Nasa has released details of robotic landers, hopping drones and vehicles it aims to send to the Moon as part of US plans to build a lunar base.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin is one of several companies picked to build the machines.
The US wants to land Americans back on the Moon before President Donald Trump leaves office in 2029.
But most experts agree that Nasa's timeline is unrealistic.
"It would not surprise me at all if China gets there first," Dr Simeon Barber, Lunar Scientist at Open University, told BBC News, citing Nasa's setbacks in securing a craft that can land humans on the Moon.
What happens if China gets their first? Space Macau? Will they take all the good spots? After all I'm fairly sure that those websites that sells plots of lands on the moon are fake and the agreements will not hold up or be honored.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39228nxyr4o
https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase/
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 29, @07:18PM (9 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_lunar_outpost_concepts [wikipedia.org]
It's interesting that going back to the 1950s its always been proposed to take about 200 tons of delivered payload. Right up to today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29, @07:31PM (7 children)
Does it perhaps correspond to some kind of max lift or thrust or would it be to many round trips?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday May 29, @07:56PM (6 children)
No that was using different launchers over the decades.
I did some research and Antarctica expeditions average a ton of food/drink per person per year. You can go a lot lighter if you live on freeze dried stuff for a couple weeks but it seems like long term sustainable life takes about one ton. My guess is they scaled up the mass for Arctic type expeditions and added some extra for fancy air tight housing and oxygen.
At some point, probably surprisingly low, it would be cheaper to refine oxygen locally than to import it from Earth. I suspect we'll see VERY small scale oxygen refining for local use long before we see He-3 refining.
In a likewise fashion, the moon does not exactly lack for silicon LOL so its foolish to import Earth silicon to deploy solar cells but the gear to make even a small solar panel factory is pretty heavy. Also the moon does not lack for aluminum so its hard to justify sending acre sized greenhouses to the moon when they could make their own using local aluminum.
The engineering challenges of a moon base are interesting. On the earth, material and energy and land are expensive. On the moon, at least half the time, you just stand up infinite mirrors (which you can make locally, eventually) and you have infinite free dirt making infinite free walls out of infinite free moon lava. So make housing that has perhaps three layers of air tight walls each a foot thick. Heck make each wall a meter thick for thermal insulation and temperature control mass. Its just free energy, free dirt, and free land, not like building aerospace stuff back home at Earth. Also pressure vessels are always expensive to engineer, so F it make your oxygen storage run at 1 bar (well, 0.20 bar) and call it a warehouse. There will never be "too much" livable space on the moon and having a backup to the backup to the backup will be a lunarian thing. On earth you'd store O2 for spacecraft in supercritical high pressure cryogen tanks. On the moon aint nobody got time for that fancy dangerous high performance stuff, just build an Amazon sized warehouse and fill it with breathable air. And when its full of air, build another warehouse. Its just melted dirt and sunlight, the moon ain't going to run out of that anytime soon.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday May 29, @08:10PM (1 child)
I guess it's an interesting bootstrapping problem: how much to import minimally to be able to bootstrap a self-contained moon.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday May 29, @08:50PM
The math doesn't work out (and perhaps not the chemistry), but John W. Campbell wrote "The Moon is Hell" about an answer to that question.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Friday May 29, @08:20PM
I was reminded of a book published in the 70s: The High Frontier, written by Professor Gerard K. O’Neill https://ssi.org/reading-old/the-high-frontier/ [ssi.org]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by corey on Friday May 29, @10:57PM (1 child)
(Score: 5, Touché) by corey on Friday May 29, @10:59PM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @05:00AM
> its foolish to import Earth silicon to deploy solar cells but the gear to make even a small solar panel factory is pretty heavy.
That's only because there hasn't been any great incentive to make solar panel factories light weight. Shipping factory parts around on Earth is relatively cheap--even if you airfreight some of the parts, you are only lifting them a handful of miles/klicks above Earth's surface. If someone gets on this job, I'm sure a factory can be designed that is much lower mass. The "optimizing" calculation to figure out how much to spend re-designing the factory should be easy--trade off the costs of additional launches...
This is not a new idea. About 10 years ago I had a short SpaceX tour (friend worked there) and in a small side room there were a number of 3D metal printers. One of the goals was (iirc) to reproduce the same part quality in a 3D printer that was lower mass. Don't worry about the special printer cost, a low delivered cost to Mars (or Moon) was the target.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday May 30, @12:13AM
That's because it's hard to launch from ground anything bigger than that. There is massive sound and heat energy released at launch. For Saturn V-class rockets, it requires something like a water deluge system, the base under the launch platform flooded with water and sprayed in the air at launch, in order to absorb and dissipate enough energy to preserve the launch platform and other infrastructure. I've heard of a larger rocket design proposed, Sea Dragon [wikipedia.org], but it launches directly out of a large body of water. There would be no launch infrastructure to put at risk and the body of water would be able to dissipate energy pretty well.
I think any larger launch vehicle will require some innovative technologies or tricks in order to have reusable Earth-side launch infrastructure. In addition, to launching out of water, there are other alternatives. What comes to my mind is boosted launch: a system like steam launch that boosts the vehicle well into the air before the engines are brought to full power. Or an elevated platform where the rocket starts at several hundred yards off the ground. Either would greatly reduce the damage that the rocket does at launch.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday May 29, @11:02PM (2 children)
First off, Blue Origin's rocket experienced a Rapid Unexpected Disassembly yesterday, and it also rapidly disassembled the launch pad..
Second, Trump is cancelling contracts left and right for utterly stupid reasons, nothing is safe. He's also ensuring new and future rocket scientists stay way the hell away from the US unless they're born here. Maybe not even then if their skin is too brown.
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @12:24AM
As a first approximation, even without Trump, rocket scientists were already staying away from the US unless they were born there, due to ITAR regulations and US companies not wanting to bother applying for individual licenses to export technology on their own soil to their own employees, when they can just hire enough US citizens.
If you ever went over US job listings for rocket companies or job descriptions related to propulsion technology, you will systematically see an equivalent of "US persons only". Not many rocket engineers qualify as US persons without being born there:
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @05:04AM
Back around 1990, NASA was in a slump (forgot the details) and a friend opined that, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jb on Saturday May 30, @08:40AM
What's a "hopping drone" and why would you want one?
If the name is purely descriptive, then the image I get is of a motorised, autonomous pogo stick with some sort of payload/tool/etc. on top. If so, that sounds like a very silly way to design a drone.
The physics involved in programming a unit to balance (let alone hop!) on one "leg" (in real time, over unpredictable terrain) involves some very tricky computations with virtually no margin for error (even with only Moon gravity and no atmosphere so no wind to worry about). Balancing on two legs is somewhat easier, but balancing on three legs is much easier.
No idea why ground-based drones should have legs (as opposed to e.g. tank-like tracks) in the first place. But if they have to have legs then surely it would make a lot more sense to have three of them ("skipping drones"?) than to have just one (as "hopping" seems to imply).