A Moon Base in Eight Years? Yeah, sure. Why not?
February 12th, 2012
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Recently US presidential candidate Newt Gingirch has been getting a lot of flack, especially from skeptics, because of a statement he made stamens implying that the US could and should establish a permanent lunar colony and do so by the end of his presidential term. That means there would be about eight years from start to finish.
Crazy?
Well, whatever you think of Gingrich, I have no problem with this idea. Hell, I’d love to see the country run with it.
Lets consider the precedent. In 1961 the United States couldn’t send a man to orbit (embarrassingly, kinda like now). By 1962 we had sent a man into orbit for a brief period of time and were still a couple years away from actually having spacecraft do precision manuvers, dock or stay aloft for more than a couple of days. In 1968, a spacecraft with three men orbited the moon and in 1969, two men landed on the moon.
Sure, today the US government takes decades to make a decidedly non-revolutionary space capsule, but it was not always that way nor does it need to be.
Lets evaluate the steps that would be necessary to setup a lunar base:
1. Get the components:
Well, there’s really nothing too technically demanding there. A few pressurized modules. Those are doable. Aerotech ought to be able to do that. There will also need to be extended stay facilities, which include life support systems, water recycling and so on. All that has been done on the International Space Station and the technology is entirely off the shelf and proven. There will need to be a communications system, again, totally off the shelf.
Power might be an issue. The surface of the moon does receive many days of darkness, except for the poles. A nuclear reactor would be nice, but might be difficult to get developed in the time allotted due to regulatory issues. Big solar panels could work with ample storage to get through the darkness. Batteries might work, but would likely be heavy. A system to regenerate hydrogen could be much lighter, but would also be less efficient and thus require larger solar cells.
But all in all, nothing that can’t be done with current technology there.
2. Send them to space:
The first step in getting to the moon is getting to space. The components of the base must be sent to orbit. There will need to be a rocket large enough to send the components and an earth departure stage to space, ideally in as few launches as possible.
We have that. The Falcon-9 heavy can send 53 metric tons to earth orbit, which is a real lot. It’s composed of three Falcon-9 boosters. The Falcon Nine has been tested, although not in the heavy configuration. It’s slated to be tested in 2013, but if we actually made it a priority to send it up sooner, it might even be possible to do so this year.
SpaceX is gearing up to start mass producing these things, so there’s no reason not to think that multiple flights could be made in a year, which would be enough to start building a respectable lunar colony.
There are even larger rockets under development. NASA has proposed shuttle-derived launch systems, which may or may not be built. SpaceX has also proposed the construction of even larger rockets, based on their highly successful Falcon rocket architecture.
3. Send the stuff to the moon
Once you get the components to space they then need to be sent on a trajectory that will put them in lunar orbit. This requires an “earth departure stage.” The Falcon-9 heavy might be able to send the components to lunar orbit on its own, but it would be at a greatly reduced capacity. It would be better to have an additional stage to send the components to the moon.
To achieve translunar injection, the Apollo program used the big S-IVB stage. There’s nothing that big in the current inventory, but we don’t need a booster that big or powerful to send the components to the moon. Since the base components would be sent on unmanned spacecraft, it’s okay if they take a bit longer than the Apollo capsules to reach the moon. Unmanned components don’t complain about lingering in the Van Allen Belts for a while or having to spend weeks in transit to the moon.
Because of this a low energy lunar transfer would work just fine.
As it turns out we have a well proven high energy upper stage that could do the job of sending the components to the moon. It’s the venerable Centaur. The Centaur rocket stage should fit the bill nicely for sending the lunar colony components to lunar orbit.
4. Land the components on the moon:
This is something which we, admittedly, don’t have any existing hardware to use. But then again, we have built a lunar lander before, having started from a lot less and had about as much time to make it work.
What will be needed is a lander that is designed to land large components, but does not have an ascent stage, as it won’t need to return them to earth. It also won’t need to have habitable areas, since it’s just a cargo hauler. A spacecraft like this was conceived during the Apollo program. The Lunar Payload Module would have been the descent stage of the Lunar Module without an ascent stage and designed for unmanned landings. It was never built, but the concept is straightforward.
The closest thing we have to a design for a lunar lander like the Apollo Payload Module is the Altair lunar spacecraft. It’s been through a few deign reviews and research was being conducted, but it is currently stalled. Still, the partially designed Altair is a viable spacecraft and could probably be built in a few years if we actually had any desire to do so.
We already have most of the major components of such a lander. Radar and remote operation systems are all off the shelf. The RL-10 engine is a proven rocket engine that could be used for a lander powered by hydrogen and oxygen. A simpler solution would be a hypergolic lander, using a proven engine system, such as a few AJ-10 engines, which is based on the engines used in the original Apollo Lunar Module.
So while the lander is an engineering challenge, it is nothing that can’t be done in a relatively short period of time. Planetary landers have been designed and built in less time
5. Send humans to the base
A lunar colony isn’t much use without some astronauts. Landing astronauts on such a remote base would be a bit more difficult than sending the components. The landing hardware would be pretty much the same, but a capsule would be required to transport the astronauts back to the earth and allow for reentry. There are at least two choices for this: the Dragon spacecraft has already been tested once and will soon be tested for a second time. It may lack the service module capabilities necessary for trans-lunar flight, but could be upgraded.
Then there’s the Orion capsule, which NASA has been taking their sweet time developing. An unmanned test version might launch as soon as next year (but I would not hold my breath on that one), and it should be fully capable of being used as a lunar command module.
That still leaves the issue of translunar injection. The Centaur is not likely to have enough power to send a manned mission to the moon on a fast trajectory. A larger version of the Centaur might be able to, or possibly a new rocket stage using the proven J-2 engine.
