Comments
rocketsocks t1_je6ybxx wrote
That's part of the reason. We've also made very poor architectural choices with Orion and SLS, both of which have been insanely expensive. We've also had very questionable program leadership and half-hearted management over the lifetime of the program. The current lunar program is the 3rd iteration of beyond-LEO human spaceflight within the past 15 years.
bookers555 t1_je77nm9 wrote
That wasn't a choice, it was forced. Congress forced the SLS to be an ultra expensive zombie of the Saturn V to let the people who worked on the Space Shuttle mantain their job. I don't think people understand how much of a ridiculous waste of money it is to use RS-25 engines on a rocket. Those engines are VERY expensive, but that's because they are meant to be reused.
Least they could have done is figure out a way to, at least, recover the first stage of the SLS.
vikinglander t1_je5j7jc wrote
I didn’t see presented (despite the title) any reason why we need to get back to the moon. I understand that ice means water means O2 and H2. However, I would bet that cryos will much much cheaper launched from Earth than made on the moon for a long long time to come.
In fact the only way this makes sense is if launch costs come down and if launch costs come down then Earth originated propellant will be even cheaper even faster. I try, but I can’t make the economics of the ice mining idea work out favorably. Go to the moon sure but maybe don’t use the ice mining argument which (unless someone can educate me?) is as wrong as shuttle being low cost.
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je8cq6w wrote
Assuming you can create fuel on the moon, where do you store it?
vikinglander t1_je8rwsd wrote
Store it as water apparently. Produce the H2 and O2 needed is the usual story.
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je9v0si wrote
You have to create fuel out of it, so you will have to store H2 and O2 at some point. That will take massive tanks if you are going to store for more than a few hours, it'll bleed out of smaller tanks. And it will take a long time and significant infrastructure to create that fuel, you don't have a lot of power generation any solar panels (which apparently you will need vast fields of) will have to be launched from Earth, installed and maintained. Temperatures on the moon reach 250F/120C, so you'll need vast amounts of insulation.
mylittlethrowaway135 t1_jeb3u4z wrote
process it then store it back (as ice) in the permanent shadow until it needs to be processed?
seems like the most efficient way.
vikinglander t1_jed92m8 wrote
Yeah so the idea of using lunar resources for propellant is nonsense.
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_jeepq90 wrote
I don't know, if you have time and robots, you could dig large holes and if you can make some kind of concrete out of regolith that might do the trick. It'll take years of constant effort that no human could do and involves tech we haven't invented yet, but tech we hadn't invented yet in 1960 actually got us to the moon.
My point is it will take a long, long time if it can be done at all and it cannot be done by humans working on the moon
gravitonbomb t1_je5jstz wrote
1000% they're gonna bottle the moon water and sell it to the richest of the rich. I don't want my tax dollars going to this with the state of our species.
bookers555 t1_je786ye wrote
Yes, reddit, the Artemis program is made to get water for the rich people.
gravitonbomb t1_je7c2ev wrote
Lunar observatory, yes.
Privatized lunar industry, no.
bookers555 t1_je8eq8t wrote
There's going to be both, like it or not. But no, Artemis is not about getting water for the rich.
[deleted] t1_je77z7f wrote
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Decronym t1_je98iin wrote
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |H2|Molecular hydrogen| | |Second half of the year/month| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |SLS|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |SSME|Space Shuttle Main Engine| |SSTO|Single Stage to Orbit| | |Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit|
|Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
^(6 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 18 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8738 for this sub, first seen 30th Mar 2023, 10:20])
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[deleted] t1_je5hl0f wrote
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[deleted] t1_je5r6n0 wrote
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[deleted] t1_je6nwb1 wrote
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wishihad20past4 t1_jea7lk3 wrote
Cant go back lost the technology to get there and cant rebuild lmao
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je5o0ny wrote
>It’s actually a decent analogy.
It's a freaking dumb analogy. What if Columbus went to America and it was uninhabited, had no food, water or air to breathe? Would anyone have returned?
