While We Wait: Part 4

[Symphony D.]

Can someone claim the moon legally and what would "claiming" the moon actually entail?

Disenfrancised got it. Everybody else here hasn't a clue.

What are you talking about? The moon has resources to make far space travel cheap. For one there is the possibility of water, and not even bringing up helium-3. America would be unstoppable in the space race if they claimed the moon.

Another person who doesn't know what they're talking about. The water is of a limited quantity such that it only really makes sense to use it on the moon. Furthermore extracting helium-3 from regolith is exceptionally difficult and expensive unless you happen to have nanomachines that can process it out. You also need at least a second generation fusion reactor, and preferably a third generation one, for it to be of value.

The moon's main strategic function is as Earth's dock because of its tiny gravity well.

 

[North King]

The moon's main strategic function is as Earth's dock because of its tiny gravity well.

Strange. Why wouldn't you use an orbiting station? No gravity well at all seems better than climbing out of the Moon's just to fall into the Earth's.

 

[Symphony D.]

Strange. Why wouldn't you use an orbiting station? No gravity well at all seems better than climbing out of the Moon's just to fall into the Earth's.

That's an extreme oversimplification of gravitation. By virtue of being in orbit the station is in Earth's gravity well. It has to be rather quite far away (ie: above geosynchronous orbit and near to where Lunar and Terrestrial gravity is equal) for gravity to be significantly less than it is on the surface (gravity decaying with the square root of distance and somewhere in Low Earth orbit, like the ISS, not being significantly farther away than the surface of the planet).

You also still have the problem of having to boost everything you want sent out up to it. Space doesn't have raw materials floating around to build things out of. Unless you have an orbital elevator, Earth sucks for deploying things from.

The Moon, meanwhile, is an airless rock (ignoring a tenuous coating of xenon and some other junk barely more dense than space). You can put as much industry on it as you want and harvest its minerals to construct things with fewer imports from Earth, and launch them much more easily. It is also easier to construct things like orbital elevators on the Moon (they'd be much shorter, and could use simpler materials technology), and by developing the Dark Side you could deploy spiffy forms of transportation that would otherwise potentially blind people who were looking at the Moon at the wrong time.

If you had sufficiently advanced technology you could also cover the thing in solar panels and have a really badass power generation system (best achieved by using nanites to engineer panels out of the regolith--during which you could extract the He-3), and use microwave transmission to send it to receivers on orbital elevators for relay back to Earth, but that takes a bit more time, effort, and technology to achieve, clearly. Its first function will be as an industrial hub and spaceport, its second as an energy generation source.

though its an obvious example of cold war power balance, and a multilaterial solution as in your NES will come up with something different.

Lawl.

 

[North King]

If you had sufficiently advanced technology you could also cover the thing in solar panels and have a really badass power generation system (best achieved by using nanites to engineer panels out of the regolith--during which you could extract the He-3), and use microwave transmission to send it to receivers on orbital elevators for relay back to Earth, but that takes a bit more time, effort, and technology to achieve, clearly. Its first function will be as an industrial hub and spaceport, its second as an energy generation source.

All right. As a base which has access to its own raw materials -- that makes sense. What you were talking about earlier seemed to be a simple spaceport, and those generally make more sense in space proper, I'd think.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

Unless you have an orbital elevator.

If the world ever decides to care about space travel again, don't you think this is practically inevitable? We're only a decade or so at the most away from having the needed technology, and given that cheap methods of nanotube formation are constantly being developed it won't be particularly expensive. Certainly if the US government wanted to build one they could do it for a fraction of the military budget.

 

[North King]

If the world ever decides to care about space travel again, don't you think this is practically inevitable?

From the sounds of it, Symphony was talking fairly near future.

We're only a decade or so at the most away from having the needed technology, and given that cheap methods of nanotube formation are constantly being developed it won't be particularly expensive.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. From what I've read more recently (can't recall where), nanotubes longer than a few centimeters have a tendency to break down rather quickly.

 

[Symphony D.]

If the world ever decides to care about space travel again, don't you think this is practically inevitable?

No, actually, I don't. Private enterprise won't have the balls for it unless somebody else does it first--this is abundantly clear given how little investment there is in something like commercial space travel. Government won't have the balls for it unless there isn't something "better" to spend money on and someone in a position of power who really likes the idea and can browbeat the other idiots into following their lead.

Even setting that aside, there are the issues of security and logistics. You need a rock on the other end of the elevator unless you want to tack on a few more decades to compensate for the additional strength needed to make it all-cable, and to get a rock you generally need to go out to the asteroid belt unless you're generally willing to deal with whatever happens by. That is an enormous undertaking by itself when no government can commit to even landing people on Mars. Even if it was robotic it would be expensive and time consuming.

