12 ms·

Northrop Grumman to Develop Concept for Lunar Railroad

41 points by sklargh 3y ago

ein0p 3y ago
Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first though? Should be trivial in comparison.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  Is it trivial? Nobody owns the Moon, there's nothing, you can just get started building. Often the technological and engineering problems are much smaller than the regulatory approvals and other legal issues it needs to through. Also, not sure if we - the people - really want to hear the solution to this problem from a super-weapon company.
  - vwcx 3y ago
    I beg to differ. An uncle purchased a beautiful lot for me right next to the Sea of Tranquility decades ago. Part of the selling point was that there isn't imminent domain on the Moon!
  - nickpeterson 3y ago
    Maybe we should spend the r&d money on r&d for how to improve regulatory approvals.
    - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
      Reducing the difficulty of a railroad to regulatory approval (what the comment you replied to does) is really oversimplifying it. The main barrier to building modern rail (i.e. high speed rail) is property owners. Nobody wants to be forced to sell off part of their property to the state to add noise pollution to their property. So everyone fights it tooth and nail. That's of course a problem and it happens with roads as well but it's standard practice to just eminent domain property for roads if people won't sell. The state will not do this for railroads though. So a railroad project may end up blocked for 20 years because they don't own a 1 mile stretch of land 20 feet wide but with a new highway extension they'll just eminent domain your half your property and bulldose your home after 5 years of negotiating to add a few lanes to an existing road. This is not to say that eminent domain is a good thing but rather that it's a lot more naunced than "regulators won't rubberstamp the project"
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      It's not government. It's your fellow men. Today you will say things like this but if I show you one picture of a grandma on the route you will stop. So let's just forestall the pretence that we want things and just reference it as a Grandma Stop. Remember this widely held viewpoint: > My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable. We're not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. And we're not going to put a dollar figure on human life Another short lemma is that having someone leave somewhere they've lived over 10 y is equivalent to violence and we arrive at the proof that grandmas and mothers in the vicinity of anything should stop that thing. The moon's big advantage is that it lacks women of any sort. Certainly there are no mothers or grandmothers there, so building engineering projects there is possible.
    - ein0p 3y ago
      What “regulatory approvals” are needed to improve and maintain _existing_ railroads such that trains don’t fly off the rails daily?
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > What “regulatory approvals” are needed to improve and maintain _existing_ railroads Environmental reviews and construction permits.
      - throwaway11460 3y ago
        You can't just upgrade existing to high speed rail. Turning radius is way too small, and noise levels much higher, and you usually need at least two tracks.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Regulatory approvals are difficult because the regulations are trying to accomplish a very, very difficult goal: balancing a ton of competing interests. I'd prefer that real efforts for such balancing happens even when it adds additional friction and expense because the alternative is significantly worse.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    Everything is trivial compared to the Moon. This is a rather obvious hundred billion dollar boondoggle, tailor made by lobbyists for milking the US taxpayers. It’s still better than spending $150B a year on wars, but not by that much, and it’s not like it’s “instead”. It’s “in addition to”. They do need to figure out the AI angle for this though, or I fear it could have difficulty in the pork barrel department of US Congress.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      But just think of all the value created for shareholders
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > hundred billion dollar boondoggle It’s a preliminary request for a quote for a study. This is either meaningless hyperbole or thoroughly uninformed.
- hulitu 3y ago
  There is a problem though. You cannot pay billions to develop a concept for terrestrial railroads. /s
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Calhsr would like a word
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Sure you can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
- bluGill 3y ago
  No, for the same reasons Northrop was even allowed to bid on this: rail roads are solved technology with plenty of experts, but the US values original research over getting things done. (a railroad on the moon should have Northrop as a subcontractor to the likes of Siemens or Hitachi to make the passenger compartment airtight and verify cooling of things normally air cooled - but those are not US companies so we pay Northrup to attempt to figure out what experts already know.)
  - ein0p 3y ago
