Hacker News Reader

Comment by poikroequ | Hacker News Reader

These things are fun to fantasize about, but realistically considering the astronomical cost it would be to ship all the necessary materials to the moon and to do the construction, it's little more than just that, fantasy. Considering there are two Boeing Starliner astronauts who may be stuck on the space station for several more months, the thoughts of building such things on the moon just isn't realistic in the foreseeable future. It's going to require exponential advances in space travel before we can even begin to seriously consider such projects.

View on HN

> Considering there are two Boeing Starliner astronauts who may be stuck on the space station for several more months

This is a bad measure of our spacefaring capabilities. It’s like ruling out the Berlin airlift because Boeing’s door plugs fall out.

The paper estimates construction using a lunar TBM. The time scale it provides, around the 2070s to 2080s, is well within our projections for what could be accomplished with even Starship, a platform that should be operational by the 2030s. (At $100mm per launch, a $5bn launch budget gives you 340 tons on the surface.)

The most speculative element, as it identifies, is not transport but remote drilling and power. That said, the author appears unaware of the degree to which we’re automating (and offsiting) mining on Earth. The idea that we won’t have remote TBMs within 50 years seems, to me, low.

Why do you need a tunnel? Proton beam is happy in a vacuum and magnets can be shaded a la James Webb for superconducting temperatures. Might need to put the collision area underground to minimize solar and cosmic noise.

What's the plan for preventing the statically charged, microabrasive lunar dust from destroying every piece of unshielded equipment?

Its reasonable to point out that we don't yet have 2 competing viable players in the private commercial space transport business

> we don't yet have 2 competing viable players in the private commercial space transport business

We kind of do have them? SpaceX and Rocket Lab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab

> reasonable to point out that we don't yet have 2 competing viable players in the private commercial space transport business

Why? We’ve only ever had one demonstrated launch system that could get humans to and from the Moon, and it wasn’t private commercial.

Going back to the airlift example, we were probably the only country on the planet that could have pulled off that operation in the wake of WWII.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com