You are correct, I should know better than to post stuff from memory, especially here on the Dope.
Because the moon is tidally locked it rotates only once every ~29 days. A space elevator or some similar structure that requires being an a fixed location would have to be located at one of the libration points (L1 on the Earth-facing side or L2 opposite) at a distance of over 61,500 km and would face enormous tidal stresses in addition to the static load to keep it in tension. Suggesting that a megastructure that is orders of magnitude larger than humanity has ever constructed, built in Lunar orbit, is not exactly bolstering the claim for the viability of “colonization” without substantial advances in materials, propulsion, and habitat technology, notwithstanding the afformentioned problems with operating on the Lunar surface (abrasive electrostatic dust, unfiltered UV that is destuctive to many non-metallic materials and coatings, et cetera), and the low gravity may present an obstacle to long-term habitation regardless of advances in technology.
The comparisons to the European colonization the Americas (the “New World”) are missing one very salient fact; not only were the Americas already habitable and abundant with natural and nutrient resources, they were actually already occupied. When illness killed off major swaths of the native populations, Europeans moved inward, amazed at the fertility of the land, apparently unaware that much of the land had been previously cultivated and prepared, and viewing this preparation for their occupation with the same sense of entitlement as a young child at Christmastime, often invoking their religious beliefs to justify the “manifest destiny” in taking the lands and resources away from the remaining native populations by intimidation, subterfuge, and force. There are no celestial bodies in the rest of the solar system which are in any way habitable, and while they may have natural resources worth exploiting, but only with enormous effort and cost, and almost certainly largely by remotely operated and automated systems rather than human explorers swinging a pick. There is no fur trading industry on Mars or diamond mines on Enceladus, and while there are certainly complex hydrocarbons on the Saturnian moon of Titan, it won’t just come bubbling up out of the ground for us to burn for cheap heating (and we’ll be needing a source of complex hydrocarbons for a carbon-based material infrastructure in any case).
There are good arguments for the value of the resources and access to space, but the notion of “colonization” in any conventional sense with existing technology is necessarily very limited, and would rationally focus on building orbiting habitats using space-based materials with limited processing which can simulate terrestrial conditions rather than trying to remake uninhabitable planets and moons into marginally suitable outposts requiring continuous external support.
Stranger
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Because the moon is tidally locked it rotates only once every ~29 days. A space elevator or some similar structure that requires being an a fixed location would have to be located at one of the libration points (L1 on the Earth-facing side or L2 opposite) at a distance of over 61,500 km and would face enormous tidal stresses in addition to the static load to keep it in tension. Suggesting that a megastructure that is orders of magnitude larger than humanity has ever constructed, built in Lunar orbit, is not exactly bolstering the claim for the viability of “colonization” without substantial advances in materials, propulsion, and habitat technology, notwithstanding the afformentioned problems with operating on the Lunar surface (abrasive electrostatic dust, unfiltered UV that is destuctive to many non-metallic materials and coatings, et cetera), and the low gravity may present an obstacle to long-term habitation regardless of advances in technology.
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It could be [made](Stranger On A Train) with materials available today, which is what I said. It’s feasible, which is what I said. It doesn’t in fact take new advanced materials that are still just theoretical at this point (such as large scale carbon nano-tubes)…you could use ’ Kevlar, Spectra or M5 Fibre’. Certainly production for these kinds of scale (and, well, getting them to the Moon, then figuring out how to build it all :p) would be a, um, challenge…but it’s do-able. Just like a skyhook is do-able on the Moon. Or, as I said, more realistically you could use mass drivers or even just rockets using fuel made right on the Moon using a good old fashion fission power plant.
As for colonization, we were talking about a lot of different things. I don’t see colonization as being viable any time soon, but you wouldn’t need to colonize the Moon, per se, to exploit it’s resources or set up manufacturing either on the Moon or, better yet, in orbit…you’d need a few dozen people and robots, all of which we have today.
Sure…but that was to build large scale colonies which they needed to systematically exploit local resources. My own point was that the costs in relative terms for what were, in effect, schemes by the Europeans to exploit overseas resources would be less today and the risk would be less…we wouldn’t be losing a large percentage of people and it wouldn’t cost 25% or more of GDP to do it. We won’t NEED a local indigenous population to enslave either, since today machines do the heavy lifting.
I agree. Basically, I think the Moon is still worth looking at to build something like our research base in Antartica, and that it MIGHT be viable as a place to exploit resources at some point down the road.
