Ice on the Moon

Shiny Number Four Blows Up

Some more Parabolic Arc comments:

1. No “commercial” human-crewed platform will ever exist in LEO as there is no ROI. Notice I did not refer to it as a “space station.” I generally only do that to mock the space station to nowhere. A true space station would have two features; first a massive cosmic ray water shield and second tether generated artificial gravity. Lunar water (lifted with around 23 times less energy than from Earth) and a wet workshop (already stressed for max Q and thus the ideal structure for artificial gravity). Until we have a future iteration of the SLS lifting a fat upper stage workshop and semi-expendable robot landers bringing water up we will not see real space stations or an end to dosing and debilitation. Half a mile long mutli-thousand ton spinning masses in Near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) or a frozen Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) make far more sense than the ISS going around in circles a couple hundred miles up at 4 billion a year. The ISS needs to end.

2. The shiny has blown up 4 times in a row and it is highly unlikely any human will ever ride in one. I predict it will be scrapped.

3. SLS is going to the Moon and Artemis is going to start landing humans. It will be with one goal in mind: a permanent human lunar presence. Whether a sometimes-inhabited human-crewed platform to replace the ISS (can’t be dropping 4 billion a year to go in circles in more than one place- not going to happen) or a Moonbase. If they find a suitable lava tube that would be ideal.

I will be a “happy soul” when the pernicious influence of NewSpace finally disappears and we start expanding into the solar system. Never going to happen with these billionaire hobbyists making it all a farce. Only a state-sponsored program is going to work.

There is always a chance Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources becomes a major part of the Green New Deal. I believe almost anything can happen after the last 4 years of crazy. Anything except NewSpace being anything but a stumbling block.

The Moon should have had dozens of robot exploration missions over the years instead of wasting money and effort on Mars. The Mars mafia has set back humankind expanding into the solar system by a couple decades at least. Bob Zubrin, Elon Musk, and all the rest of the fools promoting that rock as the next destination have done a great deal of unrealized damage.

If the Moon had been the focus we would likely have several Lava Tubes the size of small cities located and millions of tons of ice ready to be exploited. Instead we flushed billions down the drain on the stupidity that is Mars.

Robert G. Oler Richard Seaton • why? why would we have lava tubes full of cities what would they do
Richard Seaton Factories making things like space solar power satellites, massive alloy discs for pulse propulsion spaceships, the first miles in diameter artificial hollow spinning moon sections, etc. Launched into space using 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth. You know, what we should have been doing a couple decades ago.
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Quantum “unconditionally” secured communications make human-crewed combat aircraft obsolete. The most expensive DOD program in history- the F-35- is a boondoggle and the ultimate expression of “pork.” The most incredibly expensive waste of taxpayer dollars is not this single weapon system though, it is the replacement of legacy systems now underway to the tune of around 2 trillion dollars (adjusted for inflation over the next decade or so).

New ICBM’s, new missile submarines, new stealth bombers, proliferation and weaponization of weapon systems in Earth orbit , new anti-ballistic weapon systems (that will not work due to simple physics) etc. etc.

The best path is to move the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers to human-crewed spaceships months away in deep space. This would also serve to protect the Earth from impact threats and also help along Space Solar Power (using lunar factories) as the solution to the climate change crisis. All part of a Green New Space Deal.

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Inflatable space stations are one of the stupidest ideas ever. It speaks volumes that the NewSpace fans are so gullible and deluded they actually believed this concept appropriate in any way. It is absolutely one of the best ways to get people killed in space. This cheap and nasty gimmick was shouted from the mountaintops as the next big thing while the wet workshop, the ultimate reusability scheme, adaptable to cosmic ray water shielding and tether generated artificial gravity, was mocked and denigrated as somehow antiquated and obsolete. Bizarre.

There is no cheap.

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“There is no scalable space travel industry without a spaceplane,” said SNC’s Chairwoman and owner Eren Ozmen.”

There is no space travel “industry.” Like so much of NewSpace, it is a build-it-and-they-will-come fantasy. The spaceplane and inflatable space station are both bad ideas.

