I call it the Parker Dyson Spudis Continuum. All of them died recently. Eugene Parker determined that a 5 meter layer of water is required to shield space travelers from cosmic radiation. Freeman Dyson validated the concept of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion with his work on Project Orion. Paul Spudis discovered the first real evidence for ice on the Moon. The thousands of tons of water lifted from the Moon and Nuclear Pulse Propulsion is the only practical way to push that massive radiation shield around the solar system.
The ocean moons of the gas and ice giants are the places to take submarines to explore. Mars is a rock, and like LEO, a complete dead end.
The big engines are about getting to the Moon to get the water, or rather, getting double-hulled wet workshops (“Fat Workshops”) to the Moon to fill their cosmic ray shields, which is step one.
The Moon was thought to be dry during Apollo and this was one of the reasons a Moonbase was not considered feasible. What my psychopath cyberstalker is forgetting is that there IS ice on the Moon. Estimates have gone up and down over the last decade. Perhaps not enough to build propellant factories but more than enough to support a base…and provide shielding for Space Stations, Lunar Cyclers, and true Spaceships.
Mars, on the other hand, may have ice, but it is far away and at the bottom of a gravity well twice as deep as the Moon. It is not a second home for humankind because we evolved in one gravity. It also has less than half the solar energy resources of the Earth Moon system. It will require massively shielded nuclear propelled (not nuclear thermal) artificial gravity equipped Spaceships to get to Mars. The shiny is not going and we are not going to live there anyway.
With over a hundred thousand satellites in LEO, in various megaconstellations, “conjunctions”-as a certain percentage malfunction, or are commanded to reenter and do not do so precisely, or various other scenarios, are why this whole mess should never have been allowed.
As satellites go up to replace or service this enormous number or come back down they must cross the orbits of the ones in orbit. This means inevitable collisions and an increase in debris as more collisions happen. Not sustainable. Strike one.
Strike two is the militarization of these constellations which will radically increase the likelihood of conflict and escalation and the risk of nuclear war.
Strike three is the amount of contamination from rocket exhaust and reentry byproducts in the upper atmosphere.
The best possible scenario is severe restrictions on the number of satellites in Earth orbit before the situation becomes disastrous. Megaconstellations will go down in history as the worst idea of the early 21st century, from the guy who called Space Solar Power “the stupidest thing ever”, advised not panicking over COVID or Climate Change, and set loose not-seez on Twitter.
Ice on the Moon 