Railways on the Moon
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- Not if, but when should we build steel railways on the Moon?
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Written, Produced & Narrated by Ian Long
Sources:
Rolling Resistance Road Book: babel.hathitru...
Engineering Railways Book: babel.hathitru...
Sintered Regolith - doi.org/10.101...
420 KwH/Kg Electrolysis Cost Claim: doi.org/10.101...
The 420 Paper They Reference: doi.org/10.101...
Music Credits:
I bet this guy's factorio saves look insane
He's playing Factorial IRL lol
@@ANT-jm4qx no ways he doesnt play factorio
He must have been extatic when space age came out!
Railworld intensifies
Ah, the hard drugs for engineers
Peak autism, I mean anthrofuturism 😂😂
can confirm
I see it more as a sort of Gonzo Isaac Arthurism. And I mean that as a compliment as someone fond of both Hunter S Thompson and Isaac Arthur.
Whaaaatt?!?
JK I mean I do call this the autistic space youtube channel
Same thing, surely?
@Gaelic-Spirit Close enough to make no difference
A few of points:
1. Railroad will need a wide gauge. Stability in determined in part by gravity and on the moon you have a lot less gravity. Another component is center of mass. Passenger cars on the moon will have a much higher center of mass compared to earth cars due to, shielding requirements from the top amongst other considerations.
2. You should also look at labor per ton of cargo. Trains are very labor efficient, and people will be very resource intensive, minimizing man hours will be critical.
3. The day/night temp swing is huge, thermal contraction will be a major issue and needs to be addressed.
The first can be solved by maglev
Did somebody say Breitspurahn?
@segganew Actually so can the third, especially if you use EMS. You can increase the tolerance window significantly, and with no atmospheric drag, the main drawback is eliminated (even though we solved it with Transrapid, at least up to approximately 600km/h).
The only problem with Maglev, regardless if you use EDS or EMS, is the active rails problem. If we can do EMS suspension over an entirely passive guideway, I could see it being viable.
But viable does not mean easy!
Plus really gradual curves. Or super elevation.
@@spartanalex9006 lets not go there... one trip in one of those in wolfenstein was enough.
TRAINS ON THE MOON!!!
TRAINS ON THE MOON!!!!!
BOAT ON THE TRACK !
MOON UNDER DA TRAINS!!!!!
Sounds like a childhood dream
Just no trance
Trains on the moon would literally save my mental state
Men have no idea how to explain this but all intuitively understand it.
@@Icetea-2000 fact
@@Icetea-2000so true
The masculine urge to build trains anywhere.
Imagine wild west style moon train hijacking. 😳
I didnt know using 1909 data on horse drawn carriages to calculate the viability of lunar railways was something I needed to see, but I did.
very underrated video, glad the algorithm decided to lead me here
Three cheers for the printing press.
We're railers on the moon.
We work all afternoon.
But there ain't no rails
So we tell tall tales
And sing this railin' tune.
I need moonbase alpha cover of that
This is the song I came here for, thank you from all of us at Planet Express.
Edit - Apart from Bender, he says your singing sucks buggalo ass.
@@BrianStewart126 sir, I will need a full version of this please
Beat me to it, but I commented anyway
Fuck you beat me to it
Lol. Just imagine for a second a horse in a spacesuit on the Moon pulling one of these
No, mammoths! "The Shadow of the Ship", Robert Wilfred Franson, Copyright 1976. But Squeeker's don't need no spacesuits,
Warhammer 40k type beat
I wonder just how much could a space society regress and still be capable of surviving... how little actual knowledge would a lunar colony need to just keep subsisting...
@@KarolOfGutovo I think they would abandon the Moon and leave to Earth
@@richardpavlov442 Well, I guess? But assuming that wasn't possible - maybe Earthlings got violently racist against offworlder humans and started shooting down all extraterrestrial arrivals, or whatever else.
Imo the bare minimum would be
1. some power source - probably some kind of closed cycle steam/stirling engine fueled by mirrored sunlight heating it up
2. electricity - specifically whatever process allows for separating oxygen out of regolith
3. manufacturing of air-tight transparent materials capable of withstanding about 0.2bar (most likely silicate glass?)
Other than that, not much. So maybe back to 19th century technologywise at the earliest?
And while the technologies have to remain, their proper understanding doesn't. Humans did just fine using fire with phlogiston theory for a long time, who knows what "good enough" theories can be made up around some more modern science, including, idk, maybe disconnecting actually connected phenomena?
Tho that's all WAYYYY out there
The motion blur makes it kinda hard to make out the details, but judging by the bulgy side vents and the old school hi-hood, the locomotive in the opening shot appears to be an EMD GP9. In real life the GP9s were built between 1954 and 1963, so if they were to somehow get one running on the moon it would actually be _older_ than any of the Apollo lunar modules.
The locomotive exists in real life and is Western Pacific No. 713. It is an EMD GP7 built in 1953.
@@huntermossakajunkerman9646 I stand corrected. Never mind _Apollo_ era hardware, that thing's older than Sputnik!
It's amazing how a diesel electric locomotive built with the intention to last 20 years has lasted over 70.
Agree, definitely need to upgrade to a GP-38 ;)
It would have to be convertedto all-electric operation.
0:10- You *gotta* tell me what was written on those trains. I could tell there was some kind of writing/pictures but it was all a blur no matter how I slowed the video.
It was just Western Pacific
it's too blurry to see too much but if you pause it then press , or . you can move forward and back one frame at a time. It looks like its just graffiti
Buy N Large
YES, I've of my goals is to 3d print a rail track than can place pieces itself for a small scale demo of self building factory tech
That'd be very cool
👍
It called a track layer or more commonly a bulldozer with a broken track...
There is a construction machine that builds bridges with 3d printer technology its crazy I forget what country invented it. Shes a pricey beast tho.
