Ice on the Moon

“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.

Some people are getting “exercised.” Actually, not GCR broadly, but the heavy nuclei component. And it is the world’s recognized authority on space radiation, Dr. Eugene Parker, the guy they named the space probe after, that has concerns. And others. NASA is not concerned about people who go on a couple missions and don’t go anymore. So, as usual, my comments are being mischaracterized and mocked by fanboys and naysayers. Endless strings of NewSpace dogma defense are posted whenever I challenge those tenets; trivializing radiation being one of Musk’s favorites. Enjoy!

Well….could be you are wrong. Since we do oil wells miles underwater with ROV’s that might be a clue it will work. We will see. Maybe a little too much sci-fi, but all the fairy tales here have to do with a certain “entrepreneur” and I am not a fan.

Not going to be anybody working outside on the Moon. Only initially when necessary and as soon as it is not, no astronaut is going to add to his (and especially her) lifetime dose and hasten the end of their career in space bunny-hopping. As a robot, to haul regolith or ice, I am all for it.

That does not change a single thing I said. I think you tried to do what your NewSpace hero likes to do and I stated that. And you replied with more comments inferring it is…trivial. It is not.

(CNN) When the next astronaut to reach the moon walks on the lunar surface in 2024, she’ll face radiation levels 200 times higher than on Earth.
While Apollo mission astronauts carried dosimeters to the moon to measure radiation, the data was never reported. The first systematically documented measurements of radiation on the moon were undertaken in January 2019 when China’s Chang’e 4 robotic spacecraft mission landed on the far side of the Moon, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances.
Astronauts on moon missions would experience an average daily radiation dose equivalent to 1,369 microsieverts per day — about 2.6 times higher than the International Space Station crew’s daily dose, the study said.”

“(NBC) Depending on when you fly a space mission, a female will fly only 45 to 50 percent of the missions that a male can fly,” Peggy Whitson, the former chief of NASA’s Astronaut Corps, said. “That’s a pretty confining limit in terms of opportunity. I know that they are scaling the risk to be the same, but the opportunities end up causing gender discrimination based on just the total number of options available for females to fly. (That’s) my perspective.” [Radiation Threat for Mars-Bound Astronauts (Video)]
NASA follows radiation exposure recommendations established by the National Council of Radiation Protection and Measurements. The exposure limits for women are about 20 percent lower compared to men “largely due to additional cancer risk for woman from breast, ovarian and uterine cancers,-“

Really Richard…”Calm down”? Your fanboy tactic to make me seem “exercised”?

You just keep posting the same dogma- inferring that radiation is trivial. And mocking me.
Exactly like I said the Fanboys do. NASA does know what it is doing- sending people into space for a certain amount of time and then it is over for them. But you want to portray that as something different. What you wrote is so disingenuous. Thanks for proving me right and self-identifying as a “one note Prophet of Musk.”

Nothing can stop the heavy nuclei component of GCR except mass and distance. I have read a lot more than what Parker has to say, he is just the most famous speaker of truth I can cite to make Musk look like a fool on this issue. Which he, and his fanboys, certainly are. If the lifetime dose is a universal 600 mSv, nobody is going to Mars. Not without that massive shield Parker describes; “The Parker Minimum.”

That is about 500 tons of water for a very small capsule and for any practical crew compartment for long duration missions it will be in the neighborhood of a thousand. For a small crew.

“To protect astronauts from cancer-causing radiation in space, NASA should proceed with proposals to set a universal career-long radiation dose limit of ~600 millisieverts (mSv), says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”

Lunar polar ice deposits are a long way from the most likely lava tube sites for ready made habitats. It might be most practical to transport water from the deposits to the lava tube bases over land and this would, by way of a water carrier, provide massive radiation shielding for any scientists who wanted access to the lunar surface. In fact, if properly designed, such a vehicle could have a kind of “moon pool” in the underside and the whole vehicle lower itself on it’s chassis over any interesting features the scientists wanted to inspect closely. The vehicle could lower itself over an area the size of a large living room and the scientists could open an airlock hatch and descend to the surface, into “the living room”, for study without getting dosed. A little leakage through the edges, but far better than out in the open. It would still be in a vacuum, but they could take their time.

“What we can predict”?

Not we.

I predict deriving water from lunar ice and constructing habitats will NOT be done by people in spacesuits on the surface. No way, or at least very very little.

