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Russia Talks Moon Base With NASA, ESA
milbournosphere writes "Russia and NASA are reportedly in talks to create a base on the Moon. They're looking to create either a facility on the Moon itself or a permanent space station in orbit around the moon. 'We don't want man to just step on the Moon,' agency chief Vladimir Popovkin said in an interview with Vesti FM radio station. 'Today, we know enough about it. We know that there is water in its polar areas,' he added. 'We are now discussing how to begin [the Moon's] exploration with NASA and the European Space Agency.'"
Sounds like a good idea. Hopefully they can actually do something with this instead of endlessly talking about it, and sinking money into studys.
Twenty years later than it should have been on the table.
We should have had a base up there for years - an ideal place to serve as a jumping off point for science elsewhere in the solar system, even if the Moon itself is "barren".
Weren't we supposed to have a well established moonbase 13 years ago?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
With a moon base you have access to that water they mention, and perhaps enough sunlight to actually grow food (although the water seems to be in the wrong place for this). You have shelter by digging into the moon itself, and enough free raw materials to extract an atmosphere, make building materials, etc. You don't have to bring everything from earth. You have gravity as well, which makes for more comfortable living and building. None of that is available in moon orbit.
Although an orbiting moon base makes for a quicker return to earth vicinity, the value of "quick" makes it a fairly meaningless advantage. There is no point in putting a base in moon orbit unless you intend to frequently visit the moon surface. At which time you encounter the assent problem, the same problem you have with a moon base.
The major problem of a moon base, or simply visiting the moon, is the problem of fuel expenditures for lift off. For all the Buck Rogers si-fi we've written, we still can't carry enough fuel to get out of sight. Any system we have for getting off of the surface amounts to a zero-backup, Hail Mary. There is no plan B.
We (barely) got out of the moon program without the horror of stranding people there. Until a more realistic system for getting off the moon is built, putting a base there is just a disaster waiting to happen with our current technology.
Maybe it would be easier to build the often talked about space elevator on the moon.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If we'd gone with the original plan for space exploration, we'dve had a (small) colony on the moon, an orbital transfer/construction station in HEO, and a manned landing or 3 on Mars by 1985. Problem was, there just wasn't any way to put a man on the moon by 1970 if we'd done it that way. Upside is, we'dve had a reuseable lunar lander, just refuel, preflight, and go. We went with Apollo instead because it was the quick and dirty solution.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yes, I agree...
Should be a lot easier to launch something into space if there's no atmosphere and only 16 % of earth's gravity.
Also, the astronauts would have _some_ gravity... maybe you could even build something underground to reduce space radiation?
A lot of interesting things could be done there... space wouldn't be so much of an issue anymore. (Well, only if we could get some machines up there that can create building material out of stuff that can be found on the moon... Building a larger structure with material from the earth would be super-expensive).
I would think that the fastest (timeline) to having a large presence in orbit around the moon would be to boost ISS to lunar orbit, or possibly (stability?) a figure-8 orbit around earth and moon. That gives us a large, stable presence, in a relatively short time frame. ISS is nice, but it's not really doing anything super useful in LEO.
One of the reasons that the US doesn't have the supercollider and CERN does is that they reused all their old equipment. We had similar equipage, the Tevatron, but no, SSC had to be all brand new, and ended up being so great it was never built.
We have a large, manned habitat, already in orbit. Use it.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
A) It's (relatively) not that big of a gravity well, and
B) It's pretty close to here for easy construction and resupply,
C) It's easier to protect it and its occupants from radiation and asteroids, and
D) There might be water available nearby, precluding the need to ship at least one thing up there constantly.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
A small amount of gravity actually makes many things simpler. (Not everything needs to be nailed down.)
well don't you need a way to get food / other stuff there and keep it coming.
How easy is it to get the water on the moon? is it safe to drink?
I'm sure they'll filter it first. So unless it's a freakishly high concentration of heavy water, then water is water.
Most likely you'd be shipping tanks of hydrogen and oxygen and mixing them on the Moon. You don't get any savings in terms of mass, but you get a huge savings in space. The food you'd almost certainly be shipping in and would probably come in some sort of highly concentrated form delivered by unmanned craft.
Which has it's own problems until we get the trip from the Moon to the Earth down pat. If you spend too much time on the Moon, or in space for that matter, you could easily find yourself in a position where you're no longer able to stand the gravity of the Earth. Somebody may someday find a way of causing bones to adapt to the Earth again, but in the meantime it's a very serious problem.
Don't dump our nuclear waste there! It has been well established if we do that, the waste will become critical and blow the moon out of orbit.
Fight Spammers!
Umm, no.
H2O density is 1.0 kg/l.
