The Moon Keeps Getting Wetter
Ice Found in Shackleton Crater on the Moon, NASA
“NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has returned data that indicate ice may make up as much as 22 percent of the surface material in a crater located on the moon’s south pole.”
Researchers Find Evidence of Ice Content at the Moon’s South Pole, MIT
“If humans are ever to inhabit the Moon, the lunar poles may well be the location of choice: Because of the small tilt of the lunar spin axis, the poles contain regions of near-permanent sunlight, needed for power, and regions of near-permanent darkness containing ice — both of which would be essential resources for any lunar colony.”
More water’s being discovered on the moon. And it was believed to be a dead world, me thinks something is amiss here, Horatio.
Someone please fund Bill Stone.
http://www.stoneaerospace.c…
Water on the Moon really should be a game-changer.
If this doesn’t wet our appetite to set goals for long-term (permanent) bases on the Moon, we’ve lost our desire to explore. The nearest accessible neighbor outside our gravity well offers resources for sustainable human expansion in our Solar System.
Will this discovery spark NASA to establish human presence beyond LEO?
In the long-term, will commercial space have a market there?
It’s time see some vision (and action) to fulfill the dream started when we made footprints and wheel tracks on the Moon. Let’s go back to stay!
Can be a game changer. Or ender.
Used to drain the last dollars of a national space program on fantasy moon bases when really the funds are consumed on a enormous white elephant to enrich certain congressional districts w/o an achievable end-to-end plan.
Or to bootstrap a depot of resources 1/10th the cost (on orbit) as that from Earth, where the economics of solar system transportation allows industrial development and a true commercial model with positive cash flow and a recurrent reinvestment thesis to thrive.
You know, with these recent posts, you remove much of the necessity of me to comment……
Naah – was just doing the front work. You get to do the heavy lifting that follows 🙂
I’d just like us all to get to work, moving ahead. lot to do.
The key part is to be doing “big things” in “high places”, such that its easier, more frequent … to do even more of same.
This may be of interest to NASA Watch readers:
Sanin et al., “Testing lunar permanently shadowed regions for water ice: LEND results from LRO”, JGR Planets, VOL. 117,
E00H26,
13 PP., 2012; doi:10.1029/2011JE003971
The abstract can be seen here:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/cro…
The Moon’s low gravity well should make It cheaper to ship water to l1, L2, and LEO from the lunar surface than from the Earth’s surface for space station water and air resupply and for space tug and space depot refueling– especially if aerobraking is utilized for LEO missions. Plus such lunar tankers could be reusable vehicles which could further reduce cost.
Establishing a permanent human presence at the lunar poles for water mining, utilization, and export should be NASA’s top priority and the primary use for the SLS vehicle.
Marcel F. Williams
I agree with all of the above but that last part of that last sentence lol
Just can’t see building throwaway rockets and having NASA run them like the old days. Time to think differently. And much cheaper
George Worthington
Agreed George.
The most irritating thing about this, is that the US already has significant advantages that are being carefully ignored by Congress. That allow for a fantastic future.
But some people have to get their pork payoff the “old fashioned way”. Perhaps that’s all they want – the payoff. Not HSF.
Throw away rockets are expensive because we don’t throw away enough of them! And that’s the reason why rockets and rocket engines can’t take advantage of economies of serial mass production.
You should read, Lt Col John R. London III classic book, “LEO on the Cheap: Methods for achieving drastic reductions in space launch cost” on this matter. Its very informative.
Marcel F. Williams
Establishing a permanent human presence at the lunar poles for water
mining, utilization, and export should be NASA’s top priority and the
primary use for the SLS vehicle.
Will never happen and trying to do so will kill American space.
You couldn’t do worse damage than if you were trying to.
You didn’t like the ISS and its cost and international partners. This would be 10-100x more (Romney: “That’s an enormous expense”) with less return. Along that path, like Apollo, program would shutdown, and we’d not go back, like Apollo, but for even longer.
You bootstrap with robotic ISRU. This enables many, many forms of “sparse” exploration. The activity breeds less harebrained approaches to exploration. These then are the ones you might fund, full up.
