New moon base concepts

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New moon base concepts

Published in magazines

Popular Science magazine recently published a couple of articles on a potential moon base for which the cost to maintain 10 people on the moon is said to have been reduced from $100 billion to only $10 billion. NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay said that the reductions of cost were due to the planned use of recently developed technology such as self driving vehicles and waste-recycling toilets. To McKay the main advantage of colonizing the moon is the testing of technology and methods which would be similar to what would be used for a colony on Mars. McKay said that to him the moon per se is about as attractive as a spherical chunk of concrete.

Various papers concerning the moon colony were made public on the 10th of March 2016. McKay was the editor of that portion of New Space in which they were published. One team estimates that food for 10 on the moon could be provided for a year for $350 million. The waste-recycling toilet, Blue Diversion Toilet, is being developed for use on Earth by a company financed through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The possible extraction of water from lunar ice at the poles and the use of such water to produce rocket fuel by electrolysis is not a new idea. However, a group gave a figure of $40 billion worth of propellant per year that they expected they might be able to extract from the moon.

Criticism

The above base concept certainly includes preliminary robotic probes that would assess, among other things, how much difficulty accessing hydrogen on the moon would entail and how much water ice seemed to be readily available. The estimate of producing $40 billion worth of rocket propellant per year seems premature in coming before the robotic probe data is available. However, if ice is plentifully and easily available, it might still be unwise to use this resource to enable colonization of Mars. Hydrogen on the moon is rare. Once the easily accessed deposits are used up they will be gone. Hydrogen could be used to further industry on the moon in the role of supplying hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells for electricity during the lunar night. Hydrogen is essential for a Lunar Rocket-sled to Orbit (LRSTO) which would recycle the hydrogen and the LRSTO both, launching cargo and passengers to cis-lunar space. Hydrogen is used to reduce ilmenite and it is a necessary part of sulfuric and nitric acids that are to be used industrially on the moon. It might be better to use scarce lunar hydrogen in industry on the moon to benefit the whole population of Earth rather than to enable an elitist colony on Mars like the one Elon Musk envisions establishing while charging colonists $200,000 each for transportation. Elon Musk does not advertise plans to use lunar hydrogen in his transportation system to Mars, so the whole idea of exporting lunar hydrogen for rocket transportation may be unnecessary. Wait a few years and develop an eddy-current-braking to orbit (ECBTO) system to put people and cargo into cis-lunar space and the number of colonists sent to space habitats could be in the billions. This requires lunar industry to supply the materials for building the ECBTO systems in low Earth orbit and lunar orbit. Lunar materials could also help Earth with space based solar power as well as enabling the building of massive space habitats. The question is should public money enable the quick rides for astronauts or some rich people to Mars or should public money enable a millennium of prosperity by moving human trade and industry into orbit on a wave of cheaply provided lunar materials? It would require industry on the moon. It would require time, money, and hydrogen. The new moon base concepts from McKay seem to describe exporting hydrogen from the moon as a way to make money. I would rather it be described in different words. I suggest there be laws restricting the export of hydrogen from the moon so it could be called a crime. Oxygen as an export from the moon is much more sustainable. Almost every thing one sees on the moon is an oxide. So, about 44% by weight of the moon's surface is oxygen. People only need to separate the oxygen by processes like the FFC Cambridge process or ilmenite reduction to get plenty of oxygen. Oxygen would be recycled only to save the cost of making more. Hydrogen should be recycled severely because when it is gone, hydrogen will need to be imported to keep lunar industry running.

The philosophy behind McKay's new moon base concepts above seems to be that the moon is worth nothing more than a tool to rocket some astronauts to Mars and a test to see if we have learned to survive in a deadly-in-seconds atmosphere. Chris McKay speaks of terraforming Mars as if it were something easy. Just manufacture some perfluorocarbons out of the Martian atmosphere and elements found in the dirt. Then frozen CO₂ would be released enhancing the warming effect and you would need to scatter some seeds. How many tons of perfluorocarbons would be needed? How large a nuclear electric generating capacity? How many centuries before this Martian industry can be built? NASA does not say. NASA does not estimate the cost of gardening the planet of Mars. The closest they have come to giving a cost was estimating $450 billion for a program including crewed missions to the moon and Mars for exploration only. The idea, I suppose, is that once we have spent $450 billion and any cost over-runs getting people to Mars, we will be obligated to keep financing a Mars development or we will have lost our investment. In only a few millennia we could have a breathable atmosphere on Mars. I do not suggest that McKay has tried to omit important information, but the particular point I am interested in is not always included in news reports about terraforming. In The future of space colonization it is clear that the short 100 years for producing a warmer thicker but still unbreathable atmosphere on Mars is counted by starting after the industrial infrastructure to produce greenhouse gasses is built and the desired quantity of gasses is manufactured. It is not unreasonable to guess that in thirty to fifty years a remotely controlled lunar industry could have produced a hundred mile long rocket-sled track to routinely ship cargo to orbit while recycling the great majority of the hydrogen burnt as fuel. Lunar exports of oxygen, silicon, aluminum, calcium, iron, magnesium, titanium, sodium, glass, solar cells, bare and insulated wire, and sifted regolith could make industry in orbit possible. Beside these plentifully available items there are things like helium-3 and rare earth elements which are less abundant on the moon but could be exported for high prices making their recovery and use for special purposes economically practical. People only need to commit to establishing reasonably large scale industry in orbit to create the market for lunar exports that would make the cost of export low per ton. Low-cost transportation to orbit is dependent upon a large market. When shipping lunar products to lunar orbit becomes a routine part of business, its costs should be comparable to air freight, because the aircraft are reused for years and a LRSTO for launching things to orbit should be reused for years. Jet fuel is made out of petroleum pumped out of the ground. Rocket fuel could be made by recycling the LRSTO exhaust. So rocket fuel would be somewhat more expensive on the moon than jet fuel on Earth. Air freight might cost $1.50-$4.50 per kilogram. I will estimate a cost of $20.00 per kilogram, $20,000 per metric ton, to put cargo into orbit around the moon. The support for a Mars mission that a developed moon base could provide will not be available if instead of developing the moon with remotely controlled industry NASA rapes the moon removing as much hydrogen as possible to burn it as rocket fuel without the recycling possible in a rocket-sled launch. In testimony before the congress of the United States, on the 7th of September in 2000, NASA stated that costs of recurring launch ranging from $100 to $200 per kilogram would enable production of an economically operated SBSP system. Since the $20.00 per kilogram cost of launching from the moon could be made available, an SBSP system should be possible with materials available on the moon instead of the ultra light materials being considered for SBSP built from Earth launched materials. Building with lunar materials requires a time lag for the building of lunar industry, but no new scientific theories are needed. There must be considerable development of technology based on the science we already know.

