Moon base

[Shevek23]

Possibly useful:...

Oh, very useful.

Sadly, as Jackalope pointed out just above, there isn't much of a constituency for science as such. If they can convince a bunch of soldiers, or businessmen, that the science just might pay off for them, then they can get some funding. But a sure thing is, as Dyson complained, not much help for advancing science (however profitable or strategic it might be--in the case of Moon exploration OTL nothing much turned up on those fronts, though near-Earth satellites did pay off--and were on the US Government agenda (secretly, the CIA's Corona program) as such a sure thing, before Sputnik). Science needs the unexpected and you never know where or when that will turn up. As far as we know, if scientists could have sold backers in Congress, the Pentagon, or on Wall Street on a lottery ticket, said backers would be upset at getting burned--of course we still don't know what Dyson's 400-man-day program of systematic exploration might have turned up.

Here's a case where thinking too much on what might have been does make me sad. And here I'm out of beer to cry into...

 

[Workable Goblin]

I have been busy so did not answer this before. But if one reads my postings, there has never been any great emphasis on astronomy. Astronomy is a weak commercial venture, unstable with grant funds. Like my post illustrates a couple days ago, it is said by Silicon Valley historians that American radio astronomy got a huge $ shot in the arm when it was discovered that we could recieve passive LOS communications hostile (and non hostile) nations had in defiliation (non LOS), turning an astronomy device into a military ear. This makes sense.

I don't believe this. At all. The most interesting frequencies for astronomical purposes are often not even vaguely the most interesting frequencies for non-astronomical purposes. As an example, shortwave frequencies are very interesting to the non-astronomer, since they can reflect off of the ionosphere and therefore travel around the world, but of course this means incoming shortwave radiation will also be reflected, making them useless for astronomical purposes, besides which they are hopelessly contaminated by non-astronomical activity. Furthermore, the best sites for observing Russian or Chinese radio activity, like Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, or Japan, are not the best places for astronomical work.

I can buy military-developed electronics, radio, and radar technology being applied to radio astronomy, but this doesn't make any sense if you take a good hard look at it.

In other words, by Lunar Rebound (EME) we were then able to see which frequencies were being used, to roughly range where they were coming from for radar, and evesdrop on communications. This was in the late 1950's, and land locked giants of USSR/PRC were the needed areas. Orbiting satellites soon superceeded the irregularly scheduled and limited functions of most of this, but it was still nice to have as a backup.

But you don't need astronomical facilities for this, and in fact they would tend to be poorly adapted for such service (having been designed to observe the frequencies produced by stars, gas clouds, and so forth, not the emissions of Russian radios). And, again, they would mostly be poorly located for such work. I mean, how is Arecibo going to help you observe Russian radio transmissions?

To have a large device, or initially not so large communication or recieving device on the moon could easily have had huge advantages, even a layman like myself can see that. Or at least that is what I am suggesting, commercial communications and military evesdropping equipment, with a very minor focus on astronomy, perhaps early planetary disc observation with resolution issues as selling point advantage.

Except as you just pointed out, American ferret satellites were doing the same thing within a few years of the start of the space program for a far lower cost than even the most bare-bones lunar base. Certainly by 1969 a number of American (and probably Russian) ferret satellites had been launched and had operated. Why on Earth (or off of it) would you spend tens of billions of dollars building a lunar base to do something you can do far more cheaply with robots? It's the same reason that KH-10/MOL failed; the robots were just better and cheaper, with no need to risk lives at the same time.

For communications, geosynchronous satellites are cheaper and more convenient. And for astronomy, I seriously doubt that any lunar colony short of a fairly developed one is going to be able to fabricate mirrors on site, meaning that there are not even any advantages in that regard, either. Essentially, a lunar base would do nothing at all except for lunar science better than cheaper, more convenient, and more mature systems. There's no possible justification for building such a base, not in the 1970s, aside from pure science. Even today, there's not much else.

Again, the money is where one would have focused any colony that wanted to survive and grow. And the commercial aspects, at best, were a window opportunity that should be expected to greatly diminsh post 1990 in OTL due to advancements in technology and satellites, but enough to get a critical mass of infrastructure in place.

The big commercial geosynch networks started developing in the 1970s and 1980s. The Ariane was developed in no small part to launch such satellites (that's why they chose French Guiana as a launch site), as was the Shuttle. Everyone knew it was coming, no one would sink capital into something that would be enormously expensive, less capable, and surely obsolete in a few years.