I am honestly just completely baffled by this line of thinking. You are going to the Moon because it’s easier to get back than it is to get there? Isn’t is a lot easier to not go?
It would be easier for me to drive home from Denver than it is to drive there (it’s downhill coming back) but I’m not going to drive to Denver just because it’s cheaper to return. I’ll only drive there if I have a reason to bother going.
Well, no, that is not true. What is true is that it might someday, many years in the future, be the case that it is possible to make rocket fuel on the Moon, using technology we presently do not have and do not know if it’s feasible or will work there.
It is considerably more realistic to come up with ways of making things on Earth. If you want to dream up space elevators and rocket fuel made of moon dust, I can dream up a big thing that scrubs excess pollutants out of the atmosphere and that purifies water My dream is vastly closer to truth than yours.
I do not think this word “Feasible” means what you think it means. “Feasible” is something that is presently practical and easy to do. What you are describing is actually not even currently possible.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
I am honestly just completely baffled by this line of thinking. You are going to the Moon because it’s easier to get back than it is to get there? Isn’t is a lot easier to not go?
[/QUOTE]
Again, just like it would have been easier for our ancestors to stay in Africa or Europeans to stay in Europe. It’s easier in the short term not to go. In the long term if you want access to larger scales of resources then it changes the equation.
Uh…huh? What are you talking about? Even if we only consider the water ice on the Moon as the only fuel available, you do realize you can split hydrogen and oxygen using old fashion fission power (or, hell, solar power…any electricity will do) to make rocket fuel…right? This doesn’t even get into the chemistry of the regolith that could also be made into rocket fuel. This is, well, basic 19th-century chemistry…and it’s complete ‘feasible’, regardless of your definition. I really have no idea where you are going with this…I guess similar to your confusion to my own point but really more so. Did you think I was talking about fusion? Or something else?? 
Not only is it possible, but I did it myself 30 years ago in chemistry class in college…and chemistry was one of my worst subjects. 
Just to clarify something, ‘feasible’ as I’m using it means ‘we could do it today’, regardless of cost. IOW, making rocket fuel on the Moon is completely feasible from the perspective of actually doing it, but it’s not ECONOMICALLY feasible today because the launch costs of getting the infrastructure and systems to the Moon are prohibitive for any sort of realistic return on investment. It would cost hundred of billions to build a base on the Moon and set up the infrastructure too make rocket fuel (and oxygen and other stuff you’d need), and then build the mining systems and infrastructure to get stuff off the Moon and back to orbit or back to the Earth. Even if you made a billion dollars a year once you got it all up and running including support costs it would take you a long, LONG time to get your ROI…hell, you might never get it unless we figure out how to lower launch costs to those I mentioned earlier in this thread. But we COULD do it using only tech we have available today…it doesn’t take some pie in the sky future tech to do any of this stuff. Thus, to me, it’s ‘feasible’.
Your definition of “feasible” is not consistent with what anyone in the aerospace industry would use to describe the hypothetical process of in situ manufacture of propellants. The aerospace industry and government agencies involved in space such as NASA all use what is essentially the same scale of technical maturity called the Technology Readiness Level (TRL). The TRL scale goes from 1 (basic physical principles validated) to 9 (flight proven). The notion of propellant manufacture from Lunar materials is at TRL 2 (concept formulated) as it doesn’t even have a clear proof-of-concept or enough definition to validate any kind of analytical assessment. We know that there is some water ice on the Moon in some locations, but we have yet to extract enough water to wet a postage stamp. In other words, the concept is basically a cartoon. This hass not been validated as “feasible” in any sense beyond that of a Popular Science blurb.
Pretty much anything we would do in space or on another planetary-type body presents novel challenges that require new new materials, mechanisms, and procedures. Pop science articles rarely consider or inform the casual reader about the amount of development and validation required to do even simple tasks in a vacuum or low gravity environment, and gloss over the problems encountered by astronauts during the Apollo lunar missions. Extracting ice from the lunar regolith and manufacturing clean propellants is far from a simple challenge and has yet to be demonstrated to any practical extent, even by simulation.
Stranger
It’s a chicken and egg problem.
The problem with this is that I don’t know that our curiosity and interest is enough to get the expenditures necessary to go into space. There are those on this board, and in this very thread, using at least a dozen technologies that when they were nascent, people asked what possible use it could have. Our current political environment is not very curious or scientific, and the govt is where pretty much all the groundbreaking space technologies come from.
