credit luc viatour
I am not a regular reader of Popular Mechanics, and therefore cannot vouch for the accuracy of its stories but this article – Inside NASA’s Plan to Bomb the Moon and Find Water, has disturbed me.
According to the article “Andrews [the NASA man] had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F.”
So he came up with an inexpensive alternative that requires a very heavy rocket to be shot into a moon crater creating a plume of debris six miles high.
“The 5000-pound Centaur would crash into a dark crater at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kicking up a plume of debris more than 6 miles high. Four minutes later, the heavily instrumented LCROSS would ride the plume, checking for water and relaying data to Earth until it, too, slammed into the lunar surface.”
I’m only an uneducated amateur in these matters but this plan strikes me as fraught with risk. The law of unintended consequences should at least temper NASA’s enthusiasm. I urge the precautionary principle.
After all, scientists, to the delight of Lembit Opik I’m sure, have only just solved the Yarkovsky effect.
(note to august diarists who can’t find stories – I am being tongue in cheek)
2 comments ↓
Tom, its a sad state of affairs when you feel you have to label every piece of tongue-in-cheek writing as such!
I have an idea for a British Space Programme, which I would be grateful if you would pass on to your government colleagues.
Simply put – abolish Trident, and use the money, the rocket fuel, and the submariners to create a British NASA.
Spending those billions on rockets that actually go somewhere seems a lot more constructive than rockets built for destruction.
The submariners are military men with the sort of good discipline we need for moon voyages and beyond. We know they are in good physical shape, of sound mind, and able to stay sealed in airtight capsules for weeks on end.
Maybe we could just turn the submarines on their end and blast them straight into space. We often hear that Apollo ran on a computer with less power than the average mobile phone… so I even volunteer my Blackberry to power the new guidance systems.
(note – that last bit was also tongue-in-cheek… but I’m serious about the submariners).
Did you ever watch “Space 1999?” the series? Be careful blowing up stuff on the moon!
Leave a Comment