Kennedy asked the question forty-eight years ago. Dennis Wingo, Paul Spudis and Gordon Woodcock answer it.
56 thoughts on “Why The Moon?”
Comments are closed.
Kennedy asked the question forty-eight years ago. Dennis Wingo, Paul Spudis and Gordon Woodcock answer it.
Comments are closed.
Ed
With your propensity to remember things that I said that never happened, I will just leave you to your own fertile memory.
Back in the reality based world, the DCX is an example of a low cost lander. With the RL-10’s that it had and bigger fuel tanks it would have done the job quite well. That puts a basement of about $100-$200 million on the development of a cargo lander which is what I was talking about.
Back in the reality based world, the DCX is an example of a low cost lander. With the RL-10’s that it had and bigger fuel tanks it would have done the job quite well.
That puts a basement of about $100-$200 million on the development of a cargo lander which is what I was talking about.
DC-X was built and flown on Earth, Dennis, even though Wingo, Spudis, and Woodcock claim that is “futile.” And it cost a lot less than $100-200 million.
Which is irrelevant because “the NASA Altair lander” is not DC-X.
The NASA Altair lander will cost what the NASA Altair lander costs, not what DC-X cost.
If you think Marshall can build Altair for $100-200 million, great. Have you told Robert Lightfoot that? Does he agree with you? Has he agreed to cut the Altair budget request by 98-99%?
I know that’s not going to happen, and you know it’s not going to happen, too, Dennis. NASA is not going to build any manned vehicle that does not cost billions of dollars.
Remember that $2 billion robotic lander Marshall was working on? You still won’t answer my question about what happened to that project. If Marshall couldn’t build that lander for $2 billion, why should I believe it can build the Altair lander for $100-200 million?
Since when did you consider NASA a reliable source on the difficulty of doing something?
Since when do you expect NASA to complete a manned space project for less than its initial budget request?
Has that ever happened?
In a sane world, yes. But I can just imagine the battles we’ll go through to convince people that it’s safe to launch enriched uranium as a payload to space.
The russians have been doing it for a long time. And the alpha activity of enriched uranium (even highly enriched) is orders of magnitude lower than that of 238Pu, which has been launched into space by the US for decades.
But I agree, in the absence of any real benefit to having it in space, overcoming even the slightest illusory objection will be difficult. This is more a testimony to the absence of benefit than to the actual risk.
The russians have been doing it for a long time.
They just shoot the protesters…
“Matching nuclear rockets built and placed unfueled in lunar orbit by chemical rockets with nuclear fuels from the Moon would open up the solar system and reduce travel time to Mars to weeks instead of months. One more reason the moon is first.”
When you start with uranium ores of uncertain (at this time) concentration, then go to the trouble of mining it if it looks at all worthwhile, then create the means to enrich it up to the level needed for nuclear thermal rockets, then get your (presumably hydrogen) reaction mass from…somewhere,* to service the limited (even in the most optimistic scenario) number of fission NTRs that would use it, might it not be cheaper to develop reliable RLVs (which you’ll need anyway) to launch cold but fueled reactors from Earth (where mining and enrichment infrastructure already exists), instead?
(* If there’s signifigant ice at the poles, it’s likely to be more valuable for life support purposes [and the less ice there is, the more true that will be] and perhaps some manufacturing applications where it can be efficiently recycled, rather than to be broken into LH2 and LOX for chemical propulsion or NTR reaction mass. However, I believe an argument *could* be made for O2 extraction from the Lunar regolith, to be launched to depots at the Lagrange points or geostationary orbit for chemical rocket refueling.)
Note that this just seems intuitive to me, I admit to not being able to run some actual numbers. I welcome anyone with a better supported point of view…