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Apparently McMurdo Station needs 7000 tons of assorted supplies each year. Assuming Moon Base runs on a similar scale, that's an initial annual budget of $7bn j
by TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Apparently McMurdo Station needs 7000 tons of assorted supplies each year. Assuming Moon Base runs on a similar scale, that's an initial annual budget of $7bn just for the shipping.
This assumes air and water are solved problems and don't need to be shipped.
Note that oxygen != air. 100% oxygen atmospheres are not a good idea for extended stays.
Nitrogen is not common on the Moon. Nor is carbon (for filtering or other organic applications.)
It's not easy to imagine a lunar base generating >$7bn of returns every year. Apart from space tourism, there isn't a whole lot you can do/build/sell on a moon base that has more value on Earth than it would cost to transport back here.
Of course you could argue Science, and that's fair enough. But literally all the commercial arguments I've seen have been "Something will no doubt appear" - which is possibly not going to win over rational investors.
- sandworm101 5y agoRetirement homes in the lower gravity? And there is the helium-3 fusion dream. That's the purpose of so many recent scifi moonbases.
- medstrom 5y ago70 wealthy retirees, each paying $100M annually.
- sandworm101 5y agoI assume that catering to those 70 Uber wealthy might increase cargo needs slightly. But it would cut down on family visits. The kids might pay to have grandpa sent to the moon.
- nsonha 5y agoLet's coerce them into spending that money, in fact what do old people need that much for, let's seize it for science
- sonograph 5y agoThe market for retirees who are willing to pay $100M annually to live in a pressurized bubble on the moon is maybe one or two, for only one annum
- cstross 5y agoGet back to me on 3He fuel mining in the regolith after (a) demonstrating a working 3He cycle aneutronic fusion reactor (hint: it's much harder than the D-T fusion cycle that we haven't got working yet, although ITER is supposed to demonstrate it), and (b) ruling out other aneutronic fusion fuels like, oh, proton-Lithium-7, or proton-Boron-11 ... which are only somewhat harder to achieve than 3He fusion, and which run on fuels readily available here on Earth. (My gut sense is that if aneutronic fusion is practical at all then it'll be cheaper to build more expensive reactors that can run on terrestrial fuels so cheap we use them for car batteries and as an insecticide, rather than slightly less difficult reactors that are fuelled by magic extraterrestrial unicorn sparkle-dust.)
- ben_w 5y agoI saw a blog calculate that regolith He3 was so sparse that even with a reactor to use it in, one would make more energy from purifying the metals, coil-gunning the purified ingots just past the L1 point so they would fall to Earth, and setting fire to the ingots. Or, entirely separately, by pointing the ingots at electromagnets and collecting the energy from the induced currents from electromagnetic braking. (I wish I could find the original and link to it. For all I remember it might have been you who wrote it).
- garmaine 5y agoHelium-3 from the moon will never be a commercially viable energy source. At best it might be captured incidentally as part of other mining operations and sold to research labs. There are just too many other fusion options that, while not as ideal, have fuels that are vastly easier to obtain.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoIt is likely that permanent low gravity will kill them even before boredom and depression from realization that the rest of their lives will have to be spent in those small confines. (Low gravity is extremely unhealthy. And even a relatively short 1-week stay in such conditions severely affects cardio muscles, so that super-healthy astronauts have to exercise for several hours per day to keep their heart in shape)
- jhgb 5y agoOne has to wonder if you couldn't eventually just build a large centrifuge on the Moon. Put a toroid on some kind of magnetic bearing and rotate it. It should be easier than on Earth anyway since you're supporting only one sixth of the weight of the structure. Even just as sleeping/recreational facilities, it still might be worth it in the long run.
- tsimionescu 5y agoFusion power plants already seem unlikely to be economically viable, given the huge radiation damage that the whole structure takes, requiring constant disposal of radioactive concrete (presumably via robots) and rebuilding the structure every 10 or so years. Adding lunar-mined fuel to the process seems to be going in the wrong direction.
