Return to the Moon 197
apsmith writes "No matter what the subject, one has to admire a book written by an astronaut and former US senator, illustrated with photos of the author at work on the Moon. When the subject is one as potentially important to the future of our civilization as the energy resources geologist Harrison ("Jack") Schmitt sees buried in the lunar surface, along with our future in space, it becomes all the more daunting to take issue with it. Unfortunately Schmitt's potentially inspiring commercial justification in Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space rests on a shaky foundation." Read the rest of Arthur's review.
| Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space | |
| author | Harrison Schmitt |
| pages | 336 |
| publisher | Praxis Publishing Ltd. and Copernicus Books |
| rating | 7 |
| reviewer | Arthur Smith |
| ISBN | 0387242856 |
| summary | Harvesting Helium-3 from the Moon |
With NASA now planning a lunar return and several other countries planning missions, the time is certainly ripe for a book titled Return to the Moon. In fact, last November also saw the release of Rick Tumlinson's collection of essays from experts on the subject with the same title, and the Space Frontier Foundation has been running regular Return to the Moon conferences.
Schmitt's book acknowledges that context but sets out in his own direction arguing that the Moon will provide a critical contribution to our civilization's energy needs, and the lunar return discussed is primarily one of industry and commerce, rather than grand national programs. The argument for industrial use of our celestial neighbor hinges on the utility of helium-3 fusion. However, that technology and the science behind it is dealt with in a perfunctory 4 pages in this book; Schmitt leaves the main argument to scientific papers from the University of Wisconsin Fusion technology Institute that has been promoting it.
Helium-3 fusion, while having the advantage of lower radiation levels, is considerably harder than deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion: the extra proton in helium means the ideal fusion temperature for He3-D mixtures is over four times as large. An alternative hydrogen-boron reaction would require almost 10 times the D-T temperature. That makes the traditional approaches to fusion reactors, creating very hot and dense plasmas, essentially impractical for He3 fusion. Non-traditional electrostatic confinement ( "Farnsworth fusor") technology gets around the high temperature problem by essentially shooting the nuclei directly at one another in a steady-state fashion. In principle any kind of fusion is possible with such a design. However, in practice the maximum power output obtained so far is 1 Watt - you would need a hundred of them just to power a light bulb!
So that leaves a huge and unknown technology gap in scaling things a factor of 1 billion or so to power plant size. Schmitt lightly skips over this problem with the note that "much engineering research lies ahead" and then bases an economic analysis on the assumption that such a plant would have to compete with fossil-fuel plants; we know roughly the numbers there. This does provide real constraints on the costs of retrieval of He3 from the Moon, so it's a useful analysis. But there's still the fundamental question of whether He3 fusion could ever be economically practical.
Schmitt doesn't let those questions slow him down; cost estimates for the "much engineering research" piece are folded into capital cost estimates for building up to 15 fusion plants, building and launching (and staffing) 15 lunar mining settlements, and operational costs for the whole system to reach the conclusion that it could, after the 15th set of facilities was completed, be close to competitive with electric energy from coal. That's not a bad accomplishment, but it rests on a lot of assumptions of unstated but likely very high uncertainty.
Ironically, the best reason for replacing coal, the threat of global warming from atmospheric CO2 release, is given short shrift as an "international political issue" in Schmitt's introductory chapter on our energy future. In this and in a bias toward non-governmental solutions, Schmitt's text unfortunately betrays the caution of an incompletely recovered politician.
Organizational approaches are covered in detail in chapter 8, where Schmitt compares models ranging from all-government to various public/private partnerships, to an all-private approach, analyzing each model according to over two dozen financial, managerial, and external criteria. After giving each a 1 to 10 rating, he multiplies by another subjective weighting factor and adds them all up. Somehow, the all-private model wins every time. The text surrounding these numbers suggests that, despite what the numbers say, several of the public-private partnership approaches make a great deal of sense. This ranges from the Intelsat multilateral model to simply encouraging government funding of the necessary research, development, and testing, and passing technology on to private industry to earn a profit.
Schmitt's discussion of lessons from Apollo is almost reverential, including a proposal for a "Saturn VI" heavy-lift rocket, to lower launch costs. It seems unlikely that the Apollo conditions can be duplicated, but he does have an interesting argument in favor of in-house engineering talent and having a large pool of young engineers. This and the letters of chapter 10 are perhaps too bluntly put to have an impact on NASA directly, but could certainly help inspire organizational virtues in a private venture, so NASA's more recent mistakes aren't repeated.
