Posted on 09/06/2002 7:15:16 AM PDT by Onelifetogive
First commercial Moon landing gets go-ahead
Small step for commercialization of Moon surface.
The first private Moon landing has won government authorization. The decision opens the door to the commercialization of the Moon's surface.
The US State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have granted TransOrbital, Inc. of La Jolla, California, permission to send its TrailBlazer probe to map the surface of the Moon and photograph Earth. The launch is scheduled for June 2003 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The Moon is ripe for commercial development," says Dennis Laurie, head of TransOrbital. "It's a lot closer than you think, at least in travel time, which is four days."
The permit process took more than two years and twenty centimeters of paperwork to complete. TransOrbital had to prove it would not contaminate the Moon with biological material, pollute the surface, or disturb any historical landing sites.
Laurie predicts that the Moon will support similar activities to today's Earth satellites. In the long term, TransOrbital hopes to develop communications and navigation systems for Moon exploration and tourism. "Costs [of Moon travel] will be coming down and opportunities going up," says Laurie.
Several other private companies are pursuing Moon missions. LunaCorp of Fairfax, Virginia, hopes to put SuperSat, a high-bandwidth live video satellite, into Moon orbit in 2003. The company's president, David Gump, says LunaCorp also plan to send their IceBreaker rover into "craters where the sun doesn't shine" in search of lunar polar ice.
But Wendell Mendell of NASA's office for human exploration at the Johnson Space Center in Houston contends that public efforts will make it to the Moon before commercial endeavours, and cites European and Japanese trips scheduled for the next year.
NASA is showing renewed interest in the Moon since the Lunar Prospector mission of 1998-99, he adds. The mission aided technologies for the Mars missions and found hints of water at the lunar poles.
"The Moon is going to get some due, no matter what," says Mendell. He thinks funding will be a significant obstacle to commercial enterprises. Lunar Prospector, which was similar to TransOrbital's TrailBlazer, cost $63 million.
TransOrbital and LunaCorp intend to fund their endeavours through corporate endorsements and by licensing video footage and images obtained by their spacecraft for advertising, education and entertainment - such as immersive video games that leave players feeling as if they've been to the Moon and back.
Your point that we once had a working, heavy-lift launch vehicle is well taken and yes, we could re-manufacture Saturn V. However, it would require an entirely new launch infrastructure at the Cape, whereas we already have a working STS processing, assembly, and launch facility available. Also, Saturn V, while a superb machine, was even more labor-intensive than Shuttle (the S-II second stage was (literally) hand-made -- thousands of man-hours work in each one. And those guys were not paid minimum-wage).
NASA has an architecture in hand that could return us to the Moon within 5 years, using existing STS and Delta-IV launches and other easily made, Shuttle-derived hardware.
And it even uses the Space Station, too! :-)
I have been wondering about the physics of this. It has engines, fuel (does it need in space refueling?).
Additional boosters would be a deal-killer.
Is it unable to achieve escape velocity?
That'd be the case. Orbital velocity, IIRC, is 8000 m/s. Escape velocity is 11,000 m/s. That extra three kilometers per second is the real killer.
They wouldn't believe they were on the moon even if you took 'em. They'd say the Gov't had built a very realistic model and taken them there (or something). Like the warden in Cool Hand Luke said:
"Some men you just can't reach..."
"But Wendell Mendell of NASA's office for human exploration at the Johnson Space Center in Houston contends that public efforts will make it to the Moon before commercial endeavours, and cites European and Japanese trips scheduled for the next year."
Yeah, Wendell, keep cheering on those "public efforts." We were on the moon what, 30 years ago? Haven't been back since. And then he cites the success of "foreign" "public efforts." We were way ahead of the curve and now we can only point to the successes of other governments because govt. employees like him seem to be completely content sitting on earth collecting a "public" paycheck.
What a knee-jerk socialist response from our space agency. Instead of promoting a US company's efforts to explore space (NASA's mission), he tries to downplay it -- by pointing to the success other government's are having. What a moron.
I used to know an old fellow that thought the Earth was flat. He said everybody that's ever circumnavigated the globe in a commerical airliner was flat out lying- no joke. He of course didn't believe in the moon landings either.
I had an aunt who thought the moon landings were fake, but that wrestling was real.
(actually, that's a joke I heard somewhere...)
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