Colonizing the Moon is more interesting than Colonizing Mars, what do you think?

[Guest]

^{(Not posting on Science & Spaceflight because this is about personal opinions)}

I genuinely can't get excited at the concept of colonizing Mars when there's the Moon right next door, with shorter distances (easier to get there, as you all know) and potential for mining being on the table. Not to mention having the Earth in the sky - huge awesomeness bonus. Its cave systems can be also used for a foundation for building colonies, and there has been research on 3D printing structures based on lunar regolith. The lower gravity might even make some non-rocket space launches back to Earth methods viable, massively reducing overall cost. Hell, even tourism could be on the table as well, given the increased safety compared to going interplanetary. Exploring it even comes with frozen water as a bonus!

 

Mars, though, seems to be held in high regard for no reason other than "it's Mars"? Really, it's a desert planet 18 months away (9 months for window, 9 months of travel), much more expensive to get to and with no commercial potential (AFAIK). Anything goes wrong, it'll be half an hour before the crew even hears back from Earth and an year and a half before they get whatever supplies they needed. It's claimed you can grow plants on its soil after treating it, but what for? You can do the same on the Moon if you bring your own soil (cheaper than whipping out an entire mission to Mars JUST to plant a blueberry bush and call it a day), or you can just skip the middle man and go for hydroponics instead.

 

TL;DR: Being here seems much cooler than being here

Edited February 28, 2020 by Guest

[Guest]

There’s enough people in this world to do both things and more, it need not be a decision between one or the other.

It need not be a divisive topic and there need not be tribes for one idea or the other. We stand on the verge of a new era of exploration for all mankind.

[Bill Phil]

I think industrializing the Moon is worth it - but it should be a place to work, not to live.

Rather, human settlements in space should be free floating habitats. Any human carrying object will be inherently artificial - so why bother even building on the surface of the Moon when you can create your own gravity? With efficient and cheap energy it wouldn’t take much to catapult materials into space from the Moon (in energy terms), and then the material can be captured and processed in space. 

Of course this has issues too but we can solve the lack of gravity and we can make comfortable settlements.

[kerbiloid]

A lunar colony?
Why not?

Spoiler

We even don't need people for that. The lightspeed delay is just a second.

 

[Superfluous J]

I find both exciting and interesting.

But my personal favorite is airship colonies on Venus

[p1t1o]

I quite strongly dont think we should do either.

The only reasons "for" are vague and romantic

Whilst the reasons against are significant and material

Ask me again in a century

[sh1pman]

Titan. Infinite fuel and water, atmosphere suitable for aerobraking and muscle-powered atmospheric flight, awesome views of Saturn, low gravity and escape velocity (=SSTO), comfortable surface atmospheric pressure, safe distance from the Sun when it reaches red giant phase.

[kerbiloid]

16 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

Infinite fuel and water

And full absence of oxidizer making to electrolize water ice.

[sh1pman]

9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

And full absence of oxidizer making to electrolize water ice.

Oxygen is needed for breathing anyway. You just don’t need to have the Sabatier ISRU plant on Titan to fly rockets Starships from it.

And solar power is overrated. One TEM reactor should be enough to power (and heat up) the colony and the electrolysis plant.

Edited February 28, 2020 by sh1pman

[kerbiloid]

16 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

Oxygen is needed for breathing anyway.

1 kg/(human*day).

[sh1pman]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

1 kg/(human*day).

Yes. Much production is needed.

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

Yes. Much production is needed.

When a plane lacks intake air,
and a rocket launch costs a yearly breathing oxygen production,
and the planet has a dense atmosphere,
and any oxygen is electrolitic,
it looks like a planet designed for electric propellers and recharge pads powered by nukes.

But they don't need combustion.

[sh1pman]

Just now, kerbiloid said:

But they don't need combustion.

They need it to travel back to Earth and to other planets and moons.

[Nuke]

im for a moon colony because that's is the best place for placing the infrastructure needed for large scale solar system exploration and colonization. mars is significantly harder to get to from earth. 

[kerbiloid]

But all that infrastructure needs all kind of supplies from the Earth

[Nuke]

who knows what we will find when we start stripping away the regolith. 

