If we plan on using any of the moon’s resources, doesn’t it make sense to be where the resources are?
well, of course. That was my question, though. What moon resources are so interesting that make it worth it the extra trip to the moon which has all the Mars problems even if to a lesser degree when compared to orbit? (fuel, time, gravity, etc)
The Moon has mass. The Moon has water. An orbital station has to have every little bit of mass shipped up from Earth’s gravity well. A lunar station can build things in situ.
The Moon has gravity. In Zero-G, bones lose calcium and degrade. In 1/6 G, this would be a much slower process. Maybe it wouldn’t even happen.
And if you want to learn how to live on other planets, you have to be on another planet. The Moon will teach us methods for building things in airless environments, for dealing with dust and other contaminants, etc.
The Moon also has craters that could be converted into large radio telescopes.
The Moon may have other resources we won’t know about until we go there.
The Moon may have huge underground lava tubes which could be pressurized and turned into living space for thousands of people.
There are things to study on the Moon which will help us understand the origins of Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe.
There’s actually a pretty big list of reasons for going to the Moon.
[url=“http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=105720”]Considering that we’re running out of metal, I’d say “No!”
Also, it doesn’t matter a rat’s ass to those of us on Earth how polluting the industries on the Moon are. They can spray plutonium all over the face of the Moon, and the bulk of humanity (which will be on Earth) won’t have to give a fetid dingo’s kidney about it. IMHO, we’ll strike out for the Moon and Mars because we can harvest materials to our heart’s content without having to worry about polluting the Earth (and pollution is rapidly becoming the largest problem humanity faces).
Thanks again, Sam.
Wouldn’t this be like being on a boat and pooping on the life raft?. I say keep it clean for now until we are sure we can go somewhere else first.
You’ve got it backwards. The “life raft” is what we’re in now – Earth’s biosphere. The Moon has no biosphere and any human colonists there will be entirely dependent on artificial life-support mechanisms anyway, so it does not matter, much, where they throw their waste.
Of course, I could be wrong . . .
No, the choice is between not having a moon base and having NASA’s $17 billion budget cut to $9B, and having a moon base and having NASA’s $17B budget skyrocketing insanely.
A lunar station can build things in situ - once you fly up a factory for them to do so with. That costs megabucks. And then you need people up there just to run the damned factory. And it isn’t like you can build a wide range of gizmos from raw materials available on the moon with just one factory. You’d need a bunch of them.
The Moon has gravity? Big deal. I’ve got a lifetime supply right here. Why, I’m using some while I type this.
After hearing for eons that one of the big selling points of the ISS was that, unlike our home planet, it didn’t have gravity…you get the idea.
There are also ways to learn to live on another planet without being on one. A Biosphere-type experiment on Antarctica (sealed environment with continuous heat loss across the barrier) would be a very good preliminary step, and probably doable for under a billion. Try that and get back to me when you’ve got it working.
The ISS has presumably taught us some things about building in airless environments.
The Moon has craters that could be turned into large radio telescopes - and I bet we could figure out a way to do that a lot cheaper via robot.
The Moon may have…ponies. Sorry, right now we’re still looking for ponies in Iraq.
And sure, there are things to study on the Moon that will help us understand origins and all that stuff. So what part of that do we need human footsteps on the Moon for?
All I see here is that some people are romantics about putting people into space, and want the rest of us to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize their fantasies.
I want to see my government’s money going to fight global warming and provide universal health care. Right now, America’s priorities are so screwed up that dumping fantasies into the mix is absurd; after we get things straightened up a bit, maybe the fantasy will be worth talking about. But there’s no urgency to space travel; space will be there, waiting for us. If we wait fifty years, our technology will have advanced at least as much as it has in the past fifty years, and space will be easier, cheaper, more attainable.
In the meantime, I’m perfectly happy with a $9B/yr unmanned space program. We can do a lot with that.
Shows how little you know about manufacturing. Give me a lathe and some raw materials and I can turn out a factory. With CNC machines, you can have an operation that runs 24 hours a day with minimal human supervision.
CNC?
Christopher Newport College. I used to teach there. 
(The TLA* shortage strikes again!)
*Three-letter acronym. Just aren’t enough of them to go around!
Computer Numerical Control. They can be as simple as an old 286 PC (or even older as I’ve seen ones that used punched paper tape) bolted to a machine (like a lathe or a mill or other machine tool) or as complicated as a self-loading machine with automated tool selection running an SGI box.
This is where I was going. While it may be true that there are raw materials on the Moon, our ability to make use of them right now is moslty limited to piling regolith on top of our buildings for insulation (a rather inneficient insulation that would require additional structural support that needs to be shipped from here.
It is not like we are sending the Swiss Familiy Robinson and wait for them to have a moon base ready for us later on. The way NASA works leaves very little left to improvisation.
