Ice on the Moon

I was going through my email and found a Wordsmith.org that really hit home. As I often do I saw a connection with another interesting item:  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52583322

So I thought I would write an entry on it.

USAGE:
“If the corona curves continue to crest, Covid-19 might expose as much about the dead hand of capitalism (the corruption, the hubris, the greed) as Chernobyl ever did about communism.”
Ben Schott; Diary; The Spectator (London, UK); Apr 4, 2020.

As we were driving to the airport this morning my daughter and I talked and I remarked how truth is so much stranger than fiction. She had said my son-in-law wants to read some World War Two stuff and being interested in that subject I talked about a few of my favorite books. She asked me to give examples and I mentioned Audie Murphy being akin to Captain America in the movie.

There was so much about the twentieth century that has, so far, in comparison made the 21st fairly dull. If any one man could be said to have saved the world from totalitarianism in my view it would be codebreaker Alan Turing. Although a movie was made about him recently I do not believe it was very popular compared to superhero franchises so he is still relatively unknown. He was arrested for essentially being homosexual after the war and ended committing suicide. Audie Murphy did better and while he and several other future movie stars who fought in the war suffered PTSD he not only had a movie made about him but he starred in it and went on to make westerns- though he never did as well as John Wayne (who did not fight).

And while everyone remembers John Wayne not many know who Audie Murphy was.

And then there was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who toured the U.S. as a war hero and was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the real-life Black Widow, except they did not call her that- they called her “Lady Death.” Though I have never read anything about her and our Captain America ever meeting. Nobody remembers her except history buffs like me because we became enemies with Russia and true feminists like Lyudmila were just not talked about.

What is interesting about all of this is the “dead hand” of capitalism in the 21 century after it conquered the world in the 20th. The Nazis, the Communists, and…those New Deal Democrats in a racist America who were, in a sense, a diluted mixture of both. The Neoliberals finally took over around 1980 and for the last 40 years the cult of Mammon has ruled this planet. It was not John Wayne that converted the world, it was another actor. He did not fight either.

And here we are with a reality TV star in charge. He did not fight either.

Truth is absolutely stranger than fiction.

https://www.businessinsider.com/missions-experiments-for-space-force-mysterious-x-37b-space-plane-2020-5

“There have been very important changes recently that have made it a lot more compelling and urgent that we investigate this carefully.”

“It’s been recognized even as early as the sixties that this is definitely technically feasible, there’s no violation of the laws of physics-”

“-at least ten years and all told between R&D and the production/development, undoubtedly in the billions of dollars…but this is not unusual, this is similar to what we saw for development of GPS and commercial satellites in the sixties- a lot of similar technology takes a similar trajectory like this.”

“In terms of when we would see this it’s really a question of political will, right? We look back at the Apollo Moon landing and that took ten years or so, less than ten years, but the reason it happened was because there was the political will to do it-”

As I have written about several times on this blog, the politics of expanding humankind into space are inextricably connected to the Military Industrial Complex. The death of the first space age was a result of aerospace concerns realizing after the Apollo 1 fire that Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) was going to be hard money, and they went with the easy money of cold war toys. The space shuttle design was quite possibly a scam to kidnap Soviet space assets and combined with going cheap on the boosters insured failure. If true, those design features were only one of several conflicting requirements but still highlight the primary influence of the military. Any “political will” for spending billions, or hundreds of billions, is going to have come by way of the DOD.

So how do we get that 720 billion dollars in the military budget converted into a Green New Space Deal? Trump is not likely to make AOC the new SecDef anytime soon. Dr. Jaffe speaks glowingly of SpaceX while Elon is a confirmed detractor of space solar power. And not a word about using lunar resources to build space solar power satellites, which is likely the only practical way to power civilization carbon-free. At least they are going to, hopefully, demonstrate the technology. Perhaps it will catch the attention of democrats like AOC who might then understand there is the option of converting most of the Military Industrial Complex into an International Space Complex.

I would expect space solar power to follow this “trajectory”:

1. 6 to 8 launches per year of an advanced iteration of the SLS with reusable engine module and liquid boosters and expendable core tankage.
2.  An upper-stage double hulled “fat workshop” designed to incorporate a cosmic ray water shield and a semi-expendable robot lander designed for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) of lunar ice.
3.  As wet workshops are filled with lunar water, the simultaneous deployment of fleets of human-crewed Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) telecom platforms and Lunar Cyclers.
4. Once the GEO platform and Cycler fleet pipeline is flowing a third fleet of Pulse propelled 1st generation true spaceships (space boomers) using “soft” Medusa type pulse propulsion systems. As the other superpowers follow the U.S. lead and field their own deep space nuclear deterrent then work on the lunar surface will begin.
5. Once the best lava tube sites are located the construction of the first factory sites will begin with industrial infrastructure and water transport from the poles effected. Super Heavy Launch Vehicles of several models from the different superpower coalitions will eventually be launching several times a week.
6. Manufacture of both “hard” nuclear pulse systems and space solar power components will begin in about half a century- likely the late 2070’s or early 80’s.
7. By the turn of the century nuclear pulse propelled alloy discs will be lifting immense masses of space solar power components off the surface of the Moon. Space Solar Power will be rapidly taking over powering the planet. Beam propelled “Spaceliners” and a second infrastructure to manufacture miles-in-diameter Bernal Spheres will be well along in development.
8.  With the planet completely powered from space the first Spaceliners and Bernal Spheres will come into service and a long process of space colonization will begin ending with the Earth becoming mostly depopulated and returning to a near pristine state.
9.  The space solar energy capacity will continue to grow despite demand falling to almost zero on Earth and the first Bernal Spheres converted into Starships (“slowboats”) will accelerate out of the solar system on centuries-long voyages to other systems.
10.  The space solar energy capacity will continue to grow to allow the manufacture of small singularity engines for black hole starships (“fastboats”) perhaps at the end of the 22nd century or early in the 23rd.

