Ice on the Moon

“-I’m not talking about the more recent SJW/identity political movement.”

Why does it seem like you are? Damning NASA and the people “running these programs” is the NeoLiberal Kool-Aid millions of Americans have poured down their throats to varying degrees.

Got news for you….it was all bought and paid for by right-wing “think tanks” and the super-rich funding them who have been after one thing since The New Deal raised taxes on them to 91 percent (after their free market crashed due to greed and corruption, which they always do). That one thing they want is “freedom” and “liberty” and just to enlighten you those are code words for “NO TAXES.” They are almost there.

The key to your whole “take” on “Western Civilization.” You have been conned. The less than 1% that own most of the wealth on this planet want you stupid and living on almost nothing- and working 80 hours a week for them if they can get you to do it. If you actually are stupid enough.

Mars is a dead end. It is a tenet of the Musk Cult that making Mars the second home of humankind is the altruistic goal of the great one. Complete B.S.

Mars is the worst place to go and simply a P.R. tool- so the billionaire can keep conning people into supporting his hobby projects.

The Moon as a Space Solar Power satellite factory to solve climate change and a multi-trillion dollar Green New Space Deal is the only path to expanding humankind into the solar system. NewSpace is presently the biggest obstacle to any progress by promising much for little which will result in nothing. There is no cheap.

Well, the great hope is they start making an engine in the 2 million pound+ thrust range. This is the missing piece of the puzzle for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) missions.

The recent methane engines from those two NewSpace companies are one quarter the appropriate size needed to support Super Heavy Lift Vehicle programs.

LockMart-Aerojet-Rocketdyne can likely build what the billionaire hobbyists will not. Some idea of just how badly such an engine is needed; the 15 million pound thrust of the “Super Heavy” would require only 5 engines if each generated 3 million pounds of thrust. (The 5 segment SRB on the SLS generates 3.2 and a liquid fuel engine would be far more efficient of course).

Five would be better than the 28 engine cluster-mess.

Let me guess…you don’t think engines can throttle down or two different kinds of engines is an incredible waste and it is better to have 3 times as many.

Landing back the engines is not necessarily the best idea and unfortunately the Shuttle SRB’s tend to color peoples perception of ocean recovery. If the Shuttle boosters had been liquid fuel they would have been taken back to the launch site and “turned around.” With a few other design flaws eliminated the Space Transportation System would still be going strong today, at least in a cargo version. The big dumb booster concept is to essentially have a strong stage that can withstand parachuting into the ocean and multiple reuse and a pressure-fed, or partially pressure-fed booster lends itself to that. A pressure-fed will always be much tougher than a conventional stage. A pressure fed would require some type of water barrier instead of landing gear and parachutes instead of extra fuel for the landing burn. Instead of landing on a recovery ship and possibly blowing up it is lifted from the water with a frame.

For landing back the best solution, since asking a several million pound thrust engine to throttle down to only a few percent is difficult, is to use two different size engines. For the first stage I would guess four large ones and smaller central landing engine. For the second stage a single large one and four smaller ones for landing. Four and one lends itself to landing gear but it could be done with three and one.

Smaller rockets are moneymakers for satellite launch but make Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit much more difficult and Super Heavy Lift Vehicles are the way to go.

And those 2 to 3 million pound thrust engines are what are needed for SHLVs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

“Due to the engine’s potential advantage in specific impulse, if this F-1B configuration (using four F-1Bs in total) were integrated with the SLS Block 2, the vehicle could deliver 150 tonnes (330,000 lb) to low Earth orbit,[15]”

And…why not drop those two boosters in the ocean like the Shuttle SRB’s and recover for reuse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
“Recoverable Liquid Booster: A large focus of the NASA/MSFC Shuttle Growth Study contract was upgraded Recoverable Liquid Boosters. The boosters would have a similar flight path fo the solid rocket motors, separating and deploying a parachute for recovery in the Atlantic Ocean. They were to be water-recoverable and used clam shell doors to protect the engines from salt water immersion.” They could even try feeding LOX to the core like they entertained with the FH.

And if they are going to do that why not have an engine module land back with the 4 RS-25’s and reuse them also. “An in-line integrated booster/ET with a recoverable aft engine pod”

That iteration of the SLS would be what the Shuttle really should have been.

https://www.aiaa.org/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/about-aiaa/history-and-heritage/shuttlevariationsfinalaiaa.pdf?sfvrsn=b8875e90_0

It is not fake news, not “fluff.” What the Musk Cult has been flooding the internet with for a decade is far worse than any so-called fluff. It needs to end. Even Putin congratulated Joe so that is over and this rabid fanboy excoriation of anything critical of Spacex has to stop. If it was occasional it would be one thing but it is automatic and endless and is cult members brainwashing each other in an endless loop. Just like Fox news has done to a certain segment of the public for a decade.

“I was happy to chat with them,” he said. “But I’m not going to speculate on what they may or may not do.”

Be great if Biden disbanded Space Force on the 21st and reformed it on the 22nd as the Space Corps. This would remove the taint of who signed them into existence. They really need to completely divorce their organization from the failed coup attempt.

And…they need a mission that puts their members in harms way if they want to enjoy the privileges and prestige of a military service. They risk nothing and get all of the benefits and that was the draft-dodger and chief spitting on the military he called suckers and losers.

Reply: Unfortunately it is connected by name and origin and that is easily remedied by simply turning it off and then back on with a new name and originator. See how that works?

And I have to add that “paying for itself multiple times over” is not what serving as a member of the Armed Forces of The United States of America is about. People might “fight hard over money” but that is not why we fight.

(Astra rocket) It’s utility for a terrorist or anyone to do massive mischief is close to 100%.

Minuteman does not put things in orbit. It is not only a missile, it is a launch vehicle capable of dropping a payload anywhere on Earth or use as a anti-satellite weapon- and should not be in the hands of these proliferating small private companies. Period. And calling me a nut case adds you to the block list. Bye.

It blew up in a way that an escape tower never would. Which is why I made my original comment. The Starliner is marginally better because the hypergolics are not wrapped around the crew compartment and the system can be jettisoned.

But there is likely no good substitute for a tower- it is a nearly perfect design in terms of crew safety. The Starliner and Crew Dragon are a poor compromise that sacrifices crew safety. They hated throwing away those expensive towers and went with something that would make them more money. Bad choice, bad design.