It has to be done with equipment remotely operated. Astronauts in spacesuits have extreme difficulty doing simple repair jobs on the ISS in spacesuits. The kind of manual labor you are talking about is not going to happen and not just because of radiation limits.

As I keep stating, underwater operations with ROV’s are the model to reference. “We” used to use saturation divers but they go down now only for very special and difficult problems.

“An instrument aboard the Curiosity Mars rover during its 253-day deep-space cruise revealed that the radiation dose received by an astronaut on even the shortest Earth-Mars round trip would be about 0.66 sievert. This amount is like receiving a whole-body CT scan every five or six days.

A dose of 1 sievert is associated with a 5.5 percent increase in the risk of fatal cancers. The normal daily radiation dose received by the average person living on Earth is 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sievert).”

Lifetime dose is soon going to become a universal 600 mSv for astronauts.
No shiny starships to Muskopolis.

No…you say that is what “he thinks” but far from “expressly.” He did not say that at all. He is applying that inference to conventional spacecraft as presently constructed. NOT nuclear propelled space-ships with massive shielding.

You just twist everything, everything, so it ONLY applies to the NewSpace view of exploration.

NewSpace is a deception. What Elon and many others are pushing is all hype and the numbers- not the dollar numbers, which fanboys always scream about, but the numbers having to do with real physiological requirements- do not support NewSpace tenets. One of which is that radiation is a trivial problem. It is THE problem.

Not realistic for NewSpace fans, but completely realistic for those not hyping the fantasy of a cult leader.

For you, it seems the only “remotely realistic prospect” is what Elon Musk tells you.

Your “endgame” is to promote the NewSpace ideology that it can all be done on the cheap. Transparent.

“-the radiation dose received by an astronaut on even the shortest Earth-Mars round trip would be about 0.66 sievert.
A dose of 1 sievert is associated with a 5.5 percent increase in the risk of fatal cancers. The normal daily radiation dose on Earth is 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sievert).”

Lifetime dose is soon going to become a universal 600 mSv for astronauts.

The minimum amount of the shielding he is describing in water is 500 tons.

“By comparison, the space shuttle can carry a maximum payload of about 30 tons. Water is commonly proposed because astronauts would need it anyway and because it is rich in hydrogen. Heavier elements make less effective shields because the extra protons and neutrons in their nuclei fall in one another’s shadows, limiting their ability to interact with an incoming cosmic ray. To increase the hydrogen content, engineers could use ethylene (C2H4), which has the further advantage that it can be poly merized to polyethylene, a solid, thereby avoiding the necessity for a tank to contain it. Even so, the required mass would be at least 400 tons—still not feasible.“

I acknowledge you are a trying to mislead and misinform and being profoundly dishonest. Disgusting fanboy deception tactic to spin my comments like that. Really disgusting.
You have no honor.

I think it is interesting that the most important piece of hardware that enables NPP is in production right now: The Launch Abort System on the SLS. Any well designed capsule/tower combination makes getting the “pulse unit” primary components into space safely fairly straightforward.

You see to transport the fissile “pits” into space you have to do it with extreme insurance that the HEU or Plutonium does not get blown into a cloud of radioactive debris in the event of a launch anomaly. A capsule/escape tower is about the most foolproof arrangement ever devised for that very purpose. If the pits are appropriately packaged large numbers can be carried and even if the capsule is seriously damaged to the point where humans might not survive, the pits would easily come through it.

In regards to “something much better”, the concept most likely to be what everyone would expect in a nuclear propulsion system has had much theoretical work done on it. Fission Fragment Propulsion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Enjoy!
Too bad it would require a whole brand new nuclear industry to produce the required Am 242 in usable amounts. I would guess something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars to make that happen.

The most impractical concept is Zubrin’s nuclear salt water rocket. Very bad idea. Exactly what you would expect from someone who thinks Mars is someplace we should live.

Refuel on the Moon. Autos don’t refuel at 60 miles an hour. They stop and “land” at the gas station. Planes don’t refuel in the air except to prepare for war. They do it in airports. Boats do not refuel at sea, again, unless it is a warship. The take on their fuel in port.