Going to the moon is a science experiment, large numbers of people will never live there
bookers555 t1_je783mo wrote
Maybe not in our lifetimes, but expansion into space is inevitable, all that's stopping us is costs, and those have been going down for a long while now.
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je7zsac wrote
There's next to nothing there aside from iron, silicon and magnesium. Any human who lives there will have, at best, the quality of a life of a submarine crewman. You may be able to find enough resources to support a small number of people, but their lives are going to suck and more than likely will never be able to return home due to the deterioration of their bones and musculature. And that's only the things we already know about, no one knows what the long term affect of exposure to the lunar soli will do to people (and machines).
There is nothing to do there that is worth the horrible lives these people will lead that could not more easily be done by robots
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je8004p wrote
The desire to live on the moon is no more that romanticism
bookers555 t1_je89go6 wrote
And utilitarian, the Moon is a gateway to the rest of the Solar system. Even the Apollo LM descent stage reached orbit on its own in one stage. Now imagine rockets launched from the Moon, how far they could go without having to be completely spent just on getting a spacecraft into orbit like when launched from Earth. We wouldnt even need rockets even aside from the ones taking people to the Moon in the first place.
Living on the Moon wouldnt exactly be a vacation by all means, it would be just like the astronauts on the ISS, people living a strange and at times uncomfortable life for the sake of human progress.
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je8bpih wrote
Assuming your scenario works, a connecting flight spaceport on the moon, it would still be better to use to robots. From the point of view of mass regularly required to be sent from earth to keep people alivee
Also: if you have the technology to do manned flight to the outer solar system, and why you would I can't fathom, it's a 100x more difficult problem than going to the moon, with far less payoff, you likely have the technology to bypass the extra gravity well as a needless waste.
bookers555 t1_je8du29 wrote
That depends on how advanced we can make those robots, even the most advanced robots today are very clunky, and this base could be built within a decade.
Look at Mars rovers, it takes them months to do what a human could do in 20 minutes with a shovel and a microscope.
Plus there's the fact that if we can mantain a crewed base on the Moon we would gain invaluable experience on just how to mantain people in other worlds. Mars itself isnt fit for practice given that its a 9 month trip with current tech.
The ISS could have also been a crew less station, and yet we put people there to not just make everything way smoother than machines can do, but also to learn about the effect space has on the human body.
Also, this is specifically go to nearby planets. Launching from the Moon would make a Mars landing far more feasible since you are going to need the rocket itself to leave Mars, plus help shorten a trip thats already uncomfortably long.
The outer Solar system is going to requiere newer tech, but launching from the Moon will help.
Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je9u1v7 wrote
How exactly would launching from the moon make it easier to launch to Mars? Everything that you put on the moon had already been launched from Earth. And in particular, how would having to land on another planetary body, one not far from Earth with it's own gravity and much faster revolution period, make a trip to Mars faster?
CaypoH t1_je95vnb wrote
Do they only sell gravity generators at the fancy store? Or are you talking about the costs in human health and lives? We are maybe closing in on having a workable solution to the radiation problem. We are nowhere near solving gravity and nutrition problems.
I don't want to sound pessimistic, but suggesting that humans will full-time live away from Earth is on the level of "nuclear reactor in every car".
bookers555 t1_je972dq wrote
>Do they only sell gravity generators at the fancy store?
No, but we can research and develop it, the only thing preventing tech from existing is lack of political will and money.
When there's both, you can do things like landing on the Moon when only 20 years before your most advanced aircraft still used propellers.
If the government wanted it we could have even landed on Mars back in the 70s, NASA in fact had a plan for it completely laid out by the late 60s, and even other things like a crewed Venus flyby, all before the Moon landing, but achieving this would have required not slashing their budget into a fraction of what it was during the Apollo program.
CaypoH t1_je97yba wrote
Sure. And holodeck with replicators are right around the corner. Do you know how science works? Do you think it's just throwing money at people in lab coats until they give you what you want?
Having a plan is very different from being able to even test its viability, let alone execute it. Right now delivering relatively small inanimate objects to Mars intact is a gamble. And it's telling that the often cited greatest hope of human endeavor in space is a company owned by a mentally unstable conman.
bookers555 t1_je99uty wrote
I do, and I know that without funding and a powerful entity with an interest to see something happen you won't achieve much when there's no direct economic gain.