That’s why I am looking for a commercial application to space that can be used in the near future. Something that encourages private investors and capital to look up, and not just see an empty wasteland, but a good ROI.
I like the growing of organs in space because that is the sort of thing that you cannot put an upper price on. If it costs 10 million to grow a new heart, people will pay it. And then the next heart only costs 8, then 6, and so on as you get economies of scale.
If you could launch a single microsat that only weighed less than 100 lbs, and had a 3d printer and vat in it to produce an organ or two, along with a heat sheild to return it, you’re only talking a couple million to put that into orbit, probably less if you can get a secondary spot on a satellite launch.
A larger, more permanent one, with launches ony for repairs and to refill the “ink” tanks means that you are only paying to launch those now, and if it takes less than 20 lbs of material to make an organ, then you are talking well less than a million per.
Costs come down if you can use resources that are acquired that are already in space, and do not need to be launched from earth’s surface, both for raw materials, and for repair and expansion parts. Right now, there is not all that much profit to be had in placing an object into space. Communication satellites are about the only thing that are cost effective for private enterprise, and they are fairly highly subsidized by the govt, if in development costs if nothing else. Private companies do launch stuff to the space station, or to other orbits, but they are paid by govt funds, not private to do so.
If there were privately owned and operated satellites in orbit that require replenishment, then private companies will learn the most cost effective way to serve them. At some point this means building mining and manufacturing capabilities in space.
Once we have that, private capitalism being profitable in a space based recourse extraction and manufacturing scheme, then I feel development and investment into space will explode, putting up all the infrastructure that we need to move out there ourselves.
Then we get the chicken AND the egg.
How many of those applications seemed obvious in 1960? Not that I disagree that these technologies have had an impact and have paid off, but do you think it would have been possible to get Ma Bell to pony up money for a space progam for them to get communications satellites if the govt had not already paved the way?
I asked the question as a hook, not so much as a concern about use “wasting” resources in its exploration and exploitation.
The asteroid impact reason for getting into space is, I think, a good one, but not one that is going to convince a number of people, unless we actually see one coming for us. We can’t get a consensus together to combat climate change, and that is something that we can see.
There are two basic solutions to the fermi paradox. Either there is a great filter (or filters) in our past that we managed to get through that no one, or nearly no one, within our observable universe has managed to pass, or there is a great filter in our future that no one, or nearly no one in our observable universe has managed to pass. I find the second solution to be fairly terrifying, and I have to wonder if a lack of will to explore, a lack of curiosity and scientific interest, and a lack of enthusiasm for the future of the human race will glue us down to this planet until our eventual extinction event.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Your definition of “feasible” is not consistent with what anyone in the aerospace industry would use to describe the hypothetical process of in situ manufacture of propellants. The aerospace industry and government agencies involved in space such as NASA all use what is essentially the same scale of technical maturity called the Technology Readiness Level (TRL). The TRL scale goes from 1 (basic physical principles validated) to 9 (flight proven). The notion of propellant manufacture from Lunar materials is at TRL 2 (concept formulated) as it doesn’t even have a clear proof-of-concept or enough definition to validate any kind of analytical assessment. We know that there is some water ice on the Moon in some locations, but we have yet to extract enough water to wet a postage stamp. In other words, the concept is basically a cartoon. This hass not been validated as “feasible” in any sense beyond that of a Popular Science blurb.
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Let’s assume you are correct…it’s at TRL 2. What that actually means is we haven’t tried to do it, yet, in situ…as we haven’t actually looked very hard for where the water ice is. I’m good with you to that point…then you go off the rails. Making some basic assumptions (like there IS water, we WILL find it, etc…just the basics), how is it conceptually ‘a cartoon’?? Are you trying to tell me that, finding water ice on the Moon we will have some major technological difficulty in converting WATER INTO HYDROGEN AND OXYGEN?? And that that only Popular Science blurbs think we can do that? I mean, a quick Google search shows that NASA seems to think they can do the really technologically challenging task of converting water into oxygen and hydrogen…it’s all the other stuff they think will be hard and major engineering challenges. But you seem to be busting on me for a response to someone saying that it’s beyond our technical capabilities and that this is all some sort of fantasy.
You have to know that the reason we haven’t done this, or really looked all that hard for the water in a systematic way has nothing to do with basic science or engineering…it’s because of funding and public support for a mega project.
