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Moon Base baby steps



 
 
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  #21  
Old January 22nd 04, 08:57 PM
Joe Strout
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Default Moon Base baby steps

In article ,
(Ross A. Finlayson) wrote:

I guess my idea of a moonbase is a bunch of domes, using the
"regolith" as structural material.


Cylinders are more likely than domes, at least as a first step. And the
regolith is shielding material, not structural material.

Assuming you can get some silicates out of the dirt and rocks there,
then a primary step for long term habitibility is food production,
using the materials to build largescale greenhouses to grow earthly
plantlife.


That's certainly one step I'd like to see, though I doubt it's a primary
one -- you could live on imported food for a while.

Really the way to get to the Moon is heavy lift. This doesn't
necessarily mean the biggest rocket ever made, there are more
efficient ways to get stuff into space than the hugest rocket. There
are two basic classes of stuff to lift: cargo and people.


I agree we should be separating cargo and people. I don't agree that
heavy-lift is the way to go, though. You'd think that would give you
economies of scale, but the trouble is that with such a low flight rate,
there almost aren't any. I've become convinced lately that a larger
number of smaller launches is going to bring the cost down faster.

Landing stuff on Earth is kind of easier than landing on the moon, it
has an atmosphere, so giant supertankers could be aeroformed in space
and floated gently to land in the ocean with maybe only a few
kilotons. Landing on Luna requires retrorockets.


Well, yes, but the delta-V to the Moon's surface is substantially less
too. As is the gravity for that matter. Of the two, I'd much rather
land on the Moon than on the Earth.

I don't think that there are very many environmental concerns about
the moon, except this: the human presence should be invisible to the
naked eye as seen from Earth.


Hmm, I don't know about that. It certainly WILL be invisible for many
decades, except when we make a conscious effort to be visible. I think
it'd be cool, for example, to make a visible light on the new moon once
a year (perhaps celebrating the new year). How exactly you would
accomplish that, I'm not sure -- perhaps a massive laser array pointed
at the Earth.

Anyways, what you need on the moon for a base is construction
equipment, and lots of it. Probably among the first in line is one of
those tunnel drilling rigs. That gets set loose as soon as it gets
there to start drilling hundreds of miles of carefully planned tunnel
sections and large cavern starts, to start forming termite hills,
prospect and prototype, and grow caverns for the food to feed the
people.


Actually drilling tunnels is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's
necessary. The early base will just be cylindrical modules heaped over
with regolith. And hopefully, once you've got that you start
prospecting for good lava tubes. Those are pre-formed tunnels
enormously bigger than anything you could drill. You could put a whole
town in one, and feel like you were outside.

On the surface what you want are solar cells, tons of 'em.


Perhaps. A small fission plant would be a heckuva lot easier, though.

How much uranium is on the moon? Fission is a well-understood power
source. Basically what you want is the cheapest way to use huge
amounts of bulk so that surface scrapers could provide fuel for energy
production until we have a five or ten mile deep map of the entire
lunar surface.


You won't need to mine uranium for a very long time. A few kilos of
uranium is cheap to launch and will power the base for years.

Now, last I heard we and the Russians were supposed to have a manned
Mars mission by 2030. Times have changed since then, what with the
failure of Soviet Communism and that, so now such a task should be
done by 2020.


You're inhaling some sort of fumes. I'm hoping we'll see a moon base by
2020. Mars is highly unlikely.

About getting to the moon, what I think should be done straightaway
are dozens of unmanned micromissions. We need about eighty or ninety
remote control ATVs zooming around up there, in, say, fifteen months.


More fumes. However, if you said "five years" I would tend to agree.

Saying in ten years that we'll just go directly to the moon is
ridiculous. Instead, launch a bunch of little missions now and see
what happens to them. Many of them may fail spectacularly, offering a
wealth of data, and knowledge to do it right later. That means
something along the lines of having twenty universities and ten
national laboratories and anybody who cares to build one making moon
landers of various configurations and launching them to the moon
helter-skelter.


Heh, that'd be fun. Unfortunately you can't launch something to the
moon so cheaply -- just like at TransOrbital, which has been trying to
do exactly that for years now.

- Joe

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  #22  
Old January 24th 04, 04:56 AM
Ross A. Finlayson
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Default Moon Base baby steps

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

I guess my idea of a moonbase is a bunch of domes, using the
"regolith" as structural material.


Cylinders are more likely than domes, at least as a first step. And the
regolith is shielding material, not structural material.
...


That makes sense.