Quite apart from any harm done to lunar development by sending people to the moon before they can be economically accommodated, Chris McKay seems false to his goal of establishing a human presence on Mars. Any simulation of a Mars mission that can be done on the moon can, at this stage of lunar development, be done more cheaply on Earth. The idea of astronauts romping around the moon is not obviously connected to the mission of colonizing Mars. Astronauts are generally a savvy bunch. I doubt they will see the Popular Science moon mission concept as an integral part of a Mars mission. The U. S. general public should be polled on the question of whether they want a trillion dollars spent sending people to Mars or not, because if it is done without first industrializing the moon and cis-lunar space, that is about what it will cost. Half trillion dollar Mars programs have been soundly rejected by lawmakers. With $8.5 billion per year for human space flight NASA can play with the ISS and pretend to be working on going to Mars, but no crewed vessel will ever arrive at the destination. As evidence that NASA is not serious about colonizing Mars I mention the well known Robonaut made humanoid to be able to handle tools made for people. Requiring a robot to work through the limitations of human form is likely to make it ineffective at industrial tasks. So far NASA has been successful in keeping its humanoid robots too ineffective to compete with humans in developing space. NASA is developing another humanoid robot called Valkyrie to work on Mars. Robots made for industrial tasks by private industry are not humanoid in form. Robots made to move ore like a truck at a mine look like a truck with cameras attached. Robots made to paint products on the production line do not have five fingers to hold a paint sprayer. Their arms end in paint sprayers. The best that a humanoid robot could do for industrial tasks on Mars is to do the task with more expense than standard robots because of the unnecessary humanoid form. A robotic front end loader on Mars should look like a front end loader on Earth with some changes. There would be no crew cab. Remote controls would link the operator to the machine. That is cheaper than building a separate life support system in the crew cab for a front end loader and every other construction or mining machine used on Mars. Developing a humanoid robots for industrial tasks is a waste of money which concerns NASA very little. NASA wants to handle more money and is indifferent to accomplishing anything or not. Worse than just wasting money, if a NASA sponsored robot were to be the only agent suited to a certain job and it needed to be replaced, industry on Mars might be insufficiently developed to do the complex tasks and be reduced to begging Earth to send a replacement. Does NASA get its ideas for projects from Hollywood screenwriters and politicians? That would explain the seemingly perverse attitude that since there is commercial potential for developing Earth's moon such a project is disqualified for NASA while the lack of commercial potential in developing Mars puts Mars development projects right in NASA's line.

With a strategy of industrializing the moon first and using that industry to colonize Mars in an economically possible way, it is likely to take forty or fifty years before lunar industry is up to making the massive sort of vessel that could hold a crew of a thousand and a recycling life support system in a fully radiation shielded centrifuge. It is an inconveniently long time to continue a program before a desired result, but there are desirable goals along the way that the program would achieve. First there would be the development of ground truth in making worthwhile measurement of resources on the lunar surface and the development of robots that could last long enough in a lunar environment to make exploitation possible. Second there would be development of a non-rocket launching system or a fuel-recycling rocket sled launching system (an LRSTO) to put cargo into space from the moon, making possible space based industry for building of space based telescopes and other salable space based commodities. Third the cargo launching system would be upgraded for launching people at which time life support facilities would also be built so people could work indoors on the moon at the sophisticated tasks that people do better in person than by remote control. Fourth lunar materials will be used to build a space based solar power system that will free humanity from excessive fossil fuel use. Fifth space habitats will be built from lunar materials and one or more of them used as a colony ship to send to Mars. So it will be a long wait for a Mars colony, but the space program will be generating enough money to pay for it by the time that it is built.

Why would NASA, as represented by its employee, Chris McKay, avoid economically sound ideas of lunar development and promote a program which would do considerable harm to the prospects for industrial development on the moon? Not being privy to the unpublished policy discussions at NASA, I can repeat unofficial excuses I have read, and then get to some real difficulties. Objections, as presented by a peculiarly inept and accommodating opponent to lunar industrialization, follow: First, the excuse that NASA only does nonprofit missions such as robot probes to celestial bodies for scientific data and astronaut missions to celestial bodies to demonstrate the prowess of the USA. Profit-making use of space is left to private industry.

NACA produced a great deal of economically useful research such as designs for air intakes, cowlings, airfoils, and superchargers. NASA continues to do research that helps the aviation industry. There is no reason that they could not do work that would help private industry in space. NASA just needs to imitate NACA. NACA's policies led to great advances in aviation. NASA's human space flight operations have been like a two trick pony. It sent people to walk on the moon then followed with space stations. When will NASA take it's lessons learned and do something more advanced? The fact that much of NASA's human space flight operations are for benefit of NASA employees, contractors, the congressional districts in which NASA spends money, and NASA's earnest attempt to be an immortal bureaucracy is a statement of the problem. It is not a justification for continuing to do the same old thing until the federal government goes broke.

Second, the excuses that developing industry on the moon would require actual industrial activity that should be left strictly to private corporations and that industrializing the moon would not produce benefits for decades.

