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The purpose of being on the moon is having it as a massive manufacturing place for building things to move outward in the solar system. Lifting things out of th
by olivaw_daneel 9y ago
The purpose of being on the moon is having it as a massive manufacturing place for building things to move outward in the solar system. Lifting things out of the earth's gravity well is just too expensive.
The cost of shipping factories (and many raw materials) in pieces from the Earth to the Moon and then assembling them there should certainly outweigh just building and launching from Earth, especially as private companies perfect reusable rockets.
I do not see the challenges of building a habitat on the moon that much different from Mars. You have (essentially) zero atmosphere, lots of radiation, the same problems with building a pressure dome, etc.
Beyond just the gravity difference and the scarcity of any resources for in-situ utilization on the Moon, temperatures will vary from <-100 degrees at night to > 100 degrees (celcius) during the day. This is a vastly different regime than Mars, which has a much more temperate day-night gradient.
Landing men on Mars is certainly romantic, but it will be so expensive and time consuming that it cannot have much practical value.
It will be both expensive and time-consuming, but just imagine the science a few geologists could do on Mars, and what they will reveal about not just the red planet but also about our own.
- WalterBright 9y ago> scarcity of any resources All we know about that is from a few bags of rocks. Nobody knows what the real situation is there, not even close. It might be like the proverbial caveman freezing to death sitting on a coal deposit.
- gus_massa 9y agoThere are also a lot of information get by various type of spectrometers in satellites. For example, you can read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Prospector#Scientific_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Prospector#Scientific_ex... > The Lunar Prospector GRS produced the first global measurements of gamma-ray spectra from the lunar surface, from which are derived the first "direct" measurements of the chemical composition for the entire lunar surface. This data effectively maps the distribution of various important elements across the Moon. For example, the Lunar Prospector GRS has identified several regions with high iron concentrations.
- WalterBright 9y agoThat says nothing at all about what is under the topsoil.
- WalterBright 9y ago> shipping factories The idea is to ship the factories that build the factories that build the factories that build the factories that can build large ships in large quantities.
- olivaw_daneel 9y agoIf only life were an RTS game :) If we are talking about taking advantage of resources not available on Earth, the untold riches of the Asteroid Belt are eminently more accessible from Mars.
- WalterBright 9y agoAsteroids present other major difficulties, such as being much, much farther away, and having no gravity.
- wiz21c 9y agoWhat resources are we missing on earth ? I mean resources that we miss because they're in too low quantities for useful applications (not resources that are scarce and useless or resources whose scarcity is the result of politics)
- airza 9y agoI'm not sure how true that is, gravity wells being what they are
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]