LH2/LOX density, in the ratio required to make water (8 kg LOX per kg LH2) is about 0.42 kg/l.
So you use over twice as much space, as opposed to getting "a huge savings".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
..."The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
TANSTAAFL!!!!
Silence is a state of mime.
I thought I read not long ago that there might be some ancient lava tubes or similar on the Moon, and that there were thoughts of using these to create underground living habitats.
Of course neither country has a strong infrastructure to build such an endeavour (they act like they do but it all looks pretty dismal). However, far better than discussions on building up missile bases aimed at each other (i.e. ABM site in Poland, Russia countering that with additional missiles).
Another to consider is Russians are essential for USA space program (and other way around). NASA was created because the Russians launched first satellite. Apollo program was created because the Russians launched first man in space. Shuttle was created because Russians still flying spaceships. ISS was created because we partnered with Russians (Space Station Freedom never got off the ground because no Russians involved). VSE, Obamaspace, SLS, and derivatives going nowhere because it has nothing to do with the Russians. Well there is the USAF space command, maybe they're still countering the Russians.
So if you are going to do a big space program... don't forget the Russians. Of course some will say don't forget Russian spies but so what else is new. If you are a country you gotta deal with spies, like server owners have to deal with spyware.
mfwright@batnet.com
Why does everyone want to build a base inside a giant gravity well?
To stock it with moon babes in purple wigs and silver catsuits. Duh.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A disk, a back flap, and a scorpion.
Are you talking about exploration, or colonization? I agree that it's silly to send humans to explore, but colonization helps protect against extinction. We sort of have all of our eggs on one basket at the moment.
To add to the other comments:
1) it's a lot easier to build a habitat on an existing ball of rock, than to ship materials into place in orbit (or at a langrangian point) to create a self-sustaining structure and habitat. In fact, there's some theories there might be lava tubes where underground habitats can be built. Don't forget, radiation is a big problem in space; inside the Van Allen belts, it's not so much of a problem (LEO is within those belts, and the ISS is at LEO). But out at one of the L points, there's nothing to protect you. There's nothing to protect you on the surface of the moon either, but there's plenty of building material right there, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to build an undeground structure and use the surface as a radiation shield.
2) it's already proven there's water on the moon. Water is a pretty important material for sustaining human life anywhere.
3) Humans need gravity or else they develop health problems very quickly, including massive bone loss. The ISS astronauts work out constantly to combat this, and it's still not enough. The moon only has 1/6 Earth's gravity, and it's unknown what the long-term effects of this will be, but it's certainly better than 0g.
Until we start build very large space stations with artificial gravity, the moon's gravity is probably a cost that's outweighed by the other benefits.
Once again I will ask the tired question, "Why do actual humans need to ever go into space?"
Look at it this way, do you want really smart space faring robots sitting above us all of the time?
Do you really want to welcome our new robotic overlords?
Do you?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's what the ISS is there for. That's pretty much the only useful research it's doing.
And it appears that it is possible to stay in zero g for a year or two with only mild long term problems. I'd sign up (as would thousands here) even if there were more serious issues.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Or maybe you could just dig a hole in the ground and inflate a tent in it. Boom! Instant base.
Because the earth sucks.
The tent won't protect against radiation. Unless you're talking about a hole underground (the way you worded it, it sounds like you're talking about just digging a big pit), which does make perfect sense. The problem is that it takes a lot more work to dig an underground cavern than to use one that's already there, but I don't think it's proven that any such lava tubes exist yet. Of course, we only recently even figured out that water exists there, even though we set foot on the place 40+ years ago, so there's no telling what else is there that we've been too lazy to look for.
In the long term, simply to survive.
I will get surgery and wear a wig if I get to live on a moon base.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I think it's important to distinguish between at least two sets of people on this News for Nerds site who oppose manned missions and favour robotic probes instead. On one hand, perhaps there are people who aren't inclined to dream, see no romantic vision in man expanding into the cosmos, and may make a good argument that mankind can have a bold future without ever living the planet.
On the other hand, there's people who have read Ray Kurzweil's conjectures/ravings in The Singularity is Near and other books. This crowd doesn't lack dreams of humanity spreading through the galaxy. Rather, they might simply say that we should wait a few decades or a century until human beings will have supposedly overcome biological limitations that hamper spaceflight: radiation exposure, need for certain sustenance, limited lifespans that would force unrealistic generational starship designs, etc . That is, such people may figure that human beings will eventually be robotic probes, and once the two are the same, then we can really begin with longterm space exploration that is more than just a stunt.
This.
Sorry sci-fi fans, but there don't seem to be any compelling reasons for sending humans into space. Providing an earth-like environment is extremely expensive. Humans mess-up, have emotional break-downs, get sick, and they can't eat their own poop for very long.