I'm wondering about "lava tubes on the moon". I guess I was under the
impression that besides Earth only Jupiter's moon Io had active
volcanic activity, and I was thinking Luna was a cold chunk of rock.
Yet, I read here that Luna has a molten, presumably iron, core, thus
that it would have similar magnetic fields to Earth.

Lava tubes, miles long underground caverns similar to lava tubes on
Earth, where higher temperature magma flowed out and left behind open
space, would probably be among the major geologic reasons for their to
be caverns on the moon with the lack of running water. I just had
never heard of their existence before yesterday, and don't know of any
on the moon itself.

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.

About heavy lift, I agree with you in that smaller launches may be
more efficient. I guess I was thinking of heavy lift as total lift
capacity, but certainly the launch of very large items to not require
their assembly in space is also a consideration.

I always why there weren't more air-boosted launches, an aerodynamic
launch plane flies a hundred thousand feet high and the launch vehicle
separates and boosts to orbit from high in the sky. Maybe that's a
misconception from seeing the space shuttle flown around piggyback,
and about how high is low Earth orbit.

Geosynchronous orbit is much farther away than low Earth orbit, some
22,000 miles or something. Then, let's see, I think the moon is
600,000 (500-700) kilometers away, and Mars variously 20 million to
200 million.

I was reading about the Shuttle-C for cargo and saving the liquid fuel
tanks in holding orbits, I think that's a good idea. What prevents
the addition of new modules to the ISS, Freedom, the International
Space Station, every year? What's so great about the ISS's orbit that
it is there?

I got to browsing the "Lunar Prospector" web page, the probe that was
landed into the polar crater, almost.

http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/resources/news.htm

Lunar Prospector was about first US moon mission since Apollo 17, then
there's Clementine.

About mapping the lunar surface and within it, I wonder if ground
penetrating radar instruments would be any good, for example for
discovering lava tubes. They might only work from the ground. We can
see the moon's surface pretty well from here and space telescopes. I
read that Mars Express is using some form of deep radar.

One of these documents from the website there have a low lunar orbit
being around 100 kilometers. Assuming that Lunar Prospector was
pretty conservative, it says the flight time to the moon, lunar orbit,
is around 100 hours, from LEO, low Earth orbit.

"From a given launch site, a launch to the moon is possible on each
day of the month, with two launch times (roughly 12 hours apart)
available on each launch data. ^3", from "Lunar Prospector Mission
Design and Planning Support" , referring to "A 70th Degree Lunar
Gravity Model (GLGM-2) from Clementine and Other Tracking Data."

The website has Lunar Prospector at around 63 million dollars (yeech)
in 1998. Mars Pathfinder, from the previous year, was much more
complicated as it had a lander in addition to the orbital component
and went to Mars, and research says it cost about 265 million. This
is where the Viking Mars probes from the 70s cost around 3 billion in
adjusted dollars. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is if a
mailbox full of cement was to be launched into lunar orbit, what would
be its costs?

Further research, I am not a regular follower of space industry news,
further research leads to information about the ESA's, European Space
Agency's, SMART-1 lunar probe that is using ion engines to waft it
gently from Earth orbit that was reached atop an Ariane 5 into lunar
oribt sometime in 2005, with a travel time to the moon of 18-20
months. A comment notes SMART-1 cost around 110 million euros and was
launched with two other satellites aboard the Ariane 5.

I have heard varying claims about the functionality of solar sails, if
they work they're definitely a consideration for long duration
orbiters as they wouldn't have to carry reaction mass for that system.
An orbiter could have both solar sails and ion/rocket drives,
redundant systems that if correct would allow an orbiter many years of
maintenance free operation, rockets for insertion and sails for
correction.

The newspaper says the current U.S. Mars missions tally to about 820
million, with Mars Express around 300 million euros.

http://www.esa.int/science/marsexpress/

International Launch Services here has some documents about the
capabilities of the Saturn and Proton families of booster rockets.

http://www.ilslaunch.com/missionplanner/

It seems pretty expensive to launch a payload into orbit. That's a
problem with monopolies, although I guess it's a market economy, there
are presumably some crazy regulatory controls on ballistic rocketry.

It's a lot easier to fantasize about thousands of launches per year
than to design/build launching something to the moon.

So let's see:

twenty space telescopes
space planes
twenty semi-permanent lunar orbiters
increased space station
twenty-two hundred moon rovots (roving robots)
ten semi-permanent Mars orbiters
ten Mars rovots

How about 1.5 billion dollars.

Hey right on, man.

Ross
  #23  
Old January 24th 04, 03:30 PM
Alex Terrell
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Default Moon Base baby steps

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

I guess my idea of a moonbase is a bunch of domes, using the
"regolith" as structural material.


