Nuclear Power to the People–On the Moon

To Nuke or Not to Nuke the Moon, That is the Multi-Billion Dollar Question

Energy is the lifeblood of civilization.  This is true on Earth as well as for of our outward move into the solar system.  Wherever we go, our actions and our level of success will be dictated by how much energy we have and are able to productively use.  You cannot have an industrial civilization without plentiful energy.  This is true whether this civilization is on the Earth, Moon, or beyond.  With plentiful energy, the stars are at our doorstep.

In the past 20 years of my looking at, reviewing, and analyzing lunar and beyond exploration architectures, my own interests have shied away from nuclear power as part of any architecture as it immediately drives up the price to unaffordable levels and puts a major critical path milestone in the way of success.  Solar power is great for low power outposts and can be implemented without a lot of development time and expense.  However, as we have moved forward in time, there have been a lot of developments in small nuclear power systems that bear examination.  The idea is to trade the value of a low power system powered by solar energy against a high power system powered by a nuclear reactor.

Low Power Industrial Outposts (Solar)

The question becomes, can a low power (solar) lunar infrastructure be built that enables industrialization.  First we have to define what low power means.  Practically, it means between 500 kilowatts to one megawatt of power.  The reason is simple.  We can get about 100 kilowatts per Delta IVH launch to the Moon using “traditional” methods.  We can probably get about 300 kilowatts per launch to the Moon using a solar electric transportation stage and a Delta IVH launch plus the launch to put the SEP up in the first place.  Doing a bit of arm waving the cost for either path will be about $2 billion for five hundred kilowatts and probably about $3 billion using a SEP for a megawatt and about $3.5 billion for a conventional approach.

The question becomes, is 500kw to a megawatt of electrical power sufficient to reach sustainability of a lunar (or anywhere else) industrial outpost.  The answer depends on exactly where the facility is located and the richness of the resources (metals and volatiles) that are in the near vicinity of the location.  Lets say for the sake of argument that you go to the ideal location, which to me is along the rim of Whipple crater, which itself is on the rim of Peary crater at the lunar north pole.

With a megawatt of power you get a lot for your money.  You can do some serious ISRU of propellants, separating water from the regolith by heating it with solar thermal power (not in the megawatt power budget).  You can then use electrolysis to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen that can then be used to fuel single stage to orbit cargo and human carriers.  Additionally, you can use the hydrogen and oxygen in closed loop fuel cell vehicles and heavy equipment to do your mining, road building, and other activities.  However, even at the tip of the rim of Whipple crater, the sun does not shine all month, all year around.  There would be periods when you have to power down to a caretaker level.  This does not necessarily have to be bad as it could be the down time needed for maintenance, repair, and roll out of new capabilities.

Over several years some of the power could be used to manufacture solar panels.  Indeed this would be one of the most profitable things to do as if a megawatt is the tipping point of sustainability, then more power, developed locally, creates a lot of leverage.  There is nothing intrinsically impossible about doing this, you just have to send up the right equipment to do so, and then harvest purified silicon from the lunar regolith.  Dr. Alex Ignatiev has a great paper on the subject and has done a lot of work in this area.

Silicon is plentiful on the Moon but it takes a lot of energy to extract it, meaning that as resources are dedicated to this task, fewer resources are available for other activities.  ISRU of metal oxides would be the other major consumer of energy on the Moon and thus the productivity of the outpost is directly proportional to the amount of energy you have and how efficiently you use it.  Adding solar thermal power is straightforward and can be done largely with local resources, providing a multiplier effect for manufacturing.

This path is entirely doable, but is it the best use of financial resources?

Nuclear Power on the Moon

In earlier iterations of lunar architecture studies, such as in the late 1980′s Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), nuclear power was one of the core systems for power at an outpost/base.  This was principally because all of the base ideas that were part of the mainstream were not in the lunar polar regions.  At the time we knew far less about the Moon and its resources than we do now, so this made sense.  The guiding architecture came from a report, called the “Report of the 90 Day Study on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars“.   This was a very forward looking report at the time that basically had the kitchen sink of technologies, missions, and hardware for exploration built into it.  As one example of how forward looking it was, look on page 3-32 (the link to the document is in the title above) and look at the “Long Range Mars Rover”.  Here it is reproduced as figure 1:

Nuclear Powered Long Range Mars Rover From the SEI Era

Unless you have been living under a rock, you can see that the design of this 1989 Mars rover has a lot of similarity to the Curiosity lander that landed on Mars in August of 2012.  Another advanced feature was a passive nuclear reactor.  This reactor is shown in figure 2:

SEI Era NASA SPT-100, 100 Kilowatt Reactor

In looking at the SPT-100 reactor in the SEI 90 study I am struck by how underpowered the entire outpost would have been.  They were very ambitious in what they wanted to do but 100 kilowatts of nuclear or solar power (there is a solar variant in the study as well), is simply not enough to do a lot of ISRU, exploration and science.  In fairness the ISRU plant was of very modest capabilities and would have been used to make up gasses for the outpost and other non propellant uses.

In the 23 years since the SEI report nuclear technology has advanced fairly rapidly.  Most of it is still in the demonstration or research stage but there are several small nuclear reactors that are on the way to operational status.

Here is the money question….

What could you do on the Moon if you had a 25 megawatt reactor (electrical) and 70 megawatts (thermal) energy.  It changes everything….

Modern Small Nuclear Reactors

There is a pretty good body of information available on the web to inform people about small nuclear power systems.  A very good round up of this information is provided at the   World Nuclear Organization web site.  There are some interesting common attributes of these small nuclear reactors that make them interesting for the Moon.

1. Small Physical Size
2. Modular Construction
3. Unattended or Reduced Manpower Operation.
4. Self Contained
5. Low Proliferation Potential
6. Ease of Disposal
7. Lots of Power

Rather than go through all of them I selected the one that I thought was a very good representative of the group.  It is by far the smallest in power with only 25 megawatts of electrical output and 70 kilowatts of thermal output but in comparison with what we have been talking about for the Moon up until now it is an amazing advance!

