Paul Spudis says that NASA lost its way on the way to the moon.
It was clear that once the Griffinites came in, the lunar goal was being sabotaged by people who didn’t really believe in it (e.g., Doug Stanley). But I’m more sanguine than Paul is. There’s plenty of time to again make the case for moon first, and most of the things that we need to do (get commercial crew going, develop depot technologies) are independent of destination. That’s what Flexible Path is all about. As the time approaches at which it will be realistic to think about affordably going beyond LEO, we can decide how best to proceed. The most important thing in the near term, it seems to me, in that regard is to fund ISRU technologies and further prospector missions, and perhaps even robotic prototypes of processing facilities. That will provide a lot more ammunition for Paul and others who want to exploit the lunar resources and bootstrap the rest of the solar system with them.
Imagine mining the American west before the government surveyed it, the U.S. Army set up outposts, and the government sponsored telegraph and railroad systems were built. Imagine the huge barriers a firm would have to overcome. The only resource that was worth it was gold mining and then only if it was rich enough to mine with pick and shovel and transport out on a pack animal. The equivalent of someone bringing back some lunar rocks to sell to collectors. The industrial development of the west only begin after the infrastructure was in place to enable it. That would be the mission of the Lunar Development Corporation. The closest analogy would be the Alaskan Railroad.
The first exploitation of the US West was fur trapping. A few people could move a lot of fur. That started well before gold mining or the railroads.
In the US east, development was mostly private with the US government contributing pretty much through decisive military protection. For example, I’m somewhat familiar with the Vanderbilt timber business in western North Carolina. Among other things, Vanderbilt (I believe it was George Washington Vanderbilt II, not Cornelius Vanderbilt, the father and founder of the dynasty) built a network of small railroads in western North Carolina to help move timber to mills downstream. While he no doubt exploited government for funding, the actual infrastructure appears completely private.
The most significant government contribution here (and it was very significant) was the brutal clearing of the native Americans from this region (most of the Cherokee were forced out in 1838 or so).
JD: Thomas, if a lunar development corporation is needed then why aren’t you circulating a business plan among potential investors?
TM: I am afraid your question makes no sense. Why would private investors want to see a business plan for a government corporation?
Thomas, you missed the point of my question. If, as you claim, a lunar development corporation is needed, why involve the government at all? Why not raise the money privately?
Water seems very basic to me we need it for life support and fuel. NASA lays the ground work the “look see”. Establishes a bare bones moon base, simple and basic perhaps Bigelow derived. Sets up a mini demo moon based electrolyzed refinery system producing fuel, and life support essentials. An electronic rail gun is used to transport lunar resources up to an orbiter for rendezvous and transfer to a lunar cycler. NASA provides the seed to grow the commercial sector.
Then it’s up to the commercial sector to fully develop an In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) infrastructure to support space tourism, ongoing lunar exploration, space debris removal, fuel depots etc…. ISRU equals sustainability. In addition to water several other resources have been detected on the moon. Including an abundant supply of H-3.
An aggressive program to mine helium-3 from the surface of the moon would not only represent an economically practical justification for permanent human settlements; it could yield enormous benefits back on Earth
“Return to the moon”, “shoot the moon”, “been there done that” is the reply of those who routinely fail or perhaps fear to see beyond mere “boot prints and flags”. The moon has the potential to become the “Saudi Arabia of the 21st century” -not with oil, but with Helium-3 [HE-3], mined on the moon and brought back to earth.
Flex has it backwards developing future technologies without a defined market in place to focus that technology to ensure it will serve the demand. VSE on the other hand searches for the resources first. Then supports initial market development prior to moveing on to the next outward destination. The Augustine panel strikes down the entire VSE concept on the cost premise of Griffins failed Constellation architecture. However ULA has shown that VSE is still financially viable. But only if NASA’s embraces a much wider commercial involvement and ideology as advocated in Augustine’s panels finding. We don’t have to settle for “look but don’t touch” or waste decades developing unfocused technologies. We can start today. If we don’t some other nation will.
Recent findings of ice would indicate water would have potential, as well as oxygen extract.
