Moon Base baby steps

"Ool" wrote in message ...
"Ross A. Finlayson" wrote in message om...

[Lunar mass drivers]

I think one of the key advancements required is the high-termperature
superconductor.

Or you could just launch stuff at night. Any superconductors around
that work at -140°C? Who says the extreme nocturnal cold has to be
your enemy in *every* respect?

I think economical high temperature superconductor would be an
excellent thing.

It seems that economical access to space goes right back to economical
access to space. There has to be a less expensive way to launch stuff
from Earth to its moon for a moon base to be economically feasible.

So after writing to sci.space from reading an invitation in sci.chem,
I thought "hey, that was fun." Then I got to thinking about it and
realized that I knew very little about the realities of space travel
or human technology in space.

The other day I was reading a book "Living in Space", it's a pretty
good book. It talks about the human experience in enclosed and
sheltered, weightless environs.

Luna has resources. There are various compositions of dirt and rock.
The sun shines upon it, each lunar day. It has basically no
atmosphere and 1/6 the gravity of Earth.

It seems one of the major lack of resources on Luna is the lack of
nitrogen. Carbon and oxygen it has aplenty, nitrogen, which makes up
most of Earth's atmosphere, is in short supply in the regolith, also
there is much less hydrogen. There is a lot of calcium, iron,
titanium, sulfur, and even aluminum, almost all of it oxidized.

Some types of bacteria eat rust.

What's the word on the mass driver from Earth? Is it three trillion
dollars and twenty years for the continuous service mass driver from
Earth to Luna?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ma...er%22+trillion

The hypothetical mass driver is a huge edifice, it can't be aimed very
easily. the Earth mass driver launches cargo from Earth's surface to
Earth orbit. Atmospheric conditions would affect launches: the
payloads would require guidance systems. People may be more
comfortable with a magnetic plane catapult than a space cannon.

Consider launch strategies, from archaic to contemporary to fantastic:
catapult, cannon, rocket, mass driver, laser propelled, tether/space
elevator, antigravity. What are others?

Here's a question, suitable for the nineteenth century: can an
explosive cannon launch something into orbit? What would be its
dimensions? Basically the idea with that is to launch slugs into
orbit.

The catapult or spring tension launcher would not seem to be feasible
for launching anything into orbit, although they're used to some
effect to spring submarine platform ICBM's, intercontinental ballistic
missiles, into the air to airlaunch.

The rocket has been used to launch all things from Earth into outer
space. The X-15 test plane first broke Mach 5.

The mass driver is the train to space, one way.

Laser propulsion is the concept that a laser, coherent light beam,
might be able to impart reaction impulse to the launched item.

The idea of the tether is that from space a line is dropped towards
Earth and another outwards, for counterbalance, and then items climb
the tether. The Earth is somewhat too large for a feasible tether
system, unless I am mistaken.

Antigravity of course is the solution, with the concept of levitating
Detroit to the moon, or perhaps Ann Arbor, that's not a slur by any
means.

The prevalent concept of antigravity seems to be that of the
gravitational lens, an item or field that dispels the gravitational
force field between two masses, e.g. a refinery and Earth, thus that
minimal propulsive forces imply momentum to the weightless ore
refinery destined for the Moon and the shipyards. Of course, with
antigravity there's no point besides environmental concerns in having
heavy manufacturing on the far side of the moon except for local lunar
use, hundreds of years from now when such a thing might happen.

That reminds me of reading about the discovery by space telescopes of
microlensing anomalies between Earth and the Sun.

There's not much point in considering those things until their
fundamental underpinnings are beyond primary science, except that
there is, what we use today to launch items into orbit is rocketry.

That said, the foundations of a manned outpost on the moon is a lot of
launches of stuff to the moon to see how it works. Standardize and
modularize launch systems, orbiters, rover chasses, and ground
installations, to amortize the most expensive part of their
production: the scientists and technologists behind them, and one-off
production techniques, and the cost of individual failure. Utilize
those things launched into orbit, like the tanks, and ion propel them
on the slow boat to the moon, to crash as derelict.

