Here we go again, like it's 1961!

Now please give us back the smart people that NASA had at that time.

Here we go again, like it's 1961!

Who's playing the part of 'The Russians' this time round?

It's a tossup between Russia and China, but Putin's too busy playing "Risk" (the board game, remember it?) and CCP China has money to spend but trouble catching up.

I think the intent is to continue leading the way, hopefully with common sense and on budget.

> Now please give us back the smart people that NASA had at that time.

Give us back the budget that NASA had at that time. Fixed it for you.

(Of course somebody will say "they need to work smarter, not harder" and that kind of nonsense, but fact is, you won't even put a washing machine on the Moon's surface with the current budget. First we need a transport which actually works, and there are a couple million $ between "should eventually be able" and "is reliably able to do so today".)

... and second something needs to show it can survive lunar nights (not night). It's an extreme environment up there, and you want to put radioactive material there? Good luck with that.

Setting up a reactor is probably quite easy. No atmosphere to transport anything that escapes, easy to put a 1km security border around it. But then how to create electricity? Steam requires water, and the Rankine cycle, like the Carnot cycle, requires cooling....

Meteor impact will burst any pipes close to the surface.

Colour me sceptical for another 50 years or so...

ALL very good points. I thought this one out long ago...

* - Peltier devices require a sink but you can obtain that by drilling down. The moon's average temp is about 50C below Earth's as I recall, because no air. So the sink would be "reverse geo-thermal". Would require excavation and coolant, probably

* HUGE underground ice patch near the south pole offers water AND the opportunity to make O2 and H2 fuel, plus electricity for whatever. Also coolant.

If a large enough bank of high temperature Peltier devices were used for DC electricity, you would avoid the steam plant completely. For efficiency, not so good, but cost would more than likely make up for it. You could also use thermal energy from nuke waste in a similar manner (Space 1999 anyone?)

Here we go again, like it's 1961!

Do we have to "do the other things" again?

I never worked out what they actually were.

Now please give us back the smart people that NASA had at that time.

I think most of the rocket scientist "smart people" work for SpaceX now.

Which is ironic given that when Musk set it up no one from Nasa wanted to work there.

But is it big enough to knock the moon out of orbit when it goes ka-boom?

We have been warned.

My grandpa would've been 89 on that day... (he missed it by a couple of years)

And the water? There are small pockets of ice (at least we think it's ice) in a few crater shadows, but you'd have to mine it, transport it and deposit it into the reactors – which themselves have to be placed in an advantageous spot for settlement, not necessarily near the ice – without ever letting it be exposed to sunlight.

You are right abour 'permanently shaded areas' (PSR's) but there's this:

Conservative estimates suggest the south pole could harbor 100,000 to 1,000,000 metric tons of water ice across all PSRs, though some optimistic models propose up to 10 billion metric tons if deeper subsurface ice exists.

[1]GROK analysis

[1] https://x.com/i/grok/share/BGUlz3Dx18Dfk0ojQ3er3ZSyo

If it allows them to claim an exclusion zone around a nuke teapot/kettle (likely inactive) then it's simply a "Land Grab".

And if it is active, what's the cooling mechanism going to be - even Radioisotope thermoelectric generators work on heat conversion to electricity ?

There's not a lot of running water up there to do much cooling - unless it's supposed to go critical first to melt the permafrost !!!

*explosion icon of course*

It's not needed during the day (plenty of solar power available), so only bring it out at night when it's really cold outside.

(Only half joking)

reverse geo-thermal - average temp on moon is about 50C below Earth's average temp because no air. SO, you drill down and/or excavate a geo-thermal COOLING grid. Might need liquid coolant for it though, but I expect conductive heat transfer might also work...

Moon has a lot of titanium, which I believe is a lot like aluminum in its heat transfer capability.

> Furthermore, it is not clear who would use the power source.

That's the first thing which hit me when I heard about it. A nuclear reactor on the Moon? What for? Besides they are strangely specific about its size: "a minimum output of 100kW". Does some government contractor have some dead stock >100 kW reactors to get rid of?

I'm maybe too logical about this, but you usually deploy a power plant when you need power , and right now our power requirements on the Moon are nil. Only once (and only if one day) we have a permanent station up there, we could start considering the need for a nuclear reactor, depending on the station's actual power needs. Given a Moon station is a imminent as that on Mars and a reactor has a finite life expectancy, what is this project about except wasting money?

Yes batteries would be much more cost-effective to keep things running during the lunar nights. A nuclear reactor would probably break every time you turned it on...