Just using it as an excuse to build & fly huge pointless aluminium cylinders for made up jobs (heh heh) is disingenuous.
The SLS is only pointless if you really don’t want NASA to have a beyond LEO space program. But I really don’t buy into such anti-government extremism!
Plus China and Russia are also developing heavy lift vehicles. Even Elon Musk is developing a heavy lift vehicle:-) But if NASA does it, its somehow wrong:-(
NASA has been one of the most important pro-business government agencies ever invented. And the emerging private commercial space programs in America would be impossible if it weren’t for the Federal government’s 60 years of investment in space technology.
The ISS is expensive because everything: water, air, and food has to be shipped to the ISS from the Earth’s huge gravity well. Plus humans can only remain there for a few months.
On the Moon, however, water, air, and even food can be produced by simply using lunar resources (saving billions a year in cargo cost). And astronauts and scientist could possibly remain on the lunar surface for several years before having to return to the Earth instead of having to return to Earth in just a few months.
Lunar ice also has the potential to be a lucrative export to the rest of cis-lunar space for fuel depots and for mass shielding commercial space stations against galactic radiation and micrometeorites.
Marcel F. Williams
The SLS is only pointless if you really don’t want NASA to have a beyond LEO space program …
No – you’ve got it backwards. You have a beyond LEO space program … that outgrows launch capability … so demand generates need, not the other way around.
Backwards usually means socialism, so I’m guessing that’s not what you want to avoid “anti-government extremism”. Perhaps this is why people talk about “arsenal system” socialism?
Right now, if you needed to, you could get HSF to the moon, in a handful of years. You’d use existing launch vehicles to do so, first with the lander and next with EDS (or extended second stage – something desired for EELV/defense too). May I remind you that Russian Zond’s were lobbed by Proton’s decades ago. That was the beginning of their “plan B” after N1.
The main reason for 100T was the infantile technology of the times – you could only trust it for short periods of time, thus you’d do an “all up stack” each time. Which is why we gave up on Apollo post Shuttle (and Apollo Applications in general post SkyLab) – too dangerous. That hasn’t been true for decades since. Soyuz, and soon Dragon, will spend 6+ months in space. X-37B got back with over a year on orbit, with similar systems for HSF.
So if you want beyond LEO, then … build and unmanned test a lander launched via existing launchers, land it, take it off, refine, reissue. Then get crew to it via separate launch. Pretty simple plan.
I’m not antagonistic to HLV. I’m antagonistic to misuse of the resources, borne out of decades of the same misuse, by a half dozen different administrations from both sides of the aisle. And, they’ve compromised national capabilities in the process as well.
Plus China and Russia are also developing heavy lift vehicles.
Only to meet US threat. It’s another stupid arms race.
You want it so bad? Fund it FFP – fine by me. You’ll have exactly two bidders. None of them from SLS. But you’ll find they’ll suddenly focus on … getting landers etc first … like I’ve said. That’s why HLV is disingenuous – there’s no program for it to support.
… simply using lunar resources …
TRL says it isn’t simple. All that will happen it it will be jettisoned from a program due to program risk. Early on. In fact, from what I hear from NASA sources, its not anticipated to even be in the plan.
So your fantasy can’t happen. Thus, all those resources … come from the earth anyways … and you’re in a worse situation than with ISS budget wise. And all those international partners you love … are back to help fill the financial hole … while having the US foot the bill.
Screwed again.
“The SLS is only pointless if you really don’t want NASA to have a beyond LEO space program.”
Except SLS will prevent everything else you need for a BEO program. That’s why you need to force NASA to develop the other things by taking away every possible distraction. And SLS is a huge money-eating distraction.
After NASA has developed BEO architecture using existing launchers, then they can develop bigger launchers to increase what they can do with that architecture. But if you have then develop the launcher first, nothing else will get done.
(NASA’s kind of like a 2 year old. If they are given the choice of one candy now, or many candy later, they’ll always choose the one candy now. SLS is candy now. ISRU/etc is candy later.)
“The SLS is only pointless if you really don’t want NASA to have a beyond LEO space program.”
No, its the other way around. SLS will preclude NASA from ever having a beyond-LEO space program. NASA could do beyond-LEO NOW if it hadn’t been reduced to a jobs program decades ago.
