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[Azated]

While reading an article on NASA's lack of space travel due to the cost and general pointlessness, I found myself wondering what life would be life if space travel wasn't quite so pointless.

Let's assume that history is set from 1969 and earlier, regardless of any research that might have occurred. When the astronauts returned home with their space rocks, the scientists discovered some sort of uber valuable ore that made travel to the moon an incredibly profitable endeavor.

You decide what this ore is, what it does and how it affected us. Include the effects of increased space travel in your post, too. Anything else is up to your imagination.

On the large scale, did we use the ore and our knowledge of advanced spacecraft to subdue the rioting that resulted from the forced labor needed to build additional mining equipment? On the small scale, did it become harder to produce chocolate milkshakes because people had developed a taste for chrome coloured energy drinks, following the interest in chrome due to the colour of the refined ore?

[Sensei]

Is this supposed to be in Forum Games?

[Azated]

I wasn't sure which forum it fit in. It was meant to be a discussion of what could have happened, but it is a sort of game, too.

[Max White]

Can it be food.
I just think it would be most beneficial to human society to have a food source that is both ethical and indepletable in the foreseeable future. Really, a psuto-infinite food source would solve many economic problems and help move us into a post modern economy!

But also, the moon is made of cheese.

[LordSlowpoke]

The moon probably has a fair share of valuable resources. It's just that nobody scanned the moon for them due to the fact we can't just go ahead and scan a whole celestial body. If we could, we'd first stripmine Earth to the last piece of ore before looking somewhere else.

It also contains Helium-3 in significant quantities, if I'm not mistaken, and people speculate that to be source of Earth's fusion fuels in the future.

In your scenario? ...really, you'd have to point out what the ore is before we start making assumptions. What if it's a fuel? Then certainly, the increased fuel needs are mitigated by using part of the cargo. A super-strong metal beyond what we know now? Make a space elevator. Hell, make an elevator to the moon itself.

[Duuvian]

I vote we send 7 brave astronauts of random temperament to the surface of the moon with enough food, water, and alcohol to last them a while. Then, we setup a stonecrafter and build a trade depot somewhere the rocketship can land. Those traders aboard the rocketship, while kindly unloading monkeys and other defensive animals into their gymnasium, have plans to sell the resulting blue rock goblets back on Earth for ridiculous prices, being the first known trading venture into space.

I don't usually ask but may I get a round of applause for this post?

Maybe if a small robot would be cheaper to deliver, you could design an automated robot 'crawler' type deal that you drive around on the moon to collect materials to compact into a collection of statuettes. Maybe it could be a long term thing so you could press out a whole bunch of cheaper trinkets to keep it busy and affordable for crowdsourcing investment. I'm thinking Moonpennies 1c to 1cmp. Then it could be capable of printing special orders for people who would like custom orders made, and one day when it's feasible your investment could be retrieved barring the moon material somehow having contaminating effects, being illegal to possess for some why, or having degraded over time.

[alway]

The cost of there-and-back-again journeys would make it impractical no matter what the resource was. Seriously, look up the stats of the Apollo landers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#Ascent_stage
In today's dollars, the Saturn V cost approximately $1.1 billion. The Ascent Stage of the lander module had a cargo capacity of, at most, a couple hundred kg. Assuming full utilization of that capacity, you need a material which is worth over $1 million per kg.

However, if such a material were to be found, the most efficient methods of mining and delivery would likely involve:
1. manned supply craft sent to orbit containing fuel and re-entry safe capsules for humans
2. manned earth-orbit to lunar-orbit craft
3. manned lunar-orbit to lunar-surface craft
4. small earth-orbit space station for fuel and crew for asynchronous transfers
Through a re-use of craft, the launch efficiency would rise by a pretty good amount, with crew and fuel being the primary materials used. Maintenance would also be a pretty big issue, as space is pretty hostile to a spacecraft's durability. As a result, space walks would likely end up being much more common, and so suitports might come into being a good deal earlier. All the operations would still need to be done manually, simply because computers weren't up to the challenge of anything more than simple orbital calculations yet; such events likely wouldn't change that fact by more than a 50% development speedup.

Permanent moon bases would come into being, simply because on-site processing would be required to maximize the value:weight ratio.

The USSR might want in on things too, and so their space program might have actually been continued. Weaponization of space would still be unlikely; as the USSR found with their test on an early spacestation, guns threaten the structural stability of their wielder more than the target.

As for the space-elevator proposals, those would not happen. Simply put, there wasn't an available material strong enough for such purposes any time remotely near the moon landing time period. The reason it's been popular lately is because carbon nanotubes are pretty much the first thing which makes it even a possibility. And being the result of relatively new basic/material science, an active space program would still take decades to unearth those to the point where it was practical.

[DJ]

Couldn't you just catapult the stuff you're mining to get it into Lunar orbit?

[alway]

Depends on whether you have a catapult which can fire an intact rocket (needed to complete circularization of its orbit) at a velocity of around 2 km/s (lunar escape velocity is about 2.7km/s).
For comparison, the US Navy railgun tested merely a few years ago was capable of accelerating a 3kg projectile to a velocity of 2.4km/s. In order to be an effective solution, it would need larger payload capacity, low power draw, lower acceleration, and low weight. The first three and the last one are directly at odds with one another; they can be achieved simply by extending the rail and increasing the scale. In order to be a feasible mass driver, it would probably end up costing as much as dozens of launch vehicle missions simply because of required materials and scale.

And again, they wouldn't have a good way of making a rendezvous because the system is unmanned. It would require a whole host of satellites around the moon to get decent tracking on this tiny object, and without a crew onboard would require automation... which didn't exist at the point of the moon landings; and certainly isn't durable enough to be shot out of a railgun. Without onboard circularization, the projectile would effectively be a heavy, dense bullet with a relative velocity approximately that of a bullet relative to a spacecraft with a stable orbit. Entirely uncatchable.

[Nightscar982]

Unless the material itself could create a device that allowed time travel, thus allowing you to travel into the future and gain technology created by this miracle ore and create a system to mine more of it and bring it to earth.

[Starver]

My first thoughts on seeing the subject is that it has got valuable resources, as often discussed (and disputed, it has to be said) at other times.  ³He is a little futuristic for us right now to look at processing in bulk (certainly was in 1969) but perhaps when we set up the moon-base we can do more with it.  The mineral wealth (known and unknown) in the regolith probably isn't worth the equivalent costs of trans-shipment to Earth except for something really exotic, but when it comes to building Moon-side or even Earth-orbital items then (prior to decent economic exploitation of asteroids, and getting them or their processed materials back into a Sol-3 orbit) it'll be surely cheaper to source from the Moon than launch large amounts of the same stuff from Earth (no matter how ubiquitous and already infrastructure-ready equivalent Earthside resources might be).

Which is not to say it'd be easy.  And you wouldn't use a Saturn V styled mission to go out and retrieve moon-materials one LM's-worth at a time, or even slightly more just to Lunar orbit, there to be bunched together and then sent (unmanned) in bulk to LEO/wherever with a more efficient but slower trajectory.

For a start, we'd be sending people out on extended missions (possibly indeterminately so, at some point).  Moon surface (and sub-surface) accommodation, automated supply-ships sent for what can't (eventually) be self-provided with a hunk of pre-sent equipment, and all that jazz.  That includes at least rudimentary (sufficient, if not the best that would be made here on Earth) propellant manufactured on the Moon, if not quickly progress to Linear Accelerator launching technology for (unmanned) loads.  Space-tugs (automated?) of some kind would rendezvous with the projectile somewhere near the top of its trajectory (probably set so that a miss merely means crashing back down on some currently 'safe' part of the Moon[2]) and swing it into a holding orbit ready for sending on to 'wherever', as already mentioned.

Much as I liked the Shuttle, the post-Shuttle re-emphasis to separate passengers from cargo, when it comes to lifting, is probably a wiser decision than making a combined transport 'cargo-bus' system.  Add to that staging the travel arrangements (a reliable to-orbit and from-orbit vehicle, of whatever form, only being used to rendezvous at some way-station with the trans-orbital craft that has been assembled up there with the intention of remaining space-bound, for example) then we have a system we can probably rely upon at least until someone gets something novel (space elevator/fountain/tether-rotors or even by a massively unimaginative leap of imagination, By The Great Montgomery, 'transporter' technology itself!) sorted out as a replacement.


Anyway, this is a possible "now and future" answer to "What will happen...".

If the question is more about what would have happened in 1969, or thereabouts, "...if the Moon had had extraordinarily valuable resources", then the race for the Moon would have not been 'won' by the first exploratory landings, but Russia would doubtless have redoubled their efforts to get there (second, but now with a 'claim', however much this would be against the extant Space Treaties) even while the US found every excuse it could to not make their own missions an "International Moon-station" mission, in order to at least forestall the competition until "Moon-Mir" got established to mirror the work of their own "Moonlab"[1].

Where it went from there is anyone's guess.  Depends on if anyone ran out of money (or "leveragable political power", in the case of either party) in getting this set up... on any 'accidents' (or accidents, unquoted) suffered by either side... on what the Chinese/Indians/heck, even us British (maybe or maybe not separate from the Europeans, or choice European powers[3]) then did to get (back) into the race.


Apologies, BTW, if this post seems disconnected.  I'm currently running off a portable version of a browser, for various reasons, and on this hardware (maybe USB 1.1-only ports, and the browser caching the input through it near-continuously?) I'm getting severe pause/slowdown.  Type several words, wait for them to appear a few seconds later.  (And don't ask me about the difficulty of going back and editing and correcting typos/thinkos!)  Really disjoints my thinking/writing process.  I have lots more to say, but (lucky you) I'm cutting it off here, after spending half an hour, I think, on just this brief version, and I shall forgo even the usual Preview (though doubtless I;ll have the "n posts since started editing" message to deal with).  Thus "E&OE" is a definite caveat to what I have writ.


[1] Considered "Lunalab", instead, but doesn't work in my mind.

[2] Which, in a generation or two, as the technology becomes passée enough, becomes the location of Scavenger parties.  Independent Lunar traders who can make a quick spacebuck from finding and retrieving lumps of refined material that were never caught.

[3] Whether as in Concorde or explicitly not in concord!

[10ebbor10]

On a seperate note, a lunar elevator is perfectly possible, even with today's tech. (And maybe with 1969's technology too. Dunno about that.)

[10ebbor10]

A lunar elevator is an elevator from the Moon to Lagrange Point 1 or 2. (2 is kinda pointless, as that is the side pointing away from earth.) From there, you only need a small nudge to get stuff into earth orbit.

A space elevator, yeah, but the moon isn't in geosynchronous orbit, so the cable would need to be able to wrap around the earth a fuckload to make a moon elevator.

A mobile basestation would work too. Only thing is that due to the incline of the moons orbit, it will result in the elevator going everywhere and nowhere.

[Starver]

As mentioned, it would have to be going to a Lagrange Point (a Selenostationary orbit, in absence of the Earth, but of course with the tidal locking the Earth-Moon Lagrange points are stationary (or relatively so) to the Moon, even though they wouldn't be to the Earth's surface.

Less gravity meaning less intrinsic cable tension except... the length of the cable?  That's going to add something to the forces involved that I haven't calculated, but seems like it should be a problem. Earth surface to geostationary orbit (and beyond, for counterweighting) is a fraction of what you need on a Moon elevator.

But even if the tension issue is solved, I worry about the material quantities.  And while an effectively 'free' lift to orbit (assuming something like photovoltaic power being used in the elevator) is attractive, and there'd be things like the lack of atmospheric interference in its benefit over the equivalent Earthly solution, I place it as less attainable.  Experts out there may have done the mathematics that I haven't and have good reason to disagree, though, I'm currently running on gut feeling regarding all of this (after previously doing a deeper, but still incomplete, analysis which left me in this mindedness).

[penguinofhonor]

I'm thinking they would get the resources from the moon, divy them up evenly between nations based on population/industry/whatever is relevant to the type of resources, and give everyone their stuff without conflict, causing the whole world to be better off.