Moon Base or orbiting moon space station 2020-2030

[Edit_XYZ]

Show a need to build a base on the moon - going there because no one has done it is a million miles from establishing a permanent presence - unless there's a practical reason to do it then corporate America would never do it...

Are 180 reasons enough for you? http://www.businessinsider.com/180-reasons-nasa-thinks-we-should-have-a-moon-base-2012-1

Look I'm really disappointed in you Brolan, because rather than discussing Romney in a political thread elsewhere on the board, you instead are derailing this one...you could have just put up your 180 reasons and left it at that, but instead you first make a post mocking Romney that contributes nothing to the subject that's being discussed...

Who is in charge of making the decisons and his views is highly relevant to the topic of future space development AKA Brolan's post was on topic.

Personally, when I hear such 'grand' promises from a presidential candidate, out of the blue...well, let's say the credibility of that presidential candidate decreases.

Of course, that's still better than openly mocking said promises.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Angara rocket - 6 seater

Roscosmos' moon-related efforts not only include a manned lunar landing by 2030, but also the development of a space station in orbit around the moon. The idea behind this plan is to replace the International Space Station, which is only expected to stick around until 2020.

In addition to a trip to the moon, Roscosmos wants to send unmanned robotic probes to Jupiter, Mars and Venus by 2030

It wants to use the Angara rocket to complete such missions by 2020. Angara will be a six-seat spaceship that will launch from a new spaceport called Vostochny in eastern Russia.

6 seats? well bigger than the Apollo capsule...

In addition, the U.S. hopes to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by 2030.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46750661/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.T2NEfmJSS3I

via

 

[sojourner]

Re: Angara rocket - 6 seater

6 seats? well bigger than the Apollo capsule...

the same as Dragon and more than Orion.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

If someone manages to get 6 six guys to the moon surface at the same time with more modern scientific equipment and with HD cameras, it will be an actually useful and great moon landing. Even though I think that aiming at Mars and/or at a permanent base is a more useful idea, I would be terribly excited if they do just a landing in such manner, and it will be more useful than the Apollo landings. And make it longer too.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Re: Angara rocket - 6 seater

6 seats? well bigger than the Apollo capsule...

the same as Dragon and more than Orion.

Dragon is actually being designed with 7 seats and is considerably bigger than the Apollo capsule. Though not actually bigger than Orion, it does have more useable cabin volume.

If someone manages to get 6 six guys to the moon surface at the same time with more modern scientific equipment and with HD cameras, it will be an actually useful and great moon landing. Even though I think that aiming at Mars and/or at a permanent base is a more useful idea, I would be terribly excited if they do just a landing in such manner, and it will be more useful than the Apollo landings. And make it longer too.

It actually depends on the budget. If that somebody manages to CHEAPLY get six guys to the moon, he's opened the floodgates for a whole series of expeditions whose cost is bound to get lower and lower and whose goals will get more and more ambitious as the program grows. This is what the Apollo program inherently lacked: ultimately, it was a one-off deal, with a finite number of Saturn-Vs and a finite number of missions that would inevitably be terminated once it had completed its goals. The disappointment for Apollo wasn't that it came to an end, it was that it came to an end EARLY.

Once you can land people on the moon using EELVs or Falcon-9s (as opposed to, say, a $60 billion Heavy Pork Booster that you can only afford to launch three times a decade) then there's nothing to stop future expeditions and mission objectives are determined purely by who wants to go and what they plan to do when they get there.

 

[sojourner]

Re: Angara rocket - 6 seater

Ah yeah, I knew that. Not sure why I said six.

 

[throwback]

I think having both a base and an orbiting station is a good idea. A base would process helium-3 which could used for propulsion and energy production, and a station could be used for the housing and the building of ships. However, I don't think this is possible without a multi-national effort and public support.

 

[FPAlpha]

A moon base is and will be a pipe dream for a long time to come.. there simply isn't enough effort and money to go around to make this financially viable and it would consume money like nothing else on Earth currently.

There's also the potential economic return.. there's little money to be earned with it and nowhere near enough to repay its cost so nations and corporations won't bother.

The political cimate doesn't help either.. there's no arms or space race anymore. Back in the 50s and 60s the cold war fueled the entire space program and it was a cultural battle to show which one was superior which is why the US put their back into it to prove something. That will is not there anymore and it most likely will not return. Look how quickly the energy evaporated after man landed on the moon.. a few more trips and the whole thing was mothballed and the effort was directed to the Shuttle program.

