Juno yes, Moonrise no

Rand Simberg wrote:
I don't think anyone seriously suggests actually building spacecraft on
the moon, but sometimes they discuss extracting oxygen from the soil.
I've never seen anything to make me vaguely believe that this is
economically or technologically worthwhile in the service of any larger
end.

Reducing costs of getting propellant to the staging area (e.g., EML1)

That's the claim, yes. I don't buy it.

Essentially all of the papers that I've seen advocating LUNOX
production have the flaw of comparing a comparatively conservative
existing mission architecture without LUNOX to a comparatively
aggressive mission architecture with LUNOX, without looking at a
similarly aggressive mission architecture without LUNOX.

-jake

You for got Mining PGM from large Impact Craters to use as cathlists in
H2 Cars

Dennis Wingo raises this possiblity in "Moon Rush"


Just my $0.02


Space Cadet


derwetzelsDASHspacecadetATyahooDOTcom


Moon Society - St. Louis Chapter


http://www.moonsociety.org/chapters/stlouis/


The Moon Society is a non-profit educational and
scientific foundation formed to further scientific
study and development of the moon.

Rand Simberg wrote:
Reducing costs of getting propellant to the staging area (e.g., EML1)

That's the claim, yes. I don't buy it.

That's the postulate. It's still being examined.

I see much more "Lunar oxygen will save us money, let's go design
moonbases" than I do "let's see how to get propellant to L1 cheaply."
Given the state of our knowledge of such things, I think that the
Centennial Challenge prize for oxygen production from lunar regolith
(or simulants thereof) is much more appropriate than
multi-billion-dollar return to the moon plans.

-jake

On Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:03:04 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

It's supposed to be a first step. It will give us experience living on
other worlds. It will cause us to develop lunar ISRU technologies. It
will provide people on-hand to deploy and maintain scientific
instruments. It will spur the development of transportation
technologies which then, one would hope, would trickle into the private
sector. It will provide a ready source of oxygen, for refueling (er,
oxidizing?) spacecraft in cislunar space. It will provide a source of
metals and other elements for building large space stations, even
settlements, well beyond what would be practical if all the mass had to
be hauled up from Earth.



All that is so far beyond NASA's current or any future likely budget as
to be well-nigh impossible inside of fifty years.

Not the oxygen mining. That's in fact part of the plan (and the
budget) over the next two decades. If the other stuff happens farther
out, so what? One has to start somewhere, somewhen.

This new space initiative was the one that proposed we do a manned flyby
of Mars instead of a landing, as that would bust the budget.

Initially, not exclusively. Are you being deliberately tendentious?

You're talking about colonizing a lethally unpleasant place for no
better reason than to colonize further lethally unpleasant places. Try
Death Valley in midsummer, or Little America in Antarctic midwinter;
either one of them is a lot more hospitable than any other body in the
solar system, if for no other reason than you can breathe the
atmosphere; yet you note there isn't any great rush to build cities in
either location.

I don't know why people continue to trot out this stupid argument,
when it's been responded to many times.

In article .com,
"Jake McGuire" wrote:

I see much more "Lunar oxygen will save us money, let's go design
moonbases" than I do "let's see how to get propellant to L1 cheaply."
Given the state of our knowledge of such things, I think that the
Centennial Challenge prize for oxygen production from lunar regolith
(or simulants thereof) is much more appropriate than
multi-billion-dollar return to the moon plans.

Where do you see people claiming that lunar LOX production is the sole
reason for building a lunar base? It is only one of many possible
benefits. The chief benefit is having the experience of building a moon
base -- experience which will be pretty vital in us getting off our rock
of origin. Things like astronomy, LOX production, and so on are merely
side benefits, if they pan out. If not, it's still worth doing anyway.

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In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

If, 50
years from now, some madman develops a plague that can wipe out all
people on Earth, will having visited Mars do us any good?

Who says he can't take it to the Moon? In fact, what if someone carrying
the plague shows up on the Moon from Earth?

No one says that can't happen, but you've neatly missed the point. The
point is, a multi-planet (or rather, multi-habitat -- no reason future
habitats need to be planets) species is much harder to wipe out than a
single-planet one. A permanent lunar base does more to move us along
that than does a brief visit by half a dozen people to Mars.

It's also a hell of a lot more Earthlike than the Moon. Have you ever
considered what's going to happen to your Lunar colonists muscle tone
after living in 1/6th G for a year or two?