Let the drones go forth, and work on making sentient machines.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Indeed. The Apollo and Gemini used LH2/LOX fuel cells. I believe they made use of the 'waste' water from this as well.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Robotics is developing slowly but constantly on its own, but is still very far from replacing a human.
If you spend too much time on the Moon, or in space for that matter, you could easily find yourself in a position where you're no longer able to stand the gravity of the Earth.
We understand zero/microgravity's effects on human beings pretty well. That said, the longest we've ever had a human on the Moon is 3 days--not really long enough to study anything. One of the things I wish we'd have been able to study on the ISS is the effect of various levels of gravity and their effect on humans. Unfortunately, that capability was cut.
Zero-G/Microgravity is not all that great for human beings. As I understand it, besides muscle issues (ie, not using them), there's also bone-loss. I believe these are dealt with on ISS via a combination of exercise and drugs. The problem is, we don't know how much gravity is necessary. Would 0.5G be enough? 0.25G? 0.16G (ie, lunar gravity)? Do we need gravity the whole time? Could we, for example, put beds in a 1G centrifuge so people get eight hours of 1G while they sleep but spend the rest of their time in Zero-G with no ill effects?
These are things that need to get figured out.
Money is not a limited resource.
That aside, what do you suggest we do when our perfect little ball of green and blue is threatened by something we have no control over? Wish we had "wasted" the money and gotten spread out, is my bet.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
tl;dr: Robots first, mine the asteroids for building materials.
The proper plan is to start mining Near Earth Asteroids for supplies. Why NEO's? They take less velocity to reach than the Moon's surface for some of them, and all of the velocity can be done with highly efficient electric thrusters. The Moon is physically closer, but distance is not what costs in space, it's velocity and fuel. Haul back surface dust and rocks from your chosen asteroid with a solar powered tug, and have the extraction equipment in Earth orbit. Why here? it's close enough to be remote controlled by humans on the ground. Depending which asteroid and it's composition you can get: metals, glass, oxygen, fuel for more mining trips, carbon, silicon for solar panels, even water in some of them. Also sheer bulk rock gives you radiation shielding.
Once you learn to extract useful stuff, and build up a supply, you use that to build a habitat, including a greenhouse using the glass for windows and carbon to feed the plants. *Then* you start sending people. Until then you send the minimum crew you can get away with, possibly zero. With people up there and their life support taken care of long term, you can start building space elevators in Earth orbit and Lunar orbit out of the carbon you extract. Not the sci-fi one at Earth that goes all the way to the ground, that takes materials we can't make yet. You can reach 30% of the way to the ground in velocity terms at Earth, and all the way on the Moon, cause it's smaller. 30% in velocity means 50% in energy for a vehicle starting from the ground. You can now build single stage to orbit vehicles easily. At the moon you don't need vehicles at all as far as propulsion, just a pressure cabin. Now you can send people all the way from Earth to the Moon at reasonable cost. You can also send habitat parts made in orbit down to the Moon, and start building up your infrastructure there.
We already know a lot about mining and manufacturing on Earth. The main thing we have to learn is how to do it remotely, and possibly in zero gee (you can always spin things if you need gravity).
You could lay/unroll shielding on top of the tent. You don't have to leave it exposed.
You'd want to have stuff up there anyway to catch solar energy.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Because, for myself, I still bear hope that one day I'll see it with my own eyes.
And to hell with rationalization and bean counting.
...Humans mess-up, have emotional break-downs...
...and work on making sentient machines...
Anyone want to lay odds that sentient machines will mess up and have emotional breakdowns?
The usual assumption by people who have worked on it seriously (I'm one of them, retired from Boeing, did advanced space studies while there), is you set up a habitat module, which is your Space Station type pressurized cylinder, and then over that you place a quonset hut type arched structure, which you pile lunar regolith (surface rocks and dust) on top of for shielding. Depending what level of shielding you want, it needs to be around 1-3 meters. Given the Moon's gravity, that's equivalent to 16-50 cm on Earth, which is quite reasonable. Your airlock, antennas, and such would poke out of the lunar dirt.
The other thing burying your habitat does is protect it from landing craft. The rocket exhaust from them tends to throw any loose dust around at high velocity. Even if you pave the landing pad itself, there will be loose dust around that.
Cosmic radiation on the moon is pretty hard stuff. I think 12 inches of lead would be a little much for a tent. The astronauts who walked on the moon got away with it because they spent so little time there; for people living there, you need some really serious shielding to limit their exposure.
As for solar energy, it might make more sense to put those collectors in a different location, namely at one of the poles at the "peaks of eternal light", and run transmission cables to the habitat(s), which might be located in other places near other useful things. Of course, transmission cables might have problems with micrometeorites. Then again, your tent idea would probably have a much bigger problem with micrometeorites. Remember, the moon has no atmosphere, so it's constantly getting hit with micrometeorites.
