Oh yes…we are going. The deluded spacex fan club fantasizes that America loves spacex and hates NASA when it is them, a small slice of libertarian manic obsession, that hates NASA and by extension America, and LOVES spacex. Bizarre and strange that since they have hijacked all these public space forums for going on ten years, they live in their own little Muskworld bubble.
Over 100,000 people are showing up for the SLS launch.
“NASA will hold a prelaunch media briefing on the agency’s Moon to Mars exploration plans-“
They will not stop blathering about Mars….pathetic.
We are only going to Mars with something nuclear propelled (NOT nuclear thermal) and loaded with at least a thousand tons of water. That is not going to happen for a long time and when we do have such true Spaceships they will most likely not go to Mars. It has too much gravity and no ocean and is a dead end. Ceres is the best first destination for any Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO).
The spacex fanboys have to trivialize radiation, as they are doing in their comments here. It is dogma to them and in their NewSpace bubble they know nothing else. What they are missing when they claim NASA is OK with radiation is that if you listen carefully to the way NASA words it, NASA officials are “managing” short stays on the Moon and Gateway (by saying Gateway will not be permanently manned, which translates to short stays). When they talk about radiation and Mars they always mention “fast trips” of around 3 months. They are waffling.
I had yearly sexual harassment assault response and prevention training in the military. And out of the 8 or 10 I attended while I was in, in all except one or two, there was always one guy that had to stand up and angrily inform everyone that “sometimes it is the females fault.” That is not really what they were saying. Most of us understood that anyway. When Trumpists get upset about this or that and blather their coded language, most people know what they are really saying. No different.
When people get upset about a female and person of color landing on the Moon….they are self-identifying. Believe it.
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Trumpism, a whole new kind of fascism based on white grievance, gullibility, self-deception, and lack of education, will burn this country down by way of his minions if we let them. It is coming, or, as the Q-crazies say, the storm is coming, or, as the neo-nazis say, the day of the rope, or as the evangelicals say, the rapture, or, as the…..and the list goes on. They are all under one flag now and it is not the stars and stripes.
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“That was brought home to me fairly early in life when I was a county attorney and every month I had to go down the list of welfare recipients and sign ‘Robert J. Dole, approved.’ And every month I found my grandparents on that list. And they weren’t lazy, but they’d been farmers, tenant farmers. And they didn’t make it. And they didn’t have anywhere else to go but the welfare office.”
Pretty soon Americans will have no place left to go except into the streets to stop the Trumpists from disappearing their “enemies.” Watch.
The way the Musk Cultists place loyalty to their bizarro Ayn-Rand-in-space demi-god above loyalty to their country, as in their space program, makes what is going to happen soon fairly obvious.
The only “countermeasure” to Dosing and Debilitation is massive shielding and artificial gravity.
The Moon is the only practical place to get the shielding, using 20 times less energy to lift water derived from lunar ice into space than water lifted from Earth. Though plastic is approximately a quarter less massive, the most utilitarian shielding is water. Some form of Nuclear Propulsion (NOT nuclear thermal which provides, at fantastic expense, only twice the Isp) will be required to go anywhere Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO).
To spin a structure with a tether system and provide artificial gravity by far the most efficient option is the wet workshop, an SHLV upper stage already stressed for multiple G forces. Configuring workshops with an inner and outer hull to contain a cosmic ray water shield, a “Fat Workshop”, is the best path to Space Station, Spaceship, and Lunar Cycler crew compartments.
These are the realities and most logical solutions to the problems of Human Space Flight.
As I have described in other comments, the logical course is to first place “Fat Workshops” in frozen lunar orbit and deploy Robot Landers to fill the workshops with cosmic ray water shielding derived from lunar ice.
Those two pieces of hardware (and the SHLV to loft them) can provide radiation sanctuaries within ten years. Spinning these constructs with a tether system will eventually provide a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity environment. Then a permanent presence in Cislunar Space is enabled.
Hundreds and then thousands of tons of water available in lunar orbit in larger and larger space stations will enable regular human landings. Of course, as above so below and some form of sanctuary will be required for astronauts when they descend to the surface. Either roofed-over regolith covered craters or, ideally, lava tubes. In other words, a Moonbase.
