How long would it take to get to the moon in an "emergency"

[Darkrah]

So aliens land on the moon and set up mining operations. We aren't receiving any messages from them but they are obviously there and don't look to be going anywhere. The governments of the world decide to go there and find out what the hell is happening. What is the minimum amount of time that it would take for us to reach the moon if they landed there tomorrow? I know that the United State's space program is a mess but I don't know enough about anyone else.

[dragon]

Well the fastest craft is the the New Horizon at 100,000mph but that's after orbital assist and the moon is 238,900 miles. So initial velocity of 36000mph

Launched by NASA in 2006, it shot directly to a solar system escape velocity. This consisted of an Earth-relative launch of 16.26 kilometers a second (that’s about 36,000 miles per hour), plus a velocity component from Earth’s orbital motion (which is 30 km/s tangential to the orbital path). Altogether this set New Horizons barreling off into the solar system with an impressive heliocentric speed of almost 45 km/s or 100,000 miles per hour.

link


Now the fastest recorded fly by was 8hr, 35min by the New Horizions

Record breaking, fast-track to the Moon: 8 hours, 35 minutes
NASAs New Horizons mission (NASA)

By far the fastest mission to fly past the Moon was NASA’s New Horizons Pluto mission. This mission had a speedy launch, rockets powering the probe to over 58,000 km/hr to give it a good start on its long trip to the outer Solar System and Pluto. Although this is impressive, it’s worth keeping in mind that New Horizons was not slowing down to enter lunar orbit (like the Moon-specific missions above), it was probably still accelerating as the Moon was a dot in its rear view window. Still, it took eight hours and thirty-five minutes to cover the 380,000 km distance. Impressive.

link
However if you want to stop that's a whole different ballgame.

EDIT Also don't forget no one currently has a manned lunar craft to get there and the unammed craft that are out there aren't the kind needed.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

So aliens land on the moon and set up mining operations. We aren't receiving any messages from them but they are obviously there and don't look to be going anywhere. The governments of the world decide to go there and find out what the hell is happening. What is the minimum amount of time that it would take for us to reach the moon if they landed there tomorrow? I know that the United State's space program is a mess but I don't know enough about anyone else.

Did you forget that we have the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in orbit around the Moon right now? We could get high-resolution images, so long as the aliens landed somewhere within LRO's ability to change its orbit. Also, we could point preexisting spy satellites at the Moon. You'd get resolutions of about 600 feet/pixel (assuming a spy satellite possesses similar optics to the Hubble Space Telescope.) And there are Earthbound observatories, such as the half-finished Large Binocular Telescope that can achieve resolutions three times better than Hubble thanks to a technology known as adaptive optics.

That would have to do until you could re-purpose a commercial heavy launch vehicle to lob a camera, some batteries, and an antenna at the Moon. Of course, to get the best images, you'll want to aim the improvised vehicle directly at the lunar surface (i.e. directly at the alien mining site,) like the old Ranger probes from the early Sixties. Which would probably give the aliens the absolute wrong idea. Or preempt their impending invasion of Earth. Whichever you prefer. Also, isn't this more of a SLAM or Other Sci-Fi topic?

[Simon_Jester]

Assuming the mining operations are on the same general scale as terrestrial mining operations, the LRO can get excellent pictures of them- it's in a polar orbit around the moon so it covers every part of the surface sooner or later, and adjusting the orbit a bit to get back to a certain point quicker is at least feasible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LRO_T ... l_Peak.jpg

That is a link to a photo the LRO took of a 1.25 mile high mountain, to give an example of achievable scale.

If the LRO is not available (either the aliens destroyed it, or the probe has broken down in the future), then those 600 foot-per-pixel images are the best we can do from space based telescopes. Sending a cheap instrument package to image a specific site on the moon would probably take at most a couple of months (the designs are basically off the shelf but it still takes time to commission a commercial rocket launch).

[Darkrah]

It is part of a story that I'm planning to write which is why I'm putting it here.

I'm not sure I was all that clear though, obviously we can have probes there soon and already have probes there now, but my question is how long it would take us to set up and then send a manned mission there.

The aliens are just sort of ignoring us and all attempts at communication for the moment so that is why the manned mission is planned.

