Why not use Shuttles to fly to the moon?

[RobertVA]

An issue bigger than extinction level events is one of over population. There's going to come a point when medical science will figure out away to keep people from dieing. With no one dieing the human population will increase beyond the Earth's carrying capacity. Humans of the future may have to expand to the Moon and Mars simply for the realestate.

As far as relieving overpopulation by sending people to colonies on the moon other planets or even orbiting habitats:

It would take more resources launching the emigrants into orbit than supporting them here on Earth.

You might eventually make off world settlements independent enough to keep the human race from going extinct if there's some terrible catastrophe (like a big asteroid strike) here. That might take several centuries to accomplish though.

 

[FemurBone]

It would take more resources launching the emigrants into orbit than supporting them here on Earth.
.

It's not an issue of resources, its an issue of living space. In the event that medical science eliminates death and the population increases, the need for farm land will increase. This will most certainly involve major deforestation around the globe.

Moving people to the moon may be nessessary simply to make room for more farm land as well as save the Earth's ecosystem.

Rocket fuel is simply oxygen and hydrogen. Both can be obtained from water which is in abundance.

 

[Neopeius]

It would take more resources launching the emigrants into orbit than supporting them here on Earth.
.

It's not an issue of resources, its an issue of living space. In the event that medical science eliminates death and the population increases, the need for farm land will increase. This will most certainly involve major deforestation around the globe.

Moving people to the moon may be nessessary simply to make room for more farm land as well as save the Earth's ecosystem.

This is silly. There is *plenty* of land left on Earth for agriculture. It is far more economical to create new farmland on Earth than it is to create it on the moon and ship the food back to Earth.

 

[USS KG5]

It would take more resources launching the emigrants into orbit than supporting them here on Earth.
.

It's not an issue of resources, its an issue of living space. In the event that medical science eliminates death and the population increases, the need for farm land will increase. This will most certainly involve major deforestation around the globe.

Moving people to the moon may be nessessary simply to make room for more farm land as well as save the Earth's ecosystem.

This is silly. There is *plenty* of land left on Earth for agriculture. It is far more economical to create new farmland on Earth than it is to create it on the moon and ship the food back to Earth.

Frankly if they can find a way of cultivating a big dead rock - then our food problems are over permanently!

 

[FemurBone]

This is silly. There is *plenty* of land left on Earth for agriculture. It is far more economical to create new farmland on Earth than it is to create it on the moon and ship the food back to Earth.

No your strawman argument is silly. First you completely ignore the scenerio I spelled out, then you completely misrepresent my post.

You don't create farm land on the moon. You farm on the Earth and ship food to people living on the moon.

Right now the Earth has 6 billion people, so there is plenty of farm land. What if there were 20 billion people, or 30 billion people or even 40 billion people? If human beings could live forever it could happen. There wouldn't be enough land for both human beings and crops. At least not without completely destroying the Earth's ecosystem. The solution would be move people to the Moon and use the Earth for farmland.

 

[RobertVA]

But high rise apartment buildings are a LOT less expensive than the rockets and fuel it would take to launch the residents of those buidings into space.

Yes there's plenty of Hydrogen and Oxygen available, but to use it as propellant you would have to use lots of biofuel crops or fossil fuels to produce hydrogen OR use electricity to split water. Once the oxygen and hydrogen are generated you would have to chill them to liquid form which would also take significant amounts of energy.

Then there's the expense of building the spacecraft themselves. It costs millions to launch just three people on a Soyuz and a lot more per person on the shuttle. Orion on an Ares I will be less expensive than the shuttle, and probably significantly safer, but still very expensive per person.

 

[FemurBone]

^The only reason it's expensive to launch people into space now is because there is no nessessity. Rockets are made to order.

If rockets and space craft were manufactured like jet liners the cost would drop considerably.

and the electricity produced by nuclear power plants could be used to split water.

 

[RobertVA]

Jet airliners carry hundreds of people at a time. Soyuz carries three. The shuttle can carry six to eight, at higher risk due to the potential that ice or foam from the external tank could damage the thermal protection provisions. The cargo bay isn't pressurized and would require a newly designed module to carry additional passengers. Both of the currently used spacecraft are lunched with boosters/tanks that are limited to propelling them to low Earth orbit, thus considerably more propellant would be required to accelerate even those small crews and the equipment and supplies to sustain them to the moon. Larger crews mean larger launch vehicles, and it took a multi megaton vehicle to get only two people on the moon's surface with enough supplies to last a few dozen hours in a tiny flimsy spacecraft.