Cylinders are more likely than domes, at least as a first step. And the
regolith is shielding material, not structural material.

Agree cylinders will be first, covered in regolith. But domes could
easily follow. The "structural material" will be a high strength
fabric. Regolith is not suited to tension structures.

Assuming you can get some silicates out of the dirt and rocks there,
then a primary step for long term habitibility is food production,
using the materials to build largescale greenhouses to grow earthly
plantlife.


That's certainly one step I'd like to see, though I doubt it's a primary
one -- you could live on imported food for a while.

1. Extraction of oxygen
2. Production of glass metals such as aluminium
3. Production of solar cells
4. Production of food
5. Creation of a mass driver

snip

I agree we should be separating cargo and people.


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

Landing stuff on Earth is kind of easier than landing on the moon, it
has an atmosphere, so giant supertankers could be aeroformed in space
and floated gently to land in the ocean with maybe only a few
kilotons. Landing on Luna requires retrorockets.


Well, yes, but the delta-V to the Moon's surface is substantially less
too. As is the gravity for that matter. Of the two, I'd much rather
land on the Moon than on the Earth.


Hopefully, the aim will be to get lots of mass off the moon for which
a mass driver is probably the easiest way. (Though NASA should look at
aluminium / oxygen rockets).

snip
On the surface what you want are solar cells, tons of 'em.


Perhaps. A small fission plant would be a heckuva lot easier, though.


1. Put down a 1 MW fission plant (weighs about 30 tons) to provide
constant electricity.
2. Add solar panels made on the moon to provide day time electricity.
Certain high energy processes (for example, electrolysing potassium
and fluoride) would take place only during the day.
3. Eventually, a solar power station at L1 would beam down energy as
microwaves to the base, and perhaps even as laser to individual
vehicles.

About getting to the moon, what I think should be done straightaway
are dozens of unmanned micromissions. We need about eighty or ninety
remote control ATVs zooming around up there, in, say, fifteen months.


More fumes. However, if you said "five years" I would tend to agree.

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. They should
aim to build and test a prototype chemistry unit, perhaps along the
lines described he
http://www.asi.org/adb/02/13/02/silicon-production.html

If that can be made to work, give a few million $ in research grants
to some University Engineering department to build a machine that
could produce useful aluminium and glass shapes. Something like an
aluminium frame, glass walled 4m diameter tunnel.
  #24  
Old January 25th 04, 01:26 AM
Cris Fitch
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Default Moon Base baby steps

(Gary W. Swearingen) wrote in message ...
"Ool" writes:

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.

I may be wrong, but I don't think airbags would be practical on the
Moon. They'd be much heavier than the extra fuel for a soft landing.


Maybe, but I don't buy your reasoning. The purpose of the bags is not
to slow the craft down for landing. However that is done, it is
supposed to leave the bagged craft at near-zero velocity, just above
the surface. They can save money by building a lousy system that
can't be trusted to leave it very close, so they design it to stop
many meters above the surface and hope it stops somewhere between the
surface and too high for the bags to work. The main reason for the
bags is so the craft doesn't have to be capable (and expensive) enough
to guide itself to a good landing and settle down on its legs on
good-enough ground. Bag landers don't have to worry about moving
sideways to avoid hills, cliffs, big rocks, etc.

But many missions can't put up with the limitations of bags even now,
despite the cost savings. And as rocket landing systems get more
modular and mass-produced, the cost difference will decrease.


This asks the question - if you took the MERA configuration and made
a few adjustments (perhaps an improved retro in place of the parachute)
could you land it on the moon? If we can standardize our delivery
system for these rovers, it should make it a bit more affordable and
reliable.

Also, is it better to have one lander per launch, or a "MIRV"?
  #25  
Old January 25th 04, 02:22 AM
Gordon D. Pusch
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Default Moon Base baby steps

(Ross A. Finlayson) writes:

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

I guess my idea of a moonbase is a bunch of domes, using the
"regolith" as structural material.


Cylinders are more likely than domes, at least as a first step. And the
regolith is shielding material, not structural material.
...


That makes sense.

I'm wondering about "lava tubes on the moon". I guess I was under the
impression that besides Earth only Jupiter's moon Io had active
volcanic activity, and I was thinking Luna was a cold chunk of rock.


Non sequitur. There is no need for a body to have _current_ volcanic
activity for it to currently still have lava tubes. _Ancient_ volcanic
activity would have been quite sufficient to create them; on a geologically
"quiet" body with few quakes, some of them might not yet have collapsed.


Yet, I read here that Luna has a molten, presumably iron, core, thus
that it would have similar magnetic fields to Earth.


