What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There? 524
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 .
Build Orbtiting Solar Power Stations (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, this kind of thing would need serious investment, but you could use such a network to reder most earth based power generation obsolete, and you'd get a nice global death ray system thrown in for free.
Ignore it. There's nothing there we care about. (Score:5, Interesting)
The moon is a canard. As is living on Mars.
I predict that within 500 years humanity will have spread throughout the solar system. But we won't live on a single planet or planetoid. Nor will we "teraform" any planets or moons in our solar system. We will instead *build* our habitats and live within them in orbit around various planets and moons which have materials we happen to need.
I could imagine a large rotating space station in orbit around Titan, dropping a nanotube straw to the methane atmosphere and/or oceans for energy. Or we might live in orbit around Earth, Venus, or Mercury in order to extract abundant sunlight for energy conversion.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live. And in space, we should build habitats suitable to our evolutionary history. And once we can do that, the notion that we waste our time looking for "habitable planets" becomes a canard. Our only interest is to look for stars and planets with enough energy to support our biological needs.
Also radio telescopes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Live there (Score:4, Interesting)
We should STAY THERE this time. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Interesting)
Most importantly, I'm reminded of Amara's law: we're going to overestimate its usefulness in the short term, and underestimate it for the long term.
*The lack of an atmosphere will make it so that heat doesn't dissipate in that direction very quickly, but I'm thinking that the dark side of the moon itself would be a kickass heat sink.
Rape it (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the rainforests, but the moon is essentially a rock.
Re:Build Orbtiting Solar Power Stations (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never seen a study of SPS that includes an estimate of how long it will take to build them (that isn't just fantasia bullshit that is). If it will take 30 years before you break even then its not hard to justify just waiting around for something better to come up.
Don't get me wrong, I think if sufficient funding was put into an Apollo style crash program you could get SPS producing net power in under 10 years, and the same simply cannot be said for fusion. We have the physics for SPS, it's just a question of engineering now.. the same cannot be said for plasma physics.
But unless the next administration is looking for a massive public works project, that kind of funding isn't going to happen.
Re:Build a big (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Build Orbtiting Solar Power Stations (Score:3, Interesting)
The valuable materials are refractory metals, like Ti, Mg, Ni, Cr, Mn. The lunar surface is relatively Aluminum poor. The lunar highlands are made up of anorthosite which contains some aluminum, but it is tighly bound no more a useful ore there than it is on earth. We don't need to go to the moon to mine silica. The mare and highlands ate silica poor. The moon would yield strategic metals.
Simple answer... (Score:3, Interesting)
...we'll learn stuff that will turn out to be useful in really unlikely, impossible-to-predict ways.
Pretty much the same answer as with any pure science initiative, really. Remember: economics may come and go, but knowledge is the only investment that will pay dividends for eternity.
How about we build this damn thing already? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one that noticed or am I just picky? (Score:2, Interesting)
1. No Starbucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Possibilities of a Space Elevator (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine being able to siphon water out of the ocean. Have it collect into a giant ice ball and crash that ice ball into the moon. There you have a source of oxygen AND water...
What if in the center of these ice balls you had a heating device that was solar powered. The heat was distributed JUST enough to keep the center of the ice ball liquid. Thus allowing you to have FISH inside of it. Algae and seaweed inside of it.
Re:Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Interesting)
Build a ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Rape it (Score:0, Interesting)
What could possibly go wrong?
Some thoughts on lunar living (Score:4, Interesting)
The only real reason for lunar operations is industry. Judging what is on the Moon from a few measly soil samples and surface imaging is a joke. We really don't know much of anything about what might be there. We do know that a lot of stuff has impacted on it though. Prospecting will be an early high priority task.
Once people start staying there more than a few days there is going to be a significant degradation in the local vacuum and the moon will start to acquire a tenuous atmosphere. Humans are a contaminant wherever we go. The extraction of lunar O2 will be first and foremost and that is mining plain and simple. Tons of lunar material will have to be processed on a monthly basis leading into the thousands of tons per year. We will create tailiings from this process and they will have to be dealt with. If water is found the same thing will happen there.
