Military Strategic Importance of Moon Base to China/USA ++

Great Debates
21

Evidently you’ve never seen a government operation at work.

A trillion dollars is a very low estimate; it’s be a miraculous achievement to put a large permanent base on the Moon that cheaply. What you’re proposing is the creation of a space launch capability on a scale unprecedented in the history of spaceflight. All the money that has ever been spent on space exploration in the entire history of aviation did less in space than you’re proposing.

If you could put a base on the Moon for $20 billion it would have been done by rich guys by now.

I’m still a bit confused as to why this would be a better idea than nuclear weapons, which are cheaper and don’t require going to the Moon. Radiation? Drop a multimegaton rock on the Earth and I assure you you’ll have a lot of concerns besides radiation.

Even if this was possible, which it isn’t, you simply couldn’t get it up and working BEFORE it was nuked. Do you really think the world’s other powers wouldn’t notice you were building a gigantic rock gun on the Moon, and wouldn’t vaporize it?

22

Iran is begging for a preemptive strike before their nuclear weapons program gets too far. How far do you think they’d get towards this lunar earth-threatening rock catapult, even if they had the money, scientists and space program in general?

23

They’ll disguise it as a simple mass driver, useful for flinging building material to the O’Neal colonies at the Lagrange points.

And I read far too much Space Boosterism in the Eighties for my own good.

24

DrFidelius! Woohoo…one more person who made a point on my side of this argument! Once I get off work you doubters are toast.

25

If I had to guess, I would assume that in the case ABMs were actually practical, it might still be impossible to ‘shoot down’ a high-speed hunk of rock.

That’s all I’ve got - unless you’d rather drop a high-speed rock on them than nuke them and deal with fallout that will blow over your own country.

-Joe

26

I was afraid I wasn’t clear there. I didn’t mean we’d shoot down their rocks (although I bet we would create a lunar rock defense system somewhere in the 30-40 years or so it would take to build such a thing), but rather if tensions were bad enough a country with a lunar based weapon were considering launching rocks, it’s probably already bad enough both countries would be considering nuking each other anyway. It’s quicker, cheaper, and faster. I can’t believe a country would be thinking, “gosh no, we wouldn’t dare nuke you, but we’ll hit with rocks that are just as devastating. You won’t retaliate, will you? That would be rude.”

Anyone know how long it would take a rock - even launched super-duper kinetically or something, to reach the earth?

I think it might be better to build a ultra deluxe whopper destructo laser weapon and point that at the earth. No doubt though, earth would have some of its own pointing up.

27

I forget who wrote the Cold War-era story about a gunfight between spacesuit-clad astronauts and cosmonauts on the Moon’s surface. All of the bullets entered very low orbit and kept re-hitting the U.S. and Soviet moonbases as they orbited. The next phase of the lunar arms race? Building ever-bigger, stronger walls to stop the errant rounds…

28

Things to keep in mind:

  1. You still have to launch the rock from the moon, so you had to carry fuel to the moon. Which means for every pound of rocket fuel you use to reach the moons escape velocity, you had to use up rocket fuel when launching from the earth to get that fuel to the moon. Are you sure that the amount of fuel used to get the fuel to the moon doesn’t match or exceed the amount of fuel you would have used if you just launched the rock from the earth in the first place?

  2. Rock needs to be large enough to get through the earth’s atmosphere, make it all the way to the city in question and do damage. According to a meteorite web site, you need a few tons of weight to do more than just dent the earth.
    Departement Natuurkunde - Universiteit Utrecht

29

Technical feasibility aside, the infinite supply of moon rocks is really not a very good negotiating position.

The fact that you have more than me does not alter my position one bit. You can have as many moon rocks as you like, all I need is enough, say 500, nuclear weapons, to ensure your country becomes a wasteland. You bring moon rock death, I send nuclear death, snap. Ther fact that you can destroy me and vice versa is the only thing on the table, the method is not really an important negotiation point.

No nuclear fallout on my territory, hey that good for me as some people may survive. The fact that your weapons will not render my country a radioactive wasteland and there maybe something left for surviours is really no additional negotiation points for you. For you, well good luck with the radioactive mutant zombies.

Delivery time. I can have your country turned into a smoking hole in the ground in about half an hour. You have to wait for several days, earth moon distances being what they are, well you wont because you will be a smoking hole in the ground in about half an hour, which will bring your waiting to a short and crispy end. I´ll be spending the next few days figuring out exactly where the things will be landing, moving critical things and people out the way and maybe I can find a way to deflect enough crap in the next few days to improve my chances of survival.

You would be in a better negotiation position with nukes.

30

Actually, I’ve been chasing bears around the Olympic Peninsula; however, any point I might have made has already been expressed by others; the notion posed by the o.p. is prohibitively expensive, vulnerable to counterattack, and ultimately less effective than anything extant. If you did want to develop some kind of space weapon capability, like Brilliant Pebbles but using material from space, you could more readily redirect Near Earth Objects to intercept trajectories, though this would be by no means easy with conventional propulsion technology. The mass drivers of Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (to which I’m morally certain the o.p. is obliquely referring) are still science fiction, as we have nothing existing that can drive masses that large. (To be fair, the basic technical concept is sound, but making this feasible would require large superconducting magnets and a massive power supply, both of which would require more maintenance and supplies than would be plausible given existing transportation logistics to the Lunar surface, which to date includes two men, one moon buggy, and one partially expendable lander.)

