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| Science & Technology |
| US preparing to establish moon base |
| 2006-03-26 |
| For the first time since 1972, the United States is planning to fly to the moon, but instead of a quick, Apollo-like visit, astronauts intend to build a permanent base and live there while they prepare what may be the most ambitious undertaking in history -- putting human beings on Mars. President Bush in 2004 announced to great fanfare plans to build a new spaceship, get back to the moon by 2020 and travel on to Mars after that. But, with NASA focused on designing a new spaceship and spending about 40 percent of its budget on the troubled space shuttle and international space station programs, that timetable may suffer. Still, NASA's moon planners are closely following the spaceship initiative and, within six months, will outline what they need from the new vehicle to enable astronauts to explore the lunar surface. "It's deep in the future before we go there," said architect Larry Toups, head of habitation systems for NASA's Advanced Projects Office. "But it's like going on a camping trip and buying a new car. You want to make sure you have a trailer hitch if you need it." Scientists and engineers are hard at work studying technologies that don't yet exist and puzzling over questions such as how to handle the psychological stress of moon settlement, how to build lunar bulldozers and how to reacquire what planetary scientist Christopher P. McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center calls "our culture of exploration." The moon is not for the faint of heart. It is a lethal place, without atmosphere, pelted constantly by cosmic rays and micrometeorites, plagued by temperature swings of hundreds of degrees, and swathed in a blanket of dust that can ruin space suits, pollute the air supply and bring machinery to a screeching halt. And that says nothing about the imponderables. Will working in one-sixth of Earth's gravity for a year cause crippling health problems? What happens when someone suffers from a traumatic injury that can't be treated by fellow astronauts? How do people react to living in a tiny space under dangerous conditions for six months? "It's like Magellan. You send them off, and maybe they come back, maybe they don't," said planetary scientist Wendell W. Mendell, manager of NASA's Office for Human Exploration Science, during an interview at the recently concluded Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here. "There's a lot of pathologies that show up, and there's nobody in the Yellow Pages." In some ways, the moon will be harder than Mars. Moon dust is much more abrasive than Mars dust; Mars has atmosphere; Mars has more gravity (one-third of Earth's); Mars has plenty of ice for a potential water supply, while the moon may have some, but probably not very much. Still, the moon is ultimately much more forgiving because it is much closer -- 250,000 miles away, while Mars is 34 million miles from Earth at its closest point. If someone needs help on the moon, it takes three days to get there. By contrast, Mars will be several months away even with the help of advanced -- and as yet nonexistent -- propulsion systems. Not having to pay as dearly for mistakes is one key reason why the moon is an integral part of the Bush initiative. The other, as even scientists point out, is that if the United States does not return to the moon, others will. "The new thing is China, and they've announced they're going to the moon. The Europeans want to go; the Russians want to go; and if we don't go, maybe they'll go with the Chinese," Mars Institute Chairman Pascal Lee said in an interview. "Could we bypass the moon and go to Mars while India and China are going to the moon? I don't think so." Bush's 2004 "Vision for Space Exploration," by calling for a lunar return and a subsequent Mars mission, set goals, which, if achieved, would keep the United States in the forefront of space exploration for decades. Since then, mishaps and delays with the space shuttle and the space station programs have shrunk both the moon research budget and the rhetoric promoting the mission. Instead, NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has focused agency attention and resources on the design and construction of a new "crew exploration vehicle" and its attendant rocketry -- the spacecraft that will push U.S. astronauts once again beyond low Earth orbit. Despite the moon's current low profile, however, NASA continues to plan a lunar mission and to promote the technological advances needed to achieve it. Toups, one of the moon program's designers, said NASA envisions that a lunar presence, once achieved, will begin with two-to-four years of "sorties" to "targeted areas." These early forays will resemble the six Apollo lunar missions, which ended in 1972. "You have four crew for seven to 10 days," Toups said in a telephone interview. "Then, if you found a site of particular interest, you would want to set up a permanent outpost there." The south pole is currently the top target. It is a craggy and difficult area, but it is also the likeliest part of the lunar surface to have both permanent sunlight, for electric power, and ice, although many scientists have questions about how much ice there is. Without enough water, mission planners might pick a gentler landscape. Site selection will mark the end of what McKay calls Apollo-style "camping trips." "There's got to be a lot more autonomy, so we keep it simple," McKay said. "We're going to be on Mars for a long time, and