Moving forward the challenge as now become Mars.
Some might think that’s some kind of reference to the idea of “first the moon, then Mars”. In fact that’s a documentary about Curiosity, the largest and most sophisticated piece of robotic technology ever sent to Mars. And while other Mars missions are certainly being contemplated, it’s probably more accurate to say that the next big challenge is probably going to be one of the ice moons of the gas giants, like Europa or Enceladus. I am still frankly astounded at how much geothermal activity there is even out on Pluto, which one intuitively would have thought to be a totally frozen rock unchanged for billions of years.
The Soviets did have a Lunar program, but it suffered a number of setbacks. After the Apollo landings they preferred to pretend they were never really aiming for the Moon in the first place. Granted they still could’ve gone for the first woman on the Moon or Far Side landing, but that would’ve still been anticlimactic.
What manned-moon-landing-relevant technology today is really that much more advanced than in the 1960s? Computers are better, but the computation needed is pretty minor, so they don’t make that much difference. There are some better alloys and heat sheilds, but not any leaps and bounds stuff. The most expensive part is engines and body for the launcher, lander, and return module, and none of that can use any kind of off-the shelf technology or has had people doing much to advance it since then.
It may be worth mentioning that one reason it seemed easier than it was for the US in the 60s is that it was building off of a tremendous 15 year effort, just reaching maturity, to build ICBMs. A huge amount of money and manpower and inventive brilliance had already gone into learning how to build and guide powerful rockets, machinery that could operate in space, et cetera. One could argue that the cost of putting a man on the moon should also include the enormous cost of the ICBM program that preceded it, and which was directly enabling.
“Why is the Moon not currently home to dozens of different robots?”, is a more interesting question (to me).
Don’t forget their big boosters. Until the US developed the Saturn series we didn’t have anything that could lift something as heavy as a moon-bound vehicle into orbit. The Soviets already did (although not totally reliable).
That’s just it, that’s all the Russians ever had. They developed a reliable booster sooner than us and saw it’s propaganda value (however their early boosters were not nearly as powerful as the Saturn and their eventual heavy-lift booster (the N1) was never successful). The US suffered both from early, inter-service rivalry between the Army and the Air Force, the initial desire to not go with Van Braun’s designs but rather an ‘American’ one instead, and Eisenhower not being interested in any kind of ‘space race’ which he saw as wasteful and pointless. He knew the immediate purpose of rockets was to deliver nuclear warheads, not put satellites or people into space.
Consequently this is why the Russian had early success, by simply having a reliable booster. Once things got complicated they immediately fell behind and never really had a chance to reach the Moon.
I think that the next race will probably be Mars, but the enormous expense it could be a joint project
In reference to the USSR’s N1 heavy lift Moon rocket, this spy satellite photo showed the CIA that they had rushed one to the launchpad in the summer of '68 so NASA was afraid they were trying to upstage us by doing just a manned Moon orbital mission first. Making it seem like, even though they didn’t bring a little landing craft and actually reach the surface, they were still ‘first’ to the Moon.
Because of this (and the fact that the LM wasn’t ready) NASA decided to go off-script and changed Apollo 8 to a manned lunar orbit mission instead of its original mission: testing the LM in low Earth orbit (which is what Apollo 9 later did). As it turned out the Russian weren’t even close to a manned N1 launch and all four eventual unmanned ones, although each improved on the previous launch, all ended in disaster.
My position is one of skepticism towards manned spaceflight’s value in general, at least in the current context (if you want to talk thousands of years out and some far off scenarios then I’ll entertain it.) That being said, I think it’s only fair to mention there’s a lot of talk from people inside NASA and former highly visible NASA personnel that say going back to the Moon and establishing a more permanent presence there will likely allow for a better and perhaps even cheaper eventual trip to Mars. There’s even some evidence that NASA is trying to push politicians to their way of thinking and that the push for visiting an asteroid of “capturing” one has been seen as a politically motivated stupidity.
