Ice on the Moon

Jobs, Jobs, on the Moon

I have come to believe Apollo 8 was the real milestone and landing on the Moon anti-climactic.

It was the beginning of the space age and the end came with Apollo 17.

They are all still alive from the first mission but only Jack Schmitt from the last.

SLS and Artemis will begin the second space age over half a century after the first.

I am watching the President address congress right now and I believe the opportunity to realize human expansion into space is presenting itself by way of Climate Change. Space Solar Power was foreseen by Gerard K. O’Neill as the solution to global warming in the 70’s after Apollo. Space Solar Power as the economic engine of space colonization, and the Moon as the factory to build that engine, was O’Neill’s vision. A Green New Space Deal would direct potentially trillions of dollars at Space Solar Power as the solution to Climate Change. While the space shuttle wasted the lift of a Saturn V class launch system sending a 737-size glider a couple hundred miles up for 30 years, we now have ice on the Moon as the enabler of a permanent lunar presence and reason to spend the next 30 years returning to that prize we never should have taken our eyes off of.

Unfortunately, the NewSpace ideology that has become so popular has become the primary obstacle to any progress in space. The founder of the NewSpace flagship company has an agenda that is the anti-thesis of O’Neill. It is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

Tianhe is 3 people in a 13 ft diameter tube about a 100 ft long when the other module is docked, if I am reading this right.

No “true” space station or spaceship crew compartment yet exists providing a Near-Sea-Level-Radiation-1-Gravity environment (NSLR1G) and the minimum space required for a multi-year mission. I would guess that at least double the interior of the exterior envelope 15 foot thick water shield would entail a 60 ft diameter workshop stage and with 4 times that interior as the length plus the 30 ft for the ends of the shield that would be 270 ft long. With a several thousand ft tether system attached to the other equal mass of the station or spaceship, this is my guess at the size of a “minimum” habitable compartment.

“Anyway, anyone is free to give it a go.”

Not really….it is decided by, for the most part, individuals biased by a myriad of factors and coming to a decision they will explain in a way that satisfies those biases. Others involved have their own biases and agendas and if they are required on board a project, they may insist on their own particular details that may determine success or failure. This is how all technology has evolved at a snails pace across most of recorded history- until the scientific method was worked out. Not Howard Roark or John Galt.

Unfortunately, the scientific method, while far better than anything before, has a few little problems of it’s own with bias, and combined with individuals, committees, or a combination, driven by multiple agendas, often produces bad decisions. The single worst obstacle is, of course, the profit motive. Profit is divorced from goal-seeking in that it is a goal in itself. This is at cross-purposes and incredibly destructive but painted by those driven by greed as the only factor worth considering.

You raised a valid point- beaming energy through the atmosphere may have some effect that makes it unacceptable. But that has to be evidenced. Until it is, there is no other carbon-free way to provide a western standard of living to those 10 billion souls that will soon live on Earth. Nothing else will work- turning the Moon into a Space Solar Power satellite factory is the utilitarian path. The greatest good for the greatest number.

Musk wants condos on Mars paid for by strip-mining Earth orbit as an insurance policy for humankind. The libertarian/neoliberal-minded majority that make up his fan club see no problem with that. It is a solution that comes straight from a borderline sociopath mentality. No better Fermi Paradox great filter can be found than this kind of throwing the dice and hoping the narcissist billionaire saves us all.

O’Neill was a genius and picked what would work out of all the lesser possibilities. He understood global warming was likely going to be a problem and saw the solution.

Space Solar Power….. about which our present day false prophet says, “Space Solar Power- the stupidest thing ever”

Why I consider NewSpace the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

The Moon is the factory site for the economic engine that will expand humankind off-world and an insurance policy for our species.

And yet, evidence for ice on the Moon should have pointed the space agency back at the Moon in 2010. Instead a certain “connected” entrepreneur with his hobby rocket that was useless for any lunar mission decided his company, and NASA, was not going there. Read the speech…we had already “been there.”

https://www.nasa.gov/news/m…

The sooner the ISS is gone the better. 40 years of LEO is enough.

We should have left this couple-hundred-miles-up dead end far behind in 1968- but instead retreated back to it after 1972. A very short first space age and now over a half a century waiting for the second to start.

