Sorry took me so long to respond. ? One of my hobbies is vegetable gardening but don’t have much space for it. Do you know how much 1,600kg is? That is 3,500 pounds. You would need a pickup truck to move it and that only contained one meal!! One meter is roughly equivalent to a yard and forgetting about density (which at 1,600kg sound pretty packed on earth a cubic yard masses roughly 2,000 pounds-probably due to greater organic and water content).

On earth most plants don’t have yard long roots (a cubic yard…). And does his estimate include the amount of inedible parts of the plant? Tomatoes, peppers, corn have quite a bit of plant that is needed, but you can’t eat. Here is a guide to how deep a container you need on earth:

http://polk.uwex.edu/files/2011/01/Container-gardening.pdf.

Something like oh, 6-18 inches worth of soil so basically on earth that cubic yard worth of soil could be put into about 3 containers each 1 yard long and 1 yard wide and 12 deep. Some plants need more than 12 inches/some less. The smart move would be to cut the containers in half to a 1/3 since most plants need rows and if your plants get disease or pest it will be easier to control…plus options for having different crops ready at different times.

So say we have 9 containers each one yard long, one foot wide and one foot deep. One containers could easily fit nine lettuce plants. One to Two such containers could be enough to provide salad for lunch for two indefinably (cause you can just pick the leaves off the plant and not harvest the whole) or at least till the soil is exhausted or the lettuce gets to warm and sets to seed. You can even cram more in at the earlier stages!

You could fit about 27 carrot plants in another container. Enough beans for one large pot of beans in another. One large tomato plant in each (and 3-4 of such could give two people more than they could eat in a summer and tomatoes keep going till the frost kills it.). And I still have one container left over.

Of course your harvest will depend on soil fertility, but on earth that amount of soil is almost a banquet(esp. as I have not optimized it for root deep…you could grow even more in shallower pots) and you can even buy a little box of Miracle Grow that masses 680g, does not take up a about a yard of volume and lasts at least half the growing season here(3-4 months) if not all season. I think the math is against trying to harvest nitrogen from poor lunar soil. The smart move would be to import and recycle.

To be clear, the situation with respect to lunar polar ice is still much worse than this. The technique used in yesterday’s announcement can only verify a reflected signal indicative of 22% water ice in the top _micron_ of regolith. A micron is only 0.000039ths of a inch. Put another way, 22% of almost zero is still almost zero.

It’s worth investigating further with surface robots to see whether this signal is actually coming from water ice, whether the percentage of water ice holds at depth, and whether the water ice is collected in minable concentrations.

But you would not want to make a multi-ten to -hundred billion dollar decision about a human lunar return effort based on an indication of 22% of almost zero water ice. More data is needed from multi-million dollar robotic explorers before jumping to that level of expenditure.

You can see it in Olympic games, you see in the economic market size, you see it in growing military, science factor & so on. You need a large engineering & technical base to support space program, lotsa cash as well.

“I’m hoping to be around long enough to see people walking on Mars. Wouldn’t it be nice for the two of us to discuss the state of our efforts in space at that point?”

Yes, I’d like to see that, too. I’ll buy the first round when that day comes.

Thanksgiving on the Moon: A Lunar Feast

http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2009/11/thanksgiving-on-the-moon-a-lunar-feast/

“Haskin’s argument is very simple. Take a cubic volume of soil (about 1 meter in dimension) from anywhere on the Moon. In that volume of soil (weight about 1600 kg), there is enough hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen – the principal volatile elements implanted by the solar wind – to make lunch for two.”

“Longevity runs in the family. My Father just celebrated his 92nd birthday.”

Good wishes to him – the wonders he has seen in his lifetime.

My mothers father lived to 97 (as did his youngest brother), and my dad’s mother lived to 99. Having already lived to see people walking on the Moon (and I hope to see it again in HD), I’m hoping to be around long enough to see people walking on Mars. Wouldn’t it be nice for the two of us to discuss the state of our efforts in space at that point?

“As for Dr. Spudis …”

I’ve had the “pleasure” of debating the merits of HLV’s directly with Paul (both here and on his blog) prior to his publishing the Spudis-Lavoie plan. I know his perspective on the subject, as well as his perspective on “NewSpace”.

Oh, and I’ve read the Spudis-Lavoie plan, and I’ve even told Paul that I liked the robotic exploration part of it. However the cislunar transportation system part of the plan is kind of like “Step Two” in this example.

Suffice it to say that I think the plan lacks sufficient detail and relies on the false assumption that spending $87B over a 17 year period for a water production facility on the Moon is the best use of our scarce NASA budget allocation.

For instance, ISRU is just one of many, many priorities on the Future In-Space Observatory (FISO) working group study called “NASA Space Technology Roadmaps and Priorities“, but it doesn’t even make the top ten list.

I’m not the only one that is not persuaded.

That is because a large percentage of that 3 gallons is recycled. The US recycling system can recycle about 93% of all input water:

http://www.tapitwater.com/blog/2011/01/nasa-makes-recycling-water-out-of-this-world.html

ISRU on the moon is probably worth it for life support, but I think the cost to develop a system that needs to put out say a litter of water a day (to make up for losses in the life support) will be smaller, cheaper, and easier to develop than a system that needs to make 100 tons a year for propellant. It is low hanging fruit compared to the propellant. You don’t need industrial sized bulldozers to move a few grams around.

I mean assuming you had Shakelton crater at 22% water. At 22% water, all I need to do is move 4.5 grams of soil to get 1 litter of water. If need 100 tons, I need to move much more. I need to move 454MT of lunar material or 1.2 tons a day! And this estimate does not cover inefficiencies in the ISRU process(meaning for both cases you will need more material).

“His lifetime – he’s 41 years old. I think you’re a little older. ”

Longevity runs in the family. My Father just celebrated his 92nd birthday. (I’m his youngest son.) Most of my older relatives have reached their 90s. One aunt made it to 100. Another just passed away at 93. So I’m expecting to be around for quite some time!

As for Dr. Spudis …

Note these passages from the lunar exploration-exploitation proposal that Paul Spudis and Tony Lavoie released in Decemeber 2010:

“The development of a heavy-lift vehicle adds capability to our architecture but is not an absolute requirement for early missions, although we recognize that other strategic considerations (such as preservation of HLV infrastructure) may require the near-term development of such a vehicle … Once we have established a foothold on the Moon and have the capability to at least partly supply ourselves from lunar materials, the need for a very heavy lift vehicle lessens. In fact, the best time for the creation of propellant depots is after we are able to supply them with lunar propellant. Such an approach makes human planetary missions easier; the dead weight of propellant (at least 80% of the total mass of the spacecraft for a human Mars mission) need not come from the deep gravity well of Earth.”

“Much of the current debate about launch vehicles stems from the mission or objective of human flights beyond LEO. We believe that the fundamental objective of such flight is to extend human reach and presence from its current limitation in LEO to all levels of space beyond. To that end, WE ARE AGNOSTIC [emphasis added] on the need for any specific launch vehicle solution; our goal is to make complete dependence on such vehicles unnecessary as rapidly as possible through the use of off planet resources. If a heavy lift vehicle is available early in the program, we will use it. If one is not, we will use other launch vehicles.”

Other launch vehicles would include Falcon Heavy or other suitable commercial rockets.

“Basically the need of water is about 3 gallons per astronaut per day”

Facts! OK, now we can do some estimates on cost.

Three gallons per day for a crew of six staying 6 months at the ISS would be about 12, 264 liters, or 12, 264 kg. Let’s double that to a year, and round it to 25,000 kg of water per year for a crew of six.

The U.S. plans to have five CRS deliveries per year (3 for Dragon, 2 for Cygnus), so that would average 5,000 kg of water per trip. That sounds like more than they are contracted for, and likely that’s because Progress will still be delivering supplies (and water), as will the remaining ATV and HTV vehicles.

What could we do with dedicated water deliveries? If deliveries were made with a Falcon 9, it can now deliver 13,150 kg to LEO for $54M. So with two launches, that could be as low as $108M per year to supply water to the ISS. I haven’t seen a breakout on the supply costs for the ISS (other than the yearly budget), so it’s hard to estimate what they currently spend.

If we assume the same consumption for a crew of six on the Moon, then we’re talking about what the cost of delivery would be from LEO to the surface of the Moon. Considering the gravity well differences, how about we the same cost from LEO to the surface of the Moon as it was to get to LEO, so $216M total to support a crew of six on the lunar surface with water for one year.

So the big question would be – “What would it cost to produce the same amount of water using ISRU?”