I would also expect a parallel drama to play out during this process of humankind expanding into space and that would first be freezing humans without damage, then reversing aging, and also the creation of super-intelligent machines. How those advances would affect expansion is hard to predict.

On 17 August 1943, under a full Moon, 560 British bombers attacked the German V-2 rocket facility at Peenemunde. Ten months earlier Nazi SS officers Walter Dornberger (later Vice President of Bell Aircraft Corporation) and Wernher von Braun (later Director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) had toasted the flight of “the first spaceship” on this isolated Baltic island with the first successful V-2 launch.  The person who designed the critical elements of the V-2 engine, Walter Thiel, was killed in the air raid along with his wife and children, having resigned from the project the day before. Dornberger, von Braun, and other Nazi notables such as Hitler’s favorite female test pilot Hanna Reitsch escaped death, while up to 600 slave laborers in a nearby camp and 245 airmen in the 40 bombers shot down that night did not. If German night fighters had not been successfully decoyed the bomber losses could have been doubled and the next day the second in command of the Luftwaffe shot himself.

It was 14 years before the next spaceship successfully launched, the Soviet R-7, and it was likely Thiel’s work that made it possible. The 56,000 pound thrust chamber and steam driven turbopump used in the V-2 engine is very similar to the thrust chambers and turbopumps used on Soyuz, 77 years later with over 1700 launches into space.

 

Thiel had resigned from the V-2 project because he considered mass production of the rocket to be impractical. Ironically, Hitler was a true believer:

“I have had to apologize only to two men in my whole life. The first was Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. I did not listen to him when he told me again and again how important your research was. The second man is yourself. I never believed that your work would be successful.

— Adolf Hitler, Apology to Major-General Dornberger, 8 July 1944[14]” (wiki)

It was later calculated the time and resources wasted on the V-2 program did much to lose Germany the war. Hitler’s misguided faith in wonder weapons turned out lucky for the Allies. If he had been as enthusiastic about nuclear weapons this might be a very different world. The Allied Bombing Campaign in World War Two was also determined to have been largely a wasted effort with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in the raids with little effect on the outcome. Postwar, the liquid fuel rocket engine was found to be less useful despite the amazing stainless steel balloon tank design of the first U.S. nuclear missile- the Atlas. The solid fuel Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Polaris Sea Launched Ballistic Missiles became the primary cold war nuclear weapon delivery systems.

Hypergolic propellants had allowed the Titan II ICBM to be fielded in silos but these were eventually phased out. Along with liquid oxygen and kerosene, hypergolics, and solid fuel, a fourth development of interest during the cold war was the failed attempt to field a liquid hydrogen fueled spy plane called Suntan; using the propellant which would ultimately enable humans to leave planet Earth and visit the Moon.  https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4404/ch8-1.htm

After that cold war battle known as the Moon Race was won the next step was… possibly the worst thing that could have happened. And the damage is accumulating to this day.

The decision to build a largely reusable space shuttle and build an orbital infrastructure with it was the worst wrong turn NASA ever made. It was, essentially, NewSpace in disguise with a vehicle that would “pay for itself” and replace all other expendable launchers. The absurdity and inevitable failure of this program was somehow only apparent after several decades of service and the loss of two crews. In hindsight, we should now be able to identify what made the shuttle such a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, what we should do we are not and the very same mistakes are being repeated. Mars and LEO are still being hyped when they are complete dead ends.

Project Orion, which made available a practical method for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO), made it plain the Moon was the place to go to launch human missions to the outer solar system as fallout from nuclear pulse engines made operating them in the Earth’s magnetosphere a non-starter. Instead, because there was really no easy money to be made doing this, the U.S. retreated from the Moon to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The first space age lasted just short of 4 years and ended in 1972 and after nearly a half a century using Nuclear Pulse Propulsion in the vicinity of the Moon is still the only practical path to any kind of human missions into deep space. And the public is almost completely unaware of this.

The pair of 5 segment Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB’s) and four RS-25 engines of the SLS would seem to make the Space Launch System just a continuation of the Space Transportation System except for two fundamental differences: first it is not going to LEO and second it is not reusable. While the first is good news it might not make up for the second. Making the SLS a “Forty Year Shuttle”, and most importantly making it into what it should have been to start with, is not as impossible as it might seem. The ISS has proven to be a 4 billion dollar a year albatross and is one of the main obstacles to any progress. Scheduled for decommission in 2028, immediately splashing the ISS would make that 32 billion dollars available for expanding production of an improved SLS.

Anyone making their living off the ISS might be upset at the suggestion of just dropping it in the ocean. Sadly, the SLS enables the building of a fleet of Lunar Cyclers using wet workshop upper stages and would employ far more. The original space shuttle took into account our gravity well and the efficiency of chemical rockets and came up with expending the external tank as the solution. Interestingly, by just landing back the engine module instead of the 737 size orbiter, the tank could have been the ideal wet workshop and a hundred space stations, each many times the size of the ISS, could have gone up. Of course this would not have accomplished much because, as I stated, LEO is a dead end and not even really space. The ideal place for a space station is in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) at an altitude of 22,236 miles up. The 250 miles up where the ISS goes in endless circles is an order of magnitude less useful.