    What for though? Especially when a train derails every day in the US here on Earth, sometimes leaking hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals. You do realize you’re paying for this literal pie in the sky bullshit as the infrastructure around you continues to deteriorate, right?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > make the passenger compartment airtight Any ten-year concept would be for moving bulk from an extraction site to a landing zone. The train would be minimal and open air. If you want to move people, you drive the rover on the train. (Or just rover.) I would be surprised if any technology is transferable from existing platforms, which are optimised for hosts of characteristics irrelevant on the Moon.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  Unfortunately that would cause a fairly steep decline in demand for air travel (especially Boeing-based air travel), and in turn that would cause a fall in demand for jet fuel, and this economic disruption to established financial interests just isn't something a government controlled by those established financial interests is interested in.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  When did HN become so trivially Luddite? Artemis begins major launches, including for the Lunar Gateway and first crew, next year. VIPER is slated to land in November. We’re already putting billions of dollars of kit on and around the Moon. If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon. If they don’t there—if autonomous rovers are easier than trains even on the Moon—the latter definitely aren’t worth further consideration here. > Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first Granted [1]. Circa 1850 [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_U...
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    > If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon. I don’t necessarily think they correlate that well. I don’t know a lot about lunar transportation but I can’t imagine it has the same design constraints as earthly ones. > When did HN become so trivially Luddite? Space shit is cool. I would still like the government to fund something more likely to be used by the American population first. Yea that industrial rail network is cool but why can’t we get around the US without driving?
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      It is a problem of government funding, though? Isn't it more of a legal and political problem? Incessant NIMBYism is a grassroots phenomenon all around the West and stops or at least enormously increases costs of many projects that could otherwise be built cheaper and quicker. We are still paying the price for the 1960s, when highways were built right through residential neigbourhoods without asking the locals. Now, as a consequence, every construction project gets analyzed and litigated to death. Plus, people in the US don't seem to want new passenger railroads that much. It might be a vicious circle - no decent railroads, therefore no experience with decent railroads, therefore no desire to build more decent railroads, therefore no decent railroads. But the initiative, or lack thereof, still seems to be emanating from the people. Space is trivial in comparison. No one lives there and if you can overcome the technical problems, you can build anything anywhere without facing environmental litigation from 30 different groups.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  The engineering problem of railroads on the moon has nothing at all to do with the political problem of railroads in the US. This is a low value snark comment that should not belong here.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  It's not specified in the press release, but studies like this are generally on the order of $10M. Terrestrial railroad infrastructure would cost trillions to replace. Stealing $10M from NASA is not going to move the needle.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    That’s how it begins. They aren’t doing a study just to do a study. They’re doing a study to justify what is undoubtedly tens of billions of dollars in funding.
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      NASA has thousands of times as many studies and proposals as they do projects.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Why not just put everything in the same place so we don't need a railroad between the places? It's not like commerce between remote moon bases is an imminent problem. Are there more places to go on the moon than I'm aware of?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Why not just put everything in the same place so we don't need a railroad between the places? The easiest places to land, easiest places to base humans, easiest places to extract in situ resources and most-interesting places to explore are various. You don’t need a hundred sites to start with. But being able to segregate even just the extraction and production environments from living and landing spaces would help tremendously (not least in avoiding thrown-up regolith).
- itishappy 3y ago
  > It's not like commerce between remote moon bases is an imminent problem. I wouldn't be so sure. It's a 10 year study, and we (humanity) have plans for more than one moon base within the next 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_S...
ortusdux 3y ago
I wonder if this could be done using only regolith. A recent study showed that laser sintering of regolith might be a viable way to pave pathways. The resulting material had a compressive strength in the range of 8k to 30k PSI. Considering the reduced gravity, I could see this being strong enough to use as the rails. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1
egberts1 3y ago
This lunar concept is probably gonna get deployed before the infamous California High Speed Rail boondoggle.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Came here to post this.
- ls612 3y ago
  Nobody on the moon to file NEPA complaints.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Have we tried asking the Navajo Nation? https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223377817/navajo-moon-human-remains https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223377817/navajo-moon-human-...

