No roadtrip today, new label called "Brainstorms"

As I mentioned yesterday afternoon.  There still could be one, but there isn't one today for sure.

Moving on to the next topic, I got an idea from last night's last post about the Space Show for April 5th, covering the topic of fuel depots.  The idea is artificial cold traps located close to the actual cold traps on the Moon.  It's a way to recover the water, crack it, and store it.  How?  You need energy to do all this, and that would be from perpetual light near the polar regions of the Moon.  You could build an artificial crater on the surface which would block sunlight inside the "crater".  This permanently shaded region would become a cold trap.  The sun hitting the outside on the solar panels would produce the energy needed to do the cracking of the water.  It can also power the devices that go into the actual crater and recover the water stored there in the natural cold trap.

Why not just use the natural cold trap?  Well, that might be a better solution.  But you still have to get into and out of it.  It may easier to do that with an artificial trap.  The idea of a cold trap is to store the finished products for a long period of time with minimal or no losses.  For example, some of the losses could be used as inputs to fuel cells, which would generate electricity.  You have water as an output to this, which could be used for life support, or to be cracked again and recycled.

Another idea is to use the Moon base as a launch complex.  There has to be an economic basis for it and that would be it.  Instead of doing it from the Earth, just do it from the Moon.  It takes less energy to launch from the Moon and certain missions can originate there.  Such as launching solar satellites which generate electricity for use on Earth.  They can be manufactured on the Moon using lunar resources and then launched from the Moon into Earth orbit.

By the way, I have created a new label called "Brainstorms".  When I have an idea like this, I will attach this label to it.  A brainstorm is not necessarily a practical solution to a problem, just a speculative idea which may be useful or may not be.  Want to keep it all real here.  There have been many posts such as this in this blog, but I won't go back and try to link to all of them.  Instead, try looking in the PHD label for any more such ideas.