Not only was the N1 unreliable, the Russian plan involved a cosmonaut leaving the capsule while in moon orbit, entering the LEM (or whatever the Russians called theirs), and then descending to the Moon. Talk about risky!
It was called the LK (Russian for lunar craft) and was somewhat similar to the American LM in that it had an ascent and descent stage. It had no docking tunnel, the cosmonaut had to spacewalk from the lunar orbiting Soyuz (the LOK) to the LK and back again. It was also much smaller than the LM and was designed for only one man.
Other places in the solar system have atmospheres, liquid / water cycles, underground oceans, methane lakes, volcanic activity and the possibility of previous or current life. The moon has none of those things, theres only so much we can learn there.
The moons only uses I’m aware of are locations for telescopes on the far side of the moon, using it as a staging area for missions elsewhere or mining he3 if we ever figure out how to use that for fusion.
Five years later, [POST=12207323]same horseshit[/POST].
In fact, robotic spacecraft, orbiters, and rovers can go places that human beings could not survive even with the best protective systems we can build, can make multi-year transits with essentially no resource cost, can be build compactly enough to launch on a single heavy lift rocket, do not bear the cost of an expensive environmental control, life support, and protection systems (which as a rule of thumb is >90% of development cost for LEO missions and expected to be >98% for longer term missions), and most critically, can be left in situ to collect data for as long as it is operable and has a working power supply with no necessity to return intact back to Earth. The US$10B dollars spent on the now-cancelled Constellation program, the estimated US$35B to get just the SLS launcher and capsule working, and the several hundred billion dollars it would cost to launch a single crewed Mars mission (estimates range from ~US$200B for a minimalist opposition-class “short stay” mission to >US$500B for a full up conjuction class mission) could literally support hundreds of probes performing a wide variety of different missions, as well as orbiting observatories, remotely-operated laboratories, and infrastructure for navigation, communication, and space resource extraction which could eventually support more cost-effective crewed space habitation and exploration once we solve the multitude of problems of protecting human crew in interplanetary space (which will require major advances in physiology and medicine including repair or protection at a cellular level).
In fact, if the goal is people living in space indefinitely and exploring beyond Earth orbit in a sustainable, non-stunt mission manner, putting the near-term focus into developing cost effective launch technology combined with autonomous space resource extraction (so we don’t have to haul up every gram of usable material from Earth’s surface) is really the only practical path unless you expect some kind of science fiction transportation technology like teleporters or space elevators.
It is true that the development of ICBM technology helped to support the space program–in fact, the Mercury and Gemini programs flew to orbit on modified ICBMs–but a lunar landing program is significantly more than just the propulsion and guidance/navigation systems. The most critical components are also still the most costly; that is, keeping the crew safe, functional, and as comfortable as it is possible to be in an exposed can in a vacuum with 1400 W/m[SUP]2[/SUP] impinging on half of it constantly, and then returning them safety back to Earth. The Apollo program ran about US$109B in 2010 dollars to send 12 men to the surface of the moon for an accumulated EVA time of 170 person-hours. That’s about US$640M per astronaut-hour.
The far side of the moon is only dark for half of its orbit; the other half, it would be in blinding sun, as well as subject to lunar dust which would be enormously problematic for any surface operations. The Moon is inclined to the plane of the ecliptic at an angle of 5.1°, which makes it problematic as a launching station to other planets for most launch windows.
Although D-3He fusion would be desirable from the standpoint of low neutron emissions, the fact is that we don’t even have a confident timeline on achieving breakeven output with D-T fusion. Given that D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He has a Lawson criteria of 16 (the product of required temperature, plasma density, and confinement time to achieve fusion) and a power factor of 26.4 (the ratio of fusion power output to power losses within the plasma) compared to D-T fusion, we’re basically looking at about two and a half orders of magnitude difference in effort, so any argument for mining the Moon based upon the utility of [SUP]3[/SUP]He is speculative at best. And even when we achieve D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He fusion it will almost certainly just be easier to produce it artificially through tritium production and decay rather than to sift through the lunar regolith separating out the few parts per million of [SUP]3[/SUP]He from the fine dust.
