Back to the Moon in 2018

[UncleAl]

Four rules of navigation: Know where you are. Know where you want to be. Know how to get there. Know why you are going. NASA could go to the moon practically tomorrow in one launch using off-the-shelf technology - A Saturn MLV-V-3 booster ringed with Space Scuttle soild fuel boosters,

 

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/nasa3.htm

compared to

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/moon2.htm

 

As described, three such launches would give NASA a nuclear-powered permanent moon base made of government surplus parts. It's not a big deal - unless you are NASA. The big deal is political! Permanent residence in a conquered land establishes ownership and State sovereignty. The precedent is the New World.

[damocles]

A skeptic's view,

 

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/moon2.htm

 

Frankly Uncle Al; you terrify me.

 

I think I'll make a post and you will come in and make me look like a complete idiot.

 

http://www.spacex.com/payloaduserguide.pdf

 

That is for Falcon 1. from;

 

http://www.spacex.com/falcon_overview.php

 

Notice that the builders propose liquid kerosene and liquid oxygen for their cluster clucks?

 

Now I am a proponent of tele-operated robotic lunar resource exploitation.

 

http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASMIndex.html

 

I do not trust NASA to be competent to implement a program that calls for;

a. landing minerological/resource mobile surveyor robots.

b. landing 1st stage mining robots(to process lunar raw materials)

c. landing 2nd stage fabricator robots(to build simple lunar power/industry infrastructure and 3rd stage robots.)

d. building in situ, 3rd stage robots that will in turn build complex manufactories that can be programmed from Earth via radio to build everything from paper clips to a mass driver from available lunar resources.

 

Once d. is accomplished(Estimated robot seeding is at least 100 Falcon IX payloads worth of robots over twenty years to establish ONE self-sustaining solar-powered industrial base.); THEN you send men.

[CraigD]

Why are we swallowing this bullshit?...

A failry large community of academic and aerospace folk share your misgivings, BlameTheEx. In addition to Uncle Al, UM’s Ed Parks appears to be taking the lead in voicing some of it in articles like this one

 

I’m a big fan of providing the public with “Buck Rogers for their bucks”, and also of solid-fuel rockets such as Japan's M5 (I consider the relative simplicity of solid vs. liquid-fuel rockets a point in their favor), especially the “hybrid” variety, which use solid fuel and liquid/gas oxygen, such as NASA’s “envirorocket”, and can accept that reusing existing rocket designs can be a sensible engineering approach. So I don’t have any serious misgivings about NASA’s design approach.

 

The mission objectives of the “Apollo on steroids”, though, leave me cold. Although public literature is still sparse, it appears to be almost purely politically motivated rehash of the Apollo program, which put 2 people at a time on the moon beginning in 1969. Other than putting 4 people on the moon each time, it’s hard to see how the missions planned for 2018 will be much of an improvement on the missions of 50 years earlier.

 

Thus, I find myself, for the first time in my life, reluctant to show support for a manned spaceflight system.

[damocles]

A failry large community of academic and aerospace folk share your misgivings, BlameTheEx. In addition to Uncle Al, UM’s Ed Parks appears to be taking the lead in voicing some of it in articles like this one

 

I’m a big fan of providing the public with “Buck Rogers for their bucks”, and also of solid-fuel rockets such as Japan's M5 (I consider the relative simplicity of solid vs. liquid-fuel rockets a point in their favor), especially the “hybrid” variety, which use solid fuel and liquid/gas oxygen, such as NASA’s “envirorocket”, and can accept that reusing existing rocket designs can be a sensible engineering approach. So I don’t have any serious misgivings about NASA’s design approach.

 

The mission objectives of the “Apollo on steroids”, though, leave me cold. Although public literature is still sparse, it appears to be almost purely politically motivated rehash of the Apollo program, which put 2 people at a time on the moon beginning in 1969. Other than putting 4 people on the moon each time, it’s hard to see how the missions planned for 2018 will be much of an improvement on the missions of 50 years earlier.

 

Thus, I find myself, for the first time in my life, reluctant to show support for a manned spaceflight system.