In hindsight it is a 180 billion dollar money hole that continues to flush 4 billion a year down the drain. The Shuttle could have accomplished the same work, if you call it work, by simply loading extra life support pallets or rocket resupply. What a waste, what a deception foisted on the public.

The prize we never should have taken our eyes off of is the Moon. Unfortunately spacex, which has made the Moon verboten for a decade, has now managed yet another corporate welfare scam that will keep us from going back for years to come.

The dosing Moonwalkers receive and shortening of their careers in space due to that accrued dose makes working on the surface a no-go. Only extraordinary circumstances will see humans in space suits on the surface. Travel is possible- likely riding in water tanker trucks which will provide a cosmic ray shield. If water is transported from the lunar poles to areas where lava tubes are being developed then these tanker trucks would thus afford protection for humans and take them to the site where some extraordinary opportunity would warrant a surface excursion.

NewSpace delenda est

Neoliberalism is best defined as Oligarchs with obscene wealth running the world….and eventually destroying it. It is only a fluke that two such exalted beings, Musk and Bezos, are hobbyists with rockets as their toy of choice. See how that works? While the NewSpace fans think this is working as a path to the future, it is actually not. It is a dead end.

In the pre-industrial world a lack of technology placed a limit on greed and restricted the damage that could be done by warring aristocrats- but that great filter in the Fermi Paradox has become quite obvious in the 21st century. A representative democracy is about a separation of powers keeping absolute greed in check. Following utilitarian principles the greatest good for the greatest number is the unchanging goal and progressive taxation the primary instrument.

The only real obstacle is what is decided by committee being corrupted by special interests that distract and divert for individual gain. This has always been the single great sin likely to doom humankind and result in extinction. There is a path, found using the scientific method, that leads to our species expanding into the cosmos and avoiding extinction. That path is NOT “entrepreneurs” and the profit motive.

A state sponsored long-term program of Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLV’s) is the first prerequisite, and we do not have that yet. It is not another bunch of tin cans that is needed- it is a building block that can be mass produced to enable hundreds and eventually thousands of humans in space as a first step. The fundamental building block will have to provide the minimum interior volume to meet psychological needs for multi-year missions, incorporate a massive cosmic ray water shield, and have the structural strength to be spun using a tether generated artificial gravity system.

Very large double-hulled wet workshops (“Fat Workshops”), lofted with SHLV’s for the next 30 years, providing crew compartments for true space stations, Lunar Cyclers, and spaceships, are what is needed.

The Shiny Horror

Comments from Parabolic Arc and The Space Review

“The reason they’ve had so many failures of the Starship prototypes is that it represents nearly a half-century of development compressed into a short period of time.”

Not really the reason at all. It is actually just a space shuttle that takes the external tank into space with it and brings it back down. An even worse design than the space shuttle. No escape system. It is the same doomed-to-fail-do-it-cheap philosophy that has kept humans trapped in Low Earth Orbit since 1972.

There is no cheap.

Ocean-recovered liquid boosters that could be fished out and returned to the cape would have succeeded in saving the first shuttle crew lost. Having an engine module capable of being recovered instead of attaching it to the Orbiter would have saved the second shuttle crew lost (by placing the Orbiter on top of the stack). The liquid boosters and engine module would have allowed for a larger payload and thus an escape system. It also would have allowed for a cargo version.

Sacrificing one tank to the rocket equation and bringing everything back for reuse was the single redeeming feature of the STS- and it is possible to do the same with the SLS- but it costs money. Instead of spending what is necessary the U.S. is once again trying to go cheap- while tens of billions are squandered on questionable DOD programs without a qualm.

The shiny starship is…a disaster for space exploration.

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Sadly, the true visionary of space colonization was Gerard K. O’Neill, while the false prophet, the antithesis, is Elon Musk. That is where we are and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. NewSpace ranks with trickle-down economics and climate change denial as one of the three worst calamities to befall civilization.

NewSpace rejects Space Solar Power as the economic engine to expand humankind into space (and the solution to climate change). Neoliberalism locks space into an only-for-profit dead end of deregulation and obscene greed. Strip-mining Earth orbit with smallsats has replaced going to the Moon to build the giant space solar power arrays necessary to power civilization carbon free. It is a disaster.

