Bob Zubrin is poo pooing the LCROSS lunar water findings:
While the results obtained from the LCROSS mission are of some scientific interest, it needs to be understood that the amount of water discovered was extremely small. The 30 m crater ejected by the probe contained 10 million kilograms of regolith. Within this ejecta, an estimated 100 kg of water was detected. That represents a proportion of 10 parts per million, which is a lower water concentration than that found in the soil of the driest deserts of the Earth. In contrast, we have found continent sized regions on Mars, which are 600,000 parts per million, or 60% water by weight.
…For the coming age of space exploration, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland in the previous age of maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, and Europeans reached it first, but it was too barren to sustain substantial permanent settlement. In contrast, North America was a place where a new branch of human civilization could be born. The Moon is a barren island in the ocean of space; Mars is a New World. Mars is where the challenge is, it is where the science is, it is where the future is. That is why Mars should be our goal.
Let’s ignore the fact that NASA disagrees that the moon is drier than earth’s driest deserts, in light of the latest findings. As Michael Turner notes in comments, the problem with that analogy is that there is a huge difference in travel time and expense between the moon and Mars, whereas they were essentially equivalent between Greenland and the rest of North America, in terms of the technology required to get there.
Is there more water, easier to process on Mars than on the moon? Sure, as long as you’re on Mars. Therein lies the rub. This sort of reminds me of the old joke about the guy searching for his car keys in the street at night. Someone walks up and asks if he can help. “Where did you lose them?” “A couple blocks over that way.” “Well, why are you looking here?” “There’s better light.” I say sort of, because it’s not clear what are the keys and what is the light in this analogy.
Anyway, if we can use lunar water to facilitate trips to Mars, isn’t that a desirable goal? Not to Bob, who wants to go Right Now, which would be fine if he were doing it with his own money. He understandably fears that lunar activities will prove a diversion from The One True Goal, in both money and time, as ISS has. But whether or not that would be the case is a function of the reason for the lunar base. If its focus is on utilizing resources (and indeed, if it has a focus, which iSS never did, other than as a jobs program for NASA and later the Russians), there is no need for it to be a diversion — it could in fact be a major stepping stone to not just Mars but the entire solar system. On the other hand, the way that NASA currently plans to get back to the moon (the “Program of Record”) would almost certainly bear out Bob’s worst fears. But the argument shouldn’t be about destinational priorities; it should be about the most cost-effective means of developing the capability to affordably go wherever we want.
I would support Rick Tumlinson’s Near Frontier / Far Frontier paradigm.
NASA simply lacks the corporate culture to exploit lunar resources in an efficient manner. Therefore (IMHO) President Obama should encourage and facilitate the global private sector to undertake the exploitation of those assets.
Send mobile NASA robotic precursors to the lunar South Pole as soon as possible. IMHO, NASA is ready and capable of doing that, right now.
But, we need to create non-NASA entity to manage and exploit those resources going forward. NASA would just screw it up.
How to do this? Buzz Aldrin was on target, here. Again IMHO.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/a-different-kind-of-moon_b_317786.html
Point NASA at Flexible Path, NEOS, Phobos and Mars and keep Shelby and Giffords happy with the Far Frontier.
Create an NGO “development authority” to facilitate private sector claims to various South Pole destinations on the Near Frontier.
Auction the rights to exploit certain craters and use the revenue to build and deploy an EML-1 transfer depot and a reusable lunar lander.
Relax ITAR and allow NASA lunar scientists to participate with global private interests.
Is there more water, easier to process on Mars than on the moon? Sure, as long as you’re on Mars.
Gordon Woodcock put it most succinctly on this subject. Sure we can go to Mars, it only costs 10x what going to the Moon costs.
I don’t see the government being very enthusiastic about writing that 10x check much less the 1x check.
PS — This development authority would clearly lack the ability to auction legal “ownership” of any lunar location.
But they could auction access to logistical support and support only one player per location.
If Company A is the winning bidder for Shackleton and Company B wins the bid for Faustini and Company A later poaches into Faustini, the development authority simply turns off Company A’s logistical pipeline.
No property rights regime needed.
I’ve never met Zubrin so all I have to go on are his books. Having said that, I think he’s making more of a long-term point about settlement.
