How fast could we get back to the moon?

Factual Questions
21

This reminds me of one of the more implausible bits from the movie “Deep Impact”: The USA and Russia design and build an Orion nuclear powered spacecraft…in less than a year. That’s pushing it just a wee bit, I’m afraid.

One other minor nitpick is that the President announces to the world that it exists…when they’ve been building it in orbit for the last 9 months. This thing is considerably bigger that the space shuttle, and it’s in LEO. It would be a rather bright naked-eye object.

That being said, it’s still a pretty good movie.

22

I remember seeing a NASA engineer talking about this very subject a few years ago, and he said that it would take LONGER for the U.S to get back to the moon now than it took from the time of Kennedy’s announcement. Standards of safety are higher now, the tooling for the rockets is long gone, and the launch facilities have all been converted to other uses.

Sure, you could use the shuttle to take something up piece by piece, but that’s a lot of shuttle launches. And those launches are planned years in advance. Even relatively simple planetary probes take years to plan and build.

One possibility would be to do what the Chinese are doing - use old Russian equipment. Lots of that is still around.

23

Here is a related prior thread: To the moon.

Another thread, dealing withing getting to the moon as cheaply as possible: Bargain Basement Lunar Rocket

24

And let’s not forget Salvage 1, wherein Andy Taylor goes to the Moon.

25

It’s more mind boggling than that. You know those disposable calculators about the same size as a credit card? Yup, one of those puppies would have kicked NASA’s ass back in the Apollo era. Somebody tell me again, why it was a good idea for Nixon to kill the Apollo program. Oh, wait, you can’t, because it wasn’t.

26

Again, I say piffle.

Being light enough to launch is no problem. The shuttle can carry about 30 tons into low earth orbit. That’s plenty. I mean Winnebagos are big but they don’t weigh thirty tons.

You’re also overdesigning. This isn’t a satelite that is going to be boosted into synchronous orbit and then expected to work perfectly for 15 years. This is a flying can that needs, essentially, to hold air for about a week. Yes, you need power but there are plenty of off-the-shelf flight-qualified systems that can supply it. Remember, it doesn’t need to be elegant or maximally efficient, it just needs to work.

As for navigation, well, orbital mechanics is no mystery, my laptop can crunch all the numbers you need. In fact, since cost is no object, we can pack as much fuel as we like so our burns don’t even have to be particularly accurate – we can make as many corrections as we like. One of the problems with the Apollo missions was that they were skirting the edge of the possible. They carried just enough fuel, had just enough space for the crew, etc. We don’t have to worry about that.

Unlike in the 60’s we know exactly what the problems are. Also unlike in the 60’s, we can use a computer to quickly simulate any design choices we make so we can work out the major bugs in advance.

Create a crew module that will survive in space for a week just isn’t a big deal today. Submarines survive in much harsher environments. In fact, perhaps we can use a submarine as a crew module! It’s true they are designed for a hundred or so atmospheres of overpressure rather than one atmosphere of under pressure, but I bet they’d work just fine. They’ve even got on-board power systems and life support, even airlocks. This one is a little heavy, but I’m sure we could make a few modifications and get it to work, e.g. pulling the motors. Mini Sub

The OP has made the job even easier by specifying that no one has to get back. I think this really makes it too easy. I’ll bet you we could figure out a way to get a shuttle to the surface of the moon. All we have to do is get a good-sized booster strapped on it to get it into moon orbit. The shuttle engines can be used to do a “controlled crash” on the surface.

It’s been done before.

27

We’re talking about a lunar transfer vehicle and lander, not a free-floating capsule. To go from low earth orbit to lunar transfer orbit you need a delta-V of about 4 km/sec. You need a fairly powerful upper stage booster, like the Boeing Inertial Upper Stage. I believe the largest payload ever launched by the Shuttle+IUE is the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which weighs just under 6 tons, so you’ll most likely need to keep your lunar lander under that weight. That includes not just a pressurized capsule and life support equipment, but also engines and fuel for landing.

I have worked on an instrument that just needed to work for 10 hours (a ballon-borne X-ray detector) and trust me, it’s not that much easier. You still have to test it under all kinds of conditions to make sure it doesn’t fail immediately. Even with plenty of testing, we had a problem on our first flight because the test conditions on the ground weren’t exactly like flight conditions. Nobody criticized us for it - we were pleased that the rest of the system worked so well.

As I noted above, fuel will be limited by the capability of the launch system. While orbital mechanics is simple, predicting the performance and response of a spacecraft is not. Nor is it simple to take all the real-time measurements and control the spacecraft based on that information. It takes time to develop the software and train the astronauts.

Yes we do. To this day the Saturn V is the largest launcher ever built. We’ll have to make do with the far smaller capability of the Shuttle. There have been some improvements in lightweight components and structures, but composite structures take a long time to build.

