Luna 2076 – Page 11 – The Geopolitics of Lunar Colonization

VIPER Robot to Locate Water Resources on Moon

November 1, 2019

Water is believed to reside in the permanent shadow of Shackleton Crater.

NASA has announced its intention to send a mobile robot, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s southern pole to identify the location and concentration of water ice in the region.

“The key to living on the Moon is water — the same as here on Earth,” said Daniel Andrews, project manager of the VIPER mission, reports Forbes. “Since the confirmation of lunar water-ice ten years ago, the question now is if the Moon could really contain the amount of resources we need to live off-world.”

Moon water also would make Mars missions more affordable, Mars enthusiasts contend.“Creating space fuel depots would allow spacecraft to travel much farther and allow missions and satellites to sustain operations,” says Karen Panetta, IEEE Fellow, Dean for Graduate Education, Tufts University. “Rather than transporting water into space in heavy loads on rockets, the goal is to extract it (mine it) from the moon and asteroids.” more “VIPER Robot to Locate Water Resources on Moon”

Caterpillar Eyes Lunar Market for Autonomous Vehicles

October 23, 2019

Caterpillar Inc., the manufacturer of bright yellow mining trucks, bulldozers, and graders, has pioneered self-driving, remote-controlled mining equipment on Earth. Some of that technology may find a home on the Moon, reports CNBC.

The company’s R&D autonomous-vehicle R&D efforts data back to 1985. By the 1990s, Caterpillar had two autonomous hauling trucks running at a Texas quarry. The industry wasn’t ready for autonomy at the time, but Caterpillar stuck to its strategy. Its patience paid off. Today, Zion Market Research indicates that the global mining automation market will double to more than $6 billion in 2025. Writes CNBC:

Caterpillar is leading the autonomy revolution with both its vehicles and operational software. “We now have seven customers and we’re on 11 different sites,” Johnson said, “mining oil sands, iron ore, copper and gold and soon coal.” Cat has deployed 220 of its own trucks, both brand-new autonomous vehicles — costing from $3.5 million to $5 million each — and existing ones that have been retrofitted.

“We’re also converting competitors’ trucks,” Johnson said. “Our solution needs to be interoperable. It’s a competitive decision we don’t take lightly, because we recognize there are other [autonomy] providers.”

The idea of extracting mineral resources and propelling them back to Earth is far-fetched. Likewise, the economics of manufacturing the equipment on Earth and transporting it to the Moon don’t look promising. The logistics still need to be worked out. But Caterpillar is in the game for the long haul. It waited years for a market to emerge for autonomous vehicles on Earth, and it’s willing to wait years for a market to materialize in space. In the meantime, it continues its research and sponsors NASA’s annual Robotic Mining Competition, in which more than 45 collegiate teams design and build remote-controlled mining robots to traverse a simulated Martian terrain.

Russians Identify Mechanism of Water Formation on Moon

May 24, 2019

Russian researchers have discovered a mechanism by which water forms on the Moon, reports the American Society for the Advancement of Science and summarized by the Luna Society International.

Silver hydroxide molecules released from silicon dioxide in the lunar regolith react easily with hydrogen, leading to the formation of water and silver, scientists with the Higher School of Economics and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have found.

The implication is that water and silver molecules can be formed on the Moon. In some areas, the proportion of water formed by this mechanism could exceed 6 to 10%.

“The study demonstrates that water may form due to internal, continuously functioning mechanisms. (Comets hitting the lunar surface is a rather rare phenomenon.) It turns out that the water on the Moon can be present not only in cold traps but also in the near-surface lunar soil,” explained Sergey Popel, a study author and head of the laboratory at the Space Research Institute.

Also, said Popel, the presence of water can affect the phototelectric properties of the lunar regolith and the parameters of the plasma-dust system over the Moon.

Cotton Plant Germinates on the Moon

January 19, 2019

The germinating cotton plant is barely visible in this image released by Chongqing University.

China may not have been the first nation to land a human on the Moon, but it was the first to land a plant on Earth’s satellite and prompt it to germinate. The Chang’e 4 lunar lander held a small tank containing plant seeds. And now, a Chinese scientific team has announced, a cotton seed has sprouted.

Scientists aboard the International Space Station regularly tend plants to study had microgravity effects growth. But the closest terrestrial vegetation has come to the Moon was in 1981 when Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Rosa carried hundreds of tree seeds to orbit the Moon with him. Many were planted back on Earth, becoming “Moon Trees,” reports Space.com.

The Chinese lander also contains seeds to grow potatoes and Arabidopsis, a common lab plant, but neither have sprouted so far. The Chang’e 4 lander, perched inside Von Karman Crater on the far side of the Moon, is accompanied by the Yutu 2 rover. Both robots are experiencing their first long, cold night on the Oon. Daytime and nighttime each last about two Earth weeks.

A Growing Market for Space-Based Data Services

October 29, 2018

As the cost declines of launching Earth-observing satellites into orbit, space enterprises hope to grow the market for the sale of space-based data. So far, customers have been limited mainly to government customers and sophisticated, high-paying users like oil & gas companies. The market potential could grow to $7 billion from about $3 billion, North Sky Research senior analyst Dallas Kasaboski told Axios.

Some of the companies active in this arena include:

Planet. With 150 satellites in orbit, Planet can image anywhere on Earth’s landmass at 3- to 5-meter resolution on a daily basis. “Our goal to make satellite imagery universally useful to everyone by indexing the objects in every image and developing a database of not just images, but the physical objects in those images,” said a Planet spokesperson. As a concrete example, the Planet website shows the progress of reconstruction of the Oroville Dam emergency spillway after damage from heavy winter rain.

Spire. Spire analyzes its own data for customers interested in weather systems, resource management and other applications. One application described by the corporate website is using satellite data to manage ocean-going vessels and plan better routes.