They could have went with a tower that could be recovered and reused but the temptation to make that system do something to maximize profit was too great.

It is really the same logic chain that led to no escape system at all on the Shuttle.

I read some of it but…it became obvious about halfway through he was biased. He talked about how solid rocket motors would not be good docked to the ISS and that was a tell… towers get jettisoned before orbit and he knows that. I just cannot waste my time with that.

Also: “The abort motors have to be powerful enough to pull the vehicle away from a failing rocket as quickly as possible. These systems can pull up to 15G’s of acceleration for a few seconds. Now I’m not saying that sounds like fun…. But…. yeah that actually sounds awful, like being hit by a semi truck for a few seconds continually… yeah, no thanks!”

This has always been a standard fanboy criticism and it is total B.S. and borders on Orwellian: you absolutely positively WANT as much acceleration as the human body can tolerate to escape a disintegrating stack. And the hypergolic systems fall far short of that mark while the tower gets close to it. Thanks for the polite discussion.

It actually does work that way. Just like the electoral college…I elect not to accept your false reality that I have to be accountable to you. The reality, like Biden being the president-elect, is that I am here to express my views. Not promote SpaceX. Sorry.

Over the years the SpaceX crowd has climbed up on this imaginary moral high ground and it is a sad fantasy. The ideology is toxic and based on libertarian B.S.

If it is SSTO you are inferring as something akin to the first flight then….that might be valid. The problem is simple physics. We live in a gravity well of a certain depth on a planet we don’t want to pollute with any nuclear propulsion byproducts and thus are right now restricted to chemical propulsion. Not expending anything on a launch is this benchmark that is not that meaningful in terms of dollars. Since “going cheap” is why the NewSpace fans seem to think it is meaningful it is more a P.R. tool than anything else.

In my view beam propulsion is the technology that will allow a “space-liner” to take off from Earth and escape Earth orbit with only onboard propellants. This will require a Space Solar Power infrastructure as a “second stage”, actually, as a second and third stage.

If you are not familiar with beam propulsion it essentially beams energy from the ground or space to the spacecraft to superheat a propellent (most likely hydrogen) to a very high Isp.

Okay now. what part of Musk telling NASA what he has to offer them in the way of launch vehicles is what they can take or leave do you not understand?

As I explained, this weird mix of John Galt entrepreneurial miracle and let-Musk-do-it-all-because-NASA-is-the-enemy is why NewSpace is..as has been stated..the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

I understand you are unhappy and want to bounce this off the imaginary audience the fanboys are always performing for here. But I am not buying it.
Let us move on to other things Vlad; The Electoral College just proved America is not a Banana Republic. Not yet.

Let’s go there and talk about a Green New Space Deal.

Generals are supposed to be very high IQ people- or so I was told when I was in. Yet we have Michael Flynn. And people in a service that has zero risk talking about how great it is to take risks.

They need to disband on the 21st and reform on the 22nd as the Space Corps and also identify what arena they are going to send people to and earn the prestige and privileges of a military service- and leave the taint of who signed them into existence behind.

I would strongly suggest, at a minimum, to designate all Nuclear Launch Officers as Space Corps. Not much risk there as long as the world is not going to end, but it is a start.
https://www.latimes.com/opi…

Sitting on your behind at a satellite terminal on a base in Cali or Colorado and saying “bring it on” is B.S.

Not a great plan in my view Vlad. It could work I guess- if there are volatiles trapped in the ice allowing methane to be reformed. But the mass penalty compared to a semi-expendable robot Lunar Lander would be very high. Not to mention refueling a starship in LEO is a long, long, way away. If ever.

That New Shepard, on the other hand, has the makings of exactly what is needed. Carried by an iteration of the SLS, a robot lander based on New Shepard could be “dropped on the biggest ice deposits on Luna.”

Space Corps on the Moon….?

An “instant base” is not going to happen without massive radiation shielding though. And even after there is shielded living space there is the problem of debilitation. I would say the best first step is true shielded space stations in frozen Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) with tether-generated artificial gravity. These space stations would allow astronauts to ride back up from a subsurface Moonbase, shielded on the ride up at least, to periodically rehabilitate in 1 gravity. They might accrue some dose on the way back down unfortunately. This might, ideally, allow an astronaut a very long career in cislunar space instead of quickly accruing a career dose and suffering permanent tissue loss.

Hmmm. I don’t think that is how it is going to work. The ice is going to be shared and not sold by private parties. This “claim” thing might have had some validity in the 1800’s but not now. Ice resources will be exploited for water that can be used for radiation shielding and sustenance or split for oxygen to breathe or for propellants.

What I think you are basing your causal train on is some kind of “market.” There is not going to be a market up there in cislunar space for a long time. Think about why we will be in cislunar space. Why? There are, in my view, three probable different “raison d’etre” :

1. A Green New Space Deal that makes Space Solar Power the focus of solving the climate change crisis. In which case trillions will get thrown at creating a cislunar infrastructure and turning the Moon into a factory manufacturing solar power satellite components. This would be great and I am praying for it.

2. The whole smallsat constellation concept turns out to be a disaster and it is instead decided to create large shielded human-crewed platforms in GEO to replace the failed Earth orbit satellite junkyard. In this case these GEO telecom support platforms would require hundreds of thousands of tons of water as shielding and this could be lifted from the Moon for 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth. This would solve many problems (they would be invulnerable to a Carrington event) and create a pipeline for Lunar Cyclers and true Spaceships.

3. The Nuclear Deterrent of the superpowers is relocated into deep space on “space boomers.” These U.S., Russian, Chinese, French, and British spaceships would also need at a minimum several hundred thousand tons of water for shielding and also Moonbases to support their fleets. This would realize the impossible dream of removing nuclear weapons from the Earth, ratchet down the launch-on-warning risk, and also provide planetary defense against impact threats. And also enable exploration missions Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit.

Or…All three at once. The water would be distributed to these projects by international agreement. It would not be the wild west.

If these 4 spacecraft- the two American taxis, Russian, and Chinese, can all dock to a simple multi-connector airlock, then up to six can all dock together at once. No need for the ISS. In fact, several of these simple “locks” could be up at once and would be semi-expendable. No need for the ISS. The experiments can be moved from one capsule to another if needed. Enough data on long duration human effects has been gathered so there is no need for the ISS. There never was really. It is a huge waste.

