I watched a video by Sydney Brown on Conflict Theory the other day and it made me think about thesis and antithesis and synthesis and how I could apply that…to space exploration. It was a great video:
I have seen how groups form and split away from each other my whole life. In school it was the jocks and the heads, at the beach it was board surfers and body surfers, on the road it was Harly riders and sport bike riders, in the mountains it was skiers and snowboarders, in the air it was hang gliders and paragliders, in politics the right and left, coffee drinkers and tea drinkers, and so on.
In regards to space exploration there seems to be a group called “NewSpace” and a group that can be characterized as “OldSpace.” Elon Musk is of course the shining light for NewSpace and his gang of cyberthugs have dominated all the popular space forums for years. I am not a fan. OldSpace is largely invisible but I recently noticed many commenting on the YouTube channel “Common Sense Skeptic” so I suspect there are far more than anyone realizes. Myself, and I suspect a sizeable percentage of Musk detractors, are “O’Neillians”, or followers of Gerard Kitchen O’Neill, the 1976 author of “The High Frontier”, who we consider the true prophet of space colonization.
Musk is the antithesis of O’Neill. So… what is the synthesis? Can there be one? I would have said no until I saw a graphic for Musk’s “Starship 2.0” a couple days ago. I have been thinking about it:
A 60 foot diameter sphere is big enough to have a double hull with 16 feet between the inner and outer hulls. This envelope is where a “Parker Minimum” cosmic ray water shield could be placed using lunar water. It is a beginning.
Hi Scott,
Thank you so much for replying to my comment about Musk vs O’Neill the other day.
You have such a huge audience!
I was hoping you might review my concept of the “Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum.” This is based on the article about space radiation by Eugene Parker, which describes what I call the “Parker Minimum” of 16 feet of water as radiation shielding, the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion work of Freeman Dyson which is the only way to push such massive shielding around the solar system, and the work of Paul Spudis, who I corresponded with and posted on his blog for several years, which describes how to get that water shielding from lunar ice and into space from the Moon using around 20 times less energy than bringing it up from Earth.
My background is troubleshooting autopilot systems in rescue helicopters which I did for the U.S. Coast Guard. Now I am retired and have taken on space exploration as a hobby, along with paragliding and scuba diving. I used to motorcycles also but gave that up as too dangerous…so I might be considered as halfway intelligent just for that.
I have a fairly comprehensive view of how Humankind should approach space and I think you would be very interested in it. Dr. Spudis passed away recently from cancer and I have nobody to correspond with about it now. Thanks for your time.
Ahhh…Mars. Complete dead end. Gerard K. O’Neill and his people concluded that spinning artificial hollow moons and space solar power is how to take out an insurance policy for humankind. The first step is to exploit the resources of the Moon. O”Neill proposed a state-sponsored public works project using space solar as the economic engine for space colony construction. Musk is the antithesis of this- Rocket Jesus is actually the anti-christ. Musk is the false prophet of space colonization and is strip-mining earth orbit.
We can do both. And nothing is preventing us from producing artificial gravity on Mars. It’s just that 38% of Earth’s gravity might be enough.
My reply:
@Grasshopper Nothing preventing that except logic. Why waste resources on Mars when the same amount of time and effort would provide for “an order of magnitude” more people? Why go where there is less solar energy? The only way to provide artificial gravity on a lesser natural body is with some kind of circular accommodation like a train. I wrote about this years ago on my wordpress blog “Ice on the Moon” and called them “sleeper trains” to allow scientists or workers to do tours of duty on icy bodies. While ideal for keeping a limited number of people healthy on very low gravity icy moons and bodies like Ceres, it would never support large populations. The more gravity and less ice the difficulty and expense increase by “order of magnitude.” See how that works? The amount of gravity necessary to keep human beings healthy was decided over millions of years by evolution and that amount of gravity is 1G. Same with radiation. Musk is conning everyone by trivializing this. Wake up.
My reply to another comment:
@pebmets Fairly good analysis. I have read a stack of books on the shuttle over the years. I do not “appreciate” the shuttle and consider it the second biggest wrong turn NASA ever made. One of many wrong turns and the very worst wrong turn was falling under the sway of Musk, of course. NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. Worse than both shuttle disasters. I actually love looking at the starship- it is pretty cool. But…it has no escape system and really serves no purpose beyond what the shuttle did except to keep us trapped in LEO. And make no mistake, this thing is not going anywhere else. All that magic cryogen refueling in orbit? Not worth the trouble. Better ways to do it. There is no cheap.