Let me put it this way…is this, in your opinion, correct concerning making rocket fuel on the moon:
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Well, no, that is not true. What is true is that it might someday, many years in the future, be the case that it is possible to make rocket fuel on the Moon, using technology we presently do not have and do not know if it’s feasible or will work there.
It is considerably more realistic to come up with ways of making things on Earth. If you want to dream up space elevators and rocket fuel made of moon dust, I can dream up a big thing that scrubs excess pollutants out of the atmosphere and that purifies water My dream is vastly closer to truth than yours.
I do not think this word “Feasible” means what you think it means. “Feasible” is something that is presently practical and easy to do. What you are describing is actually not even currently possible.
[/QUOTE]
IOW, we don’t have the technology to do it and it’s not currently possible? Are you seriously asserting both of these? I mean, not that we haven’t tried it yet or that the funding isn’t there, but that we seriously don’t have the technology, regardless of the cost, and that it’s not ‘even currently possible’??
Sure. I agree. There will be serious engineering challenges. And if we were to actually do it, I’m sure there will be stuff that crops up that is going to cause major issues…lunar dust would be one I’d guess right off would be a serious issue. Obviously radiation and just the extremes in temperature that have caused both the Chinese and Russian probes to fail after fairly short life spans. And, no, we haven’t actually done it yet…in situ. We have managed to do it here on Earth using the chemistry in the samples brought back in terms of the regolith and, well, for centuries now in terms of splitting hydrogen from oxygen, but in situ is going to certainly bring on new challenges we would have to overcome. But to say we can’t…CAN NOT…do it with today’s technology and it’s not possible? And that all of this is just fantasy from Popular Science blurbs?
The problem is not the chemistry; the problem is scale. Any chemical engineer will tell you the difference between possibility and feasibility is scale.
Very likely not, and in fact if you look at pretty much every innovation that has lead to viable space industries (telecommunications, Earth surveillance, the Global Positioning System (GPS), et cetera) they all had their origins in military applications with virtually unlimited budgets as compared to any commercial entity. There is no way that AT&T, Bell Labs, Hughes aerospace, or any of the other titans of the era could have afforded to field and maintain the GPS system at costs of tens of billions of dollars, but funded my military necessity and then made fully availble for commercial use after the the end of of the Cold War, GIS systems based upon access to the GPS network has grown into multiple multi-billion dollar industries that are now so prosaic that most people don’t even know about or think of the complexity of the system. We are now just reaching a point that it may be cheap enough to get access to space and built lightweight spacecraft using what is more-or-less off the shelf commodity hardware without the need of radiation resistance to last for decades in the hostile orbital space environment in order to get a return on investment, but that is piggybacked on decades of military- and applied science-funded research and applications to get to that point.
Exploring other planets and building systems for resource exploitation has similar hurdles and it is unlikely that a commercial entity needing to demonstrate profitability will be able to fund such an effort, or at least not without significant automation to reduce the costs. Sending human workers to the Moon or Mars to mine or colonize is about as practical as setting up a fishery in Death Valley, and will remain so without revolutionary advances in a number of different fields including propulsion, energy production, material science, and the ability to adapt terrestrial physiology to the space environment.
Stranger
We have actually looked for water ice on the Moon, and found evidence for it in data from both the NASA LCROSS and ISRO Chandrayaan-1 probes. But just because ice is present doesn’t make it practical to extract using any extant means, i.e. ‘feasible’. There are, of course, people at NASA whose job it is to come up with concepts in the hope that some will be viable as experiments, and when such experiements are performed they generally show unexpected complications and challenges to overcome before they can be developed into a practicable technology. In the case of in situ propellant manufacture or even the extraction of water ice from the Lunar regolith (which is in permanently shadowed craters at high inclinations in the least suitable locations for a propellant depot or solar-powered facility), none of this has been demonstrated to even a basic proof-of-concept at any level, and despite your petulant characterization that I “go off the rails” by providing the informed criticism that the basic concept would need more development before it could be defined as ‘feasible’ nobody is making any plans on using Lunar-based propellant manufacturing any time soon, nor does the capitalization and use of excessive punctuation bolster your arguments.
It is valuable to present concepts for the purpose of evaluating what train of development would be necessary to make it workable or evaluate viability. It is another to vomit up a concept and then claim that it is ‘solved’, and then petulantly accuse anybody who says otherwise of being obstructive or “busting on [you]”. I’ve seen plenty of ‘cartoon’ concepts which were hypothetically viable but turned out to be wholly impractical upon a more detailed evaluation, and the manufacture of clean propellants is far from as simple as you suggest even in concept.