The Falcon 9 Heavy would not have the ability to launch this kind of mission, at least not in one shot. Two such rockets could do it by using an earth orbit rendezvous, where one launches the spacecraft and the other the earth departure stage. Alternatively, a larger rocket could be used, such as the proposed Space Launch System. This will require NASA to do something it has not done in a long time – actually build the ***** rocket and not just make a bunch of artists renderings, talk about it, spend a few billion and then cancel the project a few years later.
Getting humans to the lunar surface is much the same as getting cargo there, although it also would require an ascent stage to bring the crew back to earth. NASA’s planned Altair Lunar Lander could accomplish both and could be built with existing technology, but as of 2012, development has been put on hold. That said, I have no doubt it could be ready to fly in a few years or less, if we actually decided to do so.
Some quick “back of napkin” calculations and considerations:
A Falcon Heavy can carry 53 metric tons to orbit. A centaur upper stage weighs about 23 metric tons fully fueled. A smaller upper stage could be used as the earth departure stage or the Centaur could be fired as part of the initial launch to increase payload, but that would necessitate an even lower energy orbital transfer and might be less reliable. Thus, if the Centaur is considered the best off the shelf EDS, then that leaves 30 metric tons for the payload to lunar orbit. The Altair Lunar Lander might be a bit too heavy for this, in its current theoretical design (it’s actually really heavy). Something slimmed down a bit could suffice. For example the Apollo LM Truck would have weighed only eight metric tons and could carry five metric tons to the surface. A modernized system might be similar to two LM Trucks in tandem (two AJ-10 engines for example.) It would weigh about sixteen metric tons and could carry about ten metric tons. It is possible an even more capable and lighter lunar lander could be built using liquid hydrogen as the propellant or more modern engine designs.
Ten metric tons per vehicle is enough to begin to build a reasonable lunar base in just a few missions. The Spacehab module provides more than 28 cubic meters of fully pressurized habitable space, complete with experiment tracks and associated electrical systems and weighs only five metric tons. The Multipurpose Logistics Module, used to ferry pressurized cargo to the International Space Station, provides about 31 cubic meters of pressurized space and also weighs about five tons. Thus, a single mission to carry a habitation module could easily carry a habitable module of sixty cubic meters or more or could carry a module of roughly thirty cubic meters and still have capacity for other features, like airlocks, batteries and life support systems.
One problem that using such lightweight modules may cause is the lack of radiation protection during solar storms. Since radiation sheidling is heavy, it would make launching it difficult. It has been suggested that a lunar base could have ample radiation shielding if, upon arrival, astronauts filled bags with lunar soil and piled them around one of the modules to produce a heavily shielded shelter from solar storms.
SpaceX is already getting ready to mass produce their rockets, and if plans to recover and reuse the first stage work out, that could reduce costs and improve launch times even further.
Actually getting the station setup would be another issue. Just landing the systems close together is not that much of a challenge, but interconnecting them so that they can receive power and transfer consumables might be more tricky. It could be done by astronauts on arrival or possibly by a remote manipulator. The easiest way might be to mount the modules on a rudimentary rover-like system. It would not need to travel very far or move very quickly, only enough for the sections to mate.
Hypothetical Missions to Deliver Lunar Base in Ten Missions:
Mission 1: Primary power, control and communications module – Delivers a module consisting of a high gain communications system, cameras and sensors and several large arrays of solar panels and batteries and some basic remote manipulators, surveying instruments and other support equipment. Although most power will come from a small nuclear reactor, the batteries provide for buffering of short peak power loads.
Mission 2: Nuclear power module – Aside from the lunar poles, the moon receives 14 days of darkness, during which time solar-independent power will be necessary for heating and other uses. Batteries or regenerative fuel cells would need to be enormous for this. A small nuclear reactor with a thermoelectric generator or sterling engine and heat radiators. The module would also have power control systems and other support equipment. The Safe Affordable Fission Engine is already under development and perfectly suited to this task. Connection to other modules is achieved by small remote rovers, trailing power and communication cables, grasped by remote manipulators and automatically mated.
Mission 3: Main habitation module – 50 cubic meters of habitable space with basic electrical and ventilation systems. Mission module is unloaded to lunar surface from the lunar delivery module with a crane like device or perhaps a ramp.
Mission 4: Service, habitation and life support module I – Additional habitable space, life support systems, water recycling systems, carbon dioxide scrubbers. Module is unloaded from the lander by a crane or ramps. Also has wheeled delivery system, based on lunar rovers used during Apollo. Allows lander to land a short distance from the main module and to travel to the main habitation module to dock.
Mission 5: Service, habitation and life support module II – Similar to mission 5 and carries additional life support and recycling equipment. Allows for full redundancy of all systems. Also lands nearby and uses a rover to dock with the base.
Mission 6: Surface science module – pressurized module with airlock, allowing for access to lunar surface. Also contains experimental space for lunar experiments. External connections and racks for unpressurized experiments.
Mission 7: Secondary habitation and science module – another 20-30 cubic meters of living area, primarily designated for experimental equipment. Also uses a rover to dock. Contains additional equipment such as space suit maintenance, basic medical equipment.
Mission 8: Provisions and supplies mission – lands near lunar base with a pallet containing large tanks of oxygen, dehydrated or canned food, two or more tonnes of water, other basic supplies such as sanitary supplies, replacement parts, such as bolts and screws and other consumables.
Mission 9: Similar to mission 8. A total of about twenty tonnes of water, food, oxygen and other supplies allows for a greatly extended stay on the moon, should such a contingency be necessary, as might be the case if it became impossible to lift off due to a spacecraft failure, requiring a “rescue” mission. This mission might also carry some exploration equipment, such as one or more lunar rovers.
Mission 10 - First crewed mission, also includes some additional equipment and consumables.
The lunar outpost could be expanded in the future as needed.
Is it doable?
