The Next Moon Landing Is Near, Thanks to Pioneering Engineers

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/08/space-race-moon-google-lunar-xprize/

by mcone • 9 years ago

126 63 9 years ago

valuearb• 9 years ago

The Lunar X prize competition is really neat, and I'll follow raptly. But it's unlikely to do much for actually space exploration, just as the original X-Prize did little to advance access to space.

If SpaceX sends a manned Dragon around the moon, that's only going to be a thousand times more important than landing tiny rovers on the moon.

meric• 9 years ago

Are you talking about spaceshipone?

Retric• 9 years ago

I have often heard it refereed to as, Not A Space Ship One.

Even 160 kilometers has quite a bit of atmospheric drag, and Spaceshipone only just broke 100 kilometers.

swatkat• 9 years ago

I have great hopes on Team Indus. Hoping they'll pull of this mission. They've signed a PSLV-XL launch contract with ISRO, and they seem to be on track with spacecraft and rover development[0]. Japan's X-prize entrant HAKUTO will also be ride-sharing on this mission[1].

It'll be an exciting 2018 for us, we have two moon rover missions from India - Chandrayaan 2 from ISRO[2], and Team Indus.

[0] https://medium.com/teamindus/teamindus-missionlog-august-67e...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14023336/google-lunar-x-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2

isostatic3• 9 years ago

"we have two moon rover missions from India"

How can India justify a moon mission when you can barely walk round Delhi with tripping over homeless children?

iUsedToCode• 9 years ago

I'm guessing that's the reason they are doing a moon mission. Have to give them hope, have to jump start the economy. Can't saw trousers for eternity, can they?

Educated people will continue fleeing if nothing is done to keep them in. You cannot solve homelessness by giving out houses, jobs are the biggest help.

aphextron• 9 years ago

These prizes really confuse me. Wouldn't it cost more than $20 million just to get something into LEO with existing technology? How can mounting a robotic lunar mission possibly be done for less than that?

taf2• 9 years ago

yes - according to this: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-launching-a-satellite-with-sp... even spacex is maybe at least 68M for a satellite launch not even to the moon

foota• 9 years ago

True, but it could potentially be coupled with government grants or other funding.

ceejayoz• 9 years ago

Wouldn't it cost more than $20 million just to get something into LEO with existing technology?

Don't underestimate the PR value. Space Ship One cost $25M to win the $10M X-Prize, but having a big prize can capture the imagination of the media and by extension the public.

jk49303• 9 years ago

I work with PTScientists.com/ (a GLXP team until end of 2016). You keep launch costs low by ride-sharing (secondary payload). One revenue source is to sell payload space to third parties (what we did). Additional funding can come from sponsors (in our case Audi and Vodafone).

The intention of the prize is not to cover the costs but to kickstart an ambitious private space movement. One needs to be very lean, inventive, and somewhat risk-taking under those conditions. It forces one to think of business models that make the whole thing independent from a possible prize money (and government funding, which under GLXP rules is limited to 10%).

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

The foreseeable future for man in space is the moon, not Mars. The moon is close - orders of magnitude easier to get there and back again. Its gravity well isn't a prison. You can probably launch stuff from there to earth with a linear accelerator. It's full of natural resources that can be used to build colonies and space ships. There's no environment to degrade.

Mars doesn't make any sense. The moon does.

And besides, once we learn how to build bases on the moon, which will take trial and error, it will make it a LOT easier to build one on Mars where mistakes are not recoverable. What are you gonna do on Mars when you find out you forgot the soldering iron? Die. Moon bases can be resupplied.

olivaw_daneel4• 9 years ago

The moon is certainly more accessible, but the purpose of having a base there is more less clear from both a practical and a scientific perspective.

The scientific/engineering (and cultural/sociological) gains from a human return to the moon would be tiny compared to a Mars mission, and any funding (think tens of billions) allocated to such a mission will necessarily push a Mars mission back by a decade or more.

First, the science -- while the robotic mission to Mars have yielded many insights about the early history and present state of the planet, a human geologist could do more in a day or two than all of the rovers have done thus far. A small group of human scientists could completely rewrite the textbooks in a short stay on Mars. Can the same be said about a moon mission?

Second, living on the moon would be much more difficult (temperatures, micrometeorites, lack of ISRU, etc. etc.), and involve very different challenges than living on Mars. Most of what we learn on the moon will simply not translate to Mars--it will certainly not be a lot easier to live on Mars once a moon base is established, we would nearly be starting from scratch.

This is a perennial debate in the human spaceflight program, and I understand the desire to do something given decades of inaction. However, we must be honest about what we stand to lose if we shift our focus to a return to the moon. There is precious little gain from both a science and engineering perspective.

WOOKIE_pizza• 9 years ago

Good points on both sides of the debate. Why not do both? Imagine the "we" is really 7.4 billion people (~195 countries) so it would seem that surely we could support each others' efforts to reach both destinations. What an achievement for humanity that would be!

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

The purpose of being on the moon is having it as a massive manufacturing place for building things to move outward in the solar system. Lifting things out of the earth's gravity well is just too expensive.

Compare the size of the Saturn 5 rocket to get to the moon with the size of the rocket needed to come back.

I do not see the challenges of building a habitat on the moon that much different from Mars. You have (essentially) zero atmosphere, lots of radiation, the same problems with building a pressure dome, etc.

Landing men on Mars is certainly romantic, but it will be so expensive and time consuming that it cannot have much practical value.

gozur88• 9 years ago

No, the moon doesn't make any sense. It's a big, dusty, radiation-blasted rock. Sure, we could build bases there, but why would we? That's the question Apollo managers could never answer and why the program was ultimately shut down.

vcadambe• 9 years ago

.Net Rocks podcast did a fantastic episode (A Geek Out episode) recently on why we should consider building moon bases - https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=1424.

TL;DR Version (From show notes): We have not explored much of the moon at all, we can extract fuel and manufacture things on the moon, we need to understand how humans function long term in low gravity (rather than freefall), and finally, there are some unique science opportunities on the moon.

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

It's a big, dusty, radiation-blasted rock.

So is Mars. I do think we should be seeking out extremophiles on Earth and seeding Mars with them to see if anything takes hold, but I seem to be in a minority of one on that notion. :-)

hutzlibu3• 9 years ago

Besides what all the others have said in favor of moon, I would add: https://what-if.xkcd.com/124/

Seriously, I bet there are many rich people willing to go to the moon, if reasonable safe and fast. And this probably could be done with the moon quite soon ... and all of that would be a BIG push for everything else in space.

(especially if we manage to build rocket factorys on the moon...)

slededit• 9 years ago

The "dark" side of the moon is shielded from earth's considerable RF emissions. It's a great place to stick a massive radio telescope.

jk49303• 9 years ago

Would you be interested in bringing Empire to space? To the Moon is possible but difficult and short-lived. I'd prefer the ISS, bandwidth is okay, it would run for months, just need to keep the computational requirements reasonably low (should be possible for a turn-based game). Participants connect via Internet. I'd manage the space stuff, you bring the fame and the fun. (I played Empire Deluxe from 1994-2003 excessively with friends, what a time. Would be a nice way to give back.) It's very spontaneous, but let me know what you think.

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

Would you be interested in bringing Empire to space?

What, bring the moon under iron control? I like the way you think!

curtis2• 9 years ago

Mars has some stuff that the Moon doesn't: volatiles.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatiles):

In planetary science, volatiles are the group of chemical elements and chemical compounds with low boiling points that are associated with a planet's or moon's crust or atmosphere. Examples include nitrogen, water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen, methane and sulfur dioxide.

Of these the only one we're likely to find on the moon is water, and there probably isn't very much of it. In comparison, there's a whole bunch of water just sitting on the Martian surface in the northern polar ice cap. Carbon dioxide and nitrogen are available literally all over the planet -- sure the Martian air is thin, but compressing it is a fairly trivial exercise.

And if we can figure out how to aerobrake large vehicles then the delta-V to Mars isn't a whole lot different than to get to the Moon.

Mars is a much better science target as well. It's pretty unlikely that there was ever any life on the moon, but with Mars it seems like there is a real possibility. Mars also appears to have experienced geological processes similar to the earth. Studying the up close may allow us to learn things about similar processes on earth.

It's farther away, and that certainly adds a lot of difficulty and risk, but it is still reachable with essentially the same technology as the moon, and there are compelling reasons to go.

(That said, I totally think we should use moon missions as a testing ground for the technology needed for a Mars mission.)

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

adds a lot of difficulty and risk

That's a vast understatement. Don't forget expense and time! Orders of magnitude more.

I don't think there's any realistic way of getting a sustainable base on Mars without doing it first on the moon. On the moon you can learn from mistakes. On Mars you die from the first mistake.

moemoeg• 9 years ago

One thing worth noting is the soil, if memory serves, the moon soil hs been described as being very sharp and clingy with some properties of asbestos, as in its very problematic. This is because there has been no water, winds etc to grind the sand as on earth.

Now on Mars the soil has been moved by winds and other natural phenomenon, so it should be far less problematic to just brush it off, not to begin on the more useful composition of it, I can imagine the iron will come in handy when the habitat gets to the point where they can start refining and producing.

andyfal12• 9 years ago

100 percent agree.

The most logical plan I heard was the following: Solar power works way better, and potentially nonstop at the poles of the moon. Use that energy to cook moonrock into building materials and lauch it all into orbit on an electromagnetic mass driver. Then design and build Oniell cylinders, once we have rigorous tests of artificial gravity on humans. If you want a Mars base after the fact, go for it. Put a station in orbit around Mars that recieves deliveries from the moon.

baq• 9 years ago

The most logical plan I heard was the following: Solar power works way better, and potentially nonstop at the poles of the moon.

the problem is, unless you're at the pole, you have 2 weeks of power followed by 2 weeks of pitch black darkness, so you have to have a lot of batteries or the station isn't livable 50% of the time.

jgalt212• 9 years ago

Mars doesn't make any sense. The moon does.

I agree, except for the fact that the moon has already been done, and Mars has not. That being said Mars would be a colossal waste of money, robbing resources from real science that is currently getting done in space. If you think the James Webb telescope stymied other scientific efforts, just wait until the US goes all in on Mars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/science/nasa-webb-space-t...

Symmetry• 9 years ago

There are advantages and disadvantages. Closeness is a big issue, I'll grant you that. Robots on the Moon's surface can get quick guidance form humans on Earth much more quickly than robots on Mars. And if something goes wrong you can get home more quickly.

The gravity well difference is a thing but isn't straightforward. You need twice as much delta-v to take off from Mars as from the Moon (3800 m/s versus 1730 m/s). But on the other hand Mars has an atmosphere and while it isn't think enough for you to touch down gently with a big mass you'll only need 200 m/s or so to cushion your landing. But you need heat shields on Mars, but you need those to get back to Earth too. But lack of atmosphere means you could maybe use a mass driver to help take off from the Moon.

Mars has a gravity that's 2/5 of Earth's while the Moon's is 1/6. Is that important for human health? We have no frigging clue since the budget for a centrifuge on the ISS was cut.

The Moon rotates once every month and Mars once every 24 hours. If you're using solar panels it's a big deal making it though the lunar night, you'll need lots of batteries, maybe 25 times the weight of your panels. On Mars you need maybe the weight of your panels in batteries. There are the Peaks of Eternal Light on the south pole of the moon where this isn't an issue and you can just keep pointing your solar panels at different parts of the horizon all month.

And finally the martian atmosphere provides some protection against radiation and small meteors. It's not a super friendly environment in either case with no magnetic field so you'll probably be spending a lot of time under ground in either location.

So, it's complicated and I'm not willing to say that one is the true path and the other is stupid.

WalterBright14• 9 years ago

[low gravity] human health

I'm sure it won't be good. But with a moon colony you can rotate people back to earth. Not practical with Mars.

solar

The poles are one solution. Another is to put a large mirror in orbit to reflect power to the moon base.

Nomentatus• 9 years ago

There's no solar night at the poles, and tall structures are easy to build in low gravity.

alsadi• 9 years ago

Or possibly first /s

jcslzr• 9 years ago

what do you mean, if guys did it in 1969, why is now so hard? or you are saying that it was fake almost 50 years ago?

The Next Moon Landing Is Near, Thanks to Pioneering Engineers

Related Stories