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Quote of the Day: The Cradle of Humanity
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
I work on the Lunar Gateway program. This is a proposed crewed platform that will trail the Moon and support crewed Moon missions. It is interesting work, and it sounds glamorous, but my job is prosaic. I am part of a team analyzing the data needs of Gateway. Last week I was given an unusual assignment. My boss’s boss was given a document to review and comment on. As is typical for these types of assignments, he gave the job to my boss. Due to a combination of people being absent and others being busy, he passed it on to me.
The document contained the high-level requirements for equipment to be used to explore the Lunar surface: This includes the Lunar surface spacesuits, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (think of a two-seat lunar dune buggy), and the Pressurized Rover (analogous to a four-seat off-road sedan). Send your comments in by next Tuesday, I was told.
For those not engineers, technicians, or mechanics, requirements are the rules specifying the performance of a system. Systems are designed to meet those requirements. As an example, consider a car. It is built to meet requirements as to the number of people it can hold, how much cargo it can carry, gas mileage, and emissions standards. Want a radio or wireless capability for your car? That has to be in the requirements. That brake light at the back of the roof of your car? The result of a requirement. I was being asked to review the requirements of the surface mobility systems for completeness and adequacy.
What I found remarkable was the request to review the requirements. Reviewing requirements documents is part of what I do. Rather, I marveled at what I was reviewing; vehicles to explore the lunar surface. In the 1950s, when I was born, vehicles to roam the Lunar surface were science fiction. Yes, Colliers had published illustrated articles by Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley outlining their vision of exploring the Moon’s surface, but it still ranked as science fiction to many.
The Moon Colony from the Colliers series
I grew up during the Space Race, which culminated in the Apollo Moon landings of 1969-72. Despite the Moon buggy, Lunar exploration was still more science fiction than fact. I started working on the Shuttle program in 1979. At the time, most of us at NASA believed we would soon return to the Moon. After all, we had walked on it less than ten years earlier. None of us believed it would not be until well into the 21st century that new efforts to take manned spacecraft (it was still manned back then, not crewed) beyond low Earth orbit would begin.
Now I was looking at a document defining the performance of lunar surface vehicles and systems. As part of my job. I was to provide comment on it and improve the requirements. The science fiction I had read in my youth is turning into reality. I was part of that.
Skeptics will likely say it will never happen. That NASA does not have what it takes to return to the Moon or reach Mars. They may be right about NASA, but humans on Moon and Mars will happen, and sooner rather than later. Commercial companies are already putting people into space. India plans to launch its first crewed vehicle into Earth orbit by the end of this decade. China has a space station second only to ISS, and larger than the forthcoming Lunar Gateway. It is still growing. And the Chinese have their own plans to put humans on the Moon (the superior Han Chinese, in their view) and build outposts there. The issue is no longer if, but rather who?
Tsiolkovsky was right. Mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
Published in Group Writing
Generally, I scan them with an eye to what we can do, what we can test that we can do, and what the tests are going to look like.
The job they gave you is incredibly cool.
It is amazing how man’s possibilities are mostly limited by his own mind. There are, of course, limits. But we never know what those possibilities or limits are until we ignore the accepted ones and press on.
Well, I turned in six comments. I bet two get “accepted with modification.” The one I want most to be accepted will almost certainly be rejected because reasons. My proposed change does not really make much of a difference except in nomenclature.
David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity, thinks humanity has unimaginable potential. I hope he is right but our politics of the collective appears to impede our efforts.
I think populating the Moon will be a lot more productive than Mars. We should be building at Shackleton Crater and learning what it takes to put in serious habitation, a ‘la The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
One thing troubles me: the dust. All the Apollo astronauts came back covered in it, and I’m amazed it didn’t work its way into the equipment and foul things up. I wonder if anyone is designing an airlock that would shake loose and vacuum off some of the regolith before letting someone inside. There has to be some sort of mitigation protocol for the stuff.
You rang the bell. There were several requirements relating to Lunar dust mitigation.
I know. Moonbase Gingrich does sound better.
The dust is so disruptive and destructive that it is the biggest problem. I dare say it’s a big part of why we haven’t been back. The lunar daily static and other dust-raising phenomenon militate against ever being able to get around the dust.
“Manned” was perhaps appropriate when they were referring to just one (Mercury), or two (Gemini), or perhaps three (Apollo) people. “Crewed” seems more appropriate when there are a half-dozen or more people present (Space Shuttle, Space Station…).
The moon dust figured at least peripherally in one Arthur Clarke book I re-read just recently, “Earthlight,” and of course was central to another, “A Fall Of Moondust.”
Presumably the partial atmosphere of Mars plus almost triple the Moon’s gravity, would make Mars dust less of a problem.
What’s current thinking on the source for that vital di-hydrogen oxide stuff? Moon’s poles? or imported asteroids?
When I was a teenager in high school, my father worked at Delco, at the same time they were subcontracted to Boeing on the original Rover. He didn’t actually work on it AFAIK, he was a production engineer and manager, but it was definitely cool to go visit (to ‘borrow’ some time from their computer off hours) and know that was going on in the same building. I was very much a space fanboi.
Didn’t we already have a lunar vehicle that was there on the surface of the moon operating according to design, Summer 1969? And this was a manned vehicle.
And haven’t we already designed a vehicle that can operate on the surface of Mars? Supposedly it too has made the trek to that planet and performed as expected.
So is this new design work not redundant of what we already have designed, sent upwards and outwards and used to its fullest capacities?
One other question: we arrived on the moon those many years ago, never to return. Why no return?
I have heard it said that NASA officials “lost the technology” that got us there. This sounds like an excuse only one step removed from “my dog ate my homework.”