“On the Moon, however, water, air, and even food can be produced by
simply using lunar resources (saving billions a year in cargo cost.”
I would object to your use of the word ‘simply’. To design, develop, qualify and transport the ISRU equipment to the moon would cost hundreds of billions; certainly more than 15-20 years worth of costs savings from transporting such materials to the moon or LEO. The economies of scale simply don’t work, unless people are capable of looking at the long term.
And that really is the problem. I’ve been listening to your anti-ISS and pro-moonbase writings for a long time, and you’re completely missing the point of the whole exercise. Any moonbase will only be of use to space infrastructure if it is designed from the start to have longevity – decades of work must be sustained without losing sight of the goal, and decades of occupation must be sustained without losing purpose.
And such a thing will simply not happen anytime in the future. Because there is no national will to do it. Simple as that.
Think about that for a moment, because I’m sure you’re already replying with impassioned pleas and long lists of economic advantages of your moonbase plan. There is no national will for space expansion and space exploration. Period. Truth is, no-one cares.
Criticize Obama, or Romney, or whoever is in charge at NASA all you like, but leaders are a reflection of the society that produces them.
The general public don’t care squat about the space program. Simply, they don’t. Sure, people will always say they want to keep NASA around, but that’s mainly because they’ve gotten used to it being there. Ask them to fund NASA above education, social programs, a strong military? Even cheaper gas and more reality TV? You already know the answer, you just don’t want to admit it to yourself. The only candidate in the current election cycle to mention a moonbase got himself laughed off the stage. Think about that for a moment.
The US will never return to the moon. Period. Not in my lifetime, certainly not before 2050. There is neither the political nor social will, or proof of economic benefits, that can be returned to investors within a reasonable time-frame, that will convince people otherwise.
Certainly, you will argue that such is the provision of government, to produce change that is not dependent on immediate profit. But the government, love it or hate it, is still an instrument of the people. The people don’t care about space. They don’t care about the moon. They don’t care about colonizing the solar system. They just don’t – and as soon as you realize that, all your arguments about your moonbase plan disappear in a puff of smoke. Because NASA will never do it, and NASA is the only instrument of the ‘people’ that you have left.
That’s why I’m excited about Elon Musk and SpaceX – he just wants to go, and doesn’t care about the 99.9% of the public who would just shake their heads and go back to watching Jersey Shore.
So, if you’re serious about going back to the moon, or god forbid to Mars, I suggest you stop supporting SLS and start supporting something that actually has a chance of succeeding. SLS is a political tool, nothing more. It will destroy NASA over the next 10 years and leave nothing in its wake. The time of government leading ‘exploration’ is over. Space is too expensive and too fringe to ever again capture the imagination of society at large.
So I’m hoping the crazies like Musk will succeed, rather than putting all my hopes in an approach that was tried 50 years ago, and with 15 times the funding, and still completely failed to produce what you’re hoping for. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Apollo put men on the moon, but failed utterly at the larger vision of Von Braun. SLS will do the same thing – but without the ‘men on the moon’ bit.
The idea that a simple outpost on the Moon would cost $300 billion a year is beyond ridiculous:-)
The Center for Strategic International Studies Estimated that the annual recurring cost for a lunar base would be less than $7.4 billion a year if all of the air, food, and water were imported from the Earth. Using lunar water resources, however, should shave a few billion off those annual cost.
Romney needs to take a science course:-)
Marcel F. Williams
The Center for Strategic International Studies Estimated
Utterly worthless study. Examine what they used as a cost basis – had nothing to do with SLS like technologies to support, nor a reasonable level of human support. Basically, it was an outpost with a handful of people occupying a rock and doing nothing so we could claim it. Like the Korean’s maintaining a couple on the Liancourt Rocks so they can claim them as “Dokdo”!
Using lunar water resources, however, should shave a few billion off those annual cost.
Documented by who?? How much cost to develop? How do we prove that it works for that cost? What do we do when (like the ISS toilets and ECLSS) things break down.
This is the hard stuff to do.
This is why we do precursor missions.
Now … lets say we do a robotic mission to Shackleton.