The government authorized actual industrial activity in digging the Panama Canal. In 1903 the USA acquired rights to build a canal from Panama. It took until 1914 for the first ship to cross the isthmus by canal. The fees for use of the canal were never intended to repay the USA the capital cost of the canal. Fees just paid operational expenses. The benefit to the USA came from increased passenger and cargo traffic by ship connecting the American Atlantic coast and Pacific coast with each other and with foreign ports from which the canal shortened the voyage. On the moon, the lack of any return on investment for probably more than thirty years makes the construction of industrial infrastructure and particularly construction of an LRSTO very difficult for private industry to justify. The U. S. could do it if there were a will to do so. Other countries would likely be willing to join the project if the U. S. made a serious start. The USA needs to use NASA in the same way as the USA built the Panama Canal with government money. Consider a Lunar Rocket-sled to Orbit to be a public works project.

Third is a real difficulty. Industry on the moon has inherent military applications. The nations of the Peoples' Republic of China, and Russia are not likely to just let the U. S. set up bases on the moon that are indistinguishable from military bases. We have already signed treaties promising that we would not use the moon for military purposes but some people would settle for nothing less than verification.

The U. S. should invite other nations to robotically observe what we would openly do in developing lunar industry in such a way that it is unmistakably nonmilitary. We should sell them electricity for their robots and allow them to share robot shelters at night. We should require similar rights of observation of any Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or European bases. It would be best if we could cooperate on industry to the extent that we have shared ownership of some industrial facilities with other nations. International law allows nations to share the use of the oceans of Earth for transportation. We share the use of the radio broadcast spectrum. We follow treaty obligations in the way we share the ability to place satellites into orbit. For industry on the moon and low-cost launching to lunar orbit we should be able to work out something. ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) demonstrates some international cooperation.

Fourth, it is boiling hot during the day on the moon.

The extreme heat on the moon exists only in the sunlight. If an aluminum foil awning is stretched from east to west over a strip of regolith in the lunar equatorial region, that area will be permanently in shade as long as the awning lasts. A short wall on the north and south borders of the strip could prevent infrared heat transport to the strip from the surrounding area. It would be possible to mess this up by incompetence, but it is actually possible to produce very cold areas in the daytime lunar equatorial region by properly managing sunlight. The reason a 40 degree below zero area can exist on the moon near boiling hot dirt during the day is that there is no heat transfer by wind (or any sort of convection) from one spot to another on the moon. If radiant heat transfer and conductive heat transfer are largely blocked, as they can be on the moon, hot and cold areas can coexist peacefully quite near each other.

Fifth, it costs too much.

The cost seems commensurate with the benefits. It is impossible to give a very precise estimate of cost in the absence of sufficiently detailed ground truth for the moon and the absence of detailed plans to fit that ground truth. A guess of a $1 trillion seems reasonable for industrializing the moon up to the point of having an operating LRSTO. Then $2 billion each for a couple hundred space based solar power (SBSP) satellites, beginning with one every year or two and ramping up to a few every year. These satellites in geosynchronous orbit would each collect 12 Gigawatts of sunlight and deliver power by microwave to a rectenna on Earth. The electric distribution grid would finally receive 2 Gigawatts day & night, rain & shine, summer & winter, seven days a week. Cows could graze in the sunlight that passes through the rectenna, or wheat could be watered by the rain that falls through the rectenna. The rectenna on Earth stops microwaves like the door of a microwave oven stops microwaves, leaving people on the outside of the microwave oven safe from the heat inside the oven. The difference with the rectenna in the SBSP scheme is that the intensity of the microwave beam is much lower and the beam is not merely reflected. It is converted into electrical power. The problem would be marketing that electricity for the biggest expansion of wealth that the human race has ever seen. Criminals trying to get some of that wealth by their preferred means of selling opiates would still be a problem, but if the wealth gets spread over all the Earth, we should eliminate the problem of people in poor countries seeing no means but crime to gain wealth. The costs could be better known after sending robotic probes to the lunar surface and developing specific plans giving some detail in what would need to be done to build a rocket-sled to orbit. The USA should at least afford looking into the task to see what it would cost. If demand for transportation from the moon remains strong, further capital investment could further reduce costs per ton. An ECBTO system or mass driver launching two-and-a-half ton space ships might be helpful in this regard. Once we are building SBSP the effort to conserve electrical power will be replaced by encouragement to use more electrical power in whatever way people can profit by it. Cleaning up pollution sites, desalinating sea water and producing propane from coal are all possibilities.

Sixth, we do not need it we have ITER.

The latest cost estimate for ITER that I have found was $20 billion for operation in 2020. This is less than the trillion needed for space based solar power by way of lunar development. However, ITER is only an experimental reactor. We are not assured that the commercial version will actually work. When Soviet physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov invented tokamaks in the 1950s, commercial fusion power was thought to be just a decade or two away. It has been two or three decades away ever since. If a commercial fusion reactor does produce electricity, it is likely to be more expensive per reactor than ITER and more expensive to operate than space based solar power. The fusion power community should be put on notice that they should look sharp, because there is a competing project that will not only make them unnecessary but lead to massive emigration from the planet Earth besides. One deficiency in which ITER is not looking so sharp is breeding tritium. The deuterium tritium reaction uses up one tritium atom for every neutron produced. Not every neutron will enter into a tritium producing reaction with lithium. Neutrons will be absorbed by structural materials producing no tritium. Some neutrons will be thermalized before being absorbed by lithium 7, in which case they will produce two alpha particles and a beta particle but no tritium. A thermal neutron can react with lithium 6 to produce one tritium atom. A fast neutron can react with lithium 7 to produce one tritium atom and one thermal neutron. The task for fusion reactor builders is to get enough fast neutrons to react with lithium 7 and the resultant thermal neutron reacting with lithium 6 producing two net tritium atoms to make up for lost neutrons and so produce as much tritium as is used up. This is one of those things that still needs to be demonstrated but seems unlikely.

Seventh, the plan for industrializing the moon makes use of robots and would put astronauts out of work.

