NASA wants a permanent Moonbase -- good idea?

Great Debates
141

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
BrainGlutton, it doesn’t matter if the base is at the poles: the moon is tidelocked; the same side is always facing the earth. That doesn’t mean the moon can launch an attack on the US at any time. The earth still spins, and one side always faces away from the moon. If you can’t see the moon in the sky, the moon can’t see you, either.
[/QUOTE]

True – but that means you have no more than 24 hours to wait before your target area is facing the Moon. And it doesn’t have to be facing the Moon – you would just time/power your launch so its trajectory would intersect with the target. You could even do that from the Moon’s Dark Side. It’s not rocket science, just basic Newtonian physics/ballistic engineering.

142

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
I’ll support a moon base when someone tells me just what we could do on a moon base that we can’t do in a space station.
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Exactly my point. (and don’t answer “study moon rocks”)

143

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
It’s not rocket science, just basic Newtonian physics/ballistic engineering.
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What’s the difference? :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, you could use the moon to launch an attack on the earth, sure, but how is this a good idea compared to the alternatives?

144

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Exactly my point. (and don’t answer “study moon rocks”)
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I’d love to experience zero G for a short while, but psychologically I think I’d feel much better spending six months to a year on the moon, with ground under me and a roof over my head.

For whatever that’s worth. To me, it would make a difference.

145

Well, we could mine it for helium-3, which is the perfect fuel for nuclear fusion power . . . assuming anyone ever perfects controlled fusion . . .

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
Seriously, you could use the moon to launch an attack on the earth, sure, but how is this a good idea compared to the alternatives?
[/QUOTE]

A base on the Moon would have an unlimited supply of (1) rocks and (2) power. It could be used to devastate whole cities and even countries – without violating any nuclear-weapons treaties and without leaving any residual radiation.

Although, as Sam Stone has pointed out, making the preparations undetected would be a problem. (In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress the Loonie rebels don’t have to make any preparations, they just use the same catapults already in use to launch canisters of food Earthwards, and fill the canisters with rocks and change the target coordinates.)

Of course it’s not a good idea, weapons of mass destruction never are, but if the relevant paranoia gets us out there, that will help the human race survive, in the long run.

146

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
I’d love to experience zero G for a short while, but psychologically I think I’d feel much better spending six months to a year on the moon, with ground under me and a roof over my head.

For whatever that’s worth. To me, it would make a difference.
[/QUOTE]

Especially for old folks. Low (but not zero) gravity makes for a good retirement environment.

147

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Of course it’s not a good idea, weapons of mass destruction never are, but if the relevant paranoia gets us out there, that will help the human race survive, in the long run.
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Maybe, but at this stage, I’m not sure we’re any different than stone-age humans deciding which design of log canoe will get us to nuclear submarines sooner.

148

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
Maybe, but at this stage, I’m not sure we’re any different than stone-age humans deciding which design of log canoe will get us to nuclear submarines sooner.
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So? We’d still be sailing in log canoes if some stone-age dreamer hadn’t been restless enough to experiment with silly, impractical ideas like joining planks together.

149

Sorry, but no we wouldn’t.

Firstly, if someone hadn’t come up with the idea, someone else would have. I’d be very surprised if it was arrived at independently at several points in history anyway. I’m not a believer in the “great men” theory of history. Technologies develop, for the most part, when social, scientific, and economic forces make them likely to. I’m convinced that manned space exploration will take off if and when private corporations decide it is worthwhile. Government can help by investing in education, propulsion and other basic science research, and social welfare, and by rewarding technological innovation and development. Trying to create space missions in the absence of social forces driving and supporting them is futile and a waste of resources, as the ISS demonstrates.

Secondly, even if no one had come up with the idea, society wouldn’t have come to a standstill. Someone would have come up with some other solution, or we would have gotten along without one. Nuclear subs have at least as much in common with log canoes as with wooden sailing ships, and we’d have gotten to them either way.

Which brings me to my third point, which is that we aren’t like people deciding whether to joining planks together, we’re like people asking which log canoe will get us to sailing ships first. The answer is none of them! Shipbuilding didn’t develop out of better and better canoes, it was a radical innovation that did not directly depend on earlier methods. If the goal is to colonize space, it will take a similar quantum leap in technology (several, actually). That won’t come about through pushing existing technologies further and further. It will come about through basic research in materials science, propulsion, nanotechnology, medicine, etc.

