Lunar Mission Impossible?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/md529216a3.jpg[/atsimg]

It's been 41 years since Apollo 17, and we haven't put a man on the Moon since. What was it all for? Did we really do it simply because it was there to be done? Millions of dollars, hundreds of man hours invested, so we could plant a flag and leave a few footprints? Or, more staggeringly still, did we do it just to make sure other nations didn't get to it first?

"Manned missions to the moon should carefully consider U.S. leadership in space as we expand human presence outward into the solar system. If we go back to the moon and get there second or third, that is not U.S. leadership." --Buzz Aldrin

With NASA undergoing a yearly pruning by machete-wielding budget analysts, the prospect of an enduring human presence on the Moon grows ever dimmer. I'm one of those people who think there are very good commercial and scientific reasons to pursue lunar colonization, so I was delighted to read today of two recently proposed ventures that could mark another giant leap for humankind.

In 2015, NASA will attempt to make history by growing plants on the Moon...

The Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team, a group of NASA scientists, contractors, students and volunteers, is finally bringing to life an idea that has been discussed and debated for decades. They will try to grow arabidopsis, basil, sunflowers, and turnips in coffee-can-sized aluminum cylinders that will serve as plant habitats. But these are no ordinary containers – they’re packed to the brim with cameras, sensors, and electronics that will allow the team to receive image broadcasts of the plants as they grow. These habitats will have to be able to successfully regulate their own temperature, water intake, and power supply in order to brave the harsh lunar climate.

However, it won’t just be NASA scientists who are watching the results closely – the success of this experiment will require the assistance of schools and citizen scientists.

According to Dr. Chris McKay, a well-renowned planetary scientist, this project would have cost $300 million two decades ago – now, NASA can build and launch it for under $2 million.

singularityhub.com...

(Downside: none.)

The project keeps its fiscal lines lean by forming partnerships with schools and private scientists, and by utilizing the latest small-scale robotics. The return on investment, should this experiment result in our collecting the knowledge to make lunar food production possible, would be immense.

The fun doesn't stop there. The Shimizu Corporation has recently proposed a plan to convert the Moon into a massive solar power plant.

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It proposes building a massive collection of solar panels (a "Luna Ring") 6,800 miles long by 12 miles wide on the moon's surface. That's certainly a heavy-duty construction job for human beings, so Shimizu plans to get the work done with robots, only involving humans in supervisory roles.

Once complete, this hypothetical plant could continuously send energy to "receiving stations" around the globe by way of lasers and microwave transmission. This idea gets around two major hurdles for solar power, as there is no weather or darkness to curb electricity production on the moon. If operating in ship-shape, Shimizu says it could continuously send 13,000 terawatts of power back to Earth. By comparison, it took the United States all of 2011 to generate 4,100 terawatts of power.

Read more: www.businessinsider.com...

(Downside: dust, maintenance.)

Pretty keen, huh? And that's not the only source of energy the Moon has to offer. There are already a few private firms working on plans to mine the lunar surface for Helium-3, a non-radioactive isotope that would be ideally suited for clean nuclear fusion.

(Downside: transport, evil.)

So, here's to humans on the Moon, ATS, and remember:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/bq5296e023.jpg[/atsimg]

Very intriguing +1 & flag
Good find!

Hopefully this is actually put into action, 2015 isn't to far off!

~Sovereign

reply to post by SovereignEve


I tell you what, if any displaced NASA personnel want to take it to the next level, I bet a kickstarter-style funding drive would do very well.

I'd go in on a lunar greenhouse, wouldn't you?

Eidolon23
It's been 45 years since Apollo 11, and we haven't put a man on the Moon since.

Did you forget Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landings? The last one happened in 1972, and in total 12 men walked on the Moon. en.wikipedia.org...

Some of them even rode cool moon buggies:

reply to post by wildespace



Crap, I totally did forget. Thanks.

Edit: it's been 42 years since we put a man on the moon.

reply to post by Eidolon23


The first sentence makes your thread BS can't even get SIMPLE facts right always check before you type!

Just wondering, if the Germans had won the war...
Where would they be in present time with space exploration ??

wmd_2008
reply to post by Eidolon23

 

The first sentence makes your thread BS can't even get SIMPLE facts right always check before you type!

edit on 28-11-2013 by wmd_2008 because: (no reason given)

The first sentence had an unfortunate late-night-brain induced error which in no way invalidates the rest of the content.

reply to post by drneville


Ugh, well, there's a major Nazis on the Moon meme, you may have encountered it. And we did smuggle in a whole gaggle of Nazi rocket scientists after the war, though I think we would've been better off if we had tried them as war criminals instead.

But we didn't, and even despite all the low-grade sabotage our not so de-Nazified scientists pulled, we eventually got to the Moon.

So, would they have gotten there first? Probably. Would they have pushed the colonization effort forward more rapidly than we have? Maybe.

Im slow. So I starred and flagged for the meme alone.

That is classic

As to why we've not gone back. It's really hard. Costs a lot. You can't really drag chunks of it back. And it's really hard.

If I was doing it, I'd want a lot of stuff. And no one is willing to give me stuff.

it's not going anywhere. Lets deplete the earth first, then from the ruins and rubble of a decaying society.. we will force richard branson to fly up there with his million dollar space planes and ferry back large quantities of super helium and we can build an orbiting space station and call it helesium3 and we can force the third world nations in AustZealand to work their backsides off and become cyborgs to serve us. I'd do it.

And we can get wickis to go maniac on the renegade cyborg and this time not turn into a prawn. Awesome.

I'll start the kickstarter with .04 ltc.

But seriously. you can't mind the moon. It's hollow.

reply to post by wildespace


Yes cool stuff is basically what they did up there. But did they do anything of scientific importance?

