ESA's director general Jan Wörner spoke about ESA's plan for a lunar village at 33c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8406-the_moon_and_european_space... "Refocusing on the moon as a platform for future deep space missoins". It's a great watch, but doesn't contain many details.
Yes, absolutely. There was another talk by someone at ESA on the feasibility of a moon elevator as well: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8407-an_elevator_to_the_moon_and... , which is also quite cool. The gist is that while we don't have the materials to build a space elevator from Earth, today's materials are sufficiently strong to construct a moon elevator (from the moon into space). This would reduce the ∆v required for moon missions significantly (by around 2.8km/s iirc). Getting the materials to the moon and constructing the elevator are a different story, though :)
Something I remember proposing more than a decade ago. But it's actually better to use it as an anchor for a station at the L1 earth-moon point and one-shot payloads there by ecannon from the lunar surface, since at the right angle such payloads actually climb up the gravitational saddle to the saddlepoint where the station is and come to rest there.
Reminded me of The Three Body Problem trilogy (currently on Book 3). Highly recommend it for any fans of Science Fiction as the author is incredibly detailed and comprehensive in the social implications of space/ET life.
I don't understand why Three Body Problem gets so much positive attention? I read it and found it incredibly boring. Most of the pages were spent on the historical stuff, which the characters just weren't interesting enough to sustain; when it finally gets around to the sci-fi part the MMO conceit is dragged out endlessly and fundamentally makes no sense on any level, and then the magic unfolded proton at the end was just a deus ex machina with no connection to anything.
For the calibration comparison, I did enjoy The Player of Games; I felt the setup was a little clunky (the bit about provability of recordings by Minds should have been set up beforehand to give the reader a fair understanding of the world) and I struggled a little because I had little sympathy for the protagonist (and there's only really one) for a long time. But on the whole I did enjoy it; the part about wanting to know that victory is possible is a good crystalization of a genuine insight into human nature, and the vision of devoting one's life to something that completely catches the imagination. And the conclusions works very well as a "continuation of politics by other means" thing.
Different strokes I guess. I really enjoyed the Three Body Problem trilogy due its expansiveness both in time and in space, and its focus on ideas rather than (solely on) characters.
Then again one of my favorites hard SF authors is Greg Egan, and I've heard many times that people find his work dull (which blows my mind - Egan writes some of the most thought provoking, interesting SF by FAR).
> Different strokes I guess. I really enjoyed the Three Body Problem trilogy due its expansiveness both in time and in space, and its focus on ideas rather than (solely on) characters.
I don't know what ideas or expansiveness you're talking about?
> Then again one of my favorites hard SF authors is Greg Egan, and I've heard many times that people find his work dull (which blows my mind - Egan writes some of the most thought provoking, interesting SF by FAR).
I found the metaphysical stuff in e.g. Permutation City slow and boring - it felt like he'd had a clever idea but wasn't pushing it as hard or as fast as it could go. Had the same experience with a couple of others of his (Distress and Schild's Ladder are the ones I read). To the point where I stopped reading him for a while.
I found the Orthogonal trilogy a lot better; the physics of that is a lot more interesting than metaphysics. Though as a confounding factor I do think the characters in that were much better - still broad-strokes archetypes, but not total nonentities like in his earlier work.
Expansiveness in that Three Body Triology takes place over a large period of time (billions of years), and the fact that it takes place over such a large space (Earth, Trisolaris, outer planets, etc). The ideas were similarly expansive, especially the dark forest philosophy and its implications. That being said, there were several places where I found myself bored and waiting for something to happen. Even so it was an enjoyable read overall.
Permutation City is one of my favorites. When you say "slow and boring", I say "subtle build" to the final realization of what Paul has done and how his realization has proved the "dust" theory.
Really like Schild's Ladder too, and Distress is pretty good but not my favorite.
I agree with you on Orthogonal for the most part. Although I was very disappointed in the ending - it seemed too abrupt and predictable given the rest of the story.
> Expansiveness in that Three Body Triology takes place over a large period of time (billions of years), and the fact that it takes place over such a large space (Earth, Trisolaris, outer planets, etc).
I'm talking solely about the first one, I only read that (and probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it if it hadn't been for the Hugo). There's no large time range that I remember, very little happening anywhere other than Earth, and nothing of philosophical interest that I saw.
> When you say "slow and boring", I say "subtle build" to the final realization of what Paul has done and how his realization has proved the "dust" theory.
I found it just took too long to get around to a "reveal" that was already obvious. And the conclusion of part 2 doesn't really engage properly with the dust theory; if anything the humans' inability to modify the machines the ants' universe is running on undermines it, because under their physics that action would make perfect sense. The ants' reality "wins" by pure authorial fiat; you could - and should, it would be interesting - make an argument for why it should based on kolgomorov complexity or some such, but Egan neglects to.
