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posted by martyb on Monday May 28 2018, @05:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-takes-a-[moon]-village dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday May 29 2018, @11:42AM (2 children)

    by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday May 29 2018, @11:42AM (#685540) Journal

    I wasn't on wikipedia, I was actually cribbing that from a bunch of sources going all the way back to a Jerry Pournelle article, but that article provides a pretty good overview.
    What part of matching the tip speed to the centre of mass orbital speed in the reverse direction is confusing you? That page you linked even has an animation explaining it.
    It certainly isn't geostationary, that does require unobtanium tensile strength.

    If you optimise the length, orbit, etc, you could set it up so that it always came down over the same points, but given a 4000 km length there would probably be about eight or nine of those points spaced equally around the equator. Haven't done the actual math on that, so I wouldn't be surprised at any answer between 6 and 12 TBH. Also haven't done the math on non-equatorial orbits, but I think you would be able to set it up so that it came down over the same points, there would just be more of them by a factor of rotations/day.

    Actually the traditional space elevator is a special case of this. As the tether gets longer the orbit is higher, the tip G forces get smaller, the orbital speed gets lower, and the required tensile strength gets higher. Eventually the tip is at 1G, the tether is 72 000 km long, and it takes one day to go around the planet. At that point you tie it to the ground and call it a space elevator.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @11:52AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 29 2018, @11:52AM (#685543) Journal

    It certainly isn't geostationary, ...

    That bit drove me astray.

    Eventually the tip is at 1G, the tether is 72 000 km long, and it takes one day to go around the planet. At that point you tie it to the ground and call it a space elevator.

    New approaches/computations [wikipedia.org] for the tethered elevator.

    Since 2001, most work has focused on simpler methods of construction requiring much smaller space infrastructures. They conceive the launch of a long cable on a large spool, followed by deployment of it in space.[2][13][58] The spool would be initially parked in a geostationary orbit above the planned anchor point. A long cable would be dropped "downward" (toward Earth) and would be balanced by a mass being dropped "upward" (away from Earth) for the whole system to remain on the geosynchronous orbit. Earlier designs imagined the balancing mass to be another cable (with counterweight) extending upward, with the main spool remaining at the original geosynchronous orbit level. Most current designs elevate the spool itself as the main cable is paid out, a simpler process. When the lower end of the cable is long enough to reach the surface of the Earth (at the equator), it would be anchored. Once anchored, the center of mass would be elevated more (by adding mass at the upper end or by paying out more cable). This would add more tension to the whole cable, which could then be used as an elevator cable.

    One plan for construction uses conventional rockets to place a "minimum size" initial seed cable of only 19,800 kg.[2] This first very small ribbon would be adequate to support the first 619 kg climber. The first 207 climbers would carry up and attach more cable to the original, increasing its cross section area and widening the initial ribbon to about 160 mm wide at its widest point. The result would be a 750-ton cable with a lift capacity of 20 tons per climber.

    This... doesn't seem that expensive or technological difficult any more.

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    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday May 30 2018, @07:01AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @07:01AM (#686148) Journal

      This... doesn't seem that expensive or technological difficult any more.

      Yeah, until you read the fine print and find that you need to make multithousand km fault free graphite fibres, and the best they have done so far is fractions of mm.
      The rotating tether can be built with spectra 2000 (tm), which is already in production by the tonne.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.