NASA Budgets for a Trip to the Moon
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Thanks to NewSpace, getting out there is only going to become cheaper; we can, as civilization, afford both. Let ESA and NASA and China race to the Moon. SpaceX wants to go to Mars. If either succeeds in the next decade, we all win. The knowledge and experience gained is reusable for either, it goes into the same pool. And if we keep fighting over which destination is better, we won't get to any.
Because it costs too much right now. SpaceX is providing NASA with rockets, I'm not sure they'll have a sustainable business model to get to Mars. I hope they do find a way but until costs come way down it's going to be tough.
The only way to go there is to accumulate resources from real business, and to improve efficiency.
> The nearly $1.8 billion budget for that part of NASA would be about 6.5 percent lower than what was enacted for fiscal year 2017
Donald seems to be stuck in the Cold War. I've not heard of one good reason for him wanting to send Americans back to the Moon other than "prestige." There are much more valuable scientific targets than the Moon that we could be targeting, and it's very upsetting that he seems to be using NASA to enhance his own image (e.g. deep cuts in areas where NASA needs budget increases..)
Overall, I see this as a move towards globally inspiring national pride projects and away from the more subtle and less-expensive "only PhDs understand how this is really important," tasks. It really fits the personality and promises of the current president.
H3 mining is another thought.
Edit: other ideas
* Autonomous vehicles sent ahead of time to build habitats for people.
* Large underground bases dug into the bedrock positioned at the poles collecting solar energy.
* Long tracks to launch things into space/earth electromagnetically.
* Mining of ice which could get split into H and O for propellant.
* Mining of other materials to be used on site or sent back to earth.
* Attempt to get people to be self sufficient on another world, even if it took a hundred years.
* Depot for deep space asteroid mining ships/drones to drop off their cargo and refuel/repair without having to drop all the way down to Earth.
The Moon is also a good place to test Mars-related procedures (couple dozen hours of travel beats couple dozen months in case of an emergency).
Finally, I imagine building a telescope on the "dark side" is astronomers' wet dream.
But you’d still need a very large number of missions to make construction and maintenance of the moon base cheaper than just directly going where you want to go. It’s probably going to be a while before a moon base makes sense for economical reasons.
Also, the moon does not have a dark side. It has a far side that never faces the earth, but the sun shines there just like it does on the other side.
We can't forever just launch point-to-point missions from Earth's surface. The Moon meshes up well with industrial space activities around Earth, which we'll need anyway, and which'll create plenty of demand around itself for missions and resources.
> It has a far side that never faces the earth, but the sun shines there just like it does on the other side.
Sure, but a) lack of atmosphere while still having stable ground underneath helps, plus b) lack of RF noise from Earth would really help radiotelescopes, which was what I was thinking about when writing my previous comment.
This is essentially my argument. Short term it doesn't offer many advantages but without it, it makes the really big and cool industrial space projects more difficult.
After all if Blue Planet can cause interest in luxury $4m submarines[0] I don't see why the moon would be an exception.
Who knows, seeing Earth from outside might even trigger some activity to keep it viable for us!
[0] https://www.slashgear.com/aston-martins-next-luxury-vehicle-...
A moon base needs better and more stable funding, and for that it needs a reason. Science will not be enough, but the demands of a cislunar economy (propellant, off-world settlements for workets) just might.
* Autonomous vehicles sent ahead of time to build habitats for people.
* Large underground bases dug into the bedrock positioned at the poles collecting solar energy.
* Long tracks to launch things into space/earth electromagnetically.
* Mining of ice which could get split into H and O for propellant.
* Mining of other materials to be used on site or sent back to earth.
* Attempt to get people to be self sufficient on another world, even if it took a hundred years.
* Depot for deep space asteroid mining ships/drones to drop off their cargo and refuel/repair without having to drop all the way down to Earth.
Self-sufficiency would require manufacturing complex organical compounds and is total science fiction stuff, and will likely remain that way for a looong time.
The problem with going to the moon (or anywhere else in the solar system) is that the only thing we can do right now is science experiments. And there's a lot more impactful science that can be done for far cheaper than sending people outside of our gravity well. If you want to do anything else, then you have to develop a lot of technology to get to the point. But the space bugs want to see humans go to space, and they generally don't want to see effort being expended on the research to let humans do anything useful because it's not space research.
>The repeated application of such fire-refining processes was capable of producing copper that was 99.25% pure.
Copper and iron can be refined reasonably enough using heat. Maybe it's possible to "pitch" metallic ore into very close and highly a eccentric orbit around the sun to help melt it down before "catching" it on the other side.
Perhaps acids could be brought up and recycled?
https://www.space.com/13247-moon-map-lunar-titanium.html
Titanium might be more difficult.
https://titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-extraction-and...
Seems like asteroid mining would be pretty straight forward on the surface of the moon. The lack of erosion is capable of showing us exactly where they are.
Like I said it might take a hundred years before we can be totally self sufficient on the moon, but I think it's possible long term.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228918710_Design_an...
another:
In short:
Nobody's built any useful (for power generation) fusion reactor yet, much less one running He3.
There isn't actually much He3 on the moon, just more than here on Earth. It's doubtful that mining on the moon would be cheaper than just making it here.
I was in the audience for both and it was absolutely amazing!
And then the subsequent leader says “My predecessor loved spending money even while the people suffered. We cannot be spending billions on space exploration while people need jobs. I have let NASA know they’re going to have to tighten their belts and get to work with less so the people can have jobs. I’m introducing a bull that cuts $2B off the budget.”
Meanwhile, both leaders expand the military budget by $40B.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccalerner/2017/07/13/top-10...
Not even for the inspiration? I mean look at how everyone reacted to SpaceX's recent launching of a Tesla into space. Everyone thought it was super cool and inspiring - and it was. Now imagine how much cooler it would be to send people to the moon again in the modern age. Yeah it happened before but that was a long, long time ago, and may as well have never happened for probably 3/4 of the people in America.
Getting to the Moon, especially with something more serious than samples pickup mission, would signal that we're back on our feet again.
2) The ISS is going to de-orbit in the 2020s, so for low-gravity and habitat research, we can spend billions on another LEO station (which private industry is already tackling) or we can do something a bit more daring: set up shop on another rock.
I think NASA should be allowed, broadly, to choose its own missions and goals, and stick with it for longer than one administration. Their work takes more than 3 year election cycles.
Only because we are going to allow it. We could, you know, keep it in orbit and continue to use it.
> I think NASA should be allowed, broadly, to choose its own missions and goals, and stick with it for longer than one administration. Their work takes more than 3 year election cycles.
I could not agree with this more. Having every administration fuck up their agenda every 4-8 years is not productive.
I'm not sure if it's safe to operate much longer than the 2020's without some major work and the running costs are astronomical. I'd love to see the ISS live longer but with limited resources going to the moon instead seems like a solid plan. At least on the Moon we might be able to get some practice in at harvesting resources off world. That's really going to be the economic key to kicking off a non war related space race.
Although building a moon base would be cool. It could increase our reach for manned missions. Sort of a first/last pit stop before a long journey.