What's the reasoning behind NOT colonizing the Moon?

[MKI]

I was wondering why we don't colonize the Moon instead of Mars. Yes the Moon has no atmosphere, but Mars hardly has any either. 

Is it just because it's hard to grow stuff there due to the tidal lock? Or are there other issues that make it impractical, even though its only a day's trip away?

[cubinator]

Water is even more scarce on the Moon than on Mars.

[MKI]

6 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Water is even more scarce on the Moon than on Mars.

Even on the poles of the Moon? I know there was a big deal when they found significant parts on the poles. I know it isn't a lot, but is it really that bone dry over there? 

[cubinator]

Just now, MKI said:

Even on the poles of the Moon? I know there was a big deal when they found significant parts on the poles. I know it isn't a lot, but is it really that bone dry over there? 

It's bone dry pretty much everywhere else, and there aren't even the right ingredients to make water out of the other stuff that's there. Maybe if we're lucky we'll find significant ice deposits inside the lava tunnels, but if not then only a few spots near the poles will have enough water to do anything with.

[tater]

I'd happily visit the Moon, but who would want to live there?

 

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, tater said:

I'd happily visit the Moon, but who would want to live there?

Probably a lot of the same people who would want to live on Mars.

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, MKI said:

I was wondering why we don't colonize the Moon instead of Mars. Yes the Moon has no atmosphere, but Mars hardly has any either. 

Mars hardly has.

5 hours ago, MKI said:

Even on the poles of the Moon?

Do we see lunar ice caps from 1.5 AU?

***

We have enough spoil tips right on the Earth, to colonize.

[Guest]

The moon is a better place the colonize first than the Earth. It's way closer, and you won't have Matt Damon situation if something goes bad

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

and you won't have Matt Damon situation if something goes bad

Because there is no horrible hurricanes (horricanes?) in vacuum to crash the base.

On both planets.

[paul_c]

Probably for the same reasons we don't currently colonise anywhere else, except Earth. And even then, there are significant areas not occupied by humans. There may be plans in the future to colonise somewhere else, but at the moment its a pipe dream.

I guess.....at a push....we could say we colonise the ISS? I wonder how much all-in it costs per month, to support a human there. And you can't nip out for a Twix or a McDonalds easily there either. And so many other things. For example, have any two astronauts ever done "the dance with no pants" on the space station? 

[YNM]

39 minutes ago, paul_c said:

For example, have any two astronauts ever done "the dance with no pants" on the space station? 

Only reason why they won't do this is because they'd soil the station and ruin it. They already regularly soil themselves in EVA...

 

"Colony" as in the old days have to be distinguished from an "outpost" I think. ISS and McMurdo station is an "outpost", whereas Falkland Island and Svalbard fell more in the "colony" end (Pitcairn island is a dividing example on the "colony"/"outpost" distinction I suppose). If you want a colony, you have to be able to sustain yourself completely there, more or less. And we aren't even ready for Antarctica, so let alone most of the outer space, be it Mars or the Moon.

As for whether we can actually develop the technologies to ? I'm fairly sure we can - the question then fall on what the heck are you actually doing it for. Svalbard had (and to a certain extent has) mining, Falkland Islands had whaling (and animal husbandry but idk whether the produce from that even goes beyond themselves). Tourism has now filled the gap left to an extent. One could argue that tourism might support a space colony, but for the time being what's exactly different between an LEO tourism and a Moon tourism ? You get to be in space is a large enough thing in itself. Maybe after I'm dead we'd see people taking a holiday to the Moon or Mars but within my lifetime I question we'd have proper space "colonies".

Edited March 23, 2021 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

56 minutes ago, paul_c said:

For example, have any two astronauts ever done "the dance with no pants" on the space station? 

Yes, using Space Shuttle restroom and trying to keep clothes clean when it fails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding_Rockets

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Because there is no horrible hurricanes (horricanes?) in vacuum to crash the base.

On both planets.

Moon has the benefit that you can just jump into the return rocket and go back to earth i 3 days. Same time to do an rescue mission if you have an rocket ready to launch. 
On Mars you have to wait for launch windows and it still takes months. 

Moon has some other benefits like you can export stuff to earth orbit down the line, backside is nice for radio astronomy and its so close it could be an tourist destination. 

Mars is a bit less hostile and have higher gravity.  It also have more useful materials an base need. Its main downside is the distance. 
Yes and Musk is paying for Mars. 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Moon has the benefit that you can just jump into the return rocket and go back to earth i 3 days. Same time to do an rescue mission if you have an rocket ready to launch. 
On Mars you have to wait for launch windows and it still takes months. 

