New Mars Forums

First of all Apollo never went to permenently shadowed regens so how could they have data about them?  And the data it did bring back seems to corroborate LCROSS.  Coreing samples where taken up to three meters deep, the upper most portions of those samples had depleted levels of gold but the lower samples did not.  There is a theory that the gold particles electrostatically repel themselves much farther than other elements after being struck by micro meteors and that they would accumulate in cold traps.  Mercury should accumulate for obvious reasons just like water. 

Certainly there needs to be more exploration before you start sending mining equipment, but just ignoring the evidence we do have is rather irresponsible.  I know there are allot of mars fans out there who wish everyone would pretend like the moon doesn't exist and deem it as a distraction.  I am just the opposite I think the moon is necessary for the future of life.  We can do allot of science on mars by going direct but if you want to get serous about colonization things can happen much more quickly if we have a large profitable enterprise that can fund the development of space infrastructure and get the launch rate up. 

I think platinum groups are a good possibility, the moon is a big place and its been there for a long time; bound to have been some low speed impacts of platinum bearing asteroids every once in a while.  But that sort of mining is relatively small scale compared to what an abundant supply of gold could sustain. 

There is a whole ecological angle too.  Mining on earth damages the environment, on the moon there are no endangered species to protect.  Imagine a future where gold is autonomously mined and kinetically shot back to earth.  So abundant that your grandchildren will wire there homes with it and find it amusing that it was once so valuable.

Just a few points.

There's gold in them craters, enough to fund allot of fun and all the extra Hg will make refining the gold blissfully simple. 

Linear motors make a real nice low tech low cost alternative to rail guns. 

Original imported solar arrays could be retrofitted onto insitu concentratiors.  Production multijunction cells are already more than 40% efficient, and both silicon and multijunction cells are even more efficient under concentrated light so-long as they are kept cool.  Composite solar systems (concentrated pv coupled with heat recovery) are claiming over 70% efficiency.

I think I may actually have a copy in my pile of books but I cant find it right now.  In any event It's available on amazon. 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/ … er=&colid=

From what I here SpaceX is now working on everything at once. 

Re-entry was too hard on even there first stage because it was moving way too fast, for a near term fix they will save a bit of fuel and reignite it to slow the rocket down before parachute splashdown recovery of the first stage. 

There is also the grasshopper version of the Falcon9 that has landing legs that pop out for a propulsive pad landing on all three stages (first second and dragon), heat shielding will be added where needed. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQC72UZxZlQ

Burt Rutan is building the largest plane in the world to air drop a falcon 9 modified with a small delta wing. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=sh29Pm1Rrc0
http://www.stratolaunch.com

The delta wing is interesting addition on the air drop version, I am curious if perhaps they could use it for a horizontal landing on a dry lake bead or very long runway landing at a high speed and using drag chutes to slow it down.

The Russians would have loved to use their space shuttle.  We just had more money to waist than they did.

I'm going to sell most of them as they are, I have them listed on ebay and plan on sell them at several other places.  But that doesn't mean I cant play with a few of them.  I've been thinking about compound solar concentrators for several years, I think I posted some stuff about them on this site but I think those posts are missing at the moment.  The Solyndra panels are rated at 85°C. I don't know if they will get too hot or not, I suppose that greatly depends on how large the concentrator are, I would like to triple the amount of power from each rod if I wanted to get 20x the power I would plan on jacketing the rods in another tube and circulating water through it.  What I am concerned with atm is localized heat like a linear beam hitting the rods instead of a more dispersed light across the 1" diameter tube.  I think if I build the concentrator by the book it will have problems but if I can pull it out of focus a bit I wont.  The stock I mill the termoformer mold is quite expensive and it takes a lot of time to mill so I would like to be fairly sure I have the design down before I get that far.