New race to the moon

petra10

Graduate Poster
petra10
Joined
May 7, 2007
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Ah-ha now i know why everyone is trying to reach the moon.after 30 odd years since humans last visited it America says it will be back there in 2017(things were so much easier in the old days) China,europe and russia all trying to get there too,why, seems the moon is full of helium-3.This they say will stop us using fossil fuel and this is the new energy sorce.Anyone know anything about this
 
Yes, I have a PhD in psychopharmacoastrophysics. Of course the moon is full of helium. That's how it stays up in the sky, and it's why the Apollo astronauts' voices were so high-pitched.

(psst: that was supposed to be one every four hours, not four every one hour.)

But seriously, here's a brief article about helium-3 on the moon. Excerpt:

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Even though helium-3 is more abundant on the Moon than on the Earth, it is still very rare amounting to only 4 or 5 parts per billion in the lunar soil.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]To extract one tonne of helium-3, it is estimated that 200 million tonnes of lunar soil would have to be processed. That is equivalent to mining the top 2 metres of a region 10 kms square.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Some scientists believe that in the future it could be worth it. It would only require 25 tonnes of helium-3 to provide all the power that the United States needs in a year.[/FONT]
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I have recommended that this thread be moved to the science subforum.
 
The USA wants to get back before anyone else so they can plant fake hardware (LEM descent stages, rovers, etc) to continue the Apollo Hoax.
 
The trouble with the old "Moon full of fusion fuel" argument is that there is far more on Earth. It's called water.

I believe there is already a thread in the science subforum about this,.
 
It'll fizzle out. Just think of all the bold, Kennedy-type deadlines Reagan used to set in his addresses to Congress: Star Wars is one that springs to mind.

The U.S. has forgotten how to get to the moon, after stooging around in LEO for thirty years. Many of the vehicle drawings have been scrapped. The old-school astronauts and flight controllers have retired. The Soviet Union has disappeared, so there's no credible competition, and it was competition that drove the space race. America won - end of story.

Now that Bush has accepted the IPCC position on global warming (or has said he has to appease the Democrats), he'd be seen as a hypocrite to pollute the planet with huge rockets for the promise of jam tomorrow.

As a child, I avidly absorbed everything I could about the Apollo missions. To this day, I know a huge number of Apollo acronyms, the vehicle callsigns and crew assignments for every Apollo mission, the landing sites, and so on. I loved "Apollo 13" and "From the Earth to the Moon" because of their commendable attention to accuracy. Nobody would be more glued to his TV set than me at the next moon landing.

I just don't think it'll happen. There will be other things to spend the money on, and they'll get priority, just as they started to when Apollos 18-21 were cancelled. Manned spaceflight has been confined to Low Earth Orbit ever since. I don't think America has the burning hots to get to the moon that it did in the sixties, and I think you need that drive and enthusiasm to get through what would be a hugely demanding and difficult project

I have some old space books confidently predicting the first moon bases in the early to mid '70s. They were scheduled, but it never happened.
 
Interestingly, I was at the presentation of a military historian's scholarly study of why they never happened.

Apparently the Army & Air Force were pushing for them as a follow-on for Apollo (before Apollo had even gone anywhere - mid-60s) and wanted them armed for a retaliatory strike; since they couldn't be taken out without warning, they would have plenty of time to launch in the event of a nuclear war. Cold War MAD at its finest. They wanted to sell this approach to put the Navy's ballistic missile program out of business.

When the top level of the DoD stomped on that nonsense, the plans were already drawn up - but NASA couldn't really do anything with them, and Apollo was killed altogether anyway because it turned from building a deterrent into a showboat. SSBNs remained the deterrent weapon of choice and we avoided nuclear weapons in space - at the cost of not having moon bases.
 
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Big Al said:
I just don't think it'll happen. There will be other things to spend the money on, and they'll get priority...I don't think America has the burning hots to get to the moon that it did in the sixties, and I think you need that drive and enthusiasm to get through what would be a hugely demanding and difficult project
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I don't think America will necessarily be the next ones there, but I do think China has a creditable chance. They have stated it as an aim, they've probably got the resources to do it, and they probably have the motivation - national pride - as well. This could in turn spur the US on to trying to do it as well - national pride might well see them unwilling to be seen to be taking a back seat.
 
