Ice on the Moon

Being completely occupied with politics over the last several months I have posted very little about space. The election is 51 days away and nothing I write here is going to have any effect now so I am going to attempt to return to the main mission of this blog. However, if something completely insane happens, which is likely, I will of course have to go to that. It just gets crazier and crazier.

The fires on the west coast have reminded me of what I have posted about many times over the last few years- space solar power as the only cure for climate change. AOC came out with the Green New Deal and I posted about my version of that- The Green New Space Deal. Our president has stated his opinion of climate change:

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York- we need global warming!”

I had linked a story on a website I thought was legit but then found out it is a new site that charges 75 dollars to post stories. It is a scam as I deduced after reviewing the terrible article. But, I made a comment on the website before even reading the story:

“The one thing you can’t get on Earth you can get on the Moon is enough energy to power civilization with no carbon footprint. Turning the Moon into a factory site building space solar power satellites is likely the only solution to climate change. A “Green New Space Deal” would see the U.S. launching Super Heavy Lift Vehicles weekly on missions to develop cislunar space. In my view the key to space solar power is a public works project on the scale of the Panama Canal and Hoover Dam and not private companies pursuing the profit motive. While SpaceX is always cited as the example it is not helping by essentially strip mining Earth orbit with smallsat constellations. The shiny starship is many years away and far better vehicles, such as iterations of the SLS, can be in operation sooner.”

1:57 “First of all, it’s very difficult to separate the science from the politics. And second, even if the claims, the more radical claims are true, we have no idea what to do about it.”

It is actually not difficult at all to separate the science from the politics- all you have to do is look who paid for the supposedly objective studies denying climate change- the majority trace back to the Koch brothers and the rest to Neoliberal organizations funded or influenced in some way by fossil fuel interests. And we know what to do about it: stop burning fossil fuels.

2:55 “They produce more carbon dioxide than when they started because they had to turn on their coal fired plants again.”

If you look closely at the video you will see the person who posed the question advocating climate change as a rallying point make a face when Jordan said this- likely because Peterson is leaving out the reason Germany turned the reactors off and those plants back on: Chernobyl.

5:25 “-the kind of low resolution thinking that gets us absolutely nowhere.”

Jordan Peterson has helped millions with his online classes and self-help book but this talk, posted not long before his health problems became life-threatening I believe, are so out of touch I find it extremely disappointing. His excuses for not addressing a certain and inevitable threat to civilization are hollow and riddled with fallacies. I hope he recants, which is not impossible…if the Director of NASA Jim Bridenstine can then Jordan Peterson can.

And so we come to the Donald Trump of space exploration, the great one himself. Having inherited all his original technology from 1960’s NASA patents given away by Ronald Reagan, he now promotes Mars as a second home for humankind. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. His followers, like forever trumpers, are Ayn-Rand-in-space crazies that worship him as the embodiment of John Galt and Howard Roark.

Gerard K. O’Neill was the prophet of space colonization and one of his groups first conclusions was no other body in the solar system besides Earth is suitable for human colonization. Only artificial worlds will work. And the economic engine for that colonization will be space solar power due to Earth heating up. O’Neill stated this back in the 1970’s. Central to any plan to colonize space with artificial spinning hollow moons are lunar resources. As much as I detest the current regime I am hopeful Bridenstine alone will be carried over into a Biden administration but I have read nothing on this yet.

He built an engine that is too small- the same mistake Musk made. So…I am not optimistic.

The individualism extends to the freedom to believe whatever you want. Especially that Neoliberal idea that freedom is actually just another word for greed.

So…we have all been brainwashed by these algorithms trying to sell us something. It is a triumph for Neoliberalism which holds money is the god of this world.

The stairway to heaven.

We continue to add problems to a very long list and at some point it becomes a statistical certainty that one of them will destroy civilization. He mentions deepfakes at the end and it really is a good question to ask: if we cannot trust anything we see as real or factual or representing the truth then we have no choice but to simply trust those in our immediate vicinity and that is largely circumstance. The feedback loops of these algorithms determine those original states and circumstances. It reduces to greed and absolute evil.

Crazier every day. It cannot go on like this. What is going to happen?

Insider killing suspects released despite Afghanistan protests. The day before 9/11 people involved in killing U.S. troops were released. Crazier and crazier. What next?

https://www.logically.ai/articles/qanon-key-figure-man-from-new-jersey

I would guess the man from New Jersey was from the start trying to popularize some conspiracy scam to make money with and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams with QAnon.

A family member in San Francisco called my wife the other morning about the orange sky. I guess it is really disturbing to see and has many people suddenly realizing that climate change might not be the hoax the Koch brothers paid to institutionalize.

