Author Topic: Startup Moon Base Concepts  (Read 54425 times)

Online DistantTemple

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #20 on: 04/25/2018 01:01 am »
A Lunar Outpost could consider using a roughly 70% percent oxygen and 30% percent nitrogen atmosphere at 5 PSI - similar to Skylab - to reduce chances of oxygen toxicity and to reduce pre-breathing time for EVAs.
I hope margarine/butter or other greases won't burst into flame! The habitats could be closer to Earth atmos, and these larger "work/storage/transition" spaces at intermediate pressures like this 5psi at O, 70%/N, 30%
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Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #21 on: 04/25/2018 02:02 am »
The higher the pressure, the lower the oxygen ratio obviously. A 10 psi rate might be a pretty good compromise. Oxygen/nitrogen then should be closer to 35% oxygen and 65% nitrogen.
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Offline Archibald

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #22 on: 04/25/2018 10:36 am »
Pressurizing the cave itself  would be too difficult and risky. Better to get inflatables inside and chaining them like sausages. it would need a preliminary cleanup or polishing of the cave interior to avoid pointy rocks that could hole the module skin. That s an issue
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Offline Archibald

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #23 on: 04/25/2018 05:34 pm »
I found a while back there is an entire organization devoted to this endeavour - ILOA http://www.iloa.org/
Never find if they were serious or not.
Perhaps they are related, one way or another, to the extensive network of telescopes standing on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii ?
Does anybody ever heard about them ?
« Last Edit: 04/25/2018 05:35 pm by Archibald »
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Offline whitelancer64

Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #24 on: 04/25/2018 05:37 pm »
Can’t remember where I read this, but somewhere on a thread there was a concept of a radio telescope being placed on the far side of the moon.  Makes you wonder what a moon base for optical / radio astronomy would entail with a moon base concept.

Landing an optical telescope on the moon sounds pretty tough

The Moon isn't any better than LEO as far as optical telescopes go. Radio telescopes would be fantastic, however, because the Moon acts as a gigantic shield against radio interference from Earth.
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Offline whitelancer64

Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #25 on: 04/25/2018 05:46 pm »
I found a while back there is an entire organization devoted to this endeavour - ILOA http://www.iloa.org/
Never find if they were serious or not.
Perhaps they are related, one way or another, to the extensive network of telescopes standing on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii ?
Does anybody ever heard about them ?

The ILOA is completely unrelated to the observatories on Mauna Kea.
"One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." - Elon Musk
"There are lies, damned lies, and launch schedules." - Larry J

Offline speedevil

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #26 on: 04/25/2018 06:32 pm »
The higher the pressure, the lower the oxygen ratio obviously. A 10 psi rate might be a pretty good compromise. Oxygen/nitrogen then should be closer to 35% oxygen and 65% nitrogen.

Flagstaff Arizona would disagree. (10.8PSI) (2km)

There are well over a million people living under 9PSI (4km), and many million under 10PSI.





Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #27 on: 04/25/2018 10:55 pm »
I've been to Flagstaff, for a few days in 2007 - I was younger and fitter then. I imagine the lower partial pressure of oxygen there would take some getting used to, long term.
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Offline envy887

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #28 on: 04/25/2018 11:10 pm »
I've been to Flagstaff, for a few days in 2007 - I was younger and fitter then. I imagine the lower partial pressure of oxygen there would take some getting used to, long term.

I imagine most things about living on the moon would take some getting used to...

Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #29 on: 04/25/2018 11:25 pm »
Oh yeah! Though I imagine anyone running a Lunar Outpost would try and keep the oxygen quantity - regardless of the pressure level chosen - to at least sea level values.
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Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #30 on: 04/26/2018 05:08 am »
The Farce is Strong with this one...
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Offline nacnud

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #31 on: 04/26/2018 11:35 am »
So long as the chemistry is the same with different isotopes it shouldn't be a problem. (I'm very confident it wouldn't be an issue)

Offline whitelancer64

Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #32 on: 04/26/2018 03:01 pm »
The Farce is Strong with this one...
Sorry.  Just got carried away.

Let’s get back to talking about oxygen

Can astronauts breath different isotopes of oxygen?  In other words, it’s not a sure bet that the moon will have the same isotopes as on earth?

Oxygen has three stable isotopes (there are a half dozen others with very short half-lives), all three are found naturally on Earth, so we do breathe them.

Oxygen-16 is most abundant, it makes up 99.76% of all oxygen on Earth.

Oxygen-18 is 0.2% of oxygen. Oxygen-17 makes up 0.04% of oxygen on Earth, but it's most commonly found in deuterium and in seawater.
"One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." - Elon Musk
"There are lies, damned lies, and launch schedules." - Larry J

Offline punder

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #33 on: 04/26/2018 03:32 pm »
I've seen countless objections to lunar optical telescopes, but imo there is a huge factor that is never mentioned. That is the fact that humans have vast experience building structures on a surface in a gravity field, and very little experience doing the same in open space under microgravity conditions. It's absolutely natural for us. Compare video of Apollo astronauts working on the moon with astronauts working outside ISS.