Possibly useful:



http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw30.html

Freeman Dyson is wrong, BTW; Apollo seismic and chemical data helped create the Big Impact hypothesis, which has had a significant influence on our understanding of the solar system (people see big impacts everywhere nowadays).

 

[jackalope]

truth is life wrote:

But you don't need astronomical facilities for this, and in fact they would tend to be poorly adapted for such service (having been designed to observe the frequencies produced by stars, gas clouds, and so forth, not the emissions of Russian radios). And, again, they would mostly be poorly located for such work. I mean, how is Arecibo going to help you observe Russian radio transmissions?

Time to wrap up this topic. AFAIK, the US Military funded these to use
them in a few hours a month post 1958. The radio astronomy dishes
passively recieved electro magnetic radiation (EMR) of the radio range
from the USSR bounced off the moon during those peak times to get
a snapshot of that coming off the USSR. The nature of the moon is
that it gives off imprecise readings as a passive reflector. The peak
reflection would be at that time, and since there are risks in being hogging
the time (USSR gets suspicious, and information is best never divulged),
that is all the window the military wanted.

With a moon base, this would not be a narrow window, but about 50% of
the time, a much bigger view, and it could be ranged far more precisely,
to much less scale. With a big enough parabolic dish (of wire, so very
cheap, draped over the known chasm mentioned), it could perhaps even
pick up manuevers realtime of very local radio walkie talkie type.

The difference is enormous and it should be evident to everyone here.

While present day satellites have progressed, and the trend would not be
the friend of any lunar base, to this day there would be a wide range of
uses, albeit only available 50% of the time when the moon is out. It is
just that the niche would be much smaller than before, when the US
did without. Just knowing where USSR instalations are is one thing,
monitoring them in detail is a wealth of information sure to be of potential
use for NSA, etc. And remember that the NSA spent literally hundreds of
billions of USD on just these kinds of infrastructures.

I would guess that the NSA alone would have been willing to drop
20 billion 2011 USD on the project, eagerly so. This would be a good
selling point, but all national security issues are intangable to dollar signs.

Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is better, but electronic survaillaince is,
was, and always will be for the future a very useful issue. And always
the high ground is the best place to do this at a sizable distance.

 

[phx1138]

Time to wrap up this topic. AFAIK, the US Military funded these to use
them in a few hours a month post 1958. The radio astronomy dishes
passively recieved electro magnetic radiation (EMR) of the radio range
from the USSR bounced off the moon during those peak times to get
a snapshot of that coming off the USSR. The nature of the moon is
that it gives off imprecise readings as a passive reflector. The peak
reflection would be at that time, and since there are risks in being hogging
the time (USSR gets suspicious, and information is best never divulged),
that is all the window the military wanted.

With a moon base, this would not be a narrow window, but about 50% of
the time, a much bigger view, and it could be ranged far more precisely,
to much less scale. With a big enough parabolic dish (of wire, so very
cheap, draped over the known chasm mentioned), it could perhaps even
pick up manuevers realtime of very local radio walkie talkie type.

The difference is enormous and it should be evident to everyone here.

While present day satellites have progressed, and the trend would not be
the friend of any lunar base, to this day there would be a wide range of
uses, albeit only available 50% of the time when the moon is out. It is
just that the niche would be much smaller than before, when the US
did without. Just knowing where USSR instalations are is one thing,
monitoring them in detail is a wealth of information sure to be of potential
use for NSA, etc. And remember that the NSA spent literally hundreds of
billions of USD on just these kinds of infrastructures.

I would guess that the NSA alone would have been willing to drop
20 billion 2011 USD on the project, eagerly so. This would be a good
selling point, but all national security issues are intangable to dollar signs.

Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is better, but electronic survaillaince is,
was, and always will be for the future a very useful issue. And always
the high ground is the best place to do this at a sizable distance.

I tend to agree. The trouble is, this seems to argue not for a moonbase but for bases in L4/L5 & L2, where it's possible to monitor 24/7, & where you don't get the high delta-V requirements of lunar surface landing. Yes, the dV from Earth's surface is still insanely high, but you don't add a ton more for soft-landing & then overcoming the lunar gravity well every trip, too.

Yes, I know, this is getting away from the OP. I just thought it needed saying.