A “true” space station would provide a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G) by using a massive water shield and tether-generated artificial gravity. Such stations are a waste in LEO and would start in a frozen Low Lunar Orbit (where they would be filled with lunar water from Robot Landers) and then NRHO and GEO or serve as Lunar Cyclers and as “true” spaceship compartments.

Calling the ISS a “space station” is not really appropriate. I believe the correct term should be Orbital Platform or “O-P”. They stopped serving any useful purpose in LEO decades ago.

Hold on, this is waiting to be approved by Space Policy Online.

The radiation problem facing astronauts on long duration missions in cislunar space can, in my view, be solved with lunar-ice-derived cosmic ray water shields. These thousands of tons of water can be lifted from the lunar poles with between 20 and 25 times less energy than from Earth. Career dosing and debilitation is the single most critical issue, especially for younger female astronauts.

The horrible treatment the SLS is getting on all of the spaceflight forums by NewSpace fans is unbelievable. You would think after the last 4 years this kind of cult behavior would be unacceptable. In my view when the SLS lifts off the world will give the U.S. a standing ovation- except those who hate the U.S. and…these toxic NewSpace fans that have hijacked most online discourse.

(Starship) It is essentially a revision of the Space Shuttle concept with many of the same limitations. Considering what it lifts into orbit I do not consider it the dawn of a new age.

=========================================================================

The best solution to a Carrington Event is massive water shielding- which would be necessary for any human-crewed space station in GEO anyway. A ring of these large space stations around the Earth replacing the present telecom satellites would simply shut down temporarily for such a solar event and with their hardware/software protected behind massive thousand ton plus water shields would suffer no damage.

The best place to fill those radiation shields is in Low Lunar Orbit by bringing the water up from the lunar poles using 20 to 25 times less energy than bring it up from Earth. The stations would then be transited across the cislunar sea to GEO.

The products of these little rocket companies are actually more capable than ICBMs. The likelihood of them being used to cause serious incidents or be used in terrorist acts and nefarious schemes has increased by an order of magnitude. The libertarians scream bloody murder at regulation but this is one of those activities, like nuclear power generation, that needs to be strictly regulated. And it is not.

My view has always been that smaller launch vehicles are extremely undesirable. The rockets we want can carry people to the Moon, that is, the only things we should be launching are Saturn V class Vehicles. They can bundle all these smaller launches together on a bus or with their own little boosters for extremely different orbits. This was essentially how the Space Shuttle was going to pay for itself. If they had not tried to go cheap it might have worked. The SLS, if it had reusable liquid boosters and a reusable core engine module and only sacrificed the core tank, is what the Shuttle should have been.

The entire spectrum of Earth orbit for-profit activities reeks of greed and corruption. Smallsat constellations are the strip-mining of a natural resource and should never have been allowed. International agreements should have mandated GEO human-crewed platforms instead- going high, big, and few, instead of the opposite direction.

“The SXM-7 launch, though, was only the third where the primary customer was neither the U.S. government nor SpaceX itself.”

Corporate welfare at it’s finest. With reusable rockets sitting around you have to launch something or it kind of makes them a joke; much cheaper to build them and drop them in the ocean. You then get rid of that huge rotten standing army of worthless people sucking up money not turning around rockets. See how that works?

Like I said, corporate welfare- only 3 launches not for the government or for strip-mining Earth orbit. Delta whataboutism? Sad. And… “Laughable” that this is some kind of market-driven Neoliberal miracle performed by John Galt. Never was that even though the fanboys are true believers. The Cult of Musk, like The Cult of Trump, needs to end.

“The Greens”? They must be one of those terrible threats to the stock market.

Yes, it IS a good thing we have people like the Koch brothers that demonized all the tree huggers before the planet was destroyed by environmentalists. Capitalists are actually the second coming. (Because money is really the god of this world.)

And THAT is the Neoliberal Orwellian diatribe paid for by hundreds of millions of dollars. That endless loop of propaganda in your head. It has been playing for 4 decades straight since the Reagan Revolution.

This virtuous cycle you are describing is a fabrication. The U.S. has a space program and the SLS and Orion are the flagship projects. Your fundamental mistake is in erroneously substituting your favorite private for-profit company for our space program. It is not reality and is a kind of cognitive dissonance…or some kind of lie used for marketing. Or something in between. In any case it is a ethically toxic choice you have made and it seems to influence much of what you write here. Too bad because I like you. But many people messing up any chance of a bright future for the human species, working directly against that, seem to be likeable people. I blame it on Neoliberalism.

SpaceX is not a utilitarian entity dedicated to making us a multi-planet species. They say that but it is marketing. And I have commented on this many times. You must not be paying attention.

Musk has his own plan to pay for his starships to Mars by strip-mining earth orbit.

NASA has it’s plan for returning to the Moon to stay with a program of Super Heavy Lift Vehicles. Compared to DOD projects SLS is chump change.

Musk is not NASA. If you want to dismantle the U.S. space agency and hand it all over to Musk and let him do it his way I do not agree with that. And my perception is that all your blah blah blah money money money taxpayer taxpayer B.S. is just a facade hiding exactly that. That is NewSpace.

Yes…anyone with a college education gets that. That is not the point. We don’t want that particular revenue stream as moral and ethical human beings. The ones who have no problem with it, the sociopath/psychopath component of humanity, need to be denied their opportunities to kill and destroy. This is one of the reasons Neoliberalism and Libertarianism are partners in crime with Fascism- they all make almost no distinction between what is good or evil. To them war is not necessarily evil and in some cases a sought after opportunity.

True soldiers are like fireman…they are there to end it, and would like nothing better than to see their profession go extinct.

I have to go with accomplishing public works that guarantee a better life for our children- and of course that requires companies to furnish the hardware and they will make money off it or they will not participate. Trying to pour money in their pockets up front is an invitation to criminality.

The example of this I always hold up is Apollo 1. North American and several other companies saw the race to the Moon as a gold mine and were doing their best to cash in. It is painted now as a patriotic cold war battle with the Soviets but while that was what persuaded Americans to allow it that is not why these companies were building rockets. Companies exist to make a profit. NPO’s step outside the capitalist system and get some tax breaks because they do not compete for higher profit margins, usually on humanitarian grounds. NewSpace fanboys seem to lack any ability to distinguish between advancing humankind and profiteering. A few seem to think NewSpace is like a NPO. Wrong. I blame it on Neoliberal conditioning. Brainwashed by the Kochs.

