Golden Spike announce Phase A for commercial lunar landing missions

[Verio Fryar]

Golden Spike working with Draper. Wrote an article as I know some Draper guys and they are rather clever chaps!

Having "clever chaps" in this early phase of any project is very important. I hope they help to define a really good mission concept.

[Robert Thompson]

Now there's no issue posting this pdf given to those who contributed to the GS indiegogo.

[Phil Stooke]

That PDF gave contributors a chance to choose their preferred site from the list provided.  If I recall correctly, Aristarchus was the winner.  And you will notice that included one of the sites I said were not being considered today - Davy.  This exercise was not serious site planning, just a bit of fun.

Why did Davy fall out of favour?  In the Apollo days the crater chain "Catena Davy" was thought to be volcanic.  Now most people think it's the product of a fragmented impactor, something broken up by a very close Earth flyby which then hit the Moon as a string of closely-spaced fragments (Like Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter).  So a far less interesting site geologically. 

Phil

[simonbp]

Aristarcus, on the other hand, is a large volcanic province with a diversity of surface compositions. If you are actually interested in understanding the history of Moon, it would be the best place to build a lunar base. Plus, it's on the nearside and not too high latitude, so much more practical than the poles.

[Ben the Space Brit]

@simonbp,

Not particularly significant, but Arthur C Clarke suggested in 2061 - Odyssey Three that Aristacus was the best place for a base too. He seemed to think it was also a good place to depot water and manufactured propellent.

[Danderman]

As always, most of us would prefer that this thread about the progress of a commercial lunar venture focus on the venture, and not your personal design for a lunar base, or where that venture should operate, or how their investors should spend their opinion.

News goes here. Discussions about your opinions about the news should go in a different thread.

[JohnFornaro]

Not much news to report then.  Nothing happening here, move along, move along.

Ben:  About Aristarchus:  Where does the water come from?

General question:  What would be the best thread to continue a discussion of the merits of the GX proposal along with the merits of the chosen site?

Totally excellent phraseology: "spend their opinion".

[Danderman]

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=33918.0

can be used for discussions, and I will ask the Moderator to move off-topic messages over there.

Suggestions for renaming the thread are welcome, but please use the new thread for your opinions, and this thread for updates and news.

Sometimes I am out on the road with limited bandwidth, and have to wait a few minutes for a page to load. When I see a new message in an update thread, wait five minutes for the page to load, and then see the new message is about someone's idea of the best color paint job for the GS lander, that is not fun.

[JohnFornaro]

All righty then.  Simon's, Ben's, and my comments above reposted on that thread

[JohnFornaro]

Edit 01-30-14: Sheesh.  I thought I had repasted this over to that other thread.

[simonbp]

Pyroclastic material, probably. Or as Jack Schmitt called it, "Orange Soil!"

The only lunar material returned by Apollo that had any traces of hydrated minerals was pyroclastic glass beads (usually classed by color, orange, yellow, and green). Apollo 17 at Taurus-Littrow found by far the most concentrated deposit (below), but there were traces at all the landing sites (because impacts create a lot of horizontal mixing).

If melted with a solar concentrator, the beads would give up <1% of their mass as water. It's literally getting blood from stone, but the orange stones have somewhat more blood in them. Aristarcus appears to have a lot of this material from orbital spectroscopy. A landing to test this would be quite useful.

[QuantumG]

Figuratively.

[simonbp]

For those with journal access, here's a paper I co-authored a few years ago about doing this for oxygen ISRU on the pyroclastics in Schrodinger Basin (which is also an interesting place for other reasons):

http://specialpapers.gsapubs.org/content/483/533.abstract

[Danderman]

Can you please take general discussions of lunar soil over to the discussion thread? This thread is for updates about Golden Spike.

 

[JohnFornaro]

Can you please take general discussions of lunar soil over to the discussion thread? This thread is for updates about Golden Spike.

 

Sure.  But fix your link here!

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=30549.0

can be used for discussions, and I will ask the Moderator to move off-topic messages over there.

[Danderman]

Can you please take general discussions of lunar soil over to the discussion thread? This thread is for updates about Golden Spike.

 

Sure.  But fix your link here!

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=33918.0

can be used for discussions, and I will ask the Moderator to move off-topic messages over there.

Fixed.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=33918.0

[dcporter]

Figuratively.

Like a quarter as figuratively as usual though. The stone is an actual stone, and the blood coming out is an actual liquid.

[Blackstar]

Pyroclastic material, probably. Or as Jack Schmitt called it, "Orange Soil!"

The only lunar material returned by Apollo that had any traces of hydrated minerals was pyroclastic glass beads (usually classed by color, orange, yellow, and green). Apollo 17 at Taurus-Littrow found by far the most concentrated deposit (below), but there were traces at all the landing sites (because impacts create a lot of horizontal mixing).

If melted with a solar concentrator, the beads would give up <1% of their mass as water. It's literally getting blood from stone, but the orange stones have somewhat more blood in them. Aristarcus appears to have a lot of this material from orbital spectroscopy. A landing to test this would be quite useful.

I went to a talk by Harrison Schmitt several years ago and he showed a photo of the orange soil and then explained that almost every reproduction of the photo gets it wrong. Something is off about the color correction. I believe he said that the actual color was almost the same as that used for traffic cones--in other words, a bright orange. (There's a term like "international safety orange" that he might have used.) Anyway, the point is that it always looks orangish-brown in photos, and Schmitt said that it was actually much more vivid.

[Robert Thompson]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/01/30/golden-spike-still-aims-for-human-lunar-surface-expeditions-by-decades-end/
"Our Golden Spike vehicles will fly the flight in an automated manner, controlled from mission control, like a typical robotic space mission. In conducting missions that way, we don’t have to fly pilots; we can fly scientists, researchers, entertainers, educators, people involved in media and public outreach. In this day and age we can get a safer system by automation."
 

[docmordrid]

"Welcome to Westworld, where nothing can go wrong...go wrong...go wrong.... "