Another thing I think will be useful is to even further open the data
system to the public. Currently, you can point a dish to most
satellites in the sky and get their feed, and it is unencrypted and
standardized.

I'm thinking the lunar strategy would be this: design the orbiters
without concern of the landers (rovers and base installations). That
way their mass is shorn the lander separation apparatus. Outfit them
with modular sensor assemblies, with extendable and retractable solar
sails, where they are a usable technology, ion engines, and solar
panels, with as well nuclear constant emission and chemical storage
batteries for power. The idea here is that the orbiter array will
provide sweeps over fixed orbits that cover the lunar surface
incrementally to over the course of a year or two gather data over the
complete lunar surface with their state of the art high resolution
sensor assemblies, multispectral imaging and deep radar. These are
words I use casually, superficially, without much understanding. The
state of the art is advancing rapidly, the sensors would soon be
obsolete, yet would also provide a constant stream of data for twenty
years as they orbit Luna, and would be state of the art, or perhaps
even better: already standard.

The Mars rover computers run at 20 million cycles per second!

Another item not about the moon per se yet worthwhile is the increase
of space telescopes manyfold. The extra space telescope might
discover a chunk of near pure uranium, enough to power the planet for
hundreds of years, only billions away.

After the orbiters, the next phase is the lander design. One idea is
that these are landers all the way, not combined lander/orbiter
missions. This allows separation of specialization. The idea of the
lander is that until life support is economical and reliable, the
landers are our telepresence on the moon. We might even envision
using humanoid or biologically modelled walking robots, spiders.
Spiders are better walkers than insects, that's why so many insects
develop wings. The light distance and thus control lag from Earth to
Luna is some six seconds (radio signal travel plus processing),
immersive telepresence is at question, but a rover could be driven by
a seven year old like a laggy network game.

About the distance to the moon, some 380 some thousand kilometers,
with light going 300,000 kilometers a second, I guess the distance is
not more than two light-seconds.

It's the job of the robots, or semi-autonomous rovers, to physically
explore the lunar surface individually and in tandem. For example, in
the example of finding a cave mouth, the rover might not be able to
maintain line of sight to a base station or orbiter, but could to one
of the other rovers, to maintain communcations. As well, when the
derelict launch tank, mentioned above, is located, ten or twenty
rovers could drag it to the moonbase raw material collection site, the
junkyard, or as they say, recycled material, that would later form
some of the content of the moonbase proper. When humans arrive the
rovers are golfcarts, wheelbarrows, and mules, and hopefully not too
often jaws of life and gurneys.

Some of the landers are fixed installations, they would for example be
communications and power generation arrays. They might also store the
rover components in storage bays for the rovers to gather at the base
stations, that the rovers use to refit their tooling or replace each
other's parts. The lander may also contain a variety of other
instruments related to maintenance of the rovers, for example in the
case of the dust buildup, a reclaiming shower, or specialized robot
arms to replace wheels or other moving parts, where the other rover
components should never be subject to wear and need no replacement.

Then, send orbiters to each planet and moon in the solar system. If
the aliens come along and we have permanent orbiters around each
planet and moon, then they'd be impressed. It also impresses them to
be met by a battle fleet, or magic to them, but that's a little out of
the question.

I thought NASP was supposed to be functional already. Where the hell
is NASP? NASP is supposed to be a conventional aerobody that uses jet
power to achieve orbit.

Anyways for the moon base it seems we need some way to have large
airtight containers on the moon, for gasses and sometimes perhaps
liquids, for the needs of humans, bags of liquid. The option would
seem to be inflatable tents in the caves, with perhaps a separate
airlock module or modules. All the materials for the moon base should
be prelaunched and sitting there, perhaps organized into piles or the
junkyard by the robots, including emergency return vehicle(s), and
then the astronauts are sent to put it together, the bouncy castle,
and afterwards enjoy hot tea, moon tea from sludge grown in vats on
the moon, until they come back to Earth after their eighteen months
are up, to institutionally assess their health.

I've read that a stable closed, isolated group size is five, or more.

Cart and horse: heavy lift.

Anybody wanted to be an astronaut. Many do!