OK, but if you want a deliverable lunar reactor for when you need it to appear, some design and testing will have to have been done in advance ... such as in this project. And if you expect to need a reactor to power your moonbase, you might even want to have it in place and running reliably for a while *before* it becomes a critical part of your infrastructure.

And in the meantime, some physicists will -- most likely -- be along shortly with innumerable projects for a wide variety of sensors, telescopes, and the like, all of which might benefit from a convenient power source. Might be tricky to get your robot to plug in the necessary powerboard/extension cable though. :-)

> if you want a deliverable lunar reactor for when you need it to appear, some design and testing will have to have been done in advance

True, but the question is, do you want a deliverable lunar reactor? I still fail to see the point.

I mean, what about some gantry cranes, for when cargo containers start getting shipped to the Moon? Should we send up some gantry cranes to moon-proof them? This is a slippery slope...

As for any telescopes, the blocking point isn't lack of power (solar panels would do just fine), it's the budget of building one and sending it up there.

The problem is easy to identify. Duffy + friends have bought shares in a company with a power point presentation that mentions a 100kW nuclear reactor. Those shares will jump in value when a cost plus contract is awarded...

This is just the "but all the other kids have got one" argument that kids use to justify getting a phone (or, indeed, anything), isn't it?

If we don't know what this is going to be used for, and we're just doing it to create a "keep out" zone - then the answer is simple. Heavy looking metal box. Radiation symbols - scatter of blinking lights. Job's a good'un. Oh we also need the acronym. How could I forget that most important bit of space science?!

He's setting up NASA to fail because there's no way they can make that deadline.

It takes a decade or more to construct a nuclear reactor from a known design on Earth. How long do you think it will take to design a nuclear reactor from scratch capable or running in an airless environment on the Moon? Hint: it's take more than the 4.5 years Duffy's asking for it to be constructed in.

We're not talking about lots of megawatts if we assume the lunar outpost is adequately insulated, so presumably almost any of the smaller factory-built package reactors, due to be available Real Soon Now (or so we're told) could equally well be used on the moon and shipped up there as needed. Assuming a set of solar cells with an equivalent output to the reactor are also installed on the moon, the reactor only needs to be run for two weeks at a time during the lunar night because solar cells will provide power during the lunar day, so refuelling or replacing it shouldn't be an issue.

There's another benefit too: since it seems that moon-dust is likely to be a good insulator, that should make it easy to insulate the outpost well enough to keep the crew alive and warm(ish) enough to survive a two week reactor fail by shipping up a replacement unit from Earth or activating a backup reactor that's already on the Moon.

Lastly: if moondust is light and a good enough insulator, we won't need nukes on the Moon: just solar panels and good insulation for the moon base.

That's quite an assumption considering that it's about 3 times the mass of anything that has been landed on the moon in a controlled manner in the last 60 years.

Soviet Lunas were up to 5.8 tonnes.

A fully laden Apollo descent module is approximately 15 tonnes, but about 10 tonnes of that is fuel, a lot of which was burned on the way down.

Apollo S-IVBs (3rd stages of Saturn V) were dropped on the moon and were approximately 14 tonnes, but they were just crashed into it - probably not the best way to land a nuclear reactor.

> That's quite an assumption considering that it's about 3 times the mass of anything that has been landed on the moon in a controlled manner

Yes, but reducing the deadline will help with that, it's a typical pointy-haired boss™ strategy.

the russians, chinese , indians want one as well. The moon will be f*cked, our tides , insects, and possibly life on earth will cease when it all goes kaboom!. Leave it alone.

Might want to tone down the hyperbole. Exactly how much nuclear material do you expect will be there? The moon is huge (compared to a reactor), and still orbiting just fine, still tugging our tides just fine, despite billions of years getting repreatedly whacked by meteors that would make an exploding nuclear reactor seem like a firecracker.

[Icon for what won't happen. And even if it did, it won't cause the problem you feverishly imagine.]

What, you didn't see the 1970s Gerry Anderson documentary series?

It is one thing to declare a 'keep out zone', quite another to enforce one.

Aside from that, the lunar surface is quite hostile. Solar radiation without the protection of the Earth's magnetosphere or atmosphere, and lots of micro-meteorites, plus huge temperature variations

"The temperature of the Moon can vary from highs of 250° Fahrenheit (120° Celsius) at its equator during lunar daytime and plunge to -208 degrees F (-130° C) at night."

from: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/temperature-moon