NASA's Lunar Space Station Might Be a Boondoggle (ieee.org) 207
"NASA's orbiting Lunar Gateway is either essential for a moon landing or a boondoggle in the making," writes IEEE Spectrum.
the_newsbeagle writes: NASA is under pressure to put humans back on the moon by 2024... NASA's plan for meeting that ambitious target relies on building a space station in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. NASA says it will use its (over budget and behind schedule) SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule to dock at this (yet unbuilt) Gateway, then send down a lunar lander. Critics say this is a stupid and over-complicated plan.
This article by veteran space reporter Jeff Foust explains how NASA got itself into this situation.
From the article: Critics of the Gateway argue that NASA shouldn't just scale back the space station -- it should cancel the project altogether. If you want to go to the surface of the moon, the refrain goes, go there directly, as the Apollo missions did a half century ago. Building an outpost in lunar orbit adds expense, delay, and complications to a task that is already hard enough....
Critics say that technological alternatives are emerging in the commercial space sector. They look to Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and based near Seattle. Blue Origin is building both a reusable heavy-lift rocket, called New Glenn, and a lunar lander known as Blue Moon. Another contender is Elon Musk's SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., which is also working on a fully reusable rocket. It will carry an upper stage called Starship, which the company says could land directly on the moon and carry heavy cargo. "Having that vehicle on the moon can basically serve as the core of a pretty significant lunar outpost, growing with time," said Paul Wooster, principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX.
The article ends by presenting two possibilities.
the_newsbeagle writes: NASA is under pressure to put humans back on the moon by 2024... NASA's plan for meeting that ambitious target relies on building a space station in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. NASA says it will use its (over budget and behind schedule) SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule to dock at this (yet unbuilt) Gateway, then send down a lunar lander. Critics say this is a stupid and over-complicated plan.
This article by veteran space reporter Jeff Foust explains how NASA got itself into this situation.
From the article: Critics of the Gateway argue that NASA shouldn't just scale back the space station -- it should cancel the project altogether. If you want to go to the surface of the moon, the refrain goes, go there directly, as the Apollo missions did a half century ago. Building an outpost in lunar orbit adds expense, delay, and complications to a task that is already hard enough....
Critics say that technological alternatives are emerging in the commercial space sector. They look to Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and based near Seattle. Blue Origin is building both a reusable heavy-lift rocket, called New Glenn, and a lunar lander known as Blue Moon. Another contender is Elon Musk's SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., which is also working on a fully reusable rocket. It will carry an upper stage called Starship, which the company says could land directly on the moon and carry heavy cargo. "Having that vehicle on the moon can basically serve as the core of a pretty significant lunar outpost, growing with time," said Paul Wooster, principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX.
The article ends by presenting two possibilities.
- "If NASA, heedful of sunk costs and political realities, continues to march toward the Gateway, we may indeed witness a triumphant return of NASA astronauts to the moon's surface in 2024..."
- "The determined billionaires behind SpaceX and Blue Origin might not wait around for NASA, and the next moon boots in the regolith might stamp a corporate logo in the dust."
What do you mean *might* be a boondoggle? (Score:3)
Delta V doesn't lie (Score:3)
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I don't think there is much reason to go to the moon. But if that's what we want to do, then just do it. The reason for the Gateway is to create a large payload to lunar orbit that then gives a reason to build the SLS, which is also a boondoggle. Forget all that and build a colony on Mars.
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The moon's lower gravity makes it a very convenient satellite from which to launch future spacecraft that might need to go further out into the solar system...
...while completely ignoring the Oberth effect actually enabled by the higher gravity of Earth? What's the point of that?
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In astronautics, a powered flyby, or Oberth maneuver, is a maneuver in which a spacecraft falls into a gravitational well, and then accelerates when its fall reaches maximum speed. The resulting maneuver is a more efficient way to gain kinetic energy than applying the same impulse outside of a gravitational well. The gain in efficiency is explained by the Oberth effect,
You have to be OUT of the gravity well in the first place to use the Oberth maneuver - and the moon would work really well for that. Easy to launch up from the moon's surface, then slingshot around the Earth to head outwards.
