Ice on the Moon

https://www.livescience.com/age-when-life-has-most-meaning.html

According to this article my search for meaning was important to me in my 20’s and is now at it’s lowest point while my sense that life has meaning was low then and is now at it’s highest. Statistically across a number of individuals. Of course I have to be the unhappy exception. I suspect a study of terror management theory is what is skewing my numbers. The following schematic is not from the article, it is from: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol22/iss3/art32/figure1.html

 

From the article: “It’s not clear whether health and well-being make people feel life is meaningful, or whether people who find meaning in life become healthier. “I suspect that the relationship goes both ways,” Aftab said. “How healthy and functional we are impacts how meaningful we find our lives to be, and that meaning in our lives in turn promotes further health and well-being.”

In my view the key to understanding meaning and my own mortality at this late point in life is my three year old Granddaughter. Across a spectrum of “proximal (conscious, near, and threat-focused) and distal (unconscious, distant, symbolic) defenses” my Granddaughter is the opposite of a threat and in no way unconscious. My death anxiety has more to do with reality than all the stuff we fill up our three pound universe with. I am a simple machine.

When my Father was dying, during a particularly stressful episode when I was very tired, I hallucinated columns of glowing rectangles on the wall. Somewhat like the graphic above. I suspect it had to do with the many years I spent troubleshooting autopilot systems using flow charts. Those rescue helicopters were the most meaningful work of my life. Perhaps I was trying to figure out what was happening and looking for a solution. The solution I was involved in was the endura my Father was going through. I was searching for some kind of consolamentum for him.

Everyone has events burned into their memory- experiences they attach meaning to. In terms of affecting my worldview two stand out. It was only decades later that the first would become important to me but the second had an immediate effect. The first was the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the second was when they took the B-52’s off alert in 1991. I was 26 years old and 31 years old when those events took place. Sadly, I don’t remember much about those 5 years between. Both events connect across generations to my Father and my Granddaughter.

In 1986 I had just began my years in Coast Guard Aviation at an Air Station in the deep south. With my wife and baby daughter in our little apartment I was, at the time of the Challenger disaster, learning how to fuel aircraft as all new mechanics did. I remember that cold morning. Five years later my little girl was in elementary school and the cold war, which had shaped my life in so many ways, was coming to an end. I was checking on the status of a Search And Rescue case in the ops center and I stopped to watch Bush senior on the news talking about taking the bombers off alert. A decade later I watched another historic newscast a few days after my forty first birthday. The end of the cold war had a far stronger effect on me than 911. We had all expected Armageddon. A terrorist attack, even one that killed thousands, was just not that big of a deal.

My Father worked on jet fighters most of his career in the Navy and was at sea for most of my childhood. We never formed any kind of bond. The war with no real battles that everyone feared would be the end of the world was the reason I had no Father. The bright future the space shuttle program promised ended as I was trying to do the exact opposite of what my Father had done. I was in the one military service trying not to fight a war and instead trying to save lives. And going home to my wife and daughter every night instead of leaving them alone for months at a time. I tried to be better than him but never could. I had serious problems with the military culture and was lucky to retire.

My Granddaughter makes all that drama fairly meaningless. All the bitter regrets and unhappiness with society are fading as she grows. When I hear her voice and see her bright eyes nothing else matters except her. The past does not matter; I don’t matter. I was not a big space fan at the time of the Shuttle disaster but these many years later I now finally understand that space is how to save this world for our children. Gerard K. O’Neill was the prophet of space colonization, with the plan humankind needed to survive it’s own sins. Seven months after the B-52’s were taken off alert in 1991 O’Neill died. I did not know about his death and it would not have had much meaning for me then. Now, 28 years later, his vision is even more important as the only likely cure for climate change.

My own death, predicted by averaging the lifespans of my Mother and Father, is less than two decades away. It seems a distant end but looking in the mirror and seeing the rapid advance of aging shows how quickly my story is being read. I remember Dr. Spudis wrote an article on geologic time around a year before his death and he probably had  been diagnosed as terminal and was contemplating his life. It is interesting that while my own mortality is deeply distressing, when I think of my Wife and Daughter and Granddaughter that is what is most profoundly frustrating, depressing, and sad. As I explained to my little girl once, men are by nature expendable. It is women that matter.

 

 

NASA is going to begin the second space age exactly 50 years after the first one ended.

At the end of 1972 Apollo 17 returned from the Moon and 2022 will mark the 50th anniversary of humankind NOT exploring space. We are going to correct that mistake. As actor William Shatner announced in a recent NASA P.R. video- We are going.

NASA declares first SLS core stage complete

“Think of it as NASA’s Christmas present to America,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in an event marking the SLS core stage completion Dec. 9.”

While I consider Bridenstine the best NASA Administrator since the Apollo era and in the running as best ever, and sincerely hope he is carried over into the next administration, I don’t think of this as marking a holiday. Instead, I recall when the Augustine Commission murdered Sidemount and if not for that how the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 could have seen another trip around the Moon. 2018 should have marked humans again leaving the gravitational field of Earth- enabled by Sidemount. It was a sad time.

“We’re going to do a ‘green run’ test. We’re going to prove its capability, we’re going to get it to the Cape, and we’re going to be ready to launch American astronauts to the Moon again.”

