I don’t see that in the O.P. i do see that the moon is not the destination in the O.P.
If in the future we discover that some fuel source (perhaps not available with current technology) is cheaper to produce on the moon (in addition to the fact its cheaper to launch from there) then there is every economic reason to go there.
Getting outside the O.P. (or maybe not) a base on the moon, or several bases, make sense for other reasons besides economic.
Survival of humanity should earth fall victim to some apocalypse. Zombies couldn’t get there!
(Just being facetious about the zombies, there are other more likely apocalypses)
Military security: It is well recognized that the moon would be an excellent military base from which to defeat other earthly enemies. It should be secured. In the unlikely event that we’re not alone and hostile aliens plan to invade, securing the moon to deny it as a base for them makes sense as well. it would be easier to defend the moon if we have a presence. It would also be easier to detect an enemy presence on the moon if we were already there, whether the enemy is the chinese or aliens.
Of course I don’t view alien invasion as anything other than extremely unlikely.
Bolding mine. I think that’s a bit overstated.
In any case, the moon, has many advantages. No biosphere for one. So if you can find a fission or fusion fuel there you don’t have to worry about killing off anything with whatever waste your magic powerplant emits.
Also, it might be cold enough for relatively high temperature superconductors to work in shadows. You could have powerlines feeding propulsion lasers (as Der said above) going to large craters filled with highly efficient, dirty reactors.
And more importantly, if you build the ships on the moon, out of lunar materials, or from materials brought to the moon by asteroid belt mass drivers or whatever, it is much, much cheaper than lifting your ships from Earth.
So?
Is there thorium on the Moon? Enough to be worth mining?
If the technology to use the Moon as a useful military base existed, would it not therefore be relatively easy to destroy that base (especially if it’s aliens doing the destroying)? Maybe a war between humans could be kept non-nuclear and so minimize threats to such a lunar military base, but I doubt any aliens willing and able to travel all the way to Earth in order to fight a war would have any trouble destroying a lunar base.
Well, no. I mean, a land- or submarine-launched missile can reach your enemy’s territory in minutes. Anything launched from the Moon takes days to reach Earth. There’s no advantage. And if you’re just throwing rocks down the gravity well like in TMIAHM, that only works if the war is Moon vs. all-Earth, because there’s no way of targeting them. They could land anywhere.
Good…it’s easier to talk to someone who’s had basic chemistry. Here is a list of the composition of the Moon’s soil. You tell ME what you can make out of it. And this doesn’t even get into the possibility that there may be water ice on the moon as well (there is certainly large quantities of hydrogen that have been observed).
I’d say that the basic question of ‘could you do it’ or ‘would it be useful’ IS settled. Whether it’s ECONOMICAL to do it or OPTIMAL…that is a different kettle of fish. The OP asked ‘Is there any real use for the Moon in interplanetary travel/shipping?’ and the answer is ‘yes’, you could use it that way without having to resort to magic or bullshit. Whether we WOULD use it or whether it’s the best thing we could do is a separate question.
Obviously, if we were actually going to start interplanetary travel and shipping then we WOULD have the money. Energy is pretty easy, especially on the Moon. Leaving aside solar and the soil you could fairly easily just drop a bunch of fission reactors such as we put on submarines, if nothing else. For one thing it’s a sterile environment that is ALREADY heavily radiated, so you don’t need to worry about environmentalists going ape shit over using fission (ok, you probably still would). Dig a big hole, put your reactors in it and run your power leads back. Bob’s your uncle…lots-o-power.
-XT
No, wait, come to think of it – didn’t the Loonies use remote-controllable guided shipping containers? So they could target certain cities?
It is true that missiles from the moon would take longer than an earth-launched missile to reach an earth target, but this is not the only aspect. Missiles on the moon would be hard to destroy from earth.
Submarines are also hard to destroy, but not all countries have them and I admit that a country with submarines has little to gain by placing missiles on the moon.
However, I’m not thinking of missiles alone. A massive laser could deliver destruction even faster than an earth launched ICBM.
As far as the rocks down the gravity well, yes, but we certainly have the means to target missiles/lasers.
A weapons platform isn’t the only use either.
What capabilites any aliens have is pure speculation. it could be that their main technology advantage is in a space drive and their weapons systems aren’t appreciably more advanced than ours. Who would win a human/alien war is anyone’s guess; but I can see advantages for the aliens to be had if the aliens can establish a moon base; and I think it would be harder for them to do that if we occupied the moon.
