The quest to build a telescope on the moon
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
TFA also left out that it's not only going to be a PoC for autonomous mining and manufacturing, but also autonomous refining. When the Toyota corporation built my car they didn't start with unrefined steel ore. I don't even know how they're going to do that in a vacuum where there's no fires and no convection.
There were some design studies of lunar resources and their extraction in the 70s, iirc using solar furnaces. I think I read about this in https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-by-t-a-heppenheimer/ almost that long ago.
The novelty and distance are a challenge but maybe less of one than the problems for autonomy on Earth?
Absolutely not. In space you have to dela with things like radiation, extreme temperatures, or cold welding of joints. Energy supply can be a big issue depending on your environment. On the moon you have to deal with extremely abrasive dust.
The most critical issue in space is how difficult it is to fix things: If you can get a human there, they will be constrained by airlocks and space suits. In most cases it will be impossible to get anybody there and you need to construct 100% reliable or self-repairing machines. This is extremely difficult.
On the Moon you can do the simplest thing that works and if it works at 10% efficiency and breaks after 1 year - so be it, if it's enough time to get resources to make a new one.
Basically space exploration will have a lot more in common with industrial revolution than with overengineered spacematerial NASA stuff.
If we have to make the tractors 10x bigger to have the same power and output, and to use disposable steel cables instead of hydraulics, and to make them disposable after 2 years instead of lubricating them to last 20 years - that's all fine if it means it can work with lunar materials only.
The opposite it true: You can throw away things on Earth and have local industry produce replacements. You cannot cost-effectively bring equipment to the moon since you have significant launch costs. Optimizing for light-weight and reliable machines is inherently costly. There is no escape from gravity here.
> That's all fine if it means it can work with lunar materials only.
There is no manufacturing capability on the moon and you need to price in the cost of setting up such an industry through the bottleneck of lauches.
BTW spacesuits could probably be much better for repair work; they seem like another area where NASA has stagnated.
“The tiny, electrostatically charged particles made of crushed lunar rock clung to every surface, from spacesuits to electronics, and even infiltrated the astronauts’ lungs. Crews tried using a brush or their hands to sweep the sharp, abrasive dust off their spacesuits, but neither method proved very effective.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasas-moon-dust-pr...
But I'm sure this is being done.
By whom?
The answer there is "yes, of course" but that's not an answer to the question I asked. The question I'd like to know the answer to is "who is doing this work, right now? "
> those who work on such projects...
Yes. Who is that, specifically, by name?
In the early 1980s, some people at Stanford were talking about building something on the moon with robots by the year 2000. I asked "How soon can you do that in Utah?" They didn't like that.
If progress continues at the rate it's been going recently they may get quite good.
"The team surmises that within the next 50 years robot systems will be capable of handling a large fraction of the needs of a general-purpose SMF."
44 years later, not even close.
Google DeepMind robotics today.[1] Can put a shirt on a hanger, but not button or unbutton it.
[1] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dext...
It's rare to see an interviewer at a trade show like that have so little context about what they're looking at.
Extracting pure elements out of undifferentiated regolith (dirt) is impractical and uneconomical here in Earth, even with abundant water, power, and even with chemicals such as carbon and acids. On the Moon you’d have to use a dry process in vacuum. What would that even look like!?
Everyone seems to treat this like it’s a computer game with +1 resources per tile just waiting to be collected by a harvester.
Explain in detail how you’d extract anything of industrial utility out of undifferentiated dirt, with a smelter light enough to launch on rockets for less than the cost of any alternative.
That would not be classified as iron ore at all! Mined ores contain up to 65% iron by weight. Also, typical iron ore contains very little other metals, simplifying smelting and other processing.
Moon rocks are a random undifferentiated mess.
I recently read Blindsight by Peter Watts[1], and the aliens in that book use cyclotrons to separate asteroid material into their component elements. This is done in orbit, in a vacuum.
Interestingly, something like that would work just fine on the Moon, because it has a negligible atmosphere -- essentially a hard vacuum. It might be possible to do an "outdoor" particle accelerator to separate regolith like a mass spectrometer.
Imagine a device that uses concentrated solar power (or solar cells and an e-beam furnace) to vaporise regolith, ionise it, and then use magnets to spread it out in a huge fan hundreds of meters in size. The mass-separated atoms could be sprayed out onto the landscape where they would freeze onto the bare surface of the Moon. You'd get patches of pure metals slowly but surely building up. This would have almost no moving parts and needs no chemicals, oxidisers, or other consumables.