When Apollo 8 went around the Moon they moved the goalposts and Earth orbit stopped being space. Somewhat like the difference between balloons and heavier than air flight. Not the greatest analogy of course.
It is the difference between the Montgolfiers and the Wrights. Some may cite the first successful V2 rocket launch as the beginning, others Sputnik, others Gagarin. In my view, the first space age, from when we actually escaped Earth gravity, lasted just short of 4 years and then ended. When humans again leave Earth’s gravitational field the second space age will begin.
In reality GEO is the best demarcation line regarding where orbital flight ends and “space” begins. The difference between a duck pond and the North Atlantic. Again, not the best analogy when I also sometimes characterize Cislunar Space as the Mediterranean and missions to icy bodies starting with Ceres in the Asteroid Belt and beyond as the Pacific.
The point is that human beings going farther than in circles a couple hundred miles up is Human Space Flight. Beyond Earth Orbit is Human Space Flight.
The last astronauts returned from the Moon in 1972 on Apollo 17 and that was the end of the first space age. NewSpace is THE END of the dream as its proponents seek to end “government employees” from getting “free rides” in favor of handing it all over to “commercial interests” and pinning faux astronaut wings on billionauts. The obscene spending displays of the uber-rich on space tourist trips are the worst thing that could happen to space exploration. And the disgusting sycophants worshiping Rocket jesus idiotically clap and spew spam. There is no ROI in Human Space Flight. The last bunch of tourists were unhappy about having to work so hard and it did not go well. The novelty of floating in a radiation bath and throwing up while looking out a window will wear off. Musk is all about taking over the internet with Starlink and that is going to fail when he can’t get any more free billion tax-dollar grants. He did not get the last one. His Mars fantasy was always just a scam.
The Cult of Musk, like the Cult of Trump, is a corrosive pernicious force ruining everything it touches.
The American space program has been attacked by this legion of Ayn-Rand-in-space-libertarian-whackjobs for going on ten years. The Musk Cult is anti-American in every way and made up of individuals attracted to the bizarre and autocratic character of a narcissist billionaire hobbyist. They are the worst of the worst on the internet, gullible, toxic, cyberthugs.
The SLS is going…to the Moon. And the spacex fanboys, despite years and literally libraries of death-to-SLS propaganda, have not stopped NASA, mostly thanks to Jim Bridenstine, from returning to that prize we never should have taken our eyes off of- the Moon. That place Musk made verboten because his hobby rocket was far too little to go there. Now the shiny, that space shuttle redux that has blown up more times than any other rocket this century, with no escape system, is going nowhere while the SLS goes to the Moon.
“The Redwire Greenhouse is being developed through an award from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, manager of the ISS U.S. National Laboratory.“
Like almost all progress, paid for by taxpayers and the government. As forces prepare to try and replace that government with a fascist autocracy.
BNNT material would not be that much of an improvement on simple plastic. As the actual structure of the spacecraft it might reduce secondary somewhat but likely at great expense. Might save some mass in a storm shelter but….no effect at all on heavy nuclei from Cosmic Rays. Really. You would still not go in there unless it was during a solar storm because the radiation from secondaries would normally make it the highest dose area in the spacecraft. It may work on SEP but is not really going to help with secondaries much and claiming so is misleading.
No mass means no secondaries but a thin skin space craft is not a great idea. More mass to soak it ALL up is best plan. Near Sea Level Radiation is the ideal. Along with a tether system this level of shielding would provide what I call a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity (NSLR1G) environment. I strongly suggest the article by Parker. It is available online by googling “Shielding Space Travelers” UCLA.
People may cite Parkers article regarding “magnetic shields” but he is actually describing at length why it is impractical. He calls a water or plastic shield “impractical” only in regards to the space shuttle payload, which is also misquoted by NewSpace fanboys. All they know how to do is trivialize radiation and will lie and mislead as a standard practice to defend that dogma.
