Making Money on Moon Key to NASA Exploration

[mugaliens]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060428/sc_nm/space_exploration_dc

It appears that making money with the lunar exploration concept is key to further progress (Mars), so put your thinking caps on and come up with some VIABLE ways of actually turning a profit!

Here's one: He3 mining for the U.S. Nuclear Fusion Program which will inevitably provide the energy required for our future Hydrogen Economy.

Anyone else?

[Ilya]

He3 mining for the U.S. Nuclear Fusion Program which will inevitably provide the energy required for our future Hydrogen Economy.

There is nothing inevitable about it.

He3 fusion is rather more difficult to achieve (requires higher temperature/density of plasma) than deuterium fusion. The advantage of He3 is that it makes no neutron radiation. Neither type of fusion produces radioactive waste -- the boogaboo of nuclear fission, -- but any deuterium reactor will eventually become "hot" and will have to be disposed of. When controlled fusion is achieved, the cost of burying/emtombing spent D-D reactors will have to be weighed against the literally astronomical cost of Helium-3. (The cost of deuterium from Earth's oceans is negligible in this equation.) I am not at all convinced He-3 will win out.

BTW, I am more and more convinced that "hydrogen economy" will in fact be "ethanol economy". With sufficient energy from either fission or fusion, it is a short step from splitting water into H2 and O2, to making ethanol out of H2 and CO2. Which avoids the headaches of liquid or high-pressure hydrogen, and can even be used in internal combustion engines.

[jkmccrann]

My vote goes for a Moon Hotel. Although I'm not expecting anything anytime soon. 2080s/2090s at the absolute earliest. Larking about in low-gravity would be a huge drawcard. I'd defintely be up for a fortnight of golfing, and running and jumping and everything in low-gravity.

And this will only come about after there have been scientific & research outposts on the Moon for sometime. And they will only come about when we have the thrust power in our rockets to be making multiple trips into LEO and further with very heavy loads.

In that context, as a step along the road, ventures like Virgin Galactic et al are promising - but there sure is a long way to go.

In regards to another post of yours, I believe a Moon Hotel would fall into a service based-industry providing experience based adventures for people.

The thing I guess that I don't know the answer to is how you get people to actually work at a place like that. Cosmic Radiation, low gravity, and other effects like that all have to be overcome before anything like that is remotely viable and the solutions to those sort of issues might well not be forthcoming this century.

[Van Rijn]

The thing I guess that I don't know the answer to is how you get people to actually work at a place like that. Cosmic Radiation, low gravity, and other effects like that all have to be overcome before anything like that is remotely viable and the solutions to those sort of issues might well not be forthcoming this century.

I'd beg to work at a place like that. We know what to do about GCR - add dirt (regolith). Low gravity actually presents an interesting question. We know that there are issues in microgravity over extended periods. We don't know exactly how the body would react to lunar gravity in the long term, though negative effects are likely to be less than microgravity.

There is an idea popular in fiction, though with no evidence yet, that lower stress on the body might allow people to live longer, hence lunar retirement homes for the wealthy. Even if you don't actually live longer, lower gravity would be easier to move around in, so I can see interest for that reason alone.

Anyway, if you get the transportation cost down to something only slightly insane, there would be a lot of people going.

[loglo]

This is the hard question about space economics. How do you exploit space in a way that provides returns quick enough for investors to want to invest? Earth businesses have an infrastructure already in place to support them. On the moon every piece of infrastructure needs to be built first before any business can take place. So you first need to find a way of making a profit/income from building the infrastructure business needs to do business. For a Lunar Hotel this doesn't just mean air, water, food. It means labour, materials, emergency services etc, all would have to be provided themselves before it can even make a cent. So where does the infrastructure come from? Public expenditure?

This is the "if you build it they will come" approach. You don't open a business you just provide services so businesses can open. Problem is there aren't any guarentees anyone will come. So it isn't likely the infrastructure will be built at all as nobody will invest in a buiness if it has no prospect of making money. Investors are on the whole even more short-sighted than politicians. Capitalisation has been called the principle problem of the space economy. (see The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects by John Hickman, Ph. D.)

So at the moment we have government that needs to make money from a lunar space programme for it to happen but in an environment where private business itself couldn't. It just doesn't seem realistic. We need to bootstrap the process somehow.

You don't open up a frontier by building a city in the middle of nowhere and just expect people to show up. You do it by providing a road for the people to get to the frontier. When they get there then they will decide what they will do with it. In order to make money from space you need to be able to get to space without spending all your money just doing that.

To me this means tether technologies, something capable of boosting payloads from LEO to lunar orbit and then to the lunar surface. It is the only technology I see available now that is capable of being deployed cheaply (relatively, of course) and which can make a real difference to the cost of transportation. It builds a road through the wilderness. Once we can get to the moon cheaply then we can provide the infrastructure that will make business investment more attractive.

The moon is a frontier, not a tourist spot. We need to stop thinking of hotels and start thinking about railroads. When we go on to Mars then the Moon will be ready for a Hilton.

[mugaliens]

BTW, I am more and more convinced that "hydrogen economy" will in fact be "ethanol economy". With sufficient energy from either fission or fusion, it is a short step from splitting water into H2 and O2, to making ethanol out of H2 and CO2. Which avoids the headaches of liquid or high-pressure hydrogen, and can even be used in internal combustion engines.

Excellent response as to the inefficacy of He-3 from making a hill of beans bit of difference. Thus, the question once again becomes, "why in the world are we going to the Moon?" If it's to see what's there, send UAVs (Unmanned Astronautical Vehicles). Bring back the stuff. Look, touch, feel. All for pennies of what it costs to send men (obviously impossible in 1969, but entirely possible and far cheaper now).

Perhaps I'm a chemical idiot (I am) but what's the process of turning CO2 (greenhouse gas - BAD), 2H2 and O2 (via electrolysis aka 2H2O(aq) → 2H2(g) + O2(g)) into Ethanol (C2H6O)?

Regardless, I found the following article absolutely fascinating, particularly the central third: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol

[mugaliens]

I forgot to add - I don't think we can effectively grow enough plants to meet our energy needs without severely cutting in to our food supply. However, given Ilya's H2 and O2 from water via electrolysis + CO2 to yield Ethanol seems entirely feasible, given the energy, and we all know that nuclear (fission and fusion) would yessireindeedy provide that while allowing the reast of us to move about in our cars, boats, and planes!

[ToSeek]

I keeping figuring the day will come when space exploration actually becomes profitable. I was hoping it would happen in my lifetime, but it seems unlikely now. However, once it does, we'll be all over the solar system before you can blink.

[mugaliens]

I agree, ToSeek. Probably won't happen without an X-drive, though.

[NEOWatcher]

I keeping figuring the day will come when space exploration actually becomes profitable. I was hoping it would happen in my lifetime, but it seems unlikely now. However, once it does, we'll be all over the solar system before you can blink.
Would exploration (in the pure sense) ever be profitable? Now if you said space exploitation, then I would definately agree. The early satellites were not profitable, they were exploring the possibilities. Once proven, the result was highly profitable though. I'm sure we are somewhere along that sliding scale which depends on what your viewpoint is.