As far as being well recognized, by that I mean we did, after all, go to the trouble to make treaties forbidding the military use of space, so it has been taken seriously before.
An alien race with any mastery of interstellar travel would certainly be able to direct any number of asteroids at speed to wipe out any moon base, which would never be able to entirely defend itself.
Moon base as defence is just science fantasy.
Well, yes, it has been. As David Szondy writes on his Tales of Future Past site:
It appears there are useful amounts of this even closer than the moon.
Really? You throw out the composition of the entire moon and say “you figure it out”? You’re making the extraordinary claims, you tell me how you think it’s going to work. Since it only takes basic chemistry and all.
The answer is “yes, you could use it that way, at a net loss of energy that would cost more you more than you would get out of it.” I suppose I shouldn’t have ruled out the option of using the moon as a way to waste resources on your interplanetary trek, but yes, in fact you could use it for that.
And if we did, then we would’t need the moon anymore.
How is energy so easy? I mean, milliwatts from a solar panel for a lunar rover, sure, but an energy source that doesn’t require prohibitive amounts of energy to extract, and then in significant enough amounts for space travel? I think you need to take a second year of college chemistry, frankly.
I’m reminded of a quote from a forgettable movie… “if we could get all the atomic energy out of that saltshaker on the table, you’d never need to buy gas again”. Well, of course you could. But if you had the energy to do that, then you wouldn’t need to piddle around extracting it from household objects.
Someday we’ll have a moon base for scientific research, maybe even a small residential colony with a non-trivial population. But it will never be any commercially significant source of anything besides geological samples.
I have always been a proponent of space exploration.
However, pretending the a lunar base would be a useful jumping off point disregards the actual physics involved. Instead, we should have a geosynch orbital habitat and use it as the anchoring point for a space elevator. Originally, the habitat would serve as a construction site for increasingly larger ships. If we can just send (OK, there are logistical elements of this that I haven’t worked out) an nickel-iron asteroid into a geosynch orbit and use that as our habitat.
So, we then have raw materials for the creation of a habitat.
Nah.
Aliens with sufficient technology to hurtle asteroids might arrive without sufficient fuel to utilize their technology on such a wide scale. Like us, they might be out of fuel by the time they even get somewhere else, and like us, might only barely have an edge over a slightly less technologically advanced people.
Like us, they may have been running from their own destruction. Like us, they’d probably consider themselves on a hope and a prayer that they’d survive if they did manage to get somewhere else.
Like us, I’d argue that our likelyhood of going elsewhere and lobbing asteroids at moons or planets to wipe out some missiles and then inhabitng the place in the near future, in a useful condition to our understanding of life, is about nil to stoopid.
I’d argue that we’d be lucky to establish a base on a moon of an inferior people.
Next, I’d deny any colonizing alien a foothold on the moon.
The clip is a presentation on why Thorium reactors have several advantages over standard Fission designs, a number of which make them much more suitable as a power source for a possible Lunar construction plant.
A short article on the potential advantages of this new technology can be found here:
It is worth noting that Oak Ridge operated a prototype reactor from 1964 to 1969, which worked well. While there are certainly design issues that need to be addressed*, the billions of dollars that India and China are spending on bring Thorium reactors into production would indicate that they consider the issues to be surmountable.
*hence why I underlined potential
It seems a bit of a stretch that an alien race with the technology to manage interplanetary travel should somehow be unable to refuel along the way, from either gas giants or asteroid belts.
You either do it the quick way, using magic level science that means you can control the laws of physics/warp spacetime/step outside of the standard dimensions and their limits, all of which would also be superweapons we could not defend against in any way.
Or you do it the slow way, with massive space ships that must have the ability to resupply for fuel, food and manufacturing materials along the way from either gas giants/asteroid belts/whatever.
Either way, the idea that they would turn up, conveniently too depleted of resources to be able to attack us with either their drive system or re-targeted meteors, with no way of refueling, seems just a little bit improbable.
Any asteroid that was of significant size to be used as a resource for materials is going to be tens of thousands of tons.
As far as I am aware, there is no technology known to us to move such a mass. I would welcome any information to the contrary.
Short of that, we would need some system of robots that could strip such an asteroid into useable materials, and either build a mass launcher to fire them into the position we want, or convert the raw materials into something with its own propulsion.