This was the conclusion of Phil Bono in the early 1960’s; ” – a winged vehicle made no sense as a space ship. If required, a ballistic vehicle could divert laterally from the re-entry path by burning rocket fuel to change the orbital inclination. This required far less mass than dragging wings to orbit and back. Getting to the final conclusion took several design iterations – It all came together in ROMBUS, Bono’s 1964 design for a Nova-class booster. This introduced the innovative concept of using an aerospike plug-nozzle for propulsion to orbit, then using the same plug-nozzle as a heat shield for re-entry. The engine, in a low-thrust mode, created an aerodynamic sheath. Hydrogen cooled the base before being burned in the engine.” http://www.astronautix.com/…

No Space Planes please

Anybody with any practical technical knowledge that has read a stack of books on space travel should understand the basic problems involved. This does not appear to be the case, at least for those who have popular YouTube channels.

If you were to pick the way to get human beings down from space in the safest way possible and using the least mass then a capsule parachuting into the ocean would be that method. Nothing else really comes close.

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Not long after Yuri’s first orbital flight a guy named Phil Bono was hard at work on his VTVL concepts. While Elon is worshiped as the great visionary the truth is he is just taking other peoples work and rebranding it.

Basic Psychology

A very interesting Salon article by Chauncey DeVega:

The right-wing “cancel culture” mob has once again grabbed their torches and pitchforks. Their newest target is documentary filmmaker and political commentator Michael Moore.

What is Moore’s most recent offense?

In response to Monday’s mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, Moore tweeted “The life of Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa shows that people can come from all over the world and truly assimilate into our beloved American culture,” and included an image of the Statue of Liberty.

Alissa is the alleged shooter in the Boulder tragedy. He was born in Syria but came to the United States as a child in 2002.

Reasonable persons may choose to disagree with Moore’s timing, or his tone. But the fact remains that his comments about the Boulder mass shooting are largely correct.

Those on the right and elsewhere who are performatively “outraged” at Moore’s comment are just angry because he spoke the truth about America’s gun culture and our societal addiction to mass shootings and gun violence.

A society’s culture is not a buffet where a person chooses the things they like and then ignores or denies the existence of those they do not. Such thinking is immature, simplistic and lacks nuance. In other words, it confirms what research by social psychologists, neuroscientists and others has shown about how conservatives and right-wing authoritarians think about morality, politics and society more generally.

As demonstrated by historian Richard Slotkin in his landmark book “Gunfighter Nation”, guns and gun violence are central to America’s culture and identity.

During an interview with Bill Moyers about the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Slotkin elaborated:

And what we have in this country is we have a history in which certain kinds of violence are associated for us with the growth of the republic, with the definition of what it is to be an American. And because we are also devoted to the notion of democratic individualism, we take that glorification of social violence, historical violence, political violence, and we grant the individual a kind of parallel right to exercise it, not only to protect life and property but to protect one’s honor and to protect one’s social or racial status. In the past that has been a legitimate grounds.

To that end, mass shootings and other examples of gun violence are one of the principal ways that America is truly an “exceptional” nation.

As I explained in an earlier essay at Salon:

The U.S. has the highest rate of gun-related deaths among wealthy nations. The number of deaths from gun violence would be even higher if not for dramatic recent advances in trauma and emergency medicine.
The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country in the world — even more than Yemen, a nation torn apart for years by a bloody civil war. In fact, there are more guns in the United States than there are people. Gun violence is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $200 billion a year, according to a 2019 report.
It is especially worth noting that just 3 percent of gun owners possess half the total number of guns in America. Some of these “super-owners” have dozens of guns. They are overwhelmingly white and male. …While gun “advocates” have created superhero narratives, such as the fantasy about “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun,” the reality is that a gun owner is much more likely to shoot a family member, a neighbor, a friend or themselves — by accident or suicide — than a criminal assailant. “Defensive gun use” statistics are inaccurate and wildly exaggerated.

Many members of the right-wing chattering class and others of that tribe are responding to Michael Moore’s basic observations about guns and American culture as though they had suffered a narcissistic injury. This is true more generally in how the American right responds to nearly all attempts to enact reasonable gun safety laws.

But what is the source of this injury? For many gun owners, especially right-wing white men, the gun is a key part of their core identities in terms of privilege, sense of self and power. It is not just the gun that they fear will be regulated — they believe their literal personal existence will be imperiled if access to guns were to somehow be even marginally curtailed. Such deep attachment to guns as an extension of the self is largely explained by what social psychologists have termed “terror management theory.”

This posits that because human beings are aware of their own mortality, they therefore develop compensatory behaviors which include cultural institutions like religion and patriotism. Symbols such as flags, and in the case of Christianity the crucifix, have a totem-like power which gives the believer and follower a sense of immortality. These systems of meaning and dynamics are at work on both a conscious and subconscious level, for individuals and society as a whole.

