Last Friday, NASA announced that its LCROSS mission -- also known as "let's slam a probe into the lunar surface while another probe films the action, Jackass-style" -- found significant amounts of water on the moon. This revved up interest in lunar colonization again, despite the fact that there isn't any pure, drinkable, liquid water on the moon.
Now, water is very useful for space exploration even if you can't directly drink it, as simple electrolysis lets you crack water into breathable oxygen and hydrogen rocket fuel. The moon just became much more interesting as a weigh station for spacecraft, as robot factories could be sent ahead to stockpile hydrogen, oxygen, and possibly even purified drinkable water for manned craft heading further out into the solar system. Moreover, water is a very effective radiation shield, provided you can encircle a crew cabin in a two-meters-deep tank of H2O on all sides. The "significant amounts" of lunar water means moonbases might just be able to extract the Olympic swimming pools' worth of water necessary to ward off the cosmic fry-daddy rays awaiting space travelers.
As Karl Schroeder points out, the main barrier to manned spaceflight isn't technology but the expense of hauling the necessary materials into orbit. Launching these materials off the moon requires climbing out of one-sixth the gravity well that exists on Earth, which means there's an economic argument to be made for gathering spaceflight materials from a lunar base rather than launching them from Earth with the astronauts. Besides, if we can perfect the robot factories on the moon, we can get serious about mining comets, which have a lot more water-ice mass per capita and a lot less gravity. Robot comet iceminers mean that manned spacecraft could have a plethora of automated air, fuel, and shielding depots scattered throughout the Interplanetary Transport Network.
Thus, the lunar water discovery is very exciting, but it's unlikely to lead directly to the holy grail of space exploration -- the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Virtually all life as we know it requires water to exist, particularly liquid water that appears on the surface of the world, where it can be exposed to nurturing (and mutating) solar radiation. We've found hundreds of extrasolar planets and thousands of extraterrestrial non-stellar bodies, but liquid surface water remains stubbornly rare.
How many planets besides Earth are known to possess liquid surface water?
Showing newest posts with label Space exploration. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label Space exploration. Show older posts
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Nerd Word of the Week: Spam in a can
Spam in a can (adj.) - Space program slang term for a passive occupant in a spacecraft, specifically a space capsule. The phrase is generally attributed to Chuck Yeagar, if only because he's shown describing the Mercury astronauts as "spam in a can" in the movie The Right Stuff, though there is ample evidence that multiple astronauts and NASA officials used the term liberally during the 1960s Space Race. The early Mercury astronauts, all trained military pilots, are known to have resisted being mere "spam in a can" with no active control of their vessels, thus forcing a level of human direction into early space vehicles.
Spam in a can is now typically used as a snarky criticism of the current level of manned spaceflight technology, as humans are still travelling as meat packed into primitive metal containers and shipped long distances. This falls under the sensawunda criticism of NASA -- particularly the space shuttle successor Project Constellation, which is described as "Apollo on steroids" -- in that we are still not creating or using the sci-fi-inspired tech that books and movies has promised us for decades. Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran rather deftly pointed out the spam-in-a-can disappointment factor with NASA in the graphic novel Orbiter, wherein an alien intelligence redesigns our "primitive" space shuttle into a true interplanetary exploration vehicle.
I bring it up because: Laika passed away 52 years ago on Tuesday. For those that don't know the name, Laika was the first living creature that humans sent into space. She was a Soviet space dog launched aboard Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957. She died from overheating a few hours after launch, thus making Laika the first spaceflight casualty. Her likeness is preserved in a statue at the cosmonaut training facility in Star City, Russia, as her nation's first space traveler. Telemetry from her mission proved that living beings could survive launch g-forces and weightlessness, thus proving that spam in a can was a viable manned spaceflight model.
I also mention the spam in a can principle as a corollary to Charles Stross's recent thought experiment blog post, How habitable is the Earth? Stross essentially argues that humans are explicitly designed for a particular fraction of Earth's environment that exists during a hyper-minute fraction of Earth's geological history, thus making human space exploration -- which removes us from this environment -- a terribly difficult and expensive undertaking. Karl Schroeder recently counter-argued (the point, not Stross) that most of these problems are surmountable if we get launch expenses down and can get the proper equipment -- all of which already exists -- into orbit cheaply. Which gets us back to the spam in a can criticism: Until the tech gets better, large-scale humans space exploration is a pipe dream.
Spam in a can is now typically used as a snarky criticism of the current level of manned spaceflight technology, as humans are still travelling as meat packed into primitive metal containers and shipped long distances. This falls under the sensawunda criticism of NASA -- particularly the space shuttle successor Project Constellation, which is described as "Apollo on steroids" -- in that we are still not creating or using the sci-fi-inspired tech that books and movies has promised us for decades. Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran rather deftly pointed out the spam-in-a-can disappointment factor with NASA in the graphic novel Orbiter, wherein an alien intelligence redesigns our "primitive" space shuttle into a true interplanetary exploration vehicle.
I bring it up because: Laika passed away 52 years ago on Tuesday. For those that don't know the name, Laika was the first living creature that humans sent into space. She was a Soviet space dog launched aboard Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957. She died from overheating a few hours after launch, thus making Laika the first spaceflight casualty. Her likeness is preserved in a statue at the cosmonaut training facility in Star City, Russia, as her nation's first space traveler. Telemetry from her mission proved that living beings could survive launch g-forces and weightlessness, thus proving that spam in a can was a viable manned spaceflight model.
I also mention the spam in a can principle as a corollary to Charles Stross's recent thought experiment blog post, How habitable is the Earth? Stross essentially argues that humans are explicitly designed for a particular fraction of Earth's environment that exists during a hyper-minute fraction of Earth's geological history, thus making human space exploration -- which removes us from this environment -- a terribly difficult and expensive undertaking. Karl Schroeder recently counter-argued (the point, not Stross) that most of these problems are surmountable if we get launch expenses down and can get the proper equipment -- all of which already exists -- into orbit cheaply. Which gets us back to the spam in a can criticism: Until the tech gets better, large-scale humans space exploration is a pipe dream.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Nerd Word of the Week: Astrochicken
Image via Wikipedia
I bring it up because: Tomorrow is the start of the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con, which is perhaps the best example of a self-replicating techno-organic mashup that pushes the limits of known physics. Trust me, there are living things that appear at SDCC that no scientist is equipped to classify, and you'll usually find them ogling booth babes or audibly debating whether or not Batman should be a member of the Black Lantern Corps. And I say that is both a devout comics fanboy and former SDCC attendee. I'd gladly attend SDCC if I could, but I'd also keep a taser handy to ward off the husky mouthbreather in the Captain America t-shirt and sweatpants who won't stop humming the Dr. Horrible theme and stalking Felicia Day. Nothing we find on an extrasolar planet could be scarier than that.
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