Sorry I'm replying to several different people but I have never really done much with my membership but read some of the members only boards.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd ball park eighteen months to build and test a module to attach to a Soyuz to let it carry some people into moon orbit and return. Even if you completely ignored safety it'd still be that kind of time to even think about it, and odds would be high of a power failure or explosion followed by death. Seriously its hard to design a complete car in a year, let alone design and build it, and yet any spacecraft will need to survive higher vibrational loads just to get into orbit.

If you want the men to land on the moon its going to take significantly longer, though not radically so simply because so much work would proceed in parallel and simply cost even more money. Nobody is producing a man rated booster big enough to launch the whole thing in one piece either, so this would require taking over multiple preexisting launcher contracts.

If you want anything in less then years it will have to be a expendable probe, we could start trying to launch those in a month flat if we wanted. They'd mostly fail, but you could start trying real quick. Low mass payloads and no requirement to be pressure sealed give us vastly more options for short cutting the design and testing process.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

It is part of a story that I'm planning to write which is why I'm putting it here.

I'm not sure I was all that clear though, obviously we can have probes there soon and already have probes there now, but my question is how long it would take us to set up and then send a manned mission there.

The aliens are just sort of ignoring us and all attempts at communication for the moment so that is why the manned mission is planned.

Sorry I'm replying to several different people but I have never really done much with my membership but read some of the members only boards.

Since I am assuming you want this manned spaceship to land on the Moon, and for the humans to get out, knock on the door of the alien base and say "wat up yo?" ... the answer is years. We don't have any manned spacecraft that can depart Earth orbit, get into lunar orbit, and then safely descend to the lunar surface. SpaceX probably has all the pieces necessary to construct a lunar lander in less than two years, if you threw enough money at them. Mind you, getting it to the Moon, getting it close enough to the Moon to land, and getting it back off the Moon are different stories entirely (and would probably take a fair bit longer than two years to pull off.)

It'd be simpler to hack together something that can follow commands well enough for us to crash it into the Moon somewhere nearby the alien base. As has been said, we could probably do that in a month (plus whatever time is needed to hijack the next launch vehicle.) Do that a few times, and the aliens might be convinced of the necessity of returning our calls.

[madd0ct0r]

has someone been playing Watch the Skies?

[InsaneTD]

What if we dragged out the Apollo plans? Replaced the avionics and electrics, replaced the motor and used the latest materials to build it? They got there 50 years ago, surely they can do it again now. Might not be the fastest vehicle we could place in space, but hopefully it'd get there.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

What if we dragged out the Apollo plans? Replaced the avionics and electrics, replaced the motor and used the latest materials to build it? They got there 50 years ago, surely they can do it again now. Might not be the fastest vehicle we could place in space, but hopefully it'd get there.

Well, we do have Lunar Modules #2 and #9 in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and a whole pile of Apollo command capsules. However, I don't know how much of the actual flight hardware is still inside them (though I'd be awful wary about climbing inside the capsules ... they've been exposed to the full forces of entry/descent/landing, after all.) Enough time has passed, though, that I'm going to stick with the assertion that it'd be easier to re-purpose the SpaceX Dragon V2 vehicle, than it would be to refurbish (pronounced: reconstruct) Apollo-era hardware for flight.

The long pole in this particular hypothetical tent is still going to be the launch stack required to actually get the vehicle to the Moon. Sure, we flew New Horizons past the Moon in less than nine hours, but New Horizons weighs just 800 pounds (362.874 kilograms) less than a '60s Volkswagen Beetle. The Apollo-era Lunar Module is nearly 32X more massive.

[InsaneTD]

I didn't say rebuild the currently existing capsules, I meant update the plans and use that to build a new vehicle.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I didn't say rebuild the currently existing capsules, I meant update the plans and use that to build a new vehicle.

That's much worse, actually. It's been so long since we've built them that it would not surprise me if none of the tooling used to build them still exists.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Rob is right. We could do some insane thing like those 1960s plans for super-heavy lift that involved "lash four Saturn Vs together" (that was actually the term used) which involved pretty much putting a keel between four Saturn V first stages and then a new aerodynamic fairing and using a fifth first stage as the second stage. Do this with Proton and then add four refurbished SRBs to it and you have something... That I'd put a 600 MT nuclear bomb on for nudging a giant asteroid off course, not people.

This would only save a few weeks off Rob's estimate because the launch-and-assembly-in-orbit is going to comprise a small fraction of the time involved, too, which is why nobody would dream of risking humans to it.

