Japan Eyes Future Manned Moon Base, Space Shuttle

Dook · 2005-03-27 07:54:43

Considering that Mars will need heavy lift in the order of 30 tonne * 100 launches *360 days*1000 years, It is going to take more than Just private sector interest.

Why? Are you planning on shipping the entire population of earth, including their belongings, to mars?

MarsDog · 2005-03-27 08:47:47

And Japan is very worried about the Chinese even to the fact it has just increased the spending on its armed forces by almost 5% this year

Japan is very constricted. Large foreign investment in Chinese manufacturing, North Korea nuclear weapons, Russia controlling the islands to the North. Where can the Japanese go ? Floating cities ? They are going to see how a Moon colony works out. Hurling non observable Moon rocks (stealth coated) at the North Korean nuclear plants might become a preemptive strike. They could even suprise & wipe out the Chinese nuclear threat.

srmeaney · 2005-03-27 10:15:15

Why? Are you planning on shipping the entire population of earth, including their belongings, to mars?

That is just for the orbital dumping of coal, The Colonization needs will be one million people and all the mining, aquaculture, and materials refining equipment they can use. Unlike Zubrin's Mars Vacation, an underground city beneath Olympus Mons is just the ticket for terraforming and colonization.
A spaceport in the crater, we simply tunnel down creating a big deep pressure well where people can live without the need for space suits.

What Crap talking about creating a merger between Australia, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Commonwealth !!!!!
Firstly, It won't happen !!!!, because of WW2 and the current issues with Indonesia and world events. Anyhow , If Australia the creators of the micro processor ( then sold it to the Americans ) and many other inventions and if they wanted to go into space they would, the same for the Japanese and Singapore People.

Asia needs a common purpose to pull them back from where they are going. Thanks to the USA and the old Soviets, Bad things are going to happen. The Commonwealth has for too long sat on it's arse and let these crimes happen. If Commonwealth Membership will help these nations, so be it. Better that than another war bought on by the same attitude problems in government that started the last two world wars.
Considering Commonwealth copper has provided copper for bullet shells for the past century to people not of the Commonwealth, I would suggest that the Commonwealth has it's own crimes to atone for.

Japan is very constricted. Large foreign investment in Chinese manufacturing, North Korea nuclear weapons, Russia controlling the islands to the North. Where can the Japanese go ? Floating cities ? They are going to see how a Moon colony works out.

Floating Cities. Considering that Cruise ships are now being looked at as floating cities by the Americans, I would suggest that Floating cities are perfectly acceptable.

Space Commonwealth is comming whether your nationalist fantasies of empire are in the way or not. As we did to the Neanderthal, so the future shall do to us.

I believe the phrase is "join the tribe or go back to your cave and die."

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-27 10:53:18

And why, pray-tell, would Martian colonists need one million tonnes of coal? I mean, I've heard crazy ideas, like Errorists' particle beam pipeline... but wow, that might take the cake.

Even if we drilled down near the Martian mantle, the pressure wouldn't be quite high enough probobly, there would still be no oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, and it would probobly be too hot to live... Not to mention that such a digging project would be of the same scale as flattening the Appalachin moutains or filling in the great lakes.

srmeaney · 2005-03-27 12:08:57

Considering what is probably trapped in the core of Olympus Mons, I would suggest that Mining Olympus mons and building an underground city within Olympus Mons will allow colonists to produce the nitrogen and oxygen they need from what gets mined.
As to how this relates to the Japanese building a base on the moon, I was thinking it would be something that they would be more favourable to than certain western civilizations.

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-27 17:21:46

"Considering what is probably trapped in the core of Olympus Mons"

Ya huh... an anticent alien terraforming device, left just for us, just like in Total Recall?

Dook · 2005-03-27 18:40:12

To heck with the ancient alien terraforming device, I want to go to Venusville!

srmeaney · 2005-03-27 21:41:57

Well, isn't that interesting.

Once again for the kids at the back of the class making all the noise.

1. Olympus Mons is most likely of a very porus structure because it ate most of the planetary oxygen to create it's existence. There will probably be pockets of gas and water and perhaps even certain life forms that do not require sunlight to form. Mining Olympus Mons will allow us to release several billion tonnes of of Oxygen, Hydrogen, and hopefully Nitrogen. A large amount of Porus stone will allow us to use it in concrete as a light agreggate.

2. The Commonwealth people of "Venusville" will be a little busy as it orbits Venus in Total darkness. The Commonwealth will be busily terraforming Venus by triggering decay of Atmospheric Sulphur to something towards the beginning of the table of elements. If we can produce lots of Hydrogen from all that Sulphur, we can have Oceans. Most likely, we will loose the hydrogen to the other planets in the Solar system though.