I think so. The Falcon Heavy is expected to cost about $80 to $125 million, though perhaps less if many missions are done with the same rocket type. The Centaur costs about $23 million. The cost of a lunar lander is anyone’s guess, but if produced in a large production run, I don’t see any reason why it would need to be more than $100 million. The original Apollo Lunar Module cost about $50 million, which would be about $200 million in today’s dollars, but that is considering that it also included the habitable ascent module and that it was the first of its kind and needed to be developed entirely from scratch. It also was limited to a production run of ten units. The hardware might cost an additional $50 to $250 million per mission. There would be additional costs per mission due to control and other expenses, but all in all it could be done for under one billion dollars per mission, if costs were kept under control.
One billion dollars per mission is not impossibly expensive for the US Space program. The Space Shuttle was estimated to cost upwards of one billion dollars for each mission, though it varied greatly depending on the nature of the mission. NASA claims the official cost per Shuttle launch to be about $450 million, but that does not include the special hardware that was developed and used for each mission. Although initial hopes for the Space Shuttle were to have upwards of fifty launches per year, the most ever launched in one year was nine. During the height of the shuttle program, around four to six missions occurred per year, and the budget for the program was upwards of six billion dollars.
In such a context, the prospect of building a lunar base, using largely existing hardware does not seem to be impossibly expensive, at least if initial costs are kept down. NASA has become notoriously inefficient at getting things going and moving from paper studies to real spacecraft in a reasonably inexpensive and rapid manner, but if this could be overcome, there’s no reason to think the program cost could not be kept under fifteen to twenty billion dollars, including the delivery of humans to the lunar base. If it were spread out over a few years, that would be entirely affordable.
Sadly, it’s not going to happen…
For whatever you think of Newt Gingrich, there’s one thing I respect about the man. He’s the only candidate out there who is actually proposing the kind of ambitious, big science program that could get the nation excited again about science and move to a new level of capability. It’s not going to happen, because at this point the bureaucracy of the US government is just not capable of doing such a thing and because politicians seem to have a lot of trouble actually making a program with a real goal happen. There’s not a lot of support for such proposals in general.
In my opinion, this is exactly what the country needs. It needs a goal to focus on and a way to restore national pride and excitement about science. Such bold ideas should be proposed and they should be made to happen. Sending a man to the moon in 1969 should not be allowed to stand as the crowning achievement of the United States. We need to have the will to repeat and then overtake our best accomplishments to keep pushing progress forward.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 11:56 am and is filed under Bad Science, Good Science, Politics, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 12th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Yeah. New Gingrich was (is?) a sorry excuse for a candidate, but the US should really have a moon settlement by 2020. The US, or the UE; heck, I would go even for the PRC. It’s so sad to have such Reduced Expectations – entirely of one’s own will.
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February 12th, 2012 at 3:44 pm
What’s the point of a moon base exactly?
There are many environments even here on Earth that are virtually uninhabited (the Sahara, Antarctica) and all are far more hospitable than any extraterrestrial environment would be. And even if there were valuable resources on the Moon, it is close enough that we could extract them with robots remotely controlled from Earth.
(Resources on Mars on the other hand would be another matter — it’s far enough away that it would much more convenient to have some humans orbiting overhead to boss the robotic work gangs around.)
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February 12th, 2012 at 4:17 pm
George Carty said:
Well there are science and astronomical studies that could be done easier and better from the moon than on Earth or in orbit. And everything learned getting a base up and running on the moon would be directly applicable to do the same on Mars. Not say these are good enough reason by themselves for establishing a colony on the Moon, but there will undoubtedly be spin-off technologies that will have great benefits for everyday life on Earth.
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February 12th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Some useful stuff from Jerry Pournelle – see http://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=5358 and http://www.jerrypournelle.com/topics/gettospace.html#Prizes2
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February 12th, 2012 at 6:19 pm
Frankly, if the US had the funds for such a project at their disposal, (which they do not) a mission to Mars would yield more science and advance the cause of space travel to a far greater extent than a Moon base in my opinion.
Of course not being a US taxpayer, my opinion is moot.
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February 12th, 2012 at 6:28 pm
DV82XL said:
Oh we have the money. We spent more than two billion on a rocket that was redundant and worse than what we had before the project (which never should have existed) was scrapped. We spent billions a year on the shuttle. We spend over eight billion a year on direct subsidies to solar grid power and we spend hundreds of millions on researching “alternative” medicine that we already have established does not work.
Not that we are not spending too much money on pretty blatant waste, but I believe it could be done for what would be considered a “reasonable” cost, by federal standards.
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February 12th, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Returning to the Moon by 2020 to build a lunar base is easy to fund if you eliminated the $3 billion a year LEO on steroids ISS program. NASA is spending about $4 billion a year developing the SLS/MPCV. So total spending could be increased to $7 billion a year if there was no ISS program.
The development of the SLS upper stage for the cargo launcher is currently being delayed because of lack of funds (and probably also because of a lack of a near term mission). And there is, of course, no funding for a lunar lander or lunar base components.
NASA estimates that an upper stage will cost about $2.5 billion to develop. That would raise cost to about $4.3 billion a year.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that it will cost NASA about $12 billion to develop the Altair lunar lander plus an additional $2 billion to develop a universal cargo lander. That would raise development cost by about $1.75 billion which would push total spending up to $6.05 billion.
However, it would be substantially cheaper if NASA developed an Altair derived single stage stage vehicle for both manned and unmanned launches and for cargo launches. That means instead of developing a LOX/LH2 descent vehicle plus a hypergolic fueled ascent vehicle plus a universal lander, just a single stage LOX/LH2 descent/ascent vehicle would need to be developed. Development of a single vehicle instead of– three vehicles– should bring development cost down substantially from $14 billion to perhaps only $8 billion. So this would raise spending by about $1 billion instead of $1.75 billion which would push NASA spending up to $5.05 billion a year (close to what the Shuttle/ISS program use to cost).
