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How To Get Back To the Moon In 4 Years -- This Time To Stay (scientificamerican.com)
Scientific American describes "a way to get to the Moon and to stay there permanently...to begin this process immediately and to achieve moon landings in less than four years." It starts by abandoning NASA's expensive Space Launch System and Orion capsule, and spending the money saved on private-industry efforts like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace. schwit1 quotes their report:
Musk's rockets -- the Falcon and the soon-to-be-launched Falcon Heavy -- are built to take off and land. So far their landing capabilities have been used to ease them down on earth. But the same technology, with a few tweaks, gives them the ability to land payloads on the surface of the Moon. Including humans. What's more, SpaceX's upcoming seven-passenger Dragon 2 capsule has already demonstrated its ability to gentle itself down to earth's surface. In other words, with a few modifications and equipment additions, Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules could be made Moon-ready...
Major segments of the space community want every future landing to add to a permanent infrastructure in the sky. And that's within our grasp thanks to Robert Bigelow... Since the spring of 2016, Bigelow, a real estate developer and founder of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, has had an inflatable habitat acting as a spare room at the International Space Station 220 miles above your head and mine. And Bigelow's been developing something far more ambitious -- an inflatable Moon Base, that would use three of his 330-cubic-meter B330 modules.
The article calls Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rockets "a wild car" which could also land passengers and cargo on the moon and suggests NASA would be better off funding things like lunar-surface refueling stations, lunar construction equipment, and "devices to turn lunar ice into rocket fuel, drinkable water, and breathable oxygen."
Major segments of the space community want every future landing to add to a permanent infrastructure in the sky. And that's within our grasp thanks to Robert Bigelow... Since the spring of 2016, Bigelow, a real estate developer and founder of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, has had an inflatable habitat acting as a spare room at the International Space Station 220 miles above your head and mine. And Bigelow's been developing something far more ambitious -- an inflatable Moon Base, that would use three of his 330-cubic-meter B330 modules.
The article calls Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rockets "a wild car" which could also land passengers and cargo on the moon and suggests NASA would be better off funding things like lunar-surface refueling stations, lunar construction equipment, and "devices to turn lunar ice into rocket fuel, drinkable water, and breathable oxygen."
With rockets it is still $100K - $1M per pound to get to the moon. We need a space elevator.
As much as I love Elon and his accomplishments, let's not forget that SpaceX reusable launch system's costs to refurbish and relaunch are not demonstrated...yet. Have they forgotten the the Space Shuttle Program already?
Elok
Abandon Ares. Abandon SLS...
SLS is up to 2.5 times the LEO capacity of a Falcon Heavy, which SpaceX has never actually launched. SLS is in a different class. SpaceX might launch a Heavy in 2017, but I personally doubt it; SpaceX has never hesitated to push back dates and they've done exactly that with each new development phase. That's not a knock; they've done well and should continue their pattern. But SLS goes up in 2018 and even that first launch will achieve greater lift capacity than anything SpaceX or its competitors are actually building, never mind the SLS scale out to 130,000kg.
A least Trump doesn't appear to want to kill off SLS. If anything he seems to want to accelerate the program into a manned phase. And I'm pretty sure he doesn't give a warm piss what Scientific American has to say about it, so it looks like this heavy lift system will finally survive US politics.
But good luck getting Elon Musk to focus on the practical and eminently desirable target of the Moon. He isn't interested. It's only Mars for Elon.
He's interested in paying customers. Maybe someone who is interested in lunar development should buy some Falcon 9 or Heavy launches and just make it happen?
I don't really buy the argument that it would be cheaper to go to Mars from the Moon. Any manned Mars mission would likely to be assembled in stages in orbit of the Earth. Much cheaper and less risk than sending those same stages to the moon and assembling them there.
It's not reusable and much too expensive to be flown more often than a few times. It never was anything than a gift to the companies that built the shuttle, so they could continue to supply tanks and solid boosters and hideously expensive engines. The point of it never was getting anything into space, but to keep the same old rivers of money flowing.
That's the biggest concern I have. People tire of ongoing expenses. ISS seemed neat at first; now everyone hates it. Why would a moon base fare differently?
Long-term presences in space need to very quickly cut ties with earth, on order of greatest resource dependencies down to smallest resource dependencies. Aka, first things like oxygen, propellant, etc, then to industrial chemicals, of increasingly smaller quantities, with increasingly diversified manufacturing facilities, with very complex/low volume chemical feedstocks and manufacturing processes coming last. Cutting all ties is a process that would take centuries. But you can start with the low hanging fruit, bit by bit, and keep stockpiles of everything needed for maintenance that you can't produce locally.
Unfortunately, running counter to this is expansion. Because if you double the size of your operations, you also double your resource demands. So you need to improve resource independence at a faster rate than you grow.
Part of the problem with the moon is that it's just not a great place for ISRU. Volatiles are rare. We've never even sampled any moon that aren't depleted in volatiles, although there's some data to suggest that various volatiles might be scattered in permanently shaded areas (all of them, in the same place? That's a good question). Surface mineral diversity is limited - primarily light, non-volatile elements. Oxygen is at least widely abundant, but locked up tightly. And while the moon offers short transit times, it's surprisingly not that advantageous concerning delta-V. You can't aerocapture there, landing is fully powered (no parachute deceleration), and to get there you have to already be on such a high apogee orbit that it's not much more energy to go into a Mars transfer. Gravity is less and night is two days long. There are a couple "maybe" peaks of eternal light, but that doesn't mean that they're colocated with volatiles; the last I looked into it it looked like the closest suggested find of water was dozens of kilometers away from the nearest such peak, which would be quite the commute (and thus low throughput / high wear).
The moon is certainly the "cautious" option; emergency returns / resupplies are easy there, and communication fast. Its main value appears to be a testing ground for systems while minimizing risk. But it's not a very appealing place from a settlement perspective.
Of course, I prefer Venus to Mars, but that's neither here nor there ;) I'd like to see a parallel program for both, as the same sort of booster and transfer stage can be used for both, so it's only habitat / ascent stage development costs that are doubled. And once you get past the differences in feedstock sources, production industrial processes converge (Venus advantaged by the higher power availability and easier ability to get rid of heat - excepting in the case of cryogenics, where Mars holds the advantage)
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
You underestimate engineers. We went from "first flight" to the moon in less than 70 years. We went from "First rocket" that flew 30 feet to the moon landing in about 4 decades.It's JUST AS LIKELY that we'll go from "material with enough tensile strength invented" to "space elevator" in a few decades too.
This is what I like to call the "extrapolation fallacy". People assume that if something is possible, anything is possible.
There are limits in the universe that put upper bounds on what's achievable. At the moment, we're not even sure that it's theoretically possible to create that "material with enough tensile strength". If it turns out it's not, then no amount of engineering will make it reality (disclaimer: I'm an engineer).
It's the same fallacy that people make when they imagine advanced alien races coming up with physics-breaking technologies (FTL, Dyson spheres, ring worlds, teleportation), or when they imagine life inside of stars (it's just too extreme inside there for stable systems to exist, let alone evolve).