In 2022 we plan to fly humans around the Moon again, 4 years after the 50th anniversary of the first such flight. Ironically, 4 years is how long the first space age lasted. The public really does not understand that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is only a few hundred miles up and a strong argument can be made that it does not qualify as “space.” LEO was first traveled in 1961 by Yuri Gagarin and following flights into LEO for the next 7 years and 8 months may be considered Human Space Flight (HSF) but Apollo 8 left the gravitational field of Earth far behind in 1968. In my view, LEO was removed from the HSF category at that point in history. Going in circles a couple hundred miles up is not space travel. LEO is not really space while 22,236 miles up is Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) where “space” should be demarcated as beginning.

USAF Confirms SpaceX Awaiting FAA Approval for Booster Landing at Cape for Return to Flight

Only 4 years ago I had just started a new job and there was still some debate about whether NewSpace was going to be the train wreck it is now, or die a quieter death. Unfortunately, the flagship company continues to launch satellites, and is starting to strip mine Earth Orbit with their ruinous smallsat constellation. The toxic dragon is still scheduled to carry humans to the space station to nowhere despite having blown up and being an unsafe design. Any debate on public space forums is over as the Musk mob has essentially completed their program of hijacking all discourse concerning their cult. Their decade-long propaganda campaign has succeeded in profoundly deceiving the public.

I wish I had the time to popularize this blog and try and get the message out to the public: Space is the Future! Everybody getting rich and living in Musktown on Mars is NOT. I hope and pray a progressive administration will undo some of the damage done by corporatism and neoliberalism- and that space will be a fundamental part of that future. I truly believe the best path to preventing a climate catastrophe is Space Solar Power, as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill. I stated years ago that the mountains of treasure currently expended on stealth fighters, submarines, and missile defense, should be redirected to spaceships.

The strategic deterrent can be relocated to deep space and used in a New Green Deal in the same way World War Two made the original New Deal such a success. Lunar water-shielded “fat workshops” can be used in GEO to support a Carrington-event-proof telecom network of human-crewed platforms. That crew compartment pipeline will enable a fleet of Lunar Cyclers and a bridge across the cislunar sea. Those crew compartments are also the prerequisite to true spaceships. The same infrastructure we create to support building a fleet of “space boomers” can be used to facilitate Space Solar Power. The superpower spaceship fleets can also protect planet Earth from comet and asteroid impact threats.

In contrast, the NewSpace business plan is a dead end.

The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

 

NASA and Boeing look ahead to long-term SLS production

“If you buy one SLS rocket, the price is really high. If you buy two, the price goes down significantly, and if you buy the three it keeps going down,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said-”

It is not one launch every six months that should be the goal, it is six launches in one year, and every year for the next 30 years that should be the NASA position. The 4 billion a year presently being completely wasted on the space station to nowhere would be better spent on building two more SLS core stage production lines. The rivers of tears cried by NewSpace fans if NASA officials were to discuss this option would do my heart good. The 150 metric ton payload target would be no problem if the SLS boosters were replaced with two New Glenn lower stages. This is what is needed to loft a double-hulled “fat workshop.”

In my view the necessary building block for a cislunar infrastructure is a minimum 50 foot diameter fat workshop that has an outer 15 foot envelope filled with lunar water as a cosmic ray shield. A 60 foot diameter stage with a 15 foot outer hull would provide a 30 foot diameter inner hull. By sending these workshops with robot landers to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) a crew compartment pipeline will be created. The landers go down to the ice and convert some of it into propellent and take the rest up to the workshops and repeat. Eventually the cosmic ray shields will be full and by connecting a pair of workshops with a tether system they can be spun to provide a Near-Sea-Level-Radiation-1-Gravity environment (NSLR1G).

These crew compartment pairs can be used first as LLO space stations and then as Lunar Cyclers and GEO platforms. Their most important application will be for spaceships. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and NSLR1G enables multi-year missions to the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants. True atomic spaceships with cosmic ray water shields and tether-generated artificial gravity are the logical replacement for the terrestrial strategic deterrent. These space boomer fleets would allow guest scientists to go on voyages of exploration. Placing the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers months away in deep space would ratchet down over half a century of launch-on-warning risk and provide a means to intercept comet and asteroid impact threats. The Ayn-Rand-in-space crowd does not like the idea of progress in space being directly subsidized by the state but it shows how completely clueless they are. Everything comes from the state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJjlaggbK0

The SLS has been demonized by the NewSpace mob from the day the program was announced. The reason for this propaganda campaign is not hard to figure out. Literally libraries of death-to-SLS comments have been posted by a legion of cyberthugs because SLS competes for tax dollars with SpaceX, that poster child for corporate welfare. When anyone interrupts the decade-long non-stop infomercial that public space blog forums have become since NewSpace cyberbullies hijacked them, a dogpile of trolls quickly silences them. This kind of exposure drives the SpaceX fans into a frenzy of wailing and gnashing of teeth. They are the most toxic group on the internet as proven by survey.