Just to be clear, I do think we should explore space, and I hope we do. I don’t think history or technology is inevitable. There are things we can do to increase our chances of colonizing space. I’m just not convinced that building a moon base is one of them. Maybe a moon base would galvanize society and be the catalyst we need to get out there, but I doubt it. The ISS didn’t do it, nor did it advance technology or science, and it strikes me as just as significant both emotionally and technologically as a moon base. And it’s fucking expensive for something that I don’t think will show any return. There are much better things to spend our space budget on than a long shot with limited payoff.

150

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
There are much better things to spend our space budget on than a long shot with limited payoff.
[/QUOTE]

Such as?

151

[QUOTE=Alan Smithee]
Which brings me to my third point, which is that we aren’t like people deciding whether to joining planks together, we’re like people asking which log canoe will get us to sailing ships first. The answer is none of them! Shipbuilding didn’t develop out of better and better canoes, it was a radical innovation that did not directly depend on earlier methods. If the goal is to colonize space, it will take a similar quantum leap in technology (several, actually). That won’t come about through pushing existing technologies further and further. It will come about through basic research in materials science, propulsion, nanotechnology, medicine, etc.

[/QUOTE]

Although I do agree with you in your last paragraph and agree with you that there are quantum leaps in technology, I will nitpck this point.

Log canoes did take us to nuclear subs. And they did by the way of Sailships.

Log canoes had to evolve into Sailships. At some point in history, canoes were good enough that what stopped them from being useful was not their integrity or their capacity to carry a payload. It was the propulsion that stopped them. Then we invented Sails. Had someone hit his head and invented Sails without a good enough boat to put it on, it would have died as an idea until it had a use.

So the ISS and the Moon Base are useful in that they keep people thinking and opening the door for that next quantum leap in technology. But we also have the ability and the responsibility to weight it versus other projects who could do the same and more for our use of resources. An orbital launch to Mars is a more direct step forward.

To push the canoe analogy a bit further (don’t worry, it will break soon enough), the ISS and the moon base are like rowing around the shores of the island when what we want is to reach that other island over there.

152

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Such as?
[/QUOTE]

Sapo, I admit I know nothing about boats. ISTM, though, that canoes didn’t lead to subs, as much as rafts (or some other primitive form of joining planks together) did. That’s what BG was positing as the significant breakthrough, and what I meant by “shipbuilding” and “wooden sailing ships”–ships that were assembled, rather than just carved. (Maybe I just chose a bad analogy, though.)

Either way, though, I think the point is clear enough: space stations and moon bases certainly aren’t bad ideas in and of themselves, but they take huge amounts of money away from better projects, and may just convince the public that space is boring and a bunch of boondoggle. Either way won’t make much difference one way or the other to anything as far off as self-sufficient planetary colonies, much less (as proposed in other threads) interstellar exploration.

153

Alan, for all I know you know more about ships than I do. My knowledge comes mostly from taking pics of my children next to them.

We agree on the big issue, though. They are both first steps so far from the ultimate goal that it may matter little except for which one doesn’t get the whole thing cancelled at the public’s whim.

154

You can’t understand how ISS came to be without understanding the cold war roots of the project.

During the cold war, there were attempts to use the space race as a way to bridge the gap between the U.S. and the USSR. This started with Apollo-Soyuz in the 1970’s - a mission that had no real value other than as a way to get Americans and Soviets talking, working together, and sharing information. The thinking at the time was that by bringing us together in a large joint project, barriers of mistrust could be broken and a new era of cooperation and detente’ would ensue.

Later on, the ISS was a much more sophisticated geopolitical plan. One of the obstactles to disarmament and the peaceful transition of the Soviet Union to a free society was what to do with their massive military economy, all the scientists that built ICBMS and other weapons, etc. ISS became kind of a social works program for Russian engineers. The thinking was that by giving Russia a giant space project to work on, and by guaranteeing a future for Soyuz capsules, Progress rockets, and other Soviet hardware, it would lessen the strain of ending the cold war and help prevent these people from staging a coup, or from selling their skills to bad people like China or North Korea.