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So, where is the gas station on the Moon that is going to fuel this utterly unnecessary launch from the Moon? The mass of the Earth is minor as a gravitational acceleration boost; its good enough to save some time travelling to the outer planets, that's it. You're better off investing in ion propulsion systems.
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The moon's much lower gravity means you require a lot less fuel to escape the small gravity well there and there is less concern with a nuclear powered launch vehicle. Fuel can be ferried to the moon in advance or even better manufacturing facilities could be built on the moon itself. It may even be possible to build a railgun style launch track on the moon after you have built some nuclear reactors there. I do agree that just making a trip to the moon for no reason is pointless. At least start ferrying con
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> The moon's much lower gravity
While the moon has less gravity, and a much shallower "gravity well", But the larger gravity well of the Earth is roughly 50% overcome for Low Earth Orbit, and more than that for geosynchronous orbit. There is little benefit from taking the extra steps to transfer equipment or personnel first out of the Earth's orbit, then reducing velocity to leave them in a stable Lunar orbit, and then inchreasing velocity again to escape Lunar orbit. What is the benefit of the extra trip
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What is the benefit of the extra trip into another gravity well?
There is no point in hauling stuff up from Earth if something that could do the job just as well could be found on the Moon.
Much of the expense of making aluminum is in moving and crushing the ore. It is likely that there are regions of Moon where the regolith is rich in aluminum, and there is enough sunlight enough of the time to power the conversion to metallic aluminum. Same goes for many other metals and materials.
For that matter, nature has already taken a lot of lunar regolith through the first stag
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Uh, what does that have to do with launching from the ground vs launching from space?
My argument for launching from the ground is that it is easier to build a permanent base station on the ground than it is to build it in orbit, where you would have to launch all of your building materials into orbit just to get your platform built.
Or you can mine the materials on the ground and build your launch platform there on the ground.
You still have a gravity well to deal with for launching, but at least the m
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If you need energy and hydrogen, why not gather both with solar mirrors and avoid the gravity well of the Moon?
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Additionally, you need about 1/5th the velocity to leave the moon as compared to Earth, so you'd need about 1/5th the amount of propellant.
Hmmm..., right away it seems to me that you should need a lot less than 1/5 the amount of propellant, but I will let you do the homework since I might be wrong after all...
1) OK, you may need 1/5 the speed to escape but since Moon gravitational acceleration is about 6 times less, we end up with 1/5*1/6 = 1/30
2) if you need 1/5 of the speed then you need 25 less energy since E = 0.5 * m * v * v. 25 times less energy should be about 25 times less fuel.
combining 1 and 2, it looks like 150 less propellant only
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just found this which says 4.5% of the energy needed, so about 4.5% of the propellant needed to escape the Moon compared to Earth:
https://www.slader.com/discuss... [slader.com]
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The Moon consists of a very large mass that is conveniently in a low gravity environment. A significant amount of this mass is already pulverized ---regolith--- and ready for processing into rocket fuel.
That processing might involve using solar power, which the Moon has in much greater quantity than the Earth, with batch processing on a fourteen days on, fourteen days off cycle (in contrast to the Earth's 12 hours on, 12 hours off cycle). The efficiency of cooking water, oxygen, hydrogen, and other goodies
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Sure sounds easy to me. You fucking idiot.
Sounds easier than launching from earth and getting far enough away to then turn around to use the gravity to accelerate.
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A satellite around a satellite kind of makes no sense until you put global politics into it. Clearly others will be getting to the moon again before the US and probably creating a permanent station on the moon. The US is playing catchup and this satellite is probably just politics. It might have some long term use but for now it is seen to be doing something rather than watching China and Russia together with other players leaping ahead.
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I never suggested building a launch platform as a satellite around the moon. I suggested building the launch platform *ON* the moon.
You will have to deal with the moon's gravity well, but that's a whole lot better than dealing with Earth's.... and when the resources for building it can be mined right there, then you aren't wasting fuel and resources launching the things you need to build into orbit.
