The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.
The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.
You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%.
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
You can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.
Because it's better for Earth's biosphere to mine things like lithium on the moon rather than polluting our biosphere. The North and South pole of the moon also serves as an excellent staging ground to put solar energy collectors that can then transmit continuous concentrated power to Earth.
The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous.
On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about.
On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly.
So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible.
We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.
We use technology to do many things we are not biologically capable of. If we can use technology to remotely explore inhospitable environments, we can also use technology to wrap ourselves in a hospitable environment.
The Chinese will build a moon base, as a sign from the Chinese government to the Chinese people that China is capable of cutting-edge engineering and science (notably a demonstration to their own citizens - when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?).
America seems a bit shaky in their determination to actually build a moon base, though having Jared Isaacman as administrator gives hope. But regardless of whether America is currently on track, a successful Chinese moon base won't stay without answer
> when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?
Last year, when negative news of delayed astronaut return was all over American news, e.g. [1][2]. Apparently makes American astronauts onboard Boeing ship being stuck in space less embarrassing.
I will give you that. I will be more than happy to see both reach there in mutual success. I do fear the blow back of the more tribalistic folks that will see it as a threat rather than success.
I think the point is that that phrasing has been used by rocket companies to mean a whole range of different amounts of fuel load, it's not very precise wording in practice.
From the industry: I would expect to hear "mission duty cycle" in that case. "Full duration" doesn't have a consistent meaning (a fact which is sometimes used to the marketing team's advantage).
Flight computer tells engine to go. Full go, launch sequence. Engine goes. To me, anything but that isn’t a full-duration anything.
If clamped down, it’s a full-duration static fire. If clamps release, it goes to space. Basically, if the engine can’t tell (apart from atmosphere, which is a big apart) it isn’t going to space, it’s a FDSF. It’s a whole-engine show. If you’re running parts through a full duty cycle, that can be done in a lab (or on a stand).
The problem is that there is no standard meaning for the "full duration" in this context.
Some reports say that this means "running all seven BE-4 engines at full thrust for up to 38 seconds".
In flight the engines fire for 190 seconds.
So what the full duration means, and whether they fill the tanks with just enough fuel for the firing, or with a larger amount to help the clamps to hold the stage down, all this we will probably only find out from the investigation, if the results are ever published.
I think it's amazing they can basically hold a rocket down and let it launch like that without things exploding or shearing apart from the forces. Are those the same bolts as the exploding ones they would use for a normal launch?
(on that note it's also amazing that these exploding bolts are so reliable, I can imagine even a single one not releasing would cause... Issues)
Not sure why you were downvoted. That’s the first thing I thought of, too. They got all the people out of the area, standard procedure but still, this was a huge boom.
The real solution is to nuke the onboard modem if you must have a new or modern car. This can almost always be done with minimal side effects, because cars are expected to work even in areas without cell service.
Single solutions/solutionistic approaches will likely be incompatible with either goal; consumer needs are always changing and collection capabilities expanding. Data scope and retention also need not be counter to consumer wants, and in the very least requires a mechanism that allows consumers to 'dial in' their preferences rather than wholesale accepting/rejecting terms of usage (i.e. a gradient instead of a binary).
I've yet to encounter a service that has implemented this successfully.
I don't think consumers care about their cars being connected. Personally, I would just rather use my phone for whatever connected features you would want in a car.
I think that that would have been Apple’s positioning for their car project, but that seems to have been axed.
Maybe they’ll bring it back someday, I hope they do, but it’s almost guaranteed that governments will rain down regulation on them for entering too many markets at once—and yes, for building operating systems to which Apple refuses to build a backdoor to the encryption.
I propose requiring explicit opt in for each piece of data collected, and explicit opt in for each piece shared to a third party. Failure to opt in for a particular piece should only result in the degradation of features that can be reasonably explained as requiring the data.
Apple Maps gives you good mapping without tracking you, but I'm not sure how much of that is a technical solution like e2ee(your FindMy data is e2ee) or just you placing trust in Apple to not break their privacy policy.
>Blue Moon is one of the two lander contractors. But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust.
That isn't my impression of NASA/government opinion. Starship HLS is seen as the eventual option, as is obvious from the testing campaign. It'll get there eventually and offer unprecedented capability, but it's very clearly several years out.
Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having a less risky critical path. The rocket was already orbital, fewer refueling flights were needed, the engines weren't pushing the limits of materials technology, no reusable heat shield to worry about.
Though, ultimately it's worth keeping in mind that the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell.
> Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having a less risky critical path
Source? (Not doubting, and it sounds vaguely familiar.)
