Persistent players in my inner fantasy world seem to make an appearance in popular culture at regular intervals. In this case, not so much fantasy but nightmare. Imagine the end of the world. Really. Not kidding. It could happen. Most people don’t believe that. I believe there is a mechanism hidden from conscious view that regulates how we process death and this also connects with our children, all children, ergo species extinction. For any self-aware being the ultimate horror is oblivion and approaching death in our minds automatically generates absolute terror. Yet…most of us would lay down our lives for our loved ones, especially our children, without much hesitation. We cannot understand exactly why we must deny death because…we are designed that way. We will risk our lives engaging in risky behavior like riding motorcycles (I did for years) and drinking and other bad habits and delude ourselves that somehow the reality of what we are doing is not important. So it follows it is a fact we simply cannot wrap our heads around why we are driven by invisible agents to do so many illogical things. The ancients knew this and blamed it on “the gods.” I am high in openness according to my Big Five profile and thus prey to endlessly questioning what is going on inside my head. One of those things always in the back of my mind is Extinction Level Events (ELEs).
So there is what I call, having nothing to do with the Big Five, the “Big Three” possible ELEs, which are 1) an engineered pathogen, 2) a comet or asteroid impact, and 3) a super-volcano epic. I watched the trailer for the movie Greenland and did not feel good about it. An impact could throw enough material into the atmosphere to block out the sun for years to come and this is also the danger with a super-volcano. A big enough impact or a long enough volcanic epic and all mega-fauna on Earth could disappear- as it almost did in the Permian extinction. In regards to pathogens it is similar in concept to think of a particularly nasty bug killing off a third of the population but, as with most impacts or volcanic events, the majority of life survives. While there is nothing we know of that says a big impact or volcanic epic, or even a volcanic epic triggered by an impact- cannot wipe out life on earth, diseases do leave survivors because a 100 percent lethal pathogen would render itself extinct.
This is where our playing with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) would make it fairly easy to extinguish ourselves with a engineered 100 percent lethal pathogen. So in my view the engineered pathogen is the biggest danger to our species. It is terrible to think of a large impact or super-volcano killing off 99 percent of the human race but that would leave 78 million alive. Even if only one out of every 100,000 human beings were to survive that would leave a completely viable population of 78,000 left to repopulate the planet. It is only when numbers drop below about 2500 is a population in danger of not being genetically viable. If only one in a million human beings (7800) survived a catastrophe that would be well over twice as many needed for a viable gene pool. Unfortunately seven thousand people would not be left if an engineered pathogen were to be released. Nobody would be left.
On the bright side even the 2500 minimum gene pool number is not really the lower limit as sperm banks can cut that in half again if all the survivors are females. Careful genetic screening would allow the human race to start all over again with as few as 1000 females. The trick it where to start over if we can no longer live on Earth. It is easy to assume if a pathogen can be engineered then so can a vaccine but this may not be the case. Earth may become uninhabitable for centuries or millennia and since humans require Earth gravity to thrive no other natural bodies in the solar system are available as a second home. We would have to create new worlds. Thank you Gerard K. O’Neill.
We do not maintain a population of one thousand young females in outer space in case the world comes to an end. It is well within our ability to construct miles-in-diameter-hollow-artificial-moons that can sustain ecosystems large enough to support populations in the thousands. It will take at least a half a century and a massive investment of resources to set up the industrial infrastructure on the Moon to manufacture space habitats. In the meantime there is a way to keep a Moon work force healthy and that is rotating them up to Low Lunar Frozen Orbit (LLFO) space stations to be periodically rehabilitated with artificial gravity. To maintain the health of a thousand women in shielded stations with tether generated artificial gravity would require an undetermined number of “Fat Workshops” in LLFO. If ten percent would have to be in orbit at a time and a station could accommodate ten people then ten stations would be required. That is a completely arbitrary guess as I have no idea what percentage of the work force would have to be in rehab.
As I have written several times, any extraterrestrials observing us would consider us too stupid to survive. If we at least had a self-supporting off-world “Survival Colony” of those one thousand young females then they might shake whatever we would consider their heads and say we were not too smart (but maybe smart enough). It would puzzle observers from other stars that we have plenty of nuclear weapons, which are perfect devices for deflecting impact threats and also lifting large masses off the surface of the Moon for use in space habitat construction, but we only use them to threaten each other with destruction. Crazy.
The average American never really accepted the idea of millions of tax dollars in hardware being used for a few minutes and then dropped in the ocean. Watching that 3000 ton 39 story high fire-spewing roaring spire disappear into the sky and only a tiny capsule barely large enough to carry 3 people come back a week or so later seemed an incredible waste. If that 3000 tons had been a ship that sailed around the world twenty times without refueling nobody would have complained. Which is how far Saturn V and Apollo traveled to and from the Moon. A rocket will put a satellite in orbit that will endlessly fly millions of miles around the Earth. That rocket is a fragile shell pushed by an engine that is essentially a constantly detonating high explosive directional bomb. It seems reasonable it would wear out fairly quickly even if it accomplishes millions of miles of travel in that first push. Still, getting people to see it that way has always been a major obstacle to space exploration.
