To the moon and Mars...

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

I wasn't alive then, but the impression I get from watching the documentaries of the space race to the moon in the 60's gives me the impression of everyone working together against all odds to be the first...

Sure, 'cause we were waging the Cold War against the Communists. The race to the Moon was one of its important battles. The Commies had twice won space race battles (Sputnik, then Yuri Gargarin) and we were darn tootin' not gonna let them beat us to the Moon!

One of the lessons of world history (see my story near the end of the thread on "Terrorism or Global Warming ", at http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=1888) is that rulers have repeatedly gained support by shifting the attention of their people to some external threat (real or imagined). A natural human tendency is to "band together" and set aside mutual differences when faced by a threat from outside "our group", and all skillful leaders know that. During the Cold War, US politicians repeatedly took advantage of (and sometimes exaggerated) the threat of Communism in order to focus their constituents' attention outward.

(Now, I'm not saying G. W. Bush was involved in any conspiracy to create or ignore warnings about 9/11. I'm saying he has taken skillful advantage of the opportunity to exercise and grab greater power [e.g., USA Patriot Act] than U.S. citizens would normally grant their Executive Branch when they could make calm, carefully-considered decisions about the matter. It was possible for the U.S. to proceed without declaring "war".)

it sure would be nice if we all (USA) got behind something 100% and worked towards a common goal,

Any incumbent leader would love that!

devoid of politics and personal gain...

Such innocent idealism ...

(Kind of like how everyone pitched in during WW2 - like kids collecting scrap metal and stuff like that)

There was a very real hot war going on then.

[kwstone]

Wait for the rumours that Osama Bin Laden is going to get to Mars first. (Hey, wait a minute, maybe he's already there?)

[nucleon]

Lookie here an old thread.

I thought I'd substract from the sum of human knowledge and say a few things. I'm mainly going to regurgitate Zubrin's Mars Express plans.

*Motiviation

Welcome to the space race, the sequel. The reasons I see US going back to space is the beat the Chinese. The Chinese have the motivation. I recall reading a report saying the space race generated obscene benefits to the US economy. Because it gave young people science a career option, a _lot_ of young talent took up science related fields. Research dollars poored into science. The benefits from this are incalculable.

Because the US made the moon first, the US has the technical 'aura' (for lack of a better word). The idea that anything concieved in the US is the best. How I see the current administration - they see that if the Chinese get to the moon, the US will lose this 'aura'. China has a lot to gain to put a man on the moon, the US has a lot to lose.

China currently has the perception that their products are substandard to US based companies. If by getting to the moon, they might be able to challenge the world's general perception that anything made by the US is cool. A *lot* of industries in the US depend on the perception that the US is the best.

(1) Moon base - bad, (2) Human visit to Mars good.

1) Every experiment I've read regarding simulating an off-earth base has failed. I could very well imagine a moon base being a money sink. It abosrbs money from everywhere.

We just don't have the technology to sustain agriculture off Earth as yet. Sure genetic modification is creating some weird and wonderful ideas, but not to the extend of having a sustained agriculture off Earth as yet.

I was reading that humans that lived on the moon base would have to recycle their own urine, and eat algae.

The idea that the moon would be easier to launch manned deep space missions from the moon 'cheaper' is a fallacy. A return journey from moon to mars is the same energy distance as from Earth to Mars. Moon has no atmosphere, so more fuel is required to stop

Also the dangereous bit - quality controls on Earth are a _lot_ easier to maintain.

But on the plus side, the one industry that would benefit from a moon base would be Astronomy. No clouds, stable continents, pure bliss. A automated telescope based on the moon would probably what NASA should aim for.

2)

Read 'The case for Mars', good ol' Zubrin puts forward the case to visit Mars. From his book, you get the idea we should have done it by now.

Zubrin basically says that we should use the high CO2 atmosphere as fuel for the return journey. So the craft doesn't have to take more weight of the return fuel requiring less fuel to go in the first place.

For me personally, I keep asking, what have we as a bunch of humans done since we landed a mon on the moon. Bugger all. Sure we made some money here and there, but do we hold highly the currency of past civilisaitons? Hell no. The egyptians 1000s of years ago build the pyramids, as the information age what have we done? Bugger all.

(One exception I have, the Internet as a whole I think is a great achievement. Anything that allows people to communicate can't be a bad thing. The internet is the largest, fastest deployed infrastructure known, compare to Television, phones, radio etc..)

Anyone here been traveling? Anyone read about the Sistine Chapel, seen pictures? Anyone actually been there to see it. It's a completely different story of reading about it, and actually being there. Same thing for Mars.