There is much that is good here. The book covers some ideas in detail, including the lunar geology issues for helium-3 recovery. Designs for mining equipment, the idea of finding markets first in space, and only later on Earth, and the proposal to make the miners permanent settlers, rather than just temporary visitors are all interesting concepts developed here. The author has included copious citations for more in-depth reading.
Much of the infrastructure Schmitt calls for could be applied to any other commercial utilization of the Moon, for example to help develop solar power satellites or lunar solar power facilities, to provide lunar oxygen (or hydrogen) for in-space use, for lunar tourism, and so forth. Schmitt believes the He3 approach provides easier access to capital markets due to lower start-up costs, so less government involvement may be needed than for those other commercial justifications for a lunar return. However, the status of He3 fusion itself seems sufficiently uncertain that relying on private equity to make it happen could still be a very slow process, at least once development reaches the point of billion-dollar space missions.
This vision for a new day in lunar exploration is very different from what we have been hearing from NASA, even in recent years when a human lunar return has been on the table. There is considerable evidence we have an urgent need for new energy sources. The possibility of exploitation of the Moon for human benefit has hardly crossed public consciousness yet, but it's something that we will increasingly be turning to as humanity reaches limits here on Earth. We should all be grateful Dr. Schmitt has helped here to get that ball rolling.
Arthur Smith is a part-time space advocate and volunteer with the National Space Society."
You can purchase Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
What about conventional fission reactors? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the energy crisis is so severe, why isn't America investing in things like pebble bed reactors? [wikipedia.org] With the Iraq war potentially costing $2 trillion dollars [guardian.co.uk], that's a lot of money that could be invested in alternative energy sources.
Think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Think about it (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the Earth will be here for a few billion years. That's a long time, you know. And, even if all of the nuclear weapons that ever existed were detonated right now, the Earth would still be a hell of a lot more habitable than the moon.
Re:The moon, tis a harsh mistress (Score:2, Insightful)
Because that's forced prison slave labor, and is the kind of human rights violation we rail against the Chinese for doing. Never mind other historical examples (including the US's). Though with an ethos accepting torture and imprisonment without fair trial becoming the norm, who knows? Maybe your dream will come true....
Well fuck-a-duck (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't believe it! That's my "three E's of space travel!" philosphy! The primary difference is "Economy, Energy, and Exploration" (in that order). Which is pretty much the same thing as "Enterprise".
The only thing I don't understand is: What's with this obsession with fusion? Screw fusion. It's perpetually 20 years away. When the eggheads get it working, then we'll worry about going to the moon. Let's think a little more realistically. For example, massive mylar mirrors could focus gigawatts of energy on a space-based, close-cycle Brayton generator. The power can then be beamed back to Earth OR to all the other ventures happening in the solar system. And cheap power in space can mean cheaper costs for manufacturing and propulsion. Cheaper manufacturing and propulsion in space means $$$ for returning valuable materials from Asteriods. Of course, just like with the power, you need an infrastructure to support all that and bring prices down further. So a booming economy appears overnight to support this stuff. Venture capitalist smell money. Before you know it, we won't even remember what it was like when we didn't have space travel.
Re:Think about it (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to the moon now would be like building a 100 story sky scrapper in 1880. We probably had the technology back then to brute force our way around the problem of supporting such a massive structure. We could have mustered the man power to build it. It just would have consumed a noticeable portion of the GDP for minimal benefit. We didn't build such a structure though; we waited 50 years and got the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building was cheaper, safer, and more effective at what it did then the solution we could have kludged together 50 years earlier. Going to the moon now instead of waiting 50 years is no different.
Re:What about conventional fission reactors? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ironic for you to say such, considering it was posted in a thread on going to the moon. The technology to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth existed only on paper when Kennedy committed the country to the goal of going there before 1/1/70.
Space travel isn't feasible (Score:5, Insightful)
After half a century of building big rockets, we now know that they don't work very well. Half a century ago, they were use-once-and-throw-away devices, and they still are. Payloads are still tiny compared to the launch weight, even for the Shuttle. Compare the figures for jet aircraft, which can be half payload.
