Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "" video.

  1. AEROSPACE ENGINEER here - at least you are honest about what you were doing. The real problem for any of these processes IS NOT that we can make them work. Its how do we get those processing plants built. Sorry for the long comment Your idea is nice but getting it done will be very difficult. In 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he told me to look into Helium-3 (the potential nuclear fusion fuel). I'm Australian (American degree) and went into our mining sector to learn how to build mines. At that time I had a over a decade of control systems, manufacturing, automation and robotics. All good for doing stuff almost anywhere but I thought adding mining would get me to my dream - build a moon base. Easily the biggest lesson I got from building remote mines in difficult places, because most of Australia's mines are remote and in difficult places, is that LOGISTICS becomes a major issue. When I was doing manufacturing most of my suppliers were less than 1 hour away. If we really needed something fast we'd get in the car and go get it. In the Pilbara region (where I did a lot of work) the nearest place where there are suppliers is Perth over 1,500km away. If you are really lucky you can occasionally get things on the next jet because all the people fly in from Perth, but in general the quickest you can get things is 3 days. For large items you need to find a trucking company with available capacity and in general that's measured in weeks. I ha d a project where an idiot went welding on stuff he shouldn't have without disconnecting all the electricals. he blew 3 cards in the PLC and the replacement was delivery was quoted as 3 -5weeks. It was American Rockwell hardware and I tried their agent in Singapore and they had none but I found their Japanese store had a bunch of these cards. We had a crew of 12-15 costing over $10k per day. Even at the bottom end $5k of airfares for me to go to Japan and pick up these cards and fly back was cheaper than anything else. In response someone magically put 3 of those cards on the next plane out of Japan. This is going to be the real problem with getting anything done on the moon. The cost per kg to the lunar surface is so high that it will not be practical to fly it all there. Your silane plant will need basic stuff like pipes and pumps and valves and electrical cable all the other stuff most people never think about. AND ALL THAT STUFF adds up in WEIGHT. Its staggering to see how much stuff has to be shipped to a mine site to get it going. Just the accommodation and basic human support (water, food, sewerage) is a major effort. Then there's power and communications. Fuel for all the vehicles. And yeah i watch some of the people from NASA talk about moon bases and I know they have NOT considered how TF they are going to get things done. After seeing a TEDx talk I wrote to the speaker about where he got his information. It turned out he was a architect with one of the Worlds to firms. He was very cool about it and told me his TEDx talk was more about his company wanting him to learn how to do presentations than anything else. He sent me the materials he used for his talk. It was mostly the complete set of papers form a NASA conference on setting up lunar operations. I went and scanned the document for references on MAINTENANCE because anyone who's worked in remote sites knows maintenance is the single biggest on going issue. Out of a bit under 200 pages of technical stuff there was less than 1-1/2 pages on maintenance and all it said was it'd be done by robots. I have shown that to engineers who have worked in mining and they can't believe how stupid NASA is on the subject.
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  2.  @rafaelgonzalez4175  You mean like the one that just tipped over??? And HOW MANY of these recent missions to the moon have been manned? YEAH ZERO And how many of them have actually landed as planned and done the mission as planned??? That's NOT a big number either. There's a difference between "overly confident" and BASIC REALITY and engineers don't get paid for confidence they get paid for getting the job done cos the rest of the clown brigade screams and howls when things don't work.
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  3.  @rafaelgonzalez4175  Its called orbital mechanics and is a well understood subject.
