back to article 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 …

  1. Irongut

    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.

    1. Chris G

      @irongut.

      But what if they breed?

      Regarding the Mole's problems on Mars, I think the drill has hit the only piece of rebar for miles. Always happens to me when I'm drilling.

  2. 9Rune5
    Go

    $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).

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: $20bn

      "Does that also include the cost of a space fence to keep extra terrestrial aliens at bay?"

      Don't be silly. The aliens will be made to pay for it.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: $20bn

      I'll be surprised if the aliens don't beat us to it and put up their own fence to keep us out. After all, out there, we're the undocumented and illegal aliens.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: $20bn

        They already have. You think it's an accident we're over 4ly from the nearest star with habitable planets? We've already been moved to the Galactic quarantine zone.

  3. big_D Silver badge
    Coat

    NASA slaps a price tag on Trump-To-The-Moon

    I'd trump up some cash for a one way ticket...

  4. Alister

    Price of the Moon?

    Better ask Delos D Harriman, he's looked into it.

  5. big_D Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    GLS

    GLS have problems finding my house with their Amazon deliveries and you expect their white-van-man drivers to find the moon? :-O

  6. Anonymous Coward
    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.

    1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      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.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      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.

      1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

        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 :)

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: Is there any value in stuff from the moon ?

          Concrete needs a lot of water and lime.

          Probably not useful on the Moon, would need to be something less demanding of limited/non-existent local resources.

          Perhaps regolith-based glass? That just needs lots of grinding and heat.

          1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

            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.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      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).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "at least one year in its 100x100km orbit"

    I also think implementing square orbits is a great idea :-)

    1. JimmyPage Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      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 ?

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Coat

        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 ?"

        Doesn't that have rounded corners though?

        1. Cynical Pie

          Re: "at least one year in its 100x100km orbit"

          Obligatory fruit based fondleslab 'are you holding it right' reference

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "at least one year in its 100x100km orbit"

        Lagrange points can do strange things... so from the correct reference point, it might look like a... pair of ears. :P

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "at least one year in its 100x100km orbit"

        Stanislav Lem: The Cyberiad.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    new phrase

    "Diagnostic hammering" I like it. No boss, we're not just hitting it out of frustration, we're doing diagnostic hammering.

    Regarding the difficulites with the mole, Bruce Willis could have warned them that this is what happens when you drill.

    1. Scroticus Canis
      Devil

      Re: new phrase - Diagnostic hammering...

      ... followed by the obligatory "percussive maintenance".*

      Been doing that for decades. Pass the sharpened hammer please.

      * Usually delivered to the cadence of the chant "Work you fucker, work!"

    2. 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).

  9. juliatom543

    I wanna go there.

  10. SealTeam6

    spelling....

    "Dubia's" ?

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