After arguging with LL before I have to admit that he has a fair point. If you could get a fuel/air/water/resource mining operation started on the moon and have the infrastructure to launch that to a large lunar space station that would greatly empower whatever else you wanted to do in the solar system.

However asteroid mining is the thing that will drive further space exploration. There is nothing else that makes commercial sense.

Edit: mining the moon for resources to send to earth makes zero sense. But mining it for sending things into lunar orbit makes a lot of sense.

LegalLord

United Kingdom13775 Posts

December 11 2017 20:21 GMT

#2882

Not really, there should be mostly the same resources on the moon. Asteroids crash into the moon all the time (and have for its entire existence) and they came from the same basic source. The moon has water and a wide variety of useful rare metals so it would definitely be useful to mine. Transporting to Earth would indeed probably not be worth it, because it's not like we're short on resources on Earth, but maybe if you could stick about $500 million worth on a capsule and shoot it down you might have some luck

.

Lifting off without a gravity well is easier, yes, but you have to remember that the Earth's gravity well is much stronger than the one on the moon, and the effect of a stronger gravity well is logarithmic/exponential (depending on how you think of it) on fuel requirements. Landing, however, is ungodly difficult without a good strong gravity well. You won't be able to orbit the rock, and so docking is going to be a bit more like docking with a space station, which involves lots of precise maneuvers to reach the same orbit as the target and then to dock with it at precisely the right speed as to touch it but not to crash on it. Plus you're docking with a rock, not a station that will communicate and even possibly fire its own engines to help you on your way, which is a hell of a lot more difficult. There was one mission like that that I remember (Salyut 7, a docking with a defunct space station) and it ended up being a near-impossible task for even extremely skilled astronauts. In Earth orbit. It's possible, but holy shit does it add a brutal layer of complexity to the mission.

On landing, a gravity well is actually a huge help. You miss the planet by about 300 km because errors happen on a >200 million km journey? Nbd, the planet will pull you in and you can continue your mission. Same thing on a tiny rock that doesn't really have much pull? Tough shit, you better be able to find and navigate towards your target. Yeah, it's possible; no, it's not worth it. Compared to that general issue of precision in landing, the problem of firing retro-rockets and/or parachutes for a soft landing is simple and straightforward.

{CC}StealthBlue

United States41117 Posts

December 11 2017 21:10 GMT

#2883

LegalLord

United Kingdom13775 Posts

December 11 2017 21:13 GMT

#2884

Here's to hoping the next president isn't stupid enough to do that then.

Yrr

Germany804 Posts

December 11 2017 21:18 GMT

#2885

vote for LegalLord.

{CC}StealthBlue

United States41117 Posts

December 11 2017 21:56 GMT

#2886

Blue Origin launch scrubbed for today.

{CC}StealthBlue

United States41117 Posts

December 12 2017 17:48 GMT

#2887

JimmyJRaynor

Canada16701 Posts

December 12 2017 19:28 GMT

#2888

its nice to see the USA will be returning the moon, again.

maybe they'll land near the 11,12,14,15,16, or 17 sites and takes some cool pictures.
i wonder how damaged the moon buggie(s) is/are?

{CC}StealthBlue

United States41117 Posts

December 13 2017 01:25 GMT

#2889

The FAA confirms BO launch.

https://www.faa.gov/data_research/commercial_space_data/launches/?type=Licensed

Less than eight minutes after a blastoff planned as soon as Friday morning, the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will perform a U-turn in space and fly back to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for a sonic boom-inducing landing attempt.

A successful landing would be the 20th by a Falcon booster in two years, and the eighth of those at the Cape’s Landing Zone 1, south of Launch Complex 40.

In the future, the rockets may target another local landing site: a proposed pad at Kennedy Space Center that is the subject of early discussions between the Air Force, NASA and Space Florida.

The goal would be to lessen the burden landings impose on the Cape’s nearby industrial area, which workers must evacuate for hours during some missions.

“If we have to stop operations for a launch during the middle of day, it is severely impacting to other customers,” Brig Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, said Tuesday during a transportation conference at Port Canaveral.

As outlined in KSC’s master plan, the new landing pad could be built near the northern end of the spaceport’s secure perimeter — north of pad 39B and south of State Road 402 leading to Canaveral National Seashore's Playalinda Beach.

“We have land further to the north that’s not populated like the industrial area of the Cape is, and that might make for a really good location for a new landing zone for an increased landing rate,” said Nancy Bray, KSC’s director of spaceport integration and services.

The notional landing site now consists of wetlands that would need to be filled, adding to the time and cost needed to permit and complete such a project.

Who is leading the initiative and who would pay for it were not immediately clear: SpaceX said Tuesday it has no plans to build a KSC landing zone.

It was also unknown if the site, if built, would be exclusive to SpaceX — the only company currently landing large rockets — or available for other uses. Blue Origin also intends to recover and reuse its New Glenn orbital rocket boosters, but so far has only revealed plans for landings at sea.

Source