The Space Thread

Were going to the moon because Congress, even with the new budget, is far to cheap to pay for a Mars mission, and the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese are to far behind to do anything useful on a Mars mission. And everything has to be International now, mostly because everyone expect China is to broke for major space missions, and they have technological problems.

Anyone recall that dense rocket fuel that was left off because its burning released a ton of toxins.

Space X is making another attempt to stick the landing. This time it's on land.

Eyebones, you're making a lot of financial claims there without actually backing any of that up. Besides, there's tons we can learn by going back to the moon.

To the thread more generally; I think that one NASA boss is still obsessed with going to Mars, actually. I guess I just don't get why they feel the need that they have to focus on to the exclusion of the other. Frankly, an effort to go back to the moon as an international effort is a great thing, in my book, and NASA stands to learn a lot from that that could possibly help with pushing forward a Mars mission. Even if NASA doesn't participate, because I think the space agencies share most if not all of their data with each other.

I guess I just don't get why they feel the need that they have to focus on to the exclusion of the other.

Presumably there is not enough budget for both.

It's more Obama than Bolden I think. Not only was Project Constellation a disaster, it was a Republican disaster, so Obama felt the need to change things up. And like he said, we've already been to the Moon. As for why we can't do both, country to popular belief, Nasa's budget is actually quite small.

Edit: Oh my god the Great Filter is a literal cosmic horror story.

edited 19th Dec '15 10:14:17 AM by JackOLantern1337

Well, I thought I did give evidence that not having to fight gravity wells is cheaper than fighting gravity wells. Seems pretty clear, actually. Less gravity, more cheap.

The main thing is that there is no point to Lunar or Martian colonization, really. Oh, maybe small installations to study what is there, but the real benefit to space travel is space.

Anyhow. I think the commercial efforts are hip to this. You don't hear about them racing for the moon. They want to get to space reliably and economically.

Hopefully Musk gets to Mars, then the whole situation would be changed. But things as good as that don't happen in this day and age.

Actually that wasn't the point that I was making at all. The point was that there is usually an assumption that the response to muscle wasting, bone density loss in microgravity is a linear dose response curve. An assumption that is, in my opinion, unwarranted, at least at this early stage. But if it's not a linear response we need more data and in terms of construction and maintenance a lunar base is much easier than a rotating habitat to generate that gravity. Especially since the smaller scale centrifugal rotation style tends to induce motion sickness.

Also as far as space being for space goes, part of the reason why there's so much space is because there's nothing there. Which means you are obliged to be bringing resources from somewhere else. And as such places like the Moon and Mars make superior options because they do have smaller gravity wells and much thinner or no atmosphere's to provide drag. Without those we'd be obliged to be dragging everything we can't harvest up out of Earth's gravity well and thick atmosphere.

I also imagine a number of non-traditional launch possibilities would be more reasonable on Luna and Mars, so we wouldn't have to worry about actual rocket fuel as much. Off the top of my head, a magnetic rail would need a ridiculously long runway on Earth, but should be far shorter in lower gravity. Not to mention since there's less stuff up there, there wouldn't be much for the rail to get in the way of.

What can we harvest on the moon in enough mass that it will make up for dragging all the needed harvesting and base infestructure up out of Earth's gravity well?

Probably not much, for quite some time. I'd imagine that if building a station there ever did become feasible, the parties involved would want to put a telescope up there, though. They wouldn't have to worry about atmospheric interference up there.

For sure though we'd be dragging materials up there for some time, but I think there would be thoughts towards making it at least partially self sustaining.

Although looking at your question a second time, it's kind of confusingly worded.

edited 19th Dec '15 3:25:27 PM by AceofSpades

I'm assuming the question is "Why bother building a base on the moon (which would require shipping everything from Earth, expensively) when we could build something in the asteroid belt (where most of the materials are local)?"

There are a few reasons. Proof of concept is a big one; the shorter travel time means that a colony can be set up practically in an eyeblink, while anything to do with the asteroid belt would take at least ten years even if they launched tomorrow. Near-instantaneous communications times would also be helpful for proof of concept; if something goes wrong we'll know exactly what within a minute, not hours later. Plus it seems that we actually could use moon materials for much of the actual base; the article linked a couple pages back talked about evidence of ice on the moon, which would make it something of an oasis.

I agree that early construction should be near Earth. In a Lagrange point, probably. L1 is closer to the Earth than the Moon. That'd be a good spot. Or maybe L4; there may be enough material there are already. There is at least one asteroid trapped there.

You would bring the materials to the site, rather than take the site out to the materials. Cool thing is most of the materials are headed this way, anyway. I suspect we could chip off what we need from the fairly regular comet/eccentric-orbit asteroid delivery system with less complexity than we could build a mining base on the Moon and boost the materials up from it. There is a lot of material already in motion in the Big Empty. We can use both its mass and its motion to our benefit.

I'm just saying that eventually we'll want really big structures in low-G, assuming that we want lots of off-Earth population, so we should learn how to build those structures now.

edited 19th Dec '15 5:12:16 PM by eyebones

Nah Ace got it. If we need say water for whatever we're building, why ship a water drill (plus people to run it, a base for them to inhabit, food for them to eat, water supplies of their own, fuel for the drill, equipment to build a launch pad, fuel for their rocket, ect...) from earth to the moon then water out from the moon? Why not just ship the water from earth?

If we just want a moon base then that's fine and cool, if we need one as proof that we can do it then that makes sense, but let's not pretend that it's an effective way of helping us build something else.

edited 19th Dec '15 5:41:20 PM by Silasw

Well, I'm of the opinion that building such a structure on the moon would be good experience for building similar structures on Mars in the future, for the reasons that Discar said. Not so sure that it's proof of concept for building more space stations.

"Proof of concept" was probably poor word choice on my part. "Good experience" is a better one. You don't want your first space colony to be a couple light-minutes away, since if anything goes wrong everyone will be dead before you even know about it.

Two reasons. If you do it right you only need enough fuel to get there. If you do it right water + electricity (which only requires as few photo voltaic cells) = rocket fuel. Which means for a relatively small initial set-up you've got three of the four most important consumables for any long term mission. Fuel, water and oxygen. And you can do it again and again and again.

I think at first, we should start in Earth orbit and around the Moon, then move on to Deimos, which has water ice and phosphorous (a vital nutrient) before heading out to the asteroid belt and outer planets.

The Space X launch and landing attempt has been pushed back to tomorrow.

edited 20th Dec '15 5:00:15 PM by JackOLantern1337

@ #3212 What I really want to see is a radio telescope on the Moon's farside free from all the electronic noise we put out. I'm betting that it would be as revolutionary as Hubble has been for visual telescopy and probably our best bet for SETI

Again, do we really want to be talking to the aliens. Even if they don't want to genocide us, they may conquer us as part of some paternalistic Imperialist mentality.

Well if Aliens are out there they are either a) Way more advanced than us and they will eventually find us and we are at their whim or b) We outstrip them and they depend on our mercy

So seeking them out has no difference in the end result

There's more to radio teloscopy than SETI you know. Given how far away and relatively dim in the visible spectrum they are, it's a great method of tracking pulsars (heck it was even how pulsars were discovered). And while the resolution isn't brilliant, molecular hydrogen emits radio waves of approximately 21cm wavelength which makes radio telescopes useful for investigating some aspects of large clouds of gas. It's also pretty much the only way to see through the glare of the central bulge to figure out the structure of the inner part of the galaxy as far as I know. (Okay that and gamma/x-ray sources)

Ladies and gents, the Falcon has landed.