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Lunar Colony and Lunar Station
NASA released a video outlining their plan to prepare for a lunar colony and to establish an orbital docking station.
Maybe 20 or 30 years from now, we will have a base on the moon. I’m surprised they are still relying on a rocket that burns and dumps 80% of its mass to get a crew and supplies into space. Will we see alternatives in the next century?
I suppose NASA has managed the current space station over Earth well enough. If any accidents or incidents disrupt the lunar space station, it would take three days minimum to send help … even if someone on Earth had another rocket immediately to spare. People can’t be constantly perfect. They need to establish some breathing room for mishaps. Are we ready for a lunar orbital station?
Of course, mention of a “very diverse (and highly qualified)” crew of astronauts in a strategic outline was no surprise. Earth’s spacefarers are betting on perfection with strange priorities.
Published in Science & Technology
80% is just chemistry and physics. Fuel technology has peaked. The interesting things are in control of the burn.
I don’t expect any manned missions to anywhere in the next 30 years. NASA maintains a pretense of human exploration for marketing and funding, but the real work is all robotic now. I am fine with that, since I just want the most science.
What surprises me is that alternatives to rockets haven’t been developed.
I never understood space elevators, though if feasible that concept might be more cost-efficient in an age of international satellites and space exploration.
Over the years, I have read about and forgotten various other proposals. The most straightforward was piggybacking on high-altitude planes.
Very interesting.
But man, what’s with the production style? Extreme creaky voice girl and bad drum-machine music mixed too loudly.
This is a potential idea for smaller payloads, but there is a limit to what an airplane can carry in useful load. The maximum value is significantly less than 50%, especially in the big 747 / C-5 class.
For the White Knight design it was about 39%
In addition, the SpaceShipOne rocket used a hybrid (solid/liquid) motor, which is much safer but less efficient than liquid hydrogen/oxygen designs.
I wonder if a series of differently engineered planes could relay space cargo from one to another in a staggered climb. We have refueled aircraft mid-flight with other aircraft for decades now. Maybe there is a way to get a heavy burden into the air with a heavy cargo plane before transferring it to a lighter plane at an altitude where gravity’s pull is diminished.
Gravity pull itself isn’t the reason for using an airplane to lift it to a higher altitude. The main reason is to reduce air friction. At sea level, the pressure is 14.7 lbs/square inch. At 50,000 feet, it’s 1.7 lbs/square inch. By 70,000 feet, most common jet engines no longer work. The SR-71 Blackbird uses special fuel and special air inlets (like a ram jet) to go higher and faster.
I don’t think the USA will send a human to the moon or mars in this century. But I think China might, just so they can plant a bigger flag on the moon or take the first selfie from Mars. Here’s my odds of who has a big enough ego and wallet:
USA 0%
China 80%
Europe 0%
India 10%
private 0%
I have my doubts as well. But private companies could do it if they were free of governments.
Science fiction often portrays scientists expatriating to poor countries where they can explore unethical experiments. In this case, the situation is more like politicians and bureaucrats insisting that astronauts wear their seatbelts.
There are considerations that tend to outstrip the technological solutions.
We already have the technology for a mass driver system (similar to the Navy’s EM rail guns) for keeping all of the propulsion stuff on the ground, and limit the disposable items to just an aerodynamic/life support container that rendezvous with a catcher station on orbit. This would be the staging point for assembling systems for prepositioning of infrastructure on the Moon or Mars. This would greatly reduce the reoccurring costs (the cost/pound to reach orbit), but required a substantial investment in engineering and infrastructure to develop. You need a lot of flights to justify that investment, it must have significant commercial reason(s) (i.e. partners) to justify those costs, other wise the lower initial cost of discreet chemical launch systems and the finite number of launches for the objective of a non permeant presence on the Moon will always win out the financial argument.
So it not really a technology barrier. I suspect that it’s more of need for a imperative to have a mission. Having lived thru the race for the Moon I clearly remember all of the resistance the public signaled after we got to the Moon (we did not even finish all of the planned flights, and repurposed the already committed/built hardware for Skylab). Remember we had on going wars against poverty, drug, housing, hunger, education, and a whole slew of other social imperatives that will never be solve by technology since they are underpinning other hand out constituencies the benefit from the never ending dole. (Think how everyone acknowledges that Head Start is a failure, it have been demonstrated a failure with multiple studies going back to the early 70’s, and yet it is still budgeted)
The public hold no real enchantment with the activities of the space station. It’s a feel good remembrance as long as it the entire space program never exceeds 0.6% or 0.7% of the Federal Budget. Admittedly many of the technology developments from Space program are valved at multiples of the cost invested, something that few if any Government program can boast, and perhaps it serves a purpose since most of the old industrial manufacturing corporations have dumped their own R&D budgets (Bell Labs, RCA, GE, IBM, etc)
NASA also suffers from the same Government/Industrial complex that Eisenhower warned the nation about. The ability to override the current industrial interests that are invested in how thing are to be done is not trivial. Typically they want their part of the pie, and if NASA wants to fund something innovated to reduce costs, it runs parallel programs (look how we are funding both Elon Musk’s learning curve in rocket adventures, as well as the incumbents with the SLS). We also have a record of trying to push programs to reduce the cost per pound to orbit under notion that once it’s cheap enough, unimagined business and opportunities will materialize. However even when we try to share funding the historical firms the record is sketchy (anyone remember the Aerospike boondoggle?)