The CSIS estimates that lunar habitat and support module development will cost about $17 billion. That would increase cost by more than $2.1 billion a year which would put our spending $150 million a year over our $7 billion dollar a year budget. However, once the SLS/MPCV becomes operational, and due to the probability that the expendable RS-25E won’t be ready until 2020 or later, SLS launches should be extremely limited with operational cost for the SLS/MPCV program reduced to as little as $3 billion a year (using the current supply of SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engines) until the RS-25E engines are ready.
Of course, ISS lovers, could simply convince Congress to raise the annual NASA budget by $3 billion as originally recommended by the Augustine Commission and then we could have the best of both worlds (if you’re an ISS lover that is:-)
Marcel F. Williams
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February 12th, 2012 at 11:21 pm
On the issue of solar power on the moon I’ll just add the point that whilst the moon does get much longer nights than Earth the amount of sunlight that a given spot on the moon will receive at any given time is very predictable due to the lack of atmosphere (the moon also gets basically no seasonal variation).
Still won’t make solar a good idea for anywhere other than the poles for those who access to nuclear but it is at least possible to make a solar powered moon base (unlike Mars where solar just isn’t viable).
Also using L1 as a waystation turns out to be most efficient way to get to the moon (as identified by some of the CEV contractors, who NASA couldn’t be bothered listening to). There’d be no need for anything more powerful than 50 tonne to the moon with that mission profile (and it could reach anywhere on the moon with basically no schedule problems).
George Carty said:
To have one.
The moon hasn’t been very well explored (though you don’t really need a base for that) and does contain a lot of useful materials (though the main advantage of the moon over Earth in that regard is that it’s easier to launch from the moon, you don’t even need rockets if your payload can tolerate high accelerations).
A moon base could also be used for experiments in how humans cope with ⅙ gravity (though a rotating space station could probably just as well).
George Carty said:
They also lack the advantages of not being on Earth.
George Carty said:
For the most part you’d use telepresence for any lunar mining (assuming you care about costs) but there’ll probably be a need for a few people there to fix the robots when they break down.
George Carty said:
OTOH Mars is likely too distant for any Martian activities to have economic benefits to Earth.
ddpalmer said:
Or asteroids (which are actually a better idea than a flags and footprints Mars mission).
DV82XL said:
A mission to Mars would waste a lot more money. Asteroids are really the only things that could be better than the moon.
If you want a sustainable manned Mars programme you’ll probably have to wait until there are people permanently living in space (otherwise it’ll be flags and footprints).
Though the real problem with space agencies is that they don’t actually have a goal, even landing people on the moon isn’t much of a goal unless it’s part of bigger goal.
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February 13th, 2012 at 7:23 am
We live in a world with finite financial resources. Money you spend on one thing is money you can’t spend on another. I would much rather see our energies directed at things like ensuring the James Webb telescope gets completed, a mission to grab a sample from an ice plume on Enceladus to look for evidence of organic matter, or any number of other robotic missions that would deliver way more science for the buck. Manned missions of any type require a buttload of money because of all that entails. The science would have to be pretty damn compelling to justify the cost. The Buck Rogers factor isn’t enough.
As for the idea of robbing some “wasteful” taxpayer funded Peter program to pay for a “laudable” taxpayer funded Paul program like a lunar base it is nothing more than wishful thinking. What is wasteful is in the eye of the beholder. Existing Peter programs have constituencies that will fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs and contracts. Many space scientists (those not involved in ISS) grumbled that ISS sucked the oxygen from the room and killed off funding for worthy space missions. A lunar base would do the same.
Realistically any such program would, like ISS, need to be an international venture to have any chance of getting off the ground. Our days of unilaterally planting flags bearing the stars and stripes on lunar soil are coming to a close.
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February 13th, 2012 at 8:09 am
Blubba said:
There’s also space industry to consider, that could justify a lot more cost than science (now to find something that needs to be done in space or which is cheapest done in space which we aren’t already doing in space…).
Blubba said:
The big problem with ISS though is that we haven’t gotten anything out of it, it has just wasted money with basically no scientific return at all and hasn’t bought us any closer to developing space. Whilst it is certainly possible to do that with a moon base it is also possible to have a moon base actually do something useful (same can be said about space stations, an L1 station could be very good at allowing for exploration of the moon).
Blubba said:
I suspect it’ll really be private enterprise like SpaceX that allows it to eventually happen.
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February 13th, 2012 at 11:43 am
Blubba said:
The US government wastes huge amounts of money on any number of programs, and we do need to cut back in huge ways. We need to cut on social programs, on questionable infrastructure programs that are only in existence to “Create jobs.” We need to get our finances in order and there’s no doubt in my mind about that.
But where I believe we need to spend more money is on science, and not just on any science. We need bold, even audacious “big science” programs that have goals that will really push the capabilities of technology and establish things that are orders of magnitude greater than past achievements. They are always worth the cost.
These are the programs that firmly establish a country as a world leader in science and exploration. They attract the best minds in the world and keep them. It would give the space program direction and a mission it could accomplish. It would establish a long-term foundation for greater space exploration.
It’s been said that space should be left to private industry and I disagree with that, because private industry is great for communications satellites and such, but there’s not enough short term profit in a lunar science station. I’d think of it as being similar to South Pole Station: Government run for pure scientific pursuits, located in an area that doesn’t really make commercial sense for resource extraction.
Space exploration is the kind of thing that either needs to be done properly, with full commitment to see it through, even at high cost, or it shouldn’t even be bothered with. Doing a half-assed job gets you nowhere and that’s one of the big problems with NASA. The other being that the agency has developed a culture of bureaucracy.
