Closing the Lunar Business Case
Rick Tumlinson (moderator) – Space Frontier Foundation, Orbital Outfitters
Wendell Mendell – NASA Planetary Scientist
Bruce Pittman – NASA Ames Space Portal
Dennis Wingo – Skycorp, Inc., Orbital Recovery
NOTES BY JIM KARAVALA
– The arrival of the high net worth individual in the 1990s reminds Wendell of Asimov’s foundation series
– NASA plan in 1982 had a plan for space transport vehicles, orbital transport vehicles — FedEx in space. Astronauts would then be FedEx drivers.
– That was the NASA plan to be in place in 1999
– Majority of the mass to the moon is LOX. Fuel station on moon would cut mass to LEO to half
– mass to LEO is a surrogate to cost
– Hugh Davis demonstrated a scenario proving that the propellant to LEO was a great business
– Wendell co developer of term in-situ resource utilization (ISRU)
– Wendell wanted to bring CEOs from private companies to the lunar table with George Kuzmetski
– Investors can’t wait for the long return of investment. Business plan needs to have plateaus so that the business plan has products every 4 years so investors can bootstrap over 20 years.
– This assumes an investor who has a desire to make a lot of money. But in the 1990s a bunch of investors appeared all at once and using resources gained from other areas and invested into space.
– These guys are from the Apollo generation – this is the Apollo generation
– Now the momentum has shifted to where the government is not the only conceivable agent, but now this is no longer the case
– Bob Bigelow wants to go to the moon
– Elon Musk heading to Mars
– Government and private sector can work together in ways neither can do alone
– Commercial Lunar Focus Group
– Meeting at LEAG meeting in September in Washington
– 600m tonnes of water ice on north pole of the moon
– Who’s going to be the first trillionaire who figures out what to do with that
– Elon Musk has done a great job of bringing Silicon Valley to space
– Dennis just read final report from survey program
– 1/3 craters are from metallic asteroids
– Billions of tonnes of metals
– Surveyor coming in at 15km and noticed much higher reflectivity in craters
– Google Lunar X Prize has landing radar; improve the radar, have high powered radar, land in crater and discover a 50m metallic rock
– Wendell thinks 600m tons of water is a lot of bull. Exploration geophysicisits cannot see those lunar geophysical features, though new processes discovered make this unsure. Wendell still thinks the evidence is not there.
– LRO advanced neutron detector is giving contradictions to Lunar Prospector data
– Results from LEND are not showing up in same way as Lunar Prospector
– Water resources not a slam dunk yet
– 40%+ of the lunar surface is oxygen
– Ed McCullough knows all the 27 ways to extract oxygen
– A billion dollars profit immediately
– Markets – SDI, SPS, fuel depots
– Some business architectures now might make economic sense and involve the moon in that story
– Moon reaches the giggle point for business plans
– NASA needs to get involved to break that Catch 22
– the systems analysis is about the whole earth moon complex, how you move through it, how you leverage it and how you design for it
— To build a large facility on the earth you need to go to the developers and industry, not just NASA
– Space is an attractant; political and economic influencers could be drawn into this
– Space Portals concept for lunar research park
– Len Harper’s idea
– long-term unifying project
– State of Hawaii holding conference: Next Giant Leap Building Sustainable Settlements
– need to get miners, civil engineers and mining companies involved in this effort
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