re: profit
I don’t even want to imagine strip-mining the moon for whatever’s available.
Not to be an evil capalist, but do you really think anyone is going to notice?
Besides, it’s not like there’s an ecosystem there to screw up.
Well, no, it doesn’t. History shows that land will be populated if it’s suitable to be populated. Nobody populated Antarctica, and they aren’t exactly showing up on Ellesmere Island by the boatload.
The moon is simply not a suitable place for ordinary human habitation. Just take this two part test:
- Do you live in Antarctica? Why not?
The Moon is a MUCH worse place to live than Antarctica. A THOUSAND times worse. The environment is far, far more hostile, the separation from loved ones much worse, the dangers order of magnitude greater, the chance of escape less, the cost of going and coming back a hundred thousand times higher. If nobody wants to live on Antarctica, why would there be a rush to live on the Moon?
The answer has been clearly provided to you: It is too expensive. This is not a matter of speculation. It is an absolute fact. More moon missions were planned in theory after Apollo 17; they were cancelled by Congress to save money. Private interests have not gone to the Moon because none were willing to pony up the money. It costs too much.
Now, YOU may think it’s worth the cost, and why, you just might be right. But nobody who actually has that much money think it’s worth the cost, and that’s why nobody has gone back.
Now, this may change some day. Perhaps they will build a more economical vehicle. Maybe this fantastic, cover-of-Popular-Mechanics “space elevator” will happen, though I personally think it’s ludicrous. But so far it’s been too costly, as evidenced by the fact that nobody has done it.
Regarding possible oxygen production on the moon: I presume this would somehow entail the reduction of silicate rock and dust. Can anyone tell me how you extract oxygen from (impure) silica in a closed cycle?
Several possibilities are described here.
•Pyrolysis of FeO at >1700 °C
•Electrolysis of molten silicates at ~1500°C
•Chemical reduction of ilmenite at ~1000°C, followed by electrolysis of the resulting water.
But people do live on Antarctica. There are several research stations that are permanently manned. Exploration of antarctica has been very productive in biology, geology and other fields of science. There are also many astronomy and physics experiment for which Antarctica is a suitable location, with enough benefits to justify the enormous cost of shipping the personnel and instruments to McMurdo station or the South Pole. Not many people make a profit operating an antarctic station, but only because you can’t put monetary value on scientific results. The same should be true for a lunar base; it will be far more difficult and expensive than an Antarctic base, but the potential returns are proportionally greater.
This from Encyclopedia Astronautica regarding the money ‘saved’ by cancelling Apollos 18, 19 and 20:
Total savings of cancelling the two missions (since the hardware was already built and the NASA staff had to stay in place for the Skylab program) was only $42.1 million.
So we spent $25 billion for 6 landings and for only another $42 mil they could’ve gotten 3 (50%) more!
Government efficiency at its finest…
Because it’s time we became a spacefaring species.
Absolutely; There is thirty or more times as much water in the frozen moons and comets of the solar system as there is on earth; billions of megawatt/years worth of energy in the deuterium and He3 in the gas giants;
and the sun will provide a trillion times our current energy requirements for five billion years; how can we afford not to colonise space?
Well, there you go; it’s all relative. Antarctica is a CONTINENT, a land mass 50% bigger than the United States, and it has no permanent residents at all (I know some stations are permanently manned, but it’s shift work - no person lives there permanently) and the transient residents wouldn’t fill a medium sized apartment building.
And the Moon is a thousand times more hostile. I think it absurd to simply assume that experience shows people will populate any uninhabited land. Antarctica is “uninhabited” in any meaningful sense.
No, but experience also tells us that exploring uninhabited land and maintaining a presense is worth the cost. Which will be the goal of a manned lunar program, if there is one in the near future.
As a former Federal employee, I resent the implication that bureaucrats were somehow responsible for the cancellation of the last three missions. That was an entirely political decision, mandated by Congress, and based at least in part on the growing (and to me entirely inexplicable) apathy of the public toward the missions.
Um, here’s my question: WHY would we want to colonize the moon?
I understand the whole observatory thing, but some people are talking about turning the moon into, like, a second Earth, to help with our overpopulation here on earth.
No. Thinking of the moon as “overflow living space” is incorrect. That kind of thing won’t be practical or economical for at least 500 more years.
Why establish a viable colony in the next 50 years? Well, because we can.
This strikes me as excessive. Where did you get this figure from?
I worked at Biosphere 2 for nearly 7 years so I’ll take a stab at this one.
The original company name was Space Biospheres Ventures and they did intend to develop technology for self sustaining environments. Of course no one ever intended to put it on the moon. As it was the structure needed two huge expansion chambers, referred to as lungs, just to keep the glass from blowing out of the framework as the sun heated the air inside.
Even if they could build a structure that size it took an enourmous amount of space and equipment to marginally sustain eight people for two years. Saturn V rockets managed to get a few tons of equipment to the moon. Building Biosphere 2 on the moon will take many thousands of tons of gear. We aren’t there yet.
You can’t view Apollo 11 as being at all the same as Columbus’ voyage or Lindberg’s flight (in terms of practicality, not in terms of historical significance, in which case it more than equals them).
Even though so much has changed since their times, crossing the ocean still just relies on the buoyancy of a ship’s hull or the lifting power of an airfoil.
However, using a liquid fueled rocket 1/5 the power of an atomic bomb to get to the moon is not something whose footsteps can be followed in easily. Or, on a regular basis anyway, at all.
The Cold War sort of ‘short-circuited’ the natural progression of space travel. Most of the Apollo program was the epitome of non-general purpose. It was a one-off, custom made, spare-no-expense, send three guys to the moon & back right now, program. There’s little it had that can be translated into efficient, regular Earth-Moon travel.
Probably the worst thing about Apollo is that it made it seem like the Space Shuttle had to be our next step. But the Shuttle is also wildly inefficient even for its job of low-Earth payload placement.
In fact, as expensive as Apollo was, we’d have been much better off if we had continued to use Apollo CSMs atop Saturn Vs and 1Bs for low-Earth payloads & manned space flight for the last 25 years instead of the Shuttle. It’d have cost less money, would probably not have cost 14 astronauts’ lives, and we’d be further along explorationally than we are today.
**quote:
Originally posted by Flash-57
No. Thinking of the moon as “overflow living space” is incorrect. That kind of thing won’t be practical or economical for at least 500 more years.
Originally posted by QED
This strikes me as excessive. Where did you get this figure from?**
I personally also assume it will take at least that long for enough water to be imported for a self-sustaining biosphere to be estabished big enough to support emigration from Earth.
> This strikes me as excessive. Where did you get this figure from?
I made it up. It just seems to me that the economy of shipping people off to live on the moon, simply to reduce overcrowding, would be well beyond simply sending people there as a vacation.
I’m guessing that we will have a semi-permanant colony on the moon within 100 years. I suppose it could be done today if anyone wanted to spend the money.
I’m also taking into consideration the fact that the world seems to have more pressing domestic problems to fix before we go off to live on the moon.
So, maybe in about 75 years, the world will have settled down a bit and we can start the colony project. 25 years after that, we’ll have a colony that’s relatively self-sustaining and supports a moderate population of, maybe, 50 scientists and rich tourists.
Perhaps in the next 200 years, the colony is expanded, and maybe a few others are built. I guess people would be doing a lot of mining and energy farming. I mean, there really isn’t much up there.
In another 100 years, visiting the moon might become a cost effective vacation for the average person. Perhaps there are 1000 full-time, non-working residents living there.
In another 100 years, housing becomes affordable for the average joe.
True, but it need not be self sustaining in order to be practical.