You yourself mentioned SpaceX and their rockets as the "greatest hope for space travel", and yet back in the 90s you had things like the Delta Clipper that, with proper funding and time, could have delivered decades ago what Starship has yet to achieve.
Or what about the VentureStar, an SSTO spaceplane that was, according to Lockheed's engineers, 95% complete, and it was a spacecraft that would have achieved what Falcon 9 does but even cheaper and only needed a few years more of research to solve it's final issues, and yet it got cancelled because the government has no idea of what they are doing.
Or what about nuclear rockets, something that NASA is working on and says will have one ready to test in 2027, even though NASA had been doing some very promising work on this back in the 70s, and got cancelled because the government told them to focus on the Space Shuttles instead.
Absolutely nothing of what we use right now for space travel is cutting edge technology, we just have what the government is willing to afford, which isn't much, and when it is willing to spend money they completely waste it anyway.
Just look at the SLS, 10 years of development and dozens of billions spent to end up with a rocket no more powerful than the more than half a century old Saturn V and powered by 40 year old engines, which launches the Orion spacecraft, yet another capsule that isn't much more advanced than the Apollo CSM.
If we don't have the tech to achieve all of this is because the government doesn't have a legitimate interest, and because they are just too damn incompetent to fund the right people and let them work. And that's how you end up with a company owned by a mentally unstable conman leading the charge in space travel, because everyone else is too busy feasting on their own snot.
Guy_PCS OP t1_je5owcu wrote
Article excerpts;
The SLS was running late and over budget. Congress had put its thumb on the scale; a program this large can benefit every state and district in the country, so politicians can’t resist pork barreling it — even to the point of failure.
Lest we forget, the Space Shuttle was billed as inexpensive, safe, and reliable. It was many things, but it was none of those things. SLS seems to be making those same mistakes.
SpaceX also wants Starship to take humans to the Moon on its own. If that’s successful, then it’s possible NASA might consider replacing SLS with Starship.
Water had been found in the form of ice buried in deep craters at the Moon’s south pole, and further research showed there could be billions of tons of it. Humans have this inconvenient need to drink and breathe. Water can satiate the former, and breaking water into its atomic components can provide oxygen for the latter. As a bonus, the hydrogen in water molecules can fuel rockets. It is not hyperbole to say this discovery is one of the most important findings of our age. Science and engineering efforts to investigate growing plants on the Moon, piping oxygen from the south polar mines to bases where humans will live, using the regolith — the pulverized lunar rock covering the Moon’s surface — as a building material for habitats, and more.
cjameshuff t1_je5sbf3 wrote
> piping oxygen from the south polar mines to bases where humans will live
Regolith is roughly 50% oxygen by mass, it will be far more practical to just crack it out of minerals than pipe it across the moon from polar craters.
Water can be cracked into hydrolox propellant, but Starship doesn't use hydrolox, avoiding it due to the difficulty of handling and storage and its low density. At any rate, the great majority of the propellant mass is actually oxygen, which...again...can be obtained anywhere on the surface. Starship could take on lunar oxygen after landing, getting 78% of its return propellant from lunar sources, without any dependence on polar ice.
Which is good, because it's not certain there's enough easily-accessible ice at the poles to burn as rocket propellant. It may be better to conserve it for uses on the moon itself.
LunaticBZ t1_je6on79 wrote
This article is poorly written.
The main reason it's taken so long to get back to the moon is there's no point going to the moon for a photo op.
NASA realized when we go back it should be to stay.
Why the Artemis missions are focused on figuring out how to set up permanent presence both on the moon and the Lunar Gateway.
We need water on the moon, for water mainly. And for Hydrogen.
What the moon truly offers though is long term and that's manufacturing, refining, and mining. Off of Earth.
We aren't launching any mega structure from Earth ever. No matter how good rockets get.
From the moon... Yes we can build mega structures.
SLS program is already done they are only building the current rockets. Starship will be the rocket used for future programs.