A major rail challenge on the moon will be thermal expansion. Temperatures near the Moon's equator can spike to 250°F (121°C) in daylight, then plummet after nightfall to -208°F (-133°C). This 254°C range works out to 33cm of expansion per 100m of steel using the most basic linear calculation.
Thermite welds will require MUCH more stress to be distributed to the ties. Alternatively, larger and more frequent spacing could be used to accommodate expansion, at the cost of lower rolling efficiency and increased wear.
The thermal cycling will do a number on the rails. It might be worth calculating the cost of covering the railroad with solar shade to maintain constant low temperature. But permanent shade means the rails will fall to cryogenic temperatures which will make them much more brittle. 🥶
Another option is to use TUNNELS for all railroads. This would also grant the benefit of radiation shielding for passengers. We can expect automated tunneling to be a HUGE part of lunar infrastructure for the radiation and thermal protection benefits alone.
Great video!!!
You can do it like they do with high-speed rail tracks, for example. That is, you cut the rails diagonally, so there's a distance over which one rail gets thinner and the next rail gets thicker until it takes over completely. That can deal with quite a bit of thermal expansion.
In theory, thermite should burn in a vacuum. Have to get it hot enough to start the reaction, would the weak gravity reduce flow of the liquid iron around the join?
Thinking about using an invar-like alloy made by enriching beneficiated nickel-iron up to 30-36% nickel from the original ~10%. That should do a lot to address thermal expansion concerns with its absurdly low coefficient of thermal expansion, and still be cheaper than steel because it requires no carbon.
Also the sleepers (ties) are usually ballasted, which helps counteract some of the lateral movement caused by thermal expansion. I don;t think ballast hauling, laying and tamping was included in this video's calculations.
@@GreenJimll Neither was protecting machinery and workers from the abrasive regolith. Something I hope he mentions in the future.
There's another consideration I didn't hear you mention, that makes rails better than pavement. Lunar dust is incredibly abrasive. So a paved regolith will induce significantly more wear on everything traveling by it. And not just on wheels - the dust will be kicked up and end up everywhere. Clean rails won't have that problem.
what about vacuum welding the wheels to the rails? guess we will see in the next episode
Lunar dust can be laser cured into a type of concrete called lunarcrete
Needed this to continue building my lego set
@ 37:20 so compacted gravel roads would indeed be a significant bonus if they were built *while* roaming magnetic separation ore harvesting machines do their thing? You'd be able to build a power efficient road network while harvesting, and if you later wanted tracks to certain locations, tadaam, most of the groundwork already done.
Yup exactly!
Why not make a Dune style mobile refinery, and have it pour the molten slag into the foundation it cuts as it trundles along collecting & refining the high grade ores it separates from the lunar dust? (Free roads behind you when you're mining, some free refined metals when you're laying roads.)
Realistically however you would have ti build a new bed for it as the road would most likely still be used
@rhysrail I could see floating "rails and cross members" on / in slowly cooling slag - it's still as dense as rock, and would be as perfectly level as the lunar sphere allows.
The Tokyo bullet train exceeds lunar escape velocity on "flat" ground at a full G. The difference between orbital launch vehicle and mass transit would be literally just different positions on the throttle.
P.S. I'm more attatched to the conductive rails than the video's locomotives, I'd be using lorentz forces to drive each axle instead of a locomotive - and upping the voltage to "rail gun" scheduled cargos into orbit.
With zero air resistance, you could launch trains straight into orbit
But that would take tons of fuel instead of just electricity
You'd nearly get there, but at the point where the train is weightless you'd have zero traction so couldn't get any faster. You'd technically be in orbit but skimming along the rail top.
hell yeah
@@MattOGormanSmith Theres a serious argumemt for launching interplanetary craft from the moon with a giant railgun. And what is a railgun but a beefed up maglev?
I see you too are a man of culture
There's something that's been bothering me about the "Transporting carbon from earth" assumptions.
If you just want carbon, and you have systems to collect lunar regolith, can you not just build a starship analogue out of pure (or near pure) graphite, so making it that it's carrying WAY MORE carbon than the standard Starship payload, and reduce the amount of fuel it's carrying so it only slows down enough to slam at a middling speed into the surface. This speed would be such that the structures collapse and crumple, but the carbon of the ship body stays in a relatively controlled area.
If you had other uncomplicated and stable elements you wanted to ship, you could place them inside this ship to slam into the surface too. Therefore increasing the amount able to be transported and reducing the fuel costs.
SUB QUESTION: Have any studies been done that show areas where there are carbon deposits of any type that can be exploited on the moon?
I'll answer the sub question first: no not really. We haven't even found real 'ore' deposits, we've quite literally barely scratched the surface.
Your main point about slamming carbon into the moon, it's an interesting idea. You could probably just slam the carbon missile into a crater, maybe use a net over it for braking and then collect all the scattered carbon with something like a spice harvester from dune :)
Humans = Carbon. 🙂
In general slamming is one of the ways to optimise things, as potencially starship like thing can deliver 450t to orbit around moon, so having 4x import improving this way.
But also then tug makes sense even more, as it is a way to make a construction which is tuned for space and low accelerations and thus have less parasitic mass. But having tug associated with extra efforts, which is hard to expect early on, but 17 million tons is also not exactly early stuff but mature enough as development goes, so, it would be logical.
Considering egg dropping challenges it may be more than just passive/simple mass of materials so it can be interesting approach especially if it could with space production which we also need anyway.
@@Anthrofuturism I mean, I thought Lunar Dune (Dunar?) harvesters was where we were headed anyway, right? The Regolith must flow!... Through the solar furnaces.
I mean, we have to find something for all of the Sam Rockwell clones to do before we get the Helium 3 fusion generators up and running.
