New Mars Forums

Louis, practicality and legality are two different things. It could be profitable - but only if the government lets it, which may not be the case...

The trouble is, countries are liable for any mission launched from their territory - if a dodgy rocket from Australia hits New Zealand, Australia get's sued, rather than the company involved. This also would imply that resources appropriated by a company would be considered to have been appropriated by the country it is registered in, which isn't allowed. Possibly. I'll have to look into this.

Certainly but it is a copy of an old new scientist from 11 years ago. The proposals have been around that long. Japanese comapnies even want to turn the whole Moon into a power station to beam microwave power back to the Earth.

New Scientist: Lunar power

The University of Houston proposed the idea and even went so far as to testing it in a vacuum chamber. We would simply ignore the first stage and put a full refinery onto the Moon as one of the first things we did.

The question is, what does our industrial seed mass in at?

That is the question we need to be able to send enough capacity to be able to tool up our operations on the Moon.

So just what will we need to send. Some form of brick maker to create structures that we can put our industrial capacity in to protect it from the massive changes in tempatures on the Moon. The ability to actually harvest regolith and to break its properties down and to then seperate metals and volatiles apart. Some means to develop more harvesting and construction capacity the list goes on.

You only want to base to last 5 years? We need to keep growing our power supply, and, at least in the beginning, ISRU power is going to be difficult.

BTW, here's a link about radiation damage - http://www.soton.ac.uk/~solar/cells/spacesolarcells.htm

Louis, at the poles sunlight shines almost horizontally. It's basically a sunset which never manages to set, instead moving around the horizon. The solar panels are going to have to be straight up almost, as well as rotating to catch the light. That's no show stopper, far from it - a regolith filled base and inflated framed would mass quite low and allow the solar panels to be suspended quite high off the surface, and rotate. But I don't know how much mass we'll be looking at for our power, and numbers like that are what I'm interested in.

Remember, the first export is going to be fuel. It's best to not get ahead of ourselves when it comes to developing Luna. Later missions are going to bring along what we need to industrialise (incidentally, I reckon you'd only need 4-5 flights of FH, if you had copious amounts of Lunar fuel, to set up a colony AND mine Phobos for fuel).

I'm not daunted by the technical problems. It's the OST that gets in the way... I can just imagine some greedy little country suing for a cut of the profits, and an international court awarding it to them. I suppose the only way to get around that is to do what they did in Fallen Angels, and declare independence if and when that happens, regardless of readiness.

For the same reason we don't use inflatable solar panels on space stations and the like - atmospheric dust (though I dread to think about the dust that the panels would attract elecrostatically...) isn't the only problem. There's also radiation damage, which is normally dealt with by the atmosphere...

At the poles, you can't just lay the solar cells out, you have to hang them on something to get the sunlight.

I have two big points to make about the costs of spaceflight,  manned or unmanned. 

One is the impact of a small supporting logistical tail,  vs the traditional gigantic one.  ULA supporting the shuttle at a billion dollars (or maybe more) for 25 metric tons max per flight is the wrong approach.  Spacex at $2500/lb on Falcon-9 is more like it.  Atlas-5 is similar,  but watch that cost rise if something happens to Spacex!  That gigantic entity of Boeing plus Lockmart requires a lot of cash to feed it.  Too big is just plain bloated. 

The 53 metric ton Falcon-Heavy is supposed to fly next year for the first time,  priced at something around $800-1000/lb.  With that coming to the market,  why do we need a NASA SLS at billion-dollar shuttle prices and only 100-150 tons?  We know how to dock and assemble in orbit now. 

The other big point is the type of lead agency and contractors that can support such endeavors without exploding overruns.  We don’t have that,  and it kinda shows.  What we have done for half a century since Sputnik is the wrong way to do it.  It’s not about flag-and-footprints,  it’s about real exploration.

I gave a paper on that very topic at last August’s Mars Society convention in Dallas,  Texas.  You can find that paper online at the Mars Society’s site,  in its electronic archive.  Or you can read a version of it on my blog site http://exrocketman.blogspot.com.  Scroll down to the paper at date 7-25-11 titled “Going to Mars (or anywhere else nearby)”,  and see also my second thoughts about the backup scheme,  in the article dated 9-6-11 titled “Mars Mission Second Thoughts Illustrated”. 

