FlyIt

Here’s a money shot for all the CAD guys. @mcrs987 @InfographicTony

Happy Memorial Day!

There are more advantages to locating the first human colonies on the Hellas Planitia. Here’s one advantage that @elonmusk will appreciate. The Hellas Planitia is literally the best place on the entire planet to make CH4. The air is twice as dense there as it is on Arcadia Planitia. A Sabatier reactor requires 1 to 3 bar of internal pressure to work properly and it generates a lot of heat while it is working. CO2(g) + 4H2(g) + 30 kJ/mol [Startup Heat] --(Ni(s) catalyst)--> CH4(g) + 2H2O(g) + 195 kJ/mol [Total Heat Evolved] By locating CH4 production on the floor of Hellas Planitia, you basically cut in half the hardware mass required to feed the Sabatier reactor. You only need roughly half the volume of Martian atmosphere feeding the reactor on Hellas Planitia that you would need on Arcadia Planitia. Intake fans and piping mass is reduced dramatically. The thicker air on Hellas Planitia will aid with convective cooling of the Sabatier reactor vessel if needed. The waste heat evolved during the reaction could also be used to heat the habitats/work areas in the colony. There is a potential problem with using unfiltered Mars atmosphere to feed the reactor. There are small amounts of sulfates and perchlorates in the Martian air. Sulfur will poison the Ni catalyst and Cl will combine with H to form HCl. HCl will attack and pit the steel components of the reactor. A 3-stage chemical guard should solve the problem. Use a vortex to spin out all but sub-micron size dust particles. Then use HEPA/ULPA filters to remove the rest of the dust. Finally, use a sorbent bed of activated carbon to remove the unwanted chemicals. A zinc oxide ‘polisher’ sorbent bed could be added to remove any sulfur remaining. This is just another reason to build on Hellas Planitia! @NASAAdmin @SpaceX  

I am concerned about NASA’s current timeline for Artemis. I don’t see how @SpaceX can possibly be ready with the HLS spacecraft for orbital testing before the end of 2027. At this point, @blueorigin is the only company that has a realistic chance of being ready by the current scheduled Artemis III launch date of late 2027. One requirement that @NASA insists on–and rightfully so–is the ability for the HLS pilot to take manual control of the spacecraft if the software is guiding it towards an unsafe landing. This exact capability is what saved Apollo 11. To the best of my knowledge, SpaceX has not planned to enable any type of manual control of HLS during the lunar landing phase. An automated landing system has served SpaceX well on concrete pads and drone ships, here on Earth, but carries too many risks to ever be human-rated for making lunar landings, without a manual override system being available. @NASAAdmin

My favorite photo from Artemis II misson.

Here's one last photo showing a close-up of a random landing site in this area. The blue circle at the center of photo is 12 m in diameter.

The larger circle is about 2 km in diameter. The small blue circle in top left quadrant is 12 m in diameter. I was able to place the small circle in numerous places without encountering craters or boulders. Not sure what @SpaceX HLS landing gear diameter is, but the @blueorigin lander would fit inside the 12 m diameter circle.

Drop one on Mons Mouton inside this cluster of small craters with PSRs. Take a look at the much larger PSR in crater to the west while you are at it. IMO, this is a strong Artemis IV candidate site. @NASA @blueorigin @SpaceX

This is Mons Mouton. It lies between the Nobile and Malapert craters in the lunar South Pole region. In the first image, north is at the top. The elevation is color-coded from lowest to highest as follows: blue, green, yellow, red, brown, and white. The south and southeast portions of Mons Mouton are the highest parts of the feature. Near these high points, it has a clear line of sight to Earth and receives full sunlight for a large percentage of the year. It offers gentle 3°–5° sloped pathways around the steeper, intermittent hills that have 10°–15° slopes—ideal terrain for exploration by rover. There are thousands of unnamed craters on the plateau itself that contain small Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) which could hold water ice. These small craters should be explored before venturing into the larger, more dangerous PSRs at the lower elevations below the plateau. When deciding where to build on the plateau, one location stands out. It would lie on a line between the two largest PSRs on Mons Mouton. In fact, this route would be an excellent location for the first lunar road, and possibly the first lunar railway. The distance between the two PSRs is approximately 26 km. The largest PSR is located at -82.26, 42.29, and the second largest is at -84.46, 33.99. The second largest PSR is the most interesting to me because it features a small triangular area on its eastern rim that appears to be an ideal landing site. I have identified a triangle with nearly equal sides (about 1.25 km each) with a small PSR at each vertex. American astronauts landing anywhere inside this triangle would have a PSR just a short rover ride away; in fact, they could easily walk to one from the landing site. If the first site turns out to be a "dry hole," there are two other small craters and one very large one in close proximity to the landing site with PSRs. @CrainTim @Jason_Lil_Kim @elonmusk @JeffBezos @NASAAdmin