REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (09/16/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> You have a bunch of good ideas there. Between the three of us (you me and Minsky) we should have enough to put together an article for L-5 newsletter. Re maintenance: If things don't break down often, we can run them unattended as long as possible, then either send replacement equipment or send a crew for a brief repair trip. That way we won't need to maintain personnel for long times on the Moon. Maybe we can even have the repair crew work remotely from LLO (Low Lunar Orbit). That way we wouldn't need any lunar liftoff facility, only semi-soft-landing for equipment and space travel without landing for crew. We'd send a LLO crew only for tasks where the 2.5 second delay from LEO was intolerable. Re searching for minerals: Initially we'll need lots of oxygen silicon and aluminum, and maybe we'll go for titanium also, all of which are abundant in lunar soil. We won't need to go prospecting, nor need to break up rocks. We just scoop up all the loose dirt within a mile of our landing site and we should have plenty. As for hydrogen and carbon, the two materials we'll need in large quantities which don't occur in abundance on the moon, we'll probably get them from elsewhere anyway, from a comet or asteroid that we've dragged into LEO where remote mining isn't a problem. (One exception, if we find water in polar regions of moon, we may decide to mine it from there instead of from a comet, and then we WILL probably need some skill at searching out the heaviest deposits of water and selectively mining them.) Re smelting container: How about pile up a bunch of loose debris (mostly dust with some gravel to give it strength) and form it into a sort of volcano shape, that is it comes up on all sides but has a big cavity in the top that reaches nearly back down to ground level. Then melt stuff into the cavity. After it has cooled, lift the cooled melt (which is solid) out of the cavity (which is loose debris), and add a little debris to replace the stuff that stuck to the melt, and melt some more stuff into the cavity, ...