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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 .
Strip-mine it
Kill each other for the land
Carve it up and eat it.
The Chinese can eat with sticks.
America can, should, must, and will blow up the moon. The time is now. Children are our future.
... with American pride."
"You know you can't mess
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
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
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We'd finally get real Nymphos from outer space
The raw materials are mostly there (silica, aluminium) and the energy requirements to get smething to geostationary orbit around the earth are about 3% of a launch from earth. Sure, there's not enough volatiles to launch economicly using conventional rockets, but not having an atmosphere means most of your launch velocity can come from a linear acelerator.
Of course, this kind of thing would need serious investment, but you could use such a network to reder most earth based power generation obsolete, and you'd get a nice global death ray system thrown in for free.
OK, if a He3 reactor comes online - fine, let's mine the moon. But we sure as hell can't live there, it has 1/6th the gravity of earth. Human beings are not adapted to 1/6G, we are adapted to 1G. If there is material on the moon worth mining, then people won't do it - machines will. We can make machines that would work in 1/6G far easier than we could adapt ourselves to live in 1/6G.
The moon is a canard. As is living on Mars.
I predict that within 500 years humanity will have spread throughout the solar system. But we won't live on a single planet or planetoid. Nor will we "teraform" any planets or moons in our solar system. We will instead *build* our habitats and live within them in orbit around various planets and moons which have materials we happen to need.
I could imagine a large rotating space station in orbit around Titan, dropping a nanotube straw to the methane atmosphere and/or oceans for energy. Or we might live in orbit around Earth, Venus, or Mercury in order to extract abundant sunlight for energy conversion.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live. And in space, we should build habitats suitable to our evolutionary history. And once we can do that, the notion that we waste our time looking for "habitable planets" becomes a canard. Our only interest is to look for stars and planets with enough energy to support our biological needs.
The far side of the moon could be the perfect place to build an array of radio telescopes. With the whole mass of the moon between the telescopes and the Earth, it would be well shielded from all the RF interference that our modern civilization sprays in all directions.
I want us to set up a large colony, or as large as we can at the current time. Get a biosphere or two setup. I'm sure I read that there are machines that can convert moon rock into a variety of materials, not the least is oxygen and concrete. Large habitats chock full of people would suit me fine. Moon City One sounds pretty cool to me. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime, but I hope I'm wrong.
The first pioneers will be whalers, but eventually it will be a theme park with hookers and blackjack.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
We should commit to actually developing a colony, rather than these expensive tech demonstrations. Treat it like the south pole stations. Send 50 people and a shitload of supplies and raw materials, and Good Luck.
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This is a serious suggestion, not a troll. There is no life on the moon, nothing much worth preserving (aside from the odd monolith) so it would hardly be much of a "loss". Might as well extract as much benefit as we can from it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the rainforests, but the moon is essentially a rock.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Let's not go to the moon. It is a silly place.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
...we'll learn stuff that will turn out to be useful in really unlikely, impossible-to-predict ways.
Pretty much the same answer as with any pure science initiative, really. Remember: economics may come and go, but knowledge is the only investment that will pay dividends for eternity.
It is the perfect set, don't let it go to waste.
Death ray?
Save that for Mimas.
Hey, we're only a couple of decades late, but store all of our nuclear waste on the moon, then it can blow up and leave orbit, just like on tv!!! LOL.
Steal it from the natives.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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
really... as a matter of fact it's all dark.
I think we should get Pink Floyd up there for a concert before its too late.
"A variety of countries, including . . . Europe" Europe isn't yet one country. . . last time I checked, or is the EU THAT powerful already?
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." -Asimov
2. Inspect the stuff we left there 40 years ago so we know what specs to build to for the next 40 years.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This will give us a means of getting things to the moon. We can just keep a shuttle and park it at the elevator to travel back and forth.
Imagine being able to siphon water out of the ocean. Have it collect into a giant ice ball and crash that ice ball into the moon. There you have a source of oxygen AND water...
What if in the center of these ice balls you had a heating device that was solar powered. The heat was distributed JUST enough to keep the center of the ice ball liquid. Thus allowing you to have FISH inside of it. Algae and seaweed inside of it.
prison?
oh forgot to say, i'd use it for my twitter postings
It better come damn close to being Moonbase Alpha or I'm gonna be seriously pissed off!