You are the one that is stuck; mired in NewSpace dogma. Do you remember where the whole “depot miracle” began? It was with the falcon 9. The fanboys wanted the small cheap rocket to replace everything- and wrote libraries about how depots were going to do this. And they demonized SHLV’s. Until their cult leader started talking about falcon heavy, which was not really “heavy” but managed to redefine the term to less capability. I remember. You don’t.

Depots are not necessary. Not to go to the Moon. And going anywhere else requires nuclear energy. Not going to Mars without that. And by the time we have real spaceships we probably will pass on human missions to Mars and start with Ceres.

Very few technologies have been studied so long and so well. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars directed energy weapon programs spent vast sums on shaping nuclear explosions. It is still all classified and directly relates to concentrating and projecting clouds of plasma. What do you want to do with that? They spent nobody knows how much money trying to knock down ICBM warheads and could not make that work- but they certainly know how to make a bomb do what they want. I know what I want that technology to do. There is enough bomb-grade material in storage around the world, not in bombs, just a security problem in storage, for about 200 missions to the outer solar system. The ocean moons of the gas and ice giants. And you can go with a small ship or an immense ship in the hundreds of thousands of tons- by adding a couple teaspoons of tritium to the pulse units. The reason NOT to go is that we cannot build ships anywhere near large enough to take advantage of that energy and it is a waste of fissile material. But there is always breeder reactors on the Moon as an option when we need more. The best reason of all; such spaceships, loaded with a couple thousand such devices each, can deflect any comet/asteroid impact threat to Earth. It is almost as if this propulsion system was designed to do that- instead of pushing a plate they are pushing ice or rock. This is of course not a NewSpace arena. Only governments are going to do this. Nobody is going to hand over nuclear devices to “entrepreneurs.” Likely why such derision and scorn is heaped upon the concept; Elon can’t do it.

If only it made sense to do this but it does not. Not on a scale that comes close to supporting human space flight. Super Heavy Lift Vehicles don’t need this. Unless it is like Starship, which is just a glorified Shuttle external tank and cargo bay with some engines and fins.

If I had to guess I would say it will be one of two ways: either in a small crater that has had a structure covered over with regolith, or in a lava tube. In space…far more difficult to store. Show me some cryo-coolers.

Nobody is going “deeper” in the solar system with chemical propulsion. You already downvoted my comment on that so I expect you are just trying to set me up for some mocking and naysaying.

A large pressurized facility shielded from radiation with some gravity. That is where you have a propellent farm. Also need that to maintain any kind of reusable lander. You could have a hangar bay on a space station also but under the lunar surface is way easier in every way.

Actually, in my opinion, it would be best to start with a big empty stage with a crew compartment in the center and fill it with water brought up from the Moon by robot landers. That way you have people in a place with no secondary radiation from heavy nuclei and completely protected against the worst possible solar event. And the things you can do with a couple thousand tons of water are a very long list. THEN…when you have another one you connect two of them together with a kilometer long tether system and spin them for one gravity. And have a mast sticking out from the center of that system for docking. A “true” space station. Reel in the tether system and bring the two of them together and dock a nuclear propulsion system of some kind and you have a “true” spaceship. Or you could possibly just let the two keep rotating and use some kind of low-thrust electrical propulsion system. I am not a fan of those though.

The third stage of Apollo lit off and sent the capsule/service module/lander on it’s way to the Moon without refueling. The service module lit off and placed the capsule/lander in lunar orbit without refueling. The lander landed and returned to lunar orbit without refueling. The service module lit off again and sent the capsule back to Earth without refueling.

The third stage of Apollo lit off and sent the capsule/service module/lander on it’s way to the Moon without refueling. The service module lit off and placed the capsule/lander in lunar orbit without refueling. The lander landed and returned to lunar orbit without refueling. The service module lit off again and sent the capsule back to Earth without refueling.

Propellent transfer was never anything but an undesirable way to get to the Moon because of a lack of a SHLV.
If you have a SHLV, you do not need, or want, to use propellent transfer.

SpaceX managed to make multiple SHLV launches necessary to do what only requires one.
And the gullible fanboys cheer!

No humans have ever flown past Luna and without nuclear energy likely ever will.

Well…the rocket equation and the gravity well we seek to escape makes the bic/zippo question quite hard to answer doesn’t it? That is what this is all about…how to do that.

I would like to think in a less neoliberal society with a common goal, like solving climate change for example, the most logical path would become clear. It seems like we could perfect our launch vehicle technology step by step. Sacrificing less and less on the altar of the rocket equation till we have something…”sustainable.”