So everytime i hear some politician blabber about the promise to go to the Moon again or even Mars i roll my eyes because it's lip service to the electorate and sounds nice during election time but that's all there is.

 

[sojourner]

I could see a return to a more "space race" type pace if the Chinese get closer to their plans to put a base on the moon.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

A moon base is and will be a pipe dream for a long time to come.. there simply isn't enough effort and money to go around to make this financially viable and it would consume money like nothing else on Earth currently.

I won't be so sure. To get a moon base you need to lower the price of the launches as much as possible and then find the money to fund it and the will to develop the hardware for the base. By the way, if you lower the price, it will be cheaper than a permanent space station, perhaps way cheaper if you take into account the space shuttle and the advancements in technology.

If you developed technology that allowed the base to construct itself without human intervention, you could probably build a Mars base at the price of the international space station.

Private companies are now trying to cut the price of the launches. SpaceX at least. Falcon Heavy launch could cost $125M per launch, which is already too cheap. Out of that, probably $600K is fuel. If you get to return 2/3 of the stages to Earth 4 out of 5 times, you're cutting the prices in half. If you get to return all the stages 9 out of 10 times, the price could go down to as little as $13M.

Even if none of this happens, $125M is cheap enough. If Falcon Heavy does start flying, the governments will be willing to purchase launches for more science, and might find a way to fit a lot into those launches, including a base.

The trick is to make sure that NASA don't have to develop anything – since nobody has the political will to authorize funding for such projects. If private companies, however, offer the means already developed and at a cheap price, NASA will buy it. And screw NASA, if the price and offering is right, rich people will buy it.

Elon Musk is crazy enough to aim at a Mars base, thus probably has long-term plans to work on the technologies for that as well, if the rest of his projects don't fail. If SpaceX's launches start going (hopefully this year) they'd no doubt set some of the money aside for research in that direction.

 

[sojourner]

^Your signature confuses me as the dates for Star Trek seem to be off. Something I'm missing there?

 

[YellowSubmarine]

“The Cage” was finished in early 1965, anything beyond that doesn't exist.

 

[sojourner]

Harsh.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I think having both a base and an orbiting station is a good idea. A base would process helium-3 which could used for propulsion and energy production, and a station could be used for the housing and the building of ships. However, I don't think this is possible without a multi-national effort and public support.

1) We have exactly no data on how to extract helium-3 from the regolith and no solid idea how to use it as fuel. We also have no idea how much of it is actually IN the regolith.

2) We have no idea how to build ships in microgravity, nor the intellectual resources or the infrastructure to even think about trying it.

3) A multi-national effort implies primarily government funding, which is a recipe for disaster; governments are fickle things and public support waxes and wanes from a dozen random factors.

A sustainable moonbase depends entirely on affordability; if you can keep your costs down, you can find ways to recoup some of your expenses, leasing base facilities to interested governments and institutions that want to do some advanced science on the moon. Moonrocks alone are worth a huge amount of money if you can arrange low-cost sample returns, and even more if the researchers can figure out a way to do some on-site material processing (cracking ilmenite to produce titanium or even extracting some platinum group metals).

Anyone who thinks you can't make money on the moon with current technology is simply lacking imagination.

 

[Deckerd]

To whom are you aiming that remark, Martha39?

 

[publiusr]

A multi-national effort implies primarily government funding, which is a recipe for disaster; governments are fickle things and public support waxes and wanes from a dozen random factors.

I don't trust in alt.spacers myself. Korolov got R-7 up and running precisely because he didn't have to prostitute himself in front of Venture Capitalists (Shark Tank, Dragons Den) We all saw with the very light jet debacle that venture capitalists flee from aerospace with huge up-front costs. They are risk averse, so computer start ups are where folks make money.

Musk with Paypal
Bezos with Amazon (some brick and mortar)
Allen with Microsoft.

They fund private space only because they are so very rich that they can afford to operate at a loss--doing something for its own sake, not to make their money--that was done with 1s and 0s.

But divorces could wipe them out. Melinda Gates forced Bills money into wasted perishable goods that contibute to overpopulation. Space flight would have been a better use of his wealth.

 

[sojourner]

^Then again, you can't really argue with what Musk has been able to accomplish in just over 10 years and as for funding drying up, it happens to NASA too.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A multi-national effort implies primarily government funding, which is a recipe for disaster; governments are fickle things and public support waxes and wanes from a dozen random factors.