[1] A book I can highly recommend for the HN audience. (It has been positively reviewed here previously, which is why I read it in the first place.)
It's incredibly energy intensive and very inefficient compared to methods used on earth, but you aren't trying to compete with earth mining. You're trying to compete with the efficiency of shipping things to the moon.
There's a ton of methods available:
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/university-of-utah-ta...
You can also grind it and perform chemical extraction:
Well, with the rate at which we are launching thousands of loud satellites, radio astronomy may simply have to move to space. Maybe not the moon, but we will need to get the telescopes somewhere above the satellite constellations if we want to continue doing radio astronomy.
Sure, some people would like it, but where is the money going to come from? Are governments really willing to spend the money needed to move radio astronomy into space or to the Moon? I seriously doubt it. I think it's pretty obvious that we (humanity) care more about having thousands of noisy communications satellites than it does about doing radio astronomy.
Well, actually, they did.[1] Toyota has their own steel mills. "Great cars are made with great steel".
But there is a big gap between what is technically possible and what is economically possible. Yes, with a limitless budget, they could probably over come the technical issues. But can it be done within a budget limitation.
I am with you however, I am very skeptical we will see this happen but more than happy to be proven wrong. It is easy to say something, it is the doing that matters. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.
they test the martian rovers on earth before they send them in space. why do you think they wouldn't test this process and equipment before making launch a go?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcR6gs0Up6k
Interview with Gerard van Belle, director or the Lowell Observatory.
The topic was space/lunar optical interferometers. It's easier to do this on the Moon than in space, as there's no formation flying. He's got a "menu" of projects from a few/small unit telescopes right up to lunar manufacturing like this.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc...
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d4pivfipd9rpb19fm87lq/LCRT_NI...
When someone assembles a solar farm in the desert with no humans on site, we can talk about doing something like that on Luna.
* https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/niac2020_ban...
* https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc...
That should avoid all the Radio Interference that plagues Earth Based Radio Telescopes.
How do you aim that thing at a specific point in the sky?
Stop. Right. There. Time to read A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/
This is quickly turning into a pipe dream. Someone is letting their imagination run away.
There simply isn't enough water on the moon to make hydrogen / oxygen for deep space travel.
They want to build a radio telescope, not a simple optical telescope.
Coming back to the topic, I'd like to see the reasons why both approaches could be beneficial. I see, for example, that for space-based constructions we don't - mostly - have interference from the surface of anything, while for surface-based constructions we have support and resources. Do we have a full analysis which would allow us to say "surface always sux, in-space forewa" or "only l00mers build in space, real men are firmly grounded"? Or, talking about a finer point, deployment only - do we have full justification?
But it requires those different clusters of collectors to be stationary - so while you could probably build a swarm of satellites, they would have to stay in very precise distances from each other over time which would be considerably more difficult than planting them on a surface.
Also, a big shield like the moon blocking out radio interference coming from the earth is desirable.
IANAA, corrections to my understandings welcome
For optical frequencies, the phase is difficult to measure directly, so we instead polish the surfaces down to a fraction of the wavelength of light (so that it all has the same phase). For radio telescope, the frequency is a lot lower, and we actually can measure the phase directly, so we can make our sensors crazy shapes and adjust it by adding delay. If you can change the individual delays (say, via software) you can change how they interfere and therefore change the sensitive direction for your telescope. This is how phased arrays function.
Is this necessary, or do they simply need to precisely distinguish their relative position? My understanding of the JWT's not-perfectly-smooth lens is that the ability to measure (and correct for) its distortions vastly simplified the construction, and I naively think the same principle could be used in a swarm of satellites.
But it requires those different clusters of collectors to be stationary - so while you could probably build a swarm of satellites, they would have to stay in very precise distances from each other over time which would be considerably more difficult than planting them on a surface.
Even considering that the "surface" in question is the moon?
We know how to make thrusters. We don't know how to mine the moon and make a telescope from scratch.
In space, there are no rocks to mine, so you're have to launch all the material to space, which is wildly impractical/expensive.
Ah yes, the 'ole investor pump and dump. Get a bunch of people excited enough to give you millions, make enough to retire and then just disappear in a whiff.