I watched a video by Sydney Brown on Conflict Theory the other day and it made me think about thesis and antithesis and synthesis and how I could apply that…to space exploration. It was a great video:
I have seen how groups form and split away from each other my whole life. In school it was the jocks and the heads, at the beach it was board surfers and body surfers, on the road it was Harly riders and sport bike riders, in the mountains it was skiers and snowboarders, in the air it was hang gliders and paragliders, in politics the right and left, coffee drinkers and tea drinkers, and so on.
In regards to space exploration there seems to be a group called “NewSpace” and a group that can be characterized as “OldSpace.” Elon Musk is of course the shining light for NewSpace and his gang of cyberthugs have dominated all the popular space forums for years. I am not a fan. OldSpace is largely invisible but I recently noticed many commenting on the YouTube channel “Common Sense Skeptic” so I suspect there are far more than anyone realizes. Myself, and I suspect a sizeable percentage of Musk detractors, are “O’Neillians”, or followers of Gerard Kitchen O’Neill, the 1976 author of “The High Frontier”, who we consider the true prophet of space colonization.
Musk is the antithesis of O’Neill. So… what is the synthesis? Can there be one? I would have said no until I saw a graphic for Musk’s “Starship 2.0” a couple days ago. I have been thinking about it:
A 60 foot diameter sphere is big enough to have a double hull with 16 feet between the inner and outer hulls. This envelope is where a “Parker Minimum” cosmic ray water shield could be placed using lunar water. It is a beginning.
Hi Scott,
Thank you so much for replying to my comment about Musk vs O’Neill the other day.
You have such a huge audience!
I was hoping you might review my concept of the “Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum.” This is based on the article about space radiation by Eugene Parker, which describes what I call the “Parker Minimum” of 16 feet of water as radiation shielding, the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion work of Freeman Dyson which is the only way to push such massive shielding around the solar system, and the work of Paul Spudis, who I corresponded with and posted on his blog for several years, which describes how to get that water shielding from lunar ice and into space from the Moon using around 20 times less energy than bringing it up from Earth.
My background is troubleshooting autopilot systems in rescue helicopters which I did for the U.S. Coast Guard. Now I am retired and have taken on space exploration as a hobby, along with paragliding and scuba diving. I used to motorcycles also but gave that up as too dangerous…so I might be considered as halfway intelligent just for that.
I have a fairly comprehensive view of how Humankind should approach space and I think you would be very interested in it. Dr. Spudis passed away recently from cancer and I have nobody to correspond with about it now. Thanks for your time.
Gary Church
Ice on the Moon 