- Nexialist 5y agoA paper I read recently (Harper 2016 - 10.1089/space.2015.0029) has numbers based on the supplies needed to the ISS. The gist was, "Without some sort of recycling and/or use of in situ resources, meeting the lunar settlement goal of 100 people would require delivery of over 1 million kilograms of life-support consumables per year." And then assuming a PLSS life support system you get to to needing about 5500kg of consumables delivered per person per year. [1] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2015.0029 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2015.0029
- WalterBright 5y agoAll the biomass would have to be recycled back into water and food. The gating thing may be if lunar dust is workable as raw material for soil or not.
- Beached 5y agothere are experiments with moon simulant and mars simulant. both show that with proper prep, regolith is a sufficient grow medium. just as is, it sucks, but if you wash, and then fertilize, it will work. and then after the initial prep, you treat it like you would other soil.
- blake1 5y agoSo ~5T/person/year, let's plug in the Starship launch costs: at $1mn/T, this is only $500mn/year for the whole base. This seems a little too good to be true.
- tsimionescu 5y agoThe Starship promised launch cost is literally two orders of magnitude smaller than current launch costs. I would start there.
- XorNot 5y agoIsn't this pretty much the point of such an endeavor though, or at least part of one? There's a lot of science we'd like to do on the moon, chief of which would be to actually test the space-settlement self-sufficiency problems in an environment like that. With the ISS as comparison, it's not going to be "bam 100 people" it's pretty obviously going to be a process of rotating in progressively larger crews while the systems and bottlenecks are worked out. Not to mention we'll benefit a lot from the sort of focused sustainability research this will generate.
- LatteLazy 5y agoI can't tell you whether the figures are accurate, or if it's a good investment but... $7bn is 20 usd per US citizen. If the US and EU did it together its less than $9 per person per year. We can afford vastly more for aircraft carriers or walls between the us and Mexico or farm subsidies admin costs or medicare.
- ben_w 5y agoYeah, but one of the big parts of the Brexit referendum’s two Leave campaigns was moping about a number merely twice that size being spent for all the combined benefits of a customs union and single market (the absence of which is now being blamed as a partial cause for empty supermarket shelves!), not something which cynics already deride as a billionaire size-measuring contest. Much as I love space, any proper space program — even ones well short of colonies — must do something tangible down on Earth.
- LatteLazy 5y agoI'd be careful taking anything from the brexit campaigns as evidence of anything. It was a baseless conclusion in search of excuses... I take the wider point though. Its hard enough to get voters to find money for anything other than pensions, tax cuts or bombs. People love criticizing Bezos and Musk for spending money on rockers. But I actually think they're fulfilling something we as a society have sadly neglected.
- aplummer 5y agoSo that’s 1% of the US military budget. Double it and it seems affordable? What is the return on aircraft carriers 8-11, when the next most powerful nation has 1.
- robertk 5y agoIn fact, they have 2 in active service and are rapidly constructing more. https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-photos-show-chinas-new-aircraft-carrier-taking-shape-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-photos-show-chinas-ne...
- taneq 5y agoAlso let's be honest, aircraft carriers are super awesome and fun and good for scaring brown farmers but in a modern war against an equal power they're not especially practical. Couple o' kinetic strikes and your $13 billion new toy is slag on the ocean floor for like, what... cost to get mass to LEO is $2600 per kg so if we want 100 special order deliveries of 1-ton rods from God that's $2.6mil per rod = $260 million to sink a $13 billion aircraft carrier and destroy how many billions of dollars worth of F22s and ammunition? Like, I love aircraft carriers, they're so cool. But also physics says not so effective. :S
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kcb 5y agoI'd imagine in the opening phase of a war most orbital military systems aren't going to last very long.
- taneq 5y ago> Assuming Moon Base runs on a similar scale, that's an initial annual budget of $7bn just for the shipping. Wow that seems like a lot, which figures for launch and payload delivery are you using? Because NASA was like $1mil per kg to LEO and isn't SpaceX like $5000?
- dwaltrip 5y agoIt looks like you are using a price of $1000 / kg to get that figure. Prices will be much lower than that once fully reusable rockets are widely deployed. Currently, equipment costing tens of millions $USD are thrown away on every launch. It’s hard to overstate the shift fully reusable rockets will bring.
- tintt 5y agoPeople were optimistic about LEO shipping costs when the Space Shuttle program just started, but it didn’t exactly work out economically. Partially reusable F9 was meant to decrease lunch costs, and it did, but not to the extent some hoped. Starship, no doubt, will bring prices down, but then again, even $1k/kilo to the moon surface sounds kind of… an aspirational stretch.