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The moon's lower gravity makes it a very convenient satellite from which to launch future spacecraft that might need to go further out into the solar system
If you are trying to avoid a gravity well, why are you proposing starting in another?
You space geeks are nuts and ignorant. The space nerds know you dont leave one gravity well for another, just to leave that gravity well also. Ignorant and wasteful bullshit, aka a boondoggle.
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They're too stupid to even grasp a simulation game like Kerbals.
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The moon's lower gravity makes it a very convenient satellite from which to launch future spacecraft that might need to go further out into the solar system
If you are trying to avoid a gravity well, why are you proposing starting in another? You space geeks are nuts and ignorant. The space nerds know you dont leave one gravity well for another, just to leave that gravity well also. Ignorant and wasteful bullshit, aka a boondoggle.
Are you willfully ignorant or just plain stupid?
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That's now how you develop space technology to get to Mars.
Apollo did it right. Started with the Gemini programme to develop and test various technologies and techniques needed to get to the moon. The Apollo tested the Saturn V, starting with a minimal stack and building up, adding the CSM and LM, then doing a fly-by of the moon and finally landing.
Each stage was tested and proven one step at a time. The Russian manned moon programme failed in no small part because they tried to test their entire stack in o
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Please permit me to differ. There is little point in suppllying, and paying for, the inefficient travel from Lunar or Terran orbit to the moon's survace, and then expending much of the energy and money again to get _back_ to lunar orbit. While it's a theory that Lunar materials might be used for building spacecraft efficiently, why not tap the asteroid belts, or planetary rings such as Jumpiter, for water and building material? Solar sails can do so safely, and efficiently, though not quickly.
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No reason at all, beyond the fact that we don't have the ability to set anything like that up that far away at the moment.
We have the technology we would need to build a permanent lunar base now.
Launching from orbit avoids all of the problems associated with gravity wells, but it's easier to build something like a launch platform on the ground than it is to build it in orbit because you don't have to keep launching all of your building materials.
At least the moon has a smaller gravity well than eart
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Of course. But the materials exist there... it's only a matter of mining them.
That's only because we haven't started, not because it is not feasible with today's technology. The biggest impediment is cost, but it's not going to be any cheaper to build something in orbit, because as you said, we would be paying for all that fuel to launch the building materials up there.
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It will definitely delay a Mars mission by at least two decades, because all the available money will be sucked into keeping a moon base operational for no pragmatic reason.
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If you want to fly from LA to New York, why go through Honolulu?
Orbital mechanics? Maybe we need a "midway island", for a while anyway.
We used to fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo by Midway Island. We did this because the navigation systems we had at the time weren't all that great. It's relatively easy to line up on the 28th parallel and find that island, with a little help from radio navigation I assume. That's also about as far as any plane we had could fly, they'd have to stop there for fuel. Fuel brought by big, slow, and cheap ocean transit.
Now we have bigger pla
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We did this because the navigation systems we had at the time weren't all that great. [...] Maybe the math shows a more direct path to the moon is better on energy requirements but if a "midway island" makes the math simpler
You do realize that NASA has sent space probes to Pluto? Math is not a problem for them. Just because math is a problem for you, does not mean a space agency should be planning its projects based on what scientific and mathematically illiterate imbeciles believe they should do.
Using the Moon as a "Midway Island" is ridiculous. Space does not work like the Earth's oceans, nor does space travel work anything like sea travel. To give you an example, once you've expended your energy getting out of Earth's g
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You do realize that NASA has sent space probes to Pluto? Math is not a problem for them. Just because math is a problem for you, does not mean a space agency should be planning its projects based on what scientific and mathematically illiterate imbeciles believe they should do.
Yes, I agree, they shouldn't listen to me. Instead they should listen to the rocket scientists at NASA, the same NASA that sent probes past Pluto and are proposing a space station that orbits the moon.
