How Space Companies Plan to Build Roads and Bases on the Moon (vice.com) 52
Space experts convened in Washington DC for 2023's "Humans to Mars Summit," reports Vice, where one panel explored civil engineering and construction on the moon and Mars.
Melodie Yasher, who serves as vice president of building design and performance at ICON, previewed her company's vision of lunar infrastructure based on 3D-printing and additive manufacturing technologies... "We're looking into how to create, first, horizontal construction elements such as landing pads and roadways, and then eventually thinking about how we can develop vertical construction elements" such as "unpressurized structures and eventually, habitats that are pressurized and certified for human occupancy," she added. ICON plans to use lunar dirt, known as regolith, as a resource to manufacture a wide range of infrastructure projects on the Moon with a single robotic 3D-printing system. In 2022, the company won a $57.2 million Small Business Innovation Research contract from NASA to develop its lunar construction techniques...
Later in the same panel, Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of XArc Exploration Architecture Corporation, also offered a sneak peek of the lunar technologies in development at the XArc subsidiary Astroport. Ximenes and his colleagues at Astroport are focused on making Moon bricks out of lunar regolith that can be used to construct landing pads, as part of their "Lunatron" bricklayer vision... Astroport is working with researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio, to invent an induction furnace nozzle that heats up lunar regolith so that it can melt, then solidify, into bricks. A number of specialized robots would then assemble the materials into landing pads that can accommodate robotic and crewed missions to the Moon's surface. In addition to the company's work on lunar technologies, it has also created concepts for future human missions to Mars.
Later in the same panel, Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of XArc Exploration Architecture Corporation, also offered a sneak peek of the lunar technologies in development at the XArc subsidiary Astroport. Ximenes and his colleagues at Astroport are focused on making Moon bricks out of lunar regolith that can be used to construct landing pads, as part of their "Lunatron" bricklayer vision... Astroport is working with researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio, to invent an induction furnace nozzle that heats up lunar regolith so that it can melt, then solidify, into bricks. A number of specialized robots would then assemble the materials into landing pads that can accommodate robotic and crewed missions to the Moon's surface. In addition to the company's work on lunar technologies, it has also created concepts for future human missions to Mars.
Duh...Boring Company (Score:1)
why do you think Elon bought it?
Not so much because he loves digging holes on Earth here.
Re: Duh...Boring Company (Score:1)
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Technically it was spun off from SpaceX. In one of Musk's typical financial arrangements where he just sort of assumes that every part of every company he runs belongs exclusively to him. He started it with SpaceX resources and then spun it off and gifted it to himself and then only later gave back partial ownership to SpaceX when shareholders complained.
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I don't see how that could make landing pads or other surface structures. If you want subsurface roads, though, that might be the way to go.
Moon moment firsts. (Score:2)
First speeding ticket on the moon.
First stop sign on the moon, first person to run that stop sign.
First hit and run on the moon.
First traffic jam on the moon.
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And then there is...
First traffic light on the Moon
First traffic camera on the Moon
First traffic court on the Moon, complete with attorneys that specialize in speeding tickets in the regolith and the TV advertising to go with it
First classic movie filmed on the Moon - ElectraGlide In Gray...aka ElectraGlide In Near Zero G
Far from ready tech (Score:4, Insightful)
"Tell them we'll use regolith and robots, don't mention having to ship the binding agent from Earth".
I'm all about space exploration, but until you have a 100% in-situ system to test, you're not ready for anything but a small science outpost... and it's still probably best left automated rather than manned.
At this point, talking about building human habitats on the Moon like you're serious and it's a near-future goal is premature to the point of undermining your credibility.
Re:Far from ready tech (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not really fair. Shipping only the binder from Earth is a 1-2 orders of magnitude improvement vs. having to ship everything from Earth. Surely you can see the benefit of cutting shipping needs by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
The demand for 100% solutions is a clear violation of the Pareto principle [wikipedia.org]. Particularly in light of the rapid, exponential reductions in launch costs we're seeing and which are forecast.
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>The demand for 100% solutions is a clear violation of the Pareto principle.
That 20% of the people own 80% of the stuff? You're going to have to elaborate on how my post violates that.
I can absolutely see the benefit of hauling less mass to the Moon to do stuff on the Moon - but any long term permanent habitation must be completely self-sufficient or it will not be economically feasible to maintain it.
