Ice on the Moon

The Green New Deal is on the way, but it has enemies working hard to keep it from ever arriving. Believe it.

Spacenews posted on the recent Falcon 9 loss and Starlink problems:

“In a recent white paper, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) argued that the FCC should closely scrutinize SpaceX’s plans to provide broadband internet service via satellite. Those groups say bids by rural cooperatives for RDOF funding to provide broadband service were shut out by both SpaceX as well as fixed wireless networks.

“While delivering broadband service at the speeds promised by these applicants may appear to be viable, this service is currently in beta testing and commercially available on a limited basis in extremely limited areas, and questions remain,” the paper states. “Awarding bids to experimental and unproven LEO satellite service is a direct contradiction” to the rules of the RDOF program, it argued.

“I’m really struggling on the physics and economics” of satellite broadband, said Tim Bryan, chief executive of the NRTC, in a Feb. 4 call with reporters. He claimed there were “anecdotal reports” of people who signed up for Starlink beta but were having problems getting connections any faster than four megabits per second, but didn’t elaborate.

“Starlink’s performance is not theoretical or experimental,” SpaceX noted in its Feb. 3 FCC filing. The company said it had already demonstrated it could meet or exceed key performance tiers, including 100 megabits per second of data to customers and 20 megabits per second of data from them, as well latencies of 31 milliseconds or less.

Bryan said his group’s issue was how Starlink could scale up to serve larger numbers of customers. “My concern is mostly around the capacity not of one or two users, but what happens when you get to 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 thousand users,” he said.

“I have no doubt that the Starlink constellation could be successful in some areas, and in some cases, providing coverage over areas like the deep blue seas and those sorts of places,” he said. “I struggle to see how it’s going to reliably deliver 100-megabit service to the literally hundreds and thousands of customers in the census block groups that it bid for.”

And…recent comments on Parabolic Arc:

I have kept an eye on propulsion systems over the years and the only likely way we will see SSTO vehicles carrying large payloads into space is with Beam Propulsion. Ground arrays providing a kind of energy first stage and GEO station beaming providing the second. Since the vehicle is not discarding any stages it would still be SSTO. The interesting feature is these beam-riding vehicles will probably be very large in diameter, due to beam spreading. How large? Not sure. This is akin to Nuclear Pulse Propulsion where the larger the spaceship’s sail or plate, the more efficient it becomes, as a bomb uses a certain amount of fissile material whether it is large or small.

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https://www.businessinsider…

It is going to be a mess; upwards of a hundred thousand of these smallsats in different constellations with thousands of dead ones hitting live ones making more dead ones as new ones are launched to replace the dead ones.

It never should have been allowed, pandering blatantly to un-needed convenience. Pure greed

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You already dug your hole in the ground. I am sure you are happy.

You should really contact someone who is not a toxic creep and get their opinion on your years of harassing me and denying I have any right to any opinion other than the NewSpace dogma you embrace.

You are angry because what I wrote makes too much sense. You seem to be all about some kind of Ayn-Rand-in-Space Cult that satisfies a craving to be part of something.

In the context of this Cult following of NewSpace ideology and entrepreneurs it is just simple marketing propaganda and false advertising to portray a couple hundred miles up as some new space frontier where heroes go to make history.
It is not.

What is bizarre is alongside this P.R. hype is calling the Moon a nothing-burger because “we’ve been there”…because some entrepreneur donor’s rocket cannot go there.

50 miles up is defined as “space”, 62 miles up is also defined as “space”, yet nothing can even orbit at those altitudes. It cannot be defined as “Earth Orbit” yet it is called “space.” And the billionaires are lining up for their faux astronaut wings. I have no problem with non-tourists engaging in Orbital flight being called “Astronauts.” Even though that is defined as a person trained to fly in a spacecraft. A spacecraft does not necessarily fly in space if that is defined as something other than LEO; It is flying in orbit, engaging in Orbital Flight.

Earth Orbit or Orbital Flight are the appropriate accompanying terms for LEO. Space Flight should correctly be defined as travel at or above 22,236 miles up. Why? Simple. At that altitude an object hovers over a spot on the Earth. It is the only really clear demarcation. Any object, even in a highly elliptical orbit that only briefly reaches that altitude above the surface of the Earth, has achieved “Space Flight” because it crossed into “Space.” See how that works?