The only real reason for lunar operations is industry. Judging what is on the Moon from a few measly soil samples and surface imaging is a joke. We really don't know much of anything about what might be there. We do know that a lot of stuff has impacted on it though. Prospecting will be an early high priority task.
Once people start staying there more than a few days there is going to be a significant degradation in the local vacuum and the moon will start to acquire a tenuous atmosphere. Humans are a contaminant wherever we go. The extraction of lunar O2 will be first and foremost and that is mining plain and simple. Tons of lunar material will have to be processed on a monthly basis leading into the thousands of tons per year. We will create tailiings from this process and they will have to be dealt with. If water is found the same thing will happen there.
You can forget about lunar surface habitats. Unless you are fond of mutation. Living will be a lot like being on a submarine for a long time. The establishment of habitation space that does not require the delivery of hardware from earth will be a prime task. You can expect lots of digging, detonations and surface fracture and pulverization activities. These are all dirty, ugly things best done by people without PhD's. Scientists will be seen as a nuisance for quite a while.
Preparation of a large landing pad area will be also be a high priority as will the manufacture of local roads to suppress dust . The manufacture of many large cisterns for water and waste storage will be a big task too. Water paranoia will be the guiding principle on the moon. It will not be wasted. A complete system for the synthesis, liquifaction and storage of LO2 and LH2 also has to be installed using the decent stages of lunar landers for starts. The synthesis of real soils for lunar agnriculture will also be critical. In short, all the boring stuff that few people even thing about are the top priorities on the moon- not searching for He3.
If we want to do this it will take hundreds of people on the surface at any time and they will have to be there for at least 1 year stints to make it economically digestible. The transport is what eats you alive here. You must compel a moon-centric thought process as soon as is practical. If everyone is looking to earth to bring every damn thing the colony will fail. You must be able to repair and replace everything. Most aerospace technology is not amenable to this at present. There will be an evolution of hardware that works on the moon. High performance stuff that is finicky or prone to failure will be ditched. It is this engine of innovation that will be one of the most valuable things we "discover" on the moon.
As for the far side of the moon being radio quiet- not for long. The L2 point is a valuable location and it needs a telecom relay satellite to talk to it. One of the first things we will put up will be a telecom network in orbit and/or at L1/L2. Exploration of the far side will be a far higher priority than a radio telescope. That means comm, machines with electronics and hence noise. Not that they won't declare some small area to be "radio quiet" .
If we discover industrial scale sources of water on the moon its value as a base will be incredible. It is a bio-safe location for people to work. By that I mean they can live and work without the fear of being irradiated to death. What an astronaut will put up with for a few days is utterly different to what a welder should have to put up with over a two year tour of duty. We need the best welders, mechanics,seamstresses, cooks, farmers, doctors, dentists etc etc to make this work. If it is perceived that working on the moon is a death sentence it will be hard to find good help. Working in high orbit like L2 and L2, while necessary, will be minimized. Those are just the equivalent of runways anyway- not much industry that cannot be automated there.
If we go to the moon with some sort of tou
Once we get there, the first thing we have to do is kick out the natives!
What the hey. Why break a successful pattern?
Seriously, did /. need this much time for somebody to state the obvious?
Of course, this was supposed to have begun 9 years ago, and gone into its second phase about 7 years ago. But hey, better late than never....
With the lack of atmosphere, the amount of solar energy that's available per square meter is incredible. Photovoltaics are one obvious option. Heat engines that would harvest the huge amounts of potential energy to be found in the vast temperature differentials available between lit and unlit lunar surfaces would be another.
With so much cheap energy available, the obvious next thing to do is to start refining things, e.g. extracting vast amounts of oxygen from all of that silica and hurl it into orbit via a rail gun. Other raw materials and purified minerals to follow. Lots of O2 and refined materials in orbit = a good start towards constructing orbital factories. Additional ores to come both from the moon and the asteroids; hydrocarbons to come from Titan.
Okay, so now we've got a factory system set up with effectively unlimited amounts of energy, oxygen, hydrogen, and refined ores of any sort imaginable available to us at the top of Earth's gravity well. Maybe we might get serious about building a space elevator at that point.