ISS became a white elephant because its scientific mission was always compromised by the politics behind the project. And as the geopolitical situation changed, the rationale of ISS kept changing. So funding would be cut, and the station would be re-designed. Then funding would be restored, and it would be re-designed again. Then funding would be cut… It’s a hell of a way to run an engineering project, and the result is the hideously expensive, complex, and less than totally useful ISS we see today.

Luckily, the new NASA sees ISS for the boondoggle that it has become, and has plans to end its involvement with it by 2016, when the last of the international commitments to the station run out. And the major part of NASA’s expenditure to ISS will end in 2010, when the last shuttle flight to it brings the last major component required to complete its construction. As these programs end, money that is flowing into them now will be increasingly diverted to the new space exploration initiatives.

Had NASA not come up with a new space exploration initiative that would soak up the workers and infrastructure left behind by the Shuttle’s retirement, it’s highly likely that rather than the money being diverted into robotic science or other NASA projects, it would have simply been cut from the budget. So the choice really isn’t between having a moon base or having a bunch of new robotic explorers - the choise is between having a moon base or having NASA’s 17 billion dollar budget cut to maybe 9 billion.

155

Thanks, Sam, that makes a lot of sense.

So the question is, is a moon base better or worse boondoggle than a manned mission to Mars? I’d much rather see us on Mars (and I think the public would too), but I don’t really know what the potential scientific payoffs are for one vs. the other.

156

For my money, the moon mission makes a lot more sense, because it’s more sustainable. I can’t see a Mars mission being anything more than a ‘flags and footprints’ type mission like Apollo was.

I’d rather see a permananent base on the moon, with ongoing R&D and continual incremental improvements in our knowledge of how to live and work in space, than having all the money thrown at a one-shot mission that wouldn’t be followed up by another similar effort for decades.

Hopefully, the moon base will act as an incentive for private space industry to develop. NASA seems to finally have woken up to the fact that it would be much better if it could offload things like resupply and maintenance to the private sector while it focuses on blazing trails and doing R&D.

If a company like Bigelow can underwrite its development costs for space habitation by supplying lunar TransHabs, or a company like Kistler can underwrite the funding for its rockets by providing resupply missions to orbit for the government, then maybe we can bootstrap a private space infrastructure and eventually get NASA out of the operational space business entirely and let them focus on long-term research and exploration. That would be ideal.

157

Great posts, Sam.

Now, isn’t going to Mars like a vacation trip to Australia?. You don’t pay that ticket to go there for a weekend. A Mars program would have to be more than “flags and footprints”. There is actual interesting (i.e. potentially profitable) stuff in Mars. A Mars BASE would make a lot more sense than a Moon Base. Isn’t that in the cards at all?

158

Mars is far more problematic as a permanent base than the moon. For one thing, if there’s a problem with equipment, it takes months to get supplies or rescue there. On the moon, it can be done in hours. Mars has a deeper gravity well and an atmosphere, so getting people to and from the surface is much more difficult. And once people get there, they have to wait for months before they can get back. So we have to send years worth of supplies and get it safely onto the ground.

Then there’s the atmosphere and the weather - the moon has no atmosphere, so it’s relatively easy to control the temperature of a moon base. You can erect sun shields to block the sun when you need to cool things down, and you wouldn’t need much in the way of heaters to keep things warmed up when the sun is down, because the only way to lose heat is through radiation. Mars has winds and an atmosphere to conduct heat, and it’s very cold there. A Mars base would probably require a nuclear reactor for power. A moon base could use solar cells.

And with the faster turnaround times to the moon, it would be much easier to try experimental equipment and retire equipment that doesn’t work out.

159

I would put a base on the far side of the Moon: a primarily radio astronomy centered base, positioned to shield the dishes from the artificial radio emissions of planet Earth, as well as to collect any wavelengths thate are normally absorbed by a Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere.

I would assemble a radio array like this:

http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~tony/gif/vla.gif

and/or this

http://www.universetoday.com/am/uploads/2004-0915array-full.jpg

also, convert one of the craters into an arecibo type of radio antenna

An optical telescope would be excellent there as well, as there is no atmosphere to distort the image.

160

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Mars is far more problematic as a permanent base than the moon…
[/QUOTE]

Agree with the whole post. Why the moon over an Orbital Station done right? Other than cheap insulation, what are the advantages of being on the moon?