Maybe we could just copy some technology from the Nazis with their giant bases on the far side of the moon.
Zero-G/Microgravity is not all that great for human beings. As I understand it, besides muscle issues (ie, not using them), there's also bone-loss. I believe these are dealt with on ISS via a combination of exercise and drugs. The problem is, we don't know how much gravity is necessary. Would 0.5G be enough? 0.25G? 0.16G (ie, lunar gravity)? Do we need gravity the whole time? Could we, for example, put beds in a 1G centrifuge so people get eight hours of 1G while they sleep but spend the rest of their time in Zero-G with no ill effects?
These are things that need to get figured out.
+1 if I had mod points. This sounds like a lot of the studies that have been/are performed with respect to living at altitude. For example, I remember hearing that endurance athletes can get a significant benefit in V02 max and red blood cell count by living at altitude but training at sea level.
Actually, the most useful thing we learned building the Space Station is how to assemble and maintain large complex objects in space. Any scientific research done on board is a bonus. If we ever want to do any other large scale projects in space, we had to learn how to assemble stuff, and this was the first really big, long term example (not neglecting all the Russian stations that came before, but they were smaller and didn't stay up there as long).
If we'd gone with the original plan for space exploration, we'dve had a (small) colony on the moon, an orbital transfer/construction station in HEO, and a manned landing or 3 on Mars by 1985.
Don't forget flying cars.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You shouldn't be using liquid water in that calculation. It's not going to be liquid in space unless of course you're intending on keeping it heated the entire way. 9.617 x 10^-1 is a much better umber for that.
Also, you can use some of the oxygen for breathing saving you from having to double up on that with the rest of the gases for the atmosphere. You get the electricity which is a real challenge to get early on. And you're not committed to using all of it for water initially. You can store it for later relatively easy.
As icebike mentions, space elevator, specifically one rotating at a tip velocity equal to orbit velocity. Then you are dropped off on the Lunar surface at zero net velocity. Half a rotation later, the elevator can fling you off at more than lunar escape, so you can pretty much go wherever you want. What do you build it out of? Near Earth asteroids can supply the raw materials for fiberglass and carbon fiber (depending which asteroid you mine). The asteroids don't have a pesky gravity well, so you can haul back materials entirely using efficient electric thrusters (~10x more efficient than chemical rockets). A partially built elevator helps lower the velocity required, so it's useful even before it's finished.
It makes sense that if these things are done to collaborate between the major nations of the earth. Why not include china as well, to pool resources, it will happen quicker, with rewards for everyone, and with more distributed cost.
Because China doesn't need US/Russia and can do it on its own?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
A rotating cable 600 km long, and having 1 Earth gravity at the tip, would let you place objects at rest on the Moon, and also fling them to more than escape. If it's in polar orbit, it also has the advantage of being able to drop and pick up from anywhere on the Lunar surface. Being much shorter than the Moon-L1 elevator by a factor of around 100, it is much less exposed to meteor impact, which can cut cable strands. Also, the climb time is greatly reduced. Instead of having to climb 60,000 km or so to escape the Moon, you climb at most 300 km from tip to center to reach Lunar orbit, and about 150 km from tip to halfway to center to reach escape. You merely wait till it rotates half a turn, to release you at above orbit speed. The rotation period is around 18 minutes.
To understand how this works, imagine a giant spoked wheel rolling along the Lunar surface. Now remove everything but two spokes opposite each other and the hub, with the motion unchanged. Smaller ones would work also, but would leave some job for a rocket to do on landing or taking off.
For the same reason that humans need to exist at all. They don't. Of course, if we go with only having humans in places that they are needed, then we might as well start purging every last human down here.
Oxygen is abundant on the moon in the rocks. You can make lots of water just by shipping in hydrogen and combining it with local oxygen. You could even make some power in the process.
If we are talking about scientific research, they provide a very poor return on investment compared to probes, we can launch thousands of probes for what it costs to launch a few people into space.
The cost of the Apollo program was $25.4 billion. Astronauts went to the moon to do research, plant flags, drop feathers, and hit golf balls. We had 11 manned missions (Apollo 7-17), 6 of which landed people on the Moon. We returned with 381 kg of moon rocks and dust for further research. That comes to a little under $67 million per kilogram.
The estimated cost of the Soviet Union's Luna program was $4.5 billion. There were 42-or-so Luna probes of which 21 achieved their mission objectives. These returned 0.326 kg of moon dust. That's a little under $14 billion per kilogram.