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-27 22:41:03

"because it ate most of the planetary oxygen to create it"

*Cough* And you happen to know this how? I find that pretty hard to believe, especially considering all the oxygen in the dirt all over the planet.

"triggering decay of Atmospheric Sulphur to something towards the beginning of the table of elements"

Um, dude? Are you actually suggesting inducing element transmutation in the pretty stable Sulfur atoms... on a planetary scale? I think you are firmly in la-la land with this one.

Austin Stanley · 2005-03-27 23:40:45

Japan could certianly afford such a program if they really wanted it. There 2005 budget was ~780 billion dollars, and this program only adds up to 2.8 billion a year, .35% of the total budget. Small potatos really.

As for there economic problems, while they are trouble some, it is easy to get caught up in them and loose sight of the bigger picture. Japan has a large and extreamly well educated population (126 million). While lacking in some critical resources it is massively industrialised, perhaps even more so than the US. While they do not have the experience in Aerospace technology that the US has, the are competivtive with us in virtualy every other important technical catagory. The country has everything it needs to launch a succesfull space program, whenever it wants.

Martin_Tristar · 2005-03-28 01:24:03

Austin Stanley,

I agree !!!!

If the space community in Japan sells to the politicans and industrial executives that they could get the country out of the woes and get it focused on an ideal to create a better country, gain wealth for its citizens and grow back to a major world industrial nation and could also rival china in the process, they would do it, if it is only going to cost up to 1% of real budget terms.

Don't think they can't because you would make the same mistake our forefathers in 1930-40's did when they thought Japan wouldn't attack USA because we are world power. I would also say they are going to the moon for their country and people not for the benefit for humanity or exploring or science but the raw resources and technologies that could flow back to their country.

srmeaney · 2005-03-28 06:12:13

*Cough* And you happen to know this how? I find that pretty hard to believe, especially considering all the oxygen in the dirt all over the planet.

Because when a volcano errupt upward, not just act of heat expansion. Oxygen from beneath the surface blends through the molten stone producing pocket of gas. Stone cools to become porus.

"triggering decay of Atmospheric Sulphur to something towards the beginning of the table of elements"
Um, dude? Are you actually suggesting inducing element transmutation in the pretty stable Sulfur atoms... on a planetary scale? I think you are firmly in la-la land with this one.

Antimatter fired into atmosphere from orbiting Cyclotron. Antimatter component triggers elimination of Matter component of equal mass. Not in La-la land just yet.

GCNRevenger · 2005-03-28 06:53:02

Um, what? Now you are just making crap up srmeany. Volcanic erruptions wouldn't take up any vast reserves of underground oxygen because there are no vast reserves of underground oxygen. Oxygen is an extremely reactive chemical, the second most reactive nonmetal element infact. It couldn't exsist underground in quantity, it would just chemically bind to the rocks.

"Antimatter fired into atmosphere from orbiting Cyclotron."

*Laughs* Whatever... Yeah you definatly take the cake for insane ideas.

The amount of antimatter you'd need would be of the same order of magnetude as the matter you are trying to destroy, which would be many millions or billions of tonnes required to obliterate 99% of the Venutian atmosphere. Where do you intend to get this much antimatter feedstock?

The amount of energy you would need to do this in a reasonable timeframe would easily exceed the output of all power plants in the whole solar system. Even the output of the Sun would probobly not be enough.

And you also seem to forget one of the unpleasent side-effects of the matter/antimatter reaction... that it releases large amounts of hard gamma (and probobly particle) radiation, which would basically ruin Venus for a very, very long time.

Yeah, this definatly tops Errorists' space elevator beam pipeline. I'm not going to waste my time with people in la-la-land.

RobS · 2005-03-28 18:39:38

srmeaney, you said:

Because when a volcano errupt upward, not just act of heat expansion. Oxygen from beneath the surface belnds through the molten stone producing pocket of gas. Stone cools to become porus.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what this means, and I have a Master's in planetary geology. The spelling is mystifying; I have no idea what "belnds" means. There is no oxygen gas inside Mars. There's probably CO2 and water and some sulphur gasses; that's what comes out of volcanoes. Olympus Mons isn't porous, either. It should be a typical shield volcano, which means it is basalt (lava) with some layers of ash and cinders (lava erupted into the air that falls back to the surface as small particles). That's what it is. An ordinary volcano. It may have remnant glaciers and an icecap on top,which is interesting.