I remember quite well 40 years ago sitting in a GI bar near the Korean DMZ watching the shuttle lift-off on the Armed Forces Television Network. I was just not that interested. Now I would be very interested in seeing it finally work the way it was supposed to. For it to enable fleets of Lunar Cyclers and GEO telecom platforms it is going to have to fly 6 to 8 times a year and be mostly reusable. In my view the best path to achieving a cislunar infrastructure is with SLS upper stage wet workshops utilizing lunar water for cosmic ray shielding. The SLS first needs to have a core engine module that is reused while expending the tank structure. The second absolute need is better boosters and the prime candidate to replace the 5 segment SRB’s is a pair of New Glenn 1st stages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster

Perhaps the SLS with reusable core module, liquid fuel boosters, and a wet workshop upper stage will still be flying a half century after it enters service- a full century after I watched the first shuttle launch. If the R-7 can keep going so can the SLS.

Five years ago one of my first blog posts concerned the deleterious effects of cosmic rays and how this dictated the conditions of Human Space Flight (HSF). This illustration from the 2006 Scientific American article by Eugene Parker should be on the wall of the office of every spacecraft designer. It is an extremely accurate depiction of the only way humankind is going to travel Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) to the outer solar system. The single important detail left out is the tether system attached to it providing artificial gravity. The first place to go out there is not Mars but Ceres. Using a “Soft” Nuclear Pulse system as proposed by Johndale C. Solem https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00189777.pdf  this could be accomplished within ten years much like the Apollo Moon landing.

Of course there is no cold war to enable this new multi-billion dollar project so what would be the driver? The Neoliberal economic cult now dominating civilization is slowly destroying the ecosystem and any chance of accomplishing these kinds of public works projects so how to overcome that obstacle? And lastly what would be a valid reason to even consider spending the time and resources on such a mission? The short answer is the Green New Deal. From wiki:

“The Green New Deal (GND) is a proposed package of United States legislation that aims to address climate change and economic inequality.[1][2][3][4] The name refers back to the New Deal, a set of social and economic reforms and public works projects undertaken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.[5] The Green New Deal combines Roosevelt’s economic approach with modern ideas such as renewable energy and resource efficiency.[6][7]

In the 116th United States Congress, it is a pair of resolutions, House Resolution 109[8] and S. Res. 59, sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA). On March 25, 2019, Markey’s resolution failed to advance in the U.S. Senate in a margin of 0–57, with most Senate Democrats voting “present” in protest of an early vote called by Republicans.[9] Among the public, there is consistently high support among Democrats for the Green New Deal, whereas Republicans, in particular Fox News viewers, oppose the Green New Deal.[10]”

Instead of the “GND” the best path is the “GNSD”, the Green New Space Deal. A mission to Ceres would be part of converting our present Military Industrial Complex into a International Space Complex (ISC) with the superpowers as international partners in a program to power the planet carbon-free from space and also provide Lebensraum. The ultimate goal is space solar energy and space colonization as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill. And after that, once most of the population has expanded into the solar system and we have some assurance that humankind can survive a Extinction Level Event, we can move to the next phase which is star travel.

With enough space solar power stations beam propulsion of miles-in-diameter Bernal Spheres becomes a practical possibility. Accelerating these spheres to a percentage of the speed of light and sending them on  centuries long journeys to other solar systems is the best insurance policy for the human race and a practice of the survival imperative. If we are not, as a species, actively seeking to address the imperative then we are doing the opposite and asking for extinction.

The troubleshooting tree for this is not too complicated. Our first problem is we have a very short lifespan as individuals and this will equate to a very short lifespan as a species. We will not even address this problem collectively partly because of fear and guilt over those who have died and will die while we try to solve it and partly because of a very powerful denial mechanism built into the way our minds work. The question is best answered in that branch of the logic tree concerning how to stop death. Freezing people is not at present an option simply because we cannot do so without causing damage to the person that will not allow them to be revived, effectively killing them.

This damage occurs when ice crystals form and rupture cell membranes and disruptions to other delicate structures. It is not a huge technical challenge and storage techniques already exist to limit this damage. http://www.themanitoban.com/2011/02/freezing-without-destroying/1904/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cells_Alive_System

As I have speculated repeatedly on this blog- when some dog or monkey is successfully thawed out and revived by a non-damaging technique that will be the most important event in recorded history. An A.D. “After Death” calendar might very well replace our present one on that day. I predict “The Great Rescue” will begin at that moment and the entire human race will mobilize in a frantic emergency response to save those dying of old age or terminal illness. But that will only be the beginning of course because storing frozen humans can only go on for so long and an equally frantic crash program to reverse the aging process will then take over; “The Great Race.” The race will be to find a cure for aging and start reviving people before we run out of storage space for the dying. And when that cure is found will the final stage begin, “The Great Awakening.”

