Japanese Moon Base before US?

Status
Not open for further replies.
G

Gravity_Ray

Guest
Is this real or an anime cartoon? They are going to do all that by 2020? They do realize its 2010 right?

Anyway, more power to them. I hope they succeed.

However, I am not sure how everybody on Earth is going to react to a giant solar array going around the Moon.
 
S

sftommy

Guest
Solar power generation from the moon to earth might be a questionable goal.

But with a US Heavy lift and Japanese robotics there is some practicality to the approach for lunar development.
 
N

nextbigfuture

Guest
Thanks for the link to my website. The Japanese space agency is seriously considering the robotic moonbase but I do not think the budget and plan is approved yet. Shimizu tossed out the solar energy for the moon plan with many pretty pictures but their track record is to make farout plans like a arcology pyramid for Tokyo harbor and then do nothing. Shimizu only actually builds buildings, airports, bridges and other regular construction projects with the occasional experimental building. However, if Japan did build the robotic moonbase then it would be a stepping stone towards the solar energy moon plan. Mega-construction like that probably will not happen without a few dozen breakthroughs, including molecular nanotechnology.
 
E

EarthlingX

Guest
Nice article and pretty pictures :cool:

I think i saw somewhere that Japan is planning for a micro-wave energy transmission demonstration on ISS, but i'm not sure if there were any dates. If it gets more real, we will find out ;)

Robotic manufacturing is very real and more and more common every day. You can see example of robotic remote operation in live video from BP in the Gulf of Mexico, but proposed solar power station is still far, far away, and very likely not in the best location. Sun-Earth L1 would be much better, and if you would start with a captured NEO, probably easier.

There will be probably something like that on Luna, or other places :
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627621.200-rise-of-the-replicators.html

or more general :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injection_molding_machine
 
B

Booban

Guest
sftommy":2m1353fe said:
Solar power generation from the moon to earth might be a questionable goal.

And just what _isnt_ a questionable goal in space? At least this goal tries to solve a practical problem to benefit earthlings.
 
V

vulture4

Guest
Booban":36qa8q6h said:
sftommy":36qa8q6h said:
Solar power generation from the moon to earth might be a questionable goal.

And just what _isnt_ a questionable goal in space? At least this goal tries to solve a practical problem to benefit earthlings.

A realistic goal in space would be to reduce the cost of human space launch to LEO to less than $10 million. This is actually quite easy with current technology. With a fully reusable two-stage launch vehicle, the only unavoidable cost is the fuel that provides the energy. LOX is 60 cents a gallon at LC-38, LH2 is 98 cents. Sending the Shuttle's wings and landing gear into space costs almost nothing. The reason the Shuttle is expensive is that it was built without any developmental prototypes to test the new reusable technologies in actual spaceflight and actual refurbishment. Consequently there was no way to accurately predict cost or failure modes, and

The goal of Constellation, in contrast, is to spend roughly $400 billion to send a small group of civil servants to Mars two or three times, just because it's cool. This will never happen; it is pure fantasy. The taxpayers do not support it and no private passenger could afford it. Over $10 billion has been wasted on it already, yet its supporters are quite ready to kill any hope of developing practical human spaceflight by demolishing the Shuttle pad at LC-39.

It is astounding that even today there is no genuine open discussion within NASA on its strategic goals. It is naive to believe that those in charge are any wiser or better informed than we are. That doesn't mean we are right, or even that we agree, but at least by open discussion we have the chance to consider all points of view. That alone makes us better informed than Mr. Griffin, who killed the Shuttle, or Mr. Bolden, who failed to correct the error. Constellation advocates all blame Obama for all their problems, yet they are the ones who pushed for cancellation of the Shuttle, which is actually working quite well.

As to Japan, it is the first country to return a spacecraft from an asteroid, is engaged in operating the Kibo and improving its ELVs. There's some rationale for solar power in LEO or GEO, but solar power from the moon to the earth is absurd.
 
B

Booban

Guest
vulture4":211pyctw said:
As to Japan, it is the first country to return a spacecraft from an asteroid, is engaged in operating the Kibo and improving its ELVs. There's some rationale for solar power in LEO or GEO, but solar power from the moon to the earth is absurd.

The Japanese plan casts a wide net so that they can learn from many different areas of space operations and develop many different technologies, which is the near term goal of any space program today. By putting it on the moon, they get a major space program to be part of any international endeavor which may take place in the future, then the energy can be beamed to the moon base and not home if needed. If they are unsuccessful it can be scaled back to a more simple solar power satellite in earth orbit.
 
S

SteveCNC

Guest
That article had some interesting ideas in it although some of them I think need a bit of tweaking IMO . The idea of beaming energy through earths atmosphere just dosen't seem like a good thing to me . Is there not a problem with ionizing the atmosphere in the path of the beam ? Also wouldn't there be a lot of energy loss beaming any kind of energy through the atmosphere ?

Seems to me that if your base is on the moon , what you need external energy for , is when your on the dark side . So wouldn't it be better to have a satellite array that orbits the moon and can beam all the energy needed for night operations with a lot less energy loss and damage to our atmosphere . Some of the satellites will always be able to see the sun except possibly during a terran eclipse . At least until a cable and panel patches could be established at different points around the moon .

That's another thing I think should be altered , I would put the solar belt that goes around the moon near either the south or north pole so it wouldn't need to be quite so large to make it all the way around . With no atmosphere to interfere with the sun , I don't see the point in going to the equator for sunlight , sure at the poles you need more angle and height on the panels but that's not really a problem if your designing for that . Plus you would have a larger percentage of them able to collect light at any given moment .

Still I like that they are thinking big . That's what it will take to establish a real base on the moon that has more like 100s of people in it rather than the 3 - 7 we have at ISS regularly . Even though I know they are only at the proposal stage , it's great to see ideas like that being tossed around by someone who might could pull it off .

Personally I love Japan , in recent years they have really turned into a great nation .
 
M

menellom

Guest
Are they planning on finishing the giant Moon base before or after the giant space-based solar generator and the giant space elevator and the giant pyramid city?

This has always been Japan's problem, dreaming ridiculously big projects up then dumping all their money on cutesy robots or disturbing pornography.
 
F

Floridian

Guest
Pretty sure thats BS, I read the article and there were multiple errors. For one, the opposite side of the moon is not always facing the sun, it rotates around the Earth. There would be a lot of darkness.
 
N

nimbus

Guest
Point those errors out specifically.

What it reads like to me is that the belt is studded with emitters all along the solar capture area.
 
F

Floridian

Guest
My bad that isn't the original article. I read it on live science or something. Looks like that is a blog referencing it. I had it in my favorites but deleted it when I realized it was fake, uh let me check.

Some problems are.

You'd either have to have 24 receivers for once per hour, or send it all in one wave once per hour.

What would that much energy beamed to earth do to the planet in terms of radiation, etc.

The barrier to solar on earth is the clouds but the atmosphere also blocks out radiation.

I'd love to believe in the technology, I was excited when I first read it but then got discouraged.

Those links are slightly more legit-looking than the article I read but.

Seriously, is it going to be cheaper to build that on the moon than on Earth? If we can build a 3km-400km wide belt, we could just blanket an entire desert in these panels at much cheaper cost.

On Earth, if you placed them at the equator, you would get a lot of sunlight.


Ok its a picture but here are some points posted on the companies website:

Eliminates inefficiency due to bad weather: Does it? You still have to beam it to Earth, its also extremely expensive to get it up there. And whats the effect of adding that much heat to the Earth.

Achieves 24/7 continuous power generation: Not any more than solar cells on Earth. At some point those cells are going to be facing away from the sun as it rotates the earth, so there will not be continuous 24/7 power generation in that sense.

For example, why not build a moon space elevator, then build a giant solar array in geo-synchronous orbit that rotates and always faces the sun. I'm, not sure exactly how that would work, it might have a slight interruption if it went behind the earth, but the array itself would be a square facing the sun head on most of the time.


I mean it may be possible. I can't find the original article I read last week. If it is legit and could work I'd throw my money at it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Latest posts