In a perfect world the Saturn V would NOT have been killed and, instead, would have evolved into the reusable vehicle the space shuttle was meant to be. Instead of retreating to the dead end of LEO the Moon would have remained the focus of Human Space Flight. Instead of an Outer Space Treaty forbidding nuclear weapons it would have embraced the use of nuclear energy in space outside the Earth’s magnetosphere. Interestingly, Human Space Flight, with human-rating standards and escape tower technology, was the best path to transporting fissile material Beyond Earth Orbit with the least risk. It is not widely publicized that landing back rockets was NOT invented by SpaceX but is actually technology from almost 30 years ago. After only two years of development the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper rocket landed back in 1993.

Hindsight can sometimes be engaged retroactively by resurrecting and repurposing an old concept. The Falcon 9 is essentially an upgraded design of the 1961 Saturn I rocket with Soviet propellent super-cooling added. The Saturn I rocket engine was the H-1, development began in 1958 to upgrade an earlier engine to a thrust of 205,000 pounds, a thrust to weight ration of 102.47 to 1, and a seal level Isp of 255 seconds. The Merlin engine used by the Falcon 9 used technology developed by TRW for NASA in 1964 for the lunar lander. The Merlin has slightly better numbers and must “hover slam” land back, unlike the Delta Clipper. The hobby rocket payload is appropriate for satellites but far below what is necessary for any Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) applications.

In retrospect the mighty Saturn V first stage could have been modified to land back and be reused. The most efficient arrangement for the shuttle would likely have been two large turbopumps driving 4 thrust bells of well over 2 million pounds of thrust each and a smaller central gimbaled engine capable of landing the stage. Likewise the second stage would have landed back but just the engines and some feeder tanks, which would have separated from the stage just short of orbital velocity and then reentered using a heat shield with the stage structure expended. The first stage would have ideally used 4 large thrust bells and one small one while the second stage one large central bell and 4 much smaller ones for landing the engine section. The third stage would have been a single engine wet workshop with a lunar lander (and it’s engine) and may have even recovered it’s single engine using a free return lunar trajectory, heat shield, water barrier, and parachutes. This works out to 12 liquid fuel engines of 6 different types powering 3 stages and a lunar lander.

Sadly, the space shuttle was designed by committee, some say with a secret mission to kidnap Soviet spy satellites driving the requirements. Having served in the military I would say that does not sound like a conspiracy theory and is probably true.

 

 

By Gary Michael Church

Op-ed | Living off the land: Lunar water is key to crewed space exploration

“These unlit regions within craters, referred to as permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs, are now known to host vast quantities of water ice that have been lying in perfect isolation for hundreds of millions of years. Although an exceedingly difficult number to quantify, it is commonly believed that the quantity of water in these PSRs exceeds 100 million tons.”

Unfortunately, the author also made reference to Helium 3, which automatically inspires  readers who have any technical knowledge concerning the energy industry to conspiracy-theory-eye-roll. As I commented for several years on Dr. Spudis’ blog, the Moon is not likely to become any kind of functioning human colony. The problem is the only way to live on low gravity bodies without suffering debilitation is by way of “sleeper trains” providing artificial Earth gravity. These circular underground trains do not seem practical for any sizeable population. Not a great environment to raise children in unless built on a immense scale and in that case Habitats in space are far superior for several reasons.

In my view the Moon is a factory site. Whether sleeper trains could keep the workforce healthy or they would have to periodically go up to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) space stations to rehabilitate is one question. If there is only a few hundred million tons of water on the Moon it is not going to last forever and would serve to establish facilities, probably in giant lava tubes, after which small icy bodies would be mined in the asteroid belt and the water transported to the lunar factory sites. The next question is what will these factories on the Moon manufacture? I think…Flying Saucers. I will explain that later.

The first piece of necessary hardware is Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) double hulled wet workshops (“Fat Workshops”) launched from Earth. These would be filled with lunar water using robot landers and then pairs with tethers spun to provide near-sea-level-radiation-one-G (NSLR1G) crew compartments. A production pipeline will send these crew compartments first to frozen Low Lunar Orbits (LLO) as a prelude to humans returning to the surface of the Moon. Or, more accurately, to below the surface- as lava tube radiation sanctuaries are the likely destination. Some method of either excavating and using regolith and/or covering small craters might work but really large lava tubes are the ideal.

Once LLO is populated with space stations the next place to send them is Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO). Water shielded GEO telecom platforms are the answer to a myriad of problems. The smallsat constellations NewSpace is presently pursuing are only going to make those problems an order of magnitude worse and are a terrible mistake. Once a ring of these human-crewed telecom stations are in place then comes a fleet of Lunar Cyclers. In reality it might be more practical to simply do both if the pipeline produces large numbers. Whether humans will launch from Earth to a GEO platform, and then ride some conveyance to intercept a Cycler, or launch on straight intercept missions- is another question.

After the LLO stations, GEO telecom platforms, and the Lunar Cycler fleet, the next step is “true” spaceships. The true spaceship will be capable of multi-year missions to the gas and ice giants. The main challenge in building these spaceships are the “engines” which are of two types; hard discs and soft parachute-like “spinnakers.” The alloy disc becomes more efficient as it gets larger in diameter, and while they could be sent up in “slices” by SHLVs, a disc large enough to be very efficient would mass in the thousands of tons. These discs are the first item on the list to be manufactured on the Moon.