In my view, Space Flight is not a big deal, Human Space Flight (HSF) is.

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A black hole starship would get people there in a year or so (ship time). Accelerate a sleeper ship out of the solar system with beam propulsion at 10 percent of light speed and that would take about 4000 years. 40 centuries is a little long, even if you are frozen, so it looks like it will be a century and likely a couple, before we have enough solar power assets in space to generate the immense energies needed to manufacture small singularity engines. My view of humankind expanding into the solar system and then the galaxy would be these black hole starships (if the concept works) first catching up to the much slower “sleeper ships” already launched and possibly waking the crews up for a much faster voyage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

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“If there’s one thing we know, it’s that landing on Mars is never easy,” said NASA Associate Administrator for Communications Marc Etkind.”

The Moon should be the focus, where all the funding should go for the immediate future. Once we establish a presence there producing hardware, then we can go exploring. Mars is not a good destination. Ceres and the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants are the future.

Mars is a dead end.

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Actually, not being able to identify that single path to success is a dead giveaway of a very small mind. I am not claiming to be the one identifying that path- it was Stanislaw Ulam, an Einstein-level genius that stated Nuclear Pulse Propulsion was his greatest work. And Freeman Dyson, another bona-fide genius, validated the original design, and a short list of luminaries, including Wernher von Braun, Carl Sagan (an anti-nuclear activist) and Arthur C. Clarke endorsed the concept.

You don’t have a clue.

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The “Nuclear Salt Water Rocket” is…an extremely bad design.

You guess you are “screwed” because of a piece of paper that only requires the superpowers to amend. Ridiculous. Especially considering it is a simple matter of transporting the bomb pits on a human-rated vehicle with an escape system and packaging them to survive as much as practical a launch anomaly. Transporting them directly to the vicinity of the Moon outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, then assembling, testing, and launching nuclear missions there would satisfy amended conditions of the treaty. Such spaceships would be perfectly capable of using their “pulse units” (bombs) to deflect impact threats and this by itself would justify the treaty being rewritten.

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My view is different from yours obviously. For the mountain of money they want to pour into this they will get the Isp of about twice that of a chemical rocket- from a reaction a million times more powerful.

Stan Ulam realized that it is hard enough keeping a chemical engine from melting so he thought outside the box, and in fact threw the box away. Nuclear Pulse is like a external combustion engine: the directed nuclear energy device projects a cloud of hi-speed incandescent plasma at the plate. Like the piston in an engine it is pushed with extreme force momentarily but not long enough to melt the face of the piston.

It is akin to a jet catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier except it is the aircraft carrier being catapulted. This is no exaggeration as the main problem is the power of a nuclear pulse device means what is being pushed would have to mass in the millions of tons for the system to be as efficient as possible. The amount of fissile material used in a small kiloton range bomb is about the same as used in a megaton range bomb. Nuclear weapons are actually designed to have limited power because after about a hundred kilotons most of the energy is going up and just blowing a hole in the atmosphere. See how that works?

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Well…the benefits of crashing instead of landing are not so manifold. It has been theorized that 5 to 10 landings are needed to break even (spacex is not saying). Because it has so many engines and such a small payload I would go with the 10 landings to break even. If the F9 is blowing up or crashing after a lower number of flights on average then the other stages have to make up for that quickly pushing the number of flights needed much higher. They are rocket engines and it is a lightweight highly stressed airframe so the maintenance requirements likely go way up after a certain number of flights increasing the number of flights to make up for that even more. I do not believe any of them have landed 10 times yet. See how that works?

What is needed is a much larger vehicle with much fewer engines…and I am not talking about the shiny starship which is just another version of the space shuttle and has far too many engines in the first stage.

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LEO, like Mars, is really a dead end and needs to be abandoned.

Human habitats in space, to include Space Stations, Lunar Cyclers, and Spaceships, require a massive Cosmic Ray Water Shield and a Tether Generated Artificial Gravity system.

The best way to provide these crew compartments is the wet workshop, and a development of the wet workshop- the “fat workshop.”

The fat workshop is a double-hulled Super Heavy Lift Vehicle propellant stage that facilitates a 14 foot thick outer water-filled cosmic ray shield envelope.