Robotic missions are definitely cheaper--I'm not sure anyone would argue that. The question is whether or not manned missions provide a better "return on investment"? If your return is "knowledge," I'm not convinced that's the case.
It's a simple reversal. We've got "Man walks on moon."
So...
In Soviet Russian, moon walk on you!
I don't follow. Are you saying that it's OK for us (or our distant descendants) to be wiped out from a meteorite impact because our unfortunate descendants will "technically" be a different species? I would prefer that humanity survive long enough for that to happen.
I suppose humans don't need to go into space. We don't need to leave our basements either for that matter. Some humans may want to go into space.
I would think since the moon lacks a protective atmosphere, any old rock flying through space would make this project halt pretty quickly I would think.
If Russia's intent here is sincere and carries no ulterior motive, then they should be congratulated for doing what even the United States has failed to do. Cooperative, not competitive, exploration and colonization is the wise approach.
It's a lovely vision. I don't wish to crap all over it, but we're still struggling with how to deal with bone loss and atrophy. And that's with the most athletic candidates that take on such orbital missions. How can we ever have an average-Joe take on employment in such a space mining industry? The caliber of men and women necessary to do these missions would be exceedingly costly. I'm afraid until such problems are solved, cheap 3rd world labor strip mining in afghanistan would be cheaper and less risky if you can believe that.
Life is not for the lazy.
Moving Earth-life into space is the reason Nature evolved big-brained variants of itself. Every single nook & cranny of the planet that can possibly sustain life, does. It is Nature's fundamental way to grow and expand, but there is nowhere else for It to go. It is everywhere It can be. For It to reach beyond its gravitational limits, It (out of necessity) had to evolve intelligence capable of figuring out how to free Itself from this limitation.
In a nutshell, space habitation is what we were made to do; there is nothing else more important. I don't understand how we got lost along the way, but it probably has to do with the complications of intelligence.
We need the lunar version of a self-replicating machine shop that can reproduce >95% of its parts from materials that are proxucible on the moon. It will likely be a while before things like microchips or things requiring exotic materials wil be easier to make there, but other things may be produced from raw materials or grown (feasibility depends on what feedstocks can be found vs what needs to be shipped in). We need to look for the advantages that would allow new basic approaches to create processed goods at low cost. use of solar furnaces mirrors in a vaccum environment may make it easy to refine titanium from the regolith. If you can do that, that is a huge step towards self sustainment or even a viable export commodity.
science is a religion
The coriolis forces would probably make it too uncomfortable to sleep in a small centrifuge. Studies have shown that you really need to be under 2 rpm for most humans to live without adverse effects. Above 7 rpm and you can just forget about it. Not to mention that it's quite likely that you'd get a lot more benefit from the simulated gravity while awake, upright and moving around. So, at 2 rpm, you need a radius of at least 224 meters, and it's a linear speed around the outside of about 169 km/h. On the moon, if you had the resources, you could pull that off with what amounts to a fast circular train on a circular track about 1.4 km long. The track would need to be mounted on an almost vertical slope, or the interior of the car would need to have sloped floors and the speed would need to be adjusted slightly so that the moons gravity and the centrifugal force add up to exactly 1 g perpendicular to the floor. This would provide a large living area with earth normal gravity. Parallel tracks above and below could have smaller "elevators" that can match speed with the habitat then lock on to let people on and off without having to stop the entire thing every time someone needs to get off.
So, even if it turns out that humans can't survive for long periods of time under the moon's gravity, we have a solution we know will work because it uses train technology we know will work (unless it turns out that there's a biologically significant difference between simulated gravity and real gravity that would ruin this plan, which seems very unlikely) and that millions of people use every day on Earth. The only problem is, it's an intermediate or long term solution, not a near term one because we either need the lift capacity to send all the digging equipment, track and train cars to the moon (although, it obviously doesn't have to start with a full 1.4 km long train, that's just a way to make full use of the track), or we need to have the infrastructure on the moon to build it.
Now, if it turns out that spending half the day in earth normal gravity and the other half at 1/8th g still causes health problems, then we may be up a creek without some sort of bio-engineering solution. That doesn't seem likely though.
Since oxygen and hydrogen can be obtained from the moon, by using Sun light for energy to crack water - it would seem to make sense to export oxygen and hydrogen to Low Earth Orbit, as it requires less energy to get to LEO from the moon than from the Earth. This would reduce the size of rockets required to deliver payload from the Earth's surface to the Moon!
I think longer term getting to the Moon will be a 3 stage journey:
(1) from Earth to LEO station
(2) from LEO to a Moon orbiting station
(3) from the Moon orbiting station to the Moon's surface
Why spend the energy repeatedly lifting a new heavy vehicle required for people to live a week from the Earth's surface and throw it away after each journey? The 3 vehicles for the 3 stages are very different in function, leaving 2 of them in space best way reuse them. Reusing the Earth to LEO rocket is the most difficult.