In non-kidding mode, this would be a great way to build up a massive amount of moon-rare resources before anyone even lands. Just send up solid-body ships made of a specific resource or 5 and play darts with a crater. Bing bang boom, all the carbon you need for your rail system, ready and waiting for you.
@Brainchild110 I think their will be access to carbon. Humans = carbon food air waste, etc.
My LORD the way my jaw hit the floor seeing this on my feed
An early Geep running long hood forward? With a couple spacer cars between the locomotive and a hazardous load? Wow, you must be an individual of discerning taste as well. You just got yourself a new subscriber.
Another idea. Horse drawn wagons on the moon. Upfront of horse space suit will be expensive, and also feeding horses will be difficult, and also horses wont be able to pull as much, and also training horses to live on the moon, but over all I think the benefits are obvious; Moon Horses
I want to be in the cavalry if they send me off to war. I want a good steed under me like my forefathers before.
Solves the problem with coal fired trains not having air to burn.
Trains, on, the moon? We have surpassed critical mass autism and are now beyond reprieve. This is hella based my anthro futurist friend!
As an aerial tramway/Ropeway dork, where similar to the treatises in the video are all about 80+ years old, it's cool seeing someone else appreciate those old texts
22:36 petition to skim 30kg off that number, I'm sure it won't change much and it'd be funny
I like trains :D
I've been wanting this video since I found your channel!
I wonder if rails on lighter gravity planets and moons would be designed closer to rollercoasters where they wrap wheels around the rails not just on top?
Or raised rails with either the cars slung in between or even suspended below.
@medivalone reason I mentioned rollercoasters is it is idea I plan to 3D model when I skilled enough idea is we can have a raised rail networks that with trains on top and slung underneath for increased capacity and splitting what type of trains run on top rails or slung underneath
I don’t see the benefit here
He wishes he could fly away
From all his yesterdays
If he could, he would gladly pay
For a one way ticket to the moon
The metal bands on the wooden wheels were called Tires.
A smile flashed across my face when I saw that a new video had been released. I haven't even seen it yet, but I know it will have that quality that makes me excited to study the topic.
For the rails Electric Steel or Silicon Steel should be considered. It's not as strong as carnon steel but it's minimal carbon component means one can compensate structurally with a wider cross-section.
It's significantly stronger than cast iron and silicon is abundant. Outside of electronics its not commonly used on earth due to the expense in removing the carbon from the alloy.
How about a rover with a giant reflector/lens setup to directly sinter the compacted regolith into a road? Could be a fun intermediary for some land train action.
Maybe it needs a bunch of solar collectors concentrating on the central melter and it'd look like a bunch of sail ships slowly moving over the surface.
Good thinking.
With the ability to mount a lot of solar collectors thanks to the lower gravity and a focusing lens which sweeps across the surface, similar to an SLS metal 3D printing machine, the necessary temperature should be reached easily.
Though a slow process, the machine could even be running while landtrains are actively using the road, diverting the beam to the side when one passes.
Aside from the construction of the machine, this process would practically cost nothing.
The only thing that could maybe become an issue is the resulting surface finish.
From my experience with such 3D printers, it isn't that great. Though if this is also an issue on such larger scales or with the giant 2m diameter wheels, I have no idea.
Happy New Years!
@@exo_shadow7530 if it is too rough it needs more preparation (or more power and actually melt a smooth lava road instead of sintering).
if the surface is (partially) melted and too smooth we can put regolith gravel on it to roughen it up.
2:50 Meat horse accurate but unsettling term
That Gandalf scene for when you were talking about finding solutions in old books is so spot on on how I feel reading old manuals
Speaking with regard to wider wheels and rails on railways. I don't think it matters how wide the rail wheels are. The contact patch with standard tapered rail wheels is always going to be tiny, no matter how wide the wheels are.
Wider rail wheels instead allow trains to take tighter corners without the flanges grinding on the inside of the rail in that screeching you often hear when a train goes around a curve. Where I work on KiwiRail, new wagons have wheels that are about 1.5 x wider than the head of the rail to account for the tight curves used on the mainline and in the marshalling yards.
Dude, you are proposing that the Lunar Standard Gauge be about 15ft, or about 1.5 times wider than the Hitler proposed "Breitspurbahn", which was proposed to be 3000mm wide. Compared to Standard Gauge, which is 4ft 8.5in or 1435mm.
@@lukemendel8197 lol I didn't know Hitler proposed a new gauge. He didn't have lower gravity either so I'm surprised it's that wide
@@Anthrofuturism I mean, the GWR proposed 7 ft broad gauge, which is very similar, the arguments being that it could be faster and higher capacity.
The issue with broad gauge, is that it's unwieldy and needs much more land being prepared in order for it to work.
@Anthrofuturism well the Breidspurbahn was as almost everything Hitler wanted was crasy oversized just take a normal train and double it's size in all directions 😅 but too be fair for its planned empire it would make a good live line for the more continental parts like the trans sibiric railroad today 😅 but the cost too build it uffff
@@Ben31337l It wasn't proposed, Brunel BUILT that 7ft gauge. Widest gauge ever built.
@@Anthrofuturism It just seems a bit much when all of our Earth train development has been centered around a gauge of 1435mm. (Pro tip, gauge is usually measured in either millimeters or feet and inches.)
Have you considered Electrical Steel for structural purposes? Is basically steel that uses silicon instead of carbon for alloying, and it will have to be made for the electric engines anyways.
Not to mention the nickel that gets swept up when gathering iron could be used as well in a moon steel alloy.
@alexandruianu8432 Don't forget the Chromium!
I can't wait until we have mag lev and roller coasters on the moon 😆 awesome video. We'll done research👍
@@friskydingo5370 thanks! Pretty sketchy using old engineering books like that but it was quite the adventure haha
@Anthrofuturism 👍👍
Subbed
Wouldn't it be easier to sinter the regolite to a complete highway and drive with road-trains, like they do in Australia?
