NASA Mulling Joint Lunar Missions With Commercial Enterprises 59
MarkWhittington writes "According to a July 3, 2013 story in SpaceRef, NASA has issued a Request for Information concerning various commercial endeavors to create robotic lunar landers. NASA appears to be interested in assisting in those projects with a view of using the resulting vehicles for its own exploration plans. Officially, thanks to a mandate by President Obama, NASA is not planning its own crewed mission to the moon. However the space agency seems to be interested in supporting, in some way, a commercially run lunar base. Joint robotic lunar landings might be seen as the start of such an effort."
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To "standardize" a measure of man is to look to the past and eschew creativity..
Meanwhile, the very goal of progress is to work fewer hours.
Sounds like British people are quietly succeeding. As usual.
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Space Nutters!
YOU! You covet my ICE CREAM BAR! (I'll sit back now to see who gets it)
Re:We need to go to space, because space is COOL! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't care about space exploration you're much worse than anti-science. If you care more about "billions of dollars" than about whether humanity populates places outside of the Earth your problem isn't with science, it's with having a tiny point of view. Essentially, not caring about the expansion of humanity through space puts you closer to animals, which only care about eating, reproducing and surviving.
However, it's not the same to consider that it might not be the appropriate moment for space exploration (for example because humanity should first work on discovering better propulsion systems) than to just don't care about it.
Not caring about space exploration is similar to not caring about philosophy, art or history. It just makes you less human and more beast.
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Yup. Tang was it! Tang was the only thing invention wholly created or accelerated by the space race.
I know I am feeding a troll but if anybody believes that ignorant statement they really need to go crack a book before ever considering voting.
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"Yeh yeh, marijuana is totally legal on the Moon! Grow it and roll yourself a joint! Toke up, Moonmen! And Moonwomen!"
I had a Marihuana Bar on the moon for some time, but nobody came, the bar just had no Atmosphere.
There's gold in them thar hills (Score:2)
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Re:There's gold in them thar hills (Score:4, Interesting)
Not much gold either from what I understand.
No one has actually looked much. It's worth noting that two of the largest deposits of gold and platinum group metals (PGM), the Bushveld complex in South Africa and the Norilsk-Talnakh deposit in Siberia are both created by igneous processes possibly in conjunction with asteroid impacts, processes which happen on the Moon just as well.
The Norilsk-Talnakh deposit is actually a feature of the Siberian Traps which are effectively the Terran equivalent of a very large Lunar mare (as I recall, depending how large the Siberian Traps originally were, they could have been larger than all but the two largest lunar maria). PGM were concentrated near the outlet dikes for a vast amount of lava (several million cubic kilometers worth) via some sulphur chemistry mechanism - apparently bubbles of PGM rich magma were trapped under the series of flows, leaching a bit of PGMs and other materials from each subsequent lava flow and increased in concentration as the Siberian traps eruptions continued.
The Bushveld complex apparently is a magma intrusion coupled with an asteroid impact. It is currently unknown if the asteroid contributed the PGMs present in this deposit (which is by far the world's largest deposit of platinum). PGMs were concentrated by the very slow cooling of the deposit which settled out them in two or three thin layers (or "reefs" in the local mining jargon).
Because there is almost no erosion on the Moon, similar deposits to either of the above would likely be deeply buried. It is worth noting however that because of the Moon's much lower gravity (and ignoring the moderately lower density of lunar crust), that pressure increases versus depth at about a sixth the rate it does on Earth.
So anyway, the Moon has some features that are similar to a couple of the largest PGM and gold bearing deposits on Earth and it allows for far deeper mining than can occur on Earth. Obviously, this isn't something that is going to happen next year, but it's not unreasonable to expect that there will eventually be mining of the Moon for resources that can be used on Earth and elsewhere in the Solar System.
They're going for the lunar X Prize (Score:1)
As I recall Google has an outstanding promising $30 million to the first group to send a robot back to the moon. Maybe they're going for a moonshot to pad their budget! [googlelunarxprize.org]
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Even with the $30 million prize, sending a robot to the moon, in all likelihood would be a net expense, not a source of income.
Now that marijuana is being legalized (Score:3, Funny)
I suspect there are going to be a lot more joint missions.
Uh, JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey NASA, you heard of this place called JPL out by Cal Tech. They've been landing rovers on Mars for a while now which is WAY harder than landing one on the moon. Why don't you give them a call and stop being clueless and pathetic.
P.S.
