Thread: Japanese construction giant Obayashi announces plans to have a space elevator

^ What benefit is the moon?
It can't be terraformed. If you want a bunch of people living in habitats you can do that on earth.
We don't know what resources it has and we don;t need them yet in any event.

Originally Posted by Neo

Originally Posted by Necron99

^ What benefit is the moon?

There's a fine line on TD between trolling and being plain dumb, and a lot of the time I'm not sure what side of that divide you're on..

Ok, what benefit is Mars.? (other than the next great publicity stunt)

The Moon is the closest stable platform on which we can build, at this point in time it doesn't seem to have a use, but in the future it will be invaluable as a staging post for space exploration.

I guess that's quite beneficial huh..?

Anything other than mining can be done in earth orbit just as easy or easier, even that could be done by capturing asteroids.
Moon habitat - space station, both require the same resources.
It's no better and probably worse than earth orbit as a launching platform.
Mars at least can be terraformed.

Originally Posted by Neo

Originally Posted by Necron99

^ What benefit is the moon?

There's a fine line on TD between trolling and being plain dumb

Neo clearly a reader of Kurzweil.

If they get it built MAS will take it out.

Originally Posted by Neo

Bit of an understatement there Takeovers Man came back from the Moon.

Actually no. I mean the understatement. People did come back from the moon.

Orbital mechanics has its surprises. Would you have guessed this? Our telecom satellites in geostationary orbit GEO are delivered to an interim orbit Geostationary Transfer Orbit GTO. From there to GEO they use their own propulsion. Going from GTO to Mars actually needs less propulsion than going to GEO. That is if they have a heatshield and parachutes and can use the Mars atmosphere for braking.

The delta-v requirement for Mars landing compared to Moon landing from LEO (Low Earth Orbit):

Moon 5.7 km/s

Mars surface using aerobraking and a generous allowance for propulsive landing less than 5km/s.

So Mars landing is actually easier than Luna. Life support has made much bigger advances since Apollo than rocket propulsion. Keeping people alive for the required time for a Mars flight is now quite doable. It wasn't at the time of Apollo.

Getting back is something else. Launching from Mars requires a lot more than from the moon. Fortunately it is much easier than launch from earth. A landed vehicle that is refuelled on the Mars surface using locally produced propellant would be quite capable of returning to earth. The materials are easily available on Mars. You need to bring a solar powered array and take your time for producing it though. No quick stint to Mars and heading back unless the fuel is produced in advance.

Here a delta-v map to prove my claims.



From this website:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...et/mission.php

When we can finally bend and twist and completely control space-time is when things get really interesting.

Anyone want to go to the other side of the universe in less than a second?

You have an abundant energy source on the moon if you can ever build habitation there in helium 3, in the meantime first country that figures out how to mine it and transport it back to earth will be the next super power.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

You have an abundant energy source on the moon if you can ever build habitation there in helium 3, in the meantime first country that figures out how to mine it and transport it back to earth will be the next super power.

It's in the lunar regolith in amounts of parts per billion. You would need to process hundreds of millions of tons to get just one tone of h3 assuming you could extract with 100 % efficiency.
And it's only a fuel in fusion reactors, which we don;t have yet.

Originally Posted by Necron99

Originally Posted by buriramboy

You have an abundant energy source on the moon if you can ever build habitation there in helium 3, in the meantime first country that figures out how to mine it and transport it back to earth will be the next super power.

It's in the lunar regolith in amounts of parts per billion. You would need to process hundreds of millions of tons to get just one tone of h3 assuming you could extract with 100 % efficiency.
And it's only a fuel in fusion reactors, which we don;t have yet.

Obviously I'm not talking about today in 2014, think of the future, oil and gas will run out one day and a viable alternative is needed, helium 3 is the answer and there's a fuk load of it on the moon. Technology will advance and whoever figures it out first will be the dominant power in the future.

Originally Posted by Necron99

What benefit is the moon?

It's where cheese comes from ffs

A quick google brought this recent article up.

ExplainingTheFuture.com : Helium-3 Power

Big picture stuff, getting off world is the man problem at the moment.
Nano technology, self replicating tiny machines, like ants/termites could build the structures, thinking machines in control, not far away.
Send them off and they build the habitats, just like termites build complex mounts.

Once we are out there, we are off, the universe is ours, but if we don't leave, one day, be it a few years, 200, 2,000 or 2 mil, the world will end.
We will end, whether AI takes over and we as a race become irrelevant makes little difference, we have to try.

He3 from the moon is the funniest thing ever!

You can do fusion by using heavy hydrogen (Deuterium, the only isotope of an element that has its own name) and Lithium. It is hard and cannot be done yet, but may be achieavable in the future. You can use He3 but doing fusion that way is even much harder, not easier. The advantage is that He3 fusion is aneutronic. That means no Neutrons are involved and so no secondary radioactive material at all. However normal fusion already produces little and short lived radioactive materials. I go with normal fusion ove He3 fusion any day. It is a hoax, well almost.