First of all, the still-hypothetical lunar iron core, =IF= it exists
at all, is proportionally many times smaller than Earth's extra-large
iron core. Second, it is not sufficient to merely have an iron core;
the core must still be undergoing active convection due to a sufficient
source of internal heat generation, rather than being stably statified.
Third, the Moon rotates so slowly that the strong coriolis forces essential
to magnetic dynamo action are negligible. Hence, your belief is falsified
not once, but threefold.


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'
  #26  
Old January 25th 04, 02:41 AM
Joe Strout
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Default Moon Base baby steps

In article ,
(Ross A. Finlayson) wrote:

I'm wondering about "lava tubes on the moon". I guess I was under the
impression that besides Earth only Jupiter's moon Io had active
volcanic activity, and I was thinking Luna was a cold chunk of rock.


Heck no! The Moon is littered with lava tubes, and big ones too (up to
about a kilometer in diameter). Not that we've actually observed an
intact tube yet -- but we observe many rilles, which are most likely
collapsed tubes, and gaps in the rilles are most likely intact tubes.

Yet, I read here that Luna has a molten, presumably iron, core, thus
that it would have similar magnetic fields to Earth.


Er, no, the Moon is cold and dead now, with no appreciable magnetic
field. And I don't think it has much iron, either. The Moon is formed
from the Earth's crust; most of the iron in the Earth was already at the
core by that time, and didn't go into the Moon.

(Earth is an unusual planet in that most of the planet's crust is
hanging way up over our heads. This may be why we have dry land, some
theorists say, and may be relevant to the development of civilization...
but I digress.)

Lava tubes, miles long underground caverns similar to lava tubes on
Earth, where higher temperature magma flowed out and left behind open
space, would probably be among the major geologic reasons for their to
be caverns on the moon with the lack of running water.


Yes, exactly. Only they're much bigger on the Moon than they are here.

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.

I always why there weren't more air-boosted launches, an aerodynamic
launch plane flies a hundred thousand feet high and the launch vehicle
separates and boosts to orbit from high in the sky. Maybe that's a
misconception from seeing the space shuttle flown around piggyback,
and about how high is low Earth orbit.


It's not the height that matters; to get to orbit, you need speed. It's
about Mach 27, IIRC. That's really amazingly fast. The extra Mach 0.5
you might get from the carrier plane is insignificant.

The only real savings of launch from altitude is that you can tune your
rocket engines for vacuum or near-vacuum, instead of having to have some
compromise between efficiency at sea level and efficiency at altitude.

I was reading about the Shuttle-C for cargo and saving the liquid fuel
tanks in holding orbits, I think that's a good idea. What prevents
the addition of new modules to the ISS, Freedom, the International
Space Station, every year?


I think they are adding modules every year now.

What's so great about the ISS's orbit that it is there?


It's a sucky orbit, but it's there because the Russians demanded it --
it makes it easier for them to reach. Which I suppose is a good thing,
since they're the only ones able to service it at the moment.

Lunar Prospector was about first US moon mission since Apollo 17, then
there's Clementine.


Yep, and that's about it. Pathetic isn't it? But that should be
changing now.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is if a
mailbox full of cement was to be launched into lunar orbit, what would
be its costs?


Good question. I don't know the answer. But I suspect that once Falcon
I flies, you could get your mailbox of cement plus the translunar
injection booster into its payload, in which case, the launch would cost
you $6M. Plus the cost of the booster and cement, of course.

It seems pretty expensive to launch a payload into orbit. That's a
problem with monopolies, although I guess it's a market economy, there
are presumably some crazy regulatory controls on ballistic rocketry.


Yes, all of that is involved, however this does seem to be changing,
with several new and hungry launch companies getting ready for business
(such as SpaceX for example).

It's a lot easier to fantasize about thousands of launches per year
than to design/build launching something to the moon.


Too true!

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`------------------------------------------------------------------'
  #27  
Old January 25th 04, 06:16 AM
Ool
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Default Moon Base baby steps

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

I'm wondering about "lava tubes on the moon". I guess I was under the
impression that besides Earth only Jupiter's moon Io had active
volcanic activity, and I was thinking Luna was a cold chunk of rock.


It used to be volcanic a long, long time ago. And it's been totally
stable ever since, meaning those lavatubes are literally billions of
years old. Only large meteorite impacts could destroy them, and they
are bound to have randomly missed a few tubes.


Yet, I read here that Luna has a molten, presumably iron, core, thus
that it would have similar magnetic fields to Earth.


Hardly! The Moon rotates at the rate of once a month as opposed to
Earth's once a day. That alone would diminish the magnetic field
greatly.

