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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: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @05:53PM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @05:53PM (#685245)

    People can't live at 1/6 Earth Gravity. Short stints are too expensive.

    The sharp dust particles have been shown not only to destroy lungs, but also to cause DNA mutations!

    As yet, there's no business case for maintaining a colony there; of course, Bezos never worried about making a profit.

    How can mankind spread out when its authority figures (scientific and otherwise) refuse to recognize the reality that we live in an Electric Universe?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @05:57PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @05:57PM (#685248)

    How about solid foundations for spreading out?

    These guys should be pouring resources into building a space elevator; screw all this primitive rocket launching nonsense!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @06:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @06:33PM (#685261)

      How about solid foundations for spreading out?

      Bollocks! I can spread out jolly good in my bed, why should I leave it for the Moon?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday May 28 2018, @06:46PM (7 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 28 2018, @06:46PM (#685266) Journal

      These guys should be pouring resources into building a space elevator; screw all this primitive rocket launching nonsense!

      Unobtanium carbide molecular monofilament needed for the tensile properties and able to resist the radiation during solar storms and van Allen belts.
      Humongous quantities of material to make the threas from. Have to actually drag an asteroid into Earth orbit, launching the material for the threads from Earth is too expensive.
      On top of that, a space elevator is a (military) strategic nightmare.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Tuesday May 29 2018, @04:12AM (6 children)

        by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday May 29 2018, @04:12AM (#685440) Journal

        You build a non-tethered rotating one with a length of four or five thousand km. Stick it in an orbit at about half its length plus 50 km. Set it rotating so that the tip closest to earth has zero sideways movement. (The movement is basically that of two opposing spokes on a wheel that is rolling around the earth).
        The tips of the cable will experience about 1.4 G. Your space vehicle has to ascend to the height of the tip (50 km) and grab on. it will be swung around at 1.4G until you let go at the top of the arc, (or at whatever point your velocity is closest to your desired one.) From the point of view of the vehicle the tip will descend vertically, decelerating at 1.4G until it comes to a stop and starts moving up again.

        You could throw cargo to the asteroid belt with very little use of on-board fuel, and that could all be ion drive.

        The delta V isn't free though, lifting cargo will drop the orbit of your elevator. You fix that with a big bank of solar cells and high efficiency ion drives at the halfway point (zero-gee hub). Conversely, catching inbound cargo and lowering it gently to Earth will raise your orbit.

        The efficiency is lower than a tethered elevator, because you can't steal energy from Earth's rotation, but the engineering is possible with current materials and techniques.
        The orbits/control/use calculations are conceptually more complicated, but I think that even if you had a tethered elevator you would be doing that just as much.

        For future improvement you add more pairs of spokes.

        --
        If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:03AM (1 child)

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:03AM (#685456) Journal

          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

            by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:26AM (#685487) Journal

            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)

            Somehow, I don't thing the cable can be less than 100m or so in thickness

            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 well inside the atmosphere (rarefied, true, but "space" starts at 100km+)

            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. :) )

            - the distal end of the cable is exposed to radiation pressure.

            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.
        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @10:13AM (3 children)

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 29 2018, @10:13AM (#685519) Journal

          Hang on, are you in the Skyhook scenario [wikipedia.org]? '
          Cause "The tips of the cable will experience about 1.4 G." suggests you are, but I'm baffled by "Set it rotating so that the tip closest to earth has zero sideways movement."
          The latest seem to suggest that the rotational speed of your skyhook is 1RPDay (the proximal end of your cable hovers above the same point. with the mass centre of the cable being on a geosync orbit), but this doesn't fit with 1.4G experienced by the ends.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
          • (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.

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

              --
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
              • (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.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @11:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @11:42PM (#685345)

      What advantages does a space elevator have if it's less expensive to fly (rocket) to orbit?

      When/if 100% reuseability becomes a thing, the limiting cost is the energy required and that is about the same either way.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @07:24PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @07:24PM (#685278)

    How can mankind spread out when its authority figures (scientific and otherwise) refuse to recognize the reality that we live in an Electric Universe on a flat Earth?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @10:58PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @10:58PM (#685335)

      Not flat.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:44PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:44PM (#685628)

        No, the earth is perfectly flat. The moon is the hollow body. That's where the lizard people broadcast the matrix from. Mountains, hills, and valleys are illusions created by the matrix.

        Presumably, the lizard person moon matrix also prevents the Shadow Object from being directory observed except during lunar eclipses.

        Let me get some coffee in me, and I'm sure we can work the weather war into this.