Building a Cheese Factory on the Moon:
Orin's post about NASA's plan to build a permanent base on the Moon reminds me of this quote by former Texas Senator Phil Gramm:
If the Senate voted this afternoon on building a cheese factory on the Moon, I would no doubt vote against it. But if the Senate decided, in its collective lack of wisdom, to build a cheese factory on the Moon, I would want engineers from Texas to design that cheese factory. I would want a construction company from Texas, since we have the best construction companies in the world, to build that cheese factory. If we were going to use milk from earthly cows, I would want milk from Texas cows to be used to make the cheese in the factory on the Moon, and I would want the celestial headquarters for it in Texas. But am I for a cheese factory on the Moon? No.
Perhaps NASA is about to make Gramm's hypothetical cheese factory on the Moon a reality. More likely, we will get lots of juicy contracts for Texas (or perhaps - thanks to Bob "King of Pork" Byrd's return to the Appropriations Committee Chairmanship - West Virginia), engineers, construction companies and cows, but no actual moonbase that can do anything useful.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Moo with me:
- Building a Cheese Factory on the Moon:
- NASA Shoots For the Moon:
Sigh. You just don't understand government, do you? The immutable law is that having a program is the same thing as accomplishing something -- and provides spending authority for much longer.
There's gotta be a joke in there somewhere.
"How many Mountaineers does it take to colonize the Moon?"
"Just two, but they have to be relatives."
(I know. Best I can do.)
Actually, there may be a reason to go to the moon and that is to settle space. I haven't been following this for a number of years, but several have suggested that it would be better to build a self-sustaining community on the moon, build infrastructure there, and then use mass drivers or the like to shoot the makings of a space community into space from there, taking advantage of the moon's much smaller gravity well. Plus, the moon has other advantages here. For example, power is potentially much more readily available - not only can you use nuclear power much more easily (no messy permits, etc.), but solar is more effective since the sun is always visible and there is no atmosphere to dilute its power.
Of course, trusting NASA to accomplish any of this is quite a stretch.
The Treaty also has some provisions on exploitation of resources:
Considering what a useless, worthless boondoggle the $100+ billion dollar ISS space station has been, I think anybody even considering a NASA plan for a moonbase to be completely insane.
I say we fire NASA and leave space exploration to private corporations. If nothing else they'll waste less taxpayer money that way.
This was a Bush mandate designed to do something good for him politically, remember. Once he's gone, hopefull the next president will be wiser.
"You ARE a cheese shop, are you not?"
"We most certainly are, sir!"
Corporations will not explore space. Why would they? There is no money in that. Corporations will not even attempt to harvest resources in space - too risky, and it takes far too long to obtain any return on investment. In short, if a government doesn't do it, it won't get done.
That is exactly what NASA intends to do.
You said you wanted Texas Engineers?
Here's the one word that will make it stillborn:
Haliburton.
That should knock several billion off the budget right there.
But someone has to excavate it, process it and package it, right?
Air doesn't grow back. Once you take it, it's gone forever.
Somehow this seems meant to be an argument in favor of the NASA plan. Aren't there already enough taxpayer-funded programs that the phrases "no money in it", "too risky", and "takes too long to produce a return on investment" accurately apply to?
Corporations that depend critically on the ability to provide services to the government - as SpaceX does - are hardly "exploring space". They are, in effect, NASA / DOD contractors. You might as well say that Lockheed Corporation is "exploring space" as a private business because it won the CEV contract (now known as Orion). Would SpaceX exist as a profit-seeking enterprise without any prospect of selling its services to the government? I doubt it. Would Lockheed bother with space if they, and not the government, took most of the risk? Would Lockheed build a moonbase if the government didn't pay them to do so? Of course not.
As for Virgin Galactic, tourism (least of all brief visits to LEO for multi-millionaires) is not exploration.
We should also note that no company (and certainly not any of these three) would be able to make any money in "space exploration" if the government hadn't taken a lot of the risks, and created a lot of the necessary knowledge and infrastructure, up front.
In general, if no one will spend his own money to do something, it shouldn't be done. Fortunately, space travel apparently is worth doing.
There is a clear commercial market for putting objects and people in LEO, and things in GEO. That is just about it for viable commercial space (and it's not even that big of a market as markts go). Putting things in LEO and GEO is not quite the same thing as "exploring space" - it was at one time, but not any more - especially if exploration is used in the sense of "discovery for its own sake". I remain skeptical that a corporation will explore the solar system or even go to the moon on its own, for the reasons I already stated (too risky, takes too long to make a profit).
If it is worth building a moonbase - and this is something that should be done - then Northrop Grumman should build its own competing moonbase, with no government funding, right?
Somehow this seems meant to be an argument in favor of the NASA plan.
No, it is a statement of fact. There are a lot of things that need to be done in space, but it is not at all clear that the moonbase plan is one of them.
An intriguing theory, but decreasing pressure reduces temperature. It's rising pressure that heats things up. Clearly, our problem is that our space program is bringing too much atmosphere back.
Neither work. Texas is now politically unacceptable. West Virginia doesn't have the reputation or the infrastructure. Don't get me started on their respective cheese capabilities.
California is clearly the winner with this one. Boxer and Feinstein have paid their dues. We already have JPL, Vandenburg AFB, and one of the top tech regions in the world. Governor Arnold walks between conservative and liberal as well as anyone these days.
Plus, California is passing Wisconsin as the #1 cheese making state.
Happy moon cows make great cheese. Happy moon cows come from California.
Hurray for the moon program!
The real question for space travel, when comparing the amount of energy (and other resources) it takes to send a mass into escape velocity to the return on that investment, is it cost-beneficial to do that in outer-space, or would we be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere and obtaining a different return on the same investment?
For small scale explorations, the CBA might be positive, because the benefits are unobtainable on Earth (e.g. Tang, velcro). But for cheese, I don't think I need a calculator to figure out where the best cheese comes from - it comes from a can with a propellant.
That's a good argument there. But Maryland cheese is so 18th century. Speaker of the House trumps majority leader (especially given the majority leader wasn't speaker of the house's choice). And what politician wouldn't love to have their picture taken with Arnold in return for extra votes?
Wine, women, celebrity, weather. What more could burgeoning moon cheese factory scientists ask for?
Plus, we have large open tracts of desert land to build mock moon cheese factories, land which more accurately matches the moon climate -- hot hot when the sun is out, and brrrrr cold when it's not.
-dk
Some of that angular momentum is transferred to the Earth's orbit too [the Sun also raises tides] but if you crank the numbers you'll see that that's insignificant.
The tides that the Earth raises on the Sun are insignificant and have little friction because the Sun is gaseous and Earth's gravity doesn't pack much punch at that distance.
-dk
However, it points to a real problem. We do have a limited atmosphere. Unless/until we find a source of additional air or a way to generate more our ability to colonize off-world will be neccesarily limited.
...Boeing's space shuttle team lost many top engineers when it moved to Texas from California in 2001, contributing to poor analysis during the doomed Columbia flight, according to the Times report.
Forgive the Freerepublic sourcing, but they have an interesting followup. As far as the manned space program and Texas engineers go, I'd suggest "never again" as a working hypothesis