I was okay with Zubrin when he first preached Mars Direct, which I thought had some merit, but he seems less than truthful about anything that interferes with his Mars vision. He also seems to think that only governments can get us there.
Significant and retrievable quantities of water on the Moon are a big deal and may be a game changer as far as our next destination goes. Certainly, if the private sector masters access to orbit, I expect it will see much more commercial opportunity on the Moon than on Mars.
I say all that, secretly hoping to see men on Mars (and elsewhere) in my lifetime. But there’s a better way that shouting down all the opposition for the sole purpose of getting government funding. In a sane world of space exploration, we would be going to both destinations. . .and to others.
A member of the Mars Society myself, I think that near space infrastructure and lunar exploitation is probably a sine qua non for Mars exploring and settling. I just don’t get Zubrin’s rants about these things.
To use the historical examples of which he is fond, would pooh-poohing the value of the Azores make the discovery of the New World more likely?
Local water helps (perhaps greatly), but it’s pretty reasonable to think that we would go back to the Moon, regardless. And eventually to Mars, where questions of water have been more about what might already be living there.
If H2O were all that mattered, we’d be going straight for Europa or the rings of Saturn…
I’ve little patience with those who talk about ‘refueling’ from Lunar water, though. While possibly adequate for life support (with pretty nearly closed-loop recycling), I doubt the concentrations are great enough to warrant blowing it into vacuum as rocket exhaust. Oxygen at least, for breathing and oxidizer, can be had in virtually unlimited quantities from the Lunar regolith, if we really want it.
The Moon is a more attractive target due to geography, to begin with, and gets more attractive with accessible water. Mars remains a major and viable destination, but without a major commitment, it bears the distinct possibility of a once-and-done attempt. Sustained and widespread exploitation and colonization of space is what we should be after.
Zubrin is a bright man, but his “Mars and nothing else” strategy is going to leave him heart sick.
While I do think we may eventually settle Mars, I highly doubt ANY nation on Earth is willing to send people there, especially with the global depression now upon us.
The Moon has been tried and tested, and most nations will want to try establishing a presence there first to test whether a colony can remain independent from Earth resources (and if not, then for how long could a crew go without resupplies from Earth).
Archeologists believe that Europeans were able to live on Greenland for nearly 400 years, before they stripped the soil bare and died off. The contributing factors were the environmental damage they inflicted on the fragile soil – which would tend to support Zubrin’s analogy – and the collapse of the Danish/Norwegian empire that supported them with supplies from Europe – which would tend to refute it.
But really, the whole analogy is bunk because Greenland of AD 1000 was considerably further in terms of human hardship than Virginia or the Caribbean of AD 1600. Maritime technology was simply not comparable, and that maritime technology was developed in the 1300s and 1400s by the mainland European nations’ incremental voyages of discovery around the West coast of Africa. Colonies like Roanoke tell us that Europeans left alone in Virginia were no better off than Europeans left alone in Greenland. The difference in both cases between failure and success was a consistent and relatively dependable connection to the Old World.
Archeologists believe that Europeans were able to live on Greenland for nearly 400 years, before they stripped the soil bare and died off. The contributing factors were the environmental damage they inflicted on the fragile soil – which would tend to support Zubrin’s analogy – and the collapse of the Danish/Norwegian empire that supported them with supplies from Europe – which would tend to refute it.
That was one theory, that was shot down recently by a Danish study of the soil on a farm in Greenland that showed a continual improvement in quality over 400 years then bam, sand. A fairly quick erosion of the climate along with the readvance of local glaciers was the culprit.
Aww. Dennis beat me to it. From what I have read, the millennia-long climate change cycle kicked in about 1300AD, causing a buildup of of the glaciers that are now retreating again. It was not called “Greenland” to discourage people from going to “Iceland”, but because it was actually green at the time.
Once you set up shop on the Moon there’s all kinds of nifty things you can do. With a 1/6th g gravity well launching probes from the Moon will be a lot easier than from Earth and solar storms would a lot easier to ride out under 10′ of lunar regolith than 1″ of aluminum, as they currently have to on the ISS. Roll out a couple of miles of solar panels on the Moon, use the resulting electricity to process said regolith into metals, oxygen, and hydrogen, and it doesn’t matter if they find free water there or not.