And lets say it accumulates in tanks LOX, CH4, … water. Nothing else. Just spends its time filling those tanks. Can do it over months/years.
Then, humans have a reason to visit. To check on the quality/usability of those resources. Upgrade the “industrial base”, improve the mining of the ice, tweak algorithms to get more. And they end up extending their stay beyond brought resources.
You can do all that, right now, for the money wasted in development of the likely unusable J-2X (see current SLS plans to why), over the time frame that it won’t be used. You can fly it right now, w/o waiting for SLS. This is a mission, a point, not a TBD! No fantasy. Hard reality.
What do you get? An exploration architecture that you can take in many, many directions. Very powerful.
Now you can get hard numbers on the cost, ROI, and value of derived effect.
It will employ the same people. But it will yield a future.
More simple common sense!!!!!
Thanks for the fresh air!
Just heard yesterday that the outer ring of Saturn looks like easy fuel pickens with a little planning and thought.
Call Elon and tell him to stop by the moon first with his BEO plans.
Then call congress and tell Them to use SLS and Orion money to give boeing a big fat juicy cost plus contract to develop x-37-E space liner maybe even tell boeing they can sell them after each NASA test Flight just like NASA is doing with dragon capsules.
Call Bigelow and tell him to start blowing up balloons as fast as he can.
Isn’t Boeing in the airliner/space-liner business? Doesn’t Spacex want to go to other worlds??? Isn’t dragon our first moon lander??
Wouldn’t something like this get us going fastest to space settlement????
The moon is right there for a little drink.
2025 news
On the virgins maiden space liner flight on their new Boeing built space plane they will carry only 15 tourist using the rest of the liners cabin for cargo. Which will be dropped off at the Bigelow expanded ISS in Leo before the tourist will fly on to the L1 Bigelow station to transfer to dragon landers and become the first paying customers at the Lunar water mining outpost.
Parallel Lines
No – it’s there for our robots to land, do ISRU, and provide/accumulate portable resources for solar system exploration / development / industry.
Using it as an excuse for uneconomic moon bases is both premature and disingenuous shilling for a moribund arsenal space, addicted to another form of crack known as “cost plus”.
add:
The point: the resources are there as a means to inspire us to outward action of transformation. Transformed (portable, automated, appliable, developed resources), three things happen:
a) exploration can proceed well supported
b) industry can reliably engauge in BEO “activities”
c) scaling production to demand with a working model evolves the model with human, on-site improvement – bootstrap
Because now you have the logistics in place, ahead of their use.
In a down economy everything is about them …
The problem is that whenever NASA had a sniff of a moon program, that’s all they focus on. They’ll talk about how it’s a stepping stone, but the actually programs they develop become increasingly dead-end. Anything that’s not purely related to the first flags’n’footprints landing gets cut away as the core program goes overbudget. None of the problems relating to permanent occupation, nor long-duration deep-space travel, nor ISRU, etc, get solved, because they are not essential to the first flight.
By getting NASA to focus on truly deep space missions, especially if you limit them to existing launchers, you force NASA to solve issues like long-duration deep space travel, modular development, orbital refuelling, etc.
This is not to say that a moon program couldn’t do all that, it’s just that, historically (1960s, 1980/90s, 2000s), it never does.
Snow White is sleeping peacefully on the moon. Let’s wake her up. Send in the Seven dwarfs. Flocks of robot Dragons are ready to fly. Time to quench our thirst for the future.
Seeker up first
Dragon tracks
… None of the problems relating to permanent occupation, nor long-duration deep-space travel, nor ISRU, etc, get solved, because they are not essential to the first flight.
Yes. The first things are move to the last, and then not done.
The way you change things, is to do the first things first.
Then, from that point, they are always “in plan”.
Precisely how to avoid the trap.
“The way you change things, is to do the first things first.
Then, from that point, they are always ‘in plan’.”“
Mr. C.,
Yes!, yes!, a thousand times yes! You do the right things, in the right order. You put them into the plan that way from day one, and any idiot who even suggests changing the plan gets shot, on site, immediately. This is precisely why you don’t give astronauts the job of Program Manager.