You also skipped over my point on why airplanes stopped at Midway. They needed the fuel to get across the ocean far faster than any travel by sea could. We can send supplies by the equivalent of a tanker ship. big, slow, and unmanned (well the tankers weren't unmanned but you get the point I'd hope), to the
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NASA wants to build Gateway because NASA is no longer an engineering organization, it is a bureaucracy. The sole purpose of a bureaucracy is to sustain itself.
With the landing of Atlantis on July 21, 2011 (an ironic date that won't be lost on those of you who are paying attention), NASA no longer had the ability to launch people into LEO. Today, eight years and a day later, NASA still has no way to launch people into LEO. And we're go
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Russia only became an "enemy" again when Hillary lost, meanwhile we still use Russia to get our astronauts into space and will be doing so for at least another year.
Our media has swallowed the democrats tiny wieners, making the bad stuff look good (Russia is our friend now!) and the good stuff look bad (Russia is out enemy now!) with absolutely no coherence, at
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If you want to minimize fuel, the best option is to get into a lunar orbit that requires relatively little delta-v to escape (much less than escaping Earth), then refuel and start off for Mars.
That also gives you an opportunity to shake down the ship before starting off on a year long journey, or more realistically a two year long journey since if something goes wrong the only abort mode is to swing around Mars. Apollo 13 was lucky they didn't have further to go.
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We used to fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo by Midway Island.
Well, not just via Midway, also via the Marshall Islands, Guam, Tinian, Iwo Jimo, and just before the end, Okinawa.
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If you want to fly from LA to New York, why go through Honolulu?
To get Lei'd [wikipedia.org]?
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If you want to fly from LA to New York, why go through Honolulu?
To work around the airlines' byzantine pricing schemes?
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If you want to fly from LA to New York, why go through Honolulu?
What's the shortest distance between two points?
My only response here` (Score:2)
No shit. Really?
We're not launching the Meta Probe from Space: 1999 here. A station like that is completely unnecessary for any Mars missions.
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> . A station like that is completely unnecessary for any Mars missions.
We already have had Mars missions.
Compare that to the initial lunar missions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Learning how to build a sustainable colony from a moon base is cheaper, faster, and more likely (practically and politically) to be useful in building a colony (or getting anyone ON Mars at all). Given we haven't put a base on the Moon after having put someone on the Moon, putting people on Mars for anything other than a walk
"Might" be a Boondoggle? (Score:5, Insightful)
When Kennedy put forward his plan in 1961 for landing on the moon in 1969, he had a RAND study along with a plan (Lunar Orbit Return) to get there with a very high probability of success. Right now, NASA and the Trump Administration don't seem to have any plan other that "SLS", "Orion" and "Lunar Space Station" and a book full of blank cheques.
If NASA and the Trump Administration were serious about landing people on the moon in five years, then they would be inventorying the boosters and spacecraft that exists now (and forgetting about anything that isn't flying) and creating a plan around them. They would still need to create new hardware and could look at how they could be integrated into a long term plan for the eventual colonization of the moon and beyond.
Insisting on continuing to develop boosters, spacecraft and space stations that are essentially still on the drawing board and doing it within 5 years means that they are just financing a boondoggle.
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Actually, that's what the SLS is. It was intended to reuse the existing Space Shuttle Main Engines, but ended up requiring huge amounts of reengineering since those were normally mounted on the (now gone) orbiter. A whole second stage had to be created, don't think they have any functioning Apollo capsules laying around still either.
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When Kennedy put forward his plan in 1961 for landing on the moon in 1969, he had a RAND study along with a plan (Lunar Orbit Return) to get there with a very high probability of success. Right now, NASA and the Trump Administration don't seem to have any plan other that "SLS", "Orion" and "Lunar Space Station" and a book full of blank cheques.
Is that all the Trump Administration has? I'm pretty sure they also have that same 1960 RAND study, and likely quite a few more studies that were made in the 60 years since.
I seem to recall reading in several places how NASA had plans for an orbital station to get to the moon and back in the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways the service and command modules during the Apollo missions was that orbital space station.