If we had a rail around the moon and had a solar array arranged to always provide power regardless of time of day, and a power line circling the moon, you could essentially get power and stuff anywhere along that ring. Virtually anything humans do up there would likely benefit from that arrangement.
Also, if you focus sunlight on a point using a mirror array, you can use that to smelt, including heating regolith. Without the atmosphere and atmospheric cooling it works alot better up there.
I love the sound of trains in the vacuum on the moon. lol
@@dropshot1967 yeah I almost made it silent but it felt weird lol
Sound would travel through the subsurface medium of the moon and into your legs, you'd most likely hear something. Just not the same way it'd sound on Earth in atmosphere
@@iepineapple It would be more a case of feeling the vibrations through your feet than truly 'hearing'
@@Joe-xq3zu yes and that vibration would translate through your suit just like it did for the astronauts we sent to moon. And like they did, you would hear light muffled sounds due to those vibrations. Probably moreso due to the heavier vibrations coming from freight rail movement.
Importing carbon from the 52 Europa asteroid would be more than 5km/s cheaper in delta-v than importing it from Earth.
"We've railways on the moon, we have many Saloons, but there ain't rails, so we tell tall tails, and sing our railing tune!"
Bought your book, its absolutley amazing and ive been following this journey for a while now amazing work hope we get to see this irl one day
@@Buttered_Charcoal that's awesome to hear thank you
metal expansion and contraction would be insane on the moon
It would be a significant challenge for certain, but shouldn't be to difficult to account for.
The moon's surface is unbelievably dusty.
Its a desert with static-attractive very lightweight sand. And who knows how deep it is before you find solid ground.
This would be an absolute nightmare for just about any machine moving on it.
Very interesting concept! Love the work
Excellent analysis.
Sadly, any rail on the moon is going to vary in temperature from -100F to +200F. (Probably much more) It will buckle. Modern rail lines avoid this by specifying minumum track-laying temperatures, but laying track at solar noon only will result in more than enough tension at night to destroy the rails. I dont know of any suitable materials with sufficiently low coefficient of thermal expansion, but assume they can be developed. The first solution that comes to mind is a hollow extruded rail with a water-ice or carbon-fiber core.
Next is the lunar regolith itself. It is, essentially, tiny, very sharp, glass shards. At each solar terminator event, these shards are hoisted a few meters upward (the presumed mechanism is electrostatic forces). The phenomenon is well-documented, in spite of the unsure mechanism. Coriolis forces from lunar rotation will assure that these shards eventually coat the entire rail. This may be a saving grace, if repeated passing wheel pressure can essentially glass-coat the entire rail, further reducing rolling friction. Perhaps even better, a diamond surface for wheels and rails created using traditional vacuum epitaxy methods. A boy can dream. 😅 And, of course, the name of the rail line simply must be "Diamond Neil's Iron Horse Milky-way". That should satisfy any alien unions used for manufacturing said rail line. We're using aliens, er, right? Tradition! 😂
Great video, but there’s one big thing missing for a railroad. Ballast. It is just as important as the rails and ties because it supports the weight of the train. They specifically use crushed jagged gravel so it holds together. I wonder how you could source it on the moon?
anchors?
Isn't the moon rail bed sintered regolith? As in it's not just compacted but also heated until it becomes a huge bed of fused together rock? Like high speed rail ballast
Ballast is doing more than just supporting train weight. It provides lateral stability of the sleepers (ties) which counteracts things like thermal expansion and the forces of heavy trains going round corners. We tend to use particular rock types in many parts of the world because we need the ballast to effectively lock together to give this stability.
Of course there are ballast free track designs such as slab track, but there something like concrete is doing the jobs ballast normally does.
why not ballastless track, affixed to laser cured lunar concrete?
@@GreenJimll Lunar regolith can be laser cured into a form of concrete
You have just awoken every autistic bone in my body. Between trains, Warhammer 40k, and space shit, building trains on the Moon is PEAK
Good video but I think there are two variables you should have considered:
Firstly, on the moon rail transport will be the only viable way to transport people long distances. Without people you will likely not have a lunar economy. If this is a cost analysis video it should be considered. There are many historic examples of rail being used to make human settlement possible.
Secondly, there's a middle point between compacted regolith and rails. You could dig all the way to the bedrock (which isn't very deep) and carve a flat road on it. You could also carve deep grooves on the rock to work as rails. This is a viable option for early settlements before any major industry is developed.
One big potential problem with rails on the moon is cold welding-in the absence of atmosphere and an oxide layer, there’s really nothing telling two pieces of metal that they’re different pieces of metal after they come into contact.
The Foamers are gonna be extra crazy on the Moon! I expect we'll get private astronauts travelling to the Moon just to do some trainspotting lol.
Edit: instantly recognized the Borderlands music used at a bit past the 21 minute mark. I absolutely love that game and its soundtrack.
So long as the tracks stay clean it should be fine. Moon dust is pretty harsh. There's some static charge with moon dust that newer space suits are designed to repel. I bet you could charge the tracks to repel moon dust.
4:40 literally forgot I was watching a moon economy vid until right here. I watch a lot of history and other videos and so I got sucked into the history and was engrossed in the train history recap.
"until we have a market in the moon to dictate costs we won't know at what point..." that smells the economic calculation problem to me.
Speaking about that in a space enginering video proves the hight quality of the channel.
Speaking from Brazil.