What should we build next after that?
Whatever anyone damn well pleases.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
Obama wants to slow the space program down to spend it on welfare.
Education, actually.
It's one thing to be critical of decreasing space program funding to pay for math & science education, it's another thing to imply that the funding will be diverted to handouts.
Tweet, tweet.
Someone has already pointed out that the proposal was to fund education, not welfare, so I'll skip the blatant lie and instead comment on the gross distortion: he doesn't want to slow "the space program" -- he wants to delay the Constellation program, arguably the biggest and most pointless waste of money in the space program. He's all for continuing to fund and advance the actually useful parts of the space program.
Hmm. A gross distortion, an outright lie, and then a made up statistic about how long the money would last in its other function. How does something like that get modded "Informative"?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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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Hilarious post, but I think there are some valid things we can do there. Massive telescopes on the dark side of the moon come to mind. They could be much larger thanHubble and there is no atmosphere to block their view like there is on earth.
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Vacuum is very useful in a variety of manufacturing processes. Gravity is also useful as you don't need expensive zero gravity toilets, etc. I remember reading that titanium is one of many elements available on the moon. With lots of solar energy and raw materials, I would think a moon base/colony could become self self sufficient.
In the longer term be able to provide materials to nearby space for orbital constriction easier then launching the materials from earth. The choice of material may change, but the cost could be much lower.
Going to the moon only makes sense if you look at it as a long term investment where the break even/profit is many years away. The benefits may end up being measured more from increased human knowledge then from direct financial profit.
One of the major problems large companies have with investing in R&D is the investment is always a long term process that may take years before showing a result and even longer before showing a profit.
The longer the payback time frame and/or more expensive the research, the harder it is for a business to justify the research. Look at the internet. The basic start was back in the 70's as Arpanet. Until the mid 90's most people had never heard of the internet. Now not only has almost everyone heard of the internet, almost everyone has some type of internet access. Communications satellites were science fiction until the 60's when the first one was launched.
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.
Look, get past all the W. rhetoric. Living on the moon just became relatively cheap. For us to live there is going to sending loads O2, or providing lots of power to mine it. We are currently looking at solar power, but that really is not going to provide enough. In particular, solar will not do the job away from the poles. It would require beaming it combined with storage. That is until recently. Japan has found lots of uranium there. Not earth level, but it appears to be more than we could ship easily. Japan also has a nuclear reactor designed for the moon (the toshiba 4S). That will open up the moon to be relatively cheap.
But more important than that, is that from that uranium, we can breed plutonium that we can use to power ships as well a sats elsewhere and perhaps a base on mars. In addition, with that kind of power, we can build a rail launcher on the moon. Even more important than the He3, is the simple fact that it opens up the solar system for us. That uranium being there will do that for us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In fact, at the poles, there are crater EDGES that have near constant sun, but the craters themselves, get zero. And for a solar collector, just run it up on a tower. That would enable 100% collecting.
I had not thought about it before, but I wonder if that is not a better idea than PV?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
or whether it can be used in practical fusion facilities or not, we know that there's silicon there. A highly automated mining and metal refining facility designed to ship semiconductor-grade silicon (the crystallization is better done in microgravity) to Earth orbit might be a good way to provide the solar cells for a SPS (space power satellite) array to solve Earth's power needs and after or concurrent than that, it can be used to feed orbital wafer fabs. I've heard one can grow defect-free semiconductor crystals the size of basketballs in microgravity for cheaper CPUs with higher profit margins. That's a for instance.
There are lots of things one can do if one has zero-gravity, for practical purposes, free energy, and transportation.
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I think the moon *may provide a fantastic environment for rather bizarre and potentially dangerous physics research projects. Maybe the moon would be a great place to conduct more extended matter/anti-matter research along with various other potentially hazardous physics research surrounding faster than light travel. And perhaps the lower gravity enviornment could have other benefits for a multitude of other applications - perhaps even general manufacturing of gigantic space vessels - which would be easier to launch from the moon than the surface of earth. I say we just make an army of robots to go do all the actual work while we sit back here controlling it all from a beach. It also is a great place to put a whole bunch of Tim Horton's stores. Mmmmm.. Ice Caps!