In American culture, guns have effectively become sacred objects. In that role, the gun is a means of symbolic and literal protection from death. It is also a tool for getting and keeping one group’s power over others as seen with the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of black people, militarized policing, and the creation and maintenance of American empire.

Moore’s tweet about guns and American culture were even more triggering for conservatives and other members of the right because he included an image of the Statue of Liberty, a sacred object in the national imagination.

It is no coincidence that death anxieties are a key factor that correlate with high levels of support for Trumpism and other authoritarian movements.

Public opinion polls show that as mass shootings and other gun violence has increased in America, Republicans actually oppose gun safety efforts even more. Predictably — and far more logically — Democrats and liberals respond to mass shootings and other gun-violence tragedies with greater support for gun safety laws.

Death anxiety has a profound influence on American politics in other ways as well: In red-state regions where coronavirus rates (and death rates) are highest, support for Donald Trump during the 2020 Election was also at its highest. In essence, death and sickness have made Trump’s followers increasingly loyal to him and the Republican Party.

Ultimately, America’s inability to create and enforce effective gun laws is rooted in competing conceptions of freedom. Conservatives emphasize “negative freedom” and a belief that government should be shrunk down to the bare minimum, and that “freedom from” is the most important aspect of democracy and human existence.

Liberals, progressives and other more humane thinkers understand that government can play a positive role in society. In this conception, “positive freedom” means that citizens can live better and more productive lives where, for example, they are free from anxieties about being killed in a mass shooting, or free from the fear that they may fall ill and not have access to health care, or free from the fear that their environment is dangerously polluted.

To state this equation differently, a gun owner’s freedom ends at the boundaries and limits of public safety. Likewise, the “personal freedom” not to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic ends at the health and safety of other people.

A healthy democracy always involves a balance between these positive and negative understandings of freedom.

What Michael Moore hinted at in his tweet about gun violence is the reality that we need to embrace a new form of American patriotism, one grounded in the facts and realities of American history, life and culture.

If the American people keep on lying to themselves about who they are, then the plague of mass shootings and gun violence will continue — and all the other existential problems in our society that feed into this epidemic of violence will keep getting worse as well.

The National Guard is the militia. Join the National Guard and serve 20 years. You can keep your rifle at home in a gun safe. And when you retire they can take your service weapon and modify it to hold 3 rounds for hunting semi-auto only and present it to you. When you die the weapon gets returned. For those that do not serve in the National Guard being a police reserve officer is the other option- and their weapons would be kept in a police station when not employed in that capacity. As for the rest of us….fairly simple to allow various levels of weaponry in the general population as needed; Starting with historical self-defense weapons like 2 shot handguns (derringers) at the bottom. This can be done but it is so politicized at this point that nobody will discuss the common sense options.

More Parabolic Comments

Close to 100,000 of these pieces of space junk are on the way up over the next ten years. It is a disaster unfolding. And it never should have been allowed. At some point, when bad things start happening, many people actually involved and hoping to cash in are going to display their faux shock and outrage that “others” enabled such a profoundly bad idea.

The only solar sail technology that has any practical use is Medusa. It could be argued it is not actually a solar sail but it can utilize fusion energy for space propulsion using a sail.

The Solem Medusa concept is the “soft” precursor to much larger and more efficient “hard” systems using alloy discs. During the decades required to build a lunar industrial infrastructure capable of manufacturing massive pulse propulsion discs (https://newatlas.com/energy/rio-tinto-heliogen-concentrating-solar/) the “spinnaker” of the Medusa concept, though less efficient, could carry the first human missions to the outer solar system.

That first mission could likely to be to Ceres. Mars, like LEO, is a complete dead end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

Parabolic Comments

How many more billions down the Mars rathole? It is, like LEO, a complete dead end. The snake oil salesmen calling it the next home of humankind are promoting the absurd. Any naked mole rat/humans living in tunnels under Mars would dream of one thing; going back to Earth. Except living for years in a low gravity environment likely guarantees going back to Earth would be a miserable return due to permanent damage from debilitation.

This is why Gerard K. O’Neill’s people ruled out any natural bodies other than Earth for colonization from the start: we evolved in 1G and will only thrive in that amount of gravity. Ironically, it is the very low gravity bodies like Ceres that would allow centrifuge type “sleeper trains” to be constructed as a remedy for very small populations of workers or scientists on multi-year tours. I would guess that both Mars and the Moon have too much gravity to make the sleeper train concept practical. In the case of the Moon, periodic rehabilitation by going up to Low Lunar Orbit 1G space stations would likely be the best solution. Because of the much deeper Martian gravity well the rehab station does not seem to be an option. The more gravity the more difficult and impractical subsurface centrifuge constructs become. See how that works?

