Moon base

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.

Absolutely correct, and if I gave the impression that I thought otherwise, I apologize for my lack of clarity.

Now GEO is a different problem than LEO, and thus isn't as amenable to the sort of lightweight boosters that would support LEO operations. With this in mind, an LEO station wouldn't be a bad concept if we are talking about a larger military presence in orbit (servicing LEO satellites - and LEO is still the place to be for recon/surveillence, and weaponized systems...assuming no Outer Space Treaty), and it would permit tugs to be used (along with fuel depots) to move comsats and other HEO systems into position. IF (and that is a might big IF) that sort of infrastructure was put into place, the moon might be a good place to mine volatiles, though getting them back to LEO is going to be problematic.
 
Re: Posted Thread Bling

Yawn, how to begin with this duo? I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony, in that there are too many opportunities.


f1b0nacc1 wrote:
This isn't a matter of distance, it is about energy.
--Wrong, it is really about the cost. Energy is often the lead issue in money, but enough of that.

You keep bringing up Moore's law as if this is some sort of magic wand
-- This is not a Harry Potter type of discussion. I do confess, the only option for your M.O. seems to be not getting it. For the 15th time, the issue is that the profitable advance of Telecom, Fiber Optics and a whole slew of other interchangable areas was heavily based upon this electronics development of super compactablitity and cost cutting. Do you seriously dispute this, and if so why?

And the process remains today as if it were a physical law.

Moore's law stays pretty well true for what ever reason of physics and buisiness R&D. Since this has meant the longest and most profitable run known to man of any steady technology advancent previously, your knee jerk naysaying shakes my head in embarassment. Moores Law is the unique exception and not the norm for any business forecasting. The law was and still is suspect of continuing by experts -- and making the decision of techological experts has often not had much of anything to do with informed expert opinion. Something like securities law requires having a disclaimer that "past performance does not necessarily translate to the future". Moore's observation is an informal law of human understanding, not a physical law, but has had enoromous effect on human civilization and the gist of this Lunar topic we discuss. Other aspects of your claims are also whoppers, but here is a link to let the reader decide of the 1965 paper claim:

http://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf

Finally, the "well-connected contractors exploiting the government from within" reads like something from the fevered imagination of a technothriller
-- Nice try. Anyone who stayed around Washington D.C. much is not mystified why lobbying is a billion dollar business. Influence comes extremely cheap in Washington compared to other places in the world. That for the manned orbiting lab TruthisLife wrote about that in fact was barely nixed by Kissinger in 1969 is but one case in point. The Shuttle ended up being a white elephant due to this kind of poor contracting. 1960's NASA was a window of exception, and even there disturbing attempts happened, like after the Apollo 1 fire an astronaut sent to North American Aviation to observe found assembly employees coming to work shiftless and drunk, as if building a Monday reject Detroit lemon car. Something does get done but the whole process is a messy business.

the moon might be a good place to mine volatiles
-- Maybe in the distant s.f. future, but this thread was about how to start lunar bases circa 1970 and volatiles is a big loser for initiation and medium term profitability. I am particularly going to stay away from the Helium isotope volitile holy grail theme, except it has long been a refuge of the pseudo intellectual crowd (oddly both space and non space) howling and gibbering outside the gates of reality in gaudy and fake authoritive dismissive single statement upmanship.
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truth is life wrote:
Don't forget GEO. For fixed stations, GEO is still gold
.

-- Forget about GEO. Anything important and long term on the moon communications circuit would be pretty much billion dollar niche business, more competing with LEO (& post 1985 fiber optics) than the general GEO communication band. Every engineering position has advantages and disadvantages. GEO is not perfect and those flaws are found to be potentially useful for lunar possibilities, as I have posted at length at this site/thread/and elsewhere. I have mentioned before about LEO/GEO comparisons. Please read the posts thoroughly and then respond.
 
I have some time and have sort of touch upon the basics. Gumming up the works is that these posters would never stand up to Vinod Khosla. The creed of silicon valley (and the better half of the technology these posters garb wear as if old style Transylvanian peasants stringing garlic around their necks or perhaps Madonna using electric teletype rubber bands as bracelet bling) is to ignore the public experts, because "their assumptions are always wrong". Moore and others in the innovative fields, including 1960's space, had open door policies because maybe 10 people on the planet might sort of know what is possible in whatever neck of the woods was examined with the R &D subject at hand. My respect for Truthislife & Mr. Fibonacci is that these personality types are great for sorting out ideas' and products' fine points after being given marching orders (by some authority or another which they have come to pay considerable respect due to the shining brass exterior paint, or after being shown the grant money from whatever source). But the tone is information without adequate reflection, an ultimately sterile approach. Information is exchanged but the quality is poor with the bling and dead ends.