But it's not even the rotation of the planet that's thought to cause
the magnetic shield but convective forces in the Earth, causing magma
to float around in circles. On the Moon there's hardly any seismic
activity. It's rather cool on the inside. And it's tidally locked
with Earth, making it even more inert, with anything deep down unlike-
ly to move.



--
__ "A good leader knows when it's best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture." '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiv :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

  #28  
Old January 25th 04, 06:40 AM
Ool
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Default Moon Base baby steps

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

Geosynchronous orbit is much farther away than low Earth orbit, some
22,000 miles or something.


36,000km.

Then, let's see, I think the moon is
600,000 (500-700) kilometers away,


384,400km.

and Mars variously 20 million to
200 million.


54,511,000km to 401,356,000km.

I was reading about the Shuttle-C for cargo and saving the liquid fuel
tanks in holding orbits, I think that's a good idea.


It would be an even better idea if that fuel could be supplied from
them Moon, from where it's much, MUCH cheaper to launch. Only build-
ing an industry mining oxygen on the Moon may be hard. The Moon's
mass is 46% oxygen but extreme temperatures and/or chemical procedures
have to be applied to release it. Focusing solar power to cause the
temperatures can be achieved, but materials containing the ovens are a
tough nut to crack. As for the chemicals, keeping them in a recycling
loop is the tough part, because you couldn't get them on the Moon it-
self.

What prevents
the addition of new modules to the ISS, Freedom, the International
Space Station, every year? What's so great about the ISS's orbit that
it is there?


The lower, the cheaper, especially if you want to add a lot of mass.
You launch it just high enough so it's safe from air friction. No
one's had any ambition in the last thirty years to go any higher up
into space than they absolutely had to. That was 550km for people and
36,000km for TV and radio satellites.

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.


--
__ "A good leader knows when it's best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture." '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiv :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

  #29  
Old January 25th 04, 11:07 PM
Henry Spencer
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Default Moon Base baby steps

In article ,
Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
I'm wondering about "lava tubes on the moon". I guess I was under the
impression that besides Earth only Jupiter's moon Io had active
volcanic activity, and I was thinking Luna was a cold chunk of rock.


Nowadays, probably. But there is no question that it had extensive
volcanic activity early in its history; indeed, there are geochemical
hints that much of its surface was molten at one point.

Lava tubes, miles long underground caverns similar to lava tubes on
Earth, where higher temperature magma flowed out and left behind open
space, would probably be among the major geologic reasons for their to
be caverns on the moon with the lack of running water. I just had
never heard of their existence before yesterday, and don't know of any
on the moon itself.


Hadley Rille, which Apollo 15 landed beside, is almost certainly a
collapsed lava tube. (Lunar lava tubes can be *big*.) A few halfway-
intact ones have been spotted in images taken by orbiters. Some of them
show up as "dashed lines" -- the roof has fallen in on some parts but not
other parts, which might be very convenient for getting into 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.


Indeed, there's no ionosphere, so radio is line of sight or nearly so.
But you don't need a whole bunch of satellites. One near the Earth-Moon
L1 point, and another in a "halo orbit" near the L2 point, will suffice
initially. (Later on, it may be better to have larger numbers in lower
orbits, to reduce transmitter power and speed-of-light delays, but that
can wait.) The L1 satellite, in fact, can be postponed for a while in
favor of using Earth stations for that role.

I always why there weren't more air-boosted launches, an aerodynamic
launch plane flies a hundred thousand feet high and the launch vehicle
separates and boosts to orbit from high in the sky.


It's a rare aircraft that can fly at 100kft. Half to a third of that is
more typical. Air launch does have advantages, mostly for thinner air
(neither the speed nor the altitude per se is very significant), but it
also limits your rocket's mass to what your aircraft can carry, and even
for a 747 that's fairly limited.

I was reading about the Shuttle-C for cargo and saving the liquid fuel
tanks in holding orbits, I think that's a good idea. What prevents
the addition of new modules to the ISS, Freedom, the International
Space Station, every year? What's so great about the ISS's orbit that
it is there?


The limitation on adding new modules is the cost of building them and
launching them. The orbit is a rather complex compromise involving
reachability from launch sites, minimum air drag, and maximum payload
for launches.

About mapping the lunar surface and within it, I wonder if ground
penetrating radar instruments would be any good, for example for
discovering lava tubes.


Yes. This was done experimentally from lunar orbit on Apollo 17, although
data analysis was difficult (then) and I'm not sure how much was learned.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |
  #30  
Old January 26th 04, 01:50 AM
Ross A. Finlayson
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Default Moon Base baby steps

"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.
 




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