Brad Guth wrote:

Alfred A. Aburto Jr and pantel,
It seems of what our cloak and dagger rusemasters have most recently
made into further hocus-pocus and/or of taboo/nondisclosure, or at best
another need-to-know sort of sequestered topic is upon anything having
to do with the honest notions of this "NASA to reveal moon plan" or
"Russia to mine the Moon?" or you name it if it involves the truth and
nothing but the truth.

Unlike those having to assume that we've been there and done that moon
thing, I'm not having to assume anything that's not of physics-101, or
perhaps even duh-101 hard-science. Of course, having seen a little of
the hard-science about the harsh solar illuminated environment of our
moon as being a whole lot more than just thermally hot and nasty isn't
exactly helping the cause of folks eventually habitating upon or even
within the moon because, no matters what, you still have to get these
folks and whatever stuff safely to/from the lunar surface without
involving the somewhat negative PR aspects of such passengers impacting
and vaporising upon their arriving at moon-base whatever.

Even the earthshine environment upon the moon is potentially lethal if
almost anything physical comes along, such as per arriving out of
nowhere as represented as a wide-open-field of 360 X 180 degrees worth
of exposure, that which so much as an arriving dust-bunny could nail
your moonsuit butt, or even from a secondary meteorite shard that's
still capable of making better than 2 km/s isn't exactly a warm and
fuzzy sort of reassuring notion. Thus I totally agree with Jordan's "If
you are naked on the Lunar surface, you have far more urgent concerns
than the sunburn!", as for being within a robust moonsuit is
essentially still nearly butt naked if you're having any contest
between yourself and that of an arriving 30+km/s speck of dust.

Consider the ratio of crater diameter per size of meteorite and lo and
behold, you could be looking at one hell of a nasty hole in your
moonsuit, or perhaps at the very least a hefty dent that should easily
knock you onto your moonsuit butt. Thus a mere spec of sand might
easily become termination of life as you know it, whereas the head-on
velocity of some of those specs of sand can become worth 100 km/s.
Therefore the more natural plus artifically generated atmosphere the
better, even it it's got a good amount of the radon(Ra-222) element as
a portion of that surface atmosphere. In fact, for the sake of
defending yourself, the more radon gas the better.

If anything, my robust LSE-CM/ISS is all about the viable aspects of
eventually colonizing our Moon. For starters having the LSE up and
running is certainly a good thing, whereas from that point on we could
easily pulverise the moon with itself, thus releasing megatonnes of
O2/year from the raw basalt that's getting efficiently vaporised by
merely releasing a tonne at a time of lunar basalt away from being
roughly 60,000 km off the deck, thus without a kg of rocket fuel or any
other form of dedicated propulsion we'd obtain at the very least a
1000:1 ratio of each impact making O2 available. Therefore, per tonne
as having been gently tossed away from a few km below the CM/ISS that's
residing roughly 64,000 km off the deck would potentially release 1000
tonnes of O2, whereas eventually this mostly robotic process of perhaps
releasing 3t/24 hrs would create and sustain perhaps as much as 0.17
bar that's quite possibly breathable, that is if the lower atmospheric
layer of radon gas isn't remaining quite as extensive as some have
thought.

However, life should be good within the 50e6t CM/ISS abode or that of
keeping yourself sequestered 15+ meters deep and/or within hollow
rilles or hopefully a few ready-made geode pockets that could be easily
reconfigured as underground lakes of salty water, whereas this life
underground notion might be a whole lot more doable than we'd thought.

BTW; earthshine isn't an insignificant amount of illumination, at
roughly 50 fold greater off than what the best moonshine arrives upon
the surface of Earth is actually offering a fairly good standard by
which to work by, and there's even a touch of secondary IR earthshine
to warm your soul. I seem to recall that moonshine is supposedly worth
0.1°C upon the surface of Earth, thus perhaps as great as shifting the
average lunar nighttime surface temperature that's supposedly -153°C
by +5°C worth of earthshine could be the case, which is still damn
cold but, we can technically deal with being cold a whole lot easier
than being too warm.

