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Private Company Plans To Bring Moon Rocks Back To Earth In Three Years (arstechnica.com)
mi writes: Moon Express, founded in 2010 to win the Google Lunar XPRIZE, says it is self-funded to begin bringing kilograms of lunar rocks back to Earth within about three years. "We absolutely intend to make these samples available globally for scientific research, and make them available to collectors as well," said Bob Richards, one of the company's founders, in an interview with Ars. From the report: "The privately held company released plans for a single, modular spacecraft that can be combined to form successively larger and more capable vehicles. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon."
Futurama already did it.
E
Convince the Chinese that crushed moon rock will give them an erection.
We'll have a moon base next year
or we might get a permanent crescent moon
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Getting some lunar dust back as well would be nice, as nasa needs this thing to research their landers etc.. and the artificial thing is not as good.
I rocked your mothers gash last night
Go mom!
Still pulling in people like you despite all her skin diseases, lack of teeth and only one good eye.
Only two beers, too! Mom has a two-beer limit, if you're not pulling down her filthy drawers after two beers she move on to somebody else.
Rather you than me though.
No sig today...
This leads me to some questions. If we can effectively model the supply and demand for this material, and the pricing, we might be able to use the model to determine the best way for this company (or a cartel of companies) to constrain the supply of Moon rocks for the purpose of extracting maximum value from fools who want the prestige of owning Moon rocks.
Hush, you fool! Do you really want DeBeers in the moon rock business?
It's a crass way to fund science and exploration, but maybe it could buy us some real funding.
With corporations now in the space biz, the 'real funding' won't be for science and exploration, it will be for shareholders' lavish retirements. These days, science is funded primarily to map out the next wave of whatever exploitation seems most likely to be lucrative.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I'm afraid I gave away my copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to a young person who needed to learn a great deal more about the politics of Robert Heinlein and where many engineers of my generation learned much of our politics. The "Loonies", the inhabitants of Luna, had been engaging in just such an attack on Earth in a war of revolution. There was an amazing comment that there was no point in dropping rocks on Cheyenne Mountain anymore, since it was no longer _there_.
The revolutionaries were also broadcasting to Terra the exact coordinates of each rock, carefully avoiding population centers and historic monuments, and giving any remaining inhabitants time to do exactly that: to get out from under them. I took the story to heart as a model for premeditated violence.
Heinlein's fiction is as bad a physics text as it is a sociology or economics text. This is not to disparage Heinlein, simply to point out that plot points in fiction are just plot points. All science fiction, and all fiction generally, shares this trait.
The lunar bombardment scenario has a couple of problems. The energy gain from firing something from the moon is only about 22-fold (11.2 km/sec / 2.38 km/sec)^2), so that to do any extensive damage on Earth a still enormous amount of electrical energy needs to be put through the mass accelerator.
Another is that the projectile is not really all that cheap. Although the mass is mostly rock, viewing it as just a "cheap rock" is wrong. Rocks in this size range cannot bring a lot of kinetic energy to the ground on Earth. Entry stresses ( deceleration force and dynamic pressure) cause them to shatter and explode in the atmosphere. This can only work if a high-tensile strength shell that can withstand extreme heating is used to hold the rocks (say a steel or titanium shell). And of course this high strength shell also needs a mechanically strong aluminum coil mounted on it for the mass driver to act on. This makes each projectile a significantly costly industrial item that must be manufactured for each shot and would limit the launch rate.
And then there is the problem that that 10 G mass driver could not be hidden at all. The very first shot would show exactly where its end point is (what with radar and all), it would not get too many shots off before the warhead from Earth took it out. A huge investment of resources with little result.
That's the problem with using fiction as a text to "learn" from - the author is free to ignore anything that does not make it a "good story".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age