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NASA Mulling Earth-Moon L2 Point for Mars Staging Station
jamstar7 writes "From the article: 'NASA is reportedly mulling the construction of a floating Moon base that would serve as a launching site for manned missions to Mars and other destinations more distant than any humans have traveled to so far. The Orlando Sentinel reported over the weekend that the proposed outpost, called a "gateway spacecraft," would support "a small astronaut crew and function as a staging area for future missions to the moon and Mars."' This is actually a good idea, using the Moon as a staging base for exploring the cosmos. Once we build manufacturing capability there, why not build spacecraft there? We can build bigger, more spacious craft so as to not lock up future astronauts in a closet for months or years at a time."
Moon base isn't quite accurate: it would be a space station at the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point about 60000 km from the surface of the dark side of the moon.
Dark side as in "never receives the light of the Sun"? The Pink Floyd are still casting a dark shadow on astronomy beliefs ;-)
For something to be X miles above the DARK side of the moon, it would have to be orbiting the moon. You want to say FAR side of the moon, and you would probably not get it wrong if you either paid a little attention to your science classes in school or gazed at the moon enough times to think about the lunar phase cycle.
But, no, you should not be editing something like slashdot causing the readers to pull their hair.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
By the way, the L2 point is not on the dark side of the moon (the dark side of the moon travels around the moon every 28 days), it is on the FAR SIDE of the moon, that is the side facing away from earth.
My question is why L2 and not L1? L2 is going to be exposed to more meteoric traffic, it will have a hard time communicating through the moon to the earth (yeah you can put a comm satellites at L4 or L5 but that's complicating things and adding cost and new failure modes.) That and L1 is closer and easier to get to from Earth and easier to get things to from the moon with the gravitational assist of Earth.
There are plenty of interesting designs, but such a resource would need to be built of lunar material. Because you'd need a structure with walls thick enough to protect from solar storms, cosmic rays and all kinds of meteoric debris hitting the structure. You would probably want to have hydroponics plants on board for food, oxygen, and synthetic meat from Soybeans... or even better synthetic meat from a 3D printer, endless Filet Mignon, sushi grade Yellowtail and Salmon, and Turkey White and Dark meat as long as you have cell cultures and your meat printer. By the way, you could dissolve vital minerals in water and then use that water to build radiation proof walls. About 3 feet ft. would get the job done nicely, 6 ft would be spectacular. You'd want to harvest a reasonable sized asteroid with plenty of water or a number of smaller asteroids and use it/them to build your base. You'd want to use a swarm of assembly bots to build things with only a small human presence, most remote from the ground. Robots that could self replicate from materials in the asteroids would be perfect.
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea to get to Mars needs to read Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" or read up on the "Mars Direct" approach. All this talk about moon bases or staging in orbit or at an Lagrangian point originates in NASA designing the Mars mission via lots of committees, in which various teams and [sub]contractors got to insert dependency on their pet projects. Mars Direct presents a very well thought out and fully vetted approach, nothing but politics at this point is standing in the way - if NASA as an agency was still primarily interested in space exploration instead of pork disbursement and fiefdom preservation, and Congress had to provide slightly longer term budget commitments with less constraints and strings atached, we'd already have a permanent presence on Mars.
Not having a trillion dollars really hasn't stopped our government from spending like they do, so why not?
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
1) Money isn't actually used up when we build things. The money goes into the hands of the people who build them, the people who create the materials in them, etc. None of the money will actually leave the planet.
2) I'd rather spend a trillion dollars doing this than spend a trillion dollars fighting wars we don't need to fight.