This is a political problem. There is work for people to do on the moon once a LRSTO system is available to transport them home again without wasting tons of hydrogen burning it as rocket fuel. It is the work in space suits that can be dispensed with. The desire to preserve the self esteem of a politically powerful group should not prevent economic progress for the human race. I understand that some people want to fearlessly risk their lives going where no one has gone before and conquering space. However, for the moon this is not needed. Astronauts on the moon assisting with the initial industrial set up would be like a ball and chain as a requirement on a 50 meter race. It will take some years to build the infrastructure necessary for people to do useful work on the moon. Some sort of recycling toilet will be necessary, perhaps the Blue Diversion Toilet mentioned above. Recycling the water people use on the moon will be necessary, and radiation shielded pressure vessels in which to live. Until then the best thing that astronauts can do for establishing a human colony on the moon is to stay home and work on the engineering problems or work controlling the machines on the moon remotely. All profit making activities in space have been exclusively robotic. All astronaut involved activities in space have consumed taxpayers money. To make that quantitative, say about $7.5 million per astronaut per day on the ISS. Wherever astronauts have been involved, health and safety of the astronauts was job one. The second consideration was giving the astronauts something to occupy their time. If any time and money were left in the program, actually accomplishing something for the taxpayer could be considered. In circumstances such as found on the moon where survival is difficult in extreme and it is difficult for a human being to do anything useful, those are burdens that are hard to take. I am not a glad-hander that will lie to the astronauts telling them how wonderful they are. Astronauts, stay home! To make the future different the human spaceflight program should be cancled for a couple of decades. If you want some authoritative support for my opinion, consider that a research group at MIT admitted as fact that remotely controlled operations will always be cheaper than people working in person at a site like the moon. I contend that industrializing the moon will cause a condition in which people will be able to do economic work on the moon. The MIT group also suggested that doing the economically foolish stunt of having people do work in person on the moon as it is now would be valuable for the national prestige it would win. That research group also admitted that most Americans did not know the name of a current member of the astronaut corps. That does not seem to indicate that increased pride accrues in vast quantities from the ISS program. Why should we worry about the opinions of people who are impressed by such a waste of money. It is not only the money that will be lost. Forcing lunar industrialization to cary the burden of astronauts from the start seems likely to cause complete failure to ever arrive at any profit making condition. The very future of humanity is at stake. Do not let silly notions of national prestige interfere with doing the best that we can to survive. Politicians did not ask the MIT research group if human space-flight should continue, only what would be the best goal for human space-flight. Politicians did not ask me at all so I can say that robots working a couple decades in preparing infrastructure for human industry on the moon are necessary to achieve any worth while goal with people located on the moon working directly on that goal. The eight-and-a-half billion dollars a year spent on the current human space-flight program is not only useless, it is counter-productive. This expenditure does not fulfill the MIT group's goal of increasing national pride. It is counter-productive because it perpetuates the idea that any profit-making activity involving people in space is impossible while adding to the national debt. Those in favor of using astronaut manual labor to build a base on the moon say of the robot competition that it must be proven that robots can accomplish building industry on the moon before we try anything so strange. That is bureaucratic inertia talking. Absolutely nothing new pleases a bureaucrat. The expense and inefficiency of direct human labor in outer space has already been proven. Robots do not need great life support facilities and can work in a space suit of simple design for days on end without using up expendables. They can be designed for the task. Men were sent to the moon before robots became capable of repairing nuclear reactors, so those in charge of the Apollo program did not have very capable robots to consider as an option. Progress has been made. We do not need to conform space development programs to the dreams of politicians and Hollywood screen writers. It is time to build something worth having on the moon with the most efficient methods available. That includes doing the work with robots instead of men in space suits.

How close has NASA come to accepting the truth that men in space suits are not efficient agents for accomplishing any industrial task? They have admitted that the construction of a first moon base might possibly begin with robot labor.

Eighth, the sale of rocket fuel will earn money, that is a benefit.

To the people selling the rocket fuel that is a benefit. To the U. S. taxpayer who buys the fuel or pays the contractor who buys the fuel it is an expense. None of the uses of rocket fuel that McKay suggests have any net benefit to the people of Earth. The same spend, spend, spend ideas with no suggested economic benefit, the same things McKay is reported saying in Popular Science, are also found on MarketWatch. The justification is that the cost is only $10 billion to set-up a manned base. I have heard of under-estimating the cost of a program to sell it to the government, but even $10 billion is too much if there is no eventual benefit to planet Earth. People could conceivably redesign geostationary satellites for station keeping rockets to use lunar hydrogen and oxygen or they might be redesigned to use oxygen in an electro-thermal thruster. However this small benefit will not justify the expense of a manned base on the moon and a rocket transfer system to lift the fuel from the moon and distribute it to Earth orbiting satellites. NASA's main task has been spending government money and the contractors it hires help in this task. Building industrial infrastructure on the moon and using it to build space based power stations would require reforming NASA. Difficult but conceivable.

Ninth, we have been educating children and encouraging them to think of becoming astronauts. It is their dream. We need a human spaceflight program. It honors astronauts who have died for human spaceflight.

Children have dreamt of going to the moon or Mars since before people could fly airplanes. They should learn that personally dressing in a space suit and riding a rocket to orbit does not, in the current technological circumstances, help mankind establish colonies off of the Earth. The lessons learned by the human spaceflight program are that living in weightlessness is unhealthy and there is no foreseeable benefit that can be achieved through working in a space station limited to the current space station technology. It does not honor those who have died in the process of learning lessons to ignore the lessons so learned.

Tenth, there has been increased length of telomeres in astronauts who have been in orbit. Perhaps studying this in the space station will lead to increasing the human life span.

Those about to fall down a slope will grasp at straws. There might be something learned about increased telomere length in weightlessness at sometime in the future but the slim chance of increasing human lifespan does not justify $8.5 billion per year spent on a human spaceflight program. This research can wait until human occupied space stations become cheaper with industrialized cis-lunar space.

Eleventh, Mars just has more and better resources for a colony than the moon has. If the moon can provide some rocket fuel, that is all it is good for. We should use the rocket fuel and colonize Mars.