Before that point the ilk typically are the kiss of death for ideas and have decided delusions of grandeur of bringing the good oil, this thread being case and point of the damage that can transpire. If shedding the pretetious cloy and marble pedestal, much could be gained from a less grating approach, for example morphing to a simple "Hey, what about ...." Sadly, this too rarely happens. Anyone will eventually be wrong and these url sites should be all about shedding light on situations rather than the famous (rabid) scientist bone wars of turf and poster delicate emotional psyches. The thread title theme normally figures large in how to conduct oneself, please pay attention, sirs. Not the post title, the thread title.

Historically this group can be extremely accomplished researchers or technicians, e.g. Lord Kelvin. Unfortunately, for idle amusement these in the general group fight like cats and dogs with INTP types in OTL with little good result. I greatly suspect these posters to be in keeping with that profile character.

My reasons to spend the effort writing is not to change the personalities, as that is set in stone, but for the lurkers and general reader who might profit from the high level cross currents of ideas presented in this messy free-for-all donnybrook verbal melee fight.
 
I'd say 1965 based on Americans being as advanced as the Soviets in space exploration. There was a lot to learn. It couldn't have been much earlier than 1965.
 
Yawn, how to begin with this duo? I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony, in that there are too many opportunities.


--Wrong, it is really about the cost. Energy is often the lead issue in money, but enough of that.

-- This is not a Harry Potter type of discussion. I do confess, the only option for your M.O. seems to be not getting it. For the 15th time, the issue is that the profitable advance of Telecom, Fiber Optics and a whole slew of other interchangable areas was heavily based upon this electronics development of super compactablitity and cost cutting. Do you seriously dispute this, and if so why?

And the process remains today as if it were a physical law.

Moore's law stays pretty well true for what ever reason of physics and buisiness R&D. Since this has meant the longest and most profitable run known to man of any steady technology advancent previously, your knee jerk naysaying shakes my head in embarassment. Moores Law is the unique exception and not the norm for any business forecasting. The law was and still is suspect of continuing by experts -- and making the decision of techological experts has often not had much of anything to do with informed expert opinion. Something like securities law requires having a disclaimer that "past performance does not necessarily translate to the future". Moore's observation is an informal law of human understanding, not a physical law, but has had enoromous effect on human civilization and the gist of this Lunar topic we discuss. Other aspects of your claims are also whoppers, but here is a link to let the reader decide of the 1965 paper claim:

http://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf


-- Nice try. Anyone who stayed around Washington D.C. much is not mystified why lobbying is a billion dollar business. Influence comes extremely cheap in Washington compared to other places in the world. That for the manned orbiting lab TruthisLife wrote about that in fact was barely nixed by Kissinger in 1969 is but one case in point. The Shuttle ended up being a white elephant due to this kind of poor contracting. 1960's NASA was a window of exception, and even there disturbing attempts happened, like after the Apollo 1 fire an astronaut sent to North American Aviation to observe found assembly employees coming to work shiftless and drunk, as if building a Monday reject Detroit lemon car. Something does get done but the whole process is a messy business.

-- Maybe in the distant s.f. future, but this thread was about how to start lunar bases circa 1970 and volatiles is a big loser for initiation and medium term profitability. I am particularly going to stay away from the Helium isotope volitile holy grail theme, except it has long been a refuge of the pseudo intellectual crowd (oddly both space and non space) howling and gibbering outside the gates of reality in gaudy and fake authoritive dismissive single statement upmanship.
------------------------------------------------------
truth is life wrote:
.
-- Forget about GEO. Anything important and long term on the moon communications circuit would be pretty much billion dollar niche business, more competing with LEO (& post 1985 fiber optics) than the general GEO communication band. Every engineering position has advantages and disadvantages. GEO is not perfect and those flaws are found to be potentially useful for lunar possibilities, as I have posted at length at this site/thread/and elsewhere. I have mentioned before about LEO/GEO comparisons. Please read the posts thoroughly and then respond.
 