Jet airliners are available for thousands of transcontinental or intercontinental trips. It takes just as much propellant to lift re-entry thermal protection equipment to the moon as it does to lift people and the supplies they need. It takes a lot more propellant to decelerate a spacecraft to LEO velocity (for a space station docking) upon returning fromo the moon. A large percentage of the equipment (spacecraft tanks etc) used to get people to the moon would have to be single use (not available for a second trip). Like Apollo, Orion will dispense of the considerable energy of its 25,000 velocity returning from the moon as reentry heat. The mass of propellent to use rockets to decelerate would require a monstrous lander launch vehicle (even compared to the Saturn V and Aries V), and we're still talking about a spacecraft that (for that mission) only carries four. The Soviets had similarly massive launchers comparable to the Saturn V for the secret moon program they canceled when the US succeded in landing two man crews for a few dozen hours on the surface.

Nuclear fusion isn't close to being a technology that produces a net gain in power. It's not certain fusion will ever be an economical way to generate electricity. The politicians and environmentalists have be argueing for decades about the disposal of the nasty residue from spent fisonable materials. The stuff can't safely be in the vicinity of people for a very long time. There's a lot of debate over the feasibility of keeping the stuff from leaking into the ground water after tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands - yes it will continue to be toxic that long) of years in a buried storage drum.

Massive expense and utilization of resources and still wouldn't be making a noticeable dent in the number of people. That's not including the even bigger effort keeping them supplied with food and manufactured goods.

Much easier to build skyscrapers full of tiny apartments. You could even use the exterior walls and roof to grow additional crops. They probably wouldn't be the spacious apartments we see in high rises today. They would eventually be compact little dwellings resembling the overnight compartments in passenger trains with built in sofas that convert into bunks at night. Something like the apartment in that Bruce Willis movie (I think it was "The Fifth Element")

 

[FemurBone]

^Look, your completely missing the point. Obviously in the far future people are not going to be using Soyuz space craft and the modern day space shuttle. Technology improves with time. If the nessessity arose, travel to the moon could be made efficient and affordable.

Once some sort of infrastructure on the moon was established, a lunar colony could eventually become self sufficient.

And I didn't say anything about nuclear fusion. Nuclear power plants today use nuclear fission. 19% of the electricity the United States consumes comes from nuclear power. It is a very efficient way of producing electricity.

 

[Brolan]

You also may not need a spacecraft in the future to reach orbit

 

[RobertVA]

^Look, your completely missing the point. Obviously in the far future people are not going to be using Soyuz space craft and the modern day space shuttle. Technology improves with time. If the nessessity arose, travel to the moon could be made efficient and affordable.

Once some sort of infrastructure on the moon was established, a lunar colony could eventually become self sufficient.

And I didn't say anything about nuclear fusion. Nuclear power plants today use nuclear fission. 19% of the electricity the United States consumes comes from nuclear power. It is a very efficient way of producing electricity.

But the physics of propelling mass (people and supplies) out of Earth's gravitational influence is not going to change. We might make some reduction in propellant requirements through advanced tank and engine materials but it's still going to take megatons of propellant to get single digit quantities of people to the moon (with only enough supplies to sustain them for a short period). The only way to increase efficiency is to increase rocket exhaust velocity and there's only so much heat and pressure any material (even advanced alloys and/or composites) can handle.

As much as we like to imagine them, mini van size spacecraft taking people to Earth orbit will probably never be more than fantasy. Launching a few dozen people just to orbit will always require vehicles on the scale of Saturn V or Aries V. Multiple launches of vehicles like that every day wouldn't make a noticeable dent in Earth's current population. The human population will be much bigger in a century or so.

That population growth will place significant demand on energy supplies, driving prices for all kinds of energy up. Suppliers of equipment to "harvest" natural sources like tides, solar and wind will struggle hard to meet some of that growth. Some of the current fission reactors will be shut down due to concerns about the safety or their eroding plumbing and rapidly filling "temporary" fuel residue depositories. It will continue to be difficult to license new fission facilities until the need becomes so desperate that long term storage proposals will be accepted.

