Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: BaDkaRmA158Th on August 13, 2007, 02:58:53 PM
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Saw it a few night's ago on the science chan.
They did not use moon rocks for the test shown "because people are nazis with moon rocks aparently"
But the machine took dust "sand" crushed up rocks .ect and out came water.
Was wounder if anyone else saw this, or had any other information.
They also spoke of some type of gas, that could be used "once mined also" to fule rockets to use the moon as a steping stone to other planets or return trips to earth.
Anyone see anything on this?
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H3?
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Sounds interesting.
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I saw it, but I wasn't paying attention to it. Was on the discovery chanel the other day.
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yep. very fascinating.
:)
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cool
:)
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next time Im stranded out in the desert and dying of thirst Ill get me some of that moon dust!
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The more stuff like this happens, the closer we get to practicing golf drives at Jupiter and to sights like this :
(http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08366.jpg)
:)
Anyone have the name of the show?
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I think it was called "buying the moon" or something like that.
edit.. now that I think about it, it was on the science channel.. http://science.discovery.com
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If this was presented in view of the current NASA plan to return to the moon via Apollo-II the sequel, aka Orion (I hate that NASA stole the name from the old "bang-bang" concept too!... nothing about this program is original!), then it's all bogus.
Water can be had out of processing ALOT of lunar regolith. The moon is hyper-arid and there is an old saw that goes: if there was concrete on the moon, the folks there would mine the concrete to extract the water out of it.
These numbers are taken from what it takes to get 3He (helium-3) -- which would be a great fusion fuel if we got fusion power plants to work: 20 tons of 3He a year would cover most of America's power needs. It would go for about "$46,500 per troy ounce ($1500/gram, $1.5M/kg), more than 120 times the value per unit weight of Gold" more or less in it's power generating potential.
But, to get that ton of 3He you have to process 100,000,000 tons of regolith. 3He occurs in lunar soil, at best, at 0.01 parts per million.
As a byproduct, through the processes, you also get approximately:
6,000 tons of H2 (which you can react with more lunar oxygen for more water)
3,300 tons of water as a mix of solar wind volitiles and lunar oxygen in processed soil
3,100 tons of helium-4
1,900 tons of CO
1,700 tons of CO2
1,600 tons of CH4
and 500 tons of N2
Conversely, to get just 1 ton of water will require you process over 30,000 tons of regolith. Nothing sent up by NASA's little Orion capsule will be able to process that much regolith to get water is useful quantities. And Orion is not economically viable in the long term. Anyone who has read about the subject of CATS (cheap access to space) by Max Hunter or G.H. Stine will understand that NASA's Orion is a dead end.
Large scale lunar mining of the regolith to get 3He in fuel quantities WILL get you more than enough water for local use by lunar miners and settlers. But nothing in the works now is going down that road.
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Orion a dead end? I've mostly skimmed articles about it, but I never got that bleak an impression.
A lot of people will lay a brick if Bill Stone succeeds in his expedition to Shackleton (10^9 tons of H2O). Mining near earth objects wouldn't seem so far out, then.
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Originally posted by moot
Orion a dead end? I've mostly skimmed articles about it, but I never got that bleak an impression.
A lot of people will lay a brick if Bill Stone succeeds in his expedition to Shackleton (10^9 tons of H2O). Mining near earth objects wouldn't seem so far out, then.
Orion is pretty much a un-reusable space capsule much like the Apollo program.
Much the of capsules reentry data has been resurrected from the Apollo program days and throughly updated to today.
UPS and United Airlines cannot stay economically viable in the long run if they throw the planes away after each trip, and so it goes for disintegrating totem poles to Low Earth Orbit and the Moon. Orion can only lead to exploration camps. Not long term lunar development. It will soak up federal dollars for the next 25 years and in the end, will have only been one more federal space program to subsidize the aerospace industry in the United States.
Look at the track record.
Apollo went to the moon: probably the last large scale NASA achievement. Then the program ended, and a few of the last perfectly functional space vehicles ended up as over-sized lawn ornaments when the program was terminated. Over 35 years ago.
Space Shuttle was a technological achievement that was an operational failure. Billed as $100 per pound to orbit with a turn around time of a week - ended up costing $10,000 to $15,000 pounds delivered to orbit, killed the United States expendable launch vehicle industry when Regan decried all civilian payloads would fly on the Shuttle first, before considering other launch vehicles (thus leading to rise in world market share of Ariane and Russian ELVs).
In the end: too big for everyday launch market use (due to USAF /NRO requirements), too expensive and too time consuming for economic launch and turnaround time, too much refurbishment needed between launches. Also so big and heavy to create the problems for reentry (a much smaller/lighter craft would have fewer problems). Far too many congressional budget cuts were instilled into the Space Shuttle program from it's conception to it's first launch to allow it to be a true success. The original design called for two totally reusable vehicles, orbiter piggybacked onto launching mother-ship. One cut after another over the course of a decade give us the current space shuttle design.
National Aerospace Plane. Never really went anywhere. Some new materials and a lot of testing, even a model atop a rocket to test the scramjet, but in the end, and subsidy for aerospace.
Delta Clipper DC-X. Started as a very watered down version of the old SSX (Space Ship Experimental) aerospike idea (General Graham, Max Hunter, Jerry Pournelle and other members of the old Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy) to support "Star Wars" / Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). NASA got hold of it in it's grasp and literally broke it to kill the program, whether intentionally or not, as it was unwanted competition to CATS (cheap access to space) with NASA"s Venture Star program.
Venture Star. Remember this one? Well, very few others do either. Lot's of pretty graphics came out of this aerospace subsidy program. About it though.
