Ice on the Moon

“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.

The original comment was deleted so some of the verbage has changed- to be less offensive to the Musk Cult- and reposted:

I don’t know how spending money on LEO stations can be justified, especially if they are going to be “commercial” since there is no ROI for anything but government research. It has always been a sad fact that the Space Shuttles, with solar panels and life support pallets, could stay up as long as needed. Entire lab modules could be swapped from one shuttle to another if necessary. The ISS was never anything but a huge waste of time and resources and should be deorbited as soon as practical. The supposed 100 ton payload of the shiny would make it better than any inflatable LEO crewed platform.

The Moon is the place to establish a permanent human presence. A “true” space station, with a massive cosmic ray shield using water derived from lunar ice and tether generated artificial gravity is the next step. Even if it takes several years to fill up “Fat Workshops” using robot landers, having these shielded habitats available will allow astronauts to go on year long deployments without career-ending dosing or debilitation. In fact, if they experienced no radiation mishaps, with Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G) crew compartments they might be able to spend a full 20 years of regular space deployments without reaching a lifetime dose or unacceptable bone/muscle loss and debilitation.

The logical progression is robot lunar landers filling up these upper stage wet workshops in Frozen Low Lunar Orbit (FLLO) with lunar water and only when they have full shields sending human missions.=======================================

That “national commitment to solar power” is of course the key. That is the “product.” That is what is going to expand humankind into the solar system and beyond. There is really nothing else except some vague snake oil pitch to make humans a “multi-planet species.” Except, Earth is the only planet suitable for colonization. We will have to manufacture artificial worlds to colonize space. Only Climate Change makes Space, by way of Space Solar Power, an urgent project.

I should have specified: LEO is a dead end for Human Space Flight. Comparing LEO as a duck pond and Deep Space as the North Atlantic is appropriate. I see our present situation as trying to negotiate an ocean with a canoe. We have not even figured out how to make a kayak yet really. What is required to travel in space, even across the small local cislunar sea to the Moon, is a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G). The lunar resource of intrinsic value is water derived from ice that can be lifted into space to fill cosmic ray water shields using 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth.

“I don’t think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That it would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind,” Musk said. “They just die. So, if they don’t die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn’t advance.”

Elon is getting more and more bizarre and likely will not be running spacex much longer. Someone that keeps adding to a lengthy list of really messed up statements is not going to last.

Anyone can see the gears turning in this kind of mind….useless eaters needing to be eliminated is not far away. Of course, what is most disturbing of all is the fan club. So much like Trumpists.

I joined the Army in 1980 and at that time there were over 60,000 nuclear warheads ready to incinerate the Soviet Union and the United States. Anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan, now only remembered for the tv series Cosmos, testified before congress that nuclear war would fill the atmosphere with so much smoke and particulates that a “nuclear winter” would ensue and most of the human race would die of starvation. Of all the historical events I have witnessed in my life, the most memorable was the night of 27 September, 1991. I had left the Army years before and joined the Coast Guard and had duty that night and went up to the command center to check on the progress of a SAR case. Bush was on TV informing the public he was taking the B-52’s off alert. And we all knew this meant that the cold war, that millions of us thought civilization would not survive, was over. I tell people this affected me more than 911 and they don’t understand. They did not live that decade in the military waiting for the end of the world like I did. And now…I am worried again. There are still more than enough missiles ready to burn down civilization. At the push of a button.

The world we live in is fragile. Billions of people will die of starvation if the global transportation infrastructure is disrupted. Very few realize how easily that could happen.

“Initially, NASA considered adding a second EDO pallet to Endeavour, placed in front of the first, for a total of thirteen tank sets, that would have allowed an orbiter to remain in space for 28 days, but managers decided against it when the International Space Station assembly began, and instead removed the EDO capability from the orbiter, to reduce its weight and allow it to carry more cargo to the ISS.[1][5]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

That never-completely-filled cargo bay of dreams had room and payload for more pallets. And another orbiter could bring more pallets up, or a laboratory module could be swapped over to the other cargo bay with the arm. Solar panels would have extended endurance even longer, probably to about 4 months with added pallets and enough room for science experiments. Like I said. Not what you said.

As for lifting water into orbit- for every ton of water that can be lifted into space from Earth, 20 to 25 tons can be lifted from the Moon into space for the same energy. No “mine” required; the ice is just below the surface, with evidence indicating sheets and quantities of millions of tons.

The comments on several forums are being censored and disappearing. It was a good run but it appears to be over. The SpaceX fan club has hijacked it all.

A few are still going up but that is likely to end. They will continue to be posted here as they appear but may not stay on the original forums for very long:

Hope it was worth it to him. He has significantly raised his risk of cancer and permanently damaged his body with this mission.

Until a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G) is established as a requirement for space stations, Lunar Cyclers, and Spaceships, Human Space Flight Beyond Low Earth Orbit (HSF-BLEO) is going nowhere.

The path to meeting that requirement are “Fat Workshops” placed in lunar orbit and robot landers filling them with lunar-ice-derived water. When these shielded habitats are ready then Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) can begin with a permanent human presence in cislunar space.

A very interesting design but not for any space launch applications. As a commercial passenger carrier with a passenger pod designed to separate from the carrier aircraft in the event of allow the passengers to survive…..I think this is technology the Stratolaunch aircraft should be testing, Along with that, I would say using liquid hydrogen is also a technology that should be tested. The volume in the two fuselages might be enough LH2 storage to give it sufficient range. An end to airline disasters would be a worthy goal.

I don’t know how spending money on LEO stations can be justified, especially if they are going to be “commercial” since there is no ROI with these money holes. It has always been a sad fact that the Space Shuttles, with extra life support pallets, could stay up as long as needed. Entire lab modules could be swapped from one shuttle to another if necessary. The ISS was never anything but a huge waste of time and resources and should be deorbited as soon as practical.