we have to use the moon to think in those terms." The templates, cited frequently by moon mavens, are the U.S. bases in Antarctica, noteworthy for isolation, extreme environment, limited access, lack of indigenous population and no possibility of survival without extensive logistical support. "The lunar base is not a 'colony,' " Lee said. " 'Colonization' implies populating the place, and that's not on the plate. This is a research outpost." Once planners choose a base, the astronauts will immediately need to bring a host of technologies to bear, none of which currently exist. "Power is a big challenge," Toups said. Solar arrays are an obvious answer, but away from the poles 14 days of lunar sunlight are followed by 14 days of darkness, so "how do you handle the dormancy periods?" Next is the spacesuit. Apollo suits weighed 270 pounds on Earth, a relatively comfortable "felt weight" of 40 to 50 pounds on the moon, but an unacceptable 102 pounds on Mars. "You can't haul that around, bend down or climb hills," Lee said. "Somehow we have to cut the mass of the current spacesuit in half." And the new suit, unlike the Apollo suits or the current 300-pound shuttle suit, is going to have to be relatively easy to put on and take off, and to be able withstand the dreaded moon dust. After three days, Apollo astronauts reported that the dust was causing the joints in their suits to jam, "and we're not talking about three outings," Lee said of the next moon missions. "We're talking about once a week for 500 days -- between 70 and 100 spacewalks." Dealing with dust is also a major concern in building shelters on the lunar surface. Toups said it might be possible to harden the ground by microwaving it, creating a crust "like a tarp when you're camping." Otherwise, the dust pervades everything, and prolonged exposure could even lead to silicosis. Dust also makes it virtually impossible to use any kind of machinery with ball bearings. Civil engineer Darryl J. Calkins, of the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, warned that the combination of dust, low gravity, temperature swings and the high cost of flying things to the moon is going to define the lunar tool kit in unforeseen ways. "You can't put a diesel up there; you can't put a 20,000-pound bulldozer up there; and none of our oils or hydraulic fluids are going to survive," Calkins said in a telephone interview. "We may have to go back to the 19th century to find appropriate tools -- use cables, pulleys, levers." And even then, it will be difficult to level a base site and haul away the fill because there's not enough gravity to give a tractor adequate purchase. Instead, Calkins envisions a device that can "scrape and shave" small amounts of soil and take it away bit by bit. But in the end, "you have to learn how to do it, with real people," McKay said. "This is hard, but we can learn it. And if we do it right on the moon, we will be able to answer my ultimate question: Can Mars be habitable? I think the answer is 'yes.'" |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #20 But why? It would end up being another ISS; the astronauts can't even keep up with the repair work....which is convenient as there are no science or other kinds of missions for them to perform anyway. Its real mission happened way back under Reagan when it was announced; PR and friendly international relations. Not worth the billions spent, that's for sure. Imagine that times a million. And with the substantial chance of loss. Imagine the space program after a possible catastrophic loss. Or, perhaps even worse, imagine the space program 5 years after man returns from mars....with no science breakthrough and no one has gone back to the colony because it costs x billion dollars for each visitor, in order for the human to do....what? I mean for the human to do what that a robot couldn't do for 1/1000th of the cost? And it has to be something worth doing or investigating in the first place. It's the same reason we havent gone to the moon again: there isn't anything there we want or need. We went to the moon to A) beat the Soviet Union, and B) to get eyes on the rocks on the moon to figure out the origin of the earth and moon. At the time, robotics wouldn't have worked to get the particular rocks we wanted to see, nor would it have worked as PR. But now, with "better, faster, cheaper" and the privatization of the design process, there is no need to have all our chickens in one basket. Full committment to the manned mars mission basically eliminates any other use for the space program. I think it's similar to the ending of use of the x-15 inquiry into flight to orbit technology. We are on our way to some real discoveries, but instead we are gonna try and do it all right now without the real basic work yet done. If the x-15 program had developed further and technology obstacles were overcome (big ifs)instead of larger ground based rocketry, flight to orbit would be much cheaper now. If we keep up with better faster cheaper, we'll have the solar system explored, and costs of payloads cheaper as well. What we don't need is an expensive white elephant. Sometimes even the bullet to kill those things can be prohibititively expensive. |
| Posted by: Mark E. 2006-03-26 22:36 |