After the fire Aerospace concerns realized Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit was going to be very hard money. The draconian oversight imposed by NASA saw their profit margins going down to almost nothing. That doomed the space age before it ever really started. Cold war weaponry was where the easy money was and that is where they went. And stayed.

No Richard. Not anything close to being practical.

This is why the wet workshop concept was championed by von Braun; he understood that a structure already constructed to withstand the max Q of a launch would be sturdy enough for anything it would need to do in space- including being spun at the end of a tether to provide a 1G environment, or containing a thousand tons of water as a cosmic ray shield.

Take a look at the attached spin calculator and you will quickly see why a tether is the only practical technique for generating artificial gravity on a spaceship scale. For several hundred pounds of tether a couple thousand feet separation will generate 1G with only a little over 1 revolution per minute and an angular speed of under 150 miles an hour. Faster rotation generates all kinds of problems, the worst one being nausea and disorientation. Those small centrifuges are a non-starter for several reasons.

With a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle sending fat upper stages to lunar orbit and robot landers bringer ice-derived water up to fill the shields, a couple workshops spinning on a tether will provide a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity (NSLR1G) environment for astronauts. And that is the prerequisite for humans working in space years at a time. Nothing else comes close to accomplishing this.
https://www.artificial-grav…

“It seemed to offer a kind of hack-“

Not really. It is, and remains, the ultimate reusability scheme. I keep hearing people say it is “dangerous” when you are working in a pressurized compartment strong enough to carry hundreds of tons of propellent under multiple G-loads. Nonsense. NewSpace fanboys will say anything to demonize anything that is not in their favorite entrepreneurs business plan. Everybody had their own ideas about space and Thompson had his. If you think he was right that is on you.

“There’s been a lot of discussions on how to build a space station. Should it be a great big thing launched with a huge booster, or should it be modular taken up by a smaller vehicle and assembled in orbit, built up in segments or modules? Well, by then, the practical thing that had a reasonable chance of being funded and supported out of the Congress was a modular space station that you could fly into orbit with something like what we finally got to call a space shuttle. So you could take the modules in low Earth orbit, and if you had something like the shuttle, you could transport people. You could transport modules, you could maneuver in orbit, you could dock, you could work and so forth.”

On the shuttle:

“You can read in the history books about that it was too funded-constrained and this sort of thing, we should have been more visionary and built a bigger, better vehicle that cost less to operate. Well, I think that’s a lot of nonsense. That’s a lot of argument about he should have married some other girl, he’d been much happier. You don’t know how happier he’d been if he’d done that. It just wasn’t practical to take on a very large spending program at that time.”

Actually, nobody is “scared.” It is likely not going to be the gamechanger the fanboys think it is. It looks very cool (it is so sci-fi it is beautiful) but if you understand exactly how much is going into this monster and how much it actually lifts into orbit….it is not the dawn of a new era. The rocket equation has not changed. I grant it might be useful in a certain kind of architecture but the idea it is instilling fear is ridiculous. It is essentially a new take on the space shuttle concept and has many of the same limitations.
Easy on the hype.

“Beyond Low Earth Orbit” is generally meant to signify GEO in a future Human Space Flight context. There is no human presence in GEO being entertained right now- mainly due to radiation. I am a proponent of lunar-water-shielded GEO space stations though. Transferring to a Starship in LEO just so it can boost to GEO would be a waste. A Lunar Cycler is the best way to manage human travel between the Earth and Moon and intercepting Cycler orbits is the best job for anything launching from Earth carrying people. I am certain Starship would have to be refueled in space to intercept a Cycler. More efficient to just send a capsule direct.

It is often argued that if you can intercept a Cycler then there is not enough justification to have Cyclers- the intercept vehicle can just go to the Moon- but this is inherently flawed logic when it is realized that radiation shielding, life support, and other considerations make transit between the Earth and Moon undesirable in these small spacecraft.

The only place I can see Starship fitting into a cislunar infrastructure is if it can make it to GEO space stations. It might be useful for that.

I believe we need to get humans into space as a priority. But going to Mars is completely antithetical to any long-term human presence off-world. Why Mars keeps being pursued is a twisted tale of sci-fi popular culture as a marketing tool and certain entrepreneurial ambitions. Mars is a complete dead end and a tremendous stumbling block to human expansion into the solar system. In terms of an insurance policy for our species promoting Mars as a second home is a terrible mistake.

In my view the logical progression is first to have 3 key building blocks- 1) A state sponsored Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV). 2) A “Fat Wet Workshop”- as a double-hulled upper stage of that SHLV. 3) A semi-expendable robot lander to exploit lunar ice- to fill the cosmic ray shield of that Fat Workshop.

With these workshops filled with lunar water and connected to each other with tether systems Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G) space stations can be assembled. This first requirement- an environment that does not cause permanent damage to the human body- means astronauts can have very long careers in space before accruing a career dose of radiation or suffering tissue loss from debilitation. Presently astronauts, especially young woman, would be sacrificing their health going into space for any long duration missions. A harmful environment is a non-starter.

NSLR1G stations can transit from their Frozen Low Lunar Orbits (LLO) to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and also be used as Lunar Cyclers. Eventually, with nuclear propulsion modules docked to these true space stations, a fleet of true space ships can explore the icy bodies of the outer solar system. Mars is the worst place to try and land and there are no oceans there. It is the subsurface oceans that are the best exploration destinations.

I don’t really consider a couple hundred miles up to be “space”…I prefer the term Earth orbit and personally draw the line dividing space and Earth orbit at 22,236 miles up. LEO qualified as space until we left it far behind in 1968 with Apollo 8 and then it lost the title.

But we have actually had a faster plasma engine for decades: Search Bonometti External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion (EPPP).

The 110,000 pound thrust BE-3 would be able to land a…large…payload on the Moon. And if refueled on the Moon could lift off with large loads of water for cosmic ray shielding in Frozen Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) workshops. Human platforms, likely SHLV wet workshops in LLO, NRHO, and Lunar Cycler orbits, will all require massive cosmic ray water shields. These platforms are the key to any missions Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO). Docking a nuclear propulsion module to them makes them capable of going to first Ceres and then beyond. And tether systems to provide artificial gravity would also be needed and make them “true spaceships.”

The enabling technology for a long duration human presence in the vicinity of the Moon is cryo-cooler hardware capable of preventing boil-off losses of liquid hydrogen. This is critical and I have seen no development of this.