 

[jackalope]

I tend to agree. The trouble is, this seems to argue not for a moonbase but for bases in L4/L5 & L2, where it's possible to monitor 24/7, & where you don't get the high delta-V requirements of lunar surface landing. Yes, the dV from Earth's surface is still insanely high, but you don't add a ton more for soft-landing & then overcoming the lunar gravity well every trip, too.

Yes, I know, this is getting away from the OP. I just thought it needed saying.

The problem with L4/L5 is that there are no resources there. Eventually, yes, with deviated asteroid bergy bits. The moon has plenty of native oxygen and other resources (in rocks) we are aware of. And apparently newly found caves that can easily be sealed off and farmed, shirt sleeve work on detachable dish equipment, etc miles long and needing only a light tube and heat sinks (rock is a great insulator). Even sufficient water can be made of the soil, though the poles has other amounts. The key consideration mentioned, it has a hugely stable platform for the dish, also not at L4/L5 without great cost. I am guessing that the needed Earth manufactured equipment might be/could have been as low as 5% of the initial, much less that of the later forms. This would negate any disadvantages and be far more durable to troubles. Someday another body in the opposite moon rotation would do/have done fine as a compliment, but three closer to Earth is better and just have a couple of lines strung out for station keeping at each site.

 

[sloreck]

Self sufficiency in food will not be that difficult - although the diet may be a bit bland for a while. Remember that all organic waste matter can be composted/sterilized easily & reused as fertilizer. At first you'll have just vegetables grown, also starches such as potatoes/yams. Later corn is easily added. Small mammals such as rabbits and guinea pigs can be introduced, also catfish/carp etc that can be grown in tanks (also as a way of "recycling" organic waste). Obviously dairy products. beef, poultry (+/- getting chickens there - but fertilized eggs ship easily), wheat flour, fruit products will need to be imported (but they all contribute to a growing "organic" base). Various chile peppers will be easy to grow & spice things up. One key essential that will need to be imported=salt.

 

[f1b0nacc1]

Trace elements

Self sufficiency in food will not be that difficult - although the diet may be a bit bland for a while. Remember that all organic waste matter can be composted/sterilized easily & reused as fertilizer. At first you'll have just vegetables grown, also starches such as potatoes/yams. Later corn is easily added. Small mammals such as rabbits and guinea pigs can be introduced, also catfish/carp etc that can be grown in tanks (also as a way of "recycling" organic waste). Obviously dairy products. beef, poultry (+/- getting chickens there - but fertilized eggs ship easily), wheat flour, fruit products will need to be imported (but they all contribute to a growing "organic" base). Various chile peppers will be easy to grow & spice things up. One key essential that will need to be imported=salt.

Not necessarily so. While the CHON would be there (though unless you build the base near one of the poles you are going to have some issues with water) in reasonable quantities, there any any number of trace materials that might not, and this could lead to some serious problems over the long haul. Not that any of this cannot be dealt with, but it's never a good idea to hand-wave away some potentially serious issues, especially given our extremely imperfect understanding of nutritional requirements at the time this would have been implemented.

Mind you, even bulk foods aren't the problem nearly as much as spare parts, etc. for the various components being used in all of this. Given the raditional levels on the surface, thermal stress, etc., failure rates aren't going to be low, and plenty of spares will have to be kept in stock. Since repair work in a vaccum is problematic at this point, most of those will be in larger modules, which tend to be somewhat wasteful in terms of weight since they would likely have to incorporate multiple assemblies for simplicity's sake.

 

[f1b0nacc1]

Why though?

Of course the question keeps coming up as....Why Bother? If you want to do strategic recon/survellience, etc., it is easier to put up a largish number of LEO and MEO satellites using existing booster capacity. One breaks, you send up another, and keep plenty of launchers around for emergencies. Economies of scale keep the costs low(er), and your ability to respond to changes in circumstances (system failures, emergencies, new deployments, etc.) gives you far greater flexibility. If you MUST have manned systems to babysit them (why? these systems could be 'disposable' with replacements sent up when they fail/age out/etc.), a manned station is a far cheaper proposition than a moon base.

Now if you want to use the moonbase to provide logistical support for earth orbing systems (Ben Bova described this in his Kinnison series about a million years ago - grin), that makes more sense, but even then, I suspect that the start-up costs are going to be VERY high....

 

[Abgrund]

Certainly the U.S. could have built a permanent or long-term Lunar base in the 1970's, though continuous habitation would have been very expensive.