We sustained the Shuttle at a billion dollars a mission for thirty years; about the same as the Saturn V, but trying to go cheap and making it “pay for itself” only trapped us in LEO and killed astronauts. We should have stuck with the Saturn V and the Moon and started with reusing the F-1’s and escape tower and parts of the capsule to start with, and year by year modifying the stages so more and more was brought back and reused. What would we have now?

We might still end up doing something similar…better late than never.

Get some people like climate change activists behind it and popularize it as a way to actually get nuclear weapons OFF the Earth and months away in deep space. We get another rock like Chelyabinsk that does some damage it might change everything. But one must be very careful wishing for something like that. I like nuclear reactors on the Moon and on Earth as long as necessary to make fissile material but not for commercial power. Anything for-profit inevitably degrades till corrected due to corruption and greed and that kind of roller coaster is unacceptable with nuclear energy. Just my opinion.

Not impossible that it could fly. Keep an open mind Vlad.

“-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.

• • Buck86  SLSFanboy Gary, why is it bizarre?! Explain the mess to me.
  • SLSFanboy  Buck86 Joining the troll dogpile huh,? The username is SLSFanboy. Disgusting harassment.

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.

I would guess the structure being discussed would serve to deploy and aid in stabilizing a tether system suspending mult-thousand ton masses, rather than be the actual load bearing part of the system.

And while zero G debilitation is half the problem, the other half that must be solved along with it is cosmic radiation, which requires those thousands of tons of mass, almost certainly water derived from lunar ice.

It is fascinating to see the waffle-comments on this due to NewSpace dogma that has always trivialized any of the physiological requirements. True believers tend to anchor themselves to their false doctrines. The reality is one gravity and near sea level radiation is what astronauts, especially young females, must have for real careers in space.

Just mention a spacex product and all the screaming cheap and hatred for anything not from the mind of Musk magically disappears. Amazing.

The “structure” is not absolutely necessary when using the other requirement for any long duration human missions, which is a massive cosmic ray water shield. With thousands of tons of water involved, the mass and dampening effects make a tether system far more practical.

A Tether Generated Artificial Gravity system (TGAG) is integrated with a Cosmic Ray Water Shield (CRWS) to provide a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G). This is how human beings are going live and thrive in space. Not with any lesser measures.

Martin has a job waiting for him at SpaceX. Obviously. I would suspect much the same thing happens with anyone who is promoting something like the Starship, or the V-22 for example. It is much like the V-22 and the CH-53K. One is a monstrosity and the other can really lift some stuff. Just like the Starlifter and the SLS.

Koch is burning in the bad place; they made it hotter just for him. His brother will join him and they just might pour some more gasoline on both of them for the reunion. That is what you get for spending a fortune on propaganda convincing people to do nothing to avert a global catastrophe with the potential to kill billions.

That the NewSpace fanboys think space stations are going to be “cheap” and they will be able to take out a second mortgage and get their astronaut wings that way is how the movement started.

Juvenile, ridiculous, harmful to space exploration.

SLSFanboy Michael Weidler 

Another spacex advertisement…thanks for the second hand pot smoke.

Vladislaw  SLSFanboy and how is that different than your non stop never ending advertisements for the SLS? Heck you even advertise it in your name with every post.

Nate  Vladislaw The difference is that he’s right, because he says he is.

SLSFanboy  Nate And you…are cyber stalking me, along with a couple others now. Pretty soon every comment I make will have a long trail of disgusting harassing nonsense replies. So much for free speech.

SLSFanboy  Vladislaw LITERALLY libraries of death-to-SLS comments have been written for years by a legion of Musk fanboys. And you are upset about my views on America’s space program and rocket to the Moon? Pathetic.

Unlike almost everyone else here, I am NOT emotionally invested in any machines. I was a technician and crew on some pretty amazing aircraft and while everyone else waxed poetic over their beauty and exalted place in the universe I never thought of them as anything but…machines. My focus is on humankind not going extinct. Dont’ care at all about Elon or spacex or Boeing or SLS or any of those things. The dominant ideology of the fanboys here makes money the god of this world- it is an Ayn Rand in space kind of thing and it is all bad. Your gang has emotional issues, not me. Probably why I see right through rocket jesus.