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NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#91

Post by abfan1127 »

wongarsu wrote: post #83
jandrese wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shooting people from the moon is probably the least practical military endeavor ever seriously contemplated, and that is saying a lot. The Cold War resulted in a lot of really nutty thinking so I can't rule it out entirely, but it's hard to imagine what such a base would look like, especially with 1960s tech.

Getting from the moon to earth is trivial when compared to launching anything from earth. Using some back-of-the-envelope calculation a Atlas B ICBM from 1959 has enough fuel and thrust to deliver over 5 tons of warheads from the moon to earth. If you launched from the far side of the moon I imagine early warning and interception aren't on the table with 1960/70s tech, providing excellent first strike and second stri…

If you can land a ship on the moon, you can land an ICBM on a house in Moscow. It was less about launching from the moon. It was more about getting it to land where you want.

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#92

Post by pgeorgi »

mikeash wrote: post #78
pgeorgi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for. Could be specified as well: "Internationally organized base station (ISS style) on the Moon by 2030, permanently staffed after 2032, an experimental ecosystem to work towards self-sustaining O2 and food generation set up by 2037, usable as launchpad for Mars missions by 2045" That would at least provide clarity on priorities but it's risky: the…

I’d rather see a focus on projects that are doable with existing capabilities, and separately an effort to develop new capabilities. It seems like if you immediately aim for something you can’t do, then you develop a bunch of technology and infrastructure that isn’t very good for other tasks. You end up with a stunt that doesn’t really go anywhere. That gets you rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too bi…

I suppose the important bit is really that there's universal buy in (and with the moon landing thing that was supported by making it a matter of national pride).

With incremental progress you risk things looking invisible (just like AI is always just the things we can't yet do, while newly possible tasks are merely computations).

"Do some notable thing in two terms" monument building exercises risk being shot down on budget reasons when any part of government ends up under new management (see Congress).

So I guess you can go incremental (but solve the visibility bit somehow) or grand vision. Right now, NASA seems to be going through the worst of all.

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#93

Post by jandrese »

wongarsu wrote: post #83
jandrese wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shooting people from the moon is probably the least practical military endeavor ever seriously contemplated, and that is saying a lot. The Cold War resulted in a lot of really nutty thinking so I can't rule it out entirely, but it's hard to imagine what such a base would look like, especially with 1960s tech.

Getting from the moon to earth is trivial when compared to launching anything from earth. Using some back-of-the-envelope calculation a Atlas B ICBM from 1959 has enough fuel and thrust to deliver over 5 tons of warheads from the moon to earth. If you launched from the far side of the moon I imagine early warning and interception aren't on the table with 1960/70s tech, providing excellent first strike and second stri…

Early warning satellites would be a heck of a lot easier to install than the missiles. Basically once someone started building such a plant it would be impossible to hide what you're doing.

You'd never get first strike launching from the Moon, regular ICBMs would be all over you long before the moon IPBMs made the 1 day journey back to Earth. Even with the faster travel speed from only having to accelerate out of the Moon's gravity well, you're talking about a distance of 384,000km vs. 8,000km. Your missiles arrive to a planet that is already a radioactive moonscape.

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#94

Post by wongarsu »

jandrese wrote: post #93
wongarsu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting from the moon to earth is trivial when compared to launching anything from earth. Using some back-of-the-envelope calculation a Atlas B ICBM from 1959 has enough fuel and thrust to deliver over 5 tons of warheads from the moon to earth. If you launched from the far side of the moon I imagine early warning and interception aren't on the table with 1960/70s tech, providing excellent first strike and second stri…

Early warning satellites would be a heck of a lot easier to install than the missiles. Basically once someone started building such a plant it would be impossible to hide what you're doing. You'd never get first strike launching from the Moon, regular ICBMs would be all over you long before the moon IPBMs made the 1 day journey back to Earth. Even with the faster travel speed from only having to accelerate out of the…

It doesn't have to be a one day journey. With a 3 ton payload the Atlas B seems to have > 8000km/s delta-v. Getting from moon to earth took Apollo about 4800km/s delta-v, leaving our little Atlas 3200km/s spare fuel. If you use that to accelerate to 3200km/s travel speed you arrive on earth after about 2 minutes (if we ignore the time it takes to accelerate).

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#95

Post by corebit »

avmich wrote: post #50

For long time NASA announced a space program after space program only to be canceled at an unfortunate moment. We have to understand that our problems with advancing manned spaceflight are mainly organizational. And because of that, it's beneficial to focus efforts not on a grand goal, which may not survive the next budgetary fight in Congress, but instead on capabilities which can mostly be used for whatever goal we…

You mean... agile?