At 220,300 pounds of thrust Prometheus has the same problem as other recent rocket engines like the Raptor and BE-4: it is about 1/8 the size appropriate for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) applications. The benchmark engine being the 1.8 million pound thrust F-1B proposed in 2012.

For reuse the most efficient configuration is probably a single turbopump supplying two approximately 2 million pound thrust bells, with two such engines (4 bells) providing approximately 8 million pounds of thrust and a center engine with variable thrust appropriate to landing back the stage.

This configuration would be much like a Saturn V first stage able to land back. Unfortunately the Saturn V was actually only just powerful enough to accomplish the Moon mission using Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). The preceding Nova rocket was much more powerful and in hindsight it would have been better to use this original design. We went cheap.

The best path is an upper stage double hull wet workshop enabling a cosmic ray water shield (filled with lunar water) and tether generated artificial gravity system as a basic crew compartment. This “fat workshop” would necessarily be large and possibly double the 33 feet of the Saturn V lower stages. A reusable launch vehicle powerful enough to lift such a mass would be the ideal workhorse Super Heavy Lift Vehicle enabling a cislunar infrastructure. The problem with the SHLV concept in a reusable form has always been the great mass and volume of tankage attached to the engines that has to be recovered. Tankage need not necessarily be reused.

A first stage with 3 turbopumps and 5 bells discussed previously is likely the most efficient arrangement but as noted the largest bell now readily available is the proposed 1.8 million pound thrust F-1B. To send a 60 foot diameter fat workshop to the Moon with this first stage 3 turbopump/5 bell engine configuration triple or more the amount of thrust per bell will likely be needed.

I would speculate on an optimum design by considering the Space Shuttle. The best feature of the Space Transportation System was the basic concept of expending a tank instead of various stages and engines. The rest of the STS, of course, was not so well conceived. Taking away the singular lesson it may be that for the rest of this century the way to get the greatest amount off-world is to accept that sacrificing tankage to the rocket equation is the only practical path.

The way this would work is the first stage would land back an engine module to a ship instead of the entire stage. The tank would separate and parachute into the ocean. Whether parts or the entire tank is salvaged depends, and the same for the second stage. The point being engine modules with feeder tanks and landing gear allowing recovery, even the third stage engine separating from the fat workshop and doing a free return all the way around the Moon and back (it’s free), seems practical. The Rocky Jones space ranger Shiny Starship in my view is not practical at all.

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“Lunar Pathfinder is planned to adopt a highly-stable ‘frozen’ elliptical orbit, focused on the lunar south pole – a leading target for future expeditions.”

Unstable lunar orbits, the lack of water, and reluctance to spend money on space, were the 3 main reasons the 1st space age ended in 1972 with Apollo 17.

Frozen lunar orbits, polar ice, and Space Solar Power enabled by lunar resources now make the Moon the place to go to solve the climate crisis. Trillions of dollars now headed to the DOD for legacy cold war toys could be redirected at a “Green New Space Deal” and start the second space age. The main obstacle to this bright future is NewSpace; the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

A half a dozen Trumpist/Musk worshipers squat on this and dozens on other space forums and while they are not trumpeting his imminent return they believe in his fascist agenda to overthrow the government and are unapologetic. They also almost all believe in dismantling the Space Agency, and generally all government, and letting the private sector “do it better.” This Ayn-Rand-in-Space libertarian ideology has been the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. It has set space exploration back at least a decade and the damage is accumulating. Not to mention the corrosive effect Neoliberalism has had on the entire human race since the Reagan Revolution.

You go ahead and “move on” buddy….but don’t tell me to let the sociopaths worshiping money as the god of this world burn it all down. I am not in that club of the damned. Your fundamental mistake is using the term “we.” They represent a worldview blind to any collective or utilitarian activity. Obscene greed and Orwellian manipulation drives their behavior. The only given is they lie like the rest of “us” breathe. Obviously.

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The only practical propulsion system for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) is Nuclear Pulse. Bombs. It has been that way since Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson validated the concept in the late 1950’s. Probably going to stay that way for many decades to come. The requirement for a massive cosmic ray water shield, at a bare minimum well over a thousand tons for a small crew, makes Nuclear Pulse Propulsion the only path. Truth.

