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- As I recall, there wasn’t any material known to be immediately valuable in any great quantities on the moon. There would likely be offshoot technologies discovered, but such a situation is difficult for a private company to finance, knowing that the profits of offshoot technologies may end up going to companies other than the one that made the largest financial investment. - On the other hand, launching a communications satellite has immediate, quantifiable payoffs for the company that owns & operates it, and is much easier and cheaper to accomplish than pushing anything to the moon and landing it on the surface in one piece. - MC
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Lawmill:
Well, mirror size, anyway. Few large-aperture optical scopes use lenses. In any case, as mentioned by Sofa King above, that hurdle is being leapt with the use of segmented and multi-component mirrors and optical interferometry. One prominent example is the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which has two 10-meter optical scopes. They are the largest in use for optical astronomy, and each is composed of 36 hexagonal segments. Both will also soon be used as an interferometer with an effective diamter of 85 meters.
MC:
Not if your company is named Iridium. 
Quote: Has anyone heard about the guy whose planning to build a rocket and launch himself to the moon"
Didn’t Andy Griffith do that in the '70s in a made for t.v. movie? What was the name of theat show?
Finally found it.
Salvage 1
IRRC they owned a junk yard & went to the moon to get the stuff the Apollo missions left behind to resell it.
Not in great quantities, no, but in easier-to-reach quantities. The vast majority of the heavy elements (i.e.-metals) have sunk to the Earth’s core… back when our little Terra Firma was in its earliest stages. If the Moon was made from the same stuff with similar percentages of stuff as Earth (as is evidenced by the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks brought back), its smaller mass would have resulted in more of its metals being closer to the surface… and, therefore, easier to mine.
However, when extraterrestrial mining facilities become necessary (and cost-productive), better targets would be the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. OUR moon will probably wind up being a tourist attraction or resort hotel…
Yep, with no atmosphere, clarity would improve for optical telescopes. That is why the Hubble does so well even though it is not that big compared to some of the ground-based telescopes. You’re right that it’s harder to build/maintain space-based scope…due to the expense of putting them in orbit and the expense of getting into orbit to repair them. So by that token, it would be even more expensive to build/maintain the moon telescope.
Other posts…
I’m not so sure the ISS would be a good stepping stone to the moon. It seems easier to launch once to your destination than to launch-dock-and-launch again. I think the ISS will be a good resource to learn about human physiology in long-term space travel (i.e., good training grounds for a trip to Mars). Then again, a permanent presence in orbit or on the moon may make a particular mission cheaper.
Once it becomes more economically feasible to get there(cheaper launch vehicles) there will probably be a moon base. Mining, science, tourism - that kind of thing.
It’s been proposed that the moon may contain good fusion-reactor fuel (Helium-3?) that is not found on Earth in significant quantities. Of course, we need to invent fusion reactors first.
Achernar: Why not put a telescope on the Moon? With no atmosphere there, you could have a 'scope the size of Arecibo with the precision of Hubble. Am I wrong in thinking that it’s harder to construct and maintain space-borne telescopes than land-based ones?
Interesting idea. It’d have to be located near the longitudes between the near and far sides so that it’d be most useful. (If it were located in the middle of the near side, it’d be useless during near a full moon as the ambient light would blind it.)
Pluses:
[ul]
[li]No atmosphere[/li][li]Slower rotation of moon, so less adjustment to aiming[/li][li]Possible eventual use by moon base[/li][/ul]
Minuses:
[ul]
[li]Cost, mainly getting sensitive and fragile pieces on the lunar surface.[/li][li]Gravity. Being in zero-G (really continuous freefall) makes the need for structural support minimal for Hubble.[/li][li]Meteors. When a rock whizzes past Hubble, it doesn’t matter. But if one hits near the lunar telescope, debris from its impact would hamper its operation, perhaps permanently.[/li][/ul]
I think that Virgil “Gus” Grissom said it best in January of 1967 (Not long before his tragic death in the Apollo 1 Incident):
"If we die we want the public to accept it. We are in a risky business. The conquest of space is worth the risk of human life."
- Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Jan. 1967
I think that if I or anyone had the chance to find out even less than a trillionth of a percent of everything there is to know in the universe, why we're here, what we're supposed to do in life and to look onward to more is worth just putting at least 1 life on the line.
There are a million things that could go wrong in every single STS, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, Soyuz, etc... mission there ever was. We have seen this happen and we have learned by trial and error. Apollo 1, Apollo 13, The Liberty Bell 7, Challenger, Alexi Leonov's Soyuz Mission, Laika's Mission....... just to name a few.
There will be many, many more who give their lives so that we can get that less than a trillionth of a percent of everything. I don't know who said this but I believe to be very profound (I don't remember the exact words) Man's Lot in life to travel to new planets and stars and to look onward to the next.
What I am trying to say is that though many have died for the space programs of the world, only ending the space programs to prevent more deaths will make theirs in vain, and I, as an aspiring astronaut, hope to one day put my life on the line as many others have just for the TASTE of what is out there and to see our home from a distance.
Everything in space is so beautiful. It's beyond me why more poets haven't been sent.
