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Conestoga Update Some thoughts on what the final product should be, how to get there,what this is all for, and am I nuts?

Let's hit that last one first - am I nuts?

Well, I don't think so. You may disagree. <G> Sure, we're talking about sending people to the Moon again; not trained astronauts, not scientists, but doctors, lawyers, engineers, miners, adventurers, kids... anyone. You and me.

That certainly sounds nuts. The last time anyone went to the Moon, it was the work of a nation for years. Entire industries were created for this one goal, to send two men to the Moon for a few hours and bring back samples. And, of course, plant a flag and take pictures. How could anyone expect to replicate this effort with any less than another national effort?

I might agree, if it weren't for one thing - it's already been done once. All the money and all the effort didn't go to building the Saturn V rocket and Apollo system. It went to developing the computers to design the spacecraft. It went to the years of research to understand the conditions on the Moon and in space, and to develop ways to survive them. What is the work of genius the first time, is the work of a skilled technician the second. If you doubt this, consider the atomic bomb - years of effort, again by one of the world's wealthiest nations, utilizing the best technology and the smartest people in the world to yield two relatively small, crude atomic weapons. Within a few years, much smaller, poorer nations achieved the same result. Now, despite the active intervention of the US and other nations, even small, impoverished nations like Iraq have all the knowledge necessary to build atomic weapons. For that matter, relatively small corporations have the ability. The genie is out of the bottle, and the only thing preventing these nations or individuals from building these weapons is the relative scarcity and tight control of the necessary raw materials. The machining needed is no better than that used on eyeglasses; the theoretical knowledge widely known and available; within a few days or weeks, any competent machinist could turn out a crude nuclear weapon. The only thing preventing it is the impossibility of obtaining the pure Uranium or Plutonium to do the job.

We're also not talking about landing a city on the Moon, with shopping centers and factories and bowling alleys. We're talking about something much more along the lines of the original Oregon Trail, with small groups of families and individuals putting up with years of hardship in order to make it to their goal. We're not talking about tourist trips, either; the people the go will be going to stay, with at most an emergency lifeboat option to return them, impoverished but alive, to Earth. And finally, we are not talking about a trip made in absolute safety and security. Every effort should and will be made to protect the health and lives of the people who go, but the fact remains that these will not be NASA missions. There will be no tertiary backup to the secondary system controlling disposal of fecal matter. There will be no Mission Control to bail you out, no rescue mission to be rushed out to the pad.

Certainly that has its disadvantages, but it has its advantages, too. It makes the impossible possible, if only barely, and turns what would be a flat-out insane proposition into one which is merely risky, difficult, and most likely doomed to failure. Which, of course, is the only kind really worth doing. <G> The point is, if we want there to someday be shopping malls and bowling alleys on the Moon, we can't just wait for it to happen. Portland has shopping centers, supermarkets, churches and schools, bowling alleys... everything you'ld expect from a city on the Right coast of the US, Portland has. (Except easterners. And hurricanes. And crowds. But I digress.) Did those appear overnight? No. Were they shipped there in the wagons of those hardy pioneers? Yes - but not whole. They were shipped there in the minds and in the descendents of those pioneers. You want a bowling alley on the Moon? The first step is to go there.

So now to the What and the How. What will the Conestoga Project produce and How will it get there?

Well, the what will not be a spacecraft, or a company to build them. That's your (the user of the spacecraft) job. The Conestoga Project will produce a document, or more likely a long series of documents, designed to help you build a spacecraft. The general idea is that you could slavishly follow the documents exactly and come out on the other end with a cookie-cutter spacecraft, and that craft would get you to the Moon, but it might not be exactly what you're looking for. It's dangerous to draw too many parallels to Linux, but in this general case the analogy is a good one; the Conestoga Project will serve as a repository of information, a central, coordinating effort; the end users, however, will take that information and create many variations on the theme. It's even possible (I think probable) that there will be standardized "distributions" of designs, and possibly even prefabricated kits of the most popular designs.

The documents (and software, too, as needed) will be part textbook (Living on the Moon 101), part instruction manual (Your Trans-Orbital Injection System and You) and part sales brochure (Vacation on the Shores of Mare Cognitum!). They'll start as collections of data and evolve from there as experimentation and further data allow into the instruction manuals and textbooks. I'm going to start from the end; how people will survive once they've reached the Moon. The idea is to avoid researching methods of getting there that will be obsolete by the time the project releases version 1.0. So, we'll start with the stuff that's least likely to change.

Here's what I need from you:

• Data

I already have a decent collection of information on conditions in space, on the Moon, and so on. I need more, though, preferably in electronic format and without unresolvable intellectual property restraints. I'm looking specifically for data on:

• Lunar soil composition
• Chemical extraction techniques for those materials, focusing specifically on Oxygen and Aluminum
• Biological data on oxygen, protein, etc. requirements for human and other life
• "Organic" closed-system farming methods
• Ideas

Got an idea on how you might like to live on the Moon? Can you get it there with, oh, let's be arbitrary, 8 cubic meters of volume and less than 5000 kg? That's what I'm looking for. This is the category you can really go blue-sky on; no idea is too wild. Of course, they won't all be used, but hey - this is the initial design phase. We're dreaming here, right? Along that line, how about some ideas for these:

• Extraction of cement/concrete/other solid, airtight building material from lunar soil
• Maximize cargo while minimizing weight and volume
• Vehicles for transport on the lunar surface
• Pressure suits; the wetsuit model, the hardsuit model, the pressurized model, or anything else you can think of

Anything else you can think of that you think might be useful, email conestoga@rearviewmirror.org.