Ross F.

On 24 Jan 2004 06:30:13 -0800, (Alex Terrell)
wrote:

Several things they should do immediately. One of these is to give a
few million $ in research grants to some University Chemistry
department to test methods for processing lunar regolith.

I hate to rain on people's parade, but isn't the _first_ step to put
some mice in orbit, centrifuged to 1/6 G, to check whether it's
intrinsically possible for people to live on the moon in the first
place?

--
"Sore wa himitsu desu."
To reply by email, remove
the small snack from address.
http://www.esatclear.ie/~rwallace

(Alex Terrell) wrote in message . com...
I agree we should be separating cargo and people.

Esprecially if we can get cargo from LEO to Lunar orbit by electric
propulsion.



I research the mass driver a little.

Three trillion and twenty years is ridiculous, except maybe for the
people mover.

The Earth to orbit mass driver is more like a hundred million and five
years, for a 90G trip to orbit that presumably orbit insertion systems
could survive, with the launch track only a kilometer or so in length.

That would be much cheaper to put bulk materials into Earth and lunar
orbit and on the moon, the technology exists.

One of the ideas here is to launch lots of water ice, encased in
insulated tanks, many tons, to the moon, maybe even a few tons of
wine.

To put a mass driver launched payload into orbit, it has to correct to
go into orbit instead of simply flying off into space.

So I guess the idea of the mass driver is that it should launch every
payload to reach high Earth orbit, right at the edge of the gravity
well. That way it can fall readily into a lower orbit, or disperse
readily into a different essentially solar orbit, with the Sun having
the largest mass of any item in the solar system.

The idea is the launch pod contains the attitude controls to orient to
launch the corrective rocket to put the pod into its orbit on its path
from Earth where it had been launched at five to seven or eleven miles
per second, Mach 30-something, from the mass driver tube.

Then, the delicate solar sails, having survived the trip from Earth in
some fantastic way, unfold from the pod and, assuming solar sails
work, guide the pod to an orbit around the moon.

On command, the pod noses into the moon and retrorockets cushion its
landing.

Then, after the rovers collect the pod and drag it to the base, its
water is melted and drained, the astronauts pressure test it, and add
the new addition.

The pod could have lots of other stuff in it, like the construction
machinery frozen in ice for shock protection.

Research is telling me the mass driver is much more economical to put
bulk materials into orbit.

I'm surprised to read of the shuttle cost inefficiencies. Something
said Skylab cost 1/1000'th of what Freedom does.

Even if the mass driver is awesome, we still would need rockets for
launching stuff. The mass driver is launching standardized pods. I
still would hope the shuttles, all three of them or whatever, wouldn't
be mothballed, but that's OK. Also we still have to support the
International Space Station, although I'm kind of disgusted at its
costs, which means funding Russian space systems.

There are obviously dangers in accelerating something. The launch
path should be mostly over unpopulated territory, but also in line
with the probably equatorial, or rather, orbit parallel to Solar
orbit, for stuff from the mass driver to be sent to other planetary
bodies in Earth's orbital plane, ie, not Neptune.

Sooner or later we'll need ships in orbit. The problem there is
supplying them with reaction mass. Basically a tug and garbage
collector would be useful.

I'm reading that the pod has to have coils on it. I'm am pretty much
clueless on electrodynamics, some form of inductive electromagnetic
coils are required. Another problem is that the coils on the launcher
need to be switched at a higher rate that is feasible by some modern
methods, a scaling problem.

Another problem is that launch would take quite a few megawatts of
power.

Another problem is the sonic boom. The launch tube is evacuated in
descriptions I am reading, at the end is presumably a breakaway cap
that is the camera shutter.

A two metric ton pod should be heavy enough to escape most atmospheric
effects.

I'm sure there are a variety of failure modes, from exploding the
whole contraption to dropping a dumptruck on a sampan. That's the
first analogy that came to mind.

The pods need heat shields. These are either shed, ablative, or
integral. Ionizing radiation can reduce the density of air molecules
in the flight path from the cannon's snout.