In engineering terms, custom fabrication of all components of the airframe new is never worthwhile. Look at the Nimrod 2000 project for an example of how horrifyingly wrong the reconstruction could go, too. So, 18 months if money is simply not an object.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I didn't say rebuild the currently existing capsules, I meant update the plans and use that to build a new vehicle.

Updating the materials, avionics and engines basically means a whole new spacecraft that just happens to look like an Apollo CSM/LM. Plus the fact that, as noted, we don't have the tooling to build such vehicles any more, never mind building something to launch it.

Incidentally, Duchess, do you have any handy links to more info about that multi-Saturn lash-up idea? I'm fascinated.

[Borgholio]

Why not re-purpose the space shuttles? They would not be able to make a landing on the moon, but strap enough rockets to them and they could certainly make the trip there and back.

[Darkrah]

Why not re-purpose the space shuttles? They would not be able to make a landing on the moon, but strap enough rockets to them and they could certainly make the trip there and back.

I am not sure that that would work even to get to the moon. However the whole point of the exercise is to get people on the moon to go and "knock on the door" as someone already said. In any case the shuttles have been mothballed for a couple of years already. So let us say that whoever is in charge decides to throw money at the problem because the aliens are not only not going away but seem to be settling in for the long haul. So far it sounds like 18 months would be fast. Does anyone disagree? I've started writing already so that's why I need a hard number.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Why not re-purpose the space shuttles? They would not be able to make a landing on the moon, but strap enough rockets to them and they could certainly make the trip there and back.

They're very huge. The Space Shuttle orbiter (fully loaded) is over six times more massive than the Apollo lunar lander stack, and fourteen times more massive than the SpaceX Dragon V2.

[InsaneTD]

I didn't say rebuild the currently existing capsules, I meant update the plans and use that to build a new vehicle.

Updating the materials, avionics and engines basically means a whole new spacecraft that just happens to look like an Apollo CSM/LM. Plus the fact that, as noted, we don't have the tooling to build such vehicles any more, never mind building something to launch it.

Ah ok.

Sounds like the biggest hurdle is how to get the mission into orbit.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why not re-purpose the space shuttles? They would not be able to make a landing on the moon, but strap enough rockets to them and they could certainly make the trip there and back.

Cause they've been stripped of minor important parts like the main engines! NASA removed them so they can be expended (maybe) for the first couple of test flights of Space Launch System.

And indeed the shuttles were stripped in other ways to, such as the entire thruster system had to be taken apart and cleaned because it used toxic fuel, then reassembled sealed up (because it was actually still toxic by EPA standards), explosive bolts had to be taken out of certain components, transformers drained of toxic coolants in a couple cases IIRC, and all of this work was done with attention to preservation, not protection of core systems in a functional status. At the end of the day the shuttles were so horrendously complicated, and so hard to prep for a launch even in the normal shuttle program that even if they still did have the engines and everything else... they could be nothing but a waste of time.

A;sp you couldn't just strap the rockets onto them on the ground either, that would simply not work for structural reasons. You'd have to do that in orbit...which probably isn't impossible but we've have to come up with a docking system to make that work, since the only place to attach them would be back on the pylons that hold the main fuel tank in the first place. Oh also the solid rocket boosters and main tank would take a couple years to build anyway. ATK is working on some new solids for SLS, basically the shuttle ones made longer, but this work is going on very slowly, only aimed at 2017.

Now if the shuttles were operational and flying, boosting a shuttle from orbit to the moon might make some sense to consider, but its not even remotely an option right now. Soyuz is the only reentry capable manned system we've got, and its in production, its known to be safe in space for long periods, supplies allowing, so that's our only baseline to go from. A service module and lander would have to be designed with the simplest possible systems to be reasonable to build and (sorta) test in a short time frame. We probably wouldn't need to worry too much about weight though, which would help, by using three launches for this.

So far it sounds like 18 months would be fast. Does anyone disagree? I've started writing already so that's why I need a hard number.

I'd go with around 18 months simply because, while slightly more or less time might be possible/required, its a number which isn't likely to make any reader scream "bullshit!!!!" and it feels reasonable enough based on many many things I have read over the years on high tech programs, and yet also on the ability to rush key systems given specific enough goals, and insane enough money. And in the end that's the only thing that really matters.

