You wouldn’t necessarily need this for planetary exploration or space applications but it shows how sophisticated the technology is – and more importantly – the trends. If begun today, an Apollo-level effort for lunar or Mars exploration would take at least 10 years to become executable reality. At the current rate of progress in computer and robotic technology, what would be possible in 10 years if funded at an Apollo level, not the tiny level of current unmanned exploration?
The perception of automated probes trickling back meager amounts of data is related to the equally meager funding level. This in turn determines mass in lunar/Mars orbit, landed mass, and power levels to stream data back. If funded at (say) 50% of a crewed program, an “Apollo” level automated program could stream back 4k VR, and have earth-based “tele-explorers” in VR suits operating agile robots on the moon in near real time. Those robots would never get tired, never be killed by radiation from a solar flare, and would not require a return trip. Instead of a human astronaut saying “hey, it looks like a rock”, with modern telecom anybody with broadband internet could experience that themselves in high fidelity and near real time.
For those who argue people aren’t interested in unmanned exploration, they didn’t stay interested in manned exploration during Apollo. Ever-changing public interest is a fickle beast to harness for long-range exploration plans.
The thread is about the moon but the general topic also involves Mars. To illustrate, fairly recently it was discovered Mars is coated with perchlorate, which is toxic to human life even in microscopic quantities. On the Apollo missions the astronauts found themselves covered in lunar dust, despite using brushes and suction to clean themselves. On Mars that would be deadly. Not a totally insoluble problem, but on Mars astronauts would have to continuously maintain clean room levels of personal hygiene. They might have to use human size “glove boxes” that stay continuously connected to the spacecraft: Mars Surface Is Looking Much Deadlier Than We Previously Thought : ScienceAlert
Re why nobody else has done a crewed lunar mission, there is no cheap way. It would be interesting to compare the overall cost of Apollo in terms of % of GDP or % of federal budget vs Queen Isabella’s funding of Columbus relative to their economy in the late 1400s. Their economic structure was very different, so it’s difficult to compare. However I have seen estimates ranging from $200k current USD to about $2 million current USD. According to this web site, it cost the Spanish crown relatively little: MYTH: Queen Isabella of Spain sold the crown jewels to pay for Columbus’s voyage. - CSMonitor.com
But the reason the Spanish crown paid anything is they expected a relatively near-term financial return from backing the exploration, and which would flow directly back to them. There is no near-term financial return for large-scale crewed lunar exploration.
One argument for these types of projects is that they generate large amounts of scientific and technological advances which are useful in all sorts of places in the rest of the economy.
And with the cost of Apollo clocking in at over $110B in today’s money, it’s hard to imagine advances in technology commensurate to the cost of a moon colony at perhaps double that amount.
and yet, 50 years later they’re still lining up to get in. You’d think with all the money they saved those immediate concerns would have been resolved by now and the US would have suffered the loss of money.
As with most major technological achievements there are residual benefits that cross over to society. Those technological benefits generate financial growth.
I kinda disagree with everyone that says it’s too expensive for anyone to want to do it. Take the Al Nahyan family for example, who are rumoured to have a net worth in excess of $150 billion. This is exactly the sort of thing I can see them doing - just cause. Why not? There would be a ridiculous amount of press surrounding it and it really would be one of the biggest news stories since it was last achieved.
Well, the entire family may be worth that, but one guy isn’t. And the fourth uncle that is “only” worth $500 million, is he going to pony up $490 million for this, and sell all of his real estate and future prospects to land someone from the UAE on the moon?
Maybe you could check, but I’m not sure how robust UAE’s aerospace industry is. At it’s peak, Apollo employed over 34,000 employees and there were close to 400,000 contractors working on all the elements of the program. Many of those people cut their teeth in engineering during WWII and the cold war, and had the right skill set, education and attitude to make Apollo work. Those types are just hanging out in the UAE, or most other places for that matter.
I’ll state again. If it’s so easy, why are we still at least a decade at best from landing on the moon again, 50 years and counting later??
My understanding has always been that Alcock and Brown were the first, but Lindbergh was the first to do it solo. That he went much further as well I thought (and I suspect the public at large thought) was largely irrelevant.