Jordan; I'm not sure what you mean by "surface-tension." Did you mean to say
"gravity?"
Gravity is certainly another factor but not the key point of what dry
quicksand surface-tension is all about. A GOOGLE search for the
surface-tension of water, then try a search for the surface-tension of
dry quicksand, then start running off the math as to a 1/6th gravity
and that of an extremely bone dry environment that by all the regular
laws of physics shouldn't clump all that well and, much less explain as
to such a slight layer of dust as though the moon isn't very old nor so
freaking naked to whatever's coming along. Perhaps then you tell me how
your folks are going to be walking upon and/or snorkeling their way
through such fluffy and perhaps electrostatic sorts of nasty stuff.

I'm thinking that Russia may have rediscovered that they'll have to
deal with a few slight if not nearly insurmountable glitches along the
way.
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.s...d/608f283f4684
39de/3e63740c002a9729?lnk=st&q=brad+guth&rnum=1#3e63740 c002a9729
Such as;
Can you even moon-walk upon a surface-tension of 5 g/cm2 without
sinking out of sight?
Is such moon-dust actually clumping all that good, or what? (where's
the hard-science?)
At 1/6th G (1.623 m/s/s); what's available for compacting or otherwise
binding said moon-dust?
What happens as a result of mining the moon, as to the artificially
created moon-dust?

I believe that the task of mining our moon is even going to suck the
life out of a good Russian robot, that is unless you've got traction, a
periscope or perhaps a good set of stilts. Because, 5 g/cm2 worth of a
bone-dry quicksand surface-tension in places isn't exactly promising.

As for them Russians mining the moon isn't something that's going to
transpire any time soon without their first getting a good number of
their moonsuit butts safely onto the earthshine illuminated lunar deck
and, that's going to become just a wee bit ticky by way of having to
utilizing those yet unproven fly-by-rocket landers which don't seem to
actually exist, not even for the likes of any of those Russian
AI/robotic landers having since provided us with little more than
pop-up books depicting what supposedly transpired, that is since
apparently all of their R&D as should have been easily recorded upon
movie film hadn't been invented yet.

Even if such fly-by-rocket landers of any reasonable payload capacity
existed, or if having to R&D create such from scratch as for
accommodating the task at hand, whereas per tonnage of getting whatever
robotics and certainly of those moonsuit butts safely deployed upon the
moon, of then having to operate such mining technology of such
machines, processing and thus extracting upon whatever (such as He3)
and of getting the end product packaged and shipped back towards mother
Earth is per tonne going to involve at least a good 1000+ tonnes worth
of nasty pollution for mother Earth, and of that 1000:1 ratio of
pollution contributing factor is not to mention the horrific amounts of
raw energy that such efforts will have taken from Earth in the first
place, thus likely having far out-stripped any recovery potential of
He3. Without their first establishing a good lunar space elevator(LSE),
the lunar surface is technically going to continually suck so much
worse off than we've been informed. Of physics and science as having
been based upon LLPOF worth of smoke and mirrors simply isn't going to
make such happen, at least not any time soon.

Mining and thereby extracting whatever away from our moon sucks big
time energy and dollars even for a good robotic solution unless you've
got one of good traction, and perhaps one hell of a nifty periscope to
boot. Operating within the sub-frozen nighttime environment of our
moon, even with somewhat considerable earthshine and thereby some
indirect benefit of secondary thermal influx might become the only
CO2--dry-ice--CO2 (day-night-day) cycle of any method that worth
improving the lunar environment that'll achieve any measurable degree
of moon-dirt binding or clumping. As otherwise there's none other drier
or fluffier quicksand to be found unless you're situated upon Mercury,
as even a Venus class of hot and obviously bone dry quicksand isn't
going to be without benefit of the local elements affording viable
binders for sticking such hot and nasty Venus soil together and, much
unlike that of our electrostatic powder puff of a moon, as upon Venus
there's certainly not any significant forms of cosmic or solar influx
of sand or meteorites that could have significantly contributed to such
terrestrial depth(s) becoming whatever's Venus sand, soil or dust. In
other words, I believe that Venus is mostly Venus unless you're talking
about a time before things got all geologically hot and nasty and
subsequently developed that absolutely terrific atmospheric shield.

