Thirty-nine years ago we succeeded in landing humans on the moon. If a situation came up where everyone said “Screw the expense, get us to the moon again” and all the nations of the earth came together on the project, how long would it take to send a couple people and return them safely, a la Apollo?
Likewise, how long would it take to actually build a Moonbase capable of sustaining a crew of 6-10 people for an indefinite period of time. It would be necessary to change out the crews periodically, so you would need to not only get the peeps there, but have the technology in place to ferry them and supplies back and forth on a regular basis. Again, this assumes money is no object.
The first time around it was eight years from the decision to make it a national priority to the first landing. Right now the US is planning to resume lunar missions but the hardware has yet to be flown. I’d say if we were in a hurry, it would take about eight years again.
As for establishing an outpost (“base” sounds a bit glorified), once you had the basic capacity to land someone on the moon and return them, the next step would be to modify your lunar lander for a maximum one-way payload to land your habitat modules. Again, if it was a maximum national priority, development could be done concurrently with the initial effort and be ready maybe 3-4 years after the first landing.
This was originally going to be the next step after the Apollo missions. For the launch of three Saturn V’s you could land your habitat, a supply module, and then your astronauts, and get 5x the man-hours on the Moon over three separate missions. Then maybe two-three launches per year could rotate crews and replacement supplies and equipment. This presumes that there is somewhere on the moon you want to concentrate your effort at.
I’ve no particular knowledge of spaceflight, but as a software engineer I think it would be worth pointing out that for most any overall goal for a product, there’s not a specific amount of time in which it can be made since there are a “6 month version” and a “10 year version” and everything in-between.
If the world was going to be destroyed and all life on it at the end of 12 months,* unless a moon landing was accomplished, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if something could be whipped up. It might involve six separate ships, crafted independently by the US, Russia, China, India, UK, and Japan and five of them explode in mid-air due to the rushed schedule creating sloppy worksmanship, but likely we would succeed in a particularly unspectacular and issue-ridden fashion.
But you could just as easily take twenty years of planning to do the same job. It would still end up having flaws and issues, but it would comparatively be like Windows XP versus DOS in compared to the 12 month version.
12 months being pulled out of thin air for no particular reason. As said, I know nothing about spaceflight.
You can launch things from the Moon using things like Nuclear Propulsion and Mass Drivers. Space stations aren’t good launching platforms since they have a small mass. And the Earth has a troublesome amount of gravity to get away from, plus humans below to get irradiated by nuclear engines. If you have a space elevator from Earth, you can set up a shuttle taking stuff to the Moon. Then you have a mass driver shooting anything worthwhile back to the Earth, while nuclear propulsion ships launch off of the Moon for cool places.
If there was no impending crises that forced us to evacuate to the Moon, then it’d probably be a similar timeframe. Space travel is fraught with logistical and equipment hurdles even today.
Couple that with NASA’s recent catastrophies and you’d have a very prudent and painstaking process to produce a program (oh, can I alliterate?) that was as failsafe as possible. Even considering our considerable net technological gains in spaceflight now versus Apollo missions.
One thing that remains the same is the need for a certain speed/amount of propulsion (25,000mph?) to free the craft from Earth’s gravity, and that style of propulsion is still rockets and liquid fuel, which always carries a huge amount of risk.
I wonder what (if any) alternate propulsion means are being developed/considered for future space travel?
Is that from the perspective of Earth, the perspective of the astronauts, or from the perspective of Earth watching the astronauts, then subtracting to see how long it took the light to get to them? It’s a vitally important question because it could change the results from between 2 and .000002 seconds!
Absolutely. The moon has no atmosphere to speak of. Although, it’s called the far side of the moon, as the moon has no real dark side. You might also need to build it on the near side, as the moon doesn’t really have a satellite network as of yet.
Humanity needs an all-purpose moon base. For the reasons stated above. Once established, it’ll make all the things we want to eventually do easier. Telescopic observation, scientific experimentation, space travel, and dammit… I want a lunar hotel.
We don’t have the Saturn V (i.e. we no longer have the tooling, handling fixtures, and many of the engineering details needed to build it) nor anything of the same payload class (118,000 kg to LEO). The next most powerful vehicle that one could plausibly put together in a short time would be a Shuttle-derived platform like the Shuttle-C (~77,000 kg to LEO). The Energia system used on the Buran–an Energia Core plus 4x kerosene/lox strap-on motors–carried about 90,000 kg to LEO, and the Vulkan (a Core plus 6x strap-ons) would have carried somewhere around 110,000 to 120,000 kg to LEO, but as far as I know the Energia booster is no longer available for manufacture. The next heaviest vehicles are the Delta-IV Heavy and Atlas V EELVs with 25,800 kg and 20,000 kg to LEO. The Soyuz-U (used for manned Soyuz capsule launches) is 7,200 kg to LEO, and the Long March 2 (used for Shenzhou-5 and -6 launches) must loft somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 kg (based on scaling of the Soyuz-like capsule). So we don’t have anything to launch an Apollo-type mission (lunar orbit rendezvous with a full-up command capsule, service module, and lunar ascent vehicle), and we’d be stretching to launch an Earth orbit rendezvous using two separate systems. The Apollo system was also pushed to the limit to soft-land 5,000 kg on the lunar surface. (It’s no good to get your hardware there only to dash it into the regolith, and you have no atmosphere for gliding or parachuting, so you’re burning all the way down which eats away at payload).
So we don’t have the launch vehicle to do it, although NASA and their contractors are busy developing the Ares rocket system to replace it, with the man-rated Ares IV giving payload to LEO performance about twice the Saturn IB, and the payload-rated Ares V giving performance somewhat superior to a Saturn V. Neither of these is expected to be ready before 2018 (the scheduled date for the Ares V-Y all-up test flight).
No. First of all, there is no “dark side of the Moon.” There is a far side of the Moon, because the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth and the far side always faces away, but it spends half of its ~29.5 day Solar-synodic period facing the Sun. (There are patches near the poles that are, due to geography, in permanent shadow, but they’re few and probably not well suited for astronomy, besides being difficult to reach.) Second, the Moon is not geologically stable; tidal stresses result in occasional Moonquakes and frequent smaller vibrations which are not ideal. Finally, placing an observatory on the surface of the Moon would limit its observational field to whatever is above the horizon. Placing a satellite observatory in orbit, on the other hand, gives you nearly the entire horizon for the asking and isolates you from the problems of vibration, atmosphere, et cetera. There is absolutely no reason to go to the excess effort of constructing a Lunar based telescope when you already have to lug it up from the Earth’s surface.
As for the questions of the o.p., and assuming that in addition to an unlimited budget that we’ll also accept a much higher threshold for risk, we could probably build a system to place people on the Moon in 5-8 years. A Moonbase is a somewhat more difficult proposition, but once you’ve matured the basic difficulty of getting there it is more a matter of incremental and evolutionary improvements; 10-12 years would be my call. However, in a more risk-adverse and limited budget environment (among other problems that the current space program has to deal with) the current estimate of a return to the Moon sometime around 2020 is probably highly optimistic.
Such as? Aside from eventually promising but currently too small thrust to be useful ion jets, and proposed but undeveloped and risky nuclear fission thermal systems, burning chemical fuels to get momentum transfer is our only means of viable propulsion. Nuclear fusion powered rocket motors would be great; now all we have to do is make controlled fusion workable. It’ll only be another “another “another twenty or thirty years.””