The Moon is the place to establish a permanent human presence. A “true” space station, with a massive cosmic ray shield using water derived from lunar ice and tether generated artificial gravity is the next step. Even if it takes several years to fill up “Fat Workshops” using robot landers, having these shielded habitats avialable will allow astronauts to go on year long deployments without career-ending dosing or debilitation.

The logical progression is robot lunar landers filling up these upper stage wet workshops in Frozen Low Lunar Orbit (FLLO) with lunar water and only when they have full shields sending human missions.

Not great news for those of us who want the space station to nowhere to end so those resources can be focused on a lunar return.

I expect the possibility of a Super Heavy detonating is just too much for anyone to sign off on. I doubt anyone in the FAA will risk being blamed for the equivalent of a nuclear weapon going off in Boca Chica.

I expect the possibility of a Super Heavy detonating is just too much for anyone to sign off on. I doubt anyone in the FAA will risk being blamed for the equivalent of a nuclear weapon going off in Boca Chica.

The time to avoid “the menace of space debris” was when megaconstellations were first proposed. When the people with oversight responsibility failed to stop tens of thousands of pieces of space junk from going up a disaster was inevitable.

The only possible reason to accept the risk of a megaconstellation would be to solve the biggest challenge facing human civilization; climate change. Space Solar Power is the only appropriate role of a megaconstellation. Low latency for gamers has to be the worst possible reason to allow this menace to civilization.

“-to explore the Moon and Mars, address climate change,-“

Well, two out of three ain’t bad…Mars, like LEO, is a dead end.

The Moon should be the focus of the space agency, as a way to solve climate change by using lunar resources to enable space solar power. A significant percentage of the DOD budget, at least 10 percent (70 billion dollars) should be directed at a program of monthly launches of 150 ton+ payload SHLV’s. The primary goal of the space agency should be to industrialize the Moon and accomplish energy delivery to Earth allowing a western standard of living for 10 billion by the end of the century.

The 100 billion minimum budget should be matched by international contributions and another 50 billion by industry. In fact, by making industrial concerns aware of future restrictions on the use of fossil fuel energy, they will likely, with very little enticement, contribute more than that. With a quarter of a trillion dollar annual budget, just for starters, the solution to climate change will finally be “addressed.”

The new Military Industrial Complex swindle….proliferation of a satellite cold war. Much like the cold war that peaked in the 80’s, and made me and millions of others fairly certain civilization was about to end, instead of 64,000 nuclear weapons (1986) we will have over 90,000 satellites in megaconstellations within ten years. They are not nuclear weapons but, unfortunately, they vastly increase the risk of a nuclear exchange with the present stockpile, which is more than sufficient to incinerate every large city on Earth and precipitate a nuclear winter and death by starvation of the majority of the world’s population.

Way too many engines. Poor design. They would do better to try and build fewer and larger engines. The chopstick recovery is also something they should never have entertained. The whole multiple small engine philosophy is a farce. It is simply trying to go cheap by not building bigger engines. Much of what SpaceX has accomplished has been over-hyped and the Starship is likely the hubris that will undo them. Not optimistic.

Perhaps signing off on a vehicle that may explode with the power of a nuclear weapon made by a company that actually believes in blowing up test articles is a little too much for anyone with oversight to take responsibility for.

Separating the vehicle into two boosters and the orbiter, with fewer larger engines, might have allowed it to be possibly launched from an offshore platform. Elon might want to rethink the chopsticks also.
Not optimistic. In fact…skeptical.

I would suggest this company look into the Medusa concept using nuclear devices to push a “spinnaker” equipped spaceship. What is needed is a low mass device several thousand feet in diameter that can withstand the plasma pulse generated by a directed energy device of the kind researched by the Strategic Defense Initiative program of the Reagan Years. There is perhaps a “sweet spot” in the physics that will allow such a sail to efficiently utilize the energies and enable human missions to the outer solar system. Testing such designs in scaled down form in space may be the niche this company is looking for. The more compact the sail can be folded and stored, and sections of it joined together, would all make such a system more practical and perhaps make Gama a revolutionary and history making company.

Nuclear Thermal is a dead end.
For a reaction a million times more powerful than chemicals a little more than double the Isp.
For great expense the result is not proportional and a tremendous waste of resources.

Stan Ulam, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, realized that it was hard enough keeping a chemical rocket from melting and trying to contain nuclear energy was pointless. He thought outside that box and developed the concept of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, and he considered it his greatest work.
Nuclear Pulse has always been the only viable path to Interplanetary Travel, and will be for a long time to come:

It is no use discussing this with fanboys because they have been programmed to mock and denigrate the concept of Nuclear Pulse. Entrepreneurs will never be allowed possession of nuclear pulse devices- only governments will have control and that is blasphemy to the NewSpace Cult.

Unfortunately, the originally specified pressure-fed ocean-recovered boosters were and are the key to a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle program. Being pressure-fed they would be tough enough to land in the ocean with parachutes and could take a great deal of abuse. Likely built like nuclear submarines pressure hulls. But that did not happen and nobody is looking at it now. As a second stage the Starship might work well. But there is a practical limit to how tall it can be and adding a third stage to it’s present configuration is not going to work.

It is just not good any way you look at it.

“-programmed to mock and denigrate the concept of Nuclear Pulse-“

NSWR instantly became the worst nuclear propulsion design ever proposed. Where almost nothing can go wrong with Pulse, the NSWR is dangerous and unworkable in every way.
Only Bob Zubrin could make the case for blowing up a spaceship with it.
The NSWR makes almost as little sense as going to Mars.

Nuclear Pulse is mocked and denigrated by NewSpace for several reasons, the main one being it is not and cannot be a SpaceX product. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion “evokes” admiration for the scientific genius of people like Stanislaw Ulam, Freeman Dyson, Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and even anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan, ALL of whom either helped develop or endorsed Nuclear Pulse Propulsion.