OK, we know that the surface of the Earth is not lacking in either water or oxygen, so the only use of these materials would be as a replacement for hauling them up from the surface of the Earth to support some other activity that would have net present value on the surface of the Earth. Googaw has suggested using lunar-derived propellants to reduce LEO to GEO transportation costs. While I may not agree, he’s thinking along the right lines, since putting communications satellites in GEO accesses a unique position that DOES have net present value on the ground. Do you have other ideas for lunar resources and if so what are they and how can they make money here on the ground? Please do not suggest that they support further exploration since I consider that “punting” and not a profitable activity. I’m not saying that people won’t pursue it, I’m saying that there’s zero evidence that it is profitable to investors and other people who don’t care about space.
Even if I accepted the need for helium-3 (which I don’t) we could set up a terrestrial production line for helium-3 far cheaper than mining it from the Moon in parts per billion. Lithium-6 is bred to tritium (hydrogen-3) which decays to helium-3. Every year roughly 10% of tritium becomes helium-3.
Kirk, you may be the only person that can answer this question then. What if it turns out there is no economic incentive; do we remain in the cradle forever?
Rand, I agree with your distinction, that NASA should be doing technology development (as well as research) not systems development. But beware euphemism creep. Under the ever-creative marketing departments of NASA contractors the former term could easily evolve to include the latter.
do we remain in the cradle forever?
There are about 7 orders of magnitude between our individual lifetimes and the 1 billion years we have to get off earth before our sun gets to hot. Much less forever.
Ken, if there is no economic incentive for human expansion into space, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. It just means that it will be very slow and very limited. Like the human colonization of Antarctica. But worse.
I have searched for years to find an economic justification for human expansion into space and haven’t found anything that stands up under examination. But there are a lot of people smarter than me out there. Perhaps one of them has. That’s why I keep asking the question. But having been at this for awhile, I have hard questions to ask of those who have a proposal, and I strongly suspect that it’s not one of the obvious ones that I’ve already examined and rejected (space solar power, helium-3, etc.). I hope I’m wrong and that there’s something that will make money and move us out there. But increasingly I fear that I am not wrong, and that there is a null set of economically-advantageous options.
My leading candidate is still PGM recovery from asteroids, but the numbers still don’t hit a positive net present value. So far it has come the closest though.
I have searched for years to find an economic justification for human expansion into space and haven’t found anything that stands up under examination.
Does LEO tourism count? Because that seems like the most plausible candidate to me, provided it is done with tourists’ own money.
I consider most of those that post here pretty smart guys (and gals) but even smart guys miss things. Economic incentive is not just measured in dollars (or other flavors of currency) but people can be forgiven for thinking so.
Musk wants to back up humanity. That’s his economic incentive. He has resources and has seen how he can get there profitably in an indirect way. It doesn’t matter that 90% of people don’t care about space or that 99% or more think that colonizing Mars is a stupid idea. He’s figured out how to do it. Others will to.
The analogy with Antarctica is valid, but breaks down. I think the game changer is children. If they can be born in low and zero gravity and thrive to adulthood, that will provide an economic incentive second to none.
Does LEO tourism count? Because that seems like the most plausible candidate to me
As a natural market, extremely unpromising within the next decade or two given that well over 99% of orbital HSF is funded by government space agencies. The remaining miniscule fraction represents the marginal costs (spare seat) of the marginal costs (rockets and space station already paid for by government) of a Soyuz seat. Even at such a ridiculously artificial price there is demand for only about one tourist per year. Despite these facts, the fantasy of orbital tourism does seem to be so compelling that it makes great propaganda for winning NASA contracts orders of magnitude larger than what one can get from a private tourist.
children. If they can be born in low and zero gravity and thrive to adulthood
This hasn’t even happened at sea yet, despite centuries of human seafaring. Nor has it happened in the vast cavernous underground mines we have, which are far larger than any astronaut workspace will ever be in this century. So while you and I have been quite entertained by sci-fi of this kind, back in the real world this is still many centuries in the future.
Kirk,
[[[Please do not suggest that they support further exploration since I consider that “punting” and not a profitable activity. I’m not saying that people won’t pursue it, I’m saying that there’s zero evidence that it is profitable to investors and other people who don’t care about space.]]]
Which is why a government owned development corporation needs to serve as the intermediary step.
This hasn’t even happened at sea yet, despite centuries of human seafaring. Nor has it happened in the vast cavernous underground mines we have, which are far larger than any astronaut workspace will ever be in this century.
Do you really not see the serious flaw(s) in those absurd analogies to space?
