What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There?

MarkWhittington writes "For the first time in over thirty five years, the Moon has become the next frontier. The United States has committed to returning human astronauts to the Moon by the end of the next decade. China has hinted that it intends to do this also. A variety of countries, including the United States and China, but also India, Europe, and Japan, have either sent robotic probes into lunar orbit or are on the verge of doing so." Contribute your favorite moon ideas below; I'd like to see it used as the set to film The Moon is a Harsh Mistress .

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

[seifried]

A server farm is a terrible idea, first you got to schlep all the stuff up there, build infrastructure and (drum roll please) cool it. Cool it into what though? There's no atmosphere. So you need to build a radiator farm, but when you're facing the sun good luck radiating all that heat away. Much saner to leave the server farms on planet earth. About the only thing that makes sense is mining it for the deuterium on the surface and using it as a launch base for interplanetary stuff (no atmosphere +less gravity = much better, plus you could fire stuff using a rail gun.

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

While you are right about the potential heat sink qualities of the dark side of the moon, the problem to that is that the dark side of the moon, as commonly stated, isn't actually always dark. It is only called dark because, well, we can never see it from earth. From the lunar perspective however, all surfaces receive solar radiation, just like the earth does.

As long as whatever process can be shut down and not damaged by extreme heat during the lunar day cycles however, there is no reason not to take advantage of that extreme cold available 50% of the time.

Note: I have no idea what magnitude of heat energy is provided by solar radiation reflecting from the earth to the moon, but I assume it is a trivial amount.

Re:Also radio telescopes!

[vilgefortz]

I do believe that "dark side of the moon" means in this context the side unseen from earth.

Re:Also radio telescopes!

[CastrTroy]

The moon does rotate, but it does so at such a speed, that the same side always faces the earth.

Re:Also radio telescopes!

[Yath]

Then you'd want to shut it down for two weeks while the Sun is visible, and turn it on the rest of the time.

there is nothing shielding it from the RF interference from [...] the billions of other sources in the universe...

The ones we'd be observing with the telescope. I wouldn't call that "interference" - it's the signal.

Re:Also radio telescopes!

[coldkryten]

there is nothing shielding it from the RF interference from the sun and the billions of other sources in the universe....

Interference is the signal you're not interested in. Looking for radio frequency emissions from the billions of detectable objects that are not our planet is sort of the point of a radio telescope isn't it?

Re:How about *nothing at all*?

[ArcherB]

Why do want to go to the moon? Because the Chinese are going?

Let's see... why did we want to go last time? Oh, because the Russians were going. Aha.

Putting a man on the moon may be inspiring and make for great geopolitical drama, and it's fun to touch the moon rock at the Air and Space Museum ... but it's otherwise an utterly worthless dick-swinging contest.

It's extremely expensive to get there, and the fact that we still have no idea what to do with it (as evidenced by this very article!!) suggests it ain't worth it. Until there's some compelling economic or scientific reason for a moon visit, I believe it's simply a boondoggle for the things-we-can-do-by-wasting-enough-fossil-fuel industry.

Simple: [space.com] Helium-3 [wikipedia.org]

Fusion [asi.org] a good enough reason for ya?

Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tonnes of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per tonne. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year.

To put that number in perspective: Ignoring the cost of money and taxes and whatnot, that rate of income would launch a moon shot like our reference mission every day for the next 10,000 years.

Re:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why.

[Z34107]

I always thought the whole "Freedom Fries"... err, your "terrestrial fries", thing was hilarious.

The delectable dietary staple has nothing to do with the French, and very little to do with "freedom." In fact, they come from Belgian.

So, I call them "Belgium-fried potatoes." Or, "botatoes" for short.

Now, how inept are the French? Can't even hijack potato recipes properly, let alone solar systems. Yeesh.

RE: What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get Th

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is what we should do on the Moon over the next 100-200 yrs.

1st Communication Outpost
2nd Small Science Colony
3rd jump Off for further space exploration
4th Mining and/or Waste Disposal
5th General Colonization

Re:How about *nothing at all*?