This whole article has been about what the moon is good for besides rocket fuel. In particular it is good for establishing a colony on Mars. Some Mars colony enthusiasts propose only a way for people to get to Mars and return, completely ignoring the difficulty of establishing the industry necessary for a colony on Mars. Some seem to think that the establishment of a colony is so easy it is beneath their dignity to consider the details. If they had transportation to Mars, that would be soon enough to think about how to build a colony. So they concentrate on getting the rocket fuel in orbit as cheaply as possible. However, Mars is deadly-in-seconds to someone outside without a space suit and a space suit is very difficult to do any work in. The Apollo astronauts did little work while on the moon simply because a space suit is hard to work in. When an astronaut fell down, it was difficult to stand up again. An auger was used to try to sample the moon a ways below the surface. The auger got stuck. Remote controlled equipment will be needed for industrializing Mars as much as it will be needed on the moon. The difference is that people will need to be either on Mars or in orbit about Mars to operate remote controlled equipment there. To show how slow it is to operate remote controlled equipment on Mars from Earth, consider that Mars rover, Opportunity, covered about 44 kilometers in 13 years. That works out to an average speed of 39 centimeters per hour, 15 inches per hour. That includes considerable standing still while looking at or scraping stuff and making side trips rather than a straight path, but it does give some idea of the slowness of remote control on Mars. Equipment for industrializing Mars includes: earth moving equipment; liquids handling equipment; equipment to use plastic or metal sheets to build pressurized vessels for factories and habitation; mining equipment; equipment to sort the paydirt from the tailings; pressurized factories to take in the dirty ice through an air lock, melt it, and put out the tailings at another air lock; pressurized factories to produce iron and shape it into stock. There are many items of equipment that I could name. An industrialized moon could make equipment and launch it into lunar orbit while recycling the hydrogen. An industrialized moon could provide material to build a shielded livable space habitat as a space ship for traveling to Mars with a massive load of equipment. People have said such a large space ship is not needed, but they must under estimate the task of colonization by extremes. If the real goal is colonizing Mars an industrialized moon can help it succeed. Just claiming that colonizing Mars is easy will not get the job done.

The November 2016 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, MARS supplement to their magazine claimed that because sunlight on the surface of Mars was interrupted at times by things like night and near global dust storms, a different source of power such as nuclear power would be needed to provide 24/7 power no matter what the weather. Solar power can still work on Mars. An industrialized moon that can provide SBSP for Earth and space habitats as colonizing space ships could also provide an SBSP for Mars. It would use a large mirror to concentrate the sunlight to Earth normal strength. The height above the surface of Mars at the position of the rectenna would be less than the corresponding distance for SBSP on Earth, so there would be even less beam spread than on Earth.

Twelfth, there is a paper in the group in New Space on economic use of the moon. It describes a self-replicating industry that produces a mass driver and the components of space-based solar power stations at Earth synchronous orbit.

Yes, and Chris McKay does not talk about this paper in interviews. Matt Williams in a Universe Today article wrote about this paper that claims a self-replicating factory on the moon could build solar power satellites from lunar material and launch them to geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) with a mass driver. The paper states that if the system that self replicates and produces the mass driver and space solar power components is produced, great benefits would result. The paper contains specifications not of how to build the self replicating system (SRS) but of what capabilities an SRS would need to work as the author envisions it. It is not a bad paper. There are helpful bits of information in it but it is not a proposal for a near term project on the moon. It is more like the advance in technology that might make the project I propose obsolete if it is perfected. I will mention one thing the author missed. Components launched from the moon to Earth synchronous orbit do not need massive engines on the construction base to which they are sent to maintain orbital momentum. The launches can be a mix of direct launch to GEO from the moon, which would need to loose momentum to circularize, and to GEO from the moon by way of atmospheric braking at Earth. From perigee, braking at Earth's atmosphere, the apogee should be at GEO and more momentum would be needed to circularize. If the unspecified technology of the cone-shaped catcher catches the right mix of arrivals from braking at Earth's atmosphere and from direct to GEO launch, then the needed transfers of momentum to circularize orbit at GEO will cancel each other out. Find the paper here. The author keeps the idea simple by specifying capabilities in simple general terms. He presents a method of recurring procedures as mathematical evidence that the SRS is possible to build. He fails to say how a harvester will tell the difference between a rock and a manufactured component without human direction. I am sure that this is possible but there would many details each requiring attention by a programmer and experience in doing the different necessary tasks in the lunar environment.

The length of a mass driver track or LRSTO track depends upon the mission delta V and the limit of acceleration to which cargo and/or passengers will be subjected. While it was not explicitly stated in the SRS paper, either sort of track would need thermal control or sufficient thermal expansion joints to operate reliably. The LRSTO would have an awning stretched out to shade that portion of the track outside of the pressure vessel. A set of pillars on one side would hold the awning. The second stage carrying cargo or passengers would be discharged on the opposite side. Thermostatically controlled electric heaters would maintain the track at a uniform low temperature to maintain the highly precise position of the track.

As for a catcher at geosynchronous Earth orbit, the first transfers to GEO would need to be done with a sort of space tug, perhaps a VASIMR built to use oxygen as reaction mass. Then, dispensing with the cone-shaped catcher, a mass driver could be built at GEO to accelerate a catcher car along a track to match velocity with incoming cargo. The catcher would use a crane-like arm to deploy a loop to snag a hook on the incoming cargo ship and decelerate with eddy-current braking. The incoming cargo ship for its part would need to match the position of its incoming orbit to the track of the catcher car within the range that the catcher can reach. This would require some careful orbital maneuvering from a considerable distance.

The abstract of the SRS paper states that "only the initial R&D costs would be of any consequence", of course those R&D costs could be considerable since learning how to build SBSP components on the moon by SRS includes learning how to build them on the moon by conventional means. In other words, after SBSP systems have been built by conventional remote controlled factories on the moon, assembled at GEO, and started selling power on Earth; people might learn how to do the same thing with SRS.

Thirteenth, the boards of power companies could see the space-based solar power as possibly lowering the rate paid for kilowatt-hours and decide to politically sabotage the competition.

Lets hope they are better than that. After all they are likely to be retired before the first SBSP satellite comes on line. They should follow the progress of lunar industrialization and after it seems safe enough based on all considerations, including the political, they should buy into SBSP and be part of the future.

Fourteenth, if it takes more than 30 years it won't happen because the U. S. dollar will collapse before then.