They tried to convert the Shuttle into something useful but NewSpace and the Augustine Commission set space exploration back another decade. It broke my heart when they murdered Sidemount: If it had flown we might be back on the Moon now.
The present day success of the NewSpace flagship company is an interesting and queer reversal of that prevailing public opinion that led to the end of the first space age. The reality is that landing back the first stage is the ultimate parlor trick that has paid off in P.R. far beyond what it actually accomplishes. It remains to be seen exactly how much money is being saved by reusing the first stage of their rocket. I suspect much larger vehicles than even the shiny starship are required to break even and it would be a big surprise to the public if the numbers were revealed. So much is spent on recovering, inspecting, and refurbishing the rocket for repeated flights that just dropping it in the ocean and using a new one each time might just be cheaper. How can this be that, in the words of former Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon, “reusability is a myth”?
Labor is always the biggest expense and the man-hours spent on “turning a rocket around” compared to spending that time/money just building a new one for a single use can end up being not that much different. The more flights the more wear and tear and the more maintenance and probability of failures. The more engines and plumbing, the greater the complexity and the higher the associated costs. The “standing army” of well-paid technicians required to turn a rocket around was one of the major criticisms of the Shuttle program made by NewSpace proponents- but this does not seem to apply to their flagship. Really. The cult of maniac fans are triggered by any notion of this but it is actually true.
From Quora: “How much does SpaceX save by reusing a Falcon rocket?”
Answer by Jim Cantrell, CEO and Founder of Vector Space Systems:
“If you go through the R&D costs of developing a reusable launch vehicle, the opportunity costs (in terms of fuel used for return and the lost revenue opportunity for more payload to orbit) of returning the launcher to the first stage, and the costs of refurbishment between flights, generally accepted practice shows that you have to re-use the booster or launch the vehicle 5–10 times before you make your money back if you account for all the costs. Many papers have been written on this topic and this is a well established ‘rule of thumb’. This doesn’t even account for the price reduction that many customers flying on a ‘used’ first stage will likely demand. Thus I am thinking that very few, if any, of the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stages are going to be re-used for more than 3 or so flights and that SpaceX will therefore not break even on the reusability portion of the equation.”
On 3 June 2020 a Falcon 9 was launched and landed for the 5th time. So Cantrell was wrong and maybe they did at least break even with one rocket. But probably not. In any case the payload is far below what can be considered useful for any kind of Human Space Flight (HSF) application.
This brings us back to the original problem of space travel being perceived as just too expensive. What it really comes down to in terms of profit and loss is all loss and zero profit- at least for HSF. Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) telecommunications satellites generate billions in revenues but other than that there is very little money to be made in the private space sector. The Apollo 1 fire and ensuing draconian NASA oversight proved to the aerospace industry that Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) was going to be hard money. Military pilots could be lost in various designs that were known to have safety problems without much said while astronauts were not expendable, even if their rockets were. The industry chose the easy money of cold war toys. Thus ended the space age and the Space Agency retreated to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) which had really stopped being space after being left far behind by Apollo 8 in 1968. That’s right, a couple hundred miles up is not really space. Try a couple orders of magnitude farther out as the appropriate edge of space (GEO at 22,236 miles).
While military pilots were lost at a steady rate the loss of astronauts was not going to be tolerated and this made it a requirement that spacecraft work flawlessly. Aerospace concerns understood this would cut deep into profits after the Apollo 1 fire.
After Apollo, astronauts no longer left Earth orbit and these missions would more accurately be called “orbital flight.” A decade of Shuttle missions then made clear not much could be accomplished in LEO and possible cargo versions of the Shuttle attracted more and more attention. These variants could loft Earth Departure Stages (EDS) into orbit and eventually capsules and landers would be sent to the Moon using Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) techniques. Sidemount was not perfect but it could have served to return humans to the Moon until a much larger Nova class vehicle to be discussed here entered service.
After Apollo and Skylab NASA was desperate to continue Human Space Flight in any diluted form even if it meant satellites and humans sharing the same ride. The Space Shuttle was going to replace all expendable launch vehicles by sending up everything, satellites and astronauts, on a single multi-purpose machine that only expended a large fuel tank and reused everything else. It sounded like the answer to NASA’s P.R. problem but the program would finally end, in the opinion of many, a tragic failure. A rocket with no escape system for the human crew seems in hindsight to be an absurd proposition- but only after losing two crews made it undeniable. The Shuttle ended up costing about as much as the Saturn V per launch and so, ironically, we could have just kept going to the Moon for those 30 years for the same amount of money. Likewise, the International Space Station (ISS) was assembled at vast expense over many years when for want of a few million more dollars Skylab would have been a wet instead of smaller dry workshop and been larger than the ISS in a single launch (interior living space).
The original Skylab was a wet workshop that would have set up in the empty second stage as well as the converted third stage and would have been larger than the ISS
I mentioned the Apollo capsule being all that came back seeming like a waste when what was really incredible is what followed. That we could have gone to the Moon a hundred more times or put a hundred space stations larger than the ISS in orbit, or a combination of both, for the same amount of money- is a sad and depressing commentary on U.S. politics. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) had no interest in HSF-BEO even after the 1980 Alvarez hypothesis made it clear an asteroid or comet could wipe us out like the dinosaurs. Space Solar Power is the only practical solution to powering civilization carbon free and mitigating climate change and this global warming was also known well before the turn of the century as a possible threat. Yet the DOD will have none of it.