The ISS is a prime example of what is wrong with NASA. It really has not benefit us much because we did a half-assed job on it and didn’t add half the big capabilities it was supposed to have. The ISS was supposed to have a crew of at least 12 and have all kinds of capabilities that it does not. Despite all the cutbacks, it has cost much more than it should. The reasons are that way too many projects on it were started and stopped and extremely expensive options were used when they were not necessary. Also, much of it is dictated more by international propaganda than science value. But that is largely what it was conceived for.
Blubba said:
Not if I have anything to say about it. (which I suspect I don’t). The saddest thing would be to see the US roll over and just decide it’s no longer worthwhile to be a trailblazer and actually do something exciting and new.
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February 13th, 2012 at 12:57 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Wouldn’t that kind of laissez-faire capitalism during the current economic slump mean thousands of people starving in the streets? (As it did during recessions in 19th-century Britain…) Or turning to crime to make ends meet, meaning that even more government money needs to be spent on police, courts and prisons?
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February 13th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
George Carty said:
I’m certainly not saying let people starve in the streets. There are many problems with the way the government is currently run and spends money.
I’ll give two examples.
Example 1: Under the “Stimulus” the government spent a lot of money on ‘infrastructure’ which is good, if it’s necessary infrastructure that is needed or is long past due for an upgrade. Except it has been squandered at every turn. My parents live in a well to do town. The town got a grant of several hundred thousand dollars which they used to put in new crosswalks. They were not actually new. They had crosswalks that were painted on the road, but they had contractors come in with asphault saws and cut groves into the roads and then put in brick-inlayed crosswalks.
Now, what, I ask you did this get us?
Are they nicer looking? Kinda, but you’d hardly notice if it were not pointed out to you. Did it “create jobs?” No not really. The whole project took a few weeks. Did it put money in the people’s pockets? Well, a few workers got a few extra hours, but it mostly went to some contractor who wasn’t poor off to begin with.
Now multiply this by hundreds of thousands, because there are hundreds of thousands of such projects in the US. They employ a handful of workers, most of whom had jobs anyway, they contribute nothing substantive and they’re grotesquely expensive.
Right now in my state they are building a “Busway” between two cities. It’s a 20 mile long, one lane road that will cost half a billion dollars. (Yes, that’s billion with a B). It’s for commuters. Except nobody commutes between these two cities and there is already bus service that runs on public roads between the cities. Few people use the bus service as is. The busway will make the bus service slightly faster because it won’t need to wait in traffic, but that’s it. There’s no evidence this will actually increase ridership.
Now a second example. The social entitlement system in the US is horribly horribly redundant and poorly implemented. Lets say you’re a disabled and out of work person who has medical bills you can’t pay.
You might be getting:
Food stamps from the Department of Agriculture
Social Security Disability from the Social Security Administration
Medical coverage from Medicaid (dept of health and human services)
Heating oil assistance from the Department of Energy
Unemployment from the Department of Labor
Mortgage assistance from the Department of the Treasury
None of these programs are coordinated. All are administrated separately by their respective agencies. MANY people qualify for some but never get the assistance because they don’t realize they qualify or don’t know how to get the paperwork started.
A person might be employed under the table and the Department of Labor finds this out and cuts off their unemployment, because they were committing fraud. They might also be getting food stamps or heating assistance, which is also fraudulent, but they won’t get it canceled because the respective department does not know about it.
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February 13th, 2012 at 6:48 pm
drbuzz0 said:
We are the country that launched the Viking and Voyager probes, you don’t get any trailblazier than them. We landed Spirit and Opportunity on Mars, which held America’s attention for years. We launched Kepler, which has already found around 2500 candidate planets circling other stars. We launched Hubble, which has sent back photos that have left the public gasping. None of them half-assed. None of them manned.
Your blog describes many of the aspects for setting up a lunar colony except the most important…a compelling reason to.
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February 13th, 2012 at 7:00 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Just creating a lunar base won’t give a space programme meaning, it’s what that moon base is for that is the meaning (and it needs to be something tangible if it is to stay).
drbuzz0 said:
The problem is that if it doesn’t turn a profit then it is left to the whim of politicians, if space activities were cheaper than that wouldn’t be such a big deal for scientific missions but it does make things harder.
Oh and there’s quite a bit of profit potential from space industry, though the uncertainty is very high, a guaranteed customer would be very helpful in terms of getting private industry involved (and it is lowering of costs which will make a lunar science station affordable).
drbuzz0 said:
It being illegal to mine in Antarctica might also have something to do with resource extraction not making commercial sense.
drbuzz0 said:
Whilst it would be better to spend the money on things that actually need it almost any spending can help in a recession so a bit of waste isn’t as evil as it would seem.
drbuzz0 said:
Not actively destructive like most renewable energy projects these days (which by raising electricity prices kill off other jobs) so not really something to be too annoyed at.
drbuzz0 said:
You’d probably find that most of the cost was actually to pay for labour, and not just the people who put the bricks in the road but also those who made the bricks.
Unless the contractors were politically connected and managed to get the deal without having to offer the best price/terms they wouldn’t have raked it in.
drbuzz0 said:
Keeping those companies from going bankrupt (and thereby getting rid of those jobs) isn’t a bad thing.
drbuzz0 said:
How often does the bus run? Probably cheaper to just increase frequency if you want to attract more riders. It also isn’t going to be actively harmful.
drbuzz0 said:
Public transport with its own right of way does seem to get better ridership as it can offer a way to beat the traffic.
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February 13th, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Anon said:
Unless we consider the opportunity cost (Bastiat’s seen vs unseen). What could have been done with $500,000,000 if it wasn’t being wasted on this?
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February 13th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Matthew said:
There is opportunity cost and it would have been better had it been spent on something more useful but in a recession you need to stimulate demand so anything which doesn’t cause negative impacts elsewhere in the economy even if it does nothing can at least be somewhat good.
