[JohnDenver]

JD, can you address Devil's points please?

How does that factory on the moon work? Do you drill moon for oil? or do you use solar power to construct mirrors?

Read the links lazyboy. I'm tired of doing all the fucking homework for you people.

[eric_b]

...



FOAD

[Aaron]

And through the power of technology...

PO.com "Keeping it Real!"

From Michael Duke, CCACS Research Professor and Director of CCACS link

This is an idea that was developed by Dr. David Criswell at the University of Houston. I think that it is generally correct, though there are a lot of detailed technology questions to be worked out. Some of those are being supported by NASA in a preliminary way. I've attached a report on the concept.

PDF

[nero]

I did take a look at the link and without much knowledge of power transmission or space exploration I have some critisisms.

1. As Devil pointed out, how large a colony on the Moon would this require to operate?

The author argues that most of it can be performed by remote controlled robots but he is being niave if he feels that that solves the problem. The replacement of people with machines increases the capital costs and complexity. The factory he imagines working on the moon would be the most sophisticated piece of machinery ever devised by man. I have the feeling that to the author the factory is a big black box and that as long as you have enough energy and the right elements you can make anything in it. Maybe that's how things work on StarTrek but we aren't there yet.

The author doesn't completely discount the need for some people actually present on the Moon to operate/fix the factory so we are back to the question how many people would be necessary? Using the ISS as a guide how much would it cost to build and maintain the quarters for those people. The ISS has taken decades and over 100 billion dollars to get this far. The base on the Moon would be at least 10 times as expensive and take at least as long to get going(IMO). This is of course assuming NASA handles the project, I'm sure private industry probably could do it for a 10th of the cost but then what private industry has a 100 billion dollars to venture on a demo.

Don't get me wrong I'm all for setting up a self sustaining colony on the moon and a demonstration LSP would be a nice goal. But I think you would be fooling yourselves if you think the program would ever make economic sense.

2. Before we can start putting our energy infrastructure eggs into any one basket we better be darn sure that that basket is not going to fall apart. We probably would need at least a 10 year track record on the demo LSP before people would even start considering it a viable alternative energy source to invest in. Take a look at the history of stationary fuel cell technology, the biggest barrier to the technology is the conservative nature of the energy industry, they require years and years of demonstration plant operation before they are willing to put any signifcant investment in real power generation capacity.

So even assuming that the technology is technically sound no one will invest in it until it is demonstrated to be economically viable. The cost of producing the demo plant is such that only the government has deep enough pockets and once produced the demo plant must have a proven track record. I'll be kind and put it in the "hot fusion catagory" of potential energy technologies.

[nth]

The energy beam concept is not reality either. Several experiments done on beaming energy has not proven commercial viability.

[JohnDenver]

The author argues that most of it can be performed by remote controlled robots but he is being niave if he feels that that solves the problem. The replacement of people with machines increases the capital costs and complexity. The factory he imagines working on the moon would be the most sophisticated piece of machinery ever devised by man. I have the feeling that to the author the factory is a big black box and that as long as you have enough energy and the right elements you can make anything in it. Maybe that's how things work on StarTrek but we aren't there yet.

Nero, I don't want to minimize the complexity and cost of LSP, but one point in Criswell's favor is that factory automation is extremely sophisticated even now. Most electronic products are already built almost entirely by robots. The factory doesn't have to build "anything"; it just has to build solar panels. I don't believe a solar panel fab would be the most sophisticated system ever devised by man. Massively automated semiconductor fabs and assembly lines are being built all the time. The challenge is how to put one on the moon, and supply it with silicon, metals and other raw materials from lunar soil. It may even be possible to skip the fab idea, and just send up the panels as rolls of thin-film fabric which can be rolled out onto the surface by robots.

Also, telepresence is a practical idea which is at the engineering level, as shown by the success of the recent mars rovers.

The author doesn't completely discount the need for some people actually present on the Moon to operate/fix the factory so we are back to the question how many people would be necessary? Using the ISS as a guide how much would it cost to build and maintain the quarters for those people. The ISS has taken decades and over 100 billion dollars to get this far. The base on the Moon would be at least 10 times as expensive and take at least as long to get going(IMO).

