Welcome to /r/Cislunar!

Hi all,

the first moon base will probably start with a nuclear power plant. Something small they can just fly up there. But once you have a village with some manufacturing capacity - then things get interesting!

Solar is possible on the moon despite it having a night that is 14 days long, and without some kind of super-battery. There are plans to build a tower 2 km high to get continual solar power up near the poles.

https://www.universetoday.com/150470/how-do-you-get-power-into-your-lunar-base-with-a-tower-of-concrete-several-kilometers-high/

But even longer term, the circumference of the moon is only 10,921 km. HVDC power lines only lose 3% power per 1000 km. So if you build 3 big solar farms with enough capacity to run your moon village, one would be right outside. But the other two would only be about 4000 km away. So HVDC loses are 3% per 1000 km or 12% loss from your most distant solar farms. Even if you were at midnight and you built a solar farm all the way around on the opposite side at midday, the longest point away would only be about say 6000 km (allowing for mountains and valleys and detours.) So that's 18% loss.

It's doable.

Consider that here on earth, 4000 km is the same distance of a proposed solar farm and cable that stretches from Australia's Northern Territory up to Singapore. I know Singapore has a population of 5.6 million to PAY for this proposed cable - but I'm just sharing a vision for the future of the moon that has incredible potential to scale up.

Some imagine a 400 km wide solar farm going right around the equator of the moon - and power being beamed back to run the earth! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_Ring

We just released this week. Available here: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search?q=20205008626

It is quite astonishing how little we actually know about where water is, how deep it is buried, and how horizontally in homogeneous it may be. I think there is a lot of thought along the lines of just landing somewhere and mining it, but the truth is we don't know enough.

If this was a mine on the earth, no investor in their right mind would put down money to build a mine with information this poor. Of course, mining ice on the Moon is about more than money...

Live on Zoom today and tomorrow.

http://lsic.jhuapl.edu/Events/102.php?id=102

A genuine question. I see comments of people saying we need to go to the Moon, to settle and to eventually create a home away from home kinda thing. People talk about selling ice and subsequently water as a resource on the moon, but what are the commercial reasons for going? What resource does the Moon have that we need desperately right now and we don't have here on Earth? Isn't it just easier to mine Earth for materials instead of going all the way to the moon and back? Same goes for asteroids but since this is r/Cislunar i decided to keep it on topic for the Moon.

The talk I gave for the 2020 Lunar Development Conference, "Factors Impacting the Sustainability of a Lunar Economy", is now online, along with most of the other presentations, at Factors Impacting the Sustainability of a Lunar Economy

Here's a fantastic background article: Commercial Lunar Propellant Architecture

A lot of people are looking at mining the PSRs (permanently shadowed regions) for the water-ice to split into hydrogen & oxygen (b/c water = all of the uses). One of the key reasons is to create LOX / LH2 rocket fuel to sell in cislunar. This would help initiate the cislunar economy & provide resources for continued & advanced long-term operations.

Anyone have any good ideas about what should be considered in this space regarding business ventures, important policy, stuff to know when mining the lunar south pole, etc.?
Or just general discussion about how to go about creating the architecture?

It seems like there haven’t been too many updates, so here’s some info!

Northrup Grumman got the sole-source, non-competitive award for the initial Mini-hab module for phase 1 gateway. Other companies will still compete for the major US hab module. The MHM should get underway, and has an extra 12-18 months to try to be done on time!

Gateway Logistics Services RFP is being release today or in the next week, effectively the CRS of Gateway. Cool stuff!

SLS update from Jim Bridenstine tomorrow, oh and he’s calling out Eric Berger on Twitter for all of Berger’s anti-SLS alternative facts.

CLPS on-ramp ing process is open, companies will be submitting proposals for the next size class of landers this month

Human landing system will be managed by Marshall Space Flight Center, just starting phase 1B of the human lander proposals.

I’m sure there’s more, just stay tuned!

As launch costs continue to drop, we hope that space will become less expensive, allowing the cislunar economy business cases to close. Now, over the decades there have been probably hundreds of business ideas and proposals, that got shut down because the loop didn’t close.

Launch isn’t the only thing that gets less expensive. When kg to orbit costs less, it’s now no longer worth it to pay thousands for a more expensive component that is more compact and lightweight. You can afford a heavy component that adds 1000$ worth of launch cost mass, while costing 7000$ less than it’s lightweight counterpart.

What are some component technologies that could have design paradigm changes that would drop costs even more than simply the launch costs? My first thought is robotic arms (the difference between a 20K ground arm and a 20M space arm by MDA/Maxar...there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere)

What else could improve? How can we stretch a 10x cost drop in launch into a 20x cost drop for the overall mission? I’m happy to leave the business ideas to more creative folks, but I want to revisit things with new technology to make possible all the shelved business ideas

Has any company or agency mentioned moon cyclers recently? The idea of getting a heavy station in a cycler orbit with SEP, and just catching it in a commercial crew vehicle? I mean, Orion and such don’t need separate stations for life support, but for long term moon travel, it’d be an interesting way to get back and forth without having to make lots of deep space capsules. Besides the Delta-V savings, which are minimal or negative, what are the benefits? Quality of life during transit? Ease of aggregation? Ease of station repair? The more I think about it the more unnecessary it becomes, for anything besides far-future luxury transit habitats

The idea of aerobraking/aeroscooping upper atmosphere oxygen and nitrogen from earth and CO2 from Mars has many interesting possibilities. SEP (solar electric propulsion) would be used to scoop the resources.

Propellant depots in LEO and LMO or in capture orbits means avoiding the 9 km/s delta-v penalty from earth and means propellant fabs in space for Mars where nothing needs to be landed to create the propellant and solar panels can work full time without dust or clouds obscuring them.

This would greatly reduce mass to orbit compared to other scenarios. The missing component is hydrogen which happens to be the lightest. Eventually, hydrogen can be sourced from the Moon (or Mars).

PHARO: Propellant Harvesting of Atmospheric Resources in Orbit

First post in cislunar, interested to hear what you think.