Newt Gingrich supports idea of moon colony

[Lord Falcon]

Does this really need to be said? I disagree with Newt on a lot of issues and I sure wouldn't vote for him, but this is one issue I stand firmly with him on.

It's been 43 years since we landed on the moon. Why don't we have moon colonies yet? Granted, Newt's idea of using them to create jobs is not smart, to be generous, but it's something I find myself want to see happen in my lifetime someday.

BTW, is this the right section? I didn't know whether to put this in science section or the politics section.

[PeZook]

The effort to get there will certainly create jobs thanks to government contracts

EDIT: And yeah, it fits fine in here. Should it drift, I'll just punt it to science.

[K. A. Pital]

Moon colonies will generate lots of jobs, since supporting a rocket industry to reliably supply and maintain them would require a huge effort.

[Grumman]

It's been 43 years since we landed on the moon. Why don't we have moon colonies yet?

Why do you want moon colonies? Even if there was an airless, desolate wasteland right here on Earth, without the billion dollar commute, what would you hope to achieve by colonising it instead of somewhere significantly less awful?

Moon colonies will generate lots of jobs, since supporting a rocket industry to reliably supply and maintain them would require a huge effort.

High cost should never be a selling point. Pretty much anything can achieve that goal, since it's trivially easy to add more effort to a project - just hire an extra ten thousand people to dig holes and fill them in again.

If you want to spend a trillion dollars or so on developing infrastructure, why not do it here on Earth, where your dollar goes further and where people can actually use the bloody stuff?

[Simon_Jester]

Look at it this way: we have a base at the South Pole, we don't have a colony, because no one intends a major city to grow up there one day.

A moon base would be of considerable scientific interest, and it'd certainly be a far more constructive way for us to spend that kind of money than something like the Iraq War.

A moon colony would probably be another matter.

At this particular moment in history, undertaking to build a moon base probably isn't going to work, because it would die of budget cuts from austerity fanatics long before it got to the bricks-and-mortar stage. We need a saner political climate to discuss the issue properly.

[PeZook]

Why do you want moon colonies? Even if there was an airless, desolate wasteland right here on Earth, without the billion dollar commute, what would you hope to achieve by colonising it instead of somewhere significantly less awful?

As an industrial base for missions to the deep reaches of the solar system and beyond, obviously, to do SCIENCE! and oh yeah also mine the fuck out of near earth asteroids, plummeting the price of raw resources and making things like the hydrogen economy possible.

Should be doable in about a century.

High cost should never be a selling point. Pretty much anything can achieve that goal, since it's trivially easy to add more effort to a project - just hire an extra ten thousand people to dig holes and fill them in again.

Except for that part where the high cost is all in hi-tech industries that are paid to technologically crack new and awesome problems within cutting-edge fields and when you're no longer going to the Moon you suddenly realize you can now build digital autopilots and oh yeah that tracking network can be used to run all sorts of useful satellites.

If you want to spend a trillion dollars or so on developing infrastructure, why not do it here on Earth, where your dollar goes further and where people can actually use the bloody stuff?

Who said anything about a trillion dollars? Ten billion per year gets you a lunar base and all its SCIENCE! benefits in about a decade. We could've had one already had the Congressmangs not forced NASA to cut the Saturn V, and had them develop a vehicle with similar operational costs but 1/5th the useful payload, which flew more than a hundred missions over twenty years. Hell, we could've had a lunar base AND the ISS, since Saturn Vs could've lofted it all in only a couple launches...

[LaCroix]

If you want to spend a trillion dollars or so on developing infrastructure, why not do it here on Earth, where your dollar goes further and where people can actually use the bloody stuff?

Why do you people always act as if the money is miraculously evaporating when it's used for SPACE!!!!1!!!1

The money is spent in the country, just the same as if you were digging and filling back in holes. Just that there is technologic progress and spin-offs, and science, which leads to more technology and more spin-offs.

[TimothyC]

Does this really need to be said? I disagree with Newt on a lot of issues and I sure wouldn't vote for him, but this is one issue I stand firmly with him on.

This was something that he brought up repeatedly during the campaign.

One thing that often gets forgotten is that there are some republicans who think like big science, and who think that there is a certain government responsibility to support it.

[K. A. Pital]

Who said anything about a trillion dollars? Ten billion per year gets you a lunar base and all its SCIENCE! benefits in about a decade. We could've had one already had the Congressmangs not forced NASA to cut the Saturn V, and had them develop a vehicle with similar operational costs but 1/5th the useful payload, which flew more than a hundred missions over twenty years. Hell, we could've had a lunar base AND the ISS, since Saturn Vs could've lofted it all in only a couple launches...

We could've had the same again with the Energia but it also fell. Sometimes I wonder if there's just some sort of extreme bad luck which plagues larger rockets. I mean politics-wise of course.

[Simon_Jester]

Large rockets don't pay off immediately, aren't useful for commercial launches, and therefore require long range planning. The 1960s US and 1980s USSR were capable of that, but institutionally the modern US and Russia have trouble with it.