This partly summarizes the arguments so far concerning a moon landing and space colonies, but:
Political. Who really wants to do it? And, so what? The glamor moves now are either space colonies or Mars.Probably both could only be done with a worldwide consortium. So no bragging rights to offset the expense
Financial. It’s just too expensive and there is no indication of recouping the cost in any way, even indirectly from new technology. Again, the cost is such that we are talking about a worldwide consortium. The only real player here is China, since the USA is functionally bankrupt.
Technical. It is possible with today’s technology, but things still need to be developed and tested. As some have pointed out, there are no longer any heavy-lift rockets of the size required. Of course, they could be developed. But when all is said and done, much the technology has not changed much in 50 years.
Value. What could we really do usefully with a moon colony or a Mars colony? To justify the huge costs? What would we get back from it?
Human. A Mars trip involves a year in each direction, and AFAIK, the launch window only occurs about every two years. Can we find a group of people who will spend four years in a tin can? And, whatever else, more flights will mean more accidents.
Mining the moon or asteroids. Not feasible with current technology, but the main obstacle is the price. It would not be economically viable even very valuable minerals, the price would be astronomical. Basically, until someone develops a drive that has a high power output and an extremely compact fuel supply, it is simply not affordable to lift things into space or to bring minerals back in large quantities.
Unmanned probes. In the past 50 years there have been huge advances in unmanned vehicles. This means that we can send sophisticated probes out into space and get photos and samples back. But seeing the problems that the landers have had, I don’t think we can be certain of landing somebody on Mars and bringing them home again. Unmanned probes are disposable, becoming ever more capable, and are much cheaper than manned missions.
Summary: the USA dies not have the money anyway. The Chinese could do it if they wanted to, and they are currently the only country that could afford it. I’ll bet that they have considered it, but see it as too expensive for the time And they see many other things that they could better spend their money on.
I don’t agree. The moon has at least 700 billion tons of water ice. That can be turned into fuel easily, and it’s at the bottom of a gravity well 1/6 the size of Earth’s. If we ever get to the point where there is extensive mining of asteroids, being able to fuel large spacecraft with lunar hydrogen and oxygen could be worth many billions of dollars.
The moon is rich in titanium, aluminum, iron, and other metals. Yes, they are abundant on Earth as well, but again on the moon they are on an airless world with an escape velocity of only 2.4 km/s. A nuclear-powered mass driver could put thousands of tons of refined metal into orbit for next to nothing per kg. If we learn how to manufacture spaceships or instruments in orbit, perhaps using robots, 3D printing and other exotic manufacturing methods, the Moon could easily become the major resource provider for solar system exploration.
For example, we are not very far from being able to 3D print large solar cells or telescope mirrors in space. I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that one day in the not-to-distant future we’ll be doing things like sending up a rocket with 5,000 pounds of aluminum powder, a binder, and an array of spider-bots that will extrude an antenna or a mirror a kilometer across. When we get to the point where 3D printers can do that in space, the limiting factor will become the amount of mass we can shoot into orbit. At that point, the moon could become the major source of such material.
The moon has also been peppered with meteorites for billions of years. The entire surface is essentially pulverized dust from meteor impacts. That means rare earth elements, gold, platinum, diamonds, or other valuable resources may be readily mineable on the surface. Not having an atmosphere, micrometeorites survive to hit the surface, where they could release heavy elements which eventually fall back down to the surface. We won’t know how much of that there is until we really explore the place. Plus, larger meteors may well have the majority of their mass located inside the central peaks of large craters, which could lead to discoveries of extensive deposits of very valuable minerals.
Another thing the moon has going for it is its airlessness. This means processes that require vacuum can be done in large scale, certain mining processes become significantly easier, and there is no possibility of spreading pollutants across the surface. This would make the moon a great place to do especially dirty or dangerous manufacturing. Add to that the fact that the moon is awash in solar energy and that nuclear power would not carry the risks it does on Earth, and the moon could one day be an industrial powerhouse.
And yet another thing the moon has going for it is proximity - robots can be directly controlled from Earth, people living there can be on the internet (albeit with the worst lag ever), rescue missions take days instead of months, crews can be rotated after a few days or weeks instead of months or years at Mars, and the cost in energy and money of working on the moon is a tiny fraction of what it will cost to do the same on Mars.
Perhaps the best reason to go to the moon in the short term is because it’s the best place to prove out the technologies that would be required to survive on Mars. ISRU development, lava tube exploration and habitation, sustainable biospheres, etc. All can be done on the Moon before we try to pull off the same on Mars for 10X the cost and risk.