Steve
Steve
Grab the laser level and make sure I don’t any high spots on that dam footing. I don’t want to have to hear any crap from the mason when he shows up about having to cut any blocks. And grab a dam shovel and clear that wet concrete away from the sleeves we put in for the electrician, the plumber, and HVAC guy.
There, the footing looks great the site is clean. Tomorrow brickey will show up and this son of a b$&@h will just POP OUT of the ground!!!!!
You got your plans??
You got your schedule made?? Have you made your calls??
Do you have your job meetings planned??
Ok looks good!
let’s get started!
Inner Solar System Railroad
Steve you have this little in outline form yet Mr. Architect?
Amen brother.
A manned missions to an asteroid would be a wasteful flag planting stunt that would also be a lot more dangerous than simply traveling to one of the moons of Mars where astronauts, upon arrival, could almost immediately be accommodated by a properly shielded space station previously deployed into orbit around Mars.
Water, air, and fuel could also be provided from the moons of Mars using what NASA has learned by exploiting similar resources on the surface of the lunar poles.
A lunar base would also allow NASA an easy way to test various levels of mass shielding using frozen water or frozen mud to protect against galactic radiation, solar events, and micrometeorites. And such lunar resources could also be exported from the Moon to provide interplanetary vehicles leaving L1 or L2 with mass shielding, a lot more cheaply than exporting such resources from the huge gravity well of the Earth.
Marcel F. Williams
“A manned missions to an asteroid would be a wasteful flag planting stunt”
All HSF is wasteful flag-planting stunts. But by focusing on deep space, and stripping away all distractions, it forces NASA to solve the problems of deep space.
“simply traveling to one of the moons of Mars where astronauts, upon arrival, could almost immediately be accommodated by a properly shielded space station previously deployed into orbit around Mars.”
Except it’s not necessary for the stated mission of “Putting humans on Phobos”. Which means it would be cut.
“Water, air, and fuel could also be provided from the moons of Mars using what NASA has learned by exploiting similar resources on the surface of the lunar poles.”
Likewise, this will not be done. It just won’t be done. Plenty of people at NASA will want it done, but it won’t be done. It’ll be cancelled at an early stage as soon as the main program runs into its first funding crisis. Or not even funded in the first place.
Do you remember the speech by Bush when he announced VSE? The moon as a staging post for eventual Mars flights. Meaning: a base, ISRU & fuel processing, etc.
How much was left by the time Bush left office and Obama abandoned the moon as a goal? A 4-man capsule. A 4-man lander. And a launcher program that was slipping one year per year.
And the program would have been considered a “success” if it got humans to the moon and brought them back, once. No base, no ISRU, no Mars staging. Because once NASA was given the moon as a goal, that’s what the goal became “Put humans on the moon”, bit by bit everything else fell away.
And yes, that’s what an asteroid mission will become. “Put humans on an asteroid.” That’s the point. You strip away all distractions, no landers, no rovers, just the deep-space mission itself. Something that NASA has strenuously avoided solving.
And that’s why SLS needs to be killed ASAP. It has become “the mission”, not merely the mission-launcher. If NASA was forced to do an asteroid mission with existing launchers, it would, it must, explore more creative mission architectures.
Now there’s nothing about those creative architectures that is incompatible with a heavy-lifter. But they are incompatible with a heavy lift program. The goal will always be reduced to “build a heavy lift launcher”, and everything else will be seen as a threat to that.
1. You don’t need to travel to an asteroid to learn how to survive in deep space, you go to L1 or L2 for a year or more.
2. The long term goal is to send humans to the surface of Mars. The simplest and safest way to do that is to first establish a permanent human presence in Mars orbit.
3. The SLS will be able to send payload to the Lagrange points and lunar orbit a lot cheaper than the Delta IV heavy which cost almost as much to launch per flight as the space shuttle.
Having a heavy lift vehicle will be a game changer for beyond LEO missions and for deploying larger and cheaper space stations.
But the hostility towards the SLS really has nothing to do with the building of an HLV, its really just hostility towards NASA doing anything– accept giving private space companies free tax payer money and subsidizing them with an unnecessary $3 billion a year LEO on steroids program that Griffin, wisely for once, wanted to end by 2016. But Congress wants to keep this pork chop in space circling the Earth forever!