It's not implausible that it could have been done in the 1950's, had some nation wanted very, very badly to do it for some unimaginable reason. Surely there would have been a very high death rate among early cosmonauts.

A Lunar base offers several major advantages over an orbital space station. These include:

1. Oxygen, which is abundant in lunar rocks.

2. Hydrogen, which is much scarcer in lunar soil but not nearly as scarce as in a vacuum. Hydrogen + Oxygen = Water, of course.

3. Bulk material for radiation shielding and meteoroid protection.

4. Titanium ores for construction.

5. Pretty much any material you can think of is easier to get on the Moon than to lift from Earth.

6. A potential heat sink (make your own circulating liquid, however) and temperature stabilizer.

7. A place to dump waste where you don't have to worry about it drifting into you or falling to earth.

8. Enough gravity to simplify a whole lot of basic tasks, like walking, flushing, ore smelting, and too many to even think about listing. You can actually put stuff down and it stays there.

9. Very little energy required to remove material from the Moon, compared to what it takes to remove material from Earth.

10. No worries about orbital stability.

The likeliest use for a Lunar base, of course, is to provide material for an orbital base or interplanetary mission. It's not like we need to go to the Moon to bring titanium back to Earth.

I look forward to seeing the first Chinese Moon base established within my lifetime.

 

[jackalope]

Of course the question keeps coming up as....Why Bother? If you want to do strategic recon/survellience, etc., it is easier to put up a largish number of LEO and MEO .

Look, in 1970 we had no idea that it would be easier to put up these
items. History is full of expensive redundant plans and schemes, just
go to many an East coast US city and walk along the ruins of a
canal. Ten years after they were built in the early 1800's they were
often abandoned through unprofitable competition from railroads.
Or neck and neck steam propulsion vs. wind in the mid 1800's, where
new technological improvements of sail made it better. Grain on certain
routes, like the Europe to Australia run, were slightly more cost effective
profitwise with sail and competitent crews until the 1930's, as it is a
bulk product and the southern roaring forties gave a huge free source of
energy.

Or it could have been profitable till today. We may never know. I
do not expect most everyone in this site to know IRR or ROI, but for
businesses _all_ milestones and projections are fiction. The reasons
for presenting the fiction is what investors and other allied entities
look for, insofar as how that vision was arrived at in a logical and
effective consistency, not accuracy. It is a sort of animal spirit
that shortcuts sorting out the sheep from the rams. And investors
place their bets hoping for the lot round best -- not every investment
is ever expected to make it as reality intervenes. Governments
in particular are terrible at adequately forecasting future needs well
for technological issues, by the way, historically speaking.

This answers your question in all important salient points. I had tried
to cover it in earlier posts but seem not to have been clear enough.
The supposed reason for this clearinghouse site is to make plausible
scenarios, not cute, efficient ones with clean doilies embroidering
them. Even if the plans were totally inefficient to our present time line
approach, the possibility outlined in this thread's main theme and
stated plausibility check of a moonbase is IMO completely valid for
commercial and governmental reasons. At least a large number of
others agree, but you seem not to. Why you do not needs to answer
and reject the body of information just presented, would you not
think?

 

[f1b0nacc1]

Why or why not?

By 1970 (heck, by 1965, and possibly earlier) it was easily understood that putting unmanned satellites in orbit for recon, etc. was going to be far cheaper than manned expeditions to orbit, much less the moon. This is one of the reasons proposals such as MOL died on the vine, it was cheaper to do it with robots. As for the costs associated with getting to the moon, the delta-vee to get there was the same in 1970 as it is now...and without handwaving new propulsion technologies into existence planners at that time had a pretty clear notion of what would have to be done to put various systems into orbit versus sending them to the moon.

Getting anything to the moon (and a moon base isn't going to be self-sufficient for a very long time, certianly for at least say a decade or more) is insanely expensive, complex, and dangerous. Without some sort of useful return on the investment, any potential funding sources are going to be rare indeed, if not unheard of. I freely concede that the moon might be useful as a logistics base (though getting all of that up and running is going to be enormously expensive, easily topping 300-500 billion dollars, possibly far more), and without a preexisting LEO/MEO infrastructure, there is no point to building it. Any planner of that period who could add would have come to precisely the same conclusions. It required no special insight, only a simple understanding of orbital mechanics, rocket technology, and finance.