Sarcasm and nonsense verbage, troll-smile emoticon juvenile garbage; this is what scientifically ignorant fanboys do. And do so well.

Nuclear Pulse is mocked and denigrated by NewSpace for several reasons, the main one being it is not a SpaceX product. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion “evokes” admiration for the scientific genius of people like Stanislaw Ulam, Freeman Dyson, Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and even anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan, ALL of whom either helped develop or endorsed Nuclear Pulse Propulsion.

Sarcasm and nonsense verbage, troll-smile emoticon juvenile garbage; this is what scientifically ignorant fanboys do. And do so well.

Perhaps this is a foot-in-the-door for this company because they know Nuclear Thermal is a very inefficient way to use nuclear energy for space propulsion. The name of the company might be a hint they have other things in mind. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars is the key to super-efficient nuclear space propulsion:
https://iceonthemoon.org/th…

https://sgp.fas.org/othergo…

Yes….it does not look to be practical at all. Confining that kind of a continuous nuclear reaction is a huge challenge and the penalty for failure is over-the-top horrible any way you look at it. Nuclear Thermal has to be kept down to such low temperatures that the Isp is super low for such a large investment. The saltwater rocket is an order of magnitude more difficult to make work than Nuclear Thermal and will likely cost an order of magnitude more but is simply too hazardous to be practical. Formulating the saltwater “fuel”, let alone making the actual engine work, is a nightmare.
Non-starter.

Nuclear Pulse, on the other hand, has always been the gold standard and go-to as being almost guaranteed to succeed. And really, with the trillions spent on this technology, and over a thousand actual tests, it is as close to guaranteed as it gets.

A sufficiently gargantuan Space Solar Energy infrastructure can beam-propel a world-ship out of our solar system at some percentage of the speed of light. And that ship can slow down when it reaches it’s destination star centuries in the future by using H-bombs. So we can actually possibly build starships now with present technology. Have to turn the Moon into a mega-factory first of course. The real trick is freezing people, which would make a world-ship much smaller and far more practical. Freezing people without damage is actually not that big of a technical challenge. Though massively shielded, just the particles already present in cells would necessitate reviving passengers every so many years for a few months for cellular self-repair. So for a voyage of several centuries the passenger might age a few years.

A new Earth is not really required for humans to expand into the galaxy. A sufficiently resource rich asteroid belt/Kuiper belt would allow humans to construct artificial hollow spinning moons and support populations in the tens of billions.

Not really open to that “possibility.” There is just too much hype following SpaceX claims. An unbiased look at what they have accomplished reveals they have not worked any miracles. Elon’s people have done some good work that the great one takes credit for but much of what they are doing now is bound to fail…and fail badly. The shiny is essentially a stainless Shuttle external tank with some fins, heat tiles, and some engines. A computer program lets it land vertically.

It uses a booster with far too many engines and sacrifices a huge amount of lift to bring all that structure back. No escape system. And the list goes on.

I have to believe that at some point in the near future climate change is going to become the big issue for the human race. It will also become clear that it will be necessary to provide a western standard of living for a population of close to 10 billion. And the third step will be the determination that there is only one possible solution: Space Solar Power by way of Lunar Resources. When this happens, everything will suddenly be about Super Heavy Lift Vehicles sending payloads to the Moon. And we only have one. As for the other one, I also foresee Starlink failing which means Starship is not going to be around.

The boosters will be replaced with more powerful liquid reusables. The RS-25’s will be mounted on a module with a heat shield and be recovered for reuse. And since it will likely double its flight rate every couple years, that will drive costs down.

“A plant that employed 20,000 workers making auto glass, would employ barely 200 today. Thus, our economy rolled jobs over into services.”

Nice story but it does not explain why we do not have those factories with 200 people in them.
It is because those factories are not in America. Because, as I said, those companies chose profit over the American worker.

Your statement that “American manufacturing never shrank” is absurd except in a very limited and cherry-picked misleading sense. Exactly how Neoliberals con the population into making themselves poorer and the rich ever more fantastically and obscenely wealthy.

Directions change. As a matter of record, directions change to places like the Moon when such a destination was verboten for many years. Shouted from the highest rooftops that NewSpace was going to make Mars the second home of humankind with tourists, the F9, and depots.

And here we are…going to the Moon with a big rocket and government employees. It is not a shame at all. What is sad is the toxic ideology working directly against humankind expanding into the solar system and the deluded legion of fanboys actually cheering on the end of Human Space Flight while believing they are doing the opposite.

LEO stopped being space in 1968 when Apollo 8 “moved the goal posts” and flew around the Moon. LEO, like Mars, is a dead end. The cislunar ocean is the next step and bizarre space tourist “missions” like Polaris are simply obscene spending displays resulting in faux astronaut wings.

“-core stage production is impossible to ramp up-“

“-wouldn’t get production rate to any point close to that required to reduce the unit cost.”

“-not that there’s going to be any money forthcoming to do that-“

“Starship is already past the point where it can fail in comparison to SLS.”

“-SLS-Orion dead-enders may perhaps cause the SLS to be flown – briefly, one hopes-“

The shiny is being built to place tens of thousands of satellites into LEO and if that megaconstellation fails, which seems likely since there are not enough customers to support it, then there will be no shiny Starship. Just like there are no Shuttles anymore.

The SLS was specifically designed to go to the Moon without a fleet of Super Heavy Lift Tanker missions enabling it. All by itself. We had better make it work.

For finished goods like….all the stuff in Walmart? The Military Industrial Complex makes a tremendous profit for shareholders. The benefit to society in terms of “goods” is almost nil.

This cherry-picking and spinning of factoids are all well-known tricks that obfuscate, misdirect, mislead, and misinform. The truth is in wealth inequality, the debt Americans hold, medical bankruptcy, school loan debt, etc.

“For less than one SLS/Orion mission NASA will get the full development and two flights from lunar starship.”

