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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are looking to partner with NASA and ESA to help create settlements on the Moon. However, he implied that he would fund development of such a project himself if governments don't:
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture will work with NASA as well as the European Space Agency to create a settlement on the moon. And even if Blue Origin can't strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night.
[...] To facilitate a return to the moon, Blue Origin has a lunar lander on the drawing boards that's designed to be capable of delivery 5 tons of payload to the lunar surface. That's hefty enough to be used for transporting people — and with enough support, it could start flying by the mid-2020s. Blue Origin has proposed building its Blue Moon lander under the terms of a public-private partnership with NASA. "By the way, we'll do that, even if NASA doesn't do it," Bezos said. "We'll do it eventually. We could do it a lot faster if there were a partnership."
[...] It's important to point out that moon settlement isn't just a NASA thing. Bezos told me he loves the European Space Agency's approach, known as the Moon Village. "The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that everybody basically just says, look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other. That way, if you need a cup of sugar, you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, 'I got my powdered eggs, what have you got?' ... Obviously I'm being silly with the eggs, but there will be real things, like, 'Do you have some oxygen?' "
So how far is Blue Origin willing to go? Bezos has already committed the company to build rockets and landers. How about rovers, habitats and all the other hardware that a moon base will need? "We'll do anything we need to do," Bezos said. "I hope we don't need to do any of that. I want other people to do it. But if need be, we'll do it."
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross published an editorial in The New York Times (archive) emphasizing a return to the Moon and President Trump's recent Space Policy Directive 2 (here's the first one).
Just don't call it a colony.
Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.
Rebuttal: Dear Jeff Bezos: Forget About The Stupid Moon
Previously: Jeff Bezos' Vision for Space: One Trillion Population in the Solar System
ESA Expert Envisions "Moon Village" by 2030-2050
Related: How to Get Back to the Moon in 4 Years, Permanently
Bigelow Aerospace Forms New Company to Manage Space Stations, Announces Gigantic Inflatable Module
Blue Origin to Compete to Launch U.S. Military Payloads
2020s to Become the Decade of Lunar Re-Exploration
Blue Origin Conducts its First Successful Suborbital Test Flight and Landing of 2018
Lunar Regolith Simulants Damage Cells
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine Serious About Returning to the Moon
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:03AM (1 child)
1. Coriolis forces as you move up/down the cable - compensate or bust. Various strategies - from "rigid rod with compensation at ends (good luck with a rigid rod 4000-5000km long)" to "compensate-sideways-on-shuttle-as-you-go" (any limp cable will do, but then the majority of delta-V to reach the top comes from the compensation).
2. The equilibrium is unstable - any non-compensated delta-Pos is going to amplify if not corrected. The higher delta-Pos that needs compensating, the higher the energy expenditure.
3. Mass of the cable some orders of magnitude higher than the payload - to have delta-H for the cable+payload within something that you can compensate.
Somehow, I don't thing the cable can be less than 100m or so in thickness - which doesn't spell "cheap" when considering the perturbation that need compensated all the time - fuel (even ion engines need ejection mass).
- the lower end of the cable is well inside the atmosphere (rarefied, true, but "space" starts at 100km+)
- the distal end of the cable is exposed to radiation pressure. Second-order effects - such as Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect [scholarpedia.org] - may create troubles (light energy absorption during day - pushes on the incident surface - then thermal emission of the heated surface at night - the heated surface during day will emit thermal photons like a rocket, impulse in the same direction as the absorbed photons).
Other things that may interfere:
- high energy electric discharges [wikipedia.org] - sprites/space lightning - 50-90km altitude.
- micro- and not so micro meteor strikes
- solar storms with variable magnetic field and induced currents
Maintenance and repair budget, baby, literally skyrocketing.
Nah, I don't think any of the current billionaires have the money to take on such a project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:26AM
You steal energy/momentum from the cable to get to orbital velocity in space. It changes depending on how you use it.
(Case A) - If you grab the end and climb to the centre and then let go, you will be in orbit at 2000km.
(Case B) - If you just hang on and then let go at the top, you will be travelling much faster, either escape velocity or an elliptical orbit with a much higher apogee.
1/ (Case A) When you grab the end, you increase the moment of inertia of the system, without increasing angular momentum. This slows the rotational speed. As you climb to the Hub the rotational speed increases back to what it was. Think of a spinning skater pullling their arms in. Coriolis forces are just a manifestation of this, and would be designed in. The system of cable plus vehicle will drop into a lower orbit. How much lower will depend on the relative masses.
(Case B) Your rotational speed will increase again when the vehicle lets go, but the cable on its own will drop into an even lower orbit than case A.
2/ Delta-Pos? Change in position or momentum? That's what the honking great solar panels and ion drives in the centre are for. You can use small climbers to send fuel and supplies to the hub. You would also have some drives well out from the centre to adjust the rotational speed.
3/ Yes, of course. That's what gives it stability. You impart some of the stored kinetic energy of the cable to the payload to throw it into space, then slowly recover that kinetic energy using solar energy and low-reaction-mass ion drives. Your payload doesn't need to carry fuel or massive engines. You can also recover some energy by gently landing incoming payloads. (Dropping something from 50km high might not seem gentle, but it beats the hell out of hitting the atmosphere at >7km/s)
The cable will most likely be a ribbon, one or two metres wide (not thick) at the centre, a few cm at the ends. Actual thickness would be measured in mm. Possibly fractions of a mm. Very rough BOTEC for a starter cable : 4000 km of cable, average 1m wide, 0.1mm thick, density of 1, gives you a cable mass of 400 tonnes, plus whatever mass your hub station has.
Large, but not impossible. You start with a small one and use it to lift the bits for a big one.
The lower end of the cable is only periodically in the atmosphere, and it travels effectively vertical both ways. If it worries you, raise the whole thing. It just means your pop-up rockets have to lift it a bit further. You can model the tip as an object that is travelling vertically at 1.4G upward acceleration. At 100km it has a downward V of 1.2km/s. If you raise the endpoint to 75km then your V at 100km is only 800 m/s. (One of the reasons for picking 50 km was you can just about get there using high altitude lighter-than-air vehicles. Makes hanging around waiting for the end a bit easier. Imagine something like a helipad on top of a huge hydrogen zeppelin. :) )
Seriously, reflective/emissive radiation pressure? That is so minor it probably wouldn't even be detectable amongst the other forces such a cable would be exposed to.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.