The fact that we didn't build a moon base, and that most manned spaceflight other than the most limited of LEO boondoggles have been undertaken since suggests that the objections that I raise have some substance. Costs do matter, and the benefits of a moonbase (other than some handwaving about 'animal spirits', and some equally vague suggestions that the moon offers some unique scientific opportunities that would be worth the costs) have not been particularly well explained here. In fairness, proponents of manned spaceflight (or at least publicly funded manned spaceflight) have been equally vague and superficial in their descriptions of such benefits...once again contributing to a solid explanation of why we haven't gone back.

Abgrund offers some benefits of building bases on the moon, but none of them strike me as terribly compelling in and of themselves. This is the key point, and ultimately the hole in the theories I have seen expounded here. Not that there aren't things on the moon that are worth having, but are they cost efficient to get. When they are, we will go, until then, we will not. Pretending otherwise is only an invitation to the same sort of wishful thinking that has kept us chained to LEO for the last 4 decades.

One reason why I strongly support commercial spaceflight is that this is where future exploration and (more importantly) colonization/exploitation will come from. As future entrepeneurs discover things of value (tourism is a start, there will be others), we will see a sustainable, fiscally sensible infrastructure take shape. We will make mistakes (the comment regarding canals is especially viable here....I suspect the shuttle will be remembered the same way), but with time we will go back, and this time, we will be doing it for a reason that keeps us going back.

 

[jackalope]

Steampunk and Moore's Law

Fair enough presentation, and I see you know considerable amount of detail of the situation and time. However, Moore's Law is not mentioned or examined, a fatal flaw in saying this here idea of moon bases is plausible or implausible from a technological need basis.

Moore's Law is the general truth that the number of transistors able to be fit into an area has doubled every two years since 1960 and the development of IC circuits. (And this was brought about directly in the first years by the demand almost entirely of military and non military government space uses of initially prohibitive cost of IC chips, which then brought down the cost through mass production and experimentation at the government's expense, in a dilemma of the chicken/egg spark.)

My point is that Moore's Law was not clear, nor expected to last too many more years in so many places in OTL, especially throughout the 1960's. It was viewed by nearly all a temporary spurt. There was no guarantee that it would not level off, thus killing the OTL gains. In short, nearly steampunk solutions would have applied as a viable option regardless of the 1960's fanfare of permanently upstaging the Russians. Moore's law is fundamental in allowing these satellites to produce so many advantages opposed to other solutions, moon based communications being one. And fiber optics was at its infancy.

These existed well without any stumble, meaning that a potential for a leader or leaders to use that as a thinking. If there was a fumble of sorts, one example is what if some elected or non elected bureaucratic nitwit decided as a cost cutting effort to go slow with very limited numbers of IC chips from the get go? I find it difficult to believe in a free market system that this circa 1960 scenario that the hamstring situation would easily delay much more than 5 to 10 years, but in the wonderful world of bureaucrats anything is possible with sheer monumental incompetence and start/stop production poisoning the well of innovative factory production R&D ROI though lack of mass production.

Or in the magic 1970 year point of departure, some other snag could come up. A few come to my mind already.

Moore's Law is unprecedented in the history of efficient development of industry since our cavemen days. It has been presented in the history of computers as about the same if the Model T of yesteryear nowadays has evolved cars that in a mere hundred years of development (2011) can go to another galaxy, say Andromeda, on a tank of gas and in a few minutes. I don't know of your model, but my personal car seems to lack the space warp button (due to an assembly line mishap, no doubt!)

Gross ignorance at high levels of Moore's Law is commonplace to this day, upon occasion even in telecommunications. Take an instance of ATT spinoff company, Southwestern Bell Company -- including a presently existing remnant of the Bell Labs which invented the transistor. This situation happened about _1995_. They signed an agreement for _set rate_ electronics for _ten years_ (the cost was 500 million USD of the whole project)! The executives in this high tech company thought themselves as experts in this high science Americast cable communication scheme and believed the cost savings would be enormous. Incredibly, they had never heard of Moore's Law, and reportedly sent a memo to all departments when informed of the oversight, sadly after the binding contract was a done deal. Typically this electronic hardware decreases to around 10% of its old cost during those ten years, most unlike other industries, which had the company pay about 50% more than necessary.

No one knows how long Moore's Law will continue at our present 2011, but so called experts now hedge bets to at least ten more years past the present 51 long years of continuance.