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If NASA and the Trump Administration were serious about landing people on the moon in five years,
they will also award contract for a lunar lander and EVA spacesuits. Of course Grumman and ILC Dover didn't get a contract for their Apollo items same year Kennedy made his speech but I think something more serious than artwork should have been delivered so far at this point. As you pointed out, many other hardware items still on the drawing board.
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These plans were put in motion long before Trump. But don't let reality get in the way of your simple-minded Orange Man Bad complex.
He didn't come up with 'Space Force'?
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If you think Donald Trump, who started with a $1 million loan from his father and successfully founded a multi-billion dollar real estate empire, and was elected President after never having run for public office before, is an "imbecile," then you are dumber than a rock. That's below MORON.
If that's the story you believe then let me talk to you about this bridge I have for sale.
Need clearly defined goals and plans (Score:2)
I see the biggest problem is the need to agree on what we are trying to do. Manned missions are not the best way to do science - but science isn't the only goal. Manned missions probably are the best way to develop the technology for human expansion into space. A lunar space station and surface base provides some testing for future mars and more distant missions. Some of the technical challenges are different, but I think we would still learn a lot.
So as part of a hundred-billion $ / year scale develop
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Manned missions probably are the best way to develop the technology for human expansion into space
Right, but you need a better reason for manned missions than getting better at manned missions. There needs to be an ultimate purpose to work to. Science is better done by robots, and colonization of inhospitable wastelands is stupid.
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Whether or not colonization is stupid depends on your goals. I don't think its impossible but it would take incredible resources.
Personally, I view mankind expanding into space as the main goal. There is no rule book, others are free to choose their own goals and society to pick among them. I'm pretty sure space is not what will be picked.
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Yes, I know how big space is, the energy required etc. It would be incredibly difficult.
We don't know how to do interstellar travel, though nuclear power should in principal get us to 0.1C. A few thousand years travel time is annoying, but not a fundamental limit.
We do know how to do interplanetary travel. It would be incredibly expensive to get to self sufficient space colonization. I don't see an fundamental barriers - nothing that a $1T/year program wouldn't fix (roughly the amount the US wastes on
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"human expansion into space."
LOL
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec... [theatlantic.com]
Where do you get these delusions from?
" than 99.99999999999999999999% of everything."
And also too far away. You Space Nutters really lack a sense of reality. The vast majority of the "everything" is actually radiation-blasted vacuum with nothing in it.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... [ucsd.edu]
Cancel the program lads, pack everything and go back to the caves. This guy online says it's stupid.
Cancel SLS, have Musk go to mars (Score:5, Insightful)
100% sure it is a boondoggle. I doubt anyone at NASA really thinks this a good idea. There are many other much more efficient projects like SpaceX and BlueOrigin to do this that can do it cheaper and more quickly than SLS. I think we should go straight to mars which seems to be Musks plan. The moon is a detour. Trump wants to get to the moon by 2024 but apparently he is getting bad advice because the best way to do it is kill SLS and give the money to SpaceX and BlueOrigin. I am sure Musk can have us on Mars in maybe even 2022.
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Actually at the Apollo anniversary ceremony Trump attended the other day, he was pretty skeptical of the idea that we need to go to the Moon in order to get to Mars, and suggested that the NASA chief should give serious consideration to the idea of going directly to Mars.
Pence seems to be more interested in the Moon.
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As long as SLS continues to keep people employed by big aerospace firms in key congressional districts and states, SLS is going to keep being pushed no matter how long it takes to build or how much it ends up costing.
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Musk hasn't even demonstrated a crewed capsule launch yet. To get to Mars he needs a bigger capsule, a bigger rocket, long term life-support systems, and then some way to land when it gets there, and some way to survive on the surface. That's assume they have no intention of coming back, at least until he also invents some way to take off from the surface of Mars too.
I don't see much evidence that SpaceX is even working on many of those issues. The international group involved with the ISS (NASA, Roscosmos,
What's the goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think before you say whether Gateway is a boondoggle or not you have to know what the goals are. If your goal is just to land, do something and leave, then direct is the way to go. If, OTOH, you plan to make multiple visits to the lunar surface over a relatively short time, Gateway sounds like a useful place to store the landers so the launches from Earth don't have to carry that weight every time. And if you intend multiple lunar landings per launch from Earth, as you would for say resource extraction, then Gateway becomes a real advantage as a place for the people and equipment to stay between trips to/from Earth.
