Space Entrepreneurs Announce First Manned Moon Mission In 40 Years

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

http://www.wnd.com/markets/news/read/24829032/space_entrepreneurs_announce_first_manned_moon_mission_in_40_years

Taken from the above link:

A group of space entrepreneurs has created quite a stir with their announcement of the first private manned mission to the moon. From the foothills of Colorado emerges a new startup called Rima Marius LLC, named after the projected landing objective on the Moon. Rima Marius was initially formed as a “For-Profit” company with its main focus on the research & development of cutting-edge equipment and systems to enable the manned mission to the Marius Hills region.

The manned mission is scheduled to last 75-days, and will include exploration of lunar “Lava Tubes”, and the Marius “Pit”, a deep hole that may be the entry point into a collapsed lava tube. This target may be a suitable area for a long-term moon base.

And their website, flashy but low on details:

http://www.rimamarius.com/index.php

Basically, they'll be using SpaceX's Dragon and Falcon 9 Heavy, with some custom built hardware.

It sounds like they're either naive dreamers or scammers. It just doesn't sound feasible.

[smartcooky]

Rima Marius, a startup group based in Denver, Colorado, recently announced plans to send a crewed expedition to the Marius Pit, a mysterious hole in the Marius Hills region of Oceanus Procellarum. Led by Joel Ammons, entrepreneur and explorer, the group plans to launch their expedition by 2021.

Seven years. That is ambitious....

The plans call for several launches. Initially, two launches will throw a cargo vessel with robots and a 3D printing system capable of building a habitat out of lunar regolith, a method currently under study by Foster + Partners. Under contract to the European Space Agency, Foster + Partners designed a 4-person, classic dome shape capable of protecting a crew indefinitely. Construction of the dome would take approximately 1 week , after which two more spacecraft would be launched from earth with the crew.

....and innovative!

But can it work?

[Kiwi]

And their website, flashy but low on details:
http://www.rimamarius.com/index.php

The idea is certainly exciting, but why, oh why, do so many website designers not run their text through a spellchecker?  No doubt it's politically incorrect of me, but seeing so many typos such as on that site always makes me wonder if they're a bit dumb to not do something so simple.

[Count Zero]

...why, oh why, do so many website designers not run their text through a spellchecker?  No doubt it's politically incorrect of me, but seeing so many typos such as on that site always makes me wonder if they're a bit dumb to not do something so simple.

Yeah, I would not feel comfortable staking my life on hardware designed by people with such poor attention to detail.

[BazBear]

It sounds feasible to this self and semi-educated layman....except....this is going to be very expensive. Borrowing the line from The Right Stuff, no bucks, no Buck Rogers.

[Kiwi]

Below are comments of mine on a NZ message board last Saturday, where I alerted other Kiwis to the news (thanks Inanimate Carbon Rod!).  Got no reply, so any comments here?

Linky, but apparently you can't visit if you're not a member:
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Community/MessageBoard/Messages.aspx?id=1306223&topic=5

Direct link to the Rima Marius website:
http://www.rimamarius.com/index.php

Has anyone else seen the flyover of the area around the Marius pit? The best of its type that I've seen and far superior to those done recently for the Apollo sites from photos of the time. It show the great leap in technology since the 1970s.

Thinking about the proposed missions overnight, they seem pretty ambitious for a first return in 40+ years. Going into dome and lava tube country could greatly raise the risks to astronauts and machines, but we really don't know. Mike Collins said in his book "Carrying the Fire" that when Neil and Buzz returned to the command module he was grateful they hadn't crashed through the top of a lava tube and that he didn't have to return to earth alone.

I guess the new guys are shooting high to start with, but I wonder if a more sophisticated version of an Apollo mission for a week or so might be a better start. Still I hope it all works. At least a few Apollo people are still around to advise.

There's one problem they'll have to tackle that has never been a problem for the crews of Skylab, Mir, Space Shuttle, International Space Station and Shengzou:--

Excerpts from the Apollo 16 Lunar Surface Journal which include dust, dusted, dusting and dusty. None that include only dirt, dirty, filthy etc.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html

169:58:30 Young: (Chuckles as he looks at the checklist) Houston, this dust is just like an abrasive. Any time you rub something, you can no longer read it. And that's what's happened to our RCUs and our... every piece of gear we've got. In other words, it's a mistake to rub something to clean it off.

More, in sequence:

104:29:08 Duke: Okay, 80 feet, down at 3. Looking super. There's dust. Okay, down at 3. 50 feet, down at 4. Give me one click up. You're backing up slightly.
 104:39:58 Duke: There's a pretty one over there, without any dust on it at all. Out about 50 meters, by those three little craters?
 107:52:22 Duke: Well, I guess I can't stop talking. One final observation, Tony, is that due to the lack of dust that we had on landing and the fact that we can see blocks embedded in the side of these craters, here, I kind of got the distinct impression that the regolith is not too thick around here. And we ought to maybe think about where would be the thickest place in order to get the drill in. Over.
 107:52:53 England: Okay. That's a good observation. From the films you've seen of other descents, do you think the dust was less than any of the others?
 119:06:24 Duke: (Stepping off the LM) Fantastic! Oh, that first foot on the lunar surface is super, Tony! Okay, Tony, we're making little footprints here about 1/2-inch deep; not kicking up really very much (dust).
 119:39:33 Duke: Okay, Tony, the pan is complete. The LM just looks super. It's in perfect shape. No problem. The soil around here is very fine grained. Dusty, much like all the regolith that we've seen samples of from the other sites. The rocks are scattered. Perhaps 20 or 30 percent of the surface is covered by boulders up to 25 centimeters. Small craters pock mark the whole place; meter to 2-meter size, covering perhaps 70 percent of the surface.
 119:44:11 Young: Look at me carry it! I'm carrying it over my shoulder!!! Ha ha ha! I guess we don't have to worry about dust getting on it. Boy, one-sixth-g is the neatest environment you can find for this kind of work.
 120:07:45 Duke: (Blows) I just tried to blow off the dust (the magazine), Tony. And it's starting at frame count number 4.
 120:07:54 Young: That (trying to blow the dust off) won't work, Charlie.
 120:07:55 England: Bravo 4; and keep count of how many times you blow off the dust.
 120:11:17 Young: Oh, that's a clean dust brush, Houston, but I don't think it's gonna last.

Continued with a few more long posts of quotes, and then two of just Young and Duke humour.  It seems that the dust problem became worse with each EVA.  The same for Apollo 17 too.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

It seems the site has been updated with costs:

The total cost of the expedition as currently planned is approximately $2.5 Billion (USD). If the mission parameters change, though, these costs could drop. For example, if the mission plan changes to a single flight (no cargo vehicle) and a shorter surface stay, the cost could drop to as little as $1.5 Billion.

But in order to get started they need

To raise the initial $100 million ... we have started a public fund raising campaign.

They have posted a space craft design.

http://www.rimamarius.com/spacecraft-design.php

And it summary they say

A crewed mission to the Moon is expensive, but achievable. With public support, we can fund our investment program that virtually guarantees our success.

I'll believe this when I see it.

[smartcooky]

It certainly seems like an grand adventure.

The Apollo programme cost $25 billion. That is ten times as much as what these guys are looking at spending; more than 40 times as much in adjusted dollars. AIUI, most of that was spent on design and construction, with the remainder on training the Apollo astronauts and infrastructure.

I see no reason why they should not succeed, given that the level of technology now is so much more advanced than what they had in the 1960s and 70s.

I also think there is a lot more science to be done with regard to the Moon. "Been there, done that" is not a phrase I like to see applied to lunar exploration. We have landed in six places on the Moon; the twelve men who did so spent a total time of only 80 hours exploring. To suggest that there is nothing more to discover would be rather like dipping a bucket in the sea in six places all over the globe and claiming that we now know everything about the Earth's oceans.

[raven]

Or all about the Earth. Apollo was mostly restricted to fairly near the lunar equator. Its mission time was similarly heavily restricted. I wish them the best.
This is a grand dream, and I hope it reaches fruition.

[Noldi400]

I do have to wonder if the CEO of this company is a former Nigerian government official.  The site has all the earmarks of a scam to my eyes.

[mako88sb]

I do have to wonder if the CEO of this company is a former Nigerian government official.  The site has all the earmarks of a scam to my eyes.

Yes. Building a 4 person dome with robots and a 3D printer that's capable of sustaining a living environment for 75 days seems completely unfeasible to me. As one poster mentioned, having to deal with moon dust alone for the amount of time required to build it is just scratching the surface of the engineering problems involved.   

[smartcooky]

I do have to wonder if the CEO of this company is a former Nigerian government official.  The site has all the earmarks of a scam to my eyes.

Yes. Building a 4 person dome with robots and a 3D printer that's capable of sustaining a living environment for 75 days seems completely unfeasible to me. As one poster mentioned, having to deal with moon dust alone for the amount of time required to build it is just scratching the surface of the engineering problems involved.   

Well, last weekend, some students have apparently made a rocket engine by 3D printing and successfully test-fired it...

http://www.space.com/23107-3d-printed-rocket-engine-student-video.html

OK, its early days yet and the technology is new, but it looks very promising.

I agree with the comments about the engineering difficulties presented by moondust, but what I don't understand it why they would want to do it that way. With the Moon only having 1/6th G, they ought to be able to land a pretty big Hab in one piece, or at least in the form of a couple of large modules. If NASA can land the 900KG MSL on Mars, with all its attendant difficulties as regards re-entry, then landing a big Hab on the airless moon should not present as much of a problem.

 

[raven]

At least Mars has some atmosphere so you can shed some of that velocity with re-entry. With the moon, it's all rocket, all the time, all the way down. Which means you are in the grips of the terrible math of rocketry.

[smartcooky]

At least Mars has some atmosphere so you can shed some of that velocity with re-entry. With the moon, it's all rocket, all the time, all the way down. Which means you are in the grips of the terrible math of rocketry.

Well that goes against everything I have read about landing on Mars, which is that its atmosphere is just about the right density to be a big pain in the ass. Its not thick enough to be a really useful aerobrake, but it is thick enough to require the use of complicated systems involving retros and supersonic parachutes.

As I understand it, landing on the earth or the moon is a lot easier than landing on Mars

[raven]

More complicated certainly, but that atmosphere has some use. It doesn't take much; most of the dramatic slow down of re-entry on Earth takes place quite high in the atmosphere.