Do you really not see the serious flaw(s) in those absurd analogies to space?
By all means please enlighten us, Rand.
Jim,
[[[Thomas, you missed the point of my question. If, as you claim, a lunar development corporation is needed, why involve the government at all? Why not raise the money privately?]]]
Because the level of investment required, the risk level and payback are not suitable for direct private investment. If it wasn’t there would already be private ventures on the Moon.
The Alaska Railroad is a good example. At least two private ventures to build a railroad into the Alaskan interior failed. The U.S. government took over at the end of World War I and built it in only a few years. The site they selected to land their materials they referred to simply as “the anchorage”. Today’s its Alaska’s largest city, while the northern terminus, Fairbanks, is also a major city, while most of the state’s population lives in the rail belt. If the government had choose to leave it to private enterprise Alaska would probably still be a territory.
With a similar effort on the part of the government it will be many, many years for commercial ventures to make it to the Moon.
That should be “without a similar effort”…
BTW Rand, do you have my response to Thomas on infrastructure waiting in the moderation queue? It seems to have been auto-eaten.
BTW Rand, do you have my response to Thomas on infrastructure waiting in the moderation queue?
Sorry, I don’t see anything.
OK, trying again.
I am afraid that Thomas is very confused about the history of infrastructure development. As Karl points out the first European pioneers in the West were not government employees or contractors but fur trappers and traders, who set up very thriving and lucrative businesses, and used private canoes, barges, and boats to get their products to market. The railroads and telegraphs in the Old West Thomas describes were built and run by private corporations. Indeed, the very first railroads and the very first telegraphs were private.
(continued in the next post)
(continued)
Electric utilities for the first decades of their history were private and largely unregulated. All the major canals in Britain at the dawn of the industrial revolution were privately designed, built, owned, and operated, as were even many of the carriage roads at the time (turnpikes). The role of government in these endeavors was law and security.
(continued in next post)
By all means please enlighten us, Rand.
LOL. I wasn’t going to respond to goo’s response to me because I thought Rand said it very well, then googaw said the above. So here goes…
This hasn’t even happened at sea yet, despite centuries of human seafaring. Nor has it happened in the vast cavernous underground mines we have…
For both ships and caves the flaw in the analogy is the same. People (with few exceptions) don’t call them home! People are born on ships… then they go home. I suppose people are born in caves too… then they go home. People born in a colony are already at home and will probably stay forming economic incentives in the process.
…which are far larger than any astronaut workspace will ever be in this century.
Probably right, but not absolutely certain. If we started now, we could have several small towns out there and if on a planet with more room to grow than the largest cavern on Earth (unless you journey to the center???)
While I try to find a wording to the last part of my response to Thomas that doesn’t get auto-eaten, I’ll respond to Ken:
For both ships and caves the flaw in the analogy is the same. People (with few exceptions) don’t call them home!
Earth to Pat! Stop confusing the Sci-Fi Channel with reality! When astronauts say they are “phoning home” when calling their families, they aren’t just making stuff up. They don’t call ISS “home” in anything but the sense in which a traveling salesmen might call a Marriott Residence Inn his temporary “home”, or similar for an offshore oil worker. An offshore oil worker wouldn’t dream of raising his family on a platform; far more ridiculous is the idea that either an astronaut’s family or those funding the astronauts would go for anything so insane. Again you are talking about something very far in the future when we are immensely wealthier and technology has been radically transformed from what we know today.
Some of you astronaut fans are worse than Scientologists. You both get your religious beliefs out of the pages of the sci-fi pulps and try to impose them on the rest of us, but at least the Scientologists try to pretend to be useful.
For some reason, this blog is auto-eating all the variations of my last paragraph in my response to Thomas, so I’ll try to summarize it very briefly. Private enterprise has very commonly designed, funded, built and operated new kinds of infrastructure, but for government this has been very rare. The history of the Soviet and NASA space programs show that however governments are terribly good at wasting billions on white elephants in the attempt to build new kinds of “infrastructure.”
Because the level of investment required, the risk level and payback are not suitable for direct private investment. If it wasn’t there would already be private ventures on the Moon.
Thomas, thanks for the clarification.
What specific projects do you think that a federal lunar development corporation should undertake? Or put another way, which specific projects do you think that the business case closes, but the risk and payback aren’t attractive to private investors?
