Cleveland Plain Dealer: First we “bomb” the moon’s south pole. Next: nuke it?
A minor ripple of angst flowed in some circles last week as NASA’s LCROSS mission plunked into a deep cold crater on the Moon’s bottom. Some portrayed it as an episode in Moon-bombing, which it was not, and further imagined somehow this was an affront to our ethical nature and to lunar well-being (did they ever take a GOOD LOOK at the moon’s already-larrupped surface?). There may be further worrying over hubristic lunar disrespect if and when NASA goes ahead with plans to put a nuclear-powered research station – really nuclear as in fission reactor, not some radioisotope thermal generator gizmo – up there complete with technicians.
A big look at one nascent plan to do that, more PowerPoint than powerplant at this stage one suspects, ran last Sunday in the Cleveland Plain Dealer thanks to reporter John Mangels. The story includes photographic proof that they are cutting some metal over there. And, one further suspects, if this idea moves further along then NASA won’t be building any reactors but will farm that job out to industry.
The story is about a fairly muscular engineering exercise at the Glenn Research Center near Cleveland. Mangels puts near the top the uncertainty hanging over whether or when the space agency will get thumbs-up from the White House and Congress to return people to the Moon for the long haul. But after that it’s a crisp, descriptive tour through the practicalities of doing such a thing complete with teeny fission reactor, a bunch of Stirling engines to turn heat into electricity, big radiators to dump the leftover heat, and artist’s conceptions to make one almost taste the moon dust that will fleck off your space suit and get all over everything in the changing room. Mangels’s on line story links to many other resources – including other stories of his that touched on Glenn’s other lunar efforts.
The Tracker likes stories like this with no fussing and policy hand-wringing to the extent it displaces the nuts and bolts details of how this idea would work. Mangels also provides plausible explanation why solar power is not the engineers’ first choice to power such an installation. Still, one has to say – fat chance. I remember well writing a similar yarn a few years ago on a team at Marshall Space Flight Center busily resurrecting old ideas for fission rocket engines for sallying forth with automated behemoth probes to Jupiter and other outer planets. Seemed so logical. Now logic just seems so irrelevant to such ideas’ prospects.
See Also: MIT Technology Review – Brittany Sauser: A Lunar Nuclear Reactor ;
Grist for the Mill: Glenn Res. Ctr. Fission Surface Power Project ;
Pic Hi Res.
- Charlie Petit