It would definitely be an engineering challenge, but it seems that the
Earth to space mass driver would be the safest and most economical
option for shipping cargo to orbit.

There are a lot of descriptions of working models and even prototypes
of these things, throwing around figures like 1800 G's. A concept's
early and strong proponent appears to be the Space Studies Institute,
who offer kits to construct them.

http://www.ssi.org/

What are the costs, risks, schedules, and unknowns of constructing an
Earth to high orbit cargo launching contactless mass driver?

I think the launcher would cost four or five hundred million dollars
in three year construction after three to five years of design and
prototyping at fifteen to a hundred million dollars. Then again I
think an apple costs seventy-five cents. Anyways, the pods would
probably cost a couple hundred thousand apiece, empty.

Risks include massive failure, unforeseen problems in scaling to
production yielding unusability, acute failure leading to a pod
crashing on Earth, unacceptable violation of the environment from
noise, etcetera.

Schedules are not tied to primary research, the technologies largely
exist, an eight year schedule under budget is actually feasible.

Unknowns are unknown. I'm not a rocket scientist.

Anyways if that were so and it were started now, and the lunar
orbiters and rovers concurrently, with the space telescopes, and the
initial moon outpost with five guys, then in ten years when the group
of fifty people are ready to be launched to the moon, there would be
hundreds of tons of supplies waiting for them there, with two years of
continuous operation of the Earth to orbit mass driver.

Ross F.


Reading material:
http://web.wt.net/~markgoll/
http://yarchive.net/space/index.html
http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/know.html
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/ETEmain.html
http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/001744.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion
http://www.permanent.com/t-light.htm
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/review53/node80.html
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/phys...arthOrbit.html
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae158.cfm
http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/pro...s/brunerww.pdf
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q...i. space.tech
http://ssi.org/body_index.html
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.e.../mnr/st/std001
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.e.../mnr/st/std002
http://www.androidpubs.com/Chap04.htm
http://forums.seds.org/printthread.php?t=147
http://www.oz.net/~coilgun/theory/electroguns.htm

Joe Strout wrote in message ...

I just had never heard of their existence before yesterday, and don't
know of any on the moon itself.

Dude, you're missing out. Everybody should know about these. Do a
Google search for "lunar lava tubes" and read a while. Or even go to
the library or Amazon -- there have been a couple of good books about
them.

I think there should be shortly ten or fifteen satellites about the
moon, these would be necessary for a variety of surface operations. I
may be wrong, the moon has no appreciable atmosphere, thus no
ionosphere and only line-of-sight radio communications. A satellite
array would be critical in providing global (?) coverage of
communications availability to surface operations.

Right. A communications array is exactly the sort of infrastructure
Uncle Sam should be building.


One of the failure modes of the Earth to Orbit Mass Driver, or
Electromagnetic Launcher, EML, is that the pod falls short and impacts
the Earth.

At about five tons, ten thousand pounds, and basically with a maximum
velocity of atmospheric freefall terminal velocity, it would destroy
pretty much anything it hit. There would not be a blast radius, it
would just be like five to ten pianos dropped from high altitude.

If it hits a duck on the way up the duck's a goner, at escape velocity
anything in the way goes splat.

If the pod left atmosphere and then reentered it would burn in reentry
and be of minimal, nominal threat.

The acute short failure mode is not of high probability or damage.

What are realistic costs to construct an Earth to high Earth orbit,
two metric ton payload capacity, contactless, high availability,
fifteen year service life, low maintenance, electromagnetic coil,
elevated, fixed, rail launch system?

One question is whether it can use superconductors. The expense of
not using available superconductors over highly efficient conventional
magnet designs is in power savings and efficiency, as well as perhaps
performance. Their expense includes higher cost, aquisition,
materials research, cooling and maintenance, training, etcetera.

The physics and mechanics are fuzzy to me. Rocketry is somewhat more
intuitive, various rocket type toys were staples of childhood, such as
model rockets, bottle rockets, water rockets, and balloons taped to a
straw.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...llatlantic.net

I guess electromagnetic propulsion is intuitive, it's how an electric
motor works, or push two magnets of like polarity together and release
and they push apart.