Unless, a lunar development corporation is narrowly focused and the payback transparently obvious (your Alaskan Railway example, the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, Comsat, Synfuel Corporation come to mind) I think the chances of such a corporation being chartered are very slim. I don’t think Congress would be pleased if a federally chartered lunar development corporation offered circumlunar tourist flights to the wealthy.
Googaw,
Yes, there were fur traders, but they were able to leverage the cheap local labor base – native Americans – to do a lot of their work and used their camps as bases. But they hardly were settlers, most were out to make a quick buck. If you want settlement in space you need to have infrastructure built. Incidentally many of those fur traders found very good mineral deposits while roaming in the hills, but without any way to get the ore out they just ignored them.
But in terms of real infrastructure, most was built on Uncle Sam’s dollar. The Central Pacific and Union Pacific both got between $16,00 – $48,000 a mile in low cost loans for every mile of railroad built, while their actual costs were about half. Western Union made out good as well as the government paid them to connect its military outposts with telegraph lines. So private firms did the work, but on the government’s dollar. And do forgot the huge land grants the railroad received, 10 square miles for each mile built, plus free use of government timber and rock as needed for the building.
Would the western infrastructure have gotten built without the government? Yes, but probably not for decades. The Great Northern didn’t use subsidies and it was not finished until 30 years after the Union Pacific.
Also you might do some research on the Panama Canal, Alaska Railroad, and the major dam projects. All funded, owned and managed by the government with private industry serving as contractors. Which BTW would be the case with a Lunar Development Corporation. Government ownership and funding, but built by private firms under contract.
And lets not forget the postal roads funded every year since 1792 until the creation of the Federal Highway Authority funded by the government.
What I find so funny is that the pioneers of the 19th Century didn’t have any problem with government funding and building western infrastructure. In fact many western entrepreneurs spend a good amount of time in Washington lobbying for such funding. If that that was a major driver of statehood, have your own hand picked Senators (appointed by the governor in those days) lobbying for you. Even Henry Ford argued in the 1920’s it was the federal government’s job to build highways for his automobiles while the founders of the airlines were always n Washington with hat in hand for new airports, navigation aids, airmail contracts, landing rights, etc. to build their business with. But that goes back to the Wright Brothers, who as soon as they invented the airplane sent a letter off to the War Department to buy it….
Actually its only since the Libertarian movement was founded, based on the fantasy of TV westerns and novels like Altas Shrugged of how the economy “used to” operate, that the government building and running infrastructure has been seen as “wrong”. But for the first 200 years it was taken for granted that was the government’s job…
Tom
Jim,
[[[What specific projects do you think that a federal lunar development corporation should undertake? Or put another way, which specific projects do you think that the business case closes, but the risk and payback aren’t attractive to private investors?]]]
The early projects in order would be:
Lunar Communication System
Lunar Navigation System (like USAF GPS)
EM L1 station/refueling depot
Lunar Surface Facility
Lunar Oxygen extraction directly, or as a customer for it for its refueling depot.
Panama Canal, Alaska Railroad, and the major dam projects.
None of them anywhere close to being infrastructural novelties. As Jim Davis pointed out canals, railroads, and dams all had a history of many decades to centuries behind them. Their civilian utility had already been demonstrated thousands of times over.
“I have searched for years to find an economic justification for human expansion into space and haven’t found anything that stands up under examination.”
Well you have accepted that it’s possible to mine lunar water and use it for rocket fuel.
What you to need to accept is that once this is possible, the price of water and rocket fuel in space will drop in price. It should drop pretty fast in terms of a decade or two.
First you have to get some idea of what the near term price of lunar water and rocket fuel will be.
The price should not be the same as shipping it from Earth, ie, more than $10,000 per kg.
Instead the price of water on the lunar surface would less than $5000 per kg and the price of rocket fuel shouldn’t much more than $1000 per kg [5000 + 1000] of both the LOX and liquid hydrogen, made from the water.
Which could mean that hydrogen may be be 3 or 4 times higher per kg than LOX, but terms of mass, the 8 parts Oxygen and the one part Hydrogen it will average somewhere around $1000 more per kg.
Or said differently it should cost less than $1000 per kg to split the water.
I think in the beginning rocket fuel on lunar surface would sell for about
$2000 per kg and so lunar water will be around $1000 per kg.