A really large upper stage workshop is not going to happen without future iterations of the SLS that can lift 150 tons or more into orbit. The thousand+ tons of water needed to fill the outer envelope of a fat workshop is going to have to come from the Moon, where water derived from lunar ice can be lifted into space with 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth.

The place for a space station is not LEO, it is GEO, and the radiation environment there requires a cosmic ray water shield. Along with SHLV’s carrying fat workshops a semi-expendable robot lander that can harvest ice and shuttle water up to workshops in Low Lunar Orbit will be required.

The logical progression is: 1. The SHLV, then 2. the fat workshops with tether generated artificial gravity, then 3. the semi-expendable robot lunar landers, which can also act as boosters when docked to stations or cyclers, then 4. when filled with water, boosting the stations as Lunar Cyclers and transiting others across the cislunar sea as GEO space stations, and 5. when Space Stations and Lunar Cycler fleets are complete, assembling, testing, and launching the first nuclear propelled Spaceships to the outer solar system.

And of course, none of this is going to happen with private companies and entrepreneurs.

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I am not going to do as you order and “get on twitter” you idiot. Not preaching, not enlightening, not explaining, not doing anything except sharing my views on a public forum….it is YOU that is mocking and denigrating me.

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The NewSpace dogma that contaminated the public spaces a decade ago has not gone away- Mars as the second home of humankind, the small reusable rocket taking everything up a loaf of bread and a gallon of gas at a time, the fuel depot miracle allowing cheap spacecraft to go anywhere like gassing up your car, the idea that NASA is the problem; everything too expensive and wasting tax dollars- This has all been a disaster for space exploration. And now these smallsat constellations going up in the tens of thousands. The worst feature of it all is the toxic libertarian cyberthugs that have completely hijacked all public discourse. Like Nazi’s beating up people at the polls…it really deserves that card. Disgusting.

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Mr Snarky Answer Richard Seaton •

I more than tolerate, I enjoy watching you double down and lose. Upside to Spudis’ departure is your free agency•Reply•Share ›

• Richard Seaton  Mr Snarky Answer •
  • You POS•Edit•Reply•Share ›

So there is this thing they do…they mention Dr. Spudis dying when they really want to antagonize. Shameless anonymous cyberthugs. Disgusting.

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What the Far-Right Fascination With Pinochet Should Tell Us (theintercept.com)

The Father of all lies, the first lie that leads to all other lies, is that taxes are theft. The one percent have spent untold millions creating the myth that all taxation is stealing and that wealth must trickle down for prosperity to happen. This “Voodoo” leads immediately into red-baiting, that any redistribution of wealth is communism- and this then leads into religious arguments that communism is satanic and the real goal is atheism. The second great lie of the 21st century is that climate change is somehow a vast hoax perpetrated by a left-wing globalist cabal. This anti-science cancer of the mind was paid for in large part by the Koch brothers. And the third great lie, the most terrible and destructive lie of all, is that the media is all fake news and the enemy of the people, which has been called “Post-truth politics.” Voodoo, anti-science, and lies.

The most meaningful passage for me in the bible, the one that informs my faith like no other, is when Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?” When the very concept of truth, not as a spiritual matter but as practical reality, is destroyed, then insane totalitarian genocidal regimes are soon to follow. America, and by extension, the world, is in great danger. Right now.

A Green New Deal, and hopefully a Green New Space Deal, is becoming less and less likely. The vision of Gerard K. O’Neill, that space solar power would end poverty on Earth and be the economic engine of space colonization- and insurance for the human species against extinction, is the narrow path to salvation.

And…my most recent comment concerning NASA’s HRP https://www.nasa.gov/hrp : The ONLY thing that is going enable humans to live and work in space is a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G). Humans will not live and work in large numbers in an environment that causes permanent damage…period. The solution to dosing and debilitation is a massive cosmic ray water shield in the 400 ton range for a small capsule and well over a kiloton for any practical working space- and a tether generated artificial gravity system. The water shield and tether system is going to be a feature of Space Stations, Lunar Cyclers, and Spaceships or there just won’t be any Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO).

