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Why getting back to the moon is so damn hard
- rwmj 8y agoI always think it might have turned out better if the US hadn't tried to land a man on the moon. Instead if the goal had been to place a space station in permanent orbit around the moon. The USSR would have also been capable of this (even using Soyuz technology), leading to a permanent manned presence from both sides, and inevitable incremental development of the technology to keep people there.
- Apocryphon 8y agoAnd raising demand for building a space elevator, making further development even easier!
- smileysteve 8y agoWhy would that have caused more technology development than Skylab, Mir, or ISS?
- jandrese 8y agoWhat's the use of a lunar orbiting space station though? What science can you do in orbit of the moon that you can't do in orbit of the Earth? Building a space station in Low Earth Orbit nearly killed NASA's budget for 20 years. Lofting all of that mass to lunar orbit would have added considerably to the cost. At least with the landers we got to bring back some regolith.
- rwmj 8y agoIt doesn't need a use when two superpowers are using it as a proxy for war. What "use" did the Space Race have? > Lofting all of that mass to lunar orbit would have added considerably to the cost. Sure, but when you have to do it to keep up with a Space Race, you have 5% of your country's output being used to apply brains to the problem.
- Animats 8y agoBecause $20 million is about 0.05% of what Apollo cost. The rocket equation still applies. You still need a huge booster, and prices haven't improved all that much.
- eip 8y agoSurviving outside the Van Allen belt would require your spaceship to have 4ft thick lead walls. I assume that is a big part of it.
- ghosterrific 8y agoThis. We never went to moon. Or if we did we: - still faked a bunch of footage. - it was not Aldrin, Armstrong, etc that went (but others who did not make it back)
- 24gttghh 8y agoThis is mostly incorrect. The Van Allen belt is not some protective shield from radiation, it is an area of concentrated radiation. There is radiation exposure once you exit the sphere of Earth's magnetic field, but I believe it is lower energy than the belt's themselves.
- eip 8y ago>it is lower energy than the belt's themselves Doesn't mean you can survive in it. A dental x-ray is probably lower energy than the belts too but if you sit in front of one for 6 hours you will likely regret it.
- CryoLogic 8y agoThese are all rockets. What happened to attempts and more permanent space launch fixtures like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator I am under the impression many other methods of getting into space have been hypothesized but never attempted.
- kentm 8y agoAt least for the space elevator, we do not have the necessary materials to create it. There's been some hypotheses that carbon nanotubes could have the required strength, but we cannot produce strands long enough.
- athenot 8y agoAnd there are other challenges, including: - Wind: variable speed & direction, can be high. - Ionosphere charges: the sapce elevator would essentially be a giant ground rod in the ionosphere… that might attract a few bolts of lightning.
- Retric 8y agoYou don't need to attach a space elevator to the ground. Keeping one end of the tether at 100,000 feet still makes access to space cheap without many of the security issues of a ground based tether.
- jrockway 8y agoInteresting. How do you get stuff to 100,000 feet? I'm imagining some sort of cargo helicopter but that is probably not at all the right idea.
- Sohcahtoa82 8y agoWe used a balloon to lift Felix Baumgartner 135,000 feet for his record jump [1]. Could this be scaled up for larger payloads? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner
- gizmodo59 8y agoIs there any reason why I cannot view this in In-Cognito/In-Private mode?
- tomxor 8y ago> Is there any reason why I cannot view this in In-Cognito/In-Private mode? They want to track you to count articles you have read: > Visitors are allowed 3 free articles per month (without a subscription), and private browsing prevents us from counting how many stories you've read. We hope you understand, and consider subscribing for unlimited online access. However you can easily defeat this by: A) Using a different browser session and just clearing it once you read 3 (they don't appear to be using advanced tracking). B) The article is still actually sent, just remove the div in the body element with class "incognito-wall", then click on the body element and remove the "overflow: hidden" style.
- tjoff 8y agoC) Don't bother visit that site at all. I pretty much always surf incognito. Everything I know about that site is that they refuse to serve me. Because of it I don't have the slightest interest to read anything from that site.
- sunseb 8y agoWhat if we never went to the moon the first in the first place? I am joking of course, but I think it's weird we went to the moon in 1969 and in 2018 we can't do that anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
- rndmize 8y agoWhat part of this is "can't"? No one wants to spend the money, end of story.
- sunseb 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
- kentm 8y agoSorry, can you elaborate on the point you are trying to make?
- perl4ever 8y agoPeople may think of, say, the Hubble space telescope as being a big deal and costing a lot, but when you realize there were lots of similar ones, only they were classified spy satellites, it puts into perspective how small NASA's budget is.
- uncleamerica 8y agoWe never went to the moon, that's why it's so hard to get back!
- ourmandave 8y agoThe first time we went was motivated (and funded) by the Cold War. Now someone has to come up with a viable business model. I'm not smart enough to come up with one. Space tourism for the super rich?
- Cobord 8y agoI liked the idea of helium mining. Even if we couldn't ship it back, it could be used remotely for the applications that require liquid helium cooling. We're running out of helium, and sometimes liquid nitrogen doesn't cut it.
- SamUK96 8y agoAs a somewhat partial astrophysicist, remembering the increasing scarcity of helium on Earth is always amusing. It's the second most abundant element in the universe, after all. It's just that when you are near a star, light elements are easily heated and move away quickly towards the oort cloud and interstellar space.
- Ronnie_boy556 8y agoAll it takes is someone to fund it..
- eesmith 8y ago"the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo program would cost about $1.16 billion" The US military budget is over $500 billion per year. Cut 10% of the military spending and we could send a few missions to the Moon each year.