I have written at length on the mountains of treasure being expended on new stealth bombers and missile submarines and modernizing ICBMs and all that goes with a “credible” nuclear deterrent. In my view space is the only place all these problems can be bundled and solved in one fell swoop. But where is the profit in a insurance policy for humankind? Our short lives insure we do not care about the world ending and instead want only what we can get in our own time. That we are not focused on establishing a permanent human presence off world is a red flag our species might not be intelligent enough to survive. It may be our selfish genes are translating into neoliberalism and that great filter is dooming us, and most intelligent life in the universe, to extinction.
The engines developed or proposed during the first space age in the 1960’s make those used now seem like very poor efforts. Not building vehicles to use these engines was one of the critical wrong turns made by NASA. Anyone familiar with Apollo generally considers the Saturn V to be a tremendous machine with power to spare when in reality it was much smaller than what NASA thought would be required. Until John Houbolt managed to convince them Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) would allow a smaller rocket, much larger design variants, collectively referred to as “Nova”, were the plan. The most likely Nova would have used 8 of the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V and, using F-1A engines, would have had a total of 14.4 million pounds of thrust compared to the Saturn’s 7.6. And this is where a comparison with present engines becomes interesting. The current 440,000 pound thrust and 550,000 pound thrust Raptor and BE-4 engines have less than a third of the thrust of the 1968 F-1A engine. The shiny starship will require 31 engines to generate 16 million pounds of thrust. Adding one more F-1A to the 1960’s Nova design for a total of 9 engines would provide the same total thrust. As stated earlier, when trying to make reusability a break even proposition, the more engines the higher the cost of turning around the vehicle for another flight. Thirty-one engines is a self-defeating proposition if ever there was one.
Let us entertain the option to succeed instead of fail by reviewing a few certain conclusions. It is certain we can make the F-1B, the recently modernized version of the F-1A, and mass produce large numbers of them. It is certain (courtesy of the flagship company) we can land back liquid fuel first stage boosters on ships at sea downrange of the Florida launch facilities. And it is certain we must have “Fat Workshops” to enable any long-term human presence BEO due to the prerequisite Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity environment (NSLR1G).
Nova MM 1C
Some Nova vehicle designs studied were extremely large and the proposed MM 1C used no less than 18 F-1A engines for a total thrust of over 32 million pounds, placing well over 400 tons into Low Earth Orbit. The 60 ft. diameter upper stage would have allowed for an optimum double-hull Fat Workshop for use as the fundamental building block of a Cislunar Infrastructure. Regarding re-use… the recent development of geared-turbofans for airliners gives a clue as to the best path to follow. The new and very expensive super-alloys used in the compact gearbox enabling geared-turbofan technology can likewise be applied to turbopumps and building the largest practical turbopump is key. The reason the large pumps are important is while combustion instability may be a limiting factor in thrust chamber size a single turbopump can supply two chambers. One large turbopump consumes half the maintenance time and resources as two smaller ones so those 18 engines can use half as many turbopumps (and technically become 9 instead of 18 engines).
Two thrust chambers, one turbopump
The same rationale applies to hydrogen engines and the largest made now are the RS-25 and RS-68A at 512,300 and 705,000 pounds of thrust. The Aerojet M-1 was developed until funding ran out in August of 1966 and would have produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust to start with and more when developed further. These thrust chambers in the 2 million pound thrust range and large turbopumps feeding pairs are the only way reuse is going to break even for BEO missions and most efficiently enable a Cislunar Infrastructure. There is no cheap. Private efforts have not been able to manufacture them and only state-sponsored programs like those that produced the F-1 will make it happen. This is of course the antithesis of NewSpace dogma and why NewSpace is a pernicious ideology and has done so much damage.
The ISS proved beyond any doubt that sending up little pieces and assembling anything in orbit is a complete waste of time and will accomplish little at astronomical expense. Only scaling up beyond what was necessary to reach the Moon has any chance of expanding humankind into the solar system. With a launch mass of over 12,000 tons for a Nova MM 1C and 3,000 for a Saturn V, and lofting 400 tons into LEO versus 100, the obvious conclusion is we are not building rockets to the appropriate scale if we are ever to effect Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO). The rocket stage currently being landed on recovery vessels for reuse masses around 29 tons at shutdown while a Nova class stage as described would mass over 650 tons. The Nova stage is only about 30 feet taller but over 7 times wider at the base.
They are going to need a bigger boat, though landing back 650 tons of stage is not so extreme considering the maximum landing weight of the largest cargo jets are approximately 400 and 600 tons. The shiny starship will supposedly reenter and reuse the entire 2nd stage but, realistically, expending the second stage tankage while recovering the engine module is the likely necessary sacrifice to the rocket equation. The shuttle External Tank (ET) was about the same length but only half the diameter of this Nova second stage. Philip Bono, who was the father of the Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing (VTVL) concept in the early 1960’s, proposed using a lower thrust setting rocket exhaust plume to absorb heat and shield a stage at reentry speeds. Using stainless steel construction and a percentage of propellants to bring the second stage back down- and then more propellants and landing legs to land- would incur a significant payload penalty. But…as I inferred, if the scale of payload matches the resources expended to turn around the vehicle then it can break even. Getting that Fat Workshop on the way to the Moon is the trick and this is where 30 million pounds of thrust at lift-off becomes necessary to make any kind of reuse scheme worth the trouble. No free lunch.