You can forget about lunar surface habitats. Unless you are fond of mutation. Living will be a lot like being on a submarine for a long time. The establishment of habitation space that does not require the delivery of hardware from earth will be a prime task. You can expect lots of digging, detonations and surface fracture and pulverization activities. These are all dirty, ugly things best done by people without PhD's. Scientists will be seen as a nuisance for quite a while.
Preparation of a large landing pad area will be also be a high priority as will the manufacture of local roads to suppress dust . The manufacture of many large cisterns for water and waste storage will be a big task too. Water paranoia will be the guiding principle on the moon. It will not be wasted. A complete system for the synthesis, liquifaction and storage of LO2 and LH2 also has to be installed using the decent stages of lunar landers for starts. The synthesis of real soils for lunar agnriculture will also be critical. In short, all the boring stuff that few people even thing about are the top priorities on the moon- not searching for He3.
If we want to do this it will take hundreds of people on the surface at any time and they will have to be there for at least 1 year stints to make it economically digestible. The transport is what eats you alive here. You must compel a moon-centric thought process as soon as is practical. If everyone is looking to earth to bring every damn thing the colony will fail. You must be able to repair and replace everything. Most aerospace technology is not amenable to this at present. There will be an evolution of hardware that works on the moon. High performance stuff that is finicky or prone to failure will be ditched. It is this engine of innovation that will be one of the most valuable things we "discover" on the moon.
As for the far side of the moon being radio quiet- not for long. The L2 point is a valuable location and it needs a telecom relay satellite to talk to it. One of the first things we will put up will be a telecom network in orbit and/or at L1/L2. Exploration of the far side will be a far higher priority than a radio telescope. That means comm, machines with electronics and hence noise. Not that they won't declare some small area to be "radio quiet" .
If we discover industrial scale sources of water on the moon its value as a base will be incredible. It is a bio-safe location for people to work. By that I mean they can live and work without the fear of being irradiated to death. What an astronaut will put up with for a few days is utterly different to what a welder should have to put up with over a two year tour of duty. We need the best welders, mechanics,seamstresses, cooks, farmers, doctors, dentists etc etc to make this work. If it is perceived that working on the moon is a death sentence it will be hard to find good help. Working in high orbit like L2 and L2, while necessary, will be minimized. Those are just the equivalent of runways anyway- not much industry that cannot be automated there.
If we go to the moon with some sort of tou
For launching our future Jupiter/Saturn missions (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, this was supposed to have begun 9 years ago, and gone into its second phase about 7 years ago. But hey, better late than never....
O2, energy, and glass (Score:2, Interesting)
With so much cheap energy available, the obvious next thing to do is to start refining things, e.g. extracting vast amounts of oxygen from all of that silica and hurl it into orbit via a rail gun. Other raw materials and purified minerals to follow. Lots of O2 and refined materials in orbit = a good start towards constructing orbital factories. Additional ores to come both from the moon and the asteroids; hydrocarbons to come from Titan.
Okay, so now we've got a factory system set up with effectively unlimited amounts of energy, oxygen, hydrogen, and refined ores of any sort imaginable available to us at the top of Earth's gravity well. Maybe we might get serious about building a space elevator at that point.
What should we build next after that?
Whatever anyone damn well pleases.
Re:How about *nothing at all*? (Score:5, Interesting)
And IIRC, the He3 on the moon is still pretty thin on the ground. You've got to process a lot of regolith to extract it.
I'm all for going back to the moon and staying there, but He3 is not the reason. Learning to live there IS a good reason, IMHO. I'm just looking forward to the day when automated fabrication technology gets to the point where we can build maybe 80-90% of what we need in-situ without huge factories and manual labor. I'm not expecting magical nanotech assemblers any time soon, but you don't need to make EVERYTHING there. Just make the big, heavy stuff - and learn to design what you need using the materials you've got, even if it's sub-optimal.
The day when an off-world colony can produce enough wealth to pay for what it must get from Earth is the day we stop being an Earth-bound species. We'll get there by working both ends - reducing what needs to be sent up (and reducing the cost of doing so), and increasing the economic output of an off-world colony. But we need to go there first, even though it's expensive, and start learning the lessons that need to be learned.