You just freaking blew my mind. Thank you.
If you're near the Everett plant, I'd love to buy you a beer and chat sometime. My email is above and the whois for the domain is current.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Once again I will ask the tired question, "Why do actual humans need to ever go into space?"
Take your moon base money and your ISS money and give it to the roboticists, that we might finally advance from a 1940s view of space exploration.
The same might be said about /.
Yet you're here when your robot could be surfing the web and posting witty comments!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Madness
I am so ready for this, i have played, er, trained many many hours.
Be seeing you...
Haha, touche.
I really dont have a problem with going to space for the hell of it, I'd buy a ticket if I could, just don't pass it off as priority research.
Think of all Hubble has done, at barely 1/1000th of the way to the moon. Not to mention the cost difference.
Re-read the sequence in my previous article. Mining and ore processing are done by robots. Then you build a habitat once you have stockpiled materials. Your minimal robot assisted construction crew can survive for at least 6 months in zero-g, that's how long the Space Station tours of duty are. The habitat itself is rotating to make artificial gravity, so that problem is solved.
What has terrestrial mining in Afghanistan got to do with this discussion? This is mining in space TO USE IN SPACE. The reason to do that is to avoid the high cost of launching stuff from Earth. Cost of mining on Earth is irrelevant.
Short term: Live on a rotating habitat at one G in lunar orbit (a rotating space elevator would work, but smaller habitats also). Only make short trips to the Lunar surface to repair things. Do all the other stuff by remote control. You are close enough at Lunar orbit that remote control does not have lag from speed of light.
Long term: Find an appropriately sized crater. Build a roof over it and cover roof with 1-3 meters of lunar soil for radiation shielding (you forgot about that part). Build centrifuge in the space between. It can be centrally supported on a pivot, externally supported like the rails you suggest, or both. Start with just two opposed modules, and build up to a full ring. Dig down in the crater and add more rings if you need more living space.
Fuck People. Start the space mining, and simultaneously work on AI for the robots. By the time either pipe dream comes to fruition we'll all be extinct anyhow. At least some small spark of life can carry on where we failed to collaborate a way off this rock. With any luck the drive to create and explore the cosmos will live on in our more sturdy & logical cybernetic creations.
Money is not a limited resource.
That aside, what do you suggest we do when our perfect little ball of green and blue is threatened by something we have no control over? Wish we had "wasted" the money and gotten spread out, is my bet.
Money is not a limited resource. The stuff it represents or buys is finite. It's not a question of "how much money are we prepared to spend?" but rather "how much of of our resources and labour are we prepared to dedicate?". In fact, for any government-funded program, it's actually a question of "how much of the resources taxed from the population are we prepared to dedicate?".
A few places have thought over the years that "money is not a limited resource, so lets print some more" (1930s Germany, Zimbabwe recently as examples). It doesn't work out very well.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
We should have had a base up there for years - an ideal place to serve as a jumping off point for science elsewhere in the solar system, even if the Moon itself is "barren".
Uh, no. Although there are perhaps reasons to go to the moon, there are good reasons not to as well. The 28-day lunar night will make it difficult to ever grow food or use solar power there, and the almost complete lack of volatiles will make any lunar resources extremely difficult to extract on site. And before anyone natters on about iron and titanium on the moon, look at the abundances of these; I've got better ores growing grass in my back yard.
And then there's that gravity well. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to be annoying and costly (all those steel beams you're manufacturing at the lunar Pittsburgh are going to need to get back to Earth orbit to be valuable, and the delta-vee for that is somewhere around 2.8 km/s.) To be long-term viable, the fuel for that is going to have to be produced on the moon (see aforementioned lack of volatiles.) The delta-vee budget to send something to the outer solar system from the moon's surface is only slightly less than to send it directly from low Earth orbit.
The Lagrangian points in the Earth-moon system are, in many ways, more attractive for settlement, provided that near-earth asteroids prove useful for raw materials. And even the surface of Mars makes more economic sense in supplying exploration and exploitation of the outer solar system.
I'd like to read more of your writing about aerospace engineering. Do you have any essays, etc. online?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Why not to go down into Earth? There is unlimited source of energy there. Just some 10 - 15 km and unlimited source of energy.
The temperature increases 30 degrees with each kilometer down. Why not to build a large scale energy generating and R&D station there?
Right? We're in charge RIGHT now. That is all the right we need.
Somewhere out in space is a huge rock, and it is heading our way.
A lot of that is only a problem if you want to come back again. There is an obvious solution.
Russia already completed its collapse into economic irrelevance. Oil is about all they have left.