GEN4 Energy Molton Salt Fast Reactor

The GEN4 reactor is an amazing advance over earlier generation small reactors.  Figure 3 shows a conceptual drawing of the reactor system:

The GEN4 25 Megawatt (Electrical) and 70 Megawatt (Thermal) Reactor

Here are the key features of this reactor:

• Advanced reactor design – Use of advanced reactor concepts provides for a safer and simpler reactor, elimination of many potential accident scenarios that affect LWRs, and elimination of complex reactor systems.
• Small reactor – A smaller reactor is more appropriately sized for smaller generation requirements, can directly replace existing diesel fueled generators, and requires no upgrade to existing small electricity distribution systems.
• 10-year power module replacement – The Gen4 Module provides 25 MWe continuously for 10 years on its initial fuel load (compared to an 18 to 24 month cycle for current light water reactors).  No on-site refueling is required.  After 10 years the entire reactor module is replaced.
• Underground containment vault – The reactor is sited in an underground containment vault to provide isolation from the environment, prevent intrusion or tampering, and avoid harm from natural disasters.
• Factory-assembled transportable power modules – Factory assembly allows for standard designs, superior quality control, and faster construction and on-site deployment.

All of these features make this reactor amenable for lofting to the Moon for installation.  How much would it cost?  Even if it took ten launches of a Delta IVH or 6 launches of a Falcon 9 heavy, it would be well worth it.  The provision of 25 megawatts of electrical energy and 70 megawatts of thermal energy would transform the proposition of lunar industrialization.

Applications for Massive Power

Gone would be the requirement to engineer every last part of a low power system for optimum efficiency.  This would save quite a bit of money.  The ability to use high power ISRU systems such as vacuum induction melting of metal becomes a no brainer.  With high power ISRU and plentiful metal, structures with large interior volumes becomes very feasible.  Large interior volumes would allow for plentiful living space for humans and operational space for ground systems.  There would be plentiful electrical power and space for growing food, including meat animals.

The thermal energy could be used for the steam reformation of water into hydrogen and oxygen, and do it at an industrial scale, providing fuel for ground based fuel cell vehicles as well as fuel for lunar Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) cargo transports.  The thermal energy could also be used to drive of the volatiles in the mining of water from the permanently dark areas.  Hot phase change material could also be easily used to keep equipment warm during their sojourns in the dark areas, removing the need for mobile nuclear power systems.

In short, as here on the Earth, power is everything to a civilization and we should very much consider and study, and develop the means whereby to loft these high power systems to the Moon.  It would not be immediately, and for the very near term solar power systems would be used to bootstrap any ground operations on the Moon.  However, the leverage and advantage of these high power, modular, and safe nuclear systems must become central to the industrialization of the Moon.  It would transform the development of Mars as well and would enable the almost immediate colonization of the red planet.

We now have the technology and the tools that we need to open the solar system to development.  We stand at the door.  It would be a hell of a lot better use of money than refilling the corrupt coffers of Wall Street or Brussels.  Indeed it would moot that as the wealth that would come from such development would of itself refill those coffers, and in a far more productive manner….

An Open Letter to the National Research Council’s Committee on the Strategic Direction of NASA

Tonight I went to the web page for the National Research Council’s committee on the strategic direction of NASA. Here is the website, I invite everyone to go there and voice your own opinion.

http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DEPS/ASEB/DEPS_067029?ssSourceSiteId=SSB

I am annoyed at some of the questions, such as the question regarding humans/vs robots. This is a silly question for such an organization such as this to ask and misses the entire point about what strategic direction means. Another question asked about the strategic direction statement itself. The NASA strategic direction, vision and mission statements aren’t bad. That is not the point. The point is that the implementation of those high sounding words is atrocious. Anyway, I copied all the questions and my answers, and these are now open for your comments as well!! Maybe this public forum will help provide better information than the limited format that they used.

NASA’s Vision, Mission and Strategic Direction.
What is your understanding and opinion of NASA’s current vision, mission and strategic direction? If you think NASA’s vision, mission and strategic direction should different from the above, please state what they should be and why.

The vision and mission statement of NASA in their 2011 strategic plan are largely decoupled from the way that the strategic goal, especially #1 is implemented. 1.3 states:

“Develop an integrated architecture and capabilities for safe crewed and cargo missions beyond low Earth orbit.”

Currently, none of the BEO exploration architectures integrates ISS into its plan. It is merely assumed that ISS will not be around due to the long development period of the SLS HLV booster. The SLS booster, its cost, and long gestation is the flaw in the implementation of the Strategic direction. An alternate architecture integrating existing vehicles, advanced technology, and living off the land negates the need for the SLS.
The implementation plan that undergirds the utilization of an SLS heavy lift vehicle assumes that all payloads for human BEO missions will be lofted from the Earth. None of the design reference missions incorporate InSitu Resource Utilization (ISRU) in any serious manner. The reasons given are that ISRU is at a low Technical Readiness Level (TRL), yet there are no significant programs in NASA beyond Jerry Sanders modest efforts, in NASA’s strategic technology portfolio.

Without ISRU, no BEO exploration strategy is sustainable. At no time in human history has any exploration or colonization succeeded when reliant on supplies from home. NASA’s LRO, Mars, and other planetary missions indicate that our solar system is rich with resources, including fuels and metals, that would support a “living off the land” strategy.

The SLS centric architecture ignores ISS and wastes NASA’s flagship human spaceflight program. Its expense and long gestation time, renders human BEO exploration so far into the future as to be of little value to our society. It is recommended that the strategic plan be amended to incorporate “living off the land” as a central theme for sustainable human BEO exploration.

Budget
In your opinion, should NASA’s annual budget (currently about $18 billion) be substantially increased, be substantially decreased, or remain at about the current level – and why? [In responding to this question, assume that an increase in NASA's budget would require reduction(s) elsewhere in the federal budget and, conversely, that a decrease in NASA's budget would enable increased funding elsewhere in the federal budget.]

NASA’s budget is less important than the strategic direction and national priority. Today billions of dollars per year are wasted on a heavy lift vehicle with no funding for payloads and is not expected to be operational for another ten years. Reallocating this funding to advanced technology, in space systems, and more commercial integration would provide vastly more value to the American taxpayer.

As far as the budget goes, the budget is always given as the reason that we cannot do more in space. In this same amount of time, especially in the last several years the lie of this proposition has been made abundantly clear. Our nation has spent trillions of dollars on the financial system bail out, almost a trillion dollars in stimulus spending and barely a budge on the NASA budget. From 2001 to 2008 the budget of the education department increased more than twice NASA’s entire budget. Money is not the problem, the problem is priority.