I hope so, Richard. I'd love to see another space race. The SST is a complete dead end as far as I can see. I'd be fascinated to see how the Mk. II Lunar and Command Modules would stack up against their primitive stick-and-string forebears.

I do find it absolutely amazing that they managed to land on the moon in 1969, when most decent computers were the size of rooms. On the first Skylab mission in 1973, commander Pete Conrad had a pocket calculator that was more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer that had been such a marvel less than ten years before.

The whole thing was an inspiring affair for me, and I felt utter comradeship with Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Roosa, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan and Schmitt. The fact that they were American and I was English didn't matter a hoot to me. They were human and they "went in peace for all mankind".
 
i really think and hope someone will land on the moon 2020 at least.When i was a child i used to think we would have moonbases and regular trips to the moon by now.There is a geoligist who was actually on the moon,sorry cant remember his name,he is very keen about the helium-3 as a new energy source.
 
petra10 said:
i really think and hope someone will land on the moon 2020 at least.When i was a child i used to think we would have moonbases and regular trips to the moon by now.There is a geoligist who was actually on the moon,sorry cant remember his name,he is very keen about the helium-3 as a new energy source.
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Actually....

From the time we went Apollo, we began a process of learning about how and what we could do with space. How it could actually benefit us - how we could make money with it, defend ourselves, etc. The moon and the Apollo were one part of that process, and it is continuing. Manned spaceflight has not gone away but we understand far better what it is and is not efficient or cost effective to accomplish with it.

Mining of Helium 3 from the moon would quite likely be done with robots.
 
the moon is nice, but I think our primary goals should be solving biological mortality in our lifetimes, by SENS or whatever other approach works. Getting to the moon again could be part of an overall strategy of reducing existential risk and placing people where they could save those of us who get stranded on a dying Earth.
 
Dave1001 said:
the moon is nice, but I think our primary goals should be solving biological mortality in our lifetimes, by SENS or whatever other approach works. Getting to the moon again could be part of an overall strategy of reducing existential risk and placing people where they could save those of us who get stranded on a dying Earth.
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I've often argued that sending people into space should primarily (but not necessarily) be a one way trip. Basically, sooner or later, that's what it comes down to, if you want to colonize off the planet. So far no country has publicly voiced such an objective.
 
petra10 said:
i really think and hope someone will land on the moon 2020 at least.When i was a child i used to think we would have moonbases and regular trips to the moon by now.There is a geoligist who was actually on the moon,sorry cant remember his name,he is very keen about the helium-3 as a new energy source.
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I think a lot of people are missing the bigger prize in all of this. MARS!!! It is only logical that the next step in human exploration is Mars. I know you can say robotic missions can do the same amount of exploration; cheaper, faster, and for longer durations. But human exploration is more than just the science we get out of it. Its that fact that we humans, for the first time in civilization, could step foot on another planet. A feat that eventually will have to be done. The moon is our testing platform for the technologies that will eventually take us there, since the old Apollo tech is all but gone. Its just too bad they scrapped the Apollo missions. If they would have continued and set a 90's date for Mars, and decided not to build the shuttle, I think there could have been a chance we would already have stepped on Mars. So I don't look at going to the moon as a waste; its for something greater, and that is a possibility of getting to Mars. We are never going to send humans to Mars if we keep F-ing around in Low Earth Orbit and sending little robot golf carts to other planets.
 
Mars would be much, much, much harder to reach safely than the moon. For one thing, the chance of being caught in a big solar flare would be virtually 100% on an 18-month mission, as opposed to very small on the trips to the moon. Meteor ipacts would also be much more likely.
 
Big Al said:
Mars would be much, much, much harder to reach safely than the moon. For one thing, the chance of being caught in a big solar flare would be virtually 100% on an 18-month mission, as opposed to very small on the trips to the moon. Meteor ipacts would also be much more likely.
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If you want to be safe, you sure do not want to get on a space shuttle. Last time I looked at those odds, it was 1/54 of getting fried.
 
Big Al said:
Mars would be much, much, much harder to reach safely than the moon. For one thing, the chance of being caught in a big solar flare would be virtually 100% on an 18-month mission, as opposed to very small on the trips to the moon. Meteor ipacts would also be much more likely.
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Well they are going to have to build a space craft that can protect the crew...
 
Seriously, this is just a beat-China-there thing, nothing more.

Well that combined with hundreds of billions in glorious, vote-buying new spending, including the votes of nerds.
 
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