Reliability is still lousy, too. This is because so much weight reduction is required just to get the things off the ground that they don't have adequate safety margins. About 10-20% of satellite launches still fail, almost half a century after the first one. That number isn't improving, either; in fact, it was a little better in the 1970s. There have only been a few hundred Shuttle flights, and it's crashed once. (Update since I wrote this in 2002: twice). Commercial aircraft flights, by comparison, fail a few times per year, out of millions of flights.
Half a century in aviation took us from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the B-52. Half a century in rocketry took us from the Atlas I to the Atlas V. There's been little progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s. All the major launch systems were created decades ago. So chemical fuels just don't have the power-to-weight ratio for useful space travel. People knew this in the Orion nuclear rocket days; it's a straightforward calculation. It's unfortunate that an Orion wasn't launched once or twice, just to demonstrate that nuclear propulsion is possible.
Re:Future of our civilization? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ecological system? On the moon? Dude, give me some of what you're smoking, I need it to get the moon [slashdot.org].
Oh, sure, the moon is 1/5th it's original size now in due to all the mining, but you can still find it with a telescope in the night sky.
1. The moon is approximately 7.475 x 10^22 kg [hypertextbook.com] in size, or approximately . We haven't even dug up the equivalent of 4/5ths of the moon in the entire time we've been on Earth!
2. The moon is mostly composed of oxidized Iron. a.k.a. Rust. It might make a great base for various space operations (e.g. manufacturing, staging, telescopes, power collections, etc.) as well as a proving ground for our upcoming launch technologies, but there are far better places in the Solar System to be mining. You know, like all those heavy metal rich asteriods that pass by Earth all the time.
Re:Future of our civilization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, no! You mean those evil miners might one day turn the moon into a ball of irradiated lifeless rock!?! The horror!
I'm sorry, but isn't it this "let's just mine the blasted thing!" line of thinking that's stifled the advancement of newer energy resources for so long?
When newer energy resources are developed, it will be done using materials that came out of mines. Scientific advancement is rarely hindered by too many mines; usually the limiting factor is too much ignorance.
Re:Space travel isn't feasible (Score:4, Insightful)
Pfff. Is that your only complaint. We've got propulsion methods pouring out of our wahzoo. Lemme see, we've got Orion, Nuclear Thermal Rockets, Ion Engines, Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters (MPDT), Mini-Magnetosphere Plasma Propulsion (M2P2), etc, etc, etc. And that's just the stuff we're sure will work. On the drawing boards we've Nuclear Salt Water Rockets, Daedalus Boosters, Antimatter propulsion, blah, blah, blah. The problem with all these methods isn't that they're inefficient, or that they won't get us where we're going. The problem is that ALL of them require you to obtain orbit first.
What we're missing is cheap launch solution. There are currently no engines in existence that can provide a launch for less than ~$50,000,000. (Keep an eye on the Falcon rockets, though.) If you're using a super-booster to launch metric craploads of material, throwing away the rocket isn't so bad. But just to transport a few people or light cargo to orbit, we STILL have to throw away the rocket OR use a rocket that's so overdesigned it costs more to maintain than a throw-away rocket. (aka The Space Shuttle. Marvel of engineering, marveled by shocked accounts.)
We need to go back to 1975 and pick up the pieces where we left off. Instead of a Space Shuttle capable of carrying cargo, we need a fully reusable SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) Space Shuttle that keeps costs down. Instead of a Space Shuttle that launches a mere 27ish tonnes of cargo, we need a super-booster that can carry upwards of 100 metric tonnes of cargo. Instead of a Space Station that's sitting in the wrong orbit to do anything useful, we need a Spaceship Garage in space capable of building, repairing, manufacturing, and staging inbound/outbound flights to the rest of the solar system.
The CEV project is on the right track, but we'll have to see if the higher ups eventually pull their heads out and start supporting missions and technology that will go somewhere rather than making some politco happy with his pork.
Re:Initiative (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Think about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology only progress's when there is a need for it to progress. If we sit and wait, the technology will not become more advanced, since there won't be a need for it to. If we do go back to the moon NOW, it will help progress technology to make travel to and from the moon cheaper in time.
I don't understand why people would think that technology will progress 'magically' by just sitting around waiting for it too.