The Moon is not bereft of science to do, either. Lava tubes will be pristine environments untouched by solar wind or cosmic radiation for 3 billion years. There may all sorts of volatile chemistry going on under the surface, as the moon is about 12% void space with lots of opportunities for various materials to collect in cracks, tubes, and empty lava chambers. The far side of the moon is an excellent place to locate a radio telescope. There are still unanswered questions about solar system formation and the formation of the Earth and Moon that lunar exploration can shed light on. We still aren’t even sure where much of Earth’s water came from, and the Moon may help us answer that. Building another LIGO on the moon would greatly enhance the angular resolution of gravitational wave detections. The list goes on.
Plus, there are the unknown unknowns. When you explore, you often make discoveries no one could have anticipated. That’s one reason why exploration is so important - you don’t know what you don’t know until you get there.
Finally, the moon is probably easier to colonize than Mars, if that’s your goal. There is enough space in underground lava tubes to house cities, and it’s a lot easier to constitute an atmosphere in a lava tube than on a whole planet. So if the goal is self-sustaining colonies that could survive if a catastrophe hit Earth, the Moon is a much better bet than Mars, in my opinion. Make no mistake - it would be stupendously hard, but Mars would be orders of magnitude harder.
But the main reason to go to the moon is as a stepping stone. Mars is orders of magnitude more difficult to get to, and has many problems for humans that the Moon doesn’t have, such as a soil filled with perchlorates and an atmosphere not thick enough to be of much use, but thick enough to spread martian dust into everything. Most importantly, we don’t want to be breaking in new technologies in a life or death situation where the earliest rescue is months or years away.
If Elon Musk’s BFR lives up to its specs, it will be able to land on the moon and return without refueling in lunar orbit on the way back,and with a single refueling on the way there. If he can pull that off, going to the moon will be within the range of wealthy tourists, movie studios, mining companies, you name it. That’s really the key to whether the moon as economic value. At $10,000/kg to return mass, probably not much. At $500/kg, quite a lot. It could be that there are billions of dollars in revenue just in tourism waiting for someone to figure out how to pull it off. That is not true of Mars.
You can use plain old water for fuel if you just want to get to lunar orbit and back to the moon. A nuclear powered water rocket can have an ISP around 200, which isn’t great, but it’s offset by the lack of a requirement to handle cryogenic fuels.
It’s incredibly wasteful of water, but there is so much water on the moon that this wouldn’t be an issue unless we kept it up for hundreds of years and many thousands of launches. As a starter program to get mass off the moon cheaply and in the more near-future (say, <20 years) it has potential. It also has potential to power a surface ‘jump rocket’ that would allow us to move around the moon in nearly unlimited fashion using nothing but in-situ resources and nuclear power.
Given that we have yet to extract as much as a single mol of water from any space-based resource, I would hesitate to call anything about it as “easy”.
The value of ISPP and ISRU is, of course, being able to process and use those materials for further space exploration or eventual habitation, rather than returning them to Earth, which will never be cost effective until such a large and highly automated space industry exists that transportation costs are incidental. But the Moon is actually a poor place to extract resources compared to those in Near Earth Asteroids and other small resources that can be easily broken up without the issues of lunar dust or having to move those materials to a centralized depot (whether some kind of mass driver or rocket) and package or contain them somehow. And any way we go about it, the hazards and difficulties of the space environment are going to dictate that such resource extraction be essentially fully automated with people in only a supervisory or very occasional major repair position.
“Colonizing” either the Moon or Mars is, for any real definition of the world, essentially impossible. Setting aside that creating a terrestrial habitat means a lot of very complex environmental control and resource reclamation/recycling systems that, should they fail, constitute an immediate threat of mass casualty, the fact is neither of these bodies have anything approaching terrestrial gravity (the Moon is ~1/6 g, Mars ~1/3 g) which space physiologists expect will have some significant detrimental effects on long term habitation that cannot be rectified just with exercise or walking around with absurdly massy weights all the time. At best, both planetoids are suitable only as outposts for non-permanent habitation. Workable colonies will require simulating something far closer to terrestrial conditions, including radiation shielding, stable thermodynamic and hydrodynamic cycles, and simulated gravity, e.g. large rotating habitats in solar orbit. The other option is reworking the human body plan and cellular biology to be able to better tolerate non-terrestrial conditions, but at this point in medical and genetic engineering technology that is deep into science fiction.