Though frankly the Moon isn't a very good target in an of itself. It's main resources are water and raw material (silicon, aluminum and iron primarily, and oxygen from oxides of those). It's main attraction is as a source of raw material for shipyards and manufacturing in Earth orbit (which is closer to the skilled workforce we'd need to do anything big with those raw materials) that doesn't have nearly as deep a gravity well to boost those raw materials out of. If you want to look at how colonization has worked on Earth, it's always followed sources of really valuable raw materials. The Moon is one source but the raw materials there aren't that valuable in and of themselves, it's mostly the difference in gravity well that makes them more valuable than those from Earth itself (it's cheaper to get them from where they are to where they're needed). The nearest really valuable source of raw material is the asteroid belt: iron and other metals, carbon, hydrocarbon compounds, water (as ice). And Mars is in a much better position to exploit the belt than the Moon is, not just physically but in terms of habitability for long-term basing of the people to operate the refineries and factories.
If I were planning it, high Earth orbit would be where I'd plan my initial shipyards. The Moon would be a convenient source of the materials I'd need to build ships, habitats and manufacturing facilities for going further out. First target would be the asteroid belt itself, both surveying it for resources and grabbing the easy-to-access bits to supply Earth orbit. Second target would be Mars, orbit and surface, as a long-term manufacturing base close to the resources of the belt which would ship refined materials or finished product back to Earth for use (where the trip's all down the gravity well and isn't nearly as expensive as getting up it is). Long-term, the moon's only role here would be if we found lithobraking to be more efficient for getting incoming chunks of material reasonably stationary relative to high Earth orbit.
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The Moon would be a convenient source of the materials I'd need to build ships
No it isn't. There's a couple of metal oxides on the surface, but not much else. Where are you going to get your carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, for example ?
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Why would you need most of those? Your main need is for panels and beams, for which silicates or aluminum suffice (those are the two most abundant things in lunar surface material). You need hydrogen and oxygen for propellant and oxygen and water for life support, the moon's got plenty of water in the polar regions that you can turn into hydrogen and oxygen using power from solar panels. Nitrogen is an inert gas, your life-support systems don't need to be constantly replacing it like they do oxygen. And rem
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Why would you need most of those? Your main need is for panels and beams, for which silicates or aluminum suffice (those are the two most abundant things in lunar surface material).
You need them to build your industrial base. How are you going to get pure aluminum from a dirty rock ? And how are you going to from an aluminum ingot to a finished piece of material with all the required specs ? You need many processing steps and tools, and these require all kinds of materials. And a rocket has many different parts besides aluminium panels and beams, and these parts made from thousands of different materials, with thousands of different kinds of processes and tools to form them in final
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You need them to build your industrial base. How are you going to get pure aluminum from a dirty rock?
The same way we do on Earth: the Bayer process to refine the ore into alumina, then the Hallâ"Héroult process to turn that into metallic aluminum. As far as the ships go, remember that rockets are built to be boosted from Earth's surface up a gravity well that starts at 9.8 m/s^2. Anything built in orbit will never be doing that. Mostly those ships will shuttle between orbits under acceleration loads well below 1g (and burn times of 50% or more of the travel time, because if you don't have t
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The same way we do on Earth: the Bayer process to refine the ore into alumina
The Bayer process uses bauxite. Is there a supply of bauxite on the moon, or will the process work equally well with any random Al-containing mineral ? And how are you producing all the chemicals and how are you recycling them ? It's easy to wave your hand, but there's no chemical supply company on the Moon. Any process needs to be able to run with the materials you find lying around (in close proximity because there's no transport infrastructure either.
