Lunar mining just moonshine for now

[Chipstone306]

An interesting article I found in my local paper

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Metro/9005754.html

 

[n0mad23]

So to tease this out a bit:

Where should any 'speculative' mining attempts begin? And what should be sought after first?

My vote is for the Malapert Mountain area, and water ice should be sought for.

Then I say lets try to get a hold of some He3.

 

[Chipstone306]

So to tease this out a bit:

Where should any 'speculative' mining attempts begin? And what should be sought after first?

My vote is for the Malapert Mountain area, and water ice should be sought for.

Then I say lets try to get a hold of some He3.

I would say O2 and H2O first . HE3 is good when and if we ever develop fusion reactors

 

[silent_protagonist]

The problem with He3 is that it's essentially just another kind of oil. If I'm remembering the numbers correctly, we're likely to run out of it in a century or two, and then we'll be in the same pickle we're in now, albeit sans global warming.

I'm also fairly dubious about the prospects of mining lunar titanium, or similar industrial metals, profitably. It just costs too much to launch it off of the moon. Although, I suppose with a sufficiently large lunar infrastructure (such as extensive lunox production or a lunar space elevator, which is supposed to be doable with Kevlar or Spectra, rather than CNTs.), you might be able to get launch costs down enough to make it work. And of course I'm all for any excuse to build a moonbase.

 

[Chipstone306]

The problem with He3 is that it's essentially just another kind of oil. If I'm remembering the numbers correctly, we're likely to run out of it in a century or two, and then we'll be in the same pickle we're in now, albeit sans global warming.

But in that time we may have developed better renewable power resources Fusion is very very very clean if i remember correctly

 

[n0mad23]

Yes fusion is potentially very, very clean. He3 isn't exactly prolific on the Moon, but there's a lot more of it there than on Earth. This in itself seems to be motive to give it a whirl. Never know unless you try.

I'm thinking that rotovators are the way to go. Reusable, very little or no propellant needed either to maintain spin or velocity. Crude, sure. Primitive even, but look what David was able to accomplish against Goliath.

When the time seems right, I'm going to try to drum up some interest amongst the developers to see if we can't put together a tether transport network. Orbiter seems the best place to try it out. I'd be more than willing to do a lot of, if not all, the modeling work. But I'm not a programmer. I gave it up when C became Turbo ++.

A tether transport experiment in Orbiter is cheap and the likelihood of fatalities is reasonably low.

 

[Chipstone306]

In the mean time is there a payload of he3 for the delta glider three?

How much water do they think is available on the moon anyways?

 

[Andy44]

Well, some scientist think there may be quite a lot of water at the south pole, inside the deep craters where the sun don't shine.

There's scant evidence to support this; I think it may be wishfull thinking. Without an in situ water source, any lunar colony is going to have a tough time. Even R.A. Heinlein had to make up the discovery of underground water ice in order for his fictional moon colonies to work without being totally dependant on Earth.

 

[Chipstone306]

Thats what i figured..not much more than some scant traces of frost underground..thanks! isnt there an upcoming mission for the search for water on the moon or is that just for its composition?

 

[NukeET]

The problem with He3 is that it's essentially just another kind of oil. If I'm remembering the numbers correctly, we're likely to run out of it in a century or two, and then we'll be in the same pickle we're in now, albeit sans global warming.

I'm also fairly dubious about the prospects of mining lunar titanium, or similar industrial metals, profitably. It just costs too much to launch it off of the moon. Although, I suppose with a sufficiently large lunar infrastructure (such as extensive lunox production or a lunar space elevator, which is supposed to be doable with Kevlar or Spectra, rather than CNTs.), you might be able to get launch costs down enough to make it work. And of course I'm all for any excuse to build a moonbase.

Then I suppose the The High Frontier, written by Gerard K. O'Neill, was just a load of smoke blown up our collective ?

 

[n0mad23]

I was just laughing with a new friend at NASA about High Frontiers just last night. I found a directory on NASA back in the mid-90's (it was silly how easy it was to drop in to root directories back then) that had all the appendices of this work. Summer grad-school studies, etc. I had a 14.4k modem and it took me days to get all that stuff on my computer. All that data really made me want to get my hands on the actual book.

Then until this November, I never found an actual copy of the book.

I think O'Neil was a bit like Tim Leary. Big thinker, and a product of his generation. I hope I'm so wacked when I get that old. But a lot of it's poppycock.

For example, the Stanford torus will work, but a cylinder won't. Not unless you're willing to expend a whole lot of propellant stabilizing the thing, and it's going to take a lot. It wants to tumble end over end.

Terrestrial architecture just isn't going to work well in a spinning environment. For example, stairs will have to be unidirectional like escalators. If you think it through for a moment, you'll see why. Uh-huh - at best, moving up towards the axis life's going to start resembling an MC Escher drawing. The Coriolis effect would get wicked.

And really - vegetable gardens growing in pure oxygen? Hmm, maybe we should fill our air tanks with CO2.

Still, there's a lot of good stuff contained in that volume, and even in it's water damaged state, I probably would've spent 10 times the 25 cents I paid for it at the local library.