That’s just the inevitable result of the rocket equation. So long as we are using chemical rockets, you can’t do much better than that with a single launch.
The way to get around the problem is with orbital refueling. You still need as much fuel (more, actually), but you don’t need as much rocket, and it’s the rocket that costs money. Fuel costs are an almost insignificant part of the overall cost of getting into space.
So the answer to cheap lunar flights involves reusable rockets, and on-orbit refueling. If you can reuse the fueling rocket, you can put a lot of fuel mass in orbit for very little cost. But if you can’t reuse your rocket and your tankers cost $200 million each and are throw-away, the whole thing becomes infeasible. But if you can put 150 tons of fuel into orbit for a couple of million bucks, as Musk says BFR will eventually be able to do, then you can take off, refuel your ship in a high elliptical orbit, and you now have enough fuel to land 50 tons on the moon and fly back and land propulsively on Earth. Suddenly the cost of putting a man on the moon and getting him back might be a few million dollars instead of a few billion dollars.
That type of cost puts moon excursions within reach of the same people who buy megayachts and private jets. And that’s thousands of people. It also puts the moon in reach of people like James Cameron, mining companies, hotel chains, and other industrial concerns. Whether they are interested or not will really depend on what’s there or what we find to do there.
I’m surprised that there hasn’t been an effort to get a woman on the moon.
Mary Roach’s book “Packing for Mars” convinced me that people will never do interplanetary, let alone interstellar, travel unless there’s some way to circumvent the speed of light.
Nothing about space exploration is ‘easy’. ‘Relatively’ easy is different. I’m comparing this to landing an ISRU, separating water and hydrogen, dealing with cryogenic storage and fuel transfer, etc.
In comparison, to fuel a water rocket you just need to find water ice and melt it and filter it, then pump it into a tank. The rocket doesn’t need cryo tanks - just a big water bladder.
No, we haven’t extracted water from the moon. But if all we need to do is collect water from, say, the bottom of Shackleton crater where it probably exists as sheets of water ice, that’s a known problem with known solutions we just need to do the engineering for. And no, I’m not minimizing the difficulty of that. Just building a light nuclear reactor that can work in such a vehicle in the lunar environment is probably at least a decadal project. But it’s still WAY easier than trying to build an ISRU infrastructure on another planet that can process water into LOX, store it cryogenically and fuel ships with it, or an ISRU that can reliably fill a Martian spaceship with Methalox.
Of course. No one’s talking about manufacturing LOX on the moon to be transported to Earth. Gold, Platinum, and rare earth elements on the other hand… A gold mine on Earth is considered high quality if it can produce one or two grams of gold per ton of processed material. A kilogram of gold is worth about $25,000. At today’s launch prices, it would never make sense to bring gold back from the moon. But if you have a water rocket that can lift a tonne of gold to lunar orbit for a few hundred thousand dollars per trip, and a rocket that can bring it back from the moon for $500/kg, you would make a $24.5 million dollar profit on that tonne. A 50 ton BFR load, which is what the BFR can supposedly return from LEO without refuelling, would be worth a cool 1.2 billion dollars.
If that sounds far fetched today, you have to consider the forces the market can bring to bear when there is profit to be had. Today, we can pull a gallon of crude out of a well in the middle east, refine it, ship it across the world, transfer it to pipelines or rail cars, ship it to city terminals, move it to trucks and deliver it to gas stations, then tax the hell out of it and still sell it to the consumer for a few bucks per gallon. That’s just amazing efficiency, and it happened because there was money to be made and lots of competition to make it. If we discover anything even remotely as profitable on the Moon, we could see hundreds of billions of dollars going into the iterative development of the tools and techniques needed to constantly lower the cost of getting it.
Of course, we have absolutely no idea how easy it will be to find gold, platinum, or other rare earth elements on the moon in quantities that make it cost-effective to mine. That why you explore. If the cost of lunar exploration drops to the point where robotic exploration/assaying can be done for millions of dollars instead of billions, that’s right in line with what exploration companies spend today to find new oil wells, gold seams, etc.
