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 .
Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry Grommit... (Score:5, Funny)
They mostly come at night...mostly (Score:5, Funny)
How about *nothing at all*? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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 a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why do want to go to the moon? Because the Chinese are going?
... but it's otherwise an utterly worthless dick-swinging contest.
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
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:How about *nothing at all*? (Score:5, Informative)
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Fusion [asi.org] a good enough reason for ya?
Depends on the expense, fusion research is certainly worthwhile but we still need to ask how much we're prepared to invest in it. I haven't even heard a figure for the expected cost per kWh of power from a commercial fusion reactor.
If it turns out to cost considerably more than current power it won't be widely used, no matter how eco-friendly or technologically advanced.
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.
Well the problem is tritium is created in fusion reactors; as more reactors are built more tritium is produced so even more reactors cou
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: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.
Re:How about *nothing at all*? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Anyone here that feels that going to the moon is just an expensive waste of money and time needs to have their geek status revoked and they must join the ranks of the PHB morons.
No anybody here that falls for every piece of government propaganda or patriotism needs to have their slashdot card revoked, because that's all the moon-race is. It doesn't address the real issues of the times, lack of hope in lower class areas leading to increase in crime that's only going to speed up as time goes by, lack of money for both people and a country as a whole, outsourcing of everything stretchin
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I'm a geek, but I don't see the point of going to the moon, in fact i think its exactly the kind of showy, dramatic, expensive and ultimately useless project that a PHB suggests, and which geeks should roll their eyes at.
We got velcro and non stick frying pans. yippee, but given the potential costs of going, and the problems right here of climate change and global poverty, I think there are better uses of the cash. if that means I'm not a geek, then big fucking deal.
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.
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Only because those bastards won't let us use nuclear weapons to launch rockets. Freekin Hippies.
How about doing it smart? (Score:5, Insightful)
What should NASA do? Damned if I know. Or care all that much for now. AFAIC the real concern is for a private group to choose some location well away from the various government-run bases and just bloody well start shooting itty bitty robots up there ASAP. As I've said about Mars [typepad.com], the rational thing to do is to start processing minerals, digging tunnels that are deep enough to be radiation resistant, establishing power generation capacity, and maybe even starting a few teeny separate greenhouse enclosures in which the beginnings of working ecosystems can get going. In the next few years. Not to mention building the kinds of expertise one only gets through real world implementation.
To wait to do this with human-optimized vehicles or even simply to wait to do this until the billions of dollars in funding needed for a full mission can be rounded up and the milions of man-hours in research and development needed to make a moonbase human-capable is as boneheaded as, say, using only Microsoft products "because that's the established approach".
We already know that dust is going to make every job bloody difficult. We already know that our attempts at equipment that reliably works in vacuum and under those temperature changes haven't gone all that well. We have a lot of learning to do. And it will all go a lot better if the first humans get there to find as much mass and equipment already waiting and running as possible. So let's start with the least demanding tasks and get more ambitious as we go.
So I say:
A.) Put a couple of relays in Moon orbit. This massively cuts power and complexity demands down for the devices we later send moonside. If they can take pictures of the moon as they orbit, that's jim dandy too.
B.) Have at least two teams launch at least two different approaches to digger robots. These robots will, hopefully, if nothing else, build the first enclosures in which other robots can do things like wait out the worst radiation storms.
C.) Send more robots to survey the local area for mineral resources. Each package also includes some amount of additional power generation capacity. Ideally some mix is used of solar, temperature differential-based systems, and other approaches.
D.) And only then send robots to start doing things like making rocket fuel from moon mass.
Maybe I'm wrong about the ideal order. But I'm pretty damn sure that I'm right about my basic point. We should be launching payloads as soon as we possibly can. Barring some other group stealing what we send, we lose far more than we gain by waiting. /. classic become true.
Oh, and if we do it right, the group that does so may even get to have that
E.) PROFIT!!!!