You are missing a few basic points: Regular roads go up and down and so the vehicles that travel on them have to have the traction and power to go up hills. Rail roads are more limited since they are optimized for minimal rolling resistance and efficiency. So they have a more severe restriction on grade with a rail road. But when you first start developing an economy, you can pick out the most convenient routes on which to build rail roads. For a given cargo capacity, the size of the road needed for a rail road is smaller than for a vehicle not using tracks but needs to be flatter and will have a lower maintenance cost. There is a reason why rail roads were built before super highways! Your assumption that the cost of a rail road is just the cost of the road plus X is flawed.
@@richdobbs6595 If you apply the rail grade to a road it will increase the cost sure and obviously the cost won't be the EXACT same but similar MWh ballpark.
@@AnthrofuturismOne big point is that you dont need to have energy efficent transport. If you divide the moons circumfrince by time of a moonday you end up with 16km per hour. So basicly you can outrun the day and night cycle, means aslong as you go west you can stay always in the sun. Basicly you can build a solar powered truck/rover that drive nonstop around the moon and is fully solar powered as long you can keep an average speed of 16km per hours what is pretty simple.
@@jonasstahl9826 In practice, you don't need to go around the equator. Chances are good the development is near the south pole. Without an atmosphere, the efficiency of panels is almost the same everywhere. You just need to go north just enough so that you clear the blockage from any hills, so the length of the Great Southern Railway can be much shorter. You can power the railway by solar panels mounted vertically on very long, lightweight train cars slowly moving to keep up with the sun, putting power out through the two rails. Transport vehicles can't go around the whole route, but distances are short enough you can just go the long way around via dark side. Also, just wait until I tell you about the new composite rails. They have a sintered regolith base, a highly electrically conductive foamed aluminum core and an incredibly wear resistant rolling surface of lunar titanium. 100% earth import free versus those old fashioned earth-dependent rails from our competitors.
@@richdobbs6595 I think the main question about railways on the moon is, want do you want to haul in the first place?
The only resurce there is regolith, what is basicly everywhere and what ever you can produce from it aswell as supplys from earth.
Later on you might want to visit people on other bases and exploration outpost, nothing that realy requires huge amount of material.
The regolith transport from the mines to processing facilitys is short distance and constantly changing, not realy an application for railways.
Note that the reason we don't need need expansion joints on rails on earth is that the steel can expand in the other dimension, up to a certain extent (this is simplified, practical engineering did a video on this a while ago). However, the temperature shifts on the moon are higher, so we would need expansion joints every now and then. This increases complexity, cost, maintenance and also reduces max speed of the train. Awesome video regardless :)
There is one more advantage to rails that you haven't mentioned as of 15:00: electric transmission. If you electrify the rails, you don't need to have heavy (heavier than Li-ion of course cos you don't have the Li on the moon) batteries on your vehicle
You dont realy need batterys you can outrun the day night cycle of the moon with an speed of only 16km per hour, aslong you move west you stay always in the sun and can get direct solar power. Even if you want to go any other direction a moon day is about 14 earth days, aslong you travel only during day time you can reach anywhere on the moon in a single moon day just by solarpower
If you build a railway, you need to protect it against micrometeorites, so you always need a tunnel. This tunnel also gives you protection against radiation. And if you build tunnels for transport on the moon, you build a railway inside, because of course you do. In a low gravity environment you also need rails on the ceiling.
I like how the "we can just take earth standard rails and evolve from there" realization happened a half hour into the video. Apparently I'm not educated enough to overthink something this thoroughly.
My thought process pretty much was "just use averaged rails, make them wide"
Not all the way through this, but one thought I had about the assumption around 5:46 that the rail cost is regolith road cost plus a fixed cost for rails/trackway. The steel on steel interaction means lower ability to climb gradients, so a major factor on Earth for rail vs road construction is that it's possible to build roads with remarkably high grades, like 10% or more (so 10 units of height per 100 units of horizontal distance), and highways that can hit 5% grade, while rail doesn't do very well above like 2-3%. Even though some multiple-unit electric systems like streetcars, subways, and high speed rail trains with high power-to-weight can get to like 5% or so, a roadbed doesn't necessarily require as much cut-and-fill as a railbed given anything but flat terrain.
cobble stone roads via cindered regolith?
@@bobmike2373 next video
@@Anthrofuturism hells yeah
Another option on the moon would also be to send the trains into orbit and catch them on the destination, or simply shoot raw material straight to the destination with no train. So there might not be a need to tracks at all.
The simplicity of a train, the efficiency of a hyperloop
But a hyperloop is not even slightly efficient, it can only transport a single car at a time and can basically only go in straight lines
hyperloop is a very inefficient method, you are putting cars in a paved tunnel, it has all the shortcomings of roads whilst having all the shortcomings of rails, all in one package
Im mean that its efficient energy wise in the sense of being a maglev in a vacuum, isnt that a hyperloop. Train on tracks with moon gravity probably has to have close efficiency to maglev
@@szymonmaciak8930 I was assuming you meant Elon Musk's hyperloops
@joemamma2220The car tunnel isn't hyperloop. Hyperloop is a concept where a train travels through a vacuum tube to reduce air resistance and increase speed
The treatise probably uses long tons which are 2240lb, close to a metric tonne. This is the default in England. and has been since well before 1919
24:17 Love your content but you’re wrong about this one. High carbon steels tend to be more expensive than mild steels.
@@DundyDundyDundy yeah you're right, I was thinking of cast iron in a more historical context which isn't clear at all. I elaborated more but ended up cutting that part out of the video so that was an oversight on my end not clarifying
You forgot to mention the shape of train wheels and track. Train wheels aren't just cylinders with a flange. They're cones with a flange as a safety net. And the rails are rounded on top. A flat wide cylinder wouldn't ride very well as it wouldn't want to turn.
You wouldn't happen to have a tech tree for your work here, do you? I would love to see an overview. Thanks for sharing!