The Three Body Trilogy is actually one of my all time favorite scifi book series (and I read a lot of scifi). A lot of interesting ideas are developed through the story arc. Perhaps unfortunately, the first book is more setting the stage for the others, which makes it a difficult read for some. The Three Body Trilogy IMO would probably have better merged into a single book, but then doing so would make it seem an impossibly long read for some perhaps. I agree it is a bit slow at times, but worth it.
If you want a denser read (less setup, etc.) that also has a lot of really thought-provoking concepts, I highly recommend also "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Blindsight is probably my all time favorite scifi novel, actually.
I'd a big fan of Blindsight. That said I'm not averse to long books and I love worldbuilding (e.g. I really liked Anathem, and The January Dancer). Though I think I do also like to have a conventional plot to hold onto - a quest that our viewpoint characters are trying to accomplish - maybe that's what was missing from Three Body Problem for me.
[spoilers] The first time I read Permutation City I really enjoyed the reveal that Paul was originally a simulation (many times over) that only existed in the "real" world because the entire universe spontaneously came into being in order to maintain a simpler reality than the alternative in which his simulation suddenly stopped existing. Almost as if complexity itself has some kind of inertia. If that was obvious to you the first time around, kudos!
I also really enjoyed the commentary on solipsism in the context of transhumanism via the 'Peer' character.
Although part 2 doesn't explicitly explain why the universe of PC has the "complexity momentum" property, it does suggest the universe with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity is preferred (via some undescribed physical law). That is why the "ant's" universe wins; it's relative complexity is simpler than the world which Paul had created. I agree that it could have been fleshed out more fully.
> the magic unfolded proton at the end was just a deus ex machina with no connection to anything
The two magic protons used to conduct surveillance anywhere on Earth from a far off planet, and even change happenings on Earth to a degree, is an idea many Chinese people would instantly recognize through first-hand experience. There's the connection for the original intended readers of the book. Only a few Western readers of the translated book would be able to identify closely with the concept of always being watched, and perhaps that idea wouldn't come across as speaking personally to them.
Three Body Problem is a strange book - I really enjoyed it (reading the 2nd sequel now) but I can understand why a lot of people find it off-putting. It is a real throwback to the 50s style of scifi, big ideas but terrible characters and a plot that bounces is strange directions. If nothing else, it was an interesting change.
I also enjoyed The Player of Games but found it suffered from Ian M Banks syndrome - unlikable characters being forced into unenviable situations. But the plot was great.
Not the fellow you're replying to, but I've also read both books. I enjoyed The Player of Games very much. Three Body Problem was also good, but I found some characters to be frustratingly irrational (i.e., it feels like some people were doing things simply because the plot needed a character to do that action, rather than out of any meaningful motivation). Still worth your time - the Chinese cultural background was an interesting touch for me. I've not read the two sequels, but they also sound interesting.
I absolutely hate the Culture series, I find it predictable, boring and unoriginal.
The Three body problem and its sequels (it's a trilogy) I find absolutely fascinating. Be warned, this is very dry writing with very flat characters, mostly digestible because of the exotic Chinese background which is noticeable, but this book is all about ideas, so in many ways completely the opposite of the space opera Culture series.
Despite its length, much of which I consider filler, these are one of a handful of books which really made me question our position in the universe.
The second book, The Dark Forest, is my favorite. The Three body problem is actually my least favorite, written more like a mystery thriller rather than sci-fi.
And yes, you absolutely need to read all three parts.
This to me is a good news as it help keep the topic alive, but I doubt that this effort will be very successive (I wish it the best). It will likely get too expensive quickly. Both participants are bureaucratic (afraid of failures) and suspicious of each other (secrecy, national pride) which will also ramp up costs. We probably can set up a base now at a huge cost to set up and operation, but it will likely fizzle soon to next budget crisis.
I think to bootstrap a useful permanent base on the moon or Mars (that can grow, provides safe and efficient transport) we need to accept significantly higher risk to life, say 20%, at the initial setup / prototyping period to allow rapid development and testing of new technologies for all stages of the process (flight, space stations, energy, mining, etc.). I think enough qualified individuals will gladly accept this for a chance to fly, but regulators will likely kill this if they consider it not safe enough.
Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations. My 2c.
20% is way too high. Even ignoring the (important!) human factors, that sort of failure rate would raise the expense tremendously all on its own. We are finally seeing a glimpse of true reusable rockets, which are the only way to do things in space at anything like a reasonable cost. A 20% failure rate means your reusable rockets can't be reused very much.
Along similar lines, even if you ignore the fear and grief factor, a 20% fatality rate means you'll never create experienced astronauts.
I also really doubt that putting the risk that high would be particularly useful. Even the worst non-man-rated rockets out there have a failure rate of something like 10%, and those failures generally wouldn't kill the astronauts if their spacecraft had a launch escape system. The Space Shuttle's fatality rate was about 2%, and that was only because it was a vastly over-complex, fragile machine with no realistic abort modes in many phases of flight. No other spacecraft made or planned could fail in the ways the Shuttle did.
A government effort probably will be expensive, but only because they're slow to adapt. It will probably be quite some time before we see a(nother) reusable government rocket.