I certainly hope that we advance enough to have space travel as routine as coast to coast flying, but until there is a vision, and a financial “I’m going to make a ton of money imperative”, it’s not going to happen in my life. I have spent 40 years working on developing technologies for space operations, and it’s getting harder to innovate within the confines of government, not easier, because once you have the moniker that failure is not an option, neither is risk.
Is it not inevitable, then, that someone in the world will eventually establish such a launch facility and contract its use to anyone and everyone who wants access to space? Satellites have become essential worldwide and demand for them will only grow. Surely, there is already sufficient demand for faster, cheaper, and more efficient launches if one designs a launch program for such a generally accessible pay-per-use program.
In other words, how is a spacecraft launch facility very different from the Panama or Suez canals? Why can’t we build something like that as an international service, rather than a national lab project?
According to this conversation with Ricochet’s old friend anonymous, New Zealand already contracts out space access in a similar way (if I understand correctly, which I probably don’t).
By the way, in that (public) conversation, John basically laughs off the idea that NASA will fulfill those lunar proposals. He continues:
Will the new US Space Force simply double down on that model?
Its not inevitable, but it’s on the same scale as a Cross Continental railroad or a Panama Canal, but they had fairly clear visions since the speed and energy expended for transport was a well established societal good.
Rail guns can easily achieve orbital velocities of a “payload”. The trick is to do it over a long enough track so that the acceleration does not crush the occupants, or the components of a non organic payload. Other engineering considerations would be having the “tube” for the rail elevated (pick a suitable mountain and some structure beyond) to reduce the atmospheric drag. Getting to 38K feet and you have reduce the drag by a factor of five (15 psi down to ~3psi). Also have the tube partially evacuated for the same energy savings, and reduce the heating of the payload carrier.
Some innovation for reducing cost of construction would be nice, but one does not going to need new materials technologies that have not been developed. The cost of the launch would be the carrier and the electrical power (probably lots of capacitor storage) to accelerate the payload, so almost everything is reusable.
These are engineering endeavors, not technology barriers.
Some sort of a capture station needs to be located at the arrival point in orbit to collect the items being shipped up and either assembled, or storing the payloads (this type of systems is still going to need propellents for shifting orbits and exiting orbit).
But the heavy lift from the gravity well gets down to the price of electricity to fling the mass ….
The childish voice talking down to us was almost unbearable.
NASA needs to return to its NACA roots and should concentrate on developing useful technology. We should recognize that NASA landing on the moon was a rare event where the government did something very unique, exciting, and inspiring. They will be resting on those laurels for generations, it seems, when every other government program is recognized as bloated and inferior to private enterprise.
If there is a reason to go to the moon, government isn’t going to make it better. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocketlabs, and others are showing that entrepreneurship is alive and well, and giving a first rate example of why it’s superior to the guys who run the DMV.
Additionally, the Lunar Station lacks purpose and is a classic example of bureaucrats doing something they know and which they think politicians will pay for. They know how to make a space station, so of course we need one around the moon, they seem to think. But we don’t need a second micro-gravity lab, we already have one and it’s not too terribly useful. The only thing we need orbiting the moon is a fleet of communications and mapping satellites, no people needed.
This young girl telling us, with all the confidence children have, that this is a great plan needs to go find a job at SpaceX. If they’ll have her. We need to stop paying her.
Not really. You’d still need to get the planes where they are. The only way to do something like that would be to take small payloads into orbit and then use them from there. For instance, you can send a bunch of fuel tanks to orbit, and refuel a rocket from those tanks. It would be expensive, but it’s one way to get a larger ship to Mars. That is, launching a large ship like SpaceX Starship is a big deal, but when it gets to orbit it will have much depleted fuel tanks. Refilling them with other ships who only carry fuel as a payload into orbit would allow that ship to travel to Mars with enough fuel to land, and hopefully return.
But unless you’re in an orbit, piece-mealing cargo into the atmosphere wouldn’t likely have an advantage.
