July 23, 2010
The Moon, Asteroids, and Space Resources
The Moon: Useful and on the way
By abandoning the Moon, the administration’s proposed space policy has left the space community with a huge question mark over the important issue of learning how to harvest and use space resources. Clearly if we don’t go to the Moon with people or machines, there is no way to use the abundant water, metals, and other lunar surface materials to create new capabilities in space. Supporters of the new path suggest instead that we can obtain all the materials we want from near-Earth asteroids, small, rock-like objects that co-orbit the Sun with the Earth. Indeed, some asteroid types appear to contain significant quantities of water, thus offering a possibly rich source of off-planet water.
Water is an extremely useful substance in space. By virtue of its varied utility, water enables extended human presence in space. Besides its obvious role as a sustaining substance for human life (both drinking and providing oxygen for breathing), water is also an excellent material to shield from cosmic radiation and a medium of energy storage, both by thermal storage and also through its use in rechargeable fuel cells, where hydrogen and oxygen are combined at night (producing water and electricity). Stored water is disassociated by solar generated electricity during the day and re-stored as hydrogen and oxygen. Most importantly, water can be converted into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen; in this form, it is the most powerful chemical rocket propellant known.
So what are the relative benefits and drawbacks of using asteroidal (not lunar) resources? The biggest advantage of asteroids is that they have extremely low surface gravity. As these objects are simply very large rocks, they don’t have much mass and hence, virtually no surface gravity. A mission to an asteroid is more akin to a rendezvous in space than it is to a planetary landing. The advantage this confers is that vehicles can come and go to a given asteroid without the requirement to expend large amounts of propellant in a landing, with total changes in velocity measured in the few meters to tens of meters per second range. In contrast, a landing on the Moon requires a propulsive burn of over 2200 meters per second, both coming and going. This deep “gravity well” penalty is much smaller than launching from Earth (11,000 meters per second), but is still substantial compared with “dimple” dimensions of asteroid gravity wells.
If the propulsive energy of access were the only (or even the main) consideration for resource exploitation, asteroids would win hands down. But there are some other issues to consider. Water is indeed present in the materials of Near-Earth asteroids, but in a chemically bound form. Water molecules fill sites in the crystal structures in rock-forming minerals, bound strongly to its encasing structure. These chemical bonds must be broken to extract the water and that takes energy. On the Moon, water occurs in bound form, but also in its native state as ice in the lunar polar regions. Ice-laden dirt can be scooped up and minimally heated to extract the water. In contrast, it takes 100 to 1000 times more energy to extract a kilogram of water from chemically bound asteroidal minerals than it does to scoop up the “free water” found in the lunar cold traps. The greater quantity of energy needed to extract water from an asteroid is annoying, but can be handled through the use of large solar arrays or even a nuclear reactor to generate copious amounts of electrical power. But both solutions bring significant mass penalties and a nuclear reactor significantly increases cost, both from the technical development it would require and from the hurdles raised by legal and environmental groups it would have to overcome.
A more critical issue is the location of the two resource bodies. The proximity of the Moon is a major boon for its utilization. The Moon is both close and accessible. In terms of closeness, it takes 3 seconds for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light to go the Moon and back. This makes the remote, telepresence operation of lunar robots from Earth feasible. Early steps in the location, surveying and harvesting of demonstration amounts of resources on the Moon can be done remotely with robots controlled from Earth. We do not have this luxury with asteroids.
Asteroids orbit the Sun (like the Earth does) and vary in distance from Earth by tens of millions of miles over the course of a year. At best, asteroids are several tens of light-seconds away and at times, tens of light-minutes. This long radio time-lag means that direct remote operation of robots on asteroids will be cumbersome, if not impossible. For well understood routine tasks, this may not be a serious issue, but space resource utilization is something we have yet to learn. It is unclear whether we will be able to harvest and process asteroid water using remote robots, but it is almost certainly possible to do so with robots on the Moon.