I further prophesy the human race will quickly begin to expand first into our solar system and then to others. The means to effect this will already be available as spaceships filled with frozen colonists will embark on centuries long journeys to other stars to found new space colonies. What will eventually happen to those of us lucky enough to “make the cut” and find ourselves with an indefinite lifespan? I expect a new paradigm of spirituality will take hold based on the idea of “building Gods” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHljodCla6Q

These Super-AI’s will be developed for the express purpose of building a universal time machine to resurrect the dead and likely insure the survival of life from this plane by escaping to another. Those of us who make it to the A.D. (After Death) era and have an indefinite lifespan will at some point die by misadventure or eventually be changed into something else we cannot now imagine. But we have to first escape from what presently looks like certain extinction. We are an incredibly stupid species as self-aware life forms go and this might be the filter in the Fermi Paradox we are too stupid to comprehend. Biological life is just not intelligent enough to keep from self-destructing.

As a Futurist, a Christian, and an American I find these times far more troubling than the late 60’s when so many changes were taking place in society. I was just a boy then and did not really understand what was happening. I remember my brother returning from Vietnam wounded and infected with jungle rot and our Mother crying. I remember my Father at sea most of my childhood. Now in the last decades of my life I still do not understand how we can be so certainly doomed. There seems no common task or philosophy permeating human culture and history that worships and seeks a longer and certain existence for ourselves or our children.

Only greed and purposely sown confusion.

So Joe is pushing “flow batteries” and his main example uses Vanadium which is…toxic.

There are some large deserts available and a couple thousand square miles of Solar Thermal Mirror Fields would generate enough electricity to help address climate change. Not toxic. No exotic technology. Molten salt is a pretty good option for storage. C’mon Joe. Or are you just trying to make it all about cars?

I am not so concerned with the big battery in my electric car. I am more interested in…bumper cars. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-first-electrified-road-for-charging-vehicles-opens-in-sweden

It seems so simple but of course it is not. Just cover the deserts in mirrors and towers and accept transmission losses from power lines and electric avenues and we will be on our way to cooling down our overheated planet, right? The problem is this western standard of living I have enjoyed for half a century. The rest of the human race wants that and will not accept living in squalor. And they should not. The feedback loop that defeats building more “renewables” is the carbon we have to release to make those renewables. Renewable energy is not building renewable energy- coal is burned to make windmills. We cannot seem to catch up with demand as billions in the undeveloped world demand more energy. The only escape from this cycle of more carbon to create more carbon-free energy is carbon-free power from off-world.

The solution was found in the 1970’s by a couple really smart people. The two key figures were Gerard Kitchen O’Neill, who died in 1992, and Peter Edward Glaser, who died in 2014 (some months before I started this blog). Glaser held patents on the space solar power satellite while O’Neill promoted space colonization using artificial hollow spinning moons (and building solar power satellites with lunar resources). No carbon will be coming here from the Moon.

I came up with the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum to explain the only practical path to interplanetary travel so perhaps I could assemble another such device explaining how to save the world from climate change. How about the “Keynes-Glaser-O’Neill Continuum”? And why not a third one to explain why we need to figure out how to freeze people without damage to avoid certain extinction? The Fyodorov-de Garis-Varki Continuum”? The KGOC is fairly easy to understand while the FdVC is not so simple. I will explain.

John Maynard Keynes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes -“Keynesian economists generally advocate a managed market economy – predominantly private sector, but with an active role for government intervention during recessions and depressions.[7]”, is the person who best represents the antithesis of the present Neoliberal world economy. The free market will never enable a project such as space solar power simply because the requirement for short term return on investment will not allow it. Greed and a short lifespan mean we cannot, under a free market system, accomplish anything beyond a few years. Keynesian economics enables public works projects like space solar power which in turn are the economic engines that make space colonization possible. And if we do not go into space we will, sooner than anyone thinks, go extinct.

There are no insurmountable technical obstacles to space colonization: the stumbling block is psychological. And that brings us to the difficult-to-understand Fyodorov-de Garis-Varki Continuum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Varki

Fyodorov advocated radical life extension, physical immortality and even resurrection of the dead (which he called “The Common Task”), using scientific methods. This founding father of Russian Cosmism had direct contact with early rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who visited the library where he worked over a 3-year period. He was also known to Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. As a Christian and a futurist I believe I have a profound understanding of Fyodorov’s worldview. Considering the human preoccupation with religion and the lack of any reconciliation between spirituality and science, I also believe his ideas are key to any future human progress.

Hugo de Garis explains, “Intelligent machines (or “artilects”, a shortened form of “artificial intellects”) will be far more intelligent than humans and will threaten to attain world domination, resulting in a conflict between “Cosmists”, who support the artilects, and “Terrans”, who oppose them (both of these are terms of his invention).” The beauty of Hugo’s vision is the intrinsic capability of “Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines” to effect The Common Task. Artificial Intelligence is the only path that will take us anywhere near bending the laws of time and space. Resurrection is essentially about time travel and while we lack the intelligence to build a time machine to rescue those already dead, a GMIM will figure all this out.

Ajit Varki describes, “-an evolutionary mechanism to explain the emergence of behaviorally modern humans and some of their unique behaviors including an extended theory of mind and a tendency to deny reality.” This mechanism could be that filter in the Fermi Paradox keeping intelligent life from surviving long enough for us to detect it. The only way to transcend this program of self-destruction is an indefinite lifespan. Freezing human beings without damage, “the great rescue”, is the immediate and most practical method of integrating the ideas of The Common Task, Transhumanism, and The Survival Imperative.

