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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?
> 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.
I'm sure a lot of people also said that most of the previous space missions were "an utterly worthless dick-swinging contest". They were so fucking stupid. And so fucking wrong. They mistook the declared target for the actual benefit. The big win was in the fallout of the programs: improved electronics, aerospace design, optics, space medicine, materials science, etc ... These things would probably have developed on their own due to market pressure, but a "national goal" quite literally "put a rocket under their ass". The greatest benefit of a colony presence on the moon would be the general technology developed. As a card-carrying geek, that's enough for me. Anyone here that feels that going to the moon is just an expensive waste of money and time needs to have their geek status revoked and they must join the ranks of the PHB morons.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
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.