Until we can do 100% in-situ, it's research bases at best.
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Never mind - I had no idea you were illiterate and couldn't read an article written in simple, plain English without getting insane ideas about the topic.
The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few")
If that's still too hard: "Achieving MOST of an objective is far easier than achieving ALL of it, and usually there's no need to obsess over achieving all of it when you can just do the easy st
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I got to see him repeat some of his presentation in person the other day. There is no binder, they are apparently going to use inductive heating to melt the stuff into bricks, doing it directly in the rover thing. I'm a bit skeptical about how inductive heating would work with plain rock, but he seemed to be pretty sure that it would work, so there must be something to transfer the heat. I also giggled inside at the thought that it was literally going to shit bricks.
The first thing they plan to send up is
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Thanks for clarifying for me.
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I expect any of the "brick laying" robots mentioned above would look like a tracked vehicle. And that tracked vehicle would have all of the accessories for road construction built onto it.
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My point is not related to the structure, it is that if we cannot even create a walking robot let alone a dexterous hand it means the technology still has a long way to go. It means our control systems suck, our motor hardware tech sucks.
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Once again: nobody is talking about "hands". Your conception of what's required for something to be a "robot" is way too limited.
Eliminate or make remote the human operators and this [staticflickr.com] is a brick-laying robot.
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My point is not related to the structure, it is that if we cannot even create a walking robot let alone a dexterous hand it means the technology still has a long way to go.
Umm here [scroll.in]'s a video of some Boston Dynamics robots doing a parkour routine. There are various other videos out there showing dexterous hands, etc. The point is that we actually can build these things. We still have a little way to go in getting them to perform various tasks with less pre-scripting, but we're getting there bit by bit.
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I've got a robot with sub micron positioning accuracy on it's manipulators.
Lol your dexterous human hand.
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Personally, I expect there to be several different models, specialized for different functions. Perhaps later the models can be consolidated. But I never expect tor smoother (steam roller) robot to be combined with the surface laying robot.
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I think you're not even up to date to what's already possible with robots in regards to hands etc. We'll have human like robots within 20 years, I'll bet even within 10 years (as AI and development on robotics advances so fast the last couple of years).
But for most cases like this, robots are made to do some specific task so it doesn't rely on having to be versatile like a human. Humans are in fact not a good design to do mundane specific tasks, that's why we have a lot of factories and robots designed to d
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Some of the better robot hands, though, depend on air pressure.
OTOH, it's not clear that hands for fine manipulation are needed for construction. They probably won't be using pieces like small screws. (Even people in space suits avoid that kind of problem rather than solve it.)
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Some of the better robot hands, though, depend on air pressure.
I think you're implying that pneumatics won't work in a vacuum. That simply isn't the case. Now, doing it conventionally could be a bit of a waste of gas because traditional pneumatics obviously pull right from the air with a compressor and vent back to the air and, on the moon, you would need to use a tank. That's doable though, plus you can have a closed system that does not vent to vacuum so you can keep re-using the same gas. For most of the work you would need to do for this though, nothing like that i
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The problem with using pneumatics on the moon, besides all of the other problems mentioned (which I honestly don't think are the big ones) is that it depends on sliding seals, and the moon is basically the worst environment for that.
The big advantage of the human hand, besides its frankly fairly astounding dexterity and sensitivity, is that it is directly attached to a human who can feel their way around getting it into the right position. A computer can potentially do the same kind of thing with one, but m
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The problem with using pneumatics on the moon, besides all of the other problems mentioned (which I honestly don't think are the big ones) is that it depends on sliding seals, and the moon is basically the worst environment for that.
It would add some complications. You can have fully sealed pneumatic systems though, so It would definitely be possible. It would just take some extra engineering. In any case, while the movements of pneumatic systems might be more fluid and potentially quicker, they also tend to be less precise and weaker. Nice to have the option in your toolbox, but not a requirement by any means.
The big advantage of the human hand, besides its frankly fairly astounding dexterity and sensitivity, is that it is directly attached to a human who can feel their way around getting it into the right position. A computer can potentially do the same kind of thing with one, but making an artificial one as good as the real thing is really hard because of the sensing aspect. And with the delay you mentioned, a human that far away can't do anything delicate quickly.