[Grumman]

As an industrial base for missions to the deep reaches of the solar system and beyond, obviously, to do SCIENCE! and oh yeah also mine the fuck out of near earth asteroids, plummeting the price of raw resources and making things like the hydrogen economy possible.

Should be doable in about a century.

Do you believe that it is going to be cheaper to procure a ton of space-metal than to procure a ton of Earth-metal? If not, it is never going to reduce the price of raw resources.

Except for that part where the high cost is all in hi-tech industries that are paid to technologically crack new and awesome problems within cutting-edge fields and when you're no longer going to the Moon you suddenly realize you can now build digital autopilots and oh yeah that tracking network can be used to run all sorts of useful satellites.

So why not just fund the increased R&D and not waste our effort on the "going to the Moon" bit?

Who said anything about a trillion dollars? Ten billion per year gets you a lunar base and all its SCIENCE! benefits in about a decade.

Both the OP and Stas Bush were talking about lunar colonies, which are almost certainly going to be bigger and more expensive than what you're talking about.

If you want to spend a trillion dollars or so on developing infrastructure, why not do it here on Earth, where your dollar goes further and where people can actually use the bloody stuff?

Why do you people always act as if the money is miraculously evaporating when it's used for SPACE!!!!1!!!1

Because we understand that money is primarily a measurement of value, which can't just be printed off on a whim? People who don't understand that tend to drive economies into the ground with hyperinflation, like in inter-war Germany.

If you spend a trillion dollars of labour, fuel and materials building stuff and then putting it somewhere where it is economically infeasible to use them, you are taking value out of the system. Unless your program has a fiscal multiplier of 2 or higher, you are making your economic outcomes worse by doing it. If you spend a trillion dollars of labour, fuel and materials on required infrastructure in the US, you only need a fiscal multiplier of >1 to make your economic outcomes better. So if you're looking for a megaproject to sink a decade into, why not pick the one that makes the world a better place?

[loomer]

There's also the traditional argument for why we need a lunar colony: It ups the odds of our species surviving. Admittedly, for the first couple of decades at least it's probably going to be utterly reliant on us for a lot of things, but once you get full and self-sustaining aquaculture and hydroponic farms going, along with the necessary water harvesting, it provides a safety against any unforeseen catastrophe.

It was said earlier but I'll echo it. Newt's love of space is probably his most charming characteristic (together with his love of animals) since he really looks like he has a very innocent and genuine joy at the idea, which is not something you normally associate with a Republican.

[Stark]

It'll make it easier to grab resources to build actual decent orbital colonies. Otherwise ... prestige project.

[Terralthra]

I'd much rather go for a moon base only for mining materials for orbital habitats. The reason to mine moon resources is that it takes way less energy to get them to the right place for habs, compared to Earth resources. Other than that, why get out of a gravity well with limited land area, just to get back into another well with limited land area?

[General Zod]

I'd much rather go for a moon base only for mining materials for orbital habitats. The reason to mine moon resources is that it takes way less energy to get them to the right place for habs, compared to Earth resources. Other than that, why get out of a gravity well with limited land area, just to get back into another well with limited land area?

So . . . how do you plan to make use of those minerals on the moon without an infrastructure to process them in place? Seems like you're putting the cart before the horse here.

[Guardsman Bass]

If you can pull apart the asteroids into small enough chunks (and get past the political difficulty), you might not have to process them in space at all. You could push particularly metal-heavy segments of it to crash at particular areas on the Earth's surface, then take the metals out of the impact crater.

Not that I think it's going to happen on any big scale, anytime soon. If the potential future value of asteroid metals and water was that significant, we'd see more than a single, rather optimistic company aiming for it - the Space Age isn't exactly young anymore.

There's also the traditional argument for why we need a lunar colony: It ups the odds of our species surviving. Admittedly, for the first couple of decades at least it's probably going to be utterly reliant on us for a lot of things, but once you get full and self-sustaining aquaculture and hydroponic farms going, along with the necessary water harvesting, it provides a safety against any unforeseen catastrophe.

It's overkill, if your objective is species survival. It's cheaper and easier to either blunt a threat in the first place (asteroids, climate change), or deal with it on Earth.

[Stark]

So . . . how do you plan to make use of those minerals on the moon without an infrastructure to process them in place? Seems like you're putting the cart before the horse here.

He's talking about resources for building orbital colonies, ie dirt. A base on the moon might help get asteroids from elsewhere to build them.

[General Zod]

So . . . how do you plan to make use of those minerals on the moon without an infrastructure to process them in place? Seems like you're putting the cart before the horse here.

He's talking about resources for building orbital colonies, ie dirt. A base on the moon might help get asteroids from elsewhere to build them.