When you compare the costs of shipping all to orbit and shipping a bit less to the moon. Who comes out ahead?
That happened to the guys in charge of The TTP Project.
Has it occurred to you the solution to global warming might be out there? Think about it – every hydrocarbon “alternative” to gasoline – biodiesel, alcohol, whatever – still produces CO2 as a waste product. In environmental terms these “solutions” are actually worse than petroleum, precisely because they are renewable resources – we can just keep makin’ ‘em and burnin’ 'em until the coasts flood. We might be able to replace gasoline with hydrogen, producing no waste product but water vapor, and since the hydrogen is extracted from water in the first place that would not add to the Earth’s net supply of water; but where do we get the hydrogen? Every known method to make it requires electric power. And I don’t think we want to burn coal to get the power, that’s even more polluting than gasoline. Nuclear fission power is safer than it once was, but still creates waste. In space, we might set up solar power satellites, beam the energy to Earth and use it to make hydrogen. And if anyone ever perfects controlled nuclear fusion – see post #145.
You sounded pretty good, up until that point. (Well, not really. There’s nothing in history to suggest that NASA’s budget will “skyrocket”. Hell, you could triple it, it would still be less than 2% of the federal budget, and no president since Johnson has even suggested such a raise.)
But the question that comes to mind with the quoted portion of your post is the same one I asked about two pages and several months ago:
What if China gets there first and won’t share? Their Chang’e orbiting probe is scheduled to leave for the moon this coming April. They have big plans and the manpower to accomplish them.
During his confirmation hearings, current NASA chief Michael Griffin said something along the lines of: I don’t want to see the US flag planted by the Apollo astronauts sitting in a museum in Beijing. I agree. It would be the clearest sign ever that America was hopelessly in decline if our priorities were so skewed that we failed to build on our achievements, and let others surpass us.
I usually have to bring this up every NASA thread, when someone talks about how we should be spending space money on healthcare, and here we go again:
The total outlays planned for the Department of Health and Human Services for FY2007 are $697,950,000,000. Total planned outlays for NASA are $16,356,000,000. Total planned outlays for everything are $2,770,000,000,000. (source )
Current estimated population of the US: 300,871,254 (as of the moment I just copied this from here).
So, on behalf of each man, woman and child in the US, the feds plan to spend about $9,206.60. Of that, $2,319.76 will be spent on Health and Human Services. $54.36 will be spent on NASA. So if I understand you, you want to cut that in half, and provide universal health care for about $28 per person per year, which 9 grand can’t seem to accomplish already.
Talk about fantasy.
Your raw materials are going to be raw indeed. Going to make stuff out of iron? (Steel is right out - need coke, which is a coal product. Coal’s a fossil fuel.) You’re going to need to mine it, which will require mining machinery that you’ll need to import from Earth because you don’t have raw materials to work with your lathe yet. You’re going to need to purify it, which to do in quantity will require something a bit more advanced than you can do in your garage. So you’ll need to bring up the pieces of a smelter, I believe it is, from Earth. Then unless you’re one hell of a lathe operator, you’ll probably need a bunch of people working a bunch of lathes…you get the idea.
To make sophisticated products requires complexity and interdependence, which requires lots of people and machinery. Another reason for building the colony on Earth first is to see what minimum combination of people and imports you really need for a mostly, but not completely, self-sustaining base, and what level of technology that base would have.
But the point is, let’s find all this out by spending hundreds of millions of dollars here on Earth, and then we can decide what the implications are for the attributes and costs of a lunar base. I’m willing to see my tax dollars spent on an assortment of Earthbound tests of sustainability in that sort of price range. But to decide that it’s worth spending that sort of money on a lunar base, and then doing sustainability testing of this sort, is bassackwards.
that should be 2.3 grand. My point still stands.
I say, let 'em try - and if they succeed, good for them.
Talk about strawmen! Did I ever say the savings in the space program would pay for universal health care all by themselves? No. But will it make it harder to do so, if we triple NASA’s budget so that 2% of our budget is going into space? Yep.
And if, in fifty years, when the USA is all grown up and ready for space colonization, and China says “Try for the Moon or Mars and our bases there will blow you out of the sky”, what then?
That’s really the straw that broke the camel’s back? That’s the main boondoggle that keeps America from universal prosperity? When we’ll spend ten times that amount in Iraq this year?
There are a hell of a lot bigger line items I’d like examined with the same scrutiny NASA receives routinely before I go cutting off our future.
First thing is, let’s figure out ways to use less power to effect the same results. Lighter cars, hybrids, homes built to make use of passive solar heat in winter, you name it. We’ve got miles to go in getting the most use out of each kilowatt of electricity, each barrel of petroleum, whatever.
OK, but can’t we launch those from Earth?
We already went 'round about that on p.2 of this thread. He-3 fusion needs temperatures about 10 times those for conventional D-T fusion, and we’re having enough trouble making that work.