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Is NASA Planning To "Terraform" Part of the Moon? Not Quite
MarkWhittington writes: A story in Popular Science suggested that NASA is mulling a plan to "terraform" part of the moon. The term is more than a little misleading, as it implies making a portion of the moon livable for humans. The actual plan, being funded by the space agency as part of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program is exciting nevertheless. The idea is to deploy reflectors around the rim of the Shackleton Crater, a region at the moon's South Pole where ice is thought to exist in permanent shadows. The reflectors would focus light onto select areas to provide power for robotic explorers. In this manner, the robots would not have to be equipped with protection against the cold inside the crater and would not have to be powered by plutonium-fueled RTGs. Temperatures inside the shadowed regions of Shackleton plunge to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit.
Just hope they don't end up vaporizing away all the (currently solid) H2O before we can capture it.
If this water can be made use of, both as water for crew and fuel for space ships it's already where it can be helpful.
Go, do, learn, do some more. We've been sitting on this rock, theorizing, for hundreds of years, and all it got us was a couple of lousy atomic bombs.
Getting out and actually going to the Moon got us more "useful for mankind" tech in 10 years than the equivalent amount of resources spent in "think tank" academic institutions did in the previous 100. Look at life in 1960 vs 1860. Then look at life in 1980 vs 1970. We need the academics, but they need to get out and stretch their legs "in the real universe" once in awhile, too.
Sheesh guys, get with the times already.
Fahrenheit? Do they still measure the distance in fathoms? Force in pounds?
don't worry, surely the next CSS will have support for unit conversions
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
-280 f is -173.333 c.
Mirrors? Really?
WTF. Just make the damn plutonium-fueled RTG's happen instead.
Yeah, I know: :) Why the hell not.)
-Because: launching radioactive evilness will kill everybody. (This time, unlike the last 28+ times we have done it.)
-Because: The DOE or whoever does not have enough refined PU238 these days. Boo Hoo, make some more, damn it.
Are we a first world country with functioning space and nuclear energy programs or not? (Maybe we should outsource RTG's to SpaceX too? Once Elon Musk has some breeder reactors in the corporate fold he is pretty much ready to get the white cat, island fortress, and inscrutable henchmen.
While we are at it, that is: sending mass up and mucking around on the rim of a permanently shadowed crater.
Why don’t we send up some pipe, a thermal fluid, turbine, etc. with reservoirs on the sun side and shade side of the rim. Not sure how efficient a Stirling engine really is, but permanent shade and direct sun sound pretty ideal. We could even beam power to the damn rovers, making Nikola T. happy.
Mirrors, uhg.
Are they still using musty old units that were spun up out of nothing during the French Revolution? That metre that was supposedly a perfect multiple of the earth's radius? (oops!) What happened to the 10 month calendar?
I have several French coins from the era, when they thought they had done a big enough thing to start renumbering the calendar years. Coins for a little while were numbered 'The year 2' and 'the year 3' and so on.
Those dumb Revolutionary Committees. All we have left from their little ego trip (the French reset and did their revolution again a few times since then) are their arbitrary units of measure that aren't scaled to anything particular in the human experience.
1970 = Led Zeppelin
1980 = Disco
Progress?
Though now that I think about it, the last man on the moon was 1972, and that's when things started going downhill. Maybe you're right, let's terraform the moon, bitches!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Can we put satellites in orbit of the moon?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Don't know where you lived, but in West-Central coastal Florida, disco died, hard, in about 1979.
A lot of the 1970-1980 period was the early deployment of technologies (microchips, digital recording and communications, fiber optics, spandex) that would be put to better use in later decades...
That late 60's early 70's culture did have a lot of influence from the "blows my mind" kind of things that were being done at the time. Terraforming, space elevators, and high-speed interplanetary travel could bring that back.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Straw Man of the year!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
All we have left from their little ego trip (the French reset and did their revolution again a few times since then) are their arbitrary units of measure that aren't scaled to anything particular in the human experience.
And your proposal is... what? The cubit?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For those of use that don't speak in archaic measurement:
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp...
(-280F =~ -173C)
Establishing a lunar ice mining operation is actually the first, necessary step into building the much needed Cislunar Infrastructure that will power our future forays to Mars, Venus and the Asteroid Belt ; as well as sustain our existing LEO and GEO infrastructure in a more efficient way.
The Shackleton Crater is the perfect place to have permanent solar power as well as solid ice. From there the water and ice can be turned into bipropellant and brought to the Moon's L2 point, and from there you can pretty much reach anywhere around Earth cheaply.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The SI units are the only ones left that actually have external definitions.
All the US customary units are defined only as so-and-such many of the relevant SI unit.
Most SI units are now defined such that you could explain the definition to a hypothetical space alien by radio and they could reproduce them exactly. "Oh right, I see, and that's a 'metre' is it? OK. Well, the space ship we're sending you instructions for needs to be 316.2 of those metres long, got it?"
The only one left is the kilogram, still presently defined as "The mass of this object, the prototype kilogram". Once we redefine that, in the next few years, all of SI will have communicable definitions, a huge breakthrough that will go unnoticed by the general population who still think "twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard" is a good idea.
More important, they don't even say how many rods wide the crater is.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
The answer is always no.
Lol :
America must lead this movement of humanity into space lest other powers that do not share our values and belief system fill this leadership vacuum.
Do they mean the USSR is about to form again? or what?
12 inches to a foot is a great idea. Imagine the confusion if suddenly a foot became 10 inches.