credit: ESA
Back in August (how time flies!) I began to set out Hyperbola's architecture for exploration and with the Obama NASA transition team now questioning the agency's officials I better get on with these postings before I'm over taken by events!
That post back in August said that my next splurge of ideas would be about the scientific objectives. Click through to the extended section of this blog post for more of my lunar architecture musings
Remember: Hyperbola is now on twitter and by following Hyperbola on twitter you can find out the latest stuff being worked on and who has been talking too whom, including Obama's NASA transition team
So what do you want to do on the Moon? Scientists will give you no end of stuff to study, as this NASA Lunar Science Institute webpage shows. Look at any submissions lists for missions with any space agency and as the European Space Agency's director general will tell you, there is no lack of proposals
My argument is that I am working backwards, unlike NASA and its Constellation programme that I have suggested started with a political-industrial approach to gain support for its transportation system
So what could you do?
- a telescope on the Moon's far side
- a network of seismology stations
- numerous drilling sites for core samples
- geophysical surveys to study past volcanic activity
You can imagine more but there is plenty of scope for sending sizeable hardware to do a job and to locate it across what some call the 8th continent
For now I am going to reject the telescope because its location and constituent parts (I imagine a telescope that uses a distributed system of sensors across a large area to create a capability orders of magnitude better than Hubble) requiring a significant investment over and above what could be spent considering the constraints I have imposed upon myself. They are, recalling the August posting,
- The plan has to use existing infrastructure
- The plan has to show demonstrable progress for political reasons in the near term
- The plan has to fit into expected future NASA budgets, which will increase at or below inflation
Tomorrow I will look at what these constraints mean for lunar activity that has to be both near and far from the main lunar outpost if any significant science is to be completed to advance our knowledge of Earth's satellite
And take a look back at Bush 41's Space Exploration Initiative and see what can be learnt from its all too brief existence
on December 2, 2008 12:56 AM | Reply
IR and optical telescopes would be fine on the near side given the Earth has a 2° angular diameter. Only a radio telescope would benefit from being on the far side and even then, I would think that being on the near side would be OK since local sources of radio noise (airplanes, satellites, cars, broadcast signals) would be absent or extremely attenuated at 400,000 km.
on December 2, 2008 1:38 PM | Reply
DO you really believe that a lunar base (particularly one that will be as expensive as NASA's planned architecture would render it) can be justified for science alone?
on December 2, 2008 1:40 PM | Reply
Well with a space station that by 2020 will have cost in development, assembly and operation far more than its previously estimated life cycle cost of $100 billion, why not?
on December 2, 2008 3:29 PM | Reply
There is indeed a wide range of important science that needs to be done with regard to the Moon. The issue is whether you need people there to do it or, more precisely, if having people there is a cost effective way to do it.
The LSI webpage you point to carefully avoids this question, and the NRC study largely stepped around it as well. The reason they did so is obvious. You don't need people there on-site to do the science that needs to be done, and that's not a politically correct view in NASA's perspective right now.
Sending people back to the Moon is fine but (especially for the Moon, which is close enough to lend itself well to telepresence and teleoperation) it's kind of a stretch to assert that the justification to do that is going to be scientific, unless you look at the problem through flesh-tinted glasses. There may be other good reasons to send people back to the Moon, and we'll look forward to hearing about them as we design an architecture to do it!
Most lunar science enthusiasts are in the "as long as we're going there, we should be sure to ..." mode. But you don't build an architecture on that basis.
Oh, and forget about nearside radio telescopes. Local sources of radio noise are indeed extremely attenuated at that distance, but not anywhere near enough for the kind of performance needed to achieve the very specific and exciting science that we believe can be achieved with the vastly lower radio noise on the far side. IR and optical telescopes would be far better off in free space as well.
on December 2, 2008 5:08 PM | Reply
Well with a space station that by 2020 will have cost in development, assembly and operation far more than its previously estimated life cycle cost of $100 billion, why not?
Because we've learned our lesson? In addition to which science was never the sole, or even primary justification for ISS?
on December 2, 2008 5:10 PM | Reply
How would you justify it then? Holiday resort for the mega rich untouched by the credit crunch?
on December 2, 2008 5:21 PM | Reply
I would justify it as a source of potential resources for use in opening up the rest of the solar system, including for the development of learning how to manage asteroids, and as a place to gain experience in space habitation in general, and ultimately space settlement.
But when it will cost a hundred times the annual NSF budget, it simply can't be justified on the basis of pure science. And trying to do so simply opens it up to very effective political attack from other (non-space) scientists.
on December 3, 2008 5:03 AM | Reply
The whole approach is backward. You're trying to justify a moon base with the science that could be done there, when we should be prioritizing scientific questions that need answered, and *if* we want to answer a question that requires a moon facility *then* make the plan for one. And one that fits the requirements.
the lunar observatory would be a prime example of something that would do real science and has a reason to be on the moon, and would require a limited manned presence, but you disregard it because of cost. That should be the whole point of the mission, but you want to throw it out so we can have a motel 6 on the moon to learn about "how human presence will impact the lunar environment" (from you linked page at NASA)? Makes no sense.