"Ool" wrote in message ...
Compare that to the distances above! But it's not quite as bad as it
looks, considering gravity diminishes squared with distance. It's
not as if there's ten times more energy needed for the Moon than for
GEO. You're actually half the way there when you're in GEO, energy-
wise.

Yeah, the concept of the mass driver, electromagnetic ramp launches,
in the reduced gravity field of the moon with its lack of atmosphere
is a good idea for filling an orbit and making a ring around the moon.

The mass driver is the roller coaster that continually accelerates
using electromagnetic motive force, the super-size railgun. I think
it would take about a three mile track and large amounts of
electricity on the moon, an Earth based mass driver would have to be
much larger, although it would be much easier to construct in terms of
various logistics.

The mass driver to launch passengers would have to be much longer so
that it could accelerate its payload more slowly.

I think one of the key advancements required is the high-termperature
superconductor. Also I wonder about nuclear powered satellites. Do
they have those nuclear powered batteries?

Cursory research is saying the lunar mass driver would have to be more
along the lines of 60 kilometers in length, and that it's more of a
coilgun than a railgun.

The mass driver doesn't necessarily need a cart spinning around a
track or send-and-retrieve, instead it could levitate mangetically the
payload capsule and launch the whole thing. I read something that for
safety reasons or dust or other items that could not penetrate Earth's
atmosphere would be launched, but it seems that for just putting
blocks into lunar orbit to form an orbital platform could happen quite
safely because the launch parameters will have to be very precisely
controlled.

Hey about the distance to the moon, that seems kind of near. Don't
get me wrong, it takes a day just to drive a thousand kilometers at
the speed limit. Moon is big in the sky.

It costs six million dollars to send a mailbox full of cement to lunar
orbit?

I guess mass production of satellites and all-terrain space rovers is
just like the mass production of anything else, purchase in bulk of
non-unique items lowers costs and specialized manufacturing processes
further lowers costs, where systemic quality controls ensures
reliability.

As well, a lot goes into the systems to guide and direct the paths of
these items launched into space, that scales up pretty rapidly because
of the systems to determine orbits, with the past, current, and future
locations of destinations, until there is a chart with which fuel
module and scientific ballast to add to each of hundreds of otherwise
identical payloads, then download the firmware into the prom, button
it up, put it in the modular payload module, and ship it to the launch
booster assembly site.

Once anything is out of Earth orbit, it can basically be destined to
any other location in the solar system. It takes various amounts of
time to get there, but a time capsule could be launched to land on the
moon in five hundred years, with minimal corrections.

That of course demands extremely precise orientation systems, thus to
apply acute bursts or continuous steering through extremely low or
zero reaction mass propulsion. I think the gyroscope provides the
orientation reference, or laser pointing to beacons, I guess, I don't
know.

Can anyone please point me to maps of the Moon and Mars with the
geographic regions labelled? I hear about the Eridiana Planum and
wouldn't know it from some other feature or named area of Mars or
Luna.

http://www.penpal.ru/astro/

For Luna, it looks like the small impact craters are called craters,
and the large ones, seas.

http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/b...up/Atlas/Mars/

The lunar rovers should be these remarkably robust things, wheeled,
you know, like a lunar rover, with their own solar charging panels as
they are probably not nuclear powered, semi-autonomous, solid state in
design, with various modular attachments. One idea is that they are
cooperative in that one could recharge another through the modular
inductive power couplings, so if one ran out of power in the shade
another could go salvage it. The could also be modular in that for
example some could just carry bulk materials form place to place while
others might have robot arms for telepresence. As well, they should
be modular so that if a part goes bad one of the other ones could
actually refit it in the field.

The rovers should be in near-constant use, for example with the
rover-mobile driving around to schools on Earth so kids could
teleoperate the rovers, or just a web page.

Of course, they'd leave a bunch of tracks, which in Luna's lack of
erosive water and wind would last for many hundreds of years, leading
to various attempts to write things on the surface of the moon, in the
rover sandboxes.

It seems like the satellite array for communications and also for
remote sensing would be a good idea. Then, the rovers wouldn't need
as powerful of communications gear necessary to broadcast to Earth,
instead they can broadcast to the satellites which then interlink and
then downlink back to the lunar rover base stations.

The idea of the base stations is as solar and/or nuclear powered fixed
installations with communications relays to the satellite array and to
Earth, and the ability to recharge the rovers. The main Earth
communication link could be located where it has good reception with
Earth.

These of course are all unmanned and rudimentary in their ability to
repair themselves, thus they should be designed with long lifespans,
because the manned settlements will almost surely be busy repairing
their own systems.

Mars, besides its distance, seems better on most counts for settlement
and colonization than the moon. In the absence of FTL travel to
millions of primeval Earth-like worlds, Mars is kind of like living in
the desert.

In terms of mining, I still think the asteroids are where it's at:
some are just huge chunks of precious metals.

Yeah there is a lot of information about lava tubes.

http://www.oregonl5.org/lbrt/l5lbi88.html

Have a nice day,

Ross F.