Posted on 03/25/2024 8:13:03 AM PDT by Twotone
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has set its sights on the Moon, recently choosing defense giant Northrop Grumman to work on concepts for building a lunar railroad network, according to the Debrief.
The recent development is DARPA's latest announcement concerning their 10-year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study. The ultimate goal is to reportedly establish a human colony on the Moon and a "thriving lunar economy."
DARPA published the following statement about the development:
The 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) will explore the rapid development of foundational technology concepts designed to move away from individual scientific efforts within isolated, self-sufficient systems and toward a series of shareable, scalable, resource-driven systems that interoperate – minimizing lunar footprint and creating monetizable services for future lunar users.
LunA-10 Topic Area 1 (TA-1) focuses on a portfolio of lunar providers and users who will, together, define a series of future integrated lunar frameworks that take advantage of commercial development and nongovernmental funding streams. Each integrated system design and framework will be backed by a quantitative analysis of needs, validated analysis for anticipated use case(s), concepts of operations, scaling analysis for foundational systems, and metrics for integrated system performance. Performers will identify current investments and future technical challenges toward achieving these goals.
Though building a lunar railroad might be something dreamed up in a science fiction story, it reportedly reflects the Department of Defense's curious interest in lunar operations and its ambition of establishing a military presence on the Moon.
Northrop Grumman made the following statement about the project: “The envisioned lunar railroad network could transport humans, supplies, and resources for commercial ventures across the lunar surface – contributing to a space economy for the United States and international partners."
Northrop Grumman was just one of 14 companies selected by DARPA in December 2023 to participate in the study, according to Space.com.
Michael Nayak — program manager in DARPA's Strategic Technology Office — said: "A large paradigm shift is coming in the next 10 years for the lunar economy."
"To get to a turning point faster, LunA-10 uniquely aims to identify solutions that can enable multi-mission lunar systems — imagine a wireless power station that can also provide comms and navigation in its beam," Nayak said.
He went on to say that such a project will accelerate "key technologies that may be used by government and the commercial space industry, and ultimately to catalyze economic vibrancy on the moon."
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I’m always cautious about people who are too quick to denounce an idea as a ‘boondoggle’ as opposed to making a rational and reasoned argument in opposition to the idea.
CAHSR as proposed by the French back in the 1990’s would have been a great idea. They were going to build it on mostly state-owned land or cheap land on the west side of Interstate 5 and the plan was for a 90 minute trip from SF to LA.
They would build it, pay for it, and run it for 50 years and then give it to the state of California.
Southwest Airlines successfully lobbied to kill that idea and then the Democrats saw an opportunity to grift untold billions from the taxpayers and thus the High Speed Fail Authority took shape.
Now they’re looking at a four hour trip from SF to LA if it ever gets built.
May as well fly.
They ought to have built a Ferry instead. At least that way you could take your car with you...............
Some evil stuff as well. The head of DARPA during Obama’s admin was into “biologicals”. Makes one suspicious.
Put one of Elon’s boring machines up there, and build an undergrounde rail road. Seal the surface entrance with air locks and see if you can keep air in the tunnels.
Then you can build rooms maybe even surface domes off of that.
But first the giant moon based Ray gun!!
HELL’S BELL’S-—We cannot even get a railroad between LA & SF built.
IT IS YEARS OVERTIME & BILLIONS OVER BUDGET.
2 bed 4 bathroom homes, views of, well, nothing but a sky and rocks and divots and small peaks and lunar rover tracks and a few flags... $4.5 billion dollars- negotiable
Broke country.
Doesn’t know what a woman is.
Ergo…
Moon railroads!!
Talk about yer word salads...
Well...Biden did say the USA is building a railroad across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
It will cost less than the CA high speed rail.
... and be done quicker since there are fewer endangered species to kill between here and the moon.
Before needing a Lunar transportation network, NASA needs designs and technologies for habitation (colonies of science and technology workers) on the moon, which I believe will require structures that sit predominately underground, to minimize the radiation exposure of the humans employed there.
The turnstile-jumpers will be right there...
No. It's not our hard-earned tax money; it's only our 24-hour printing presses that spit out our growing federal debt of $34 trillion.
It seems like an atypical DARPA project. The ones I’ve seen were more practical and down-to-Earth, pun not intended.
Just six years to go across an untamed wild continent…and CA can’t build one train inside CA in 25 years!
It should have been done 40-50 years ago, if we were a forward looking civilization.
Instead we wasted ten’s of trillions of dollars on stupid wars and ineffective welfare systems.
We also wrecked our middle class via stupid economic policies.
Someday people will look back on this time and just shake their heads and wonder how could people be so stupid?
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/growing-the-lunar-economy/
the future at the Moon holds promise for a robust lunar marketplace.
Lunar rail actually makes migration easier...
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