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  #1  
Old 03-27-2019, 01:02 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Default Good Moon return news! (link)

Hello All,

Quite a few of us here have been watching--with hope for a change of focus from the government to the private sector, with NASA becoming a customer and returning to its N.A.C.A. role of developing high-risk, high-payoff technologies but *NOT* operating transportation systems, leaving that to private industry--recent events. The coverage of the just-concluded Crew Dragon test flight to and from the ISS included many hopeful signs, such as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine's repeated and emphatic statements that "It's time for NASA to become a customer and stop being a government airline to space, doing basic research and leaving space transportation to private industry, as with aviation." (I'm 11 years older than the NASA Administrator--no wonder I feel like a well-bearded unicorn...) Today I have seen and heard even more good news:

In a speech given today at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY5SuZqch2Y [much of it is also provided in the form of text]), Vice President Mike Pence outlined a plan for NASA to return to the Moon within five years (by 2024), four years earlier than NASA's projected date of 2028. The plan is to establish a lunar base near the Moon's south pole, for scientific research and to one day support missions to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System. Also:

While the Vice President said that NASA must get the SLS flying as soon as possible in order to carry out the 2024 initial lunar return, he immediately followed up by saying--emphatically--that the focus must be "on the mission over the means," and that the President has directed that it be done by any means necessary. The Vice President also said that if private rockets and other hardware are the only way to achieve this goal within five years, then we will use them. He also stated that NASA must develop new propulsion systems--including nuclear rockets!--for future expeditions deeper into the Solar System, and:

He also announced that Canada has become the first international partner on the Lunar Gateway station, having signed a 24-year agreement for development and operation of the station, construction of which will begin in 2022. The overall plan is to establish a permanent lunar surface base and the Gateway, and to use this lunar infrastructure to fully explore the Moon, and as a jumping-off point for traveling elsewhere in the Solar System (just as Arthur C. Clarke advocated in his 1968 non-fiction book, "The Promise of Space"). I've heard and read many such speeches about space policy over the years, but this one sounds very--no pun intended--"down to Earth," being focused, and technologically and economically feasible within the stated time frame, unlike the grandiose, unfocused, and unrealistic SEI (Space Exploration Initiative) of President George H.W. Bush.
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Old 03-27-2019, 01:57 AM
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Speaking of exploring the Moon, that is a task that we have just barely begun. The Apollo missions only explored six sites in a relatively narrow strip along and not very far from the lunar equator, and the Surveyor and Luna missions were relatively "latitude limited," too (see: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/L...moonimg_07.html ); only Surveyor 7 landed far south of the equator (18 miles north of the bright rayed crater Tycho), and the Surveyors' and the Lunas' instrumentation was rudimentary compared to what we have today. Also:

Only this year has the first lunar farside landing--by China's Chang'e 4 lander, carrying the Yutu 2 rover--taken place (with the help of the Queqiao relay satellite in a wide halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point, behind the Moon, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang...4-p14legacy.png ), and the lunar farside exhibits fundamental differences from the nearside (its almost total lack of maria--seas--is the most visually obvious one). There were even nearside sites on the Apollo landing sites list (such as the Marius Hills volcanic area and the crater Tycho) that the mission planners kept pushing "to the rear of the shelf" because of safety worries (hiking up and down the Marius volcanoes, climbing down into Tycho, etc.), and:

Back in the 1960s (until it was cancelled in 1962), JPL was working on a robotic lunar rover, called Prospector (see: http://www.astronautix.com/p/prospector.html ), which was to have followed Ranger and Surveyor. Prospector was cancelled largely because its size and weight would have made it necessary to launch the rovers aboard Saturn I rockets. But today, the small Mars rover designs that we have (the Spirit & Opportunity rovers, and the even smaller Sojourner rover) could be launched on quite small rockets, or even as secondary payloads on medium launch vehicles, and they would need little modification to operate on the Moon (even their airbag & tractor retrorocket systems [minus the parachutes used on Mars], with relatively slight modifications, would work on the Moon). They too could be solar-powered, using radioisotope heaters if necessary to keep their electronics warm through the two-week lunar nights. As well:

While lunar rovers *can* be Earth-controlled, as the two Soviet Lunokhod rovers showed, the need to gear them way down due to the 2.6-second round-trip light time delay (so that their drivers could avoid accidents, since little could happen during that interval with the low-geared rovers) makes operations slow and tedious. Astronauts orbiting the Moon or at the Earth-Moon L2 point Gateway station, in contrast, could remotely operate lunar rovers in real time, which would enable them to cover much more ground, and conduct more experiments and observations, in far less time than Lunokhod 1 and 2 required.
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Old 03-27-2019, 07:52 AM
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NASA has a goal of going to the moon in 5 years. Fine. They want American boots to be first on Mars. Fine. My advise is abandon SLS and use the money to hire a private company or two to do it sooner and cheaper. 2-3 teams could fully do it for 1/2 the cost of SLS.
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Old 03-27-2019, 08:33 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerry Irvine
NASA has a goal of going to the moon in 5 years. Fine. They want American boots to be first on Mars. Fine. My advise is abandon SLS and use the money to hire a private company or two to do it sooner and cheaper. 2-3 teams could fully do it for 1/2 the cost of SLS.
Vice President Pence's speech at the Marshall Space Flight Center seems to be a directive to that effect (as the President directed: "Get SLS flying ASAP, but if you can't, we'll go with whatever hardware--including privately-developed hardware--that will get us back on the Moon within five years.") It's a directive like President Kennedy's, where the objective (to the Moon and back "before this decade is out," in JFK's case)--^not^ the means of achieving it--is of prime importance. Now:

Back then, they were prepared to build Nova, or use Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), or Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), whichever would achieve the Kennedy deadline with the least technological risk. (LOR finally won out, partly because rendezvous and docking were unknowns in 1961, and partly because LOR involved landing the minimum amount of equipment on the Moon [the most dangerous and expensive part of the voyage], as the EOR Moonship would have been considerably larger, heavier, and more expensive than the Lunar Module.) Also:

Future planetary missions, if launched from Earth, would utilize EOR (as von Braun pointed out in the early 1960s, soon after LOR was selected for Apollo). But starting from an outpost on the Moon instead of from the Earth (the Moon's surface is already 95% of the way to Mars and Venus in terms of the necessary energy, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in "The Promise of Space"), using "EOR from the Moon," so to speak, would make such expeditions easier and cheaper to mount. Plus:

An electromagnetic launching track set up on the Moon's surface (William Escher at the Marshall Space Flight Center studied this device, which he called the "Lunatron" [Arthur C. Clarke first suggested it in 1950]) would enable fuel and acceleration-indifferent supplies (using a track two or three miles long) to be launched into lunar orbit--with a small orbit circularization burn--or directly into solar orbit, using little or no rocket propellant. Even crewed spacecraft could be launched off the Moon in this way, although to limit the acceleration to human-tolerable levels would require the track to be about a hundred miles long (while it would be a major project--which could be simplified and cheapened by using modular components--such a long Lunatron would be very cost-effective [even cheaper than air transportation on Earth!] once it was built and in operation).
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Old 03-27-2019, 09:15 AM
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I've seen this kind of bold pronouncement before. Many times. Mars, the moon, Mars again.

When NASA gets a 50% budget bump, with a commitment for a decade at that level, I'll believe this latest announcement is more than PR.
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Old 03-27-2019, 12:01 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stefanj
I've seen this kind of bold pronouncement before. Many times. Mars, the moon, Mars again.

When NASA gets a 50% budget bump, with a commitment for a decade at that level, I'll believe this latest announcement is more than PR.
So have I. A budget increase (I forget the figure, but it's more than a token amount) is in the works. Also, today there are different and--for the "lunar cause"--positive circumstances:

No fewer than three crew capsules (Crew Dragon, Starliner, and Orion) are now, or soon will be, available, and at least Orion and Crew Dragon are capable of lunar-return re-entries (Dragon's heat shield can even handle Mars-return-velocity re-entries). Adequate to good launch vehicles for the job (such as the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and the BFR and New Glenn) already exist or soon will. The only new item needed is the lunar landing & ascent vehicle, and work on it is already underway (ditto for the Gateway station, which Canada has already joined as a development and operation partner). Also, China is eyeing the Moon as future territory, with resources (water, ilmenite, titanium, aluminum, etc.) that can be used to further extend their reach and their military capabilities with regard to the Earth, and:

It sounds like science fiction today, but the Chinese plan for decades in the future. While using the Moon as a missile launching site is dubious at best, other concepts--such as setting up large, very high-resolution Earth-surveillance telescopes, and extremely high-power, solar-powered laser projector arrays to destroy targets on the ground, in the air, and in Earth orbit--are feasible with current or near-term technologies. (One of the reasons why the Breakthrough Starshot project wants to set up the lightsail probes' launching laser projector array on Earth--despite the beam-collimation difficulties caused by the atmosphere [cost and logistics are also factors in their decision]--is to completely avoid political problems; if set up on the Moon, the laser array--in the wrong hands, or as the result of an aiming error--could lay waste to targets on and above the Earth, which scares many influential people.)
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Old 03-27-2019, 01:22 PM
dcastle dcastle is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stefanj
I've seen this kind of bold pronouncement before. Many times. Mars, the moon, Mars again.

When NASA gets a 50% budget bump, with a commitment for a decade at that level, I'll believe this latest announcement is more than PR.



Agreed. Sounds great but no bucks, no Buck Rogers. If they are cutting or even keeping the NASA budget level then manned lunar missions in that kind of time frame are really about impossible.
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Old 03-27-2019, 05:15 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blackshire
enable fuel and acceleration-indifferent supplies

Even crewed spacecraft could be launched off the Moon in this way, although to limit the acceleration to human-tolerable levels would require the track to be about a hundred miles long.
Hyperloop 2. Handy, the moon is already a vacuum with unlimited solar power, and nuke friendly too.

Last edited by Jerry Irvine : 03-27-2019 at 08:18 PM.
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Old 03-28-2019, 02:18 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerry Irvine
Hyperloop 2. Handy, the moon is already a vacuum with unlimited solar power, and nuke friendly too.
The industrial engineer Neil P. Ruzic's 1965 book, "The Case for Going to the Moon" and his 1970 book, "Where the Winds Sleep--Man's Future on the Moon: A Projected History" both cover numerous eye-opening industrial, physics-related, astronomical, medical, and even agricultural advantages that settling and setting up shop on the Moon would give us, on the Moon as well as here on Earth. He also mentioned the solar and nuclear power compatibility of the Moon (just set up a reactor in a convenient small crater or purposely-dug shallow pit, with a light metal roof over it to provide shade and protection from the very slow, gradual meteoroid erosion (which mars the finishes of heat-reflecting surfaces), and:

Neil Ruzic also patented a lunar cryostat, which is nothing more than series of vertically stacked, intentionally slightly wrinkled (to minimize heat transfer between them) Mylar "dishes" (Kapton would be a more durable substitute), metallized on the upward-facing side and black-coated on the bottom side. By stacking them to various heights, any desired cryogenic temperature, down to almost Absolute Zero, could be maintained for the entire two-week lunar night (or even forever, in one of the permanently-shadowed polar craters). Many industrial processes that require cryogenic cold and a hard vacuum could be carried out very cheaply on the Moon, using the cryostats. Many common medications, such as Penicillin, require vacuum and/or deep cold during their production, and the Moon provides both in endless abundance--plus plentiful local raw materials. His motto for lunar development was, "Free vacuum and free cold!" Also:

A linear version of the cryostat could be used as a "levitation belt" (as he called it), a "road" just over which electrostatically levitated vehicles could travel at high velocities during the "night season," as he imagined future lunarians might call the fortnight-long lunar nights. Sufficiently long levitation belts, he pointed out, would support electromagnetically launched spacecraft, whose launching energy would come from solar or nuclear power sources, possibly via large capacitors that would discharge into the electromagnets in sequence.
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Old 03-28-2019, 11:29 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stefanj
I've seen this kind of bold pronouncement before. Many times. Mars, the moon, Mars again.

When NASA gets a 50% budget bump, with a commitment for a decade at that level, I'll believe this latest announcement is more than PR.


I did a whole back cover of a certain rocket catalog about that 10 years ago...MLAS.
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