Ice on the Moon

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

1. Earth Orbit and Orbital Flight (not space and space flight).
2.  HSF-BEO (beyond GEO and across the Cislunar Sea to the Moon).
3.  Low Lunar Frozen Orbit (LLFO).
4.  Cosmic Ray Water Shield (CRWS using lunar water brought up by Robot Landers).
5.  Tether Generated Artificial Gravity (TGAG).
6.  Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G environment).
7.  Closed Loop Life Support (CLLS multi-year endurance utilizing the CRWS as a grow medium for a self-sustaining ecosystem).
8.  Medusa soft 1st generation fission Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP1).
9.  HSF-BELO (beyond lunar orbit to Ceres as the first destination).
10.  Orion 2nd generation alloy disc fusion Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP2) to Callisto.

 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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).

More to come…

 

 

 

 

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

So I thought I would write an entry on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth is absolutely stranger than fiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only greed and purposely sown confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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