But even if rocket fuel were to sell for 10,000 per kg or more (such as 20K) the selling rocket fuel on the lunar surface will lower the cost of getting stuff off the Moon.
And getting stuff off the Moon, is the beginning of where this space stuff can affect people on earth not interested in space- the things you mentioned as the He-3 or PMGs.
Or can you bring real stuff to earth- opposed to “entertainment video” or tourism.
I think the most significant “thing” that will be “brought to Earth” within a time frame of 50 year from the beginning of lunar water mining is electrical power.
But in the early days, one thing will be lunar dirt.
Without rocket fuel on the lunar surface gold bricks could not moved from the lunar surface to Earth, economically. And lunar dirt is more valuable than gold bricks and there is no shortage of it on the Moon.
Now people who are not interested in space may not place any value on lunar samples- they could not be in market for such things. They may even be annoyed if their local school buys some lunar samples. “It’s waste of tax dollars”. Or something.
But other than selling lunar dirt on earth could be profitable, the significant of exporting lunar dirt is you will need lunar rocket fuel- one more market for lunar water/rocket fuel.
In terms of the total amount electrical power generated each year in space [ISS and numerous satellites in space from all countries], making a 100 tons of rocket fuel per year would be a significant portion of that total.
Roughly, 100 tons would need: 100,000 times 5 kW/h
500,000 kw/h divided by 365 day is 57 kW. So somewhere around a 1/10th of the existing electrical power being generated in space.
In the first couple years of mining lunar water and making rocket there probably will not be as much as 100 ton per year produced- mainly due to a lack of demand and that starting with less capital in the infrastructure will be a way to mitigate the risk of not having enough demand in the short term. Also with less capital investment various possible problems encountered in making the rocket fuel will have less cost.
A government could do various things that would reduce this risk which could result in higher production in the near term.
Having rocket fuel at the lunar surface would significantly reduce the cost of getting back from the Moon. Having rocket fuel in lunar orbit or anywhere in high earth orbit will significantly lower the costs of getting to the Moon.
There is more potential market demand for rocket fuel at lunar orbit then there is at the lunar surface, but if rocket fuel is being shipped mostly from lunar surface, then obviously this mean that lunar surface has a higher total demand for water/rocket fuel.
2/3 of all water mined on the moon could used to ship rocket fuel to orbit. With this in mind, one can get a general idea of how much lunar water would need to mined to meet possible demand.
If in a year say 50 tons of payload are landed on the Moon- this by itself could require 100 tons of lunar water mined in a year.
A manned Mars mission could need 100 or more [200 or even 500] tons of rocket fuel and/or lunar water.
If 100 tons is needed in one year for this- it would require 200 tons of water to be mined on the moon.
If the price of lunar rocket fuel is $2000 per kg, the fuel cost to lift 100 tons of payload to lunar orbit is 200 million dollars. At some point it could make economic sense to replace using rocket fuel and use tethers or some kind of mass driver [say using mag lev or coil gun].
Thereby replacing a energy cost of 200 million with energy cost for same mass lifted to less than 1 million dollar- though the infrastructure may cost a billion dollars or more. So say a driver driver could compete and eventually win the competition vs chemical rockets lifting cargo/freight from the lunar surface.
But making the mass driver could use a fair amount lunar water initially in order to build it, and one would probably still have chemical rockets being used to get on and off the Moon as well as to different places on the Moon.
So within a decade or two from the start of lunar water mining, there could easily be say 1000 tons of lunar water being mined per year, and requiring about 1/2 of total energy being made in space.
Or 1000 tons of water at $1 million per ton- year gross 1 billion.
Power companies could be say 500 kW at $50 per kWh about 200 million yearly gross. Gas stations pay for water and power and make and sell rocket fuel. Transportation companies move water and rocket fuel and people and other cargo- and buy rocket fuel.
At this point what is actually things returned to earth would be lunar dirt and perhaps a few tons of PMG. Perhaps at this point fusion energy is getting closer to being commercially viable. Maybe people are looking at mining He3 on the Moon- or some other body in the solar system.
1000 tonnes of water is about the amount of water in couple residential swimming pools- it’s still a rather small scale operation. Though compared to say the Apollo program this is massive- the Saturn V rocket mostly bring rocket fuel to the lunar surface- about 20 tons to surface or about 50 tons to lunar orbit- an couple humans went also- and this took a few years.