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February 13th, 2012 at 9:04 pm
Anon said:
And we’ve seen stimulus spending work to help an economy recover by fostering demand… when, exactly? The Japanese have been trying it for years, the US did it twice in the last few years and failed miserably, the Canadian one failed, and th less said about the EU bailouts the better.
Better if the cash had been left with the people who earned it, who could then spend it on stuff they wanted (actual consumer demand). This is just the broken window fallacy – you see the money being spent here, when it would still have been spent elsewhere, and on something actually useful.
Velocity of money is a great indicator for economic analysis (in a healthy economy, lots of stuff gets bought and sold), but it shouldn’t be mistaken for a driver. A stimulus attempts to cure the fever by redrawing the lines on the thermometer.
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February 13th, 2012 at 9:40 pm
Addendum regarding stimulus money.
Governments don’t actually have money. Every dollar they spend comes, ultimately, from one of four places:
Your paycheck (income taxes)
Your grocery bill (sales taxes and business taxes)
Borrowing (your kids, who have to pay it back)
Printing money (your savings, since the effect of increasing the money supply is to devalue everyone’s holdings of that currency)
A good argument (one I support) can be made that it is justified for essential services (cops, military, courts) and vital infrastructure (port facilities, power stations, road and bridge construction and maintenance), but that just makes it a necessary evil, rather than a positive good. Outside of those, it becomes an unnecessary evil, and should be stomped, hard (me? a fiscal hawk? nah…).
In all four cases, the money is taken from people who have uses for it, generally goods and services (ie. consumer demand) and put towards a different demand, one chosen by the politicians and bureaucrats in charge of the distribution (after taking a cut off the top to pay themselves, of course). All a stimulus does is shift the money from where people would naturally spend it to politically favoured projects which may or not be important enough to reach the level of essential service / vital infrastructure. In other words, it’s a net economic loss.
The argument is often made that people are being paid, and that this is a good thing, but I would refer its proponents to Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
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February 13th, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Leaving it alone didn’t work out too well in the great depression either.
The problem is savings, somehow you need to convince people not to do it and to instead spend the money, that’s what it is all about.
Matthew said:
Stimulus spending is one of the reasons why a government should run a surplus when times are good (and also one of the cases where borrowing money is legitimate).
Matthew said:
That’s the problem, the money wouldn’t be doing anything useful, it’d just be sitting in a savings account (or converted into cash or gold or whatever if people fear a bank collapse wiping out their savings).
Of course I’m not saying that spending it on nothing is the best thing to do, just that it may be better than not spending the money.
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February 13th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Matthew said:
In a recession people wouldn’t be spending it, they’d be saving it, thereby depriving businesses of the money they need to operate, thereby depriving the employees of those businesses of their jobs, it’s a vicious cycle and needs to be broken.
Do you have a better way of breaking it?
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February 13th, 2012 at 9:58 pm
Anon said:
At what point after the first stages of the Depression was it being left alone? The Depression started September 1929, .
Anon said:
And reducing their income while increasing their expenses is a good way to do this?
Anon said:
And the last government to do anything with a surplus but spend it like a drunken sailor was…
Anon said:
That’s not quite correct. Assuming you have your savings in an investment vehicle (rather than just a savings account), the money is being used to invest in businesses which (ie. economic growth).
Even in a savings account, it’s used as the reserve which allows banks to loan money to people who want to do things like buy houses and start businesses. Unless you’ve converted it all to precious metal certificates and are hiding it under the bed, your savings are generating economic activity.
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February 13th, 2012 at 10:10 pm
Anon said:
As noted above – the effect of savings keeping money out of the economy is incorrect, since it flows right back in the form of investments and loans. Also, savings don’t actually get removed from pesonal spending, only delayed (ie. you start spending it when you retire). The alternative to saving is to live beyond one’s means using borrowed money, and all that does is push the crash date a bit further back. Eventually, you run out of money and you get an even worse crash.
Better to have a nasty readjustment now than to have a much nastier one ten years down the line when we have less capability to deal with the fallout (due to destroying our wealth via malinvestment). Does it suck? Of course it does, and it’d be silly to argue otherwise. But a stimulus just masks the symptoms while allowing the underlying problems to progress to an actual catastrophe point.
Again, I haven’t seen a single case of a gov’t stimulus actually being effective. The New Deal is often cited, but the depression ran until WW2 (where the full employment that came with the wartime economy essentially put a hold on things), and didn’t really recover until after the war, when hundreds of thousand of GIs came home with money to spend in a newly industrialized country.
btw, I apologize for the trailing off re the Great Depression in my previous comment. I missed it on editting, and now I can’t figure out what I meant to say. I assure you, though, it was hugely insightful and devastatingly convincing *grin*
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February 13th, 2012 at 10:14 pm
Additional: you’re mistaking cause and effect. A recession is *caused* be people not spending money on stuff. Taking money out of people’s paychjeck and adding to their grocery bills will tend to cause such behaviour.
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February 13th, 2012 at 11:03 pm
Anon said:
Except it’s a huge amount of money spent on something we don’t really need that lasts a short time and doesn’t contribute much to jobs either. The number of bricks they bought is unlikely to impact the brick maker significantly. Really, the economics just don’t make sense for paying for crap you don’t need. That’s all the more true when there is crap that we do need that would provide an equal or greater number of jobs. And for that matter, the bricks may well have been imported.
Anon said:
If all that keeps a company afloat is public money paid for projects that the public doesn’t need and gains minimal benefit from, then it has already failed.
Anon said:
There are public transit systems people use that are effective and could be improved for a lesser amount of money. This is a hell of a lot of money for a transit system that serves an area that is unlikely to use it. You might get a few more riders, sure, but not enough to make it worth the astronomical price tag.