Got interrupted...

Yes, temp swings are a pain, vacuum is a pain (but also an advantage for a telescope, for instance), dust is a pain, etc etc. We've been mitigating challenging environmental problems a long time, and we're pretty adaptable. The main point is that we are evolved to think and work in a gravity field, not in microgravity. It's built in to our nerves and bones. You don't have to train a PhD for a year to drive a front-loader across a patch of dirt, as opposed to repairing a machine on the outside of the ISS. Again, look at the Apollo guys: they behaved perfectly naturally and worked very effectively amid all those unsolvable lunar environmental challenges.

But hey, all we can do is trade opinions on the weight of various factors here. My opinion is that people don't see the advantages of lunar surface vs. in-orbit because they just don't understand how difficult it is to even comprehend how to work in microgravity. YMMV.
« Last Edit: 04/26/2018 06:12 pm by punder »

Offline Coastal Ron

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #34 on: 04/26/2018 03:57 pm »
I've seen countless objections to lunar optical telescopes, but imo there is a huge factor that is never mentioned. That is the fact that humans have vast experience building structures on a surface in a gravity field, and very little experience going the same in open space under microgravity conditions. It's absolutely natural for us. Compare video of Apollo astronauts working on the moon with astronauts working outside ISS.

Of course you're ignoring the complete vacuum of space, the vast swings in temperature, and though the Moon has gravity it's only 1/6th that of Earth. Plus there is the tremendous cost of keeping humans on the surface of the Moon versus keeping them in space closer to Earth.

So when considering all of those conditions, being weightless is not really much of a liability compared to working on the Moon...
If we don't continuously lower the cost to access space, how are we ever going to afford to expand humanity out into space?

Offline jebbo

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #35 on: 04/26/2018 06:01 pm »
The Moon isn't any better than LEO as far as optical telescopes go.

Both have good seeing, but exposure times and object visibilities are seriously reduced in LEO. The lunar limbs are better, as Earth is near the horizon, reducing its impact on observations. The thermal environment should also be easier to manage, assuming a dome structure.

Also, in the long run, having observatories that are in a fixed location, that can be assembled, maintained, upgraded and operated in situ is a huge advantage over autonomous orbital instruments.

However, I guess this is straying off topic

Offline Dean47

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #36 on: 04/27/2018 12:05 am »
Hey  --  I thought this was supposed to be fun!

I would put my moon base inside one of the easily accessible lava tubes, probably the one at Marius Hills.  I would initially use variations of the Bigelow modules connected together, with provisions to easily expand the base as more people moved in.  As the base expanded I would start installing iron domes using iron extracted from the lunar soil.

I would expect some water to be trapped on the walls, floor and ceiling of the lava tubes.  Additional oxygen would come from lunar soil, with iron an easy by-product.

Power would come from a combination of resources.  Primary source would be a set of NASA kilopower nuclear reactors.  Backup would be solar arrays connected to Tesla battery power packs.

I would install a large module as soon as possible after the basic power, plumbing, ECLSS and living quarters were installed.  Something large enough to play low gravity basketball, put on low-gravity ballets, do acrobatic exhibitions, etc.  Those would be broadcast to earth on PPV television.  How much would you pay to see a trapeze act, basketball game, or gymnastics competition in 1/6 G?  (A revenue stream!)

After the initial four couples and a dog (thanks DougSpace for that image!) additional inhabitants would include a large number of carefully vetted, physically fit, very rich people who found living at moon base attractive.  (I can see the brochures now:  Clean air and water!; low radiation!; balanced diets!; free medical care!; low gravity!; no disease!; all 24-hour news channels will be banned!)  The moon base would sell very expensive condos to those people and their names would be forever engraved on the walls of the lava tube -- another revenue stream!

There would be hotel accommodations for visiting Russians, Chinese, etc., unless they get there first  --  then the accommodations would be for us.  Another revenue stream!
 
The question "paper or plastic?" would never come up when shipping from earth  --  both would be welcome as long as they could be broken down into CO2 and water.

I would name my moon base either SeleneDion or SeleneGomez, depending on my mood at the time.


Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #37 on: 04/27/2018 04:21 am »
'Selene Dion'... He's here till Friday; try the fish... ;)

http://instantrimshot.com/
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Offline spacester

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #38 on: 04/27/2018 06:30 am »
The overarching objective is to become space-faring species. We cannot say that we are space-faring if we are not living robustly on the moon.

The purpose of living on the moon should be to live on the moon; to demonstrate that it can be done, and to learn how best to do it. Getting to a robust presence for the species means we learn how to do it at any location of our choosing.

