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NASA Wants Fast Moonbuggies and Solid Lunar Lander
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:16 PM
from the sounds-like-a-dream-i-had-one-time dept.
from the sounds-like-a-dream-i-had-one-time dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA may have its eyes on the Sun and Mercury this week but it is clearly focusing on the moon for the future. NASA is soliciting proposals from the scientific and aerospace communities for design ideas for its next lunar lander. NASA officials said the Altair spacecraft will deliver four astronauts to the lunar surface late during the next decade. According to NASA Altair will be capable of landing four astronauts on the moon, providing life support and a base for weeklong initial surface exploration missions, and returning the crew to the Orion spacecraft that will bring them home to Earth. And while they won't be flying to the moon but rather flying around the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., the space agency has set April 4-5 as the dates for 'The 15th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race'. The race is for high school and college teams where they build and race their lightweight, two-person lunar vehicles. More than 40 student teams from 18 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada and India have already registered." My proposal just features a domo-kun mouth and giant pink ears attached to an El Camino. Money please!
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Better than that, what they need (Score:5, Interesting)
Energy certainly wouldn't be a problem, with every day sunny.
Re:Better than that, what they need (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Also, if it was made near a pole, and vertical solar panel were used...
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The advantages of being at the lunar poles are vastly overstated.
Re:Better than that, what they need (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about what that extensive mineral utilization entails. You're limited by what's up there. The lunar regolith is mostly aluminum oxide, silica, and some calcium, with trace amounts of various gasses like hydrogen and helium. Suppose then you want fiberglass. That's an easy one. You suspend the regolith in a liquid and separate the silica from the alumina based on density. Then you melt the silica and blow it out of a fine nozzle to form strands. Unless you can figure out how to do it in a vaccuum, however, which is plausible, you need a gas to blow it, either brought from earth or boiled out of the regolith.
That right there is five primary subsystems:
1.) Power
2.) Regolith collector
3.) Silica separator
4.) Furnace and fiber machine
5.) Gas storage and/or production.
But fiberglass is all but useless without epoxy, and making fiberglass parts is a messy, complicated job here on earth. You'd be crazy to stake the success of your lunar base on the ability for a self deploying robot to produce useful and quality controlled parts on the moon. Not to mention, all you've got at that point is structural parts, which are only a fraction of the mass of supplies you need.
You could look at the same needs for producing aluminum. It gets really interesting when you start looking at the mass of equipment needed to produce sheet aluminum out of cast ingots. The raw aluminum itself is very energy intenstive to produce, requiring 7.5 kW-hours of electricity per pound to reduce from alumina in high volume smelters.
And I'm not even going to get started on what it takes to make complex shapes like a pressurized habitat or a seal for an airlock.
All of this is why NASA is looking at landing all the needed supplies on the moon and practicing the techniques with human involvement from the start. The first supplies produced will probably be oxygen (which can be electrolytically separated from the silica, alumina, or small amounts of ice present on the moon), and bricks for radiation protection and insulation sintered from the raw regolith.
Start simple. As you show you can make useful items from simple processes, then you add complexity.
Parent
Re:Better than that, what they need (Score:5, Interesting)
> a typical John Deere combine weighs about 12 tons.
Yes, but how many tonnes per day does it output? If you don't need that kind of output, it can be smaller.
> And it needs gas and air in sufficient quantities to produce about 200 hp to operate.
Due to that being the cheapest method to get it functioning on earth. With more reliable solar energy, you could skip the gas and air on the moon for any processing task which electricity is physically capable of handling.
> Think about what that extensive mineral utilization entails. You're limited by what's up there. The lunar regolith is mostly
> aluminum oxide, silica, and some calcium, with trace amounts of various gasses like hydrogen and helium.
And several areas with notable high quantities of other elements, including but not limited to potassium, carbon, iron, and magnesium. There are places where the high concentrations of these are actually fairly close even.
> Suppose then you want fiberglass. That's an easy one. You suspend the regolith in a liquid and separate the silica from the
> alumina based on density. Then you melt the silica and blow it out of a fine nozzle to form strands. Unless you can figure out
> how to do it in a vaccuum, however, which is plausible, you need a gas to blow it, either brought from earth or boiled out of
> the regolith.
Spin the container, quickly. There are many ways to apply pressure.
> That right there is five primary subsystems:
> 1.) Power
Solar
> 2.) Regolith collector
Plenty of machines would work for this, being a generic digging tool, possibly with some instrumentation to ascertain rough
composition.
> 3.) Silica separator
This could probably be automated, but I wouldn't know the specific process.
> 4.) Furnace and fiber machine
Again, run it on electricity, the process shouldn't be that hard.
> 5.) Gas storage and/or production.