The long development time is a definite problem but fusion power has been soaking up government funds for more than fifty years. Space-based solar power by way of lunar industrialization is a more worthy competitor. Let us hope it succeeds. Even without any spending for space development the U. S. economy is headed for collapse in considerably less than thirty years. To prepare for investing in space to secure the economic future of mankind, the U. S. must be prepared to invest over the long term (thirty years is a long term). First it must balance its federal budget and make some small annual payments in reducing the federal debt. This will likely cause some short term contraction of the U. S. economy but if people are sold on the need for investment they could take pride in what is being done and bear difficulty, inconvenience, or hardship. There is potential for the U. S. economy to grow and the expansion of industry in cis-lunar space allows great growth once the return on investment kicks in. As an alternative other nations can industrialize the moon.

Fifteenth, a repair robot has not been achieved in ANY industry on Earth, so robotic industry on the moon without humans to do repair work is impossible.

This is simply a false statement. Usually robots are not used for repair on Earth because equipment needing repair can be moved to a handy repair facility where humans work easily. However in the nuclear industry there has been need for repair where people could not easily go because of radiation. In nuclear power plants repair robots have been capable of bolting and welding activities. This can be done on Earth where there is need for repair where people cannot easily be supported. Whatever needs to be done as a repair on the moon could be done with robots also because of the multimillion dollar per day cost of supporting a repairman on the moon with supplies directly from Earth. When there is sufficient industrial development, we know how to produce the recycling life support systems which will make the support of some people on the moon economical. The objection of robots supposedly not being able to handle repair is sometimes limited to the repair of robots. The repair of robots is not something different in kind from repairing nuclear reactors. There are simply more and smaller repair activities packed into a smaller space. Certainly it would be easier for a human to do repairs by hand on the spot if being on the spot could be easily arranged. To avoid ten million dollars a day for a repairman, many inconveniences can be accepted.

Sixteenth, space based solar power stations would be a constellation of bright new stars that would spoil the night sky for professional and amateur astronomy.

This could be avoided by construction methods intended to avoid brightening the night sky. A fifty mile power cable could separate the solar power collection section from the microwave generating section of the space based solar power station which would hang that much closer to Earth. The microwave generating section could be shaded by disk of aluminum (or other metal) foil blackened on the side facing the microwave generating section. The reflected sunlight would be directed away from Earth. At a position half way from the solar power collection section to the microwave generating section a foil disk could reflect the view of empty space and stars toward Earth blocking the view of the solar power collection section. By these methods interference with Earth based astronomy could be minimized. The industrial capabilities on the moon would be a great boon to space based astronomy with the construction of professional quality instruments advancing the state of the art in astronomy before the space based solar power stations are even constructed. Thousands of cheaper space-based telescopes would become available for students and for rental by serious amateurs. We should go with the future. Things can be better if we make them that way.

Seventeenth, we need to defend Earth against asteroids that are sure to hit instead of wasting money for industry on the moon.

I am glad that you brought up the point. Space based telescopes will be produced by cis-lunar industry fed by lunar resources. Those telescopes will be able to take up position in the most advantageous locations, such as (perhaps) at 0.72 au in the plane of the ecliptic. A few telescopes spaced around that orbit could find asteroids that mostly appear in the daytime sky as seen from Earth and therefore often go unobserved. If sending a rocket to an asteroid to deflect it from collision with Earth would help, cis-lunar industry could provide such a rocket. Whatever the strategy, cis-lunar industry would provide more robust options for deflecting incoming asteroids than industry located on Earth.

Eighteenth, machines on the moon to build things will contribute to the subjugation of humanity by machines.

The Terminator movies were meant to scare children for their amusement. Let us consider real dangers from AI. Dimi Apostolopoulos of Carnegie Mellon worked on robots for NASA in the 1990s. When NASA cut budgets for robotics he took up a position building robots for the U.S. Marine Corps for the war in Iraq. He designed a reconnaissance robot but his team added weapons because the Marines wanted fighting robots. The fighting robots were never deployed because of problems with distinguishing friend from foe, recognizing an enemy's attempt to surrender, and identifying noncombatants. Clearly there are some dangers with artificial intelligence but the military uses are likely to be under a human chain of command. Military artificial intelligence is likely to be no more dangerous than land mines and bombing of enemy resources. Stopping lunar industrialization will only reduce the likelihood of people being able to flee from war into space. It will not prevent military use of AI. Nick Bostrom claims that some level of artificial intelligence could be dangerous to the human race. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have also suggested dangers in artificial intelligence. The threat that Hawking, Musk, and Gates have warned of seems more to do with giving a computer program control over the purchase of supplies, hiring employees, acquiring buildings, producing products, and selling them. First of all, current AI does not have sufficient knowledge of what supplies, employees, buildings, and products are to deal with them independently according to some rules to maximize profits. AI merely assists executives in mining data and seeing relevant economic data displayed in an orderly fashion for making decisions. There will be some warning before AI ends up telling all of us where to work and when to die. In any case, stopping lunar industrialization will not stop the development of AI. Remote controlled lunar industrialization will be under the control of operators on the Earth. We do not know how to make the machines on the moon independent of human control at this time. There is no more danger of AI getting the upper hand on the moon than on Earth. The legal status of AI agents is crystal clear. They are property, not persons. If an AI agent causes harm, it is the manufacturer, the programmer, and the purchaser who are held liable. I have seen no evidence of an AI agent filing a petition to be recognized as a legal person or having any desire to do so.

Mike Wall, Senior Writer for Space.com wrote about the relationship humans would have with robots at a suggested future lunar base, calling it "cooperative". However a human being usually does not cooperate with a robot any more than one would cooperate with a screw. People use screws and people use robots. One might call a screw uncooperative if it drifts as one tries to drive it into a piece of wood, tapping into the wood at a spot slightly removed from the desired location. The screw is just being a screw. It would help more to drill a lead hole than to call a screw uncooperative. If two people would compete in digging trenches on the moon, one with a robotic excavator and the other wearing a space suit and using a shovel, it would be easy to see that the space suit is not the right tool for the job. This competition could be simulated on earth with the person using a space suit having it inflated to 1.3 atmospheres pressure. That extra third of an atmosphere would cause the space suit to puff out to a particular inflated shape like a balloon, just as happens with space suits on the moon. The requirement to move the suit out of this shape to do useful work makes working in a space suit very difficult. The outdoor environment on the moon is lethal in seconds. That is the reason for using remotely controlled machines to do work on the moon rather than walking out on the surface of the moon. Artists love to draw astronauts in space suits walking happily all over a moon base but it is a deceptive image. There is nothing useful to be done in a space suit on the moon. People on the moon should be in a vehicle or in a building. A space suit is the smallest, most limiting, and worst vehicle a person could use to move through a vacuum.

