The Space Race is back....China eyes 2017 moon landing

[Larry]

the only thing i'm worried about is how you build a satellite from lunar rock/dirt

How do you build a satelite out of earth rock/dirt? You refine the metals, . . .

It's a several-step process. And we already know how. It takes people, knowledge, and factories. (And the will to do so.)

[mjah]

Check this out, from right here on Earth, where items are readily serviceable by humans breathing ambient air, freely wielding tools and safely making mistakes that can be fixed with a quick trip to the huge supply shed:

- 170+ year old locomotives that are still operational

- Thousands of passenger aircraft with essentially limitless service lives under routine maintenance

Why do we build these things to last so long, when they're so easily replaceable on Earth?

Because they're friggin' expensive, that's why. Nobody wants to spend tens of millions of dollars on a new jet that'll only fly for 20 years, even if it pays for itself in 10.

These things are basically just costly commodity items, and that's also the transition we're talking about if we gather solar power and strip mine ungodly volumes of dirt to build metal from Moon dust. You're making the Moon into a routine source of materials, and your stuff up there has to last for an incredibly long time if you're going to spend a trillion dollars to make it work.

Or would you rather have to build a new Moon power station every 20 years when the old one falls into irretrievable disrepair?

Believe me, a goal of 200 years is not unreasonable, particularly given that there will always be some unforeseen factor threatening to reduce that lifetime significantly.

[Om]

Well, since you asked, (Aha! I knew I could sucker someone into lending me a soapbox.)

(To save typing, and save bandwidth for people who've read it before, here's my previous (I think, my first) post on the subject.

I'll simply repeat: We could be completely energy independant, right now, if we'd started back in the Reagan days. In fact, we could be supplying electricity to China. And the project would've paid for itself already.

But it takes a big commitment.

My perspective, though, is that I'd rather go into defecit spending on a project that has the ability to pay the money back, over defecit spending for the purpose of creating yet another entitlement that will only result in the creation of a new special interest group that will demand that we spend more money, next year.

My first thought about this, interestingly, was something I recalled writing here some time ago. And wouldn't you know it ... I read down into the thread, the there's Larry's post linking the very old thread I was remembering.

[Larry]

Sorry about the brevity of my responses this morning. (I know how disapointed everyone is when I'm brief. ) I was using my tablet, which means typing takes about 5 minutes per sentance.

Now,

No, I'm not trying to say that "If Bush would write the check, then the Saturn V assembly line could start Tuesday." I'm assuming that something like this would be a great challenge. (And, for example, I think O'Neil estimated five years from commitment till the first launch. Those first five years were research, planning, and tooling.)

(Right now, I'm recalling another Kennedy line: "We chose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.")

I'm certain that there will be a lot of new things that will need to be developed from the ground up. (I've mentioned one where I think our existing technology could really use some work: self-guided spacecraft, for delivering supplies to orbit and to the moon.)

I also think it's a safe bet that, once things get started, we'll discover some unanticipated landmines. I would think, in any project this large and this cutting-edge, it's guaranteed that people will die. (I do not, however, anticipate a shortage of volunteers. Not even after the first death(s).)

But unless I've grossly misread your statement, then your position seems to boil down to "I'll support it after it's been working for 10 years. And has a 200 year warranty. And anybody who disagrees with me is a nutjob." My point is that there hasn't been a single advancement in human history that has been held, in advance, to that burden of proof. (In fact, I don't think there's a single human technology that can yet meet that standard.)

Yes, I expect for there to be a lot of study, and a lot of engineering. I'm not going to be a bit surprised if our first attempt to deliver a cargo container to the lunar surface results in a new crater. (Yet another good reason to use robots for delivering cargo.)

OTOH, there's a really good reason for having people "up there" rather than robots, and that's the unexpected. The best repairman when something breaks (and something will break) is a man. (No, I'm not being sexist.)

(Although, I also believe that, for years to come, one big guiding mantra needs to be "redundancy is your friend". Example: I would claim that you don't send people to the moon unless you have two, completely independant "habitat modules" (or whatever acronym NASA decides to assign), each of them capable of supporting the entire crew for (however long it would take to deliver a replacement.) It's OK with me if the two modules are attached somehow, so that the crew can use both of them conveniently. They just have to have the option of abandoning one of them if needed.)

(If I'm not mistaken, out first four attempts to launch a satelite exploded on the pad.)

[Soliloquy]

Ben Bova? Is that you?

[The Bounty Hunter #21]

yea i cant wait until we go to Mars

[Larry]

Ben Bova? Is that you?

Merely a humble disciple.

(Seriously, does my level of writing on this board make somebody suspect that I'm a professional at this?)

[mjah]

Larry, I'm actually a big fan of having people in space as long as there is a very good reason for it. So I hope you don't take my skeptical counterarguments as an indictment of human aspirations to explore and learn.

