Ed, you seem not to have read my article and wordly take Joe's wrong
interpretations of it. I did not say that people never walked on the
Moon and not that it is impossible to do so, just that it is
dangerous and difficult. I also did not say that all Moon landings
were faked, but instead that most lilkely many, or at least some
times, studio videos have been shown in TV as the real thing. For me
there is no doubt that people have been on the Moon and indeed walked
around there, but likely not for many kilometers, but just quite near
around the landing sites. In fact, we can't really know what exactly
the astronauts did on the Moon, only what NASA wants to show and tell
us - don't believe everything, as much prestige and propaganda is
involved.

OK, it's regolith and I will correct it in my writings (how is it
pronounced anyway ?). As to regolith being packed on the Moon, I
wonder how it can be that with the low gravity there and total
absense of humidity in it? Your proposed experiment with the flour in
a container would basically give the same result if you instead would
use air and a plywood 'piston', that would prevent the compressed air
to leak upwards. Besides, on the Moon there actually would be lateral
displacement of the regolith, just as it would be with dry sand on
Earth, like sand hills in the Sahara for example.

The boulders on the Moon can be rocks that rest on the bedrock
beneath, or even be part of the bedrock. These 'boulders' can have
been there already before the regolith was formed around it. What
makes you think otherwise?

As to the rest of my writings, I hear no comments, but from Joe that
it is all nonsense, without him specifying it - very negative
attitude only. I point out that temperature control in vacuum is a
major problem and how to deal with it, but nobody reacts on that. I
point out that habital structures cannot contain large glass areas,
even less flat ones, nor can there be huge cupolas under pressure and
similar other Sci-Fi designs. Instead I show altrnative designs, but
nobody reacts on that. I give a method how the surface of landing and
settlements sites can be prepared - nobody reacts on that. I discuss
the problem of energy systems on the Moon, what would be possible
there and what not, but nobody reacts on that either. In my latest
revision, I describe how regolith could be used as a fuel, even show
a schematic design of such an installation and as yet no reactions on
that either.

Instead critics on my spelling and a few wordings that are
interpreted as negative as possible and that's all. Can it be that
most of the members of this group have no skills in basic physics and
mechanics whatsoever, but "know" everything about the Moon and what
you can do there? I wrote my article just for the layman, in the hope
to bring some awareness of basic physics and mechanics that apply
here and are large ignored by the Sci-Fi authors, but people don't
want to learn, they know it all already, yes? Instead I'm criticized
for not wanting to learn, like how to spell regolith, etc.

How about seeing the splitter in the eyes of others, but not the bar
in the own eyes?

Niclas

> Ed, you seem not to have read my article and wordly take Joe's wrong
> interpretations of it. I did not say that people never walked on the
> Moon and not that it is impossible to do so, just that it is
> dangerous and difficult.

Funny, that's sure not what you seem to say in your paper, and I quote
(laboriously retyping because you have locked the PDF to prevent copy
and paste -- a clever but ultimately futile way to avoid criticism):

"The first thing that should be considered is the observation that its
whole surface is covered with a powdery dust layer (rigolith)... that
appears to vary between 2 and 20 meters thick. ...Naturally, 'walking'
through such a dust layer would be fully out of the question."

Most native English speakers recognize "out of the question" as meaning
"impossible." So you did, in fact, write that walking on the Moon is
impossible, however you want to imagine you wrote something different
because this particular point has been seen as foolish.

There is much other foolishness in the paper, but we're busy people and
can't be expected to wade through too much of it.

> I also did not say that all Moon landings
> were faked, but instead that most lilkely many, or at least some
> times, studio videos have been shown in TV as the real thing.

So what's that make you -- a "mild" conspiracy theorist? I'll admit
that that's a new one to me, but then, net kooks come in many different
shapes and sizes. You're still a kook. None of the moon landings were
faked; none of the Apollo footage was faked; no fake moon sets were
built and passed off as the real thing, not even once. This is well
established fact. The conspiracy nuts all get together and think that,
because there is more of one of them, there may actually be some doubt
about these facts. But there is not; the nuts are merely deluding
themselves and each other.

> As to the rest of my writings, I hear no comments, but from Joe that
> it is all nonsense, without him specifying it - very negative
> attitude only.

I'm negative because it is nonsense, and because so far you've shown
very little willingness to listen when the glaring mistakes are pointed
out to you. You show almost all the signs of a classic net kook, and
to be honest, I'm rather upset that the SSI list (which has always been
a very low-noise and high-quality list) has been invaded by such.

