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There are so many things to do with Moon exploration besides building moon landers. People like Bezos just need to choose - you don't even need a particular ima

by avmich 5y ago

There are so many things to do with Moon exploration besides building moon landers. People like Bezos just need to choose - you don't even need a particular imagination. For example, if we're to progress forward from results of Apollo, we'll need Moon surface infrastructure. That's landing sites - with radio beacons, optical illumination and transport capabilities for payloads. We'll need Moon houses - places to live on the Moon for some longer time, like e.g. half a year in a row - and for that we'll need pressurized units, radiation protection, spacesuits, storage for aforementioned payloads... Is it possible, for example, to send something - maybe small - from Earth to Moon really fast - preferably faster than 2 days - if we need? Like, a critical device or a small amount of particular material? Starship isn't going to to that, not alone at least. How about really bulky units - do we need to assemble them on LEO or Moon surface? Caterpillar once wondered which equipment would be needed on the Moon - do we need raise those questions again? Space Studies Institute, by late O'Neill, who inspired Bezos, did some research into mass drivers ( http://ssi.org/category/mass-drivers/ http://ssi.org/category/mass-drivers/ ) - can BO help deploy something like that on the surface of the Moon? We don't need landers alone. We'll soon need a whole range of equipment for Moon exploration, there will be more and other needs, BO needs to participate.

philwelch 5y ago
As you alluded to, Bezos was inspired by O'Neill. The main building on the Blue Origin campus is named after him. The explicit mission of Blue Origin is to help achieve O'Neill's vision. And Jeff is a reasonably smart person. So it's probably more instructive to think about how he reached the conclusions he's reached. Don't assume that Blue Origin isn't working on something just because you haven't heard of it yet. The Blue Moon lander design seemingly came out of nowhere at the specific point in time that Blue wanted to announce it and bid for HLS. You could infer that they were working on the concept for some time before that. (As a point of disclaimer, I worked at Blue Origin on a six month contract last year, and I am unable to confirm or deny any further inferences you may make from this publicly available information.) It's easy to imagine the end goal of millions of people living and working in space. If millions of people are already living and working in space, you can build stuff, in space, out of space rocks and parts of the Moon pretty easily. The difficult question is how to bootstrap that process in a commercially viable way. O'Neill thought that our need for clean energy would force us to resort to building massive solar power receivers in space and beaming the energy down to earth using microwaves. That hasn't panned out, at least not yet. Others thought that there would be opportunities to manufacture semiconductors or drugs in zero gravity. Neill Blomkamp made a film about the concept that eventually, rich people would just start building space habitats as the ultimate gated communities, and then life on Earth would really suck; as a big fan of the concept of space colonization, I sort of resent him for that now, though I appreciate the allegory. Not even Jeff Bezos could afford to get an entire Stanford torus built even if he wanted to, and he probably wouldn't make the money back by selling real estate on it either. The trick is to find some way to generate more money that you can reinvest back into the system while you're building out the path to the ultimate goal. Without a solid business case, you're left with the rationale of: 1. You need space infrastructure to build space infrastructure. 2. Infrastructure investments take a long time to pay off. 3. The government usually pays for infrastructure for these very reasons. 4. Let's get the government to pay for space infrastructure. That conclusion has two corollaries: 1. The government is your customer. Do what makes the government, as a customer, happy. If this means acting like a big, old-fashioned defense contractor, oh well--that's something I'm critical of too, but it's a reasonable thing to try. 2. You can't sell the government anything it doesn't want to buy. The government wants to buy a moon lander. They aren't necessarily stupid; you kind of need the moon lander before you build out any other moon infrastructure. But the moon lander is the opportunity on the table right now. If the government buys the moon lander from SpaceX and then decides that they want to buy a mass driver or a moon Quonset hut or a moon backhoe, maybe Blue Origin will pursue those opportunities and it'll work out for them.

by avmich 5y ago

philwelch 5y ago

As you alluded to, Bezos was inspired by O'Neill. The main building on the Blue Origin campus is named after him. The explicit mission of Blue Origin is to help achieve O'Neill's vision. And Jeff is a reasonably smart person. So it's probably more instructive to think about how he reached the conclusions he's reached. Don't assume that Blue Origin isn't working on something just because you haven't heard of it yet. The Blue Moon lander design seemingly came out of nowhere at the specific point in time that Blue wanted to announce it and bid for HLS. You could infer that they were working on the concept for some time before that. (As a point of disclaimer, I worked at Blue Origin on a six month contract last year, and I am unable to confirm or deny any further inferences you may make from this publicly available information.) It's easy to imagine the end goal of millions of people living and working in space. If millions of people are already living and working in space, you can build stuff, in space, out of space rocks and parts of the Moon pretty easily. The difficult question is how to bootstrap that process in a commercially viable way. O'Neill thought that our need for clean energy would force us to resort to building massive solar power receivers in space and beaming the energy down to earth using microwaves. That hasn't panned out, at least not yet. Others thought that there would be opportunities to manufacture semiconductors or drugs in zero gravity. Neill Blomkamp made a film about the concept that eventually, rich people would just start building space habitats as the ultimate gated communities, and then life on Earth would really suck; as a big fan of the concept of space colonization, I sort of resent him for that now, though I appreciate the allegory. Not even Jeff Bezos could afford to get an entire Stanford torus built even if he wanted to, and he probably wouldn't make the money back by selling real estate on it either. The trick is to find some way to generate more money that you can reinvest back into the system while you're building out the path to the ultimate goal. Without a solid business case, you're left with the rationale of: 1. You need space infrastructure to build space infrastructure. 2. Infrastructure investments take a long time to pay off. 3. The government usually pays for infrastructure for these very reasons. 4. Let's get the government to pay for space infrastructure. That conclusion has two corollaries: 1. The government is your customer. Do what makes the government, as a customer, happy. If this means acting like a big, old-fashioned defense contractor, oh well--that's something I'm critical of too, but it's a reasonable thing to try. 2. You can't sell the government anything it doesn't want to buy. The government wants to buy a moon lander. They aren't necessarily stupid; you kind of need the moon lander before you build out any other moon infrastructure. But the moon lander is the opportunity on the table right now. If the government buys the moon lander from SpaceX and then decides that they want to buy a mass driver or a moon Quonset hut or a moon backhoe, maybe Blue Origin will pursue those opportunities and it'll work out for them.