Another thing about rare earth elements - we may have a real shortage of them soon. I just read an article that said that we only have proven reserves of rare earth metals to make about 1/5 of the solar panels we would need to maximize our use of solar. Of course, if the price goes up we will search for more, and it may not be a problem, but a major push for solar power may cause a real price spike in those materials. There are already critical shortages of some rare earth metals like Europium, terbium and even more common ones like Lanthanium. Prices on rare earth metals have already gone up more than 100% since 2010. It’s not nearly as valuable as gold or platinum - yet. But if we keep finding more uses for the stuff, who knows?
Also, however, remember that the central peaks of large crater may contain most of the mass of the asteroid that created it. If that’s the case, you don’t have to go to the asteroids to find concentrated resources - you just need to dig into the crater peaks on the moon, which may be easier than going all the way out to the asteroid belt. Again, we need to explore to find out.
Yeah, I suspect you are right about the asteroids - why dig through the regolith for tiny flakes of gold, when you can find entire asteroids made out of heavy metals, just sitting there waiting to be chopped up?
But if we do get extensive asteroid mining going, the Moon may still be valuable as a source of water, fuel, and metals for use in provisioning or mining the asteroids.
We have almost no data on the long-term effects of low gravity. We know the effect of Earth gravity, and of no gravity. No data points in between. In fact, one of the first early scientific uses of the moon will probably be to get some long-term data on the effect of low gravity on humans, so we can start to predict how big a problem Mars is.
Lunar lava tubes are fully protected from meteorites, cosmic and solar radiation. They have constant temperatures of -10 to -20 C. At least some of them are large enough to house entire cities.
But there is a big show-stopper you haven’t mentioned: Nitrogen. So far as we know, there is very little nitrogen on Mars, and we need it as part of the plant cycle and as an inert gas for the atmosphere. Even a medium sized lava tube would need millions of tons of it if you wanted an earth-like atmosphere. So barring some major discovery of a large nitrogen pocket on the moon, we won’t be living in a shirt-sleeve lava tube environment in our lifetimes at least.
So I recognize that even creating an underground habitat on that scale is near-impossible today. But terraforming Mars? Pure fantasy. Just the amount of nitrogen you would need to import to reconstitute a breathable atmosphere beggars belief. I did the math on that a while back, and just the energy released from dropping that much nitrogen on Mars from the Oort cloud would be equal to many billions of nuclear bombs. It’s not something even remotely feasible with any technology we have - or can imagine in any kind of forseeable future.
So the moon isn’t ‘easy’ to colonize - unless you compare it to the difficulty of colonizing Mars. But that’s kind of like counting infinities - one may be a much bigger problem than the other, but both are still way, way outside our current capability.
Out of all the obstacles and constraints raised here, it is not the speed of light that is of most consequence, nor am I aware of any research towards “circumventing” it. What did Mary Roach mean?
Roach’s book is more about the physiological problems of long duration human spaceflight. It’s a pretty cursory read without much technical detail but it does hit all the high points including the effects of cosmic radiation, microgravity (bone and muscle loss, macular degeneration, changes to the vestibular and nervous systems), the problems with hygiene and contagion in a microgravity environment, the psychological and sociological issues with long duration habitation in a limited volume, et cetera. The one area she doesn’t touch on are the molecular biology issues at the cellular level (other than a bit about radiation damage to the genome), information about which has become better understood by research performed and published since she wrote the book.
It is true we do not have direct evidence of fractional Earth gravity on human beings, but based upon plant and small animal studies it is expected there is a threshold below which major and potentially irreversible impacts upon human physiology will occur to a degree comparable to that of microgravity habitation, and that such a threshold is probably pretty high. Such effects may be particularly pronounced on human development in childhood, which would potentially preclude any human “colonization” in the sense of self-sustaining colonies not dependent upon resources and population from Earth. Without rapid and inexpensive space transportation–something far cheaper and more effective than chemical or nuclear thermal rockets will ever achieve–any kind of permanent habitation on the Mars, or probably even the Moon is a non-starter. Occupying solar orbiting habitats that can produce terrestrial-like conditions including simulated gravity is plausible, but the threshold to collect and process enough material to build such a megastructure–even out of native materials such as water ice, silicate fibers, and oxygen/nitrogen from Near Earth Asteroids–will require extensive automation prior to being able to support any long duration human habitation.
For some reason, I think the automation aspect of this will seem quite quaint 100 years from now. I for one believe we will have tech that is basically inconceivable in that amount of time. Especially if the singularity actually occurs during that time as widely predicted (and assuming we survive it)