(And, yes, after more than a month my reputation marker still reads Red to myself when logging in, with no reply from the Administrator. To others, or myself before loggin it is gray neutral. What an amazing software coincidence.)

 

[Workable Goblin]

Look, in 1970 we had no idea that it would be easier to put up these items.

Er, actually they did know that. Why do you think KH-10/MOL got killed in favor of KH-9 and KH-11, what do you think Intelsat was doing? By 1970, there had been about a dozen or so comsats launched, and a lot more "ordinary" satellites; it was pretty obvious that they were practical, and a hell of a lot cheaper than a Moon base.

I don't know what Moore's Law has to do with this at all. We're talking about rocket science, not computer engineering, and by the 1960s, even, computers were perfectly capable of managing comsats (and, in the event, everyone knew that Earth orbit sites, ie. GEO, were best for those, not some Moon base, and had for decades). In fact, it was the comsats which turned out to be the "canals"; killed by fiber optic cables that drastically increased bandwith across submarine cables without either requiring impractically large cables or involving the huge latencies inherent in satellite communications.

EDIT: That's not to say comsats are dead, but they now fill specialty roles, like remote mobile communications or links to places where it just isn't practical or cost-effective to lay fiber to, rather than the very expansive role that was predicted by early figures (such as Clarke), or during the early 1990s just before fiber went everywhere (Iridium, Globalstar, Teledesic, etc.).

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Fair enough presentation, and I see you know considerable amount of detail of the situation and time. However, Moore's Law is not mentioned or examined, a fatal flaw in saying this here idea of moon bases is plausible or implausible from a technological need basis.

Moore's Law is the general truth that the number of transistors able to be fit into an area has doubled every two years since 1960 and the development of IC circuits. (And this was brought about directly in the first years by the demand almost entirely of military and non military government space uses of initially prohibitive cost of IC chips, which then brought down the cost through mass production and experimentation at the government's expense, in a dilemma of the chicken/egg spark.)

My point is that Moore's Law was not clear, nor expected to last too many more years in so many places in OTL, especially throughout the 1960's. It was viewed by nearly all a temporary spurt. There was no guarantee that it would not level off, thus killing the OTL gains. In short, nearly steampunk solutions would have applied as a viable option regardless of the 1960's fanfare of permanently upstaging the Russians. Moore's law is fundamental in allowing these satellites to produce so many advantages opposed to other solutions, moon based communications being one. And fiber optics was at its infancy.

These existed well without any stumble, meaning that a potential for a leader or leaders to use that as a thinking. If there was a fumble of sorts, one example is what if some elected or non elected bureaucratic nitwit decided as a cost cutting effort to go slow with very limited numbers of IC chips from the get go? I find it difficult to believe in a free market system that this circa 1960 scenario that the hamstring situation would easily delay much more than 5 to 10 years, but in the wonderful world of bureaucrats anything is possible with sheer monumental incompetence and start/stop production poisoning the well of innovative factory production R&D ROI though lack of mass production.

Or in the magic 1970 year point of departure, some other snag could come up. A few come to my mind already.

Moore's Law is unprecedented in the history of efficient development of industry since our cavemen days. It has been presented in the history of computers as about the same if the Model T of yesteryear nowadays has evolved cars that in a mere hundred years of development (2011) can go to another galaxy, say Andromeda, on a tank of gas and in a few minutes. I don't know of your model, but my personal car seems to lack the space warp button (due to an assembly line mishap, no doubt!)

Gross ignorance at high levels of Moore's Law is commonplace to this day, upon occasion even in telecommunications. Take an instance of ATT spinoff company, Southwestern Bell Company -- including a presently existing remnant of the Bell Labs which invented the transistor. This situation happened about _1995_. They signed an agreement for _set rate_ electronics for _ten years_ (the cost was 500 million USD of the whole project)! The executives in this high tech company thought themselves as experts in this high science Americast cable communication scheme and believed the cost savings would be enormous. Incredibly, they had never heard of Moore's Law, and reportedly sent a memo to all departments when informed of the oversight, sadly after the binding contract was a done deal. Typically this electronic hardware decreases to around 10% of its old cost during those ten years, most unlike other industries, which had the company pay about 50% more than necessary.

No one knows how long Moore's Law will continue at our present 2011, but so called experts now hedge bets to at least ten more years past the present 51 long years of continuance.