41 points by sklargh 3y ago

ein0p 3y ago

Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first though? Should be trivial in comparison.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaway11460 3y ago
Is it trivial? Nobody owns the Moon, there's nothing, you can just get started building. Often the technological and engineering problems are much smaller than the regulatory approvals and other legal issues it needs to through. Also, not sure if we - the people - really want to hear the solution to this problem from a super-weapon company.
- vwcx 3y ago
  I beg to differ. An uncle purchased a beautiful lot for me right next to the Sea of Tranquility decades ago. Part of the selling point was that there isn't imminent domain on the Moon!
- nickpeterson 3y ago
  Maybe we should spend the r&d money on r&d for how to improve regulatory approvals.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    Reducing the difficulty of a railroad to regulatory approval (what the comment you replied to does) is really oversimplifying it. The main barrier to building modern rail (i.e. high speed rail) is property owners. Nobody wants to be forced to sell off part of their property to the state to add noise pollution to their property. So everyone fights it tooth and nail. That's of course a problem and it happens with roads as well but it's standard practice to just eminent domain property for roads if people won't sell. The state will not do this for railroads though. So a railroad project may end up blocked for 20 years because they don't own a 1 mile stretch of land 20 feet wide but with a new highway extension they'll just eminent domain your half your property and bulldose your home after 5 years of negotiating to add a few lanes to an existing road. This is not to say that eminent domain is a good thing but rather that it's a lot more naunced than "regulators won't rubberstamp the project"
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    It's not government. It's your fellow men. Today you will say things like this but if I show you one picture of a grandma on the route you will stop. So let's just forestall the pretence that we want things and just reference it as a Grandma Stop. Remember this widely held viewpoint: > My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable. We're not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. And we're not going to put a dollar figure on human life Another short lemma is that having someone leave somewhere they've lived over 10 y is equivalent to violence and we arrive at the proof that grandmas and mothers in the vicinity of anything should stop that thing. The moon's big advantage is that it lacks women of any sort. Certainly there are no mothers or grandmothers there, so building engineering projects there is possible.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    What “regulatory approvals” are needed to improve and maintain _existing_ railroads such that trains don’t fly off the rails daily?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > What “regulatory approvals” are needed to improve and maintain _existing_ railroads Environmental reviews and construction permits.
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      You can't just upgrade existing to high speed rail. Turning radius is way too small, and noise levels much higher, and you usually need at least two tracks.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Regulatory approvals are difficult because the regulations are trying to accomplish a very, very difficult goal: balancing a ton of competing interests. I'd prefer that real efforts for such balancing happens even when it adds additional friction and expense because the alternative is significantly worse.
- ein0p 3y ago
  Everything is trivial compared to the Moon. This is a rather obvious hundred billion dollar boondoggle, tailor made by lobbyists for milking the US taxpayers. It’s still better than spending $150B a year on wars, but not by that much, and it’s not like it’s “instead”. It’s “in addition to”. They do need to figure out the AI angle for this though, or I fear it could have difficulty in the pork barrel department of US Congress.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    But just think of all the value created for shareholders
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > hundred billion dollar boondoggle It’s a preliminary request for a quote for a study. This is either meaningless hyperbole or thoroughly uninformed.
hulitu 3y ago
There is a problem though. You cannot pay billions to develop a concept for terrestrial railroads. /s
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Calhsr would like a word
- itishappy 3y ago
  Sure you can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
bluGill 3y ago
No, for the same reasons Northrop was even allowed to bid on this: rail roads are solved technology with plenty of experts, but the US values original research over getting things done. (a railroad on the moon should have Northrop as a subcontractor to the likes of Siemens or Hitachi to make the passenger compartment airtight and verify cooling of things normally air cooled - but those are not US companies so we pay Northrup to attempt to figure out what experts already know.)
- ein0p 3y ago