To support missions beyond the Moon to the outer solar system a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) program to enable building a cislunar infrastructure is the first step. Cosmic ray water shielding must be acquired from the lunar poles and brought up to the waiting workshops (the “Fat Workshop” concept) before any long duration human missions are possible. Once these crew compartments in Low Lunar Frozen Orbit (LLFO) are shielded then humans can again leave Earth’s gravitational field and return to the Moon to maintain a permanent presence. After the water shielding comes the tether systems to provide artificial gravity and then a Lunar Cycler fleet and GEO human-crewed telecom platform network will follow. Eventually, true atomic spaceships using crew compartments from this production pipeline can depart for Ceres and the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants.
Unfortunately, the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) and the NewSpace flagship shiny starship are both simply too small to support such an effort. Going four times larger is the necessity while billionaire hobbyists claim they can accomplish great things spending less than what NASA has on their Moon rocket. If space clown tourism and strip mining Earth orbit with tens of thousands of pieces of smallsat junk is their idea of great they need to find another hobby. NewSpace is all hype.
NASA has a new head of the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate. A really good pick since she was an expert on the RCS and OMS on the Shuttle. Now she has to deal with the new elephant in the room NASA will not discuss with the public: the hypergolic abort systems on the SpaceX and Boeing commercial crew astronaut taxis.
RS-25, OMS, and RCS thruster detail on the Space ShuttleOrion escape tower after jettison
While the Orion capsule on the Space Launch System (SLS) went with a traditional expendable tractor escape tower the commercial crew entries decided they could do better than expending those expensive towers and went with a dual-purpose system. Both commercial crew taxis dispense with a service module and instead combine their escape system with an orbital maneuvering system. Both companies made an extremely bad decision that is a step backward into the cognitive dissonance that produced a Space Shuttle with no escape system at all.
The Boeing system is expended at the end of the mission and is separate from the capsule and can be jettisoned but is still not a great design compared to the traditional solid fuel tractor escape tower which will not explode and kill the crew it is intended to save.The design of the crew dragon makes almost any anomaly with the integral engines and over 3000 pounds of hypergolic propellants a loss-of-crew event.
NASA could have required a reusable tractor escape tower, ocean-recovered by parachute like the Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster (SRB). Instead, the space agency appears to have let the NewSpace “Public Private Partnership” concept work its supposed magic. Unfortunately, the temptation to make the escape system a “moneymaker” instead of a “moneywaster” was obviously too much for the commercial crew competitors. As with the Shuttle, crew safety took a back seat to going cheap and now it appears we (or rather, the astronauts) are stuck with these bad designs for the foreseeable future.
The simple mission of the tractor escape tower is pulling the capsule free of the rest of the stack and super-accelerating this minimum mass away from a possibly disintegrating launch vehicle. The 8-ton SLS Launch Abort System (LAS) activates in milliseconds to blast the Orion capsule away at 12 G’s using 400,000 pounds of thrust. The commercial crew taxis do not come close to this performance. This is a sacrifice of crew safety in the interest of doing more with less. Not expending escape towers or even part of the hypergolic system in the case of the crew dragon is the money-maker SpaceX and Boeing have traded a great deal of survivability for.
There is no cheap.
Why didn’t NASA require this system to be reusable like the shuttle SRB?
I expect the 8 tons of the Orion LAS is too much to add to either commercial crew stack and just bolting it on to either capsule is probably not going to work. So, as Kathy Lueders is quite aware of, there is no easy solution at this point. Except to call these hypergolic systems a wonderful added capability and not a problem at all. See how that works?
Good luck Kathy.
June 3, 2023, Update. Kathy now works for SpaceX.
And I am adding these numbers from a Space Review site forum comment:
The single best measure of the effectiveness of an escape system is thrust/weight ratio. This shows how fast the system will get a crew away from an exploding launch vehicle. The only upper limit is what will kill the crew, which is between 65 and 75 Gs. I am guessing that would take over a 20 to 1 thrust weight ratio. Anything under that is what you want. That is how you survive your rocket blowing up. Unless the escape system itself is wrapped around you and it blows up. While that has happened with a hypergolic system it can’t really happen with a solid fuel escape tower.
Thrust/weight:
Orion 17.5
Apollo 11.3
Starliner 5.58
Crew Dragon 4.82
Starship 1.17
Watched the John Oliver episode on Police on YouTube. The last minute and a half really got to me. “They are lucky what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”
Thank you John for the “sentient polo mallet” remark. Make no mistake what is being discussed here is poverty. No job, no income, no savings, no future. The war on poverty is real while the war on drugs never was. Vice…substance abuse, gaming, trafficking, have always been a response to poverty at one end of the spectrum and luxuries taken for granted by the rich at the other end. Violence is also either a flag that people are suffering an unbearable situation at one end of that social spectrum or those in power wishing to steal wealth from another state at the other extreme. Jacob Bronowski: “[War] is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft.”
