I don’t want to be a dentist or a doctor (he who cureth can maketh ill). I’d rather be a space hotel keeper. So if the pirates want their treasure, let ‘em have it. Just don’t expect me to heal them with anything besides prayer or some herbs. But I’d still rather be a space tourism buisness man than a herbalist or a minister, and I don’t ever want to be a chaste catholic priest.

At Mt. Malapert we could set up a base made of inflated regolith covered modules. We would also set up mining tractors that can descend into shadowed craters and mine ice. Then we would convert that ice to LH2 and LOX or silane+LOX to power reusable rockets that make sub-orbital hops to locations all over the Moon that deploy wheeled prospecting robots that thouroghly explore areas of interest. While lunar orbiters can detect areas where there might be ice or elements of value, we really need the ground truth from soil samples, drilled cores, etc. When the robots are done exploring they will rocket back to the base at Mt. Malapert and detailed analysis of samples will be done.

The robots could be teleoperated from Earth and from the Moon base via comsats and L1 and L2 or in elliptical polar orbits.

We will ship chlorine to the Moon in the form of copper, zinc and lithium salts instead of big tanks of supercold liquid chlorine. Eventually we will get some Cl, Cu and Zn from volcanic glass mining.

1) Land 100s of tons of equipment, mine regolith, extract materials, chiefly iron and silicon, and volatiles (H,He,C,N), also cannibalize landers for materials like aluminum, and do some Al extraction on the Moon to, and make some cement
2) make steel of various grades
3) form steel rods, beams, pipes, tubes, flanges, nuts, bolts, pressure vessels, tanks, plates of various thicknesses (most flat, some curved), maybe some sheets (hot roll plates several times to thin them out, cut ‘em as they widen into narrower plates, and finally cold roll sheets if we want work hardened sheet metal)
4) bolt together a frame from beams then weld up flat plates and weld in webs and make mobile homes for living in and working in. Some inflated modules will be landed on the Moon for living and working in earlier, before we get the mobile homes set up
5) expand steel production by building magma electrolysis furnaces powered by solar panel DC to get iron, and keep mining for iron fines that have 5% nickel in them until the mining ‘bots are run into the ground
6) make electric motors and generators for induction furnaces for carburizing and melting with flux to get more steel. Workers and robots in mobile homes will assemble motors and some generators..will need lots of motors for various purposes
7) forge, cast and extrude frames and axels for more mining robots. make buckets of welded steel plates.
somewhere along the line purify silicon, dope it and make more solar panels
9) aluminum production will also require heat supplied by induction
10) keep mining and sell helium 3 for about $1.6 million per kilogram

To get 50,000 tons of 0.5% steel we need 250 tons of carbon. One thousand he3 miners like the Mark 3 could produce 82,000 tons of carbon per year. That’s enough for 328 SPS, so in about three years of mining enough carbon would be produced for 1000 steel SPS. It will probably take over 50 years to build 1000 SPSs, so plenty of carbon could be produced on the Moon during their construction.

Also, 33,000 kg/yr of helium 3 worth about $50 billion per year would be produced concurrently.

I don’t think aluminum will be the chief material for SPS because of the difficulty of extracting it in terms of energy and the need for chemicals like sulfuric acid and chlorine as well as complex processing equipment. For steel we only need magnetic iron fines miners and magma electrolysis as well as carburizing and fluxing furnaces made of cast basalt or “fused adobe” and the energy required to make steel is not likely to be as great as the energy required to produce aluminum. Also, there is not enough copper on the Moon and no lithium to speak of to alloy aluminum so lunar aluminum will not be very strong. Wrought iron (less than 0.2% carbon) is stronger than unalloyed aluminum.

So helium 3 and volatiles mining would seem to come before SPS. See: http://www.moonminer.com/Reality-Check.html

2850maH @ 1.5volt are standard now a days for cameras

so about 4WH / in**3

400WH/in**3 with CN technology….

12X12X12 X 400 WH/ft**3… 700KWH/ft**3 is the best battery tech. known to date..

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a small army of engineers and techs with years of experience at different manufacturing jobs are going to be needed to figure out how to make the thousands of parts (10s or 100s of 1000s of parts?) needed to industrialize the Moon, if there is ever a profit making reason to do it.

I’ve been thinking, maybe if we show some basic “hows” maybe the “why” will emerge, even though “why” usually comes before “how” in the real world dominated by financial factors.

P=0.5(5.6707E-8)(5 m^2)(1500K^4 – 4^4) = 717,685 watts…..of course as it cools it will radiate slower…but that would take calculus would it not??

In an earlier discussion you said that because the heat conduction is so high the slab probably wouldn’t form a skin. Also, if we pour into a shallow titanium mold with a titanium lid with a thin oxide layer to prevent vacuum welding because we don’t want the iron to volatilize away, that would slow down the cooling….but if we poured into sand and covered with sand…it would really slow the cooling, but sand (regolith) is cheap and abundant!