I don't trust in alt.spacers myself. Korolov got R-7 up and running precisely because he didn't have to prostitute himself in front of Venture Capitalists

No, he had to prostitute himself in front of crony capitalists, to wit, the political establishment of the Soviet Military.

We all saw with the very light jet debacle that venture capitalists flee from aerospace with huge up-front costs. They are risk averse, so computer start ups are where folks make money.

And yet huge aerospace firms DO exist and do make a huge amount of money doing what they do. The government didn't invent Boeing and Lockheed, they just gave them something to do. The same is likely to happen in commercial space.

They fund private space only because they are so very rich that they can afford to operate at a loss--doing something for its own sake, not to make their money--that was done with 1s and 0s.

And yet even Elon Musk has gone on record saying they couldn't operate at a loss indefinitely. If SpaceX doesn't receive the contract money for the ISS flights, they'll be hard pressed to meet their commercial launch schedule in the satellite launch business. That's primarily the reason why they haven't started clearing their launch manifest yet: they're still trying to get that NASA money to fund their operations.

Besides, the commercial providers have ALREADY supplanted the government programs in just about everything except for manned space exploration, or were you really not aware that the Air Force and the NRO have been using ULA's launchers for 100% of their payloads since the 1990s? It's not even a question of whether or not private industry can profitably operate in space, it's a question HOW ELSE can they profitably operate in space?

 

[publiusr]

ULA blows hot and cold. If you have been over at Phil Plait's forum, you know that ULA is the king of crony capitalism. They went after ARES Constellation and wanted to supplant it with a depot system that ULAs own man--the designer for the DTAL lander--Josh Hopkins--said would cost more than HLV development, and confirmed by the AV week citation I posted at bautforum which questioned the cost-savings of the EELV-only depot architecture..

First the arguement was that we didn't need in-house arsenal method, and ULA made the claim that private space firms--meaning them--were capable of taking things over, when EELV costs have only been rising, as per a recent article from The Space Review. But when Musk came along--and you had real private spaceflight, you saw this BS study from The Aerospace Corp which is made up of folks behind the EELV program to begin with--a think tank of USAF cronies.

The tune then changed, and the arguement was to preserve industrial capability---in house. Now where have we heard that before? On page 10 of the March 19/26 2012 issue of AV WEEK & SPACE we see a critique on that arguement in terms of defense posture ("Unnecessary Shield?") even though one may not always agree with all the points made.


Musk railed against that--also found in an AV Week article from a few months back. I posted links to the relavent citations at bautforum over the years--them being ignored by true believers who failed to learn the lesson from the Very Light Jet debacle: Venture Capitalists run from aerospace with huge up front costs...

Here I talk about yet another threat to the comsat industry:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=166111

The March 19/26 2012 issue of AV WEEK & SPACE is rather interesting. On page 10--also in the op-ed section, is the blurb "Ascent Dissent." Where an aerospace engineer offered to do work for the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (Mepag) but was rebuffed. So Griffin was not the only aerospace engineer to be ignored by the planetary science community who often pay a price for ignorance on the subjects of rockets--what with Louis Friedmans two failed Volnas and the loss of both OCO and its GLORY replacement on Air Farce Minotaurs.

There seems to be a level of contempt for rocket engineers which needs to be addressed. We see similar things in other fields, where Stanley Williams almost paid with his life for mistakes on Galeris. You may remember the NOVA program about the incident where we learned--gasp--that vulcanologists often don't talk to seismologists enough. It's all COSPEC and gas samples with them--being more adrenaline junkies like Storm Chasers. But I digress.

On page 16 we learn how antarctic science may be helped by the salvage of Express-AM4, a satellite in a useless orbit that may find a use for communications with our most southerly continant.

In the same issue we see other interesting op-eds on why aromatics in hydrocarbon fuels are not really needed for good seals, (page 8) Fire Safety of composite airframes, the Kepler mission getting an award, and--last but not least--how the FLS Microjet (the BD-5J minijet we saw in the Bond film Octopussy) is making a comeback (page 22).

 

[sojourner]

Yep, you definitely digress.

But to address the depot architecture - it relied on economy of scale to bring costs down. The reason EELV costs are rising is due to the very limited numbers being built. If you only build 2 per year, you still have to have the manpower in place. Doing nothing between builds and driving up cost per unit. The more you build, the cheaper they get.