- sfifs 5y agoThe Space shuttle program was run by people who were in the taxpayer wealth extraction business. As we've seen already, no one really imagined how we could progress on costs when companies actually get into space transportation business
- tsimionescu 5y agoSpaceX money is also made the same way. It's US gov money that funded much of the research anyway, US launch facilities that handle the launches, and SpaceX is charging the US government many times more per launch than it charges for commercial launches (they claim the government has extra requirements) .
- tintt 5y agoYou’re totally right, Saturn V, Space Shuttle, SLS – all of them are great technology, but financially speaking, they were all doomed from the get go. I weren’t trying to compare NASA and Space X, I was trying to point out that optimistic outlooks on large reusable rockets usually don’t fully consider implications of increased complexity of such project.
- 5y ago
- samstave 5y agoWill we ever get to some other metric than "money" WRT 'returns'? I've always wondered about this WRT "black budgets" and the theories about Breakaway Civilizations; "Of what value does 'Money' have in Space?" --- Lets assume that trillions are funnelled off into black budgets for [purposes] -- that assumes that hte 'money' (fiat currency (paper/the-concept-of-value/10101010s/etc)) is being used to pay for/buy [goods/services] -- Where the hell is all this money going? is there an economy and a place where such vast amounts are being spent. Lets assume they are paying their engineers/suppliers/companies/etc - the Deep Workers far beyond the depths of SkunkWorks etc - where exactly is that money going? What are they buying. This has been the biggest flaw for me in thinking about Breakaway Civs - and spending money/making money in Space. If we were to assume that the moon had some set of valuable minerals/etc that would be beneficial to mine and then return to earth, where is the value in mining Tungsten on the Moon (given your shipping calc, for example) and bringing that back to earth unless the earth had none of said resource... Personally, it would be interesting to think about how a production capability could be built on the moon to support the fabrication and manufacture of vessels on a lunar-orbitting ship-dock, which then could carry on to mars/wherever... and pull from the resources of metals on the moon, which AFAIK is supposed to have a lot of metal... Further, why has Musk constantly talked about "going to Mars", but said seemingly very little about doing a dry-run, proto, etc to the Moon first? Shouldnt building a Moon-base be much more immediately important than a Bezos-esque trip to Mars? FFS SpaceX is talking about getting to Mars, but all the required life support eco-system requirements do not appear to have been even addressed? It all feels amiss... Please enlighten me.
- XorNot 5y agoRe: Musk and Mars - because that's his founding reason for SpaceX. His original idea was just "I have a lot of money, what's something absurd I can do?" and the answer was he wanted to land a greenhouse on Mars - then got jerked around trying to buy Russian rockets to do it and then realized he could just make his own rocket company. Elon is slightly crazy as most billionaires are, he's just crazy in a very specific direction: some people buy mega yachts, he wants a SpaceX rocket to be landing humans on Mars. Now in reality...SpaceX can't privately fund a manned mission anywhere. That's got to be a NASA/international thing - if only because the core competencies are so incredibly broad-ranging (SpaceX do rockets - and rockets are already a "here's 50 fields you can contribute a Ph.D to, we need all of them to make this work"). But if your goal is to go to Mars, then you talk about, and build towards, going to Mars and wait for NASA to say "hey we'd like to get the moonbase going". Which is pretty much what has happened: I have no doubt that in the next 20 years we're going to see a manned mission to the Moon, and I'm very sure that it's going to be a Starship that takes it there.
- tintt 5y ago$7bn is just a third of NASA budget, it’s doable, but you’re right, there’s no reason to go as big as McMurdo Station with today’s technology.
- jhgb 5y ago> Apparently McMurdo Station needs 7000 tons of assorted supplies each year. Assuming Moon Base runs on a similar scale, that's an initial annual budget of $7bn just for the shipping. This would never be a real scenario. McMurdo supply runs are not designed for such high transportation costs. With such transportation cost expectations you'd be pressed to lower the mass of the supplies in the first place so that the sum of the cost of preparing the supplies and the cost of transferring them were minimized. You need to compare two Pareto optima completely, not just one axis of them.