| #19 Darrell: That's because there are only miniscule amounts of He3 on Earth. With the right fuel, fusion becomes a lot easier. Mark E: I partially agree with you, in that many of the "hard work" and "repetitive task" aspects of creating a Moonbase and mining He3 would be far more efficient if done with robots, instead of people. Even if they only tunneled an inch a day, you'd still have a 30 foot long tunnel after a year. The best bet would be to have a large, heavy, slow landing craft, with a small nuclear reactor for power, and several robots to do different tasks. Even the craft that landed them could be cannibalized for any number of specialized purposes, especially structural reinforcing for the tunnels and pressure doors for the entrance. Designed from the bottom up for dual use. Another robot would be for dust abatement and collection. The more dust that is removed from the Moonbase area, the less damage by the dust. Another robot could be used as an "ice miner", capable of digging verticle shafts to get to underground ice, and digging another verticle shaft in the tunnel, much wider but shallower, for use as a lined cistern. Digging "outside" would be easier, as the surface covering the ice might be just "regolith", crumbled rock that could possibly just be scraped away. A manned expedition would be easier by several factors if they arrived on the Moon to have a safe, oxygenated tunnel with several thousand gallons of water. Robots would be designed for multiple purposes, and be reprogrammable from Earth or on location, even "transformable" into equipment the astronauts would use after their primary mission was over. Doing things like building a runway, so spaceships could land like the space shuttle instead of VTOL, and, of all things, making brick out of Lunar dust, water and sealer, under high compression. The nuclear reactor over used to obtain He3 could also be used to make glass-a very functional material. All of this means that most of the work would be done on the Earth prior to sending the robots up. And, all lessons learned could be re-used when we did much the same on Mars, long before the people got there. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-03-26 21:22 |
| #18 Re #13: As I understand it, helium-3 is only useful for fusion reactors, and we haven't made those work with hydrogen yet after 60 years of research. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2006-03-26 20:35 |
| #17 None of those is really an answer. I'm not arguing against space exploration; I'm saying (as if my opinion matters! HA!) that the money is better spent in different kind of space exploration. Denial of use of assets in space is easier than lifing astronauts. I don't believe that most of the technological advances you mentioned came from NASA, but rather from military tech adapted for NASA. Notwithstanding that, assuming your premise, still think of how much we would learn about propulsion and such if we had 50 launches and missions to mars in the next decade, rather than just one big one. There is no necessary or compelling mission to be done on Mars that can't be done by robots for 1/100 the cost. So send 100 more and think of what you'd discover. As far as establishing a colony to ensure the redundency of humankind, I don't really think that such a colony could be self sustaining in any real way. We can't even make a biodome here tha works. More likely it would one day simply go silent; we would return to find a design flaw and a bunch of dead astronauts. Another Roanoke colony, with no croatan to go to... I don't see the advantage of manned missions specifically given the current economics of humans in space and current lifing costs, except for PR purposes. |
| Posted by: Mark E. 2006-03-26 18:41 |
| #16 US preparing to establish moon base One of these days, Alice. Pow! Right in the kisser and to the MOOOOOON! /Helium-3® :) |
| Posted by: Jackie Gleason 2006-03-26 18:20 |
| #15 tell me a job that requires people in orbit or on another planet that cannot be perfectly performed easier, cheaper and on a quicker timeframe by an automated craft? * Preventing the use of the moon as a military base by China or whomever. * Preparing for the ability to have some people live off of the earth, for any of a variety of reasons ranging from 'we want to' to 'science' to 'idiots are capable of destroying us all'. * And because it's hard. A lot of our technology breakthroughs have historically come from military or space applications that are HARD and really push the boundaries of our capabilities. DOD technologies and new space missions have historically more than paid for themselves in later commercial spinoffs. The list is extensive, but just to take a few of direct relevance to us at Rantburg: - TCP/IP and the design of the Internet - cell phones (based on spreadspectrum military radio technology) - UNIX and its derivative operating systems, which are ubiquitous as servers on the Internet - communications satellites - global positioning satellites - jet engines for airplanes - real-time control system technologies (hardware and software) that are now embedded in applications ranging from manufacturing plants to automobile braking systems - digital signal processing chips, which are now in every CD player The list goes on and one. Everyone of the above required significant advances over the state of the art at the time and were in no way commercially possible. But once developed for military and/or space use, their eventual commercialization led to our technology lead in the marketplace. Contrary to what some people assume, significant technical breakthroughs don't just come out of thin air - they nearly always result from efforts to solve hard problems. Manned space is a hard but doable challenge that pushes the state of the art in a wide range of fields at once. It also attracts a lot of people to work on it. The value is there for us downstream. On the other hand, if we ignore the challenge, others will take it up and improve THEIR competitive posture instead. |