Physicist’s fusion rocket idea may unlock long-distance human space travel

Nasa-backed fusion rocket could blast astronauts to Mars and back in 30 days

“Work is about to start” on “fusion rockets”…when we could have spaceships, true spaceships, exploring that first icy body in our system closest to Earth (Ceres) in a relatively short Apollo-program time frame. A “Medusa” spaceship could be lofted into polar orbit in 100 ton modules that would dock with each other and in the right orbit could possibly light off their “pulse units” (bombs) without any or a very small amount of byproducts entering Earth’s magnetosphere. If each H-bomb can impart 100 mph then 1000 bombs can provide 100,000 mph. Using this figure for travels to icy bodies in the outer system a rough one way travel time can be estimated. I did some very rough guesses of travel times several years ago in the blog entry titled “Interplanetary Missions.” One thousand bombs might provoke automatic naysaying but a Trident missile can carry 14 warheads and an Ohio class submarine can carry 24 missiles with 336 warheads on board. Since the “bus” that carries the warhead is only the nose section of a missile, a dozen or more carousel type platforms (a ten warhead Peacekeeper missile carousel is shown below) could all be stacked in just one of the four launch tubes shown. The four launch tube construct shown could carry over 400 warheads in stacked carousels as described and gives a good idea of the scale needed for pulse unit storage on interplanetary missions.

1000 bombs will get you out there but to stop anywhere requires another thousand. To come back to Earth requires another couple thousand to accelerate and then slow down again totaling approximately four thousand bombs, though this number can be lowered using different techniques. For missions to the gas or ice giants using gravity assist and the atmospheres of these bodies to slow down it might be possible to decrease the number of bombs to around 2000 and still maintain a high speed/low transit time. The “slugs” used to generate the cloud of plasma the bombs use to push the spaceship could also be derived from icy bodies and this would save mass. The cosmic ray water shield could also be utilized as a source for slug mass and this would restrict the crew space or likely dose the crew for a short period till the shield could be replaced with the water derived from the destination icy body.

The key feature of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion is the larger the plate (in a “hard” system like Orion) or spinnaker (in a “soft” system like Medusa) the more efficient the pulse units become. Extremely large spaceships on a scale we are simply not used to thinking about are far more efficient. It is akin to comparing airliners and container ships with the container ships going fast and the airliners slow. Until we have an industrial infrastructure on the Moon that can manufacture plates close to a thousand feet across we will be wasting fissile material. However the waste would be justified for initial exploration missions and future fissile material stocks could be replenished with lunar thorium-transuranics or breeder reactors.

Launch points for a nuclear pulse mission must be outside of Earth’s magnetosphere- either cislunar or possibly a super-eccentric Earth polar orbit.

1. Moon 2.380 km/s =4.70 times less escape velocity than Earth

Material can be lifted from the Moon into space using 23 to 25 times less energy than from Earth. For every hundred pounds sent into space from Earth over a ton can be lofted from the Moon. Since a true spaceship will require well over a thousand tons of water shielding for a small crew, the ice on the Moon is the place to acquire that shielding derived from lunar ice. Eventually the massive engine plates needed for super-efficient pulse drives will be manufactured on the Moon.

2. Ceres  0.510 km/s   approximate travel time 140 days/4.6 months

Jupiter system  235 days/7.7 months

3. Ganymede  2.741 km/s
4. Europa 2.025 km/s
5. Callisto 2.440 km/s (outside of Jupiter’s radiation belts)

Saturnian system 424 days/14 months (1 year 2 months)

6. Mimas 0.159 km/s
7. Iapetus 0.573 km/s
8. Titan 2.639 km/s
9. Rhea 0.635 km/s
10.Dione 0.510 km/s
11.Tethys 0.394 km/s
12.Enceladus 0.239 km/s

Uranian system 777 days/26 months (2 years 2 months)

13.Miranda  0.193 km/s
14.Ariel 0.558 km/s
15.Umbriel 0.520 km/s
16.Titania 0.773 km/s
17.Oberon 0.726 km/s

Neptunian system 1190 days/40 months (3 years 4 months)

18.Triton 1.455 km/s (around a 7 year mission to visit my favorite moon round-trip)

Plutonian system

Pluto is presently relatively close to Neptune’s orbit but is moving away from us and may be up to 5 billion miles away or farther before any mission is underway: 

297 weeks/70 months (5 years 8 months)

19.Pluto  1.229 km/s
20.Charon 0.580 km/s

Most of my past comments on “The Space Review”, did not make it past the moderator, and I was recently banned for my criticism of NewSpace. Here are my edited original and follow-on comments:

I would speculate 100,000 miles per hour is the target speed for a unshielded spacecraft to take people to Mars. That would expose them to dosing and debilitation for only a couple months there and a couple months on the way back. The energy required to get the craft going that fast, then slowing down, then speeding back up, and finally slowing down minus a practical reentry speed, can be calculated and then evaluated using an Isp number. To go that fast is going to require nuclear energy as chemicals are almost useless. Nuclear Thermal Rockets only have an Isp about twice that of chemicals. That only leaves one practical propulsion system available right now with the least amount of development needed…and it is the one that seems to be verboten to even mention. I would add my firm belief that Mars, like LEO, is a dead end, and unshielded spacecraft are also a non-starter except for very short missions, such as intercepting Lunar Cyclers.

It is a binary problem of dosing AND debilitation. Concerning dosing I consider the basic popular science guide to be Eugene Parkers article in Scientific American, “Shielding Space Travelers.” Concerning debilitation I believe Gerard K. O’Neill’s classic book, “The High Frontier”, makes clear that Mars is not the place to go to live simply because humans evolved in one gravity. Just as our DNA will not tolerate cosmic radiation levels much beyond those found on Earth I also believe we will not thrive in lower gravities. Even if much lower gravity does not seriously debilitate, like microgravity, growing up in lower gravity will likely mean never being able to visit Earth.

The best path is to provide a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G). This all falls in line when considering the massive shielding required, a tether-generated artificial gravity (TGAG) system being the only practical solution, and some form of nuclear propulsion being the only way to push such multi-thousand ton true spaceships around the solar system.

Everything about how the world works became much clearer after I read a book last year called “Democracy in Chains.” The author did a great job and she wrote on a dense and complicated subject in a way I, just an average person, understood quite well. The central focus of the book was, in my view, taxes.

From other readings I have come to understand that taxes are what make a state function. This is an inescapable fact those of the libertarian persuasion refuse to accept. And it is greed that blinds them and leads them down a path that results in nothing but ruin and anarchy for everyone. Almost everything that has gone wrong in America, and by extension, the world, has to do with the rich avoiding taxes.

If Fascism was replaced by Neoliberalism then Communism was replaced by Oligarchs. The two go together as Neoliberalism is an ideology and Oligarchy is the practice of that ideology. America is presently fighting a form of Fascism called Trumpism that is a response to Neoliberalism. Across the spectrum the Neoliberals want to be Oligarchs and are using the Trumpist dream of a Fascist America, who call any opposing them Communists. It is a strange brew whose main ingredient is the destruction of truth and this era has, in fact, been named, “Post-truth: Post-truth is a philosophical and political concept for “the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth”^[1] and the “circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth”.^[2] Post-truth discourse is often contrasted with the forms taken by scientific methods and inquiry.^[3] The term garnered widespread popularity, in the form of “post-truth politics“, in the period around the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit referendum. It was named Word of the Year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary where it is defined as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.^[4][5]

And that…is the truth. They (Republicans) have calculated quite carefully that Trumps rabid base is the key to them staying in power for life and becoming rich with no apparent risk for trying to do so….so why not try? They would be stupid not to try. That is what they are. And if we let them we deserve it. They believe that. If enough democrats do not understand the danger America faces over the next 4 years and work to vote them out the Trumpists could destroy this nation. “History doesn’t repeat itself,  but It often rhymes” – Mark Twain. The parallels with Fascism in Europe are obvious.

The Green New Deal is not frequently being addressed by that term due to a great deal of propaganda that has had the effect of programming many Americans to dismiss any notion that our planet is getting hotter. The above video highlights the kind of bought dog politician that represents fossil fuel interests. A Green New Space Deal that makes the ultimate solution of powering civilization carbon-free from space the goal- is thus even farther away.

Only one technology is missing to allow actual star travel: revivable cryopreservation. When we can freeze people without damage and revive them decades later then centuries long voyages to other star systems become possible (and desirable as an insurance policy for our species). Accelerated out of the solar system by beam propulsion to some percentage of the speed of light the starship would arrive hundreds of years later in some nearby system and likely used nuclear pulse devices in combination with other techniques to slow back down. Since humans have radioactive particles present in their bodies causing damage and some damage from outside radiation occurs even in a massively shielded environment, the passengers would likely be revived after a certain period, perhaps a decade or two, for a short period, perhaps a few months, to repair the damage to their DNA.