I would love to see someone setting up a plant in the
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There's no point of talking about resource extraction as long as we don't have any local fuel production and any such system is currently nothing more than a thought experiment. It will never have meaning to bring fuel from Earth down into the Moon's gravity well in order to lift anything back out into space. The whole Apollo lunar decent module fueled was 15200 kg, the dry ascent module that came back up 2150 kg. Even if we assume it's 100% payload and it was free to reuse indefinitely you'd still have to
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One of the two fuels of choice for rockets is hydrogen. If you have water, which the moon does, and sunlight, which the moon does, then producing hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis is trivial and in fact an already-solved problem. Long-term storage of hydrogen in a vacuum is a major pain to solve, but lunar gravity's low enough you can produce your fuel on an as-needed basis instead of having to store huge amounts of cryogenic liquid as needed for launches from Earth.
reusable vehicles (Score:2)
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The problem we have is we are launching a full transport system from the earths gravity well every time.
It's a solved problem. If you wanted to build a space telescope, 99% of your budget would go to design and manufacture of the actual telescope, while only 1% goes to launch cost.
And, having the Boondoggle station orbiting the Moon would have zero benefit on bringing these launch cost down.
The 2024 timeline is a bit of a giveaway (Score:5, Insightful)
Why 2024 and not a more realistic/attainable deadline? Could it be because the primary (and likely, only) goal of the intiative is to fluff Trump's ego by promising him that he'll be able to take credit for something Great before he leaves office?
A more realistic timeline would aim for sometime in the 2030's, but of course then the credit would end up being given primarily to some other President, and we can't have that.
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t he'll be able to take credit for something Great before he leaves office?
It also makes a great Pence for President campaign item. Pence can go around the country with five year old video clips of him announcing the return to the moon program. Of course like all NASA programs never do it on schedule (exception Apollo) so result could be a plaque, "March 3, 2027 A.D., We have returned in peace for all humankind, Elizabeth Ann Warren, President of the United States."
is either essential for a moon landing or a boondo (Score:2)
2024, what a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
If Trump were serious about that, he would have went to Congress and asked for a massive budget increase. NASA's budget was gutted under Nixon and has declined and declined over the years (this chart [wikipedia.org] says it all).
Every President makes some bullshit pie-in-the-sky promises about what NASA is going to do someday long after they're out of office. But not one has asked Congress to give NASA the money they would need to actually fulfill those promises. The end result is an agency that can't even put a man into low earth orbit anymore, but still promises bullshit like a "man on Mars by 2035," and now a "man on the moon by 2024." It's a joke. They couldn't put a man on the moon in 2034, much less 2024. Shit, they probably won't even be able to put a man in *orbit* in 2024.
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One way to bring your chosen metric back up, is to increase NASA funding.
Another way is to decrease the funding of anything else.
Lets get rid of government funded cancer research so that NASA can claim a larger percentage of the budget..... great ideas you have.
Also, your understanding about who controls spending... the president... its ignorant bullshit. The House controls spending.
Re:2024, what a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
So your chosen metric is as a percentage of federal budget.
No it's actual budget.
Lets get rid of government funded cancer research so that NASA can claim a larger percentage of the budget..... great ideas you have.
Or maybe if we as a country want to do great things we should fund them, like say increase taxes a bit. Interesting that you jumped straight on cancer rather say military spending. Normally people this early in the discussion don't expose their incredibly biased and poor argument strategy yet. You've got a lot to learn.
Also, your understanding about who controls spending... the president... its ignorant bullshit. The House controls spending.
There's nothing ignorant about it. Spending controls are a negotiation of branches of government. Currently the one side proposing the big goals hasn't even taken that proposal to the negotiating table. It's not the house's job to manage the entire government, it's their job to vote on proposals.
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long after they're out of office
Trump thinks he'll still be in office in 2024. But he probably also thinks that this can be done on a shoestring, and when this fails he'll just blame it on whichever group of foreigners he's currently blaming things on when it happens. Or Democrats, or journalists, or all of the above.
Going to the moon is pointless. (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, NASA should be focusing on planning science missions, and let the private industry develop the rockets for them.
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Like launch loops? [wikipedia.org] Getting one working is more engineering/funding than physics.
