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gnarbarian

How about a moon base we could use as a base camp for missions to the outer solar system or mars?

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.

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SF author Charles Stross has a couple of damning criticisms of He3 mining on the moon, found here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/moonshin...

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 guess that feels a little like England setting up a base in Greenland as a supply depot to stop at before crossing the Atlantic to the new world. There’s way more stuff at their home base so it’s hard to see how adding a far off stop in a desolate place will help.

Well for one Greenland is outside the massive gravity well of England. So you can save a lot of fuel only shipping things back to Greenland between missions.

Or like England setting up a base at Sealand before crossing the Atlantic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

I'm thinking more long term. Things I'd like to see:

* 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’s inclination is 5 degrees to the ecliptic, you’d have to try really hard to find a worse place to put solar panels.

Self-sufficiency would require manufacturing complex organical compounds and is total science fiction stuff, and will likely remain that way for a looong time.

How else would you power a moon base without getting stuck sending up material forever?

Pretty much everything on your list is not possible with our current technology. More importantly, it's feasible to develop this technology on Earth.

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.

Aside from H3 I'd argue everything on that list is within our grasp if we tried to do so.

If you define it as "building infrastructure on the Moon to do so," no, it is not available with current technology. Where are you going to get your acids for refining, for example, if you can't scavenge from old piles of organic goop?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refining_(metallurgy)

>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.

Here's a pretty cool research paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228918710_Design_an...

another:

http://www.chicagospace.org/strategies.html

Greenland is also a nice parallel for an entirely different reason. The land is at the extreme margin of habitability, definitely for the Vikings who settled there. And when the traders of the North Sea stopped visiting Greenland, the colony disappeared within a few generations. (Most historians now believe that the loss of trade is what killed Norse Greenland, not the Little Ice Age)

Unless you can make propellant on the moon, that’s going to be less economical than going directly. There’s nothing to be gained by going down another (albeit not very deep) gravity well. The base camp analogy doesn’t really apply.

You could make propellant on the Moon (from water).

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.

Hm, hydrolox could indeed be possible. Didn’t think of that.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

Why can't it make sense on economic grounds? I would imagine that once there was a moonbase there would be a number of rather wealthy people who would like to visit.

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-...

You can't hope to maintain a Moon settlement off the back of ultra-rich peoples' vacation fads. For one, the whole scheme would collapse once the super-rich get bored.

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.

Some lunar base advocates push the "exploration base camp" narrative. But I find it disengenuius. It's too far away in terms of energy cost, and too close in terms of travel time.

Practical applications for He3 have been 30 years away for the past 50 years.

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