All I can say in his defense is that he might have wanted to destroy Trump and decided to wait for maximum effect. If he waited because he wanted to sell books then…that is on him. But taking the spotlight off Trump and wasting time damning Woodward is not doing the right thing either. They should bring it up after the election.

There are FT’s (Forever Trumpers) and LeftT’s (Progressives) and there are NT’s (Never Trumpers) and CD’s (Corporate Democrats). Those are the cardinal points of the compass. The only ones that can save America are the same ones that put the screws to FDR and made the New Deal happen (LeftT’s). Our only hope is the Green New Deal. We have to 1. Get rid of Trump, 2. Put the screws to Biden (or Harris if he resigns due to health reasons) and make them adopt a Progressive instead of Corporate agenda, and 3. Keep the Neoliberals in check so the Green New Deal can work. Why don’t they put that out and tell everyone else to also?

The “Truth Died” repeatedly over the years. The first time was probably when Bill Clinton sold the Democratic party down the river for corporate money. MSNBC is not going to talk about that because it happens to be owned by a corporation. I never knew until I began to study up after the destruction of truth by Trump began. I knew nothing about what Neoliberalism is. Now I do. The Russians, our new adversary after the end of World War II, may have finally beat us in the most insidious way possible. Our president may be a Russian asset. Just as incredible as Trumps conspiracy theories….except it is quite possibly true. It came out a couple days ago they stopped the counterintelligence investigation on Trump and nobody really knows. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier every day.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/909198327/jad-abumrad-how-journalism-taught-me-a-new-way-to-resolve-conflict

So…Abumrad is looking for that third space where revelation and resolution exist. Hmmm. Not seeing much of that with Trump.

The Flying Saucer Secret

The flying saucer is a popular culture standard with every public library featuring a shelf filled with “UFO” books. What is not widely known is a secret project featuring a spaceship with a giant solid metal disc as an engine was underway over half a century ago, with small test models actually flown. This working flying saucer was conceived in 1946 by the eccentric genius Stanislaw Ulam. The propulsion system was first proposed in writing in 1947, the same year as the first modern saucer sighting and the Roswell incident. But before the conspiracy starts it must be understood this real flying saucer used nuclear bombs to push it through space and so was not something sighted cruising the skies of Earth. Ulam had studied the problem of space flight and his solution was a monolithic alloy disc accelerated by plasma generated using the highly energetic release of nuclear energy. His reasoning was, since it is difficult keeping even a chemical rocket engine from melting, trying to contain a reaction one million times more powerful in the same way would be a dead end. He realized an “engine” with no internal combustion but instead using a completely external nuclear reaction would have vastly better performance. With no moving parts. Ulam was not thinking outside the box, he threw the box away. Capable of flying at fantastic speeds and exploring the outer planets, this system was eventually patented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1959. Freeman Dyson did the original work.

The main problem with this real flying saucer then and now are the radioactive byproducts produced by the propulsion system. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) is safely used only outside the magnetic field surrounding the Earth. While chemical rockets can send small spacecraft Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) the smallest efficient disk for a pulse system would mass several hundred tons. Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLV) like the mighty Saturn V would be developed and could carry sections into space for assembly but subsequent events in the early 60’s halted work on pulse propulsion. The 1967 Apollo 1 fire then made it clear to aerospace concerns that sending humans into deep space would be hard money. Cold war projects offered higher profit margins and this drove industry to the easy money. The budget for space exploration in the 70’s was drastically reduced and the Saturn V was discontinued in favor of an inferior lift Space Shuttle pitched as paying for itself. 

The concept of a massive alloy disc as a spaceship engine was put on hold from the date of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Two decades after the end of the project Reagan’s Star Wars would begin and run for another ten years with interesting results. The directed energy weapons (bomb-pumped X-ray lasers) studied in the Strategic Defense Initiative were exactly the right devices needed to superheat and efficiently project a plasma cloud onto a pulse propulsion disc. Ironically, far more progress was thus made, and far more money spent, perfecting the flying saucer decades after the project was canceled. Experiments done covertly under the guise of fusion reactor research also provided data enabling this channeling of nuclear plasma in one direction. 

Pulse propulsion ideally transmutes a slug of matter, most likely water or plastic, into a super-heated super high speed jet of plasma. The end goal is to repeatedly accelerate a multi-thousand ton disc and payload through space somewhat like a aircraft catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier. The still classified secrets of star wars hold the secret to making flying saucers capable of flying to the limits of the solar system and back with mission times of a few years. 