“Will get” is not now. The battle cry of “cost plus” and the endless disparaging descriptors do not remove the SLS from the launch pad….now.

The fanboys screaming death-to-SLS are a happy fact to the many who want no NASA and no Human Space Flight. That makes the NewSpace movement, in effect, anti-space, because no “private enterprise” is going to pay for something with no ROI. I will keep saying this.

If someone is working for an organization and is opposed to the flagship program he or she is being paid to support and even spends an inordinate amount of time criticizing it anonymously on internet forums, ethical issues are definitely a problem. In the military we would occasionally have someone that, for whatever reason, did not want operations to go well and would sometimes actually make sure they did not go well. They usually ended up discharged. I can’t stand that kind of duplicity. It makes me sick to my stomach…especially when it involves national prestige and our future in space. I have on several occasions interacted with self-identified NASA employees on forums who were essentially double agents for a certain company. It is a feature of NewSpace ideology which is Neoliberal in nature and without any moral compass or integrity.

I will say this…. whether the many here commenting are NASA-bashing out of “patriotism” or in the interest of promoting a private company or are just projecting their anti-tax/anti-government worldview onto space exploration and actually want state-sponsored Human Space Flight to end, the result WILL be the end of Human Space Flight if their intentions are realized.
I don’t want that.

Those who believe space tourism or asteroid mining or retirement condos on Mars are going to expand humankind into the solar system are living in a fantasy world. That SLS is no fantasy.

“There are very few people saying dismantle NASA and hand it over to commercial companies,-“

“-NASA has no business directly managing heavy lift anymore.”

“-spend the money on fuel depots and the rockets that are already funded and have to make sense financially because they have to compete not just for government payloads but for commercial payloads too.”

“-gets rid of the pork project-“

Nothing is going to the Moon except SLS.
I could spend a half hour or so and cut and past up to a hundred comments from SpaceX fanboys saying almost exactly what you say “very few people are saying.” I know because I have read them, year after year. Hundreds of them saying that NewSpace and the profit motive is all that is required and government space programs are “pork” that just waste money.

The game being played is transparent to anyone that has been paying attention.
SpaceX fanboys are not fooling anyone who knows anything about space.

That you know so little about radiation is telling. It is the atmosphere extending up from the surface of the Earth that stops most of this kind of cosmic radiation. Not the magnetic field of Earth. Using a magnetic field would require far more energy. Eugene Parker had concerns about both and since he is the world recognized authority on this subject I will take his advice over yours. Your “concerns” about my comment are noted.

“To stop them (heavy nuclei) within the space of a few meters, a shield would have to have a magnetic field of 20 teslas, or about 600,000 times the strength of Earth’s field at the equator. So strong a field requires an electromagnet constructed with superconducting wires, akin to those used in particle accelerators. The astronauts would have to endure a magnetic field of 20 teslas, and no one knows what the biological effects would be. The late John Marshall, a University of Chicago experimental physicist, remarked to me many years ago that when he stuck his head in a 0.5-tesla field in the gap of an old particle accelerator magnet, any motion of his head produced tiny flashes of light in his eyes and an acid taste in his mouth, presumably caused by electrolysis in his saliva.”

Parker goes on to add, “-engineers may have to cancel out the field within the living quarters using an opposing electromagnet. A secondary magnet clearly makes the system more complicated and more massive.”

No, I was not under that impression, but due to the ISS being a spacex cash cow it certainly qualifies as a NewSpace project now…which is why fanboys become so upset when anyone rightfully criticizes LEO “space stations” as a dead end.

NewSpace self-identifies as a profit-driven ideology and there is zero profit in human-crewed LEO platforms. The billions required to maintain one do not yield a ROI. The space tourist fantasy is one of the original tenets of NewSpace, but as I stated, nobody will pay when it is realized “the great adventure is essentially floating in a radiation bath and vomiting while looking out a window.”

Only government will spend on human space exploration. NewSpace ideology is inherently a contradiction, a swindle. A lie. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

600,000 times the strength of Earth’s field seems quite likely to have “injurious long-term effects. MRI machines are typically 1 tesla, and that is what a crane magnet uses to pick up 4 tons of metal. Living in a field 20 times as powerful a person would have to remove metal objects and any metal inside the body would be a disqualifier. As Parker notes, another superconductive magnet system would likely be required to cancel out this field, all of which would affect the other systems and materials in the vehicle. And it is not guaranteed to work like water shielding. A non-starter.

Polyethylene being used for rad shielding because it “would not leak” is not likely as water is utilitarian, that is, it can be used for many things. This more than makes up for the greater mass.

“Optimizing” for less mass would mean vastly increasing complexity and limiting the availability of a critical resource. Not a good “trade-off.” The optimum solution is to have a propulsion system that is not mass sensitive. This seems like a non-sensical statement, but such a system does exist and is available. In fact, the main problem with Nuclear Pulse Propulsion is that only massive spaceships, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of tons, are an efficient use of fissile material. This makes a massive water shield complementary.

“He will continue to do things NASA will find it advantageous to go along with, but NASA will rapidly recede in overall importance as private enterprise in space takes the lead.”

Private enterprise is toxic to space exploration. There is no ROI in human space flight so “private enterprise” is not going. I would consider them anti-space. I have to disagree with you.

“As for new space keeping us trapped in LEO, that is a farcical statement. I mean, seriously?”

And then…the spacex advert. And then…

“-government apathy and ineptitude.”

“-sucking out that life blood via cost plus contracts.”

Your reply shows why I believe NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

The ISS is the spacex cash cow and delivers very little on the taxpayer’s investment. Talking about “sucking out that life blood”? Because it is making money for Spacex…no mention.

For the rocket in competition with SpaceX: literally libraries of death-to-SLS comments over the years. All in the interest of promoting a private company by denigrating the premier U.S. space project. “Cost plus” is the holy battle cry used like a divine hammer to beat down any satanic communist sympathizer.