| Posted by: anon 2006-03-26 17:21 |
| #14 Again, tell me a job that requires people in orbit or on another planet that cannot be perfectly performed easier, cheaper and on a quicker timeframe by an automated craft? A low estimate for a mars trip in today's dollars is 30-35 billion. Not likely it'll be this cheap, but assume this is true. The cost of the 2 mars rovers was approximately 820 million; Cost: Approximately $820 million total (for both rovers), $645 million for design/development + $100 million for the Delta launch vehicle and the launch + $75 million for mission operations. Assume roughly 350 million for each additional rover. With these figures, for the cost of the lowball estimate of a manned trip to mars, we could put almost 100 rovers all over the planet. And that doesnt' take into account economies of scale... |
| Posted by: Mark E. 2006-03-26 17:08 |
| #13 From what I've heard, a Moonbase will be an odd thing. First of all, the big reason to go to the Moon is to harvest ultra-valuable Helium-3, a single cargo of which would pay for the entire space program since Gemini. That's why the big interest all of a sudden. One cargo that would provide all the United States' energy needs for two or three years. Big money. The He3 is in the very abrasive Moon dust. To concentrate it, you scoop it up and heat it. The He3 comes off as a gas. The best way to scoop it up is with a big vacuum cleaner. Shaped like a dome, you pump probably nitrogen gas through it, to create a pressure differential. It has no internal moving parts to be destroyed by the dust. Then you run the dust through a nuclear furnace to release the He3. When people arrive in the first place, they are going to want to live underground, away from the radiation, dust, temperature differentials, and vacuum. So, the *first* thing they do is vacuum up the dust over the bedrock where they want to mine. It's a lot easier to mine horizontally, so they will probably go into the side of a crater or a mountain. Drill a bunch of holes, then fill them with blast charges to make a crude shaft. Then insert the pre-made habitat into the shaft. Use sealant around the habitat so that it acts like a plug, so you can continue to mine deeper, expanding the base. Large robot machines make this a lot easier, thank you in advance, Caterpillar Corporation. The object, unlike with previous missions, is to continuously improve and upgrade the Moonbase, so that with each mission, more refined and processed goods can be brought from Earth. Hopefully by then, there will be technologies like the Space Elevator, and a large Earth-Moon ship that just takes smaller ships from Earth orbit to Moon orbit and back, never landing itself. And probably powered by He3. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-03-26 16:33 |
| #12 And possible exploitation of the asteroids ... |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-03-26 15:38 |
| #11 moon base Alpha... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-03-26 15:26 |
| #10 Just what we need, more Moonbats |
| Posted by: Captain America 2006-03-26 15:09 |
| #9 john: And then what? Maybe a colony. This sun will eventually burn out. It would be interesting to see if it is possible to live off the land on some planet that isn't earth - given conditions of intense heat or cold and different atmospheric pressures. Another thing that needs to be explored is a means of propulsion that can take humans to another planetary system. Science fiction writers have posited changing the climate on entire planets in order to make them more hospitable to human habitation. That has to be examined. A lot of money will be involved. And perhaps hundreds, if not thousands, of years of research. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2006-03-26 14:57 |
| #8 putting human beings on Mars And then what? |
| Posted by: john 2006-03-26 13:55 |
| #7 Have they acquired the necessary permits from the Lunar Government? |
| Posted by: tu3031 2006-03-26 13:12 |
| #6 anon: If congress doesn't, the Chinese will. They will in any case - they've said so. They also said they would have an aircraft carrier ready by the end of the 20th century. Note that aircraft carriers aren't a breakthrough technology. Putting up a base on the moon is a major endeavor, and the Chinese haven't even landed there yet. In fact, Chinese astronauts will be doing a spacewalk for the first time in 2008, something that NASA accomplished in 1965. I wouldn't look for any breakthroughs in the Chinese space program anytime soon. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2006-03-26 12:40 |
| #5 If congress doesn't, the Chinese will. They will in any case - they've said so. |
| Posted by: anon 2006-03-26 09:34 |
| #4 Let's just be sure that this time we don't mess with the Mysterons. |
| Posted by: Perfessor 2006-03-26 09:22 |
| #3 More likely never. Congress either won't fund it or it will receive just a trickle of funding. Too bad Neil Armstrong's first words weren't "I claim this moon in the name of the United States!" Every developed nation would have screamed "No f***ing way!" and by now you'd have a dozen different bases on the moon. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-03-26 09:15 |
| #2 Better late than never. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2006-03-26 08:46 |
| #1 All your base are belong to us... /someone had to say it |
| Posted by: Raj 2006-03-26 08:11 |