However, a private effort won't go anywhere, because there's no business case for a moon base, nor even a "dream big" case for an Elon Musk type figure. (Mars is a better target by nearly every measure for the second one.)
The best bet IMO would be a public-private partnership, with governments providing the basic goals and funding, and private companies providing the technology and services.
Space Shuttle was not a major breakthrough -- we were in space and had orbital stations for a long time by then. It was supposed to be a cheaper, more convenient way to do things that we already did.
Soviet space program, Apollo program are better examples and both had ~10-20% fatality rates, at least during the initial phases (for example, Apollo 11 (successful moon landing) was 6th Apollo mission; one out of those 6 (Apollo 1) was fatal).
Ancient seafarers, voyagers, explorers faced more dangers and had higher fatalities than today's office clerks. If we are to keep making new voyages we should accept that there is danger involved. If we are spending $X and could make one step with success probability .9999 or 1000 steps with success probability .8 we should seriously consider both options, not let bureaucrats reject the riskier one out of hand. My 2c.
Apollo 1 was a ground test that was retroactively given a mission name to honor the dead. If you want to count it toward the fatality rate then the denominator needs to include all the other ground tests they did, not just the flights. A more complete view would also include Mercury and Gemini.
The Soviets lost a few people in flight during the early days, but the last one was in 1971. There's no reason to think we should have a similar fatality rate in 2017, with modern materials, processes, and control systems.
I agree in theory that if a 20% fatality rate were somehow required, it would be acceptable for things like this. My argument is not that it's unacceptable, but that it's so high as to be a hindrance rather than a help, and that it's far beyond what's necessary even in a "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" type of program.
We don't need airliner-level "one in a billion" safety, but something around 1% seems highly reasonable.
Didn't the Space Shuttle go 1000 times (yes, thousand times, not thousand percent) over budget in terms of cost of launching 1kg of payload into space?
I don't think so. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, the lowest cost estimate during development was $635/lb in modern dollars. The actual cost was something like $8,000-$20,000/lb depending on whether you're measuring marginal or total costs.
Thanks for looking it up. I think Wikipedia has the variable costs? If I remember right, the article I got the shocking estimates from amortized the fixed costs of developing the space shuttle over the entire life of the program---and since they did much fewer missions than planned originally, you get the crazy overrun.
Anyway, even your figures are crazy.
Part of the reason SpaceX can be cheaper is not because they are smarter---but because they don't have to source parts from each and every congressional district.
Wikipedia has both, thus the range. But I misstated the high end: if you take all costs into account then it's $27,000/lb. Which is an awful lot, to be sure.
> 20% is way too high. Even ignoring the (important!) human factors, that sort of failure rate would raise the expense tremendously all on its own.
Historically, a 20% mortality rate is not a huge barrier. Power and Plenty discusses an episode in the early European spice trade in which somebody sent several ships to India for pepper. All but one of them were lost, giving mortality much higher than 20%, but the voyage made a hefty overall profit from the single surviving ship.
It seems fairly obvious to me that a wooden sailing ship, even built by hand with old technology, would be far easier to construct than a moon rocket.
It's hard to compare costs across such a great gulf of time, but consider for example that the Spanish Armada consisted of 130 ships, and was fielded by a country of about 8 million people at the time. If a 16th-century ship cost as much as a moon rocket today, then that would be roughly like the USA building 5,000 moon rockets. Moon rockets probably cost about $1 billion or so (Saturn V was a bit under in current dollars, SLS will be quite a bit over) so that would be about $5 trillion. Less than a decade later, Spain was able to throw another 140 ships at the English, so it wasn't a one-off thing either. And that's ignoring naval or merchant ships that didn't participate in the Armada.
I'd wager the ships were much more expensive than the crew at the time. Human life was quite cheap until recently (and still is in many/most parts of the world). A couple hundred man-years of of skilled laborers versus a couple hundred random nobodies?
OK, I agree that the ships are relevantly cheaper than the moon rockets. On the other hand, there are many organizations -- and individual people -- who could easily afford to lose a billion dollars on a moon rocket today. It was common (in some sense) for a galleon-owning merchant to be completely ruined by his single ship failing to come back. So I don't see that the cost of launching rockets is so high as to prevent the activity.
It seems like all of the work to support the idea "20% mortality is too high" is being done by the observation "there is no pepper on the moon". It may be too high on a cost-benefit basis, but that's because the benefits are very low.
But if you think that the benefits are high, perhaps because an initial high-cost high-mortality phase is the prerequisite to a long-term and profitable low-mortality phase, or even a long-term and profitable high-mortality phase, it seems pretty easy to accept 20% mortality.
The benefits not being that big are a big part of it. Yes, if there was some hugely compelling reason to create a moon base then a 20% loss rate would be fine. But there isn't. There are no resources that would make it worthwhile, and I don't see the "national pride" argument supporting that kind of cost. That's what Apollo was built on, and that got canned after only six landings. And they had the USSR to compete with, so I'd think the "national pride" motivation was much stronger than it would be now.