Perhaps the mostly Russian Venus Express mission will help to further
define as to whatever's what with regard to the various depths and
composition(s) of the otherwise geologically hot and nasty Venus soils,
plus identifying a few of those likely active lava and/or mud flows
plus S8 sulphur vents that should be atmospherically interactive enough
for the onboard science instruments to sample.

The Next Lunar Rover; may still manage to sink itself out of sight
http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplor...BeyondLEO/leo1
94/rover.htm
Having a dry mass of under 1000 kg and having six extremely large
traction wheels seems a whole lot more doable, that is as long as their
conditional laws of moon-physics of such nasty dust/soil remains as a
relatively thin coating that's somehow magically clumping within the
first 12.5 mm and apparently comprised of entirely nonreactive
substance like nowhere other.

However, along with accommodating another 1000 kg of payload brings the
tally to nearly 2000 kg, thus 333 kg divided upon 6 wheels is still
counting upon 56 kg/wheel which is at least getting somewhat suggestive
of what darn little mass that supposedly thin layer of such nicely
auto-clumping moon-dirt of lunar cornmeal and portland cement can
manage to support, and that's for using wheels offering better than 6
fold the surface contact area, thus in total accomplishing the task at
roughly 10 times the traction of what those original Apollo rovers had
to work with.

Terrestrial ROLLING RESISTANCE isn't quite the same thing as for the
moon.
http://www.perfnet.com/haul_truck_83...ization/introd
uction_and_definitions.htm
The following link provides us with a nifty traction and required
energy calculator, although terrestrial based but otherwise especially
interesting if using their "Sand Dune(.16)" consideration as to what a
150 kg tractor + 150 kg trailer for a combined mass of 300 kg
represents at various grades. I also used 10 mph and 100 seconds as for
the acceleration factor, zero ballast and a grade of 10%. You may want
to utilize an overall efficiency of 0.25 instead of 0.85 just for good
measure.
http://www.talbertmfg.com/index2.html
This is assuming and thus based upon a reasonable set of two
extra/double-wide or that of the usual four large diameter and wide
enough driving tires/axle of good tread design that are not sinking
into whatever substance as being driven upon. It's obviously not
considering the much lighter fluff or far less clumping nature of
whatever actual moon-dust is all about, which may actually represent
another factor of extremely slight moon-dust buoyancy issues as much as
less surface-tension since their no good reason for such dust to have
compacted, nor at least in any known manner of physics as for clumping
that substance under the absolute best of situations wouldn't sustain
more than 50 g/cm2 unless there's only a relatively thin layer of such
moon-dust and/or sufficiently nearby bedrock upon which to drive.
Whereas a wise assumption of unsupported and thus unclumping
surface-tension might be a bit closer to 5 g/cm2.

BTW; the absolute driest of our terrestrial sand dunes would still have
a million fold more moisture content as for their accommodating
whatever binding degree of soil/sand clumping, thus walking and/or
having to drive upon such a terrestrial substance that leaves no
footprints nor of even sustaining any trace of tire tracks for long is
still a surface-tension that's considerably better off than what even a
1/6th gravity and certainly more than bone dry situation upon what our
scorching hot and otherwise terribly solar and cosmic reactive moon has
to offer. Keeping in mind, that if Earth didn't have the magnitosphere
and a sufficiently thick amount of atmosphere, Earth too would be even
more reactive because of the average densitiy being greater than that
of the moon. Thus if the moon is not reactive in your good book it's
because of having a sufficient atmosphere. So make up you mind, does it
or doesn't have an atmosphere?

According to http://www.talbertmfg.com/index2.html
Supposedly sand upon Earth terrain that's bone dry (least clumping)
offers a flat surface rolling amount of extra resistance being worth
15%, whereas without taking into account as for tires sinking into said
sand but just for going the least bit vertical adds considerable insult
to injury, meaning that the rolling resistance can easily double due to
a loss of traction and thus wheel spinning. A 10% grade upon a hard and
smooth surface represents another 10% worth of base energy required for
the same task of moving a given tire upon whatever asphalt/concrete
substance, whereas on a truly lose sand or lunar composite dust that
your tires have been sinking into may more than double if not require
four times that ratio.

