Not realistically, it doesn’t have a giant dynamo in its core.

Not realistically. But there was a proposal to place a magnetic field generating satellite in the Mars Sun L1 point to deflect some of the incoming charged particles.

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html

> piping oxygen from the south polar mines to bases where humans will live

Regolith is roughly 50% oxygen by mass, it will be far more practical to just crack it out of minerals than pipe it across the moon from polar craters.

Water can be cracked into hydrolox propellant, but Starship doesn't use hydrolox, avoiding it due to the difficulty of handling and storage and its low density. At any rate, the great majority of the propellant mass is actually oxygen, which...again...can be obtained anywhere on the surface. Starship could take on lunar oxygen after landing, getting 78% of its return propellant from lunar sources, without any dependence on polar ice.

Which is good, because it's not certain there's enough easily-accessible ice at the poles to burn as rocket propellant. It may be better to conserve it for uses on the moon itself.

Which people?

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Ah, I see your point. It could have a larger orbit but just extremely long days

This comment is incorrect. Figures 2 and 3 in the study provide evidence for the existence of water in glass beads from a lunar soil sample.

While future studies should aim to collect additional samples, their study supports the claim that water could be more abundant on the moon than previously thought.

Article excerpts;

The SLS was running late and over budget. Congress had put its thumb on the scale; a program this large can benefit every state and district in the country, so politicians can’t resist pork barreling it — even to the point of failure.

Lest we forget, the Space Shuttle was billed as inexpensive, safe, and reliable. It was many things, but it was none of those things. SLS seems to be making those same mistakes.

SpaceX also wants Starship to take humans to the Moon on its own. If that’s successful, then it’s possible NASA might consider replacing SLS with Starship.

Water had been found in the form of ice buried in deep craters at the Moon’s south pole, and further research showed there could be billions of tons of it. Humans have this inconvenient need to drink and breathe. Water can satiate the former, and breaking water into its atomic components can provide oxygen for the latter. As a bonus, the hydrogen in water molecules can fuel rockets. It is not hyperbole to say this discovery is one of the most important findings of our age. Science and engineering efforts to investigate growing plants on the Moon, piping oxygen from the south polar mines to bases where humans will live, using the regolith — the pulverized lunar rock covering the Moon’s surface — as a building material for habitats, and more.

Thanks for this recommendation! Definitely going to check this book out!

>It’s actually a decent analogy.

It's a freaking dumb analogy. What if Columbus went to America and it was uninhabited, had no food, water or air to breathe? Would anyone have returned?

Going to the moon is a science experiment, large numbers of people will never live there

Read 'Supernova Era' if anyone wants to read a sci-fi book about this.

Er…no, not really.

This was about 1.9 billion light years from Earth. The closest GRB ever observed was about 130 million light years from Earth. For a GRB to pose any sort of threat to life on Earth, it would need to be about 8,000 light years from Earth, and even at that range, we wouldn’t “all be dead” (though there’d be a significant increase in things like cancer rates for the next decade or two due to atmospheric damage).

1000% they're gonna bottle the moon water and sell it to the richest of the rich. I don't want my tax dollars going to this with the state of our species.

I didn’t see presented (despite the title) any reason why we need to get back to the moon. I understand that ice means water means O2 and H2. However, I would bet that cryos will much much cheaper launched from Earth than made on the moon for a long long time to come.

In fact the only way this makes sense is if launch costs come down and if launch costs come down then Earth originated propellant will be even cheaper even faster. I try, but I can’t make the economics of the ice mining idea work out favorably. Go to the moon sure but maybe don’t use the ice mining argument which (unless someone can educate me?) is as wrong as shuttle being low cost.

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I think on top of this, if you eat enough they can cause obstructions because they're not digested, and they collect water.

I read this the other day this is sooo cool, I think the Chinese discovered this finding?

Well let me know in 10,000 years how many there were.

They don't often notice the strikes inside, the station takes MMOD hits daily.

Just looking at some data- SpaceX dragon 1, missions CRS-1 - CRS-17 spent a total of 410 days exposed at ISS. In those days it collected a total of 246 MMOD impacts. That's an impact on average every 40hrs.Or even worse, the MPLMs in 10 missions with almost 70 exposed days collected 398 impacts. Some of which completely penetrated the hull.

Hells bells, that one was on CNN among other places. The fact is we think we know all these things about space and all we know is what we observe vs what a couple guys guessed far before space travel was possible. That’s not facts, facts are observable. The theory was nothing escapes, the fact is this is how stars are made…

He has a point though. If you detect an event your models say is “once in 10k years” in the first few decades you’re even looking, odds are they’re more frequent than your models suggest. Obviously, it’s only one data point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up being more common than predicted.

The moment you start spouting theory as fact I know exactly what you are but nice try guy.

I was thinking this last night when I first saw the news story, we've only been looking for the last few decades, how are we able to determine the gap between these huge events?

Baffling how we can detect the presence of planets billions of kilometers away. The precision involved is probably ridiculous

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