I'm not sure if this should go here or future history but with any pod you like after WW2 what is the earliest date a permanent/semi permanent moon base could be built.
Moon base
- Thread starter Atomicwalrus
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Without any technological stretch at all, 1973-ish. There were plenty of Apollo-based long-duration (~2 weeks) mission plans. In connection with these, there was real work done on what would be involved in establishing a "revisited" landing site, so you can get a semi-permanent base by that date with only relatively minor AH trickery.
If you go back farther and imagine that the plans of von-Braun, Ley et al. from the late '40s and early 50s somehow get implemented, then you can get a much more robust lunar installation by perhaps the mid-1960s. But you have to get rid of the Cold War and the Moon Race for that to happen. Pity, because IMO those are still the Right Way To Do Things.
Ok I just googled that bloke and well WOW I'm not sure of the feasibility of all of the things he talked about but even if half of those ideas are possible OTL space agency are bloody slack.
I also found a link to an in production AH movie based on a pod of if everything happened as he predicted looks good but low budget
links here if you want to have a look has some trailers in the gallery section.
http://www.manconquersspace.com/
If I have introduced you to the "Colliers Space Program" (my term, but if you do some research, you'll see what I mean), then I am very happy, because you have discovered a CRUCIAL bit of cultural history. This work was HUGELY influential on people my age and a little older (i.e. peak Baby Boomers), and had a major influence in shaping public attitudes toward space exploration and development in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s.
As I mentioned in my post, there are many, many (many, many) students of space development history who view things through the lens of the von Braun/Ley publications in the late 40s and early 50s. I would argue that much of the EMOTIONAL anger at the way NASA has gone since c. the peak of Apollo, and the EMOTIONAL support for the New Space folks comes from a deep reservoir of images and ideas that trace their origins back to those works.
As for the film you mention, I'm well aware of it. Sadly, its been "in production" for a loooong time and, while I wish the creators well, I have my doubts about whether it will ever be completed (just like so many of my own personal projects).
It is guessed you are referring to Willy Ley. His nuclear tug for bulk goods for the moon base is a great example. A far cry from the make work attitude of disaster prone Nasa post 1975 (Oberg rather disagrees, but certainly correct for daring human space exploration.)
I have posted a few POD type thinkings in MMM (Moon Miner Manifesto) issues, the favorite is a TL where either the unlikely event of the US pushing forward or an American group doing it independently. Not as outlandish as it may seem.
For example, domes are expensive foolishness at first. Caves are protected, existing (search "moon skylight") and supposed to be easily sealed (very high temperature gas, I guess). Problem is we don't know how far they go yet.
The pressure of a vacuum has enormous stresses, you see, and there are solar storms to contend with. Releasing heat in a sink is probably the biggest problem. A mile or more long tube for growing food and living is rather easy for a base. An oxygen atmosphere is easily manufactured and not a safety problem as often suggested.
Also, as previously posted at that site, the potential was an oportunity window that has now pretty well closed with better microwave and GSO, that of satellite tracking and beamed interface with the Earth. For example, Earth AM radio is often terrible away from the station repeater, especially with cheap sets when there is too much solar activity. And many places beamed to have no listeners. A good radar template could follow these highway routes and settlements having the most listeners during the 45% or so period the moon is overhead. Not a perfect solution, but one that would bring in considerable amounts of money then at a critical time, as the moon was/is a very stable, predictable platform and many templates might be placed at the same time.
Lunar craters have been proposed, but the focal length is too long and the cost of setup of anything in space is prohibitive for all but the most simple systems. The Sea of Tranquility one is possibly close enough to the dead center (Sinus Medii) to use a drop parabolic type. These holes are now known to be about 100 feet (30 m) deep. In times past, radio antennae have even been made of chicken wire, and it tends to be lightweight. The wave guides and other comparably small technical items would come from Earth, of course.
Anyway, it was a potential option for a comparably cheap and self propogating colony to start post 1969 or so. The first step would have been to map the lunar ground to 2 meter pixels, mascons be damned. I am guessing in part, but it certainly makes a good storyline plot device, with modest parallels to Marconi's radio (did not take off until the 1912 Titanic disaster forced shipping companies legally to buy the equipment, and here the rescue option often presents itself for much smaller incidents).