20% over the first dozen missions would be 2-3 lost missions in that first dozen, which would be unprecedented in space flight.
Your last sentence confuses me. I went out of my way not to moralize the risk, and only discuss how it would pose problems in terms of cost and creating experienced people.
> Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations.
On what do you base this? If it's too expensive and dangerous for governments, with the ability to leverage overwhelming resources if they chose to and not care a bit whether any revenue were generated, how is it more likely that a severely resource constrained company likely limited by a profit (or at least constrained loss) motive will succeed?
On talking to a few folks I know who work for NASA. Government officials in most areas are VERY averse to risk taking. Managing and sometimes working on a mission with a fatal crash is likely the end of the career. Business as usual and not reaching far enough has no career downside.
And safety is expensive -- getting the system from .99 to .999 P(success) leads to a large increase in complexity and makes developed technologies more difficult to reuse -- the systems designed for high P(success) are usually monolithic, tightly integrated, built for a single purpose things, not modular systems of reusable components.
This has nothing to do with resource constraints; this is pre-conditioning / expectations that are not going to change for a large government organization. Unless there is a highly visible, universally accepted national need.
Both profit-motives and a re-election motives can disrupt efforts. But I think being small is significant leverage for achieving new things, and small + technology is compounded leverage.
I think that a small effort must approach things more from a bootstrapping of minimal effective steps. I've found this often incompatible with the design-by-comitee approach of government procurement bureaucracy. A government approach tends to put more importance on not making any mistakes than doing things fast and efficiently.
At a recent government placement I could buy post-it notes with the department budget, but not tissue paper. I could buy an iPad to test my software, but not a new monitor (that's IT!). I could buy an Adobe CC licence, but I couldn't install it or upgrade it without an IT admin. Process can eliminate judgement & autonomy.
> At a recent government placement I could buy post-it notes with the department budget, but not tissue paper. I could buy an iPad to test my software, but not a new monitor (that's IT!). I could buy an Adobe CC licence, but I couldn't install it or upgrade it without an IT admin. Process can eliminate judgement & autonomy.
In fairness, that also describes many large private entities.
The only figure in the article that's related to SpaceX is
> On a smaller scale, SpaceX, Musk's rocket company, cut a deal for about $20 million in economic development subsidies from Texas to construct a launch facility there. (Separate from incentives, SpaceX has won more than $5.5 billion in government contracts from NASA and the U.S. Air Force.)
$20m is pocket change as subsidies go. And if you consider the contracts that NASA has with SpaceX as subsidies then you'd have to think that about Boeing and BAE and all the other defense contractors.
Cost-plus procurement being corporate welfare is a valid position, but it's a much bigger issue than SpaceX.
Good point. public and private funding are complementary to each other so there is a healthier Eco system for technology/social progress. Funding from (some time bureaucratic or socialist) government without concerning profit is necessary part of the system. Let me give you a few examples.
Quite a few many pioneers like Hinton, Bingo ,maybe LeCun(was working with Hinton before moved to NY) are happened to be from Canada. I realized the answer for the mysterious coincidence until I watched the video that Hinton explained why he moved to Toronto: There was not enough funding from US other than Military at the time while there were some funding in Canada that didn't demand much instant result from his research.
The healthcare system in Canada is also better than the states although it has a lot lot lot of problems. I believe socialist Canadians care more about people than efficiency of the system initially but it ended up with only 6 or 7 payers for the cost and less overhead instead of more than 2 thousands of payers along with less regulated but very complicated system.
The hi speed train system in China funded by government totally changed the concepts of distance , time, space , contribute so much to economy beyond calculation. I guess if California government can do the same thing, Silicon Valley would spread to be a bigger area and a lot of developer can afford housing by living 100 miles away from where they work.
BTW, I myself was quite pro small government/free market but became more moderate not because I'm influenced by my follow Canadians but by looking it at "High Order" level of efficiency.
20% is impossible. When dealing with so many factors, thousands of failure points, is boils down to either safe (1%) or nothing (100%) with a very slippery slope between. It is basic algebra. When you multiply lots of factors you must either aim very low or accept near-infinity. There isnt much advantage to midpoints. The individual factors before multiplication would be nearly identical, with slight errors quickly adding up to total unpredictability. The 20% rocket wont be much cheaper than the 1%. You will spend far too much effort bouncing around between 1 and 100 trying to hit the 20.
No doubt savings can be made, but the overall reliability of such a complex system isnt directly and smoothly related to cost.
I wonder whether you'd have regulatory problems if people died on the Moon compared to rockets blowing up in the atmosphere. The latter can easily harm people who haven't consented to potentially being blown up for science. But nobody has the authority to regulate what happens on the Moon, so you should be okay to use the El-Cheapo Inflatable Habitat, right?
Regardless of regulations, as engineer you should be comfortable of flying a rocket that you designed/built/engineered. Would you go for that if odds of dying would be as high as 20% (one of five) ?