Writers and illustrators should try to give an accurate picture of what a future moon base will be like instead of giving descriptions suitable for science fiction. I believe people cooperating with robots and people walking all over the moon in space suits are misleading descriptions. A moon base will not look like that unless it is designed by Hollywood screen writers and technologically ignorant politicians. A space suit is limiting not only because it restricts the motions of arms and legs, it also prevents a wearer from bending at the waist. A man said something like he could do in twenty minutes every thing a Mars rover did in 18 months. I would like to see him wearing a space suit with actual one third atmosphere pressure difference between inside and outside and try to do field geology in an Earth based simulation. I would like to be there laughing at him, not because I bear ill will for anyone but because I think it would do him some good to help him learn the sort of limitations that people on Mars would face. I am not opposed to people on Mars, but when they are there they will do outdoor work by remote control. People available on Mars to do remote control will speed up the tasks that robots do there immensely. There will be no more waiting an hour between one command and the next.

There is a hard suit made that is a possible substitute for the current space suit. The hard suit does not require effort by the wearer to maintain any particular shape, but this suit has not yet been fully developed for moon use. It requires a special method to escape from a number of lock positions for which efforts of moving limbs will not change the shape of one or another joint.

A space suit was reported as costing $2 million (two million dollars) in 1994. That is plenty expensive, but the big reason for not having space suits in a colony on the moon or on Mars is that these troublesome devices would require a completely different technology from other things used so they could be built locally rather than imported from Earth. A colony cannot get along without outdoor robots but it can get along without space suits.

A robot that one could cooperate with would be a self driving car on a city street, sharing the street according to traffic rules. If the way the robot car drives is not satisfactory, one takes up the issue with the owner and the programmer of the robot. So, let us have no more fears of robots subjugating people.

Nineteenth, if the ISS is crashed into the pacific we will lose all the billions of dollars that were spent on it.

Those billions are already lost. There is no way to recover them. The ISS will never make a profit. Spending more on it by operating it longer will only increase the loss. There is some possible scrap value in the solar cells and wiring attached to the ISS. The possible value depends upon some plan for a remotely controlled device in orbit that can contribute to actual profit-making activity being able to make use of salvaged solar panels from the ISS. One might say, "Well, the ISS was never intended to make a profit." However the promoters of the ISS at first claimed that experiments done there would show how profit could be made in space industries. They were just wrong and keeping the ISS will still fail to recover any benefit commensurate with what is spent on it. The way to get reasonable return on space development is to leave those expensive nuisances called astronauts on Earth and send robots where robots belong to eventually produce life supporting infrastructure on the moon so humans can follow. Basic industrial infrastructure should come first. Life support is easier to build when there is some local industrial infrastructure. When people finally do return to the moon, they should be called passengers, not astronauts.

Twentieth, isn't this SBSP idea the same thing that people keep hyping as a high tech money-maker launching ultra light-weight carbon nanotube stuff into orbit to harvest free sunlight but with the profits always removed to sometime after the investors money is taken.

There was never a profit-making industrial idea that was so good that con artists could not alter it to make it sound even better in promising impossible results to investors. Now, I would not want to claim that any specific company deliberately defrauded investors, took their money, paid company officers and high-priced engineers until they could not get a bank loan. Then the officers and engineers kept their wages claimed that they had done their honest best and ceased operations. I would not want to be sued for libel. The project I am suggesting requires considerable development but the basic science is known. There is no requirement for carbon nanotubes. The federal government that I suggest should provide financing has engineers who can recognize technical impossibilities and I would not be receiving money as this project is developed in any case.

Twenty-first, SBSP will ruin all of our investments in oil wells and coal mines.

Oil wells and coal mines will still be needed. Plants keep soaking up carbon dioxide. People have just been dumping more carbon dioxide into the air than plants can handle. Some oil and coal burning will still be needed to maintain the carbon dioxide level at 0.04%, 0.036% or whatever level people decide is best. We might need to incinerate leaves and old paper to recycle enough carbon into carbon dioxide in the air to keep plants happy with the high carbon dioxide level which plants react to as a fertilizer. SBSP will replace fossil fuel as a basic source of electricity, but not as a means of getting necessary carbon dioxide into the air. When electricity becomes cheap enough we might use an energy subsidized process to clean up old land-fills. Mercury, lead and cadmium could all be recovered from dumps and stored as useful commodities. Carbon dioxide could be dumped into the air as needed or stored as carbon while releasing the oxygen. Abundant energy would make cleaning up the planet easier. Don't think that increased carbon dioxide in the air has been all bad. The Earth has been getting greener. Twenty-five to fifty percent of land which is covered by vegatation has gotten greener in the last 35 years. Benefits to plants have occured at the same time as detrimental changes in climate. People might be able to live with a carbon dioxide level as high as 0.05% (five hundredths of a percent). We do not know what harmful effects that level of CO₂ will cause because we have not done that experiment yet. We are still working on it. The only reason that carbon dioxide concentrations dropped to less than 300 parts per million (0.03%) in the Oligocene is that green plants were scraping the bottom of the barrel getting every last bit of CO₂ they could while dealing with CO₂ starvation. There are two kinds of people who claim that human emissions of CO₂ need to drop to zero to reduce the atmospheric level of CO₂ to less than 400 parts per million. Those kinds are the ignorant and the untruthful.