Why? Not necessar at all.
Here's a good example of what *COULD* be done.
A small solar "digging" rover. It doesn't need to be fast, just reliable. It diggs regolith, and puts it in a bin.
The bin, once sufficiently full, will close up and heat up. The aluminium and oxygen can be separated. The aluminum, melted, could then be released (possibly through a mechanism designed to pump out plates.
The oxygen? Bring up some high tolerance balloons to store it.
Similar processes could be used to make glass.
Given the regolith composition will be known, a couple simple visual and pressure sensors should be sufficient to get the aluminum out reliably. Next time up, the astronauts just need enough material to assemble the (preferrably thick) aluminum sheeting into a shelter. It doesn't completely eliminate the weight requirements for a shelter of that size (they'll need nitrogen, heating mechanisms, food, etc.), but it will greatly reduce the required weight to make it.
Not knowing exact compositions up there, other things could potentially be made as well. A lot of simple, but heavy-lift work should be automatable.
Parent
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a pressurized habitat does not have to be a complex shape, and BRING THE DOOR FROM EARTH. Just because 99% of the product is domestic, doesn't mean that you can't bring the 1% that would be really hard. It would definitely simplify things for astronauts could show up, install a door, and pressurize, instead of having to build the entire structure.
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(Bring Your Own Door)
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The point is not to have it build everything (requires a lot of handwaving), but to prevent us from having to move a lot of heavy stuff from the earth to the moon (thus saving a lot of cost, and not really requiring handwaving).
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Do I really need to point out that lab trials are a very long way from actual equipment? And that we haven't got any equivalent machinery on earth that functions like this - despite decades of trying?
In so far as weight goes - the bare structure (which is all than can be expected to be produced, even with hurricane strength handwaving) is the lightest part of the base. The equipment you'll have to launch to produce it will
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a good example of what *COULD* be done.
A small solar "digging" rover. It doesn't need to be fast, just reliable. It diggs regolith, and puts it in a bin.
The bin, once sufficiently full, will close up and heat up. The aluminium and oxygen can be separated. The aluminum, melted, could then be released (possibly through a mechanism designed to pump out plates.
The oxygen? Bring up some high tolerance balloons to store it.
If it's so easy, let's see you do the same thing on earth.
You do realize you're talking about dissociating alumina and storing the molten aluminum, right? Inside a lightweight vehicle? 1.7 MJ/mol binding energy? Melting point of 2054C? (There is a reason that Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold.) Even the commercial aluminum extraction process requires dissolving the alumina in molten cryolite (sodium hexafluoroaluminate) at 980C and requires pre-extraction of the aluminum oxide from the ot
Re:It's all about scale... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is true. I agree with this part. However, everytime the topic of ISRU comes up, I see plenty of armchair engineers talking lightly about applying it from the get-go at very, very advanced levels, and it's clear they haven't given any real thought to what it takes to achieve the sort of results they're talking about. One of the posters above, for example, dismisses building a pressure vessel for a habitat as fairly elementary. That first of all neglects the point about structural mass actually being a minority of the payload needs for a moon base, and secondly shows an ingorance of the large and specialized tooling needed to build such components here on earth. How much can that infrastructure actually be shrunk down, made lightweight, or made multipurpose by simply sacrificing productivity?
As I said, I agree if we're going to live in space truly long term, we need to learn to use the resources out there. Once we reach the trade surplus point, we'll have reached that dream of the lunar-industrial age. But it seems like everyone is assuming with a little clever engineering we can do that right now. That's not so. It will take a herculean amount of engineering, testing, re-engineering, failing, succeeding, and taking baby steps to get there.
That's why the first resource utilization will be simple things. Once you've established a baseline competancy, it's easier to add on to it than to do the whole thing all at once. It also leaves you in a better and less expensive position to react to problems or unanticipated supply or demand changes.
On the point about sending unmanned missions first. That is actually part of the plan. NASA decided last year they should identify several targets on the moon of scientific interest and send short "sortie" mission similar to the Apollo program there. At the same time, they would also pick a site for a permanent base and land equipment there in advance of a crew. Right now it looks like two missions to send power, basic supplies, and a basic habitat. Then short manned mission to get everything set up. This would be followed by a longer missions with stuff like ISRU equipment, a pressurized rover for long exploration missions, and additional living/science facilities.
Parent
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Getting the picture of the scale that's being talked about?
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Look at aluminum. The above poster was kind enough not to mention all of what you need to convert aluminum ores like bauxite into aluminum. Let's assume bauxite. First, you have to mine it, t
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Decoded version [innovations-report.com].
Also dig around on ISRUInfo.com [isruinfo.com], especially in their conference proceedings [isruinfo.com] sections. There are lots and lots of ideas for designing the hardware to be applicable in small scale missions.
