New Mars Forums

Well, at least the lines will be short.

Acrobat Reader 7 seems to allow copy/paste.

Agreed.

No one is allowed to win anymore. In business, in life, in war, in peace, in everything.

And its making us all losers.

In a predictable pattern no doubt.

Does that mean there is going to be clouds of hydrogen were ever we fire one of these off?

By that standard the Earth itself would not be suitable for human colonization.

Just as resources are not neatly and evenly distrbuted on Earth, nor are they in space. Sometimes you got to travel a little and sweat a little to get them.

We need to start thinking of space as a place, instead of little peices of it as place.

Which is were, exactly?

We've toyed with several methods over the last decade or two, and canceled all of them. We've finally decided to hell with it and are going for bulk. Alt Space hasn't come up with anything yet. A RLV is is no wheres near NASAs drawing board, so its at least 30 years away, and even then is unlikely to have the weight or volume of the standard rocket, and a space elevator at least 50 years after that.

Enless we start pumping out HLVs by the thousands, there is no such thing as cheap Earth launch.

You don't aim it. You put a basket in front of it. Or send it with its own means of maintaining its orbit while still reducing the amount of fuel required to launch it. Although in theory you could building a big turn table in center of a large crater and put extentions every few degrees on the craters rim, effectively putting it in whatever orbit you want.

Back to the basket. A space station in geostationary Lunar orbit would be placed so that it recieves the bundles of material just as the force from launch is being overcome by lunar gravity. In otherwords from the stations prospective the cargo would hardly be moving at all. A large semi ridgid cone would absorb the little remaining impact and capture the material, and pull it inside for whatever processing it requires. The size and weight of the object would dictate how much juice to give it on the ground to reach the required trajectory.

Lunar factories are still a long ways off, and admittedly its going to be some time before were going to be able "export" large amounts of anything. But you underestimate what even small teams of what we would call on earth craftsmen working in small workshops can create. The amount of minerals that are going to pile up outside even the smallest lunar base from oxygen will literally demand that something productive be done with it, if for no other reason than the rover assigned to gather oxygen bearing regolith can't get around it! Basic smelters capable of churning out pure iron, aluminum, titianium, and other materials can be used for everything from structural beams to rover frames with simple tools that you can put in your very own garage. And everything that can be produced there is one less thing that needs to be launched from earth.

And the best thing is that it will all be of simpler to build and of higher quality because it doesn't have to endure a violent launch from earth while being similtaniously be light enough for launch.

Only if you don't mind a $200 million surcharge on everything. The only route to truely bring launch cost down, barring a major advance in launch technology, is to reduce the force required to do it. And you can't find that here.

Asteroids are tricky. First you'd have to stablize its orbit. To mine it, the best way I can think of is to bring in scaffolds to put around it, and then firmly attach the scaffold to the asteroid, giving you something to lean against as you dig in.

That would only be practical with small asteroids though, which isn't by itself bad. Theres lots of them, and its saves the bigger ones (> 1km in diameter) for habitation.

Zubrin's Latest

He proposes, as I have, using the HLV to launch the remaining ISS components. But he seems to want to do it without the Shuttle, which I don't think is possible.

He also points out the weakness in launching a TLI stage using cryogenic fuels. I wonder if methane, the fuel used in the CEV that allows it to be useable for up to 6 months, would be a viable choice for the 2nd/TLI stage. It would probably require a different rocket.

Finally, he still hasn't managed to mentally seperate the important mission of orbital optical astronomy, and the Hubble.

Well thats because at the moment there is no power it it. You can be sure the moment we decide to do anything big up there this committee will be dragged in front of the General Assembly for questioning, and try to control it.

And there are people in America who would go along with that, cause, well, wrong forum.

The best reasoning for creating self sustaining bases off world is to provide an example for creating a civilization less dependant on environmental issues. Space based agriculture will lead the way in recreating earth based agriculture to be less dependant on fragile climactic changes. I hate to bring global warming into what is already a mud slinging fest, but its the reason. Global warming or cooling will happen no matter if we burn fossil fuels or not, because its happened before.

By the way Tristar, your missing link and the best way to exploit lunar minerals is with a mass driver. That way you can cheaply collect resources without the trouble of zero g mining, shoot it off the surface cheaply, and construct objects in in zero g with ease. Its much easier that launching with rockets, and almost infinately scalable. Parts of huge spacecraft could be prefabed on the surface, launched and put together much like huge oceangoing ships are today.

What about a big disposable HLV module stuffed with all the supplies needed for a year or more. It would seem to be cheaper than launching several cargo CEVs,
Progresses, or ATVs per year, and the cost would be far less than even a shuttle launch.

Being basically a big tank, and not requiring much in the way of shielding since its not really going to lived in (it doesn't even need life support, just be pressurized, the respirators by the door). Contraction/expansion issues should be limited, its only got to last about a year. It would dock in the same manner as the shuttle. Basically a big pantry, or storage shed, garbage truck at the end of its life, and if provided with fuel its second stage could provide orbital boosting, though that could cause structural issues..

It would eventually form the basis for the horizontal hab modules needed for bases. Real ones would have much better shielding, be strengthened (so it can be buried for radiatoin protection), and landing apperadi and a rudimentary method of surface locomotion (just wheels, so they can be towed next to each other and attached), one destined Mars would have a heat shield. One destined for the ISS could be equiped with a deployable heat shield to get an idea of how a Mars entery would go.