Suppose that we needed to land someone on the Moon as quickly as possible…how fast could we do it?
For purposes of this question, cost is of no concern whatsoever; for whatever reason, we have to get there as quickly as possible. The survival of humanity itself is at stake, and the longer it takes, the less our chances.
So…how long before we land someone? Assume that they have to land safely within a 5 km radius of a given point on the Moon’s surface, and then do a Moonwalk.
I imagine we could refurbish/remanufacture a Saturn V and have it ready to go in a matter of months if urgency was the ‘key’ and money/staff was absolutely no object.
Alternatively, you’d need to come up with a propulsion unit/lunar module which would work with the Shuttle I guess - tho I think that would take longer…
The real killer in ‘time’ terms is testing tho - if you want any degree of ‘safety’ it takes a long time to check everything out. If you REALLY needed to get there - I assume you’d be happy to take a few risks…
VERY interesting question tho - I’ll ponder it some-more and I look forward to more ‘educated’ answers…
TTFN
JP
Another thing that would add to the time would be training the astronauts to use the equipment.
Refurbishing a Saturn 5 would be a major long-time undertaking. It’s not so much the saturn 5 as the infrastructure needed to launch it, which has all been either scrapped or retrofitted to Shuttle use.
If we had to get back to the moon in a real hurry, we’d have to use our existing launch and orbital infrastructure. We have now the technology and experience to assemble complex structures in space, something we didn’t back in the 60’s, so there’s no need for a great big rocket to launch a moon-ship in one piece. We can send our ship up in pieces by Shuttle and Proton rocket, and use the space station as an assembly base and staging ground. A lunar lander would probably fit in a single shuttle bay, and a earth-to-lunar-orbit tug would probably take a few more flights to assemble and fuel. We could probably do it in under 5 years if we really had to, and were willing to throw enough money into it.
Does the astronaut have to get back (to the Earth’s surface) alive?
It’d be a WHOLE lot cheaper if the astronaut was expendable.
Five Years?!?
If we really had to, getting to the moon would be utterly simple. From Kennedy’s announcement to the first landing took, what, seven years? We could gen up a manned lunar orbiter from off-the-shelf parts. Remember, a lot of the stuff used on the moon mission had to be specially designed. For example, NASA specially developed a digital control system for the Apollo missions, the DSKY . Nowadays, I’ve probably got more computing power in my laptop than NASA had at mission control.
The lander might be a bit trickier, though not much. Once again, the materials science of the lander was cutting edge for the late 1960s but now I’ve got a tennis racket that is significantly more advanced. The point is, you wouldn’t have to do everything from scratch. You’ve done it before, so you know what the problems are. You’ve got a design, albeit a crude one, that did work. Modify that design using modern materials and you’re off – and with a more comfortable and safer system than you had thirty years ago.
I’d say, six months, tops.
I read somewhere that if we wanted to go to the moon, it would take longer than it did in the 60s. There were a number of reasons, including environmental impact statements, the possibility of lawsuits, issues of astronaut safety and others that would make it much harder now. Of course if there were a reason we absolutely had to in least time, I guess we could match the 60s, but absent the urgency we felt then it would probably take 2 decades.
Stephen Baxter’s Moonseed, huh?
I seem to have blocked out what he pulled out of his back pocket to get the guy with the backpack nuke to the Moon, but Homer Hickam’s Back to the Moon had a whole brand new magic thruster bolted onto the hijacked shuttle to get to lunar orbit.
The short answer is that we have nothing on the shelf that would get us to the Moon again quickly. AndrewL’s five year estimate sounds reasonable, given enough interest.
Agreed. And keep in mind that “infrastructure” is far more than just the buildings and support equipment. It’s thousands of engineers and technitians who collectively understand how it works. It’s sub-contractors and their parts suppliers who have the facilities and skills to manufacture components. I’ve seen a case where a satellite launch failed and the team immediately started building a replacement, and even then they complained about some semiconductors no longer being available.
My slightly educated guess (I’ve worked on satellite projects but not in management) is that given a very generous funding, it’d still take 5 years. I’d say 3 years to design and build a prototype, 1 to test it while building the flight unit, and another year to test the flight unit. Design is not just CAD work - you often have to test the performance and durability of components before you can incorporate them in your design.
Um, he asked if it was humanity-or-no-humanity… I SERIOUSLY doubt any lawsuits or environmental impact reports would be filed until after the fact, if we were still here.
I’d chip in the middle, certainly less than 2 years. We’d have to build everything from scratch, but if it were humanity-or-no-humanity, we’d throw everything we had at the problem.
Also, the poster did not specify WHICH country this was. Several countries, most notably China and India, are currently working on a manned mission to the moon. NASA throwing in its backbone with them would get it done much faster than anything else.
As long as they converted from standard to metric.
