Author Topic: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.  (Read 60845 times)

Offline Mader Levap

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Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« on: 06/06/2014 01:07 pm »
As meekGee suggested, I take here discussion that was very OT where it was.

The question is the trade-off between harder-to-reach Mars and harder-to-live on Moon.
How much harder is to live on Moon? Certainly not orders of magnitude harder (for that you need Io or something).

Even if living on moon is significantly harder than living on Mars, travel expenses will weight costs in favour of Moon in near and medium future.

In other words: assume that living on Moon is harder. Your and meekGee error is that you claim this assumption means no Moon base whatsoever. This is wrong and looks like wishful thinking of Mars Firster.

Why? Scenario below explains that.

1. Moon base will be deployed first, simply becasue of lower total costs (cost to travel+cost to live).
2. It will grow slowly due to our assumption (harder life).
3. Decades later (when cost to travel will be sufficiently low) first Martian base will be deployed.
4. It will grow faster (easier life)...
5. ...and some time later (another few decades) will be larger than Moon base.

Result? Of course, Moon First.
Be successful.  Then tell the haters to (BLEEP) off. - deruch
...and if you have failure, tell it anyway.

Offline HappyMartian

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #1 on: 06/06/2014 02:37 pm »
The much lower risk, and quicker, trips to the Moon than Mars, or asteroids, means the Lunar surface will initially be the most attractive and affordable beyond LEO 'boots and wheels on the ground' location for robots, commercial investors, miners, tourists, astronomers, geology graduate students, politicians, rocketeers, and pioneers.

The Moon is also close to the immense marketplace called Earth. Electromagnet catapults can routinely launch aircraft off of aircraft carriers and will someday launch spacecraft off of the Moon and thereby enhance its ever expanding role as the transportation and resource hub of the Solar System.
"The Moon is the most accessible destination for realizing commercial, exploration and scientific objectives beyond low Earth orbit." - LEAG

Offline Burninate

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #2 on: 06/06/2014 02:57 pm »
What's the immediate goal of a Lunar base?

What necessitates increasing the size of a lunar base from 0 people to 3 people, from 3 people to 100, from 100 to 3000?  What do we get out of it?

A Lunar mass driver (maglev + linear induction motor) aimed at the horizon is a hell of a thing for getting mass amounts of resources back to Earth... but what's the Moon got that Siberia doesn't?

If the terminal goal is only to seek out self-sustaining incremental terraforming / Marsbase-building strategies, the Moon is just not helpful for learning about Mars.  If the terminal goal is to learn about building stations without in situ resources - well then we already have LEO for that, and we don't have to worry so much about radiation there in the meantime.

Essentially the only major thing the Moon has got, is a much shorter and more frequent trip.  Aerobraking at Mars (a technology with a boatload of compelling improvements in the pipeline) cancels out almost the entire dV advantage of the Moon being so much closer.  If we build that aforementioned mass driver, it improves the economics of return to LEO quite a bit, but what would justify the huge investment to get to that point?

Radiation shielding and an in situ smelter / machine shop perhaps, as a replacement for mass brought up from Earth's gravity well?  That only works when there's sufficient demand in LEO, something that's only going to be true when there's thousands of people moving there every year.
« Last Edit: 06/06/2014 03:01 pm by Burninate »

Offline HappyMartian

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #3 on: 06/06/2014 03:29 pm »
What's the immediate goal of a Lunar base?

What necessitates increasing the size of a lunar base from 0 people to 3 people, from 3 people to 100, from 100 to 3000?  What do we get out of it?

A Lunar mass driver (maglev + linear induction motor) aimed at the horizon is a hell of a thing for getting mass amounts of resources back to Earth... but what's the Moon got that Siberia doesn't?

If the terminal goal is only to seek out self-sustaining incremental terraforming / Marsbase-building strategies, the Moon is just not helpful for learning about Mars.  If the terminal goal is to learn about building stations without in situ resources - well then we already have LEO for that, and we don't have to worry so much about radiation there in the meantime.

Essentially the only major thing the Moon has got, is a much shorter and more frequent trip.  Aerobraking at Mars (a technology with a boatload of compelling improvements in the pipeline) cancels out almost the entire dV advantage of the Moon being so much closer.  If we build that aforementioned mass driver, it improves the economics of return to LEO quite a bit, but what would justify the huge investment to get to that point?

Radiation shielding and an in situ smelter / machine shop perhaps, as a replacement for mass brought up from Earth's gravity well?  That only works when there's sufficient demand in LEO, something that's only going to be true when there's thousands of people moving there every year.

Mars would be 'flags, footprints, and getting to this place is not fiscally sustainable at this time so lets find a dozen excuses to forget about it for fifty or sixty years'.

The Moon is easy for everyone on Earth to see and love. Real-time two-way communication is doable. Transportation risks and costs in cislunar space will drop once we have Lunar derived propellants.