There are processes that use different techniques to prevent ice crystal formation during freezing and this is the major problem with cryopreservation so it is not the technical challenge that is widely assumed. Interestingly, the societal disruption from such a discovery would change the nature of human life profoundly and be the most significant event in human history. Some monkey or dog is revived without damage after being frozen in a lab one day, maybe tomorrow, and the world would suddenly change. Nobody would allow their loved ones to die when they could be frozen until the technology to reverse aging becomes available. It would immediately become “The Great Rescue” as the world mobilized to save those close to death. As soon as the race was over and the pipeline into cold storage was created would come “The Great Race” to reverse aging. As hundreds of thousands, and within a few years, tens of millions are placed in storage, vast resources would be focused on reversing aging. And when that problem was solved next would come star travel.

This is the bright future that initially attracted me to space travel: the only practical way to send people to another star is by way of suspended animation. And that technology would profoundly change humankind simply because we love others and will not let them die.

So I am looking for others who might like to join me in popularizing and promoting this path. Please comment as I have reopened the comments section.

I have been commenting on a couple different sites for the last couple months and it was not a good experience…as if it ever was. The far right has such a stranglehold on these public forums it is scary. The moderators refuse to shut down the harassment when someone (like me) offers alternative opinions. So when people visit these sites they find fanboys that send them away shaking their heads and with no further involvement in space and this is sad. I have tried over the years to be an alternative view on a half a dozen such forums and have always ended up banned for replying to the dogpile of insults and intolerance that inevitably occurs. The sad truth is anything that hints at any “liberal” policy or not found on the SpaceX website is trivialized, mocked, and denigrated. This has become such a pervasive theme on internet forums associated with space that the damage is irreparable. So enough of that. I have reposted this from an earlier entry; before Biden was elected it was “Bernie and the Green New Space Deal”, when I was hoping for a progressive nominee, and now have re-branded. Here we go again:

Converting the United States Military Industrial Complex into something that will create a sustainable future for humankind will be the great feat of history. Nothing impossible about it or even extremely challenging in terms of technology. It is what we should do as a species if we want our children and grandchildren to have any kind of a future. The problem, of course, is that minority of psychopathic neoliberals who happen to control most of the worlds wealth and want nothing to do with anything that does not give them even more god-like power. So we have something we should do and we have a stumbling block. And then what we have is a dire need for people like Bernie Sanders.

The present Army Navy Air Force Marines establishment is about fighting wars here on Earth against other superpowers whose people collectively have no desire to watch the world economy crash and possibly billions die in a global conflict. It is mostly a façade and militaries exist largely as a safeguard against an individual like Hitler coming to power in one of three or four superpower nations. As recent events show, this is not so unlikely. The nations thus retain their militaries as a safeguard against any other power seeking to subjugate them. The United States maintains armed forces so far beyond what other nations have it is absurd and why we do that is fairly obvious- it is an industry that makes a lot of people rich. Those people and companies want to keep making money and anything threatening their gold mine is acted against swiftly.

The best strategy is thus to not threaten Military Industrial Complex (MIC) “wealth creators” but instead offer those players an alternative. That alternative is Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) using the Moon as the new industrial base to power planet Earth. Solar thermal towers with their mirror fields and molten salt storage are about the only practical technology for generating energy in a sustainable manner on Earth but unfortunately all the great deserts of the world combined are not going to enable a western standard of living for 10 billion people. And make no mistake, the only way out of this is to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on Earth. All of us.

While NewSpace ideology has caused inestimable damage to space exploration and colonization, the flagship company has at least popularized Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing (VTVL) as being the most efficient method of reusing rockets. It will likely be decades before reusing really large Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLVs) breaks even economically but at least the Ayn-Rand-in-space-train-wreck has done something “not harmful.” Whether VTVL would have happened anyway if the shuttle boosters had been the originally specified pressure-fed ocean recovered type instead of solid fuel remains to be seen. I suspect with pressure-feds a variant of the shuttle would still be flying.