Marcel F. Williams
Hostility is PRICE!!!!!!!
Plus lack of performance!!!!!!
Simple
Billions for NOTHING!!!!!!
2. The long term goal is to send humans to the surface of Mars. The simplest and safest way to do that is to first establish a permanent human presence in Mars orbit.
Let me state this succinctly.
NO NO NO NO and NO.
The long term goal is the economic development of the solar system. This focus of landing people on Mars has been a distraction for over 30 years now. Without economic development as the goal Mars gives us more flags and footprints, dusty shelves of forgotten data (I know this as I am one of the people leading the fight to reassemble the apollo data before everyone dies).
Mars is simply NOT sustainable in any measurable way (did you see the last Griffin DRM where it was going to take 6 or SEVEN ARES VI launches plus an Ares 1 for ONE FRIGGING Mars mission?) without the utilization of the resources of the Moon, and now we have it in our means to create a manufacturing base of operations there to create the infrastructure that we need to open the solar system to all Mankind.
Mars is only one destination, a very good one, and where a new civilization will grow, but the path we have been trodding for over 30 years of demanding an HLV as the precursor, along with everyone being built here on the Earth and launched HAS TO BE DISCARDED.
Agreed. So lets not turn them into two-bit crackheads with an inane project. They need to do the harder work of the conquest of space.
Work that no Musk can do.
Something like NAUTILUS-X. Which, surprisingly, they are the experts on, have the skills for, can do economically / rapidly / on time / on budget.
It is deliberate misuse of them, that I’m concerned about.
Because we need them now more than ever. But not jerking around with a bunch of obsolete Shuttle parts, doing a poor von Braun imitation.
Giving time for others to scope out the game.
add:
If you read von Braun’s 1952 book “Conquest of Space”, you’d see what I’m getting at. I think he’d think very little of SLS, that they were thinking completely wrong. He’d want movable exploration platforms, and a means to make them go. Technology changes. But the thinking behind SLS is 1950’s.
And it shows.
The SLS program is estimated at $40-60B between now and 2025. In that same time we will spend over $4T on Welfare, $8T on Defense and more than $500B on foreign aid. Personally, I feel there is room for both commercial space entrants for ISS re-supply and other activities as well as NASA working on BEO exploration that is not the typical area that has any cost pay-back for a commercial venture.
Marcel, no.
Paul and Mr. C., yes.
Anybody who doesn’t understand why needs to do more research and read more history, and there’s no room to try to explain it here. Those who already understand it need no more than No and Yes.
Steve
The only thing that is underfunding NASA’s beyond LEO program is the $3 billion a year LEO on steroids ISS program. End that program and NASA suddenly has plenty of money for a lunar program!
Marcel F. Williams
Again, you live in the fantasy that getting rid of the ISS will bring more money for a moonbase program. One will not lead to the other.
You can wave your arms all you like, but NASA – regardless of how much money it gets from Congress – will NOT be going back to the moon.
Forget people for now. Yes I think we should have people in BEO and on the moon, but for now we should focus a robotic program on the moon. Use lots of robots, telepresence maybe, to explore, sample, build shelters, extract resources all kinds of things. Progressively add capabilities. Pave the way for humans but humans not required. This stuff wouldn’t happen fast but everything would build on itself. There is already a ton of work being done in universities on robotics, research in addition to all the robotics in various industries already including space as well. It’s a way different thing from what would be required with humans. Not only that but it would be an enormous benefit to robotics on earth with lots of tech transfer, kind of reminds me of NASA’s investment in early computer tech. It seems to me this is the only real way to expand our presence in the solar system.
The surveying is a good testbed for techniques in standardising lander and teleop-rover platforms, the ISRU testing and construction goals are good for COTS-style contracts.
You can justify the teleop-rover platforms to the Manned Mars Mission obsessives by saying you’re testing techniques that would be used by humans on Phobos/Deimos to control Mars Rovers, or on Mars to run remote ops. And you can justify it to the Luna Base obsessives as seeding the ground. And for the anti-Mars, anti-Lunar types, like myself, you can say that showing that direct tele-op robots on the moon proves that a direct human presence is unnecessary.