Maybe. Where did you get the 10 times figure from? I believe the hardest part of the earth-moon journey is the leg from earth to earth-orbit. The Apollo program sent a lot of tonnage and people to the moon, and wasn't prohibitively expensive. It would make a lot more sense having the robots/people up there working on something with a huge potential commercial payoff, instead of hitting golf balls and doing gee-whiz science fair projects. They should be doing real, practical work.

Don't get me wrong I'm all for setting up a self sustaining colony on the moon and a demonstration LSP would be a nice goal. But I think you would be fooling yourselves if you think the program would ever make economic sense.

What do you mean "ever"?

Your comments about commercial feasibility raise a good point. I thought the most interesting parts of Criswell's work were his comments on providing enough energy to make everyone on earth energy-wealthy, like the first world is now.

But think about this: Suppose we knew, for a fact, that we could lay out $1 trillion, and thereby set-up a system which produces electricity "too cheap to meter". Who will put up the money for it? Nobody, because it doesn't make economic sense. No investor wants to invest in a mine which will be so productive that it causes the price of the commodity to drop to zero. So, although I'm a generally a proponent of capitalism, this is an area where it is clearly defective. In cases like this, capitalism actually hinders growth.

Personally, I think the benefits of electrifying every household in the world with free, clean energy is worth a trillion dollars. It certainly would be a more constructive use of the money than the Iraq War (for instance), and it didn't take much effort to dig up that war money. They just wrote the checks -- it took five minutes. Energy security is at least as important as military security, and every powerful nation knows that. If energy problems start to really bite, the big checks will be written -- the only question is where they will go. Personally, I prefer space energy to nuclear because it's clean, and the growth potential is infinite.

It reminds me a little of open software, like Linux or Wikipedia. There is no capitalistic motive to engage in large, labor-intensive complex projects if the final product is free. And yet, oddly enough, these projects get done, and they become an extremely valuable opus and inheritance of all mankind. We're going to have to adopt an approach like that if we want to capture the big energy flows. How exactly to do that is the riddle. The international cooperation involved in modern space development is a good practical model.

I don't think "not enough money" is a valid excuse. The money is there. It just needs to be aggregrated on an unprecedented scale. Human beings may have to take a big, new step, where the initial capital investment is orders of magnitude larger than anything ever before attempted, but so is the pay-off. We may have reached the point where baby-steps won't get us to the next rock in the stream. We might have to jump.

[JohnDenver]

The energy beam concept is not reality either. Several experiments done on beaming energy has not proven commercial viability.

Do you have any documentation on those experiments?

[Mercani]

The Sun is beaming orders of magnitude more energy to the Earth than this system can beam from the moon.

So why don't we build this "energy base" on Earth and forget about beaming the Sun's energy from the Moon to Earth and instead get the energy directly from the Sun?. The concept of PV solar basically.

Don't we have the raw materials that exist on the Moon here on Earth?

[Devil]

Most electronic products are already built almost entirely by robots.

Now, I'll take you to task here, on this single point, just to show you how weak your arguments are. I have worked in the electronics industry for over 50 years, so I do have a modicum of experience. Let's have a look at it holistically:

What are the raw materials of, say, the electronics assembly?

Let's start with the printed circuit. The laminate is most usually made from an epoxy resin (derived from petroleum), reinforced by woven glass fibres and electrodeposited copper foil. Each of these three components requires human supervision for the manufacture. OK, one operator can look after 3 to 5 weaving looms and check constantly for broken fibres. Then the laminate is packed and paletted and sent to the PCB Fab plant (without robotic trucks, I fear). The PCB Fab industry is very human-resource-intensive, with factories of up to 10,000 employees, because the process involves many tens of different kinds of operation, mechanical, electrical, chemical, photographic, lithographic, printing and also requires a hefty infrastructure, such as waste water treatment and stack monitoring, with constant wet analyses, micrographic sample preparation etc.

The active and passive components are often similarly humanly-intensive.

