Slashdot Mirror
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?
> there is absolutely no other valid purpose besides that, for the short term
For some values of "short".
Reminds me of Seward's folly. Buy Alaska? What a total waste of money. Can't possibly justify such a waste while there is still one "Poor person" left anywhere in the world.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It is the perfect set, don't let it go to waste.
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
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.
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.