So once you get as much as 1000 tons of lunar water mined in one year, this means there is about 300 tons per year of rocket fuel in lunar orbit. The rocket fuel in lunar orbit could worth say $5000 per kg.
With a heavy launcher [Ariane, Proton, Delta-IV] you get about 10 tons to lunar orbit. Use 10 or 20 tons of fuel at lunar orbit and land one the Moon and leave the Moon with refilling another 10 or 20 tons at lunar surface. So for rocket fuel you would pay 5 million per ton for rocket fuel at lunar orbit and 2 million per ton at lunar surface.
So with existing rockets you get crew and stuff to the moon for about 250 million. Or about 1/4 the cost of a Shuttle flight.
So maybe 50 million per passenger ticket- making it a larger part of cost being be getting from lunar orbit to earth surface- though one could use rocket fuel at lunar orbit and get back to earth in different way than how Apollo program did it.
Anyways, as I was saying at the 1000 ton per year point, all you would have is, perhaps a few tons of PMG and say 30 or 40 tons of lunar dirt.
Now, you would be lowering the costs of NASA getting to Mars, but that just going to encourage them to spend more money doing other things- so you lose in that sense.
And it will probably takes a few decades after this before the world can get electrical power from Space
Actually its only since the Libertarian movement was founded, based on the fantasy of TV westerns and novels like Altas Shrugged of how the economy “used to” operate, that the government building and running infrastructure has been seen as “wrong”. But for the first 200 years it was taken for granted that was the government’s job…
I don’t know why you’re obsessed with libertarianism, but it’s worth noting here that the current federal government is far larger, more powerful, and intrusive than the government of the 19th century. Let me also remind you that most spending of the current US government is entitlements not infrastructure.
(Continuing with the infrastructure discussion, another brief summary since this blog software is again auto-eating my posts on this subject)
As the Soviets showed, trying to centrally plan the next five years is hard enough. Trying to centrally plan farther out than that is insanity.
The early projects in order would be:
Lunar Communication System
Lunar Navigation System (like USAF GPS)
EM L1 station/refueling depot
Lunar Surface Facility
Lunar Oxygen extraction directly, or as a customer for it for its refueling depot.
Wow. This is impossibly ambitious. None of those projects can be justified until there is a substantial human presence on the moon already. Indeed, some of them would not even be possible without a substantial human presence on the moon.
You want to build the Holland Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge while there are only Indians living on Manhattan.
You want to build the Holland Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge while there are only Indians living on Manhattan.
🙂 Well said. Indeed this is a pretty good description of the typical Exploration Directorate flagship project.
EML rendezvous would be an immediately economical choice even prior to a first return sortie to the lunar surface insofar as propellant and equipment can be stockpiled at EML-1 or EML-2 by single impulse ballistic trajectories. No space tugs or ion drives required.
See Jeffrey S. Parker
http://ccar.colorado.edu/nag/papers/AAS%2006-132.pdf
25% to 33% net increase in delivered payload compared with conventional Hohmann transfer.
Lunar surface “GPS” and communications grid would be easy as well.
Place a small handful of small satellites in orbit around EML-1 and EML-2 and it is mission accomplished.
I would ask Garmin and Verizon (for example) to pay ALL the costs in exchange for promotional considerations.
Lunar surface “GPS” and communications grid would be easy as well. Place a small handful of small satellites in orbit around EML-1 and EML-2 and it is mission accomplished.
So easy to see from inside a lunar polar crater. 🙂
I would ask Garmin and Verizon (for example) to pay ALL the costs in exchange for promotional considerations.
Go ahead and ask them, who is stopping you?
Silly googaw, before descending into a lunar polar crater, the wise explorer places their own transponders and/or relay antennae on the crater rim to allow line of sight to the intended destination.
As for lunar orbit infrastructure, my key point is that such things are not terribly expensive or difficult, of you already are doing a lunar campaign.
Lunar surface “GPS” and communications grid would be easy as well.
You really think Congress is going to charter a lunar development corporation to construct a lunar navigation and communications system prior to any permanent facilities on the moon?
Those are the types of infrastructure that only make sense if the customer base numbers in the hundreds of millions on earth.
Proposals to place the equivalent of GPS or Intelsat around the moon in the year 2010 are just impossibly premature. Like Magellan wanting to build a canal across Panama so he doesn’t have to sail around South America.