That’s arguable. The temperature of the ocean is stable and predictable, and the unlimited supply of water is useful for cooling. A spacecraft is baked by direct sunlight on one side and exposed to a near absolute zero space on the other side.

There’s a big difference between an asteroid with barely detectable gravity and the moon. And how do you propose to refuel the Shuttle in orbit for the trip to the moon? Make a pit stop at a “Russian space station” who just happens to have several hundred tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen?

28

A couple years, maybe, but how are you going to get the license from Michael Jackson?

29

It occurs to me that, if you aren’t worried about the astronauts getting back (Sending a suicide mission to the moon to find Liv Tyler’s boyfriend, and attach him to a mini-nuke to keep him from returning to Earth, or some such) you wouldn’t have to worry about designing much in the way of crew safety. That could save a lot of time. However…if the crew suffocates halfway there, or the cobbled-together lunar lander’s decent engine blows up when you try to fire it up for the first time, even if the crew doesn’t matter, you’ve just wasted a bunch of time and effort for a failed mission, and it’s time that you might not have. So it might be a better gamble in the long run to spend a little longer on spacecraft design and end up skirting past the landing deadline by the skin of our collective teeth.

Or not. I’m probably wrong.

30

I find this whole line of reasoning completely ridiculous. You’re telling me that with 30 years of technological advance in EVERY CONCEIVABLE AREA, and having already done it once, we would have MORE trouble doing it again? That’s ludicrous.

So what if the toolings are gone? They didn’t exist in the first place, before. If everything could be done from scratch 30 years ago, and a program could go from nonexistence to a successful trip to the moon and back in SEVEN YEARS, 30 years ago, there is no way that we’d be unable to duplicate the effort now.

We know almost infinitely more about everything now than we did in 1969. Count me in with the 6-10 month crowd.

31

But we haven’t advanced in every area. We no longer have a rocket like the Saturn V, which was far bigger than the shuttle. And we might not be able to build one if we wanted - all the subcomponents of that rocket used 60’s era hardware, and much of that is simply no longer available. Simple valves and fittings can no longer be bought off the shelf. And on a design as optimized as a moon rocket, you can’t change very much before you might as well just design a whole new rocket.

And would the Apollo stuff even fit in the shuttle? If not, you’ve got to re-design a moon rocket from scratch.

I suspect we’d do it faster than the 7 years it took the first time if we really devoted heavy resources to it, but not by much. Certainly it wouldn’t be months. Maybe five years?

32

-Couple of things here.

As noted above for one, we now have FAR more rules and regulations. Yes, in a hypothetical “Doomsday” scenario, we’d bend a bunch of rules, but barring that, today, as opposed to thirty years ago, we now have OSHA, machinists’ unions, federal regs on hazardous materials (like dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, both evil, nasty corrosive poisons in addition to being excellent rocket fuels) the everpresent threat of lawsuits, even environmental impact statements.

Red tape alone would consume tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars over the term of the project.

Second, the space program didn’t “spring into existence” the moment Kennedy made the challenge. The prior Mercury and Gemini missions had already been going on for six or eight years, and rocket development itself had been underway since Von Braun came over from Nazi Germany at the end of WW2 and helped us develop their V2 technology into a nascent space program.

Technically, our “space program” started in roughly mid-late 1945, so that’s closer to twenty-four years to go “from nothing”.

My vote is one year for a one-way mission, three for a return trip, both if it were a cost-is-no-object situation. Under a Doomsday scenario, make it to the Moon or the Earth blows up, etc, maybe nine or ten months for a suicide mission, year and a half, minimum, for a round trip.

Keep in mind that even a doomsday/one-way trip has to have a nearly-100% chance of success. Flying motorhomes with slapdash airlocks tend to fare badly in the rigors of multi-gee accelleration, cosmic-ray exposure, micrometeoroid bombardment, severe and unequal solar heating and orbital maneuvering.

33

Two years, I guess.

Two desgin teams each desgin a prototype, we decide to build both and launch the best one (or heck both for redudancy). Money is no object.

From an engineering point-of-view our task is made much simplier by the fact our crew could be recovered upon return (I insist upon return) by the shuttle. No need for a strong design to withstand either launch or recovery.

A series of smaller bits strapped together after launch from earth by either shuttle or by Proton. Fuel taken up by ESA.

Frankly it sounds pretty straightforward to me.

zbuilding the F-117 or B2 would require more time and effort.

34

I’m amazed anyone would say six months. That’s insane - you guys do have jobs, right? What can you get done in 26 weeks at YOUR job? Aside from the fact it would take longer than that to train the astronauts, I think it’s quite obvious it would take at least a few years to build the vehicles.

