Moon Base baby steps

(Russell Wallace) wrote in message ...
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?

Agreed, and the same for Mars.

But no one in this thread has suggested people colonising and breeding
on the moon. I would envisage one year tours of duty, which should be
quite feasible. Pregancy would be punished by an immediate ticket home
(or to an orbiting colony), at unless / until pregnency in 1/6g (or
38g for Mars) is proven safe.

(Ross A. Finlayson) wrote in message . com...
(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.

I've always considered an Earth launch mass driver as impractical, due
to atmospheric heating. I suppose you could have a mass driver
booster, which launched payloads at 2km/s, whereupon a rocket takes
over.

But as many have pointed out, the key to space colonisation is to make
the maximum use of resources that are (energetically) close to space,
which, in the short term means high Earth orbit. The nearest objects
are NEO/NEAs (Near Earth Objects/Asteroids) followed by the moon.

So the trick is to make as much as possible from these. And the first
step in that is Chemistry, which is why I invited sci.chem people to
commmentate.

(Ross A. Finlayson) wrote in message . com...
"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.

Economical Access to Space = f(Earth launch costs, proportion of mass
obtained from non Earth sources)

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.

Glad you've come over.

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.

If you're new to this area, check out The High Frontier, (GK O'Neill)
and Mining the Sky (Lewis). Living in Space is probably nearer term.

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.

Carbon is abundant in many NEOs. Nitrogen is a problem, but not a
major problem until we move from Torus colonies to Cylinder colonies
with their large volumes. Until then, a Heavy Lift Vehicle delivering
NH3 is enough.

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?

Somewhat behind a Space Elevator and way behind a rotovator.

Though a mass driver launching at 2km/s is feasible.

Cardman wrote in message . ..
On 26 Jan 2004 05:45:25 -0800, (Harmon
Everett) wrote:
snip

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

Bricks tend to be full of impurities, but they seem to build pretty
solid walls.


You could use an inflatable dome as the armature to form a hardened
surface of melted regolith over.

If you had your inflatable dome, then I do not believe that you should
try making your own regolith sand castles out of it.

But we need the couple of meters of regolith to provide radiation and
micrometeorite protection and temperature insulation.


Is there a good way to melt a little bit of regolith at
a time?

Focused sunlight.

I'm thinking maybe inflate a dome or tube, have a little
rover push up 20 or 30 cm of lunar dust up against it as heat
sheilding, have another little rover with a melting chamber (lasers?)
melt a pile of lunar dust outside that. Push some more lunar dust,
melt a little more, and gradually build up a ceramic surface over the
dome, that could support a couple of meters of regolith. It would
take a year or two, but you could end up with a habitable structure
anywhere you wanted it.

And what about windows and getting things like electricity and people
in and out?

Not sure windows would be a good idea. Electricity in through a post
at the top until people arrive, and then they can reroute it however
they want. A door/ airlock might have to wait until people arrive,
too. But instead of the first order of business for the new arrivals
being to build themselves a complete (very cramped) shelter, the first
thing they have to do is cut a door into an already operational,
fairly spacious shelter, and set up an airlock.
A much easier task.

Instead of a hemispherical dome, it would probably be a revolved arch,
or onion shaped dome, to help support the burden of the lunar soil.

"Joseph S. Powell, III" writes:

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.

Correction: All that has been established is that _SOME_ sort
of hydrogen-containing substance exists near the polar regions.
The physical nature and chemical composition of said hydrogen-
containing substance remains a matter of speculation. Water
is _one_ possibility --- but ammonia is _also_ a possibility,
as are carbonaceous chondritic matter or tar-like "tholins."
We won't know for sure until something capable of measuring
the actual composition and not just the hydrogen content
is launched.


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'

(Alex Terrell) writes:

But no one in this thread has suggested people colonising and breeding
on the moon. I would envisage one year tours of duty, which should be
quite feasible. Pregancy would be punished by an immediate ticket home
(or to an orbiting colony), at unless / until pregnency in 1/6g (or
38g for Mars) is proven safe.

Quite bluntly, if they've paid for their own ticket, it's nobody's bloody
business _what_ they choose to do. It's _their_ right to decide what _they_
consider "safe" --- =NOT= some officious thug appointed by the Nanny State !!!

The main reason why I want to get =OFF= this Mother-May-I rock is that
there are too darned many "safety fascists" like _you_ getting in my face !!! :-(


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'

"Joe Strout" wrote in message
...
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).


"Ah we sure?" Seriously, we may find the 1/6 g isn't enough to prevent
calcium loss, but is enough to make bone breaks more likely than in orbit?


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

(Alex Terrell) writes:

(Ross A. Finlayson) wrote in message . com...
(Alex Terrell) wrote in message
. com...
[...]

I research the mass driver a little.

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

I've always considered an Earth launch mass driver as impractical,
due to atmospheric heating.

Launching from the ground is not _completely_ beyond the realm
of technical possibility. For example, according to one estimate,
if you used a mass-driver to lob a telephone-pole size rod of
ordinary solid steel at about Mach 28--30 and could somehow keep it
from tumbling, it would only lose about a meter or so of its length
while punching out of the atmosphere. If it were protected with 10--20 cm
of sacrificial carbon-carbon heat shield, similar to the one used to
protect the Galileo atmospheric entry probe, one could get the whole thing
into orbit essentially intact.