It was only nuclear weapons that put an end to World Wars repeating ad infinitum. Those wars were about money and race and… we are still dealing with both.
Which brings us to Neoliberalism. I was watching a video of an interview by George Monbiot on a break last night and one of my Trump supporter coworkers came in to the break room to use the microwave and stopped to watch it with me for a few minutes. I watched him while he watched and listened to Monbiot and the look of total confusion on his face was interesting. When you work with someone… after a certain amount of time you come to realize, whatever their faults, they are human beings like yourself. Unless they are sociopaths of course. How we are made to fight each other is the trick.
If war is a cooperative form of theft then the war on poverty must essentially take the form of progressive taxation. If the wealthy want to call taxation legalized theft then why not roll with that? I have discussed the 91 percent tax rate on the rich from the last century with conservative acquaintances and their response is usually “it’s been proven they never really paid that tax rate- they found ways around it.” Which I take to mean that being a criminal is fine if you are rich. After close to a century the cycle is complete and the rich no longer pay a real progressive tax and this is for the most part legal.
Boston Globe Cartoon The New Deal came as a result of the free market crashing in 1929
Monbiot is fairly well known right now despite his unfashionable tree hugging. The first organization I ever joined was the Cousteau Society when I was a boy and now everything the inventor of the aqualung foresaw has come to pass in regards to overfishing, pollution, and reef destruction. Greed rolled over the ecology movement of the 60’s and 70’s like the proverbial freight train. It would have been better if we had gone with E-trains. Money has become the all-powerful god of this world and the deity demands human sacrifice. At some point our luck as a species is going to run out.
image: Cousteau Society
Last year when they were separating families at the border one of my coworkers commented in my direction that simplistic formula so many Americans hold dear, “they need to fix their own country and not come here and ruin mine.” While I had long ago learned to keep my mouth closed around these types, this time I spoke my mind. I explained, “in those corrupt Central American regimes these people are fleeing from, any activity that does not serve the thugs in power will get a gun pointed at your head. People are disappeared or murdered in public for the slightest reason. If this was not true they actually would be “fixing their own country.” See how that works?” That coworker has since not spoken a courteous word to me and disparaged me to anyone who would listen. It accomplished nothing except make others believe I was “un-American.” I regret speaking out, as many do. The Germans wanted to believe the Jews were ruining their country and any one defending “enemies of the state” bitterly regretted it. Of course, in the end, those Germans who allowed and enabled Nazi ideology lost everything. That is the slippery slope of Fascism leading to death camps, gas chambers, and ovens. When the masses allow manipulation by fear and embrace propaganda the result is predictable: only bribery and violence have any effect while conscience and empathy are mocked as weakness. Then the sociopaths take over.
Almost all undocumented immigrants are running away from countries with endemic poverty and violence.
Gerard K. O’Neill saw poverty as the driver of war and conflict and envisioned Space Solar Power as eliminating those problems. Cheap clean carbon-free energy from Solar Power Satellites would enable space colonization and thus guarantee the survival of the human race through unlimited Lebensraum. Concerning Neoliberalism and profit-seeking there is no cheap and nothing is free. Everything must generate a profit and what does not is discarded as useless. Instead of a Green New Space Deal we have a billionaire hobbyist with exploding toy rockets and fantasy retirement condos on Mars. Pandemics resurging in police states and shameless obscene greed is the harsh reality nobody seems to be able to admit is happening.
African slaves were a Neoliberal dream come true as they allowed people to be sold as beasts of burden by simply branding them as less-than-human, subhuman, or, using Nazi terminology- Untermenschen. In this new century, if we have less than a million in the bank, as the underclass we are also not really considered human beings either.
The one percent are really pushing their luck.
Miles in diameter artificial hollow spinning moons are the future we could have image: NASA
I was going to write about China and their space solar power plans in reply to a comment by Barry. Then…I began to think about future launch vehicles and spacecraft in general and decided to write specifically about spaceships. Sorry Barry. I have touched on the various elements involved in spaceflight in other posts but I will here attempt to review and clarify.
The 1st Generation Spaceship
The first issue is defining “space” which is not really 200 miles up. Space begins more accurately a couple orders of magnitude higher than Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and should be demarcated at 22,236 miles (Geostationary Earth Orbit or GEO). There are several reasons to call anything below this minimum distance above sea level “Earth Orbit” and refrain from calling it space. A simple simile explains why: Low Earth Orbit has as much in common with deep space as a duck pond has with the North Atlantic. The radiation environment in deep space necessitates a massive cosmic ray shield for any long duration human missions. Even the next order of magnitude quarter million mile wide region of space between GEO and the Moon is best characterized as a minor “Cislunar Sea.” While Earth orbits are delineated into many different paths, for simplicity let us say there is only LEO, which is everything below GEO. Following this line of reasoning Human Space Flight (HSF) should not include going in endless circles at very high altitude in LEO and this activity should thus be called “Orbital Flight.” HSF should rightly be minimally defined as transiting between GEO to the Moon across the Cislunar Sea using the blanket term “Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO).” The ice at the Lunar South Pole is the key to building any true spaceship as well over a thousand tons of water will be required for each shield. Water can be lifted from the Moon using 23 times less energy than from Earth for a given mass.