Really, really huge telescopes. Not only is there no atmospheric distortion (Adaptive optics will only take you so far) but with low gravity and no wind at all you can build them big and build them light.
That's what I mean by jumping off point. You have to take it in stages unless you want to risk a manned Mars base from the outset - right now we've found it hard to run a self sustaining isolated environment *on earth* let alone on another rock. You learn on the Moon, with a shorter lifeline to Earth, even if it's energy-expensive and not long-term viable, then you move outwards. The point is to cut our teeth in the "relative safety" of the Moon before we are confident about going further abroad.
I meant breast implants.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
No, seriously... why? Because the Chinese are talking about going there? Is it going to be a big busywork project like the space station?
I can think of a half dozen space-related projects that would make more sense to fund, and at a fraction of the cost. This obsession with big vanity projects is crazy in light of the budgetary environment we'll be in for the next few decades.
I suppose since Slashdot has a wide variety of readers from different countries that your post is correct in saying specifically why Slashdot readers might oppose such a mission, but since people in Europe, Australia, etc. are not US citizens it might be more relevant to talk about why Americans oppose such things too. The general argument goes like this - "How can we pay for _____________ (insert anything space related) when we still have problems in this country that we haven't solved?" Back in the day it was easy to sell the American public on space missions because they were exciting and there was also a fear that "If we don't do it first, the Russkies will use it to destroy us". Geez, back in the late 1960s the movie "2001 A Space Odyssey" pictured a working space station and lunar bases in 2001. The old "UFO" TV show from the early 1970s had a small lunar base in the 1980s. Here it is 2012 and we can't even get enough enthusiasm up to even go back just one more time to the moon, let alone do anything interesting or useful there. What it is going to take is a president and Congress who want to make it a priority and they basically say "Screw it. We're paying for it. End of story." We'll never go back until the Chinese put their own base up if we wait for the American public to get on board with this. I believe for various reasons that the Russians are quite sincere about wanting to find partners, but you could probably just substitute "European" for "American" in my post and you'd have the same result. Sorry Ivan, but if you want a partner for a lunar base you're probably going to need to talk to Beijing. Sigh.
I wonder how drinkable it would be... full of radiation, maybe?
Make the landing pad slightly bowl-shaped.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The problem with a rotating tether as you describe is that you only get an "instant" to catch the end of the cable, secure it to the payload, and then clear the area as the payload takes off.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Great plan below here, but from a politician with elections coming up in less than 2/4/6 years, a) tl/dr, b) what kind of payback horizon are you talking about? Will my voters see anything worthwhile in their lifetime? In their children's lifetime?, c) take anything the far out science guys say, and multiply the schedule x3, the budget x12, and the tangible taxable benefits x0.2, does it still sound good? Good enough to get me re-elected? "We're going to Mars!" was a dud for W., why should I think I'll get more bang out of supporting this?
Short version: build a bridge, one plank at a time, and get to several something usefuls along the way - pie in the sky is going to stay there.
tl;dr: Robots first, mine the asteroids for building materials.
The proper plan is to start mining Near Earth Asteroids for supplies. Why NEO's? They take less velocity to reach than the Moon's surface for some of them, and all of the velocity can be done with highly efficient electric thrusters. The Moon is physically closer, but distance is not what costs in space, it's velocity and fuel. Haul back surface dust and rocks from your chosen asteroid with a solar powered tug, and have the extraction equipment in Earth orbit. Why here? it's close enough to be remote controlled by humans on the ground. Depending which asteroid and it's composition you can get: metals, glass, oxygen, fuel for more mining trips, carbon, silicon for solar panels, even water in some of them. Also sheer bulk rock gives you radiation shielding.
Once you learn to extract useful stuff, and build up a supply, you use that to build a habitat, including a greenhouse using the glass for windows and carbon to feed the plants. *Then* you start sending people. Until then you send the minimum crew you can get away with, possibly zero. With people up there and their life support taken care of long term, you can start building space elevators in Earth orbit and Lunar orbit out of the carbon you extract. Not the sci-fi one at Earth that goes all the way to the ground, that takes materials we can't make yet. You can reach 30% of the way to the ground in velocity terms at Earth, and all the way on the Moon, cause it's smaller. 30% in velocity means 50% in energy for a vehicle starting from the ground. You can now build single stage to orbit vehicles easily. At the moon you don't need vehicles at all as far as propulsion, just a pressure cabin. Now you can send people all the way from Earth to the Moon at reasonable cost. You can also send habitat parts made in orbit down to the Moon, and start building up your infrastructure there.
We already know a lot about mining and manufacturing on Earth. The main thing we have to learn is how to do it remotely, and possibly in zero gee (you can always spin things if you need gravity).