“The final engine specifications, released in April 2015 following the full test phase, included a minimum thrust of 89 kilonewtons (20,000 lbf), an even wider throttling capability by 20 percent than the preliminary numbers, while maintaining the previously released full power thrust spec.[11]”

No problem with “subsidizing” the military since they would support themselves by armed robbery of other countries if we did not. It is when they make up stuff to get money. You know what I mean Vlad. Why are you laughing at me? You think it is funny that we blow billions on the farce that is missile defense and the most expensive DOD project ever- the F-35 fighter? All that treasure for…nothing.

We should be building spaceships.
The problem is these billionaire hobbyists are not building what is needed.
And that results in two steps back for every one forward.

Just what they can do on the cheap and calling it the best.
It is a lie.

There is no cheap. The Shuttle, marketed as paying for itself, proved that, and the NewSpace dogma of everything-on-the-cheap has empowered a cult of toxic libertarian fanboys, much like Trump empowered his cult, to be the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. I am not the one that is blind.

Low latency is really meaningful to only one industry: video games.
No low population state lacking high speed internet can subsidize this.

It was a ridiculous field of dreams scam from the start. Much like those shiny starships to the Martian libertarian paradise it is supposed to pay for.

The Legal, Medical, and Engineering Professions are the triad which enables civilization to exist. All the fools here blathering about doing away with those pesky lawyers are the idiot children of the human race. If they actually believe what they are babbling. I suspect most are just playing that game we have seen in government for the last 4 years; the firehose of falsehood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi….

“Thus, an army of trolls can influence a person’s opinion by creating the false impression that a majority of that person’s neighbors support a given view.[1]”

Mars is not the second home of humanity. One of the first conclusions of Gerard K. O’Neill’s research group in the 70’s was that no natural bodies in the solar system other than Earth are suitable for human colonization- the very first reason being human beings evolved in 1G. Mars is a gimmick.
A marketing ploy.

Artificial wings are fine but artificial gravity is pretty much a problem that can only be solved in an efficient way when you start with zero gravity.
See how that works Mr. Cartoons-make-me-smart?

This is akin to impact threat deflection: entities offering their “cheap” solution for a price when it is no solution at all. There is no cheap.

The problem is the thousands and soon tens of thousands of satellites in Earth orbit when there should be at most a few hundred. Ideally human-crewed GEO platforms equipped with “laser brooms” could keep Earth orbit fairly pristine.

This would require lunar water shielded “fat workshops” to be transited from the vicinity of the Moon to GEO. Which would require a state sponsored program of Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLVs). Of which there is only the SLS being stacked right now and for years to come. Unless you believe a certain entrepreneur who is promising a shiny starship impossibly soon.

Many years ago a certain organization was pushing their “gravity tug” as the solution to deflecting impact threats instead of using nuclear weapons. This is an example of placing civilization in danger to benefit some individual or group’s business plan. Criminal. The strip-mining of Earth orbit is the same dynamic in my opinion.

Starliner and Crew Dragon, if they would replace their substandard escape systems, could be used to intercept a fleet of Lunar Cyclers providing transportation between the Earth and Moon.

Other than that…all an incredible waste of resources in my opinion.

I would suggest they de-orbit that 4 billion dollar a year money hole and redirect the funding to a lunar return. If they had splashed it in 2016 as planned that would already be 16 billion that could have been used on a cislunar infrastructure. If they keep it up there till 2030 that is 40 billion down the drain.

“The ISS has been described as the most expensive single item ever constructed.[385] As of 2010 the total cost was US$150 billion. This includes NASA’s budget of $58.7 billion (inflation-unadjusted) for the station from 1985 to 2015 ($72.4 billion in 2010 dollars), Russia’s $12 billion, Europe’s $5 billion, Japan’s $5 billion, Canada’s $2 billion, and the cost of 36 shuttle flights to build the station, estimated at $1.4 billion each, or $50.4 billion in total.”

What will happen if there is any anomaly has already been demonstrated- loss of crew (that explosion was in no way survivable). That could not happen with an escape tower. The problem is that spacex fanboys like you will never entertain any criticism of your fantasy world. Not tolerated. That is why you try to paint me as “banging the table and screaming.” It is actually you doing that.

Baloney. An escape tower is not going to explode like that over 3000 pounds of toxic hypergolics wrapped around the crew compartment would. No way. They persuaded “actual technical professionals” there was no problem with the shuttle having no escape system and the same culture of cheap has taken precedence over crew safety yet again. Thank you for blocking me. I just wish all of your gang would.

---

Using that particular set of guidelines LEO would be considered that low-radiation domain a couple hundred miles up where platforms can go in circles for years before being dragged down by what is left of the atmosphere at that altitude. Around a hundred miles up is where Apollo would do an orbit before going to the Moon.

Between LEO and GEO is broadly “Earth Orbit” and it is GEO where “Human Space Flight” (HSF)- or dipping below that 22,000 mile high domain- would be “Beyond Low Earth Orbit” (BLEO) or HSF-BLEO.

Cislunar space is “Beyond Earth Orbit” or BEO. So Human Space Flight in the vicinity of the Earth and Moon is HSF-BEO. And it follows that leaving our “Cislunar Sea” for the outer solar system, or “outer space”, would be “Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit” or BELO.

Besides 1) Earth Orbit and the classifications of 2) LEO, 3) GEO, 4) BLEO, 5) BEO, and 6) BELO, there are the frozen lunar orbits, or, “Low Lunar Orbit” (LLO). In addition there is “Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit” (NRHO) proposed for the Gateway. And there are also various Lunar Cycler orbits that go around the Earth and the Moon. That might eventually be called…”Earth Moon Cycler Orbit” (EMCO).

4 billion a year for research on Earth and we would have a cure for old age, or at least a way to freeze people without damage till they could be cured. Criminal to pour those billions into that hole in orbit. Nothing of consequence has come back down in close to half a century of LEO platforms. They are an incredible waste.

They should put an escape tower on top and use this stripped model for crew dragon instead of that draco-bomb which never should have been allowed to carry people. When it blew up the first time the great one should have learned his lesson and went with an escape tower instead of going cheap on crew safety.
There is no cheap.

Starliner does not have a very good escape system either but it is marginally better than the Crew Dragon because it is a little farther from the crew and can at least be jettisoned.

