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All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

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Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#271

Post by nandomrumber »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #241
nandomrumber wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxygen if the third most abundant element in the universe.[1] The Moon minerals contain plenty of it: The finer regolith, the lunar soil of silicon dioxide glass .[2] Minerals forming the lunar crust are made up of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, along with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen. [3] I figure you mean free oxygen or diatomic oxygen O₂, but that s…

Even though some minerals on the Moon contain oxygen, it doesn't mean the dust can't oxidize further when exposed to a gaseous atmosphere with high oxygen partial pressure.

The dust is predominantly silicone dioxide (glass), which is notoriously stable / non-reactive.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#272

Post by lukan »

OisinMoran wrote: post #225
lukan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile. But having solid ground is still nice. A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously. The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.

You may enjoy this piece, Domes are over-rated: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...

I did enjoy it, but I don't think domes are overrated. They are just way harder to build in reality, than in science fiction ..

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#273

Post by wolvoleo »

GuB-42 wrote: post #121
wolvoleo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing something like that at planetary scale is science fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.

To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way. We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters? It may be bad for us, but compared to ter…

That's exactly my point. We don't have the manpower, the materials, the industry.

For mars this just isn't happening unless we ship half of Earth's people and resources over there. Who will have to live on a toxic planet.

But we can't even ship all that stuff there because we don't have enough fuel to do that (it requires many times the payload in fuel) and all the launches would make earth uninhabitable. Terraforming mars is therefore science fiction unless we break a lot of barriers like clean fusion, space elevators etc. And even then the material question will remain a problem.

I think even reverting climate change on earth, a much easier problem than terraforming a remote planet, is a pipe dream. If we're going to be going carbon capture at that global scale, we're going to need to extract so much material, manufacture so much equipment, transporter it all, deal with all the captured carbon, maintenance, power etc all stuff that's not possible to do completely carbon neutral, that we're just polluting a lot more. Especially if we want to do it at a timescale where it still matters.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#274

Post by heavyset_go »

vintermann wrote: post #192
heavyset_go wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this affect surfaces like walls, finished wood furniture and floors, plastic, paint, etc? I imagine it will cause some material to off-gas aldehydes at the very least.

I don't think off-gassing is a problem, ozone treatment is famously how they get rid of cigarette smell in used cars, furniture and whole apartments. But I would worry about the effect on e.g. plastic seals. There are a lot of plastics that become brittle with ozone exposure, let alone UV exposure.

I imagine the UV energy itself weathers surfaces like the sun does, but at different scales. It's probably not enough to matter from the lamps.

"Hot car smell" is plastics in the car releasing volatile gas from the heat and sunlight, and surfaces in general fade, peel and crack from sun exposure over time. Thought maybe something like that would happen with different exposed materials to the lamps.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#275

Post by jonas21 »

mapt wrote: post #263
bell-cot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw all their samples back outside, then very carefully sweep the inside of the LEM and throw the broom & dustpan out too? In theory, they could have been equipped to partially pressurize the cabin with (say) helium - which would allow some sort of vacuum cleaner to work. But that could have added a fair bit of mass (by the LEM's very tight mass budget standards).

This sort of scenario, which was thought too improbable to plan for, even by an organization as psychotically obsessed with astronaut safety as NASA, is exactly why human spaceflight was important for exploration. Because astronauts could improvise a sensible solution and the tech couldn't.

If you didn't have the humans on board, you wouldn't need to pressurize the cabin with oxygen. Or even have a cabin.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#276

Post by cornholio »

lisper wrote: post #240
cornholio wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terraforming is an exceptionally energetic endeavor. Even if you had the perfect combination of icy asteroids with just the right amount of water, nitrogen, oxigen etc. and the means to hurl them towards Mars, this kinetic event would be so energetic that it would take centuries to millennia before the surface would cool to habitable temperatures. it's not physically possible to do it ex in the span of a human lifeti…

Just put a parachute on the asteroid. ;-)

All that kinetic energy needs to go somewhere. It's irrelevant if the asteroid burns up in the atmosphere or if trillions of tiny parachutes heat the atmosphere.

I guess you could devise some scheme where kinetic energy is shed or transformed into useful tasks; for example, delivering to Venus an amount of water similar to Earth requires an icy ball half the diameter of the Moon - and the kinetic energy of this mass traveling at 10km/s is about half of the energy required to spin up Venus to a 24h cycle. So some space elevator like contraptions could hypothetically catch the snowballs and lay them on the surface while at the same time spinning up the planet.

But if you have the required clarketech it's unclear why bother with planets instead of creating exponentially larger and better habitats.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#277

Post by card_zero »

ryandrake wrote: post #248
jiggawatts wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument is a simple opportunity cost calculation: There will never, ever, ever [1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life. Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option! Also, people that are desperate e…

I wish this kind of economic and biologic sanity was more common in discussions of colonizing outer space. We've watched too much Star Trek. Building a city in Antarctica will be economically viable long before building a city on Mars is.

The Madrid Protocol says you can't do anything fun with Antarctica. Can't have a mine, a garbage heap, or a farm. I suppose the world's militaries stand ready to capture any enterprising colonists and destroy their structures.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#278

Post by alfiedotwtf »

cyberax wrote: post #112
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a germaphobe, and he put one of these ozone-injecting air purifiers in our tiny office. Every morning I would walk in and it felt like I was walking into a thunderstorm from the smell. No gunpowder, just thick ozone

In general, if you can smell ozone, you should NOT be in that place.

Yep! When he refused to not turn it off each day, that was the day I updated my resume and GTFO

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#280

Post by burnt-resistor »

chromacity wrote: post #44
krunck wrote: post #9

Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars

Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you, but living in an environment with background radiation levels 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry... Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.

Anyone venturing to Mars is likely taking a one-way trip for many reasons.
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