> as engineer you should be comfortable of flying a rocket that you designed/built/engineered
I don't think this is true. Some examples:
- If I were a flight engineer (which I'm not), I would be happy to design a plane that I was confident a pilot could fly within safety levels that were acceptable to me, regardless of whether I felt I could personally fly it as safely.
- I've seen a modern blacksmith write about certain female customers' desire for chest armor molded into the shape of breasts. This is fairly dangerous -- such armor effectively aims a large metal spike at the center of your chest -- and completely unnecessary. He showed a photo, with a comment along the lines of "I made this woman a boob plate [his term] because she asked for it to be made that way. I live in fear that one day she will trip and crack her sternum. But wearing the armor makes her feel sexy, and that matters too."
- If I design something with a 10% failure rate, and someone else is happy to operate it knowing it has a 10% failure rate, and it really does have a 10% failure rate, why is it my place to tell them "I wouldn't operate that myself, and therefore you can't either?"
That would depend on other factors. For a test flight, I'd suggest we volunteer a chimp. If the plan was to establish a colony, and it meant my descendants might be some of the first humans to explore the wider galaxy...
Well, let me put it this way: absent clinical immortality, I can't imagine being male, childless, and unwilling to take that chance.
That statistic is based on a very small samples size. In the span of less than a year the SpaceX failure rate is now about 7%. In another year it will probably be 2% if things go well.
From an engineering and process perspective, early models are more failure prone.
Even with very expensive risk avoidance these kind of missions can be ridiculously failure prone. Just look at how many Mars missions have been lost. Is there really much difference between a process that produces a 20% failure rate and one with 80%-100% (lost all your data)? This would seem like a difficult balance to strike.
Both countries are currently in desperate need of sizeable public works programs to keep people usefully occupied. Cost is proxy for human activity, but not necessarily a useful one. If we really are looking at massive near term automation, this is exactly the kind of proposal we can expect to see get off the ground...
I'm pretty sure there is minimal overlap between the set of people you'd want to hire for a lunar base program and the set of people in need of public works programs.
Crew? No, you want middle-aged types, preferably past reproductive age, for that. Obvious reasons familiar from decades of discussions about astronaut selection include radiation exposure, elevated risk of casualties and psychology.
Design? No, nobody sane would let inexperienced hands design hardware for human space flight and settlement.
Hardware production? Maybe some of that. A few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand, mostly watching over the CNC machines doing the actual work?
I feel that you are vastly underestimating the amount of, and variety of work required in this kind of endeavour. Apollo annually took ~1% of the GDP of the United States to get off the ground. And most of the people who worked on it were not astronauts or rocket surgeons.
If the problem is loss of life and not material, I don't think we should keep with the "recruit the best of the best and send them there". Do it Australia style: select prisoners and launch multiple missions: if 7 out of 10 fail, you still have 3 bases working. Too bad for those who died.
I agree that you need to send robots. But robots right now on Earth are not capable of operating without a little human intervention now and then. That's why you need a moon crew - albeit a skeleton crew to start off with. They'll sort things out that need to be done on-site.
Which robots? We can barely manage to keep rovers alive on Mars and they aren't lifting 500lbs space rocks. The Chinese couldn't keep their rover losing its drive train on the moon after 48 hours. The ESA has never had a moon rover.
We're very, very far from industrious robots on Earth, let alone on the moon or mars. We aren't even building mega-structures with robots here outside of trivial edge cases, why do you think we can do it on the moon?
Also from a cost per lbs perspective, swarms of giant building robots will cost more than the GDP of most nation states. A handful of astronauts with powertools working with ultra-light materials won't. For example, a small team can raise up Bigelow's mostly inflatable moon base concept in days:
I think you're greatly underestimating what it takes to mine regolith in vast quantities, transport it, produce it into something usable, then build heavy structures with automation. You're looking at 10,000+ lbs machines and many of them and with no heavy energy source. You're not running these off solar or a small RTG, so you're probably talking building a nuclear reactor on the moon just to power these juggernauts.
Meanwhile human built lightweight structures are pretty much doable right now with a heavy human rated rocket like the upcoming SLS or SpaceX's upcoming heavy configuration.
I really believe (mostly) self replicating robots are necessary for any serious space colonization. Starting with just humans is way more effort than it's worth. Imagine just sending a few rockets to the moon. Waiting a few years, and then humans arrive with a base and infrastructure already set up for them.
Self replicating robots don't necessarily need to be super high tech. A well stocked machine shop plus a simple robot operator could manufacture 99% of it's own equipment. I once saw an interesting paper proposing a series of small robots on tracks that could produce more tracks and more robots.
Even if this process is very slow, it's exponential. Soon you have 10x as many robots as you started with. Then 100x, and then 1000x...
I really believe (mostly) self replicating robots are necessary for any serious space colonization. Starting with just humans is way more effort than it's worth. Imagine just sending a few rockets to the moon. Waiting a few years, and then humans arrive with a base and infrastructure already set up for them.