Folks, have you ever been involved in ANY large project, of any kind? There are custom-made parts to be built here - even if you can scrounge up some of this stuff, some things will have to be custom-made, and that means

  • finding a company to do it
  • scoping the project out
  • creating the diagrams and drawings
  • getting the tools and dies made
  • making the parts
  • testing them
  • remaking them,
  • putting them into the larger vehicles and testing that.

Six months? Totally impossible. NASA doesn’t even have the personnel they need - those people have to be hired, and that’s not a one-day hiring process, my friends. Then you have to decide between a jury-rigged shuttle-launched effort, which absolutely WILL take multiple shuttle launches, itself a big operation, or rebuilding a Saturn V, which would take a few years. Plus training. With max effort, I’d say two years.

35

Hmm… I wrote something here and now I can’t see it. Anyway others have covered it better.

But I had time to think over some elements: As some people have pointed out, we do not need to make everything shuttle-portable, we can use multiple launches of commercial rockets such a Proton to LEO. ALSO, I read that the assembly line that made the Energya very-heavy booster is sitting idle but more or less intact in Russia… including a handful of unassembled stages.

As mentioned earlier, for a habitat/command module we could adapt/refit a Russian space-station module (a Soyuz would be mightily cramped, though technically possible); to the aft end we attach the escape-velocity and lunar-return booster stage, to the fore end on a multidock hub we attach the LM and an off-the shelf Soyuz for “lifeboat”/reentry vehicle.(*)

However the LM we’d have to design, develop, build and make operational anew. This is not something you do in 3 months. Same the TLI stage which we may redo from an extant upper-stage booster but may have to go over several times to make it reliable for manned flight.

But you’d still have to build, test and man-rate the whole thing and achieve systems integration, specially since you’d be adding “aftermarket” systems to the off-the-shelf components; prepare to make/launch at least 3 of the final stacks (in case another shuttle blows up midway thru the program); and you’d have to train crews (landing’s tricky!) . Optimistically I’d say two yrs in desperation, if you don’t mind losing a couple of crews in the attempt; more like five.
(*)(BTW Soyuzes were tested – in their unmanned-satellite version Zond – on circumlunar flights. And manned Soyuzes have done 2+ weeks non-Station endurance flights. So if the standard were lowered to just going on a mere swing-aroud-the-moon you could do it by coupling an escape-velocity upper stage to an improved Soyuz and telling the guys to prepare for a bitchin’ rough reentry)

36

Oh, and a US-only all-home-grown effort? No less than five.

37

Yeah, like we’ve ever been to the moon… :wink:

38

You have to remember that, as they say in Knowledge Management circles, “NASA has forgotten how to go to the moon”. Quite frankly, much of the old guard is retiring or has retired already from NASA, and with them goes all the knowledge of how to do a moon mission. To go to the moon would require figuring out everything a lot of stuff from scratch, even though we did it already.

39

It may just be my own ignorance, but this just sounds completely unlikely to me. Technology moves forward, not backwards. There was a thread a while back about “Technologies we’ve lost”. Many of the comments were about how even though all the people who have died who knew a particular tech, such as some kind of steel forging or whatever, we now have better ways of doing things.

40

The only purpose of the Saturn V was to lift all the componentry one needed for a lunar mission in one fell swoop. Something like 90% of the system’s fuel was relegated simply to achieving LEO. With the ISS, a huge proportion of the weight, and therefore cost and difficulty of contruction, is unnecessary.

A modern mission doesn’t have to carry re-entry heat shielding, for example, because the returning astronauts can just hop a shuttle down. The ISS also now has all the major componentry necessary to assemble itself, so construction of a lunar transit vehicle could actually be built as part of the ISS, then detached when the mission is ready.

By parking the old Columbia at the ISS, with a crew compartment (perhaps a refurbished Spacelab) placed in the bay, the ISS could house perhaps a dozen or more workers, and probably keep two or three on EVA at all times.

Furthermore, the combined launch facilities of NASA, ESA, Russia, China, and other potential players such as Japan, India, and the Department of Defense far outstrips the worldwide launch capabilities of the 1960s. Traffic control may actually be a larger problem than getting the necessary goods to LEO.

I’m betting that once a design is settled upon and the proper adaptors for the componentry are built, assembly could be completed in a matter of days or weeks.

Everything except the lander could conceivably be cobbled together from currently existing parts. With the ISS, chase-rockets could even be held on standby in case of emergency to deliver any replacement components. Aside from catastrophic failure or an uncontrolled burn, astronauts travelling to the moon would benefit from a much better system of redundancy and safety than they did under Apollo.

So I think the real question is, “how fast can you design and build a lunar lander and lunar space suits?” My guess is less than eighteen months, if you scrap all other missions in the pipeline and have complete support from all the worlds space powers.