“Today we are seriously considering a project - somewhere at the turn of 2033-2035 - to deliver and install a power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues,” Borisov said.
He said all the technical questions concerning the project had been solved apart from finding a solution on how to cool the nuclear reactor. “We are indeed working on a space tugboat. This huge, cyclopean structure that would be able, thanks to a nuclear reactor and a high-power turbines…to transport large cargoes from one orbit to another, collect space debris and engage in many other applications,” Borisov said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last month dismissed a warning by the United States that Moscow planned to put nuclear weapons in space as false, saying it was a ploy to draw Russia into arms negotiations on the West’s terms.
It’s kind of a chicken and egg problem though, isn’t it?
They need the power to build significant structures, but you have to build the reactor to generate the power.
There’s been a few proposals to get nuclear power to work on the moon. I don’t know what the Russians are planning, possibly it’s just made up who knows, but but the best solution I’ve heard would be to use ammonia as a coolant instead of water, as it won’t freeze when it’s run through pipes on the surface of the moon.
Of course it does mean launching and not insignificant amount of nuclear material into space on an ongoing basis, unless they mine the moon for uranium, but that’s probably a couple of decades down the line of the earliest.
And I’ve been thinking about boinking Jennifer Lawrence and Zoe Saldana. It’s all been solved apart from finding a solution to getting them in the same room with me and convincing them to do it.
i am guessing china will be the one doing the landing this time
Say what you will about China and Russia, I hope they succeed because I’m on team space exploration.
More like space explodation, am I right?
This is dumb. Solar panels are plenty with no atmosphere and a tidally locked location. It’s more of a fear tactic I presume.
The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, not the Sun. Fixed points on the surface still have a day-night cycle. It takes a month, by the way, so a solar-powered device would have to have two weeks worth of battery capacity.
Multiple panel sites and cables to feed between them, then.
LOL, cables between sites halfway around the circumference of the Moon? You do realize you’re talking about ~5500 km worth of cable, right?
And the transatlantic data cable is estimated at about 340,500 miles (547,981 km) of cable over 2500 nautical miles. Getting all of that up there to the moon would definitely be its own project but the cable itself isn’t unprecedented. It’s doable.
Probably cheaper to park a reactor on the moon though.
And none of them are transporting any significant amount of power.
There is significant amount of losses when you transport electricity over long distances.
And the transatlantic data cable is estimated at about 340,500 miles (547,981 km) of cable over 2500 nautical miles.
I feel like that figure is probably the sum of the length of all the transatlantic cables installed since 1858.
Speaking of which, I was watching a video about the first transatlantic cable just the other day, and I was surprised at how frequently the things snapped and had to be dredged up and spliced. On the moon, you’d either have to design a robot capable of doing that, or you’d have to get the whole run in one go.
It is kind of fun to think about how it could be done. Seems to me there are two options:
- You soft-land it and drive halfway around the moon, in which case you need a very robust and durable rover and are going to have a fun time dealing with the entire gamut of lunar terrain (good luck climbing all those crater rims, LOL), or
- You drop the cable from orbit, which raises interesting questions about spool deployment speed, cable strength to weight ratio, and forces on a cable impacting the surface after free-falling from however high up. With no atmosphere, you can orbit the moon as closely as you dare as long as you avoid impacting into the side of a mountain. But the lower you orbit the faster your speed over the surface is, so the faster the cable deployment needs to be. Is there an altitude simultaneously high enough to avoid overheating the spool bearings or exploding the cable due to centripetal forces, yet also low enough to avoid letting the falling cable accelerate so much it shatters upon impact with the ground? I don’t know!
Don’t forget the weight of this cable.
I don’t know the weight of high voltage cable but by using just household cable I calculated that 5500km of cable would weight around 990 000 metrics tons.
And a nuclear-powered device would have to run for 2 weeks in direct daylight, at ambient temperatures up to 120° Celsius (250° Fahrenheit), with no air or water available to cool it.
And massive batteries of course. I’m pretty certain that you can’t really power a lunar colony with just solar panels unless you literally placed them around the equator of the moon.
He said all the technical questions concerning the project had been solved apart from finding a solution on how to cool the nuclear reactor.
That’s generally the hard part in running a nuclear reactor. Especially if you don’t have access to water. Or air.
Can’t wait for the Lunar sequel of Chernobyl.
