“-that it would end up costing far more than it would produce. They simply say that they would still favor it, only as a way to ensure the survival of the species.”
Not that much more. And NOT if the components were manufactured on the Moon. You keep spinning this.
“Paying it’s way” compared to what? That is the catch 22 in your little drama, isn’t it Richard? Maybe coal would be cheaper but “cheaper” is not what this is about. You want it to be though. Your contrarian nagging is recreation I guess. You keep making stuff up: Human beings being present are not deleterious if you want to discourage those telecomm platforms from being attacked and want to keep them repaired. You WANT people on nuclear armed spaceships. And I did not say anything about human crewed Space Solar Power platforms.
Incessantly making stuff up to try and discredit anything I post here.
From the paper you cite:
“Our analysis suggests that after the initial investments in lunar mining and space manufacturing and transportation, that the profit margin for producing space solar power is very high (even when selling power below fossil fuel prices). We have investigated the financial scaling of ground launched versus space derived space solar power satellites. We find that for the carbon mitigation case even modernized ground launched space solar power satellites are not financially viable. For space derived solar power satellites, however, the increased demand makes them break even substantially sooner and yield much higher profit.”
And your sad attempt to discredit O’Neill:
“I have to say that this reinforces a suspicion I have long had about O’Neill: He likely understood that space based solar power was not economically viable, but he latched onto it as a way to bootstrap his space colonization scheme,-“
Elon thinks Space Solar is “stupid” because he cannot make it happen. It takes resources only the government can provide. He wants more money and the best he can do is pander to rural video gamers. There you go…Voodoo doctor. That depends on “out of touch with reality” physicists and engineers to make his Mars fantasy come true. One man’s vision is an economist’s fantasy. I guess. Or vice versa.
We will see nothing emerge organically by leveraging technology to serve the economy. We will see people get rich and those billionaires indulge in Mars fantasies and things like strip mining Earth orbit.
Elon is not a physicist or an economist…he is an “entrepreneur.” He has paper on the wall that claims he has some knowledge of those subjects. Good for him but bad for us. Again, the best he has come up with is pandering to rural video gamers to pay for his Mars fantasy. If he is so intelligent, he must understand why O’Neill’s people ruled out Mars as a second home for humankind.
Which means it is all just good fun for him and the only thing that MUST work to keep the cake and ice cream coming is Starlink. Filling LEO with tens of thousands of pieces of space junk.
It is the state that funded the basic research enabling almost everything you are talking about. “Entrepreneurs” are essentially the gamblers that take it and run with it. They are not “unsung heroes”, they are simply looking to cash in on what other people did and paid for. The people who paid the taxes that paid for the basic research often just get to pay for it again, and again, and again. A 91 percent tax rate on top earnings, as in FDR’s New Deal, modifies that into something far better; what made America great.
You are playing the Ayn Rand game and dividing the human race into wealth creators and looters. It is all a bait and switch game. In reality the consumer “creates” the wealth and the “entrepreneurs” who charge whatever people are willing or actually manipulated or forced to pay are the “looters.”
https://www.aei.org/economi…
“I see before us two basic choices. There can be more wars, more restrictions on individual freedom, as we battle in what has to be a zero-sum game over the resources of our planet, or a new flowering opportunity with wealth for all humanity and the arts as we open a new frontier in space with more than a thousand times the land area and the resources of planet Earth.”
Thus spoke the true prophet of space colonization and sadly we now follow a false one. O’Neill envisioned miles-in-diameter artificial hollow spinning moons with humans living on the inner surface. These cities in space would be mass produced eventually in the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands. In zero gravity, with solar energy, and the resources of the Moon and asteroid belt, these constructs are actually not a possibility but a certainty once momentum offworld is established. Ultimately Earth becomes a sparsely inhabited adventure tourist destination while uncounted billions thrive in space colonies. With many of these habitats accelerated out of the solar system at a percentage of the speed of light to other stars. World ships.
Unfortunately, O’Neill’s vision depended on state sponsorship of an immense Space Solar Power public works energy project. The Reagan Revolution was the antithesis of any such collective government effort. The present project of a certain wealthy individual to make humankind a “multi-planet species” is also antithetical to O’Neill as Mars was quickly ruled out and considered a dead end early on.
And here we are.
Yeah…Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal…failures like that. The New Deal building highways, bridges, hospitals, colleges. All that is an “outdated model.” While wealth inequality is far beyond anything ever seen in history. All of human history. What you “believe in” is raising the temperature of the planet and may well burn civilization to the ground. That ideology is long past due to be “outdated.”
The basic problem is that those who have everything want the 99 percent that make up the rest of the population to believe that “technology” is more important than “resources.”
Code for money is more important than people. The fundamental resources of a safe place to sleep, clean water, food, medicine….they are what technology is meant to guarantee.