Re:The moon, tis a harsh mistress (Score:4, Insightful)
Robots are like computers. They're very good at optimizing something that's been done a million times before, and can be done the same way a million times again. They suck when they have to adapt to changing situations. Even when a human is nudging their controls from a distance, their use is extremely limited. As long as we're shooting robots into space to do our exploration for us, we're wasting time and energy that could be saved if we could go there ourselves.
Which of the two is both the most ethical
There's no ethical quandry. A lot of people want to go, and damn the risks. Risk is part of being human. (Why do you think we have all these skydivers and bungie jumpers?) If you don't want to take the risk, then don't. But don't tell other people what to do with their lives. THAT is unethical.
Re:What about conventional fission reactors? (Score:3, Insightful)
In that context, going to the moon for He-3 is too realistic to get support in this administration!
Re:Well fuck-a-duck (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that there is no guarantee the larger bodies have the minerals in ores which ended up in places that are economical to extract.
In some sense, we're very lucky that the Earth is geologically active and interesting enough that heavy junk like gold and uranium ores and significant amounts of iron, etc., are actually near enough to the surface that we can mine them. It could very easily have turned out differently, and all the iron, uranium, etc., ended up in the core (where most of the Earth's iron is believed to be), leaving us on the surface pounding sand.
Jupiter is a freaking big planet, but if all the "good" stuff is way down in the core, well then, it doesn't help us very much.
Re:Well fuck-a-duck (Score:3, Insightful)
And how, precisely, are you going to do that? And please don't give me that laser shit again, we don't have lasers powerful enough to beam back significant quantities of energy. Not to mention which there's no compelling reason to put solar collectors on the moon when we're not willing to invest in a deployment of them in the Arizona desert (for instance).
Re:Well fuck-a-duck (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother with lasers? High powered Masers are far easier to produce. Besides, you can use clusters of high-powered microwave transmitters. This leaves the option open of transmitted less power to more receivers. (A good thing.)
Not to mention which there's no compelling reason to put solar collectors on the moon when we're not willing to invest in a deployment of them in the Arizona desert (for instance).
Actually, I was talking about in orbit. And it doesn't cost that much. Here's an experiment for you:
1. Go to the store and purchase a large, deflated mylar balloon. Note the cost when you purchase it.
2. Go to a hardware store and find a mirror of the same size. How does it's cost compare to the mylar balloon?
The far greater cost of the mirror is why Earth based solar power stations dont make much sense. In space, you can float a "soft" mirrored material that would fail miserably here on Earth, and even expect that the solar winds will help keep it spread out. Also, you'll receive a lot more Solar power outside of the Earth's atmosphere.
Re:Well fuck-a-duck (Score:3, Insightful)
What's your point? As long as millions of metric tonnes of it isn't dumped on the market at once, it will still fetch a good price. In fact, we have a bit of a problem on our hands. Apparently all the major gold mines have already been tapped out. Miners now need to process up to a tonne of ore to produce a single ounce of gold. Considering its uses in electronics and industry (not just jewelry), that's not a good thing.
Putting that aside, there are a lot more metals and precious materials than gold:
In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust.
So the idea is not so much to gather gold, but gather gold and other materials. Many of those materials would actually be more valuable if they were kept in space, and then bought and sold in a space economy.
Also, "experts"? That's a puff piece written by a journalist, and even with the overwhelmingly positive tone he can't help but point out major problems with the idea.
The author of the article isn't the "expert" genius, it's the scientists who run the NEAR project and specialize in the composition of asteroids.
he doesn't even take account of the cost of transportation, let alone finding some method of mining without oxygen and in minimal gravity.
He doesn't, because that's not his department. That's for the engineers and space mining firms to figure out. Will they figure it out? I have no doubt about it. Dropping cargo containers into the ocean is not that expensive of a proposition. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out economically, but it is doable.
This is literally pie in the sky fantasy.
Mmm. That's the argument back and forth, isn't it? Well, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Either we're just fanticizing and none of this will EVER happen, or we're well in touch with reality and will proven correct in the years to come. In the meantime, it never hurts to debate the crap out of it. The best way to get something done is to tell people that they can't do it.
Re:Make sure religeon is banned on the new planet (Score:3, Insightful)