More Water than Ever Found on the Moon
time.com
time.com
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternativ...
Best guess [1] for cost to lift a kilo/liter to orbit is $20,000 per.
Have to be real expensive to mine water to make it more expensive than shipping the stuff from the Pacific.
[1] It is surprisingly hard to tease out data on this value: government accounting is partly to blame. Also: FedEx does not (yet) list their rates for 'delivery to LEO'
Because I would guess you could escape moon gravity and fall towards earth for a lot less than $20,000 per liter.
And large chunks of ice, hurled from the moon, would just melt in our atmosphere. Which is OK if you don't care to deliver water to anyone in particular and just want more of it on earth. You know, in case global warming doesn't raise sea levels enough.
Just send solar powered robots at in initial cost of $20,000 per kilo to mine the ice, and have them hurl it at earth for a lot less than $20,000 per liter.
$20,000 is cost of taking Earth water into space, and hopefully dumping it on the moon. That's compared to however much it is for existing moon-dwellers to setup and mine water from the moon.
Of course I don't know how much and it is still likely to be ridiculously expensive.
Not tons, but some, in support of work for a prior employer.
But it turns out one of the ordinary byproducts of ordinary rockets is water, which is why all space food is dehydrated.
More like 'a particular fuel that can be used in a rocket is ..'
But actually I'm not sure what you're talking about, sorry. Can you expand and correct my knowledge?
Rocket fuel goes out the back end, pushes the rocket forward, right? The water is stored in tanks which astronauts draw out to rehydrate their tang?
This, of course, assumes colonies on the moon. Personally, I doubt we will ever have them. But if we do, I think it's also reasonable to assume that the cost will have been lowered significantly.
Think of it as a benchmark.
We know X costs Y, so Z needs to cost less to be viable.
This is useful even if the value of Y declines. It ought to: there is money to be made in reducing transaction costs.
I'm more bullish on the prospects for living off-world.
If we can get there for a reasonable cost, if it's possible for people to live there, people will go.
On the flip side, yeah, actually we can make a pretty good guess at how to mine this water. We actually are pretty good at mining. Run in through a machine that literally boils it out. Done. Throw the leftover rock in a big pile. At 2% concentration that's more than enough to get you started, it just needs energy, which is also fairly easily to get in this context. A real miner might do something else but that would certainly work.
In other words, I think that the only circumstances in which we would want to mine water on the moon, transporting water would be orders of magnitude less expensive than $20,000/liter.
The "unknown" bits I was referring to are the infrastructure required to be on the dark side of the moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_...
But who knows. Maybe when society is so advanced that we have infinite power from controlled fusion, extremely accurate and high powered lasers and magnetic field generators, and quantum computers, we'll be able to build a box that moves around individual atoms to construct something.
Making water out of anything else, is possible in molecular quantities at an exorbitant price using a particle accelerator (or so). So in practice, impossible.
A Star Trek Replicator, even one that doesn't transmute different elements into each other and just re-arranges them, is a long way off. The best current design we have is called an ecosystem and uses plants, fungi, animals, other life forms and sun light.
You can also extract amounts of oxygen and hydrogen from more complex substances and turn them into water through the magic of that science we know as Chemistry. You should expect that this will generally take a bunch of energy, though.
Nanotechnology has the potential to let us construct much more complicated sorts of chemical structures. It would be really neat, but wouldn't really change how much energy it takes to separate water out of other materials, and would probably be a lot less energy efficient than standard industrial methods.
I like the more agile approach. Release early, iterate often.
I think if you recognize the advantages and disadvantages of both you could effectively use either of them. Of course doing that might not be considered "humane" by our current standards.
I think the real hope is waiting for hardware to master the "fixing itself" problem (preferably by conquering replication, which would also largely fix the expense problem). Little need to drag along the wetware at that point though.
(dredmorbius: I am in fact referring to humans. Using microbial life is an interesting idea in its own right however.)
Sentient wetware tends to bring along baggage of requesting rights and such, which can be expensive to provision.
Hardware can both survive and function in a wide range of extreme environments.
Space is just a place.
Taking a real long-term view, it's no more ridiculous to live in the Moon, or Mars, than it was for early man to move out of Africa and settle Europe, Australia, the Himalayas, California.
Every place man has lived has been radically different from an African savannah. We get along by adapting, improvising, inventing, using technology.
This is not to discount the hazards, dangers, and exceptionally different environment found outside our atmosphere.
But it's time for a real, actual Space Age. We'll make it up as we go along, same as we always have.
It may appear to be that way from one post. I don't.
The health of astronauts coming back from the ISS has deteriorated.
The short-term affects of micro-gravity appear to be un-good, I agree.
Please note I was speaking of settling places with gravity. About that we simply don't know, yet.
Psychologically, they aren't topfit either.
If you spent six months living in an industrial facility the size of a winnebago you'd be a little off, too.
My expectations of 'the future' are that people will live in bodies with gravity - the moon, Mars. Off-planet facilities will be what off-shore oil platforms are today: a place to work, and live short-term, for high pay. Then you go home to the wife and kids.
Once off Earth colonization takes off that distinction will seem less and less significant over time.
...we really need to get the hell out of here. In 1 billion years the Earth will be a dead planet, because the Sun keeps changing. And a dinosaur-killing boulder will probably hit us much sooner than that.
Eggs in one basket, etc.
Preacher > Choir
for a slightly better read than the Times page. Bigger picture too!