[mjaworsk]

This is a problematic approach given the current direction in fusion energy research. The problem of D-He3 fusion is that the cross section for reactions is more difficult to attain than D-T fusion. Sure, there are neutrons involved in the latter, but obtaining satisfactory plasma conditions is the main reason we don't already have fusion power. To jump over to D-He3 and up the temperature and density requirements would push the plasma capabilities further still. Additionally, there's still the issue of fuel dilution, which in the case of D-T fusion, only a single He4 is left over to (somehow) remove. The neutron removes itself not being confined. In the case of D-He3, there's an He4 and a proton diluting the fuel, essentially, twice as much as in the D-T case. Dealing with fueling and fuel dilution issues is part of the mission of the ITER project, but there are still a lot of issues remaining in this area and it doesn't get easier with D-He3 fuels. Finally, claiming that the fuels will be aneutronic is not entirely correct. Namely, one still has a bunch of He3-He3 reactions as well as D-D reactions occurring whenever these species are in the same plasma. While having lower cross-sections than than the D-He3 reaction, they still occur and still produce neutrons. So even though the single D+He3 reaction is aneutronic, a reactor based on that fuel combination still will not be and will still have a non-zero activity level associated with it.

Um, education, not welfare

[weston]

Obama wants to slow the space program down to spend it on welfare.

Education [spacepolitics.com], actually.

It's one thing to be critical of decreasing space program funding to pay for math & science education, it's another thing to imply that the funding will be diverted to handouts.

Re:What about the candidates?

[osu-neko]

Obama wants to slow the space program down to spend it on welfare.

Someone has already pointed out that the proposal was to fund education, not welfare, so I'll skip the blatant lie and instead comment on the gross distortion: he doesn't want to slow "the space program" -- he wants to delay the Constellation program, arguably the biggest and most pointless waste of money in the space program. He's all for continuing to fund and advance the actually useful parts of the space program.

Hmm. A gross distortion, an outright lie, and then a made up statistic about how long the money would last in its other function. How does something like that get modded "Informative"?

Re:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The delectable dietary staple has nothing to do with the French, and very little to do with "freedom." In fact, they come from Belgian.

That's somewhat true. Pre-WWI, they were called German fries. We rechristened them French Fried in honor of our allies. No doubt, they were too polite (and desperate for our help) to object to denegrating their cullinary reputation.

And then 100 years later we think they will be insulted. Kinda sad.

Re:How about *nothing at all*?

[BPPG]

Wow, someone's about to make me feel like an ass.

Three bonded Hydrogens != Tritium

A Hydrogen with two neutrons = Tritium.

Re:On second thought ...

[call-me-kenneth]

It's just a model.

Re:TFA is vacuous

[mwanaheri]

Ack. Just what one would expect from an article in which Europe is called a country.

Re:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why.

[4D6963]

Now, how inept are the French? Can't even hijack potato recipes properly

All your fry are belong to us! (yup, I'm French, although I must say we didn't hijack it, we don't call them "French fries" but "frites", it's you the hijackers)

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

That won't work.

It's cold in the shade on the moon because there's nothing there generating heat, and because the lack of a proper atmosphere means that heat from sunlit places will not easily flow into shady areas.

The lack of heat flow is precisely the problem, though: it not only protects shady areas from incoming heat, it also makes it very difficult at best to get rid of excess heat that accumulates (such as due to servers).

Oh, sure, you won't get any extra heat from the sunlit areas, but that'll be your smallest problem really. All your giant heat sinks, cooling elements, radiators, fans and so on will NOT WORK. The heat that's generated by the CPUs etc. will STAY THERE, because you can't (easily) get rid of it.

THAT is the problem.

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

[argStyopa]

You've neatly categorized why it's quite important to get there FIRST.

"There are a lot of uses for a low gravity, low temperature* (half the time, anyway), high sunlight satellite."

There are precisely two places on the moon where you can have all of those things, all of the time:
- solar power AT ALL TIMES
- low temp AT ALL TIMES (by digging a shallow hole, or finding a handy crater) ...and that would be the poles.

First there gets his pick of 1 of 2 sites, or if he's resource and capability-rich, he could grab both.
Second to arrive *might* get the leftovers, or nothing.
Third+ gets nothing, save through departure of first or second, be it by bankruptcy or other (ahem) more direct actions.

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

That is because it is a vacuum. No pesky gas molecules to transfer the heat.

Re:Opens up the solar system for us

[WindBourne]

First, You did notice that the measurements that you put up where the size of a building, and not of the of reactor. yes? Second, the Toshiba 4S was actually designed for the moon, with the intention of 1 launch to send it up there. In addition, the test version is only 10 MW. The one for the moon is meant to be 50MW. That is a LOT of power. But to be honest, if it even takes 3 ares V to get a 10 MW power for 30 years well that is cheap. Now, as to the relatively cheap, Nuclear power ON the moon FROM the moon is relatively cheap. Try to launch nuclear powered sats, ships from earth over the next 50 years and see how cheap and easy it is. It will not be. So RELATIVELY, it is cheap to be on the moon.