Dr. Paul Spudis and the ice at the lunar south pole is the reason this blog exists
Now comes the second issue of classifying “spacecraft” and “spaceships” as two very different vehicles. In regards to the Cislunar Sea this can be slightly confusing as a Lunar Cycler might possibly have all the attributes of a true spaceship except for a lack of nuclear propulsion. If the Cycler meeting the other criteria is designed with the capability to mate with a nuclear propulsion module and undertake deep space missions it can then be called a spaceship even if it is limited to the Cislunar Sea. A true spaceship must have a Near-Sea-Level-Radiation-One-Gravity environment (NSLR1G). The two systems necessary for generating this environment are a massive cosmic-ray-water-shield (CRWS) and tether-generated-artificial-gravity (TGAG). The first destination for Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) missions is not Mars, it is Ceres in the asteroid belt. Mars is a dead end. Such a mission to Ceres, using a Medusa “soft” nuclear pulse propulsion (NPP-1, first generation) drive utilizing low power fission bombs, would require at least a year and more likely two. Thus, a true spaceship would require living space large enough to meet the psychological requirements of the crew, a closed loop life support system (CLLS) with multi-year endurance, the already mentioned massive cosmic ray water shield and a tether-generated artificial gravity system.
(Ceres: CRWS/TGAG=NSLR1G+NPP1+CLLS=HSF-BELO)
To go beyond Ceres to the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants, starting with Callisto outside the Jovian radiation belts, will require more than a soft fission pulse propulsion system. Callisto bound spaceships will require a second generation hard fusion pulse propulsion system utilizing a multi-thousand ton alloy disc from a lunar factory. (Callisto: CRWS/TGAG=NSLR1G+NPP2+CLLS=HSF-BELO)
Those lunar factories mass-producing multi-thousand ton alloy discs will take several decades to construct and no “Orion” second generation fusion bomb driven spaceships are likely to appear for a half a century or more. In the immediate future the prerequisite for a first generation spaceship fleet construction pipeline is the creation of a Cislunar Infrastructure and the fundamental building block has yet to appear. The most critical piece of the puzzle is a construct I have written about previously on this blog: “The Fat Workshop.” How much interior space will be needed to keep a small crew psychologically healthy for two or three year missions? And how small a crew?
(Boeing) With a 15 foot thick water shield taking up 30 feet of the interior the remainder must meet the psychological needs of a human crew for years at a time on missions to the outer solar system. This likely equates to a wet workshop around 60 feet in diameter- the Fat Workshop
To send a 60 foot diameter double-hulled Fat Workshop to the Moon is going to require a much larger iteration of the SLS. The most efficient configuration of the ideal Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) may turn out to be a reusable first stage in the 10 million pound thrust range with 4 large 2 million pound plus thrust outboard engines and one smaller central landing engine. Whether the second stage would land back in it’s entirety or just the engine module remains to be seen. It would seem the laws of thermodynamics and the rocket equation demand the sacrifice of at least the second stage propellant tanks, as was the case with the space shuttle.
Not only the workshop but likely a semi-expendable Robot Lander will usually top these SHLV lunar missions to develop infrastructure. The Landers will land on ice deposits and bring water up to the workshops in orbit around the Moon. The wet workshop crew compartment will be the fundamental building block as it will serve as a crew compartment for first Low Lunar Frozen Orbit (LLFO) space stations and then be used for both a Lunar Cycler fleet and a network of crewed GEO telecom platforms. Once the pipeline is supporting these assets in the vicinity of the Moon, transiting between the Earth and Moon, and in high orbit around the Earth, then NPP1 modules will effect the first true spaceships.
Earth Orbit and Orbital Flight (not space and space flight).
HSF-BEO (beyond GEO and across the Cislunar Sea to the Moon).
Low Lunar Frozen Orbit (LLFO).
Cosmic Ray Water Shield (CRWS using lunar water brought up by Robot Landers).
Tether Generated Artificial Gravity (TGAG).
Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G environment).
Closed Loop Life Support (CLLS multi-year endurance utilizing the CRWS as a grow medium for a self-sustaining ecosystem).
The day has finally come I dreaded for close to a decade. The billionaire hobbyist has sent his hobby rocket into Low Earth Orbit with a pair of unfortunate humans. Congrats to Bridenstine for “the win” and I hope he stays unsullied if something goes wrong.
90 Years Ago
In 1930 “the capitalist airship” R-100 flew the Atlantic and was hailed as the triumph of free enterprise over socialism. A few months later “the socialist airship” R-101 crashed and burned and the entire Imperial Airship Scheme was canceled. The R-100 was scrapped. There were several problems with airships that would seem to have made them impractical but I have addressed these in another post and they need not have passed into history if available solutions had been adopted.
It is interesting to speculate if airships had come into use and then been used as communication relays would a kind of satellite communication network have become available in the 1930’s. As I write this the crew dragon is firing its draco thrusters. Packing the capsule with propellants and multiple engines instead of using a service module was an incredibly bad design choice. Much like airships- which had no double hull with an inert gas in the outer envelope isolating the inner lifting hydrogen from atmospheric oxygen. Because this very basic precaution was never taken it virtually guaranteed airships would burn like torches in the event of an anomaly.