Stranger
Right so the moons even useless for the things I mentioned. Far better to spend the money on a permanent station / fuel depot at one of the lagrange points and use that as a staging post for missions elsewhere.
The L4 and L5 libration points are convenient insofar as they are in a fixed position relative to the Sun-Earth motion, but they’re not an especially convenient place to place a space station to support spacecraft launching from Earth despite science fiction depictions and various proposals for a couple of reasons. Although they’re locations that are gravitationally neutral (with respect to the Sun and Earth) getting an object there means having to get enough momentum to reach that point and then apply impulse to stop, or else spiral out slowly up to it such that your net momentum relative to the point is zero. Contrast this with going to the Moon, where you need to apply just enough impulse to get into the Moon’s sphere of influence after which you apply enough impulse to fall into a lunar orbit. So it either takes a lot more impulse or a lot of time to get to the L4 and L5 points. Those points, being gravitationally neutral, also tend to collect a lot of dusk and small bodies (“trojans”) that orbit about it, which could be a resource for extraction but also pose a potential hazard to spacecraft. They’re also outside of the strongest part of Earth’s magnetic field and so are afforded essentially no protection against charged particles emitted by the sun. The major advantage of these points is that it takes relatively little energy to insert and extract from interplanetary space, so if you wanted to bring resources from elsewhere in the solar system for processing in orbit via some kind of space tug and then have it fly away, the L4 and L5 points are useful. For most other purposes, there are better orbits.
For interplanetary missions launched from Earth, placing a way station and propellant depot in Low Earth Orbit aligned with the solar ecliptic plane makes the most sense. However, for a single mission, a permanent space station isn’t really needed. Prestaging propellant and components in orbit to be assembled into a spacecraft would be the most efficient use of lifted mass. A space station is really only necessary to support some kind of ongoing activity (e.g. a large number of missions, industry requiring human control or supervision, et cetera), and that only makes sense if you have enough infrastructure to extract resources from space instead of launching them from Earth via rocket.
China may or may not attempt a lunar mission. I don’t think it is beyond their eventual capability; they’ve demonstrated competence in human spaceflight so far, and they have both a history of success (the United States) and failure (Soviet Union) to compare and avoid the kind of errors both countries made. Whether they follow through is largely a matter of political will and economics. I am highly doubtful they will attempt to erect a permanent base on the Moon or send a crewed mission to Mars or another planet in the foreseeable future despite the prognostications of some enthusiasts; the prestige factor in being the first nation to accomplish such a goal is largely predicated on it being a proxy for some deeper conflict, and the PRC seems far to pragmatic to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a program of no essential fiscal value.
For Russia, the combination of an unstable economy, a blustering political attitude, and the brain drain of technical talent in the post-Cold War environment pretty much guarantees that they will not revive a lunar landing program or any great advances in spaceflight, despite a long and steady history of itinerant space habitation and technical expertise.
And as much as various commercial interests and hucksters want to promote crewed space capability, it seems unlikely to the point of certainty that any non-national entity is going to pony up the hundreds of billions of dollars of development of capability for an ongoing lunar or interplanetary transportation and habitation, not withstanding the physiological and logistical challenges. There are a number of fundamental technical advances in propulsion, energy, materials, resource extraction, and medicine that are necessary before long term habitation and exploration by human crew are really practicable. However, by investing more reasonable amounts of money in developing autonomous spacecraft and infrastructure synergetically combined with natural advances in medicine, materials, energy, et cetera, such a capability will likely become technically and financially feasible. It isn’t going to happen in ten or twenty years, and probably not fifty, but it will eventually come without expending a large amount of money on a desperate, marginal mission to be the first at any cost. The Vikings were the first Europeans to discover North America, for what little good it did them; the Spanish were the first to explore more than the coastline, but it was the France and England who followed, ultimately profiting the most, in large measure because they built sustainable trade networks and an infrastructure.
Stranger