As lead mechanical engineer who designed, built, and tested a lunar mining machine within the last year, I can assure you: we're working on it.

Let me just indicate that if NASA (or some other government entity) had not funded the project, the private space sector would have taken decades to begin considering funding it.

The civil space industry provides funding and support for state-of-the-art space technologies, while the private space industry - with their ROI requirements - follows behind. There is nothing wrong with this protocol. If you'd like to see more private space industry, fund NASA so that companies can justify spending money on more mature technologies.

Milky Way heavier than thought? Maybe it's your mom.

Zing!

planed!

I didn't take offense or anything... just wanted to bring some logic into the minds of someone who might not understand. This topic hits pretty close to home, since we have a prototype PILOT sitting in our lab downstairs.

Just wait until next year's field tests. Everything's gonna get scaled up. Lots. =)

What are the givens to this problem?

-NASA wants extensive use capabilities.
-ITAR restrictions make it so that US entities would rather stay in the US rather than go through the paperwork of going elsewhere.
-Volcanic ash tends to be similar in abrasiveness, chemistry, and agglutinate size to lunar regolith.
-The presence of flora and fauna should be minimized.

Taking these into consideration, you get Hawaii and the Southwest. Since the volcanoes in the Southwest are dormant, their ash has had more time to erode into a less abrasive form. Result: test in Hawaii.

As one who has formerly worked on NASA contracts (and hopes to continue to do so in the future... just because it's so damn cool), I can assure you of two things:

-You are right, and
-You are wrong.

You are right in that there is some fat that could be skimmed from the process; there is some highly skilled labor that sits idly as projects continue onward.

You are wrong, however, to assume that space technology is getting cheaper by the minute, and the industry should be able to continue along at the same speed as... say, consumer electronics. Designing for space is crazy-expensive.... ridiculously expensive... and the problem isn't NASA or its subcontractors. It's the vendors.

NASA and its subcontractors make stuff. We either design it from scratch (frequently), update an off-the-shelf item (sometimes), or just use an off-the-shelf item unmodified (rarely).

Designing from scratch costs the most in terms of high- and low-skilled labor (think engineers and mill operators) and material. It's also the most frequent due to the many requirements of spaceflight: radiation hardened, extremely light weight, strict volume requirements, high vibration launch environment, low outgassing, low flammability, etc.

Updating an off-the-shelf part is a little easier, but it still involves plenty of engineer time. In addition, the original part is usually on the extreme high-end of a vendor's offering. We can't have a coolant pump that has an MTBF of 2 years. It's gotta be 10. or more.

And finally, even if an off-the-shelf part is used by itself, it still needs brackets and an electrical interface (if necessary). Plus there's plenty of engineer time spent just to be sure that it's flight-worthy.

And finally, multiply all of these costs by the factor of not mass-producing this stuff. When you order only 5 specialized valves, the unit cost is going to balloon.

So, jollyreaper, I applaud your space geekiness. There are many like us. But designing and building for space is hard. And it costs a lot. Them's the facts.

Now, if we (the space industry as a whole) got a three-fold increase in funding... you'd really start to see some sweet stuff.

I'm not sure if this was tongue-in-cheek, but in Leon Lederman's book, "The God Particle," he explains the etymology of the titular boson. He claims that he nicknamed the Higgs Boson as the "God Particle" because his publishers would not let him title his book "The Goddamn Particle," due to the elusiveness of such.