The way forward is a first stage at least half again as large as the Saturn V, landing on a ship at sea, as the first piece of hardware. Four large engines and a smaller central landing engine, will become the standard. Much like airliners have become a giant version of the original German ME-262 fighter, the standard rocket will become a larger version of the Saturn V. The second stage will likely fly around the planet and land back at the launch site using ceramic tile technology with one central engine and four smaller landing engines- or a low thrust setting might be utilized to form a plume shielding the vehicle during reentry (as proposed in the 60’s by Philip Bono)- or a combination. And the third stage will be a wet workshop with the engine section possibly doing a lunar free-return back to re-enter and land for reuse.

SHLVs from the U.S., from Russia, from China, with versions built under license by European and Asian companies, will largely replace the cold war toys and nuclear triad hardware still being developed or modernized.  Warships and warplanes will no longer be the money-makers. The new Military Industrial Complex wealth creation strategy will be based on giant rockets. Lunar-water-shielded wet workshops will first go into Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) and then to a Lunar Cycler fleet and finally as spaceship crew compartments. Eventually immense power stations will lift from the surface of the Moon and find their way to GEO where they will begin to beam carbon-free power down to planet Earth.

That is the Green New Space Deal.

Beyond changing over the Military Industrial Complex from Earth-based to space-based and powering planet Earth carbon-free there is the original colonization plan of Gerard K. O’Neill. In any plan similar to O’Neill’s, a hundred years from now the population of Earth may begin to decrease as beam-propelled space-liners leave daily for space habitats. Within a few centuries Earth will be a place to visit like a national park. Not only will Earth be a garden but miles in diameter Bernal spheres will be sent on centuries long voyages to other star systems. There are very few technical challenges to this bright future. In contrast, the road humankind is on now has a good chance of ending in extinction.

My comment from The Space Review: Unfortunately the legion of NewSpace fans that have hijacked almost all public discourse on space do not tolerate creative & crazy ideas like Space Solar Power satellite factories on the Moon as the solution to climate change. They are mostly libertarian far-right Ayn Rand types who worship Elon Musk as the embodiment of John Galt, Howard Roark, and Tony Stark, all rolled into one Cult figure.

Only a state sponsored program is going to enable any space mega-projects and Musk is not a Space Solar advocate. He instead wants to strip-mine Earth orbit with tens of thousands of his very own small satellites beaming internet to a world that does not need this contrived convenience…and his followers are not open-minded about anything not found on the SpaceX website.

Comment by Vladislaw· 

“that have hijacked almost all public discourse on space do not tolerate creative & crazy ideas “

“You mean how you hijack all public discourse and do not tolerate creative and crazy ideas put forth by SpaceX? You are your own worse enemy. You do not tolerate ANY idea outside of your own.“

Projection and lies, the very foundation of Trumpism. And Vlad hates Trump. So it is also The Cult of Musk, like The Cult of Trump, that needs to end.

Counting the hours now. Thank you God he is out. Thank you God.

“In 1969, the Space Task Group proposed a plan for the post-Apollo future space program. One component was a space tug so crewed flight between the Earth-orbiting space station and the lunar-orbiting space station, from there to the lunar surface. For budget and other reasons, President Nixon rejected this plan, ultimately approving only the space shuttle.”

We see the results of Nixon going cheap. If liquid rocket boosters had been used instead of the SRB’s it is highly likely an iteration of the Space Transportation System would still be going strong today.

What we know now a half century later is that cosmic radiation makes long duration missions Beyond Low Earth Orbit (BLEO) in the “Cislunar Sea” problematic. Not only dosing but debilitation makes any multi-year human activities in space without a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity (NSLR1G) environment to be ruinous to health and simply unacceptable. Young females are especially vulnerable to damage and higher risks of cancer from dosing and debilitation.

We now know the best form of the space tug proposed in 1969 is the “Lunar Cycler.” A fleet of Cyclers might be the superhighway connecting a lunar industrial infrastructure with Earth. The stumbling block is exactly what doomed the Space Shuttle; going cheap. There is no cheap. The biggest obstacle to expanding humankind into space right now is “NewSpace” which only allows “entrepreneurs” and the profit motive to determine how we leave Earth. This path is even more certain to fail than the Space Shuttle which was sold on it’s relative cheapness and ability to “pay for itself.” Only massively shielded crew compartments and tether generated artificial gravity systems are going to enable humans to live in space for years at a time. These constructs will mass in the thousands of tons. Water as shielding brought up from the Moon using 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth to double-hulled “Fat Workshops” are the most practical solution.