[IncongruousGoat]

I'm (very) strongly against colonization of the Moon. The reasons are many, but can be summed up by saying that, were the Moon anywhere in the solar system other than Earth orbit, it would be near the very bottom of the list of potential colonization targets. In many ways, it's one of the least habitable places in the Solar System. There's very little water, no carbon (which is a killer all on its own, given how vital carbon is to anything humans could possibly want to do), no atmosphere, a very long diurnal cycle, no magnetic field, and a surface covered in a layer of highly abrasive, electrostatically charged dust. Fun fact about that dust: every sample of dust that was brought back by the Apollo program has been contaminated and is unusable for research purposes, because the dust attacked and wore through the seals on the vacuum bottles it was stored in. Lunar dust is nasty.

Of the items on that list, only one and a half apply to Mars: the lack of a magnetic field, and the lack of an atmosphere (Mars's atmosphere is thick enough to be useful for some purposes, but it's still a problem). Mars's regolith isn't super friendly, but compared to the stuff you find on the Moon it might as well be Earth sand. The diurnal cycle is extremely close to that of Earth, there's plenty of water to be had frozen in glaciers, and the atmosphere contains enough carbon dioxide to get most of the way towards building a biosphere. Basically: Mars has enough stuff and conditions that are close enough to those on Earth (relative to the rest of the solar system) that there are clear roads towards both a self-sustaining colony and, eventually, terraforming. In any case, the roads to both of those goals are a lot clearer for Mars than they are for the Moon. Those are pie-in-the-sky sorts of objectives at this stage, but they're useful metrics since the traits that make both of those goals possible are also beneficial for nearly every stage of colonization that precedes them (overall friendliness of the environment, similarity to Earth, etc.).

Oh, and before anyone mentions Helium 3: We can't even make D-T fusion work yet, and D-T fusion is far easier to achieve than anything involving He-3. So let's not go advocating establishment of mining colonies for the extraction of a resource we don't know how to use.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Nuke said:

who knows what we will find when we start stripping away the regolith. 

As there was no water on the Moon, probably just basalt.

Everything heavier is already hear, after the proto-Moon impact.

53 minutes ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Helium 3: We can't even make D-T fusion work yet, and D-T fusion is far easier to achieve than anything involving He-3

Unlike the D+T, He-3 gives aneutronic fusion (alpha+proton are released), so no need in:
1) several meters thick passive protection, as you can use a magnetic trap powered with the reactor itself;
2) turbines (mostly), as the energy is mostly released in form of charged particles, so you can consume the fusion power from their interaction with that magnetic trap.
So, more secure, more compact, more appropriate for wide use.

But on the Moon its highest concentration is ~ 1g of He-3 / 100 t of regolith, so the Moon still makes no sense.
Probably, it's easier to produce it by fishing lithium from ocean and exposing it in a reactor to get tritium, which decays into the desired He-3.

[Nuke]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

As there was no water on the Moon, probably just basalt.

Everything heavier is already hear, after the proto-Moon impact.

Unlike the D+T, He-3 gives aneutronic fusion (alpha+proton are released), so no need in:
1) several meters thick passive protection, as you can use a magnetic trap powered with the reactor itself;
2) turbines (mostly), as the energy is mostly released in form of charged particles, so you can consume the fusion power from their interaction with that magnetic trap.
So, more secure, more compact, more appropriate for wide use.

But on the Moon its highest concentration is ~ 1g of He-3 / 100 t of regolith, so the Moon still makes no sense.
Probably, it's easier to produce it by fishing lithium from ocean and exposing it in a reactor to get tritium, which decays into the desired He-3.

i think proton-boron11 fusion is more viable than he3. if you are doing he3+deuterium you can lose energy to d-d side reactions, creating neutrons. so not 100% aneutronic. and boron is pretty damn abundant on earth. though if you are going to build a moon base its probably better to source the fuel locally, and you don't need a whole lot. but i like to point out that we are talking about second-third gen fusion reactors. the first reactors are going to target the fuels with the biggest cross sections as they are easier to fuse, and that's d-t and d-d. 

[YNM]

Neither. Getting out of a gravity well just to get into yet another one is just plain stupid... although in this respect the Moon is a better choice than Mars.

 

But ideally ? Just a space station. Around gas giants.

[scottadges]

When people talk about mining or construction on the Moon, I always think of this bit from the 2002 film version of "The Time Machine":

https://timemachine.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Lunar_Cataclysm

I'm not saying this is realistic... but it is a cautionary tale not to f#*& around with the Moon.

Edited March 7, 2020 by scottadges

[HansonKerman]

Floating space stations, or the moon. KSP taught us that colonizing the Moon is easy, right?

 

 

RIGHT?

 

right?