I understand you are in a category of technical writer/engineering analyst and none of this reflects on you. But the questions I am asking need to be asked.
I think the main issue is probably that Apollo-level technology would not be sufficient to create any kind of long-term base on the Moon.
Apollo barely got 2 men to a lunar landing and back again. And they didn’t have any supplies to set up a long-term habitat. All of which required a huge rocket that was mostly fuel.
Your phone has more processing power than the Command Module, Service Module, and Lunar Module combined.
Yes. The Lunar Rover. Locke On mentioned it in Comment 12. However that was a one-and-done vehicle. (That is what its requirements called for.) It could not be used after a few days of use. It could carry two astronaut and lacks the capabilities of the vehicles envisioned for long-term use on the Moon. It is like comparing the 1885-86 Mercedes Benz to a ‘57 Chevrolet.
We have, and like a bear on a bicycle the wonder is not how well it does, but that it can do it at all. None of the Mars rovers move at faster than a walking pace (They top out at 1.4mph.) They also mass around 400 pound and are no bigger than 5ftx7ft. They could not carry two astronauts and their equipment.
If we don’t mind using vehicles that cannot be refueled, are not designed to survive a lunar night, go the speed of a elderly walking human, and lack the ability to carry any significant cargo or crew, sure. But it would be like driving that 1885 Mercedes-Benz from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back. It was done, but a ’57 Chevy (or the 1950s Volkswagen Beetle, since we are talking Germany) does it better in greater comfort and carrying more luggage.
That one’s easy. No one with the money to pay for the trip was willing to go. That includes the US Government. The cost of putting a pound of payload into orbit has dropped about 97% since 2000. Launch cost drops make a big difference in our capability to get there.
If you mean we cannot build a Saturn V today, that is true. It depends upon a 1950s-1960s industrial base to build. If you mean we cannot build a Saturn V-class rocket today, one capable of launching as much into orbit as the Saturn V, that is demonstrably untrue. We used one just two or so weeks back to put a space capsule into Lunar orbit. (That mission ends tomorrow, with the capsule returning to Earth this Sunday.) And you should see what Elon Musk is building. It should be way better than the Saturn V once it is operational.
I am actually an engineer who became a technical writer for a while. (The demand for space rendezvous navigation software engineers cratered in 2011, and I decided to reinvent myself as a tech writer, rather than wait for openings in that field.) While my current job is not space navigation, it is engineering.
I hope I have answered your questions adequately.
Sadly, rocket technology hasn’t improved that much.
Not as much, but it has improved significantly. Like I said, launch costs have dropped 97% since 2020. But computers have improved by about six orders of magnitude since 1972.
Moon’s poles at present. However, if there are hydrides and oxides in Lunar regolith, you can make H2O by cracking the hydrogen out of the hydrides and the oxygen out of the oxides and combining the product to form water. Solar power works real good on the Moon 14 days out of every 28. All it takes is patience.
Getting enough supplies and people to the moon or Mars, to establish some kind of long-term base, even with no provision for return, and even at a 97% discount, would still be hugely expensive. And what kind of return on investment could there be, with no way to send anything back?
We don’t need it all to go all at once. We can marshal resources in orbit, assemble it there, and push a significantly smaller amount of stuff on to the Moon.
Costs money. Takes time. Still eminently doable.
Apollo also pushed a significantly smaller amount of stuff to the Moon, compared to what was initially launched.
Getting it off the Earth is still the biggest job, and since there’s no friction etc in space, it takes the same amount of energy to push 1000 tons to the Moon all at once as to do it 1 ton at a time.
Although once in space/orbit it could be done using something like ion-thruster “tugboats” rather than chemical rockets.
Getting stuff off the Moon or Mars (especially the Moon) is a whole lot easier than getting stuff off Earth. Moon can launch using an electrically driven catapult. (No atmosphere to induce drag.) Getting stuff to Earth is a matter of navigation and guidance. There is that marvelous atmosphere to serve as a brake. If what you send back is unbreakable (say, refined metals) you just need to slow it down enough it doesn’t bury itself when it hits the Earth’s surface. (It could increase the value of land in the Australian Outback, the Sahara Desert, the Mojave or the Gobi as uninhabited desert makes great drop zones.)
Ion drive is being used to lift Gateway from low-Earth orbit to its near-rectilinear halo orbit trailing the moon. (NRHO is a fancy way of saying it orbits an empty spot in space – the halo bit – in a nearly box-like rectangle -the near-rectilinear bit.)
A ++.
You think environmentalists would allow stuff like that?
I think after a few hundreds of millions starve because of green agricultural policies there will be so many environmentalists hanging from lampposts or burned at the stake (and damn the carbon footprint) that their opinions won’t count for much.
Still cool to be a part of it
Space exploration is one of the most exciting human activities. It reflects the pinnacle of our technology and technological infrastructure. And this may be the achilles heel of manned space migration. Humans seem to be constantly moving in two directions — one of which undermines the technological infrastructure we currently need for space exploration. It is entirely plausible for us to strand a manned outpost until we have mastered self-contained sustainability. This is the real “space race” — to develop self-contained sustainability before we destroy essential infrastructure.
I’ll support serious efforts to colonize planets inhospitable to human live after humanity has made a serious effort to establish city-sized permanent self-sufficient colonies in Antarctica.
If a sizable number of people aren’t willing to live their entire lives in Antarctica; where there is at least oxygen, water, Earth gravity, Earth air pressure, a magnetic field to protect from cosmic radiation, relatively easy communications access to the rest of the planet, and the ability to leave occasionally for a vacation; then the idea that people will be willing to live on Mars or the Moon in numbers sufficient to “save humanity” is a pipe dream.
Until then, almost everything to do with space exploration should be done with robots.