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  4. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: The problem with manufacturing ANYTHING off-Earth for delivery to Earth is the final step. Delivering to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is one thing delivering to the surface of the Earth is another thing entirely. Its simply a matter of logistics and the problems logistics create like energy dissipation. For every kilogram in LEO it has akinetic energy of 30.25MJ which might not mean much but 1ton (1,000kg) is the equivalent of about 7.23 tTNT and the Space Shuttle (~70 tons) is about 506tTNT or half a kilo ton of TNT. With its max landing payload of 14t a Space Shuttle comes back down with the approximately 600tTNT. The reason I bring this up is that a few years ago Jeff Bezos (yes the Blue Origin guy) said he wanted to move all processing into Low Earth Orbit because there would be unlimited cheap energy and pollution would just drift away into space. Around that time I was working on an Australian iron ore mine called Tom Price in Western Australia. I went into mining because in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt who told me to look into Helium-3. So I went looking for mining experience to add to a back ground in aerospace, automation and robotics. Tom Price was good because the math is very simple because it produces around 20mta (million tons per annum). At an average around 70% iron content 20tons of iron ore produced 14tons of raw iron. FYI - that's how iron ore is graded and sold - by its iron content. So Tom Price's 20mta would need 1million space shuttle flights NOT because it need that many to lift the iron ore up but because that's the limit of the Space Shuttle coming down. Scott can explain the difference between MTOW and MLW if he likes. Problem 1million space shuttle flights equals 600million tons of TNT. To give that perspective the current W88 thermonuclear warhead of a trident missile has 475kTNT of "bang" So 1 million space shuttle flights is like letting off 1263 W88 thermonuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere. Tom Price was once a large iron ore mine for Australia at 20mta Most of our new mines to 60mta and Australia's production is over 920mta or 46+ times Tom Price. Sorry but unless we come up with a magic Star Trek transporter or wormhole technology we will never bring anything back from either the moon or anywhere else for use on the surface of the Earth UNLESS we only need it in very small amounts and its extremely valuable. For example Scott mentions Helium-3 which actually has been proven to be usable for nuclear fusion BUT like every other form on fusion IT DOES HAVE PROBLEMS making it work. In the discussions of Helium-3 I once saw someone claim an amount needed to supply all of Britain's energy needs and when I extended that out to 8billion people it requires less than 10 space shuttle flights to land from Low Earth orbit at a cost of under US$5billion for a fuel value of over $1trillion. I am NOT the only person to have worked out those sorts of numbers and its why there are people who still think Helium-3 is a viable future fuel. For anything else its the same basic problem you need to find something that is incredibly valuable per kg. FYI - The reason why I use the space shuttle in these sorts of calculations is because to date it is still the only viable system we had for bringing any sort of cargo back down to the Earth's surface. Yes the Russian had Buran but it only flew once and nobody really knows what it might have been good for. Here's the thing - even if we suddenly did have something better than the space shuttle and even if it was 100 times better then we'd only need 460,000 flights a year to lift Australia's iron ore into orbit and bring the stell back down. Then there's the problem that Australia is only about 1/3rd of world production. Plus there's all the nickel, copper, aluminum and other stuff we use to deal with.
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  5. Follow #1 On the subject of Aluminium as a rocket Propellent- ITS A WELL KNOWN Propellent. Look at the Wikipedia page for the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster and look at the propellent the link is in the box of specifications (RHS) at the bottom. The link is for APCP (Ammonium perchlorate composite propellant) and on that page look at the list of components and the sub-section "High energy fuels".
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  6. Follow up #2 On the subject of mining and materials process in on the lunar surface. The most fundamental issue is "How do you start making stuff on the moon?" How do you start digging up stuff? How do you then process raw ore into raw material? How do you process raw material into raw stock than can be machined, molded, pressed, forged,.... etc? How do you get the basic machinery to the lunar surface to do these things? How do you do casting, machining and welding in 1/6th gravity? I priced a small lathe a few years ago and its cost was around AU$4000 and its the sort of lathe you'd need to start making stuff on the moon. IT WEIGHED 600kg NOT including the tooling, coolant, grinder to re-sharpen tools or power supply So if you added in another 400kg for all the other stuff then its a neat metric ton. At US$10k per kg to LEO and the expected 100x that to the lunar surface. Its basically US$1 billion just to transport the basics for getting started on the moon and that's only if the cost estimate of 100x is right. Its more likely 10x or more than that at the moment. FYI - for those wondering why an aerospace engineer thinks the way I do. When I went into building REMOTE mine sites in Australia one of the first things I learned is that its basically a logistics and infrastructure task. The actual digging of a hole and the processing of rocks into stuff is almost nothing compared to everything else. Before you even come close to digging you have to build accommodation, food storage, potable water processing and storage and waste water (sewerage) processing. Because BEFORE you can start building anything you have to take care of the humans doing the work. That's accompanied by the logistics facilities as in places to unload and store the materials you'll build everything from. After taking care of the humans and logistics the next thing is building the places where they work - offices and WORKSHOPS. BUILDING ON THE MOON will be the same basic problem. Its the great lesson I got from building mines in remote locations.
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