Dr. Paul Spudis, Tony Lavoie, Sunday, 1-16-11 January 16, 2011
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Dr. Paul Spudis, Tony Lavoie, Sunday, 1-16-11
http://archived.thespaceshow.com/shows/1496-BWB-2011-01-16.mp3
Guests: Dr. Paul Spudis; Tony Lavoie. Topics: Their paper titled “Mission and Implementation of an Affordable Lunar Return.” Please note that you are invited to comment, ask questions, and discuss the Space Show program/guest(s) on the Space Show blog, http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com. Comments, questions, and any discussion must be relevant and applicable to Space Show programming. We welcomed back Dr. Paul Spudis and as a first time guest, Tony Lavoie to discuss their recently published paper, “Mission and Implementation of an Affordable Lunar Return.” You can download their paper here: http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2010/12/can-we-afford-to-return-to-the-moon and www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf. I urge you to read their paper before commenting on the blog or sending either guest an email. While our program unfolded in three segments, our entire discussion was focused on their program for returning to the Moon. Dr. Spudis started us out in the first segment with a history going back to Augustine when he was not satisfied with the conclusions from the committee and set out with Tony to see if they could develop a lunar return architecture that would work and fall within the NASA budget. During the first segment, our guests addressed the commercial potential of their suggested program as well as the incremental approach the program draws upon. Toward the end of the segment, we talked about timelines, both for the robotic and site exploratory missions, then followed by the human missions. We also talked about the use of telerobotics for this program as the Moon is close enough to allow for this while a NEO or Mars mission would incur substantial time delays rendering it difficult to use teleoperated robotics. In our second segment, Tony expanded the time line topic and carried it out to around year seven. We also talked about ways to assure long term congressional financing and project support. We took several listener questions including one from Marshall regarding a possible liquid core for the Moon. Spike both emailed and called in with questions about the paper, while there were several additional questions about the use of lunar water for fuel as well as for humans. Toward the end of this active listener give and take with our two guests, Jerry asked about the Moon having an increased value due to recent exploration and discoveries. You do not want to miss what our guests had to say about this. In fact, as you will hear from our guests, this increased lunar value with the discovery of water and more provides a significant part of the rational and the economics to return to the Moon. At the end of this segment, our guests fielded a heavy lift question. As you will hear, the paper suggests moderate heavy lift at approximately 65 metric tons. While the analysis was not made, the suspicion was that without heavy lift the mission costs would be higher. In our third segment, we continued with listener questions and calls on a range of subjects related to the paper. John inquired about reusability and engines. Tim inquired about nuclear propulsion & a liquid oxygen and aluminum powder as the propellant. I then asked Paul and Tony for their implementation plan for their program. We concluded the program with a discussion of the value of this plan and returning to the Moon for us to become space fairing, not just to quickly go to a destination and return as we did with Apollo. The plan is about making Cis-lunar space affordable and routine so we can continue expanding our presence in space. We talked about space development as a wealth building tool and investing in space development and not treating it as an expense. Post your comments and questions for our guests on The Space Show blog at the URL above. Dr. Spudis has a website, www.spudislunarresources.com & a blog @ http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon. Guest email addresses are on the title page of their paper.
To John H. of Atlanta ice flows,
Good call on the reusable lunar to space shuttles. Fully reusable space craft that can be operated and serviced on the lunar surface with no major base is really pushing it. Given their paper replaces constellations Altair lander with a fleet of 5 types of lunar landers (some expendable like Altair, others reusable). Given Altair alone was budgeted as a $20 billion development program, replacing it with 5 types of lunar lander/shuttles could easily cost several times more then the Earth launch costs of all the resources you’d ever be able to recover with the proposed lunar bases. Larger perhaps then the bloated development budget for everything in constellation. (And of course a fleet of surface rovers, which will need development, shipment to, and servicing on, lunar surface.)
I wonder how much launched fuel payload the lunar resources proposal even could supply for the return to the moon program? How would that compare to all the launched lunar gear mass — or more importantly the total number flights for the mine, vrs the number of flights planed for the current program?
The paper outlined a 17 launch mission to the moon for their lunar resource recovery program. The whole manned lunar return program with base was only assuming 2 flights a year. So the resource recovery effort would dwarf the scale of flight operations of the base operations it’s there to support?
Mr. Spundis stated that the point of the return to the Moon mission was to validate and demonstrate lunar resource recovery – but I doubt the voters feel that way.
The fault in the whole lunar resources concept was in a sense pointed out in page 3 of the guests paper.
“…Launch cost is a “Catch-22” problem: costs are high because volume (traffic to LEO) is low and volume is low because costs are high. In the future we may expect to see some improvement in launch cost numbers but a drop by factors of 2 or 3 (rather than by orders of magnitude) is most likely.
The VSE sought to break this impasse. In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is a new and different approach that involves learning how to use what we find in space to sustain and extend our presence there…”
They are very correct that launch costs are high due to little demand for launches. In many launch vehicles bottom line, there is virtually no cost to the launches themselves, it’s all overhead and fixed costs. But then there is virtually no cost advantage to lowering the amount of supplies you launch, since you programs yearly launch budget is largely unaffected by the number of launches. Further, simply launching the supplies from Earth, eliminates the cost of developing a entirely new fleet of transportation, and resource recovery and processing systems, needed to use resources recovered and launched from the moon. Given that lunar resource freighter system (for use of lunar resources used in space) could reasonably be expected to cost as much as the original earth launch fleet (and there’s additional expense for resource recovery and processing equipment development, testing and operation). Using lunar resources could well dramatically increase your program costs (even doubling them), increase your program complexity and risk, rather than lowering them.
This is a old oversight. Back in the ‘70’s Gerald K. O’Neil first started promoting the idea of mining lunar resources, to build space colonies in L-5, to build and market Space Solar Power Stations in Earth orbit. This round about method of fielding these power sats was projected to be cheaper since it avoided the huge launch costs by using Lunar resources. This concept generated enough public interest to lead to the L-5 society to promote it, and to have the department of energy to commission a serious study of it. However the DOE study shocked the space advocates when it showed it was far cheaper to launch everything prefabricated from Earth. Unlike the space advocates, the DOE study had contacted launch systems providers to recalculate their launch costs at the vastly higher market size a minimal SSPS program would need. The economies of scale of the SSPS program drove launch costs down nearly a hundred times less than the O’Neil and L-5 people had based their economics on.
We’re not going to open up the final frontier on wishful arithmetic.