ISRU of lunar water is the spark that ignites and reinforces other fledgling space markets. It would be a mere baby step in the grand scheme but still a vital first step. Why “flex” around LEO for another 2-3 decades playing with technologies that may or may not apply. Why not just go for it go for the water now.
As with most business schemes of this magnitude the government lays the ground work and absorbs the initial risk. We still have the shuttle so stretch it out a few years minimizes the gap. The shuttle could loft large Bigelow moon habs, lunar landers, lunar cyclers, tanks for fuel depots. Allow the shuttle to transition into low flight rate shuttle-C HLV lite for large size cargo only roll as commercial assumes the manned and light cargo LEO and cislunar transport roll. As commercial launchers mature the need for a shuttle based HLV will gradually decline.
Allow the water to pull, define and focus the commercial development in a free market entrepreneur effort. I think the water changes everything. I can’t believe after all these years we would just ignore the lunar water. To me it’s like delaying the start of the transcontinental railroad for another 20 to 30 years while we shoot our budget wad playing around with undefined locomotive and railroad construction technologies.
Jim,
The systems will not be as large as the ones for Earth. Six small Comsats will do for the communication system. They could also double for the navigation system. They would eliminate telecommunications blackouts on the Moon so rovers could easily explore the poles and farside where the really interesting stuff is easily. BTW NASA almost lost the LaCross mission when a problem occurred on the farside of the Moon. A comsat would have allowed the problem to be fixed much sooner.
A EM-L1 station would finally give Bigelow as customer able to pay for one of his stations and not cost as much as you think.
The rest is doable one step at a time.
Silly googaw, before descending into a lunar polar crater, the wise explorer places their own transponders and/or relay antennae on the crater rim
I see, push off the complication onto the customer. What a great way to start designing a “commercial infrastructure”. Please let us know how to design this “GPS” transponder? And while you’re at it, please describe which specific EML1 and EML2 halo orbits your satellites are in and show why they don’t periodically bob below the horizon when viewed from the north or south pole, or both, even when viewed from a crater rim? And how well does “GPS” triangulation work given the positions of your “GPS” satellites?
Project M should go to the lunar poles to look for water. Then the GM designed robonauts should go first on mars direct type flights to prepare human bases.
Tony, keep talking like that and I’ll actually start thinking people read my blog. http://quantumg.blogspot.com/2010/03/moon-first-for-robotic-exploration.html
googaw, people are born and live their entire lives in mining towns and isolated island colonies all the time. No, underground and the ocean proper hasn’t been colonized, yet, but in the case of oceans, there’s a lot of people interested in doing so.
They don’t call ISS “home”
ISS is a colony? Who knew? Googaw, perhaps you need to look the word colony up in a dictionary.
Clue: Caves and ships are not colonies (in most cases.)
Now if your argument is there never will be colonies, then you should argue that.
Again you are talking about something very far in the future when we are immensely wealthier and technology has been radically transformed from what we know today.
I guess you did. This is an opinion which respectable sources disagree. Some are seriously talking about one way trips now.
If I was an investor and most of you walked in my office, I would throw you right out. Especially the guy telling me that lunar water “ought” to cost $2000/kg, and that our deliverable in the future will be lunar dirt and helium-3. Seriously, people, step back for just a minute and listen to how incredibly silly that sounds. I might as well go build a bonfire of hundred-dollar-bills in my front yard.
Fifty years from now we still won’t be on the Moon unless one of your figures out some way to make money doing it right here on Earth.
A comsat would have allowed the problem to be fixed much sooner.
A EM-L1 station would finally give Bigelow as customer able to pay for one of his stations and not cost as much as you think.
The rest is doable one step at a time.
Thomas, I will follow your progress with interest. Good luck.
The problem with NASA, and with much of what government does, is that it’s what Friedman called “type four spending”: spending someone else’s money on someone else. The person spending, even if he has the best of intentions (ha), doesn’t know if the person providing the money, or the person receiving the benefit of the spending, actually wanted it spent this way.
It’s a major miracle if this comes even close to being economically efficient.
The person spending, even if he has the best of intentions (ha), doesn’t know if the person providing the money, or the person receiving the benefit of the spending, actually wanted it spent this way.
Yes, another example of Hayek’s Knowledge Problem.