Lunar South Pole Landing Sites Studied

space.com ^ | 5 Jun 03 | Leonard David

[RightWhale]

Things could hardly move slower.

[KellyAdmirer]

Enough robots (that will probably break down like all the Mars probes) already. Unbelievable. What is wrong with NASA? Plan to send a manned mission back to the moon already! Junk the obsolete shuttle if necessary, nobody gives a hoot about dangerous and totally unproductive low earth orbits anymore. We have to wait years longer just to examine more moon rocks? NASA needs somebody with some vision, which has been sorely lacking there.

[demosthenes the elder]

this is taking bloody forever.

[demosthenes the elder]

someone explain to me: why are we building a hugely expensive space station which has no capacity to serve as an assembly dock for terra-lunar shuttles?

[WhiteGuy]

What a huge waste of OUR money.....................

What do we hope to see as a return on OUR investment?

Tang still sucks and I haven't seen "Space Food Sticks" at Krogers for years.

Zero out this foolishness.

[RightWhale]

What do we hope to see as a return on OUR investment?

That's right, it is a centralized group project. Individual taxpayers do not get to choose how their money is spent, instead, the Central Committee [Congress] decides. It's kind of amazing anything gets done at all considering most of their plans are knee-jerk responses to impending crises.

There is a better way. There must be.

[mvpel]

If there were dried concrete on the Moon, settlers would mine it for its water. The Moon is that dry. This is why the presence of easily available water on the Moon would be an incalculable boon for lunar exploration and settlement.

[RightWhale]

why are we building a hugely expensive space station

That's what you get when you put the Vice President, Al 'Mister Wizard' Gore in charge of NASA.

[RightWhale]

Short term: haul water.

If there is some water in the polar region, that will help the initial development of a settlement. But you might find the hauling of water to be about as effective as setting up water extraction plants.

Long term: smash carbonaceous chondrite asteroids and comets into the moon and mine those for volatiles.

[mvpel]

Or better yet, go to Mars - compared to the Moon, there's vast amounts of water there, and the delta-V is not that much higher.

[demosthenes the elder]

it is a matter of practicality.
A practical program of expansion would start with establishing routine orbit-to-orbit transit from earth to the moon and back, ferrying equipment and supplies to construction sites. Once that is stable and reliable, the risk inherent in establishing ship production facilities on the moon becomes one that can be faced. Once those manufactories are established, large interplanetary-capable ships could then be built and launched from the moon, with no need to worry about environmental effects and at a much lower energy requirement for surface-to-orbit transit than is required for terran launch. THEN it would be appropriate to extend the process to Mars and the asteroid belt.

[Junior]

The Chinese are going to put a manned base on the Moon, and all we can do is send robots. Abolish NASA now!

[mvpel]

The bulk of the Delta-V is in getting from the Earth's surface to Low-Earth Orbit. From there to the Lunar surface, you need 6.2 km/s of velocity change, versus 4.8 km/s from LEO to the surface of Mars.

With the lift capacity that we scrapped thirty years ago and which is now rotting away at Johnson Space Center's tourist attraction, along with some clever approaches that Werner von Braun never thought of in his musings of Battlestar Galactica-style Mars missions, we could mount a manned mission directly to Mars.

[demosthenes the elder]

I favor nuclear hydrogen rockets, myself.
I have heard that a Florida University has started building a refined testbed engine based on the old Kiwi family, taking advantage of modertn materials ans production/design sciences.
Well and good.
The problem remains the expense of getting mass off of earth's surface. 9.8m/s*s is a bitch no matter how you slice it. It is also environmentally unsound.
A one-shot to Mars is no big deal, but it is not a practical step in an ongoing process of expansion.
Such a process calls for routine flights of MANY ships to and from the objective. Fast ones. Big ones, too. To meet that requirement, building ships on the moon and launching them from the moon makes MUCH better sense.

[mvpel]

I guess the priorities shift depending on whether your goal is to explore and settle Mars, or to use the notion of footprints on Mars to drive a massive spacebound infrastructure project.

[demosthenes the elder]

I have in mind more a "rape the solar system of its resources for economic and strategic profit" kinda thing.

[mvpel]

That's a worthy goal, certainly.

But considering that concrete has more water than the average lunar rock, while on Mars there may well be vast aquifers of liquid water within drilling distance, and you can make air and rocket fuel out of a bit of hydrogen plus the Martian atmosphere using 19th Century technology instead of having to melt rocks, and you can make pure iron on Mars through reaction of the ubiquitous iron oxide with hydrogen, and plastics through reaction of the carbon monoxide left over from making oxygen with the atmosphere, the fact that you can grow crops under Martian sunshine, and so on, Mars has all the ingredients needed for a self-sustaining branch of civilization.

[demosthenes the elder]

true, all. however, getting from here to there without the intermediate step of building a fleet of true haulers is impractical if not impossible. I am not arguing that the moon will ever be a viable colony site. Neither were various dimestamp islands during the european conquest of earth. Like those islands, however, the moon can and should serve as a useful waystation, and should serve as a primary build site for the ships we will need.
side-note: for strategic reasons, the US really ought to establish a permanent military presence on the moon, with a heavy-capacity mass-driver. We certainly can NOT let the damned ChiComs do so.

[FierceDraka]

I think you and I have been reading the same books, my friend.

[Fiddlstix]

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