 

[Neopeius]

This is silly. There is *plenty* of land left on Earth for agriculture. It is far more economical to create new farmland on Earth than it is to create it on the moon and ship the food back to Earth.

No your strawman argument is silly. First you completely ignore the scenerio I spelled out, then you completely misrepresent my post.

You don't create farm land on the moon. You farm on the Earth and ship food to people living on the moon.

Ah. You're right. I misread you're post.

This assertion is actually even sillier.

 

[FemurBone]

But the physics of propelling mass (people and supplies) out of Earth's gravitational influence is not going to change.

It's not an issue of changing physics. It's an issue of progress and necessity.

It took Christopher Columbus over a month to sail from Spain to the Bahamas. That same trip could be made today in 7 or 8 hours in a jetliner. No one at that time had any concept of a jet liner. But they exist today. Nobody changed the laws of physics; its called science and engineering. That's what scientist and engineers do, they figure things out. They solve problems.

When Kenedy addressed congress about landing a man on the moon NASA hadn't even put an man in Earth orbit yet. Nine years later a man is walking on the moon. Nobody changed the laws of physics. Scientist and engineers figured out how to do it.

If something is nessessary, scientist and engineers will figure it out.

 

[FemurBone]

Ah. You're right. I misread you're post.

.

If your IQ was doubled you'd be half as smart as a chimp.

 

[MANT!]

Actually farming the lunar soil IS possible,detailed chemical analysis shows by using chemical fertilizer, plant growth is possible using lunar soil in a controlled environment. Huge underground greenhouses to actually process oxygen and food are possible, as long as the greenhouses are provided with a efficient power source such as a fission power plant.
http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102212635.html

One issue is 'initial expenditure" the more one spends up front in space exploration,aeronautics etc. the less you end up paying later.

The evidence for or against H2O on the moon is sketchy, but theory supports water ice below the surface at the lunar poles. If that is the case,a largely self supporting base IS possible provided with a large enough initial expenditure to allow for a fission power plant, a viable greenhouse system, reliable transportation, and room for growth. Lunar colonies, not in my lifetime but a lunar base IS possible and probable during THIS century (Just don't expect "Moonbase Alpha" anytime soon). As to how we will get there? I'll let the scientists and engineers figure that out.

After all, according to Clarke's First Law "When a distinguished scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

 

[TerriO]

Ah. You're right. I misread you're post.

.

If your IQ was doubled you'd be half as smart as a chimp.

FemurBone, you know better. Infraction for Flaming. Comments to PM.

 

[USS KG5]

If something is nessessary, scientist and engineers will figure it out.

Travel to the moon is completely unnecessary though - you cannot create sustainable communities on the moon so why bother? As others have said the solution to a growing population is population controls and greater population density here on Earth - in fifty years very very tall buildings will be the norm for accomodation in a lot of cities.

The moon is nothing but a big dead rock, and the idea of people living there without some amazing terraforming technology is, as others have said, very silly, why in Gods name would you WANT to live there?

Now, if we found an amazing "second Earth" we could somehow get to via a wormhole and populate where we could cultivate, where there were resources and where a population could flourish, all your arguments about economies of scale, about how if we needed to we would etc come more into play.

Space travel at the moment is not really worthwhile practically or commercially outside of LEO, if we go further it is "bacause its there" - great reason, but you have to place it in a practical context.

 

[Neopeius]

Ah. You're right. I misread you're post.

.

If your IQ was doubled you'd be half as smart as a chimp.

That dig is well deserved. I can't believe I said "You're".

 

[TerriO]

Ah. You're right. I misread you're post.

.

If your IQ was doubled you'd be half as smart as a chimp.

That dig is well deserved. I can't believe I said "You're".

That doesn't mean you guys have free reign to troll and flame each other as though you're training firemen in Mordor.

Now, can we please get back to the topic?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

One more reason for not using a shuttle to go to the moon is that the heat shield is not designed for re-entry at 11km/s. Using retrorockets to decelerate to the usual speed of 8.2km/s for re-entry would add considerably more weight that would need to be boosted to the moon and back again. Uprating and testing the heat shield for higher speed re-entry would require an expensive research program.