The minimum diameter and mass of the flying saucer is the critical factor and is determined by the efficiency of the nuclear device and how narrowly the plasma cloud is directed at the disc. Minimum device size and directional numbers are highly classified but a disc could possibly be launched in sections on SHLVs for assembly in Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) outside the magnetosphere. It is more likely a truly efficient disk with an Isp exceeding 100,000 seconds would be close to a thousand feet in diameter and be quite massive. In this case the Moon becomes the place to fabricate the discs using In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), probably in lava tube factories. Super-efficient giant discs become possible with lunar ISRU and these spaceships could lift immense payloads off the lunar surface.  

In the interim of the half a century required to build lunar factories able to fabricate discs (and lunar power plants providing fissile U-233 from thorium) there are a number of options. The most promising path is the 1994 Medusa nuclear sail concept of Johndale Solem. This is the “soft” version of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and would be less durable and likely limited in payload. Such spaceships would not use flying saucer discs but instead resemble giant parachutes- referred to as “spinnakers” by Solem. The Medusa spaceship requires small pulse units (bombs) and extremely strong and refractory materials for the spinnaker. The main predictor of the mass of such a spaceship surfaced in 2006 in a popular article published by radiation expert Eugene Parker. “Shielding Space Travelers” detailed the 14 foot thick cosmic ray water shield required for human deep space missions and this will likely determine Medusa’s practical limits for crew and payload.  

Pulse units are the key to pulse propulsion and there is no shortage of the necessary fissile materials. Estimates for the amount of fissile material required to build a nuclear device are two, four, and nine  kilograms, or as little as 4.5 pounds to 9 pounds for plutonium, to around 20 pounds for uranium. The official “weapon equivalent” amount used by international agreement is 25 kilograms of uranium per warhead (about double the unofficial estimate). Not counting material actually in weapons there are approximately 55,000 of these equivalents stockpiled worldwide and this works out to around 110,000 “unofficial” pulse units using uranium. Plutonium is a little more complicated with 3 kilograms enriched or 5 kilograms of reactor grade counted as equivalents and 130,000 in this global stockpile with a .5 unofficial factor working out to around 200,000. As well as these equivalent stockpiles, enough material in the over 400 operating reactor facilities worldwide could be reprocessed and enriched on short notice for a possible total of up to half a million pulse units. At two thousand pulse units per mission there is enough fissile material on hand to launch two hundred missions to the outer solar system. With a shuttle-sized fleet of five spaceships each going on a mission every four years using just the existing stockpile would enable missions for the rest of this century. 

To approach the 100,000 mph plus speeds needed to make a three to five year two-way mission to the outer solar system possible a minimum of approximately three thousand pulse units would be required. This is using a 100 mph average acceleration per pulse unit. A pulse unit would contain around 120 gallons of water or that volume of plastic and might resemble two stacked 50 gallon drums. A standard 20 foot long shipping container will hold 88 drums stacked. This gives some idea of the pulse unit space requirements for a mission: approximately forty standard 20 foot long shipping containers massing something over 1000 tons. There are various profiles that use braking in the atmosphere of one of the gas or ice giants and then landing on an icy moon and using ISRU to fill the pulse units and also draining water from the spaceship radiation shield for the final deceleration back into lunar orbit at the end of the mission. Using collapsible slug containers these profiles would reduce pulse unit mass.

The flying saucer “secret” is there is no other path to Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO). 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

If this does not do him in then nothing will and America is over.

Two amazing pieces of reporting that prove there is still hope.

https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/election?p0=263&iso=20201103T00&msg=2020%20US%20Presidential%20Election

Two months to go and tomorrow is the big day.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

The man who told us we were the 99 percent is dead. A year younger than me.

-“he argued that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less. “Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it,”

The world runs on Neoliberal ideology and so there is no “collective soul.”

It is unbelievable that millions of “Americans” support this creature. It is disturbing and depressing.

My YouTube comment: “Disconnecting people from the truth is the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life, except for impending nuclear holocaust in the 80’s, which only someone who was in the military during those years understands. When the most powerful man on Earth calls everything we are told “fake news” then we have gone “Orwellian.”

4:55 “They get to rocket-boost us into the end times- that’s what they want.”

It is true. Many of these far right people are living in a prepper or left behind fantasy.

I went swimming again and I am really beat- but I have to write something about Markey winning. The best possible future is a Biden administration dragged kicking and screaming into a progressive revolution where “the laundry list” is checked off one by one. A Green New Deal, M4A, School loan forgiveness and free college, a living wage…just for starters.

Went swimming this morning so I did not have time to post anything. Have to to work.

 

23:31 “This is why Marx calls Capitalism ultimately a revolutionary force; there’s no internal or external check on their pillage and their greed and this is now having very very dire social and political consequences-”

28:18 “Any hope comes from sustained mass civil disobedience-”