Twenty-second, there is an area of technical development that has not demonstrated the capability needed for launching to orbit from the moon with a rocket sled. While a rocket sled has gone 2868 meters per second which is in excess of lunar escape velocity, the fastest a maglev rocket sled has gone is only 283 meters per second. It is not known when a sliding support system to hold the sled at a fixed distance from the rails will be developed that is suitable for use on the moon and can perform a speeds over 1600 meters per second as would be needed for an economic launch system. It is ill-advised to enter into a program spending billions on a robotic base that is dependent on a maglev rocket-sled launching system when maglev rocket-sleds have only demonstrated only about 18% of the minimum required velocity.

The lack of a demonstration that maglev technology can be used with rocket-sled speeds in excess of 1600 meters per second is a serious lack with respect to using such technology in a plan for a profitable moon base. Rocket-sled tests have shown that a rocket sled can achieve a speed of 2868 meters per second. Thus we know that rails can be made straight and smooth enough for rocket-sleds supported by those rails to move at 2868 meters per second without being shaken apart by vibrations caused by variations from straightness and smoothness in the rails. That a maglev rocket-sled only achieved 283 meters per second indicates that some other factor is at work. The rails of the Holloman high speed test track (HHSTT) that were used with the Mach 8.5 record setting run are continuously welded heavy-duty crane rails. Their straightness, smoothness and strength are likely adequate for Mach 8 rocket-sled tests but maglev technology also depends upon the magnetic property of the rails at some depth past the surface of the rails. The magnetic properties of each rail length are not necessarily homogenous from end to end and welding to connect one rail to the next could possibly affect the magnetic properties of the rail at the position of the weld. The 846th Test Squadron quite possibly used different rails to test their maglev sled. I do not know the purposes of the tests at the HHSTT but to test for the suitability of maglev rocket-sled technology for use on the moon it would be better to have a twenty mile long vacuum chamber in which to build the track so that tests could be conducted without the interference of aerodynamic forces on the sled as would be the case on the moon and rails in which the magnetic character is homogenous from end to end. So there should be no welds in the magnetic portion of the rails interacting with the maglev support system. This could perhaps be achieved by hammering the magnetically active portion of rails together out of iron wires each wrapped 169 times around the 10 foot average diameter spool on which it is transported. Constructing things in a vacuum is a more natural way to do things on the moon, but the difficulty of building in a vacuum chamber on Earth can be justified if it is necessary to demonstrate a technology that is to be used for industry on the moon that will be critical to the future of humanity. There may be a cheaper way of demonstrating the technology than what I suggest, but as yet there is no demonstration that the desired technology is either inherently adequate or inadequate. Foregoing welds or using a track inside a vacuum chamber are not the essential things for demonstrating maglev technology for the moon. What is essential is sufficient magnetic homogeneity in the rails and small enough interference from aerodynamic forces for the maglev system to work, and an ability to extrapolate with confidence that a technical solution exists for achieving 1600 meters per second rocket-sled velocity on the moon. The support holding the record setting Mach 8.5 sled over the tracks was not maglev technology. Perhaps something like the slippers on the record setting sled would be suitable on the moon. Maglev technology may have some inherent sensitivity to vibration.

If people are serious about industrializing the moon and want to test maglev rocket-sled technology as an optional means of transporting products from the moon to cis-lunar space, people should specify a test track that will model lunar conditions. A twenty mile long vacuum chamber in which the magnetically active portions of the rails are built by hammering together twenty mile long wires transported on spools to the site of construction of the rails would be likely suitable conditions. This would avoid possible magnetic inhomogeneity at welds. Active electronically controlled electromagnets could support the sled at a particular distance from the rails. The rocket nozzle should provide thrust directed through the center of mass of the sled and that center of mass should lie in a plane connecting the center lines of the right hand and left hand rails. Thus the sled would be between rather than over the rails. The cheapest version of a rocket sled that fulfills requirements such as a 1600 meter per second speed, ability to operate in a vacuum and use of a track constructed out of largely lunar materials should be the basis of a planned transportation system to compare to options like a gun in which hot gasses propel the projectile by pressing in from the sides.

If rocket-sled technology were subjected to tests in simulated lunar conditions with the intent of testing a potential moon to cis-lunar space transportation system and failed to reach 1600 meters per second speed, then there would be evidence that rocket-sled technology is inadequate; not before such tests.

Twenty-third, there is too much that is unknown about SBSP system built from lunar materials. We do not know the precise lunar mineral types in their abundances by location, nor the depth to which minerals can be dug up, nor the details of how robots will do construction in space, nor the effects on the environment of Earth from operating a SBSP system, nor how far from a rectenna a person with a pacemaker must remain so the beam does not kill the person by messing up the pacemaker.

These are all questions that need to be addressed and they will be addressed as part of the preliminary developmental process. Robots need to be used in space for assembling large dish antennas out of components with equipment and on a jig that allows the completed antenna to function as well as one made on Earth to precise tolerances. Antennas should be assembled in this way to be attached to satellites launched without the enormous faring that would be needed to launch an Earth assembled antenna to orbit. Such antennas would handle Earth/satellite communications. Large space based radio interferometry satellites could also use large antennas assembled in space. This can give people some experience with industrial purpose robots in space. Robots should be custom built for this job and astronauts and Robonauts should not interfere.

A survey of the disposition of lunar minerals with remotely controlled equipment can be done with better cost effectiveness without the bother of astronauts and android shaped robots.

Studies can tell us all of the environmental effects of SBSP, but to convince skeptics one set of microwave beaming satellite built by special purpose remote controlled equipment and Earth based rectenna should be used to demonstrate the full scale workability of the scheme before investing in the full scale industrial plant on Luna for building at least fifty of the same thing.

NASA's most powerful reason for using astronauts for tasks that could be done more economically with remote controlled equipment has been that we have astronauts in space anyway so we might as well use them for something or the expense of putting them up there is wasted. So we need to remove astronauts from space and save the money that is wasted on them in order to remove this obstacle to progress that astronauts constitute. Efficient shielded life support equipment with centrifuged living quarters can be produced so people on the moon can do scientific analysis of geological samples and of industrial production samples and build in machine shops devices of which there will be needed only one or a few. People doing repair indoors on whatever can be repaired indoors will make sense when there is efficient life support. It is the irrational premature placement of people in space at great expense and for no purpose that is an obstacle to progress in space.