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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