I had the shielding in the concept, but I didn't describe it well enough. Essentially you dig a circular trench and the sloped outer wall is what you mount the track on. You make a ceiling for the trench and pack soil on that. The shielding is actually why I like the trench and train track approach to the crater approach. If you use a circular trench, you just have to cover the trench, if you use a crater, you have to either cover the whole crater, or build up an inner wall so you can make a ceiling over the track area. Also, I prefer the track to the central pivot. For one thing, if you want the central pivot, you really do need to cover the whole area (or build a large heavy overhang around the edge at least). For another, for safety you'll want a track around the outside anyway even with the central pivot otherwise the arm needs to be be super strong to stop the modules from drooping when it's not spinning (the track needs to be strong as well, of course, and designed so that the train can just hang on it when not moving. Finally, you don't have to balance the track-based system on either side, you can start with just one car, and you can build up a habitat one car at a time with all cars connected to each other.
I've actually put more thought into this than is healthy. Descending rings as you suggest are a good idea for increasing capacity, you could even have bridges between the rings. I also looked at concentric rings. If you have a starting ring at 224 meters, and you have about 30 meters to the next ring, you can get in five rings before you hit 344 meters at which point the linear speed required for 1 G is 209 kph (don't remember why but I selected 210 kph as a max safe speed). At that point, you have 2.16 km of track. I imagined a triple standard width train car at 9 meters wide and about double height at 9 meters high, with a length of 26 meters (based on the length of an extra-long train car). With three internal stories, it would have about 700 square meters of floor space (not counting space taken by walls, doors, partitions, infrastructure, and ladders/stairs/elevators. That would be plenty for 10 inhabitants per car, and a 3 ring high, 5 ring wide colony could have about 1000 cars on the tracks for 10,000 inhabitants.
Whether any of this would ever be necessary is a currently unanswered question. It may turn out that bone loss and other health problems, while high in microgravity, are negligible in 1/6th of a G. Or that strapping 5 times your mass in weights to yourself is sufficient simulation of 1 G (wouldn't want to run into a wall or drop a few meters on the moon carrying 475 kg of weights though since the inertia would be the same even if the weight is 1/6th) that you don't need any sort of centrifugal simulation.
It would be really nice if the governments actually involved in manned spaceflight would actually get their act together and land some people on Mars or the Moon for an extended stay so we can actually answer the physiological questions and find out what we'd actually need for colonization. As in the article, at the moment, it seems like all they do is talk about what might be needed and study the issue for a while, then cancel whatever program they have going to actually get there, then start over again.
Are you saying the elevators will need therapists? Or that the space ships will try to kill their occupants?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If something is easy, it isn't worth doing. I think this is worth it (if done right) simply because we can. Doing things just because we can is worthwhile because we'll learn something from it. Exploring the unknown is fantastic because we don't know what we'll get, worst case we'll learn how not to do it. We can't even fathom the best case outcome. Children derive so much joy from learning and experiencing new things, where does that creative magic go as people age?
But that doesn't imply hard things are worth doing because they're hard. Life is full of hard things that aren't worth doing.
That's wonderful logic for mountain climbing or an extended vacation, especially if you're spending your own money. But spending a trillion dollars from the national purse to do something "because we can" is the height of folly.
It's basic research that might pave the way for inventions we can't possibly imagine. I'm not saying we should spend $1 Trillion tomorrow, I'm not on the committee, I can't tell you what the right move is. But spending $50 billion every year, with awards to companies for accomplishing certain goals, for the foreseeable future could very well be an investment in future industries. $50 billion would more than double NASA's budget and personally I think they should get much more.
We could get a far better research return on our $50bn by spending it on... research. And I'd rather put money into finding a cure for Alzheimers than a new radiation-resistant memory chip.
Why not stop fighting all our wars and do both?
Because for every dollar the federal government spends it borrows forty cents. We could get rid of DoD entirely and we'd still be borrowing money. Even in the pacifist's dream scenario (which will never actually happen) we still don't have the money to waste on a moon base.
Did we have money waste on the moon the first time? It cost about half a trillion dollars (in today's money) and I want to say the estimated return was 13:1, but that's from memory and could be very wrong. Regardless the space race spurred the semiconductor industry and had many other spinoffs, today the Merlin engine that SpaceX makes is based on the J-2 used in the Saturn rockets.
We don't know what we'll get, we don't know what we'll learn
13:1? By whose accounting? NASA has a long history of taking credit for things other people have done, from semiconductors (military) to velcro (Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral). I have yet to see any credible evidence we got even a 1:1 return on our money.
According to wikipedia, the Merlin engine uses a pintle injector like the LEM did. That's kind of a small thing, actually, since there are all sorts of ways to do fuel injection.