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A rough guide for going back to the Moon

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Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#131

Post by m4rtink »

GolfPopper wrote: post #65
bluGill wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. Been there done that. There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science). All the arguments for going to the moon need to be considered against everything else we can do - opportunity cost is real, but investing in the moon we are not investing in…

> There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon Farside radio telescope: https://www.colorado.edu/project/lunar-farside/

Also mass drivers so you can ship ridiculous amount of lunar oxygen, aluminium & even general dirt for shielding into the cislunar space. Not to mention any materials processed by high energy industrial processed provered by solar forges on the surface of the moon (both thermal & powered by locally manufactured solar panels).

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#132

Post by m4rtink »

wat10000 wrote: post #60
Planktonne wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of my complaint. More and more money is poured into 'innovation' across our society, but what do we have to show for it?

A huge variety of tools and technology that billions of people use daily. What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972.…

The Appolo Guidance Computer was one of the first applications of silicone integrated circuits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Logic...

"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"

A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#133

Post by bayindirh »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
bayindirh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity. Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions. Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the…

The solar system has effectively infinite resources.

For a certain population smaller than n, Earth also has effectively infinite resources.

So again, it's a relativity, not a certainty.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#134

Post by m4rtink »

abcd_f wrote: post #7
1970-01-01 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is entirely different. Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race. Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget. https://www.planetary.org/cha…

> won the space race Some of it. Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.

The Soviets scrapped their N1 after multiple launch failures & then pretended they never were in the race. You can argue if US won, but the Soviets definitely lost the race.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#135

Post by m4rtink »

ashika wrote: post #30
sajithdilshan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is not the technological advancement, it’s the limits of physics which are the same as in today as it was back in 1960s. We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives

cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_rocket_propellant#Metha... cough

Bah, this is the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

(Unfortunately if you do launch from Earth, neighbors will likely by a bit annoyed).

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#136

Post by m4rtink »

pfdietz wrote: post #45
sajithdilshan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is not the technological advancement, it’s the limits of physics which are the same as in today as it was back in 1960s. We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives

That's a very bad take. Rocket costs are not driven by physics, they're driven by more mundane issues, like single-use hardware. The cost floor dictated by cost of propellant is remarkably low.

Yeah, the moment propellant drives your launch costs, you have effectively won the chemical rocket launch game.

And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#137

Post by m4rtink »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

I'm not gonna lie, I'm closer to a conspiracy theorist and non-believer than I am to trust history on the moon landing stuff. Doesn't help that I wasn't alive when it happened, and that we haven't since gone again. It feels so nonsensical to me, I would love for someone to help me educate myself on it from a more grounded point of view that can satisfy my paranoia. Did we really go there? How come we (as in humanity,…

Because instead of a gradual progression and space infrastructure building (as was the original plan before Kennedy set the goal to Lunar landing before 1960s are over, its well documented in NASA history pages).

As a result a space race with the Soviets developed, resulting in the USA winning & Soviets loosing - at a price. The Apollo hardware was a racing hardware, like a race car, build to win a race and little more. As a result, the whole program was horrendously expensive to run & it was politically unworkable to continue running it once a victory in the space race has been achieved.

There was no shortage of people calling to continue not just with Moon but space exploration & industrialization in general (with a good example being Gerard O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...). But they could never get the beancounters & shortsighted politicians to allocate the necessary costs to get things going.

What I think changed is both the technology finally getting cheap enough that more entities can finally get involved without begging a government for a massive budget, because launcher reuse was demonstrated and even just because a bunch of very rich people who like space got involved & can do it themselves without depending on others.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#138

Post by pfdietz »

m4rtink wrote: post #136
pfdietz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very bad take. Rocket costs are not driven by physics, they're driven by more mundane issues, like single-use hardware. The cost floor dictated by cost of propellant is remarkably low.

Yeah, the moment propellant drives your launch costs, you have effectively won the chemical rocket launch game. And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.

People think rockets use tremendous amounts of fuel, but a Falcon 9's fuel is only slightly more than half the weight of the fuel in a fully fueled 747. There's also a lot of oxidizer (about 2.5x as much as the fuel) but LOX is very cheap, the second cheapest industrial liquid after water.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#139

Post by adrian_b »

bluGill wrote: post #78
somenameforme wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this sort of view is quite myopic. In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity. But we're not going to get to the endgame without playing the opening first. The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our arms with various instruments attached and act like b…

You fail to comprehend just how large space is. Almost all of space is well out of reach. There is zero reason to think we will ever be able to overcome the laws of relativity, which in turn mean we will never be able to reach the stars. I know, this negative comment makes you mad, but there is every reason to think it is the case. A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails compl…

Earth is by far the best we can get, but on big enough spaceships it is possible to create living conditions that are better than on any other body of the Solar System, except perhaps on a ship floating in the clouds of Venus.

The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.

On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.

Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.

Re: A rough guide for going back to the Moon

#140

Post by m4rtink »

pfdietz wrote: post #46
hmokiguess wrote: post #34

I'm not gonna lie, I'm closer to a conspiracy theorist and non-believer than I am to trust history on the moon landing stuff. Doesn't help that I wasn't alive when it happened, and that we haven't since gone again. It feels so nonsensical to me, I would love for someone to help me educate myself on it from a more grounded point of view that can satisfy my paranoia. Did we really go there? How come we (as in humanity,…

The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could they just have stopped? There's a disconnect between the event and the consequences. The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure…

Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building.

Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P

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