A For-Profit Trip To The Moon

jrg writes "The company, TranOrbital, Inc. has a project, TrailBlazer, to become the first (early 2001) commercial space mission to enter lunar orbit. They plan to do this for a fraction of the price it would cost NASA, plus they plan to map the entire surface of the moon in unprecedented detail using HDTV video cameras (finally, we get to see those alien bases! ;) ). If they can pull it off as cheaply as they claim, this might signal a new phase in the human utilization of space. "

The debate starts early corporations in space

I see the concerns shaping up really quick. I also see the folks lining up with kudos. The kind of debate already voiced in some of the early comments are the sort of posts that will follow the discussion throughout.

The debate is whether or not corporation involvement in the direct exploration of space a good thing.

There are pluses:

1) Businesses are usually apt to get things quicker than the government.
2) Businesses tend to be more effective in the results gained.
3) Businesses do not suck as much taxpayer dollars to achieve their goals. Notice that comment: I have not forgotten the whole debate over corporate welfare programs. Programs that give money to corporations that already rich for going into this or that market etc..

There are downsides as well:

1) Can we trust the corporations who are not motivated by the popular vote factor to not exploit their position and pollute the heavens in the same way they have polluted the earth.
2) Safety concerns are also a factor. NASA despite the few notable exceptions we all remember has a pretty good safety record. Can we trust the corporations will have the same sort of record?
3) What about the science factor? Is there any incentive for a money making operation to support the scientific community the same way NASA has?

The real question is whether the practical use of space is worth the possible downsides of corporate involvement on a massive scale. With good regulatory limits and oversight I think that the corporate model can be the new wave and spark a new era in the exploration of space.

Why?

I first asked my self, "Why would a corporation be interested in making an extremely detailed map of the mood?" Then it just hit me.

An extremely detailed map would allow for planning a more in-depth mission. Possibly for mineral/metal prospecting for future mining missions. For a corporation the moon may be the most valuable untapped resource EVER.

They wouldn't have any government regulations. How can you pollute an already lethally radioactive environment? You cannot pollute an atmosphere because there isn't one.

You have the stability of a huge body (not an asteroid with almost no gravity) with low gravity. The low gravity would allow for cheaper movement and processing of the minerals on the moon. The minerals produced would be much stronger due to the low gravity and the vacuum of space. You also have water, which was recently found on the southern poll.

After you have set up shop you must get the goods back to earth. Well the low gravity of the moon and vacuum of space presents a rely cool option. You can build a huge catapult that would launch the goods at tremendous speeds, kinda like they have on an aircraft carrier. These goods would fall into orbit around the earth and be used for whatever... A space station or brought back to earth for sale.

The possibilities are endless and mankind finally has the technology to explore them.

Clearly The Way Things Are Going

There's been more and more talk from NASA about skipping Mars missions, never going back to the moon, etc. This is kind of sad, but probably OK.

We all know that commercial enterprise can do way better with space missions than the government. Primarily because there's no overarching benefit to the goverment sponsoring space trips anymore. The research, while it should, IMHO, be government-sponsored, will probably go better as a commercial system.

Less screw-ups, more competition, lower prices. Get me a room on that Lunar Hilton, baby!

-Waldo

trash

...great. They're offering people the opportunity to have their business cards and/or a personal message deposited on the moon. Wonderful way to mark the first commercial space venture...dumping a load of paper on earth's only natural satellite...

...and yes, I do detect some foreshadowing here...as if commerce hasn't fscked up our own planet enough, it's time to branch out and fsck up the entire solar system.

A Modest Proposal

On their website, TransOrbital Inc. offers anyone willing to cough up the cash the opportunity to have their business card flown to the moon on their space vehicles. All this for a mere $2000 (US). If that is a little to steep, then you can have a personal letter, poetry (or whatever else will fit onto an 8-1/2" x 11" piece of paper) etched onto a nickel disk (read "stored on a hard drive") and sent to the moon for $50 a page.

My proposal is to take the currently disputed [slashdot.org] Slashdot pages along with Microsoft's basterdized Kerberos code and send them to the moon. We could all send a few dollars to CmdrTaco (et. al.) to pay for the disk space on the satellite. It would be Slashdot's new claim to fame -- the only website violating the DMCA on two celestial bodies. And, if Bill wants the code removed, he can go to the moon and get it himself!

Maybe Slashdot could run a server on the moon and get around the DMCA all together . . . but that damn network latency!

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If there was no private exploration in history

Let's just think what our history would be like if the only allowed exploration of unexplored territory was via government sponsored agencies.