Last week's episode of Doctor Who had an interesting take on that scenario:
The idea is to send an initial 'seed' factory that creates masses of simple robots that mine resources and, once critical mass has been achieved, build new factories.
The ideas in the report seemed like science fiction four decades ago, but maybe they are more attainable today? I don't know enough about modern robots to know. This seems like an interesting area for a private company to tackle, since tech like this most certainly has applications here on Earth.
On big, big, big advantage here is that, unlike Mars for instance, robots on the Moon are literally 1.5 seconds away (3 seconds round-trip), as far as radio communications go. Remote-control in real-time isn't that hard. You'll have to go a little bit slow because of the 1.5-second delay in seeing what the robot sees, but it's perfectly manageable. The same just isn't true on Mars because it's around 5 minutes away (for a 10-minute round-trip).
This means you can send up big robots that have little to no intelligence or automation, and are not much more than giant R/C cars with webcams. Seriously, we could just launch regular heavy construction equipment (earthmovers, bulldozers, etc.) rigged with cameras and remote controls; the real problem is the power source, since all those things run on fossil-fuel-burning engines here. So the challenge is making versions of these things which are battery-powered and can somehow be recharged with solar power.
Oh yeah, I guess the other big difficulty is dealing with the Moon dust (regolith), which is notorious for getting in everything and fouling things up. But that shouldn't be that hard to deal with; our heavy equipment (and even things like cars) are already designed to handle harsh environments and dust. We'd probably need different elastomeric seals though since there's no atmosphere on the Moon.
Edit: fixed Earth-to-moon and Earth-to-Mars delay times
> robots on the Moon are literally 3 seconds away (6 seconds round-trip)
Moon's apogee (point of furthest distance from Earth) is 405,400km [1]. Speed of light is roughly 300,000km/s [2]. Robots on the Moon are 1.35 seconds away (2.7s round-trip). Even with equipment delays I can't see how you could arrive at 6 seconds round-trip.
> Mars [...] is a minimum of 15 minutes away.
Mars' aphelion (point of furthest distance from the Sun) is 1.67 AU [3][4]. Earth is about 1 AU from the Sun (by definition). Also, Sun is ~500 light-seconds away from Earth. Thus, at conjunction the distance from Earth to Mars is not more than 0.7 AU or 350 seconds (5.8 minutes).
Yeah. Mars is important, but testing stuff out where the ride home is a couple days instead of months/years seems a lot more sensible.
Sure, the Moon offers different challenges in spots, but it'll still let us validate things like growing crops, water reclamation, robotic construction, etc. with the ability to pop home if it all goes disastrously.
There's another planet with a huge amount of unused sub-surface, and on-surface living space - the Earth. We don't even need to leave the gravity well!
If you're concerned about civilization-ending climate/nuclear disasters, consider that even in that event, parts of the Earth will still be more hospitable for human life then the Moon or Mars.
Robert Zubrin has discussed the "moon first" strategy, and has made the interesting observation that many of the pro arguments come from entrenched space industries looking to make a buck on existing hardware. The argument being "we already build parts to go to the moon, so let's just do that."
Personally I would love to see both outcomes. But given a limited budget, going to Mars has the advantage of providing a (admittedly risky and uncertain) possibility of extending the survival of the human race, where as going back to the moon seems to provide more indirect benefits.
Given a limited budget, lifting everything from earth, other than for a quick stunt mission to mars, is not economical. Nearly all the mass and elements needed - everything but hydrogen - is on the moon already. And hydrogen (water) may just be available too, at the poles.
I thought the whole idea of "moon bases" were put to rest a long time ago? Not any categories I'm aware of where they are the best option, from mining, forward base to Mars, habitability, etc
I feel like it's a stepping stone in more ways than one.
There's still plenty we don't know about how our own biology functions outside of Earth's gravity well, atmosphere, or magnetosphere. Long term studies will need to be done, and lunar studies are a much more approachable candidate (cost and mission risk).
We could always go straight to Mars and do the research there, but that is the riskier strategy. We'd definitely learn what we need to, but it opens up more failure modes for any colonization mission, and managing the risk on Mars would be expensive. Mars colonization would already be straining our ability to engineer and fund, let alone doing it semi-blind.
I wonder, if the moon becomes a habitable location in my lifetime, will all those people who bought 'an acre of the moon' have their contract upheld? [0]
"Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means"
It's actually unclear whether this prohibits private property, though it probably would because property can't exist without enforcement of property rights by a sovereign government. Which raises something of a difficult question for asteroid mining ventures. Personally I think we will see the OST revised or rescinded once these hypothetical situations start actually happening. We need more clarity on property rights for commercial exploitation of space resources to become viable. No one is going to invest $100bn to capture and mine an asteroid only to find out that they technically do not have exclusive rights to the asteroid and anyone who reach near earth orbit can legally mine it too. In any case, those BS certificates for moon acerage are definitely not enforceable, for about fifty different legal reasons. The most obvious of which is you can't sell what you don't own.