"The degree of traction between the tire and the ground is called the
coefficient of traction."

"Since there is never 100 percent adhesion, the coefficient is always
less than 1.0. The result of multiplying the weight on the drive axle
times the coefficient of traction represents the maximum force which
can be transmitted before the tire spins out."

"For example, a vehicle with 200,000 kg of weight on the drive axle and
working on ground conditions having a coefficient of traction of 0.6
can deliver up to 120,000 kg (200,000 kg × 0.6) of force before the
tires will spin out."

Given roughly 1000 cm2 per set or pair of over-enlarged moonboots as
having to walk upon such dusty locations offering a surface tension
worth 50 g/cm2 represents that a given moonsuit EVA that's worth 25 kg
should be doable at representing 25 g/cm2, although upon one moonboot
foot at a time or perhaps 500 cm2 applied per step would be having to
support the entire 25 kg is going to become nearly equal to whatever
the best possible surface-tension that's supposedly capable of clumping
moon-dirt eventually supporting at greater than 50 g/cm2, which
represents that whatever moon-walking may require somewhat enlarged
footprints that could represent a pair of clown shoes or those of
compact snowshoes unless the hard stuff is always an inch or so below
the dusty surface.

I'm thinking that, Even though the surface-tension is perhaps worthy in
certain places of supporting as much as 0.05 kg/cm2, in other places
this may be somewhat like having to walk through a dry fluff density of
powder snow, in that each step will have you sinking through the more
than likely a 5 g/cm2 composite of moon-dust before that amount of
magic clumping moon-dirt worth of soil compression becomes worthy of
sustaining even that 5 g/cm2 amount of surface-tension and thus becomes
all that usable, thereby any rolling tire or other flat tread like tire
or belt/tred is going to be transferring a great deal of material up
and around that form of wheel/tire traction, whereas a camel like
traveling machine might prove more acceptable, especially if it had six
legs that were long enough so as to keeping it's payload and passengers
above the thick dust that has got to be worth 10+ meters in places.

Traveling via robotic (six legged) moon-camel isn't all that far
fetched. Say if each of the six legged machines offered a m2 cupped
foot per leg, as that's potentially giving 6 m2 or 60,000 cm2 to work
with. At half-loading is where that amount of area becomes worth 30,000
cm2, upon which 0.05 kg/cm2 = 1500 kg of moon mass or 9t Earth mass,
although I seriously have my doubts we'll actually have nearly as good
as 50 g/cm2 to work with unless you've bottomed out.

A traction tread/belt as having perhaps 10 m2 of a working amount of
surface contact should do as well if not a bit better as long as it's
submerged operating depth capacity isn't limited. Thus 100,000 cm2 X
0.05 kg/cm2 = 5,000 kg or at the same half-load capacity of 15t Earth
mass.

As background info; excluding factors of buoyancy, at 1G the
terrestrial surface-tension of warm water is 72 dynes/cm. That's worthy
of just 7.34e-2 g/cm2. Obviously terrestrial dry-quicksand is offering
a great deal more surface-tension plus a better displacement degree of
buoyancy, although uncompacted moon-dust may not support a
surface-tension much better than 5 g/cm2.

Dry Quicksand
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/enc..._quicksand.htm
"Lohse found that a weighted ping pong ball (radius 2cm, mass 133g),
when released from just above the surface of the sand, would sink to
about five diameters. Lohse also observed a "straight jet of sand
[shooting] violently into the air after about 100 ms". Objects are
known to make a splash when they hit sand, but this type of jet has
never been described before."

That's roughly a total ball surface area of 50 cm2. Dividing that by 3
offers at most 17 cm2 worth of a supportive surface area that's having
been somewhat offset by a slight buoyancy factor since the above
weighted ball submerged itself to roughly a depth of 20 cm before being
supported. As then we can deduce the notion that a 133 g mass had
eventually obtained a dry-quicksand surface tension worthy of not more
than 7.8 g/cm2, or 46.8 g/cm2 worth of terrestrial mass as having been
situated upon the moon could become the case. However, being that the
same dry-quicksand as otherwise situated within the same 1/6th G
environment should also be taken into account, thus perhaps at the very
optimum best 10 g/cm2 is about all we're ever going to obtain. Thereby
not going by my previous 50 g/cm2 but having to use 10 g/cm2 if not 5
g/cm2 to safe should become the wise alternative as for keeping your
moonsuit butt and head above such obviously extremely dry-quicksand of
the moon, especially wise if that's having to involve the compression
ratio of 5:1 as being worth taking note of.