Stranger
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
We have actually looked for water ice on the Moon, and found evidence for it in data from both the NASA LCROSS and ISRO Chandrayaan-1 probes. But just because ice is present doesn’t make it practical to extract using any extant means, i.e. ‘feasible’. There are, of course, people at NASA whose job it is to come up with concepts in the hope that some will be viable as experiments, and when such experiements are performed they generally show unexpected complications and challenges to overcome before they can be developed into a practicable technology. In the case of in situ propellant manufacture or even the extraction of water ice from the Lunar regolith (which is in permanently shadowed craters at high inclinations in the least suitable locations for a propellant depot or solar-powered facility), none of this has been demonstrated to even a basic proof-of-concept at any level, and despite your petulant characterization that I “go off the rails” by providing the informed criticism that the basic concept would need more development before it could be defined as ‘feasible’ nobody is making any plans on using Lunar-based propellant manufacturing any time soon, nor does the capitalization and use of excessive punctuation bolster your arguments.
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Interesting. No one has done even small scale tests, you say. So, this paper by NASA in 2007 showing a small scale test system is probably false then. Or, I guess, since we haven’t sent it to the Moon yet, it doesn’t count…in your book? I could vomit out, as you say, a ton of links to actual small scale or test bed projects, but I won’t bother…you seem fixated on the fact that we haven’t done it (yet), so it’s not proven until we do. Nor do you seem capable or willing to even try and extrapolate technologies we have and project what we could do…only what we have done.
It is valuable to present things in a balanced way. Of course, it’s valuable to not build strawmen either. I never said it was ‘solved’…patiently, we haven’t done it yet, so it’s not ‘solved’. Nor did I say it was simple. I asserted and maintain that it’s (since you seem to be annoyed by caps I’ll indulge myself) SOLVABLE. All your objections are basically engineering and funding. There is no need for advanced tech or magic sci-fi needed…simply the funding to do it and the engineering to solve the issues at they arise. There would be major challenges…I freely admitted that several times, despite your attempt to paint me as saying it would be easy and everything is solved, but they are challenges we could, with the proper funding, solve.
This isn’t even new stuff…freaking NASA has been exploring this subject for decades now. They have built prototype equipment and tested concepts in the lab. What they haven’t done, yet (and probably never will at this rate) is to actually send the stuff to the Moon or Mars or where ever to test it out full scale, see what fails and what works, refine the design and build a large scale system or at least full proof of concept. And the reason they haven’t done that isn’t because it’s too difficult a challenge or the tech is beyond our capabilities…it’s because their funding is limited and they have other, more pressing priorities with their rather limited funding.
What you said was this:
This is simply not a true statement. There remains a lot of work to be done to deal with challenges both known and as yet understood, and potentially the need for advances in various technologies to make in situ propellant production viable, and no, throwing infinite amounts of hypothetical funds at the problem doesn’t decrease the time or development milestones to an arbitrarily small interval, much less being able to “do it today”, just as nine women cannot produce a baby in one month. And I’ve found that when someone simply dismisses problems or concerns as being just “engineering and funding” without laying out any kind of roadmap or guidance on how to tackle the technical challenges, they’re almost certainly talking through their hat without any real idea of the nature of the challenges or the innovations required to overcome them.
Interestingly, if you look on the NASA Techincal Reports Server for the In Situ Resource Utilization Program you’ll find this paper from 2012 this paper detailing progress that the ISRU program made up to that point, which was more than I was aware of. You can see the TRLs for different technologies in Table 3, and while some have achieved a TRL of 5 (“Component or breadboard validation in a relavent environment”) but there are several enabling technologies that are still at a TRL 2-3, which indicates that ISRU as a whole is still far from being practicable in the near future even as a proof-of-concept. I don’t see any more recent progress updates and IRSU is one of the areas which has taken a budget hit, unsensibly in favor of funding the SLS, but there is clearly much work that needs to be done before in situ propellant production or other consumables is actually workable technology.
Stranger
It may be an improper use of the term, but I would use the term “feasible” to mean that there are no laws of physics that prohibit, any new laws of physics that need to be learned, nor any new novel materials need to be developed. FTL and warpdrive != feasible, unless we learn new physics that allows it (doubtful). Space elevator != feasible, unless we develop stronger materials (kinda doubtful, but not nearly so as one that requires new laws of physics.) ISRU = feasible (or at least as feasible as going to the moon seemed on September 12, 1962) If there is a better term for something like that, then I would be happy to use it, but feasible seems appropriate enough.