And that…tells anyone anything they want to know about the outgoing administration. Goodbye and good riddance to all of them. Except for Bridenstine, who is the only one that should stay. I wish he would reconsider:

“The major sticking point in agreeing to a final bill for the past several months has been language in both the House and Senate versions that requires DOD to rename military installations that honor Confederate soldiers. President Trump vowed to veto the bill if any such language was included, but the Senate version remains. It gives DOD three years to implement the binding recommendations of a commission that will be established to look into the matter. The House bill required the renaming to be done in one year.”

“The Kármán line is an attempt to define a boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.[2]”

“Other organizations do not use this definition. For instance, the US Air Force and NASA define the limit to be 50 miles (80 km) above sea level.[3] There is no international law defining the edge of space, and therefore the limit of national airspace.[3]”

Can’t even orbit at 50 miles. “Actually”, as usual, you are making stuff up.

As I stated, calling LEO “space” is a marketing ploy, and is not accurate.

Report concludes former Spaceport America director violated state law

“Entrepreneurs” attract corruption and criminality while state sponsored projects generally deliver without that if they have oversight committees doing their jobs. The best example being the draconian oversight imposed by NASA on contractors after the Apollo 1 fire. That was actually the death of the space age before it even began as Aerospace concerns realized Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) was going to be hard money. They chose the easy money of cold war weapons. I have seen comments to that effect for years and I completely agree with them. Choosing to make spaceships instead of submarines carrying enough warheads to incinerate millions of human beings is something corporations and “entrepreneurs” will never do. We have to do it with letters and votes. Mothers against drunk drivers changed an entire culture and we just voted a super-cult leader out of office so there is no excuse.
A Green New Space Deal is the hope of humankind.

China pushes ahead with super-heavy-lift Long March 9

Compared to military programs it is not throwing much away- just expending hardware that would require a great deal more money to reuse for small savings and a sacrifice in payload. It is simply an aluminum can vs a glass bottle choice. That has always been the argument that NewSpace proponents refuse to acknowledge. I recently commented on the Shuttle expending one component of the Space Transportation System, the external tank, as the necessary sacrifice to the rocket equation. Because of other design decisions this of course did not work out- but it was the best feature of the STS.
So with that in mind it is not hard to see why the shiny starship is not exciting me.

(Reply to Ron) You accuse me of being “strange” and “swayed by emotion” with zero evidence- which, as you also accuse others of, is pushing an “unsubstantiated rumor.”

“SpaceX has shown that reusability can be done, and that it is economically beneficial.”

Actually, the Shuttle showed that reusability could be done first in 1981 with spacex doing it over 30 years later- not that great an accomplishment. And spacex has yet to reveal exactly how “beneficial” their reuse has been. The falcon expends the upperstage engine while the Shuttle only expended a tank. The Shuttle was a Saturn V class vehicle (that wasted much of it’s payload on the Orbiter) that in a cargo version would have lifted much more than the FH.

It seems to me you have the strange emotions concerning a private profit-driven company as a “game-changer for humanity.” And you should not cred-brag about your “background” here. I could do the same but I try not to. Hope you had a good thanksgiving Ron.

(Reply to Ron) “Humanity” cannot afford to trust the future to “entrepreneurs” who don’t think a lethal virus should stop factory workers from risking their lives for the bottom line. See how that works?

And it is pretty obvious what you are dragging into this conversation. Toxic borderline insults again Ron?

Try and improve. Things need to get better.

The Chinese are on the way to having their own Saturn V and it seems many people commenting here are not taking that very seriously. The SpaceX promotion on this forum frequently devolves into half-truth and blandishment. It really needs to be called out so as to discourage this becoming a cult of wishful thinking. Probably too late for that.

“No, the Shuttle was “refurbish-able”, not reusable.”

Not according to everybody else.

“For the Falcon 9 1st stage all they do is clean and inspect.”

What about the second stage?

“Even the low costs of the partially reusable Falcon 9/H are not yet low enough, which is why the fully reusable Starship is so important.”

Demanding everything be dirt cheap is not going to expand humankind into space. The opposite is true and the proof of that is the truth about the next comment:

“We built the 450mT ISS out of components that Falcon 9 can lift, which is proof that it doesn’t matter how much a single launch can lift, but HOW MANY launches can be done.”

At 150 billion and 4 billion dollars a year to maintain, the ISS is the example NOT to use. If China sends up a wet workshop upper stage (Skylab was a “dry workshop” that with a few more million dollars spent to make it wet would have been larger than the ISS) they will have done it an order of magnitude cheaper than what the NewSpace formula of private companies with small rockets can.

As for the shiny starship..while the Falcon 9 is really a modernized 1961 Saturn I rocket with a 1993 Delta Clipper land back feature and some soviet propellent super-cooling thrown in, the Starship is going to require much more than NASA knock-offs and will never be as cheap as promised (in my opinion). The Concorde and American SST come to mind.

Launchspace Technologies proposes debris mitigation and collection constellations

My opinion on the entire smallsat constellation concept is it never should have been allowed. The way to go was in the opposite direction- up into GEO with large shielded human-crewed platforms. The low-latency gamer addicts would just have to suffer or move to some better internet. The GEO platform was what Arthur C. Clarke envisioned in his classic work, “The Promise of Space.” That would not be possible of course without an over-arching government sponsored project which most NewSpace proponents consider straight-up satanic. Smallsats are straight-up greed. Streaming cat videos from 42,000 pieces of junk is not what was promised.

The best solution to space junk has always been the “laser broom” in a high orbit pushing it down.

SES to provide satellite connectivity for U.S. military ‘internet of things’

“A large group of vendors from across the defense, aerospace and tech industries have been selected so far to compete for up to $950 million worth of individual task orders the Air Force plans to award as it continues to test and develop the ABMS.”

A billion more dollars down the MIC rathole. The problem with this weaponization of Earth orbit is the smart first move in a conflict with the U.S. is for any adversary with launch capability (and that is proliferating also) is to send up as many tungsten pellets as possible at once to destroy everything in orbit. The force that has trained to fight without overhead assets and communications will have a tremendous advantage.

Unfortunately this would likely lead to a far higher likelihood of nuclear weapons being launched. With everybody launching everything they have in the blind, civilization would take a hit that would result in a breakdown of a very fragile global infrastructure- with billions dying of starvation and radiation poisoning. A new dark age with cannibal armies roaming the Earth. Ever seen the movie “The Road”?