“-doubts about the company’s ability to remain on schedule and a complex concept of operations that requires multiple missions to fuel Starship in Earth orbit before going to the Moon-“

What a disaster for space exploration…worse than the shuttle.

NewSpace has set space exploration back at least a decade and the damage is accumulating.

“Given the lunar lander’s central role, any development delays could jeopardize NASA’s plans to land astronauts on the Moon-“

Selecting the shiny was a profoundly bad decision and has, in a stroke, set a lunar return back years. The antigovernment libertarian fanboys groveling before their Tony Stark cult figure could care less about landing on the Moon. Their hijacking of every forum discussing space is actually about their ideology, which is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-American. It is the worst thing that has ever happened to the U.S Space Program.

There is some hope this will be reversed and NewSpace put in check. The years it took spacex to simply lash three hobby rockets together are a clue as to how this is going to go.

I remember very clearly the rolling of the eyes and the sarcasm during the hearing about assured access. SpaceX made promises then everyone in the room knew they would not keep. And they did not…the FH took far longer to develop and the taxpayer ended up paying a huge penalty to keep the Delta IV Heavy flying special missions in case spacex dropped the ball.

They have consistently dropped the ball on everything they have attempted. Without fail. There is no real evidence reusing the first stage vs dropping it in the ocean is breaking even and that is their principle claim to fame. Actually the concept and the first successes were not the work of spacex at all though they certainly take credit for it. They failed from the start with an engine far too small.

“SpaceX has already saved the taxpayers billions of dollars, and saved years of time for NASA and DoD. “ Pure fantasy. The propaganda and lies of fanboy-world are eternal. Spacex was going to get all the pork when the Augustine commission murdered Sidemount- plain and simple. The ice on the Moon has had to wait while Elon built his company on the taxpayers dime.

The political influence of the NewSpace flagship company has made them the sole source and as one of the most heavily subsidized companies in America they are the ultimate example of corporate welfare. It has set space exploration back a decade and the damage is accumulating.

Now SpaceX is making a new promise and considering what needs to be accomplished the chances they will not drop the ball again on HLS are about the same as a snowball in hell.

“The years of delay in the development of the Falcon Heavy, as well as recent tests of the Starship program as reported in the news, also raise technical and scheduling questions.”

Not to mention the toxic dragon blowing up and then being used on crewed missions anyway, despite a fundamentally unsafe design.

What do the fanboys say so far?

The poser thinks it is bland and the best bang in ages. Ridiculous.
“-this looks like to me more and more of a sort of “kill SLS” effort. and in it is a reasonable hail mary-“ Fanboys will always play their part in the infomercial without fail.

The wrong turns being made send Human Space Flight in the same circle it has been going in since 1972. It is essentially about the most profit at the least risk without regard for any end goal except that. It is not about accomplishing anything except political pay-offs and shareholder checks. And the American people are left holding the empty bag.

Musk has his gimmick- Mars and humans as a “multi-planet species.” Except somebody made it clear almost a half a century ago that Mars is a dead end. Mars is essentially a marketing tool and a lie. Just to make sure the real path is hidden from view the great one has made it clear he considers Space Solar Power a non-starter and instead pushes strip mining Earth orbit. Beaming down cat videos and enabling video gamers in Alaska is not a viable economic engine for space colonization.

This is a mess. NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. The saddest part of all is the big lie that Musk is doing this to safeguard our species when in reality he is doing exactly the opposite.

The Space Shuttle, which was a very bad design in so many ways, at least had the potential to make the 180 billion dollar boondoggle space station to nowhere unnecessary.

Extra life support pallets or resupply from rockets (as is done with the ISS) would have allowed the Shuttle to stay in orbit for six months or longer. That giant never-completely-filled cargo bay could have held a fairly large crew compartment.

And when it came time to bring the shuttle down then the next shuttle would have transferred the pilot needed to land it. In this way that so overblown “permanent presence in space” could have
been effected for a tiny fraction of that mountain of treasure poured down the LEO rathole. Now at 4 billion a year being flushed and if finally deorbited in 2030 that will, with rising costs, be over 36 billion that could have been directed at a lunar return.

About 15 years is the service life expected of anything in space but the ISS has been the cash cow for NewSpace and so it is being kept up there till every possible penny is taken out of the taxpayers pocket.

“Safely and sustainably transporting crew and cargo to and from low Earth orbit destinations for NASA and other future customers is the ultimate goal.”

