Saturday, December 18, 2010

Another alternative to Moon landings

Joseph Friedlander has a guest post up at NextBigFuture which is titled Setting up an Industrial Village on the Moon . It looks like another method of getting matter up there to the Moon in order to make a permanent presense there.  But there can be no permanent presense unless there's an economical reason for being there. What could that be?  He's looking for a way to bootstrap a colony.

The ideas he mentions say nothing about space elevators or tethers.  Rather, it is looked at from another angle entirely.  In order to get matter to or from the Moon, or from one location to another in general, a method is needed in order to protect the cargo.  The way that he mentions, which by the way, I like, is to use explosions as a decelerator. That idea isn't new, as the Russians used it in the sixties for hard landings on the Moon.

The trick is not to avoid crashes, but make the crashes not quite so hard, so that will not cause disintegrations. The remainder of the mass that's not disintegrated can be salvaged.  This makes setting up a Moon base more economical.

As the old saying goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat.  It can indeed be an economical way of getting materials up there that can be used to build that permanent presense.  Is there yet another way to skin the cat?

I suggest this: why not used controlled crashes to ship stuff from one part of the Moon to another?  From the lunar base to a equatorial base?  Use mass drivers on the polar base, and then catapult the cargo to the equator.  Then send up the cargo by way of a space elevator to the space station that I mentioned earlier.

Why send it all the way from the Earth if the goal is to be more economical?  It could be used to send materials not found on the Moon from the Earth, but for matter that is already there on the Moon, try this other way instead.

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