I have some time and have sort of touch upon the basics. Gumming up the works is that these posters would never stand up to Vinod Khosla. The creed of silicon valley (and the better half of the technology these posters garb wear as if old style Transylvanian peasants stringing garlic around their necks or perhaps Madonna using electric teletype rubber bands as bracelet bling) is to ignore the public experts, because "their assumptions are always wrong". Moore and others in the innovative fields, including 1960's space, had open door policies because maybe 10 people on the planet might sort of know what is possible in whatever neck of the woods was examined with the R &D subject at hand. My respect for Truthislife & Mr. Fibonacci is that these personality types are great for sorting out ideas' and products' fine points after being given marching orders (by some authority or another which they have come to pay considerable respect due to the shining brass exterior paint, or after being shown the grant money from whatever source). But the tone is information without adequate reflection, an ultimately sterile approach. Information is exchanged but the quality is poor with the bling and dead ends.

Before that point the ilk typically are the kiss of death for ideas and have decided delusions of grandeur of bringing the good oil, this thread being case and point of the damage that can transpire. If shedding the pretetious cloy and marble pedestal, much could be gained from a less grating approach, for example morphing to a simple "Hey, what about ...." Sadly, this too rarely happens. Anyone will eventually be wrong and these url sites should be all about shedding light on situations rather than the famous (rabid) scientist bone wars of turf and poster delicate emotional psyches. The thread title theme normally figures large in how to conduct oneself, please pay attention, sirs. Not the post title, the thread title.

Historically this group can be extremely accomplished researchers or technicians, e.g. Lord Kelvin. Unfortunately, for idle amusement these in the general group fight like cats and dogs with INTP types in OTL with little good result. I greatly suspect these posters to be in keeping with that profile character.

My reasons to spend the effort writing is not to change the personalities, as that is set in stone, but for the lurkers and general reader who might profit from the high level cross currents of ideas presented in this messy free-for-all donnybrook verbal melee fight.


I am sure that TIL can handle his end of this....

Cost is based upon many factors, the largest of which is Energy. More Energy (hence more delta vee) means more fuel, large transfer vehicles, more infrastructure....all of these are EXPENSIVE, and not likely to get less so.

You don't really answer my comment re: Moore's law, and certainly don't point out how it would make lunar development cheaper or more suitable. Given the problems with payloads (see above), it makes little sense that larger, more fragile, and less efficient electronics would make lunar development MORE desirable, rather than less. More to the point (forgive the pun), given the issues with recon at lunar distances (rather than LEO/GEO), electronics are even more vital, hence more sensitive to problems with Moore's law.

By the way, I am well aware that Moore's law is nothing of the sort....it is quite likely that it would have ended up that way no matter what, but it isn't a physical law, only an observation that Gordon made years before. All the more mysterious why you seem to be unable to see it as something other than a totem....

Your comment regarding DC contractors is especially amusing to me. I lived in DC for 15 years, and spent most of it working for various Beltway Bandits. It is one thing for a bandit to hijack an EXISTING priority, but another entirely for them to create a new one out of whole cloth. In various technothrillers this happens all the time, but the notion of an enormous $100 billion+ investment being ginned up just to make contractors rich who would be rich anyway (just through different programs) strikes me as implausible at best. Even NASA wasn't able to capture a large enough base of lobbyists to sustain economically non-viable programs indefinitely...you are proposing something much bigger, and far harder to defend on the numbers.

Finally, 'volatiles' refers to hydrogen, oxygen, water, etc. NOT H3. We know that there is water on the moon, and we even know where substantial quantities of it are. Those MIGHT be worthwhile supporting a logistics infrastructure for an LEO operation, but that is about all I can see worthwhile getting from the moon for some time to come.

You aren't worth more of my time. I leave the thread to you.
 
1955 could work with an early Orion project and a government willing to actually launch an Orion drive vessel (extremely unlikely to say the least).

Ignoring Orion I say 1980 is far more reasonable, maybe 1975 with NERVA.

This is just purely from a technical point of view, getting funding is another issue altogether that I will leave to others with better knowledge
 
posted:
I am sure that TIL can handle his end of this....
You aren't worth more of my time. I leave the thread to you.
 

My, my, my, one can practically hear the snarl. Nice of you to allow another poster the right to handle his side of the conversation, or perhaps you commonly work in choreographed wolf pack teams with others? None of this thread has been worth my time for dealing with a few naysayers, as the deteriorating tone answers little at the cost of lots of words. The only reason for the persistence is that when shouted down the shrill posters gain ground with what is usually warped thinking, in my observation. Again, this site really should be about free flow exchange of ideas, not "When I want your opinion I will verbally beat it out of you."