In the coilgun there is important synchronization of timing for the
charge to be applied to each of the coils along the launch tube in
sequence to interact with the inductively charged coils on the launch
pod. This can be electronic or electro-optical in coil charge
interlock. Each coil imparts boost to the launch pod. I got that
from reading that simple light sensors are used to trip the coil
capacitor in some of the prototypes.

I'm kind of surprised, I've never heard much about EML mass drivers in
the popular media.

I'd heard about Iraq's huge cannon, Babylon, but the media told us it
was for shelling London, not launching satellites for less than a
hundred dollars a kilogram.

http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/SGbull.htm

Poor Bull. That's pretty interesting, about HARP, my opinion for
increasing explosive projectile range is perfected progressive rifling
(p.p.), specializing rifling patterns for high-volume production runs
of standardized loads, but that's only for firearms. For launching
things to space, what I think is right is the Earth to Orbit Mass
Driver.

NASA has mention and diagrams of mass drivers on their public web
pages, I've seen reference to an 80's paper "Earth Based Mass
Drivers".

http://www.google.com/search?as_epq=...earch=nasa.gov

"The mass driver has been tested, but it is not yet ready to be used
as a standard device.

The main problem with using a mass driver is that in some way or
other, the free bucket must be caught or stopped at the construction
site, that is, violently decelerated from its speed to rest." -
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Educat...ner/cinco.html

NASA seems quite biased towards reusable booster assemblies. In
considering the above statement, that is not applicable to the Earth
to Orbit Mass Driver (ETOMD), nothing needs to catch the pods because
they either kick-boost themselves into high Earth orbit or on failure
of that system shoot harmlessly off into space. The pods have their
own guidance systems.

It seems like a lot of the primary research papers for NASA are from
the 70's. That's good!

Almost all the references to a mass driver are to the lunar mass
driver, not the magnificent Earth to Orbit Mass Driver! The lunar
mass driver payload is in the area of ten kilograms, with one shot per
second.

Also they call pods buckets.

So anyways NASA does not have much up-front public comment on the
Earth to orbit mass driver. What is the problem with that? Have they
diligently considered it?

I think NASA's pretty sharp. In a huge bureaucracy, there's got to be
some smart people. Also, I guess NASA is not just NASA, it's also
their network of military-industrial partners, commercial contractors
funded by tax dollars to provide services to NASA. A lot of NASA work
is very important and even critical. It's not a commercial
enterprise, it's supposed to be a governmental agency, although
protectively aiding, indiscriminately, but not abetting, American
enterprise is accepted, corporate welfare is only rarely, and
generally not.

So anyways I'm trying to figure out the costs and timeline of an
Earth-to-Orbit Electromagnetic Mass Driver. My conservative estimate
is less than half a billion dollars in less than eight years, as is
also my wild-ass guess, ballpark figure, approximated expenditure,
etcetera.

Here's what I could do, ask SEDS.

http://www.seds.org/

Many of them may have a better estimate. They have a discussion about
the "exit" air pressure heating, erroneously requiring 90% ablative
heat shield, the Earth-to-Orbit pod heat shield is only 10%. Plus,
they'd work cheap.

Thanks, have a nice day,

Ross F.

(Alex Terrell) wrote in message . com...
(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...
If you did pressurize the whole tube, almost certainly you would first
coat the walls with a sealant of some kind.

I think you'd just use an inflatable pressure vessel which is larger
than the diameter of the lava tube. Then inflate, until the pressure
vessel is constrained by the tube walls. That's your sealant. The main
requirement where it's in contact is abrasion resistance, rather than
tensile strength. That's good, because abrasion resistant structures
can be made on the moon, whereas tensile structures are high tech
single piece products which for some time would need to be made on
Earth.

There's not a lot of reason to pressurize the entire lava tube unless
you plan on filling it with structures from floor to ceiling or if you
want the esthetics of a big, O'Neill-esque, Earthlike environment and
are wealthy enough to pay for the huge amount of nitrogen needed for
the atmosphere. The air in a 120 ft (37m) diameter dome would mass
about 15 tons, as much as the dome itself (assuming 1 atm pressure and
1 lb/ft^2 dome). The air in a 100m diameter, 1 km long lava tube
would mass about 10,000 tons.

