Moon Base: NASA's Recurring Dream

Wired News ^ | 02:00 AM Jan. 15, 2004 PT | Noah Shachtman

[vannrox]

Moon base? Old news.

In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start, because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.

[vannrox]

A very interesting article.

[mhking]

Only a few years late....

[Brett66]

Instead of permanent colonies, astronauts would visit the base in 45-day jaunts. While they were there, the moon-goers would stay in an inflatable home envisioned by Kriss Kennedy, the master architect at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Really? This is the first I've seen or heard of these designs. I think Boeing's modular inflatable designs are the most realistic I've seen at this early stage.

[Vesuvian]

I say construct Moonbase Alpha

(and I want to zip around in an Eagle!)

[RightWingAtheist]

From a story by Heinlein:

[unibrowshift9b20]

Why don't we get some orbiting mirrors, made out of reflective fabric that is super thin and super light and point them to converge at some water on the moon that boils and turns a generator to make electrical power. If you don't want to use a regular old fission reactor that is. That would be lots easier than fields and fields of inefficient, more-$/mass-than-gold-solar cells. But all this may be moot shortly after its actually built if fusion is that close.

If you used orbiting mirrors or fusion, you could basically get all the energy you could ever imagine needing. Electolyze your frozen water, make O2 for breathing, H2 and O2 for rocket fuel.

Heck, you could eventually make some REALLY big mirrors that you could use to heat up the whole moon if you wanted, or light up the dark side. That would be awesome.

[WOSG]

"Lunar bases became a way to get past our oil dependency," Launius said. The plan was to build solar panels the size of football fields on the moon, which would capture the sun's rays and turn them into electricity. Then the electricity would be converted into microwaves and beamed back to Earth.

Other than making electricity at absorbitant cost - like maybe $10 a kilowatt hour, this is a useless idea. The other ideas are similarly non-economic.

[WOSG]

uh, you can do all that on earth!

Even cheaper is plain old nuclear power.

[unibrowshift9b20]

"uh, you can do all that on earth!

Even cheaper is plain old nuclear power."

True, you could put your orbital mirrors in GEO and focus them somewhere, but it would lose clarity in the atmosphere and really screw up weather patterns from the intense heat of sunlight from perhaps a hundred sq. kilometers of sunlight focused at one point.

And yeah, nuclear will be the fuel of choice to begin with. But everybody loves to hate nuclear, and if we really want to use solar power, that was just my 2 cents, rather than pv.

[boris]

"Other than making electricity at absorbitant cost"

Me, too:

[Terpfen]

I say construct Moonbase Alpha"

Nah. Give me Von Braun City.

[Vesuvian]

Wow, zipping around in a Gundam has to be cooler than zipping around in an Eagle Transporter....

[Terpfen]

Nah... obtaining a Gundam would be like being able to fly the very first prototype of the latest, greatest jet. Mobile suits are weapons of war, humanoid tanks with the firepower class of capital ships.

Though I wouldn't mind having my very own Zeta Plus.

[hopespringseternal]

Project Horizon called for 61 Saturn I and 88 Saturn II rocket launches to bring 490,000 pounds of cargo to the lunar surface over the course of a year or so.

Launch technology scales up really well, if you have the right mentality. It is like moving dirt. For your flowerbed, a spade is fine. For trees, you need a shovel. For roads, you need front end loaders and dump trucks.

We've never really gone any farther than the shovel, and that is why nothing interesting has ever happened with space.

If we are going to continue to use expendable rockets and semi-salvageable shuttles, our current endeavors are about the right size.

If we ever want to accomplish anything, fully reusable SSTO and/or laser launchers are what's needed. The problem is we don't do enough to justify either, and can't do enough until we have either or both.

Both are technologically possible, and economically unviable.