Would the gravity on the moon be enough to stop bones from decalcifying if not how would those living in a semi/permanent base get around this problem.
I don't know if that's knowable with the work that's been done up to now. But we do know that there's plenty of exercise that can be done in a zero/micro-G environment (i.e. on ISS) that has a positive effect. So I'd guess that with 1/6G to work with, it wouldn't be that hard to do even better than what's been achieved on ISS.
Hoist40
Banned
I don’t think anyone knows for sure. We obviously have lots of experience with 1 gravity and a significant amount of experience with 0 gravity but very very little with partial gravity. You can only do very very short term experiments on earth, and our only experience on the moon itself was the Apollo landing which only lasted a few days at a time
There was suppose to be a centrifuge module on the ISS to test small animals, plants and materials but it was never fully funded and the parts made are still sitting on the earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module
So until we either go to the moon for long periods or build a centrifuge in orbit there will not be any hard data.
What would be more beneficial though 2 week lunar stays or a Space station.
I guess a lunar base could act as a test bed for technologies to be used on other planets like Mars but you wouldn't be able to do experiments under zero gravity.
A space station, without a doubt. Much cheaper to maintain, you get to do most of the same sorts of experiments (particularly biomedical, since on a station you can have a centrifuge setup that varies from zero to some rather higher g-number), and it can act as a base for further exploration, as a propellant depot especially.
The Moon is utterly unsuitable for the latter without a large and expensive oxygen production system (and even then, you're better off shipping LunOX back to Earth orbit for use), quite expensive, and the only real benefit over the station is that you can study lunar geology. A bit...limited, wouldn't you say?
Now, as for the OP, technically speaking a lunar base could probably have been established in the 1960s or even (if you swung everything just right starting in the early 1900s) the 1950s. But politically or economically? Not yet, maybe not ever. It has no obvious Earthly use, none that could justify the high cost of building and staffing it, so until that can be overcome, it's not likely to happen.
One of the best things that a moonbase can do which a space station cannot is that it is a huge, perfectly stable, relatively slow moving platform for just about any sort of telescope array (and if you use the far side is also radio shielded).
But it's a long way to go versus a medium Earth orbit for this purpose; unless one is able to manufacture most of the material needs of a Lunar observatory on the Moon from lunar materials, surely it's easier and less costly in delta-V terms to design a suitable orbiting platform, with active stabilization and control of its angular motion.
To get the benefit of shielding a radio telescope from Terran radio noise, Earth-Moon L2 is an option. Of course in terms of kilometers L2 is even farther away than the Moon's surface! One might take it as defining the outer boundary of the Earth-Moon system. In terms of gravitational potential it is just about the highest-energy point to try to reach in Earth's gravitational domain. And by virtue of the very fact we are considering exploiting, it is rather terribly isolated, out of all direct communication with Earth. But that's the point, isn't it. Actually I'm not honestly sure the Moon totally eclipses Terran radio noise at L2, but it seems likely it would--L2 is I think pretty far from the lunar surface, in the same ballpark as a geosynchronous orbit over Earth or perhaps farther, but while the Moon is only 1/4 Earth's diameter, still Earth is quite far beyond the Moon so it should be well blocked by the Moon even that far out.
And you don't have to provide delta-V for landing or takeoff from L2, so in fuel terms it is closer than the lunar surface.
So, two big orbiting astronomical stations, one in a moderately high Earth orbit, one distant, presumably automated, one way out at L2 for radio astronomy. Or the former Earth-orbiting observatory might actually be a whole family of separate (again presumably automated) telescope satellites, each with their own specialized missions.
Some targets would be eclipsed by the Earth every couple hours, but I don't see why on the whole orbiting telescopes can't be made to accomplish anything a Lunar-based one can. Maybe I underestimate the difficulty of damping vibrations without a large stable mass to dump them on, but then again, how often would Earth-orbiting satellites be subjected to unplanned disturbances? They can get disoriented by tides, there might be magnetic interactions and perturbations by solar wind and light pressure, but all of that can be accounted for in design. There will be micrometeorites but there are also those on the Moon; the initial damage they do will be the same, and it's hard to believe that the vibrations they set up won't get damped out pretty handily by the structure of a telescope itself. The major vibrations that might be a little harder to get rid of in orbit as opposed to on the Moon would be those that come from turning the aim of the telescopes to new targets, I'd think. Again it's hard to see why that predictable and deliberately planned disturbance can't be compensated for.