Originally Posted by Takeovers

It is a hoax, well almost.

As reported in an Artemis Project paper, about 25 tonnes of helium-3 -- or a fully-loaded Space Shuttle cargo bay's worth -- could power the United States for a year. This means that helium-3 has a potential economic value in the order of $3bn a tonne -- making it the only thing remotely economically viable to consider mining from the Moon given current and likely-near-future space travel technologies and capabilities.

From the above link, read it, and loads more information out there.

Obviously I am in the Mars first camp. I am waiting for Elon Musk and SpaceX to build their Mars vehicle. Planned capabilities:

100ton cargo or 100 people to Mars with one flight. The ship, called MCT - Mars Colonial Transport - then flies back to earth to do the next trip. It is planned to fly app. 2024 with people to Mars but that may be too optimistic.

The whole thing is supposed to be cheap enough that Elon Musk can afford flying a few of them.

The russians and NASA both are making plans for nuclear transfer vehicles but the technology is far off, extremely expensive and may never materialize.

Elon Musk is planning with conventional technology, using chemical propulsion with methane as fuel. Methane can be stored in flight and be used for Mars landing. It can also be produced quite easily on Mars. SpaceX already has the required landing technology, supersonic retropropulsion and NASA has asked and received data on the technology from SpaceX. Present NASA technology allows only max. 1 ton landed on Mars as with the Curiosity Rover.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

Originally Posted by Takeovers

It is a hoax, well almost.

As reported in an Artemis Project paper, about 25 tonnes of helium-3 -- or a fully-loaded Space Shuttle cargo bay's worth -- could power the United States for a year. This means that helium-3 has a potential economic value in the order of $3bn a tonne -- making it the only thing remotely economically viable to consider mining from the Moon given current and likely-near-future space travel technologies and capabilities.

From the above link, read it, and loads more information out there.

I did read up on it a while back, believe me. The numbers you give are correct. The point is however that millions of tons of a better fuel are available on earth at nearly zero cost.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

Originally Posted by Takeovers

It is a hoax, well almost.

As reported in an Artemis Project paper, about 25 tonnes of helium-3 -- or a fully-loaded Space Shuttle cargo bay's worth -- could power the United States for a year. This means that helium-3 has a potential economic value in the order of $3bn a tonne -- making it the only thing remotely economically viable to consider mining from the Moon given current and likely-near-future space travel technologies and capabilities.

From the above link, read it, and loads more information out there.

But that 25 tons requires billions with a B tons of lunar regolith to be mined.
How much energy does that take, directly and in infrastructure/equipment?

Assuming as per the OP, we have cheap access to space, solar arrays and beamed energy would be much cheaper and more viable to supply earth needs.
If fusion was done on earth they would use deuterium, the oceans are full of it.

H3 might come into play as a spacecraft fuel,, but by that stage we would probably be mining it from the gas giants rather than grinding up the lunar surface for a 10 in a billion element.

Originally Posted by Necron99

Originally Posted by buriramboy

Originally Posted by Takeovers

It is a hoax, well almost.

As reported in an Artemis Project paper, about 25 tonnes of helium-3 -- or a fully-loaded Space Shuttle cargo bay's worth -- could power the United States for a year. This means that helium-3 has a potential economic value in the order of $3bn a tonne -- making it the only thing remotely economically viable to consider mining from the Moon given current and likely-near-future space travel technologies and capabilities.

From the above link, read it, and loads more information out there.

But that 25 tons requires billions with a B tons of lunar regolith to be mined.
How much energy does that take, directly and in infrastructure/equipment?

Assuming as per the OP, we have cheap access to space, solar arrays and beamed energy would be much cheaper and more viable to supply earth needs.
If fusion was done on earth they would use deuterium, the oceans are full of it.

H3 might come into play as a spacecraft fuel,, but by that stage we would probably be mining it from the gas giants rather than grinding up the lunar surface for a 10 in a billion element.

The subject of mining helium-3 on the Moon as a fuel for future clean, safe nuclear power plants is a fascinating one that raises many questions. Some of these questions are highly technical, and relate to the feasibility of the involved nuclear physics. Other questions concern the not inconsiderable practicalities associated with getting to the Moon, mining and super-heating large quantities of lunar rock (Space.com have reported a suggestion of roughly one million tons of lunar soil being needed to be mined and processed for every 70 tonnes of helium-3 yield), and then getting the precious cargo back to the Earth.

Again from the above link.

Originally Posted by The Ghost Of The Moog

Neo clearly a reader of Kurzweil.

Never heard of him until now, but thanks for the heads up.
Ray Kurzweil, Director of engineering at Google.
As Google are one of the front runners in commercial robotics and AI, I'd say he's someone worth listening to.

Originally Posted by Neo

As Google are one of the front runners in AI, I'd say he's someone worth listening to.

Oh really?