Private enterprise is toxic to space exploration. There is no ROI in human space flight so “private enterprise” is not going. With Sidemount, we might be back on the Moon by now.
In my opinion NewSpace has set space exploration back at least a decade.

Again, only government will spend on human space exploration. NewSpace ideology is inherently a contradiction, a swindle, a lie.

Actually, the “leading” will be done by NASA. “Business” does not “support”, they are supported by the taxpayer.

Business has no interest in anything that does not have a ROI. Business would never “support” Human Space Flight without government awarding them a profit.

This entire myth that NewSpace has propagated is a lie, a confidence swindle. All designed to use a cult of personality as a P.R. trick. Manipulating the gullible conservatives on the right with red-baiting and a Neoliberal ideology that is toxic, that has largely destroyed the middle class and is wrecking the planet.

Ah yes, the old “orbit is halfway to anywhere” attributed to Heinlein. It is not actually documented exactly what he said and there are various versions. It might have been “Geostationary Orbit is halfway” which would have been more accurate. The original NewSpace dogma of the F9 and miracle depots accomplishing all things and NASA should be dismantled and it all handed over to Musk. I remember. The reality is that going around in circles a couple hundred miles up is going nowhere. LEO, like Mars fantasies, is a dead end. The Moon is the next step and always ways. It was going cheap that turned us away from that prize we never should have taken our eyes off of.
And NewSpace is all about going cheap.

I wonder how many commenting here understand the unrealized damage that is done with the endless NASA-bashing and denigration of America’s premier Human Space Flight project?

If they do understand, there is only one reason they are doing it. To end Human Space Flight.

That shiny 14 story office building is never going to be human-rated without an escape system. Never going anywhere beyond Earth orbit without very powerful large dependable cryocoolers that can maintain hundreds of tons of cryogens. Which do not exist. The reason for the shiny is to haul the tens of thousands of satellites into LEO for Starlink. Except there are simply not enough customers to make it work.

The SLS is likely all we have for a LONG time to come and we better make that work. Figure it out.

The new SpaceNews Comment Policy:

We are a respectful community. Refrain from personal attacks, hate speech and profanity or you will be banned.

“Approximately 130 known dwarf planets inhabit the trans-Neptunian region. Dwarf planets are the most common type of planet in the solar system, far outnumbering giant planets and terrestrial planets. They are also the least explored. Ceres, Pluto, Charon, and Triton (the latter two often considered as both satellites and dwarf planets) remain the only explored dwarf planets,” the document said.”

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion using the gas and ice giants as gravity slingshots could send a human mission out there. That would save on bombs on the way out but slowing down to land, then speeding up again, then slowing down again near Earth….that’s a lot of bombs.

Even if the acceleration gained from each pulse was as high as 200 or 300 mph, it would still require thousands of pulse units. Perhaps as many as ten thousand. For example, a thousand pulse units to get up to speed using gravity assists, three thousand to slow down, three thousand to speed back up, and the last three thousand to slow down upon return to cislunar space. And it would still be a multi-year mission. The good news is that the spaceship could be really huge, in the hundreds of thousands of tons, because the problem with Nuclear Pulse is the minimum size bomb, which can be juiced with a few teaspoonfuls of tritium to deliver tremendous energies and thus push a really immense ship using the same amount of fissile material as a small one.

Have to build Battlestar Galactica on the Moon.

I remember the 1980 article by Gregg Easterbrook about the space shuttle that almost perfectly predicted its flaws and inevitable failure. Many were upset about it criticizing the shuttle then and a few are even now still bitter- despite it being accurate. The “Debunking Starlink” YouTube video by Common Sense Skeptic seems to be a repeat of the Easterbrook article. A phenomenon I have seen throughout my life is when people who promoted something that was obviously not going to end well forget they were all for it.

Actually, that the crew will include a female and person of color is an incidental aspiration and not the “Number One Goal.”

“Woke” is about recognizing social injustice and it is used as a pejorative by those who have no problem with racism and discrimination.

That “it does not matter what it costs” is a nod to the Ayn-Rand-in-Space Libertarian NewSpace cult that has flooded space forums with a toxic neoliberal ideology for over a decade.

The big lie is that these far right death-to-SLS comments, literally libraries of them over the years, mean anything except that people are gullible. That people can be propagandized into supporting the death of the middle class and bashing their nations premier space program in the interest of advertising for a private company.

To NASA it is a ticket to the Moon for it’s astronauts after over half a century of turning away from the vital mission of expanding humankind into the solar system. That is absolutely worthwhile. No longer trapped in LEO, Human Space Flight is back…and the crewed flight around the Moon will mark the beginning of the second space age.

Costs can change in future iterations with a higher flight rate. The Shuttle flew for thirty years at a billion per launch and it is not a big challenge (unless you are a spacex fan) to lower the SLS costs. That it sends a large payload direct to the Moon with one launch makes it far superior to any scheme involving multiple Super Heavy Lift Vehicle tankers. When it is realized all the hype is concealing an unworkable scheme of unacceptable complexity and difficulty then the SLS will be considered the solution. It is just that simple.

My point was they already went cheap. It was what killed two crews and made the Space Transportation System so expensive. And SLS is just shuttle components repurposed in an attempt to avoid the cost of new engines. Because the money to build a new SHLV went to other programs. Setting space exploration back more than a decade.

Those who have allowed themselves to be sucked into the NewSpace ideological black hole have addicted themselves to anti-American NASA-bashing and cult worship of their Howard Roark/John Galt/Tony Stark hero. It is so sad that politics and gullibility have sent the U.S. Space Program down so many dead end roads. LEO space stations, space tourism, Mars fantasies, megaconstellations, shiny new versions of the failed Shuttle concept- and the damage is accumulating.