Hyergiant. By bringing all elements under one roof — design/build, license/test, launch/deploy, operate, and replenish — Hyergiant’s Galactic Systems division can provide what it calls Constellation-as-a-Service and deliver space-derived data.

Tiny Nuclear Reactors Could Provide Energy on the Moon

May 18, 2018

Artist’s rendering of a nuclear power system on the Moon. Photo credit: NASA

NSA has successfully tested a design for a small nuclear-fission reactor, the Kilopower, that could provide a reliable source of power on the Moon.

Current space missions, reports Scientific American, use fuel cells, nuclear batteries or solar power, but each source has drawbacks. A a night on the Moon lasts two weeks, and the strength of sunlight on Mars is only 40% that of earth. “When we go to the moon and eventually on to Mars, we are likely going to need large power sources not dependent on the sun, especially if we want to live off the land,” says Jim Reuter, NASA’s acting associate administrator for space technology.

Kilopower is a small, lightweight fission reactor that can provide up to 10 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power three to eight typical American houses — and enough to power a human outpost on the Moon or Mars. more “Tiny Nuclear Reactors Could Provide Energy on the Moon”

The Compelling Economics of Lunar-Built Bricks

July 19, 2017

Early settlers on the Moon will need to protect themselves against radiation, which will entails covering habitats with meters-thick layer of protective regolith. Professor Matthias Sperl, with the German Aerospace Center, imagines the necessity of transforming loose dust into sturdy bricks. Because the Moon lacks the components of mortar to bind the bricks together, they will have to be unterlockable, similar to Lego toys.

Given the economics of lifting building materials out of Earth’s gravity well, it would make far more sense fabricate the bricks on the Moon, said Sperl in an article in Horizon, the European Union research & innovation magazine, Using solar energy and 3D printing could bring down the cost tremendously.

Here’s how the economics shake out:

‘If you bring something up to the space station you may think about a cost between EUR 5 000 to EUR 10 000 to bring one kilogram of material. To such an order of magnitude you can easily add a factor of 10 if you go to the moon.

‘Imagine that you have a machine that you put on the lunar surface to build the bricks, something similar to the rovers we put on Mars. Such machines weigh about 200 kilograms, which would cost you roughly EUR 20 million. If you need to bring additional infrastructure such as shoveling devices, you can assume a cost of EUR 100-200 million.

‘Now imagine building bricks and other elements worth 10 tons of upload (material taken to space) on earth, as you will easily need a couple of thousand bricks for one building. To ship all of that to the moon, the estimated cost would be EUR 1 billion.

Of course, once you’ve paid to put machines on the Moon, they can build bricks to protect more than one habitat.

Bigelow Gets It: Geopolitics and the Moon

July 19, 2017

Robert Bigelow, a Los Angeles real estate baron turned space entrepreneur, understands the stakes involved with lunar colonization. It’s not just about exploration and scientific discovery. It’s not just about development of new power sources. It’s about geopolitical supremacy. If we don’t get a foothold on the Moon and the Chinese do, the United States is toast.

At a NASA conference today on the International Space Station, he predicted that his company’s first two space habitats would be ready for launch by 2020, reports Quartz. Bigelow expressed his hope that NASA would deploy them on the Moon.

“There’s no time to lose,” said Bigelow, CEO of Made in Space. China has lunar ambitions. If it gets there first, it will be able to impose its own rules on what is still a legal grey area. He made a similar argument in a Senate hearing earlier this year. As reported by Quartz, he said:

“China is very pre-disposed to ownership, whether its creating the islands in South China Sea, properties in massive quantities that they’ve purchased in South America or Africa, whether you open a [foreign subsidiary in China] and can only own 49% of it,” he said. “China could exercise an effort to start to lay claim to certain lunar territories. I don’t think it’s a joke, I don’t think it’s something to be cavalier about. Such an ownership consequence would have an amazing impact on the image of China vis-a-vis the United States and the rest of the world, if they should own large amounts of territory on that body, if we stood back and we were not prepared.”

more “Bigelow Gets It: Geopolitics and the Moon”

Thales Alenia Develops Space Tug Concept

June 2, 2017

A team from Thales Alenia, a Franco-Italian aerospace company, is developing the design for an electric-powered lunar space tug. The reusable vehicle would fly back and forth between Earth and the Moon, transporting cargo and passengers. It would be refueled at a low Earth orbit fuel depot and maintained by astronauts on the Moon and International Space Station. Reports NBC News.

The greatest advantage of the tug is that it would run off Hall Effect Thrusters, which use electric propulsion. In this sense, the tug would be powered much like NASA’s Dawn spacecraft and Japan’s Hayabuse 2.

The space-tug concept is described in an Acta Astronautica paper, “The Lunar Space Tug: a sustainable bridge between low Earth orbits and the Cislunar Habitat.” more “Thales Alenia Develops Space Tug Concept”

222 New Impact Craters Measured over Six Months

October 12, 2016

Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

A count of new crater formations on the Moon has turned up 33% more than predicted, researchers at Arizona State University have found.

Meteors regularly impact the Earth but they usually burn up in the atmosphere. On the Moon, which has no atmosphere, they constantly form craters and impact basins. Bombardment by small meteors could post hazards to future lunar settlements.

Emerson Speyerer and his Arizona State colleagues compared 14,000 photos taken between Oct. 25, 2012 and April 21, 2013 by the high-resolution camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), reports New Scientist. They found 222 new impact craters more than 10 meters wide, a third more than predicted. They also found 47,000 new splotches, Speyerer’s term for splatter-like changes in reflectance on the surface caused by dust and rock thrown off by the initial meteoric impact.

The largest new crater was 43 meters in diameter. more “222 New Impact Craters Measured over Six Months”