Simple yet critical design difference: The Boeing Starliner has the abort system and load of hypergolic propellants below the capsule and with the ability to jettison the system. The Dragon has the engines and propellants wrapped around the capsule and cannot jettison the integral system. While a solid fuel rocket escape tower is the best option the Starliner is second best while the Dragon comes in third. One might wonder why an escape tower was not made recoverable and reusable and made a requirement by NASA. The answer is the dual purpose of these abort systems which SpaceX and Boeing both see as “money-makers” instead of “money-wasters.” Unfortunately there is no free lunch and the price is paid in vastly diminished crew safety.
The fundamental problem is the inability of the Space X and ULA launch vehicles to lift a spacecraft capable of leaving Earth Orbit. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is a dead end and should have been abandoned long ago. Back to airships: Besides a double envelope the second requirement for airships to succeed was a pressurized cabin so the craft could fly above the turbulence that repeatedly tore them to pieces. The analogy with Human Space Flight (HSF) is the minimum requirement of sending craft Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) to intercept shielded Lunar Cyclers instead of inferior lift vehicles placing humans in LEO to no purpose at all. The Moon is where the factories will be built.
The Space Shuttle was one of the worst wrong turns ever made by the Space Agency while NewSpace has undoubtedly been the worst. The strip mining of Earth orbit with smallsat constellations and the continuation of inferior lift vehicles to the space-station-to-nowhere has wasted mountains of money and years that should have been focused on a lunar return. When evidence for water ice was confirmed in 2008 this should have immediately pointed the U.S. back at the Moon and ended HSF operations in LEO.
The logical path was to invest in a evolved Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) with ever more powerful iterations. The most critical need at this point is reusable boosters for the SLS and a reusable core engine module for the SLS. The ISS and commercial crew program should be ended and the funding redirected at opening new SLS core production lines and reusability of a core engine module and new boosters.
wiki: An ocean-recovered pressure-fed/tap-off booster and land-back 2nd stage engine module (expending the tank) would make this configuration unbeatable)
I received a phone call last week concerning my job performance, which had been suffering due to overwork and a work related disease, and it was not good news. I am now faced with a big change in my life. After planning on continuing to work for another 10 years till I was close to or even 70 it does not appear I will be able to continue in my present field. Unless some miraculous cure occurs and the damage already done can somehow be reversed. I can hope. For now it looks like I will be going down the workers compensation road until I can find my way into a new arena. Many are in my shoes.
image: thekingjamesversionbible.com
I have also had second thoughts about many of the blog posts I have made and removed them, and will probably remove several more. The reason for removing them is it might be time to try and “get a side-gig going” on the internet. All my material will have to be of a much higher quality for that to work. I am not a rocket scientist but seeing the trash other people are generating revenue with I think I can give them some competition. For close to two decades I listened to the famous conspiracy radio show Coast to Coast AM and if the clowns that were guests there can make money then I certainly can. Hopefully without making up ridiculous X marks the spot in Roswell NM lies about the universe we live in. I am certain I can be the news now and everyone will enjoy the show.
While I have never had the bug to write the huge amounts it takes to make a living at it the work does interest me and I have no other usable skill sets. I cannot turn wrenches on airplanes hour after hour like I could in my 20’s and 30’s and neither can I pound the pavement and keep the late hours I did as an investigator. My executive protection experience was limited and there are so many ex-operator types doing that I will get no phone calls there. Essentially I am looking at some hard times ahead. And I am not getting any younger. I guess I will just have to trust the plan I am now formulating and stick to it. If I believe nothing can stop what is coming then perhaps people will pour money into my pockets.
I would love to go on Coast to Coast and express my views on playing Comet Ping-Pong with nuclear weapons to save the planet from another dinosaur killer. It is more likely, however, our great threat is an engineered pathogen, rather than a comet or asteroid impact. Only those with a Q clearance understand how incredibly effective nukes are for propulsion in deep space and deflecting impact threats. The language of evangelical Christianity may come to define the Green New Space Deal movement. I hope to marry an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained (thank you for those words, Adrienne LaFrance).
I was raised an Atheist and married a devout Christian. How does that work you might ask. It works because I reconciled my disbelief with my belief. A child’s basic personality is formed by the age of eight or so. It is extremely difficult to change that, but behaviors and beliefs can be “modified” to enable survival in an environment that requires such change. Whether it is actually change or just a temporary departure is relative to how long the different behaviors and beliefs are required. If it is required for a short time, like a performance, it is not change, but if it lasts to your dying day, call it change. I took a film class many years ago and learned about suspension of disbelief and the fourth wall and all that stuff. More on that later. People will “believe” the Earth is round because they will be taught it is so and be given examples of evidence, such as objects sinking below the horizon and the movement of apparently spherical objects in the sky like the Sun and Moon. So we believe. Most of us.