That's fair enough. The best solution is probably just some onsite humans. It is an interesting question though if it should be
Moonbase Alpha (Score:1)
https://i1.wp.com/geekdad.com/... [wp.com]
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I've never seen the referenced image, but I expect the first moon base to look rather like a buried submarine. Probably designed for taller people, though.
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The base layout itself for Space:1999 was fairly sensible. Nothing really wrong with that. The problem with Space:1999 was the absolute ridiculousness of the premise in the first place: an explosion blowing the moon out of the solar system instead of just blowing it up, or liquifying the surface, etc. Not to mention that it's travelling fast enough to be passing by other stars and their planets all the time but somehow not too fast for spacecraft based on traditional chemical rockets to leave the moon, land
Wheres the meat? (Score:2)
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The problem with that type of thinking is that, taken to its logical endpoint, it's just nihilism. What's the point of anything. Why bother doing things like eating, reproducing, heck, even breathing? Why go to all the trouble?
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mankind hating incel spotted.
You're hilarious applying the notion of "strip mining" to the moon. There is no soil nor vegetation or any kind of biosphere at all that are the concerns about strip mining. Just dead rock that will always be naturally dead. News for you, most the universe is lifeless waste from star explosions.
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> no advantage in having the silly chemical meatsacks around, and just leave them on earth
But robots will find humans delicious, especially when dipped in HCl acid.
Uh huh (Score:3)
Now we just need a bunch of self driving Tesla cars up there to run around in.
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Hyperloop Alpha does not work in a vacuum [tesla.com].
It constantly amazes me how many people who rail against Hyperloop don't even have the slightest understanding of what was actually proposed. Albeit, it's not helped by half a dozen completely different things taking up the name "Hyperloop" (including SpaceX's own student competition!).
By all means criticize it, but only if you actually know what it is you're criticizing.
Re:Uh huh (Score:4, Informative)
Meh, since I'll just assume that reading is too difficult for you, given that the Hyperloop Alpha proposal is nearly a decade old, I'll sum up:
Hyperloop, as per the Alpha document, is not a vactrain, and not maglev. It's an air bearing train, akin to the levitation of spinning hard drive platters. As an air bearing, it requires air. Use of air bearings is for three reasons:
1) Hard vacuums (1e-7 to 1e-13 bar or even lower) are very difficult and expensive to maintain; mild partial vacuums (in this case, 1e-4 bar, akin to Mars pressures, or Earth pressures at ~50km / 30mi) are many orders of magnitude easier to maintain.
2) Maglev is very expensive. Air bearings simply require high smoothness, which can be achieved by a pipe polisher. Note: smoothness != turning radii, that's a different issue
3) Vactrains require hard vacuums to avoid building up a column of air ahead of the train, creating backpressure, and cannot operate in partial vacuums. With Hyperloop, the air for the air bearings comes from a battery-powered compressor at the front of the capsule, thus killing two birds with one stone.
Magnets are used, but only for accelerator/decelerator rings, which only make up a tiny portion of the overall length. Capsules are loaded in parallel, enter airlocks in parallel, then merge into a line. The Alpha proposal design case was for two lines, one in each direction (though potentially periodically switching directions if one line was down for major maintenance), though the long-term goal was for a grid of lines.
Towers are XY+Z dampers with allowances for slip. Two vacuum slip joints to allow for expansion are used (one at each end of the route), though more are not ruled out (expansion can also be resisted physically). Earthquake simulations were conducted. The extreme fineness ratio (length vs. cross section) means that except immediately near any breach, repressurization would be slow (shocks move at several times the speed of sound down the length, but carry virtually no mass at any meaningful distance from the entry point). Capsules settle down onto electrically-powered wheels at low speeds and can drive on them. Emergency exits are placed periodically along the tube. A maximum of 490 people are in a tube at any given time (max 28 per capsule), but many of these are at low speeds at any given point in time, and total transit times are 35 minutes.
The tubes are nearly an inch thick steel, with segments connected by orbital welders, akin to pipeline construction. The material cost is low (I've run the numbers myself to verify them). Project cost is kept low vs. HSR (~$6B, vs. ~$100B for HSR Phase 1) for a few main reasons (albeit some of them are cheats).