What I’m looking forward to is building a couple of really *big* telescopes on the back side of the Moon and near the poles, where they can sit in the dark with almost zero atmosphere for weeks at a time. Those would put Hubble to shame.
Assuming copious amounts of energy from nuclear power on the moon (perhaps an array of small, sealed, zero-maintenance reactors like the promised Toshiba 4S or Hyperion Power Module) might it be remotely economical to generate hydrogen fuel and/or oxidiser from the water for suborbital refuelling/reoxidising? I’m sure it would require vast amounts of energy to wring water from a desert, but might it actually be less profligate than hauling the equivalent from Earth’s surface?
Two points:
1. If you are going to anywhere (from Earth) it wouldn’t make sense to land on the Moon even if fuel was already in tanks ready to be transferred.
2. If you are talking about the Moon or Mars being the starting point; The Moon has the advantage of a lower gravity and it’s easier to bring things you need to build infrastructure from the Earth. However, ISRU is going to be the driving force in how fast that infrastructure is going to come online. Mars wins.
Forget nuclear power. You have the biggest g-d-mn fusion reactor in the solar system beaming it to your lunar doorstep for free, at the rate of 1720 W/m^2. You also have millions of acres of aireless, gently undulating/fairly flat land to roll your solar panels out across. And no NIMBY’s for 300,000 kilometers to complain. The question isn’t what you can make of all that on the Moon but what you CAN’T make. The Moon can’t deliver the nubile, scantily clad Moon-Maidens promised in the ‘1940s pulp SF magazines. You’ll have to provide your own. But that’s about it.
“If you are going to anywhere (from Earth) it wouldn’t make sense to land on the Moon even if fuel was already in tanks ready to be transferred.”
Who’s talking about landing? Airless, barren planetoid. Low gravity. Unlimited power from PV or Solar thermal arrays. Sling the fuel tanks out to L5 with a mass driver. Shoot a USS Enterprise ready-to-assemble kit into space if you like. You can do that from Mars, too, but the Moon is a lot closer. I can see the human race leapfrogging from the Moon to Mars to Jupiter and then the outer planets this way. It doesn’t really make sense to skip the Moon because it’s right there in our backyard.
If you are going to anywhere (from Earth) it wouldn’t make sense to land on the Moon even if fuel was already in tanks ready to be transferred.
No one has proposed landing on the moon on the way to Mars. I have no idea where this nonsense comes from.
No one has proposed landing on the moon on the way to Mars. I have no idea where this nonsense comes from.
Well…they did it in that episode of The Time Tunnel…you’re right; it’s nonsense.
> No one has proposed landing on the moon on
> the way to Mars. I have no idea where this
> nonsense comes from.
>
It comes from Zubrin. And of course it’s a straw man. When I asked him about lunar-LOX tankers ascending to EM L-1 to rendezvous with craft coming up from Earth, he just quickly started waving his hand and essentially saying if you can do it, great, but I’m not buying it.
Of course he’s free to doubt whatever he chooses. But if he wished to make an honest argument, he would have criticized the lunar tanker scenario to start with rather than bringing up an idea trivially easy to disprove.
It comes from Zubrin. And of course it’s a straw man. When I asked him about lunar-LOX tankers ascending to EM L-1 to rendezvous with craft coming up from Earth, he just quickly started waving his hand and essentially saying if you can do it, great, but I’m not buying it.
You want to think a little off the wall about that. Fer example the neat part about a particle beam accelerator is it doesn’t really care what kind of particle it accelerates. So let’s take a tank of, say, oxygen, heat it into a plasma, give it a + charge, and squirt it through a particle accelerator straight up from the lunar surface. At the terminus point orbits a large negatively-charged plate so that when the positively-charged O atoms strike it these “stick” and can be collected and compressed into LOX. On Earth this would be a stupid idea because the particles would cool and lose their charge to the air within a few centimeters of the exit nozzle then scatter but the Moon is in a near-perfect vacuum so it might just work. Your solar power farms (see above) give you all the power needed to do this and the method could be adapted to a number of different materials besides O2. Scattering and diffusion would reduce the efficiency but we’ve solved that with Masers, haven’t we?