Some of us do not want to accept what others do believe for various reasons. From an evolutionary point of view this fills a small niche and insures these doubting Thomas types will survive some odd environment that requires one to automatically reject what others believe. In our modern world far more of these types survive than would in a prehistoric setting and because of a tremendous population there are a fairly large number of contrarian and cognitively dissonant people. Millions of them. What makes us the strangest creatures on Earth is our far more common denial of death and acceptance of religious belief despite no scientific evidence across the centuries justifying our assumptions about the necessity of a God or Gods. Billions of us accept there is almost certainly some higher power. We have our moments of doubt of course, and Christians even believe Christ had his moment of doubt.
Science would seem to place those many more billions of people of faith in that same category of contrarian and cognitively dissonant Flat Earthers but we intuitively know there is a fundamental difference. We are designed to seek meaning- and an ultimate meaning would necessarily be ultimately self-aware and intelligent. The alternate view, is that God is just a clever evolutionary device that protects us from the unacceptable reality of oblivion. In other words, there is no designer. But…the universe is a strange place and in my view it is just as likely there is an ultimate meaning that is ultimately self-aware and intelligent. I would say to anyone on the street the reason God is invisible is to allow us to exercise free will, or the illusion of free will. Why would God allow us only an illusion and not true free will? I would say to that- the reality is in the future. The far future where we travel back across eternity to the beginning; to God.
I am not a big fan of the “Intelligent Design” movement because if God wants to not interfere with our free will and be invisible, it would seem contrary to that to “prove” otherwise. I believe it is more to the point to try to effect what we would have in the past only prayed for as divine intervention. See how that works?
This kind of thinking was not really possible before science came along and presented humans with “miracles” like time travel as real possibilities. And time travel into the future is absolutely possible and more an engineering problem than any fundamental challenge to the laws of physics. When approaching the speed of light time on the starship slows down and a 5 year round trip to another star might find the traveler returning to Earth a thousand years in the future. Of course travel backwards in time is the trick and we might have to build super-intelligent machines to figure out how to solve that. So we will, if we survive long enough as a species. Time travel is essentially resurrection and as a Christian I know all about that.
Breaking the fourth wall in theater and film is an amazing device and in real life the equivalent is to talk about death as if it is real and imminent. The comparison is interesting in that if you simply act without a fourth wall then…you are not acting anymore and you are living. The play ends and reality begins. If you express death as the constant fundamental opposite of existence that is immanent, then extreme stress and confusion arises in the group. Much like when flat earthers start ranting and demanding the textbooks be changed. We are social creatures and do not exist apart and eternal as gods. We are born into families and societies and depend on others for survival. Neoliberalism is a flat earth attempt to deny our collective identity by making the super-rich into demi-gods.
In a 70 year lifespan our brains store about 1 gigabyte of detailed information. If a 18 dollar thumb drive can store 64 gigs it does not say much about us. But there is more to humans than memory storage. We are a problem-solving species and collectively pursue incredibly complex goals.
It is confusing and how we individually weave threads of “alternative facts” and self-deception makes up the fabric of civilization. When politicians want to make a lie into the truth they call it an alternative fact and when we want to make an invisible God visible we call it faith. Quid est veritas?
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of the passage and extended praise to Pilate:
“Do I still have to add that in the entire New Testament there is only one solitary figure one is obliged to respect? Pilate, the Roman governor. To take a Jewish affair seriously – he cannot persuade himself to do that. One Jew more or less – what does it matter ?… The noble scorn of a Roman before whom an impudent misuse of the word ‘truth’ was carried on has enriched the New Testament with the only expression which possesses value – which is its criticism, its annihilation even: ‘What is truth?…” (Nietzsche, writing in The Antichrist, §46)(wiki)
As the spirit guide and justifier of genocide for the Nazi’s, Nietzsche had no use for faith in anything except “The Will To Power” (der Wille zur Macht). It is a problem for me that we are so capable of destroying each other yet we do not combine well for any drive in the opposite direction. In fact, we refuse to even consider the possibility of focusing on the physical challenges of first freezing without damage those dying and then perfecting the reversing of aging and waking them up. While we collectively are good at war we do not seem capable of turning that switch in the opposite direction.
But anything is possible as the universe is much larger than even the collective consciousness of 7.8 billion people. Each person has more connections in their brain than there are stars in the galaxy. How those connections interact equate to the number of galaxies in the universe. With each of those 7.8 billion little three pound universes having their own unique view- while the larger universe might have a different opinion. If the universe is in some sense a part of the mind of God then we should seek to stay here for now and become more than what we are. Our best course is to defeat death and travel back in time to resurrect the dead. That is the best path and we should freely choose to seek it.
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
The Man who saved the world
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.
Audie Murphy was the real Captain America (image: Marvel.com)
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.
Pavlichenko (wiki)
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.
image: Artifacts Catalog
And here we are with a reality TV star in charge. He did not fight either.
“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.
Cold War Toys image:(Gizmodo UK)
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.
image: Scarfo Productions
I would expect space solar power to follow this “trajectory”:
6 to 8 launches per year of an advanced iteration of the SLS with reusable engine module and liquid boosters and expendable core tankage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Ceres: CRWS/TGAG=NSLR1G+NPP1+CLLS=HSF-BELO)
(Callisto: CRWS/TGAG=NSLR1G+NPP2+CLLS=HSF-BELO)
Ice on the Moon 