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The Race to Develop the Moon

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Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#81

Post by gozzle »

DiseasedBadger wrote: post #75
Pfhreak wrote: post #69

When are developing asteroids? The moon is a neat stepping stone, but the raw quantity of space stuff just sitting in asteroids is where I'm really excited to see us go. We're talking chunks of rare metals in the thousands of tons range. As well as kilometers of iron, nickel, and water for building and supplying ships in space.

I miss the Obama space administration. Instead of shooting for platinum mountains, we're planning to spend 20$ billion to repeat a great fucking Kennedy did decades ago. Except we're in denial about the cost, so we're not actually planning to spend that much money. So we won't succeed. Honk honk, indeed.

> Honk honk, indeed

We can be cynical without resorting to the clown Pepe meme. While hiding it behind a type of dogwhistle can be attractive, I'm sure there are many other people outside of one community that can relate to your sentiment here.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#82

Post by mjevans »

bluGill wrote: post #44
rtkwe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you want it for. For use on earth probably but there's also a lot of unexplored potential surface and near surface resources on the moon where going deeper and deeper into the earth is quite expensive and dangerous in it's own right. For use in space especially consumables like water it makes a lot of sense to find them in space as much as possible because the rocket equation is a royal pain in the as…

ICs are generally small and light - they would be among the last things to make in space. I expect we would start with metals: steel is very important for building, and you need a lot of it, so making that in space gets the rocket equation strongly on your side. Rocket fuel is another one because you can cheat the rocket equation if you don't have to bring all your fuel with you. As manufacturing and space cities pro…

Von-numan machine style exploration is the major reason to fab anything in space. It doesn't even need to be the latest process or anything super special; it just needs to be reliable and operate within the power budget.

Imagine if we surveyed the asteroid belt and sent robots to likely areas to mine for resources. Then returned them on kinetic delivery trajectories that were designed to accelerate the moon's orbital velocity (tidal effects or something else are probably slowing it down slowly over time? I forget the details) and keep it balanced.

We'd probably want water, metals, and anything useful for chemical reactions sustaining life, industrial production, or high-density single use fuel. Hydrogen and Oxygen could be obtained from ice via electrolysis, which solar power could provide during the day.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#83

Post by imtringued »

bsamuels wrote: post #42
amelius wrote: post #4

Wouldn't it be easier to hunt for resources deeper in Earth's crust?

Probably yes. There's a few things the moon has going for it: - it's in a vacuum - it has low gravity - abundant solar energy without the uncertainty of weather So many different kinds of industrial manufacturing processes are hampered by the presence of oxygen/air; in a vacuum you could make super pure alloys. Low gravity means you can use smaller, less powerful machinery to do the same work. The solar thing is kind…

The atmosphere is only "clean" because nobody is polluting it right now.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#84

Post by empath75 »

eesmith wrote: post #57
rjf72 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two sides to risk. Risk tolerance for a given mission is one. Mission tolerance for a given risk is the other. What I mean there is I doubt that SpaceX will be a less safe option than NASA, Roscosmos by proxy, for getting crew to the ISS. But SpaceX's big picture plan is to get people, regular people, to Mars. And that is something I think would never happen with NASA would never even consider takin…

Ahh, I think I got it. I'll restate it to see if you correct me. The SpaceX long-term goal is cheap and safe space travel to Mars. The risk is very high that this goal will fail. NASA won't accept this sort of mission because it's very likely to be a waste of money which could be used for other NASA goals (eg, robotic probes). Though looking at it, it implies that NASA is being fiscally responsible, but the other 1/2…

Tesla autopilot has killed a few people and they’re still using it.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#85

Post by imtringued »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #11
Bizarro wrote: post #3

All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon These writers just can't help themselves. It's part of their hive-mind checklist.

This is a new form of white supremacy, where the article author goes out of their way to mention the white race in association with accomplishments. I find the trend to be extremely creepy. Edit: clarifying I mean the article author

What the hell? You are reading so much into a single sentence and skipping the entire context surrounding it. According to the article the moon landing was just a political stunt that did not result in any progress toward space exploration. In fact it actually marks the end of human space travel. The fact that only a single country went to the moon is not impressive. It is damning. Space has become uninteresting and no one wants to go there.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#87

Post by AnimalMuppet »

azernik wrote: post #41
joering2 wrote: post #29

If you want to understand why there will never be a Moon base on the Moon, all you have to do is to take a look at any photo of the Moon itself - without atmosphere the planet is being been bombarded so often that you would have to go underground. Deep underground. Too deep underground!

Not very deep at all - meteoroid protection requires only about 15-20cm of regolith, and radiation protection requires about 2m. Easily doable. https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.htm...

Sure, if you're only trying to protect against meteroids and radiation. But there's a whole lot of craters deeper than 2m on the moon. If you're trying to protect against the impacts that produced them, you do in fact have to be a long way down.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#88

Post by azernik »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #87
azernik wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very deep at all - meteoroid protection requires only about 15-20cm of regolith, and radiation protection requires about 2m. Easily doable. https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.htm...

Sure, if you're only trying to protect against meteroids and radiation. But there's a whole lot of craters deeper than 2m on the moon. If you're trying to protect against the impacts that produced them, you do in fact have to be a long way down.

(Nitpick: those impactors are also meteorites, just big ones; the numbers in the paper I linked numbers are based on probabilities over time of an impactor large enough to get through shielding.)

Giant impacts are relatively rare - in the ~13 years of NASA's monitoring program, the largest impactor seen on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon left a 15m (inner diameter) crater [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.6458.pdf], and most have been orders of magnitude smaller.

Remember - the Moon has no active tectonics, no atmospheric weathering, and no water or other liquid evaporation/condensation cycle. The craters you see are an aggregate over billions of years, including some periods of much higher levels of random debris than currently (e.g. the Late Heavy Bombardment, which left most of the truly stupendous craters). In any given human lifetime spent on the Moon, you're unlikely to even be within visible distance of an impactor that can go through 2m of regolith.

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#89

Post by rtkwe »

Symmetry wrote: post #35
all2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For silicon based things, the moon would make sense for manufacturers. Is there enough solar energy for something like that? Specifically for smelting and refinement? What materials would need to be shipped in for manufacture?

For half the month the lunar surface is basically paradise for solar electricity with 1.3 kw/m2 of sunlight 24 hours a day instead of just the 1.0 kw/m2 on Earth's surface for half the day. But the other half of the month is complete darkness except star and Earth light. Unless you're at one of the poles and rig a solar panel to rotate horizontally. This is good for industrial processes you can start and stop over th…

That's why most missions are going to be focused around the poles at first until something other that solar is brought to the moon (like nuclear, be it fusion or fission).

Re: The Race to Develop the Moon

#90

Post by woodandsteel »

imtringued wrote: post #72

Unfortunately there is almost no carbon or hydrogen on the moon with the exception of trace amounts in permanently shadowed craters. Self sufficiency is barely possible in those areas which comprise less than 1% of the moon's surface.

As the article says, the moon has water, and that means hydrogen. Regarding carbon, it is an abundant element in the universe, so I would expect there would be a good deal in the minerals.
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