The single narrow gate to salvation, exploiting lunar resources as the solution to climate change by way of Space Solar Power, is ignored as civilization stumbles toward catastrophe. The last hope is a Green New Space Deal and the disease of global Neoliberalism wrecking the planet is working directly against that. And the NewSpace fan club is a willing partner in the destruction.

No, actually Starship is just a new version of the Space Shuttle with some of the same problems and a couple new ones. The amount of water required for cosmic ray shielding can only come from the Moon due to the 20 to 25 times less energy needed to bring it up into space. Since only nuclear energy can push such a massive construct around the solar system that also means it would have to be assembled, tested, and launched in the vicinity of the Moon, outside of Earth’s magnetosphere.

“Ultimately, in a capitalist society, the resources go to the most effective and efficient use, as long as the government does not contractually mandate those uses. In the case of the SLS, the government seems to have saddled its space agency with the development of a massively over-budget launch system that might already be obsolete by the time it enters service. That won’t change no matter how many Congressional hearings are held about it.”

In a “capitalist society” there would be no space exploration. This is all part of the big lie, that the United States is “capitalist” and NOT “socialist.”

Actually, the United States is a “Mixed Economy”:

“A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise. Common to all mixed economies is a combination of free-market principles and principles of socialism. While there is no single definition of a mixed economy, one definition is about a mixture of markets with state interventionism, referring specifically to a capitalist market economy with strong regulatory oversight and extensive interventions into markets. Another is that of active collaboration of capitalist and socialist visions. Yet another definition is apolitical in nature, strictly referring to an economy containing a mixture of private enterprise with public enterprise.”

Far right Neoliberals have never stopped propagandizing for a pure “free market economy.” And that would inevitably lead to an autocratic oligarchy of the kind seen in Russia and China. That is what Americans are being manipulated into promoting. Fascism.

“NASA hasn’t said, ‘Our mission is to land a woman on the moon,'” NASA astronaut Nicole “Duke” Mann, a test pilot and member of NASA’s Artemis Team, told Space.com in an interview. “Our mission is to return to the moon for sustained lunar operations as part of the Artemis mission.

Why is NASA sending a woman to the moon? | Spacehttp://www.space.com/nasa-moon-landing-woman-artemis-pro…

Billionaire hobbyists are not going to expand humankind into the solar system. That is the NewSpace scam used to promote subsidizing their projects. Only the government has the resources to do it and NewSace fans work directly against that with endless NASA-bashing. The worst thing that ever happened to space exploration.

They need to fix that. I would say 3 Raptors with one Merlin that can throttle down enough to hover in the center. Four engines instead of nine and having to carry the RP fuel for landing in a separate tank should work out much better than over twice that number of engines. This might be something they want to work on because there is some doubt that Starship is going to be all they say it will be. In fact, the system might end up not being used at all if it is suddenly realized Starlink is not financially viable. Could happen.

I have no idea what is available in terms of material for the Spinnaker. Getting the fissile pits into space is no problem if you they are packaged appropriately and transported with a capsule/escape tower. The Orion has an extremely powerful abort system and that would be the lowest risk. One of the reasons I support SLS.

Not only does the bomb technology exist, but there was a mountain of treasure spent on “directed energy weapons” for Reagans Star Wars program and that data is still classified. We don’t even know how money was spent. Classified. And much of it had to do with directing the energy of a nuclear weapon. So, I would speculate they could make super-efficient pulse units.

The speeds attainable are spectacular. The faster you go the shorter the mission. And to justify not having massive cosmic ray shielding or artificial gravity the mission would have to be very short; not more than a couple months. Mars is too deep a gravity well but Ceres is perfect and probably the only suitable destination with Medusa due to the short mission requirement. In my opinion. Let’s GO!

Strip mining Earth orbit as in destroying a natural environment for short term gain.

“-everything it has (government) is confiscated from the people whom create it. Those are redistributed as a result of politics not free market economics-“

Neoliberalism is wrecking the planet. The Ayn-Rand-in-Space libertarian crazies that flood these space forums with their toxic ideology need to be exposed. Exactly why I am here.
The big lie being pushed is that “wealth creators” are the only beings of any “value.” The rest of us are just “looters.” As I explain in the next paragraph this is essentially a cult that makes money the god of this world.

The nation collectively creates the wealth: Businesses have in the past spent almost exclusively on R&D only for applied research that will generate profit, but the basic research is government research and is redistributed to corporate interests. For example, a cure for para and quadriplegic spinal injuries, for which the basic research exists, does not generate enough profit to satisfy their fiduciary duty. So…no cure. Neoliberalism has driven down how much government spends on basic research and forced industry to now pay more- now up to 30 percent. But that research is only available to the company. That companies actually place profit above human life is no myth- and the most glaring example is climate change.

“There is a trade in finance known among some as the “Chomsky trade”, after the linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky. Mr Chomsky once pointed out that, if you want to know what’s worth investing in, look at what US federal research funding organisations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) are investing in today, and then go long 30 years. In the 1950s, the big thing was transistors, which gave us the microelectronics revolution in the 1980s. In the 1960s, it was digital processing, which gave us personal computers in the 1990s. In the 1970s it was biotech, which started to come on line in the 2000s. And in the 1980s, it was the beginnings of machine learning and big data, which will transform much of the world of work in the 2010s and beyond. . . . Despite the ill-informed claims of politicians, the US government and the US taxpayer are the critical investors in basic scientific research, not the private sector. Private foundations fund only 6 per cent of US research and development. The federal government funds 55 per cent.”

I do not think this movement to hold historical figures accountable is “disgusting” in any way. It is simply an adjustment society needs to make and, in my opinion, it is very important in that it teaches this generation not to deify individuals in these cults of personality that have always afflicted civilization. That many of the founding fathers had slaves, that the south was not “fighting for states rights” (well, they were fighting for the right to have slaves, anyway), that Mr. Brown and others had their past as nazi SS officers erased…all this being exposed is not disgusting, it is a good thing. Fascism is an ideology that wants the cult of personality, and all the psychological tricks, to be effective. And we the people, as a democracy, need to understand that, and make progress. And that is why I am a progressive. Any ideology that logically ends in children in gas chambers is my enemy. I am anti-fascist.