SpaceX is going to get to Mars before anyone else, by far. I’m confident of it. Elon Musk seems to have developed technologies and companies specifically for operation on Mars. Boring machines, battery operated vehicles (including trucks), satellite networks, and of course SpaceX. Elon Musk gives me great hope for the future of mankind.
If SpaceX goes to Mars, taxpayers will be funding it. I am confident of it ;) Elon is a great story.
like 400 miles of track.
At one brick at a time, eventually you can rebuild the Pyramid of Giza in space!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the taxpayers fund it, but the difference would be that Elon is driving the ship, not the politicians begging for funds. It will be largely his plan and his creations that they will subsidize and then sponge off his success.
Why can’t people just stay with Bernie and the rest of the moonbats? Why build a new base?
I can’t help but think of starting at the Pacific Ocean and zooming up the Sierras.
Wait a second… what’s the highest altitude point along the US-Mexico border?
‘Kill two birds with one stone.
I really don’t think drag is the main aerodynamic concern, it’s aerothermal heating. How tall of a structure do you have in mind? What altitude do you expect the rail to be at when the vehicle reaches high hypersonic speed and starts ablating?
Or to pose the question a different way, is the plan to leave the launch rail at orbital speed, or to lob the vehicle up at suborbital velocity and then us a chemical rocket to accelerate to orbital velocity?
If you’ll indulge me, I pulled this graphic out of a research paper I found on the internet. The speeds we are talking about have only ever been an issue for reentry systems, so that is all that is plotted, but it still seems useful enough for a back of the envelope discussion
With a railgun launch system, we are talking about going deep into ablation land in the lower righthand corner of the graph. I am a guidance guy, not a materials guy, but I would guess the combination of low altitude (less than, say, 30 km) and high speed (greater than, say, 7 km/s or Mach 20) is fatal for any current engineering materials, based on how far it is below even the Martian return profile in green.
For reference, a very low Earth orbit at 200 km altitude has a speed of 7.8 km/s, equivalent to about Mach 25 (!) while ascending through the atmosphere (depending on what reference altitude you choose). Current rockets are still well down in the supersonic regime when they ascend through 30 km, and only reach hypersonic and orbital speeds at very high altitude using their upper stages.
Do you know something I don’t that leads you to say it’s just an engineering problem requiring no new materials and a nearly all reusable system?
Earth Re-entry paths as Velocity/altitude graphs, showing the influence of the trajectories on the relative mass specific enthalpies/total pressures of entry. Shuttle type trajectories enter at high altitudes (low pressures) with moderate speeds compared to lunar or sample return. The heatflux levels from convection, diffusion, conduction and radiation lead to different requirements of Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) for the corresponding missions,(adapted from [7]). [source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Earth-Re-entry-paths-as-Velocity-altitude-graphs-showing-the-influence-of-the_fig4_261316575 ]
The Space Force is basically taking over the existing Air Force Space Command which has a real and ongoing mission. It’s not a space exploration or expeditionary fighting force that needs to make up new ways to justify its budget. They (issue contracts to) build, launch, and manage space assets (satellites, launch facilities, launch vehicles, tracking systems, and ground control stations) and monitor space threats such as adversary satellites, ballistic missiles, space-related cybersecurity and signal threats, and space debris. I assume that includes ownership of the Global Positioning System.
Not unless physicists, chemists, and engineers manage to discover that magic exists. There’s simply no other way to escape Earth’s gravity without some sort of breakthrough discovery that blurs the line between science and magic, like space elevators, or the Epstein Drive from The Expanse that runs on “efficiency”, or a super-powerful EmDrive that creates enormous amounts of thrust without expending fuel, etc. Good luck with those.
The best option using actual feasible technology is to give up on this whole “human colonies” pipe-dream and just pour all one’s resources into robotics. The number of problems that need to be overcome drops exponentially by setting up colonies of robots rather than colonies of humans.
And every human they send to Mars will be dead in less than a decade. Getting to Mars isn’t the challenge. Surviving Mars is the challenge. God designed Mars to kill humans. SpaceX would be better off trying to terraform Antarctica or building cities on the bottom of the ocean.
Speaking of magic, I presume this is not the Epstein who didn’t kill himself.
Epstein’s death was an unfortunate accident, but it benefited a lot of people.
Then again, if you’re concerned about the survival of the human species, “colonies of robots” doesn’t quite make the grade.
We are very close to having the technology to keep the human race going, if something goes seriously wrong with the Earth.
And something going seriously wrong with the Earth is just a matter of time.
I personally prefer ocean exploration to space exploration. Perhaps we need a Star Wars of the sea to raise the interest (and money).