Building A Base On The Moon

The cold war between the US and Russia ended half a century ago. But it paved the way for Space exploration for the year to come. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin made history by becoming the first human to journey into outer space, achieving a major milestone in the Space Race. Then the Space Race ended when Neil Alden Armstrong became the first to walk on the moon.

Since then no human had set foot on any heavenly body. But now after Elon Musk's BFR announcement and China's successful landing on the far side of the moon another race to make a base on the moon is all set to start. And this time private companies and national space agencies are in it all together to put humans back on the lunar surface. But what we will need before we start building a Base On Moon.

Building a living space out of the Moon’s available resources makes sense. There’s the potential of using lava tubes, tunnels formed during the Moon’s volcanic past, as shelters with access to frozen water ice beneath the surface. But a more immediate plan is to build a habitat using lunar regolith, the fine dark basaltic grey sand that is similar to volcanic sand on Earth.

Building a moon base and actually living on the moon will require careful planning. First, we need to identify and map available lunar resources, including hydrogen and water ice. Such compounds are crucial if we are to create breathable air and rocket fuel, whether for an observatory or a launchpad to go to the outer planets in our solar system.

There are many desirable resources on the moon, from the water ice that can give us fuel and air and other volatile elements to titanium. These may have accumulated in permanently shadowed polar regions, where it is too cold for them to vaporise.

Professor Matthias Sperl from the University of Cologne works with the German Space Agency, DLR, using volcanic powder to make bricks. The regolith simulant is held together using a process called sintering, where concentrated sunlight or lasers bond the material together. He used 3D printers to construct different shaped bricks to see which worked best. “What we can build with current techniques and shapes is interlocking building elements,” said Sperl. “We’re not building Lego but we have interlocking bricks.”

Any moonbase is likely to be situated at the Moon’s poles as evidence of water ice was detected there. Oxygen within the lunar regolith itself could also be extracted for breathing. The most likely source is ilmenite (FeTiO3) which, when combined with hydrogen at temperatures of around 1,000C (1,832F), produces water vapour, which then needs to be separated to produce hydrogen and oxygen. 

So all there is left to do is to go there and build one right? The answer is not so black and white. The Moon has temperatures ranging from 127 to -173 C (260 to -343F). Then there’s radiation and the low gravity, one-sixth that of the Earth’s. A lunar day is also around 29 Earth days, which means two weeks of daylight followed by two weeks of darkness – an issue for solar power. Any new technologies for a lunar outpost must, therefore, work under these conditions.

As well as logistics is a huge challenge as we can't load everything on one single rocket yet. So yes it is within our reach to completely build a base on the Moon, but it will at least take a decade to do so. 

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How Many Times A Falcon 9 Can Be Reused?

On the 21st of December 2015, SpaceX made history by landing their first Falcon 9 booster back on land. After years of development and testing, SpaceX was one step closer to dramatically reducing the cost of spaceflight.

Since then, over 45 boosters have been landed with over half of them being reused. But how many times can a Falcon 9 be reused And what does it take to refurbish each booster between flights?

In this article, we are going to look at how SpaceX upgraded the Falcon 9 to be more reusable. We are also going to look at what goes into refurbishing the Falcon 9 and how it will eventually be replaced by Starship.

In April 2018, SpaceX launched the new and improved ‘Block 5’ Falcon 9. This new version brought many upgrades to the engine heat shield, grid fins and landing legs, with an aim to reduce the amount of refurbishment and maximize the number of flights per booster.

Although this upgrade cut out the need for a lot of refurbishment, the average turnaround time for a booster has only dropped from 356 days to 107, with the quickest turnaround time being 72 days. The Space Shuttle, on the other hand, achieved a record of just 55 days between flights back in 1985, with regular refurbishment times of less than 100 days.

However, after the Challenger disaster, the safety standards increased and this put extra pressure on refurbishment. The process became an enormously expensive task, requiring over 9,000 employees to make the Shuttle ready for flight. With SpaceX aiming to achieve a refurbishment time of just 24 hours, they will need to match the turnaround process of airliners, with each rocket only needing a quick inspection between flights.

When the first stage booster returns to Earth either by land or by sea, it’s lifted onto a trailer and transported back to the SpaceX hangar. This can take multiple days to complete since each of the four landing legs need to be removed manually. Although they are designed to be quickly retracted, SpaceX has only been able to do this on two occasions.

Once the booster is back in the hangar, the refurbishment process begins with each engine going through a number of rigorous tests to make sure that every component is ready for flight. According to Musk, each Merlin engine could perform up to 1000 flights without major refurbishment.

The hydraulic grid fin system, which failed during a landing in the year 2018, must also be checked for any leaks. The fuel tanks and pressure vessels go through a series of ultrasonic tests to check for tiny cracks that could lead to a failure once the rocket is pressurized for flight. Once the booster has passed the inspection process, it performs a static fire test with all 9 engines, before being attached to the payload.

At the moment, all of these checks still need to be completed as they venture into the unknown territory of multiple reuses. Each mission will give them more knowledge on how many flights each booster can perform and over time, the refurbishment process should become more refined.

So far, there are three Falcon 9 boosters that have each completed triple launches. SpaceX currently has around eight Falcon 9 boosters in their fleet, but eventually, they aim to grow that number to 20. Although the Falcon 9 could theoretically fly up to 100 times with minimal refurbishment, each booster is only expected to perform a total of around 30 flights over the next decade.

However, with SpaceX working on a much more powerful and fully reusable rocket, the Falcon 9 could become obsolete much sooner than expected.

SpaceX is currently building the first prototypes of their ‘Starship’ rocket in Texas and Florida. And with customers already lined up, they aim to launch their first commercial payload in 2021. Not only will SpaceX use Starship for Mars and commercial satellite missions, but they also want to use Starship for travel here on Earth, providing flights to anywhere in the world in well under an hour.

Unlike the Falcon 9, Starship is designed to be fully reusable with an aim to complete thousands of flights before any major refurbishment is needed. If SpaceX can get Starship up and running, it could replace the Falcon 9 altogether since it would be capable of launching much heavier payloads for a fraction of the cost.

Over the next few years, SpaceX will be hiring thousands of new employees to work on Starship. When it comes to hiring, Elon Musk has admitted that he doesn’t care about college degrees. In fact, in the early days of SpaceX, Elon taught himself rocket science by reading books and talking to people in the industry.  So if you want to join SpaceX or anything you are interested in then starts gaining knowledge about it from today.  

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