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#96

Post by csours »

superkuh wrote: post #5

It's terrible because they effectively canceled the asteroid retrieval mission (ARM) when they chose to fund the proposals that did not include any de-spin mechanisms. This leaves them with literally 3 possible asteroids to try to bring in. Useless. The point of the lunar gateway was to have a close (in time) place for resources and the like. But without any ability to capture and bring in asteroids it's just a waste…

Is there a sweet spot of asteroid size/energy required to adjust orbit/danger (etc, obviously I don't know all the parameters)

Like, you don't want to waste time going after a bunch of tiny asteroids, but if they're too big it would take too much delta-v to move them.

Or I might be wrong entirely.

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#97

Post by bbojan »

wongarsu wrote: post #94
jandrese wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early warning satellites would be a heck of a lot easier to install than the missiles. Basically once someone started building such a plant it would be impossible to hide what you're doing. You'd never get first strike launching from the Moon, regular ICBMs would be all over you long before the moon IPBMs made the 1 day journey back to Earth. Even with the faster travel speed from only having to accelerate out of the…

It doesn't have to be a one day journey. With a 3 ton payload the Atlas B seems to have > 8000km/s delta-v. Getting from moon to earth took Apollo about 4800km/s delta-v, leaving our little Atlas 3200km/s spare fuel. If you use that to accelerate to 3200km/s travel speed you arrive on earth after about 2 minutes (if we ignore the time it takes to accelerate).

You are off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#98

Post by cr0sh »

unethical_ban wrote: post #64
quanticle wrote: post #48

This might be a radical idea, but after reading that article, my thought was, "At this point, the most merciful thing to do might be to put NASA out of its misery." Specifically, this would entail: - The US government getting out of the business of designing launchers: We'd acquire launchers the same way the Air Force gets airplanes: define requirements and solicit bids. This isn't perfect (see: F-35), but it's a dar…

The military should be put out of its misery. Less dramatically, I don't like just how much the military is the primary domain of non-military objectives. They shouldn't be the leader in nation-building, establishing rule of law, running propaganda in foreign nations (all state department/CIA) or being one of the only avenues for getting free college unconditionally through the government. NASA has been keen on the i…

Crazy idea that likely won't ever occur, but imagine if we had a program like the military, but for NASA, where you sign up to "join NASA", and after a stint, you can either stay, or retire out with funding for college (maybe with the option of returning to NASA if the education you receive is relevant for their missions)?

In a way, Trump's "Space Force" could kinda lead to that, I'd just rather it not be a military focused effort, but something that advances humanity's best things towards space travel and exploration, rather than its worst (violence).

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#99

Post by avmich »

smaddox wrote: post #70
avmich wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect GP underestimates the scientific value of Apollo missions. It's so much difference to e.g. study samples brought from the Moon (and taken with reasonable care) in Earth labs than to send robots to do the same. There is a POV that robots are good for scientific missions up to certain price point. After that manned missions become more cost effective.

I don't see how it would be cheaper to send a human to the Moon to retrieve samples than it would be to send a robot.

Some arguments are here: https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration_1.h...

Retrieving a sample is cheaper with a robot - Luna-24 costed a fraction of Apollo. Knowing what to retrieve while having flexibility of choosing surface regolith, separate rock, samples dug out from a better place or else - that's where humans win.

Re: NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

#100

Post by greglindahl »

Retric wrote: post #63
rtkwe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot of value in the research NASA/JAXA/ESA/Roscosmos does in space. Some experiments are only really doable under long term microgravity The US runs it as a national lab and many companies use it for experiments. Maintaining it that way makes it way easier for companies to run experiments in space, with out the ISS each company would have to design, build and launch their own satellite for each experim…

The catch 22 is any experiment that you can only do in microgravity is also only really relevant in microgravity. That’s fine if we have a larger goal, but not really useful on it’s own. Sure simply learning this stuff is interesting, but the costs are so extreme it’s effectively a vanity project.

This generalization isn't true. One modern example is manufacturing optical fibers like ZBLAN[1] -- they work great when you bring them back to Earth. Another new example is 3d printing organs in microgravity[2] to take them back to Earth.

The traditional example is doing basic physics that needs long duration microgravity.

These sorts of research aren't a large fraction of what's currently done on the ISS, but it's also not zero.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBLAN

2: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/growing-human-...

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