I have been watching this video a couple of times, and are quite amazed that NASA mission control could allow such reckless driving around on a strange unknown planet. It seems to me that they are on a joyride doing their best to show off like a bunch of teenagers. It makes me wonder if these missions were scientifically driven at all, or just some missions to show off and make a show of it all. But why did they need 6 missions to do that?

I know they picked some random rocks to bring along home, but what else came out of these missions. They even brought along golf clubs and practiced golf. Who would seriously have allowed such insane behavior on a highly risky scientific mission. As far as I know they couldn’t even produce a quality picture of the surface of the moon.

If the Chinese eventually succeed with their planned missions in the near future, we will hopefully see some more scientific approach to it all.

drneville
Just wondering, if the Germans had won the war...
Where would they be in present time with space exploration ??

helius
reply to post by wildespace

 

If the Chinese eventually succeed with their planned missions in the near future, we will hopefully see some more scientific approach to it all.

They are launching their 1st lunar probe in Dec., but the joy of scientific discovery is probably secondary to commericial targets.

As with our space program, prestige also plays a part in Chinese designs on the Moon.

Politically, a space program “has payoffs,” says Pollpeter. “It shows that China can do great things. A human space program fits into that.” And it also sends a powerful political message to Taiwan, says Cheng: “We can look down on you.”

reply to post by drneville


If the Germans had succeeded in buggering up the entire globe, then the chances are that they would not have gotten to the moon until much later, that is assuming the entire globe was not a barren, shell pocked wasteland by that point. Fact is, they were in significant financial trouble by the end of the war as it was, having been in none too fine a shape before hand. Knowing the type of nations they were up against, the kind of folk who opposed them, the entire fight would have gone underground if total domination had been on the cards, and much of the raw resources and wealth they would have needed to fund such an event, would have been denied them by resistance forces.

wildespace

Eidolon23
It's been 45 years since Apollo 11, and we haven't put a man on the Moon since.

Did you forget Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landings? The last one happened in 1972, and in total 12 men walked on the Moon. en.wikipedia.org...

Some of them even rode cool moon buggies:

still. no stars visible from the moon...

Eidolon23

In 2015, NASA will attempt to make history by growing plants on the Moon...

The Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team, a group of NASA scientists, contractors, students and volunteers, is finally bringing to life an idea that has been discussed and debated for decades. They will try to grow arabidopsis, basil, sunflowers, and turnips in coffee-can-sized aluminum cylinders that will serve as plant habitats. But these are no ordinary containers – they’re packed to the brim with cameras, sensors, and electronics that will allow the team to receive image broadcasts of the plants as they grow. These habitats will have to be able to successfully regulate their own temperature, water intake, and power supply in order to brave the harsh lunar climate.

However, it won’t just be NASA scientists who are watching the results closely – the success of this experiment will require the assistance of schools and citizen scientists.

According to Dr. Chris McKay, a well-renowned planetary scientist, this project would have cost $300 million two decades ago – now, NASA can build and launch it for under $2 million.

singularityhub.com...

(Downside: none.)

I'm not sure about the lack of downsides. The many ways that arabidopsis has been played with transgenically and in terms of Genetic Modification, and the impossibilities of containing it in the lab, it is just about possible that it could take over the world...take it to the Moon...and that potential goes universal.

And I am only half-joking

Eidolon23
Or, more staggeringly still, did we do it just to make sure other nations didn't get to it first?

Yes. It was a propaganda war to prove that we were superior to the Soviets after they beat us into space.

Staying on the moon for 72 hours is relatively easy. Staying on the moon for months at a time, not so much. By Apollo 13 people were bored, because it was so routine. By Apollo 17, people were demanding that we solve the problems on earth first. With the budget cuts to NASA it'll be a miracle if we go back before a private venture gets there.

Whether it was propaganda or not it drove innovation and the economy really well. And it inspires people to this day. Why haven't we gone back? Money. And why do we need to go back when we're working on a manned mission to Mars?

Eidolon23
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/md529216a3.jpg[/atsimg]

''Hey man, how many times I got to tell you
that I just canna do it?!
Rockets canna work at very high altitudes here!
It was just all a dream that you had that I visited you, my friend. All a programmed dream!
Just like when that cow jumped over you, remember?''

Kali74
Whether it was propaganda or not it drove innovation and the economy really well. And it inspires people to this day. Why haven't we gone back? Money. And why do we need to go back when we're working on a manned mission to Mars?

Practice.

As pointed out, it's been 42 years since NASA has put any human beyond low Earth orbit. While everything is documented, nothing beats hands on experience and knowledge, and almost all of those that work at NASA now, do not have the actual experience of placing a human beyond LEO.

Even during the Apollo Program, they practiced before they ever landed on the moon. Apollo 8, 9 and 10 are great examples of that practice, with 10 going all the way to the moon, orbiting once and then returning.

Reaching Mars will be even harder than Apollo ever was. It would make sense to use the Moon as practice first to "get back in the saddle" as it were.

Also: colonies.

If we ever want to set up a colony on Mars, it makes sense to do it on the moon first. Mostly because it would be good practice, and if anything seriously went wrong, the colony on the moon is only days away, where as one on Mars would not be easy to get to.

We could practice that right here on Earth (and technically we have with the Biosphere 2 project), but there are things we can't quite simulate here on Earth, as compared to actually living on a lower gravity, near vacuum other world.

------------------------------------

To the thread:

There was actually a lot of science going on with the Apollo missions. Here is a link to a list (too numerous for me to type out here):

Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments

There are also many things that the Apollo Program is given credit for helping the rest of the world with, such as being the driving force that lead to the invention of IC chips (Intergrated Circuits), without which, we would not have the multitude of electronics, such as the computer I'm using right now.