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once had an argument with the SAC planners about Soviet capabilities in regard to atmospheric nuclear test limitations; they claimed that the Soviets would built new and more effective weapons, testing them behind the Moon. (This would have been in the early 'Sixties when both powers were still trying and failing to hardland a single probe on the Lunar surface.) He told them that they were nuts; that the cost and incentive of doing that was not only prohibitive, but pointless as each power already had very effective designs and enough data to built even more compact weapons without performing atmospheric tests. He turned out to be absolutely correct; not only did the Soviets not test weapons behind the Moon, it is doubtful they even could have, at least with any reliability. This did not, of course, prevent them from developing more effective weapons (as did we) by making use of underground testing and more effective analytical tools.

This is not to say that the question itself is not worth asking, but the answer is trivial; there is no significant military advantage to a Moon base, except in defending it against other Moon bases. Or, as Trooper Simmons says in RvB, Episode 1: “The only reason that we set up a red base here, is because they have a blue base over there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here.”

Stranger

31

Note–the US Navy is testing a prototype mass driver cannon for naval artillery purposes as we speak.

Field testing at sea in 5 years or less.

32

Re–mass driver/railgun

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,160195,00.html

33

From your own citation:*…the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot. That, of course, is the problem with rail guns: Like lasers, they’re out of step with modern-day generators and capacitors. Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation. At 32 megajoules, this new system appears to be the most powerful rail gun ever built, and the Office of Naval Research is installing additional capacitors at the Dahlgren facility to support it. The planned 64-megajoule weapon, if it’s ever built, could require even more power – a staggering 6 million amps…The more daunting challenge is the force of the rail gun itself: A few shots can dislodge the conducting rails – or even damage the barrel of the gun.*And this is for a device throwing a projectile on the order of a thousand kilograms. Something the scale of what the o.p. describes would be dramatically bigger, require considerably more power throughput, and would have presumably much higher heat dissipation issues. As of the current state of the art it is as much science fiction as fusion drives and interstellar vessels.

Stranger

34

Ok… Perhaps a much more interesting debate then is “Military and Strategic Importance of Space, Space exploration, technology, expansion”

You have convinced me that a moon base with the ability to throw big rocks at Earth is step 1000 out of 1000 very significant steps in the future history of space exploration. This is again analogous to all of us on Earth sitting a the bottom of a mountain cliff. At the top of that cliff is perhaps a moonbase or other such Space based militarily strategic position that is extremely advantageous to us down here on the Earth.

In any case, my question to you becomes,

[ol]
[li]What is the military and strategic importance of a space program for a nation such as China, Iran, Etc…[/li][li]If you were China or Iran, and you had say 100 Billion dollars to invest over the next 20 years either in Nuclear Weapons, or ordinary military, or a Space Program, which one do you believe will put your nation in a better position on the world stage?[/li][/ol]

My argument would again be that any investment is nuclear technology is a virtual waste- since any actual war involving nuclear weapons will basically mean the end to civilization on Earth. I would also argue that investments in ordinary military should be limited to merely enough to adequately defend your borders from conventional military attack and you don’t need a ridiculous budget for that.

So, if I was advising the power brokers in such a country, I might say aim for those 1000 steps up the cliffs of power into Space…ok now that I think about it, there are some other areas of technology I also might argue for like Artificial Intelligence and nanotechnology…but those too could support a space program.

Ok, so I suppose the long and short of it, if you believe humanity will ever expand out into space significantly, then I think you should recognize that whoever gets out there ahead off the rest of humanity will have an advantage.

I apologize for my metamorphosing wandering withering post :slight_smile:

35

If you want to use the military threat of dropping stuff down a gravity well onto your enemy, it would be really stupid to build your base at the bottom of a second gravity well instead of at the top of the first.

36

Space colonization is of central strategic importance… even though it is not widely recognized as such.

If we do manage to make the Earth uninhabitable, the technology required to make a self-sustaining space based colony will be the only thing between humanity (and whatever species we preserve) and extinction.

Not that I don’t believe that Jee-zuss will show up and bail out the righteous and all of that (I don’t). But we really should do something about out survival as a species besides ‘have faith’.

Being able to inexpensively and quickly produce habitats could make all the difference between life and death.

Now then, to give it a nationalistic spin, should it be Americans who are of all races and creeds on the moon or a Red Chinese monoculture?

Certainly the Chinese could summon up the will to do it more easily than we could. America is only interested in spending all of our resources to keep the global supply of petroleum and toys moving our way.

37

It may require more power, but it won’t need to be portable, like the Navy one, so that’s an advantage there. It can also be a lot longer and bigger.

38

Piffle.

It’s the first prototype version.

Things will improve. Energy needs can be controlled, with better computer management of the system. This will come, with experience.

39

If yer gonna whip yourself up a MoonBase, yer gonna need to be able to defend your MoonBase as well as your supply lines.

Let’s just look at defending the supply ships as an example. This would be very difficult for even the USA to achieve, much less anyone else. Imagine trillions of bits of shrapnel launched into orbit by rogue nations–how could any nation navigate its spacecraft through such fatal minefields?

40

Go self-sustaining. Hydroponics for food, water wrung from the rocks.