“The budget proposal includes $822 million for Mars Sample Return-“
“The proposal includes $224 million for development of commercial space stations-“
Over a billion dollars, and add another 3 billion for the space station to nowhere.
4 billion dollars that is not pointed at a lunar return.
“President Joe Biden’s administration is announcing billions in new funding for climate, clean energy and environmental justice programs as part of the President’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023.
Several environmental and science agencies would see significant funding boosts if Congress approves Biden’s budget proposal, shared first with CNN.
The US Department of Energy would receive $48.2 billion, the Environmental Protection Agency would receive $11.9 billion and the US Department of Interior would get $17.6 billion — all significant funding increases from the Trump-era funding levels each agency started with when Biden came into office.”
Take just one third of that funding, about 25 billion, and double NASA’s budget with that entire 25 billion dedicated to the establishment of a cislunar infrastructure enabling Space Solar Power as the solution to climate change.
Just for starters.
The abort system is a bad design anyway. I was wondering if they were just going to modify the toxic dragon and mount it in the Starship in some way so it would have some kind of escape system.
There is simply no way Starship is going to be human-rated without something like that.
Some version of it was also a far more likely lunar lander than the 14 story office building.
The best course would have been to strip out the hypergolics and add an escape tower. With a human-rated FH and a high energy upper stage it could probably go around the Moon.
But Elon don’t like hydrogen so…
Starship as a second stage, with the “Super Heavy” as two shorter boosters mounted on either side, with a third stage stacked on top of Starships nose- would be the best configuration. No need for any escape system if the Starship is all propellent. But this was not to be. Too bad.
Kind of sad when one considers a third stage carrying a pair of Dragons- one with an escape tower and the other modified as a lunar lander. A far more practical scheme than what is being pursued. Again…too bad.
Elon has his own vision and the Moon was never a part of it. The whole Moon thing is something they want to suck up NASA dollars with while they build Starlink. Only Starlink really matters because Elon is gambling, and it is a gamble he will likely lose, that he can take over planet Earth’s internet and pocket all that money humankind now spends on terrestrial broadband.
Classic Enron gambling….like a drunk sailor in an indian casino that thinks he will own the place by the end of the evening.
Walmart…why are the shelves not filled with products made by American companies with 200 employees each- if all our companies went to automation?
What you are doing is lying in that way the Neoliberals have perfected over the course of a century of “explaining” their system of making money the god of this world and ignoring human beings. The American worker has been screwed over by corporations who are un-American psychopathic entities actually having personhood status under the law- which was corruptly voted into existence by Neoliberals. The ones and zeros have been gambled and used to avoid taxes to the extent that cheap labor and financial instruments have made America mostly a “money market” which is to say, not a market at all, but a swindle. Most of what industry we do have is either based on defense or used as a way to launder the rest. The service industry pays barely enough for people to survive on, which is wage slavery. The few legitimate industries are held up as a distractor. Wealth inequality is astronomically high and taxes on the rich are incredibly low. Exactly what Neoliberalism is about. Exactly what you are about. It is a game that consists mainly of telling stories with made-up numbers that justify the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The big hammer I have been repeatedly hit over the head with is…people have never been better off, what are you complaining about? My last job I was working 13 hour shifts, mandatory overtime, and could not take time off without months of notice in advance, and barely keeping up with my bills – and that is America for 8 out of 10 of us. A rapidly shrinking middle class will bump that up to 9 out of 10 soon enough. Now…you can come up with some more propaganda to argue against everything I just wrote. There are libraries of it to draw from. Right wing think tanks. In the end it is really about one package deal: Evading taxes and regulation and ending all entitlements except for the wealthy.
What any one person has seen “directly” is like saying I know the world is flat- I have seen this directly. And yes, there are people who believe the world is flat. Are they lying?
See how that works? The key word in our discussion is JOBS. The word being used deceitfully is PRODUCTION. If automation has made everything so wonderful then why are people working such horrendous hours for so little money? Jobs and production are terms completely predicated on quality of life. That some are demi-gods sailing the oceans on yachts or flying across oceans on their private jets while most of the human race is thousands of times below that standard, as if we are billions of bugs compared to a few magnificent pachyderms gracing us with their droppings…is what I have personally seen directly and that is not voodoo.
Neoliberalism.
“Horse buggy being displaced by cars is creative destruction.”
Creative destruction in the Neoliberal sense is not automation, it is predation. Neoliberalism does not distinguish between the two, it only recognizes profits generated by commodities. That is their religion and human beings are way down the list of anything that has meaning. Keynesian economics, which you mentioned, is the sworn enemy of Neoliberalism because it places welfare of human beings first. That is blasphemy to a purely market driven system which holds as dogma that “The Market” is the only generator of anything good and all else is evil.
Now that is the truth. What to do is what The New Deal did; tax billionaires and corporate shareholder profits at over 90 percent and sink that money into infrastructure and social safety nets, not megayachts and offshore accounts. The Reagan Revolution ended the New Deal. The confusion is that most democrats now are really on the right and even call themselves “capitalists.”
Progressives are a minority. Only fear of the guillotine makes them notable.
Fusion is essentially putting a star inside a box and is not likely to be practical. Really…it is just not going to work well enough to use it for commercial power. If fission is not really economical compared to renewable energy then fusion is a non-starter. It is one of a list of projects that vested interests have made fortunes off of by promoting it. Missile defense being another one that was never going to work due to physics yet still absorbs mountains of money. We see the same basic mechanism with Nuclear Thermal Rockets which try to contain energies that melt all matter like butter. But there seems to be plenty of money to be made promoting it instead of the politically problematic and far superior Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. I do not know a lot about OTEC except that the environmental consequences would most likely be catastrophic. Changing the temperature of the ocean is sure to bring unforeseen negative consequences. We are presently dealing with an impending catastrophe due to heating up the atmosphere and doing essentially the same to the ocean….does not get my vote.
A relatively narrow beam of microwave radiation, that does not appreciably warm the atmosphere, hitting an antennae field, out of all the ways to generate tremendous amounts of electrical energy, since it comes down from space, appears to be the least harmful. I will absolutely admit there is the possibility it may have an unforeseen effect on the atmosphere. But considering how much cosmic radiation and other types of energy bombard the Earth this is unlikely to be a show-stopper. Unlikely, but not impossible.
As for a single-point being a weakness, Wind turbines and solar panels are back-ups, and my own favorite, which has trouble right now competing with solar panels due to start-up costs, is solar thermal with molten salt energy storage. Green Ammonia, which runs internal combustions systems amenable to filtering out nitrous oxide (like piston engines) is a way to store and transport energy like we do with fossil fuels right now- without generating any greenhouse gases. But it does not work on things like jet engines or rockets due to not being able to keep the exhaust clean.
Ice on the Moon 