Northrop Grumman to Develop Concept for Lunar Railroad

https://news.northropgrumman.com/news/releases/northrop-grumman-to-develop-concept-for-lunar-railroad

by sklargh • 2 years ago

41 40 2 years ago

news.northropgrumman.com

ein0p5• 2 years ago

Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first though? Should be trivial in comparison.

Is it trivial? Nobody owns the Moon, there's nothing, you can just get started building. Often the technological and engineering problems are much smaller than the regulatory approvals and other legal issues it needs to through.

Also, not sure if we - the people - really want to hear the solution to this problem from a super-weapon company.

nickpeterson• 2 years ago

Maybe we should spend the r&d money on r&d for how to improve regulatory approvals.

vwcx• 2 years ago

I beg to differ. An uncle purchased a beautiful lot for me right next to the Sea of Tranquility decades ago. Part of the selling point was that there isn't imminent domain on the Moon!

ein0p5• 2 years ago

Everything is trivial compared to the Moon. This is a rather obvious hundred billion dollar boondoggle, tailor made by lobbyists for milking the US taxpayers. It’s still better than spending $150B a year on wars, but not by that much, and it’s not like it’s “instead”. It’s “in addition to”. They do need to figure out the AI angle for this though, or I fear it could have difficulty in the pork barrel department of US Congress.

hulitu• 2 years ago

There is a problem though. You cannot pay billions to develop a concept for terrestrial railroads. /s

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

Calhsr would like a word

itishappy3• 2 years ago

Sure you can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop

bluGill• 2 years ago

No, for the same reasons Northrop was even allowed to bid on this: rail roads are solved technology with plenty of experts, but the US values original research over getting things done. (a railroad on the moon should have Northrop as a subcontractor to the likes of Siemens or Hitachi to make the passenger compartment airtight and verify cooling of things normally air cooled - but those are not US companies so we pay Northrup to attempt to figure out what experts already know.)

ein0p5• 2 years ago

What for though? Especially when a train derails every day in the US here on Earth, sometimes leaking hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals. You do realize you’re paying for this literal pie in the sky bullshit as the infrastructure around you continues to deteriorate, right?

JumpCrisscross6• 2 years ago

make the passenger compartment airtight

Any ten-year concept would be for moving bulk from an extraction site to a landing zone. The train would be minimal and open air. If you want to move people, you drive the rover on the train. (Or just rover.)

I would be surprised if any technology is transferable from existing platforms, which are optimised for hosts of characteristics irrelevant on the Moon.

JumpCrisscross6• 2 years ago

When did HN become so trivially Luddite?

Artemis begins major launches, including for the Lunar Gateway and first crew, next year. VIPER is slated to land in November. We’re already putting billions of dollars of kit on and around the Moon.

If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon. If they don’t there—if autonomous rovers are easier than trains even on the Moon—the latter definitely aren’t worth further consideration here.

Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first

Granted [1]. Circa 1850 [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_U...

vineyardmike2• 2 years ago

If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon.

I don’t necessarily think they correlate that well. I don’t know a lot about lunar transportation but I can’t imagine it has the same design constraints as earthly ones.

When did HN become so trivially Luddite?

Space shit is cool. I would still like the government to fund something more likely to be used by the American population first. Yea that industrial rail network is cool but why can’t we get around the US without driving?

testudovictoria• 2 years ago

Is it really outrageous to ask for some of the crumbling infrastructure around us to be updated or better maintained? Granted the OP comment said _first_ when it's not really an either/or situation. It's not like we need billions in R&D to apply what's been solved in dozens of other metros across the world.

colechristensen2• 2 years ago

The engineering problem of railroads on the moon has nothing at all to do with the political problem of railroads in the US.

This is a low value snark comment that should not belong here.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

Unfortunately that would cause a fairly steep decline in demand for air travel (especially Boeing-based air travel), and in turn that would cause a fall in demand for jet fuel, and this economic disruption to established financial interests just isn't something a government controlled by those established financial interests is interested in.

bryanlarsen2• 2 years ago

It's not specified in the press release, but studies like this are generally on the order of $10M.

Terrestrial railroad infrastructure would cost trillions to replace. Stealing $10M from NASA is not going to move the needle.

ein0p5• 2 years ago

That’s how it begins. They aren’t doing a study just to do a study. They’re doing a study to justify what is undoubtedly tens of billions of dollars in funding.

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

Why not just put everything in the same place so we don't need a railroad between the places? It's not like commerce between remote moon bases is an imminent problem. Are there more places to go on the moon than I'm aware of?

JumpCrisscross6• 2 years ago

Why not just put everything in the same place so we don't need a railroad between the places?

The easiest places to land, easiest places to base humans, easiest places to extract in situ resources and most-interesting places to explore are various. You don’t need a hundred sites to start with. But being able to segregate even just the extraction and production environments from living and landing spaces would help tremendously (not least in avoiding thrown-up regolith).

itishappy3• 2 years ago

It's not like commerce between remote moon bases is an imminent problem.

I wouldn't be so sure. It's a 10 year study, and we (humanity) have plans for more than one moon base within the next 10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_S...

ortusdux• 2 years ago

I wonder if this could be done using only regolith. A recent study showed that laser sintering of regolith might be a viable way to pave pathways. The resulting material had a compressive strength in the range of 8k to 30k PSI. Considering the reduced gravity, I could see this being strong enough to use as the rails.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1

egberts1• 2 years ago

This lunar concept is probably gonna get deployed before the infamous California High Speed Rail boondoggle.

throwaway5959• 2 years ago

Came here to post this.

ls612• 2 years ago

Nobody on the moon to file NEPA complaints.

itishappy3• 2 years ago

Have we tried asking the Navajo Nation?

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223377817/navajo-moon-human-...

Northrop Grumman to Develop Concept for Lunar Railroad

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