Multi-thousand ton alloy flying saucers forged in underground lunar factories are going to take awhile, and the second type of nuclear pulse engine, the spinnaker, can be put into service immediately. Though not as efficient or able to accelerate as much mass as discs, spinnakers do not first require decades to build a lunar industrial base. The discs will also be used to lift immense masses from the surface of the Moon. After the pipeline of crew compartments and the first discs comes the second major item from lunar factories: Space Solar Power components. Powering planet Earth with solar power beamed down from space is likely the only practical solution to global warming. Along with the energy industry the nuclear industry will relocate to the Moon. U-233 transmuted from lunar thorium will be used in Nuclear Pulse Propulsion systems.

Gerard K. O’Neill made mention of planet Earth heating up due to the burning of fossil fuels in the 70’s and considered it yet one more reason to pursue Space Solar Power. O’Neill saw Space Solar Power as the economic engine to ultimately enable migration from Earth to space colonies, which brings us to the main “product” to be manufactured using lunar resources: hollow artificial “child” moons. Bernal Spheres. These miles-in-diameter spinning habitats are why space is so absolutely important to the survival of humankind. With beam propulsion they can be accelerated to a percentage of the speed of light and sent on centuries long journeys to other stars.

The same Space Solar Power infrastructure that will serve as the economic engine enabling the construction of Bernal Spheres will also enable beam propulsion and at last fleets of jetliners to space carrying millions of passengers every year will ride microwave beams across the cislunar sea. As the next century approaches the population of Earth will begin to decrease and Bernal Spheres will lead and trail our planet in solar orbit. In the next century the Space Solar Power infrastructure will eventually generate enough energy for the first “slow boats” to be sent on their way to other star systems. How freezing people, artificial intellects (“Artilects”), or more likely “Quartilects”, as quantum computers evolve, and black hole starships, will play a part are great subjects for speculation.

In my view black hole starships, using small singularity engines, are the most likely method by which humankind will colonize the galaxy. Before the mind-boggling energies required to creates such engines are available, I suspect god-like artificial intelligence may make other technologies we now believe impossible, or cannot imagine, a possibility. Artilects and star travel aside, it is freezing people that is most likely just around the corner. A successful technique freezing people without damage, thus saving them from death by injury, disease, or old age, would be the most significant event in history. Or…an artificial super-intelligence capable of solving all of humankinds problems regarding mortality and star travel might be the other possible future.

We will see. First we start with the ice on the Moon.

 

 

By Gary Michael Church

“June 15, 1940 – Using the Berkeley cyclotron, researchers demonstrate that neutrons captured by uranium 238 lead to the creation of element 94, plutonium.”                                (In 1941 the Manhattan Project begins) http://www.atomicarchive.com/Timeline/Time1940.shtml

“In January 1950, President Truman made the controversial decision to continue and intensify research and production of thermonuclear weapons.” https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/hydrogen-bomb-1950

“On September 27, 1960, The first operational semiconductor IC is created.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit

In 1972 the first modified DNA molecule was created and 2 years later the first genetically modified animal; a mouse.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_animal

Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), was a proposed missile defense system first announced publicly by President Ronald Reagan on 23 March 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

I love connecting the dots, probably because of the many years I spent troubleshooting autopilot systems on aircraft. When I see a new development often a pattern springs to mind and I just have to ruminate on it and am driven to fabricate some kind of coherent picture from that pattern. I watched a YouTube video today and went through that routine. In light of artificial intelligence, climate change, and the scourge of neo-liberalism, the modern world is facing an incredibly uncertain future. Most people do not come close to understanding the tremendous changes now in progress. The first silicon computer chip was made the year I was born and almost 60 years later we find humankind in this most disturbing situation. Some of the danger can be blamed on computer technology but it is more a finely woven tapestry of interacting threads woven across the centuries that now seems almost complete. I personally have come to the realization that unless we find a cure for individual mortality our species as a whole is likely doomed. And sooner than we think.

If this blog entry is about an indefinite lifespan a visitor might wonder why all the references to nuclear weapons are necessary. Reading my other entries would paint a picture of a future where an indefinite lifespan has made space travel a necessity and nuclear weapons technology the key enabler. First the fission bomb and then the fusion bomb and then the bomb-pumped laser have made Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (bombs) the sure way to travel through space. The likely technologies run like this; space solar power as the cure for climate change and the economic engine to build hollow artificial moons. Nuclear pulse would be used to lift enormous masses off the surface of the Moon. The resulting space solar power infrastructure would be the cure for climate change and then be used for beam propulsion systems allowing launch vehicles to carry millions of people a year into space.

At some point the space solar power network will be powerful enough to accelerate these artificial moons towards other stars at some percentage of the speed of light. Upon arrival centuries later these “slow boats” will slow down with Nuclear Pulse. But before they do there is one piece of technology required that we don’t have yet: Freezing people without damage thus allowing them to be revived decades or centuries later. And here is the chicken or egg problem: as long as people keep dying we have lebensraum on Earth and don’t need to go into space. Freezing people is just the first step in reversing aging and humankind spreading into the galaxy. If the space solar power network becomes powerful enough it may be able to manufacture small black hole singularity engines to propel “fast boats” close to the speed of light. In this case freezing people may not be needed as time dilation will make for short trips. In fact, the likely scenario for passengers on slow boats is to be awakened early for transfer to fast boats at some point in the voyage.