I do see things like isru and space development in general as “just an engineering problem”. It’s a big problem, that will need quite a bit of funding and resources to solve, but ultimately, I do not see any fundamental roadblocks based in physical sciences for our eventual development of such. The roadmap for the technology is easy, pretty much what we have been doing, but more of it. Like you said, we haven’t had much progress lately, but that is not because we have run into any constraints on the science, but that we have stopped funding such efforts. The roadmap for the political and fiscal environment is much more difficult, as funding priorities change with every administration in a field that usually takes more than 4 years to pan out.
I am sure there are challenges, and there are going to be challenges that we are not anticipating even, but the main challenge is the will to overcome those physical challenges.
But, in any case, meh. China is doing all this stuff, so it sucks that the US is falling further and further behind, but at least someone is doing something that will benefit our species.
China is not doing any in situ propellant or other resource extraction and they are likely decades away from establishing any kind of sustainable presence in space. I’m not sure where the veneration of the Chinese space program comes from in the ranks of space enthusiasts, but they are not doing anything that the United States and the Soviet Union did not do decades ago. Their interest in planetary science seems to be minimal, and their crewed program seems primarily geared toward showing that they, too, are a superpower in space. (Their military programs, on the other hand, are more worrisome and demonstrating some concerning capability.) When the Chinese actually establish a crewed Moon base or start building the propulsive capability for a crewed Mars mission I’ll start to be impressed.
There are plenty of challenges which are not physically impossible and yet are well beyond engineering capability. It is not physically impossible to go to another star system, or bore to the center of the Earth, or perform controlled nuclear fusion power production, but all of these things are so far beyond our current state of the art that they lie in the domain of science fiction, regardless of the amount of funding or effort is applied to them. Achieving any of these goals would require fundamental technological developments. Something that is “just an engineering problem” is a challenge for which all the basic principles and methods have been established and it is essentially an exercise in using available tools, materials, and procedures to make a workable product. A suspension bridge or a skyscraper is “just an engineering problem.”
In situ propellant production isn’t as far beyond the state of the art is nuclear fusion, but it will require significant development and testing of new methods, tools, and procedures. It is not something that we could send out an RFP and expect a contractor to come back with a workable result in a couple of years using demonstrated principles, regardless of budget, which is precisely the claim made by XT. It is plausible, and in fact we could lay out paths to development of such a technology, but it is not feasible in the sense that we could develop the production specifications for such a system and have a contractor build-to-spec without running into potentially showstopping problems; it requires substantial basic development testing to get to the point that it is a feasible (M-W def: n. " capable of being done or carried out.") technology.
If you don’t work with the nuts and bolts of actual space system development and everything you’ve seen are pop science articles and PowerPoint presentations, everything may seem as if “the roadmap for the technology is easy”, which is what I mean when I talk of ‘cartoon engineering’, but I assure you it is anything but. If it were really that easy, we’d be doing it. People talk today about how ‘easy’ it was to go to the Moon and how successful we were, which glosses over many of the desperate risks and near failures were experienced during Apollo. Technology development such as crewed interplanetary travel, in situ resource utilization, or nuclear fusion aren’t just left foundering because there is no will or sufficient funding but also because these are very difficult challenges often wanting for better materials and the understanding and simulation of physical processes than we are capable of at the current technology state.
Stranger
I don’t mean to be a pedantic ass, but you are simply redefining a word. That isn’t what “feasible” means. That word does have a useful meaning in English, and that is not it.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
This is simply not a true statement.
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And I stand by that statement. It’s pretty obvious that we have the tech to do it.
Thanks for the link…it’s actually similar to the link I gave you earlier for a similar project in 2007. I’m unsure why you think this link makes your point, however. According to the paper:
(I see why you didn’t quote from it though…their formatting sucks for cut and paste). We both know WHY the technology hasn’t progressed much beyond simple laboratory proofs of concept…it’s because there is simply no funding for it beyond some basic funding for lab work or proof of concept, since we don’t have any plans to go back to the Moon or even Mars, and if we DID do a mission it wouldn’t be part of it at this stage…maybe not at any stage unless we were planning follow on missions that could potentially utilized in situ refueling. We haven’t even worked through a rigorous project to systematically look for where water ice might be on the Moon or the extent of it…simply done a few missions that have proved that there is something there.