The difficulty in comprehending the Fyodorov-de Garis-Varki Continuum is the seeming cognitive impossibility of it all. We cannot imagine doing what God is supposedly going to do for us, we cannot imagine a god-like intelligence so far above ours anymore than a insect imagines what we are thinking about, and we cannot even accept the idea of death. Wasting billions on consumer goods instead of research on how to freeze and thaw fragile microstructures without damage is…stupidity. And it is, of course, suicide. How to escape stupid-world is the trick. That is the FdVC.

In regards to The Survival Imperative there is one more person that needs to be mentioned and that is Kevin Parkin. https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2405/1/Parkin-Thesis.pdf

With a large enough space solar energy infrastructure the immense energies of the Sun can be utilized to beam propel a miles-in-diameter Bernal Sphere on course for another star at a significant percentage of the speed of light. Upon arrival, centuries later, nuclear devices used in a pulse propulsion system would slow the starship down. This is the “Slow Boat” humankind is most likely to use in our first voyages to other solar systems. How quickly we can launch such missions may mean the difference between the survival of the human race and extinction. It is hoped we survive long enough on Earth that the most likely second generation “Fast Boat” would follow: a proposal to create an artificial black hole and using a parabolic reflector to reflect its Hawking radiation was discussed in 2009 by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship

We have these YouTube celebrities getting a million views babbling about flow batteries for their electric cars. As I have said many times on this blog, any extraterrestrials observing our certain path to extinction would simply shrug and say, “too stupid to survive.” I wonder if some UFO pilots were actually having that conversation while watching the F-18s off San Diego chase them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4404/ch10-5.htm [200] Fig. 51. Cross-section of an injector used in experiments with an 89-kN rocket engine using liquid oxygen and regeneratively cooled by the liquid hydrogen. A lightweight design, the injector was a converging showerhead type. Measured performance was 93 percent of theoretical. From Tomazic, Bartoo, and Rollbuhler, NASA TMX-253, Apr. 1960.

The year I was born the high performance rocket engine was just being born. 15 years previously the first nuclear weapons had been dropped on cities and 7 years earlier America and China ended their conflict in Korea. My wife is Korean so that war has significance to me and it only ended when Eisenhower threatened to drop nuclear weapons on China. Eisenhower was also the guy who ordered the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe in bad weather. He was not kidding.  From the New York Times:

”The President expressed with great emphasis the opinion that if the Chinese Communists attacked us again, we should certainly respond by hitting them hard and wherever it would hurt most, including Peiping itself,” the record of the meeting says, using the former name of Peking.”

Considering the economic woes that followed the Vietnam war it is an interesting “what if”:

”This, said the President, would mean all-out war against Communist China,” the document continues. It is one of hundreds of papers, most of them originally classified as top secret, included in the State Department’s latest volume in the series called ”Foreign Relations of the United States.” The volume, in two books, covers Korea from 1952 to 1954. The series is a source of primary material on American foreign policy. – The latest volume, in addition to discussing readiness to use nuclear weapons, discloses differences in approach between officials.  – The discussion about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Korea was followed by a policy of threatening to use such weapons in case of a large-scale attack by the Soviet Union. There was also discussion in 1954 of possible American nuclear support to aid French forces besieged at Dien Bien Phu in the war that ended French rule in North Vietnam.”

The Reagan Revolution ushered in a new era of robber barons and now we have a Neoliberal world order with the rain forest burning and great barrier reef dying, ice caps melting, and pandemics threatening global chaos. The richest man in the world wants to industrialize space and as much as I truly hate the inequality and rampant greed that put him in his semi-divine position, I have to agree with him. I have written in this blog about how I came to my present worldview by way of reading “Project Orion” while helping my wife research a paper on situational ethics. My own take on the critical task facing the human race is not the same as Jeff Bezos and Gerard K. O’Neill, it is slightly different.

As long as human beings have short lifespans, our species is doomed. Nobody cares about a future they will not be in. We have a built-in denial mechanism that keeps us from facing this problem. Having been a troubleshooter of aircraft autopilot systems for several years as my principal trade, I believe I have some insight on the solution. In my view the first step is to simply acknowledge the fault- we get old and die. The second step is technically simple- find a way to freeze humans without damage before they die while we work on step three. Step three is reversing the aging process. Not a very complicated flow chart. The main feature is the step two storage problem while we are figuring out step three. Mr. Bezos has some experience with storage and deadlines.

But before that can possibly happen there is the problem of Neoliberalism- which places human life after the main reason for existence which is greed. Money is the god of this cult that has taken control of the world. The proof is simple to see in the calls to “go back to work” and just let people die because the economy is more important than individual lives. Space is directly connected to an indefinite lifespan for obvious reasons. If we do not die and we continue to reproduce then the world is not going to support that future infinite population.

We will not stop reproducing and it follows that freezing people is the only way we are going on centuries-long journeys to other solar systems. I would suggest that all these super-rich people stop competing against each other in this one area (step one), direct immense resources at the problem (step two), and then enable the solution (step three).

If you are not sociopathic predators and have some intelligence beyond how to amass incomprehensible wealth, please do that. Have a good day Jeff.

Gary Church

 

 

Well, I have survived the virus so far, but it is not going well at work and I was so burned out when I got off yesterday I called out today. Of course, I might be infected now and it won’t kill me for a couple weeks. Great. I am laying down trying to get one of my feet healed up enough to get me through tomorrow and then I get a couple days off. Then I have to shoot at the range and then the next day it is back on 13 hour shifts. Watching a YouTube documentary on the Second World War and it occurred to me, why not write a blog entry?