-Ra-
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- Or of course, there’s the silly answer, that if you put a space station on the moon it is no longer a space station but a moon station. - MC
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I was so pissed when the moon was abandoned, having read all of the greats of sci-fi, having drooled over many beautifully rendered artist’s drawings of moon bases in magazines, books, articles and assorted other publications. The government cut NASA’s budget and it had to give in to selling itself and poking up commercial satellites and such to survive. Even after we walked on the moon, there was a rush of groups screaming for the NASA funds to use for other reasons. A. Clarke saved it by developing the communications satellite, which appealed to the major corporations and the shuttle came out of that.
Now, they’re looking at Mars. I still recall ‘2001 a Space Oddessy’ and the technology used in the ‘Discovery’ and wonder what’s holding us up. (Well, making smaller cell phones, developing expensive equipment for expensive sports for the rich, using space technology to make strange television commercials, concentrating on animated, furry, self triggering toy chatterboxes to sell to kids and putting microchips in smelly sneakers just might have something to do with it.)
I was so pissed when all of those beautiful and exciting drawings of moon bases came to nothing. I wanted to go to the moon on a vacation!
Just hint that the moon has some exploitable commercial value and the corporations will develop their own ships and trample each other in getting there over night to rape the planet. I am keeping an eye on some of these private concerns who are building their own ships for tourists and thinking about eventual space station motels.
In the mean time, I’m impatiently awaiting a good Mars landing, hopefully around or on the polar caps, with lots of far roaming pictures.
Because Going to the Moon takes 3 days and going to Callisto takes 3 years.
Not only that, but then when a massive explosion knocks the moon out of its orbit, you have to deal with Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, and that hot shape-shifting chick.
Ok everybody,
here is your assignment. Go to your library, if you don’t already have a copy of the book, “Colonies in Space” by T.A.Heppenheimer. Great book, written in the 70’s but still relevant because our spacegoing technology has not really progressed any since the late 70’s. We still use the same technologies, remember the shuttle was designed in the early 70’s. It was Nixon that made the decision to go with strap on boosters instead of a flyback reusable booster, so I guess he’s to blame for Challenger.
Yes, there are plenty of resources on the moon that we could use in space based contruction. The key is that energy in space is virtually costless. Read the book, you’ll be both interested and pissed because our politicians threw away our opportunities because of political decisions.
Korzdan
I’ve been reading this board and as an aerospace engineer, thought I’d give you a “rocket jockey’s” opinion. If someone came to me at work and proposed a telescope on the moon, here’s what I’d say.
There are a few problems with it.
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Getting it up there. You would have to have a couple of communications satellites orbiting the Moon to get info back and commands to it - remember, it’s on the far side of the Moon. Then, you’d have to build it, have it crash on the Moon, deploy, possibly more than once (if it’s really big), then assemble itself, all while maintaining extremely tight tolerances and not breaking or smudging anything. You could have astronauts help, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it any easier. IMHO, it would be easier in micro-g (no crash, no gravity to distort the dish/lens/mirror).
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RADIO pollution has nothing to do with an OPTICAL telescope - different parts of the EM spectrum. Not my area of expertise, but if I remember correctly, the atmosphere doesn’t really interfere that much with radio waves, so you might as well stay on the ground for a radio telescope.
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And here’s the big one: being on the far side of the Moon will get you away from the Earth’s radiation, but not the Sun’s. Anywhere on the Moon, except a few deep craters around the poles, gets the same amount of sunlight. Any optics sensitive enough to do what’s necessary will get burned out by this much light, and would need a sunshield. Therefore, the telescope will be useless or severely hindered for ~14 out of ~28 days.
IMHO, a better idea would be a space telescope in a Lagrange/libration point, always in the same spot related to the Sun and Earth. That way, you block the Sun and Earth with one damn big sunshield (tennis court size). This happens to be the basic idea behind the Next Generation Space Telescope.
A couple quick points:
Callisto - nasty radiation and an asteroir belt in between
Mars - I haven’t read the A. Clarke book with the 1-10% more fuel figure, but I’d be willing to bet that’s for the same size vessel and a really slllloooooow trip. The trip to the Moon And Back takes about 10 days. Mars and back would take AT LEAST 18 months. Longer trip, more supplies. More supplies, more mass. More mass, more fuel. More fuel, more mass. More mass, more fuel…
Hope that didn’t sound too testy, just wanted to be thorough!
I believe we should go back to the moon because of the technology - if we knew what we would invent/discover, we wouldn’t have to go. Also, it can be a proving ground for technology and planning we’d need to go to Mars.
If you’re interested in the Apollo era, I heartily recommend A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin, or the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
good points…just one comment…
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*Originally posted by Pigs in Space *
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The asteroid belt is sparse enough to be of little/no concern to navigation.
Question - I know Jupiter has some nasty radiation going out to the orbits of Io and Europa…but does it lethally extend out to Callisto? I’ll see what I can find out…
Quoth Pigs in Space:
Not quite. The basic idea behind the NGST is the same as the idea behind the Hubble, but bigger and in the near infrared. What you describe is the basic idea behind the Big Occulting Steerable Satellite (BOSS), which could be used to increase the effectiveness of the Hubble or the NGST.
Yes, NGST is bigger and has a slightly different spectrum than Hubble. It will also, most probably, be situated at the L2 libration point, which is the only thing I said. It is not the only satellite to use this orbit, so BOSS could be put there - it’s a big libration point. I haven’t heard of it, but I’m not sure what you mean by helping Hubble or NGST. Just so you know where I stand, I’ve just started on the proposal for NGST.
For more info on NGST and it’s orbit go to: