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NASA's Resource Prospector Mission Could Land On the Moon In 2020
MarkWhittington writes: Ever since President Obama foreswore interest in returning to the moon in his April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, lunar exploration has been on the back burner at NASA. According to a story at Space News, that may change starting around 2020 thanks to a project called RP15, the letters standing for "Resource Prospector," a rover designed to drill into the lunar regolith and collect samples for analysis. The rover, originating at NASA Ames Research Center, was recently tested on a simulated lunar surface at the Johnson Spaceflight Center south of Houston. RP15 was built by the same team at JSC that developed Robonaut 2, now being tested on the International Space Station, with the software being written at Ames. The tests at JSC involved the rover being controlled by engineers at NASA Ames, half way across the country in California.
Then, in just a few decades after that we should have the tech to land a person there.
The purpose of this mission is to look for ice at the poles where there are places that haven't seen sunlight for billions of years. It will drill up some soil and then heat it up and examine what volatile compounds there are.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The rover [,,,] was recently tested on a simulated lunar surface
I see what you did there...
Every time I hear about some wacky boat voyage to the New World, I think "why"? Surely the costs far outweigh the returns. Anything remotely valuable enough to consider doing it for, like gold, would realistically require lots of mercury (and gravity) to separate, and it would hardly be viable to bring all the dirt back here to refine. This is pie in the sky stuff (figuratively!).
First there, first rights.
Sux to be NASA.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
unlike Mars is always 20 years away (and has been for past 50 years!). My usual gripe of everyone from Musk to NASA to Zubrin love to talk about Mars because they can always defer building a transfer stage and lander to some other smucks 20 years into the future. Now if we talk about the Moon then gotta start building something now. Now this rover is a small mission but at least puts some focus on the nearest celestial body.
One of you posted a comment that back in 1970s and 80s NASA's plan was to build an infrastructure of LEO, stations, and lunar missions. But in later 1980s the "Mars Underground" hijacked the space policy and pushed to bypass all that and go directly to Mars. And we've been stuck in LEO ever since!
mfwright@batnet.com
I'd rather the money be spent on a real ship.
We need to loft a multi-megawatt reactor to power those engines, provide ample power for life support, and generate a magnetic shield for protection from various forms of radiation.
It would need it to be big enough to support a centrifugal section for living and working quarters. And that would have to be big enough to provide space for medical facilities, a galley, hydroponics, recycling, etc.
In short, we'd need to build an actual, for real Ship, not just some tin can that is shot into orbit on a chemical rocket.
No one is talking Star Trek Warp engines....Ion would do just fine. Maybe those EM Drives if they turn out to be something other than another Cold Fusion. But the first step into exploiting the minerals in the solar system is being ale to get to them, stay there, and get back with them. That means long term missions and no chemical rockets.
Seems to me the technology is available in bits and pieces here in there. Political will, focus, determination and of course money are all that's needed. We went from shooting small rockets into orbit to landing on the moon in less than a decade using slide rules and pencils. No reason we can't actually build something like this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We don't know what is there which is why we will send a rover to figure out.
Also the poles (specifically the rims of craters) have access to permanent sunlight which is a pretty decent place to establish a base.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You are over-simplifying things.
You have to remember that during the depths of the economic downturn there was tremendous pressure to cut federal spending to reduce the debt. The newly-powerful Tea Party in particular made it their second-highest frothing point, behind ACA. Democrats lost a lot of seats in Congress over alleged "spending". (Whether that's "fair" or not I won't address here. Politics is perception.)
Under that kind of political pressure, NASA is a prime target because it's not a bread-and-butter program. When people don't have jobs nor safety nets, spending on space is not a priority of theirs. Any explicit cuts made by O was simply a response to the will of the people at the time. It's what's supposed to happen in a democracy.
Further, the sequester, which reduced NASA's budget automatically, was a bipartisan "trigger" that kicked in if a certain budget agreement was not made in time.
As far as moon programs, if I remember correctly, O was against manned missions to the moon, not unmanned scientific probes. Thus, the article summary is misleading. This was because he felt manned missions to asteroids and Mars were better priorities.
Table-ized A.I.
Every time I hear about some wacky boat voyage to the New World, I think "why"? Surely the costs far outweigh the returns.