You could probably shoot down anyone who gets too near to your asteroid. If there is no space police to stop them from stealing your stuff, there is no space police stopping you from defending your stuff either.
Not that I'm advocating it, but an alternative to rescinding the OST would be to set up an international organization responsible for allocating "space property", possibly under the umbrella of the WTO.
Sadly I'm quite sure that these issues are always solved by force. I simply cannot imagine that countries with the means to get to <valuable space resource> will abide by the decisions of a foreign organisation which has just given said resource to your frenemy.
> property can't exist without enforcement of property rights by a sovereign government
Please. Four or five seconds of thought will disprove your theory.
The Moon will be the ultimate homesteading experiment: Whoever is able to put their Moon property to productive use will be the owner. It doesn't matter what the laws or treaties on Earth say; if you're there and making claim to the land, it's yours.
Yeah. If there's no government but you find yourself capable of consistently, successfully enforcing your own private property rights... congratulations, you are the government. Long live the king/queen.
As for any territorial dispute the question you're asking is: will any of the people who've bought "moon estate" on this website be able to enforce the border (either individually or collectively)?
Unless a superpower bought one of this estates, the answer is most likely no.
I think those citing the "outer space treaty" and such are misled. The reason there's no private property on the moon right now is because there's absolutely no incentive to do so.
If we start colonizing the moon, and in particular if we start mining it you can be sure that the story will be much more different. Look at the many territorial disputes around the arctic (and its valuable resources).
I see no reason that anyone except the people who paid into it would ever recognize such claims. I can claim your house all I want, doesn't mean anyone will recognize that I own it.
Capability: having the means of defense (soldiers, technology, weapons...)
Capacity: having enough resources to use capability (manpower, food, ammo, money, energy)
Brazil for example is great at the second, having plenty of resources, but sucks at first, having no national tank manufacturer, poor naval tech and so on...
North Korea is sort the opposite: have tons od artillery, missiles, nuclear tech, but most likely nowhere near the resources needed for extended war, they can only hope people fear the damage they can output in their initial strike is deterrent enough.
Waiting for the day when most of the richest countries will join together to invest in an orbital ring, or mass driver, or sky hook, or something to make launching stuff in space much cheaper. All of those proposals will cost a few hundred billion dollars to a few trillions so we probably won't get any of that until the richest countries decide to pay for it, and then if necessary, charge the rest (or everyone) for using it.
If any part of the mission of this proposed station involves monitoring the Earth for climate change data, and it certainly will, then the US will not be part of it. I think if voters wanted the US to lead in space and science then they shouldn't have voted for someone who dismisses basic science.
China will absolutely lead on this now that we've put in an anti-science government. Expect them to lead on other things that were traditionally our domain too.
Why is this down-voted? It's 100% correct. The US will not be part of anything that involves climate science at this time.
We should be looking to China to lead the world in many things in the coming years. The US has shot itself in the foot, and continues to shoot itself in the foot.
Just guessing: maybe the down-voter thought it was an attempt to make an off-topic political point? I wouldn't entirely disagree - I can't imagine why you would want to go all the way to the Moon and set up a manned base there in order to observe Earth - but a reasoned response making that point explicitly would certainly have been better.
There is plenty of peculiar-looking down-voting on HN. I am seriously beginning to wonder if that down arrow serves any useful purpose.
>I can't imagine why you would want to go all the way to the Moon and set up a manned base there in order to observe Earth
Why wouldn't you? You're all the way there and pointing a sensor at the Earth isn't a big deal. You know you can do more than one thing at a time, right?
Climate science is probably one of our bigger planetary issues and perhaps the biggest issue facing humanity right now. You know Earth is a planet right? That's part of planetary science, that's why you explore space in the first place. It doesn't get an exception for purely political reasons. Studying the Earth is no different than studying Mars or Jupiter.
Its incredible the hoops people will jump through to justify Trump's absurd climate conspiracy theories and asinine policies in regards to science.
I've always wondered why the US never went back to the moon. Or never set up a moon base for space exploration and experimentation.
Even when countries like China and India are making attempts to mine the moon for Helium - why don't we hear such stories from the US? If it makes sense for China and India, it probably does make sense for US too. Or do the US elites know something much more fundamental and powerful that we might never hear of until the next world-war?
I don't like the controversy theories, especially about aliens, but I don't like the arguments against the controversy theories either. I don't know if aliens exist and even if they existed and visited us few decades back, I believe they would disregard us as a sub-Type 0 civilization (like Michio Kaku categorizes). They would have found us similar to primitives - studied us and left.
>I've always wondered why the US never went back to the moon. Or never set up a moon base for space exploration and experimentation.
The US sent half a dozen crewed missions to the moon, and made numerous unmanned missions.
There's no dark secret - space travel is complex and expensive, travel to the moon vastly more so than simply to orbit, and money is governed by politics. When the US had the prestige of possibly beating the Soviets to the moon , there was the political and popular will to do so. But eventually, the trick simply got old, and no longer seemed worth the expense.
