Great ideas, resulting in monumental achievements...
...can also be instruments of enslavement.
Posted on 01/26/2012 7:36:33 AM PST by The_Victor
The United States will have a permanent manned colony on the moon by 2020 if Newt Gingrich is in charge, the Republican presidential hopeful announced today (Jan. 25).
Gingrich laid out this goal during a speech in the city of Cocoa, on Florida's Space Coast. He also said that near-Earth space would be bustling with commercial activity by 2020, and that America would possess a next-generation propulsion system by then, allowing the nation to get astronauts to Mars quickly and efficiently.
"By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American," Gingrich said.
The former Speaker of the House made no apologies for the boldness of his amibitions, which depend primarily on the emergence of a vibrant commercial spaceflight industry. He said the U.S. space program needs a kick in the pants like the one President John F. Kennedy gave it in 1961, when he promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Great ideas, resulting in monumental achievements...
...can also be instruments of enslavement.
The Constitution doesn't authorize it, ergo, its unconstitutional. No knees required - just an eye or two for reading.
Thanks, but I actually knew that. I was actually thinking of the 80 million mile round trip.
You are seriously suggesting an economic advantage in going all the way to the moon to extract elements that on earth are literally as common as dirt?
Location, location, location!
Do you understand the concept of “the gravity well”?
(if not, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBQHtF3WhMw)
If so, you know that it is very expensive in energy & hardware to lift equipment or materials up out of that gravity well to Earth orbit & beyond.
Materials on the Moon and equipment made from them are at the bottom of the Moon’s gravity well, which is 1/22nd as large as that of the Earth. Thus, lower energy cost to get them to space.
We do not need pig iron on the moon, especially at a cost of $1 billion/oz.
Thanks for the reminder of specifics and the links. I had remembered the prize, but I couldnt recall the particulars.
Unless there are two Stennis Space centers you must live nearby. We do contractor work at Stennis often. I worked at the ammo plant there in the 80s. Small world.
“I guess the Louisiana Purchase was just the government wasting money on forests filled with hostile indians that are too dangerous to invest in.”
“The moon isn’t just across the river.”
Right now it takes less than 1/10th the time to travel to the moon than it did to travel to Louisiana from DC at the time of the purchase
Those are some great guys working there. Many still have the “can do” magic.
Neighbors... who knew?!
LLS
You're ignoring the little problem that these not very expensive materials aren't just lying around in useful metallic form on the lunar surface. They're chemically bound in rocks similar to basalts here on earth. To actually use any of this stuff a complete industrial base (and I use the word "base" in the sense that the Chinese have a vibrant industrial base) would have to be moved from the earth to the moon. How many thousands of tons of machinery go to make up a mining operation, an ore processing plant, a power plant large enough to run an industrial complex and a metal fabricating plant, all of which have to operate and be built in a vacuum which means the workers have to have all of their food, air, and water shipped up to the moon along with additional vacuum habitat to house them. Not to mention that the normal building materials of the industrial infrastructure (ie concrete) won't work - no water, and no way to make concrete.) EVERYTHING would have to be prefabricated on earth and shipped at great expense to the moon. Sorry FRiend. The idea just isn't economically feasible.
Suppose you got the costs down to 1% of the Apollo return costs (which is extremely unlikely due to the cost of building a complete industrial economy on the moon). Think $4.5 million an ounce delivered to the earth multiplied by .01 and try and determine just what raw material is worth $45,000 an ounce. It sure wouldn't be anything you listed.
Yeah, but did it cost Lewis and Clark $4000 per lb just to step out their door? $4000/lb, by the way, is the incredibly low-ball price that SpaceX is claiming for cargo to earth orbit.
This whole thread is like an example of why government should not be funding projects like this. Private companies, which are by definition risking their own money, are inherently conservative in developing new technologies. They want to make something better than their competitors, but they also want to base their products on tried-and-true technologies. They develop incrementally. Governments, on the other hand, fund themselves through taxation, and thus they prefer wildly impractical ideas that: (1) ensure votes and (2) serve as monuments to politicians’ egos.
What could the US possibly need a moon base for? No other country is even remotely close to establishing a large base on the moon. There’s no unobtainium on the Moon that could finance a settlement. It’s a financial loser at this point. Furthermore, the US does not have the money to afford a moon base. Even if the US was mass producing a lunar cargo rocket, with current technology you’re still looking at prices of probably, bare minimum, $500 million to put a person safely on the moon. So, the 10000 people on the moon already runs you 5 trillion, and that’s before you get to the inconvenient part where you have to ship thousands or millions of tons of equipment to the moon to support this population over the long term. All for some basic minerals that are available on earth, with the exciting opportunity to live in conditions that you could obtain on earth by living in a walk-in oven/freezer in the Fukushima parking lot.
I was just about to e-mail you on this very topic. This is one of two areas where I completely disagree with Newt. There is no rational reason to spend dollar one on colonizing the moon period. This seems like buying off your favorite voters in a swing state.
The other one is making unemployment dependant on getting training. This is one of those Newt ideas that sounds good for about 10 seconds then you start to think it through and it falls apart.
First, who is to pay for this training, the unemployed person who has no income or the Fed who is also broke.
Second, suppose a software engineer gets laidoff due to a recession and outsourcing. Doe he really need more training in software engineering when no one is hiring them or is he supposed to go get training to be a welder because there is a job opening for a welder in his town? Why should he retrain when everyone has promised this recession is a glitch and the fix is in and all will be normal soon?
GA, you should read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and read it in conjunction with this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment. It provides a very good explanation of just how important holding that particular high ground is.
Petroleum was not a major economic resource in 1867 when they made the Alaska purchase, and oil was not discovered there until almost 40 years later in 1896. Just because a commodity isn’t valuable yet or discovered yet doesn’t mean it won’t be later, for purposes not yet imagined.
Read it ages ago - when it was first published. Great FICTION, but it is FICTION; it is NOT reality. That NOVEL presupposes an industrial capacity on the moon that approaches the USA today. There is no self sustaining industrial capacity on the moon. There is no industrial capacity on the moon at all. The cost of producing such is beyond the capacity of even the largest national economies. They don't call economics the "dismal science" for nothing. It kills grandiose pipe dreams like this onw with the harsh realitles of cost. You should read a few FACTS like that actual cost of delivering a kg of material to the moon, and the actual cost of returning an oz of material from the moon ($1,783,000) in 1970 dollars.
"there'll be pie in the sky bye and bye bye and bye."
Then you and your fellow space enthusiasts form a corporation to explot these non-existent riches. Be a real conservative and keep your hand out of my and my fellow taxpayers' pockets when funding your boondoggle.
NASA has examined 841 pounds of lunar material. It is all pretty common stuff - basically rocks and dirt that you can pick up right down the street for a lot less money. Scientifically it's valuable if you're looking into the origin of the solar system. From a commercial raw material viewpoint it is worth about the same as 841 pounds of volcanic rock from anywhere on earth.
In fact, if you read Science (rather than science fiction) you will discover that the prevalent theory on the origin of the moon is that it is a large chunk of earth's mantle that was blasted into space by a violent collision early in the solar system's history. This means that what you find there will be pretty much the same as what you'd find as an average composition of the mantle Lots of the lighter elements, carbon silicon iron titaniaum calcium magnesium oxygen sodium, etc. not so much of the heavy ones.
“Heinlein wrote FICTION.”
So did Jules Verne.
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