Okay, you understand why, but nobody else does. What are you babbling about? Why would SLS make me anti-fascist? And it was being trolled that kept Goddard away from public life and government grants. He was so incredibly humiliated by newspaper articles mocking his research that he became reclusive. Think about that when you reply to me.

China would do well to NOT imitate Musk, and this article-that-is-actually-a-spacex-advertisement and hopes that “last nail is put in the coffin of SLS” is playing on the popular culture myth- generated by a decade of rabid fanboys endlessly posting sycophantic internet praise. But SpaceX may not be around that much longer in it’s present form. Doubtless the F9 will be putting satellites up for a long time to come but the toxic dragon is not a great design and if the company goes under it will probably get dropped. Their business plan right now:

Pandering to rural video gamers by strip mining Earth orbit to pay for a super-size version of the shuttle.

SpaceX is the Enron of space exploration. Elon even hired the Enron prosecutor as his personal lawyer.

Like Enron, only so much can be faked and there are just not enough customers to support Starlink.

Actually, Robert Zubrin has a chapter in the case for…that planet which will not be named, that talks about the Chinese Superships. I am not a Zubrin fan in any way, but I have to say that chapter made a very important point. I interpret it differently than NewSpace fans. It was about a state sponsored Super Ship. Not a private venture. And THAT is the only way humankind is going to expand into the solar system- by way of government resources. The fanboys scream Orwellian treasure by insisting the opposite. So bizarre.

China would do well to NOT imitate Musk, and this article-that-is-actually-a-spacex-advertisement and hopes that “last nail is put in the coffin of SLS” is playing on the popular culture myth- generated by a decade of rabid fanboys endlessly posting sycophantic internet praise. But SpaceX may not be around that much longer in it’s present form. Doubtless the F9 will be putting satellites up for a long time to come but the toxic dragon is not a great design and if the company goes under it will probably get dropped. Their business plan right now:

Pandering to rural video gamers by strip mining Earth orbit to pay for a super-size version of the shuttle.

SpaceX is the Enron of space exploration. Elon even hired the Enron prosecutor as his personal lawyer.

Like Enron, only so much can be faked and there are just not enough customers to support Starlink.

Instead of all these billions going to stealth bombers, missile submarines, proliferating the weaponizing of LEO….the cislunar infrastructure that could be built with that treasure is mindboggling. Consider the trillions spent on foreign interventions and DOD programs since the turn of the century. We could be in the process of powering civilization carbon free with Space Solar Power right now. Instead…..

Maybe we need a “Green New Space Deal.”

Station orbit upkeep was likely the main reason spacex went with a particularly bad escape system design. It was just too tempting.

Tens of thousands of satellites in Earth orbit are increasing the risk of conflict on Earth and have the potential to restrict future access to space. Describing megaconstellations as “strip mining” is accurate.

Neoliberalism is real and so is climate change. Your cognitive dissonance does not make that “meaningless.”

America is a democracy and “liberty”, as defined by neoliberals like you, is just the practice of absolute greed, which inevitably leads to corruption and the death of democracy at the hands of autocratic oligarchs. So, it is you that is actually “anti-American,” not me.

America is a nation by the people for the people and we the people ARE the government through our elected representatives. I understand that perfectly but you consider “the market” as the only system that should have any actual power and anything else is “socialism.” By your definition America was, and is, socialist…and you seek to end that. I call that treason.

Not waste…just the consequences of going cheap with the original Space Shuttle. If the originally specified pressure-fed liquid boosters had been used they would have been more powerful and perhaps such hot-rod engines would not have been required. As it was, railing the segments back and forth to Utah was not economical. As it is, recovering the RS-25’s with some kind of return module is also not going to break even without more flights per year. The SRB’s are fairly powerful but still problematic due to environmental concerns. With liquid boosters and a RS-25 return module it would be sustainable and desirable. Sacrificing the upper stage tankage on the altar of the rocket equation instead of landing it back like the Starship allows a large payload which was the original Shuttle concept.

“-if you can’t impose the same restrictions on everyone all you’re doing is harming yourself-“

Actually, that is completely backasswards logic. Unless you are placing profit above human life and then it makes perfect sense. Climate change threatens all of humankind. A few of us consider ourselves demi-gods though.

“Just like building cars, refrigerators, TVs, and everything else, commercial space is about to be offshored beyond the reach of the US government hydra.”

Government is not the hydra. Offshoring happened because corporations chose profit over the American worker.

Hail the corporate hydra, don’t blame it on the representatives you elected. We the people decided that, whether you want to admit it or not. If we elect people who actually regulate the economy, as we used to with embedded liberalism, then the neoliberals do not get to offshore. We then build and buy American, like President Biden says.

Corporate shareholders and money managers call deregulation “FREEDOM!” and so does Fox News. They rely on the 99 percent of us who have watched the middle class disappear to be stupid enough to think that is patriotic.
What they have actually done is exchange the words “Liberty” and “Freedom” for “Capitalism” and “Greed.”

“-it will be those same uncouth businessmen- that will actually deal -“

That is not what happens, unless they are held criminally responsible. They will get bailed out. And make billions. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us.

That you really detest unions and always go back to that tells me at some point in your life somebody did something to you and you have transferred responsibility for that event to “unions.” You mentioned being bullied on the playground when you were a boy by “union thugs.”
President Herbert Hoover had proclaimed the 1920s “a new era” of permanent prosperity where corporations would de-emphasize short term profits, and workers would “democratize” capitalism by owning stocks and bonds, and the small number of poor would be generously cared for by private charity, this capitalist utopia collapsed in the stock market crash of 1929.