People really do not commute between the cities of Hartford and New Britain and the busway links two areas that already have crappy public transportation. So upon getting to the station it’s not easy to reach your final destination. Basically it follows an old railroad right of way. Since it’s already a clear way, it shouldn’t be hideously expensive to develop, right? Well… yeah, that was the plan. But once they got to designing it the cost went from 57 million to about 550 million.
Actually I was wrong about the length. It’s a total of 9.4 miles. I have no idea how that equates to more than half a billion dollars. It’s just a bad idea, because it’s of such limited use and so expensive.
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February 14th, 2012 at 10:33 pm
Sending humans to Mars is a ****ty idea. I mean that literally. The customary vulgar connotation also follows. It is still unconfirmed that Mars has no life forms whatever. But if it does have any, there is only one way that it could be based upon DNA, and also use the same base-triplet amino acid code that terrestrial organisms have. It’s been proved in the lab that the code is arbitrary. If life on Mars is found, and it uses the Terran code, then it and we have common ancestors.
But if human gut bacteria are in the Mars landers, any such discovery is compromised.
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February 15th, 2012 at 12:06 am
Albert Rogers said:
If it’s something we’ve never seen before and not like human gut bacteria then we probably could still say that it probably isn’t contamination.
Though the forward contamination point is still very valid (it’s been suggested that we’ve already put life on Mars).
I personally suspect that any extremophiles still surviving on Mars probably did have separate ancestors to us (of course I don’t have much of an argument for this, need to actually find life there to really know).
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February 15th, 2012 at 10:54 am
I really doubt that there is life on mars. In fact, I’d bet against it. The reason is that we have not found any yet and there are no obvious signs of life.
I believe if there were life on mars, it would be everywhere. We would land there and see slimy blobs of living material, fuzzy mats of fungus-like organisms, life in the soil, spores or spore-like things floating in the atmosphere etc.
It’s been said that the surface of mars is inhospitable to life and that if there is life there, it would be in a few isolated places, sheltered from the oxidizing soil, the harsh thin atmosphere and the unblocked solar radiation. I do not buy it. If there’s one thing we know about life it’s that it consistently surprises us by its ability to adapt to the environment. We’ve found life thriving in areas of the earth that we once thought were far far too harsh for living organisms. The organisms don’t just get by in those environments, they thrive and take them over.
If you had life on mars and gave it enough time (which presumably it would have had by now) it would be everywhere. If the areas are too cold, it would have evolved some kind of natural antifreeze or other mechanism to protect it. If the areas have harsh variations in weather, dust and wind, it would have evolved a very tough outer shell to the cells. If the area has too much solar radiation, it would evolve a way of dealing with that, or perhaps be mostly found on the undersides of overhangs or just a few millimeters bellow the soil.
I just can’t imagine that life could exist on a planet for millions or billions of years and not take it over.
About the only place you won’t find life are areas where the temperature is so high or there is so much radiation that organic matter can’t exist without being denatured right away. That’s not the case on most of mars.
Remember that what we consider an extreme environment is only from our perspective. To the life forms that inhabit these areas, it’s not extreme at all. It’s the home they are perfectly adapted to and that they may even need to survive. It’s not even that they’re “tough” so much as just perfectly suited to the area. Many require it. From their perspective, the world they live in is not super hot, ours is super cold or vice verse. You could take some ice worms as an example of this. They live in super cold environments at temperatures well bellow freezing. They produce a number of antifreeze compounds and enzymes that allows the fluids inside them to still move. The thing is they are not simply tolerant of cold temperatures, they *need* it that way. They can survive only up to a few degrees above freezing. After that, their membranes fall apart. The worms actually turn to mush if they get above about 5 degrees C.
That is just how life is. It takes over, it will become perfectly acclimatized to almost any environment.
Hence, if it were on mars, I’m confident it would be all over the damn place.
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February 15th, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Anon said:
You’ve already had ’stimulus’ for 30 years; it’s not working. Total debt in the US economy exploded under Reagan and there have only been a few quarters since when GDP grew faster than debt.
Taking on more debt, public or private, does indeed increase GDP, for a while. But the abillity and desire to purchase what it is being produced using real economic output has not increased; it is fake demand. This fake demand drives malinvestment, it drives the excess production of goods and services for which there is no real demand. When the debt becomes unable to grow further you end up with a disaster.
If the US and Europe can’t deleverage now, what makes you think deleveraging will be possible in the future? You have to pay down or default debt now, which will contract GDP and will force you to recognize the depression we are currently in or the result will be so disastrous that I wouldn’t put it off the table that there will no longer be an entity known as the United States on the other side of this.
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February 16th, 2012 at 2:06 am
Soylent said:
Isn’t the real problem that since the rise of mass homeownership, governments have come under enormous political pressure to keep house prices high, resulting in them effectively subsidizing land owners and home owners at the expense of the real productive economy?
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February 16th, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Hey. I was linked to this by Winchell Chung, and I wanted to say that I have some pretty split feelings on this article. The issue is that on the one hand, you’re right. With a Falcon-heavy-based architecture and some new developments, it would be possible to be back on the lunar surface in eight years for about what we’ll spend in the next eight years in developing the expensive White-elephant SLS. However, the issue is that…well, your math sucks. Centaur is a venerable stage, but it’s not a magic “get any mass from LEo to LLO” totem. it’s limited by the Rocket Equation just like everything else, and that means with its fuel load (~18 tons) and the specific impulse of its engine (RL-10A-4-2, Isp ~451s), it can only push about 8.9 tons through TLI (~3100 m/s delta-v required). Up the engine to the RL-10B-2 (isp=464s) used on the Delta IV Upper stage, and you can get to 9.1 tons. Out of both of those numbers you also have to subtract the 1.9 ton mass of the Centaur itself. A better stage would be the Delta IV Heavy Upper Stage, which is to be used as the interim cryo upper stage on SLS. It carries 27.2 tons of fuel, masses 3.4 tons dry, and already uses the RL-10B-2 with Isp of 464s. That’d allow 10 tons through TLI. Either of these appears to be exceeded by values I’ve seen cited for Falcon Heavy using the second stage it already has, which is about 13.5 tons TLI payload mass. I apologize for nitpicking this, as I believe your fundamental point that we could return to the moon within an eight year window without substantially more being spent on space is true, but I think because that underlying point is true, the evidence used to support it should also be correct.