About the volatiles, I was hoping that you would not say that collecting really common stuff like water on the moon and transporting it elsewhere, so guessed at the He scheme. Frankly, it is even worse, though Gerrard O'Neill and others have suggested it for L5 colonies. They with their vision have earned the right to this extremely distant idea extremely unsuited for _starting_ such an early colony. Repeat, all this thread has been for starting a colony, not long range goals which volatile sourcing would greatly seem to be. O'Neill et al never to my knowledge have dared suggested a colony just to mine the volatiles until post 1980's (outside this thread view), mostly it was a mass driver for the rock to build the huge living cylinders, etc solar protection and structure. Pray tell what is all that volatile mater going to do in space? Most of the mass is not for volatiles, and if not that structure, then what. But you will not answer, certainly not in a civil manner, so you write. Oh, once again, this thread is starting a colony and by extension maybe how to fund it, if that was not abundantly clear.

First you have to collect the water. Water on the moon is either in the soil in the form of hydrogen, so it has to be collected and baked, then mixed with 02. Doing anything on the moon short of lunar caverns is very expensive, by the way. Or one can go to the poles and bake out the soil there, where, our recent data shows, there is raw ice. Remote sensing is consistent with extremely dispersed tiny chips of frost deep inside the soil, not lying on the surface in sheets. This sounds extremely expensive to dig out by most methods, but some time in the future you might wish to post the details of this. Then you have to refreeze it, load it to a mass driver (hugely expensive to at first build), then send it to the end destination where ever that may be for what ever reason you might deside would need huge amount of water for. Expense seems to be no object.

More likely for any mysterious heavy need for water in space the asteroid chunks that regularly graze or hit or near miss our planet are a better answer. Many are 20% or more water, most unlike the less than 1% of the choicest part of the lunar surface we are presently aware of, and with an Earth atmospheric insertion at low angle skip for safe the very loose carbon ones less than 30 meters across that harmlessly naturally explode very high in the atmosphere there is far lower dV to successfully insert in Earth orbit. Far cheaper to transport, much easier to gather, etc.
"Your comment regarding DC contractors is especially amusing to me."

Re: Contractors. Sigh. Richard Nixon chose the Shuttle circa 1971 ( I forget exactly when) or so amongst many plans as it seemed the right one to go with the information put out like a smorgasboard by the corporations. He publically has stated that the mistake was his very worst executive decision as it was totally misrepresented in the assumptions presented to him and totally abused (his general words many years afterwards in memoirs) in implementation. It was not a quick decision and he did his famous iron sit and study routine of going over every detail. It worked for Nixon negotiating with the very astute Soviets, with US Labor George Meany et al, but not the Contractors? Maybe it is that these people have a system that is more prone to self direction influence than you suggest. Or that he trusted them too much, too long.

My guess remains that Corporations and contractors do misdirect at a top level and unsupervised it happens all over the place historically to varying degrees.

There are many others, for example the M16, where apparently the detractions are covered up (e.g. the Europeans in Nato rejected clear flaws and rigged tests as an obvious contractors scheme). Or so I have read, all by cognizant individuals in the field, or men who were getting in serious trouble using the products like Colonel Hackworth. These people usually are not the type belt way people enjoy to be around, except to shout down and label as Nuts, Sluts, or the Disgruntled to quickly cut off a lot like the way you are now trying to do to me. Fitting you live there.

Get any money from the system? By the way, I read maybe at most 2% or 3% fiction and usually skip over it quickly. The rest is nonfiction, as fiction bores me. The last type of potboiler you tried to slur me getting my ideas from was Michael Creighton's Rising Sun read many years ago, and I quickly found he played fast and loose with the facts, not at all in keeping with Japan watchers experience at all. Factual history or technology explanation are both far more fun to a geek, although grudgingly in theory a well done historical fiction can put together a lot of threads in a more compact way.

What is your percentage? You sound like a man of experience knowing what all those action thrillers have.

I already posted it was not a classical law of physics. Perhaps you skipped over my post as it was listed more than one time, anticipating your attack. Exactly, Moore's law makes Lunar Development less likely, as long as it keeps being correct. Finally you figured out that was key to my premise after multiple posts to that effect. Then again, no, you did not.

There was no guarantee Moore's would remain in effect, as I have posted numerous times before being a critical part of the scenario. I am obviously answering some one who is trying to flood the field of information with noxious chemicals with the seeming intent to make a hazardous waste bog.

Good bye. Come back when you want to read other people's arguments carefully before you get out the chainsaw.
 
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