-- RobS

Austin Stanley · 2005-03-29 02:33:55

I have to admit, the orbiting Cyclotron idea caught me off guard. Full points for creativity. But even a casual examination proves it can't possibly work. Most obviously there is no way to selectivly target the sulfur in the atmosphere. Anti-matter is going to react with the first partical of matter it hits, regardless of it's nature.

I guess you could still use it to remove excess carbon dioxide but the amount of mass you want to annilate is stupendously huge, and your energy requirments to annilate are thusly even more enormous. Here's a quick back of the envelope calcualtion to prove it.

I'm not sure exactly how much Venus Atmosphere masses, but since it is about 90 times as thick as Earth's (and I know the mass of Earth's atmosphere) I'll use that as a concervative estimate. 5 x 10^18 kg. That's 5 million billion metric tons. To remove all of this would require an equal mass of anti-matter. Since we don't have any anti-matter mines handy that anti-matter must be generated artificialy via cyclotron or some other (currently unknown) method. Since we are creating it we must pay the steap energy cost involved with matter (anti or otherwise), ~90PJ/kg. Thus we would have to create 449 x 10^18 PJ (that's petajoules BTW 10^15J) worth of anti-matter. Now ~450x10^18 PJ is alot of energy, 4.50x10^35J, such a huge number I don't know of any easy way to express it. But the problem is actualy much worse.

To produce any amount of anti-matter you must also produce an equal amount of matter giving us a theoretical limit of twice that amount, 9x10^35J. But we can't even come close to that. CERN facilites currently spend millions of times the theoretical limit. I'll be generous and assume advanced techniques get that amount down to only 1000 times the theoretical limit, some 9x10^38J.

The sun itself only puts out 3.9x10^26W. So, assuming you could capture ALL of that energy it would take you only 73 thousand years to remove it all. And since you can only capture a infinitesimally small fraction of the sun's energy, the idea is completely unworkable. Indeed it would take MUCH less energy to simply fling the stuff out into space then to try and annilate it.

Tim · 2005-04-07 19:32:03

Another update on the Japanese plan by space.com. They seem really confident that they can get a lot more for their yen then NASA gets for their buck. Manned flights, moon bases, robots, nanotechnologym, and supersonic airliners for $2.6 billion a year? Doesn't seem possible.
http://space.com/missionlaunches/ap_050 … _moon.html

Japan Announces Manned Moon Flight by 2025
By Kenji Hall
Associated Press
posted: 06 April 2005
12:20 pm ET

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's space agency mapped out a new, ambitious plan Wednesday for manned flights to the moon by 2025 as a first step to explore the solar system's farflung planets, but said decisions about whether Japan will go it alone or collaborate with other nations won't be made for another decade.
The proposal unveiled by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, marks the agency's first attempt in years to rethink its missions and rejuvenate a space program that has been hobbled by recent launchpad and space probe failures.

JAXA sent the plan to a government space panel for review, asking for a budget increase to roughly US$2.6 billion (euro2.03 billion) a year, from US$2 billion (euro1.56 billion). By comparison, NASA's annual budget is US$16.2 billion (euro12.6 billion).
"Until now, the question has been, 'Can Japan develop its own manned spaceship?' We will know the answer in another 10 years'' when the agency will review its options, JAXA Chairman Keiji Tachikawa said.
"It won't require a big budget rise,'' he said, adding that it's "too soon to know how much it will cost because things might change in coming years.''

Japan's long-term vision resembles those of U.S. President George W. Bush and European space officials, who hope to land astronauts and robots on the moon as a first step to sending space shuttle missions to Mars.

Over the next decade, JAXA's plan calls for scientists to develop robots and nanotechnology for surveys of the moon, and design a rocket and space vessel capable of carrying cargo and passengers.

By 2015, JAXA will review whether it's ready to pour resources into manned space travel and possibly building a base on the moon. A decision to possibly to try for Mars and other planets would be made after 2025.
The plan emerges two months after JAXA sent a communications satellite into space aboard the country's workhorse H-2A rocket -- its first successful launch since November 2003, when a rocket carrying two spy satellites malfunctioned after liftoff and was destroyed in mid-flight. That accident forced officials to put the entire space program temporarily on hold.
It also marks a major policy shift that was set in motion last year when a Japanese government panel recommended that the agency focus on manned space flight instead of unmanned scientific probes.
Despite being Asia's most advanced space-exploring nation, Japan has been playing catch-up to Europe in commercial satellite launches. Tokyo also has struggled to outdo China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003 and later announced plans for a trip to the moon.
Tachikawa said JAXA's plan wasn't a reaction to the recent string of failures that led to a 15-month grounding of the domestically made H-2A rocket.