NASA’s priority as integrated into national priorities, has been sorely shortchanged. Organizations such as the National Academies of Science and other like organizations have dominated the discussion regarding the strategic direction of NASA and hence NASA becomes yet another government science project. It has been observed that on this committee there is only one person with a robust business background. Additionally, there is no advocate for the economic development of the solar system and its strategic value to the nation. The solar system is rich in resources, resources that can make the difference in providing for the 9 billion humans who will be alive in less than 40 years.
Therefore the question is not budget, it is priority, and with the right priority our national space efforts should have a budget of at least $75 billion per year.
Human Component of Space Exploration.
In your opinion, what is the relative value of a space exploration program (to low-Earth orbit and beyond) that includes humans as compared to a space exploration program that is conducted exclusively with robotic, uncrewed spacecraft and rovers? That is, to what extent does a human presence add value to a space exploration program, and is it worth the cost and risk?

This is the old humans vs robots canard and truly has no place in the deliberations of such a body as this. To even ask this question indicates a serious misunderstanding of the value of the space enterprise to the nation and the world. It may be that this was placed here to simulate discussion and it is in this context that it will be answered.

We live on an Earth where in less than forty years we will have a population of over 9 billion people. There is a large school of thought that the resources of our planet cannot long sustain such a population and that it is inevitable that with the exhaustion of our resources our civilization will collapse. This is what I call a “one world” argument that ignores the vast resources of our solar system in energy, materials, and living space. In my chapter on Space Power Theory this was called “the geocentric mindset”. This mindset takes as a given that there is nothing of value in space, when nothing is farther from the truth.

The obverse of the geocentric one world mindset is the “Many Worlds” hypothesis.
The many worlds hypothesis has as its core the scientific fact that our solar system is rich with resources and that it is our goal not only to obtain these resources for the preservation and extension of our global civilization, it is our goal to take our civilization to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. In this many worlds hypothesis it is an intrinsic value that humans and machines together will create a solar system spanning civilization of unparalleled wealth, technology, and freedom. We have the technology, we have the financial ability, the question is whether our leaders have the vision to do their part to enable this future.

NASA Communications
Do you feel that NASA is very good, moderately good or not very good at communicating its vision, mission and strategic direction to its stakeholders, including the public? Why? How do you obtain information about NASA (TV news, websites, Twitter or other social media, etc.). If you think NASA’s communication strategy needs improvement, what specifically do you recommend? Why?

There are two NASA’s. The first NASA is the one that we who are insiders know about. The agency who is the hostage to political interests, where decisions are made not on what is in the best interest of the nation but on which senator has the best means of squeezing NASA to make it provide for his or her favorite pork barrel. This is the NASA that destroys the space shuttle program with no replacement. This is the NASA that spends more than a Nimitz class super carrier on a telescope. This is a NASA that never saw a budget that it could not overrun so badly as to endanger the entire NASA mission.

Then there is the NASA that the public sees. This is the NASA that, at 10:30 pm on a Sunday night, has several thousand people in the quad at NASA Ames to watch the landing of curiosity, and they weren’t all NASA employees or contractors. This is the NASA where at 10:30 in the evening in Los Angeles, you could not even get to the Griffith Park Observatory where several thousand more people were waiting for Curiosity’s landing. This is the NASA that, though it is 0.5% of the Federal budget, gets 98% of all government internet traffic, and drives entire sectors of the global internet bandwidth during moments like Curiosity’s landing.

No one gives a damn about NASA’s communication of its strategic direction, people care about results. The American public is far better at understanding what NASAs strategic direction should be and it is to the shame of the agency, these committees such as this, and the congress, that NASA is not what the American public think it should be. That is NASA’s biggest problem.

The recommendation is to do more exploration!

International Collaboration
Should the United States conduct future human space exploration efforts on its own, like the Apollo program, or should the United States conduct such efforts as collaborative international efforts, like the International Space Station? If you recommend the latter approach, should the United States insist on taking the lead role? Why?

The United States of America, even with its flaws, is the hope of the world. Of course we should collaborate with our international friends. That should not substitute for leadership. It should not be used as a means to cut the budget. Our leadership will do more to foster international collaboration than international collaboration will do to foster leadership.

It is time for us to lead.

Commercial Space Ventures
Should NASA and the federal government continue current efforts to encourage the development of a commercial space industry as is, or should it either curtail or expand these efforts? What specific actions would you recommend? Why?

1.  Zero G Zero Tax

Zero G Zero Tax (ZGZT) is a tax policy whereby federal taxes on profits, and investment capital gains are taxed at zero percent for a period of twenty years. Existing industries such as communications and remote sensing are excluded. The internet has exploded into a complete revolution of the way our entire civilization works, and this was aided by a favorable tax policy. The economic development of the solar system is more important to our global family than even the Internet.

2. Large Scale Prizes

The use of prizes in history to foster innovation is well known. The design of every locomotive on rails is directly descended from a prize competition in 1825 for a viable system to move freight and people over rails. The Ortieg prize in the early 20th century provided the incentive that allowed Charles Lindberg to raise the funds that he needed to build and fly the Spirit of St. Louis over the Atlantic and change the aviation world. The Ansari X prize provided the incentive that enabled Burt Rutan to build Spaceship 1, who’s commercial descendant will enter service carrying passengers within the next several months.

Prizes must be sized to provide enough financial incentive to recoup most of not all of the commercial cost of a venture and be structured to enable a sustainable market after the prize is won.

Prize 1: The Humans to the Moon prize.

A prize of $5 billion dollars to the company/group/organization who can place three humans on the Moon, keep them there for six months, and return them safely to the Earth.

Prize 2: The propellant prize.

A prize of $5 billion dollars for the first ton of propellant derived from lunar resources and returned to low Earth Orbit at the International Space Station or other low orbit.

Other Remarks
Are there any additional comments regarding NASA’s strategic direction that you would like to make?

It is unfortunate that the composition of this NRC council on NASA’s strategic direction has no core member from the commercial space industry. The credentials of the members are stellar within their realms but these are narrow areas of expertise that do not allow for the long view or the broad outlook that the nation demands in charting the strategic direction of the nation’s space efforts.

