metals, like Ti, Mg, Ni, Cr, Mn.
Wouldn't we be able to get these materials far, far, cheaper by mining our own waste dumps. How much of the highly refined metals is "rotting" away in aircraft graveyards all over the continent? How much are electronics dumps? How much are we just burying in old mines along with the coffee grinds, disposable diapers, plastic wrappers, cereal boxes, and tons of other trash?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Perhaps they need to sit back and take a look at the third world countries, homeless, sick, starving and uneducated people on our own rock before we start trying to live on others.
If mere money could solve all those problems, they would have been solved a long time ago. Money is useless without stable government, stable courts, stable trade and a stable economy. The root cause of poverty is not lack of money, it's the lack of infrastructure to create money.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Without an atmosphere, you'll be totally dependent on soil extraction for materials. It's unrealistic that you'd be bringing anything in really large quantities from the earth. That said, lunar soil is pretty much devoid of Carbon and Nitrogen. Both are necessary for sustaining human and plant life. That's a pretty huge impediment to a sustainable human presence on the moon.
There's plenty of metal and oxygen, and plenty of sunlight, so it might be a better plan to send up a fleet of teleoperated machines to prep the place for a future human presence. Might take a couple of decades to do, but we probably need that time to figure out the other issues.
Been there, done that. It's a big airless rock. Unless we get some way of lifting stuff to orbit at a price comparable to, say, China to US air freight, forget it. Chemical rockets are about as good as they will ever get, which is not very. Maybe with nuclear rockets or something new, but redoing Apollo is pointless. (Also, the current NASA would botch it.)
We have trouble keeping the ISS supplied and staffed, and can't find any really good reason for having built it in the first place.
What should NASA do? Damned if I know. Or care all that much for now. AFAIC the real concern is for a private group to choose some location well away from the various government-run bases and just bloody well start shooting itty bitty robots up there ASAP. As I've said about Mars, the rational thing to do is to start processing minerals, digging tunnels that are deep enough to be radiation resistant, establishing power generation capacity, and maybe even starting a few teeny separate greenhouse enclosures in which the beginnings of working ecosystems can get going. In the next few years. Not to mention building the kinds of expertise one only gets through real world implementation.
To wait to do this with human-optimized vehicles or even simply to wait to do this until the billions of dollars in funding needed for a full mission can be rounded up and the milions of man-hours in research and development needed to make a moonbase human-capable is as boneheaded as, say, using only Microsoft products "because that's the established approach".
We already know that dust is going to make every job bloody difficult. We already know that our attempts at equipment that reliably works in vacuum and under those temperature changes haven't gone all that well. We have a lot of learning to do. And it will all go a lot better if the first humans get there to find as much mass and equipment already waiting and running as possible. So let's start with the least demanding tasks and get more ambitious as we go.
So I say:
A.) Put a couple of relays in Moon orbit. This massively cuts power and complexity demands down for the devices we later send moonside. If they can take pictures of the moon as they orbit, that's jim dandy too.
B.) Have at least two teams launch at least two different approaches to digger robots. These robots will, hopefully, if nothing else, build the first enclosures in which other robots can do things like wait out the worst radiation storms.
C.) Send more robots to survey the local area for mineral resources. Each package also includes some amount of additional power generation capacity. Ideally some mix is used of solar, temperature differential-based systems, and other approaches.
D.) And only then send robots to start doing things like making rocket fuel from moon mass.
Maybe I'm wrong about the ideal order. But I'm pretty damn sure that I'm right about my basic point. We should be launching payloads as soon as we possibly can. Barring some other group stealing what we send, we lose far more than we gain by waiting. /. classic become true.
Oh, and if we do it right, the group that does so may even get to have that
E.) PROFIT!!!!
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Quoting an e-mail distributed by the Mars Society in reference to a McCain speech from within the current week:
"I am intrigued by a man on Mars and I think that it would excite the imagination of the American people," said McCain. He argued that NASA needs to do a better job of inspiring the American public, as was the case during the race to the Moon in the 1960's. "I'd be willing to spend more taxpayers dollars [to support NASA]," he said.This is good news for pro-exploration voters, but I believe this is political posturing. He was in Florida while he gave the speech, and NASA is big business there. Until I am convinced that McCain has intentions to spend less on military conflicts, I cannot bring myself to even consider giving him my vote.
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Presumably we would only extract the interesting things, like useful metals or He3, and leave behind the useless chunks of plain old boring bulk rock there. We have plenty here. Aside from mystic voodoo, the gravitational force should therefore remain more or less intact.
And if we ever reach the point where we can theoretically actually move enough of the Moon here to the Earth to make a difference on the raw gravitational front, then I think we'll be able to handle most of the ill effects of any removal.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
If it were up to me, every kid with an IQ over 120 would get a free copy of that book, among others, on their twelfth birthday.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I know some of these have been mentioned already but here are a few tings that come to my mind.
1: Lunar space elevator/slingshot to launch payloads at high velocity.
2: Giant telescopes. No atmosphere, low gravity, and no jarring lunch into space makes huge telescopes easier.
3: Radio spectrum analysis on the far side of the moon would block spectrum pollution from earth.
4: Resources. Titanium, Helium-3, and others.
5: Laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory (LIGO on the moon). Since there is less seismic activity on the moon the detection of gravity waves would be easier.
6: Asteroid/comet detection. An array of observation stations could scan the sky to track and catalog potentially dangerous space objects.
7: Earth defense from asteroid strikes. A laser array (or a mass impactor) could slightly deflect a asteroid on a collision path with earth.
8: A base of operations for manned interplanetary missions since it is easier to launch a craft from its reduced gravity field.
9: Earth observatory. It would be a stable, long term point from which scientists could monitor many aspects of earth.
10: Fun. Who wouldn't love a rock climbing wall, swimming pool, or pedal powered flying machine on the moon.
11: Profit. I'm sure there would be a monetary incentive, either in the resources or tourist like activity, for people to go to the moon.
12: (Insert next hundred ideas here...)
Indeed there is no shortage of ideas or reasons to go, the article seems more focused on the potential problems of land management/rights/claims. i.e. Who gets to make the rules for the moon.
And moving between those locations at full impulse I suppose?
Besides, even if we had that kind of mythical ultra-fast and ultra-cheap propulsion system that would allow a colony to hop around the system there is one far more important reason why humans tend to gravitate (no pun intended) to the nearest giant rock.
It is in our nature. We are land creatures.
We got thousands of square miles of free oceans, yet most of us would rather stay on the shore.
We could live off the sea far easier than we could off the space. And we have been sailing the seas for thousands of years now.
And how many floating colonies do we have?
A self-sufficient platform somewhere in space is not a home. Planet or a moon is.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens