Scientists Petition U.S. Congress for Return to the Moon

http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-petition-u-congress-return-moon-191838421.html

by bane • 13 years ago

66 54 13 years ago

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fit2rule4• 13 years ago

This is going to end up being a race to build the first helium-3 reactor on the moon, I just know it. After that happens - wow! We may well just enter the new Space Era after all.

Trouble is, its also highly likely that it'll be the Chinese leading the way. If they didn't have such a violent history of human rights abuses as a nation, I'd be a little less concerned, but as it stands right now I can't see Chinese domination of space-based industry being a good thing.

Then again, it might just solve the pollution problem if we can just push China up into space, and use clean technologies for deliveries back to us here on Earth. Here's hoping it happens within the next 50 years, anyway!

rory096• 13 years ago

Doesn't using the Moon's helium-3 presuppose that we're capable of creating energy-positive helium-3 reactions here on Earth?

Though at the pace we're headed back to the Moon now, we're probably about on target to match the perennially thirty-year-off working fusion reactor.

spiritplumber• 13 years ago

We just have to ask the hot space Nazis for technical assistance.

fit2rule4• 13 years ago

>Doesn't using the Moon's helium-3 presuppose that we're capable of creating energy-positive helium-3 reactions here on Earth?

I think the only thing stopping us is the place to do it safely, and maybe the Chinese have realized that doing such things as he-3 experiments on the moon is probably not so difficult, after all .. I mean, of all the countries on Earth right now who would benefit from this sort of 'clean energy' production, it'd be the one place on Earth that humans have utterly shit on. So I'm all for it, by the way, even if it involves hot space Nazi's ..

Retric• 13 years ago

About 1 in 10,000th of earth bound helum is H3 which makes it several orders of magnitude cheaper to extract on earth than on the moon.

PS: For scale the US reserve was over 1 billion kg of helium last I checked which works out to something like 100,000+kg of H3. At 20% effecency it takes ~260kg of H3 to run a 1GW power plant for 1 year. So, we might want to start mining H3 on the moon, but after getting 10+ H3 reactors running for 20+ years which is going to take a long time. However, I suspect where going to ignore designing H3 reactors for similar reasons as we are ignoring thorium basically the fuel is no the expensive part of nuclear reactors.

fit2rule4• 13 years ago

Send robot to moon.

Robot #1: locate he-3!

he-3 robot finds he-3 on moon!

Send 2 more robots to moon.

Robot #2: build he-3 reactor!

reactor robot starts to build reactor ..

Robot #3: build little factory for making: robots!

robot-building robot builds robot-building factory ..

reactor robot is finished! Just Plug In!

robot-building robot is finished! Plugged In!

ROBOTS in SPACE!!

(Edit: to answer this - "the fuel is not the expensive part of nuclear reactors", yes the most expensive part of all this is doing it on Earth.)

throwaway_yy2Di2• 13 years ago

The obvious way to get He-3 is to synthesize it, by irradiating lithium with neutrons from a fission for fusion reactor. This is where commercial He-3 comes from today.

Mining it on the moon is an idiotic attempt to rationalize its commercial value. In fact: lunar thorium is 3-4 orders of magnitude more abundant than He-3 [0][1], so if you wanted helium-3 from the moon, it would almost certainly be cheaper to mine lunar thorium instead, and use lunar nuclear fission reactors to synthesize it! Which doesn't fit in anyone's stupid sci-fi fantasy.

For what it's worth, [0] estimates the total amount of he-3 in lunar regolith, over the entire surface, as only 2.4 million tons -- barely a fossil fuel.

[0] http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/2175.pdf

[1] http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n8/fig_tab/ngeo1225_F1...

peter303• 13 years ago

Neither party particularly likes funding NASA (save if they have them in their home district). The Dems prefer to expand social spending over government R&D. The Repubs thinks government funded R&D is a deficit-rasiing frill. Thats whty they both were quick to shut down the shuttle program.

cshenoy• 13 years ago

It'll be interesting to see if and how those positions will change once other countries like China and India make major advances in space technologies and discoveries.

nationcrafting5• 13 years ago

Seems a bit 20th century to ask Congress for money to do it, when people like Elon Musk have shown you can do pretty much anything NASA can do privately at a 10th of the cost.

JumpCrisscross2• 13 years ago

when people like Elon Musk have shown you can do pretty much anything NASA can do privately at a 10th of the cost

SpaceX replicates NASA's orbital launch capability with efficiencies to spare. The redundancy does not, however, extend to deep space exploration, landers and rovers, and sundry scientific and technological endeavours with limited near-term profit potential.

melling3• 13 years ago

Yes, but the private business model seems to be the best way to get more money into the space program. Apple has almost $150 billion is cash, and they don't know what to do with it. Google, Microsoft, etc also have large cash surpluses. Now if we could have 3 or 4 companies, anywhere in the world, like SpaceX, then we'd have hundreds of billions of dollars in the space program. NASA's budget is less than $16.6 billion for 2014.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

Going back to the moon will be orders of magnitude more expensive than what Space X is doing, and knocking a zero off that price tag isn't going to bring it within the reach of private industry without Congressional support. As it is, half of Space X's funding as of May 2012 came from NASA pre-payments on launch contracts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding.

That said, I would love to see greater involvement of entities like Space X in a return to the moon. Space X has already proven it can do what NASA has already done, 50 years later, but at much lower cost. That's actually a pretty reasonable path to commercializing space. The problem here is lack of any market for the service. Space X worked because there was an existing market for launch services.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

In fairness, Musk credits NASA for laying much of the ground work.

nationcrafting5• 13 years ago

That's great. But w.r.t. going to the moon, the ground work has clearly been laid now. They did go there, after all. So, the task is not "getting them to do it again" but "doing it ourselves, better and at lower cost".

philwelch• 13 years ago

Anything? Really? So Musk built a space station, landed men on the moon, and launched a massive space telescope? He's landed robotic rovers all over the surface of Mars? He hasn't even put a human being in orbit yet.

nationcrafting5• 13 years ago

No, he hasn't done all those things. That's kind of the point here: this is about going back to the moon i.e. doing things that have already been done. The point now is to do them in such a way that you can generate wealth while doing it. So, when private companies go to the moon, they will do it better, at a fraction of the cost, and generate wealth while doing it.

hobbes78• 13 years ago

Definitely scientists have an opinion far from unanimous, as Stephen Hawking finds the idea "Stupid. Robots would do a better job and be much cheaper because you don't have to bring them back."

http://www.todayinsci.com/H/Hawking_Stephen/HawkingStephen-Q...

bradleyjg3• 13 years ago

If you look at the justification it is totally circular -- "we need to send people to the moon to learn how to send people to Mars".

Much much more science can be done for the same price if you omit the humans. The commercial viability threshold is much much lower if you omit the humans. The one and only reason to send humans up to space in the foreseeable future is patriotic chest thumping. Well that and to stroke the adolescent fantasies of those who grew up on science fiction.

tomkin2• 13 years ago

When you omit the humans, you omit the humanity of spaceflight. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums it up best:

  Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, 
  agreed with his interviewer in saying that "the manned program is a force 
  of nature on the educational pipeline of America. It is the force that excites 
  people to want to become scientists in the first place." [1]

Plus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi636wl6a1w

[1] http://www.space.com/8184-robots-humans-space-colbert-tyson-...

logfromblammo3• 13 years ago

Think of a manned Moon mission as more of a propaganda piece for the Mars-exploration party.

The Moon is days of travel time, whereas Mars is months of travel time. Round-trip communication delay to the Moon is seconds. Delay to Mars is minutes. Pieces of the Moon can be returned as souvenirs. Delta-v for returning bits of Mars is ridiculous. People can SEE the Moon with the naked eye, even in urban light pollution. Mars requires a map of the sky and a pair of binoculars, at least.

The Moon is important because it motivates the nonscientific people of Earth to support more productive forms of space exploration research. It reminds people that this is not only a very small world, but the only one we have. And it creates a seed economy with a shorter possible cycle of iterations than a few missions clustered around the same 3-month launch window every 780 days. There is some merit to having regular shorter missions to a closer target, so that when that window comes around, you have people with steady jobs and experience around to run the longer missions.

It isn't just about the scientific benefit. You also have to consider the human factors. Nobody wants to train for years to be unemployed 90% of the time, waiting around for the next time someone needs some specific skill. The thing about Moon missions is that they can be done with resources that would otherwise be mothballed and rusting, or used once and discarded.

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

But you're never going to get the same level of funding for robots that you'd get for a manned mission.

Not ever. It's never going to happen.

So the comparison is pointless.

The only way you'll ever get that level of funding is to send humans, and now and for the foreseeable future, humans are going to be much more capable. Notice I didn't say efficient, because again, efficiency is a moot point. Efficiency only matters if you get the same scale of funding. And that's just never going to the be case.

It's pure fantasy to think otherwise.

lumberjack• 13 years ago

And furthermore people like Robert Zubrin (Mars Direct) will probably see it as yet another conspiracy to take funding away from what ought to be the real manned exploration mission of the 21st century, which is of course a manned round trip to the red planet.

ehutch792• 13 years ago

I don't understand how robots could do a better job than humans at the job of 'being a human walking around on the moon'

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

What's the point of being a human walking around the moon? If you can do what you need to do with a robot it's a much safer and less expensive option. Much of the reason for sending humans to the moon was as a politically motivated show of technological superiority. Sending a robot to collect soil samples, perform a experiments, and then rocket the results back to Earth was the approach preferred by many of the engineers and scientists working on Apollo. Sending men who would "fly" the spacecraft was a less scientific decision.

bane• 13 years ago

I'm of the opinion that sending frail probes to take grainy pictures and scrape rocks to get small samples for limited onboard labs would do far less science in a year then six guys with shovels and a pocket camera in a month.

JumpCrisscross2• 13 years ago

In an nutshell, because people want and are willing to pay to. That creates demand which people like Elon Musk (a) represent and (b) are willing to work for and finance.

squozzer• 13 years ago

Been there, done that.

It might be worthwhile to use Earth-to-Moon travel as a benchmark -- such as we used "crossing the Atlantic" or "New York to LA". Otherwise, what's the use?

1) I suppose we could build factories to make stuff too dangerous or difficult to make on Earth. But LEO would probably work just as well more cheaply. 2) Build a "Super Guantanamo" where "life without parole" has some real teeth.

We might find LEO, Sealabs, and near-Earth asteroids more useful. Going to Mars would be more difficult and more imaginative.

maaku• 13 years ago

So once Lindberg crossed the atlantic, that was it? Been there, done that, no need to ever make a nonstop flight across the atlantic again?

eudox• 13 years ago

Robert Zubrin has spent a large chunk of his career[1] arguing that going to the Moon is absolutely worthless. Go to Mars instead, it's not orders of magnitude harder. Why the Moon? There is nothing of value. Some ice embedded in rock, extremely diluted He-3. Really, it's just useful as a megascale solar panel.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm34Muv6Lsg is a good summary.

Anon84• 13 years ago

I'm a scientist (although not currently living in the US) and I definitely think we (the US in particular and humanity in general) should go back to the Moon and eventually Mars.

Yes, we can (probably) do more science and for cheaper with robots. Yes, we can (probably) develop the same technologies we would other wise by focusing just on automated exploration but there is one very important thing only human exploration can do:

Inspire generations of future scientists

Never underestimate the power of seeing someone personally going where no one has ever gone before or doing something that has never been done before. Thousands of people cross the straight between England and France everyday, but when someone swims across it makes the news. Thousands of people skydive everyday, but when Felix Baumgartner jumped from higher and faster than anybody before it made the news. How many of the older generation of scientists and engineers chose (at least initially) that carrer path because they grew up watching Neil Armstrong bounce around on the Moon? Or watching the now defunct Space Shuttle take people to the edge of space and dreamt of doing the same? A big project similar to the space race could make science and engineering sexy again, and would have one other advantage that only giant projects with clearly defined goals have:

It focuses research in one direction, speeding up technological evolution

The reason why a bunch of nerds in the middle of the New Mexico desert were able to build an atom bomb in practically record time was because everyone had a clear idea of what the goal was and it was immediately clear when progress was being made towards it and when it was achieved. The same thing applies to the Space Race. When Kennedy first said "we choose to go the moon in this decade" it was far from clear that it would even be possible. But it gave everyone a clear and inspiring goal to strive for. "We choose to send a bunch of circuits to the moon" wouldn't have nearly the same effect. This is the reason we now talk of "moonshot projects" (and google has a whole division for them). They are almost impossible but the goal is sufficiently clear and inspiring to make people work hard until they are accomplished.

Imagine what would be possible if Obama were to say "we choose to go to Mars before the end of the decade" and actually provided NASA and private contractors with the funds to do it? What technologies wouldn't be developed and commercialized that we haven't even dreamt of?

tesseractive• 13 years ago

Suppose we set a goal to build a dirigible the size of a small town that could float up in the air and people could live on it and it would have an expected lifespan of at least 30 years? It would be enormously expensive and I have little doubt that some new technologies would have to be pioneered to produce something so audacious. But at the end of the day, it's still reasonable to ask why that's a goal we should spend so much to achieve, and the fact that we would invent a bunch of cool technology along the way seems insufficient as a response. There are lots and lots of things that we could spend tons of money on that would produce a bunch of spin-off technology -- how would we decide which of these things we should dump truckloads of money into, and which ones we shouldn't?

Scientists Petition U.S. Congress for Return to the Moon

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