1) Smaller, more frequent vehicles with shorter durations over a given spot reduces viaduct loadings
2) The project is primarily built over public right-of-ways, dramatically reducing land acquisition and permitting costs
3) The project has lower capacity vs. HSR (max of 15M passenger trips per year, vs. HSR's design of 38,6M for Phase 1, later lowered to 31,3M, but higher achievable )
4) The project avoids cities, connecting from outskirts-to-outskirts (akin to airports) with no in-town stops
5) The project avoids en-route stops.
The need for #3 follows from #4 and #5, but #4 and #5 are cheats; cities are generally the most expensive parts of transit projects (usually by large margins), and service to towns en route is usually demanded (and also increases the total ridership). It was the need to service inside cities which led from Hyperloop to Loop (PRT [wikipedia.org], akin to underground skyTran [wikipedia.org]), which became the initial (but not exclusive) goal of the Boring Company, which was founded as a result of the Hyperloop Alpha study.
Now you know what was actually proposed, so you can criticize the actual thing from here out.
Also on this topic: n
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Going only to the outskirts and avoiding stops is something HSR can do as well, it's not specific to Hyperloop.
Building it over public rights of way is an interesting idea, but doesn't really reduce costs like he seems to think. Building anything over something that's already there, like a road, brings its own complications. You have to place the supports to the side, and often there isn't much space at the sides of roads unless you eat into the pavement (sidewalk). Suspending big, heavy, inch thick steel t
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Your description does not match up with the design. Japanese maglev tracks are fixed to the ground. Hyperloop tubes are
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(And before commenting on Loop, please, for God's sake, take the time to read what PRT [wikipedia.org] is, why it is the way it is, and why that matters. The whole article)
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Dampers can only do so much in a large earthquake. They are more expensive to build too, and to maintain since they must be periodically tested and the movement creates additional wear.
It's going to be difficult to build dampers that don't shift a lot when the pressure wave and the pod pass by.
About the Vegas tunnel, what is the actual benefit over a train? They have to employ a lot of drivers, recharge the cars periodically, and they get traffic jams. Getting in and out of the cars is slower than a walk-on
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Dampers do exactly as much as you engineer them to do, which is proportional to the earthquake you're engineering to. Same as any engineering safety factors.
The cost of dampers is included in the pylon costs. If you want to eliminate them, then you better make the pylon budget cheaper.
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About the Vegas tunnel, what is the actual benefit over a train?
Gestures adamantly at the above post.
PRT could be great, but the system in question is crap. If Vegas casinos had been smart enough to allow the city to put the monorail where it belonged, then even it would be superior to this particular system. But the best implentation of PRT (not just for Vegas, but yes, for Vegas) would have elements of both of these systems, because it would have individual cars on rails. Rubber tires and roads are the dumbest way to do PRT, of which I am otherwise a huge proponent.
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The monorail was far too expensive. Cost a lot more and still ran at a loss.
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The monorail was far too expensive. Cost a lot more and still ran at a loss.
They put it where it didn't make sense, so people don't use it. Public transit doesn't have to make a profit, either, if it solves problems and/or enables profit elsewhere. I should not have to explain these things to you.
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I thought the hyperloop was basically a Bellamy Tube scaled up to handle people. The problems are leakage at the seals and that building up a high velocity requires a LOT of air pressure when you're dealing with heavy masses. There's also some friction problems when you're moving air seals at any rapid velocity. So to handle those problems it was proposed to use simple nearly-ballistic travel paths.
Even if you get it all working properly, the compromises made to reduce friction mean that it's a point-a t
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It is not. Not even remotely. The document is literally linked above for you to read.
I'm not sure why people are so allergic to actually reading things before developing adamant opinions about them.
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Reading is hard. Thinking about what you've read is even harder.
Also, apparently only 79% of US adults are functionally literate, and 54% have prose literacy at less than a grade 6 level.
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Space exploration is a negligible amount of money. So no, we don't need to cripple advancement for your romantic ideals.
How about...road graders? (Score:2)
In poor and rural areas, roads on earth are made using a simple process of scraping the dirt into roads using a road grader. Why wouldn't that technique work on the moon too? It would be a whole lot easier than fancy new untested technology. And there's no need for high-speed freeways on the moon, a simple dirt path, with some smoothing, should do just fine.