Building a Moon Base: Part 4 – Infrastructure and Transportation

i think that it is the lack of gravity that allows the dust to stay suspended longer.
I agree that the base should be uilt underground, and i understant that it will be expensive, time consuming and power intensive. However, i think that we will minimize the dust problem by building underground. additionally, the layer of surface overhead would provide protection rom meteors and radiation without having to build much of anything. if we centralized the base around a vertical lava tube that could be domed over, we could drill into the sides to create ledges and tunnles for habitation and storage. even though i know we are trying to stay away from science fiction, it would be similar to the city of Zion in the movie The Matrix. subways i think would be a dust free form of transportation, or if that is too expensive, raised monorails would be cheaper and less power hungry than the magnet train and the lack of gravity would be a prolem for the suspension cable cars whereas the monorail is fixd to the track so friction wont be a problm either. we could take advantade of the lack of gravity with the landing craft. if we had ships with vertical take off it would be pretty easy to land the ship on a platform just inside the lava tube considering the tube is wide enough, which eliminated the landing strip and the dust contact. the ships probably would not be earth worthy, so a ferry system would have to be established where a ship brings people and cargo from earth to the lunar ships that take them to the moon. or istead of landing ships, cargo could pass through an air lock and lifted by the elevater concept. (personaly i think that the elevator on earth is too farfetched, but seems way more feasable on the moon). finally, solar farms are much more feasale on the moon since half is always in the sun and there is no atmosphere to dull the light. plus underground, we wont mess up the landscape…

Engineers only think “inside” the box. That’s the problem with engineers. Man’s accomplishments have been in spite of engineers, not because of them.

i did not say it would be cheap and i didnt say it would be easy. but you have to at least try to think of somthing that might work. at least i sugested that we use solar collection, which improves in effectiveness every so often. obviously you wouldn’t send manned rovers to search for an adequete site, you would have to set up a system of satelites with the technology to survey the landscape (no i dont know exactly what they are, so f*** off!) as well as under the surface. i am not entirely stupid either, obviously the wall strength will have to be tested before it can be used and yes i know that will cost a TON of freaking money and time and manpower. i said that the elevater had a signifigantly better chance on the moon, which might still be really small, because the lack of atmosphere and materials needed to build it. but i can only do so much without a degree. mabye you should try and push us in the right direction, tell us what might be feasable and what might not, eliminating completely rediculous ideas instaed of acting like a total bad ass with your credentials and degree making yourself look like a total jerk.

Oh, I don’t know, Mr Sniffles, how about every single thing created by humankind, including, but not limited to, the extraordinary Apollo program. No engineer was dragged kicking and screaming there. And it was engineers who were in upper management at NASA who advised Kennedy prior to his historic “We choose to go to the Moon” speach.

The parent-child relationship of Necessity and Invention is what drives innovation. But, that said, we can only invent and innovate from that which we understand. Sitting in a bedroom burning yourself out on video games and then “postulating” solutions to very difficult engineering problems based on your “understanding” of science as written in the pages of a sci-fi book or a TV program, well, I think my contempt for that approach should be plenty obvious.

These juvenile musings need to be replaced with a real-world understanding of structural mechanics and dynamic processes. At that point, these bedroom trekkers will begin to see the enormous challenges their cavalier assertions dismiss. But, as we all know, that will mean leaving the bedroom, the video games and all pre-conceived notions of science behind and do some very hard work learning how the real world works. I’m not holding my breath.

I recall a recent thread on a website based on an article about how the Mars rovers were losing power because of dust build-up on their solar panels. It was infuriating to read the responses and sense the “outrage” that these simpletons were spewing because NASA didn’t think to put — are you ready for this — a feather duster on a mechanical arm to wipe off the dust. How demeaning of that superb engineering achievement, those outstanding little rovers. One cogent reply attempted to outline the parameters of the mission and the limited weight they could carry to Mars and he was blown off as some kind of idiot.

Conceptual engineering, particularly the kind we off-handedly call “rocket science”, is the absolute pinnacle of human intellectual achievement in the engineering disciplines, only surpassed by the engineers trying to contain the forces of the sun in their fusion reactors. And I don’t wish to slight any of the other engineering disciplines but I think, to a person, they would agree with this evaluation.

To blather inanely about fantasy technology as though it will just happen overnight while we’re asleep is, most assuredly, an insult to the profound achievements that these extraordinary people have and are providing. People talk of stellar warp drives as if they are in the labs and just a few years away. Wishful thinking ain’t gonna do it. It takes logical, rational minds to probe nature for it’s secrets. And then, understanding that, we can proceed to real world application. To just blithely dismiss the organization, cooperation and creative efforts of the real heroes of our vaunted technological society as “just” engineers who have to be “prodded to do their job”, well, go to a desert island, Mr Sniffles, and start putting the society of your choice together. I suspect you’ll be a while. I further suspect you won’t exceed the meager managements of Robinson Crusoe.