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Unfortunately there are no reasonable ideas on how to do a launch from earth without rockets.
Space elevators (and similar mega-structures) require impossible materials, and represents an enormous investment
Rail guns aren't practical for earth launch ( OK for the moon).
No other ideas I've seen don't violate known physics.
The thing is - rockets work. Fuel costs are not that high, just need to keep making the technology most cost effective.
Thats because it is (Score:2)
In the sailing ship days to resupply did they create a small floating city or did they just build a city on an island?
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Would you accept aircraft carriers as portable airbases, serving a similar function?
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Yea, but aircraft carriers primary function are for force projection.
If it was a good idea to have a floating port im sure tons of other nations would do it, outside ot the energy costs though, which is cheaper, claiming a chunk of rock with some resources or maintaining a floating port that needs to be resupplied to resupply things? I guess the real issue is space is full of nothing and the moon at least has something that can be used to live off of.
I say moon surface first, luna station second, there are
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An aircraft carrier serves one major purpose: to provide an island where there isn't one. It's basically a floating air base the Navy can park wherever it needs an air base without regard to whether there's anything there or not.
In space the equivalent of "island" isn't habitable space, it's mass. Your primary need is for a gravitational anchor everything else can hook itself to to make it easy to maintain near-zero velocity relative to everything else in the neighborhood. Having enough mass to maintain an
Put it in LEO (Score:2)
Buzz Aldrin recently proposed his T.O.R. plan, to essentially put the Gateway into LEO instead of lunar NRHO. Now, instead of being a gateway to nowhere, it'd be in a good spot for orbital refueling and switching vehicles to go to anywhere, not just the Moon. It'd be far easier to maintain, comparable to the ISS, rather than it being days away if anything were to happen. It also means that the lunar ascent modules don't have such long periods inbetween windows to rendezvous with their carrier (Orion, in thi
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If you're going to do orbital refueling, why do you need a station ? Seems like you could just launch the rocket and a fuel tanker and dock them together in any orbit that's optimized for final trajectory.
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You don't strictly need one. However, once traffic in the area picks up, it'd be a convenient place to keep a propellant depot, spare spacecraft, and craft meant for other types of destinations (say, come there in a craft meant for a place with no atmosphere, leave in a craft meant for a place that does have an atmosphere.)
So it could improve efficiency, if put somewhere that it makes sense.
Ya their competition, (Score:2)
The money doesn't matter (Score:2)
The fact that this stuff is an expensive and stupid idea doesn't matter to those in Washington who are insisting that it be done (and done the way they want it done). Its all about funneling money into big aerospace companies to both keep political donations flowing and to keep jobs going in key districts and states.
Slow and steady (Score:2)
So instead of doing it the right way, we should return to unicorn one-shots?
I guess. The only reason politicians care is because China is making noises about going to the moon, and woe be to any elected official who lets a dictatorship get the high ground.
bigger picture (Score:2)
putting people on the moon again, with the help of a lunar space station, is just step 1, isn't it?
a test to see if this lunar space station something that will work, for later on putting people on mars.
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This is exactly the kind of thing you can 'test' on paper, and doesn't require an actual implementation to judge.
The billionaires won't save you. (Score:2)
All of them would soon go broke trying to fund it. You can't do it by selling of $1B a year in stock, that would need to jump to $25B/year. Musk wouldn't last a year. Oh, they have a lot on paper, but they can't sell off more than their majority, and dumping the stock they'd need to dump would only crash the price. There is no money in the moon for generations. There's a reason it was funded by the government, because only they can spend that sort of cash and expect not a lot in return. In today's woke soci
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Arguably, we could have put Man on Mars in the 1990's. NASA did a research project led by Robert Zubrin in the 1980's, where the technology at the time could have readily sent a small team to Mars, and back, in a roughly two to three year mission. (Of course, its likely they'd be dead of cancer if they tried it back then, but there were no shortage of astronauts willing to try it.) The key to success was sending out a robot mission to Mars to collect H2O/methane, and cut the fuel/oxygen requirements in h