Is it really worth going through and tearing your paper apart point by
point? I think when we hit several ridiculous claims halfway through
the first page, we've already seen what level of quality and
credibility to expect for the rest of the paper.

But all right, if you insist, I'll do a few more. Let's see here...

Let's skip the nonsense in the last paragraph of page 1, claiming that
your vehicle could at any moment be swallowed up by a crack under the
dust, since this is basically the same nonsense as above.

Let's go to the temperature control section. First, your false belief
once again that only you understand anything and all other lunar base
designers are idiots: "There is an other basic condition, totally
ignored by the artists-designers and that is the matter of temperature
control." Wrong: see "The Lunar Base Handbook"'s entire chapter 11,
for example. Or to pick something from a random Google search for
lunar images, S89-26097 on http://www.solarvoyager.com/nasaimg2.asp>,
which clearly shows a radiator (the essential part of a thermal control
system). So, sorry to burst your bubble, but you are not the first
person to think of this issue; engineers have been dealing with it for
decades.

In the fifth paragraph, you make the same ridiculous claim about space
settlements. Wrong again: even student designs include thermal
regulation, including careful calculation of how much radiator area is
needed and how much mass this will require, as you can see here
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement//Contest/Results/2002/Aether/Construction.htm>
in section II.E.4, "Radiators". We could cite many more if you wish.

But let's read on... how about your claim, on the end of page 2, that
"leakage is not a function of pressure difference as most layment
think, but from pressure ratio ...which is infinite to vacuum. A tiny
leak, that would not be serious for a submarine at far greater pressure
differences, would be lethal for a space craft ..or a space-suit."
More nonsense; see
http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/higgins.html> for the right
answer.

Moving along, on page 3, you again make the egotistical and totally
false claim that (amazingly!) nobody else has realized that the Moon
has a 14-day night. Come on, if you really think you're the first to
notice this, you should probably be on medication (and I say this in
all seriousness as someone with a neuroscience degree). Nor do most
designers believe that fuel cells are an energy source. At least
you're right about these points; you're just silly for thinking that
everybody else is wrong.

Your objections to various ways of providing nighttime power contain
various small errors (e.g., if you wanted a lunarstationary power sat,
you'd put it in L2, L4, or L5; and a nuclear reactor could work just
fine on the Moon, using radiators for cooling). You also neglect the
point that fuel cells can be cycled indefinitely; during the day you
electrolyze water with solar power, and at night you run it through the
fuel cell to produce electricity. That, or chemical batteries (which
are improving rapidly), is probably what early bases will do when they
start overnighting.

Page 4: more with the mythical moon dust. Enough already.

As for your "SPU" design, I think your "cooling towers" will not work
very effectively, because they are surrounded by too much habitat --
you want your radiators large and flat, with a view of as much black
sky as possible. But a bigger problem is that they have inadequate
radiation shielding. If you're going to have people staying for an
extended amount of time, you really need to bury it, not have it
sitting on legs. (Other shielding mass will also work, of course, but
regolith is already there and easy to use.)

Intermezzo: nonsense about terraforming the Moon. Titan is not a proof
that a low-gravity body can hold an atmosphere; most likely Titan's
atmosphere is continually replenished by outgassing from the interior.
The lifetime of gasses on the Moon is around 100 days
(http://www.islandone.org/Settlements/DegradeLunarVacuum.html).
Terraforming the Moon in itself isn't complete nonsense
(http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002iaf..confE.230R), but your ideas
about it are -- I already pointed out that there is very little
nitrogen available, which is the major component of our atmosphere. If
you replied to that, I must have missed it.

However, let's just examine why this claim is nonsense: "...just one
small nuclear bomb of say a few kilotons TNT could be detonated on the
Moon's surface, after which an expanding ring-shaped chemical reaction
front would 'scrub' the Moon's whole surface, 'consuming' all the dust,
as well as forming a dense atmosphere at the same time, mainling
containing water vapor, free Oxygen and Nitrogen - an Earthlike
atmosphere!"

Besides the fact that this would involve creating Nitrogen out of
nothing, the real reason this is silly is that explosions of a few
kilotons happen on the Moon all the time. They're called impacts.
They create craters, but they don't terraform the Moon. (And note,
BTW, that there is no hyphen in "terraform" -- such gaffes merely make
it easy to see that you haven't done even the slightest bit of reading
before claiming that you alone have come up with all the solutions to
problems nobody else has even realized.)

Sheesh. I can't believe I just wasted half an hour on this.

Joe Strout -- joe@...