 

Agreed.

 

However I want to spread life out, so that we don't fall prey to this;

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous-Tertiary_extinction_event

 

Its bad enough that we are poisoning ourselves to death and heat polluting our range. We can do something about that.

 

It would be embarassing to be taken out by a large rock. Surely we are better problem solvers than the dinosaurs?

[CraigD]

... However I want to spread life out, so that we don't fall prey to this;

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous-Tertiary_extinction_event

 

... It would be embarassing to be taken out by a large rock. Surely we are better problem solvers than the dinosaurs?

I agree that this is an overridingly compelling reason to aggressively develop manned spacefight. When arguing for it, this is my “big gun” (or rock, if you’ll pardon the wordplay).

 

I think the NASA’s “Apollo on steroids” program will consume resources that could be working towards the existence of a large, sustainable population of extra-terrestrial H.Sapiens, and that the technical spin off from it will be of dubious worth.

 

In short, I believe we deserve a much more ambitious program, not something echoing the politics and technology of the 1960s.

 

Perhaps the exploitation of a pre-selected asteroid is the way to go. If so, the era of government-based space exploration may well be over.

[UncleAl]

Frankly Uncle Al; you terrify me.

Good. The future was meant to be dangerous. Arithmetic is useful. As for space, KISS,

 

Keep

It

Simple,

Stupid.

 

Energy to low Earth orbit is payload weight in burned coal. Build simple, cheap, reliable, mission-targeted boosters. It might be worth recovering and refurbishing the engine. Ask a fuel-blown racer what he does. Better to build cheap, use once, and toss.

 

What is on the moon worth having? You want a very large optical retroreflector array for laser lunar ranging (Nordtvedt effect). You want a low-gee, stable, quiet, hard vacuum platform for very large antennas imaging deep radio to extreme UV and x-ray. That's it, folks. Lunar regiolith is compositionally worthless. It's ony use is to burrow under as a thermal and radiation shield. You might make a big solar mirror and fused it into ceramic. There are no primordial water/ice deposits Get over it.

 

Is it worht going to the moon and buildings stuff? Absolutely! A huge optical telescope would put the Hubble to shame. Have no illusions about anything else except maybe using the moon as a low-gee airless launch platform. But if you go spraying gases you defeat everything else. Think before you spend. As for that coal-powered orbit... Compare the heat of combustion of a coal lump to the kinetic energy of that coal lump in low Earth orbit.

 

Tabulated heats of combustion for coals range from 2.4-3.2x10^7 J/kg. The all-purpose heat of combustion rule: 5 eV for every molecule of O2 used. This gives 4x10^7 J/kg for pure carbon oxidized to CO2, and is consistent. For an object in low Earth orbit v^2 = Rg, and the kinetic energy/kilogram is Rg/2. With R = 6x10^6 m (from the center of mass) and g =10 m/s^2 that works out to 3x10^7 J/kg. A rocket uses 100X as much energy to put a kilogram of payload in low Earth orbit. (A better number for gee at 300 miles altitude is 840 cm/sec^2.)

[BlameTheEx]

Why do we keep going back to the Americas? Been there, done that. Since Columbus we haven't even found a shorter route to India that way.

 

Frankly, the moon is an extremely exiting place. It holds clues to the origin of our own planet. It is the only extraterrestrial body that we can hope to have regular exploration of within the foreseeable future. We can learn a lot about long term space travels by establishing a base there.

 

It is an important frontier. You see it as bullshit, fine. I see it as a huge opportunity to take some serious steps into manned exploration of our solar system.

 

I see it as bullshit because I am looking at the politics, economics and psychology. The opportunity IS potentially huge, but in practice more likely to trash the american space program.

 

Manned exploration of the solar system is a fine ambition and this is an excellent way of ensuring it will never happen. If NASA bets too heavily on Apollo II only to see the project cancelled by a future administration my guess is that it will be the end. NASA will be wound up too. I am cynic enough to believe that this is Bush's plan.

