The Moon better get ready for Chinese Despotism™. I wonder whether Moon dust will be jailed, tortured and executed for lack of optimism about the Great Beloved Chairman's ability to let a thousand flowers bloom in the vacuum.
China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
91–100 of 164 posts
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that was done on ISS, in Earth's orbit. This is on the Moon which seems like a bit more of a breakthrough. It probably means we can grow plants on every planetary body in the Solar system. So Moon, Mars. Very promising.
What is the breakthrough part here? If we can grow in 1g and 0g, is 0.2g surprising at all?
The question isn't just whether something can grow in .2g but how fast it can grow, what shape it will take, etc. This is all stuff you need to nail down if you want to try to survive on crops grown on the Moon some day.
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
You spin your O'Neill cylinders, that's how you get gravity.
Easier said than done https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EHKQIC5p8MU
Pretty much any project that involves humans settling in space in itself is a long shot goal by todays terms.
Even if you start mining the asteroids any time in the coming decades, it won't be any thing less than a century after that, until you put humans into permanent colonies.
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#94To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be.…
[deleted]
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#95It is incredibly disappointing to me that the USA didn't do this decades ago. The USA basically won the space race... then decided to chill out for 50 years. I understand that perhaps we did not want to continue to fund NASA at such a high rate, but NASA budgets still could have focused on this. Space is the next frontier of humanity's existence. A moon base is a logical, achievable next step in man's space explorati…
> The USA basically won the space race... then decided to chill out for 50 years. The USA military got what it needed under the cover of a civilian space race. The US didn't chill after that. It put even more money into rockets but those were funded through the military for ICBMs.
> "The USA military got what it needed under the cover of a civilian space race."
This sort of cynicism is very popular but largely unfounded. In terms of rocket technology, the moon missions were following in the wake of ICBM tech, not the other way around. The Mercury/Redstone, Mercury/Atlas and Gemini programs were all using rockets that were designed initially as ICBMs (well, the Redstone was an SRBM.) Those rockets were already developed and paid for by the time a civilian applications were found for them.
Consider this timeline of launches: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/USAF_ICB...
'Atlas D' and 'GLV' are the Mercury and Gemini programs, respectively. They both came after the majority of ICBM tests for their military siblings. The military wasn't using rockets built for NASA; NASA was using rockets built for the military.
Then there is the Saturn V itself. A massive purpose built cryogenic liquid propellant rocket first flying in the late 60s. ICBM technology had moved on, cryogenic liquid propellant ICBMs were already discontinued by that time. In 1962 you had the introduction of solid fuel Minutemen and in 1963 the storable fuel Titan II's were brought into service. Both of these rendered cryogenic propellant ICBMs like the Atlas family and the Titan I obsolete, and both were finally fully retired in 1965 (and subsequently recycled as satellite launchers, roles that they served for many years following. The last Titan II launched a weather satellite in 2003.) This is years before the Saturn V ever flew. The Saturn V simply was not an ICBM program.
Now, the Space Shuttle is another matter entirely...
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smallest scale fabs can fit the whole cycle in one building: wafer production, CMP, gases facility, front-end, back-end and etching/deposition/doping lines. Some 180nm level fabs are like that, and rely on equipment unification in between back-end/front-end/etch/deposition/doping lines. Big questions: 1. How to make wafers in low/no gravity? Without convection, you can't purify silicon. May be you will rely on an ent…
If you want gravity, you use centrifuges. Not really a problem.
> Not really a problem.
Your gravity vector will have to be uniform, otherwise your crustal will turned curved.
Your centrifuge will have to be either very large, or you will have to find out how to do that without convetion
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sending things to (actual) space is expensive. Drones are a lot cheaper than orbital weapons and easier to justify than WMDs. There's not much profit in sending things beyond Earth orbit as Earth is where all the strategic targets are. So other than satellites there's not much to do in space from a military-industrial point of view.
There is no friction in space, so things can move much faster and stay there longer. Sending a drone to shitistan at 7.8 KM/second is impossible to do in Earth's atmosphere with today's technology. Likewise for keeping an object airborne for more than a few tens of hours. In space, things can move quickly and stay up there for quite some time. See also the high Delta-V experimental craft, such as the X-37, which allo…
> shitistan
Seriously? This isn't 4chan.
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#98It doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. If you can grow plants in pressurized compartments in micro-gravity it should work on the moon, also. It would have been another thing if they used parts of moon soil and the like. And this wasn't the first time biological material has grown on the moon. The American astronauts brought plenty of growing biological material with them, too.
wait its not growing in a sample of regolith? i thought that was the point of the experiment (gravity experiments with plants have been done on ISS, no?)
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replicators. Feels like no one watches Star Trek anymore. Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho.
>Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho. No, they didn't. They came up with transporters to save money not having effects shots of ships taking off and landing, and replicators are basically the same, a prop meant to save a bit of money while looking "futuristic". Replicators and transporters violate physics (thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle, E…
Oh Geez! I work in Industrial Automation. I have had a front row seat to the gains made over the last 20 years that nobody ever predicted. I give factory tours regularly and most people with decades of experience have their minds blown at the efficiency gains in industrial processes.
It has nothing to do with violating physics. Its just about being part of hyper-connected systems where incremental change, is happening in a thousand different places along the entire assembly line that add up to huge gains that nobody can imagine individually.
Are we going to see things materializing at button press in an instant? No. But we are going to get damn close.
Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I heard is that we have data on plant growth on Earth (1G) and on the ISS (0G), but not at reduced gravity like on the Moon (.17G).
It would be easier to produce the .17G on the ISS (with a centrifuge) than putting these seeds on the moon.
[deleted]