@pebmets Yes, I was fascinated by the shuttle for several years even after initially reading that old Greg Easterbrook article, “Scotty beam me out of this deathtrap.” I never thought it was a worthwhile design in any way except one: the salient concept was to have a Saturn V class launch vehicle that only sacrificed one big tank and reused everything else. Unfortunately, while it did accomplish this, it also wasted most of that lift on putting a 737-size glider in LEO and bringing it right back down. Along with all the other problems, that came mostly from trying to go cheap, it was a tremendous waste. There is no cheap. Many people with the ability to think critically KNEW it was no good, they really did, but they went along with it and allowed all the hype to have it’s effect. Just like Musk and his shiny toy, it really all comes down to a few people with an agenda they are trying to profit off of. With Musk it is likely sycophants warping his wrong-headed “vision” of saving the world. Sad.
Other Comments:
“Utterly profound breakthrough”…to LEO? Got news, that “breakthrough” happened when Apollo 8 went to the Moon in 1968. Low Earth Orbit is, like Mars, a complete dead end. Lunar resources are the only “utterly profound” goal to be reached. And Starship is not going to the Moon without multiple refuelings of cryogens in space which nobody seems to understand is an absolute nightmare.
The engines have always been the tip-off that Musk is a hobbyist. The Saturn V F-1 and the space shuttle SRB’s were in the 2 million pound thrust range and that is the minimum starting point for Super Heavy Lift Vehicles. Otherwise you end up with way too many engines and profoundly violate the K.I.S.S. principle. The Raptor is about a quarter the size of the smallest engines most suited for big rockets.
Well…what inspires me is some medical treatments for old age so we have an indefinite lifespan because as long as we are all doomed then our species is also doomed to extinction. We just won’t care until we have some kind of future to care about. That is the holy grail to keep us from dying out…space travel comes after that. Once we stop dying then even if we practice limited reproduction, and we will not stop having children, we will have to eventually go to other stars. So Elon is an idiot if he thinks he is doing what makes sense. He should be investing in regenerative medicine, not rural video gamers.
Exactly: thousands of tons of water shielding and a 2km tether is about right. I wrote about this on my wordpress blog “Ice on the Moon.” Come and let’s discuss Chris.
@Scott Manley To provide a carbon free western standard of living for 10 billion people the space solar power satellites will have to be manufactured in factories on the Moon. That will take around half a century if we start right now with it as an international goal. In the meantime solar thermal power plants and other measures are what will mitigate climate change but only mitigate. To build that lunar infrastructure we need bigger rockets than what Musk is building…and that means state sponsorship. Musks legion of toxic Ayn-Rand-in-space crazies want NASA dismantled and it all handed over to the great one. See how this works? Fully reusable sounds great but to get started we might stick with the original correct idea of the space shuttle which was to expend a single tank on the altar of the rocket equation. Unfortunately they went cheap and messed the shuttle up; that it did not even have an escape system makes that crystal clear. Too many small engines is part of that recipe for failure. There is no cheap. I hate to waste the opportunity to talk to you but I have to go. I will reply later today. Love your channel. Regards
@Scott Manley “I’m not a rocket scientist.” Neither is Elon, but everyone seems to think he is. It is really about a billionaire hobbyist following a plan that was discarded as wrong-headed long ago. He has accomplished just enough to allow him to screw up the rest of space exploration and has set us back decades. He is riding the limited reusability success to the detriment of everything that makes any sense. Mars is a dead end. Really. O’Neill was right and space solar power is the solution and now it is the only solution to providing a western standard of living to 10 billion people. Wake up brother.
@Scott Manley I don’t know if you have ever looked at my Blog Scott, but essentially it is about what I call the “Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum” which comes to a couple conclusions from an “O’Neillian” perspective. Gerard Kitchen O”Neill had some smart young people studying space colonization and one of the very first things they figured out is that Mars is a dead end and Space Solar Power as a state-sponsored public works project is the economic engine necessary to move humankind into space. That is, of course, the opposite of Musk. In my view the critical piece of the puzzle is what I call the “Fat Workshop”; a very large double-hulled upper stage to be partially filled with lunar-ice-derived water for cosmic ray shielding. It will require a SHLV with a much larger throw weight than what Musk is building to send those things to the vicinity of the Moon. At some point the ridiculous number of Raptor-size engines necessary so profoundly violates the K.I.S.S. principle that…well, I think you understand now.
Engines in the 2 million pound thrust range are a fundamental prerequisite for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit. It is as simple as that and unfortunately the Raptor is an inferior piece of equipment in that regard. It is close to worthless because it takes so many of them to lift Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLVs). That is just one feature of the shiny that nobody will acknowledge with the critical flaw being there is no escape system. It is just a different kind of shuttle with the same problems.