The Space Station formerly known as "Freedom" = International Space Station. NASA"s white elephant to beat all white elephants. Original designs like Boeing's Space Operations Center was an 8-launch, $8 billion project. Now estimated to cost about $130 billion by 2010 at expected completion and retirement of the space shuttle. The ISS is expected to be closed out by 2017 (that's when NASA zero's out the budget for ISS to spend it on other things) --- and that is with a half dozen modules canceled from the final project.
Last big redesign was called the "A, B, C" design point..... the C version envisioned the use of the shuttle stack to create a heavy lift launch vehicle (much like the Ares of Zubrin's Mars Direct plan).... in the end, they chose "D". The final design and it's orbit were determined by the U.S.A.'s State Department to get Russian onboard so those pesky Ruski scientists post cold war wouldn't be building big bombs for the bad guys (gee...didn't work did it?).
Too much on-board vibration for a lot of the 0-gee research that was touted. Awful expensive for a research station. A bit underpowered. Has been a huge drain on the space exploration budgets of no less than 7 nations.
In short: ISS has taught everyone else how NOT to build a space station.
NOW: Orion...... a rehash of the Apollo Program from 40 years ago.
Nothing really new here. Even the name Orion is taken from another program... the old Orion concept of tossing nukes under a pressure plate with heavy springs connecting it to a launch capsule above.... Old "band-bang". Max Hunter and G.H. Stine have got to be spinning in their graves over this one. The only plus on Orion's side is that some of it may have applications in an Mars Direct type mission architecture. But as to permanent habitation or economic development, Orion is a dead end.
The old NACA (NASA's predecessor) was a fantastic organization in it's time. NASA managed to win the Space Race which was so closely tied to the Cold War. The post-Apollo NASA has not had any real leadership in it's own ranks, from any Administration, or somewhat realistic or reliable Congressional support since Apollo. It's an agency without a true mission or goal. It has become a monstrous bureaucracy the kind that Chinese wisdom warns against. It's a federal feeding trough for the aerospace industry.
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Thanks Ted. I thought I'd seen Orion being considered in t/space's designs and a number of other industry favorite possibilities like NEOs? I never got the impression that anything else could compare to Orion in its predicted functions; nothing but powerpoint PR and rumors to judge from.
I suppose the coming decade of space industry development is going to be very decisive. What do you think of NG buying the rest of Scaled?
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Originally posted by moot
Thanks Ted. I thought I'd seen Orion being considered in t/space's designs and a number of other industry favorite possibilities like NEOs? I never got the impression that anything else could compare to Orion in its predicted functions; nothing but powerpoint PR and rumors to judge from.
I suppose the coming decade of space industry development is going to be very decisive. What do you think of NG buying the rest of Scaled?
I wept. The spunky little company that came up with the VariEze, Voyager, and SpaceshipOne under a large aerospace corp. This isn't like when SC was owned by Beech Aircraft, Wyman-Gordon, or Castparts and Rutan and the employees bought the company back several times over it's history.
NG has held a large block of shares for a long time, but this is new, and I don't see Rutan and employees buying Scaled back from the owning company this time. I think it will get lost among the subsidiaries and buried under.
Orion may eventually lead to Ares and a Mars Semi-Direct mission. But in the long run it is not sustainable. It's not economically sound and government will stop footing the bill at some point. it always does in space. Orion can enable science and research and human exploration..... but none of that is sustainable in the long term if human occupation in space cannot be made profitable to the private sector.
The problem with Orion and the rest is the determination to build a one-ship-does-it-all deal. Shuttle was too big and complicated and compromised during design to be economical. It was way too big to launch satellites into orbit economically. Orion is another disintegrating totem pole to space. There are crew and Heavy lift options, but all throwaway equipment.
There are concepts to Cheap Access To Space that just don't get pursued by the main stream aerospace community: the aerospike designed SSTO SSX, hydrogen peroxide powered SSTO vehicles like Black Horse, laser launchers, reusable two-stage to orbit designs similar to SpaceShipOne. We're back to disposable rockets.
You don't need a reusable ship with a 30+ ton payload capacity, you need a much simpler, smaller, lighter reusable ship that can carry up to 10 tons or a passenger module. For big loads you need a heavy lift launch capability: an HLV based on the Shuttle stack like Ares would work, or the old Energia, or a reusable idea like Boeing's old "Big Onion" HLLV. 100 tons to LEO minimum, 150 to 250 tons even better. HLLV is how you put space stations into orbit or bases onto the surface of the Moon and Mars, not piecemeal erector sets.
For a third option, something like a laser launch system or rail launch system could work well for consumables as it can potentially have the lowest cost per pound to orbit..... but those types of launch systems have limited military applications, so they don't get funded either.
Down the road there will be a need for reusable CATS vehicle like the envisioned Venture Star with a heavy lift ability, but we are not there yet.
The current government and NASA will never get humans to the point of living and working in space. Private industry will, if there is profit to be made, but the investment is too big and government policies too unpredictable to risk it Remember when Reagan ordered all payloads onto the Shuttle if there was room on it? That decision killed several cheap ELV start up companies in the United States.
NASA needs to be trimmed back to it's NACA-styled roots with emphasis on enabling technologies, testing, and robotic exploration,..... and turn human space endeavors over to private industry with government sponsored "Space Prizes" much like the X-Prize and those mentioned in Zubrin's Mars Direct scenarios.
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Well, Bigelow's announcement is a bit of good news :) By 2010, that'd be awesome .. It would be great if just a few more guys like him got the itch to pioneer space.
So much for the Transhab concept not being worth funding eh?
Doesn't that circular rail launch system have the military's attention?
BA's Sundancer announcement (http://bigelowaerospace.com/multiverse/news.php#update)
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I'm waiting on one of these...
(http://www.outatime.it/public/40-mr_fusion.jpg)