It is recommended that the NRC team doing this effort bring together the nation’s experts and futurists in this arena and to strongly consider the role of the economic development and even colonization of the solar system not as quaint science fiction, but as concrete goals to be obtained by our generation.

Changing the Conversation about the Economic Development of the Moon

Changing the Conversation 

It is time to throw down the gauntlet as they say, regarding the Moon. It is my firm conviction that the industrialization of the Moon is the necessary and logical first goal of the second American space age.  The industrial capability of the Moon and its near space environs can now be developed. The industrialization of the Moon paves the way for reusable human interplanetary spacecraft, large communications and remote sensing platforms in geosynchronous orbit, and the settlement of Mars.  By introducing reusability of the in space segment of all of the elements we transform the first human landing on Mars from a heroic flags and footprints publicity stunt into the first wave of human economic development and colonization of the solar system.  By enabling the development of large platforms in GEO orbit we further leverage the existing $300 billion per year existing economic value of this space real estate.  In short, we transform our current primitive level of space technological development away from the throw away space junk creating model to one wherein we can finally develop the potential of the space economy.

Adapting New Technological Advances to Lunar Industrialization and Mars Settlement

It is my position that we have the technological wherewithal to utilize the most recent and unheralded dramatic advances in robotics, computer controlled manufacturing, and 3D printing technologies.  These developments have pushed us pass the critical mass necessary to create a flourishing lunar manufacturing outpost. An example of this is a three D printer that can print metal.

Many of the superalloys used in advanced military systems have a heavy vacuum as one of the processing steps.  Most if not all of the base elements needed are plentiful on the Moon.

http://www.feinguss-blank.de/english/technologies-solutions/casting/superalloys/

With the abundant titanium, aluminum and other elements on the Moon coupled to e-beam and other additive 3D printing technologies…..

……it is easily possible with the technology we have in hand that to build large, super strong structures on the Moon, launch them into orbit with a reusable lunar RLV and assemble them into a Mars cycler that can be used multiple times as a ferry to move people to Mars, and then return to Earth orbit (probably Earth Moon Libration point 1), where the next set of people and or cargo can be sent.

In this fashion Mars would be transformed into a viable destination for human settlement.

Another dramatic advance that has occurred to make this far more feasible is the revolution in embedded electronics, driven by the hobby, military, and professional robotics world. Arduino, Lynxmotion, Servocity are names and websites that you have probably never heard of are part of a an evolving ecosystem of small and large companies like Analog devices, Maxim, and Intel. These companies are at the base of the food chain for the robotics and remote systems world and their products have helped to dramatically lower the hardware cost of entry for robotics, coupled with an explosion in the software world. Software now exists for autonomous remote locomotion of a wide range of robotics and industrial equipment. This software and hardware has not made it into the NASA world as of yet but in more commercially driven entities remote operation of a plethora of robotic equipment is already a reality.

Greg Baiden, and Penguin Systems are part of that revolution higher in the food chain, making heavy industrial equipment that can be monitored and controlled remotely:

Another conviction; even with all of the advances in automation, humans are 100% required on the Moon. Murphy lives and no matter how many ways that you look at hardware failure and work out methods to to preclude it, failure always finds a way to outsmart you. With enough infrastructure in place humans can also use their creativity to work out new things and way ways of doing things in that environment. Taking humans in the early days of the lunar manufacturing outpost development may be expensive but humans are much more easily reprogrammable than a machine and human problem solving skills will be necessary. We must get away from this idea of robots vs humans, both are necessary on the Earth and they will be off of the Earth, at least for the foreseeable future.

This mobile robot platform would be capable of autonomous as well as tele operated action.

A Different Kind of Exploration Architecture

With the goal of developing a lunar manufacturing outpost (what kind of name could you come up with for the outpost) a different kind of launch and transportation architecture to the Moon becomes more cost effective than a heavy lift vehicle. The only real purpose of a heavy lift launch vehicle is to lift large ground integrated systems into orbit. These systems have to withstand the launch, vibration, and thermal environment in their flight from the Earth to orbit. If we are able to manufacture the large heavy structural and other parts on the Moon, we can change what we lift from the Earth from these large systems to parts. Computers, transceivers, embedded systems, motors, and all the things that can be more easily made on the Earth. Since these are not fully integrated systems, they could be packed just like we pack things for shipping on the Earth in a vibration environment and send them up. If a launch vehicle failed the value of the aggregate of the parts is far less than what the entire system would have cost. This is just the beginning of the savings.

Today we already have crucial elements of a 21st century cis-lunar (Earth Moon system) transportation network.  We have the International Space Station (ISS) that is the aggregation point for payloads and humans in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).  We have near term commercial human spaceflight vehicles from SpaceX (Dragon), Orbital Sciences (Cygnus), the Japanese (HTV), the European (ATV), and the Russian Progress, Soyuz, and Proton vehicles.  The next steps would be a human and or robotic cycler to the Moon, along with a simple system for landing human and robotic payloads along with direct flights of supplies using existing EELV’s, Falcon 9′s, Japanese, European, and Russian launchers.  There are only a very few payloads that ever require a heavy lifter and if we shift the emphasis to lunar manufacturing, then the need for heavy lift basically goes away.

Premature?

The inevitable push back is that this is not possible, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and decades, and whatever new reason can be thought up. However, I ask the reader to put this thought aside for a second and consider the value of having a lunar manufacturing outpost that would build these systems. This would completely revolutionize our society. No longer is Mars that far off target,it is within our grasp. Resource depletion? The World Wildlife Federation Periodically puts out a press release stating that we need the equivalent of two more Earth’s to supply the 9 billion inhabitants of the Earth in 2050. Since this is obviously impossible we have to change our entire civilization to somehow move backward to the 19th century. The startling fact is that it is now possible to put the thousands of worlds of the asteroid belt and those near the earth into service to serve the resource needs of the Earth.

This was foreseen as far back as 1965 by Neil Ruzic in his book “The Case for Going to the Moon”.  An image of his vision of a lunar manufacturing operation is shown below:

Lunar Manufacturing Using the Advantages of Vacuum and Precision Temperature Control in Cryostat Processors

The bowl shaped devices above are cryostats.  These were patented by Mr. Ruzic during the writing of this book and are standard items in Earth bound vacuum manufacturing today as they allow for precise temperature control of processes like the forming of superalloys for aerospace.  Ruzic took this much farther in his book, showing how entire factories built in cryostats could be used on the Moon to leverage the advantages of the Moon’s environments.  He did not see the Moon as a place where things can’t get done, but as a place that enables things that otherwise we could never get done.  That is how the mindset must change.  Thinking about what can be done with the Moon is a lot more practical than complaining about the difficulties.

