[ExI] What happens to US space programs after November?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:24 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:26 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> >> I am not so sure that it makes any sense for humans to live on the
> >> moon even if there is something economic to do there.  I.e., what can
> >> people do that robots/teleoperation can't?
>
> > Fix stuff when the robots break in unexpected ways, which is either very
> difficult/expensive or impossible to fix with the robots themselves.
>
> > In theory this never happens.  In practice this almost always happens
> with
> new tech of this nature.
>
> The time to get a new robot to the moon is around two weeks.
>

Not including time to diagnose the fault, build a robot from scratch to fix
the fault (which starts after the diagnosis, which starts after the fault),
and this approach would seem to be launching several tons of robot instead
of much less food & resupply.


> Is it worth the many billion it would cost to keep humans on the moon?
>

Would it in fact cost many billions?  Granted, ISS maintenance is over $1B
- it's about $3-4B - but that includes expansion, experiments, and all
other costs as well as keeping the humans alive.  I'm having trouble
finding hard data on how that breaks down, but it looks like a distinct
minority actually goes into life support, and the bulk of it is just NASA's
bureaucratic overhead, not actually producing anything (except jobs to
support federal funding).


> How do you propose to protect them from radiation?


The best answer I have yet seen on this is to set up the colony in a lava
tube, which has enough overhead mass to reduce radiation to or below
average-Earth-surface level.  There are other methods too, but this is a
simple, robust, and low cost solution.  Perhaps put entrance shafts to one
side of the lava tube, rather than on top, so you don't have a "radiation
sunlight" part of the tube that people should stay out of.


> I am highly
> biassed in the direction of people in space, on the moon, and on Mars.
> But I can't make an economic case for them.
>

 Good on you for even thinking of the economics.  That's the most critical
part that most who propose this ignore.

I haven't completely solved it either, but the more I analyze it, the more
it seems the case will have to be made by what the colony can return to
Earth, rather than the usual orbital/interplanetary servicing options that
keep coming up.  This is for two reasons:
1) Today, there is either literally no or a very tiny (depending on what
you count) off-Earth market.  Either way, insufficient funds can be
extracted to support the colony until an off-Earth market builds up.
2) Even once an off-Earth market does build up, for a long time it will be
dwarfed by the size of the on-Earth market.  Even a tiny sliver of the
on-Earth market will provide way more support than the entire off-Earth
market can provide, likely for decades after the colony's founding.
(Decades after founding, the colony will presumably be much more
self-sufficient than right after it is founded.)

So, what can a lunar colony provide for Earth?  (I haven't thought through
what a Martian colony might provide, as a lunar colony is likely to happen
first: even assuming completely independent lunar and Martian colonization
efforts, the lunar one needs less resources and thus is likely to establish
a colony before the Martian effort does.)  The main things I am currently
aware of are:

1) Power, from solar panels manufactured on the Moon and relayed (probably
via one or more intermediary satellites) to rectennas on Earth's surface.
You have made extensive studies of Earth-launched solar power satellites; I
would be curious to see your take on this alternative.  Assume that any
intermediate satellites are built on and launched from the Moon as well;
they're simple enough that it seems less cost to set up the manufacturing
facilities on the Moon than to launch from Earth.

2) Constructing & launching Earth-orbiting satellites.  Aside from simple
cases, like the above, I don't think this is really a viable market, as
most satellites need complex enough electronics manufacturing that setting
up the facilities on the Moon outweighs the launch cost savings, at least
for a long while.

3) Mining Rare Earth elements for return to & sale on Earth.  Lunar
Prospector confirmed there is a concentration of KREEP (potassium, rare
earth elements, and phosphorus) in the Oceanus Procellarum and Mare
Imbrium.  While valuable minerals on the Moon tend to be spread across a
wider area than on Earth - if there are ore veins, we apparently haven't
found them yet (though close range survey of lava tubes is a promising
candidate if they are there) - they are already ground up, so we exchange
less grinding work for more collecting work.  This would benefit from a
local power source being set up first, such as item #1 on this list but not
entirely (if at all) devoted to returning energy to Earth.

In any of these cases, one starts with an all-teleoperated system.  It's
easier to absorb cost & schedule impacts when, say, you're just doing
initial prospecting instead of when you're in heavy production mode.  Cost
it out with reasonable assumptions; in theory, once the operation is set
up, cases 1 & 3 cost nothing or almost nothing per unit (megawatt or ton)
delivered to a customer's choice of locations on Earth, so to achieve
profitability, you have to deliver enough value (as measured by dollars) to
more than overcome the initial investment within a reasonable number of
years. (For instance, magnesium is about 10% of lunar regolith and
currently sells for about $6 per kg, so figure out how many kg of magnesium
an effort could deliver back to Earth within 10 or 20 years, and compare
that to the cost of setup.  The priciest of rare earth elements sell for
much more than that, and so may be more viable to base an effort around,
but are also not present just anywhere on the Moon.  Even more viable, but
harder to model, might be multi-element mining: return magnesium and rare
earth elements and aluminum and other things without much additional
effort.)

Then, once one has that going, if history is a guide the added value of
humans will become apparent - as mentioned previously, from things that in
theory should not matter but in practice often do.  Often these are hard to
directly measure financially (without analysis efforts that themselves can
cost billions of dollars; see examples from NASA); the trick is to have
enough profit to pay for setting up and maintaining life support before you
get to this point, to help overcome the alternative proposal of simply
abandoning the effort.
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