Then you have to worry about securing the thing once it's built, because nanotubes are nice and strong but carbon likes to bond with things and a giant tower ascending into the sky which enables Western nations to ditch Earth and potentially get lots of free electricity from orbital solar arrays makes a mighty nice target for anybody who doesn't like them.

It's not just a question of building the elevator. There's a lot more to it than that. I have personally come to favor the ideal of a linked orbital ring and elevator system over just a raw elevator system anyway.

 

[North King]

It's not just a question of building the elevator. There's a lot more to it than that. I have personally come to favor the ideal of a linked orbital ring and elevator system over just a raw elevator system anyway.

Do you mean something to the effect of Clarke's ring in 3001 (assuming you've read it)?

 

[Symphony D.]

Do you mean something to the effect of Clarke's ring in 3001 (assuming you've read it)?

No, his ring was built in geostationary orbit and just served to connect the elevators.

 

[North King]

No, his ring was built in geostationary orbit and just served to connect the elevators.

Well, they also served as skyscrapers.

What were you envisioning, then?

 

[Disenfrancised]

If the world ever decides to care about space travel again, don't you think this is practically inevitable? We're only a decade or so at the most away from having the needed technology, and given that cheap methods of nanotube formation are constantly being developed it won't be particularly expensive. Certainly if the US government wanted to build one they could do it for a fraction of the military budget.

We are rather more than a decade away from a space-down elevator (seeing as that needs a working extraterrestrial infrastructure and a method of asteriod redirection, and considerably more from a bottom up one in terms of materials technology.

@Symphony D: 'come up with something different' refers to the final result as produced by multilaterial ideas, not proposals by anyone nation/p;ayer

 

[Abaddon]

*We're building castles in the sky...*

 

[Abaddon]

One thing I have always been a bit nieve to;

If passing through the atmosphere burns stuff up, and is generally really reactive etc.. How does the elevator survive being constantly within it?

 

[Luckymoose]

Another person who doesn't know what they're talking about. The water is of a limited quantity such that it only really makes sense to use it on the moon. Furthermore extracting helium-3 from regolith is exceptionally difficult and expensive unless you happen to have nanomachines that can process it out. You also need at least a second generation fusion reactor, and preferably a third generation one, for it to be of value.

The moon's main strategic function is as Earth's dock because of its tiny gravity well.

Oh, really? And you are the expert? I never said immediate extraction of Helium-3 did I? No. As for the water, it isn't for drinking, but for travel.

 

[LightFang]

One thing I have always been a bit nieve to;

If passing through the atmosphere burns stuff up, and is generally really reactive etc.. How does the elevator survive being constantly within it?

How do spaceships survive? Do the same thing.

 

[Supermath]

One thing I have always been a bit nieve to;

If passing through the atmosphere burns stuff up, and is generally really reactive etc.. How does the elevator survive being constantly within it?

The burning up of stuff occurs because the object in question is moving really fast, causing great amounts of friction that will make a rope burn Mr. Pleasure by comparison.

 

[Abaddon]

How do spaceships survive? Do the same thing.

They shoot through it in a few seconds.. I doubt the space elevator will do that

 

[Abaddon]

The burning up of stuff occurs because the object in question is moving really fast, causing great amounts of friction that will make a rope burn Mr. Pleasure by comparison.

Thankyou, so its friction.

Have I completely made it up that the atmosphere is highly reactive and would be very "corrosive" to anything sitting in it?

 

[North King]

Have I completely made it up that the atmosphere is highly reactive and would be very "corrosive" to anything sitting in it?

Are you corroding?

 

[Symphony D.]

Oh, really? And you are the expert? I never said immediate extraction of Helium-3 did I? No. As for the water, it isn't for drinking, but for travel.

Compared to most of the rest of you, yes, I am.

A few billion gallons of water, while sufficient to sustain human colonies for a considerable amount of time, is insufficient to simultaneously be used as a fuel source without rapid depletion. Furthermore, if the year is 1960, stellar fusion is a fairly recently discovered phenomena, and He-3 extraction with that level of sophistication is a minimum of 100 years, if not more, into the future.

Put another way, no politician would be thinking about it. It is therefore a non-consideration as regards a body claiming a celestial object at the time. You as a player might, but that's extreme OOC behavior akin to fighting over the Caucuses in the 1700s because you know in a century you'll be pumping oil out of Baku.

If passing through the atmosphere burns stuff up, and is generally really reactive etc.. How does the elevator survive being constantly within it?

Bullets break up when they hit water because they're being massively decelerated, and the forces tear them apart. The same is true of a spacecraft going from the vacuum of space to an atmosphere. It is decelerated and friction is generated. The elevator isn't moving through the medium, so why would it heat up?