  What for though? Especially when a train derails every day in the US here on Earth, sometimes leaking hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals. You do realize you’re paying for this literal pie in the sky bullshit as the infrastructure around you continues to deteriorate, right?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > make the passenger compartment airtight Any ten-year concept would be for moving bulk from an extraction site to a landing zone. The train would be minimal and open air. If you want to move people, you drive the rover on the train. (Or just rover.) I would be surprised if any technology is transferable from existing platforms, which are optimised for hosts of characteristics irrelevant on the Moon.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Unfortunately that would cause a fairly steep decline in demand for air travel (especially Boeing-based air travel), and in turn that would cause a fall in demand for jet fuel, and this economic disruption to established financial interests just isn't something a government controlled by those established financial interests is interested in.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
When did HN become so trivially Luddite? Artemis begins major launches, including for the Lunar Gateway and first crew, next year. VIPER is slated to land in November. We’re already putting billions of dollars of kit on and around the Moon. If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon. If they don’t there—if autonomous rovers are easier than trains even on the Moon—the latter definitely aren’t worth further consideration here. > Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first Granted [1]. Circa 1850 [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_U...
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon. I don’t necessarily think they correlate that well. I don’t know a lot about lunar transportation but I can’t imagine it has the same design constraints as earthly ones. > When did HN become so trivially Luddite? Space shit is cool. I would still like the government to fund something more likely to be used by the American population first. Yea that industrial rail network is cool but why can’t we get around the US without driving?
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    It is a problem of government funding, though? Isn't it more of a legal and political problem? Incessant NIMBYism is a grassroots phenomenon all around the West and stops or at least enormously increases costs of many projects that could otherwise be built cheaper and quicker. We are still paying the price for the 1960s, when highways were built right through residential neigbourhoods without asking the locals. Now, as a consequence, every construction project gets analyzed and litigated to death. Plus, people in the US don't seem to want new passenger railroads that much. It might be a vicious circle - no decent railroads, therefore no experience with decent railroads, therefore no desire to build more decent railroads, therefore no decent railroads. But the initiative, or lack thereof, still seems to be emanating from the people. Space is trivial in comparison. No one lives there and if you can overcome the technical problems, you can build anything anywhere without facing environmental litigation from 30 different groups.
colechristensen 3y ago
The engineering problem of railroads on the moon has nothing at all to do with the political problem of railroads in the US. This is a low value snark comment that should not belong here.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
It's not specified in the press release, but studies like this are generally on the order of $10M. Terrestrial railroad infrastructure would cost trillions to replace. Stealing $10M from NASA is not going to move the needle.
- ein0p 3y ago
  That’s how it begins. They aren’t doing a study just to do a study. They’re doing a study to justify what is undoubtedly tens of billions of dollars in funding.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    NASA has thousands of times as many studies and proposals as they do projects.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Why not just put everything in the same place so we don't need a railroad between the places? It's not like commerce between remote moon bases is an imminent problem. Are there more places to go on the moon than I'm aware of?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Why not just put everything in the same place so we don't need a railroad between the places? The easiest places to land, easiest places to base humans, easiest places to extract in situ resources and most-interesting places to explore are various. You don’t need a hundred sites to start with. But being able to segregate even just the extraction and production environments from living and landing spaces would help tremendously (not least in avoiding thrown-up regolith).
itishappy 3y ago
> It's not like commerce between remote moon bases is an imminent problem. I wouldn't be so sure. It's a 10 year study, and we (humanity) have plans for more than one moon base within the next 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_S...

ortusdux 3y ago

I wonder if this could be done using only regolith. A recent study showed that laser sintering of regolith might be a viable way to pave pathways. The resulting material had a compressive strength in the range of 8k to 30k PSI. Considering the reduced gravity, I could see this being strong enough to use as the rails. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1

egberts1 3y ago

This lunar concept is probably gonna get deployed before the infamous California High Speed Rail boondoggle.

throwaway5959 3y ago
Came here to post this.
ls612 3y ago
Nobody on the moon to file NEPA complaints.
- itishappy 3y ago
  Have we tried asking the Navajo Nation? https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223377817/navajo-moon-human-remains https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223377817/navajo-moon-human-...