I was reading in New Scientist to say that we still don't know what Mars actually looks like when using human sight. All the current photographs have been taken with IRGB filters. (Digital cameras use red, green, blue filters, the Mars probes have always used infra-red instead of red filters.) The reason being this shows geology features better than normal RGB photography.

I really think the moon base is waste of time/resources.

-- Craig

[xilman]

Originally Posted by nucleon

I was reading that humans that lived on the moon base would have to recycle their own urine, and eat algae.

-- Craig

You mean we don't do that down here on Earth already?

What do you think happens to your urine, and where does your drinking water come from?

Never eaten seaweed in a sushi restaurant?

Paul

[Maybeso]

Originally Posted by nucleon

... (1) Moon base - bad, (2) Human visit to Mars good.

I agree with your/Zubrin's points regarding China as a motivating factor. Some of it could apply to Japan as well, if to a lesser degree.

However, your agument seems to be for a one-time-visit to Mars over a long-term presence on the Moon, which can't be won in the stump-for-money arena. Because if you're talking about manned missions, it is safer and cheaper to advance in small stages. While if you're talking about Mars, it's safer and cheaper to send robots to establish a base first, then send the crew. Talk to the military about supply and support logistics and you'll start to understand why Mars will remain out of reach until we take a couple of steps toward it.

You are correct, every simulation of an off-earth base so far has failed. For two reasons: They were necessarily small-scale, and tried to be self-sufficent and capable of supporting humans from day one. We don't have the understanding to build a small self-sustaining ecosystem that works out of the box. Our goal should be isolated unmanned greenhouses that needs progressively less extraction of wastes and input of deficiencies. Over time they become more interconnected and more complex, involving more species. But this type of construction requires too much living space to work in earth orbit.

A large scale base on the Moon is cheaper than a large scale space station in high Earth orbit because you don't have to lift every ounce of material for each square foot of your habitat. You send up tools and machinery, and use them to construct lunar fabrication plants to build a base out of local materials.

It is also cheaper to build a station in lunar orbit out of lunar material than imported Earth materials. And it is cheaper, easier, safer to do that with an established lunar base than without one.

Launching deep space missions from the Moon IS MUCH easier. Using the Moon's orbital momentum saves on fuel. Using the Earth as a slingshot saves more - which you can't do from Earth orbit. Using both the Earth and Moon as slingshots will save enough fuel to increase payloads by an order of magnitude.

On the return, you can use the Moon to drop into Earth orbit, or use the Earth to reach lunar orbit, almost for free. Getting to either surface from orbit is handled by local landers - The deep space mission does not haul the ship/fuel necessary for landing out to Mars and back. So being able to refuel on Mars is not an argument against the Moon.

The Moons lack of an atmosphere is not an issue, it's an advantage. To land on Mars, you need a very carefully engineered reentry vehicle, and it's a very precise operation. To land on the Moon, you need a spacesuit, a small platform, and a rocket with fuel. The reason the lunar landings were dangerous was they brought their air and fuel from Earth, so there wasn't any extra. If you are extracting metals out of lunar rock, you will have waste products - solids, liquids, and gases. A gas that is extracted from a solid expands 600 times. With solar energy to heat/pressurize, or ionize, or combine them into 'burnable' compounds, all of them can be used as fuels. With excess fuel launched into orbit, a very safe automatic shuttling service is easy - the Russians have been robotically resupplying stations in orbit for decades.

Don't get me wrong, Zubrin's reasons for sending people to Mars are all good ones. I agree we should go, I just don't think Mars should be next. Personally, after the money has been spent, and the mission is over, I'd rather have a base on the Moon than a flag planted in some dune on Mars.

- Bruce

[nucleon]

Bruce - you have some good points.

In the Lecture he gave near me (Uni of Qld, Brisbane Aust), Zubrin did acknowledge that a lot of progress had been made in Ion Drives. His Mars express plans were all basesd on chemical rockets that we have now. Zubrin had dismissed other forms of propulsion - solar winds, nuclear engines.

At the time he did say that Ion drives didn't have enough acceleration to leave Earth Orbit. I'm not sure about Moon orbit though.

I could very well imagine using waste gases as a fuel for ion drives to ferry materials between Earth and the moon. After a time there would be enough waste gases floating between the Earth and the moon, there will be a point where no further gas is required, and we'd using Ion drives like turbine engines sucking out gases left behind.

Almost think of it as a gaseous railroad.

From a philosophical point of view I like your point about having a permenant base on the moon is more practical, than taking some happy snaps off the surface of Mars.