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Let's see... why did we want to go last time? Oh, because the Russians were going. Aha.
It's on Turner Classic movies right now.
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.
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Re:Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
The Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Which takes us back to... (Score:3, Insightful)
If it were up to me, every kid with an IQ over 120 would get a free copy of that book, among others, on their twelfth birthday.
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
It's made of cheese. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's made of cheese. (Score:5, Funny)
Come on you can do a better job than that:
1. Mine the cheese
2.
3. Profit!
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Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why. (Score:5, Funny)
"You know you can't mess
Re:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why. (Score:5, Funny)
We shall blow up the moon ourselves, if necessary. Nobody can deny us our right of self-defense against the moon. If the French happen to think the idea of blowing up the moon is silly, then we'll rename food products just to spite them ("terrestrial fries"). Anyway, the French don't have the right to oppose our ideas because they're only French and they don't even run the planet anymore, much less the solar system.
chaos (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why. (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
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)
TFA is vacuous (Score:5, Insightful)
YAWN
Re:TFA is vacuous (Score:4, Funny)
Re:TFA is vacuous (Score:5, Funny)
We came, we saw, we left. (Score:5, Insightful)
On second thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Insightful)
Also radio telescopes! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Also radio telescopes! (Score:5, Informative)
The ones we'd be observing with the telescope. I wouldn't call that "interference" - it's the signal.
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Re:Also radio telescopes! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Also radio telescopes! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Also radio telescopes! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Also radio telescopes! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Build a Huge Telescope (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"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)
First there gets his pick of 1 of 2 sites, or if he's resource and capability-rich, he could gra
going to the moon (Score:2, Insightful)
1. it demonstrates to other nations technological prowess. don't mess with us, we have the tech to go to the moon
2. it demonstrates to citizens how wonderful the usa/ china/ india is. they forget their earthly concerns
there is absolutely no other valid purpose besides that, for the short term
as for the long term, i won't pretend to know there might not be a more long term purpose, if you don't preten
Re:going to the moon (Score:5, Insightful)
For some values of "short".
Reminds me of Seward's folly. Buy Alaska? What a total waste of money. Can't possibly justify such a waste while there is still one "Poor person" left anywhere in the world.
Porno Studio (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re: (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
The next administration (Score:2)
Re: (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.
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Wouldn't we be able to get these materials far, far, cheaper by mining our own waste dumps. How much of the highly refined metals is "rotting" away in aircraft graveyards all over the continent? How much are electronics dumps? How much are we just burying in old mines along with the coffee grinds, disposable diapers, plastic wrappers, cereal boxes, and tons of other trash?
What about the candidates? (Score:2)
Do either McCain or Obama have policies about space exploration in general and the moon commitment in particular?
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Quoting an e-mail distributed by the Mars Society in reference to a McCain speech from within the current week:
"I am intrigued by a man on Mars and I think that it would excite the imagination of the American people," said McCain. He argued that NASA needs to do a better job of inspiring the American public, as was the case during the race to the Moon in the 1960's. "I'd be willing to spend more taxpayers dollars [to support NASA]," he said.
This is good news for pro-exploration voters, but I believe this is political posturing. He was in Florida while he gave the speech, and NASA is big business there. Until I am convinced that McCain has intentions to spend less on military conflicts, I cannot bring myself to even consider giving him my vote.
Um, education, not welfare (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What about the candidates? (Score:4, Informative)
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"?
There's even a question? (Score:2)
That's no moon... (Score:2)
It's ... OK, never mind.
Seriously, at this point there is no purpose to going to the moon for the US. We don't have the tech (or the budget) to set up a self-sufficient base, much less a colony. The transport costs for supplies are too expensive. Personnel would have to be rotated off--at additional cost of money, resource, and risk to their safety.
What we need to do is develop and send some form of unmanned, containerized, modular base, that can autonomously set itself up and start producing power, oxy
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Precisely. Based on current knowledge, there's no economic benefit in going to the moon, whether it's a "day trip" or a colony.