Does not look right at all. Way too tall…like they just wanted the tallest rocket. They should have gone with 2 boosters mounted on either side like the space shuttle. The starship also has no escape system- a fundamental mistake they made with the shuttle. Considering how many prototypes blew up it seems like they would have the very top a capsule with the crew inside that could be blasted free by a solid rocket system. As is it is just a different kind of shuttle with the same critical flaw.
I wrote blog entries on this several years ago on my wordpress blog Ice on the Moon posing the idea that small sat constellations are the opposite of what we should be doing. Actually…large Geosynchronous Earth Orbit human-crewed platforms in water shielded space stations would be immune to all these storms.
Any extraterrestrials observing how we are strip mining our planetary orbit to play video games would come to the conclusion we are too stupid to survive and write us off as a soon-to-be extinct species.
“I had one man try to rip my mask off. I’ve been screamed at, I’ve been told to go back to my country,” she said, after someone heard her speak with an accent.”
My uncle was at the Battle of the Bulge, and I was told that, just like in the 1965 war movie, he was a cook…and then he was given a rifle and sent into the fight. The Canadians were also fighting the Nazi’s and the Japanese Empire and over 44,000 gave their lives in the struggle against totalitarianism. Now a new variant of fascism, called Trumpism, is spreading across North America and Canadian truck drivers seem to be the next super-spreaders.
My journey from a completely apolitical disinterested consumer to staunch progressive began around 2003 when I was helping my wife research a college paper for her situational ethics class. I suggested the paper address nuclear weapons and now I am sitting here almost two decades later writing a blog entry about…Fascist Canadian Truck drivers. The twists and turns are easy to see if one reads a few books about the cold war.
We had Nazi Scientists building us a Moon rocket, then we had a committee building the shuttle on the cheap, which was a disaster (two actually), and now we have a borderline sociopath billionaire hobbyist building a new stainless steel shuttle with the very same critical flaw; no escape system. America also has a critical flaw that could see it burned to the ground; neoliberalism.
It was no surprise the shuttle failed as it had no real purpose as there was no plan to expand humankind into space. Now the new shuttle supposedly does have a mission- to make Mars the second home of our species. There are so many things wrong with the shiny shuttle and going to Mars plan it is difficult to even start explaining. The same can be said for the Trumpist neoliberal psychopaths who just might manage to burn it all down.
Lately I have been reading about CRISPR gene editing and this gives me some hope that the ultimate solution to all the world’s problems is a possibility. That problem being death of course. As always, I hold to the fundamental tenet that as long as we are driven by a limited lifespan we are doomed not only as individuals but also as a species. If not a fountain of youth then perhaps a way to freeze people without damage until a cure can be found. I can dream and pray for that.
While the “Freedom Convoy” epic unfolds, I am thinking about the shiny and what could have been. I imagine the shiny with an escape system and a pair of pressure fed boosters attached to either side of it. They could have built it back in the 70’s but nobody except a few visionaries like Philip Bono that Vertical Take-Off/Vertical Landing (VTVL) was the way to go for reusable launch vehicles. A pair of monster pressure fed ocean recovered side mounted boosters, extending above and perhaps initially providing propellants to the core engines, and a reusable core like the shiny, might have been a continuation of the space age. Instead, LEO shuttle was the end of the first space stage.
A shuttle mounting either a crew module or a cargo module, but never a combination, was the path not taken. An unmanned cargo module would have been able to take hydrogen-oxygen Earth departure stages (EDS) into orbit without endangering a crew. An earlier launch placing a CSM/LM stack into orbit to dock with the EDS would have continued the space age. The critical requirements for the shuttle program should have been full reusability and a cargo version capable of placing an EDS into orbit.
It is never too late to take two steps back and turn onto the correct path. As with Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO), there is also progressive taxation and progressive wages…supporting the Nordic Model for the United States (universal health care and free college tuition).
3:00 “-When we were kinds, we saw the close-up shot of those NASA rockets going up, the country coming together-”
I was going to try and lay off the politics and get back into the original mission of this blog but…I cannot seem to do that when the space age is being referred to in this manner.
Whose country is this? The aging white males with no education, a low-paying job, and no hope of living the life their parents did are going to burn it all down out of sheer frustration and rage. It is true. And why is this? Greed. The homeowning 40 hour a week citizen with job security, medical care that will not bankrupt them, with one breadwinner and one homemaker…that seems gone forever. Wealth has been transferred upward from the middle class to the wealthy since the Reagan Revolution and now it is all about to melt down.