-- Craig

[jasong]

One other benefit of going to the moon which hasn't been mentioned was covered in Discover magazine some months ago. I'm going to sound like an idiot since I don't know the technical terms, but it said that there is a type of helium on the moon that can't last on earth because of the Earth's ionosphere. The article claimed that the helium might be the answer to solving the fusion problem. Bringing back 220 pounds of this special helium was stated as the predicted break even point in terms of expense and return.

One pound of this stuff is supposedly worth millions of dollars.

[Uncwilly]

Mining He3 has been pointed out as a benefit of visiting the moon. However, the mining is not as easy as just picking up random moon rocks. I doubt that we will obtain this benefit within the next 50 years.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Mining He3 has been pointed out as a benefit of visiting the moon. However, the mining is not as easy as just picking up random moon rocks. I doubt that we will obtain this benefit within the next 50 years.

And, for that matter, is probably much more easily mined, in thousands of tonnes quantities, from the atmospheres of the gas giants, principally Jupiter and Saturn.

We already have the technology to mine the Jovian atmosphere for He3 and have had for at least twenty years. What we don't yet have is a market for He3 in kilotonne quantities to support the extremely large start-up costs.


Paul

[clowns789]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

However! the idea of "building a base" on the moon has some difficulties.

Tell that to...
http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html

[Numbers]

Originally Posted by nucleon

The reasons I see US going back to space is the beat the Chinese.

The idea of going to the moon to “beat the Chinese” or the Japanese for that matter is completely nuts. Speaking as a non-American I think that this “aura” you speak of is a brave, bold, belief in your own invincibility, a confidence in yourselves and your “get-it-done” attitude that contributed to your getting to the moon in the first place. And let’s not forget that you did it forty years ago.

When the Wright brothers (two Americans) first flew it was not forty years before anyone copied them, Bleriot flew the channel just six years later. Think of cars, computers, television, radio any great invention is followed very quickly by many imitators and improvements, but no one has come even remotely close to emulating the single most wonderful technological achievement of any century; landing a man on the moon and bringing him back home again safely. You guys have a great deal to be very proud of, and you do not have to do it again now or ever just to “beat the Chinese”. That would just be a big boys pissing-up-the-wall contest you’ve already won, hands down. The Chinese, by comparison, are barely out of the starting blocks.

IMHO what you should be doing now is capitalising on the advantage this gives you. The “perception” that everything American is best was probably a valid idea four or five years ago, but 7/11, the Iraq war, Global Warming, etc have shown the world that you are not invincible, that you do make mistakes, that you are, despite what the Olympic medal tables tell us, only human after all.

Which is not to say that you should not be going back to the moon.

I recently read that it would take as long to re-develop Saturn V as it did to build them in the first place. Which means that when the Shuttle retires in 2010 you don’t have a vehicle capable of putting a man into space, so it seems rather a moot point to be discussing whether you should be going to the Moon or to Mars, doesn’t it?

Sean O’Keefe’s (Chief at NASA) idea was to assemble a large rocket in orbit using pieces carried up by four separate conventional rockets. Michael Griffin (his replacement) famously trashed that idea on his first day in office. One hundred days later he still has not come up with a viable plan for a heavy lift vehicle to take space exploration by man any further than that day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong uttered those immortal words, “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” All you have to do now is to make it a leap to somewhere rather than just a leap from somewhere.

What you should be doing, IMO, is not one but two telescopes on the moon, on opposite sides, linked together so that you have a telescope the size of the moon. Hubble has, for reasons I don’t begin to understand, been tremendously popular with both the science community and, almost as importantly, the public. Not just the science fans and astronomy geeks, but everyone – my mum has a Hubble picture on her living room wall even though she couldn’t tell you what it’s of (it’s the Horsehead Nebula). Something that would not just equal but far surpass anything that Hubble can do, would be a worthwhile mission in it’s own right. But the advantage of a mission like this is that it would give you an opportunity to build, in small stages, the infrastructure for a moon-based community in a meaningful and productive way so that each small step was in and of itself useful.

For example, building bricks from moon-dust has been mooted, and experiments are underway on Earth. A facility like a telescope on the moon would give you an opportunity to take a small production machine to the moon and build a few bricks, which could actually be used to build a wall to protect the telescope. Extracting fuel from moon rock could be tried out, small scale, to power the telescope. Artificial environments could be tested to grow food that the service missions could use, and so on. Small steps, many missions, much progress in a way that allows you to build on what you have already done whilst the public are sucked in by the pretty pictures being beamed back by the biggest telescope in the galaxy.

Just an idea…