I have written often about freezing a human being without damage as the most important event in the history of the human race. On that day everything will change and nothing will ever be the same again. The pandemic might be giving people a taste of that kind of change. Nobody with any intelligence is going to think lightly about a contagious pathogen after this is over. And…as I have stated for years, an engineered pathogen is one of those few things that could end in our extinction. Freezing a human being without damage is essentially a technical challenge involving lowering the temperature of microstructures without ice crystals forming and damaging those structures.

There appears to be some kind of psychological mechanism at work that is preventing humans in all their various organizations from focusing on this most important of all technical challenge. As long as we collectively ignore individual mortality then we are, in my view, certainly doomed as a species. This most important key technology is obviously not as difficult as something like faster-than-light travel or teleportation. Those common science fiction devices are more science fantasy and have very little chance of ever happening as they violate certain fundamental laws of physics. Freezing an intricate and delicate microstructure while inhibiting the formation of ice crystals does not involve  violations of the laws of physics and requires no magical unobtainium or handwavium.  A tardigrade is a fairly complex organism and if one can be revived after being frozen for thirty years I would think there is some hope for us.

Of the several book projects I have considered one of my favorites is a review of the key technologies that enabled human beings to become the dominant species on this planet. From what I have read it was fire that let us cook food and this made our brains bigger. “Fossils show the teeth and digestive tract of Homo erectus decreased in size around the same time brain size increased. This evidence likely means our ancestors started eating softer, higher-quality foods (although not necessarily cooked). New archaeological research has also continued to push back the earliest known date for the control of fire. For example, traces of purposeful fire at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa have been dated at more than a million years old.”  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/food-for-thought-was-cooking-a-pivotal-step-in-human-evolution/

“Fire, by keeping people warm at night, made fur unnecessary, and without fur hominids could run farther and faster after prey without overheating. Fire brought hominids out of the trees; by frightening away nocturnal predators, it enabled Homo erectus to sleep safely on the ground, which was part of the process by which bipedalism (and perhaps mind-expanding dreaming) evolved.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/?page=2

If fire made us intelligent by way of cooking then persistence hunting may have provided the high quality fat and protein for the fire. We may have worshipped fire and could have run down and killed game with simple spears with fire-hardened tips but it was binding a piece of shaped stone to that simple spear with plant fiber or other material that made the ultimate weapon- the spear. The spear made human beings the apex predator as a stout shaft of wood with a razor sharp flint or obsidian tip could kill any large predator and a fire would provide illumination to defend against attacks at night.

Many technologies could have been world-changing and history-making and seem simple enough but never came into use. These could-have-beens fascinate me and space exploration is one of those subjects most populated with ideas about what could have been. I was interested in missed opportunities long before I was a space enthusiast though. The could-have-been that hooked me early on I read about as a teenager in a book on the ME-109 by Martin Caidin. During the Battle of Britain the German single-engine fighter could not stay over England for very long and Caidin wrote that if they had been equipped with a simple drop tank England might very well have lost the Battle of Britain and been defeated by Germany.

My own theory concerning the Battle of the North Atlantic had to do with torpedoes and wire guidance. The Germans came up with a wire-guided missile to use against allied bombers and this technology was used postwar in anti-tank missiles. The less known application of wire guidance was in torpedoes. Since the wire propelled Brennan torpedo had been patented in 1877 the idea of using wire was not new. A line of hydrophones along the side of the U-boat would have given the bearing of the torpedo and the periscope would have given the bearing of the target and sending commands through the wire to the torpedo to match the two would have resulted in a hit. Such an improvement in torpedo accuracy would have resulted in a quick defeat for England as the U-boats came close even with unguided torpedoes.

While it would not have changed the outcome the Bachem BA 349 Natter or a similar concept may have stopped the Allied bombing campaign in its tracks. The Natter was essentially a anti-aircraft missile that used a human being as the guidance system. The pilot required very little training, needing only to steer the aircraft for a few minutes until a bomber filled the sight, fire the rocket salvo, and then bail out and parachute back to Earth. In my view it was the perfect weapon to use against allied bombers. Luckily it was not pursued much earlier in the war by von Braun and his people who, if I recall, were consulted on it.

I despise Nazis and it is scary to think how close they came to conquering the world. Too bad more people do not feel that way about Neoliberal ideology. It was the free market worldview that ended the space age before it really began. As I have stated many times over the years, it is obvious that after the Apollo 1 fire the aerospace industry realized Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) was going to be hard money. They went with the easy money of cold war toys. I remember sitting in class in elementary school as a boy watching the Apollo 13 splashdown on a black and white television and my teacher crying her eyes out. The deaths of three astronauts sitting on the launch pad years earlier had already ended any hope of humans expanding into the solar system. Not because of any insurmountable obstacle- simply because of greed. The effect of different weapon systems in war highlight interactions between those pursuing agendas and the harsh reality opposed to those plans. A clear example of this are the main guns mounted on various tanks with the soldiers demanding the most powerful weapons possible while those in charge were telling them they were not necessary.

The most famous example in space exploration is the statement concerning the loss of the space shuttle Challenger.

