Ice on the Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-have-no-reason-to-believe-5g-is-safe/

Along with the small-satellite-constellation-space-junk-horror-movie this is proof we are doomed as a species. We seem to be contaminating our environment while we destroy it with climate change. It is perhaps a dead pool among aliens which will do us in first, a dinosaur killer, a volcanic epic, a pandemic, or a nuclear-winter-pandemic-cannibal-apocalypse brought on by a combination of events.

I happened to tune into the fat drug addict on AM radio today and did not immediately recognize his voice. It has changed in a quarter century of Orwellian ranting but the message is the same lies-are-truth garbage that has been brainwashing the weak-minded all these years. He babbled about death and how the liberals were causing the suicide rate to go up by telling the youth the planet is going to be uninhabitable and that was why escaping to Mars with Elon is so popular. His point being it is normal for our brains to fool us into believing we will not die and socialists are an abomination destroying that clever deception. Incredible.

Boeing is now being revealed as responsible for the deaths of 346 people in two crashes, one in 2018 and one in 2019, associated with 737 Max design flaws. This after no passenger jets crashed in 2017- the safest year in commercial aviation history. Ironically, the niece of Ralph Nader died in one crash, the person famous for revolutionizing consumer safety with his book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The connection with being a doomed species is clear; the greedy malicious children in the group are leading us to our deaths. Where are the adults? All busy attending the church of neoliberalism.

Nearly 30 years ago I learned an important lesson about the law of unintended consequences due to my experience maintaining the HH-60J rescue helicopter. In the airframe school we were taught some history about the aircraft and it has some similarities with the 737 Max tragedies. The Army selected the H-60 to replace the Huey back in the day and one of the design requirements had been that with a minimum of disassembly it must fit in the back of a C-130 transport plane. The reason being helicopters are maintenance intensive and only fly so many hours until they need serious inspections- and it takes them many of those hours to get anywhere far away on the planet because they are so slow. The problem was due to other performance requirements some complicated design tricks were needed to make the H-60 small enough to fit. One trick was the “stabilator” wing on the tail which was driven by a computer to compensate for a shorter fuselage length. Unfortunately the cable run to the actuator in the tail was not adequately shielded which made the run a kind of antennae and flying through certain kinds of radar beams would generate a signal in the cable that drove the stabilator actuator down. The helicopter, if going above a certain speed, would violently dive and there was nothing the pilot could do about it quickly. Since helicopters would encounter these beams when making approaches at low altitude to an LZ several dove into the ground killing everyone on board. They finally figured it out and fixed it.

The sad fact is the helicopter only barely and with difficulty fit into the C-130 and this turned out to be a seldom used feature. The point being that when we seek to gain extraordinary advantage or profit there is a reason it is extraordinary. If greed overrides caution then failure is most often the result. This lesson applies to the existence of humankind and not just airplanes and economic markets.

Having landed on the Moon a half century ago we should have fleets of spaceships traveling the solar system by now. You would think. The reality is the public does not understand what would define a true spaceship. Though I have always disliked similes concerning space, especially those like JFK’s calling space an ocean, it has some utility.

1. A spaceship, like a ship on the ocean, must be capable of crossing an ocean. The space analogy of a small ocean, like the Mediterranean, might be from the Earth to Mars. The Pacific analogy might be Pluto. The analogy to oceanic storms would be radiation and the equivalent to running aground would be meteorite damage.
2. The basic requirement to travel interplanetary space, that is, Human Spaceflight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO), is to weather space storms. If radiation is the equivalent of an ocean storm it is interesting that taking a microcosm of an ocean into space as a kiloton+ cosmic radiation shield seems to be the prerequisite.
3.  The next requirement for HSF-BELO is speed. It relates directly to the first problem because though 400 tons are needed to shield a small capsule, humans have psychological limits concerning living space and mission time which equates to thousands of tons of water. And pushing those kilotons requires nuclear energy. There is only one practical nuclear propulsion system: Bombs.
4.  Along with dosing there is long term microgravity debilitation which will require tether generated artificial gravity. Micrometeorite shielding will require more mass and a warning and deflection system for larger particles. The unavoidable mass penalty for multi-year HSF-BELO missions is going to be ten thousand tons plus.
5.  A “true spaceship”, versus a spacecraft, would likely mass well over ten thousand tons minimum, carrying a couple thousand nuclear bombs, at least a thousand tons of water for cosmic ray shielding, using either a metal disc or a parachute of some kind as an engine. Water would be acquired from, and assembly and testing would be done on, or in the vicinity of, the Moon.
6.  On multi-year missions the true spaceship would spend most of the time split in half with equal or spaced masses spinning at the end of a several thousand foot tether system. The larger the disc (or “spinnaker” in a Medusa type) the more efficient, faster, and longer ranged, likely operating between Ceres and Neptune.
7.  Relocating the superpower nuclear arsenals into deep space to ratchet down the cold war launch-on-warning situation is perhaps the only enabler for HSF-BEO. Fleets of such “space boomers” would also protect Earth from impact threats and allow for guest scientists on voyages of exploration to the gas and ice giants.