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With it’s first successful flight in 1957, variations of the R-7 have been flying for over 60 years. If we had continued launching Saturn V’s to the Moon instead of going for the cold war toy money machine we would have launched approximately (at 6 a year since 1972) one hundred and eighty lunar missions. If 150 had been one way cargo landings around 4000 tons of construction equipment and supplies for a lunar base could have enabled a permanent Moonbase and it would be operating right now. If lunar lava tubes were found and utilized then workers in underground habitats several times the size of sports arenas might be establishing an industrial infrastructure…right now.

And those Saturn V’s would of course have been modified for greater reusability at some point and continually refined. What could have been, and what could be. With a Green New Space Deal utilizing lunar resources to enable Space Solar Power as the solution to climate change trillions of dollars would be pointed at expanding humankind into the solar system.

The only-for-profit NewSpace scam is the biggest obstacle right now.

Weaponizing Earth orbit and smallsat constellations are a very bad combination. The way to avoid this escalation and proliferation is a space version of a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that outlaws anti-satellite weapons and severely limits the number of satellites allowed in Earth orbit.

The best path is large human-crewed GEO platforms that serve much the same purpose as foreign embassies. Humans hovering 22,236 miles above their national borders would be a stabilizing factor as action against them would be far less likely.

The problem with humans performing long duration missions Beyond Low Earth Orbit (BLEO) is radiation of course. Dosing and debilitation are the elephant in the room nobody will address. The massive cosmic ray water shield and structure required for tether generated artificial gravity systems make lunar water and wet workshops the only practical options. It is verboten to discuss largely because NewSpace has damned any voice over the last decade stating humans working in space require a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G). The reason being that NewSpace above all other things screams cheap as their first dogmatic precept.

Unfortunately, there is no cheap.

Green Run Complete

Ready to go, the SRB’s are already being stacked. We are going.

Cults

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2021/03/03/spacexs-starship-sn9-flies-lands-takes-off-again-and-explodes/

I have to put this article about space after the video about politics because both feature different cults: The Cult of Trump and The Cult of Musk. With not too much difference between the two.

This idea that there are givers and takers, that people who are not white are the takers…is fundamental to many, if not the majority, of conservatives. Likewise, this idea that government, specifically the Space Agency, are also takers and only the only-for-profit NewSpace semi-divine “entrepreneurs” are not stealing is fundamental to that ideology. It is no coincidence that the majority of Musk supporters are also rabid Trumpists.

Redistribution of Wealth is Key

Everything Evil is creeping into the Chaos that is Trumpism

Everything we are seeing cause division and conflict in our society can be traced back to one issue. It is about…taxes. How much must be paid? Everyone wants to be rich, to be the richest, to be the king of the world. The communists saw all money as a function of property, of land and what was on the land. The fascists saw all money as an adjunct function of race, of the people living on the land. The capitalist simply sees money and what new money can be created from what exists. The Neoliberal however, not only sees money as the god of this world, but believes it is the only and absolute god. There is no other concern, not truth, not justice, not human life; nothing has any meaning except wealth. And anything is allowed in pursuit of wealth. Nothing is forbidden.

Existence can be framed with perhaps three questions that need to be answered. Can we defeat death? Can we defeat our own animal instincts? And can we determine an equitable tax rate? The third seems mundane and too practical compared to the first two but in truth the issue being determined is most ancient and weighty as it is really the concept of sacrifice being addressed. Our lives are made up of discrete and finite moments and each can be assigned a dollar value in terms of what kind of world we live in. We sacrifice those moments, we sacrifice our lives, in pursuit of our bread and happiness by way of that magic called money and this balance can be for many a hell on Earth. In a Neoliberal paradise where the rich live in gated communities and the poor starve and die in the gutter, money is indeed a god-like power gifting any who wield it with a comparative heaven.

In a representative democracy using imbedded liberalism as the operating economic principle it is not money that matters most, it is how much of it you get to keep. And in a functioning democracy the tax rate is decided by the people. I have never failed to inspired shock and outrage in conservatives by informing them the only reason they have anything is because the rest of us let them have it. In a society featuring extreme inequality democracy is an impossibility because those living in poverty would vote to redistribute the excessive wealth of the few to the benefit of the many. If these words are disturbing to most people it is because the majority in America now live as brain-washed consumers, essentially wage slaves, with mountains of debt.

The Fascists are creeping in to cause chaos and bring about the race war they have dreamed about for generations. The rich will find themselves in the same situation the one percent of Germans did that went along with it…they will be eaten as well.

The Biggest Obstacle

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

Starlink likely to FAIL?

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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