The other aspect of the Moon’s proximity is accessibility, the ability to access a space destination routinely and often. As the Moon orbits the Earth, we can go to and come back from the Moon pretty much at will – launch windows are almost always open. In contrast, because even near-Earth asteroids follow their own paths around the Sun, launch windows are short and come at irregular (albeit predictable) intervals. Round trips to and from asteroids are even more difficult and after multiple weeks to months of travel, loiter times are either very short (on the order of a week or so) or very long (a year or more). This wildly variable duration of access may be handled on a robotic mission, but it precludes any significant human/robot interaction during the materials processing on an asteroid.
Finally, there is the issue of surface gravity. Much of the “dirty work” of resource processing involves separating some substance from another, or extracting something embedded. Having gravity usually makes this an almost trivial step, one that we don’t think about very much – unless we don’t have it. The Moon does indeed have a significant gravity well (about 1/6 that of the Earth) and although this works against us when we want to export product, it works in our favor when we need to process materials. The extremely weak surface gravity of an asteroid is almost microgravity and makes it very difficult to separate materials there without specialized equipment, again adding mass, power, complexity and cost to the processing chain.
In short, there are many considerations to take into account when planning an architecture based on resource exploitation. The seemingly damning case against going to the Moon to harvest material resources largely revolves around its relatively high surface gravity. It takes roughly two tons of water-equivalent liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen propellant to lift one ton of water to the L1 point, where it can be used to supply and fuel a variety of spacecraft destined for many different places. That same ton of water lifted from the Earth would take over 19 tons of propellant to deliver it. The other side of that coin is that gravity is extremely useful – if not critical – for many materials processing techniques. Gravity can only be artificially created near an asteroid at some expense and mission complexity, whereas on the Moon, it’s a feature that comes for free.
Learning how to access and use space resources is a critical skill for a space faring society – skills and knowledge that will reap rewards right here on Earth. The Moon offers us a school and a laboratory for acquiring this critical knowledge. By virtue of its proximity, accessibility and resource endowments, the Moon satisfies our early space ISRU needs and allows us to create new capabilities to routinely access cislunar space, where all of our economic and national security space assets reside. The asteroids have much to offer for material resources and we will eventually journey to and use many of them. But we have business on the Moon first. Mining the unlimited wealth of the Solar System will become inevitable once we have learned the lessons of how to do this job on our nearest neighbor.
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As far as manned missions are concerned, I think its obvious that the Moon should be our primary objective. Exploiting the Moon’s oxygen and hydrogen resources should also be a priority. Obviously oxygen and water are essential for human survival beyond the Earth. But hydrogen and oxygen are also excellent rocket fuels that could dramatically lower the cost of traveling to and from the Moon and could even make transferring satellites from low earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit a lot cheaper.
Also, thanks to the Moon’s low gravity well, a colony on the lunar surface could end up being the primary location for the manufacturing and launching of satellites destined for both low Earth and geosynchronous orbits before the end of the century,.
I’m also a strong advocate of using robots to grab small NEO asteroids 50 to 1000 tonnes in mass and bringing them back to stable Lagrange points like L4 or L5 for resource exploitation. The most efficient way to do that, IMO, is to simply deploy large light sails, one to two kilometers in diameter at L4 and L5. Such large sails could each probably transport a 50 to 100 tonne NEO asteroid to a Lagrange point every year. They shouldn’t weigh more than 40 tonnes, and with the latest light weight materials, should probably weigh a lot less. A lunar colony is probably going to need carbon and nitrogen resources from the asteroids if those resources found at the lunar poles are insufficient.
I don’t, however, see the logic of sending humans to a large NEO asteroid since it would require several months of travel and probably several hundred tonnes of mass shielding to protect the human brain and body from the deleterious effects of galactic radiation. Such a venture would be a lot more expensive and dangerous than setting up a lunar base. A manned asteroid journey also makes no sense as a precursor journey before we attempt to go to Mars since it would be equally and possibly even more dangerous than simply traveling to Mars orbit in the first place.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — July 23, 2010 @ 5:57 pm
Of course the moon is a good place to test out ISRU. However, even there was already a habitat there, we still have a lot of work to make ISRU testing a reality. There is a lot that must be done on Earth before we can even begin doing ISRU on the moon or any asteroid.
For instance, any water in say de Gerlache crater will not only be mixed in with the regolith, it will also be super cold – down around 3 Kelvin. At that temperature, water is a mineral. It isn’t slush, it’s a rock. It may actually be more difficult to mine that than it would be to break chemical bonds in asteroidal material.
We don’t know. There is so much we don’t know – and need to know before trying ISRU anywhere – that there could be multiple Centennial Challenges to try to cover the trade space. And there is plenty that NASA can do in this regard before we ever go anywhere, too – mix some lunar soil simulant with some water, bring it down to 3 Kelvin, and test failure rates on diamond bits, for one.
At least, that would put the horse (research) in front of the cart (destinations).
Comment by Ed Minchau — July 24, 2010 @ 1:45 am
http://quantumg.blogspot.com/2010/07/dr-paul-spudis-responds-sorta.html
Comment by Trent Waddington — July 24, 2010 @ 5:17 am
It would be nice to see the public discussion focus on Lunar Robotic Precursor missions to extract and return reasonable amounts of regolith for developmental ‘process’ research and analysis.
I think it would be somewhat prudent to utilize the Orbital National Laboratory (ISS) to evaluate micro-gravity processing techniques on celestial regolith.
Comment by Marcus — July 24, 2010 @ 5:32 am
Ed,
it will also be super cold – down around 3 Kelvin. At that temperature, water is a mineral. It isn’t slush, it’s a rock. It may actually be more difficult to mine that than it would be to break chemical bonds in asteroidal material.
Not likely. To get solid, dense ice, you need some type of freeze-thaw cycle for the ice to re-crystallize. The polar cold traps have been as cold as they are now for at least 2 billion years and have never seen freeze-thaw. Moreover, the LCROSS results suggest a “fluffy,” less-than-normal density of the cold trap regolith it encountered during impact, which released the observed water vapor and ice. Finally, the slow, incremental addition of cometary ice over extremely long times suggests that lunar polar ice deposits are aggregates of amorphous ice particles and dirt and may have a “fairy castle,” high-porosity structure.
Radar cannot distinguish between solid, dense ice and fluffy, snow-like ice, so either is possible. However, having said all that, I fully agree with you that precursor robotic prospector missions are required to characterize the deposits and physical environment of the lunar poles. Even more robotic missions would be required to gather data for NEO asteroids, as our knowledge of them is much less than for the Moon.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 24, 2010 @ 5:33 am
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There are at least two additional challenges I see to processing NEOs for profit (in addition to those mentioned above):
1. Many NEOs spin, perhaps at high rates of rotation and along multiple axes. Actually mining a fast spinning NEO could be far more difficult than many expect.
On the other hand, if intact NEO fragments have survived impact with the Moon (as suggested by Dennis Wingo and others) we can mine NEOs by looking for those same fragments hopefully lying peaceably on or under the lunar surface. Another benefit of lunar gravity.
Note that I do acknowledge the “if” aspect of this.
2. Which NEOs should we fly to?
Arrive at a NEO that is NOT suitable for exploitation and you’ve wasted years on an expensive deep space prospecting mission.
Arrive at a suspected lunar cold trap crater that is not suitable for exploitation and within a matter of days your prospecting team (human or robotic) can be at the next crater. And this is only after lunar orbital assets have imaged the entire surface of the Moon, as LRO is doing now, in order to narrow the list of target craters worth visiting.
It seems to me that identifying potential mining sites on the Moon shall be far easier (at considerably less expense) than identifying which NEOs offer the best odds of containing materials worth harvesting.
Comment by Bill White — July 24, 2010 @ 7:29 am
Bill,
Many NEOs spin, perhaps at high rates of rotation and along multiple axes. Actually mining a fast spinning NEO could be far more difficult than many expect.
Thanks for adding this — I had meant to discuss this issue in the post, but forgot about it. You are absolutely correct; the spin rate issue is a problem that cannot be quantified until we go there.
I also agree with your second point and it is one that I had not considered. Multiple asteroid missions are required to assay which ones hold resource potential and as each one is unique, the results of one probe cannot be extrapolated to other bodies.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 24, 2010 @ 9:25 am
The author said “By abandoning the Moon…”
This kind of statement is really misleading. The Administrations plan, which was based on the “Flexible Path” of the Augustine Commission, focused on creating the infrastructure to allow future administrations go anywhere, including the Moon. That their next exploration goal was an NEO reflected the desire to do something that has never been done before, which is leave the Earth-Moon system and rendezvous with an asteroid. You see this as abandoning the Moon, and I see this as picking a goal that has the highest amount of “New-ness” using NASA’s limited resources.
One could make the same argument that you advocate less ambitious goals for NASA, in that NASA has already learned how to land and return from the Moon, and now they want to do something that has never been done before.
Resources abound in the Solar System, so I look at the question of where to extract them as really based on where do we need them? If someone funds an outpost on the Moon, then ISRU would definitely be a priority, but are no outposts planned or funded.
I was extremely displeased with the current Congressional bills that lower the funding for robotic precursor missions to the Moon, because even though I don’t think it’s time to return humans to the Moon, I do think we should be doing as much exploration and preparation as possible using robotic systems. Using what we have learned with our Mars exploration rovers, I see that we can build and deploy much larger and capable Moon rovers that could eventually do a vast amount of the exploration needed to start ISRU, and potentially even do the beginnings of ISRU without the need for humans.
Finally, just as you are a strong advocate for ISRU, you know I have been very vocal about lowering the cost to access space. In your articles about extracting water and minerals from the Moon, I always get the sense that you are glossing over the huge cost it will take to transport the continuous stream of equipment and supplies that will be needed to start even a pilot plant on the Moon. For anyone that has seen the TV show “Ice Road Truckers”, instead of driving hundreds of miles over frozen land, imagine doing that over 238,000 miles of vacuum with no rest stops or rescue vehicles along the way – you have to have the road and the truck system before you can open a factory or mine, and that is what the Administration is focusing on first.
Comment by Coastal Ron — July 24, 2010 @ 12:01 pm
“If the propulsive energy of access were the only (or even the main) consideration for resource exploitation, asteroids would win hands down.”
In my opinion this is rarely the case. It’s true an asteroid has an extremely shallow gravity well. But to land on an asteroid you have to escape earth’s gravity well and enter an elliptical transfer orbit about the sun. Then, upon reaching your destination, you must match velocities with the asteroid.
I would try to estimate delta V for different trajectories by setting up an iterative Lambert Space Triangle spreadsheet. Inputting earth and asteroid time and xyz coordinates as well as velocity vectors for earth departures as well as asteroid destinations, it seemed to me big delta V was the rule rather than exception.
Low delta V launch windows to asteroids seem to be very rare, so far as I can tell. And since most asteroid orbital periods aren’t even multiples or simple fractions of earth’s period, nice launch windows don’t re-occur on a periodic basis. Should we land useful infrastructure on an asteroid, it could be quite some time before we could send additional infrastructure to the same asteroid.
Comment by Hop David — July 24, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
Coastal Ron,
so I look at the question of where to extract them as really based on where do we need them? If someone funds an outpost on the Moon, then ISRU would definitely be a priority, but are no outposts planned or funded.
You continue to miss the point. We need the resources – in this case water for propellant manufacture — in cislunar space. The true goal of the VSE is to develop a transportation system that can routinely access all of cislunar, including (but not restricted to) the lunar surface. If we do this, going to the planets becomes easy. Going to an asteroid or Mars for a one-off, flags-and-footprints stunt mission (as the anti-Vision calls for) does not serve this need.
You also seem to think that we need an oil refinery on the Moon to harvest significant quantities of water. Not so; in fact, we start small, with a couple of metric tonnes of equipment (rovers, haulers, solar arrays, ovens for ice melting), the total of which can produce a few tonnes of water per month. We build up capability gradually, first to support operations on the lunar surface, then to export to cislunar.
I’ve heard the mantra of “cheap access to LEO” for decades and we are no closer to it now than we were in the 1960′s. The simple fact is that we need a different kind of game changer. ISRU might be that. But we’ll never know if we don’t try it.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 24, 2010 @ 3:36 pm
IMHO, “cheap access to LEO” will require high launch rates from Earth. The high cost of LEO access also is a market condition not a technology problem, again IMHO.
If this is correct, then transporting “the continuous stream of equipment and supplies that will be needed to start even a pilot plant on the Moon” will require those same high launch rates that are needed to permit lower cost access to LEO to emerge.
Creating a genuine cis-lunar transportation infrastructure (LEO depots and EML depots working in synergy to move material to the lunar surface to do ISRU) will be a source of launch demand that will facilitate cheap access to space.
Comment by Bill White — July 24, 2010 @ 3:46 pm
“Resources abound in the Solar System, so I look at the question of where to extract them as really based on where do we need them?”
We need them in LEO. It would also be nice to have them in EML1 or 2 as these locations have an ~2.4 km/sec delta V advantage over LEO for deep space destinations like asteroids or Mars.
In terms of delta V, the moon is quite close to LEO as well as EML1 or 2. See this delta V map: http://clowder.net/hop/TMI/FuelDepot.jpg
Various Direct advocates point out it’s easier to depart from LEO for a deep space destination than it is from the moon’s surface. They then conclude lunar propellent is worthless. This is what I call the Tucson to Omaha by way of Austin argument: http://clowder.net/hop/TMI/TucsonToOmaha.jpg
Austin may be out of the way, but Texas gas supplies stations in Albuquerque and Denver which are enroute. The same could be true of lunar propellent supplying LEO and EML1 depots.
Comment by Hop David — July 24, 2010 @ 5:52 pm
We need.
1. A rover that will find the consistency of the ice. Is it solid like a lake, which will require coal-miningesque machinery. Or is it light and fluffy bound up with the other regolith, requiring nothing more than a backhoe.(this can fall under a one-off mission)
2. The processing plant for fuel. The miner, shuttlecars, oven, storage. Hopefully enough to make 10+mT of fuel a month.
3. An OTV/lander which will fly off the lunar fuel. From then on, all we need to do is lift a package of bots to LEO to expand the works going on Luna. Fuel and launch costs should then drop. As the travel from LEO to Luna will be “paid”.
Comment by Rhyshaelkan — July 24, 2010 @ 7:19 pm
Great post & great comments! I’m on the Moon-first side of this argument. A few quick questions…
1) There wasn’t a great deal of water kicked up by the LCROSS mission. If that is representative of the density of water in permanently shadowed craters, will there be no advantage to going to the lunar poles than the lunar equator?
2) Can each of the components needed to establish propellant-quantities ISRU fit on a Falcon 9 Heavy? To develop industrial lunar ISRU, do we need to spend the billions on a new HLV or could that money be spent on prospectors, landers, extractors, ovens, ascenders, etc?
3) Do we really need the hydrogen which water ice provides? H2 is only 11% of LOX/H2 by mass. H2 could be brought up from Earth’s surface. OR, is the amount of energy needed to extract O2 from lunar equatorial SiO2 so high (compared with mining from maybe low density water ice) that it is impractical?
4) Wouldn’t just going with (soon to be) existing non-heavy launchers such as Falcon 9 Heavy sort of force us to have higher launch rates than if we build massive HLVs? So, wouldn’t that eat into the cost savings argument of HLVs?
5) Surgeons can teleoperate on patients. Robonauts can have very dexterously manipulate an object. Is there any particular reason why humans are physically needed on the Moon during the establishment or ongoing operations of mining activities?
6) Finally, can even humans be delivered to the lunar surface using only non-heavy launchers? (e.g. using LEO-fuelled, dry Apollo lunar descent stage = 2034 kg)
Comment by JohnHunt — July 25, 2010 @ 10:49 am
JohnHunt,
A few brief answers to your questions, from my perspective.
1. LCROSS actually found between 5-10 wt.% water in its ejecta plume. That’s 3 orders of magnitude greater than the highest non-polar concentrations of hydrogen. Moreover, we find km-scale craters that apparently have pure ice deposits within them. So there is no question that the “ore” bodes are at the lunar poles.
2. Yes, you could deliver all the mining equipment you need on an Atlas 5-class medium lift rocket.
3. Yes, because our ultimate goal is permanent sustainable presence in cislunar and we get the hydrogen when we get the water, so why not use it?
4. I am agnostic in regard to heavy lift. If we have one, I would use it to put large payloads on the Moon. If we don’t have one, we can use existing launchers.
5. We need humans to fix and maintain the robotic mining assets, just as we do with any large-scale industrial robotic infrastructure on the Earth.
6. Sure. We just assemble the vehicles we need in space and fuel them there.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 25, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
> 4. I am agnostic in regard to heavy lift.
Don’t be. HLV and sustainable space development are competitors in a NASA budget of essentially fixed size. We should be arguing that the money being contemplated to be spent on a HLV would be much better spent incentivizing sustainable space development.
> 5. We need humans to fix and maintain the robotic mining assets.
Why can robonauts fix robotic mining assets?
Comment by JohnHunt — July 25, 2010 @ 12:20 pm
HLV and sustainable space development are competitors in a NASA budget of essentially fixed size.
It is not clear to me that it is NASA’s role to capitalize private space companies. Let them demonstrate their ability to routinely reach LEO at low cost and I have no problem contracting for service. In the mean time, a “New Space” company is just another contractor.
Why can['t] robonauts fix robotic mining assets?
Who will fix the robotnauts?
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 25, 2010 @ 2:55 pm
> Who will fix the robotnauts?
Another robonaut!
Why not? Spare parts can be easily shipped to the lunar surface. Whenever there is a problem, one robonaut disassembles the defective part on the other robonaut, attaches the new part, and then screws it in. The defective part will probably be so small (e.g. a motor or chip) that it probably would be worthwhile just to replace the inventory of that piece on a latter mission rather than shipping it back to LEO for human repair.
> It is not clear to me that it is NASA’s role to capitalize private space companies.
That’s a legitimate perspective. But NASA’s already capitalizing private companies with SpaceX and Orbital. Now NASA’s not paying for the entire development of Falcon 9 and Taurus II. But they’re partly paying for the private development of technology which they will then be able to use for their own (NASA’s) purposes at a fixed price. So far, it seems to be working and at prices which are considerably less than if NASA had done it all themselves. That’s not just my opinion, it’s also apparently the opinion of Iridium.
Now, I would only apply this approach where, at the end of the day, there is likely a commercial market which these companies with this new technology will be able to exploit on an economically sustainable basis. But once the market for lunar-derived fuel to LEO is established, I don’t see the government needing to incentivize any further commercial space development. I think that it will proceed on its own.
I think that government money may well be necessary. The upfront investment requirement might be so high that too many private companies won’t want to be the first to take the risk. NASA has its own need for these services. Why not allow it to partner with industry to develop this commercial capacity. I really don’t care how cis-lunar space is developed so long as it is developed sooner rather than later. If government spending is helpful getting companies over the initial hump then I’m fine with that.
> Let them demonstrate their ability to routinely reach LEO at low cost and I have no problem contracting for service.
If we wait a couple or three years for them to demonstrate routine, low-cost of reaching LEO then, by then, we’ll already be committed and spending billions of dollars on an HLV which is not economically self-sustaining. At that point there will be little budgetary room left to incentivize NewSpace companies to develop cis-lunar space. No, the time is now for the argument to be made that 10-15% of NASAs budget should go to incentivizing companies to develop the basic components necessary to exploit lunar resources and to master cis-lunar space on a pay-for-performance basis. I don’t see how this can be done without holding off on an HLV for a few years. Look, once you get lunar-derived propellant to LEO then do you really need an HLV?
Comment by JohnHunt — July 25, 2010 @ 4:14 pm
“Look, once you get lunar-derived propellant to LEO then do you really need an HLV?”
Getting out of Earth’s atmosphere and into orbit are the major hurdles. An HLV, if it is more efficient, is still useful to get things to LEO. From LEO on out you can use Lunar and asteroidal based propellants. Whether your space-tugs are solely chemical propellant based, or electro-chemical(ion, VASIMR, etc), an efficient HLV will move that much more goods, that much faster.
I am sure not getting younger, get ‘er done!
Comment by Rhyshaelkan — July 25, 2010 @ 10:06 pm
Wow. Paul, you think the Obama is abandoning the Moon? The Moon is relatively easy to get to (yeah, it’s a deep gravity well), and we all know, it’s 3.5 days away, constantly. Let’s see if some American corporations can get there. NASA, with all the resources of the US Government, can do the Asteroid missions. Let’s give NASA something hard to do. After 35 years of LEO, let’s see them do something that SpaceX can’t be expected to do.
Me, I think they’ll spin their wheels like they have been for the past 20 years. I expect SpaceX is up to the challenge. I actually doubt if NASA is up to the challenges that have been issued.
Comment by Steverman — July 25, 2010 @ 10:15 pm
Wow. Paul, you think the Obama is abandoning the Moon?
Yes.
NASA, with all the resources of the US Government, can do the Asteroid missions. Let’s give NASA something hard to do. ….I think they’ll spin their wheels like they have been for the past 20 years… I actually doubt if NASA is up to the challenges that have been issued.
Well, which do you believe? Does NASA need something “hard” to do, like flags-and-footprint missions to asteroids instead of the “easy task” of returning to the Moon and learning how to live on another world? Or are they incapable of doing anything at all? That’s an argument for abolishing the agency, not for putting them in charge of developing a new commercial industry.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 26, 2010 @ 4:43 am
“Well, which do you believe? Does NASA need something “hard” to do, like flags-and-footprint missions to asteroids instead of the “easy task” of returning to the Moon and learning how to live on another world? Or are they incapable of doing anything at all? That’s an argument for abolishing the agency, not for putting them in charge of developing a new commercial industry.”
Exactly! If we’re going to have a government space program then we should use it! Practically all of the studies show that NASA creates a lot more wealth for this country than it consumes. How many other government programs do that? There wouldn’t even be a Space X or a Bigelow in this country if there were no NASA!
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — July 26, 2010 @ 2:25 pm
> An HLV, if it is more efficient, is still useful to get things to LEO.
A very good point Rhy. I’ve just been sort of burned by the Space Shuttle not living up to its promise of cheap access to space. I want to be rational not cynical. But when the Augustine Commission says that the first thing that they’d have to do with a fully developed Ares V would be to cancel it because operations would cost too much, I’m just not convinced that a NASA-developed HLV will be more efficient.
Comment by JohnHunt — July 26, 2010 @ 4:55 pm
Cheap Space Shuttle cost were based on the idea that there was going to be a demand for dozens of shuttle flights ever year. Of course such a high demand for space flights never showed up especially after other countries began to develop their own satellite launch vehicles.
Still, a three billion a year shuttle program represents less than 0.1% of annual Federal budget expenditures. In fact, the entire NASA budget represents less than 0.6% of total Federal budget expenditures. Yet for some reason, the public thinks we’re spending a whopping 24% of the Federal budget on NASA?
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — July 27, 2010 @ 3:29 am
No one mentioned mass drivers. Gerry O’Neill and Henry Kolm envisioned that they could reduce the cost of putting lunar materials into space. As a member of Space Studies Institute, I helped in a small way to fund the development of the SSI mass drivers (and was standing in SSI’s lab when one of them was demonstrated in the mid-80s… “don’t blink or you’ll miss it”).
I haven’t heard a peep about mass drivers for 20+ years, do the economics of combating the lunar gravity well weigh against them these days?
Comment by John — July 28, 2010 @ 10:12 pm
John,
do the economics of combating the lunar gravity well weigh against them these days?
Not to my knowledge. As far as I know, mass drivers are still on the table as a means for exporting large amounts of mass from the Moon.
However, we are largely debating the direction and activities of the space program over the next couple of decades. I would imagine that a mass driver on the Moon would be a feature of a more advanced stage of lunar surface presence. Right now, I am focusing more on getting us there in the first place, let alone devising a huge building project there.
Once we demonstrate that useful materials (in this case, water) can be extracted from the Moon, then we can worry about how to export it to cislunar space. I would think that rocket power would serve the early stages of such an industry, possibly transitioning to mass drivers once we have established a production chain and market for the product.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 29, 2010 @ 8:54 am
Even the simplest of Moon bases could be the beginning of great things! I think many nations (Japan, China, Russia, India, etc.) are starting to realize this.
I predict that less than 20 years after the establishment of the first lunar bases, we’ll have mass drivers launching thousands of tonnes of regolith and processed materials into lunar orbit annually. Lunar materials via mass drivers should be quite competitive with small asteroids being imported into the Lagrange points via light sails.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — July 29, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
“I haven’t heard a peep about mass drivers for 20+ years, do the economics of combating the lunar gravity well weigh against them these days?”
I still like the idea of mass drivers. I do not feel like doing the math at this time. However, we do know the km/s required to reach EML1. As the near side of the moon always points towards Earth and therefore always towards EML1. Imagine this.
The railgun crests the north or south pole pointing towards EML1. The railgun is long enough to generate sufficient velocity at 3 Gs acceleration to reach EML1. Now you can launch most everything you want, people or cargo.
It is all good stuff. However if you would try to present this to investors or agencies to cut costs. They would only see the costs of how much would it weight and how many launches, FROM EARTH, would it take to make it happen. And promptly say it is not feasible. Not taking into account lunar industry.
Same can be said of SPSs. Everyone says it is not feasible due to the costs of launching from Earth. However what if everything was built with lunar industry?
The easy retort is “lunar industry does not exist”. Which it does not. I however, say “damn the torpedoes”. Wanting SPSs is a win win situation.
To have SPSs we would:
Use the water present for fuel to cheapen spaceflight. Cheaper spaceflight will allow more launches of bots to start mining operations. Material is used to fab structures for humans to reside and work(there is also the possibility to sinter regolith itself into building material using microwaves emitters, whatever your poison is). Humans now arrive and take up residency without hardly lifting a finger, possibly only requiring the installing of airlocks. In workshop areas, I am sure there would be both pressurized and unpressurized ones, the old bots can be maintained and new bots can be fabricated using lunar materials. With the occasional Earth items that cannot be fab-ed from lunar materials. New solar foundries using lunar aluminum as the concentrating mirror and regolith “kettles”. Bigger mining bots are built, bigger foundries, more better faster. Seed lunar industry pulls itself up by the bootstraps.
Oversimplified I grant you. But not impossible and will cost only as much as you are willing to waste. I want privatization of space, as they look at bottom lines. It will still not be cheap, however a businessman willing to put the time and money in could eventually print his own money.
I feel SpaceX has made a huge first step. Rich and poor alike should join together to make an organization to bring mankind to space. The key is Luna. The gateway to mankind’s eventual colonization of space.
Comment by Rhyshaelkan — August 2, 2010 @ 4:02 am
Heh sorry for pontificating. Space gets me excited.
Comment by Rhyshaelkan — August 2, 2010 @ 4:28 am