China, and anyone interested in a Moon base, should be interested in lava tubes. If NASA does wake up, it’s likely to roll over and go back to sleep. Fortunately, Elon Musk needs a Moon base to get to Mars.
The movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, got a lot right. The surface of the Moon is an obnoxious place to live. The surface temperature goes from about -200o F to 200o F. Gamma rays bombard the surface, but cosmic rays are a bigger problem. Cosmic rays hitting the Earth produce the Northern Lights as their energy dissipates in the atmosphere and are deflected by our magnetic field. Those subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light, are not easily screened
Why must we entertain and finance blatantly stupid ideas? Nothing is going to make Greta Thunberg happy, so let’s stop trying. No government money or mandates should encourage the dumb ideas.
The tech, called MO/GO, short for “mountain goat,” is a hybrid soft/rigid system designed to assist wearer mobility and boost the wearer while walking.
Pretty sure they came up with MO/GO first, then came up with the “mountain goat” explanation. Still, it would help a lot of people if it works.
The launch cost of $4,500 will almost certainly restrict its use for the non-mobility limited.
Depending on the performance specifications of the actual product, this could be big. It’s certainly cheaper than a knee replacement and is in the price range of mobility scooters. The military would be interested, along with people who aren’t impaired, just not up t the challenge.
MO/GO isn’t a great name, I’d go with “kicking pants”.
February 6th, 2018, Elon Musk demonstrated that launching objects into orbit had become a mundane commercial activity. To make it interesting, the object he put in orbit was a Tesla Roadster that has since traveled over a million miles and made four laps around the sun. Where is the Roadster now?
Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half. This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience. Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people. She should recoup her expenses.
Disney is a big company, with a net profit of 1.7 billion dollars last year. They can’t keep making big mistakes like this. How did they screw this up so bad?
The legislature and unelected regulators enjoy magical thinking because the time frames are long, they will never be held responsible and perhaps engineers can meet the goals. Automakers have long been burdened with fleet economy standards that must be met. The Laws of Thermodynamics are problems for engineers, not legislators. Cars became lighter and less safe while also becoming more complex and expensive.
The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time.
For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.
Musk is the richest person in the world and with Tesla and SpaceX, owns two companies that dominate their highly technical market sectors. He also owns companies that may be critical to the future in the fields of boring tunnels, artificial intelligence and a brain/computer interface. Since Musk is bringing us the future more than anyone else on Earth, it may be worth trying to comprehend his message.
When it comes to how he defines that threat, however, he has been vague in public—painting a picture of something akin to hysterical groupthink by liberals against merit-based achievement and free speech, a catchall for what he expresses disagreement with.
That seem pretty clear. While a few large investment companies, corporate media and politicians are banging on about diversity, inclusion and equity, it may be worth asking where they see DIE taking Western democracies.
With recent congressional testimony and charges of plagiarism against the current president of Harvard, it seems obvious that she is a diversity hire with scant accomplishments to be account for her lofty position. How much of the rest of our institutions are led by unqualified people who are above accountability?
Musk is arguing for merit in judging applicants and with his obvious success, it’s worth considering his opinion.
On the Moon, astronauts will need protection from a different set of hazards. They’ll have to contend with cosmic and solar radiation, meteorites, wild temperature swings, and even impact ejecta. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found hundreds of lunar ‘skylights,’ locations where a lava tube’s ceiling has collapsed, making a natural opening into the tube.
The International Space Station is only about 300 miles high. That gives the ISS some protection from cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are positively charged particles moving at relativistic velocities. Alpha radiation consists of some of the same positively charged particles, and is the type of radiation that Putin has used to assassinate opponents. He used polonium which emits alpha radiation. Those particles are big and slow, and can be stopped with a piece of paper. When a person ingests polonium, the radiation attacks the person from the inside, with nothing stopping the particles.
Cosmic rays are moving at nearly the speed of light. Shielding with lead, as one might use to block Superman’s vision, doesn’t work because the particles hit lead atoms and knock them free. Those heavier atoms would act like shrapnel.
Hydrogen atoms are good for shielding from cosmic rays, so water, ice or plastic works, but you need a lot of it, on the order of several meters. A lunar lava tube would provide meters of rock and would be excellent shielding.
On the Moon, astronauts will have to contend with the temperature swings. Earth’s natural satellite is a world of temperature extremes. One side of the Moon is in direct sunlight for half of the time, and surface temperatures reach as high as 127 degrees Celsius (260 °F.) The side that’s shrouded in darkness sinks as low as -173 °C (-280 °F.)
The Moon is a world of temperature extremes only on the surface. Apollo astronauts did experiments with thermal conduction on the surface of the Moon. Go down half a meter, and the temperature is a constant temperature of about -4 °F. It gets colder than that in Ohio.
Because the Moon has no atmosphere, heat is not conducted through convection, but only from radiation from the lunar surface to the -450 °F of space and through conduction through Moon rock. A lava tube on the Moon be -4 °F. An enclosure that is insulated from the floor of the cave would lose very little heat.
China’s future plan, after successful exploration, is a crewed base. It would be a long-term underground research base in one of the lunar lava tubes, with a support center for energy and communication at the tube’s entrance. The terrain would be landscaped, and the base would include both residential and research facilities inside the tube.
This is likely to be every nation’s plan. China has 30 million people living in caves, so maybe the idea doesn’t seem as novel to them.