As for getting those two reasonably hefty moonsuits and especially of
their lander at something that amounted to nearly 16 tonnes resting
nicely upon 4 pads that looked as though each offered roughly a square
meter (10,000 cm2/pad), thereby having to accommodate 675 kg/pad that
barely managed to compress past the first inch is suggestive of their
having 6 out of six times set their fly-by-rocket craft down upon a
relatively firm surface-tension of something that's certainly
indicating as better than 100 g/cm2. This is either quite unexpected or
damn lucky since in places the surface-tension could have been less
than 5 g/cm2 and otherwise at most 10 g/cm2, and of course their next
generation lander that's getting proposed is going to have to become
extremely robust for taking a payload of perhaps 3 astronauts plus a
rather substantially larger and thus more of everything rover that's at
least twice the capacity of what our Apollo teams had to work with,
thus a combined terrestrial mass of certainly not less than 24 tonnes
and most likely with the necessary de-orbit and down-range plus
sufficient (what-if) spare fuel and the third person accommodation
making it worth 27 tonnes, which computes out to 1125 kg/pad. Thus even
with each 4 m2 landing pad is still having to bet the farm upon setting
down upon a dry quicksand surface-tension of better than 28 g/cm2,
which by all logic and certainly of the known laws of physics simply
may not exist unless we're talking about mostly bedrock or at least
situated upon significant piles of impact related shards that are
sufficiently vertical in slope so as to have since been blown nearly
clean by some 1200+km/s solar winds, that which should have easily
reached and reacted with the surface if there's actually as slight of
atmosphere as having been reported.

I believe getting this task of whatever safely to/from the moon surface
down to a bit more realistic measure requires a lunar space elevator:
Of any such new and "improved lunar landing architecture" certainly
needs exactly what the LSE-CM/ISS infrastructure has to offer, that is
unless we're talking about one-way tickets to ride. As per the task of
terraforming our moon into becoming a bit more robotically obtainable
is certainly a doable task without ever risking a single astronaut.

Jordan; The Moon is _not_ particularly "radioactive." In fact it is _less_
radioactive than is the Earth.
Please offer your basis (other than based upon those NASA/Apollo bible
scriptures) for this conclusion because, even NASA's new guard has
science published as to the average lunar bedrock that is considerably
more "radioactive" than upon Earth. Thus instead of our receiving a
local geological based dosage of 0.5 mr/day, as per existing here upon
Earth, you'd be looking at several mr/day, plus whatever's cosmmic and
solar contributed, plus whatever's of secondary/recoil dosage that's
smack dab in the hard-X-ray spectrum and, every time earth is situated
directly between yourself and the sun is when you'll get an extra taste
of what our outter most Van Allen zone of death can contribute, as
somewhat the lunar SAA sort of booster TBI shot. All and all, if things
should get a little bit testy, having banked bone marrow should save
the day.

Jordan; I don't have a _clue_ as to what you mean by "reactive" in this
context.
Search for secondary/recoil radiation, or perhaps secondary/recoil
photons. You'll find more info than this usenet cold hope to store.
Basically the direct solar radiation for the most part isn't of what's
going to nail your sorry DNA/RNA hide to the wall, although a quick
shot of whatever's being expedited along by a 1200~2400 km/s solar wind
isn't even a fair contest because, your DNA will lose big-time.

Nope, still no clue penetration into the guthbrain.

[guth links flushed]

--
Official Associate AFA-B Vote Rustler

"The original human being was a female hermaphrodite with
both male and female genitalia."

"Human beings CAN NOT live in a solar system without a sun
with a ferrite core and a planet without a solid iron core."

-- Alexa Cameron, Kook of the Year 2004