The charity of billionaires will take care of all the unfortunates….riiiiight.
Like trickle-down economics, that is another piece of worn-out propaganda. Those not living in the right-wing echo chamber know what game that is.
“In terms of protection from thievery, money is more important than people who are trying to steal it-“
“Thievery” being taxes of course. And the people stealing it are the poor.
This is the view of the one percent. Not the ninety-nine.
It is very convenient to call the governments that collect taxes corrupt and the problem. Less government means essentially no regulation or taxes and the rich get to do what they want- which is not pay taxes or clean up their messes.
That is the free market scam. And it is wrecking the planet. The best example of this is the Koch brothers- who paid millions over the years, a tiny investment to them, to convince the world that climate change is a hoax.
See how that works?
“-liberty and capitalism are the same thing.”
No hope for you. Have a good day.
Go on Fox News when they are discussing “Freedom” and you can almost always substitute the word “Greed” and the conversation makes perfect sense. Those conversations are most often demonizing taxes or a social program.
Non-Greed based economic systems, like those found in the Nordic Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
– are not neo-feudal. In fact, they score higher than the U.S. in almost every measure of quality of life.
Again….Have a good day.
“It also directs $110 million of that funding to nuclear thermal propulsion development, which was not included in the administration’s proposal.”
NTR’s, at great expense, using a reaction one million times more powerful than chemicals, approximately double the Isp. It is an incredible waste. Nuclear Pulse is the only practical system for a long time to come.
LEO, like Mars, is a dead end in terms of Human Space Flight. All resources should be directed at the Moon. The problem is that any unshielded human crewed platform like the Gateway is the equivalent of a boy scout canoe in the North Atlantic when outside of LEO. To establish a permanent human presence, I would guess the best option, outside of finding a convenient lava tube, is to use a small crater and robot lander to construct a shielded habitat. This might serve to make a human-crewed lander more of a priority:
“The omnibus bill includes $1.195 billion for NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program to develop a lunar lander version of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle for the Artemis 3 and potentially future missions. That is the funding NASA requested, although House offered $150 million more and the Senate $100 million more in their individual bills.”
The starship is the most bizarre lander possible. What a mess.
Well…artificial gravity is a requirement but so is a cosmic ray shield, which would be massive, but there is nothing to be said about that. Or it being in LEO, which is a dead end. Or it pandering to billionaut tourists, which is a dead end. Or what it is going to manufacture, which is nothing since there are no products in close to half a century from space stations. As for the mentioned “Gravity Ring”; any rotation close to 3 R.P.M. is very likely not going to be tolerable and going with a conservative 1 R.P.M. the “ring” would be over a mile in diameter. This is actually the way it is going to happen…two multi-thousand ton masses spinning around each other using a approximately kilometer long structure or tether and likely a combined light stabilizing structure and tether system. The main obstacle is where to get the massive amount of water shielding. Bringing water derived from lunar ice up from the Moon requires 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth. And then, back to what is it going to manufacture- the answer to that might be gravity itself. Factory workers on the Moon, or rather under the Moon, in subsurface lunar industry, may need to go up into Lunar orbit periodically to rehabilitate with one gravity. What are those factories on the Moon making? Space Solar Power components as the solution to climate change.
I am actually not happy to see this for several reasons. It is extremely difficult to “divert” heavy nuclei GCR and this is, as they state, only a half measure.
And “the Halbach Torus” is going to be endlessly hyped as the solution to radiation when it has a low probability of even halfway providing the required protection.
The “Guaranteed to work” solution, described by Eugene Parker (the “Parker Minimum”) is 5 meters of water.
Medusa is the really practical solar sail they could use to take humans to the outer solar system within a ten year apollo time frame. It just doesn’t use our sun and instead relies on tiny momentary suns.
Look at what got us there the first time: a hypergolic pressure fed ablative thrust chamber two stage lander, with a variable thrust landing stage and a second, even simpler, ascent/abort stage. The absolute simplest and most reliable construct possible. Because it had to work.
This time it is going to have to work also. And that 14 story office building has got to do it all, everything the whole Apollo stack did. And we don’t even have any cryocooler hardware yet….or the fleet of tankers to even make this possible. It is a tremendous project compared to a more conventional design like Altair was. Just saying.
So you work in space…and get exposed to radiation often enough. And there is a lifetime dose and if you are a young female that dose is different and exposure accrues…year after year. Living for years, year after year away from Earth and outside of LEO, if you are in that near sea level Earth environment those frequent short term exposures are not a problem because your body can repair itself- to a certain extent.. But if you are already living, 24/7, in an environment where you are constantly getting dosed, it all falls apart very quickly. And humankind as a species is simply not going to go offworld, into an environment that is harmful in that way. If you are young, female, have any notion of bearing children, or imagine children growing up….it is not going to happen. That is why it is “Orwellian” to say GCR exposure is “acceptable” for humans in space. It is the “calling the opposite the truth” which is one meaning of the term “Orwellian.”