One more example to illustrate the principle of “what could have been” is the airship. The Zeppelin is best known for bursting into flames and we now consider it strange that such a giant delicate flammable thing could ever have been considered as practical. There were three big problems with airships. The first, as shown by the Hindenburg, is that most efficient lifting gas hydrogen would burn like crazy. The second was they were extremely difficult to handle when they landed. The third was they simply could not be built to withstand severe turbulence. The solution to the first problem was to have a thin layer of nitrogen gas in an outer envelope which would have made the ships far less likely to catch on fire. The reason this was not done was because the technology for handling gases like liquid nitrogen was not well developed. With the ability to separate nitrogen and liquify it an airship could have maintained an outer nitrogen envelope and the stronger double hull construction of the last U.S. airships would have facilitated this as this image of the structure shows:

The second problem was ground handling and again the Akron and Macon partially answered this problem with propellers that were rotatable and reversible, as 2:25 of this video shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjPqK8dYD1A

The last problem was really connected to the first two as flying above most turbulence, in the stratosphere, was the only way to keep airships from being destroyed by severe weather events. Manufacturing lifting hydrogen from gasoline on board the airship would have allowed the engines to run on hydrogen as a means of regulating the amount of gas and this would have allowed for increased expansion and efficiently decreasing the amount of gas which was the main obstacle to high altitude airship flight. Engines could be turbocharged for high altitude flight and to provide pressurization for crew compartments and this technology was actually available. https://www.ge.com/reports/supercharged-ges-aviation-business-rose-ashes-world-war/

 

As I wrote about in this blog in May of 2015, “the-coming-zeppelin-satellite-apocalypse”, the airship is a way to connect the planet that may soon make expensive satellite, and especially the problematic smallsat megaconstellations, obsolete.

Airships did not dominate aviation early but if they had it is interesting to consider whether people would have considered airplanes just too dangerous for commercial travel. The key technology in about a century might be beam propelled “spaceliners” beginning to carry millions of people a year to space colonies. It could happen.

I binge-watched a series on Amazon Prime a couple months ago called “Counterpart.” Something about it captured my interest and I am not sure quite what. It was a very “deep” plot with people interacting with better or worse versions of themselves from an alternate universe. Probably why it was canceled. Too much to think about. The plot involved a flu virus that had decimated one world while the mirror world in the alternate universe was not effected. Years after the pandemic a secret-within-a-secret-organization make plans to infect the mirror planet because they believe the flu had been a biological weapon attack. Concerning the real world, COVID-19 is not decimating our population; one to three percent mortality and the majority of those elderly or having other health issues.

The premise of the Counterpart plot was that humans are a flawed and self-destructive species. The bioterrorists wanted the gateway between the two worlds permanently closed because they believed in this nihilistic worldview and considered the mirror planets to be eternal adversaries with no hope of any good outcome. The similarities to our real world are disturbing to me now. Not so much when I watched the series- it was just interesting in a way I could not pin down. Now…

I have often written about the need for immediate action in regards to expanding humankind into space as a insurance policy for our species. The Survival Imperative as it has been called. I have stated that we are presently in a position to direct immense resources at establishing independent space colonies and that this fortunate circumstance may not last. The fragility of our world economy is now being exposed and the danger of tipping over into a new era of global conflict, a new dark age, is looming. The one opportunity we had to survive as a species for the millennia to come may well be gone if our technological civilization melts down. My view for years has been that as long as we have such short lifespans individually then we are certainly doomed as a species. Nothing showcases this more clearly than blatant calls for people to return to work because the economy is more important to our leaders than human life.

I have been on leave for the last couple weeks and in a location fairly remote from cases of the virus. Now it has spread here and I am returning to work tomorrow. My employers have historically treated their employees badly and I do not expect much consideration in regards to protecting us from infection. I am almost 60 and nearly died of sepsis last year and am still suffering the effects of that event, and my job also places me in contact with the public, so I am in a higher risk category. I have to go back or risk getting fired and have a family and bills to pay. No choice. How many in similar situations will die in the coming months?

I will not be posting much in the days to come, so good luck to you all.

Gary Church

In my view, space is either going to go a certain way or we are not going.

The first deciding factor is whether getting human beings off-world into independent colonies is going to be made the goal. This is actually how it all must start- by everyone agreeing that these survival colonies are the ultimate goal. An insurance policy for our species is the only way we are going to end up in space. These independent colonies are going to be artificial spinning hollow moons made of lunar material, at least for the next couple centuries. How big they are going to be is the interesting question. There is going to be a magic number based on available material strength and the most efficient construction technique. Diameter will be in miles anyway- whether a few or many is not clear. The fanboys do not get it and think we are going to Mars.

The second deciding factor is how to first create that Cislunar infrastructure that will turn the Moon into a factory manufacturing artificial worlds. The critical enabler is going to be a Nova-class Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) with a “Fat Workshop.” Exactly how big the vehicle has to be likely depends on how large the wet workshop is. The Saturn V was 33 feet in diameter and since a cosmic ray water shield is going to be 15 feet or so thick then a double envelope may be up to 60 feet in diameter. One option might be the smaller diameter upper stage being placed inside the large diameter lower stage to effect the double envelope. The final design is going to be larger than any presently planned iteration of the SLS. The minimum acceptable amount of living space for long duration missions is the  psychological requirement that will determine the size of the SHLV.

These workshops, when attached to each other with tether systems, will provide that vital prerequisite of a near-sea-level-radiation and one-gravity environment.