When a million of people has to jump, the months will be spent in standing in line for tickets.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

export stuff to earth orbit down the line

Once you have some stuff to export. The Moon has even less than Mars to export.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

backside is nice for radio astronomy

Is nice for the dish. The astronomers aren't needed around.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

15 hours ago, MKI said:

I was wondering why we don't colonize the Moon instead of Mars. Yes the Moon has no atmosphere, but Mars hardly has any either. 

Is it just because it's hard to grow stuff there due to the tidal lock? Or are there other issues that make it impractical, even though its only a day's trip away?

Haven't gone through everyone else's responses, so apologies if I repeat something.  I understand, but I'm also mildly amused by people's desire to colonize the moon, or Mars or the Asteroid Belt.  No dig at you, by the way... but here's my thinking:

From the beginning, Space Exploration (caps intended) has been a government/military/commercial/scientific exercise (order intended). 

• It's a prestige thing for governments and citizens,
• a military 'high-ground' early warning, command and control, and 'warning to others' thing for militaries and the governments they support,
• a profit center for very large corporations/conglomerates,
• and a place to expand human knowledge through very expensive efforts.

All of our accomplishments tell us that it is possible to get there.  That we can keep people alive out there.  That there are profits to be made, and things to be discovered.  We look to the stars, as we've always done, with a sense of wonder and a thirst for adventure and new opportunities.  Many of us are impatient, longing for the next horizon and want there to be people taking the next step... now.  We want to know someone has put one foot on the road that takes us out there.  And so we think, naturally, 'why don't we' (humanity, rather than some nation-state)  'why don't we have people living out there already?  We need to start a colony.'  This follows that 'top-down' thinking where our success at Space Exploration should transition to Space Colonization.

The problem is that colonies do not work from a 'top down' perspective.  You cannot declare a colony in an inherently inhospitable place and hope for it to succeed.  A colony has to grow 'organically' as the center of a larger community of people independently seeking their own life/freedom/success/riches.  In other words, people have to be able to step off the boat, march into the wilds, stake a claim, take what they can and then - when they want to or need to - return to the colony to sell their goods and barter or buy others.  (Caveat: unless you are willing to do what England did with Australia or Russia with Siberia - which even those analogies are inapt because people are able to live and thrive in both places without government support - or having escaped from government control.  That won't work in a Space Colony.)

So - the thing that might work (instead of a colony 'declared' by a government or corporation or church hoping to create a new home for humanity in the stars) - the thing that has the highest chance for success, in my opinion, is to analogize the oil and gas fields in the Arctic or mines in other remote places.  You start with a profit driven motive for people to go and set up resource extraction on such a scale that remote/robot driven machines are no longer efficient and need 'boots on the ground'.  Those people in turn need services (food, entertainment, etc) and others follow to provide those services.  Something like that resembles a town - and a town is, in effect, a colony.

My caution to you and others, however, is what happened in the American West.  There are hundreds of communities, long abandoned 'ghost towns' where once the ore dried up... so did the town.  The communities that remain in the deserts are those that did not set up on some hard to live on remote but profitable rock... but in the places where it was easiest for people to live and thrive: where there was water.  So, to sum up, if we somehow discover that there is enormous profit to be made mining ores on the Moon or Mars we may get a colony on one of those rocks... but it won't be intentional.

 

[kerbiloid]

We are afraid of deserted places where nobody Lawful Evil  starts yelling at you: "It's my place, get away!", so we can be sure there are no ghostly Chaotic Evil hiding there, like big cats and wolves.

Like a cat, sitting at the closed door and heart-breakingly crying to have the door opened, and indifferently walking away once you have done it, 
The cat is not silly, it put "checked" in the watch list, actually silly is the cat's human.

So, while the simple animal spends enjoys the time, the humans, as intellectual beings, spend decades and hills of resources to get to the Moon and ensure that nobody hides on the opposite side of it.
To feel more important, they invent various poetic and logical intentions for it.

Lunar and Martian vacuum, frost, radiation, and low-G are Lawful Evils. We know them , we know where they are and what's their nature and habits, and how to avoid those places.
But we have a treacherous feeling that there can be something but rocks, stones, sand, and dust, some horrific Chaotic Evil, and we need to check.
This feeling of alarming internal vacuum is what the "wanderlust" is.
Like we like the smell of burnt cellulose which means that our forest is burning.

Edited March 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

What exactly would be the point of colonizing the Moon?

I suppose it would be a good place to have a really isolated biolab or something. Maybe a highly secure military research lab. But both of those can likely be done just as securely here on Earth for a lot less money.

[MKI]

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

What exactly would be the point of colonizing the Moon?