That is the best I can do for you Tom. Have a good day.
Well, that is the thing….depending on how you define it, it would not be a “spacecraft”, it would be a “Spaceship.”
I would classify a vehicle with the required massive cosmic ray water shield AND a tether-generated artificial gravity system, providing a near sea level radiation and one gravity environment, AND with a nuclear propulsion system to propel it- since chemicals are essentially useless for those tens of thousands of tons- as a Space-ship.
Likewise, I would classify something with that shielding and artificial gravity but no nuclear propulsion as a Space-station.
A Lunar Cycler is a problem to classify because it might just use a nuclear tug to get it going and rely on periodic rendezvous or some kind of solar electric system to keep “Cycling.”
But, vehicles without the water shield or tether system and chemically propelled, or even NTR propelled, would be classified as Space-craft. What we call a space station now would more properly be a “platform.”
If that is a non-starter than Human Space Flight is a non-starter because that is what we have to have to send people Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit.
I appreciate your civilized discourse. The shiny is actually very striking and beautiful in a sci-fi sort of way. Setting aside the “super heavy”, which is not so striking, I have to say though it is just another Shuttle, except it is bigger and brings the external tank back with it, at a huge penalty in lift. And like the Shuttle, I do not see it being successful…as anything but a second stage. The problem with stacking a third stage on top is obvious- it can only be so tall. If as a second stage Starship could put a third stage with an escape tower/capsule and close to the size of the Apollo stack into LEO, if I recall that was a little under 60 tons, I would be happy with it. Still not a Musk fan, but I would be supporting that particular project.
I claimed “Near Sea Level”, or rather, the expert, Dr. Eugene Parker, specified 5500 meters (about 18,000 feet). The “reality” is that what you get on Earth is not what you get in space. The particles might be measured at a certain energy and mass and summed as Sv but the effects are different. http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/pu…
No…I said “Near Sea Level” and Eugene Parker specifies the same protection that the Earth’s atmosphere provides at 5500 meters, about 18,000 feet.
The data on Ramsar is inconclusive- a very small pull and not very meaningful anyway in regards to something like a Mars mission. You stick with it though. I know you will. Your dogma demands it and you cannot admit anything except the NewSpace trivialization of this problem. Good luck.
Do you know how to stop? You tried to use that to promote your company and now your point is….what?
Could it be, like a good fanboy, you are just trying to fill up the page in hopes that these unfortunate comments casting doubt on your hero go unnoticed? It seems any thread where such comments appear are quickly flooded with pictures of dogs and cartoons and long bloviating analogies.
I believe the best way to get people to and from the Moon is with shielded Lunar Cyclers. Intercepted from Earth they quickly exchange passengers and the same exchange occurs in the closest pass to the Moon. From Earth it would likely be some model of capsule and from the Moon a Lunar Lander. It is obvious how that would work from Earth but from the Moon it could be done a couple different ways. But that is later and we have to start somewhere.
Robot Landers….deriving water from lunar ice, processing some of that water into propellants, and shuttling that water up to large empty stages in lunar orbit, might be what is needed long before any humans are sent there. It might take a couple or more years with robots first. Once we have these massive containers of water, with a crew compartment in the center, everything becomes much easier. I will let the subject of zero G debilitation rest and concede addressing that problem might take several more years- but not having to worry about solar events and having water to make breathable oxygen and propellants out of is the way to start.
So I would say we should be focusing on that first- setting up a place people can survive despite radiation or any possible solar event. When we have that…THEN SEND PEOPLE.
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. The critical element of the system has been tested over 1000 times. It has an Isp an order of magnitude (and this is not Musk hyperbole) greater than NTR’s. Truth.
Trying to contain a reaction a million times more powerful than chemicals when it is difficult just keeping chemical rockets from melting, is an exercise in futility. At incredible expense, you get comparatively little improvement.
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. The critical element of the NPP system has been tested over 1000 times. It has an Isp an order of magnitude (and this is not Musk hyperbole) greater than NTR’s. Truth.
Trying to contain a reaction a million times more powerful than chemicals when it is difficult just keeping chemical rockets from melting, is an exercise in futility. At incredible expense, you get comparatively little improvement. NTR’s are a dead end.
People like von Braun with wet workshops. Freeman Dyson with Nuclear Pulse, Eugene Parker with radiation shielding, Paul Spudis with Lunar Resources, and Gerard K. O’Neill with Space Solar Power, had all we need to know figured out long before the SpaceX wunderkind decided he knew it all. The world is slowly being dragged, kicking and screaming, as with the Lunar return, which was verboten for years, toward the realization that NewSpace is the wrong path.
Ice on the Moon 