@@phrozenwun not yet but I will
I love how every video you just continue the case for a steampunk moon society
Wouldn’t a monorail be possible on the moon
It would be just as possible as on Earth, but with the same downsides that make us build more traditional railways instead of monorails.
More expensive to maintain, and construct, way more complex infrastructure...
A big problem on the moon is the dust, very sharp and abrasive that will grind away everything mechanical and moving part, not to mention being dangerous to humans if it gets inside. Even a compacted regolith is going to raise dust. Rails can reduce that a lot.
HELL YEAH
On ties:
Surprisingly, there are also metal ties made. Not sure how effective they are, but I imagine they are a suitable stand-in for wooden ties in high-speed applications. concrete ties would be harder to make for switches, partly due to how specialized they would have to be. Though part of the spacing is not just compression, but supporting the rails themselves. While heavier rail is more rigid, it would still be a bit of a nasty surprise to hit sagging rail at speed. More ties also means faster speeds or heavier trains from what I remember.
A bit surprised you didn't touch on ballasting; you don't want the track to sway while or after a train runs over it, but I guess the actual design/material wouldn't matter much on the Moon. No need to worry about drainage, so compacting regolith would probably work good and be very cheap. The compacted regolith ballast/roadbed could also serve dual purpose as roadways as long as the flangeways are carved out for the trains, _which basically means street-running on the Moon everywhere._
I commend you for doing all of the research that you did to come up with supporting numbers. This is very professional work and you should consider writing a paper on this subject. However, there is a missing part to this plan. Rails are made from steel that is rolled in a rolling mill. They are not just simply poured out of a ladle into a rail shaped mold. In order to make the "T" rail section that we have on earth, you will need a facility to first cast ingots or blooms; then those will need to get fed into a rolling mill. You will need to consider the energy cost of casting and rolling the rail in addition to melting the steel. Casting and rolling requires large amounts of cooling water, which means you need a building to maintain normal atmospheric pressure. All of this will require at a minimum of several thousand tons of equipment delivered or made on the moon. In the end, I believe you will find it will be more efficient to import finished rail from earth. In another approach, you could make cast rails like they used in the early 1800's that were short sections. But because cast steel would have less strength and durability than rolled steel, you will need more steel to make up for the difference by increasing the section size.
On earth, it took hundreds of years from learning to make iron and steel to the point where we could build massive structures in the 19th century because it took a lot of time to build up the infrastructure necessary to make what was needed. It was a constant cycle of mining materials, and making tools from those materials, so you could just continue the cycle to more efficiently mine and make better tools.
It would take a very long time to build industry on the moon without bringing large equipment of all types from earth. So long, that it would exceed several lifetimes and that would kill the project because goals would change over time.
Same as the foundries, the rollers would be a one time inital investment, useful for manifacturing any steel structural member required for any other project. The only additional cost this introduces is the energy required by the rollers, and considering we axpect a roughly 6 times ROI already, it will more than likely fit within the margin.
The thing you have to understand here, is that wile infrastructure decelopment, especially production infrastructure, seems absurdly costly upfront, it reduces the follow on cost of anything manifactured on site by many orders of magnitude.
The same way you dont see China invest in the developing regions of east africa by aponsoring local small manifacturies, but by plopping down megafactories and their complete ulsupporting infrastructure with 20k workers, you will also see massive inital investment to kickstart further development on the moon, once we start industrialising it.
Quiet simple because we can afford it now, unlike colonial empires in the 17th century.
Something you're missing is that a railway on the Moon or Mars can go significantly faster _safely_ than a non-rail steered vehicle. Just by virtue of being fixed to something that will probably be more similar to a monorail or roller coaster's rail than a traditional train rail, a moon train can make faster turns than moon cars without the risk of toppling over. At 1/6th gravity, even a slight turn at high speeds can cause a rover to tip over. Let alone what might happen if it hits a bump.
Also, even on Earth, friction against the ground is much more important for trains than air drag. The first trains weren't even going at speeds where that was a significant factor at all, and many still don't. It's why most locomotives are still shaped like the most aerodynamically efficient shape ever -- a box.
Beneficiated nickel-iron seems like the obvious material to use if you can get away with it. Though it is going to have worse thermal expansion than steel and be more brittle, so with 300C of temperature swing, maybe you can't.
But that got me thinking: Invar, with it's amazingly low coefficient of thermal expansion, is a nickel-iron alloy with like 3.5x the amount of the stuff in regolith. So just enrich it with nickel!
Though the vacuum metallurgy paper doesn't cover nickel, it gets used in vacuum tubes and such, so pretty sure iron sublimates first in a vacuum, under the likely melting point of this stuff under a bit more pressure. So, at the temperatures you would need to form it into rails in the first place, carefully control the pressure and have a colder surface elsewhere and you should be able to get an invar-like alloy and pure iron for other applications.
This should also cut into the other stuff you need steel for. Anywhere it is just for thermal stability, invar is objectively better and takes no carbon.
One thing that worries me the most on moon rails is the thermal amplitude between night and day. 300 Celsius is huge. Even Earth rail operations don't reach that high of an amplitude, however there is no air to take away that temperature either ! So any deformation resulting from rail/wheel action will stay there for a while before it can dissipate. That being said, trains will be lighter thanks to lighter gravity... but the thing remains that during the hours of transition between night and day (and depending on the terrain relief too is Sun exposure is blocked), operations might have to be suspended over some period of time. The only way to circumvent that, they easy way, is to block sunlight altogether with a structure built over the track, but your train will not be able to use solar power directly. But it can also protect the trains and all rail related equipment from dust that will be attracted by static electricity that the train operation will generate.
For heat management, radiators are the only way to go in vaccum... but I don't think piezzoelectric powered heaters will be enought to dissipate the heat from a train, so it will require a lot more energy, especially if you don't protect the rails from the Sun... Otherwise your electricity bill will be so expansive that running a train on the Moon might become immensely prohibitive...