The returns were easily demonstrable once we knew of the existence of a new continent. Furthermore the technology for journeying there, exploring and generating an economic return already existed and was well proven (boats, horses, guns, farming, tools, etc) and in wide use. While journeying across the oceans was risky and expensive it wasn't even remotely close to as risky or expensive as space travel. All the technology we had prior to Columbus crossing the Atlantic worked without modification on both sides of the Ocean. Almost NONE of the technology we possess for traveling and mining and living on Earth or in low orbit is viable in deep space and in many cases not on other worlds either. We utterly lack the ability to make viable and self sustaining biospheres capable of supporting extended life in space. One day hopefully but not today.
I strongly advocate exploring the solar system and working towards human habitation away from Earth. But I'm also not blind to the reality of how lacking we are in our technology to facilitate such travel much less our ability to economically exploit resources away from Earth. The economics of asteroid mining or other similar such endeavors currently make zero sense unless you start invoking fictional technologies like space elevators and advanced autonomous mining robots that are well beyond our current level of technology. I sincerely hope we get there but it's almost certain to take longer than my remaining lifespan to even get rudimentary pieces in place even assuming we can collectively agree to spend the money to make it happen. We cannot currently even get into low earth orbit economically so we have a long (and exciting) journey ahead of us.
But at what price point does exploration suddenly become a good idea? Would you wait forever?
It's not a price point but rather what social motivation would make it a viable idea? (It's always been a good idea) I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a pretty compelling argument that historically there have only been two drivers for this sort of large endeavor. First is an existential threat like war. The US went to the moon because of competition with the Soviet Union. If you are worried you are going to die that tends to open the purse strings of the treasury. If we saw a big asteroid coming for Earth I guarantee you that NASA would become the best funded organization on earth literally overnight. But since that hasn't happened (yet) our leaders attention is focused on more immediate concerns.
The second is economic gain. BUT pure exploration of the big expensive kind is almost NEVER done by private enterprise and realistically it cannot be done except by governments. You simply cannot make a business case for it. Uncertain economic returns, huge unquantifiable risks, and indeterminate time to payback makes for an impossible business case. Go ahead and try to get adequate funding without being able to specify the return, the risk or the time to payback. That will be the shortest meeting of your life. There might be a fortune in platinum to be mined in space but you simply cannot currently make an economically viable business case to go get it with any reasonably viable existing or near term technology. Once the exploration has happened and the frontier pushed back a bit THEN we start to see the businesses push things forward. But we aren't there yet.
We need to keep going at it but we probably need to accept that it is going to take a while. We're still trying to figure out how to get into space economically and how to build a self contained biosphere that can support humans safely away from Earth. We don't need to be happy about it and we absolutely should push our leaders on this but realistically it just isn't likely to happen quickly unless one of the two drivers above kicks in for some reason.
uh, Helium 3 maybe?
It'd be great if it came home with Chang'e 3 in it's jaws.
"Yes, we said we were sending it to the moon to retrieve raw materials, it decided on it's own that was the easiest/best source."
-Styopa
If feels like the 1960's all over again. Soon.
The main idea of mining the moon or asteroids is to use the product up there.
It is HORRENDOUSLY expensive to lift mass out of the Earth's gravity well. If you're going to build any substantial structures up there, it may (if it's a lot, it WILL) be far less expensive to launch bootstrapping manufacturing technology and mine the resources on the high frontier, rather than burn resources to kick the finished products up there.
Once it's in orbit, if it can be packed to take some rough handling, getting it down is dirt cheap. Getting big stuff off the moon is also cheap, partly because the gravity well is so much smaller, but mostly because the atmosphere is almost nonexistent, so a solar-powered electromagnetic catapult can do nearly all of the job. So things mined and manufactured "up there", if that can be done cheaply enough, can be easily shipped "down here". (The main cost would be packaging and the disposable guidance system - which could be as cheap as a solar/laser sail or laser-ablated reaction mass coating, and/or the capital cost of busying out a reusable orbit-changer or time on the laser.)
Refining a lot of stuff does NOT necessarily take a lot of water. If you do use water in the process you can typically get it back to re-use. Also: Water is one of the things you'll be "mining" - assuming that's cheaper than trapping hydrogen from the solar wind and combining it with "industrial waste" oxygen from refining metals out of handy rocks
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Guess we've had the rights since 1969 then.
Rights are ephemeral. They only last as long as you are there, sitting on the front porch with your shotgun, yelling at them to "get off your lawn".
If you're not on the porch, you've abandoned it, and it's "finders, keepers".
The Moon. If it gets us to Mars within 20 years, go for it. Otherwise, skip it.