I will continue to take up the cudgel in the engineers’ defense against this blithering mob of dimwits.

Get back to school and learn something worthwhile, you twits.

“I will continue to take up the cudgel in the engineers’ defense against this blithering mob of dimwits.”

~Frank~
Ironic that you’d choose something as crude as a cudgel to defend Engineers, I would think perhaps, a slide rule to be more applicable, but I doubt Engineers need your defense, most have pocket protectors. Tell me what use Knowledge is without the Imagination to apply it creatively? Look around you right now and tell me what it is that you see that wasn’t at some point first Imagined and *then* Developed? Do not dismiss the criticality of having insight that is not bound by a contemporary understanding of our world. It is an ability to think rather than to simply know that propels our species forward.

My musings were, as were those of so many others, suggestions in the hope that someone might find inspiration. Creative Spark is one of the myriad hallmarks of our species. You have chosen to assume our thoughts were posed as an affront to Engineers, I know this is not true, because I was not affronted. The singularity within our race that truly sets us apart is our ability to imagine. What is interesting is that thus far your Imagination has yeilded unto you only the apparent misconception that everyone perusing and replying to this thread is a juvenile that fixates on video games, this at least is the perception of “us” you have Imagined for yourself.

It’s intriguing that you seem to think all of the ideas posed were derived from Science Fiction. I have more computing power in my Cellphone that what is present on the Voyager Space Probes and those were Engineered and Launched only thirty years ago. What is Scientific Reality today is quickly being overwhelmed by a fast approaching tomorrow. You come across as stodgy and contemptuous, don’t assume you have a monopoly on knowledge.

You earlier asked a great series of questions regarding the myriad hurdles that must be overcome to see any of these suggestions rise to fruition. In response to those questions I am compelled to say, “You’re an Engineer, figure it out”. I am not disparaging the achievements engineers have made, but you seem to believe that Engineers are the sole impetus for development. The advances we have seen and will continue to see are to be celebrated by Everyone. The Saying was “One Small Step for Man…” Not, “One Small Step for Engineers….”

You have repeatedly called *Us* “Children”, “Kiddies”, “Twits” and “Juveniles”, I can scarcely begin to explain to you how cantankerous this makes you sound. I am almost surprised you have managed to glom onto this newfangled technology we young hooligans like to Call the “Personal Computer” and it’s child “The Internet”. Your mind shows commendable elasticity for a geezer. You use statistics the way a drunken man uses a light pole, for support rather than illumination, but I digress.

In closing, I will share with you a rather well known quote from a man admired by Dreamers and Engineers alike,

“Imagination is to Knowledge what three is to one.”

~Albert Einstein~

Hey! All of you guys. Stop and think. Man most likely will never establish a permanent self-sustaining base on the moon. There is no sensible return on investment. Not even for military advantage. Scientific curosity isn’t enough to justify the mind-bending expense and technological challenges involved. Who, in any government is going to lay his or her credibility on line proposing something as useless to the common man as a moon base? So, all you dreamers keep on dreaming, it’s good mental excercise. If you make it to Washington, save face, stay reposed.

From Andrew:

subways i think would be a dust free form of transportation, or if that is too expensive, raised monorails would be cheaper and less power hungry than the magnet train and the lack of gravity would be a prolem for the suspension cable cars whereas the monorail is fixd to the track so friction wont be a problm either.

That’s actually a great idea Andrew! I was thinking about something similar. Why deal with the dust problem when it may be easier to simply create pressurized, underground subways instead?

Oh yeah, don’t mind the angry people. They are just here to remind us all on how superior they are than us.

just out of curiosity, how long would the lag be if there was a moon-to-satelite-to-satelite-to-earth internet connection?

Al Hall,

Your first point couldn’t be more wrong. Humanity did things because there was a need, not because some ancient forebear sat down one day and dreamed of something. No one dreamed up fire. An ancient hominid was near freezing to death or perhaps having his or her clan members dragged off by a predator in the middle of the night that focused his or her mind on a solution. Constant observation and the ability to draw relationships between disparate occurences led to the control of fire and changed our species as it conferred a survival advantage no other creature could comprehend, much less utilize.

Humanity from its outset was beset by the scourge of survival. Not a single mastadon walked into their camp and obligingly dropped dead so they could eat for the winter. All it took was a belly-wrenching hunger and a few near-death experiences and the mind of our ancestors was focused on the need to survive. From that need, not dreams, came the spears to bring down prey and, over time and continual observation, the spear throwers, that multiplied the distance and striking power of the spear, became another of the contrivances of our survival.

Natural selection weeded out the dimwitted as those with organized minds were able to develop successful tactics in the hunt. If your tribe had smart people who were more clever in the hunt than the tribe over the hill then you survived and the other guys didn’t. Life back then, as it has been observed, was nasty, brutish and short with not a dream among them.