[Spacescifi]

On 3/2/2020 at 9:14 PM, IncongruousGoat said:

I'm (very) strongly against colonization of the Moon. The reasons are many, but can be summed up by saying that, were the Moon anywhere in the solar system other than Earth orbit, it would be near the very bottom of the list of potential colonization targets. In many ways, it's one of the least habitable places in the Solar System. There's very little water, no carbon (which is a killer all on its own, given how vital carbon is to anything humans could possibly want to do), no atmosphere, a very long diurnal cycle, no magnetic field, and a surface covered in a layer of highly abrasive, electrostatically charged dust. Fun fact about that dust: every sample of dust that was brought back by the Apollo program has been contaminated and is unusable for research purposes, because the dust attacked and wore through the seals on the vacuum bottles it was stored in. Lunar dust is nasty.

Of the items on that list, only one and a half apply to Mars: the lack of a magnetic field, and the lack of an atmosphere (Mars's atmosphere is thick enough to be useful for some purposes, but it's still a problem). Mars's regolith isn't super friendly, but compared to the stuff you find on the Moon it might as well be Earth sand. The diurnal cycle is extremely close to that of Earth, there's plenty of water to be had frozen in glaciers, and the atmosphere contains enough carbon dioxide to get most of the way towards building a biosphere. Basically: Mars has enough stuff and conditions that are close enough to those on Earth (relative to the rest of the solar system) that there are clear roads towards both a self-sustaining colony and, eventually, terraforming. In any case, the roads to both of those goals are a lot clearer for Mars than they are for the Moon. Those are pie-in-the-sky sorts of objectives at this stage, but they're useful metrics since the traits that make both of those goals possible are also beneficial for nearly every stage of colonization that precedes them (overall friendliness of the environment, similarity to Earth, etc.).

Oh, and before anyone mentions Helium 3: We can't even make D-T fusion work yet, and D-T fusion is far easier to achieve than anything involving He-3. So let's not go advocating establishment of mining colonies for the extraction of a resource we don't know how to use.

 

Let's look at what the moon are mars have to offer us.

 

Moon: Soil with glass in it, it is incredibly abrasive stuff, you don't want it in your lungs. To be sure, the first settlements will likely be pressurised inflatables. About the only way to to use lunar regolith soil in a way nontoxic to us is to make concrete out of it so it won't disperse. Unfortunately we would have to use the already sparse supply of water locked in ice that the moon apparently has to acomplish this.

Don't know what color moon concrete would be, but I will guess and say either white or pale gray.

 

Mars: offers lots of industrial level or worse amounts of perchlorates in the soil. Unless you can install a filtering buffer between plants and the martian soil, the plants will be yellowish and also likely toxic to eat. The only plus is that at least martian soil is not full of glass like the moon, so not as abrasive.

Edited March 7, 2020 by Spacescifi

[planet-creations]

Colonizing the Moon is definitely worth it, because the Selenites (organisms that live on the moon) will get to see that beautiful view of Earth from 384,500 km away.

[ChrisSpace]

On 2/28/2020 at 6:06 PM, Aperture Science said:

I genuinely can't get excited at the concept of colonizing Mars when there's the Moon right next door, with shorter distances (easier to get there, as you all know) and potential for mining being on the table. Not to mention having the Earth in the sky - huge awesomeness bonus. Its cave systems can be also used for a foundation for building colonies, and there has been research on 3D printing structures based on lunar regolith. The lower gravity might even make some non-rocket space launches back to Earth methods viable, massively reducing overall cost. Hell, even tourism could be on the table as well, given the increased safety compared to going interplanetary. Exploring it even comes with frozen water as a bonus!

 

Mars, though, seems to be held in high regard for no reason other than "it's Mars"? Really, it's a desert planet 18 months away (9 months for window, 9 months of travel), much more expensive to get to and with no commercial potential (AFAIK). Anything goes wrong, it'll be half an hour before the crew even hears back from Earth and an year and a half before they get whatever supplies they needed. It's claimed you can grow plants on its soil after treating it, but what for? You can do the same on the Moon if you bring your own soil (cheaper than whipping out an entire mission to Mars JUST to plant a blueberry bush and call it a day), or you can just skip the middle man and go for hydroponics instead.

 

Okay so let's list the pros of each one:

The Moon

. Short enough distance for real-time communication

. Shorter travel time

. Lower Dv requirements

. Helium-3

. Lower gravity makes construction easier

. Earth in the sky

 

Mars

. Gravity is probably better for the human body

. More land area

. Easier to terraform

. More resources

. Two easily-accessible asteroids

. Safer from Earth

 

In conclusion I'd choose "all of the above"