(And, yes, after more than a month my reputation marker still reads Red to myself when logging in, with no reply from the Administrator. To others, or myself before loggin it is gray neutral. What an amazing software coincidence.)

Er, actually they did know that. Why do you think KH-10/MOL got killed in favor of KH-9 and KH-11, what do you think Intelsat was doing? By 1970, there had been about a dozen or so comsats launched, and a lot more "ordinary" satellites; it was pretty obvious that they were practical, and a hell of a lot cheaper than a Moon base.

I don't know what Moore's Law has to do with this at all. We're talking about rocket science, not computer engineering, and by the 1960s, even, computers were perfectly capable of managing comsats (and, in the event, everyone knew that Earth orbit sites, ie. GEO, were best for those, not some Moon base, and had for decades). In fact, it was the comsats which turned out to be the "canals"; killed by fiber optic cables that drastically increased bandwith across submarine cables without either requiring impractically large cables or involving the huge latencies inherent in satellite communications.

As TiL says, moores law is irrelevant. Comsats constructed with discrete transistors would have been huge and expensive - and still cheaper than humans......

 

[Workable Goblin]

As TiL says, moores law is irrelevant. Comsats constructed with discrete transistors would have been huge and expensive - and still cheaper than humans......

Yes, what you need is to avoid solid-state electronics altogether. Then von Braun and Clarke would come into play (ie., big stations full of vacuum tubes). Of course, you also made it a lot harder to get power in space (solar cells use many of the same principles as solid-state electronics, so it's hard to see how you could avoid one and have the other), but solar dynamic power is just massive and bulky, not impossible (thus further driving large crewed stations).

 

[f1b0nacc1]

Moore's law...

OK, TIL and Dathi both saved me the trouble....

Keep in mind that the various systems that would make a lunar base irrelevant for national security (as well as most economic) needs were already well on the way in the 1950s, and this was easily obvious to most of the engineers and strategic planners of that time.

Yes, if somehow advanced computer technology (most of which came from the development of ICBMs, NOT spacecraft), the advance into space would have been more difficult, but certainly not impossible. However, even if this was the case, getting to LEO/MEO and doing useful things there would require LESS computing power, and thus be far less vulnerable to a retardation of computer advances than would getting to/doing useful things on the lunar surface.

Look, there are some potential viable sources of water and a few other consumables, possible some other marginally exploitable resources absent some very significant technical advances that we haven't made even now. There is NOT any other compelling reason to go to the moon....yet.

 

[jackalope]

　
　

Look, in 1970 we had no idea that it would be easier to put up these
items.

Let me rephrase that to only one possible meaning. We had no idea that the technology would advance to the point that it did in the 1990's and beyond, that it would not instead level off due to physics. Since we are dealing with the forces at small sizes never before worked with, where quantum mechanics start to effect manufacturing process is one part. Another is that the technology guiding it is deceptively simple, that of photo engraving which was developed in the 1852-1880's. Forecasting normally expects level offs because there has not ever been before or since a steady linear progression of the duration for IC computing power.

Moore's law was presented in 1965 and others had previously suggested it as a prediction, but it was only an unassurred prediction. It could have easily been ignored as such by deciding leaders. As it was, apparently it did level off a bit from doubling every year to doubling every two years over the last 50 years It is not irrelevant, and if the situation was greatly slowed down due to a less dynamic Silicon Valley, other technologies would have been more viable, including my radar antennae mentioned in the thread. To date, radio dishes are unpopular in free floating space for a variety of reasons.

That humans in space is an expensive activity is true. But with the cave scenario mentioned, comparibly easy self-sufficiency would have technically been possible. Note that if the Russians had been the first on the moon, POD 1960, then the next target would very possibly been a base.

Fiber optics became viable to compete with comsats in the 1980's. That leaves 15 years of time to build. It may or may not prove worth to keep, but that is not the plausibility check the thread maker asked, now is it? And if you checked my post here in the last couple of days, I had mentioned fiber optics as a contender. Nice of some of you out there to give me credit for that.

Moore's Law is a contending issue for the years till 1985 or so, then, if only for the issue of price. Slow down the price drop and other options seem more appealing. As it was, KH-10/MOL:

"By June 19, 1969 Henry A. Kissinger and others had made the decision to eliminate the manned part of the MOL due to funds cut backs and then to reassess the systems usefulness to the National Reconnaissance program."