Nobody knows, because we've never done any research on the extended
effects of 1/6 G. Maybe it's a big problem. Maybe it's not a problem
at all. Most likely it's somewhere in between. This is one of the
important questions a lunar base will enable us to answer. (Of course
there are other ways of answering that too, like a rotating space
station, of which I would also be in favor.)

Note that Martian gravity may turn out to be a big problem, too. We
don't know that either.

They'll be quite happy to
live on the Moon, as they won't be able to stand upright on Earth anymore.
The first generation of their children will be exiles from Earth from
birth.

That's interesting science fiction, but it may or may not bear any
resemblance to reality. Your statement of it as if it were fact doesn't
improve your credibility much.

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In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

We've been flying in space for around
forty-five years now, and so far around 450 people have been into space
versus a world population of around 6,446,131,400 as of July of this
year. So in other words, the odds of anyone now living having flown in
space would be around 14,324,736 to 1.
You'd better hope they really up spaceflight numbers in the years to
come to better your odds. :-)

Your ability to succinctly state the point, while at the same time
utterly failing to grasp it, is astounding.

You're talking about colonizing a lethally unpleasant place for no
better reason than to colonize further lethally unpleasant places.

Lethally unpleasant to an unprotected current-day human, yes. Much like
Alaska, or most of Canada -- how many winters do you think you would
last without clothing or shelter? Clothing and shelter will be needed
in space too (at least, for contemporary humans), but so what? It's a
niche that will be filled, and once the solar system (and eventually,
other star systems too) is teeming with life, it won't seem so
hospitable.

But you and the rest of the meek are welcome to inherit the Earth.

If we get our population under control, and develop renewable sources of
energy, along with some terraforming of Earth itself, we can avoid
having to move to other planets for thousands, if not tens of thousands
of years.

Unless a planet-killing asteroid (or plague, or technology, or terrorist
group, or what have you) comes along in the next hundred. Stick all
your eggs in one basket and hope for the best if you like, but
fortunately there are others who will spread them out.

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On 3 Jun 2005 14:51:08 -0700, in a place far, far away, "Jake McGuire"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

Rand Simberg wrote:
I don't think anyone seriously suggests actually building spacecraft on
the moon, but sometimes they discuss extracting oxygen from the soil.
I've never seen anything to make me vaguely believe that this is
economically or technologically worthwhile in the service of any larger
end.

Reducing costs of getting propellant to the staging area (e.g., EML1)

That's the claim, yes. I don't buy it.

That's the postulate. It's still being examined.

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

1: Astronomers

Needs a base on the far side, you can only use it for 14 days maximum
each month, and there is the communication problem.

False on all three counts -- well, except maybe the last one, which is a
problem, but one trivially solved. For the first one: much of the same
astronomy could be done in permanently shadowed polar craters, and
different forms of astronomy can be done even from the near side.
Second point: some kinds of astronomy can be done even in the lunar
daytime; some places on the far (and near) side can be shielded from the
sun in various ways (remember, there is no atmospheric scattering of
light as there is on Earth); and again, there are permanently shadowed
craters that could observe 24/7.

In short, you're spouting nonsense again.

There is also sagging of the telescopes under gravity to contend with

Ah yes, we can't build telescopes under 1G, so how would we ever build
them under 1/6G? Oh, wait. We can.

and lunar dust getting on it and its traverse mechanism.

Lunar dust travels a ballistic path from whatever kicks it up. Stick a
rope around your telescope to keep the sight-seers from getting too
close, and you won't have much dust.

2: Tourists

It would be fun if the Earth moved in the sky; it doesn't.

I see -- because the Earth is stationery in the lunar sky, a visit to
the Moon isn't fun? How absurd.

The cost of the ticket will be rather high also; even Earth orbit looks
cheap once you figure out the total amount of energy required to get the
tourist there and back.

Yes, it increases the energy required by about a factor of 0.75.

3: Anybody who wants to get fantastically rich in the beamed solar
power industry

And can talk the world in to shutting off their lights around the time
of the New Moon each month; in fact the power arrival is going to be
limited to around twelve hours fifty minutes per day to any point on
earth no matter what the phase of the Moon is.

You demonstrate amazing lack of understanding of the proposal. I'm not
a big fan of lunar solar power, but not for this reason -- getting solar
power on the Moon all month long is a fairly minor problem. (Bigger
problems, IMHO, are the fact that the Moon isn't stationary in the sky,
and that the transceiver required is even huger than one in GEO.)

