6 ms·
I suspect this will in the end be solved in utmost unsexy, boring and reliable way by solar plus huge NiFe battery and/or hundreds of kilometers of high voltage
by rini17 4y ago
I suspect this will in the end be solved in utmost unsexy, boring and reliable way by solar plus huge NiFe battery and/or hundreds of kilometers of high voltage grid, manufactured by robots from local resources or asteroid mining.
Or somewhat sexier, beamed orbital power or mirrors are less technically challenging than on earth.
Either should be less expensive than hauling nuclear reactors from earth and ensuring they get reliable cooling.
- mjevans 4y agoBootstrapping issue. Probably going to need the initial bots to have RTG based power mostly as a self-heater.
- Panzer04 4y agoWhat’s wrong with operating half the day? I guess it’s space, so it’s worth a lot of effort, but I’d think if they can avoid RTGs and just use solar they would.
- Oxidation 4y agoThe night is 14 days long and is deeply (cryogenically) cold, which is really bad for lots of hardware. Military component ratings are something like -55°C[1]. Lunar night is more like -130°C. Ideally you keep as much equipment as close to an even temperature as you can, or it might never turn on again when daylight comes. [1]: the exact definition varies, but it's in that general area. Industrial is -40°C and commercial is 0.
- rini17 4y agoRight, everything except solar panels should be underground, not only because of temperatures but to keep the regolith away too.
- throwaway14356 4y agohumans use to build with mud, sometimes with walls meters thick. Underground or natural caves would be even better. It doesn't get any less sexy. Not sure how it works with such extremes but on earth it takes months of heating or cooling to get through a few meters of soil.
- mumblemumble 4y agoThere's another bootstrapping issue there: how do you get the underground base installed and functional in less than 14 days?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rini17 4y agoWhy must the build be done all at once in one go? Humans will land at the dawn, leave before dusk, working in 14 day shifts set up the base. This will repeat for several months till the base gets self-sufficient enough. Some stations in Antarctica were built that way only during summers, in winters they were left empty till finished and operational.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fbdab103 4y agoI would think that the first generation base would be situated at the poles with perpetual (or as close as possible) sunlight.
- TomK32 4y agoHow about two bases? Simply move people and critical experiments to the other base before nightfall.
- Panzer04 4y agoTravelling a few thousand km is probably harder than just running a wire around the moon ;)
- Oxidation 4y agoEspecially when you have to do it every 2 weeks.
- atoav 4y agoBut is it the same amount of fun?
- TomK32 4y agoYou probably want to travel anyways for exploration and mapping.
- funnymony 4y agoDo you? If we assume robots building stuff. Mapping is a task way easier to automate.
- burnished 4y agoLunar cowboys arent gonna be robbing no wire, nosirree, lunar rail is a necessity.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoWe can’t outrun it forever…
- atoav 4y agoOne base, on stilts, constantly walking with the sun.
- wankle 4y agoNiFe batteries last for decades, I agree that would be the best choice for the battery type.
- yyyk 4y agoOrbital power has the huge advantage that setting it up is essentially independent of the rest of the mission - we can set up most of the work in advance, so that part doesn't count towards a weight limit and we can abort/wait if it doesn't work. Once a secure base using orbital power is set up, then NiFe should be arranged for redundancy.
- at_a_remove 4y agoI think the heat part would best be Feolite, which is mostly sintered iron oxides, but with some other bits added. It has a tremendous volumetric heat capacity, nearing that of water, but you can crank it way past 100 C without worrying about pressure.
- MrDunham 4y agoOne of my all time favorite everyday engineering things I've learned is the absolute bonkers amount of energy needed to boil water (vs nearly any other fluid). It's so commonplace yet absurd/impressive when you really think about it.
- 6177c40f 4y ago> "manufactured by robots from local resources or asteroid mining." I feel like this just creates the new problems of operating, powering, and maintaining the robots, plus all the difficulties associated with mining asteroids and refining the mined materials somewhere (presumably somewhere that's not Earth's surface, which means we still need to generate power somewhere off Earth for this to work).
- Mistletoe 4y agoI am still awaiting the future promised me where 3d printers replicate themselves. This is orders of magnitude easier than robots making themselves in outer space, yet we are still waiting and I assume we always will be.