A quick note on orbital telescope vibration. Two words: solar arrays. It's definitely a solvable problem (it was with Hubble -- an interesting story).
As for how much lift you need to get a sustainable lunar settlement started, it depends on whether you're talking 1970s technology or not. Without at least early 1990s robotics tech, the lift requirements for a truly permanent lunar settlement are daunting, especially if you stick with a relatively realistic timeline in which we're using Saturn Vs.
But note three things. First, an extended-stay Apollo program would have been able to do useful work toward getting a settlement started. Basics like shelter and power could have been tackled to a first approximation. Practical experiments like dabbling in using lunar resources for food production might have been on the agenda before the end of the 70s.
Second, if you can withstand the threat of an ASB invasion into your TL, you can imagine a medium-rate production of Saturn Vs (with incremental improvements as they go), which gives you economies of scale in both production and launch ops, AND you can get rid of STS, which gives you a bunch of money to play with.
Third, you have to get NASA focused on developing a truly robust cislunar transport network in the 1970s. This means a relatively small LEO outpost (not necessarily permanently manned) in the right inclination (28.5 deg. IIRC) that can serve as an assembly base. It also means, very importantly, development and implementation of an at least LEO fuel depot, and development of a cislunar transit vehicle and a reusable lander. Those are tall orders, but they're what's required to really make a go of claiming the moon as a usable resource. 1960s-70s technology provided a good base for incremental development of all these things. All that was missing was the will and the vision to do it.
EDIT: If you're serious about building a robust lunar settlement before the end of the 20th century, you have to get NASA out of the launch business as soon as possible. The painful irony is that, without the economic failure of STS, this is unlikely to happen as a matter of the natural bureaucratic and Congressional pork politics of the agency.
As for how much lift you need to get a sustainable lunar settlement started, it depends on whether you're talking 1970s technology or not. Without at least early 1990s robotics tech, the lift requirements for a truly permanent lunar settlement are daunting, especially if you stick with a relatively realistic timeline in which we're using Saturn Vs.
But note three things. First, an extended-stay Apollo program would have been able to do useful work toward getting a settlement started. Basics like shelter and power could have been tackled to a first approximation. Practical experiments like dabbling in using lunar resources for food production might have been on the agenda before the end of the 70s.
Second, if you can withstand the threat of an ASB invasion into your TL, you can imagine a medium-rate production of Saturn Vs (with incremental improvements as they go), which gives you economies of scale in both production and launch ops, AND you can get rid of STS, which gives you a bunch of money to play with.
Third, you have to get NASA focused on developing a truly robust cislunar transport network in the 1970s. This means a relatively small LEO outpost (not necessarily permanently manned) in the right inclination (28.5 deg. IIRC) that can serve as an assembly base. It also means, very importantly, development and implementation of an at least LEO fuel depot, and development of a cislunar transit vehicle and a reusable lander. Those are tall orders, but they're what's required to really make a go of claiming the moon as a usable resource. 1960s-70s technology provided a good base for incremental development of all these things. All that was missing was the will and the vision to do it.
EDIT: If you're serious about building a robust lunar settlement before the end of the 20th century, you have to get NASA out of the launch business as soon as possible. The painful irony is that, without the economic failure of STS, this is unlikely to happen as a matter of the natural bureaucratic and Congressional pork politics of the agency.
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Stationkeeping is the primary cause of satellite failure, or recently was for
many years. The difficulty is a critical mass of use to justify the areas
the moon is a good platform for. On Earth, the largest cost of astronomy
is the equipment. Like astronauts, the human component is trivially
cheap. Getting equipment to the moon is a killer, putting it mildly.
That said, if there was enough infrastructure on the moon, costs would
plummet excepting the super technical stuff. The far side of the moon
is, unfortunately, the most isolated in communications, especially in the
1970's.
No easy ways out of these issues, but the potential was/is there.