The gist of the exploration definition is getting the answer to two deceptively-simple questions:  (1) what all is there?  and (2) where exactly is it? 

That wording is not Texas slang,   I meant it exactly as written,  word for word. 

It means you land and you dig deep and you drill very deep.  Drilling kilometers down,  perhaps.  You have to do this in a lot of sites,  too.  A real planetary survey.  We never even did that on the moon,  so we still don’t know what is really there,  even today.  And none of 4 decades’ worth of robot landers has actually answered those questions for Mars. 

The gist of the “right team to do it” question is that the NASA we need is not the NASA we have,  and the contractor base we need is not the contractor base we have.   If we had the right team,  we could go to Mars at any time for under $50B,  and make dozens of landings in one trip.  The right contractors would look more like a Spacex,  an XCOR,  or a Scaled Composites.  I still don’t see any credible agency or entity to lead it,  not in the US,  nor in Europe or Japan.    Japan may come the closest,  but still misses the boat by a wide margin. 

It would take too long to justify all these assertions here.  I suggest you look at my convention paper,  or at the two cited blog site articles. 

There is a third idea in the conversation thread here:  reusability.  Implementing reusability in one form or another is a lot less effective than reducing logistical tails,  toward reducing spaceflight costs.  It’s also a very tough technological nut to crack,  but it can be done,  at least for lower stages. 

There’s a third article on my blog site,  dated 12-14-11 and titled “Reusability in Launch Rockets” that addresses what might be most fruitful things to attempt. 

GW

louis wrote:

I am not sure how familiar you are with commercial practice. Really what you say about the state being responsible would be no impediment to a Mars Consortium. All they have to do is indemnify the country concerned and put up a bond to back that indemnity. For example Panama would authorise the Mars Consortium to operate in Outer Space and could require the Consortium to indemnify it to the tune of say $10billion for the period of agreement - let's say 10 years.  Panama requires the Consortium to get a bond for that and the Consortium has to pay say 5% for that = $500 million. The Consortium in turn borrows the $500milion over 10 years, paying off the loan at perhaps something like $100 million per annum for ten years.  In the context of a Mars Mission,paying $100million per annum for effectively a licence to operate would be no problem. Panama would no doubt get various benefits from having the Consortium's offices located in its territory.

Very sure. Yes you could launch rockets from Panama but just like you can launch ESA rockets from Kourou. But what do you do with them.

Panama cannot grant you the right to mine metals in space for profit, no country can, only an international body (the UN) can. And there are costs the UN body that allows mining for minerals in the sea extracts billions from the only company willing to try and that then is put to use across the world.

I have been wanting to change the outer space treaty for many years now. It was perfect to stop the space arms race but it now is not fit for purpose. The trouble is that it still stands and there are very many organisations and countries that will stop such changes.

louis wrote:

Grypd - I wasn't arguing that the Moon Treaty will NEVER become part of international law - I was simply pointing out you were factually wrong to claim that most states, including the USA, had signed the treaty.  You haven't admitted your error, but that's your affair.

As we know from flags of convenience at sea, state registration can mean very little in practice. It wouldn't of itself be a brake on commercial development.

Sorry Louis we are at crossed purposes here. I was stating that most countries have signed the Law of the sea and yes i agree that they have not signed the Moon treaty. What im trying to show is that in international law the precedent has been set (They signed the similar law of the sea treaty and of course the outer space treaty) and since there is no treaty currently standing that repudiates the Moon treaty its has a lot of weight in international law. It is classed as common heritage status and as such only for use for the benefit of all mankind.

I honestly hope the Moon treaty does not become international law. The other thing is that you have to note about flags of convenience is that it will not apply to space. Any accident etc will not be the private company that gets the bill to fix it but the country. All missions even if from a private source are designated as belonging to the country that sent the mission. It is the countries responsibility to register that mission with the UN and it is the country that has the fiscal liability. The normal flags of opportunity states cannot afford that liability. That is article VI of the outer space treaty.

GW Johnson wrote:

Once somebody has actually been to Mars the first time and brought some rocks back,  I kind of doubt that Mars minerals will remain as valuable commodities.  It's a perception thing.

I would say just like moon rocks have been...government owned and not in private collectors property vaults as they did not go and get them....So how did any become sold?

The up front cost to send men to mars, keep them alive all comes out of the collected sums for any return ore or refined metals.