NASA Watches Armageddon

[blurr]

knowing nasa it probably never made it out of the atmosphere

[Builtgypsy]

It's funny, NASA is a space agency and the best thing they're good at is science. That's kinda odd.

I don't know how they'd actually plan to mine on the moon. Microgravity leads to bone and muscle loss over time, and it would be almost prohibitively expensive to actually ship mining equipment to the moon (at least all in one go). For every kilogram of weight being pushed into space, a ship has to generate at the very minimum 60 MJ on earth. That's an incredible amount of thrust, and why spacecraft are like 90% fuel and that's just for one trip.

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by Builtgypsy

It's funny, NASA is a space agency and the best thing they're good at is science. That's kinda odd.

I don't know how they'd actually plan to mine on the moon. Microgravity leads to bone and muscle loss over time, and it would be almost prohibitively expensive to actually ship mining equipment to the moon (at least all in one go). For every kilogram of weight being pushed into space, a ship has to generate at the very minimum 60 MJ on earth. That's an incredible amount of thrust, and why spacecraft are like 90% fuel and that's just for one trip.

Well, that's kind of the point of this research. If there is enough water on the moon, then we wouldn't have to bring it up. If there are enough resources on the moon to *build* the machinery and help support the people there, then instead of shipping each piece of mining equipment and every bit of every resource, we could ship equipment for making mining equipment and just the critical parts we couldn't make there, and dehydrated food to reconstitute with the water that is there (if it is, of course), and get it done for a lot less energy cost.

That, along with advancements in launch technology here, such as an "orbital elevator" or railgun tech (the sorts of things that NASA has been a barrier to, rather than a resource for, as they soldier on with 30 year old shuttle technology), could lower those costs to a feasible level.

And the moon isn't microgravity. It's gravity is lower than the earth's (about 1/6th as much), but isn't the same as the losses in zero-g.

PhilB