Re:Simple answer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Face it. The only reason
Advertising (Score:1, Interesting)
Telescopes (Score:2, Interesting)
vacuum and gravity are useful (Score:3, Interesting)
In the longer term be able to provide materials to nearby space for orbital constriction easier then launching the materials from earth. The choice of material may change, but the cost could be much lower.
Going to the moon only makes sense if you look at it as a long term investment where the break even/profit is many years away. The benefits may end up being measured more from increased human knowledge then from direct financial profit.
One of the major problems large companies have with investing in R&D is the investment is always a long term process that may take years before showing a result and even longer before showing a profit.
The longer the payback time frame and/or more expensive the research, the harder it is for a business to justify the research. Look at the internet. The basic start was back in the 70's as Arpanet. Until the mid 90's most people had never heard of the internet. Now not only has almost everyone heard of the internet, almost everyone has some type of internet access. Communications satellites were science fiction until the 60's when the first one was launched.
Re:The Obvious (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How about *nothing at all*? (Score:1, Interesting)
Opens up the solar system for us (Score:5, Interesting)
But more important than that, is that from that uranium, we can breed plutonium that we can use to power ships as well a sats elsewhere and perhaps a base on mars. In addition, with that kind of power, we can build a rail launcher on the moon. Even more important than the He3, is the simple fact that it opens up the solar system for us. That uranium being there will do that for us.
And there is. (Score:3, Interesting)
I had not thought about it before, but I wonder if that is not a better idea than PV?
whether there's He3 there or not (Score:4, Interesting)
There are lots of things one can do if one has zero-gravity, for practical purposes, free energy, and transportation.
Once upon a time, the American West was looked at as an unprofitable, useless wasteland.
Re:Simple answer... (Score:3, Interesting)
If we knew that, we wouldn't need to go there, would we?
But for a start, we'd learn huge amounts about practical engineering in environments with no atmosphere and 1/6 gravity, and I'm sure there'd be all kinds of interesting knock-on effects of that. Not to mention the effects of low gravity on the human body (which has never been studied before), which could well lead to new insights in medicine. And all that's just spin-off knowledge from the primary purpose of any lunar expedition, which will most likely be scientific like astronomical or cosmological.
Re:How about *nothing at all*? (Score:5, Interesting)
You said we'd be building big, heavy stuff in factories on the moon. Yes, that's the right goal to aim at. But what will that "stuff" be? Not construction beams for a new lunar suburbia. They will be parts for space stations, space telescopes, spaceships, and all kinds of other stuff that we will want in orbit. Why should that stuff be made on the moon? Well, because all the raw resources are there, because automated manufacturing there should be feasible, and because it will be very easy to launch heavy things into orbit from the moon: With such low gravity and essentially no atmosphere, things can be launched with a simple railgun.
I don't think it will be so great to live on the moon, with all that nasty dust and weak gravity. I say we should cover the moon with solar panels and maybe some fission reactors, and use all that energy for smelting lunar ore, both precious and ordinary. There is no end to the usefulness of the satellites we can make from raw materials on the moon. One of those things: photovoltaic cells which we could railgun into geosynchronous Earth orbit to generate clean power for us. Another thing we need in orbit are big construction pieces from which we could build a large, rotating and mostly self-sufficient space station. That's where we should live - in orbit (maybe at a liberation point), not on the stupid moon.
Also, try to imagine assembling segments of a gigantic (as in 100+ meter) metallic mirror in lunar orbit. The resulting telescope could actually resolve exoplanets!
That's what we should be doing on the moon! Of course, before all that is possible we still need to take steps to refine our technology of automated manufacturing, and we don't need to be on the moon to do a lot of that work. But we do need to learn about the special conditions there, like issues having to do with the dust, the diversity of the geology, the feasibility of certain smelting techniques, the optimal design of nuclear powerplants for the moon, etc. (Yes, the first operations must be powered by fission, get over it. It's the fucking moon.)
So there's my answer.
Crazy Research (Score:2, Interesting)