Is China Looking To Build A Gateway Too?
Looks like China has its own ideas of some sort of lunar Gateway for human missions to the Moon – or are they planning to use the one that @NASA wants to build? pic.twitter.com/8BB3P8K9si
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 18, 2018
EM L-1 and EM L-2 are the two keys to monitoring everything that is happening on the Moon and it appears China wants to stake their claim to both.
China already has a communication satellite on an Earth-Moon L2 halo orbit. It’s part of their Chang’e 4 mission (a far side, robotic lander and rover.)
Yes, I have following the mission. It will be interesting to see if they follow it up with a replacement.
The Chinese space program keeps their long term goals pretty close to their chests. But I get a strong impression that they do have long term goals and what they do is in support of those goals. I suspect they will continue operating their current L2 communications satellite for as long as it serves a purpose and replace it if and when that serves their future purposes.
I don’t mean to imply anything sinister about doing things to serve opaque purposes. I just mean they seem to have goals and are doing what it takes (and not more than it takes) to accomplish them. That includes infrastructure, and I’m afraid supporting infrastructure in a systematic way is something the US isn’t too good at.
Earth-Moon L2 halo orbits are extremely useful for operations on the far side.
About 20 years ago a proposal commercial venture I worked with was doing a business plan for putting a soecialize comsat in that location that could serve that function. It would have included a camera to provide live images of the far side and instrumentation to study how the Moon interacted with the Earth’s magnetic tail at that distance. But the launch costs and cost of building it were too high too close the business case for it.
The potential electrical charge the near side is exposed to during the full Moon from the Earth’s magnetic field is another reason I favor development of the far side of the Moon over the near side.
“do you foresee NASA doing on the far side”
Far side is a very good place to store nuclear waste because it will never face/affect earth.
I wasn’t aware that nuclear waste could pose a problem from 250,000 miles away. And anyway with just a little more velocity you could put it in solar orbit which would be easier than landing it on the Moon. We’d still know where it is and wouldn’t have to worry about polluting the Moon.
The folks who settle the Moon won’t see it as pollution, but as a gift with many uses, especially the production of energy. Remember, folks who are irrationally scared of a little radioactivity aren’t going to make it as space settlers.
Could be but the logistics seem a bit complicated. Moon reactors would presumably have fuel sent from Earth in some type of canister which is designed to be easy to insert or unload into the reactor. Obviously all of this done by robots. So assuming that the Moon reactors can use the waste fuel exactly as is without any processing, then on Earth they would simply place waste into the same type of canisters and send them to the Moon.
Most likely a lot more waste is produced on Earth than is needed on the Moon, at least initially, so if the intent is to send all waste to the Moon then I guess they stockpile it for the future. Although if reactor/canister designs change then only older reactors can use the stockpile, unless they have a way to transfer the fuel out of the old canisters into the new reactors, which would be very risky on Earth, but on the Moon I guess it’s okay.
Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic about how effectively astronauts and robots can deal with all of this on the Moon as compared to on Earth, I tend to view it as everything needs to be as simple and automated as possible by the time it arrives on the Moon.
I’m not entirely clear on what you (or anyone) means by nuclear waste. Before anyone was talking about producing power, the purpose of a nuclear reactor was to create synthetic radioactives. And, later, to produce power while making more radioactive material than the process consumed. You get more fuel from processing the spent fuel rods. So I’m not sure I’d call all of that “waste.” Admittedly there is some stuff you don’t want in there as well. But it’s not uncommon to hear people talk about all of it as waste.
I was referring to spent nuclear fuel from reactors which can potentially be reprocessed into fuel but which in the U.S. is instead planned for permanent underground disposal. Thomas Matula was suggesting that a lunar colony might be glad to take it, my point was that I think reprocessing nuclear fuel is too complex of an activity to do on the Moon (perhaps my overpessimism at work). My “canister” illustration was just meant to represent whatever method will be used to send nuclear fuel to resupply reactors on the Moon, and my point was that I could see sending reprocessed fuel to the Moon since it would be transported and used the same way. Then again as you pointed out, once it’s been reprocessed it’s not really waste anymore.
Back to the original question that I was replying to, I don’t see the far side as having any advantage over the near side for disposing of spent nuclear fuel or any other type of nuclear waste, or really any side of the Moon as far as that goes since I think solar orbit is the best “landfill” that we have in my opinion for anything hazardous, as long as the “trash barges” are big enough to track and don’t pose a risk of future planetary collision.
Ok. I was thinking that lunar bases would probably been nuclear power. If so, those bases would probably want the ability to reprocess spent fuel. That’s an obvious way of providing sustainable power and cheaper than importing radioactive. Given that capability, getting nuclear “waste” from Earth might easily be an advantage.
When it comes to radioactives you can’t use and really don’t want to be near, I agree with you. The far side of the Moon is no better than the near side. And dumping it into a solar orbit would be almost as easy and possibly a better was to dispose of it.
Unfortunately after half a century of nuclear power the US still lacks a waste reprocessing facility, so all the waste is still mixed together in an unusable mass and stored at a hundred or more operating and decommissioned reactors.
This has been discussed seriously for many years, but realistically the launch contingency risk is a bit high and the total mass is problematic. Burying it in the salt formation at Carlsbad NM is probably a more practical option.
The moon is already drenched in radioactivity of cosmic rays. Any radioactive waste we dump on it will not pollute/increase it. If we store it on the moon it will never fall on earth. if we put it on sun orbit, it may theoretically fall on earth in the distant future.
Yes it would be relatively safe to pick an area of the Moon to be the radiation dumping ground, but then that becomes a part of the Moon that can never be touched again. Maybe no huge loss considering we have the whole Moon, but it just seems unnecessary when it can be safely placed in solar orbit. Yes in theory if you project out enough thousands of years there becomes some uncertainty of striking the Earth, but if that’s a concern I think that can probably be increased to hundreds of thousands of years at a minimum if you are willing to spend more on fuel to circularize the orbit somewhere between Earth and Mars.
Even better, although requiring a huge amount of fuel is to send it into the Sun. But if that is not currently practical then I would say send it into an orbit that is safe for let’s say three thousand years, and assume that by then technology will be advanced enough for future generations to send out robot trash trucks out there to pick it up and fling it into the Sun as easily as we pick up trash on the side of the road. Yes that is putting the burden on our descendants but I would rather do that than leave future generations with a big radioactive dumping ground on the Moon to deal with. And if we want to get into hypotheticals an asteroid or comet could hit the dumping ground and fling radioactive material all over the Moon and into space.
Be a great place to static test nuclear-thermal rocket engines…where the “tree-huggers” can’t get all exercised about it!
If you are going to the trouble of stashing it there you might as well just dump it into the Sun.
I said useful for operations, not that I’d want to put a space station there. I was thinking of a communications relay, but now that you bring it up, there might be other uses. I’m not certain, but I think the lower-energy trajectories from the surface to orbit would favor near side to L1 rather than L2. But that’s a moot point, since the planned Gateway wouldn’t be in either L1 or L2. And I don’t have a clear picture of what the Chinese are thinking of.
Actually it makes perfect sense .. a halo orbit at EML2 allows com traffic to earth. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…