Now take that, and add the exponential long term cost of a habitat and mining operation on the moon with 1970's / 1980's dollars and tech. I remember there being numerous plans for a moonbase at the time, it was discussed by NASA often, but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.
I find it odd that in the 60s it was deemed affordable, but during the 2 decades of boomer super cycle, the female migration to the workforce, and spending money now which our grandchildrens grandchildren will be repaying... we could ill afford it.
You're missing something important: back in those days, we didn't have to funnel all our wealth to a small number of billionaires (in fact, the term didn't really exist back then). Now, we do. Giving the vast majority of our wealth to a few billionaires like Gates, Buffet, Bezos, etc. costs a lot. So yeah, we simply can't afford this kind of stuff any more.
It wasn't considered to be worth the cost, that's not entirely the same as not being affordable. The US wanted to focus on the Shuttle, satellite reconnaissance and Star Wars.
The ISS is a good example of this phenomenon - it was going to be "Space Station Freedom[0]" before it became the "International Space Station" because budget cuts made the original plans no longer feasible.
Also the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, which presented both an unexpected opportunity and a risk. Opportunity in that Russia was no longer the enemy and could be a partner with experience running space stations. Risk in that Russia was not going to spend as much on space by themselves as the Soviet Union did, and their rocket engineers might have been tempted to go work for Iran, North Korea or other countries with nuclear ambitions. By doing the ISS together with Russia, those engineers were kept employed.
> but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.
I'd sooner they spent the money on a lavish boondoggle that would inspire a generation (moonbase) than a lavish boondoggle designed to blow stuff up (F35).
Note: I'm not a disliker of the F35, I think when they work the bugs out it'll be a pretty fantastic plane - though whether it'll be value for money is arguable (and there isn't enough evidence one way or the other).
Moonbase will be a lavish boondoggle designed to blow up and then activists will argue that this boondoggle must be scraped and money redirected to world hunger/saving whales etc.
I'm not discounting the efforts the US made back then. And there are many ongoing efforts - obviously I am not discounting those. I am questioning the rationale to not take advantage of the significant lead, especially when we (as humans) have better technology than before
The Moon doesn't buy us much... Water ice and He-3, sure, but that's about it. You can't swing a dead cat in the solar system without hitting a chunk of water ice and we are a long ways from needing substantial quantities of He-3.
Mars makes a more sense for a lot of reasons. A self-sustaining outpost on Mars is a _lot_ more plausible than the Moon. Due to the availability of carbon, there are a lot of substances that are a lot easier to make on Mars (notably, rocket fuel). The Martian atmosphere is 100x less dense than Earth's, but it is 100000000x more dense than the Moon's. While ~0.01 atm isn't a lot of pressure, it's certainly enough to be useful.
The Moon is closer, but really they're both firmly in "if something goes wrong, you'd better be able to fix it on your own" territory. It takes a bit more energy to get to Mars, but since you can use the atmosphere of Mars to slow down, the difference in energy requirements to get to the surface of each aren't vastly different.
If ESA and CNSA want to head to the Moon, great, I think any progress in that direction is great, but I think Mars is a much better goal (and the Moon isn't really "on the way" to Mars).
Is that true? Because my understanding is that Mars have just enough atmosphere to cause troubles but not enough to help.
Hence the tumbler design of smaller spacecraft landing on it and insanely complicated landing of Curiosity which is larger.
The Martian atmosphere is commonly used to aerobrake. If you can use parachutes in the Martian atmosphere (at least to some extent), you can sure as hell use it to slow a spacecraft.
Curiosity's complex landing system had little to do with the atmosphere, and a lot more to do with a) not wanting to land the thing on a hillside or in a crater it couldn't get out of (which nearly happened to Opportunity - http://www.space.com/36587-mars-rover-opportunity-landing-si...) and b) the much larger size than previous rovers, making airbag bouncing less suitable.
The Moon works as a nice achievable MVP for a first iteration at colonisation tech.
Mars is orders of magnitude harder and more likely to end in failure - which apart from the immediate fate of the victims, would also be a PR disaster that could set colonisation programs back by decades.
There's a lot to be said for developing launch tech to explore/colonise/mine the rest of the solar system from the bottom of a shallow gravity well instead of a deep one.
In many ways, Mars is easier. Really the only way it's harder is that it's further away (so it takes more energy and travel time for stuff (both payload and communication signals) to get there).
The Moon, on the other hand, lacks an atmosphere, has very little gravity, and is extremely resource poor, and has bigger temperature extremes. It presents a lot of challenges that don't exist on Mars (or are substantially reduced).
If you want to build a base as a staging area for expeditions, there's no point in putting it on the surface of anything. Just stick it in the Earth-Moon L2 (rather than wasting a couple km/s getting down to the surface of the Moon and back).
Written by the guy whose pre-Voyager psychic remote viewing of the gas giant Jupiter revealed its rocky, mountainous, crystalline surface? Yeah, I'll pass.
