Forum - View topicNEWS: Team Aims to Pierce Moon With Evangelion's Spear of Longinus
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mdo7
 Posts: 6253 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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To be honest, I don't know what to make of this.
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Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
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As exciting as this project may look, I just don't see how it would be worth spending nearly a million dollars just to send a tiny little spear all the way to the Moon.
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Xagor
Posts: 192 |
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It's not really about the spear. I'm assuming it's about a proof of concept of being able to get something to the moon, without being a space agency like NASA.
A gimmick like the Spear is just to help get funding. |
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PHOliveira88
Posts: 13 |
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Said that way it makes a lot more sense. It's a project about finding new ways to dump our trash on other celestial bodies, now I get it. |
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LokiReed
 Posts: 136 |
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Don't get me wrong, i love anime. But this is taking it waaaay too far....... I think this might actually be the biggest waste of money, time, and effort i've ever heard of......
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4575 |
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I'm just gonna quote the good Dr. Evil: "How about noooo!"
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partially
Posts: 702 Location: Oz |
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Precisely, it may be dumb and gimmicky, but it is exactly the sort of thing that would get a project funding. Unfortunately if they simply sold it as a private initiative to send small payloads to space, people wouldn't get behind it. The purpose of the project is to send a 24cm spear to the moon, but the actual goal is the technology and learning behind it, people are taking this way too literally. Exactly the same as that Kickstarter to put a satellite in orbit that took selfie photos. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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I'm guessing that's what it was, too, since any other fan movement would have simply passed an anime reference along to an existing NASA ISS mission, like the guy who brought the Char helmet. (And Eva or Char helmets, I'm wondering which is the more embarrassing fan-ref.  )
Although, of course, NASA isn't as actively looking at the moon, which leaves the private sector wide open. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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I also bookmark the Forum, since even a strange news item will get comments (the news items that don't are usually "Studio sets date for release"), and the columns and reviews on the sidebar will usually get the discussions. I keep forgetting that the current list of News headlines can be found in the pulldown menu at the top of the page, and don't check it as often. I tend to skim over the normal studio/manga headlines anyway. |
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D-Rock
Posts: 135 |
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What the f*ck, seriously? Biggest waste of money ever.
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TnAdct1
Posts: 117 |
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Flah
Posts: 25 |
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Maybe they don't know that whole thing about the moon being made of cheese is just an old wive's tale. This is many kinds of stupid. It doesn't even serve a scientific purpose. But, if a bunch of otaku want to throw their money at something like this, I'm not going to stop them. |
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Ulinox
 Posts: 687 |
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They should use this money for something actually useful, like a new manned mission to the moon or helping create a space-station up there. This is just a complete waste.
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miharusshi
Posts: 2 |
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Now I get why Koro-sensei blew up a huge portion of the moon.
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xthorgoldx
 Posts: 7 |
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> $1 million dollars
> US launch 2015-2016 > Lunar impact > Backer merch Jesus Christ, and I thought the copypasted "open-world-zombie-survival-MMORPGRTS" kickstarters werefull of it. $1 million is barely enough to buy your place and weight on a launch vehicle, let alone build the supporting infrastructure for the satellite and the satellite itself. Furthermore, no commercial service currently offers lunar launch services - only the state space agencies, and then only for science missions - which means you're looking at developing your own vehicle for lunar injection, which is holy god expensive. But, for the sake of hilarity, figure out how much this'll cost in wildly optimistic conditions:
So how much does getting to LEO cost, for starters? Well, assuming we go with the cheapest option around, we can buy a spot on a Falcon 9. That gives us a $4,100/kg launch price, which comes up to a handy $20,500 for our lunar impact payload. Not too shabby, we might have a chance of pulling this off! Thanks, Elon Musk! (Note: Japanese commercial vehicles are several years behind US vehicles in terms of cost-to-orbit). But we're not just carrying payload - we have to carry the rocket that'll get us into a lunar impact trajectory. This launch requires that we achieve lunar collision - which means reaching an altitude of 362,600km. A minimum-energy LEO-to-LOI burn requires (if we mimic the LRO's mission profile) 963 m/s of delta-v. Problem is, lunar injection requires chemical rockets (electrical rockets don't have enough thrust; a sequential injection burn would take years), and this is where things get expensive - rockets are expensive, rockets are heavy, heavy things are even more expensive. So, how much fuel to we have to burn, using the LRO's engine ISP (212.9s) to achieve 963 m/s? Formula's simple:
Now, assuming the engine is massless, you'll end up burning about 7.93kg of fuel. However, no engine is massless - and since we're going with chemical rockets, you're looking at a lot of extra weight, which has to be incorporated into fuel, and on and on. For sake of simplicity, I'll assume that the weight of the superstructure is proportional to the weight of the payload as in the Surveyor mission (Centaur stage, 4954 lbs; Surveyor 3, 666 lbs), which gives us an engine weight of 37.19kg for a 5kg payload - and this should be heavier, since thrust doesn't scale well with size. Recalculating to incorporate this mass, we get a fuel requirement of 66kg. This leaves us with a total mission mass of 108.19kg, which costs at minimum $443,000 to get into LEO. So, just for the cost of launch, we're looking at using half the budget. Now, consider how much it'll cost to design the payload, the ground station to manage the mission's flight, how much it'll cost to pay the people that design the payload and man said ground station... *THEN* add on the costs of fulfilling all of those backer promises (shirts? replicas? smith-wrought spears?) $1 million dollars? Nuts. Unless JAXA is giving them a ride to LEO for free, this is utter nonsense. I mean, it's all well and good to be excited about doing stuff in space - it's a cool concept, no doubt about it. But cool concepts with unrealistic expectations in terms of cost, deadlines, and the limitations of physics only serve to disappoint and waste people's time and effort. If they want to throw a spear at the moon, by all means do so, I'll be the first person to applaud when you succeed (not only out of respect for incredible nerdiness, but because spearing the moon is an incredible technical achievement). Just don't get people's hopes up with unrealistic projections that are bound to fail - there's no shame in saying "We need $2 million to do this." tl;dr: This project will require a considerable amount more than the current funding goal and current projections are, to be short, foolishly optimistic. Disclaimer: NASA's NRO mission entered lunar polar orbit, in addition to having a true lunar injection. The delta-V requirements for straight-up lunar collision might be a bit smaller, but doing those calculations will take some time that I don't have right now. If outrage at dreams being destroyed is sufficient I'll do even more math, but as it stands I think the ballpark estimate is close enough. Edit: Didn't notice the first time through, but this is part of Google's Lunar XPrize, the requirements of which are that a robot ($!) must be soft-landed ($$$!) on the moon. Can you say "Oh god our delta v budget just went through the roof?" Last edited by xthorgoldx on Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:37 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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