Capitalist predictions that the Depression would be over in weeks turned into months, and months into years. Communism attracted tens of thousands and huge protests and demonstrations made the news. And labor unions pushed harder than ever.
In 1935, the New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt, elected three years earlier at the height of the Depression, would enact unemployment insurance, along with the most comprehensive public works, labor, and social welfare legislation—including collective bargaining, old age pensions under Social Security, minimum wages, and the 40-hour week. Together, they represented the most important victories for workers in U.S. history.

FDR considered his greatest accomplishment was “saving capitalism.” He knew, only 13 years after the Russian Revolution, that America could go the same way unless he convinced his fellow capitalists to leave the free market they profited so much from for a regulated market.
In 1980 the Reagan Revolution set us on the road back to 1929. The present reckless path in space is just a repeat of the dot com bomb, Enron, the housing bubble, Theranos, etc.

“That is why Gary is utterly as convinced as Xi Jinping that, in Space, private = pirate!”

The disgusting dog whistle, painting me as in league with a great satan….lies from someone who has a wounded personality and has been suckered into the far right alternate universe.

I disagree completely. Methane is actually in the middle between kerosene/oxygen and hydrogen/oxygen. Hydrogen has the most energy and if the tankage is expended it can lift far more than methane. This was the salient feature of the Space Shuttle; a Saturn V launch vehicle that expended one upper stage tank and reused everything else. Going cheap in all the ways the Shuttle did- SRB’s and sidemounting a glider to bring the SSME’s back, ruined the concept. But it was, and still is, an excellent idea. Simply screaming cheap about something shiny with so many engines is not necessarily going to be “affordable.”

If the Shuttle had been funded as needed, had liquid boosters and a recoverable engine module with the payload stacked on top of the external tank, it would still be flying. It could have lifted as much as the Saturn V as a cargo carrier or with a capsule/escape tower, both of which can be reused, it would have transported crew. And likely never killed anyone.

It would have looked much like the SLS. If the Starship fails, and since it is essentially just a bigger shuttle with many of the same faults and some new ones, it probably will, then improving the SLS will be the way to go. It is funny that fanboys think all their years of death-to-SLS wailing and gnashing of teeth actually mean something. It does not.

I corresponded with Lunar Geologist Paul Spudis several years ago off and on about various things lunar both on his blog and by email. I asked him about tubes near ice and he told me there were no lava tubes near the polar craters with known ice. Nowhere even close. He would know. Maybe there is ice in places other than the poles but we won’t know until we explore. We have spent billions on Mars and very little on the Moon. Very little on robot exploration anyway. Something I have never understood. Something about Mars generates interest…and funding. In my opinion it is a dead end in almost every respect. Ceres is a far better exploration destination. It probably has an ocean. And I am a scuba diver. Even if Mars has some underground lakes Ceres is a low grav icy body and landing anything is far easier than the deep gravity well of Mars. The only real advantage Mars has is an atmosphere to aerobrake in but, again, in my opinion, we are not going anywhere Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit without nuclear propulsion. If you have an atomic spaceship you don’t need to aerobrake. Kind of like all you need to go to the Moon is an SHLV. You don’t need fuel depots. In my opinion.

“When operated by robots, little or no rad shielding would be needed.”

It is not that it is needed, if the thing is full of water it is just available for whatever. Why not use it.

“Artificially bored tunnels” are probably not a real good idea to start with. Small craters, or start with a small crater and deepen it with explosives, then cover the top with a load bearing structure and pile regolith on it- is really going to be how it is done. Digging tunnels I doubt is going to happen for a very long time because it is….very hard work with very heavy equipment to do that. If intact lava tubes exist they could be immense. It would be such a wonderful incredible gift to humankind to be able to move into one and set up factories. Seems too good to be true but it is not impossible.

Nuclear weapons in space on human crewed “space boomers” would be my plan. It would realize the decades old dream of removing nuclear weapons from Earth and end the launch on warning in minutes situation that has threatened civilization for so long. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion seems almost designed for this mission as the pulse units are not only the highest thrust and Isp system available, they can push ice and rock just as effectively as a spaceship.

The screaming bloody murder from the NewSpace fans is always deafening over this and it is infuriating to me. They know that only governments can do this which is blasphemy to their cult of entrepreneurship.

“We don’t know about the quantity or nature of the ice in permanently shadowed craters. We only suspect that ice is there in large quantities.”

Evidence for massive ice deposits was collected with a lunar satellite probe radar in 2008 and the data released in 2010. Other missions have backed that data up. Unfortunately, a certain “entrepreneur” with his new toy, which could not go to the Moon, used his influence to make any talk of a lunar return verboten. His fan club went right along with that and there are libraries of comments to that effect. Perhaps Shotwell saying “we are not Moon people” will jog some memories. When fanboys say things like “we don’t know” it is an echo of those years when they screamed derision at anything that took the spotlight off their hero and his Mars fantasy. We seem to have now regained some collective sanity but this set space exploration back at least a decade.

My problems with the SpaceX Falcon 9 are the number of engines (too many of course) and the abort system on the Crew Dragon.

Perhaps they could replace those 9 engines with 3 Raptors. And strip that hypergolic system out of the Dragon and mount an escape tower. And partner with Blue Origin to power that upper stage with hydrogen. If Starlink and Starship fail this might keep the company in business.

My problems with the SpaceX Falcon 9 are the number of engines (too many of course) and the abort system on the Crew Dragon.

Perhaps they could replace those 9 engines with 3 Raptors. And strip that hypergolic system out of the Dragon and mount an escape tower. And partner with Blue Origin to power that upper stage with hydrogen. If Starlink and Starship fail this might keep the company in business.

If SpaceX goes bankrupt, which is very likely, considering the “high-risk” projects they have undertaken, their best path to consolidating after bankruptcy might be with what I described.

Considering how far they have set space exploration back, they deserve whatever they get. In my opinion we would have been better off without them.