But here we are, so they did something right. And that “right” thing was focusing all of their early brain power on the pressing and incontrovertible needs of survival. This is what spurred the innovation and the engineering, primitive as it was, and added, bit by bit, to the survival base of our species. This will to survive that is imbued in our DNA is the driving force of our innovative nature giving rise to such ancestors as the tool maker, homo habilus, the handy man. Not a dream coursed through his brain that woke him up at night with an idea he had no use for and wouldn’t contribute to his survival.

Dreams, my friend, confer nothing to the grand scheme of things. Cold, unforgiving experience is our guide. We ignore it at our very great peril. As I noted in a previous post, we, as a species, can’t know what we don’t experience. That said, even the “dreams” you hold in such high acclaim are rooted in reality we’ve experienced. Distort that reality with nonsense and we get the vapid traipse of the undisciplined mind as evidenced here in these posts.

When our species went from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one we were transformed again as a species. Never again would we be able to go back to our hunter-gatherer ways because agriculture conferred a survival advantage so great that it would be like giving up our ocean-going ships so we could return to swimming to cross the ocean. Agriculture was not dreamed up. It was the constant observation of the environment, the seasons and our unique ability to see cause and effect that brought crops to harvest and ensured our survival as a species.

And we don’t educate engineers to make our dreams come true. The marketplace dictates what an engineer will design and build, not your dreams. Some entrepreneur has an idea, perhaps based on a suggestion by someone, which he or she thinks will make them very rich, conferring a decided survival advantage to the entrepreneur and his or her children. At that point they hire an engineer to build their idea. Is that a dream? Nope. A need was identified and exploited for profit. At its root it’s the need to survive.

No matter what you think of space travel and the reasons we, as a species choose to take the enormous risk and expense involved, it’s ultimately about finding something that makes us fabulously rich or confers in some other way a profound advantage in survival. How many times has it been written that we must go into space to colonize another world for the eventual time when we finally wear this tired orb out and we can’t live here anymore. A bit farfetched at this point in time, but not wrong in its overall conclusion.

On your second point: Yes, it is wrong to express silly “dreams” when the original article tries to convey just how difficult colonizing the moon will be from the infrastructure and transportation angle. Read the article again. Florian Ruess, a contributor, was dismissive on this particular point “…And please forget about the much-cited lunar concrete! There are so many showstoppers for this imaginary material that I don’t even want to start mentioning them.” This man, without saying it, doesn’t want to be bothered with “dreams”. And “lunar concrete” is a far cry from the silly sci-fi Star Trek “dreams” put forth in the subsequent comments. I’m not the only one who thinks that these challenges require rational, logical minds to innovate for the needs of a real, practical moon base. Dreamers need not apply.

You’re right that it shouldn’t be ‘just for “Bachelor of Science degree” and above’. I’m a firm believer that sometimes the best solutions to some intractable problems come from those that aren’t inculcated with the “company philosophy”. But even an outsiders contribution, someone thinking outside the box, so to speak, still needs to be in the same room that the box is located in!

And concerning your “Oh, by the way…”, there isn’t a single thing on Star Trek that can be found in our technology today. No warp drives. No transporters. No replicators. No tricorders. No phasers. No photon torpedoes. This fantasy entertainment, and that’s all that it is, has done nothing for the advancement of society except entertain the rational among us and fill the foolish heads of the rest with nonsense and contempt for real science. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a template for our future or a standard by which to organize society. It is entertainment and nothing more.

Point 3: Video games and sci-fi as entertainment is fine. It’s the descent into an all-consuming abuse that’s the issue. I prefer chess as entertainment. But, be assured, that my wife would be making appointments with a therapist if I locked myself in the bedroom for hours on end playing chess on line. It’s the waste of time that I take issue with. And all indications are that there are way too many people — young and old, sad to say — that fry their brains on this crap and then can’t navigate a logical thought process much less achieve anything of note in school or life. Then they show up in forums such as this with their addlepated notions of science and engineering taking great umbrage at any criticism of their silliness.

Point 4: Lighten up? Sorry, their prating foolishness needs to be called to task. Again, I point to the serious nature of the original article above and the need for rational thought and not the fatuous yammering put forth here.

Which brings me to my original point that the puerile posts on this thread are insulting to the real engineers who labor to bring a real and functioning moon base to the benefit of all humanity. As I’ve said before, without a strong foundation in math and science, nobody goes anywhere in this world.

Are these posters stupid? No, I’ve seen no indication that they lack the ability to understand the difficult lessons of science or math. It’s obvoius, though, that no one has called them on their nonsense or held their feet to the fire to understand the real world as it really is. That is the underpinning of my trenchant criticism.

Oh, and a final note, I don’t need to find myself a girl or get rid of the one I have. My beautiful wife loves me just as I am and for all the “geezer” that I am.

Respectfully,

Frank

haha. dont we essentially have “photon torpedoes”? the best example i can think of besides fireworks are flares and flashbangs. they dont destroy anything and wern’t inspired by star trek, but i thought the connection was amusing. : )