My aging white male poorly educated coworkers have been so propagandized they are now living in an alternate universe.
Hadfield talks about how great spacex is but then talks about what a big problem space junk is. Ridiculous. He then goes on to talk about space tourism being the next big thing and how it will “free up NASA to explore.” Ridiculous.
The ISS never should have been built. Of the many paths Human Space Flight could have taken the most efficient, in terms of Low Earth Orbit, would have been to use the space shuttle to better advantage. The shuttle orbiters could have stayed up for close to the standard 6-month tour by either loading up on life support or being resupplied or a combination of both. The orbiter would have had to be landed by remote control or by a pilot transferred to the orbiter from another orbiter…or a combination of both. The fantastic sum of money squandered on the ISS should have been spent on semi-expendable robot lunar landers. This, however, is after the fact that the shuttle program itself was a mistake.
The best course, in hindsight, would have been modifying the Saturn V into a reusable system over the course of several decades. The first stage, capsule and tower being the first reusable components, followed by different iterations of the second and third stage. With a reusable, or partially reusable Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) sending robot landers to the Moon the key piece of hardware would have been next. The critical missing piece of the puzzle was the “Fat Workshop.” This double hulled wet workshop would have been the basic crew compartment for everything to follow.
Before continuing, a review of the terms used on this blog concerning space-
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Humans in LEO or below Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) are not technically engaging in Human Space Flight (HSF) but instead Orbital Flight. Space is generally defined as in or beyond GEO and below this as simply Earth Orbit.
Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) This is catch-all term applying to any craft that flies above LEO and even above GEO but is still in Earth Orbit, often in an eccentric orbit.
Beyond Low Earth Orbit (BLEO) This is the “cislunar sea” found between GEO and Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) and generally refers to transits between the Earth and the Moon. This is where Lunar Cyclers operate.
Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO) This generally refers to interplanetary flight.
There were many possible paths to establishing a permanent human presence in space. At every opportunity the U.S. went cheap and sabotaged any prospect of a successful program.
My comment on this YouTube video: “I was writing about this in 2015 on my wordpress blog “Ice on the Moon” and wrote an article for space science magazine titled “Water and Bombs.” I have since refined my view into what I call the “Parker-Dyson-Spudis-Continuum” (PDSC). This states that a massive water shield derived from lunar ice and Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (bombs) is the only way we are going Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). The best first destination is NOT Mars, which is a dead end, but Ceres. That is, after we have created a cislunar infrastructure to support constructing “true” spaceships providing a Near Sea Level 1 Gravity environment (NSL1G). Along with the PDSC I believe the critical piece of missing hardware is the “Fat Workshop” which is a double hulled wet workshop to facilitate shielded crew compartments for spaceships, lunar cyclers, GEO telecom platforms, etc. and…I am not a Musk fan.”
Another danger sign. These creatures are an abomination…they represent, literally, genocide of other races, of women and children, of the disabled. They support that as an ideology. And they are starting to show up on the streets.
4:50 “-racism is a mechanism of power, which is why you see many people who aren’t personally racist at all, who are simply…want their taxes cut, don’t want government regulation, exploiting any means they can, supporting any kind of mass panic, be it a racial panic, be it a panic about COVID, to push people to vote for an extremist movement that is going to pad their pockets.”
5:25 “-many business elites, particularly in the hydrocarbon business, they recognize that their work is against the public good. So…they need to support a movement that will split apart the public and result in a system that they can control.”
The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public goodis an impediment…” Jason Stanley
Paraphrasing Kathleen Belew: All of us are more violent in the aftermath of war (Afghanistan)…Certainly, we are experiencing one of these historic peaks. “We are at a crisis point that just boggles understanding.”
The one percent sowed chaos to keep eyes turned away from taxes and regulation and may well have burned this nation to the ground.
“The 400 richest families in America pay about 6 percent income tax.”
They used to pay 91 percent and that 85 percent is paying for this insurrection. It is not over and the crescendo has not yet come to pass.
Ethnic Entrepreneurs…in an “anocracy.” We are in big trouble. What is so bizarre is my black and hispanic coworkers who are conservatives or evangelicals and their cognitive dissonance regarding what is going to happen to them when the Fascists take over. I know what is going to happen but they do not seem capable of understanding it. My uncle fought at the battle of the bulge.
Most Americans don’t even understand what democracy is; the elected few governing according to the wishes of and serving the many. The autocrats are the wealthy few governing according to their wishes and served by the many.
Ice on the Moon 