Now South Pole ice -

I thought the Clementine findings were the basis of that optimism for subsurface water ice in that region. I've read a couple of (granted highly optimistic) papers that think there might be more than just traces of other volatiles as well. The Aitkens Basin is a massive impact site, (nearly extending to the equator?) and some of those craters down by the Malapert Mountains haven't seen sun in what - billions of years?

Granted the deliberate crash (when was that?) didn't kick any water up, but if I remember it wasn't exactly on target either.

Oh man, I hope that there's a good supply there. Otherwise my novels are going to have about as much credibility in the short term as Jules Verne's Jouney to the Moon.

 

[NukeET]

What I wondered is if the concept of the mass accelerator (to economically launch "stuff" of the lunar surface) was FUBAR?

There is an addon for v050216, by Kulch, called the Lunar Mass Driver, BTW.

EDIT: n0mad23 what is up with your last post in this thread? Don't know if anyone else has problems with the text/background contrast ( or rather lack thereof). I'm seeing white on gray.

 

[Andy44]

Clementine's sensor data is the stuff people are pinning their hopes on. The fac tthat the impact didn't kick up water doesn't rule water out, but I have drank way too much koolaid in the past to start thinking there's actually water on the south pole until I see some hard evidence.

In my lifetime I have seen Mars and Venus proved to be basically hostile to life, as well as most bodies in the solar system.

I haven't given up all hope; there may very well be water on Luna, or life-sustaining conditions in Europa's seas, or a useful source of water on Ceres. Encaladus has real water, so it's not out of the question. I just know better than to get my hopes up. Show me the water.

Then I need to find a way to visit it myself, instead of watching other people...

 

[Prius]

Fusion power is a nice idea. It's potentially clean, cheap, and efficient. The big drawback though, other than the fact that there's only a limited supply, is that it isn't easily accessable. We have to go to the moon to a small area that can easily be monopolized by a company or nation. We fell in love with oil because we could find it absolutely everywhere, and with the new 80% efficiency solar panels, solar power has the potential to become our big energy source. Except the energy companies might just find reasons to avoid it since it's not easily monopolized.

 

[Andy44]

The bigest drawback of fusion is that, like lunar water, it's only theoretical. Show me a self-sustained fusion reaction and I'll take it seriously.

That's more koolaid I've been fed since I was a little kid. "Fusion is close. Right around the corner!" It's like the boy who cried wolf.

 

[n0mad23]

It's true - it all hinges on "hope" doesn't it? I'm not giving up on the water on the Moon just yet though. That said, even if there is I'm betting that there's going to be less than the most optimistic estimates.

If there is, there's certainly the problem of getting it both out of the ground and then to somewhere useful. The polar regions are not going to be conducive to a mass driver, which means that if that's going to be one of the platforms, it's going to have to be somewhere else. The ice will have to be transported there first.

Isn't there still some controversy as to whether the mass driver will even work? I thought there was some sort of problem with the magnetic switches in the original designs.

NukeET - I recently installed Kulch's Lunar Mass Driver and am please to report that it works on the current platform. It's very different that what I was expecting in terms of design. Oh, yes I messed up and instead of pressing "underline text" I did something to the color/background and couldn't figure out how to fix it. Sorry.

If there is ice to be mined in the South Pole region, the power supply could be solar panels set on the Malapert Mts (more than 20 days of daylight) and calcium metal wires could take the electricity down into the darkness.

The ice itself could be transported out with cispolar rotovators and either deposited directly at the mass driver site, or tossed out to stations in L2.

However, even if this scenario worked, I think O'Neil's right about viability here. For the enterprise to become viable at all, we'd need a thousand people in permanent bases before the venture would actually start paying for itself.

That my friends is even under the best case fantasies probably a VERY long way off in the future.

 

[Prius]

The bigest drawback of fusion is that, like lunar water, it's only theoretical. Show me a self-sustained fusion reaction and I'll take it seriously.

That's more koolaid I've been fed since I was a little kid. "Fusion is close. Right around the corner!" It's like the boy who cried wolf.

Okay, just go outside at about noon, and look straight up. There's a self-sustained fusion reaction.

 

[Andy44]

Okay, just go outside at about noon, and look straight up. There's a self-sustained fusion reaction.

Sure. We know fusion exists, we just can't scale it down. When you can do it, let me know. I'll invest most of my savings in it.

I never said fusion is fictional, merely that self-sustained fusion power reactors are only theoretical at this point. It's certainly no sure thing, not enough to plan a real life Moon colony project around.

 

[Chipstone306]

If you ask me the only purpose i see the moon serving is as a training ground for a future mars mission.(and maybe another starbucks location) Too desolate and limited resources that are critical for human development. When people talk about a successful human colony of at least 1000 people I see a drain on space funding. Unless we can see significant rreturns on a moon base or at least some scientific purpose ( maybe 10 people max) I do not see the moon being nothing more than a 7 day vacation for astronauts

 

[thomasantony]

Actually, it doesn't serve much purpose in that way as a stepping stone to Mars.

In fact it takes more dV to go to moon, land on it .. and then launch to mars again .. than for a direct trip to Mars.

Also Its damn too close to Earth to be like a practice mission. A trip to a Lagrangian point or an NEO is more like a Mars mission.


~
Thomas