The third determining factor after how to get humans in the vicinity of the Moon for long periods are the Landers that will take workers down to the factories under the lunar surface. If there is ice at the poles in solid sheets and it has volatiles trapped in it then Robot Landers will be able to exploit these resources and make methane propellent, which is much easier to store and transfer than liquid hydrogen. The semi-expendable Landers will be able to intercept wet workshops and insert them into frozen lunar orbits and then fill their cosmic ray shields with water in preparation for astronauts. Landers can also dock with these crew sections and boost them into Lunar Cycler orbits around the Earth and Moon. Once the Lunar Cycler fleet and a ring of human-crewed GEO telecom platforms is in place then the first true spaceships can be assembled.

The variables are the resources on the Moon- such as whether there are comet volatiles trapped in ice and whether there are suitable large lava tubes that can be used as ready made factory sites.

The Narrow Path

The problem is radiation and zero G. Dosing and debilitation. The solution is the ice on the Moon used to fill a cosmic ray water shield. And of course a Lander to get the water and bring it up to the crew compartment. That habitat is going to have to be some kind of Skylab wet-workshop and only the SLS, likely a larger iteration with much bigger boosters, can place something big enough to hold that much water in the vicinity of the Moon. For every ton of tap water brought from Earth twenty-two tons can be brought up from the lunar poles. And water is by far the most utilitarian shielding material.

These are the hard facts, the elephant in the room. The article by Eugene Parker in Scientific American from 2006, “Shielding Space Travelers” makes it clear these plans for some kind of Lunar ISS are not going to work. It is not just radiation, artificial gravity to prevent debilitation is also required for long duration missions and a tether system is the only practical way to do that. A near-sea-level-radiation and one-gravity environment is the prerequisite and there is no way around that. It is long past time to end permanent damage to astronauts, especially young females.

The narrow path, not the flexible path, is the only path- and it means abandoning LEO and funding more SLS production to enable a shuttle era cadence. That is really the only way a “sustainable” human presence Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) is possible.

800,000 subscribers and over 15,000 views today. Wow. And Paul Shillito managed to get the single most important piece of information concerning space radiation and Human Space Flight…wrong.

In 2006 Eugene Parker wrote an article for Scientific American that remains the best popular science guide to “Shielding Space Travelers” from radiation. Parker explains cosmic radiation much better than this YouTube video. The key fact for anyone interested in Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) to understand is that 15 feet of water is required to provide a near-sea-level radiation environment in space. In the above YouTube video at 9:30 it is stated only a meter is needed when it is actually 4.5 meters. A small capsule will require around 400 tons of  shielding while a crew compartment with any practical living space will need well over a thousand tons of water.

There is only one propulsion system that can push that kind of mass around the solar system at a speed allowing voyages to the gas and ice giants within 3 to 5 years. That system, as I have written about often on this blog, is nuclear pulse propulsion. H-bombs. They actually might be less powerful A-bombs in the first true spaceships since they will likely be “Medusa” ships using large parachute type devices to capture the plasma cloud generated by the nuclear device. https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00189777.pdf   The most efficient spaceships will use a large alloy plate and the greater the diameter the higher the Isp.

The Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum is derived from the reality of cosmic radiation, the only practical system to push the massive shield required, and the only place to acquire water shielding, assemble, test, and launch nuclear missions- the Moon.

The names are those of the scientists I have read about doing the research that will actually determine how humankind ventures beyond the Moon and into the outer solar system. Eugene Parker, who I have already cited, Freeman Dyson, who recently passed away and whose work validated bomb propulsion, and Paul Spudis, who also recently passed and was responsible for the first original work on exploiting lunar resources.

I wish these YouTube celebrities would drop me a comment and start corresponding with me. It is bad enough I have been banned from all the public space forums because I criticize SpaceX. I am like the Alex Jones of space enthusiasts…except I am actually telling the truth.

And welcome any Ars Technica forum commenters to Ice on the Moon:

The lunar gateway should be the eye-opener concerning Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO). The problem that NASA and everyone keeps ignoring, the true elephant in the room, is cosmic radiation or, “dosing and debilitation.” Humans are simply NOT going into space until the basic prerequisite of a near-sea-level-radiation and one-gravity environment is met. An environment that causes permanent damage to humans means we are NOT going there to stay or in any significant numbers. NewSpace is going in the completely wrong direction with almost everything it is doing by ignoring this starting point.

A massive water shield and a tether system are the only way people can go on multi-year missions and actually live in space. The water has to come from the lunar poles simply because it requires 22 times less energy to bring it up from the surface of the Moon. A several thousand foot tether system is the only practical system to generate artificial gravity. Skylab type crew compartments and the SLS to transport them to the Moon to receive lunar water are the only practical option since they would already be stressed for launch from Earth and can be partially filled with water and spun. NewSpace fans do not allow discussion of this narrow path, having been programmed to follow “the flexible path.”

Anybody interested can search Ice on the Moon wordpress and there you will find that narrow path.

Please post your comments but understand I will not tolerate any blatant advertising of the NewSpace flagship company or any of the standard toxic borderline insults. I will delete them and you can try again. I will be spending my own precious time vetting them so if you post too many unacceptable comments in a row…you will be banned. Thanks. Before anybody posts a comment I strongly suggest you read the basic article any space enthusiasts should read and understand as a foundation for any views they present here: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~sshepherd/research/Shielding/docs/Parker_06.