The new administration has the opportunity to address Climate Change by proposing Space Solar Power satellite factories on the Moon as the ultimate solution. A “Green New Space Deal.” The prerequisite is a state sponsored program of Super Heavy Lift Vehicle launches of 6 to 8 lunar missions per year- to start with. The ISS needs to end and those funds redirected, and iterations of the SLS with reusable boosters and a reusable engine module, as well as a very large diameter upper stage double hulled wet workshop, are the fundamental building blocks. The obvious source to pay for this is the DOD. A pipeline of fat workshops going to Low Lunar Orbit (we now know there are sustainable “frozen orbits”) and then utilized as Lunar Cyclers and GEO platforms can also provide, by mating nuclear propulsion modules, true spaceships.

These spaceships could carry nuclear devices to deflect impact threats and conceivably replace the present strategic deterrent of terrestrial delivery systems. An Earth free of nuclear weapons, powered from space carbon free. As envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, lunar resources and space solar power would be the economic engine eventually enabling the colonization of space.

“We are still on track to take the first woman to the moon by 2024 and complete a Mars landing by 2029.”

Possible to orbit the Moon by 2024 but the Mars statement is, in my opinion, totally impossible. Simply because radiation, that elephant in the room NASA does not like to talk about, is just too ruinous to health, and added to debilitation, is not going to allow humans to go anywhere without massive shielding and artificial gravity. And it might as well be added that shielding will be lunar water lifted with 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth, and a tether generated artificial gravity system several thousand feet long. A minimum thousand tons of water and roughly equal masses spinning around each other would be a “true spaceship” and we will not be seeing that by 2029.

The SLS may get us to the Moon a half dozen times but much more powerful reusable boosters will be needed to replace the SRB’s and the engine module will need to be recoverable and reusable. This future iteration will require funding…now. And it will essentially be what the shuttle should have been; more lift than the Saturn V with a core stage tank as the necessary sacrifice to the rocket equation. The best way to begin that is to end the ISS ASAP and redirect those resources.

“You’re right: in the 1960s, NASA defined a bold goal, determined the best way to accomplish it, and told industry what to build to make it happen. Those days are over. Today industry decides what it wants to build, their senators tell NASA that it must accomplish things that way, and NASA is left to awkwardly try to explain how this fits into some kind of coherent goal. What a sad state of affairs.”

You’re wrong: in the 2020’s, NASA is still the Space Agency of the United States of America and “those days” are NOT over. Not if the New Administration tells the public those days are back.

A Super Heavy Lift Vehicle carries that refueling depot with it and goes direct to the Moon. The very raison d’etre of the Saturn V. Not only does a SHLV make depots unnecessary, but diving down through the Van Allen belts to within a few hundred miles of the Earth’s surface to a rendezvous as an everyday maneuver is….far more that just putting gas in your car. It is a mess popularized by NewSpace as the small rocket snake oil cure for all difficulties.

If “relying on smaller rockets plus propellant depots” will allow more frequent missions why does the SpaceX “Super Heavy” have over 11 million pounds of thrust? Quoting NewSpace dogma, which was useful in promoting the inferior lift Falcon 9 in years past, quickly gets SpaceX promoters into trouble.

The Super Heavy is a booster design in the right thrust range but with only one problem- the Raptor engines are about one quarter as powerful as the Saturn V F-1 and thus four times too many. The Starship is not a good design at all being simply an attempt at creating a shuttle variant that does not expend an external tank. It has no escape system for starters- a fundamental mistake of the shuttle it repeats.

Once NASA gets out the way? NASA did accomplish reusable boosters- the Shuttle SRB’s each had almost half a million pounds more thrust than the Falcon 9. The shuttle was actually a Saturn V class launch vehicle that wasted most of it’s lift on the Orbiter. The Falcon is a much less powerful vehicle which uses too many smaller engines. The Crew Dragon has a poorly designed escape system that packs over 3000 pounds of hypergolic propellants into a small capsule. The P.R. hype of their products and the endless damning of NASA by a legion of fanboys has made it obvious who the “main obstacle” is. The NewSpace ideology of “smaller-cheaper-no Moon-NASA inept” has done a great deal of unrealized and profound damage to space exploration.