If we get a Kickstarter going I'm sure we can raise enough to send Trump to the moon. Especially if we can find room in the capsule for May, BoJo & Farrage.
What price the Moon? Tips from the past might save the present
What price a boot on the Moon? Or maybe six robot wheels? There's a number for the former in this week's round-up of all things spacey. NASA slaps a price tag on Trump-To-The-Moon Speaking to CNN Business, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed that getting boots on the Moon by 2024 is going to cost a bit more than the …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 09:41 GMT 9Rune5
$20bn
Webb actually asked for $20bn.
Back in the sixties? Makes $20-$30bn in today's dollars seem like a bargain?
Does that also include the cost of a space fence to keep extra terrestrial aliens at bay? Surely us going to the moon again is going to ruffle some alien feathers (and claws and whatnots).
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 10:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?
If so, maybe the programme could start with a series of robotic probes that can extract and return enough "stuff" to help finance the whole shebang ?
Also I'd be interested to know how easy (or otherwise) it would be to make things like ... heat tiles ... from lunar materials. Because if you can dump the weight you need to return from the Earth to space part of the mission, you can either send more, or spend less.
Also, just ferrying astronauts from lunar orbit to landing and back to lunar orbit is much easier than going earth-moon-earth in single trips.
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 11:23 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?
Somewhere in the bowels of NASA is a declassified plan put together in the '60s lookin at how to establish a permanent Moon base using near-future tech. So unmanned launches and robodozers to prep the base, then an assembly crew, and finally a fully operational battle Moon. Partly to try and claim the high ground before Russia did. That costed the different approaches, ie lobbing stuff straight to the Moon vs to orbit and then ferrying it across. That seems the more sensible approach, plus creates the SF staple of orbital assembly yards.
As for in-situ, see-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunarcrete
and also work looking at establishing a lunar fibreglass industry, either to reinforce concrete, or just be ready for making sexy fibreglass bodied sport-rovers for future lunar settlers.
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 17:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?
I would assume it's easier to leave the tiles in orbit, than make them or transport them from the luna surface.
SpaceX is making the system part of the skin/shell/structure/cooling in general, so multiple use means it's not as prohibitively heavy as a separate layer just of tiles.
I'd love to see a cycler system... but for that to make sense, we'd need regular and frequent transportation needs.
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 22:10 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?
But what would you need tiles for? Ferrying mass from Earth orbit to the moon isn't as hard as getting that mass out of the gravity well in the first place. Tiles need not be that heavy, but are fragile. But so may be relying on alternative cooling systems to survive Earth re-entry.
I think on the Moon, it's more about using available resources rather than relying on expensive shipping. So commuting into London, the train used to go past a big yard full of cast concrete tunnel segments destined to line Crossrail. If we can come up with practical lunarcrete and fabrication, could have robo-fabs forming convenient shapes to turn into structures, then maybe lunar shotcrete to help line and seal them.. But with some challenges, like casting or pumping concrete in a microgravity vacuum. Then for Mars, rather than use fancy aerospace metals for those ships, maybe a double skin of concrete would provide enough structure & radiation protection, especially if you could fill the gap with ice.
Fun stuff to think about though :)
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Thursday 20th June 2019 17:49 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?
Yup.. presumably you could use local water and potentially capture some of it as it dries. The papers cited in the wiki article discuss various options, but regular Earth-like concrete I think would have all it's water sucked out if it was exposed to the surface conditions & be very weak.
I've also wondered it it would be possible to just vitrify regolith using solar furnaces but that could be fun, ie rapid cooling leading to temperamental blocks rather than tempered. Also wondered if it'd be worth capturing any gas that may be outgassed during heating.
Also this just appeared-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXIeywVd4KM
From the Royal Insitutiion with a panel discussing life on Mars.
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Monday 24th June 2019 07:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?
Check out "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space" by Gerard K O'Neil. It's a book about how we might construct rotating orbital colonies economically; ie: teh idea is to make the project pay for itself as rapidly as possible. The main source of materials to build the colonies envisaged is the moon, because it's easier to lift material from the moon to low earth orbit than it is to get from the surface of the earth to LEO, in terms of the amount of energy required.
As for the "stuff" available on the moon - pretty much the same as you'd get on earth minus organics and most volatiles. So plenty of silicon and aluminium with an admixture of other elements, but the lighter the element the less likely you are to find it unless it's bound to other elements chemically.
So far as industry is concerned, getting us set up on the moon makes a lot of sense for a number of reasons - easy availability of "stuff" that can be more readily and cheaply got to LEO than from Earth; a low-gravity environment rather than a no-gravity one, meaning that some industrial processes that won;t work in freefall can be carried out there, plus the bonus of letting us see what happens to humans experiencing low-G for extended periods as against no-G; useful to know before heading off to Mars. Which I hate to say, as I'm generally an enthusiast for the thinking in Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan (which regards the moon as an unnecessary in order to get us to Mars), but even I think that Zubrin was a tad over-optimistic in parts of that plan. It bugs me that after all these years in space there has been no actual effort as yet to create a slow-rotating habitat in orbit so that we can gauge the long-term effects of low-G on humans. (plenty of ideas for it, sure, but nothing has actually been built).
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 12:49 GMT JimmyPage
Re: "at least one year in its 100x100km orbit"
Presumably if you can put enough Big Things in the right places, you can create a square orbit a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle ?
In fact if we are looking for advanced, intelligent life out there, highly artificial orbits of Big Bodies might be a better thing to look for than trying to extract sense from static ?
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Tuesday 18th June 2019 19:56 GMT Robert Sneddon
Sky-high SLA
The Apollo missions included having the astronauts deploy seismometers on the Lunar surface. They could be tested after they were placed and there was a short checklist if there were problems. The checklist's final instruction, if nothing else worked was "Apply Lunar Boot" i.e. give the recalcitrant seismometer a swift kick. It might work, they weren't going to bring it back to get it fixed and the cost of a service engineer callout for an on-site repair was over the Moon (so to speak).