But if we're to learn as we go, then it is unwise to try to hit the first pitch over the center field wall. Using power generation as an example, a logical first step would be a small, unmanned power generation station with a target lifetime of one or two years, which proves the concept and technology. At most, this would require human assistance for initial set up -- a single trip to the Moon, tops, to get everything started. Ideally, you wouldn't need any people at all; it would launch in 8 sections and rendezvous on the ground for self-assembly. Alternately, you'd get all 8 pieces in Moon orbit, self-assemble there and then land the entire assembly as a single unit. That alone would be an incredible technological achievement.

If the thing failed after a few years for some reason, you wouldn't risk more lives just to bring the little experiment back online. You'd just abandon it and take what you learned to the drawing board for the next, bigger step.

But I really think the whole Moon power issue is moot. For a trillion dollars we could take an average of 20 square miles of otherwise unused land per state (much more for CA, much less for RI) and convert them into solar generation facilities right here on Earth. That would take care of something like 90% of our electricity needs and almost eliminate fossil fuel consumption in power plants.

To completely cover our needs, including transportation, maybe you double that. I dunno. But the point is, you don't have to go to the Moon to come up with feasible plans to power the Earth.

Terrestrial energy solutions like this one require incredible technological leaps, too. You have to figure out how to cheaply mass-produce hundreds of square miles of long-life, weatherproof, hurricaneproof, tornado-resistant networked solar cells; connect them to the existing spaghetti mess we call a power grid; and about a hundred other issues that nobody has probably even thought of yet.

But it's still easier than doing the thing on the Moon. It's distributed so there's no single point of failure. And you get easy access to the facilities by walking into a field, rather than by launching some glorified repair technicians in a Saturn V sized chemical rocket for a journey through hundreds of thousands of miles of instantly lethal vacuum.

The point is, let's go to the Moon for some reason other than finding a more complex, expensive way to do something we could just do here. If that standard (i.e., mission feasibility study) comes back empty, then there's really no reason to do it. Instead, we aim directly for Mars and build a mission that will perform complex searches for life that require humans to be present.

[Larry]

Um, I think a lot of people seem to have missed part of The Plan I'm proposing.

The solar power stations, and the factory that builds them, are in orbit.

The moon base is a source of raw materials for the factories and the colonists.

(That's why the initial projections for self-sustainability are 10-100 people on the moon, and 1,000 people in orbit. The lunar colony is simply a strip mine that delivers lunar soil (which is mostly aluminum oxide) into earth orbit.)

I'd agree that earth-building a solar satelite, launching it, and delivering power to a ground receiver is a good technological testbed. (The technology has been tested in laboratories. But that doesn't prove that it will scale well.)

(The actual kind of satelites O'Neil was proposing would take thousands of shuttle launches, each, to earth-build. And his plan has the colonists building one in the 15th year or so, two the year after that, three the next year, and building geometrically.)

The whole reason for a lunar colony and an orbital colony is that it's cheaper to do all that, than it is to earth-build them.

The big problems with earth-based solar (as opposed to orbital) are, #1, night and weather. Night really means that your (terrestrial) solar array only works at half effeciency or better for 5-6 hours a day. (That's on clear days. But there are places on Earth where days that aren't clear are really rare.) This also means that you're generating power at a time when people don't need it as much. You need to generate enough power, in 5-6 hours, to run California for 24 hours. And you need a way to store the excess, so you can "spend" it at night. (Electricity is really easy to ship, and easy to convert into other forms of energy. But it's a real pain to try to store.)

(I've read, although I've only seen it once, so it may be wrong, that with existing solar technology, if you were to cover the entire state of Nevada with solar cells, you wouldn't get enough power to run California at Noon (never mind creating enough excess to tide you through the night.)

Now I'll also admit: I'd be in favor of a lunar colony, and an orbital colony, even if I had no idea what we'd be doing once we got there. To me, space-based solar power is simply one cost justification for what my gut tells me is the right thing to do, anyway.

I want us to have a permanent, well-supplied space presence, simply because it then gives us more choices, which we can use or not as we decide at the time.

When a satelite fails, I want us to have the option of repairing it. I want us to have the option of assembling a Mars vehicle in orbit, and launching from there. (Although, in terms of energy cost, I believe the asteroids are closer than Mars, from Earth orbit.)

To me, right now, we're in the same position as if, after Colombus 'discovered' the New World, Europe had decided that "well, we've proved we can go there, now let's burn the ship and forget about it, because nobody can prove that actually sending some people there will pay off."

Yes, solar power, to me, is simply a justification for something we should do, anyway.

(I'll even admit: Yes, I do have a Starfleet uniform hanging in my closet. I've even worn it in public, although not recently.)