Edited.

 
« Last Edit: 06/06/2014 11:28 pm by HappyMartian »
"The Moon is the most accessible destination for realizing commercial, exploration and scientific objectives beyond low Earth orbit." - LEAG

Offline ncb1397

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #4 on: 06/06/2014 04:06 pm »
The air pressure on the summit of Olympus Mons is .03% of 1 atm. Delta V to Lunar orbit is about 1.87 km/s while mars is 4.1 km/s. A mass driver on Mars is a bit harder than on the moon but hardly insurmountable. SSTO on Mars is pretty easy as is SSTO on the Moon. Mars is closer delta-v wise to the outer solar system.

Payload to TMI vs payload to TLI is not much worse. For instance, SLS block 1 does 24 mt to TLI and 20.2 mt to TMI. The problem with Mars is delta-t(has more to do with risk) than delta-v(has more to do with cost).

Moon first is not up for debate though. The history of humans in space will have a chapter on the Moon before a chapter on Mars. There is no retro-actively changing this without a time machine stopping Kennedy from being assassinated or something.

Offline savuporo

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #5 on: 06/06/2014 05:04 pm »
What's the immediate goal of a Lunar base?
As rapid industrialization as possible, with cutting edge automation, robotics and teleoperations.

Learn to make as many things as feasible using the available energy and materials.

EDIT: Dont limit yourself to just trying one thing, such as He-3, PGMs, propellant from water, construction materials or anything else. Industrialize as flexibly as possible.
« Last Edit: 06/06/2014 05:44 pm by savuporo »
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Offline dror

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #6 on: 06/06/2014 05:38 pm »
What's the immediate goal of a Lunar base?
What necessitates increasing the size of a lunar base from 0 people to 3 people, from 3 people to 100, from 100 to 3000?  What do we get out of it?

H3

Space is hard immensely complex and high risk !

Offline pagheca

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #7 on: 06/06/2014 06:03 pm »
The question is the trade-off between harder-to-reach Mars and harder-to-live on Moon.

First, there is a tremendous amount of science to be done on the Moon. And I see a moon base as a sort of inevitable step, no matter when.

I'm biased by my experience and my work, I know, but I see it as the installation of stations in Antarctica: in some sense in the Geophysical Year 1957 there was not a clear reason other than politics to go there and install expensive permanent stations. Today, however, some of the best astronomy in the world is done at the South Pole. Note that this was something unexpected in 1957, when the first few large permanent facilities were built on the Antarctic Plateau. This shows there are almost always some unknown unknowns waiting to be catched when we extend our frontiers.

Moreover, there is an hell of glaciology, atmospheric science, biology going on there, despite the fact we don't have yet a real economical exploitation of Antarctica: metal nodules are there with oil (probably) but nobody is actually benefitting from them because of the Antarctic Treaty. However, despite of the unavailability of even future economic returns, Stations have been flowering everywhere and the development of facilities has not stopped. Rather the opposite.

Regarding astronomy, the vacuum and the lower gravity on the Moon would allow to build very large instrumentation with unprecedented sensitivity, including interferometers, that still present unresolved problems, specially for larger than we say 100 m baseline, in LEO. LEO is not really a competitor either because of maintenance and integration and specially scaling and refurbishing structures in orbit is more challenging. We could install instrumentation that may be refurbished and working at very low temperature for more than a few years (and then not thrown away as for LEO or L2 telescopes etc.).

Of course there are a lot of drawbacks, but I can't see Mars as a competitor to the Moon either. Mars is Mars. It's literally "another planet" with its own challenges, benefit and costs. Reaching it is difficult and dangerous for humans first because of the two order of magnitude times longer trip, while for robotic probes there is the problem of the gravity making returning samples still difficult.

Happy to listen and learn about. I'm sure there is a lot to be discussed and understood, huge costs to be covered, etc. However, I can't really understand why people is considering going to Mars when the Moon is just 3 days away from us, unexplored and almost untouched since decades, when technologies from the sixties allowed us (...US, actually) to get there after a 10 years "only" work.

I respect any different opinion, but that's why I fully agree with Mader Levap.
« Last Edit: 06/06/2014 07:13 pm by pagheca »

Offline bad_astra

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #8 on: 06/06/2014 06:41 pm »
Until we develop rapid non-chemical interplanetary travel I see the moon as our most obvious gravity well to visit and settle. I see it as Moon, the Rocks, then Mars in that order. Our version of Canaries, Azores, Americas.
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Offline HappyMartian

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #9 on: 06/07/2014 09:52 am »
Until we develop rapid non-chemical interplanetary travel I see the moon as our most obvious gravity well to visit and settle. I see it as Moon, the Rocks, then Mars in that order. Our version of Canaries, Azores, Americas.


