kpmancus@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Keith P. Mancus) (02/13/89)
>This is off by several orders of magnitude. You can't put even one >space station module, with supporting solar cells, batteries, and >several weeks of food, on the Moon, with six shuttles, even if we >had a lunar landing vehicle (a $5+ billion development in and of itself). >The estimates from NASA for a *minimal* lunar base: about 10 people huddled >in space station modules covered by dirt, with no mining or manufacturing >operations--run around $100 billion. There have never been any reasonable >estimates made for mining operations on the Moon, whether they be the >alleged ice, LOX, or whatever, because we don't know how to build mining >eqipment that can operate in vacuum and high temperature and radiation >extremes. An ice-mining operation would increase the price-- and the base >machines, parts, most food and chemicals except water would have to come >from Earth. Nor would such a base accomplish anything that could not be > > >Nick Szabo szabonj@fred.cs.washington.edu Well, it seems to me that given the enormous cost and uncertainty involved in establishing an ongoing manned lunar base, the next logical step is a serious of heavily equipped unmanned lunar rovers. This has several beneficial effects: (1) It gives us a chance to test out rover technology over moderately rough terrain, which will tell us a great deal about how well those rovers can be expected to work on other planets. (2) It lets us explore large chunks of the moon quickly and cheaply. We need to do this before choosing a sight for our lunar base anyway; what we know about the moon is based on six landing at isolated sites and orbital mapping. (3) The rovers mentioned in (1) can test autonomous behavior modes needed for other missions that are minutes or more away by lightspeed. If the software bombs, control can be taken over immediately. Where else will you be able to run in-vacuum, large scale, full-blown tests of the hardware and software under temperature extremes? Eventually the manned base can be built, when we have a better idea what we're doing. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ -Keith Mancus <kpmancus@phoenix.princeton.edu> <- preferred <kpmancus@pucc.BITNET>