OTOH, what we've got is a projection, that's been peer-reviewed for over 20 years, that says you'll get your money back, with interest. And you'll have energy independance and a positive balance of trade. Yeah, there might be some bumps in the plan. OTOH, it's also possible that the colonists will think of something they can sell that will make even more money. Do there have to be two plans that will turn a profit?

[chomerics]

Let China go to the moon, we should not battle them in another space race (this is coming from a man who would directly benifit from such a mission, and would undoubtably be in a position of upward mibility in NASA).

NASA is unfortunately a gynormous governmental agency without the manpower to even contemplate such a mission. When the first moon landing was accomplished, the budget was around 6% of the GDP. This allowed NASA to build the infastructure needed for the mission. Now, the infastructre is in place, but is completely antequated. The thermal vac chambers needed to launch a moon mission have been downsized and replaced with smaller more efficient units. The Saturn rockets are no longer in service, and they undoubtably would need to be revisited.

NASA went on the faster, cheaper, better mantra, and unfortunately they found out all three do not work. You can get two out of the three but not all three together. That is the nature of engineering, tradeoffs. Mjah correctly identified the risk assesment, and this is a big part of the burocracy in NASA because it is really hard to quantify risk. NASA has been good at technalogical ideas and their space exploration has produced some of the best achievements in the history of man. . . but they have not been that good at manned space travel. This is because there is another couple of layers of burocracy required to send a human into space, and this is due to risk assesment. More paperwork, more signoffs, more QA, more everything, and it adds tremendously to the cost.

The only way NASA would be capable of such a mission is if they brough in some new blood, and completely revamped their policies on everything. Nothing more then a complete overhaul of the entire burocracy would enable this to see the light of day and neither NASA nor the government is ready to do this. In other words, it would be doomed before it got its feet off the ground. I say this from the inside, and I wish it were not true, but it is. I have countless experience in the inefficiencies due to the burocracy, and I see the problems from the top down. In the future, I hope to see a change, but O'Neil as well as other big wigs are more concerned with politics then changing a dinosaur of a system.

:2cents:

[mjah]

Interesting points from chomerics, our guy on the inside.

So let's say we look at this whole thing and say, "You know what? We really need orbiting solar power transmission satellites to supply our power to a set of receiving stations on Earth." And let's imagine that somehow we're dealing with an agency that will undertake such a challenge and follow it through. Let's even assume that there's some dire need for the whole thing to happen -- a sudden and crippling shortage of fossil fuels, for instance -- so the US as a society stands firmly behind the idea and the funding floodgates are opened.

Somebody specs the whole thing out (for real, and with redundancies, not as an academic exercise). Hey, we need x square miles of collecting area, and we're going to build n of these huge things to accomplish that. Maybe we can do some fancy orbit planning to keep the satellites out of the way of our sunlight, while still allowing for reliable power transmission, so we don't block a fraction of the light impinging upon Earth and accidentally cause unsavory climate change.

So we have all that worked out, and a hundred other questions too. And now we have to figure out where we're going to get the raw materials and where we're going to assemble them, and from where they will launch.

I find it incredibly difficult to believe, even given all this, that there is any cheaper and more sensible way than to just build the pieces on Earth and launch them directly.

Here's a list of things that we have on Earth, but don't have on the Moon and would have to create from scratch (in the most literal sense of the phrase):

1) Very good knowledge of natural resources;

2) Very good knowledge of mining operations and geological features;

3) A supermassive and preexisting supply of:

- Mining technology

- Geological surveys identifying precisely where each required material can be found

- Transportation

- Refining and processing facilities for any conceivable required material

- Casting, smelting, machining, assembly and countless other processing facilities

- Humans

- Air

- Water

- Food

- Fuel

4) A survivable environment

5) An uncountably infinite number of contingency plans against problems at every stage of production, from supply constraints to catastrophic facility failures

6) Hospitals

About the only disadvantages to building on Earth are more gravity and occasional bad weather. If, as a result, everything is bigger and requires significantly more fuel to get to orbit, who cares? Launching from Earth is a problem we've already tackled thousands of times. It's really hard to imagine one disadvantage creating more expense and complexity than a full-blown industrial city on the Moon, particularly one that starts with few or none of the terrestrial luxuries appearing in the list above.

The other issue is human involvement. Silicon-based intelligence and capabilities are advancing far more rapidly than our ability to sustain humans in space. A set of power-generation satellites that are run entirely by computer control and hundreds of humans on the ground would be far, far less complex than putting even a skeleton crew up in space.