By minerals of course I meant metals. (Which the moon actually does seem to have a supply of.) http://english.pravda.ru/news/science/2 ... 88-moon-0/

[Terralthra]

I'd much rather go for a moon base only for mining materials for orbital habitats. The reason to mine moon resources is that it takes way less energy to get them to the right place for habs, compared to Earth resources. Other than that, why get out of a gravity well with limited land area, just to get back into another well with limited land area?

So . . . how do you plan to make use of those minerals on the moon without an infrastructure to process them in place? Seems like you're putting the cart before the horse here.

Put the manufacturing infrastructure at the Lagrange point where you're going to build the hab? We're talking about smelting iron into structural steel (which can be done in vacuum in an electric arc furnace powered off of solar panels) and melting silicates into glass (again, solar-electric furnace in vacuum is fine). All that needs to be on the moon are mining equipment and a bucket-utilizing mass driver to get loads of essentially raw iron, carbon, and silicates out of the lunar ground and to the lagrange point. Alumina in the loads of ore are also useful to the habitat construction process, as well as the trace magnesium, sodium, and titanium which, combined with iron, and silica, make up the majority of the moon.

One can make a perfectly functional self-sustaining hab using almost nothing beyond those elements for the primary structural elements, mirrors, and manufactured photovoltaics for power. Most of the interior structure, too, if you're willing to go with concrete over steel-frame buildings.

[Marko Dash]

what we need right now is orbital infrastucture. if we can start building things in orbit we can launch material in whatever size packets we have the rockets for. orbit is 90% of the way to anywhere.

this would require the major powers to give their space programs more than the current breadcrumbs, or somthing like space-x or skylon to revigorate the publics interest in space.


forgive any typos, on the Wii ATM...

[PeZook]

Do you believe that it is going to be cheaper to procure a ton of space-metal than to procure a ton of Earth-metal? If not, it is never going to reduce the price of raw resources.

All the rare earths in the crust came from asteroid impacts ; There's likely more out there, and if we can score some asteroids full of platinum, then suddenly the available supply increases spectacularly (world yearly platinm production is only 192 tons ; One . Same for other rare earths, such as iridium.

If we could find a 10 metre wide asteroid that's mostly platinum, and bring it back to Earth, that's 92 100 tons, or...about five hundred years of Earthside production. Of course there'd be losses because no asteroid will be pure platinum, much will be lost in transit etc.

So yeah, I do believe it might very well be cheaper to capture asteroids and mine rare earths from that. Of course, it depends on how many such asteroids there are, but we can't find out without sending probulators out there, can we? And the payoff can be HUGE.

So why not just fund the increased R&D and not waste our effort on the "going to the Moon" bit?

Because going to the Moon has other benefits in addition to the R&D results? It galvanizes the public with a clear goal and the feeling of adventure? Helps maintain the experience and infrastructure required to keep the satellite networks running? Helps IMPROVE the satellites with spin-off technologies used for probulators and manned spacecraft? Enables us to not bother redeveloping knowledge necessary for manned spaceflight if we ever need to deflect an incoming piece of murderous space rock, or clean up low earth orbit from debris? Lets you try out new industrial techniques in microgravity or low gravity?

R&D is all well and good, but having an actual problem to crack helps develop engineering applications that can translate directly into machines used for the real world, like the AGC which was basically a ready-made autopilot (because it was used as exactly that) you could just plug into an airplane.

Both the OP and Stas Bush were talking about lunar colonies, which are almost certainly going to be bigger and more expensive than what you're talking about.

So spend fifteen billion per year and wait three decades instead of one. That's the funny thing: it really isn't THAT expensive compared to world GDP.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

It's been 43 years since we landed on the moon. Why don't we have moon colonies yet?

This question is a bit like asking "if Colombus discovered the Americas in 1492, why the USA was only founded in 1776?"

Also, I think that y'all are overestimating the voting public. The US barely teaches evolution in schools, while Russia jails people using the documents of the Council in Trullo (7th century) as a legal base. Unless you're talking of China or (joke contestant) the European Union , none has the political will to do something as bold as a moon colony.

[K. A. Pital]

With the recent developments (DS4G ion engines, workable thermonuclear reactors in the nearest future, Skylon spaceplane looking more and more feasible) it would be easier to sustain orbital and Moon infrastructure on a never-seen-before level.

[ChaserGrey]

We could've had the same again with the Energia but it also fell. Sometimes I wonder if there's just some sort of extreme bad luck which plagues larger rockets. I mean politics-wise of course.

The problem with heavy lifters is that while they're cheap in terms of cost per pound, they're pretty damn expensive in absolute terms. So unless you're launching something like a moonshot or Skylab, it's just not going to be worth it. You can cluster satellites together, but that gets harder and harder the more individual payloads you have.

[PeZook]

Yeah, the only possible use for heavy launchers right now is with government programs. Nobody needs to have 100 tons of satellites in LEO, all of which will require their own transfer stages to go anywhere, plus the assorted logistical and launch scheduling headaches, etc.

Of course, the fact two such launchers were designed and built means we can do it again with much less trouble, whenever the political will is found to fund a project that will require them. I suppose that's a good thing, kind of