In article ,
Cardman wrote:
On 26 Jan 2004 05:45:25 -0800, (Harmon
Everett) wrote:

Joe Strout wrote in message ...
In article ,
(Ross A. Finlayson) wrote:

...................

There's no water, so concrete is out of the question, but maybe melted
regolith could serve as structural elements.

If you tried melting it, then I could only envision lots of impurities
making your job of making a solid wall very difficult.

It is not at all clear that impurities which would not just
"slag out" will weaken the wall that much. Adobe and bricks
have "lots of impurities".

--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558

In sci.space.policy Russell Wallace wrote:
On 24 Jan 2004 06:30:13 -0800, (Alex Terrell)
wrote:

Several things they should do immediately. One of these is to give a
few million $ in research grants to some University Chemistry
department to test methods for processing lunar regolith.

I hate to rain on people's parade, but isn't the _first_ step to put
some mice in orbit, centrifuged to 1/6 G, to check whether it's
intrinsically possible for people to live on the moon in the first
place?


Yes. Its just the issue of a lack of place in space to put the mice. Even
more, if you only keep people in space for say a year at a time, you
don't need to do that, we know that people survive a year just fine in
much less than 1/6 G.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

In article ,
(Russell Wallace) wrote:

On 24 Jan 2004 06:30:13 -0800, (Alex Terrell)
wrote:

Several things they should do immediately. One of these is to give a
few million $ in research grants to some University Chemistry
department to test methods for processing lunar regolith.

I hate to rain on people's parade, but isn't the _first_ step to put
some mice in orbit, centrifuged to 1/6 G, to check whether it's
intrinsically possible for people to live on the moon in the first
place?

No. People have stayed in microgravity for extended periods of time;
staying on the Moon will be no worse than that (and may be quite a bit
better, for all we know).

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Joseph J. Strout Check out the Mac Web Directory: |
| http://www.macwebdir.com |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'

If you want it to work for longer than the two weeks that a lunar
day lasts, that is...

(Also, Lunar dust is very sticky--a problem they have to face on Mars
as well, with sand accumulating on the solar panels and in the mechan-
ical parts. On the Moon there's nothing to blow it off with, either.)

Two possibilities: either A. Compressed gas cannisters, like you clean dust
out of your keyboard with, or B. some sort of wiper blades, probably manual,
that and astronaut could just dry-wipe the dust from the pv cells...


2) Design a lander to take the rover from lunar orbit to the lunar
surface, maybe a solid rocket motor to slow it down and an airbag
system for actual landing;

I'd be surprised if an airbag system would do a lot of good. Since
there's no air you can't use any aero-braking methods to slow down,
so, unlike the Mars probes, Moon probes would have to stand on top of
a descent stage rocket anyway, rather than hang from a parachute. If
such a rocket can slow the probe down enough for airbags to work, it
could slow it down enough for a simple soft touchdown, too, I bet.


Lunar gravity is much lower than Martian - you're right, powered landings
pose little problem.

The big enabler would be water resources.
That will drive site selection and tech development.


Another post states that the interior of lava tubes is probably at a
constant -21 degrees C. Comet impacts on the Moon could well have
flung some ice/water vapor down a lava tube where it condensed. This
is one resource our rover could look for. For a technical reference,
see 'The Adventures of Tin Tin: Destination Moon' by Herge.

That odds of that are essentially zero. Most of the hypothesis for water
on the moon are based around solid water deposits being flung around.
Water vapor would remain gaseous in the lunar environment. Vapor
spreads evenly around the entire moon, from what they determined from
the Apollo expirements, then is swept away. The vacuum of the normal
environment would essentially evacuate any tube prior to any
condensation.




That's why a polar base would be more desirable - the lunar polar ice
hypothesis was finally confirmed by observations made by the Lunar
Prospector spacecraft in 1998.
Once liquid water is manufactured, one could then fill parts of the external
bladders of Lunar Transhabs with water as a radiation sheild.