Yep.

And maybe a few other folks see it that way too.



"The report's authors said that returning to the moon would foster better international cooperation given the interest about the destination in other countries, and such a mission would help develop technology to land and eventually live on Mars."

From: NASA warned plan to send humans to Mars may fail    By Jean-Louis Santini June 5, 2014
At: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-warned-plan-send-humans-mars-may-fail-022806799.html



"With the NRC study showing favor towards a return to the Lunar Surface, a potential battle between lawmakers who continue to express a wish for NASA to return to the Moon, and the current NASA leadership, may be in the offing in the coming months."

From: NRC Pathway approach to Mars includes Lunar landings, Chinese alliance By Chris Bergin
June 4, 2014
At: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/06/nrc-pathway-approach-mars-lunar-landings-chinese-alliance/ 
"The Moon is the most accessible destination for realizing commercial, exploration and scientific objectives beyond low Earth orbit." - LEAG

Offline gospacex

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #10 on: 06/07/2014 09:11 pm »
And so the "Moon first! No, Mars first!" flame war has been reignited for the seventeen gazillionth time.
« Last Edit: 06/07/2014 09:11 pm by gospacex »

Offline redliox

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #11 on: 06/07/2014 10:20 pm »
Moon or Mars...always a fun debate!  It's kind of like deciding between going to the supermall two hundred miles away versus the minimart a quarter-mile away.  Ultimately it depends on what you're going out to get.

I'm a follower of the Mars Direct philosophy, largely because it's straightforward and economical...and we are stuck in an economy where less-is-more...and NASA is not so likely to get the 'more' it needs in its budget.  NASA will spend a few years daydreaming what it could do with SLS, but once it's flying most of those dreams will pop and a lucky few become reality.  So what we're really debating is what that reality might be.

For economics, the Moon ultimately wins out.  As is, SLS and Orion have the capacity to get us into lunar orbit; that seems to be the secret skeleton (out of Constellation's closet) subtly supporting the program.  Apparently an additional module or vehicle is needed if we're to go on monthly-scale-missions.  The Moon isn't a desirable planet, but it isn't fully explored and it's more complex than an asteroid.  And, as always noted, it is conveniently located.

Mars should be the long term goal for sure, and aside from propellant production and exploration, I think I can sum up why in one word: life.  Aside from colonizing for the sake of humanity's future, finding out if Mars likewise spawned life is the undeniable spark the Moon lacks in comparison.  It can help us answer the bigger questions.

IMO as well, I think the Moon would win out purely on cost.  Still, I think it's a better stepping stone to Mars versus the asteroids.  I was left with mixed feelings after Obama's speech, but if anything I would credit his administration for SLS which is the rocket needed for either lunar or Martian missions.  But if we're going to do this in a stepping-stone-approach with concerns about technology and human life...lets use the Moon as that stone.

My suggestion would be spend the 2020s flying to the Moon, Lagrange points, and surface under the auspice of setting up a science camp and preparing for Mars.  By the end of the '20s turn the Moon camp's reigns over to commercial companies, making the Moon turf for industry and universities, while NASA begins the 2030s making excursions to Mars with likely its moons as initial targets.

The Moon can become a convenient, commercial destination that can develop at its own pace whereas Mars explored in the stages set by NASA and whatever governments cooperate in its venture.
"Let the trails lead where they may, I will follow."
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Offline savuporo

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #12 on: 06/07/2014 11:08 pm »
And so the "Moon first! No, Mars first!" flame war has been reignited for the seventeen gazillionth time.
A more constructive thought exercise for the OP and the thread :

what would make you change your mind ?
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Offline pagheca

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #13 on: 06/07/2014 11:11 pm »
what would make you change your mind ?

Having from Mars the same great seaview we have from the Moon.

« Last Edit: 06/07/2014 11:55 pm by pagheca »

Offline savuporo

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #14 on: 06/07/2014 11:56 pm »
Seriously.

Everyone with a "moon/mars/Betelgeuse first" hypothesis would help the discussion a lot by explaining the conditions of how is this falsifiable? What sort of evidence, information or experiment would reasonably disprove the claims.

Maybe we should have a thread titled "moon first: here is how you can prove me wrong"
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Offline KelvinZero

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #15 on: 06/08/2014 12:15 am »
And so the "Moon first! No, Mars first!" flame war has been reignited for the seventeen gazillionth time.

I think there should always be a moon-mars punchup thread. Same with SLS-vs-commercial. What gets really tiresome is when it swamps other threads drowning out the actual new and relevant gems in that thread. I think the moderators should have a macro that just copies any such post to the appropriate punchup thread and replaces the original with a single link to it :)

Offline butters

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #16 on: 06/08/2014 12:24 am »
The biggest challenge in human missions to Mars is the delta-t. It takes a long time to get there, and perhaps more importantly, it takes a long time to get back. We have to really master deep space ECLSS before we can commit to a Mars mission.