JAXA will scrap several planned missions but hasn't publicly said which ones, the agency's executive director, Kiyoshi Higuchi, said. Missions will be reorganized so they aren't so cut off from other projects, as they have been until now, he added.

JAXA already has a moon survey mission planned. Its SELENE probe -- originally scheduled for launch in 2005 but since delayed -- is designed to orbit the moon, releasing two small satellites that will measure the moon's magnetic and gravitational field and conduct other tests for clues about the moon's origin.
JAXA officials said their hope is establish a base on the moon that could mine resources found on and under the lunar surface. An illustrated handout showed an astronaut directing an array of robots constructing the base, which would draw solar power from photovoltaic panels and explore the moon's poles for traces of water to convert to hydrogen fuel.
Eventually, JAXA hopes to expand missions to search for evidence about the origins of the universe and life beyond our planet, JAXA officials said.

Other aerospace projects include a passenger airliner that will travel at Mach 2 -- or twice the speed of sound -- for five-hour Tokyo-Los Angeles flights and an unmanned, hydrogen-fueled plane that can travel at Mach 5.

GCNRevenger · 2005-04-07 22:23:59

Nationalist hype mixed with wanting to steal the fire from China...

If they strapped together a trio of the H-2A rockets, they might be able to put a man on the Moon, but not do that and the other stuff on that budget.

I won't say they can't land people on the Moon in 20 years and build a supersonic airliner, but it would be very difficult.

Yang Liwei Rocket · 2005-04-29 04:01:22

Poor Japan and the Japanese also had a dreadfulcrash and the toll climbs to 103 according to Daily Telegraph Australia , seems the Government made a stupid response much like it did during the Kobe Quake disaster

According to space dot com the NASDA or JAXA is in trouble because of the big cuts and stagnant economy, "If the present rates of decline continue, the space program will collapse," said Keiji Tachikawa, a former private sector executive who assumed leadership of the space agency, known as JAXA, four months ago. "We are almost in a crisis situation."

Nuno Cardoso · 2005-04-29 07:32:59

The people who believe in the Japanese space program seem to forget that Japan is a different society, which is based on strong social ties. Sadly, for space activists, the Japanese society has grown used to pork politics.

So in a way one must educate the public that space really matters, but i´m not sure one can make that leap. Pork tends to be addictive.

Nuno Martinho Da Cunha Cardoso

The Author of:"The Diagonal Method:An Alternative Approach To Arithmetics."

SpaceNut · 2005-06-20 08:59:15

Japan Dreams of Robot Moon Base in 2025, Advanced humanoid robots could take over mining, telescope-building chores for humans.

All with a budget 1/10th of Nasa? ???

Grypd · 2005-06-20 10:31:43

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,a … .asp]Japan Dreams of Robot Moon Base in 2025, Advanced humanoid robots could take over mining, telescope-building chores for humans.
All with a budget 1/10th of Nasa? ???

Yes as it has been shown with telerobotics that we do not need to send many people to the Moon to create a very advanced Industrial capacity. Japan knows this and plans to utilise this fact to give itself the advantage.

Robots would have the advantage of not needing a lot of consumable food and air and for repairs, if we can do major operations on humans using telerobotics then we can work on machines which by there nature are easier and tougher.

So dont think of it as JAXA having less of a budget think of it as the japanese being able to get 100 times more out of there dollar spent than NASA.

SpaceNut · 2005-06-20 10:43:21

Another thing that Japan has going for it is the robotics design and AI research as well all done on the private sector dime not that of the government space budget.

Grypd · 2005-06-20 10:59:26

Yes and there is a general love of all things robotic in the psyche of the Japanese just look at all the manga they produce!

There is a trend to greater automation anyway amongst Japanese industries there population is getting older and shrinking and they have a competition with the rest of the asian tigers coming up. And they have experience of Robotic mining it is Japanese companies that are building some of the best new Robots working in the mines of Australia.

Vir Stellae · 2005-06-20 19:56:46

So dont think of it as JAXA having less of a budget think of it as the japanese being able to get 100 times more out of there dollar spent than NASA.

??? Japan is the king of wasteful spending, they've been running huge deficits for a decade funding useless construction projects like the Tokyo bay aqualine.

GCNRevenger · 2005-06-20 20:15:53

100X? Huh?

Japan can hardly get their H-2A rocket to fly reliably

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