And I'd place the radiators on the rail web, especially if it's higher than Earth rails.
The other problem is tunneling the mountains and crater ridges. TBMs use a lot of lubricant and water for their operation, something that is simply not possible on the Moon unless you possess a HUGE water processing facility already. Plus, the airtightness of the digging chamber must be ensure otherwise, pressure won't be maintained for water/mud to stay fluent to help the machine.
Moon crust is light and unstable, using explosives for tunneling might not be a good idea, digging trenches perhaps.
In short, unless building your raiway on relatively flat plain, you might prefer enclosed monorails to take on terrain, with some trenches to go through terrrain obstacles.
The other alternative, more expansive that just laying the track on the plain would be to dig a trench for half of the height of the train gauge, and close it up with a roof covered in regolith to protect your infrastructure from micrometeorites, sunlight and radiation. Covert trenches. So you don't have to dig a tunnel completely, though, getting through obstacles will still be a challenge.
But you'll have to say goodby to the view of the breathtaking lunar landscape from the windows anyway. Of course you are talking about freight trains and not passenger trains so it doesn't matter here but I'd still incorporate a passenger car for the train crew or maintenance purposes as there will be no logistics quickly available in case repairs is needed on the way. The added benefit to use wide tracks is that crew car would just be a standard habitat module mounted on a rail wagon structure.
True that setting the track on a plain and not protected into the ground, wider tracks would be more efficient but if we have to protect them from 'the elements', using standard rail gauge would be preferrable, leading to cheaper works to cover the tracks.
As for costs, as on Earth, setting up the logistics based on Moon processing facilities will be the challenge. Once it's in place, it will run much cheaper.
Is there a step between metal rails and compacted regolith? At some point we’re going to have lots of molten regolith and extract out all the good stuff but at some point there’s only so much Si we actually need. At some point we need to use it or dump it. Rather than really just dumping it 1) we should reclaim as much heat as we can for other industrial processes 2) we should be able to use that waste effectively.
Instead of ties, what if we just had slabs of previously molten regolith? The road would be a series of interlocked slabs of thick glass. Even if they crack they’re still very usable. We drive over broken asphalt and concrete all of the time and the slower the speed the less all those bumps really matter.
I think a video on lunar “ecology” would be good. There’s no atmosphere but would there be limits to floating dust we can kick up before we need to worry about “air quality”? What would the bulk of the lunar waste be? I suspect Si would be the biggest one so what do we do with it? Will we end up with big slag dumps on the moon?
That's the thing about the dust on the moon, it doesn't float. With no air, every little individual grain of dirt just falls to the ground like a rock unless it's physically stuck to something with some surface texture or static electricity. I know that lunar soil would build up on astronaut spacesuits because they were made of cloth and all that moving around made them carry a bit of a charge, but anything that was kicked up in front of the Rover or someone's boot would just fall.
@ could the dust be charged itself? Could you end up with a cloud of nano particles supported by a Brownian motion-like haze of like charged particles?
Another thing we could do with moon trains: SOLAR PANELS!!!!!
You could get a lot of free energy from the unfiltered sunlight that strikes the top of the train cars. It would most likely have to be electric anyway
That would weight the trains down, you could lay solar panels basically anywhere on the moon, it's not like there's any environment to conserve
One factor I've never seen someone bring up is regolith on seals.
Regolith is likely one of those substances that can find its way in through a hermetic seal. Just like graphite dust (which is a nightmare to work with, you'll know if you've ever machined graphite), it's fine, sharp and electrostatic enough to start wedging itself in the seal. Then with each movement, the grain of dust just slides deeper and deeper. This both ruins the seal in a fraction of its normal expected service life, and means you now have abrasive dust inside your sensitive machines. Rails would mean you could design a vehicle without suspension, meaning you'd have fewer moving seals for the regolith to ruin.
You could even use linear EM-propulsion, where the rail and vehicle forms two parts of an electric motor. One has permamagnets, the other has electromagnets. Then the only rotating seals would be the seals around the axle bearings.
What could he interesting is discussing the human based infrastructure - given the moon likely favours automation and humans relegated to skilled labour- discussing habitats, and ways of movement and workplaces coupled with prior videos could be interesting
There's a way to prefab a structure that might be ideal for the moon. It could be easily repaired, altered, added or put somewhere else. Stainless might be ideal for such a shape of said enclosed rail so it wouldn't have to worry about lunar regolith dust.
This knocked me TF out for 6 hour. Subscribed.
really wish the video had more animations as he was talking, since (as he mentioned in the video a couple of times), everything is so convoluted that it would be really nice to have stuff just laid out on screen to give direct visuals to what he is talking about, rather than somewhat related stock footage
also, just having a screen recording of him changing a rectangle in blender was funny the first time, not so funny the following times (an animation with labels about what and where forces were being applied would have been more useful)
(using animations rather than stock footage would of course increase the time it takes to make each video, but then it's a tradeoff between channel upload rate and video quality)
About the (energy) cost of delivery to the Moon.
Why not use the data on the Nova-C mission landing? 1908 kg of payload, Falcon 9 rocket, mission cost $118 million, rocket cost $67 million, don't know how much energy. I don't know what cost to take as a basis - expensive equipment certainly won't be needed to deliver raw materials, and the cost of delivery will tend to the cost of the rocket, I think about $100 million. Also for consideration, the initial cost of the mission was $77 million.
Let's take $118 million for calculation, then 1 kg will cost $61844/kg; at $67 million it's $35115/kg.
The Saturn-5 rocket cost $185 million, which is $1647 million in today's money. With a useful mass of 43.5 tons, its cost was $37862/kg.
Thus, the lower limit of the price is about $35,000/kg, with a realistic mark of about $50,000/kg.