I think this is an excellent metric for what is ‘feasible’. And I, again, disagree with your conclusion. I think that if NASA sent out a request for proposal based on their requirements they would definitely get responses. Of course, this boils down, in the end, to your opinion verse mine, since we both know NASA isn’t going to send out for an RFP on this…they don’t have the funding for a large scale Lunar mission, don’t have the funding or priority to divert funding to actually calling for an RFP as part of a wider mission to test it in situ, and aren’t likely to get that any time soon. If they DID have such funding and a mandate, however, I have zero doubts they could build an RFP and get responses and have a winning bid/proposal.
I’ll leave it there, since ISTM it’s a matter of interpreting the cites given (you see one thing in them, I see something completely different) and basically it comes down to your opinion verse mine…until funding levels and priorities change and we actually do it, and yours is the better bet, since we’ve screwed around with this for 40 years and still haven’t gotten out of the small-scale test bed, nor are we likely to until we are willing to spend more than a couple million or 10’s of million bucks to do it right.
China is behind us, at the moment, but they do seem to have a will to surpass us, and we don’t seem to have a will to keep up.
I would expect you to start being impressed in the coming decade.
Right, and by “engineering problem” I do mean that it doesn’t require any new physics or materials we do not currently have the ability to produce in significant quantities.
If you dump enough resources on an engineering problem, you can solve it, given enough time.
You could dump resources on something like FTL till the ends of the universe, and still have made no headway.
Something like a space elevator on earth requires materials that may or may not be available in the sort of quantities, so is more than an engineering problem.
Although, given advances in superconductors and computers, I have seen promising signs that indicate that fusion may actually be something we see done in a practical fashion in our life times, but that is still not just an engineering problem, it is mixed with a materials science problem, with a bit of physics problem thrown in for good measure.
But it is something to which there are no foreseen roadblocks in the physical science to accomplish. It is simply a matter of investing the resources required to work out all those problems. All the basic science works, it works here on earth. It is just a matter of adapting what we already know to a new environment.
I am not claiming that this will be easy, but I also have to say that when Kennedy said “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” going to the moon was not exactly a straightforward proposition.
We had a willingness to face difficult obstacles and overcome them that I fear is lacking in our country today.
I was saying that the roadmap for the technology was easy, in comparison to the roadmap for dealing with the political and fiscal issues that do not prioritize development in the sciences at all, much less those space development.
The fact that there is little will and funding to develop these technologies does mean that the pace that they are being developed is slow, and we will be waiting longer for those materials we want or understandings of physical processes. If the will and funding to do that research isn’t there, then that research simply doesn’t get done. It’s not a matter of time, and just waiting for the research to be done before we can go to the next step, we have to actively do the research before we can get to the next step. And doing that research is exactly where we are falling behind.
I was using the same definition as Stranger is using, “capable of being done or carried out.” in that there is no new physics or exotic materials (like carbon nanotubes or graphene) needed. I also did say, “If there is a better term for something like that, then I would be happy to use it”. I consider feasible to be at least a step down from practical.
I could not think of a more suitable word for something that is most likely possible given what we know of physics, and materials technology we already posses, but needs (possibly extensive) research and development to become a reality. I suppose “plausible” may be a better word, but to me, that infers that there are unknowns in the physics itself that could prevent it from happening.
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China is behind us, at the moment, but they do seem to have a will to surpass us, and we don’t seem to have a will to keep up.
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China’s capabilities are, IMHO, vastly overstated both in the media and on this board. Basically, I agree with Stranger on this…China isn’t doing anything, afaik, with in situ refueling because, basically, they aren’t at that stage yet where they even have a viable design or project to land humans on the Moon. They could, of course, land an automated robot on the Moon to test concepts, but even there I’m not sanguine that their program is at a stage where such a venture would have more than a slim chance of succeeding…and, basically, it would be a waste of their resources at this stage to even try something like this, when the money could be better spent on other aspects of their program. Assuming they really DO have the ‘will to surpass us’ in manned (or unmanned) space exploration…as opposed to the propaganda machine to APPEAR to surpass us or be equals wrt space exploration (or a variety of other fields). China, especially the CCP, talks a really good game, but IMHO you have to take everything they say, especially everything they project for future projects, with a mountain of salt and a wait and see attitude. I’ll believe it when I see it, basically.