Mind you in WW2 it took about 2 years to get a new plane or tank from paper drawing to production, and that was with planes and tanks simpler then modern cars, though in relative terms they were cutting edge products of the era.

For a safe mission I'd say four years, but clearly this is a situation where great risks could be accepted. Just not risks to the point that we have a 175% chance the spacecraft explodes on the pad after we built it in a month out of spare parts. Because that would waste the booster if nothing else, and while many space launches going on per year, not so many of them use the heaviest models of booster, and as noted none of these modern boosters remotely compares to a Saturn V.

[Enigma]

Why not built another rover and send it to the moon and communicate with the aliens through it?

[Darkrah]

I've been trying to come up with a reason for the manned mission to be a necessity and have decided that humanity tries sending probes up but the aliens simply scrap them and use the raw materials for construction. They might also be stealing satellites out of orbit but are ignoring anything that has living inhabitants which will be why the humans feel it is safe to send people up maybe I haven't decided yet. So the aliens are thieves as well as ignoring radio waves or other attempts at communications.

[Darkrah]

So far it sounds like 18 months would be fast. Does anyone disagree? I've started writing already so that's why I need a hard number.

I'd go with around 18 months simply because, while slightly more or less time might be possible/required, its a number which isn't likely to make any reader scream "bullshit!!!!" and it feels reasonable enough based on many many things I have read over the years on high tech programs, and yet also on the ability to rush key systems given specific enough goals, and insane enough money. And in the end that's the only thing that really matters.

Mind you in WW2 it took about 2 years to get a new plane or tank from paper drawing to production, and that was with planes and tanks simpler then modern cars, though in relative terms they were cutting edge products of the era.

For a safe mission I'd say four years, but clearly this is a situation where great risks could be accepted. Just not risks to the point that we have a 175% chance the spacecraft explodes on the pad after we built it in a month out of spare parts. Because that would waste the booster if nothing else, and while many space launches going on per year, not so many of them use the heaviest models of booster, and as noted none of these modern boosters remotely compares to a Saturn V.

That's the reason I've come here for advice. I honestly don't know enough about certain elements of stuff to write a convincing Hardish Science Fiction story, I've usually used handwavium and sufficiently advanced aliens to bullshit whatever I wanted into a story, aka Science Fantasy although I've tried to be internally consistent. I know about general relativity and the necessity for things like gravitational slingshots to get around the solar system at out current level of technology but I don't know enough about the building of such things to feel comfortable with just choosing a random number. So if the humans are going at breakneck speeds to get there 18 months but when they realize that the aliens aren't going anywhere could they slow down to try and do things better, you and everyone else seem to be saying that it would take years to do the thing properly so that might be what I will end up doing if it is feasible.

Edited to avoid that blinding red color I used first.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I've been trying to come up with a reason for the manned mission to be a necessity and have decided that humanity tries sending probes up but the aliens simply scrap them and use the raw materials for construction. They might also be stealing satellites out of orbit but are ignoring anything that has living inhabitants which will be why the humans feel it is safe to send people up maybe I haven't decided yet. So the aliens are thieves as well as ignoring radio waves or other attempts at communications.

If the aliens are doing that, then I'm not sure we'd want to be sending manned spacecraft to them (as you're now making them out to be actively hostile.) In that case, it might be more prudent to figure out how to target the Moon with live nuclear warheads. That, or strap thrusters to old V8 blocks, and start pitching those at the alien base ...

[InsaneTD]

I've been trying to come up with a reason for the manned mission to be a necessity and have decided that humanity tries sending probes up but the aliens simply scrap them and use the raw materials for construction. They might also be stealing satellites out of orbit but are ignoring anything that has living inhabitants which will be why the humans feel it is safe to send people up maybe I haven't decided yet. So the aliens are thieves as well as ignoring radio waves or other attempts at communications.

If the aliens are doing that, then I'm not sure we'd want to be sending manned spacecraft to them (as you're now making them out to be actively hostile.) In that case, it might be more prudent to figure out how to target the Moon with live nuclear warheads. That, or strap thrusters to old V8 blocks, and start pitching those at the alien base ...

I can't help but picture a giant space shotgun shooting old Chevy motors at the moon reading that. It's a rather amusing image.

[Enigma]

Or strap a container filled with nuclear waste, strap some rockets and aim at the aliens.

No point to send a manned mission if they are hostile. Sending people over will create the risk of them being used as raw materials.