The _real_ problems with attempting surface mass-driver launches a

1.) The ridiculous accelerations involved, which would severely limit
what sorts of cargoes could be launched, and

2.) The atmospheric shock waves it would produce, which would cause
complaints and lawsuits from many hundreds of kilometers around the
mass-driver site.


I suppose you could have a mass driver booster, which launched payloads
at 2km/s, whereupon a rocket takes over.

Doesn't ameliorate the shock-wave problem, unless you use something like
Keith Loftsrom's "Launch loop" to get it above the bulk of the atmosphere,
of have unreasonably strong but light materials such as diamondoid so that
you can implement something like J. Storrs Hall's concept of a mass-driver
perched on the tops of unreasonably tall towers.


But as many have pointed out, the key to space colonisation is to make
the maximum use of resources that are (energetically) close to space,
which, in the short term means high Earth orbit. The nearest objects
are NEO/NEAs (Near Earth Objects/Asteroids) followed by the moon.

Agreed.


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'

(Alex Terrell) wrote in message . com...
I've always considered an Earth launch mass driver as impractical, due
to atmospheric heating. I suppose you could have a mass driver
booster, which launched payloads at 2km/s, whereupon a rocket takes
over.

But as many have pointed out, the key to space colonisation is to make
the maximum use of resources that are (energetically) close to space,
which, in the short term means high Earth orbit. The nearest objects
are NEO/NEAs (Near Earth Objects/Asteroids) followed by the moon.

So the trick is to make as much as possible from these. And the first
step in that is Chemistry, which is why I invited sci.chem people to
commmentate.

I found references to other NASA or NASA funded papers on Earth to
orbit mass drivers, but didn't find any online. Can I get the
documents from them?

I found references to some publicly funded mass driver research, but
not NASA. (Insert jokes about NASA.)

Has NASA dropped the ball on mass drivers?


When you say "Space Elevator", what do you mean by that? Does it hang
from a skyhook? I also am unfamiliar with "rotovator", cursory
research (type term into text box, press enter) shows it may be a
tether based system with multiple tether systems in concert. One
chaotic impulse and the tether fails.

I think the space tether is completely impractical, maybe not in the
future but currently.

The point of having a ground installation is that it can be
constructed and maintained standing on the ground without wearing a
spacesuit and having been launched into space.

The atmospheric compressive heating (often called "friction") would be
a major technical hurdle to overcome to maximize the payload/heat
shield ratio. I don't know, but maybe electrostatic discharge from
the energized pod could also spearhead an evacuated path on its
regular route, reducing the necessity to heavily shield it.

Mass launchers were built in the seventies and probably before. About
using a mass driver to accelerate a rocket and then airlaunching the
rocket, the Australians have done this already to put items into
space.

I'm trying to get an understanding of the relationship of exit
velocity, launch track length, G forces, and power. Anybody have a
chart of that?

In terms of G forces, you figure there's a soft start and then quick
increase in acceleration, relative to G force, mass times 9.8 m/s^2,
then the huge brick wall of the atmosphere at the end of the tunnel.
I think electrostatic discharges, or some other electrical phenomena,
could reduce the density of air immediately near the launch, lessening
the hard transition.

Theoretically, the mass driver could be an angstrom in length, and
achieve nearly any exit velocity by the application of some incredible
amount of power. The tradeoff is between G-forces effected upon the
payload and the length of the launch tube or track applying continuous
acceleration.

On Earth, it's actually not that difficult to pour hundreds of tons of
concrete on the prepared site and have a five to ten kilometer track
in nearly any non-urban place in the world, ready to emplace the
magnetic levitation track and fit the launch coils. Thus, the track
length should be as long as feasible, on the actual Earth to Orbit
mass driver for cargo.

I think it should be put in mountainous Colorado, or perhaps Montana,
launching north over Canada, then over Greenland and the Atlantic on
its way out. At ten or twelve thousand feet altitude, there's still a
very thick atmosphere, that is much less than that at sea level.

The payload would look like a reverse shooting star. Its launch,
scheduled for Tuesdays at 10:45 A.M., weekly, would be accompanied by
a deep cracking boom, as the hypersonic projectile snapped the sound
barrier on its path out of the atmoshere and on into orbit.

This is different from a rocket which also makes a sonic boom and
spews tons of poisonous gasses onto the launch pad, at irregular
intervals.

The Earth to Orbit Mass Driver is a better environmental alternative
to unassisted rocketry. The launch apparatus is completely reusable,
hundreds, thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. Its
use introduces no toxins directly into the environment. Electricity
may be from greener sources, where a Thiokol plant is still extremely
polluted.

Hazardous nuclear waste and other poisons unfit for Earth could be
readily launched into space, after sufficient regular use of ETOMD
showed it consistent in its cheap access to space, to safeguard the
environment from those hazardous materials.

There are certainly plentiful mineral resources in space. Notably in
asteroids, nearly pure deposits of precious materials that be
historical finds on Earth float around somewhere out in space. There
is enough to build a soaring civilization on Mars and most other
planets of the system at lower prices than the possibility of any
terrestrial resource. Yet, it's out there, and we're stuck on Earth,
the brilliant gem and cradle of life.

Currently, the cost of developing space resources and physically
exploring space is a function of the cost of getting to space.

We could talk about nanotechnology and assemblers.

My opinion is that an ETOMD is an operational requirement of a
realistic Moon base.

Ross F.

Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
SNIP

When you say "Space Elevator", what do you mean by that? Does it hang
from a skyhook? I also am unfamiliar with "rotovator", cursory
Start here-
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,57536,00.html

or here-
http://www.isr.us/SEHome.asp