Completing our unfinished business on the moon

;O)

You would not BELIEVE what some people are willing to pay, for stuff like this....

mothership, during REM.

beam mind-sucking ray energy

stereo, to attack and

Scary...

tah

Aloha, Lunar sunlight is 5 times more intense than terrestrial sunlight as there is no (significant) atmosphere to diffract it. This means a solar panel of the same area will get 5 times more electricity with all other things being equal. Higher recharge rate will allow you to have more battery on the same amount of solar panel. This lets you run your toys during lunar night for a while longer before you run out of power. The Ti, Al, quartz, and carbon in the lunar regolith will still require a buttload (technical term that) of power to be turned into anything useful. This on top of hauling your extraction, refining, forming, and joining facilities. While I do like the idea of a lunar colony, and lunar manufacturing, in this particular instance it aint gonna happen. The mass and electricity budget simply are not there.

Take Care, Larry

We're developing a Faraday condom, too.

It won't use chicken wire, though.

You don't need them. I lost mine to Frank Zappa's "Yo Mama", and now that Number One Son has discovered Linkin Park, I think I've got some scar tissue forming...

tah

Window Screen! Can you say "texture"?

tah

ROFLMAO!

John

regolith, n.

The layer of loose rock resting on bedrock, constituting the surface of most land. Also called mantle rock.

hey, I'm not embarassed to say I had to look it up! ;)

- iz

More so for you, though.... I'd seen your posts, glanced over them, couldn't see anything you wrote over your sig, and had come to the conclusion that you had contracted some sort of recurrent posting problem... like the Usenet Hiccups y'know... :)

We'll never know just how many of my insightful replies, carefully researched cites, and scintillating retorts might have come your way if I'd noticed your peculiarly-placed one-liners sooner ;)

say again...

Ah, so desu ne...

Or a second collector on the far side of the moon, and LONG power cables interconnecting their photoelectric arrays.

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

You got me now. I'l have to do something about that (one of these days)

Phil - the stupid reader will put Phil Ste>>

Phil Stein

I thought that was Romulans bearing gifts.

Randy

Hmmm. I thought it was Clintonesque.

Randy

At least on the moon you don't have to worry about wind blowing the conductors of your power line down, or ice building up on them in a storm, or trees growing under them and shorting them out (which is what started off the Northeast blackout last August)...

-dave w

Then it's, I 'ahh say it's a rooster, Rhode Island Red that is, and it's been over to Kurt's hen house. ; )

Randy

Gee Ray. Armstrong had to take a leak some time.

Randy

But this much-touted lack of an atmosphere, cited so often as an inducement to lunar solar arrays, hides a danger more certain than weather or foliage grown amok! The hidden danger of the lack of an atmosphere is... the lack of an atmosphere.

Conditions on the surface of the moon are... harsh... to say the least. But even if your fantastical power lines were shielded from the extremes of heat and cold, the radiation bombardment from Sun and stars, the constant pitter-patter erosion of micrometeorite strikes, and the ever-present threat of drunken moon-moles gone amok... there is no way to shield the lines from _meteorite_ strikes.

And high-tension lines long enough to reach halfway around the Moon will present sufficient area to gar-un-tee line-breaking strikes on a monthly basis.

So the lines must be buried... and your first lunar construction task is a project larger than the Great Wall of China... unless of course you put the base at one of the poles... but because of the Moon's libration you'd still need hundreds of miles of lines for day/night collectors... and the fuel needs of making lunar polar landings from Earth-launched transit orbits will drive fuel costs thru the roof...

Nuke. It's the only way to go... ;)

The same place earth got its oxygen, a star.

That is a very good reason to establish a base on the moon. In fact, I stated in another post that Bush's "closer to Mars" was actually referring to solving technological hurdles instead of gravity wells. We should start close and work our way out.

tim