How do We Do this Thing?

This type of development is not all NASA’s job. NASA can work to build technologies to support this type of development and can help drive the destinations for science purposes. The government did not build the intercontinental railroad but it did enable their development. The Pacific railway act of 1862 can a model for our future in space. People will say that in the middle of a recession we cannot fund or do something like this or that we have other priorities. When the pacific railway act was signed the blood of Americans had been shed in civil war not fifty miles from the capital not long before. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would die in that war in the next three years and yet the government found the money for the pacific railway act because it was important to the future of our nation. Space is just as important to our future now.

Money

Simple, two paths, one is by using the model of the Pacific Railway Act, which is similar in structure to the COTS missions to ISS today. Or by a Prize. The prize path is more desirable as it results in the most innovation and competition. The prizes have to be substantial.

Say

Ten billion dollars for two humans to live on the Moon for six months.

And

Fifteen billion dollars additional for the first lunar surface to lunar orbit RLV that does the trip twice in one week.  This would be required to use propellant derived from the Moon itself.

That money can come out of the High Speed Railroad fund and would be a far better use of the funds, and one that looks forward and not backward.

By using the prize approach the broader economy will be stimulated but only for achievement.  The prize has to be high enough to enable the entrants a profit, but not enough to be the same size of outlay if the government was going to do it.   There is absolutely nothing in the world precluding congress and the white house from doing this and the value of doing this far outweighs the cost to the treasury.

Why This and Not That?

Basically all of NASA’s architectures since about 1990 have been the equivalent of an Antarctic research station on the Moon and or Mars.  These destinations are for everyone and if instead of focusing on the science mission we must focus on the development of these locations for the benefit of all mankind.

Is not this goal worth solving the ISRU problem?  That is all stands between us and lunar manufacturing.  A scientific outpost was a worthy goal 20 years ago.  However, today we must look beyond that to the economic possibilities of the Moon and how it can be leveraged to solve the 21st century problems of sustaining and expanding the reach of our civilization here on the Earth for the 9 billion people who will be living here within a single generation.  The future is not Mad Max, the future can be the starship Enterprise.  Which way it goes is up to us.

The beginnings of a lunar manufacturing outpost

Slaying Sacred Space Cows

I spend a fair amount of time discussing space development with people, in presentations,  blogs, and in personal conversations.  Most people who know me know that one of my prime foci is off planet industrialization, principally beginning with orbital space and then the Moon.  One of the most baffling and tragic responses that I get in this realm is the complete dismissal of the entire concept.  The back and forth in someone else’s blog thread is never satisfying because you cannot develop more than a short stream of thought and when the other person/persons are simply dismissive, no real progress is made.  Thus in this missive I am going to go into some of my basic thoughts regarding lunar industrialization and see if we can get beyond these, in my opinion, misunderstandings regarding how hard it is.

Background

As is my way in developing these ideas lets begin with how things are done here on the Earth and then see how they might develop on the Moon.  I always look at history as a guide.  I grew up near Birmingham Alabama, then called “The Pittsburg of the South”.  Some of my earliest memories are of riding in a car by the big steel mills in Ensley, Fairfield, and downtown (Sloss furnaces) Alabama.

These places always fascinated me as you could see the hot steel ingots being stamped, rolled, and worked from the car.  At Sloss you could see the hot steel being poured from the ladles into molds.  Many of my friends that I grew up with now work at steel mills like Fairfield, ACIPCO, O’Neal Steel, and others.  While I have not worked at any of these myself, I know a pretty good bit about them and have used their products in hardware that we have built, such as our 22,500 lb steel solar/wind trailers.  Figure 1 is a picture of the frame of our solar/wind trailer under construction:

Figure 1: The GSW-7000 Solar/Wind Trailer Frame Under Construction, Centreville Maryland, 2011

The trailer under construction in the picture above is made from standard A-36 steel.  The frame parts are made from tube, “c” channel, flat plate, and square tubes.  All of these parts are welded together using very simple frames, c clamps, and other devices to hold the pieces together while they are welded.  This principle is pretty much how most heavy equipment is built, with the larger production lines being more automated.  The pieces here came from a steel distributor and were cut into the right lengths/sizes using laser and or plasma cutters.

This background is provided in order to convey to the reader a small sense of my history with steel as well as a bit of information on how vehicles are put together in a low production environment.  There is nothing magic about how this is done, just simple steel products welded together by competent people who do this as a living.  I love metals and have spent a lot of my life around heavy equipment and its uses, especially in the coal mining industry.  Thus I can at least speak with some knowledge of the subject here on the Earth.  The interesting part is how to translate this to how we would do such things on the Moon.

Basic Things Needed for Lunar Industrialization

There are four basic things needed for basic lunar industrialization.

• Raw Materials
• Energy
• Manufacturing Infrastructure
• Workforce

Availability of Lunar Metals

It is well known from the literature (one example) on the Apollo samples (the greatest part of their legacy) that there is meteoric metals and nano phase iron in proportions up to 1%.  Apollo 16 samples, being from a highlands site has the greatest proportion of meteoric materials, which is to be expected as the highlands have the oldest regolith.  Thus if we were to do the most minimal processing of highlands regolith from a site at the North pole (my favored location for many reasons), then we can expect to obtain quite a bit of metal. Beneficiation, or concentrating, of this metal could be accomplished on the Moon with nothing more than an electromagnet and a dump truck rover.   There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that a robotic rover with a magnet could not pick up a minimum of 100 kilograms per hour of this meteoric metal.  This can be done without any of the exotic chemical or other methods of separating metals from their oxides on the Moon.

Melting and Forming the Metal

There are different ways of melting metal but they all require energy.  For the Moon there are two easy ways to do it.  The first way is to simply use the sun and all you need to do it is a fresnel lens.  Here is a video of a guy who does just that, with a very simple and lightweight system:

Here is a second and much faster method using a parabolic mirror:

If you notice the video closely you will see that they only used a small fraction of the available light on the parabolic mirror to melt the steel.  At the lunar north pole where up to 100% of the time it is sunlit (Northern hemisphere summer) there is plenty of sun to support a continuous operating foundry.