The completed printed circuits and components are shipped to assembly plants which are, today, fairly heavily automated but still require considerable numbers of personnel for loading the robots, monitoring their performance, sorting out component feed blockages. But there are other products used, such as stencils, solder paste, cleaning solvents, all requiring human work etc. However, each board is visually inspected, usually by human eyes, but even automated optical inspection requires a human operator for each machine. Then comes retouching, 100% human.

Then the completed boards have to be mechanically mounted in whatever, tested, packed and despatched.

Your sentence implies we can dispense with human intervention: this is not the case. We are VERY far from a factory with no human intervention between the raw materials arriving to the final DVD player being delivered to your front door. In fact, thousands of persons are probably involved in the manufacture of what is needed for you to read this, even though a few of the operations are individually highly automated.

So it is the same with the way you gloss over the rest of your hypotheses. Get practical, man!

[jato]

The Apollo program sent a lot of tonnage and people to the moon, and wasn't prohibitively expensive.

Wrong!


http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/attm/a11.am.lm.2.html

Lunar Module: WEIGHT: Empty: 3920 kg (8650 lb)
Crew & Propellant: 14,700 kg (32,500 lb)

But that is a misleading figure...

Consider the payload. Payload is all that matters regarding delivering items to the Moon. Exclude the propellant and the actual spacecraft weight itself:

The actual payload that was placed on the moon:
2x Astronauts, space suits & misc. gear= 1000 pounds
Lunar rover= 460 pounds
Total= less than 2000 pound.


If you were to only need a one-way trip to the moon, you could count the ascent stage as payload:


Ascent stage, inert 4,341 lb
Scientific equipment 406 lb
Propellants 5,835 lb
Total ascent stage 10,582 lb


Some fun Apollo facts:

If you car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission. The Saturn V launch vehicle contains 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).

The ratio of propellant to payload in Saturn V is 50 to 1.

The power of one Saturn V is enough to place in earth orbit all U.S. manned spacecraft previously launched. (Sounds great, but it only put 2 people and a rover on the moon.)

[sjn]

If you car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission. The Saturn V launch vehicle contains 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).

The ratio of propellant to payload in Saturn V is 50 to 1.

The power of one Saturn V is enough to place in earth orbit all U.S. manned spacecraft previously launched. (Sounds great, but it only put 2 people and a rover on the moon.)

We'll just have to use nuclear rockets...

[Ryan]

I've been a big space-exploration fan, love science fiction, etc. One of the things peak oil has forced me to realized is that we missed our chance. The High Frontier concept was brought up back in the later 1970s by Gerard K. O'Neill. His whole push was to build solar-power satellites using lunar materials. But there just wasn't a push to do that - instead we invested in SUV nation. Any chance we had to build a space-faring civilization is gone. There simply won't be any space programs in a post-peak world.

[JohnDenver]

If you were to only need a one-way trip to the moon

Actually, that's probably the way we should count it, being as the main thrust of this LSP concept is to use robots. Personally, I don't think we should even bother putting humans up there. We should see how much infrastructure, power generating equipment and tooling we can put up there working on a strictly robotic/telecontrol basis.

So, using your figures, we would have about 20 tons landed on the moon, per Apollo mission, and six missions from 1969 to 1972. So we can put up 120 tons on the moon in six years, with 60s/70s technology.

In fact, if we're not bothering with the return trip, we might as well land the command and service module (CSM) together with the lunar module. That would give us another 15 tons, per trip. So we should be able to put 210 tons of stuff onto the moon in six years, using 60s/70s technology.

The engines on the CSM and LEM were very small, so it seems to me that not that much extra effort is needed to send something to the moon, as opposed to just putting it into earth orbit.

If you car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission. The Saturn V launch vehicle contains 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).

This is still peanuts. Even if a Saturn V launch is equivalent to 1.2 millions gallons of gasoline, that is still a drop in the bucket compared to the 137,975,573,000 gallons of gasoline burned in the U.S. in 2002. As a percentage, the launch would account for 0.00086% of a years gasoline budget.

[JohnDenver]

Any chance we had to build a space-faring civilization is gone. There simply won't be any space programs in a post-peak world.