However, there's also solar power beamed from GEO (or even from LEO
constellations). A robust lunar infrastructure would be able to provide
much of the mass these powersats would require.

assuming you are talking about using mass drivers to move lunar soil
into GEO to build solar arrays, the total cost of the lunar soil
factory and launch facility, plus the cost of manufacturing the arrays
in GEO would probably far exceed the cost of simply shooting everything
prefab from Earth straight to GEO.

As asserted by the guy who thinks that lunar astronomy can only be done
for 14 days of the month. In reality, lunar resources almost certainly
WILL be cheaper eventually; whether that will be the case at the point
where we're ready to start building powersats is uncertain. But
clearly, the sooner we start developing lunar industry, the more likely
it will be economical when we need it.

5: Anyone wanting to head into deep space and who needs lots of
aluminum and/or oxygen

We've got a fair amount of both right here on earth. We've even got
these cool high-tech biooxygen generators that only need water,
sunlight, and soil to work.

Yeah, the trouble is that they're all at the bottom of a deep gravity
well, and lifting large amounts of mass out of that is expensive.
(Granted, that may change in the future, but even so, it's likely that
lifting it from a shallow gravity well will ultimately be cheaper no
matter how you're doing it.)

6: Anyone who wants to build big-ass space colonies

Let's just build a big-ass Antarctic or Australian Out-Back colony, or
one on the continental shelf; any one of these would be far cheaper to
do, and far easier to get to and from.

And far more pointless. Let's not.

7: Anyone who wants to exploit, colonize or otherwise make use of
astroids or outer-system moons and who needs to test out tech

We could get a lot of iron from the asteroids

True, but not really the point.

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In article .com,
"Jake McGuire" wrote:

But it's not going to help me get into space, is it?

And a moon base will, how?

By spurring the development of technologies needed to reach the Moon and
live there for extended periods of time, including a cislunar
architecture that will, among other things, help the growth of space
tourism. Knowledge of ancient bacteria on Mars won't do that.

If we discover a big asteroid or comet headed for Earth,
is knowledge of life on Mars going to equip us to divert it?

And a moon base will, how?

By providing knowledge of things needed to do exactly that, like rocket
engines and guidance systems. Yes, we need rockets and guidance systems
to reach Mars, but we don't need to know about *life* on Mars, which is
the comparison being made here.

If, 50
years from now, some madman develops a plague that can wipe out all
people on Earth, will having visited Mars do us any good?

And a moon base will, how?

By getting some of the population off Earth, obviously. Are you really
dense, or just acting that way on usenet?

Developing the ability to actually *live* off-planet is far more
important than just visiting another one, evidence of life or no.

If we wanted to develop the ability to live off-planet, we'd be
spending money on regenerative life support, tether dynamics, medical
effects of reduced gravity, etc etc. Not sending four people to the
moon.

Who's sending four people to the moon? We did more than that with
Apollo. This program is about an extended presence on the moon, which
will necessarily involve a lot more than four people. It will, in fact,
require development of regenerative life support, result in study of the
medical effects of reduced gravity, and quite likely (by that time) spur
the development of tether systems. Some of that would also result from
a Mars mission, but again, not from knowledge of Martian microbes.

Well, perhaps the recently-announced Centennial Challenge will change
your mind about the technological and economic viability. (I'm not sure
how one defines "worthwhile" in this context.)

I was thinking of two criteria. First and most importantly: can you
bring the oxygen to the moon cheaper than you can produce it there?
Secondly - the oxygen is presumably going to be used in the service of
some other goal - is there a cheaper way of accomplishing said other
goal than lunar oxygen extraction, be it closed-cycle life support,
huge mass drivers, or big laser launch systems.

Ah. Well those are valid questions, but they can't be answered until we
have the ISRU technology in hand. And of course, the answer will keep
changing as the technology does. But I think it obvious that
eventually, it WILL be cheaper to produce it locally than it will be to
ship it from Earth, if it is to be used locally.

As for being in the service of a larger end -- seems pretty obvious to me.

I disagree. I think that the vast majority of arguments for lunar
exploration come from the "What neat things could I do to justify a
moon base" rather than "I want to do this neat thing - is a moon base
useful for it?" This leads one to argue for He-3 extraction and other
silliness.

And utterly misses the point. A moon base is justified because it's the
next step in becoming a spacefaring civilization. You're the one
looking for further justifications for it -- I don't believe it needs
any. There *will* be side benefits, some of which we can predict now,
and others we probably haven't imagined. But those are side benefits,
not the reason for doing it.

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