Now I propose an innovative conversion factor for dollars to MWh. This is the commercial price of electricity, $/kWh!
And this price should be based on the USA, as the world's leading economy, with a fairly average price of electricity in the world, and the place where launches are made. There, the price of electricity is 0.18 $/kWh, or 180 $/MWh.
Then the price of 35,000 $/kg is equivalent to 194.44 MWh/kg of the energy budget, which should be summed up with 0.27 MWh/kg indicated in the video. Also 50k $/kg = 277.78 MWh/kg, 62k $/kg = 344.44 MWh/kg.
We need rails encircling the Moon, this is tens of thousands of kilometers of rails.
That's a lot of launches just to deliver carbon. The equatorial railway would require 11,000 km, that's 4 million kg of carbon, that's 2,000 launches of Falcon 9 or 92 Saturn-5 rockets. In money, that's $134 billion for Falcon 9 rockets, or $152 billion for Saturn-5 rockets.
There is an upper limit to the number of rocket launches from Earth, the number that, if exceeded, will irreparably worsen the ecological situation.
Currently, there are about 200 launches per year. If this increases tenfold, i.e. to 2000 launches per year, the ozone layer will be irreparably damaged.
And therefore, we must avoid unnecessary launches in such large volumes, when we theoretically have alternatives for local extraction.
The need for rails on the Moon will already be in the established industry, which will be able to organize carbon extraction on its own.
with the moon having no atmosphere, using aerodynamic shapes isn't necessary, also with with a kilometers long track, it can be used to launch anything into orbit horizontally, which will save alot of fuel in the long run, both literally and figuratively.
AMAZING video!!! Since there is no platetectonic movement on the moon, a circumspaning railroad would be cool to build finally. Also to mabye conect future potential cities across the surface.
this is Adam Something's final form
The main thing this video has shown me is how heavy and how much material regular train lines take.
Veratasium just had a video showing how much steel tracks stretch and contracts from 40 degree changes, have you seen how bad this would be on the moon?
You should look at aerial cable cars / tramways.
Up out of the dust
I've been begging for this, for like 5 videos now, finally.
I think you overlooked a few things. Cold welding of metallic and thermal expansion/contraction. Even if its compacted regolith, it will still contain metallic that will cold weld to metal tires. Temperature swings on the moon are over 200 degrees C. Thermal expansion and contraction would make a continuous rail difficult to maintain unless the rail was covered and temperature controlled. Moving materials simply by flinging them into orbit by mobile magnetic rails might be the best, lowest energy cost solution. Electricity generation, not even considering cold fusion, on the moon is not that expensive. There's fission, solar and hydrogen, all of which can be made semi-mobile or disposable for transport/construction on a mining site.
rails have one big benefit: a prepared, level, and known good surface that isnt likely to wear out and collapse as you use it over and over and over again, especially since flexible rubber or rubberized wheels needed for the friction, or tracks for a larger contact surface due to reduced gravity, would have great amounts of wear on them comparatively
remember that thrusters kick up regolith every time they operate close to the surface
rovers also tear up a regolith surface, or will tear themselves up if they dont do so
the other benefit is that a rail system will distribute the concentrated forces a lot better, leading to a better regolith road lifespan than if you were to have the wheels directly on the regolith surface, where they will wear out things in a specific path and rather narrow pattern, which will increase issues as the regolith road is used
The cost of 1 ton over 1 km is going to change dramatically as one goes through a specific region and deals with random work site failures and problems. There was an industrialist in the United States living just before world war II who wrote an open letter to students of manufacturing and engineering. He told them that he would never give up his shop skills but what the country needed facing the coming war was people who started with shop skills but had book skills as well. The shop skills gives you a realistic understanding of how things should progress on a work site or on a project in the shop. The book skills gives a person with those shop skills the ability to refine and perfect the design of their work.
🎵🎶“We’re railways on the moon! We hope to get rails soon! But there ain’t no rails, so we tell tall tales, and we sing a railing tune!”
22:42 sooooo close :(
Realistically, lunar trains would be extremely easy to make entirely automatic, since the main obstacle to automatic trains on earth is that people (or animals, or fallen trees) can get onto the rails and get whacked by a train. None of those things are very common on the moon, so trains will only need human drivers in switching areas, if that. It’s also worth pointing out that trains using overhead line or third-rail electrification don’t need to carry their own fuel or batteries, and can instead be powered by more efficient and easily-maintained stationary generators.
A number of years ago I ran across a scientific paper that related that Glass processed on the moon would not be brittle (because of the vacuum there would be no gas contamination). The Lunar glass supposed to equal low alloy steel in elasticity and hardness which would be the same as the steel used in rails. It would also be cheaper to make on the moon. Try and find it - it was very interesting.
A side thought to all of this is that there might be a snowball effect to a lunar project like this occurring. Since Trains/Railroads are practically mile markers for industrial development, once the need for lunar industry to construct a railroad is clear, it will likely snowball to support and streamline other projects since the lunar economy would be "self-sufficient" for large scale projects like Station Colonies and deep spaceships (at least not requiring resources beyond cash and earth manufacturing specialty part/systems that may not work on Earth), this being that it's easier/less costly to shuttle a Steel Beam or sheet metal from the lunar surface to a drydock in Lunar Orbit versus what it would take to get that same materials from Earth.
This is also not touching the skill/manpower pool that would begin to develop as this occurs as well (though I imagine it becomes easier to ferry a Master Welder and his equipment to the moon and take the time to either teach or set up the robotic systems to help further these projects since they would likely be a semi-regular service to the moon by this point).
There’s another aspect of the efficiency of trains that you failed to mention: just having one big engine rather than hundreds of tiny engines gives them a vastly cheaper by-the-ton cost than shipping stuff by truck or car.