But if we ever discover that there is an economic advantage, my proposal is (IMhO) more workable than manned missions.
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.
Re:Ignore it. There's nothing there we care about. (Score:3, Funny)
This morning I felt like I was far from adapted to 1G. 1/6G would have been just the thing to help me get out of bed!
Re:Ignore it. There's nothing there we care about. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Perhaps they need to sit back and take a look at the third world countries, homeless, sick, starving and uneducated people on our own rock before we start trying to live on others.
If mere money could solve all those problems, they would have been solved a long time ago. Money is useless without stable government, stable courts, stable trade and a stable economy. The root cause of poverty is not lack of money, it's the lack of infrastructure to create money.
I had a new idea for a space race . . . (Score:2)
a few ideas (Score:2)
2) space telescopes
3) forget the moon, visit an asteroid instead- the moon requires that rockets carry much more fuel for laeaving the moon than an asteroid, also the moon is deficient in volatiles in comparison to many asteroids/comets
Live there (Score:4, Interesting)
Missing some elements (Score:3, Insightful)
There's plenty of metal and oxygen, and plenty of sunlight, so it might be a better plan to send up a fleet of teleoperated mac
obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We should STAY THERE this time. (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Rape it (Score:4, Insightful)
Presumably we would only extract the interesting things, like useful metals or He3, and leave behind the useless chunks of plain old boring bulk rock there. We have plenty here. Aside from mystic voodoo, the gravitational force should therefore remain more or less intact.
And if we ever reach the point where we can theoretically actually move enough of the Moon here to the Earth to make a difference on the raw gravitational front, then I think we'll be able to handle most of the ill effects of any removal.
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.
Re:Simple answer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Face it. The only reason
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But what is there to learn on the moon, that can't be learned on Earth? All it is is a rock. A rock without an atmosphere and 1/6 gravity.
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 l
Create fake fake moon landing videos (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember "Space 1999"? (Score:2, Funny)
Obviously... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Space: 1999 (Score:3, Funny)
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
Don't forget! (Score:3, Funny)
What the hey. Why break a successful pattern?
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....
Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Been there, done that. It's a big airless rock. Unless we get some way of lifting stuff to orbit at a price comparable to, say, China to US air freight, forget it. Chemical rockets are about as good as they will ever get, which is not very. Maybe with nuclear rockets or something new, but redoing Apollo is pointless. (Also, the current NASA would botch it.)
We have trouble keeping the ISS supplied and staffed, and can't find any really good reason for having built it in the first place.
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.
So many things... (Score:3, Insightful)
1: Lunar space elevator/slingshot to launch payloads at high velocity.
2: Giant telescopes. No atmosphere, low gravity, and no jarring lunch into space makes huge telescopes easier.
3: Radio spectrum analysis on the far side of the moon would block spectrum pollution from earth.
4: Resources. Titanium, Helium-3, and others.
5: Laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory (LIGO on the moon). Since there is less seismic activity on the moon the detection of gravity waves would be easier.
6: Asteroid/comet detection. An array of observation stations could scan the sky to track and catalog potentially dangerous space objects.
7: Earth defense from asteroid strikes. A laser array (or a mass impactor) could slightly deflect a asteroid on a collision path with earth.
8: A base of operations for manned interplanetary missions since it is easier to launch a craft from its reduced gravity field.
9: Earth observatory. It would be a stable, long term point from which scientists could monitor many aspects of earth.
10: Fun. Who wouldn't love a rock climbing wall, swimming pool, or pedal powered flying machine on the moon.
11: Profit. I'm sure there would be a monetary incentive, either in the resources or tourist like activity, for people to go to the moon.
12: (Insert next hundred ideas here...)
Indeed there is no shortage of ideas or reasons to go, the article seems more focused on the potential problems of land management/rights/claims. i.e. Who gets to make the rules for the moon.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Save that for Mimas [wikipedia.org].