[ExI] Moon Bases Not Needed

[Samantha Atkins]

On Jul 30, 2011, at 9:28 AM, john clark wrote:

> Dan wrote:
> 
>  "one might like to have a safe haven in case whatever comes next is not anything like what folks here are planning or hoping for. For instance, imagine one of the horror scenarios plays out -- nanotech gone wild or Skynet or whatever "
> Yes but that's not what people mean when they say they want to go to Mars, they're talking about spending a hundred trillion dollars or so to get half a dozen people to Mars, have them fuck around Mars for a couple of months, and then spend another hundred trillion dollars to reverse that herculean task and bring them all back to Earth. The result would be similar to what happened with the Apollo moon program and we'd have the world's most expensive reality show. People would love the first episode but just like with Apollo they'd feel like they were watching a repeat and be bored stiff at the second and all future landings unless something went very badly wrong as in Apollo 13. We'll know its time to send people to Mars when we're prepared to do so with a one way ticket; and that won't happen until the technology allows us to establish a permanent and completely self  contained colony. We're not there yet. 
> 
> 
> 
> Kevin G Haskell <kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com> wrote
> "it would really only make sense if we needed to locate the same materials somewhere up there that are mostly located in China as "rare-earth" materials. "
> There is no reason to think that the Moon or Mars contains more rare-earths than the Earth, and the rare-earths are not really rare, most are more common than Copper or Lead and even the rarest is more common than Silver. The trouble is that all 17 rare-earths are in the same ore and the chemical properties of all 17 are very similar so its very difficult and expensive to separate them out; and the oar often has radioactive Thorium and Uranium in it which can make for an environmental mess it you're not careful. Also, although Gold is much rarer than any rare-earth in the Earth's crust, there are places where Gold is much more concentrated than average, rare-earth oar is not as well concentrated.  
> 
>  John K Clark
> _______________________________________________


The above is over the mark of even the most pork laden ways to go to Mars but I understand you exaggerate to make the point.  It is not at all the plan of folks like Zubrin who wish to set up a continuing and growing presence there.    His models are much much more modest and AFAIK doable in a bit healthier economic climates than this one.  In particular the plan includes cracking enough rocket fuel out of Martian resources to fuel a return trip to earth.  

I agree of course that we need to build space infrastructure out in GEO to support more real missions on a more sustainable basis.  To do that you need in situ resources without hauling them up gravity well and better autonomous and tele-operated robotics.  To get the resources you need no spend quite some years with gravity tugs moving NEA asteroids into some closer at hand heap or you need to wait until you have the autonomous bots to mine them in place.  Some of this can be replaced by moon resources.  To get that you need a a small nuclear plant or two on the moon and enough robotics to mine and built out infrastructure there to get what can be mined on the moon to GEO.  However, the moon is missing a lot apparently or at least in as minable concentrations as many asteroids possess.  Of course those asteroids periodically impact the moon but it is a bit of a job finding and mining them there. 

Some of these asteroids to have higher concentrations of some materials than any minable known surface deposits on earth.   Some of our best earth deposits of some metals (for instance nickel) are in fact old meteor impact sites.  Some of the rest are from fumaroles. 

- samantha

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