Elon, please launch Falcon Heavy so we can shut NASA down and put the money in to your actual space program instead of the empty shell that is NASA these days
Re:Uh, JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
....so we can shut NASA down
Congress would have to revoke their charter, I believe. Senators keep NASA around due to inertia, weather forecasts, the odd bit of national prestige, and contracts to companies from, or doing business in, their states.
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....so we can shut NASA down
Congress would have to revoke their charter, I believe. Senators keep NASA around due to inertia, weather forecasts, the odd bit of national prestige, and contracts to companies from, or doing business in, their states.
If you know anything about contractors and NASA, one word of advice...DON'T!
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Not known wy (now, there it is, a new shpelling: do people still aspirate the "h" of the "wh"?) you replied to me, Slick, as I wasn't the one suggesting NASA be shut down, but I'll take it as good advice anyway.
Interesting sig you have, by the by.
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Oh, OK, thanks for the clarification. Thing is, I think it depends much on looking at the usefulness of a project or research program. Congress folks tend to look at funding/jobs/votes and tend to not give a shit about the worth of anything to the nation at large - if they even have the interest or ability to do so.
I'm only familiar in a passing way with the general kinds of things 'twixt contractors and agencies, mostly from dealing with some milspec bidding decades back. I had enough trouble with all t
Re:Uh, JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA needs to stay around so that when the Chinese land on the moon the US government can go into a panic and pump money into it.
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Boots on Mars. Why is this so hard to understand?
Its hard to understand trading one deep gravity well for another.
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We will be trading one deep gravity well for two.
Fairly basic engineering that the shouldn't be a single point of failure for all known life in the universe.
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Fairly basic engineering that the shouldn't be a single point of failure for all known life in the universe.
You dont have to go to another deep gravity well in order to spread life and/or humanity out, a fact that makes your argument completely empty. You are as short sighted as the people at NASA these days (who seem to want glory instead of logic.)
We should be working on sustainable independent space craft, starting with sustainable independent space stations. In the grand scheme of things, gravity wells are for noobs.
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We should be working on sustainable independent space craft, starting with sustainable independent space stations. In the grand scheme of things, gravity wells are for noobs.
The obvious rebuttal is that we have only one example of a sustainable independent space craft right now - the planet Earth and it happens to have a very large gravity well. Gravity wells happen to also be places where resources get concentrated enough to be useful.
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They also happen to be a place where enough gravity exists to keep humans healthy without having to expend energy and resources to generate it artificially.
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In the grand scheme of things, gravity wells are for noobs.
I apologize for the lateness of this second reply, but we are noobs in space. Building on Mars means that we can transplant most of our technologies and systems wholesale. It also has all the elements we need for survival. So we can build a civilization on Mars which could be sustainable even in the absence of any off world support.
Down the road, Mars can generate a second market for space-based goods as well.
Do you know what you are talking about even (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure NASA have heard of this JPL since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech is a NASA laboratory [nasa.gov].
From TFA:
So how is reaching out to commercial entities to improve their existing know-how instead of relying ONLY on their own labs "being clueless and pathetic"?
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The current american dream is short bursts of intense work by 'outsiders' followed by riches, so companies that exemplify that imagery get a lot of political attention. The older style of 'lots of planned hard work over long periods followed by reasonable long term profits' just isn't sexy. So there is a push to get NASA away from companies that have long consistant but boring track records (and, importan
hi (Score:1)
Public-Private Partnerships (Score:1)
Are we really still thinking that these things will ever be cost-effective?
Re:Public-Private Partnerships (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no technical difference between public, public-private or private - only the implementation detail of how the money winds up in campaign donors' pockets.
Dicking around (Score:4, Interesting)
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Putting a test pilot in a rubber suit into a tin can and putting that tin can on a dead rock is not a "great thing".
When the "dead rock" in question is the Moon, it becomes a great thing.
How about a social model that requires LESS WORK considering how much technology we have?
Why bother with a social model when a personal model will reduce your work load to whatever you desire.
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Need a lander for the Lunar Resoure Prospecto (Score:2)
They need a lander for this mission to explore the permanently shadowed region of the lunar poles.
http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/lsf2013/content/resource-prospector-lunar-volatiles-prospecting-and-isru-demonstration-mission [nasa.gov]
The Artemis Project offered this in 1998 (Score:3)
If anyone is interested, the http://asi.org/ [asi.org] site is still there. Would've cost the same as 4 shuttle flights and left a permanent base on the moon. But nooooo.
What's changed? Well, now there's even less money spare...
Interference (Score:1)
Just use 10 year long plans. (Score:2)