The second step after freezing people is to be able to extend their lifespan indefinitely. That is essentially what the technology being discussed in the link below is about. Artificial intellects (Artilects as Hugo De Garis calls them) are the wild card. Quantum computers might give rise to “Quartilects” that join with GEnetically MOdified HOmo SApiens in a symbiotic relationship whose goal is to….what? For that I would go back to the Russian Cosmists and their “Common Task” to resurrect the dead.

1:50 to protect eradicate and prevent disease, keeping our aging population healthy.

Several space terms and concepts are abused by NewSpace supporters and used as deceptive P.R. devices. A recent comment from Australia needs to be addressed;

“-(also as far as I aware there’s nothing wrong with calling a Bernal Sphere a space station).”

That’s no space station, it’s a moon. An artificial moon.

Let us start with defining what space itself is. Space, as differentiated from Earth Orbit, should be demarcated at Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) 22,236 miles up. NewSpace has pushed much of their business plan for years with propaganda identifying LEO, a couple hundred miles up, as some kind of new frontier. LEO is actually a dead end for Human Space Flight and should not even be classified as such. Comparing LEO to deep space is like comparing a duck pond to the North Atlantic.

Continuing on to spacecraft vs spaceships, what I call the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum is I believe the best guide for understanding the difference between the two. And with the preliminaries out of the way we can now address the subject of space stations. The first problem is that 40 years of LEO space stations have been a tremendous waste of time and resources and proof of why we should abandon LEO as a complete dead end in terms of Human Space Flight. For many years the space station vacation tourist fantasy was NewSpace dogma and has always been a joke to true space enthusiasts. If one goes by certain criteria, the Space Station and the Lunar Cycler are the interesting comparison, since a Shielded Lunar Cycler would be the intermediate step to a true spaceship.

The ISS and those before it are what should be more accurately called “Orbital Platforms” or “OP’s” since they cannot really support long duration missions anywhere except LEO as they lack a cosmic ray shield. A “Space Platform” might have a cosmic ray shield but not artificial gravity and does not have much utility so I doubt they will emerge. A true Space Station would have both a cosmic ray shield and artificial gravity. Shielding and artificial gravity almost certainly equate to lunar water and tether systems as other methods are not very practical. A capable enough propulsion system would make a true Space Station into a Lunar Cycler and a nuclear propulsion system would make it a Spaceship. Such basic practical realities and distinctions need to be understood. A Habitat, as visualized by the space colonization movement of the late 1970’s, is large enough for people to raise families and actually live in indefinitely. The Habitat is thus orders of magnitude larger so tether systems would be replaced by the torus, sphere, or other configurations. In this context calling a Bernal Sphere a Space Station is wrong.

If you look into this NASA study on habitat design you find some mention of material strengths and how strength is a determining factor of size due to artificial gravity stresses. What type of alloy and pattern of construction would be ideal remains to be seen. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro2/docs/nasa-sp-413.pdf

In my view the benchmark, after looking at the various concepts, is an artificial moon, a hollow sphere, several miles in diameter, spinning to provide 1G on the inner surface at the equator (a Bernal Sphere). One question of interest is how many miles in diameter? The trick is to provide cosmic ray shielding as well as structural strength, as well as making the structure able to be gradually repaired and likely entirely rebuilt over time so that it will last several centuries or, essentially, as long as structure is being remade over time. These three requirements; 1G, cosmic ray shielding, and gradual regeneration, are the factors to focus on when converting a Habitat design into a Starship design.

A Bernal Sphere converted into a Starship would be accelerated to some percentage of the speed of light out of the solar system by an immense solar powered beam propulsion system. Upon reaching another star several centuries later it would likely use pulse propulsion nuclear devices (bombs) to slow down. Due to the acceleration and deceleration, the more severe interstellar radiation environment, and degradation of structural materials over time, these Habitat/Starships would need to be built to a much higher standard than Bernal Spheres used only as habitats. The smart species would build them to the higher standard from the start.

The missing piece of the puzzle in regards to Star Travel is freezing people. A population reproducing over generations on a “world ship” does not appear desirable and I place it in the category of space elevators as being a lost cause. Suspended animation is, however, not a losing proposition at all since it is a straightforward  problem preventing damage to cells from ice formation. We can likely freeze people without damage and revive them so we should start building the infrastructure now to allow missions to other stars to be launched within a century.

Of course being able to freeze people, as I have written about on this blog, is the ultimate game-changer and would be the most significant event in the history of humankind. Besides having no option except to find a cure for aging, suspended animation also means Star Travel because humans will not stop having children. While it has been calculated the resources are available in the asteroid belt to support space colonies in this solar system with a total population in the tens of billions, interstellar migration is of course the better path to plan on from the beginning.

I posted a comment on YouTube today and Donald Brent asked me to explain why I believe Musk has set space exploration back a decade. I have explained this a couple dozen times on popular space blog forums in previous years, before I was banned from all of them. The story starts in 2008 with the Chandrayaan 1 lunar mission.

https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/mini-sar-nears-completion-of-its-first-mapping-cycle-152597012/.