So in 1969 it got axed because other options were more viable. But it lasted until then. Could it show persistence in OTL, and not a sure thing in another TL? No, of course not. It must be ASB and not at all plausible, to answer this thread's title question. I am being sarcastic here, but really people, where you are coming from is a mystery of the myopic.

 

[jackalope]

various systems that would make a lunar base irrelevant for national security (as well as most economic) needs were already well on the way in the 1950s, and this was easily obvious to most of the engineers and strategic planners of that time.

Plausible enough for the sheer facts of Lunar distance and being in LOS only 50% of the time, as I myself have mentioned numerous times. Of course it would be possible a well connected contractor with lobbists could bend the direction another way, as has happened so often in the Belt Way maze. Or a political reason, such as national pride. Once built, though, the potential exists for a large radar assembly providing pin point accuracy beyond anything we have now. Having a few humans around might be useful from time to time. The largest dish to the present in space has only been so large, however closer to the Earth. And as stated, no where near as a stable platform.

 

[f1b0nacc1]

Not about distance or LOS....

This isn't a matter of distance, it is about energy. The delta vee to reach the moon under optimum circumstances (ignoring, for a moment, landing issues, etc.) is 40% greater than that of LEO, which means far more mass dedicated to fuel for any payloads being 'sent up'. This number alone completely swamps any question of electronics made lighter or more compact as a result of advances in manufacturing, etc. The launch windows for the moon are more limited as well, since LEO is reachable pretty much on a 24/7 basis. Moore's law (which was never a 'law' per se, only an off-hand remark Gordon Moore made which has been mythologized into some great insight over the years) notowithstanding LEO-based systems offer so many advantages of Lunar-based ones that it is simply inconceivable that any sort of serious attempt to build a lunar base (except for the remote possibility of using it for a logistics site) is going to be undertaken.

You keep bringing up Moore's law as if this is some sort of magic wand that is going to make the moon instantly viable, ignoring that whatever improvements in reaching the moon come from this (minimal, as I have already pointed out, this is a matter of celestial mechanics, not solid state physics), similar or greater advantages will accrue to reaching LEO. The KH-10 and MOL were both LEO/MEO systems, and both were replaced by BETTER unmanned LEO systems. If we argue no Moore's law, going to the moon gets far, far harder, and certainly maintaining a base there (as opposed to in LEO, something that was being actively considered in the 1950s) remains quite attractive in comparison. Even if we argue that LEO would have somehow been considered too expensive as well (and if this is the case, lunar flights would be even less likely), the alternative to LEO based systems would be long-range aircraft, carriers, etc. on Earth, not limited, extremely expensive systems on the moon.

Finally, the "well-connected contractors exploiting the government from within" reads like something from the fevered imagination of a technothriller. We are not talking about some extra tranche of aircraft or even a new production line, we are talking about significant fraction of the defense budget (dare I suggest a non-trivial fraction of the GOP) for what exactly? Nobody, and I mean NOBODY inside DOD thought that this was a viable option, and even most of the defence plannersw tended to ignore lunar options as wildly expensive and utterly impractical Satellites, certainly, they are cheaper, more flexible, and can be implemented in a timeframe that most bureaucracies can deal with.

 

[Workable Goblin]

This isn't a matter of distance, it is about energy. The delta vee to reach the moon under optimum circumstances (ignoring, for a moment, landing issues, etc.) is 40% greater than that of LEO, which means far more mass dedicated to fuel for any payloads being 'sent up'. This number alone completely swamps any question of electronics made lighter or more compact as a result of advances in manufacturing, etc. The launch windows for the moon are more limited as well, since LEO is reachable pretty much on a 24/7 basis. Moore's law (which was never a 'law' per se, only an off-hand remark Gordon Moore made which has been mythologized into some great insight over the years) notowithstanding LEO-based systems offer so many advantages of Lunar-based ones that it is simply inconceivable that any sort of serious attempt to build a lunar base (except for the remote possibility of using it for a logistics site) is going to be undertaken.

Don't forget GEO. GEO communications satellites are infinitely more attractive than a Moon base, simply because they sit in one place continually. The Moon isn't anywhere near so convenient about that. There's a reason GEO has been considered the default location for comms sats since the 1940s, with the modern LEO constellations only arising because of an unforeseen move towards smaller and smaller ground antennas and more and more portable ground stations. For fixed stations, GEO is still gold.