A water shield is heavier than a plastic shield but far more desirable because it can of course be used in a life support system and for other things like dampening out oscillations in a tether-generated artificial gravity system. Both systems are massive and would require Nuclear Propulsion and NOT nuclear thermal, which is just not good enough. Only Nuclear Pulse (bombs) now, or possibly some new form of Nuclear Electric may soon be available.
Space radiation shielding is not something like a computer or rocket engine that can be improved upon. The blabbering spacex fans do about this or that “new thing” is about very small increases in ability to block radiation from solar events or “solar storms” and these are often called “storm shelters.” What most people do not understand is that crews stay out of those shelters unless they are bombarded by solar radiation. Why? Because the 24/7 radiation constantly penetrating spacecraft and astronauts is COSMIC RADIATION and is very different. When the heavy nuclei component of galactic cosmic radiation hits these storm shelters they actually produce “secondaries” and generate more radiation. Only when a solar storm hits do they save the astronauts from profound dosing but normally they have the highest level of radiation in the spacecraft. See how that works?
Unless you stop almost all the cosmic radiation you get no benefit and end up with more or less the same dosing as no shielding at all, except when Solar Energetic Particle levels go up. What does it take to stop cosmic rays and the secondary radiation effects? From “Shielding Space Travelers” by Eugene Parker (the guy they named the solar probe after):
“To match the protection offered by Earth’s atmosphere takes the – equivalent to the air mass above an altitude of 5,500 meters. Any less would begin to be counterproductive, because the shielding material would fail to absorb the shrapnel. If the material is water, it has to be five meters deep. So a spherical water tank encasing a small capsule would have a mass of about 500 tons.”
THAT…is “state of the art.” For any practical living space for long duration missions at least, at the very least, double that figure to a thousand tons.
A couple thousand cubic foot greenhouse or a couple thousand cubic feet of storage is the choice on a Spaceship.
Some rough calculations show you can store about 10 years of food for 8 people in that space (about 60 tons). A greenhouse can supposedly provide for the same number of people. For missions under ten years it would probably be far more efficient to carry the food instead of growing it. A mix of stored dehydrated food and a smaller greenhouse and whatever product can be had from water grown plants/organisms in the radiation shielding might be the best solution.
The critical problem is Climate Change….and all resources should be focused on a solution.
And there appears to be only one solution: Space Solar Power by way of Lunar factories.
The more “renewable” energy that is manufactured on Earth presently creates carbon because ironically fossil fuels are used to make wind turbines and solar panels. Because demand continually increases as third world countries seek a western standard of living, we will never be able to meet demand while decreasing greenhouse gases to any meaningful degree.
Hydrogen/Oxygen Super Heavy Lift Vehicles sending refinery and manufacturing tooling to a Lunar Industrial infrastructure project is the only way to produce Space Solar Energy components Off-world relatively carbon-free and eventually power civilization from orbit.
A robotic Lunar Lander that can exploit ice deposits and repeatedly carry water up to “Fat Workshops” and create radiation sanctuaries for astronauts is, in my view, the key to human expansion into Cislunar Space and beyond. If not for the corrosive influence of NewSpace such a program would likely have been started in 2008 after strong evidence for ice at the poles was found. One of the reasons NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
“Growing full crops in space will be critical to future space exploration missions as plants provide food, oxygen and water reclamation. Increasing the throughput of crop production research in space, through commercially developed capabilities, will be important to deliver critical insights for NASA’s Artemis missions and beyond.”
Multi-year missions to the outer solar system will of course require a closed-loop life support system to provide air and water. Growing enough calories is problematic in the confines of a Spaceship so radiation resistant algae (thousand ton plus cosmic ray water shields facilitate this) is the most likely feature. Not radishes. Some kind of algal product may supplement food supplies but most of the calories will likely come from storage.
Complaining about going to the Moon instead of DOD waste. LOL. Transparent: it is all about supporting the Cult Leader instead of the nation of birth.
And that is what is happening in this country; populism, treason, insurrection. All of it can be traced back to one thing- the rich evading taxes and regulation. Their faux think tanks have pushed free-market ideology decade after decade. Our post-depression mixed economy is now failing because of that. It all goes back to that, which is likely going to end as badly for them as it does for the rest of us.
Ice on the Moon 