~100,000 BC, Oldavie Gorge

The tribal government reports an arid landscape once you pass the Nile, we don't think it's commericially viable to send anything out there.

Plus, the youngsters of the tribe think we should concentrate on making Oldavie perfect before we send out any expeditions.

-15,000 BC Kamchatka

Well, yeah, maybe there is something to the northeast, but it's probably just frozen wasteland.

~1492, Spain

While some of the native did display strange fruits and vegetables, and gold and gems, we don't think the commercial exploitation of the new world is viable.

We will send scientific teams to explore the new world, once every 10 or 20 years.

-~1600, England

Perhaps we could work within the system of the Church of England, since Parliament won't authorize a colonizing expedition to the New World.

I could go on.

George

Where have all the geeks gone?

Not long ago, a proposition to cheaply and profitably put people on the Moon was a rallying point for geeks. New uncharted lands! Life in space! Vast resources! Fascinating environments! Geeks would walpaper their cubes with pictures of rockets, Moon landings, and sketches of non-Earth colonies. Building and occupying a Moon colony used to be one of the holy grails of engineering.

But...nearly all responses to this news item today have been "aw gee, why would anyone want to go to the Moon? they might make it dirty! and jerks might go there." Come on people! What happened to the sense of adventure? of engineering challenges? of survival challenges? of profit motive? of any combination of these? What happened to all the geeks that would give their left nut in a heartbeat for a ticket on a Moon-bound rocket to build a colony?

Geekdom is dead - replaced by politically correct, green, TV-mesmerized lumps.

Re:A Good Thing?

Too late. Our respective governments have had such a monopoly on that for so long that there is already a huge number of objects up there in orbit. In 1963 the U.S. Air Force launched into orbit 400 million tiny needle-sized objects [theatlantic.com] in a single experiment! Maybe that's why we see so few UFO's these days... ;)

Transportation's a killer

Highly dangerous, and/or toxic manufacturing and machine houses (chip and board fabricators, for example) could be moved off of the planet, reducing industrial and thermal waste on the planet. The fact that space is so huge (oh, really?) is enough to realize that there will be more than enough room.

At current transport costs of $5000/kg, you would not be able to afford a product assembled in space from raw materials made on Earth. Coming down is cheap (almost free), going up will cost you an arm and a leg... If you postulate raw materials from space (plastics from carbon and hydrogen found in comet cores, metals from asteroids or the Moon) you have to ask yourself how you get all the money to start all the mines, the chemical plants, the plastics plants, the semiconductor foundries, the LCD manufaturing plants, and everything else you need just to get the first complete product out of this pipeline. It's a huge investment, and definitely not going to go anywhere as long as there isn't a big market for such gear in orbit; it will be cheaper to ship finished product up than to ship up the infrastructure and then re-engineer everything to work under space conditions.

Waste can be stockpiled in designated areas, and if neccesary, shot into the sun, where it would be quickly neutralized and broken down. The sun would not be affected in the least from this, after all, it is just on huge fusion reactor.

That's silly. It takes far more energy to send something to the Sun than to send it out of the Solar System permanently (about 2.5 times as much delta-V), and mass, especially organic mass (toxic or not) is a rarity in space. It would make far more sense to run your waste through a plasma torch with some excess oxygen and sort through the simple molecules that result than to "throw it away" in the manner you propose.
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic

Re:Got Spam from TO on Wednesday

>Strela is Russian for, I believe, "arrow." Their
>hand-held Stinger-oid missiles (SA 7, I think,
>though I don't recall) were called by the same
>name.

>Either they've been up to something and
>slapped an old name on it, or somehow these
>people are planning to use very short range
>surface-to-air missiles to loft their payloads.

The Strela is a new launcher based on bits and
pieces of Russian RS18 ICBMs (SS-19 Stiletto
by NATO classification). See here for more
info:http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/ strela_sum.shtml

>What else are they not telling us?

Nothing. Russians just reuse hardware names...

>Which no one will see, unless the ad is huge (on
>the order of several miles across).

Trailblaser has a camera and it takes pictures of
the ads as it takes pictures of the moon. No one ever said you actually see the ads from Earth.

>Earthrise 2001: A defining video image for the
>New Millennium

>As if the December 1968 shot by Apollo 8
>wasn't good enough. How the heck does a
>"video image" (I guess these people have
>never heard of "pictures") define a whole
>millennium?

It actually isn't, unless you personally consider handheld 8mm camera to be better than HDTV?

>An atlas of the entire lunar surface for
>students & planetary scientists

>These already exist. The only thing they can
>possibly add is more accuracy and smaller >resolutions.

That's the main point. The detail of Clementine et al wasn't good enough since that wasn't what they were actually designed for. Clementine was a test of a DOD satellite, not a real lunar probe.

>Low-altitude, high-speed video, for Hollywood >science-fiction movies footage

>Equivalent or better quality can be produced in
>any decent computer imaging lab. They're
>starting to reach (read, grope) for anything
>that could be useful here.

You just don't like people do you? Anyway, ask
any film expert, they'll tell you they prefer
real shots to generated ones. Everyone who saw
Apollo 13 knew that the launch sequence was
faked...

>"Look honey, my message got routed via a >satellite over Copernicus!" Yawn.

Sounds pretty exciting and interesting to me. I guess your just not part of the target audience.

>What are they hiding from us? This can't
>possibly succeed as-stated.

I'm afraid it is. They're not hiding anything. But I suspect my say so isn't going to convince you....

Re:Why?

The environment is not radioactive.

Yes it is. One of the design issues of the space suites is to protect against radiation from the sun. IMO that is part of the environment.

Water was not found on the moon
Ummmm.... NASA tends to disagree [nasa.gov]

Other links....
another NASA article [nasa.gov]

More water than original estimates [nasa.gov]

Info on Prospector [nasa.gov]

For instance, goods falling into earth's atmosphere would need to be assured of a safe reentry.

I never said that! Please read what I wrote...

These goods would fall into orbit around the earth and be used for whatever... A space station or brought back to earth for sale.

That is brought back to earth for sale. Most likely by a space craft similar to the space shuttle!

A steel produced in a vacuum is stronger. Read it here [memagazine.org]

Anyway if you try to refute statements please back them up with facts like this. I was just making a comment not submitting a report.

Maybe I am just responding to a troll.

Re:Sounds cool, but is this wise?

someone trying to patent oxygen?

Don't be silly, they wouldn't patent oxygen.

They would patent an apparatus that supplies oxygen. No wait, there's prior art for that. They would patent an online apparatus that supplies oxygen.

Captain's Log, Belt Freighter #227, 8/17/85 09:15 GMT:

I have asked the climate control crewman to check on the oxygen levels. He is preparing his suit to go outside in order to manually examine the regulator. After I deliver this shipment of magnetic monopoles to Earth, I will have enough money to pay the Amazon "online apparatus" royalty, and then be legally allowed to check the regulator from inside the cabin via remote sensor.

Coincidently, by that time I get back home, IP6 may finally be adopted, and the regulator will be able to have its own address. I think I'll keep the masquerading firewall in place, though. I learned my lesson last time when 31337 h4xx0rs used my solar collector as a mp5 trading site.

---

Limits to resolution of pictures

I was surprised to read a blurb from TransOrbital which claims that

The photos from lunar orbit will be very high resolution, utilizing a telescope with an HDTV camera. "We expect to be able to see the tire tracks from the Apollo-era rovers."

The laws of physics state that the smallest angular detail visible to a system is
1.22 times (lambda/diam), where "lambda" is the wavelength of the light and "diam" is the diameter of the lens. This limit is set by diffraction. Now, if the lens is 10 cm in diameter, and the light is red light of 600 nm wavelength, then the limiting resolution is about 7.3e-6 radians, or 1.5 arcseconds.

In order to see details of linear size "L", a camera with resolution "theta" radians must be closer than D = L/theta. Suppose the tire tracks are 20 cm wide each. Then the spacecraft must have an orbit of about (0.2m)/7.3e-6 = 27 km or
lower to resolve them. That's quite a bit lower than the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft ...

Now, it's true that the long, long tracks of the lunar rovers might make a high-contrast feature over a large area; and that feature might show up in pictures, even if its width is smaller than the limiting resolution. In fact, I suspect that this is why the advertising mentions the rover tracks: because compact items like the rovers themselves, or the remaining sections of the Lunar Module spacecrafts, will NOT show up in the pictures.

If the spacecraft has a safer orbit, more than 27 km above the lunar surface, or it has a camera lens less than 10 cm in diameter, then the limiting resolution decreases, and the smallest object which can be discerned is larger than 20 cm. I wouldn't get too excited, yet.

Got Spam from TO on Wednesday

An image of the spacecraft they sent me [std.com]

Here's the text of their email to me:

TransOrbital Offers the 1st Commercial Spaceflight to the Moon

A Project Participation Opportunity with a For-Profit Space Venture

Solicitation of Interest

Not only will the 2001 TrailBlazer Project be the first commercial spaceflight to the Moon; it will also return the first video from the Moon in thirty years. The video will be of very high quality and digitally enhanced, showing the lunar surface details as has never been seen before.

The entire Project is intended to cost a small fraction of what it would cost NASA to complete a similar project.

TransOrbital Inc. has developed a low-cost, video spacecraft project for lunar orbit. TransOrbital's commercially funded robotic spacecraft, 2001 TrailBlazer, will return HDTV video from lunar orbit for use as Internet content and other commercial products. The privately held company has already arranged for a launch aboard the "Strela" launch vehicle. The 2001 TrailBlazer Project is a for-profit Space Venture and will produce high-quality video and other products such as:

• The first advertising opportunity in lunar orbit
• Video with lunar background showing corporate logos on a sub-spacecraft
• Earthrise 2001: A defining video image for the New Millennium
• Final de-orbit video, up to moment of impact
• An atlas of the entire lunar surface for students & planetary scientists
• High-resolution aerial photography of pre-targeted sites on the Moon
• Low-altitude, high-speed video, for Hollywood science-fiction movies footage
• The first deep space email service, from lunar orbit
• Interactive Lunar Flight CD-ROM game made from the photography

The photos from lunar orbit will be very high resolution, utilizing a telescope with an HDTV camera. "We expect to be able to see the tire tracks from the Apollo-era rovers."

Excellent Website and Portal Content

"We want to do for the Moon what Jacques Cousteau did for marine exploration, to go, to see, sell the images as content and repeat it again and again." The Project will provide exceptional long-term content for TransOrbital customers' Internet portals during construction of the spacecraft, the launch, and throughout the spaceflight to the Moon. This exciting Project can propel customers' portals to the forefront of the Web, as the premiere sites for content, education and news about space and the Moon. The spacecraft will also provide small cargo delivery service for relics and personal & business cards, to a hard landing on the lunar surface.

The Project will be fully insured against launch and technical failure, assuring the return of deposits in the event of disaster, a welcome feature incorporated into TransOrbital's business plan. TransOrbital is seeking additional associates and customers for products created during the 2001 TrailBlazer Project.

Point of Contact:
Gregory Nemitz
VP, TransOrbital, Inc.
3672-A Bancroft St.
San Diego, CA 92104
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
http://www.transorbital.net

Mike Caprio, [e-mail]

Re:Clearly The Way Things Are Going

You know, looking back, I really wish that I had a chance to experience the excitement of the US landing on the moon and walking around. I have always thought that space stations and lunar colonies would be the wave of the future, but it's not. NASA seems to be too busy conducting experiments of "Wow check out how these tomatoes grow in zero gravity." Well frankly I'm a little tired of it. I want to see all my Star Wars dreams become real. I like Sci-Fi. I want to be part of this "wave of the future." Quite honestly I'm a bit disappointed that I can't go to the moon yet, so if HDTV pictures are the best I can get, I'll take 'em.
Dissenter

A similar mission

I remember that there was a similar mission to map the moon back in 1994. It was called Clementine and was a joint project of NASA and the Air Force. The probe had all sorts of cameras in it (IR, UV, visible) plus a laser rangefinder, and it basically mapped the moon in extreme detail. The probe was to flyby an asteroid after it finished mapping but its engine failed during that latter stage.
Anyway, that mission was extremely cheap and the probe was very small (about 200kg IIRC). In fact they launched it on an Air Force surplus Titan 2 ICBM. I don't remember the total cost, but it was less than $100M and the mission took pictures in many wavelengths plus it made a relief map of the moon using the laser rangefinder. I don't think this commercial mission will contribute anything new to science, it looks like it will just take pictures of company logos on a moon-Earth background.
There was also the Lunar Prospector which had alpha, gamma and neutron spectrometers to study the materials that make up the moon. It cost even less than Clementine.
So don't diss on NASA with the cost of Lunar missions. Unmanned small probes to the Moon are not too hard to make and considering those guys just have one video camera, hell, you could almost launch that thing on SCUD missile for a ridiculously low cost and hope to recoup the money by taking stupid ad photos that anyone can do in photoshop in like 5 minutes.

Interesting!

"... this might signal a new phase in the human utilization of space."

I wonder what the load average of space is now?

[root@space /root]#w

1:02pm up 71 days, 3:33, ALOT users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00


Bad Mojo [rps.net]