0Therefore, starting at the poles to mine ice is an indirect means of achieving the goal. Maybe obtaining that polar water is the best strategy, but then again, maybe if we adjust our thinking in terms of cost per pound to deliver nice pure earth water, the polar effort is just a giant distraction.

So the location is chosen to serve other purposes.  Living on the moon is what we currently call tourism but if we are routinely space-faring, it's not just tourism, it is people doing their business too. Certainly, rich people paying to visit are going to be a major economic driver, but not the only game in town.

So we want to learn how to live on the moon. The questions are: what do we need to do to get started,  what do we need to do to get good at it, and what is the long term goal?

The obvious answer is to start living there so we can live there, but what comes first? IMO if you cannot define the very first mission, you do not have an actual plan.

The name of this location would be LIP1 - Lunar Industrial Park One. It would exist for the purpose of developing the technologies to live on the moon in ever-increasing numbers.

The site would be chosen based on availability of a variety of regolith minerology, having a large flat plain to build on (after sweeping the dust into berms), and having something interesting to see on the horizon, and someplace interesting to go nearby. The Sea of Tranquility, near Apollo 11, is a possibility. (Note that the site should be considered sacred ground, and tourists would have to not disturb it.) Other Apollo missions might be just as good.

While landing habitats and other support equipment and then moving in would be a huge accomplishment, being able to scale up requires building your structures from in-situ material, meaning regolith. So the first priority is to see what can be done with the regolith: are we looking at sintering, or 3D laser printing, or melting and casting, or what? Can we make glass storage vessels? What are the material properties and how much can we tweak the formula and process to get what we want?

Even if you are going to use lava tubes as your structure, you still have to seal it up and provide ingress/egress, power, water, heating and cooling, etc. It is not clear that fitting out a lava tube is not much much harder than fitting out a structure with purpose-built geometry.

So the first mission is a power lander. It would have a small swarm of robotic agents that would deploy and set up solar panels as the start of a massive field of PV and batteries. It would serve as the first power-handling node of a future local power grid. This power needs a load, and we need to learn how to make stuff from regolith, so this first lander would include a crucible for melting regolith and pouring it into molds. We would learn a lot, and that would guide future planning.

The second priority is LLOX (Lunar Liquid Oxygen), also produced from regolith. THIS is the main resource that the moon will provide our future space-faring economic powerhouse. NOT water: if we are going to think big - and what is the point of not setting big goals? - we need to launch LOX from Luna to EML1, stockpile it there, and power our expansion to the Solar System from there. Remember that by mass, oxygen is much more in demand than fuel. Water comes from NEAs.

So you have a power lander that, with refueling and reoxidizering, could hop around if required, but might never fire its engines again. Future equipment would need to be placed by reusable landers (the first true "space ships"?) . The LOX plant might be the first mission for the reusable lander, but then again maybe it is more important to the overall effort to get that started and not wait for a fancy new lander.

Once you have placed industrial equipment like the power lander and LOX plant, you are looking at the first people arriving, with their primary mission being to stay alive, and the secondary mission being to get the equipment unstuck. The initial challenge would be making it thru the long night, but with sufficient power storage, that should not be overly dramatic.

One possibility for the long night is to heat up a pool of regolith to a molten temperature during the day, and both generate electricity from that heat at night and use the heat directly for the habitat atmosphere.

These first two missions would have the purpose of verifying that we can build walls and make oxygen. You would plan on running them autonomously and / or remotely, and get through a couple nights if possible before crew arrives. If it fails, it fails. Either way, you would have crew show up to get it unstuck as required, as their secondary mission.

Going forward, you would  expand those two key technologies. Food and water would arrive with the crew; some life science work could commence immediately, but you would NOT depend on lunar water or fresh local food for survival.

The ultimate goal would be to build a very very large habitat, fill it with full Earth normal air, strap on wings and fly around, and take a dip in the swimming pool afterwards. A place of abundance in the middle of magnificent desolation.

Online DistantTemple

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Re: Startup Moon Base Concepts
« Reply #39 on: 04/27/2018 11:02 pm »
Quote from: dean47
I would install a large module as soon as possible after the basic power, plumbing, ECLSS and living quarters were installed.  Something large enough to play low gravity basketball, put on low-gravity ballets, do acrobatic exhibitions, etc.  Those would be broadcast to earth on PPV television.  How much would you pay to see a trapeze act, basketball game, or gymnastics competition in 1/6 G?  (A revenue stream!)
Must ahve been said before... but I've not read it... Quidditch, from Harry Potter. Thats the ideal game for low g. Adapted a little...
« Last Edit: 04/27/2018 11:02 pm by DistantTemple »
We can always grow new new dendrites. Reach out and make connections and your world will burst with new insights. Then repose in consciousness.

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