But the billion dollars for the ABMS is worth the risk.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to leave agency in January

I can dream Biden will appoint someone to kill the smallsat constellation concept before it turns Earth orbit into a strip-mined nightmare of space junk. But…sadly, that disaster is probably going to happen no matter what considering the past Obama/Biden support of spacex. No win. Glad anyone having to do with Trump is leaving (except Bridenstine, I wish he would reconsider staying on) but I am not a supporter of LEO broadband.

I tend to look at the range of possible designs for reusable launchers going from variations of the Chrysler SERV to the SLS-as-what-the-shuttle-should-have-been. What I mean by that is the Shuttle would likely still be flying and continue to fly decades into the future (like the R-7/Soyuz) if a few critical details in the design had been different. But we went cheap and…there is no cheap.

The main feature of the Shuttle was the ET as the only expendable component and main structure for the rest of the stack to mount to. This was really the best idea in the Space Transportation System. Due to the rocket equation the expending of second stage hydrogen/oxygen tank structure while reusing as much else as possible works out well to maximize payload. Akin to fighter planes using a drop tank. The second excellent feature was the two boosters being ocean recovered. But that was pretty much where the good features ended and the bad features guaranteeing the Shuttle would fail began.

Liquid boosters instead of SRB’s would have been recovered and taken back to be inspected and readied for the next launch instead of broken down into segments, railed back to Utah, reloaded with propellent, railed back to site, and then reassembled. The limited diameter due to rail transport ended up limiting power and the payload of the STS- and all this was key to what guaranteed the Shuttle would fail.

The second worst feature of the Shuttle was mounting the SSME’s on the Orbiter. This necessitated the side-mounting and the Orbiter itself meant most of the payload of a Saturn V class launcher was wasted lifting a 737 size glider a couple hundred miles up so it could come right back down. And the heat tiles ended up being a tremendous eater of man-hours and expense. By having an engine module at the bottom of the ET that returned separately for reuse the STS could have placed the payload, any payload, on top of the stack. And this version of the Shuttle would have looked much like the SLS.

The Chrysler SERV (like the Kankoh Maru) was the other more radical concept and is very interesting. I think putting a 260 inch solid rocket booster in the center of it and dropping it out of the bottom after use, and a couple other features changed, would have resulted in a practical launch vehicle with nothing being expended. Which is of course what everyone seems to think is the main point. I am more about bowing to the reality of the rocket equation and expending that core/second stage tankage if that results in more lift. That large gain in payload by expending at least a fuel tank is what I think John Shannon was expressing when he said “reusability is a myth.” This is actually an improvement on the benchmark Falcon which not only expends the tankage but also the engine. It was a sad day when they killed Sidemount…we might be back on the Moon by now.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/…

I believe future iterations of the SLS can be that best-possible-shuttle and are the best way to go.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

Climate Change is the single most critical issue facing civilization and the only way to provide the energy for a western standard of living to everyone on Earth is Space Solar Power. The Moon is the carbon-free factory to build the Space Solar Power Satellites and the only solution to Climate Change. Entrepreneurs are not going to make it happen- only a state sponsored program, a Green New Space Deal is going to succeed.

Bob Mahoney· Your first sentence is perhaps the most unscientific statement made in these pages in a long time. Its decided absolutism (across four lobes of inquiry, even!) rivals (if not exceeds) quite a bit of badly considered religious dogma. Your second and third sentences aren’t much better in this regard.

Wow. It is breathtaking (in a tragic way) to witness such confidence in conclusive prognostication. The advice parents are wont to offer their teenage children when the kids offer up similarly toned absolute declarations comes to mind: “You should move out now while you know everything.”

Richard Seaton· It is the single most critical issue. A western standard of living requires a great deal of energy and for 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100 there really is only one way to do it. Really. Entrepreneurs are not going to spend trillions on a half century long project to essentially give free electricity to most of the world’s poor. So…your denial of reality is breathtaking.

Bob Mahoney· 1st post:
Single most […] issue facing [implied: all] civilization.
Only way.
for a [implied: required] western standard of living to everyone on Earth.
only solution.
only a state-sponsored Green New Space Deal is going to succeed.

2nd post/reply:
is the single most.
[implied: required] western standard of living
Only one way.

I’ll concede that you are consistent. But you seemingly missed my single most critical only point.

Richard Seaton· I explained it and you are obviously not going to acknowledge that building powerplants, factories to build wind turbines, solar cells, all of that infrastructure on Earth, cannot keep pace with the demand for a western standard of living without producing more carbon and greenhouse gases. Antennae fields, on the other hand, are not significant producers and factories on the Moon are not going to affect Earth. See how that works? It is the only way. You can mock and condescend but you cannot change the reality that is climate change.

Dick Eagleson· Well, at least you’re consistent. Your farcical prophecies about the size of the world’s population 80 years hence is as delusional as all the scaremongering about alleged rises in global average temperature and sea level made by your fellow Warm Doomists for the same interval.

Marcel· The Earth’s oceans contain about 4 billion tonnes of uranium, nearly a thousand times the amount of uranium in terrestrial reserves. Marine uranium resources are derived from the oceans interaction with 100 trillion tonnes of uranium within the Earth’s continental crust. So uranium is actually a renewable energy source since uranium can be perpetually mined from seawater– as long as the Earth’s oceans exist.

Plus spent fuel from uranium could be recycled to produce 30 to 60 times more carbon neutral electricity.

And I didn’t even mention the abundant terrestrial reserves of thorium that are more than three times as abundant as terrestrial uranium reserves.

So there is no shortage of carbon neutral energy resources– on Earth. Marcel

Richard Seaton· Chernobyl and Fukushima plus the vast processing and reactor construction infrastructure on Earth you are proposing is a non-starter.

Marcel Williams· Chernobyl, of course, was a facility with no containment structure which is something that Russia and the Ukraine don’t do anymore. All US commercial nuclear reactors have containment structures.

At Fukushima, only one person died of radiation poisoning; I believe the individual actually fell into the reactor.

Unfortunately, the earthquake and tsunami killed about 16,000 people. A dam ruptured in the area, wiping away five homes, killing 8 people.

