The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will help scientists search for water at the lunar South Pole, and will be the first in-situ resource utilization demonstration on the Moon. PRIME-1, which will be mounted to a lunar lander, is made up of two components – The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) and the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSolo)

Brian Wang

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I am encouraged by this phase of Lunar Exploitation. It is enthusiasm tempered (of course) by my Goatish suspicions of ‘not enough, not fast enough’ underwhelmingness.

So, the Polar drill-and-sniff probe is going to land and hopefully stay upright. No problem. And it has a nifty drill-o-rator from which it can dig down a bunch and take either continuous samples or periodic ones, to lift back and heat up, and detect emitting gasses from. Great!

But is PRIME going to hop around, taing dozens, scores, hundreds of samples all over Luna – even if constrained to a city block, or square mile’s worth of the surface? If not, then what are the odds of it hitting a particularly sweet spot under which a zoo of curiously intriguing species lie in wait? Mmmm… not all that good.

That’s what I mean.

It feels stunted, ‘economy’. As might befitting a cash-strapped Lunar explorer program that isn’t getting very much traction from the billion-dollar budgets that abound at NASA, ESA and so on.

Now don’t get me wrong, digging out some regolith from near South pole of Luna is a good thing, even if it is a single bore. It would be good just to find the distribution of volatiles there. So, I remain cautiously enthusiastic.
________________________________________

All and all, I am still somewhat tepid about the viability of Lunar ‘exploration’. Tepid because not just the initial but the ongoing cost of cobbling together these missions is anything but cheap, and anything but trouble-free. There is quite a bit of risk involved.

Sure, in our NBF Science Projection universe, there is a lot of opportunity on the Moon for exploration. I mean, it has a surface area of about 10% of Earth’s total land area. Think about that: close to the area of the United States, Europe, China and Canada combined. That’s a LOT of area! So, one might imagine that across that whole Lunar briquette’s surface, there are zillions of interesting (and who knows, potentially profitable) areas to explore and exploit.

But on the other hand, I think back to the Apollo missions. It felt to almost every science-motivated groupie (me at the head of the list!) that the magnificence of the Apollo landings was ‘cut short’ rather prematurely. Felt that way for years. Then, digging about, I learned that we weren’t really compounding our discovery-rate or the science-rate much at all by Apollo 17.

Of course, getting the lunar dune buggies up there was a boon for casting wide to find ‘more stuff’. Somehow changing the knife-edge thin margins for fuel, mass, on-Luna time, and payload back to Earth to get thousands of kilograms of bits back, well that was fairly incredible. And in 1968 to 1975, there was no carbon fiber. No graphene. Everything was pretty ordinary, of course with titanium being the heavyweight (lightweight!) winner. Still, it took a Saturn V rocket the size of a small city skyscraper to lift a few space monkeys up there with their buggy, do some digging, and return to Earth with bags of rocks in tow. Oh, and leave seismometers behind. And mirrors. And telemetry equipment. AND DIG HOLES in the regolith. And return that to Earth too!!!

Again, if you’re still following and mildly irritated by my line of thinking, you’re likely to cite both the incredible science that resulted from all those missions, AND that the missions were never intended to be more than primary science, not habitation, not permanent or even temporary residence on Luna. It really was about dune buggies, lots of rocks and other samples, and getting the compliment of astronauts there, AND BACK in one piece.

Then in that light, the whole idea of Lunar Exploration seems to have a glib patina burnished by Science Fiction imagery, deep-projectionist Science Theatre narratives and maybe ‘space boredom’ from it having so little in common with Star Wars, or Interstellar or even Alien. Go to the Moon to do what? Find water. Oh, that sounds exciting. Water, and perhaps carbond dioxide, and nitrogen. Not very likely, but still hmmm… not very exciting. Meanwhile the excited projectionists posit dumping huge-scale lunarscape repavement-and-mining equipment up there to dig, dig, dig, boil the dirt and extract all sorts of stuff from Luna which is clearly WAY to expensive to send in bulk from Terra.

To do what with? Yah. Building materials to build more big stuff. To build more big stuff. And housing for the astronauts who’ll very likely be needed up there, AIs or not, to deal with real ‘hard’ day to day problems and develop science goals. OK. I see. Yet, I don’t. The ‘cost’ of sending the leading REAL scale missions will make NASA’s Apollo mission budget look like raiding the petty cash account. Seriously. And humanity has that kind of budget for a self-serving Lunar community? Hmmm… color me purple and call me an eggplant.

⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

1 thought on “Honeybee Robotics Lunar Ice Drill for 2024 NASA Mission”

GoatGuy

October 23, 2023 at 10:28 am

I am encouraged by this phase of Lunar Exploitation. It is enthusiasm tempered (of course) by my Goatish suspicions of ‘not enough, not fast enough’ underwhelmingness.

So, the Polar drill-and-sniff probe is going to land and hopefully stay upright. No problem. And it has a nifty drill-o-rator from which it can dig down a bunch and take either continuous samples or periodic ones, to lift back and heat up, and detect emitting gasses from. Great!

But is PRIME going to hop around, taing dozens, scores, hundreds of samples all over Luna – even if constrained to a city block, or square mile’s worth of the surface? If not, then what are the odds of it hitting a particularly sweet spot under which a zoo of curiously intriguing species lie in wait? Mmmm… not all that good.

That’s what I mean.

It feels stunted, ‘economy’. As might befitting a cash-strapped Lunar explorer program that isn’t getting very much traction from the billion-dollar budgets that abound at NASA, ESA and so on.

Now don’t get me wrong, digging out some regolith from near South pole of Luna is a good thing, even if it is a single bore. It would be good just to find the distribution of volatiles there. So, I remain cautiously enthusiastic.
________________________________________

All and all, I am still somewhat tepid about the viability of Lunar ‘exploration’. Tepid because not just the initial but the ongoing cost of cobbling together these missions is anything but cheap, and anything but trouble-free. There is quite a bit of risk involved.

Sure, in our NBF Science Projection universe, there is a lot of opportunity on the Moon for exploration. I mean, it has a surface area of about 10% of Earth’s total land area. Think about that: close to the area of the United States, Europe, China and Canada combined. That’s a LOT of area! So, one might imagine that across that whole Lunar briquette’s surface, there are zillions of interesting (and who knows, potentially profitable) areas to explore and exploit.

But on the other hand, I think back to the Apollo missions. It felt to almost every science-motivated groupie (me at the head of the list!) that the magnificence of the Apollo landings was ‘cut short’ rather prematurely. Felt that way for years. Then, digging about, I learned that we weren’t really compounding our discovery-rate or the science-rate much at all by Apollo 17.

Of course, getting the lunar dune buggies up there was a boon for casting wide to find ‘more stuff’. Somehow changing the knife-edge thin margins for fuel, mass, on-Luna time, and payload back to Earth to get thousands of kilograms of bits back, well that was fairly incredible. And in 1968 to 1975, there was no carbon fiber. No graphene. Everything was pretty ordinary, of course with titanium being the heavyweight (lightweight!) winner. Still, it took a Saturn V rocket the size of a small city skyscraper to lift a few space monkeys up there with their buggy, do some digging, and return to Earth with bags of rocks in tow. Oh, and leave seismometers behind. And mirrors. And telemetry equipment. AND DIG HOLES in the regolith. And return that to Earth too!!!

Again, if you’re still following and mildly irritated by my line of thinking, you’re likely to cite both the incredible science that resulted from all those missions, AND that the missions were never intended to be more than primary science, not habitation, not permanent or even temporary residence on Luna. It really was about dune buggies, lots of rocks and other samples, and getting the compliment of astronauts there, AND BACK in one piece.

Then in that light, the whole idea of Lunar Exploration seems to have a glib patina burnished by Science Fiction imagery, deep-projectionist Science Theatre narratives and maybe ‘space boredom’ from it having so little in common with Star Wars, or Interstellar or even Alien. Go to the Moon to do what? Find water. Oh, that sounds exciting. Water, and perhaps carbond dioxide, and nitrogen. Not very likely, but still hmmm… not very exciting. Meanwhile the excited projectionists posit dumping huge-scale lunarscape repavement-and-mining equipment up there to dig, dig, dig, boil the dirt and extract all sorts of stuff from Luna which is clearly WAY to expensive to send in bulk from Terra.

To do what with? Yah. Building materials to build more big stuff. To build more big stuff. And housing for the astronauts who’ll very likely be needed up there, AIs or not, to deal with real ‘hard’ day to day problems and develop science goals. OK. I see. Yet, I don’t. The ‘cost’ of sending the leading REAL scale missions will make NASA’s Apollo mission budget look like raiding the petty cash account. Seriously. And humanity has that kind of budget for a self-serving Lunar community? Hmmm… color me purple and call me an eggplant.

⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

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