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posted by martyb on Sunday March 14 2021, @05:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the ♫sowing-the-seeds-of-love♫ dept.

[Nearly 4 years ago, we covered flooding at the "doomsday" seed bank at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Fortunately, there was no harm to the seed samples stored there. For further background, consult the Wikipedia entry on the seed vault. --Ed]

Why We Need A ‘Moon Ark’ To Store Frozen Seeds, Sperm And Eggs From 6.7 Million Earth Species:

Species or planets[sic] could be wiped off the face of the Earth any minute—so we need a “Moon Ark” to safely store frozen eggs, sperm, seeds and other DNA matter from all 6.7 million Earth species.

That’s according to students and staff at the University of Arizona, who at the IEEE Aerospace Conference last weekend divulged details of an ambitious “modern global insurance policy” for our planet.

Their daring plan is to build a complex in the Moon’s lava tubes staffed by robots and fuelled by solar panels on the lunar surface.

[...] The incredible plan to build a lunar base that includes an underground ark goes something like this:

  • Ball-like SphereX robots—each weighing about 11lbs/5kg and able to fly and hop—to enter, explore and map the Moon’s recently discovered (in 2013) network of underground lava tubes, each about 328ft./100 meters in diameter.
  • Design, and then construct, underground ark in the lava tubes, with solar panels on the lunar surface and elevator shafts that access the facility.
  • Launch 250 rockets to the Moon, each taking 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species (it took about 40 to build the International Space Station).
  • Store the petri dishes of seeds in cryogenic preservation modules inside the lava tubes, which would shield the seeds from solar radiation, meteorites and temperature fluctuations.
  • The seeds would be kept at around -292ºF/180ºC, temperatures that would likely cold-weld together metal parts of the base. Cue “floating shelves” made from cryo-cooled superconductor materials that enable quantum levitation above a powerful magnet.
  • Staff the facility with robots that navigate through it above magnetic tracks. Robots that can operate under cryo-conditions don’t yet exist—though the proposers admit that new technologies will be needed to make the “Moon Ark” a reality.

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  • (Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Tuesday March 16 2021, @09:21AM (1 child)

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Tuesday March 16 2021, @09:21AM (#1124769) Journal

    Yip, on all of this I'd agree. With one exception. If any "normal" company has failed like Boeing has, not only in space but also now even in commercial air transport, they would almost certainly no longer exist. And it's not out of the question that we'd even be pursuing criminal charges against them - Boeing have now, at the minimum, contributed to hundreds of deaths by what are undoubtedly major systemic issues within the company, likely due for the pettiest of all motivations - optimizing for shareholder profit instead of actually focusing on their products. But because they're Boeing, everything is business as usual.

    Our entire political system has become deeply incestuous. This is, in part, due to appointments, and in part due to sycophancy in hopes of personal advancement. And Boeing is a major part in this entire dysfunctional system, working as a key player in the military industrial complex, among other roles. Musk has been more than happy to wade into numerous controversial topics ranging from the dysfunctional media to wokeness, and he even committed to cardinal sin of speaking in a cordial way with "The Russians" in Cyrillic! But the one thing he's never poked has been the SLS, or "real" politics in general. And I don't think that's a coincidence. The government could kill SpaceX in a practically infinite number of ways, and the media would kick their spin machine into overdrive to condone it.

    I think he's doing the right thing by just keeping his eyes on the prize. Like you allude to, it's increasingly looking like SpaceX will, at the minimum, be flying folks around the moon before the SLS gets off the ground. And that will speak far louder than any words ever could.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 16 2021, @10:27AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday March 16 2021, @10:27AM (#1124790) Journal

    I bring it up because I think SpaceX is quickly becoming too important for the U.S. government to kill. It's now the American ride to the ISS, with Boeing not being an option until no earlier than September 2021. It's a critical launch provider for NASA, the Air/Space Force, and the National Reconnaissance Office. Starlink is also being eyed for use by the Air Force and Army. Musk is gaining leverage that he can use to go on the attack. One of SLS's biggest proponents, Senator Richard Shelby, is retiring after 2022.

    At the same time, Starship needs to be operational before the SLS can be utterly destroyed. Even though several Falcon Heavy launches are probably a better idea than one SLS launch, providing a single rocket that can do everything that SLS can is important, to leave no remaining excuses. Starship has a wider/larger payload fairing, and can likely exceed even the mythical SLS Block 2's payload capacity (~130 tons), while in fully reusable mode. In-orbit refueling is required to get any payload to TLI, so that must work first. A chart on Everyday Astronaut [everydayastronaut.com] suggests it can get 40 tons to TLI with a single refuel (comparable to SLS Block 1B at 43 tons), and the full ~150 tons with two refuels.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]