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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday June 08 2016, @09:17AM
from the build-a-space-elevator-on-the-moon dept.
from the build-a-space-elevator-on-the-moon dept.
NASA seems hell bent to go to Mars, but can't afford to on its own.
Its international partners have no stomach for that — they would would rather return to our moon and build a base there for further exploration.
Doesn't going back to the moon make more sense? Build a base on the moon, and use its low gravity and possible water at the poles as propellant for further space exploration?
Why not the moon first?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11868840/moon-return-journey-to-mars-nasa-congress-space-policy
Links:
From NASA itself, in 2008: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/series/moon/why_go_back.html
The all-knowing, ever-trustworthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_Moon
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Should We Skip Mars for Now and Go to the Moon Again?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday June 08 2016, @03:24PM
NASA: here's a project.
Design and build a constellation of Mars satellites that provide a communication and navigation network. Navigation like GPS on earth.
One thing that will be needed is the ability to precisely locate previously landed equipment, and land more equipment at the same site.
Once there are multiple sites, it will be useful to be able to precisely navigate between them.
As other features of Mars are mapped, they can be precisely mapped and uploaded to Google.
Get SpaceX to launch this network after you design it.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday June 09 2016, @02:53AM
You would need the fairly complex ground station to make a Mars GPS constellation work. One thing the first semi-permanent Mars base will need to have is Network Access Point #1 in a rack. If we send modern people there they will expect the Internet to work so a subset of it will have to be there, Including Google in general, at least enough for Android devices to function, GMail, Maps with a Mars dataset, Wikipedia, etc. And probably a cell tower capable of operating entirely standalone, something no existing one can do outside of, perhaps, some test gear.
Now imagine the problem of base #2. It probably won't be line of sight to #1 and good luck stringing fiber to it. Sat links are too slow and lagged so maintaining a coherent Internet will get interesting. A lot of assumptions we take for granted here dirtside will need reinventing.
With the horrible ping time to the Moon something similar probably needs planning for there as well.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 09 2016, @12:57PM
Good luck with internet connectivity.
With enough engineering, they might be able to get decent bandwidth.
But latency is going to be horrible. Ping times will be horrible.
Quick googling tells me the one-way time for a radio signal is between 4 and 24 minutes. Double that for a round trip ping.
Using highly interactive low latency apps will be out of the question. For example: Telnet, VNC.
You would want to use really old school internet apps. Usenet (NNTP). Email (SMTP).
Sliding window protocols with really large windows.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.