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Actually, we don't know if there are mineral deposits on the Moon, as it hasn't been explored in enough detail to even make a reasonable guess. Anything below the top couple of centimeters is pretty much a complete mystery. On top of which, it is not clear the Moon has gone thro
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Beyond that a quick set google searches suggests you can find the following redily on the moon, out of various mineral forms:
Sulfur
Iron
Oxygen
Potassium
Aluminum
Hydrogen
Calcium
fix (Score:2)
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"Common elements" are not the same thing as "useable ore deposits". If you do a similiar long distance scan of the Earth's surface, you'll find lots of silicates, lots of iron, and quite a bit of aluminum - but 99.9999999% of it is either of too low a concentration to be recoverable without a massive effort, and a similiar percentage is locked up in chemical form
One word - Land Rover. (Score:2)
Doh, two words.
Land Rover Discovery.
Doh, three words.
Go Team Canada! (Score:3, Interesting)
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http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/01/08/mdasale.html?ref=rss [www.cbc.ca]
Rims & Ground FX (Score:3, Funny)
Turn in your Geek Card, please. (Score:2)
No room for Bender, huh? (Score:4, Funny)
You... asked for it... (Score:2)
(Or, just get a Honda 3-wheeler or other model)
Apologies to the Simpsons. (Score:5, Funny)
Smells like a steak, and seats thirty five?
Lunorero! Lunorero!
Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down
It's the country-fried Moonbuggie endorsed by a clown
Lunorero! Lunorero!
Hey, hey!
Twelve yards long, two lanes wide,
Sixty five tons of American pride!
Lunorero! Lunorero!
Top of the line in Lunar works,
Unexplained fires are for the managers of the dorks!
Lunorero! Lunorero!
She blinds everybody with her super high beams
She's a rock-crusin', sand-spuin' drivin' machine
Lunorero! Lunorero! Lunorero!
Whoa, Lunorero! Whoa!
You mean... (Score:2)
Solid Lunar Lander (Score:2)
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Let's see now... (Score:2)
Does anyone still take this seriously? (Score:2)
It's about time (Score:2, Funny)
Domo-kun mouth and giant pink ears (Score:2, Funny)
Airlocks? (Score:4, Informative)
The designs I've seen for this don't really use airlocks . Suits similar to Soviet designs dock with the capsule or buggy. Astronauts climb in from the back and undock to work outside. Samples and equipment go through a smaller lock. Makes for some funky looking craft.http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/09/rvs-in-space-lu.html [wired.com]
Solved in on 'U.F.O' (Score:2)
Fast buggies and low gravity (Score:3, Funny)
Oh well, at least the UK gets to share its space funding with the rest of Europe, so we don't spend only our money hot-rodding cars for low gravity
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They probably just want to make donuts on the moon. I would. THAT would be cool.
Pimp it, motherfuckers! (Score:2)
And paint on some flames (over the lime green to solar orange gradient base coat) and get one of those "La Cucaracha" horns. You can't hear it in a vacuum, but it's the principle of the thing.
Oh, and a wicked sound system so our Mooninite homeboys can experience our righteous mammalian thump-thump. Well, I guess the whole vacuum thing figures in again, but still...
I'd start with a dropship (Score:2)
Solid Lunar Lander (Score:3, Funny)
Amazed that this is first (Score:2)
Why human-powered buggies? (Score:3, Interesting)
"stepping stone to mars" (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, plan to keep the astronauts up there for at least a month so that we can start planning for long-term habitation.
Am I crazy to be suggesting this? It would certainly reduce redundancies, and free up funds and time to focus on the other issues we'd have with a Mars mission (ie. the intermediary vehicle that would take the lander from Earth's orbit to Mars or the Moon and back)
Actually, come to think of it, I'm not seeing how a moon mission would be *that* much less difficult than a Mars mission, apart from the return journey.
A couple of things (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, even though mars is not really the same as the moon, they are trying to make this hardware work for both planets. For example, the original orion's last stage and the lander's primary called for using methane/LOX engines. The idea was that on mars would be easily able to generate methane and even O2. But the current orion went to using the J2 on the upper stage of the orion. It remains to be seen what the lander will use. But parts of the habitat, any rover/shuttle, and automated manufacturing will be made to work for both.
I am guessing that by 2016, the private companies will already be on the moon, and gearing up for mars. The mars trip will probably be a 1 way mission that is funded by a couple of billionaires. They will expect the team to live their natural lives there, or return them after 5-10 years. The idea of sending a team for a couple of months or even 2 years makes NO sense what so ever.
Parent
Re:NASA Wants Fast Moonbuggies (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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