The “ultimate goal” is, of course, shareholder checks. Both spacex and Boeing are trying to go cheap to get there. There is no cheap.

Both the Starliner and toxic dragon are unsafe designs due to their hypergolic abort systems, though Starliner has a slight edge in that at least that system can be jettisoned. These LEO taxis were always a waste of time…just like the space station to nowhere.

LEO is a dead end. Fifty years of LEO platforms (they are not really space stations) is enough.

A true space station would feature a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G) provided by a double-hulled compartment (with the outer envelope filled with a cosmic ray water shield) and Tether Generated Artificial Gravity (TGAG) system.

The mass of water required to shield even a small crew while providing minimal working space would be well over a thousand tons. The prerequisites are a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) able to loft a large diameter wet workshop (“Fat Workshop”) and water brought up from the lunar poles using 23 times less energy than bringing it up from Earth.

These workshops, likely around 60 feet in diameter, would be the basic crew compartment for space stations in GEO, NRHO, Lunar Cyclers, and nuclear propelled spaceships. Once a construction pipeline is in operation fleets of such constructs would be assured. The missing piece is a semi-expendable robot lander able to process lunar polar ice and ferry the derived water and propellants to a frozen Low Lunar Orbit (LLO). This lander would also double as a modular booster able to transit the filled workshops back across the cislunar sea to GEO or other orbits.

or humans (especially young females) to live and work in space a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity environment (NSLR1G) will be required. Until wet workshops with the structure to contain a kiloton plus water shield and spin using a tether generated artificial gravity system are in use there will be no expansion into the solar system or space based industry. It is as simple as that. Only a state sponsored program of Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLV) sent to the Moon to fill their “Fat Workshop” radiation shields will enable a second space age. Dosing and debilitation is the penultimate challenge…with the ruinous NewSpace only-for-profit ideology being the primary obstacle.

The minimum requirement is an engine with more power than the benchmark F-1A at 1.8 million pounds of thrust. Very disappointing that an engine first test-fired in 1959, over 60 years ago, has not been bettered. It took less time than that to advance from the Wright brothers to Gagarin. The simple reason being the only need for such a powerful engine is Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO). Not much ROI there; GEO telecom satellites are the big moneymaker and do not need those big engines. Simple greed has prevented any progress.

Every Year 2017

Stratolaunch Took to Air Two Years Ago

Using this monster to get a launch vehicle, and not a very big one, up to around 40,000 feet and 500 miles an hour was never going to pay off. I just do not get how investors get conned into this stuff. The first stage of a launch vehicle does the same thing in…under a minute? And then it keeps going.

I would say it is a great design for a jetliner if all the passengers are carried in a center pod that can be jettisoned and soft land (perhaps using a combination of parachute and rockets) if the plane…has a problem. We then might make every year 2017; the first and so far only year there were no fatalities in a commercial airline disaster.

That is something to invest in.

10 Million Fools

8:30

The white-obsessed are many and well-armed. I could have told them there were far more people ready for violence than they imagined. I have seen it for years in my workplace.

Several of my co-workers believe Tucker is the only one “telling the truth.” I believe he should be fired for fomenting racial violence.

Yet More Parabolic Comments

“OSIP is ESA’s website that enables the submission of novel ideas for space technology and applications.”

“Anybody is welcome to submit ideas through OSIP. The platform supports individuals who wish to contribute to European space research and interact with space industry experts. It also encourages ideas from legal entities interested in interacting with ESA and gaining funding or support for new research activities.”

I have plenty to submit to OSIP. The vision of Arthur C. Clarke in “The Promise of Space” was large human-crewed GEO platforms maintaining a global telecommunications network. It was always the logical and most efficient path but cheap and nasty and short-term profit have so far defeated any such construct.

Humans working in space in the interest of expanding our species into the solar system have always faced three obstacles: the profit motive, dosing and debilitation, and lack of political will. Gerard K. O’Neill correctly foresaw space solar power as the economic engine to enable space colonization. Evidence for ice on the Moon in 2010 solved the radiation problem by providing a source of shielding requiring 23 times less energy to lift into space than from Earth. The political will was always on the side of the DOD and the easy money of cold war toys.

