Why we don't have a base on the Moon.

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this is one of 'keet.



I went to a talk the speaker was a Apollo engineer.
He said it. I guess I always know it but it made my brain explode. I am livid.
click on the picture if you want to support my cartoons an sponsors (hehe).

-Jake

We traded the Moon for Viet Nam and the "Great Society".

ruveyn

but vietnam is still owned by vietnam right....?

Thanks to LBJ we lost Big Time.

ruveyn

The Russians werent in Vietnan and they stopped their program too. Both the US and Russia realized it was a lot of money to spend.

It was Nixon who really kneecapped NASA. There was a dip under Johnson but Nixon put the axe in. Bush's NASA admin, Mike Griffin, also blamed Nixon. Nixon was presented with options for a Mars mission, orbital station + shuttle in various configurations. In the end we just got a very stripped down shuttle with nowhere to fly it.

There is an account that Nixon wanted to cancel it all and only went along with shuttle as a cold war effort.

[quote="simon_says"

It was Nixon who really kneecapped NASA. There was a dip under Johnson but Nixon put the axe in. Bush's NASA admin, Mike Griffin, also blamed Nixon. Nixon was presented with options for a Mars mission, orbital station + shuttle in various configurations. In the end we just got a very stripped down shuttle with nowhere to fly it.

[/quote]

The government giveth and the government taketh away.

If space business had been private, it might have turned out differently.

ruveyn

the funny thing about private.
what was stopping the private enterprise?
if you say competition with post Apollo Nasa milk will come out of my nose.

Private enterprise doesn't fund innovation. "Venture" capital will only venture where it can see at least some potential for immediate profit. If the government would have pumped more money into space exploration, it's possible they may have reached the point where it would have been taken over by private enterprise, and we'd probably be a lot better off for it, especially now when we could use another big industry to keep our economy going. And of course, then we would all be singing praise for the entrepreneurs who made it possible

It's (the moon) too far away among other reasons.

If they ever find deposits of crude oil under the lunar surface...

And society isn't so great either...

Am I the only one who finds it completely ridiculous that our primary source of energy is still black gunk that we need to dig out of the ground, when every second enough energy to power the entire world for a year is literally thrown in our faces?

I would think it hilarious, were it not so tragic. I mean, over 12,000 years since the end of the last ice age, and all we have to show for it are a few tin cans in earth orbit, some abandoned vehicles on the lunar surface, and some very expensive toys crawling around on Mars; not to mention our dependence on fossil fuels and the wheel.

It is high energy density black gunk which is why it is so thoroughly and broadly used. It beats wood and maple syrup. More Joules per kilogram etc..

ruveyn

Absolutely. And in Joule's time, it was an excellent source of energy with a promising future. But now it's 2012, and we're still using 19th-century gunk.

Almost all energy on the planet is created by the trapping of solar energy:

At its most basic is the simple heating of material, and later radiation of that heat.
There is the convective flow of water, its evaporation and precipitation in the atmosphere.
There is the convective flow of air, driven by differential pressures created through uneven heating, and through the movement of water through the atmosphere.

Most of these processes are dynamic, ongoing processes, and generally available to tap into. Windmills, waterwheels and the like have been basic methods of obtaining mechanical advantage from solar energy for a long time.

But far more effective are the chemical processes. The key to this is fixing carbon. Autotrophs (e.g. plants) take simple molecules, like CO2 and H2O, and use external energy sources to create more complex molecules. These molecules have large amounts of energy bound up in them that gets released when those molecules are broken down. Heterotrophs, on the other hand, take complex organic molecules and then break them down, using the chemical energy released to drive biological processes.

Chemical processes are vastly more efficient at storing energy--but they are not the only way of converting solar energy into mechnical energy. To the extent that we can create direct transfers (e.g. solar cells) and more efficient storage, we can begin to close the gap.