[Jay-qu]

ok, so just for a minute pretend you are the administrator for NASA, you are being pressured for results and progress - what would you do? seriously if it where your choice what would you do

[damocles]

ok, so just for a minute pretend you are the administrator for NASA, you are being pressured for results and progress - what would you do? seriously if it where your choice what would you do

 

For the near term in rocketry? This:

 

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/

 

http://dma.ing.uniroma1.it/users/bruno/Petro.prn.pdf

 

http://www.spacex.com/falcon_overview.php

 

And if I were totally insane, I would do this;

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion

 

ADDENDUM: In post #19 of this thread you will read my support for a gradualist approach to building a lunar base. Whether it would become a radio observatory or an industrial site I leave to my betters(as in people who know the engineering possibilities in detail) to work out. Based on my limited knowledge, I suspect that building a mass drive; for example, will be impossible without importing a CHON* asteroid or two to the site.

 

*Snowball made out of carbon/hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen....

 

Best wishes;

[BlameTheEx]

ok, so just for a minute pretend you are the administrator for NASA, you are being pressured for results and progress - what would you do? seriously if it where your choice what would you do

 

In terms of results I would look to the mars rovers, space telescopes and probes to the outer planets. For shear excitement how about a rover to titan? For science I can't think of a better project than a larger space born far infrared telescope. A really good look at the most distant galaxies should just about wrap up cosmology.

 

For progress in the near term ion drives are the technology of promise. The drives themselves are no great challenge but the power supply is. Large, ultra light, space assembled, solar panels are the answer. Get the power to weight ratio high enough and you enter a whole new ball game. Satellites would be space assembled and boosted from low orbit with ion drives. Then later boosted back down to low orbit for maintenance upgrading and repair. Suddenly the ISS has a commercial purpose and NASA actually gets paid by industry to develop exactly the resources it needs for assembling interplanetary craft and the space experienced personnel to man them. This is a technology breakthrough that WILL happen. Right now the only question is who will to supply the personnel. In 10 years time will the only men in space be Russians making good money out of a USA abandoned ISS?

[Jay-qu]

A really good look at the most distant galaxies should just about wrap up cosmology.

 

ummm... I dont think so! Cosmology deals with some of the biggest questions we have - I would hate for them to be answered before I even get the chance to have a shot :doh: (that is if they can - and ever will be answered)

[Docalex007]

I think going back to the moon is a key move in our bid to one day advance exploration out to Mars. The moon is our close friend and we could really use the area for a strategic space outpost. This will also allow us to tweak our abilities to travel to the moon building a safe record and making it easier everytime. Establishing a common method and route to get to the moon is very important.

 

Yes we've been there before and know it can be done. But think about it. Going to the moon is obviously NOT common and people still see it as a "big event". This should change. Going to the moon needs to be seen and thought of as a usual trip to ISS. No big deal. Once we conquer that aspect, I think its then time to take the next steps to further solar system exploration.

 

By the way, its my first post and i'm happy to be a member of a great looking science community.

[Tormod]

By the way, its my first post and i'm happy to be a member of a great looking science community.

 

Welcome - and we seem to agree on the moon exploration thingy. MAke it so common that it becomes second nature. Then we'll conquer Mars. :Waldo:

[Docalex007]

Welcome - and we seem to agree on the moon exploration thingy. MAke it so common that it becomes second nature. Then we'll conquer Mars. :Waldo:

 

Thanks. As you pointed out, having another space race could be beneficial to us and our success in short term space advancement. More importantly the speed of success. I know China knows they are catching up to Russia and the US and see this as an opportunity to do something neither country as done before. Competition brings out good hard work ethic (although maybe sometimes the opposite like sending a mission that has known design flaws). Its all a risk, but I don't like it when we sit around and do things at crawling tempo.

 

Either way, I hate the fact that all (most) of human space flight/activity/missions is controlled by agencies governed by politics rather than by self motivated private interest sectors.

[Boerseun]

One good thing about the Moon - there's no natives. So, we can break it and destroy it and spraypaint rude NASA logos all over it and not feel guilty at all.

 

Methinks that the first pub to open over yonder will be a strange experience, being totally blotto at 1/6th Earth gravity!:Waldo: