I am not asking why humankind wants to go to space. That is for other scientists to answer. I will just take it for granted.

My argument here is that in order to go into space in large numbers, it is a good idea to go to the Moon first.

We will need to build big spaceships, and the raw materials for the spaceships are on the Moon. I will explain in the sections below.

I am inviting everybody to comment and improve on this plan. The plan is concocted in layman’s terms through a few sleepless nights and has neither been validated by calculations nor common sense.

Requirement: Transport Capacity
We will need to build spaceships of a size that dwarfs the Titanic or any other ocean liner or major tall building presently on Earth.

The reason is that when we colonize other planets the transportation time from Earth to another planet will be so long (at least one year) that good accommodation on the way is a must.

At a later stage we will be going to other stars and that will require that the society on board can exist for 10 to 50 years without support from the outside.

This means that the spaceships must be self-sufficient with energy, organic materials and water. Also, emigrants are not going to be satisfied with small cabins, bunks, and no room to move. They will need and want all the facilities of a modern city including entertainment, education, hospitals, leisure time activities etc.

Spaceships will become our new cities in space.

To build spaceships that large, lots of materials such as metals are required. For operating spaceships, lots of supplies are required.

Suppose that we want to build a spaceliner for regular traffic between Earth and Mars. Here are the specs as I see them:

Shape: A torus with a diameter of 300 m and a width of 100 m. The spaceship’s size may be doubled or tripled by adding another unit along the same axis. During flight the spaceship will rotate to create gravity inside. There will be 5 decks with a total of approximately 100 acres of floor space.

Mass: It is estimated to weigh (unloaded) about 100.000 Metric Tons, 2 thirds of which will be metal (Steel, Titanium and/or Aluminium).

Propulsion: Ion engines. They produce a very small but steady thrust and spend little propellant. When running at full power, they will produce an acceleration of 0.01 m/sec2, small enough not to be felt inside the ship, but powerful enough to raise the speed 8 km/sec in 10 days. They will be powered by two nuclear reactors (for redundancy) located fore and aft on the axis. In addition, the outside of the craft will be covered with photo-electric cells that will generate 30 Megawatts close to Earth.

On Earth, the building of the ship would cost about the same as the building of a major cruise ship, say $1 billion. To move the materials to space would cost at least 20 times the mass in fuel, or 2 million tons of fuel. The materials would have to be packed inside a space shuttle. At $ 250 a ton we are looking at an added cost of at least $ 0.5-1 billion.

In other words, that transportation cost to the assembly point would add at least another billion dollars to the cost of building a spaceship.

Raw Materials on the Moon
After An initial investment, it would be much less costly to mine the materials on the Moon, smelt them into metals, and catapult them into space. They would then be picked up by the team that would assemble the ship as a space shipyard.

This would mean that we would need mining equipment on the Moon. The power for digging, drilling and smelting would be electrical and would be produced by a nuclear power plant.

Transportation would be done by electrical trains, and the elevation to lunar orbit would be done be an electrical catapult.

As a byproduct of the smelting and refining of metals, we would get oxygen for human breathing and which combined with protons radiated in from the Sun could be used to generate water.

The Moon has minerals (Armalcolite with the chemical formula of (Mg,Fe++)Ti2O5) that can be refined into Steel, Aluminum, Titanium, Silicon and Oxygen. They will all be useful. The metals may be used for construction, silicon as a raw material for semiconductors, and oxygen for breathing and a component for burning fuel in chemical rockets.

In the long term, the Moon is likely to be very important in supplying construction facilities with raw materials. Low gravity allows materials to be processed in ways impossible or difficult on Earth, such as 'foaming' metals, where a gas is injected into a molten metal, and then the metal is annealed slowly. On Earth, the gas bubbles rise and burst, but in a zero gravity environment, that does not happen.

Annealing is a process that requires large amounts of energy, as a material is kept very hot for an extended period of time. This allows the molecular structure to align in the strongest possible way. Materials which cannot be alloyed or mixed on Earth because of the gravity field effects on density differences could be combined in space, resulting in composites which could have exceptional qualities. No one knows, because no one has been able to experiment along these lines on any scale. However, it is possible that a material or process will be identified which will be highly valuable on Earth, but impossible to make there. (Extract from wikipedia.org )

But would it not be too expensive to make the infrastructure to produce the building materials?

We are going to need the following:

1. A power source like a nuclear power plant.
2. An electrical distribution network.
3. An electrical railroad.
4. Electrically powered drilling and digging machines.
5. A number of electrolytic smelters and metal refining machines.
6. A crew to run the equipment.

The size of the configuration has to be big enough to produce the materials for a spaceship in less than 3 months. This means that we should be able to produce 35,000 Tons of metal a month and probably a large number of people.

We would probably need an infrastructure as large and as complex as the spaceship itself. But once the moon base and the shipyard in space are finished, it will be easy to produce spaceships at a faster pace and less expensively than from Earth.

More to come

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Tor Foss Mortensen
Euroluna