So I originally left out the personal reason I'd like to colonize the Moon instead of Mars, as I was more curious about the practicality of it. Beyond the usual "we don't wanna lose everything if Earth is destroyed" idea, the main thinking I have behind colonizing the Moon is that you can build a space elevator there more easily. 

I'm not sure if humanity can ever build a space elevator on Earth due to how difficult it is, but we can essentially build a space elevator on the Moon using current technology. With a space elevator, you can build almost anything in lunar orbit ready to go out to anywhere in the solar system. This obviously assumes the Moon has enough resources to build spacecraft, but AFAIK the Moon has enough of those raw materials. 

With such infrastructure, you can easily gain access to the rest of the solar system without having to deal with getting to orbit from Earth. Starship might be able to do it in the future, but it's still limited in its capabilities and cost compared to just building a space elevator, which would essentially make the Moon the starting point for all space exploration of any scale. 

 

 

 

 

[mikegarrison]

6 minutes ago, MKI said:

So I originally left out the personal reason I'd like to colonize the Moon instead of Mars, as I was more curious about the practicality of it. Beyond the usual "we don't wanna lose everything if Earth is destroyed" idea, the main thinking I have behind colonizing the Moon is that you can build a space elevator there more easily.

You would go through all the trouble to move human industry from the Earth to the moon, just to make it easier to move it again from the moon's surface to lunar orbit?

Edited March 23, 2021 by mikegarrison

[MKI]

41 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

You would go through all the trouble to move human industry from the Earth to the moon, just to make it easier to move it again from the moon's surface to lunar orbit?

If there is a colony on the Moon, then yes the manufacturing is there and final assembly is in lunar-orbit. 

Currently if you want to go anywhere in the solar system, you have all the manufacturing on Earth, but you have to go through the trouble of getting whatever you built into orbit before even going anywhere else. Which is why stuff is small, or expendable, or convoluted (Starship in-orbit refueling). 

 

 

[cubinator]

Honestly I'd like to see it all. Lunar surface, lunar orbit, space elevators, Mars, Venus, nuclear rockets to the asteroid belt and outer planets, followed by colony ships to all the stars in the galaxy. The best future I can imagine is one where all the possibilities are open.

[monophonic]

15 hours ago, MKI said:

colonizing the Moon is that you can build a space elevator there more easily. 

Except you can't. Not one that is useful anyway.

You see, the thing about a space elevator is that you want the upper station to be at the geostationary orbit. That way your space ships can come and go docking to and from your elevator as they please. At any other altitude your ships need to furiously burn rockets right to the moment the docking clamps connect just to match the motion of your elevator station. Strong rocket blast is something you definitely do not want happening right next to your precious space elevator.

Problem with the Moon is that it is tidally locked with the Earth. As it rotates so slowly, once around every 28 days and a bit, the theoretical selenosynchronous orbit is actually way outside the Moon's Hill radius. In other words, you won't be orbiting the Moon at that distance, you will be orbiting the Earth or the Sun.

Now you might think it could help you get started on reaching actual orbit. But you won't get any useful amount of velocity from the increased radius due to the very slow rotation, the difference in gravity compared to the surface is minimal, and there isn't any atmosphere to get above of. You could build a much bigger linear accelerator right on the surface and use less resources on it than building a massive tower to put your launch system higher.

Well there is the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon. That would be a nice spot to drop off cargo, right? Just a little push and the gravity from Earth should bring the pod down essentially for free? True, but that spot is over 60000 kilometers from the Moon. Even at 1/6th the gravity I don't think our current materials can handle that, even when not considering the tidal forces on a structure that long.

So there isn't really any point in building a space elevator on the Moon. It wouldn't bring you any advantage over just putting your launch pad on the highest spot of the Moon at the Selenean summit. Now Mars, on the other hand... maybe somebody else can check the numbers for that one?

[Scotius]

I wouldn't be surprised if Moon became a major source of mineral resources in the future. At least as sort of intermediate stage before full blown asteroid mining. It's closer. It has (still) usable gravity. Due to lack of tectonic activity, whatever elements are present should be relatively shallow. And if we dig in the craters, we can be reasonably sure we'll find goodies asteroids brought with them

[Lewie]

We don’t want to put even more money in the pockets of contractors......

Really, a successful colony (moon or Mars) will probably be lead by the private sector. Look at SLS! There is no way NASA could build a colony in a reasonable time frame.

Edited March 24, 2021 by Lewie

[kerbiloid]

They should start finding asteroids, rich with precious metals, and redirect them into the Moon.

Then harvest.

Edited March 24, 2021 by kerbiloid