Nuclear reactors actually require much less material per kilowatt produced than renewable energy and substantially less land area. Nuclear also produces at least 300 times less toxic waste than solar panels per kilowatt produced. But if spent fuel is recycled then they’d produce about 9000 to 18,000 times less toxic waste than solar panels per kilowatt produced. Marcel

Richard Seaton· Unfortunately, your promotion of “safe” nuclear reactors in every country on Earth might be something the nuclear industry wants to see but it is not the solution to climate change. Again, to provide the vast amount of electricity necessary for 11 billion people to enjoy a western standard of living would require tens of thousands of nuclear power plants. From a Smithsonian article: “All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE—and most of it ends up sitting on-site because there is nowhere else to put it.” Transuranic waste lasts for a thousand years. There are plenty of factoids inferring nuclear waste is not that bad, that it is just a minor problem that quickly diminishes. It is not a minor problem. It is not a safe source of energy and Space Solar Power is the far better option. What people are doing that promote nuclear is distract the public from the correct path identified by Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s.

Dick Eagleson· As Marcel correctly notes, recycling of nuclear fuel reduces the mass of so-called “nuclear waste” to trivial levels. The “problem” of “nuclear waste” disposal is entirely one created by the crackbrained U.S. prohibition on recycling such “waste.” That prohibition is a product of the politics of ignorance and fear of which you, and the rest of the American Left, are very much an exponent.

Richard Seaton· Trivializing Chernobyl and Fukushima and calling statistics from The United Nations projecting populations “farcical” is typical of the recent war on the truth. It is all fake news if you don’t like it. The American Left brought an impoverished people out of the great depression with The New Deal, defeated Nazism, and put Americans on the Moon. The recent radical right populism, which your climate denial would indicate you are an exponent of, has caused the needless deaths of at least a hundred thousand.

A Green New Space Deal is the hope of the future and the correct path. Those that scream bloody murder at anything not involving billionaires and their bought dog politicians lowering taxes to nothing and ending all social programs are the great danger.

oldengg· Space solar power is fine for use on satellites and on the Moon. But to transform energetic solar photons to electrons (solar cell) then transform those electrons into less energetic microwave photons (gyrotrons) and then beam those microwave photons down to an antenna farm (that is at least as big in area as the equivalent solar energy farm) and finally transform those microwave photons back into electrons that are fed into the grid only pencils out if there are no competing terrestrial-based electric power suppliers.

Unfortunately for space solar power there are such suppliers (direct solar, wind, nuclear). So O’Neill’s idea amounts to generating electrical power in space where it’s extremely expensive to produce and then trying to sell it at a profit on Earth where electrical power is much less costly to produce.

Richard Seaton· “-if there are no competing terrestrial-based electric power suppliers.”

I will just keep explaining this over and over: Climate change means nothing terrestrial can “compete” with space solar power electric suppliers in terms of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. And that is the critical issue for civilization.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

---

The defense industry is where 1.2 trillion dollars (it will likely be a trillion and a half) are now being sunk into new ICBMs, stealth bombers, and missile submarines, continuing over the next 30 years. The total lifecycle cost of just the new submarine fleet of 12 boats is estimated at $347 billion. And then there is the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, and also the cost of construction of the Interstate Highway System was approximately $114 billion (equivalent to $530 billion in 2019). Just as the interstate is a defense industry adjutant so is energy and of course Climate Change is a huge DOD issue.

No “commercial” entities are going to colonize space anymore than they are going to turn Antarctica into another Eastern Seaboard. The long list of fanboys on this forum are living in an alternate universe only a couple notches down from Trumpworld. Most agree on the main points of NewSpace dogma and in my view it is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. It is a dead end and has set any progress in space back a decade and the damage is accumulating.

Rescuing civilization from the catastrophe that is climate change is eerily like the virus saga we have watched play out these many months. Just as one man is largely responsible for at least a hundred thousand needless deaths it was one man, Charles Koch, who paid for climate change denial and unless that damage is undone it will be several orders of magnitude more than a quarter million who will die.

And there you have it; it was Gerard K. O’Neill that wrote the correct plan to power civilization carbon free and expand humankind into space- not the John Galt/Howard Roark/Tony Stark entrepreneur. He and the rest of the Neoliberals are the problem. They only care about one thing- money. Human life is secondary when it should be first and dictate our actions. Bezos makes alot of noise about following O’Neill but he is, so far, just promising to drain the swamp like someone else did.
I wish Bridenstine was staying on for two reasons- his advocacy of exploiting lunar resources and because he recanted his climate change denial.
The big opportunity now is making Space Solar Power as big a part of The Green New Deal as possible.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

---

And there is the dead giveaway that nobody is ever going to live on Mars. Due to no air and hard radiation it would be an underground existence. Due to not enough solar energy to power closed loop life support systems these tunnel communities would depend on nuclear power plants. What products will they “sell” to pay for their necessities? It is a joke. Not to mention that Martians would likely never be able to return to Earth after a certain number of years- or if they were born on Mars.

Space colonies, on the other hand, would have 1 gravity and travel to other artificial moons and nearby Earth would be commonplace, eventually with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of city sized habitats. The economic engine to start space colonization was envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill: Space Solar Power. Which also happens to be the only solution to providing the energy for a western standard of living to the population of Earth carbon-free and thus solving climate change.

A Space Solar Power cislunar infrastructure would eventually enable beam-propelled single stage to orbit space-liners to begin decreasing Earth’s population as more and more miles-in-diameter habitats are mass-produced. Until in a few centuries Earth is a sparsely populated pristine “adventure” destination and tens of billions live in space.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

Life would be quite different in a 1 G Sphere compared to Mars. Anybody living on Mars would dream of one thing- living on Earth. Anybody living in a Bernal Sphere would not have to dream, they would be able to visit Earth or any other Sphere easily enough and not travel months- and they would have low or zero gravity immediately available as well as normal gravity. A miles-in-diameter Sphere is an immense volume with a vista that will not induce claustrophobia. Mars would not be that way. Mars also has a deep gravity well; too much gravity to make landing or escaping easy and not enough to keep humans healthy. Why go? The resources can be had from the Moon or transited from icy bodies. Granted those icy bodies are farther out than Mars but lifting volatiles out of the Martian gravity well is a spectacular expense in comparison.

This was all researched in-depth in the 70’s by O’Neill and his students. I profoundly disagree with the NewSpace dogma that Mars is the second home of humankind. While I am criticized for maintaining this strong stance…it is a matter of wasting time and resources on what I believe is the wrong path. When I am told to not be so hardline I have to ask them the same thing.