- ketzo 5y agoYeah, but flipside, you're probably gonna need things on the Moon that you wouldn't for a terrestrial base. I think it's fair to assume that the $7bn a year figure is just a very rough number, but still a useful one for understanding just how outrageously expensive it would be to maintain a Moon base.
- jhgb 5y agoYou kind of have a model of a lunar space station in the form of ISS. That's definitely not 7000 tonnes of supplies for a base. Maybe something like 15 tonnes per year or so.
- ben_w 5y agoISS currently has 7 people on it, McMurdo Station varies between 250 and 1258. I don’t know the mass/year of the ISS resupply missions, neither including or excluding orbit reboosting fuel which a moon base can clearly ignore.
- jhgb 5y agoI'll take a look at the exact figures, but assuming the average number of people at McMurdo is 750, it's 9 tonnes per person per year, whereas in the case of ISS, it should be something like one third of this number per crew member at worst. Clearly they've already minimized the necessary supplies somewhat already.
- perihelions 5y ago"initial annual budget of $7bn just for the shipping" That's less than the (inflation-adjusted) Apollo Program budget (which accomplished far less!) edit: (To be clear, I'm not advocating any course of action -- just pointing out the amazing degree of progress)
- nextaccountic 5y ago> It's not easy to imagine a lunar base generating >$7bn of returns every year. Apart from space tourism, there isn't a whole lot you can do/build/sell on a moon base that has more value on Earth than it would cost to transport back here. Perhaps manufacturing? We might find out stuff that is better done in low gravity.
- BurningFrog 5y ago$1 per Earthling and year for a Moon Base is a very cheap and obvious investment! It's genuinely impossible to predict how much money Moon Tourism could generate, until you've built it.
- Beached 5y agothere are a few really good proposals for lunar economy. pulling glass for zblan fiber works better in micro g than here on earth. many theorize that low g on moon would also result in a higher quality product than we can make here in earth, and this quality of fiber is very expensive currently up to 1000+ epr meter, if it becomes trivial to make it on the moon, the moon very well could provide all of the manufacturing for the fiber optics here on earth. there is the helium3 mining argument. although I'm not sure of demand. it is cheaper to supply LEO from the moon than it is from earth. mining water, growing food, manufacturing rocket fuel, are all possible on the moon, and are a product for Leo space stations. nasa alone payss >6bil a year to resupply the ISS, that's not including Russia, esa, jaxa, etc. not all of these resupplies can be replaced by the moon, but a large portion of them do contain food, and basic products that theoretically could be manufactured on the moon. mining various minerals on the moon like aluminum may be more expensive, especially at first. but how do you quantify the habitat destruction? regulations may force earth mining into oblivion and make moon a reasonable alternative. not likely to happen, but maybe it should. as you stated tourism probably will be popular IF you can make it affordable to the middle class. low g research as a service is also a good revenue model. many people pay good money to have their experiments performed in micro g, it's very reasonable to assume the same will be true for lunar g. also, all moon/mars bases put a HEAAAAVY emphasis on Insitu resource utilization. early moon bases will be expensive and very likely a net loss. but almost every single plan I see around basically says "step 1. get there. step 2. achieve self sufficiency asap except for complex manufactured goods" things like water, food, air, fuel, building materials, bio plastics, paper products, basic manufacturing/cnc/printing of tools and replacement parts. most thing short of chip production panel production and super complex manufactured goods are very achievable, and will theoretically mean that 10 years after moon base alpha, very few resupplies are needed
- noduerme 5y agoWouldn't nitrogen and carbon just be kind of a one-time cost of any new expansion? Once they're there in a closed loop, you shouldn't need to constantly ship more. I'm also curious about your assumption that any station on the moon needs to be run for profit from extractive activities or tourism. McMurdo uses a lot of supplies because it can. Its design is not as self-sustaining or fault tolerant as a moon base would have to be. A slightly better analogy would be Amundsen Station.
- hinkley 5y agoHonestly I think the sanest model is one of progressively building a surplus atmosphere for reserves and to fill new modules. Ship food up, astronauts convert it to carbon dioxide and urea, and whatever of the latter you can’t convert back to proteins ends up as free nitrogen, which you can use to build air.