I’ve really gotta go with
Truth Seeker here. Althought the actual parts aren’t still there, I highly doubt the plans, specifications, or schematics have been thrown away.
Maybe I’m not really following the OP, but I’m sort of picturing an Armageddon [super](the movie)[/super] kind of scenario. The earth is threatened by a nuclear golf ball on the moon that needs to be defused to save the world. If its a whole global effort, with the finest minds and pooled resources of the world, with a life-or-death urgency, we could make it in a very small amount of time. Of course the trip takes a long time, I doubt the planning would be 5 years!!
I suppose I’m assuming the “we” in the OP subject to mean “we humans”, not “we as a country”.
Total time to Moon from launch: less than 72 hours.
-Actually, much of them have been. In some cases, we still have the ancient IBM-format computer tapes, but lack the actual hardware to read them, it all having been scrapped decades ago. Or, in other cases, the tapes are so brittle with age they’re basically unreadable even if we did have a computer that would read 'em.
Besides the hardware, there’s the software- their systems from the Apollo era are long obsolete. Find (or build) the hardware to read it, then you need the software to display/read/print it out. And we’re talking literally tons of tapes, so manual conversion from a CRT screen to say, a Word document would take decades.
Some data from paper drawings were converted to microfiche, which has itself degraded over time. Warehouse clearings, storage requirements, minor accidents and floodings have destroyed other parts.
Besides the OP’s hypothetical situation, the above problems also means, in real-world terms, that much of the data gained from the Apollo missions (telemetry, lunar geography, radio transmissions, results from lunar experiments, etcetera) has also been lost.
Most definitely…and then some.
IIRC NASA had the equivalent of a 286/386 class computer. Before you think, “No way!” realize they had this some 15 years before you or I did.
What you have in your laptop is likely FAR beyond what NASA had when they did the moon launches.
I believe that you’ve got more computing power in your cellphone than NASA had at mission control.
Piffle. How long would it take to slap an airlock on an Airstream trailer?
That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here, not a commercial satelite launch. All we have to is to get there and, I suppose, back. AndrewL is correct. Launch the bits with the shuttle, strap 'em together and go. Crew quarters and life support? Suitably modified Airstream trailer packed in glorified tin can that fits in the cargo bay of the space shuttle. Check. Engines? Canibalize whatever engines you’ve got laying about the place, stick them in another glorified tin can (or cans, if necessary) and strap them onto the crew quarters. Check. Navigation and Guidance? Where’s my old laptop? Check.
This thing wouldn’t look pretty, but it would work. Remember, unlike the Apollo system, the assembled ship doesn’t have to be able to withstand much acceleration. You could probably literally hold the thing together with bailing wire to get it to the moon and back.
Once again, the lander would be slightly more tricky, but not much.
It might even be worthwhile to use the ISS itself as a core for the lunar transfer vehicle. It’s already got life support and power and such, just need a big booster rocket to push it to the moon and a lander.
This mission also gets much easier if you’re not worried about getting the astronauts back alive.
I gotta agree with Jayrot here. If the problem is really severe, I can’t see people sitting on their hands and taking 5 years to send a mission to the moon. I would think people would be working round the clock planning and building. If it was that serious and money was no object, you would have thousands of planner and builders. In a apocolypse scenerio I can’t see a manned moon mission taking more than a month. What would take so long to do?
I was wondering if anyone was going to catch the inspiration for the question…
I don’t recall exactly how the protagonist gets to Lunar orbit, but I do remember how he gets down to the surface: there’s a scientific probe that’s designed to soft-land on the Moon that hadn’t been launched yet. It’s taken with him into orbit, at which point he climbs into his space suit and rides it down.
Needless to say, it’s a one-way mission. For purposes of this discussion, we can also assume the mission to be one-way. Our heroes will not be coming back.
It’s not that easy. Yes it’s simple to make a metal box that can withstand one atmosphere. It’s less simple to make it light enough to launch, and strong enough to withstand vibration and thermal stresses. Life support is more than just an oxygen tank - you need full control of the air and temperature, and you need power to run it all. And we haven’t even mentioned the propulsion and navigation system as well as the software and training to run it all. A new system like that needs to be tested extensively on the ground, otherwise it will simply fail in space. Once launched it has to work perfectly - you can’t do test flights of spacecraft, you can’t do in-flight repairs, and there is no place for emergency landing. (Even swapping a Hubble component is done after months of training.) Unlimited funding may not help much - if you had a team of 10,000 computer programmers, do you think you can create a new operating system in a day? Or as von Braun said, you can’t get a baby in a month by getting 9 women pregnant.
If we absolutely had to send a man to the moon within one year, it might just be possible. We’d forget about the return trip. Spend 10 months building one-way spacecraft the best we could, and launch half a dozen of them. I’d give it a 50% chance that at least one will land successfully. A month is completely out of the question.