The ECLSS requirements for the cis-lunar environment are everything Mars demands and then some. If we can handle long-duration human missions in cis-lunar space and on the lunar surface, then we can handle Mars missions of the same length. We can prove this out with missions where it takes much less time to get there and get back, reducing risk and cost.

I don't see how we can work up the confidence to commit humans into Mars transfer orbit for the first time until we've gamed out the procedures, technologies, and hazards somewhere closer to home. Apollo was a good first step, but we've got to stay for a Mars-relevant duration. We have to learn how to live on another world, day in and day out. Anything less would be irresponsible.

Offline pagheca

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #17 on: 06/08/2014 12:26 am »
savuporo,

Ok, I accept your invitation and will be serious (at least as much as I can... :) ).

I don't think you can really have "demonstrations" here. The debate is opinionated, in a Bayesian sense (this is something people find difficult to understand here: technicalities are technicalities, but spaceflight is not only technicalities and demonstration. So, there is a lot of room for different opinions here).

Imagine to be on the 11 of September 1962, one day before JFK Apollo speech, and you have to tell which is the best strategy to speed up space exploration. I don't think many people would say "Tell the President to talk about going to the Moon and back within the end of the decade". Nobody would take you seriously. We are in a similar situation. We are talking about something that is completely unrelated with the reality of things, politics, human psicology, economics, etc.

I think we can just say what we guess is the best strategy for us. It's Saturday night and I like to waste time speculating and dreaming, but I do not think there is mathematics in what I'm going to say.

I think that:

(1) there is a huge amount of awesome science to be done on the Moon. Regarding astronomy, it's empty, there is no atmosphere and the sky rotate pretty slowly. Mars has a lot of problems, including dust and an atmosphere plus gravity. It is more similar to the Earth. With no great benefits (at least, I can't really see them but a lot of fancy proposals to solve the various problems). Geology is of paramount importance on the Moon to understand our Planet. You can communicate easily. You can even call home and get the phone answered in 3-4 seconds, not in minutes. So, running experiment would be possible with assistance from the Earth in real time.

(2) it's a "natural" step. You first go to Normandy, and then you get across Europe till Berlin. You go to McMurdo, and than you go to the South Pole. You go to the America, and then to Australia. Not the opposite.

(3) safety concerns (radiation, rescue issues, etc.) may delay Mars missions for a while. A trip to the Moon may take a week return if you need to evacuate someone or deploy some urgently required material. You know if you were successfull or not in 3 days and then can try again.

(4) it's cheaper. We already have demonstrated our technology can do that 40 years ago.

(5) it can be a rehearsal for a lot of other missions. Once you master how to survive on the Moon, 3 days from home, you can - almost - survive everywhere in the solar system.

(6) I think (but with a big error bar...) it would be relatively* easier to convince funding agencies and several countries to cooperate in the project. The Moon is visible from the Earth. People knows we can do that. Watching the sky you can see the Moon. (*relatively easier doesn't mean easy!).

(7) we could develop something incremental there, as the turnaround duty cycle is relatively shorter. Light is promptly available (ok, two weeks a month...) to supply energy. The gravity well is shallower. There is potential for really easy ways to pull out with today technology if required.

On the other side, I can't really see any good reason to go to Mars first. Sorry about that. I think this, for what it matter, is the only thing I do not agree with (my idol) Elon Musk. But I would bet he will change his mind later. I guess he want to push people to do something with a very far objective to then sell the feasible one. 

Opinions at go-go....
« Last Edit: 06/08/2014 12:29 am by pagheca »

Offline pagheca

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #18 on: 06/08/2014 12:37 am »
one more:

To be honest I do not trust any "one way" plan to Mars.

And this because I know that even in a place like Antarctica people doesn't like to stay more than an year or two continuously. Nobody can't live inside a pressurised suit for all his life (when he wants to get "out") or meet the same people every morning.

I experienced what isolation - a much milder isolation! - means at the Pole. You miss the green, the walk and the occasional rain. I liked like crazy the experience, but I never met a single person that want to do that forever without taking at least a vacation in summer. This wouldn't be possible on Mars one way missions, while Moon offer a nice way to go back home after an year or so, ISS-like.
« Last Edit: 06/08/2014 12:40 am by pagheca »

Offline savuporo

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Re: Why IMO Moon First is inevitable.
« Reply #19 on: 06/08/2014 01:01 am »
savuporo,

Ok, I accept your invitation and will be serious (at least as much as I can... :) ).
..
(4) it's cheaper. We already have demonstrated our technology can do that 40 years ago.
Yeah, i don't think you got it. Falsifiability means that you outlined the conditions of how that claim can be shown to be false.
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