Sob sob... Ryan, you're talking like a wet noodle. Show some backbone! We already are a space-faring civilization. Look at this incredible shot:



Note the spacewalker at the bottom. Check out the size of that friggin' thing!

[Ryan]

I have plenty of backbone - the ISS is a joke and a terrible waste of time/money. I wouldn't use it as an example of a viable space program. It's pathetic that we don't have anything better since the Apollo program.

[Devil]

If you were to only need a one-way trip to the moon

Actually, that's probably the way we should count it, being as the main thrust of this LSP concept is to use robots. Personally, I don't think we should even bother putting humans up there. We should see how much infrastructure, power generating equipment and tooling we can put up there working on a strictly robotic/telecontrol basis.

So, using your figures, we would have about 20 tons landed on the moon, per Apollo mission, and six missions from 1969 to 1972. So we can put up 120 tons on the moon in six years, with 60s/70s technology.

In fact, if we're not bothering with the return trip, we might as well land the command and service module (CSM) together with the lunar module. That would give us another 15 tons, per trip. So we should be able to put 210 tons of stuff onto the moon in six years, using 60s/70s technology.

The engines on the CSM and LEM were very small, so it seems to me that not that much extra effort is needed to send something to the moon, as opposed to just putting it into earth orbit.

If you car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission. The Saturn V launch vehicle contains 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).

This is still peanuts. Even if a Saturn V launch is equivalent to 1.2 millions gallons of gasoline, that is still a drop in the bucket compared to the 137,975,573,000 gallons of gasoline burned in the U.S. in 2002. As a percentage, the launch would account for 0.00086% of a years gasoline budget.

John

For once, please, think, get real and come down to earth. Your head is in rarified space, way above the clouds. Have you ever seen a single robot that did not require human supervision? Even the Mars buggy thing had to be teleguided. What you are proposing is just not possible with today's technology. For at least a dozen reasons. Period. Full Stop, Fertig, Kropka.

[nero]

Also, telepresence is a practical idea which is at the engineering level, as shown by the success of the recent mars rovers.

As Devil pointed out so well, creating a factory that takes lunar dust and makes complex things out of it is automation on a different scale than we currently have. This factory-colony would have to have the ability to practically fix itself. The recent mars rovers had a life expectancy of 3 months and they have been losing functionality as time progresses. Any factory-colony on the lunar surface hopefully would last longer than that and would have some ability to take corrective actions and repair itself. The factory would probably have to be able to make practically anything it needed from lunar dust and energy. Once we are at that level of complexity I don't see what difference adding people to the equation makes.

The base on the Moon would be at least 10 times as expensive and take at least as long to get going(IMO).

Maybe. Where did you get the 10 times figure from?

That would be in my opinion hence the "(IMO)".

The Apollo program sent a lot of tonnage and people to the moon, and wasn't prohibitively expensive.

It was expensive and that was why the last missions were scrapped in 1974: to save money. So in a sense they were "prohibitively expensive".

But I think you would be fooling yourselves if you think the program would ever make economic sense.

What do you mean "ever"?

If we don't find an alternative cheap source of energy then I really mean "ever". This sort of project is a huge high risk high payoff gamble. In an energy poor world we will have competing more pressing activities that will demand our immediate attention. Without cheap energy (which we still have for a few more years at least) nobody will be able to gather the venture capital to finance this project. Your metaphor of having reached the point where we have to jump to the next rock is apt. Once we are on the energy down slope the jump is going to get harder and harder as our "muscles" atrophy.

[nth]

The energy beam concept is not reality either. Several experiments done on beaming energy has not proven commercial viability.

Do you have any documentation on those experiments?

Just look up microwave beams or wireless energy transfer.

here is one interesting one:
http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/research/FEL/0b0.html

[gnm]

I nominate JD for the first one way trip to the moon!


-G

btw do you have ANY IDEA how much energy that hypothetical beam would waste just heating up the 20 miles of atmosphere it was punching through? I'm thinking LOTS....

[clv101]

JD's still in the Denial Stage, he'll come around eventually and realise business as usual can't be sustained by pie in the sky space projects or even be sustained at all.