Most of the ISS crew's work time, for instance, is spent keeping systems online that are only there to keep humans alive in the first place. Get rid of the people and you have a station that is incredibly less complex. Of course, you also then have a station that is incredibly worthless, as almost nothing of hard scientific value is done there; the ISS crew spends most of their life in space preventing themselves from dying. I imagine that the improved inorganic technology required to reduce astronauts' workloads and make space habitation useful will bring us to the point at which permanent human occupation of space is of dubious value.

Putting humans in space permanently to man power satellites is like putting humans under the ocean permanently to build tidal power generation stations. Sci-fi stories make it sound fascinating, but in real life it's just not necessary.

[Larry]

The reason you build the satelites in orbit (as opposed to earth launch) is because it's cheaper.

If you build the satelite on Earth, and launch it, and if the satelite has a design life of 20 years, then the money you make from the power doesn't pay for the money you spent putting it there.

Building a self-sustaining colony in orbit is a lot more expensive than launching one satelite. But once it's built, then the marginal cost (the cost to build the second satelite) is outrageously lower. That's how O'Neil's plan works: outrageous startup costs, but virtually zero marginal costs.

(That's the main reason for using lunar supply. The lunar colony can use a mass driver to launch their ore. The mass driver's only "fuel" is electricity. It'll cost a fortune to put a mass driver, and enough solar cells to drive it, on the moon. However, once it's there, the cost to put a ton of payload into earth orbit is virtually zero.)

If your mission is to build one satelite, it's monsterously cheaper to build it on Earth. If your mission is to build 1,000, then it's cheaper to build them on-site.

No, there are no detailed subterrainian (sublunerian?) resource maps of the moon. (And, at least initially, they wouldn't do much good, anyway. The lunar colony won't have the ability to travel very far, or to do much tunneling, anyway.)

However, the samples from the six Apollo missions showed very similar composition. These results seem to indicate that you can pick a spot at random on the lunar surface and be pretty confident about what you'll get from a strip mine. (And it you build your base at one of the Apolo sites, then the odds are even better.)

FWIW, the moon appears to be approximately one-third oxygen, by weight. The second most abundant element is Aluminum, followed by Magnesium. (I think the fourth is titanium, but after the first three then you're well into single-digit percentages, and their abundance begins to fluctuate from place to place.) The lunar "rock" seems to consist almost entirely of metalic oxides.)

One side effect of this is that it just about guarantees that Oxygen will be an industrial waste product from the task of refining metals.

Curiously, Hydrogen, theoretically the most abundant element in the Universe, seems to be almost completely missing on the moon. This makes lunar and space colonies a lot more expensive, because they'll be almost completely dependant on terrestrial-supplied Hydrogen. (The good news is: It only takes one pound of Hydrogen to make nine pounds of water.) (I also notice that Carbon isn't on the "most common" list, but I don't know how important that would be as a manufacturing material. It does mean that organics would have to come from Earth, but that's where we were planning on getting them, anyway.) (My copy of the NASA feasability study is in storage. I'm confident of my memory about the three most common elements, but I may be wrong after that.)

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Y'know, I've really got the feeling that I've mentioned all of this in the thread I provided the link to. Why do I have the feeling that a lot of folks didn't even read the proposal?

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(And why do I have the feeling that I'm quoting from three independant, multi-year, peer-reviewed feasability studies, all of which are decades old and have never been refuted, arguing against people who's position is that Man should never leave Earth, (or at the very least "It'll never work"), and who's reason behind that position is "I just know it."?)

(For example, why did it take over 20 posts before I had to point out that "The Plan" didn't involve generating power on the moon (other than to power the lunar base)? Why am I now having to point out that I don't think anybody's planning on "[p]utting humans in space permanently to man power satellites". I'm proposing putting humans in space to build power satelites. And while yeah, it would be cheaper if the entire thing could be done by robots, (ideally, they'd be self-reproducing robots), I think that the number of real-world things that're made entirely by robots is really small. I suspect (but haven't seen a study) that we're a lot closer to the technology of creating self-sustaining (with as little support from earth as possible) human space colonies, than we are to being able to go from metalic ore to functioning satelite entirely by robot.)

[chomerics]

Don't get me wrong, there is MUCH MUCH benifit in having a manufacturing facility on the moon, but we are nowhere near where we need to be in order to accomplish the task, and NASA is not the agency to do it (at least in its current form).

A base on the moon would be the logistical launching ground for space exploration. Look at it this way, the 95% power needed to get to the moon is used up just getting outside of Earth's gravity. So you have really two options. . .

1. Develop a new rocket based on a different technology.

2. Develop a moon base and use it for a launching pad for space missions.

The raw materials are there, and they believe they may have found a water source as well. The gravity is only 1/6th the gravity on earth, so it would require much much less fuel to launch from the moon. In the future, it will be our entry port to human space exploration, but we are in no position to do so right now.

NASA is not the right agency to do the job, and this administration is in NO POSITION to even attempt something like this.