By 2010 data was released that strongly indicated ice on the Moon. This was a pretty big deal and should have pointed the space agency straight back at that prize we never should have taken our eyes off of. Unfortunately, a campaign contribution by a certain entrepreneur made his hobby rocket the priority and talk about the Moon was verboten. The President gave his infamous “we’ve been there” speech and that was it for almost a decade. Slowly, year after year, the evidence for ice and other factors such as radiation made it clear we were not going to Mars anytime soon and the Moon was the best destination. It has also become clear that nearly a half a century of LEO space stations have been a tremendous waste of time and resources.

The ISS had been scheduled to be decommissioned in 2016 but because it was the NewSpace cash cow and essentially the piggy bank for SpaceX, it is still going in circles up there, going nowhere, at 4 billion dollars a year. The best course would have been to decommission the space station to nowhere a couple years early and build Sidemount as a lunar Heavy Lift Vehicle. It broke my heart when they killed it. On the wings of maybe, downing birds of prey. The worst wrong turn NASA ever made was buying into the scam that is NewSpace. The first flight of Sidemount would have been in 2013 and 6 a year means roughly 36 heavy lift missions would have been flown by now. If those missions had been dedicated to a lunar return we might be getting ready to land people and move into a Moon base about now. Of course that probably would have depended on abandoning LEO- which is the only place the SpaceX Falcon could go. See how that works?

Not content with having his own satellite launch company handed to him by the taxpayer, Musk has never done a thing to dissuade or denounce his rabid fan club posting, literally, libraries of death-to-SLS propaganda over the years. He promised a cheap astronaut ride to the ISS years ago and we have yet to see it. His next boondoggle is the space-junk-horror-movie that is Starlink. 12,000 refrigerator size smallsats and now a possible 30,000 more. NewSpace has been pushing their scam for over a decade now and the effect has been to program those who were teenagers a decade ago to be true believers today. Tens of thousands of people who are interested in space, perhaps several hundred thousand, are followers of Musk and believe his whole Mars-as-a-second-home-for-humankind con.

In the 1970’s the true prophet of space colonization, Gerard K. O’Neill, early on eliminated Mars and other natural bodies as possible colony sites because of the requirement for Earth gravity. Humans thrive in 1G and nothing indicates lower gravity does anything but harm. A million years of evolution is not going to be undone because Mars happens to be a convenient P.R. theme. Mars is too far away, without enough solar energy, and with too much gravity to make landing easy and not enough to keep humans healthy. Mars, like Low Earth Orbit, is a complete dead end. The future is the Bernal Sphere built with lunar resources and space solar energy powering Earth as the economic engine financing space colonization. No other plan has even a small chance of succeeding. Humankind will never create off-world colonies courtesy of billionaire hobbyists. Only state-funded public works projects on the scale of Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal will create the infrastructure required to start up factories on the Moon and begin to build the necessary industrial base.

 

 

 

The penultimate disruption to a nation is the threat of destruction, one such specific threat being invasion by a genocidal enemy. The modern example of this is the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in 1941. Russians had already suffered from revolution and then civil war, famine, and purges under Stalin that killed millions in the 20’s and 30’s. They now faced an adversary intent on simply making them disappear and taking over their land as lebensraum. The Russian people fought back with the entire population of over 150 million, with few exceptions, exerting themselves to the limits of human endurance, year after year. Imagine such a struggle now, at the end of 2019 or 2020. Instead of a few hundred million involved, imagine billions, the majority of the human race. How would it start? The more important question to ask, after the identity of the adversary is revealed, is why we would want to stop it.

Therein lies the “ultimate” conspiracy theory. But first, more about threats; my interest in space travel began with helping my wife with a class on situational ethics some years ago. I recommended the cold war for a paper and while doing some research for her I happened upon “Project Orion, the true story of the atomic spaceship” in the public library. And I was hooked. Space Travel led to Star Travel and that led to suspended animation which led to deeper questions and nothing has been the same for me since. The most fascinating part of all this is what strange beings we are. Instead of focusing on the possible future we can effect within the laws of physics, we seem to most often defect to magical thinking. It occurs to me often that by way of being distracted by fantastical constructs we may well go extinct. Nuclear warfare led me to other existential threats such as another dinosaur killer impacting Earth or a new volcanic epic or an engineered pathogen. And this led me to Gerard K. O’Neill and his plan to colonize space and incidentally stop global warming. Looking for why nothing seems to be going the way it should I discovered neo-liberalism. Now I know.

On to the conspiracy-

In the 1997 movie Abre los ojos, and the 2001 remake Vanilla Sky, a television commercial featuring a dog revived from suspended animation may be a futurological prophecy soon fulfilled. If tomorrow in some lab, a dog or some other animal is (by some electromagnetic or sonic technique preventing ice formation) reanimated after being frozen- then the most significant event in the entire history of the human race will have occurred. Not only the most significant but the most absolutely disruptive and paradigm changing event of all. Nothing else would even come close. A few minutes of considering what it would mean to be able to freeze a human being for decades and then revive them without damage gives my claim credibility. The revealing of such a freezing technique would, in a matter of hours, cause a chain reaction species-wide as first those with loved ones near death and in the following days everyone would realize that death, the eternal enemy, could now be warred upon and eventual victory clearly seen as our destiny. There is nothing magical about freezing something delicate in a way that does not cause damage. It is simply a problem humankind must focus on and advance technology to solve.

It is a three-step process. Affecting the condition of microstructures and connections during changes in temperature is the first problem to be solved. The second problem is to store millions and possibly several billion frozen human beings. This would be the battle to save those dying and would enlist the population of planet Earth working to the limits of their endurance- like Russia in World War II. The more difficult problems of rewriting DNA and gene therapies to reverse aging are the final step. Like Cortez burning his ships, after we started freezing people there would be no alternative except to succeed.

Now comes that question of why.  Why is such a freezing technique considered impossible or impractical, and not a subject of any significant funded research? How can simply lowering the temperature of tissue without damage by ice crystals be such a completely ignored and scorned subject of study? The properties of water are about physics and research on low temperature liquid states holds the key. Is there some latent psychological mechanism working against the idea of funding this path? It would seem so. To answer these questions conspiracy theorists will jump on mind control and alien forces at work, while more mundane fundamentalists and narrow-minded beings will predictably preach moral objections and heap ridicule. After exploring the issue of life extension one becomes convinced some secret is just below the surface. Something similar to Terror Management (a psychological theory). Or maybe a super-intelligence IS telepathically influencing us to ignore this subject of extending our lifespan. Probably not. Probably we are just afraid.

And then there is the possibility such a freezing technique already exists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“God has granted to me to make friends with two of the people here: one is Orlov, and the other and principal one is Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. He is a librarian at the Rumyantsev Library… He has devised a plan for a common task for humanity, the aim of which is the bodily resurrection of all humans. First, it is not as crazy as it sounds (don’t worry, I do not and never have shared his views, but I have understood them enough to feel capable of defending them against any other beliefs of a similar material nature). Secondly, and most importantly, because of these beliefs he leads the purest Christian life… He is sixty, a pauper, gives away all he has, is always cheerful and meek.’ L.N. Tolstoy writing to V.I. Alexeev, 1881”

As my coworkers seem to drift farther and farther right I am going in the opposite direction. This brings to mind the psychology of Jordan Petersen and how we need the opposite view if we are to ever understand our own. Though I am certainly perplexed by Trump supporters it is possible to just accept their behavior has a mechanism driving it and if I cannot understand it I can at least start with that. The best way I have found so far to make some sense of the present situation is to frame it as a kind of bizarre social Darwinism. As a few discerning progressives have stated recently, it is not about left and right, it is about up and down. Those at the top and those at the bottom and the deceptions sustaining this extreme inequality.

Deception in nature is of course ubiquitous in the form of camouflage. When humans evolved consciousness they went supernatural in the way they exercise self-deception concerning their own mortality. This is the basis of the psychological theory of Terror Management. Troubleshooting a fault by looking at all the parts of the system is my only gift and when applying that talent to this up and down problem I see deception as the salient factor. This goes back to my favorite verse in the bible and the question asked by Pilate, “What is truth?” All the parts point to a thanatological distraction acting as a kind of mass hysteria throughout history. We must substitute stories because the realities are too much to bear. The endless stories are how we escape distress.

The reality that generates all these constructs we believe to be so important is the unacceptable mystery of existence. Why is this world so terrible and yet so wonderful? Our simple default is to believe it is either completely terrible or completely wonderful but either of those worldviews alone wreck our psyche and is catastrophic to survival. To reconcile both as existing together is beyond our ability so we are driven to make stuff up. This is not simple and quickly becomes infinitely complex. When we have to make stuff up we automatically assume everything and everyone is either made up or is making stuff up also- so life becomes this game not about what is true and real but what you want to believe. My troubleshooting leads me to choose that fault as the big problem; the correct process is to imagine the best possible reality and then try to make it real, to turn a lie into truth – not make up the best possible reality and then just believe the lie without making it real. We must not choose the story we like. The mistake is choosing a story, which is fundamentally different than making a story real. The devil is in the details.

The most difficult path is to accept the world is both terrible and wonderful and not as alternative stories to choose from. We can only “accept” for short periods when we are at our strongest and most resilient. Between the two poles of terrible and wonderful is the great unknowable. For short periods we are transfixed by a world either terrible or wonderful but most of the time it is that queer mix we do not know how to deal with. So we resort to making up stuff and fooling ourselves into thinking we know something. And that is where the trouble starts. In terms of the obscene wealth amassed by a very few individuals and the self-induced delusions we use to make sense of that, what we are doing is choosing to believe one lie or another. Those choices lean left or right and our unique personalities push us one way or the other. The immutable law we rebel against here is that simple problems get solved but the hard problems will remain no matter how hard we try to make them simple. That hard problem is not left and right, it is up and down.

For any who are reading this expecting a blog entry about space exploration, this issue of left and right and up and down relates directly to the first space age and the future of our species. The perfect example to illustrate the left/right-up/down dichotomy is the race to the Moon. Ostensibly a cold war battle between socialism and capitalism, it showcased the shortcomings of both political systems. The west won by resorting to a soviet command economy program and then, because of the lack of profit that went along with that style of project, ended the first space age just after it began.  We have yet to see humans travel beyond Earth orbit again and the present push is underfunded and shot through and through with neoliberal agendas almost guaranteeing failure. There is no short term profit to be made Beyond Earth Orbit and since we typically die after 70 or 80 years nobody cares about the long term. Individually there is no future to care about. Yet we collectively refuse to invest any significant resources into indefinitely extending the human lifespan. This seemingly bizarre little detail, never addressed with any degree of seriousness, may ironically doom our species to extinction.