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February 16th, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Rob Davidoff said:
You might be right.
But as far as TLI using the Centaur, I would argue that if the mission is not manned, then you’re not going to be limited to a conventional lunar insertion. You could in principle use a very low energy transfer, which would take much longer but would use a lot less energy than is required by conventional TLI
There are a number of low energy techniques that have been developed and used with unmanned missions. Some involve a high elliptical orbit where each time the moon passes, it tugs the mass closer until eventually it takes only a relatively low impulse for lunar capture. Others use Lagrangian points transfers.
The Japanese Hiten probe used an ultra-low energy insertion technique to fly past the moon and insert a subprobe into lunar orbit. It took three months of precision maneuvers.
The Centaur might actually not work so well for that if it requires multiple burns some time apart. The Centaur can be fired at least twice, but the propellant would boil off if it had to wait months.
Really you’d have to do some very complex orbital calculations to figure out how you could get many tons to the moon in the lowest energy transfer possible. I would think the Centaur probably has more than enough thrust to achieve that, but again, it might have to make multiple burns over a long time. So perhaps some other type of stage would be better.
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February 17th, 2012 at 7:25 pm
drbuzz0 said:
If it’s such a vital transport/commute route, why isn’t the railway still running??
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February 17th, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Gmax137 said:
It’s not. Not at all.
Actually, the path it takes would be 1/3 on an old rail line that has been disused for many many years. about three miles follows that rail line. The remaining 6.5 miles follows a rail line that is still in use. It would be a paved road alongside the train track.
The existing rail line has passenger service on it as is. The passenger service does not go to New Britain (where the busway is to start). There is a station in Berlin, which is a town over. Hence, you could use the rail shuttle already if you live along most of the proposed busway or if you’re at the end, you could take a bus to the next town to get the rail shuttle.
However, few people use it to commute. They cut back service years ago for lack of riders.
It’s a simple geographic problem. New Britain and Hartford have very few between city commuters. People who work in Hartford live in the suburbs of Hartford and those who work in New Britain live in the suburbs of New Britain. It’s as simple as that. The line passes through a few suburbs, but since it’s only a few and it’s a one dimensional line, there’s really only a handful of potential riders. Nobody really commutes between the two cities – or at least not many.
It’s a useless project but it’s all politics. It allows the local politicians to bring in some federal-level funding and pad the pockets of some of the construction contractors. I don’t doubt there may be corruption there too. We’ve had chronic problems with that in Connecticut.
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February 19th, 2012 at 11:34 pm
This wont quite top that half billion dollar asphalt you mentioned, but this comes close:
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/06/sustainability_center_at_psu_r.html
Despite rising tuition Portland State University wants to spend $23 million on this massive “sustainability center” that in part depends on materials that haven’t been invented yet. If that wasn’t enough, despite the constant threat of budget shortfalls, a great many of our enlightened state leadership want to fork out the remaining $37 million in money that it can’t afford to spend. Pure madness…….
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February 25th, 2012 at 11:01 am
The Centaur rocket stage would not be enough for a conventional TLI of anything the size you’re talking about, so Rob Davidoff is correct in that sense. However, you would not need that if the objects being sent were unmanned and there was no kind of time constraint. If that is the case, the Centaur might even be overkill. The payload could just be put into a proper transfer orbit and then it could be nudged into the lunar capture orbit with small thrusters and ion engines. Ion engines are great for being efficient. They use very little propellant, but the current generation provide small amounts of thrust.
You could do it, but it would take months. That might be fine for the unmanned components. Actually, it might be even better than using the Centaur as the EDS if you could add some more capacity by having upper staging largely based on ion engines.
This does not solve the problem of humans though. It presents a lot of problems to have humans waiting that long and you don’t want them to linger in the Van Allen belts too long. Therefore, you need a better earth departure stage because the Centaur is not big enough.
The Centaur might be a good starting place (it would have to be expanded and maybe have a bigger engine or more powerful ones). I agree with Rob Davidoff, however, that the Delta-IV upper stage is probably a better starting point for the human earth departure stage. You will need to, at some point, develop a bigger stage for getting the manned lander there.
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March 9th, 2012 at 8:09 pm
A moon base, why not?
Because there is nothing there that couldn’t be better done with robotic satellite technology. However, if NASA is interested in sending humans to contaminate other planets, they should right now be working on a propulsion system with vastly more energy intensive fuel than chemical species. I.e. nuclear propulsion.
No sane person is going to spend four years sitting in a projectile lazily hurtling through the Sun’s gravity field until it gets to Jupiter. If such a person were sane at lift-off, he or she would not be so at Jovian arrival, and the return journey is, I believe, necessarily similar to Jupiter’s orbital period.
The solution to such problems is of course energies corresponding to speeds in excess of the escape velocity from the Sun’s gravity field.
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March 9th, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Albert Rogers said:
If you want to mine the moon eventually you’ll probably need to set up a moon base of some sort.
Of course the big problem as stated many times is that the politicians can’t come up with a decent motivation for space activity, it’s all national prestige and job creation.
Albert Rogers said:
You could do lunar and asteroidal missions without nuclear though it could still help massively for power on the moon and would be necessary for power on Mars (you could probably get to Mars with only chemical propulsion too).
Albert Rogers said:
Merely doubling the specific impulse of chemical rockets would be quite useful.
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