NASA Wants Fast Moonbuggies and Solid Lunar Lander 117
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!
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Better than that, what they need (Score:3, Informative)
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, then crush it, likely in multiple stages, down to powder (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then wash the powder in a solution of sodium hydroxide (Insert Long Tail Here) to produce soluable AlOH. You then filter out the other components (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then cool it (on the moon, this would involve extensive radiators) to preciptate out the AlOH. You then filter out the precipitate (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). You then heat the AlOH to 1050C (Insert Long Tails For Heat And Furnace Maintenance Here) to drive the water off (Insert Long Tail For Water Recovery Circuit Here). You then cycle the alumina out. The alumina then gets deposited in a hot bath (Insert Long Tail For Heat And Crucible Maintenance) of molten cryolite (Na3AlF6). The cryolite is steadily consumed (Insert Long Tail Here), as is the carbon anode (Insert Long Tail Here); the anode is consumed rather quickly. A tremendous amount of electricity is consumed (Insert Long Tail Here) in the electrolysis. The aluminum settles to the bottom, where it can be drained and sent to casting (Insert Maintenance Long Tail Here). I'm not even going to bother with casting and forging.
Just from a more fundamental standpoint, ignoring the tails of manufacturing the chemicals/products associated with each, where are the consumed Na, F, and C supposed to come from? The moon is very poor in them, especially C and F. You can try for a more closed process (more massive, complex equipment and more maintenance), but you'll never do that great, especially concerning F and C (in the form of various gasseous carbon/oxygen/fluorine compounds). And there's a *lot* more energy needed, too.
It's easy to not see the forest through the trees when considering colonization of moons and planets. Unfortunately, the "forest" in this case is how tightly interlinked almost all of modern human industry is. And you can't just bootstrap it on other planets; you're dependant on it for your survival. You can't just go out with picks and expect to produce enough product to even maintain your survival, or expect to make products in a clay-brick forge that burns charcoal from a nearby forest. Bootstrapping, as we did on Earth, simply can't work there. You need modern industry, and hence have to deal with its limits.
Re:Better than that, what they need (Score:1, Informative)
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]
Re:Better than that, what they need (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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 other minerals present (which usually involves a multistep process using a sodium hydroxide solution) How much cryolite, sodium hydroxide, and water are you transporting to the moon?
At best you are talking 50 MJ/kg (14 kW hours/kg) for an industrial scale plant. I doubt you could achieve anywhere close to that in small scale. So if you were willing to pay the cost to get the international space station's solar arrays to the moon, you could extract a block of aluminum a foot on a side each day. Assuming you didn't want to do anything else with that power, of course. Like extract the oxygen (which formed an oxide with elements in the cryolite during the aluminum extraction process). Or the silica (which is disolved in the sodium hydroxide solution).
But as I suggest, do try this at home so you can show us how easy it is.