Elon Musk has been the single biggest obstacle to any progress in space as he is a detractor of space solar power, made the Moon verboten for a decade due to his rocket not being able to transport any worthwhile payload there, and his starlink smallsat megaconstellation scam which has made Earth orbit the new get-rich-quick confidence game.

Weaponization of Earth Orbit and proliferation of small launchers. A very bad road to go down. Hand in hand with smallsat megaconstellations this is setting up a new cold war. All a scam. The smart move in any future conflict between peer adversaries is to wipe out all overhead assets with tungsten pellets. Like a “limited nuclear war” this preparation for space war is a farce designed to make billions of dollars for the defense industry- when and if it ever really happens it will all be wiped out in an hour.

Starlink is a slow motion disaster and never should have been allowed. The corruption and influence peddling that enabled it should be under investigation. Unfortunately it was the Obama/Biden administration that created the monster in the first place.

No thanks for spacex:(

Evidence for ice on the Moon in 2010 should have fundamentally changed the course of the space agency as it made a Moonbase practical. It was a tremendous development that was completely suppressed. The Falcon had zero lunar application and thus the Moon became a verboten subject for ten years. Musk then decided he was going to take over the planet by way of tens of thousands of pieces of space junk and that build-it-and-they-will-come flim flam became the new hobby project. There is no end to the damage a single “entrepreneur” can do if he has made the right back room deals. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

The Falcon is a commercial satellite launcher, not powerful enough to launch the big spy birds and with little use for any deep space human missions. It is finally being used as an LEO taxi, as was promised so long ago, but the toxic dragon is a poor design and NASA made a bad decision to risk their people on it. Much like the shuttle. And the shiny is just a variation of the shuttle concept with many of the same bad design features.

In regards to Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) spacex has been the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. And the damage is accumulating. If not for Musk’s backroom deals and influence peddling the space agency would have redirected it’s focus from the dead end of LEO back to the Moon ten years ago (when evidence for water at the lunar poles was revealed).

Cheap and nasty is no insurance policy for the human race- and that is what space is really about. All the fanboys and “entrepreneurs” have increased the danger we will go extinct by distracting from the ultimate goal. But you and your gang have a loftier and more important goal: Going cheap and providing video gamers lower latency. I have zero respect for anyone gullible or twisted enough to support the NewSpace agenda.

It is all about going cheap and making a buck. The space age ended before it really started on the day of the Apollo 1 fire. Aerospace concerns realized any human space travel beyond LEO was going to be hard money and they went with the easy money of cold war toys. A good example is the F-104. Nobody really cared about all the pilots who died flying it. But three astronauts burning alive…see how that works?

If you are depressed about the con side of the profit motive then you should be in favor of state sponsored space exploration and not NewSpace.

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“The SLS development schedule continues to slip one year each year.”

Only because of those who wanted the ISS as their cash cow for decades (two decades so far) to come. It broke my heart and disillusioned many space enthusiasts when they killed Sidemount.
We would likely be on the Moon by now.

https://www.airspacemag.com…

And if you are wondering why there is no forum on the site I provided a link to it is because a certain Musk fanboy arch-troll threatened legal action against Air&Space magazine for not allowing his gang to harass and bully spacex critics. So that forum disappeared. Any forums that allowed people to criticize spacex are now low traffic because of moderators simply deleting the endless threads of trolling by Musk’s legion of cyberthugs.

And that is why, as I stated, I have zero respect for the misguided space clown wannabes and Ayn-Rand-in-space libertarian whack jobs who have bought into the NewSpace scam. The damage they have done to public opinion concerning space exploration is profound and unappreciated.

————————————————————————————————————————————————–And now my take on the Republics telling corporations to “stay out of politics.”

The right worships money as the god of this world. This is the simplest and most accurate way to explain the truth about our present culture and government. It is a case of that so accurate re-interpretation of the golden rule- those with the gold make the rules. In regards to our government the right is concerned with one thing above all others- to keep the rich from being taxed. The Republicans are accurately stating the fact that if corporations want to remain untaxed in the short term they should be supporting voter suppression. The corporations are not going along with it because their people are recognizing that if democracy dies then in the long run the resulting oligarchs will engage in a no rules battle that will cost all most of their wealth. The politicians on the right just want to keep their little kingdoms in power and the corporations do not care about that. It is an interesting study of individualism vs collectivism.

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…