> the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell
The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction. (Hell, even without HLS you can ship nuclear power stations and solar panels and rovers.)
It seems to point to rising costs on SpaceX's end, and in my reading, is very critical of them compared to BO.
>The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction
I believe that suits are still important because you can't really do much with a crew there without them. There aren't even new EVA suits available. And, of course politically, it's going to be seen very poorly if they can't do a "One small step for a man..." moment.
As mentioned, Apollo suits are neither safe, nor in working condition now. Even the EVA suits on the ISS (which are only usable for space walks) are decades old and just barely being kept going.
The US simply hasn't been able to bring new spacesuits into use for a long time, every single time, the costs and timelines have spiraled. Probably because a lot of the knowledge has been lost to old age, and the new guys need some time to relearn those lessons and improve on them.
No. One, they don’t exist in working condition. Two, the tolerances and materials were unacceptable by modern standards. (And for modern purposes. We’re going there to do shit. Not be Boy Scouts.)
They also change every time a Congressional staffer sneezes. If the space suits don’t work, a pivot would be easier than having the space suits with no rocket to put them on.
Really the least risky thing right now would probably be if BO retooled their lander to fly on a Falcon Heavy. If asked, SpaceX could probably launch 4 Falcon Heavies to orbit before Blue Origin could launch as many New Glenns.
I really don't think there's anything particularly derisked about NG + Blue Moon 2 compared to Starship HLS.
The issue is that Blue Moon is designed to have its hydrogen fuel topped off by the second stage of New Glenn, which isn’t possible on Falcon or Starship.
Falcon Heavy has a much smaller max payload diameter (~4.6m) compared the New Glenn (7m), I doubt the landers (MK2 especially) can be retooled to fit without essentially starting from scratch.
> Does Blue Origin not have another pad? (Did they blow up a pad or a test stand?)
The explosion happened at their only completed pad.
They reportedly have a second pad under construction (for the larger "9x4" variant of New Glenn) but I've not seen a lot of detail about how far along it is.
Would not be surprised to see them accelerating construction of the new pad.
> But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust.
Right now it seems like it's Axiom or bust, with their suits. The suits have missed a lot of milestones, and there's not much point in going to the Moon without suits. Latest NASA OIG report put them somewhere in the 2030s at best...
Heh, I don't think so. The ISS suits have their own problems, are custom made for the ISS, are bulky AF, and "modified for the moon" might take longer than expected.
Been thinking about this quite a bit. I think every lunar airlock will end up with a wash station and will end up using basic water sprays to get the job done. Soil compactors can be used outside to compact the dust and prevent it from being an issue during moon walks as well. I think once a moon base is established most moon walks will be on-base where dust would have been dealt with in the first few years and then after that it's basically like walking on compacted soil so it won't be loose.
And if you're wondering why they might use water for this well... water will be abundant and basically every habitat will have a municipal water hookup. A moon base might quickly find itself with several hectares of water and no where to put it. Might even end up injecting it into the ground where the water will be able to maintain it's liquid state (moon crust quickly reaches room temperature only a few dozens of meters underground).
Yup. That gets us to the stone age on the moon. I'm a big fan of bootstrapping the moon's industrial capacity straight to the industrial age. We need not only concrete production but also steel, water, etc. The faster we bootstrap all this stuff the faster the moon will feel like any other place you can go. I think there's gonna be hardware stores on the moon within the century.
Blue Origin's lunar architecture is designed for a maximum of twelve moon landings per year for the Blue Moon Mk2 without using Orion and the same $4 billion budget per Orion+SLS flight.
SpaceX's architecture requires a second cislunar starship for the return trip. That will mean at most four moon landings per year and even that is optimistic. The large size of Starship makes return trips and lunar refueling really unattractive. If SpaceX wants to compete they will need to build a dedicated cislunar vehicle.
> The “Peeping Tom” Laws Penal Code 647(j) explicitly states it is not a defense to this charge that the defendant is a cohabitant, landlord, tenant, cotenant, employer, employee, or business partner or associate of the victim.
Here the "reasonable expectation of privacy" is not because they were in the nude, but because they were secretly using your home to test clumsy robots and wouldn't like to be caught.
I said the owners can't be held liable, I meant the owners can't be held liable.
You can "in certain circumstances" (negligence, overt criminality...) go after the managers. You probably can't go after the managers for things like producing a business plan they could have plausibly believed was legal and causing the company to incur civil liability.
In the situation described in this article, probably both the owners and the managers (likely the same people!) get away without being held accountable, and the victims have no recompense because the company folds.
The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.
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