The second means, using indirect sunlight in the form of electrical power, is achieved by using an induction furnace.  The next video shows that:

So what we have here are two different methods of melting metals that would be directly applicable to melting metals on the Moon, even with a lot of rock contamination, which since rock is lighter, floats to the top and is scooped off as slag.

The next video shows metal pouring and forming.  The sand mold method of metal casting is as old as the Hittite empire, long before Rome.  The video here is from a British television program called “Metal Monkeys”.

Remember at the beginning of this article where in figure one the trailer is made from welded pieces of steel?  It is quite simple using the sand mold process to make the basic parts that go into the trailer frame construction.  On the Moon it would be done using sintering of the regolith using microwaves after forming the desired part:  Figure 2 shows my concept of the induction furnace and mold that would be used to build structures on the Moon:

Figure 2: This shows a vacuum induction furnace on the surface of the Moon that would be used to melt and pour metal.

Uses of Metal On the Moon

There is no end of the uses of metal on the Moon.  For simple parts and objects the manufacturing infrastructure is minimal.  All that was used in the construction of our trailers in figure 1 was saw horses to hold the frame, C clamps to hold the pieces together while they are tacked together, and then a bridge crane to lift the assembly and turn it over during the production process.  Obviously you need a welder as well, but on the Moon welding is very easy and you could use a laser welder, which requires a lot of power but little in the way of consumables or good old concentrated sunlight again.

Figure 3 shows an Eagle Engineering design of the LOTRAN rover on the Moon:

Figure 3: LOTRAN Rover, made from aluminum tubes as can be seen in the drawing

Figure four below shows a lunar habitat with structure holding up the weight of the regolith radiation shielding:

Figure 5: From Eagle Engineering, Lunar Habitat and Support Structure for Regolith Shielding

In figure 3 and 4 there are many of the structural pieces that, rather than being brought up from the Earth, could be derived from local ISRU derived metals.  Even the habitats themselves could be made mostly from locally derived metals.  There is a class of steel called “Maraging Steel” that is a high nickel alloy that is very close to what you would have available from meteoric and nano phase iron derived from the regolith.

Slaying Sacred Space Cows With a Gestalt Tempered Blade

One of the sacred cows that drives the demand for a heavy lift vehicle is that ISRU is not ready for prime time, that it is too hard, and that it is something that will happen in 20, 50, or 100 years, pick your time.  A friend of mine who was on the Augustine II commission told me that Norm Augustine simply would not allow any discussion of ISRU as an enabling technology for transforming the Constellation program.  He said that he simply did not believe it was possible.  In another blog forum recently when I brought up the possibility of making rover parts from ISRU derive metal, the person I was interacting with simply refused to carry on the conversation as for me to even mention that was to shift the discussion into the non-credible.

After reading this somewhat long post I hope that the reader will get the idea that obtaining, melting, and forming metal is no big deal.  As someone who grew up with and continues to work with steel I find it astonishing when otherwise intelligent people simply dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.  There is absolutely nothing precluding a metals centric ISRU implementation on the Moon that would have an immediate upstream effect on the entire architecture for lunar/Mars exploration.

In all of the discussions about heavy lift, I have never been able to find anyone who can list more than a few payloads that require a heavy lifter.  These are things such as a habitats, pressurized rovers, power systems, and humans.  With a robust implementation of ISRU coupled with the landing of modest equipment with existing vehicles, the need for heavy lift is completely eliminated.

That is a sacred cow worth slaying…

On Orbit Servicing, The Rest of the Story

I have read with interest Jeff Foust’s article “The Space Industry Grapples with Satellite Servicing” and wanted to add the perspective of someone who has worked in this area for several years.

This requires that an overview and exposition of our experience in this field be discussed so that a proper context can be developed.

The article: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2108/1

The Question 

The key question in the realm of On Orbit Servicing (OOS) is touched on by Jeff Foust about half way through the article:

“The key question is whether satellite servicing is financially viable: can a company providing, say, basic refueling services sell them at a price that is attractive to the satellite owner and still profitable for itself?”

This is not just the key question, it is the only question that really matters! OOS will stand or fall on how successfully and cost effectively this question is answered.

When we founded Orbital Recovery Corporation (ORC) it was the result of an intense discussion with insurance industry professionals.  We did not begin by talking about technology, but rather by examining if a cost-effective solution could be found.

A Business, Not a Technology

We began with the founding premise that in order to be successful, the company had to address an as yet unmet commercial market in space.  Without that we would just become another government contractor, dependent on government customers and cost plus contracts in order to survive.  Since GEO is the only commercial market of any size, we zeroed in on that.  What we noticed is that in Europe and Asia there were a large proportion of inclined GEO birds, those who had exceeded their lifetime and who had abandoned north/south station keeping to conserve fuel and thus generate lower yet still valuable revenue streams.  Our market intelligence indicated that the transponder fees for these birds were only a small fraction of the fees for a regular geostationary bird.

Our discussions with the insurance industry centered around whether or not these birds could be given a new lease on life, maneuvered back into geostationary orbit, and brought back into more profitable service.  At this point we did a cost/benefit analysis between the operations of inclined birds and the increased profit potential of the same bird if it were life extended in GEO.     After running these numbers, we came up with a pricing metric for a life extension service that would enable ORC to make a profit.

It is important for the reader to notice that up until this point the word “technology” has not been used.  We initially were completely agnostic in this regard as we were a start up and did not have a large R&D operation that had to be fed.  We did not have any metric of success other than to make a profit in a commercial market.  This completely freed us from the slavery to the BAA/RFP/FAR world, where technology is everything and increasing the cost is what increases profits.

The metric, or in NASA terms, our second level zero requirement (after commercial focus), was to state that whatever we did for life extension, if it had yet to be ‘invented’, it had to be the lowest possible cost R&D activity that would get us into the market place the soonest.

The focus on the path of least resistance (R&D cost) for orbital life extension eliminated many of the technologies that most people are focusing on today.  We eliminated advanced robotic arms for freeing solar arrays or antennas as the subset of satellites that have this problem is small and the R&D cost for implementing the capability is very high. We eliminated refueling for the same reason, and because the operators and underwriters that we spoke to about this were extremely nervous about it.  Think about the ramifications of an accident in an orbital slot with seven satellites and you get the picture.  The cost of R&D for this was also similarly high.  At every instance, and at every decision point, the total cost of the system and how to reduce it was our focus.  After whittling down the R&D to focus on simple life extension via a parent/child spacecraft pair, we reexamined the market to make sure that we still had a business which we did.  Then we did a straw man design to bracket the costs and then hit the road to talk to the satellite operators.

Customers Not Contracts

In a 16 day whirlwind global marketing trip we met the vast majority of the global satellite operator community.  At each stop, not only did we have acceptance, we had an audience that made several suggestions on how to improve our marketing approach.  (We also had the expected suggestions on adding robotic arms, refueling, and other enhancements.)  We assured each potential customer that after the first billion in free cash flow that we would implement follow on technologies.  It was appreciated by our potential customers that we had a singular focus on providing the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to OOS.

After we introduced our concept at the Paris satellite financing conference in 2002 we were off and running and gained allies from unexpected places.  We put out an RFP, based upon our requirements to the global satellite manufacturing community.  While we did not expect responses from the incumbent GEO comsat manufacturers, we were surprised when not one single American manufacturer responded — not one!  We did get responses in Europe however, and this precipitated our shift to European manufacturers.  Not only did we get responses, we were offered technologies that had already been developed for our form of life extension from the German Institute for Mechatronics and Robotics near Munich.  We formed partnerships with European manufacturers and even received matching funding for our idea from ESA’s ARTES-4 program.

Our first go around for system design did not meet our cost requirements and we shifted to a system based upon the successful European SMART-1 science spacecraft that flew a similar mission profile from GTO as a secondary payload (also a means to save money on launch).

The second go around, with a proven bus of similar capabilities to what we needed was much more successful and we were able to sign not one, but two comsat operators for our service.

The Best Laid Plans…..

With all of this behind us, why were we not successful?  Completely unrelated to our Orbital Recovery Corporation business, our rapidly to become former CEO was arrested for tax fraud.  That puts a crimp in your business plan.  This was so completely out of left field that we were not able to overcome it.  In practical terms we were unable to execute the changes in corporate governance that were required for continued investment and business execution.  The reasons for this are complex and worth a book in and of itself, but the bottom line are these:

With our approach and our focus on the business, we were not only able to attract investment, partnerships, and customers, we were able to leverage a lower cost system design to provide a compelling solution to our customers that was accepted in the market place.

The focus on technology, on the hard, or even DARPA hard technologies is a faulty path for an emerging enterprise servicing a commercially dominated market.  This is where many of the entrants or incumbents in OOS are being misled down a path toward non-success.  If technology was the solution, then the DARPA Orbital Express mission would have been the touchstone of success.  (In my opinion, Orbital Express harmed the perceptions in the commercial market.  The $336 million dollar price tag was sufficiently high so as to give our commercial customers significant doubts that we could do this cost effectively.)

Today, the focus on refueling and other activities that require massive R&D does nothing to bring confidence of affordability to the commercial market (that is ten times larger than the government market) that OOS will be something that saves them money in the foreseeable future.

The Future of OOS

There is one group that gets it.  Vivasat LLC (www.vivasat.com) and U.S. Space LLC has teamed up to pick up our fallen standard and is moving the low cost of entry concept that we at ORC pioneered forward.  The key is what it has always been where Orbital Recovery left off.  They believe, as did we, that this service can be built for a cost/price that brings value to the customer and a profitable business to the provider.  It simply does not matter what companies think of their own gee whiz products, value to the customer is the only metric that matters.  Those who focus on the government, must live or die by the government’s requirements, that lead to uneconomical systems.

In closing, OOS is absolutely a business who’s time has come.  Those who realize that it is a business opportunity and not a science project are the ones that will open the doors to a completely new market space.  The customers want it and are willing to pay for it, if it saves them money.  That is the foundation of any successful commercial business, whether in space, or anywhere else for that matter.

Systems Engineering Approach to Building the Future

In thinking about grand plans for the economic development of the solar system, it is easy to get caught up in the fact that you are thinking about building grand plans and so you get, grand.  In many many conversations, papers, and even here, people who poke holes (and they are good to have by the way), like to poke at the fact that you are designing grand plans without the path to get there.  I realize this but I have always not wanted to talk too much about the near term steps as they are too close to being a business plan for what I want to do.  However, it seems that what we need is to get the ideas out there and look for those who believe in what we are attempting and support it financially.  So, instead of talking about the grand plan, lets begin at the beginning.

I am doing it this way because so many times we get bogged down in the development of the grand plan and people get confused and there is legitimate criticism that has to be answered regarding elements of the grand plan, so, starting at the beginning, walking through the steps, gives everyone an idea of how we can get there from today without any big miracles and without so many of the things that some think that we absolutely must have.  There is also a revolution brewing in terrestrial technology that is going to make reaching the two goals above much much easier to reach as well.

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In the EE world when you do a new design, you think up what your design should be and then see how many of the parts that you need are off the shelf, existing, and inexpensive.   The more the better and the cheaper your product the better for competition and market creation.  After exhausting the easy stuff you see what you have to do that is unique to your design that you have to design/build in order to make the whole work.  If the iPad had cost $5,000 rather than a few hundred, it would not have broken the new ground in market creation that it did.  Steve Jobs had the vision of something like the pad a long time ago with the Newton but the technology and the infrastructure was not there.  Now that it is, the iPad is a huge success.  We need to bring the EE and Silicon valley thought process into the space world and these steps we will mirror in developing the ideas for reaching the big goals.

First is the design. It does not have to be specified to the detail, just the goal.  The goal for the iPad was probably no more than a few bullet points.  For a bridge or interstate the first goals, or in NASA speak, the level 0 requirements need to be stated.  This is the easy part.

First Goals for The Economic Development of the Solar System.

1. A self sustaining (as opposed to self sufficient) lunar industrial outpost that creates more value in dollars returned to the investor over time than the cost of the enterprise.

2. A transportation infrastructure that allows for ubiquitous transportation of humans and cargo anywhere in cislunar space (defined as any altitude above the earth less than 500,000 kilometers)

These are stupendous goals or requirements that make us want to start talking grand plans again, but lets begin with the next step of the silicon valley world when designing a new product, what is out there that I can use today to get my design accomplished?

First there are rockets.  There is the PSLV from India, the Long March in China, the Proton, Soyuz, Dnepr from Russia, the Ariane V from Europe, the H2A from Japan,  the Atlas, Delta, Taurus I/II, the Minataur from the U.S, and the Zenit and Falcon 1E/9 from quasi commercial providers.  A pretty good stable of rockets with capabilities between 1 and 25 metric tons to orbit.   A couple of these are off limits in the west but the rest are readily available in prices around $2000-5000 dollar/kg to orbit.

Then there is the International Space Station.  It has six crewpersons, with only two required to keep the station operational.  It has the Russian modules, it has the U.S. Destiny lab along with the Columbus from Europe and Kibo from Japan.  These are amazing facilities that are dramatically underutilized.  It is in a 51.6 degree orbit that is considered by some hole pokers as bad, except that it is there, the mass penalty for getting there rather than the lower Florida 28.5 degrees is 6.5% of the payload.  Did I mention that it was there, in orbit today, whereas the mythical better one at 28.5 degrees is yet to exist.  I hope that Bigelow changes that but if I am designing something today, I have to look at what is available today, that station is not there yet.  I can and do acknowledge that it is coming and that it will have a positive effect on lowering the cost of human presence in space for everyone.

There are also the vehicles such as the European ATV, the Russian Progress, the Russian Soyuz, the Proton for heavy payloads to the station as well.  There is also the Japanese HTV that is flying now.  In the near future we hope that both the Dragon and the Orbital Sciences CRS vehicle (Orbital you HAVE to change that lame name) carrying payloads to the station.  Eventually NASA will have a new vehicle going to the station but it is an even bet that Musk with the Dragon, Boeing with the CTV, or Lockheed with a commercial version of Orion will make it to the station with people first.  That is a good thing for all of us. This makes several vehicles that are currently flying or will fly in the near term for the station.  Together these vehicles are an amazing resource for flying payloads to the ISS.

We also have a large ground infrastructure.  We can buy communications from Priordia net or Universal Space Network.  We can buy some components from the existing U.S. aerospace industrial base but they are generally incredibly expensive, though some of it is for good reason.  Elon Musk is showing that it takes a vertically integrated operation to cut the costs of a large system.  This is what the large aerospace companies did decades ago but they are for the most part assembly houses now and this has led to unnecessary cost increases due to the way that government contracting works with multiple levels of overhead and G&A tacked on, like a VAT tax on aerospace contracts.

Building a vertically integrated operation is probably the first difficult thing to be done in the process, build a technical team that has a wide ranging technical talent, along with the latest productivity enhancements that the computer age brings to the table.  There are a lot of really smart people out there in the U.S. aerospace and NASA worlds who want to do things the right way, getting them together into a team is the most important thing that is the foundation of everything else that is done.  Instead of large teams of process dependent cogs, you have to have a small, very smart, very well paid group of top tier engineers.  Couple them with young new blood from college that can be mentored in real time and who can do the late night work.  As much as money, more than anything else, is the importance of the organization and composition of the engineering team.

Other resources such as the far better CAD/CAM of today, 3D printing, and other simulation software helps to dramatically increase productivity are very important as well and the people that know how to run the equipment to its best potential.

There is a large body of literature, scientific papers, and the work done by others to build upon as well, and all of these are important as we have to understand what people have built before so that we can take that knowledge and leverage it in our own work.  These are the assets that we have available today to help build aerospace systems and these provide the basis for doing designs.

That comes next.

 

 

Why I Am Here

Hello folks, this is my first real foray into this type of blogging.  I am here for two reasons.  The first is that everyone is talking and talking past each other, but it seems that not enough people doing anything to help build a positive new world.  There is the idea, that to me is a throwback to the 1970′s, that we are doomed and we are just going to have to get used to the idea of being less free, less prosperous, and less willing to look forward brightly to the future.  I reject this idea, which is at the core of reason 1.  Reason 2 is to talk about what we can do to bring into being a prosperous 21st century.

At the core of the issue today that confronts the whole world is energy.  Increased sources of higher quality of energy, starting with wood, then coal, now oil, along with industrialization has allowed mankind, starting with the English industrial revolution almost 300 years ago to increase lifespans from approximately 40 years to today’s 78+ years for advanced countries.  Today these advances are under threat.  From the specter of climate change forced by the burning of hydrocarbon energy, to the energy and resource demands of the rapidly developing nations that are already surpassing demand in the west,  our civilization is under pressure.  What to do about that pressure will decisively shape the outcome of the 21st century.

There are those, among them a great number of our political elite (in the west), who believe that the only solution is to step back from the future, to reduce our demands on the resources of the planet as a means to convince China, India, and other rising nations to themselves constrain their own growth.  The underlying premise is that our energy and material resources are fundamentally limited by the physical limits of planet Earth and must be conserved for their to be any hope in the future.  They furthermore discount the ability of technology to provide the answers to take us beyond today and to solve the basically technical problems to get beyond today’s limits to growth.

The idea of limits to growth has been around since the 1960′s and is embedded deeply into today’s environmental movement and many of the political class, but is it a fact, an axiom that technology indeed does not have the answers to these problems?  This is what I want to focus on, solving the technical problems. This is what I want to talk about here as I am 100% certain, as a technologist, that technology does have the solutions to our problems today.  The doubters say that of course a technologist would say that, it is a question of self interest.  They are right, however, we also have an interest in the rest of our fellow citizens and people in the rest of the world as well and we know that there are solutions, global and local level solutions that will shatter the limits to growth that are far more perception than reality.

That is something worth talking about and it is our duty as technologists to bring the solutions to the attention of our fellow citizens so that a debate can be had.  This debate is already in progress and 99.5% dominated by the limits to growth position.  It is time for that to change.  That is where I will start next time.

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I don’t want to talk about the paternity of Sara Palin’s child Trig, or whether or not president Obama is a socialist.  There are 5000 places to do that on the Internet.  Solving the technical problems does have a political aspect to it an in that context I will discuss it.  However, wasting time on political spitball fights is a recipe for paralysis and I don’t want it here.