This is akin to a race to the bottom where we collectively sacrifice our species so as to live our momentary individual lives just a little better off than others. Nothing is going to make us individually sacrifice until there is a future to sacrifice for. The terminal illness that is aging translates into a society where the individual seeks to gain as much power and wealth as possible in the moment. Part of this insatiable appetite is to invest in safeguarding extant wealth by any means possible and, naturally, influencing and deceiving others is the best way to accomplish that. While the patriarchy is often blamed for much of this it must be understood women enjoy wealth just as much as men. Part of the left and right deception has to do with stories about the battle of the sexes. In reality it is women who are the more existentially important beings- as I have often told my daughter. Males are largely expendable and act that way, at least for the first quarter century of life. It would be wise to send only women and no men to colonize space.

In closing, Federov’s Common Task is not camouflage for any left or right storylines. The Task always at hand is a call for all to go up, and if that requires dragging those very few at the top back down, then so be it. In the end, it is essentially about the 91 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent of the 1950’s that made America great. That story was made real, but the neoliberal fantasy happening now is simply camouflage for predation and greed.  Propaganda.

 

I envy this YouTube personality with half a million viewers…I really do. So I will try not to let any bitter resentment show too much in my own humble blog offering concerning his space-themed videos. I will try but since nobody visits my blog I might have to just vent a little. Sorry Joe. Of course, I could actually TRY and promote my blog but that takes time and I barely find enough of that to write. A poor excuse. But that is my story and I am sticking to it.

Joe promotes Musk and SpaceX which I do not like at all. He also seems to think space solar power is a dead end which makes me want to not like Joe at all. But I can’t help enjoying most of his videos. It is not a perfect world and I must take the good with the bad. His offering this morning had some of what I considered not so accurate information and neglected three key concepts- and I just had to write a blog entry about it.

1. The idea that Artificial Gravity makes you sick.                                                                       This is not really a factual statement. What I recall from my studies is past NASA research indicated a system requiring more than 4 revolutions per minute of centripetal artificial gravity might not be practical due to difficulties adapting to it. My spin calculator website says those 4 revolutions per minute require a radius of 183.37 feet and a speed of 52.37 miles per hour to generate one disorienting and nauseating gravity. In view of this information the best place to start might be 1 revolution per minute since most of us are familiar with the second hand on an analog clock. This would require a radius of 2933.92 feet. Let’s just call it 3000 feet because 1G equaling a 6 thousand foot tether revolving once per minute is easy to remember. The great strength of materials like spectra allow for very long tether systems and the length to get the rotation down to once every two minutes would be 2.22 miles. The trick is to find the rotation rate that will allow people to live comfortably for years at a time. The key concepts being the tether or, later on, the Bernal Sphere. The miles-in-diameter hollow spinning artificial moon where humans can thrive in one Earth gravity.
2. The idea that Artificial Gravity is the main problem.                                                        The “problem” with space travel is three-fold and the first and most difficult one to solve is not gravity, or, to give it a descriptive term, debilitation. Between dosing and debilitation the problem of radiation dosing is far more serious. The third part of the problem, as Joe talks about, is time. Dosing and debilitation are not a big deal if it only lasts a short period. Unfortunately, a spaceship we have the technology to build right now, using atomic bombs for propulsion and reaching speeds of over 100,000 miles per hour, still takes several years to accomplish two-way missions to the outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn. A small capsule holding a few astronauts requires around 400 tons of cosmic ray water shielding to duplicate a near-sea-level radiation environment. The practical living space for a multi-year mission would likely triple that mass to well over a thousand tons. The big dumb metal plate or folded-up Solem Spinnaker that is the hard or soft “engine” of a pulse-propelled spaceship need not rotate but a kiloton+ cosmic ray shield would spin as the equal mass with a pair of masses spinning at the ends of a tether system. The key concept being the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum which I detail elsewhere on this site.
3.  The question mark about Artificial Gravity is nonsensical.                                                 It is not a question of whether we can do it- it is a question of how we WILL do it since we simply must have it. To infer it is not “achievable” is to infer Human Space Flight is a dead end. There is certainly enough of that defeatist tunnel vision garbage going around and we don’t need any more it. No thank you Joe. I was extremely disappointed when I watched the YouTube video about space solar power since that is almost in the same category as Artificial Gravity as a must-have. Any scenario without space solar power where humans expand into space is highly unlikely.  Gerard K. O’Neill, the true prophet of space colonization, believed space solar is the key to the future of the human race (and also cited it as the cure for climate change) and I have to agree. O’Neill is why I am so opposed to the NewSpace scam the Musk Mob endlessly hypes. O’Neill envisioned a kind of green new deal with space solar power enabling the construction of artificial worlds while Musk promotes…a neoliberal alternate reality where all the John Galt and Howard Roark types will settle on Mars. The key concept being O’Neillian space colonization of the 70’s instead of the present NewSpace scam being hyped by Ayn-Rand-in-Space-libertarian nutjobs. Don’t be one of them Joe.