“BTW, all, just for context, it appears that 2019 OK is by far the largest asteroid [to] pass this close to Earth in the last century!” reads one subsequent email from Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson. NASA experts determined that a combination of factors ultimately caused the agency to miss it, including the position of the moon, bad weather and the slow-moving nature of the asteroid. (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nasa-internal-emails-asteroid-ok-2019_n_5d8402bbe4b0957256b3f555)

Wiki: “The object’s size is estimated at 57 to 130 metres (187 to 426 ft) across-”

“If 2019 OK had been around 100 m (330 ft) in diameter an Earth impact could have released as much power as the 50 megatons generated by Tsar Bomba.[11] If 2019 OK had been around the middle of the size estimates it could have released the equivalent explosive energy of about 10 megatons of TNT similar to the 1908 Tunguska event that flattened 2,000 km2 (770 square miles) of forest land.[9] If 2019 OK had been on the smaller size it still could have released over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast by Little Boy at Hiroshima.[12]”

 

These city killer near misses happen all the time. It is the extraordinary one that is the problem. One of those big asteroids or comets is going to get us. Could be tomorrow and it could be even bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. Really. It would be just a spike in that probability curve everyone mistakes as safety. In hindsight we would remark it was out of the ordinary but considering the timescale not really extraordinary. Except no one would be left to make the comment.

The human race would be gone…forever.

Any alien race observing us would not be surprised.

We were just not intelligent enough to survive.

I made some references to being a Queen fan in a previous post and mentioned the song “39.” On my birthday a few days ago I averaged the lifespans of my Mother and Father and figured out what year I would die if that average held true- and it was, coincidentally, 2039. Less than 20 years to go.

The most likely method of star travel is going to be the “slow boat” that takes several centuries to reach a fairly close star by travelling at well under ten percent of the speed of light. The crew would almost certainly be frozen and even though massively shielded from radiation would likely still have to be re-animated periodically. The reason for the wake-ups for several months each time would be so their bodies could repair damage done by unavoidable energetic particles. The slow boat would be accelerated by beam propulsion out of the solar system and use H-bombs to slow down upon reaching a destination. This would require an immense space solar power infrastructure and is not  likely to happen in the next 20 years.

A recent article about a new therapy that can reverse aging was interesting, except it is only good for 2 years. That bumps me up to 2041…maybe. Humans are great at imagining the best possible scenarios and making them reality. That is, they lie to themselves and then try and turn that lie into truth. I prophesy around 2040 freezing people without damage and thus allowing them to be revived decades later will be perfected- and I will be fading fast and among the first to go into cold storage.

Since nobody will allow their loved ones to simply die when there is hope for them to be cured of their condition or aging reversed- the terminally ill and the elderly will all be frozen. With 56 million people a year going into storage facilities those solutions will simply have to be found. So…at some point in the future I consider it quite possible I will be awakened from a frozen state and start aging backwards. I am familiar with the work of Hugo DeGaris and considering his worldview I might also expect to be gradually “enhanced” in that future new age. How the existence of Artilects (super intelligent artificial intellects) will affect humankind is unknown. We cannot even guess. I can, however, speculate that in some sense it will be as if I died because I will not be the same person I am now. So be it.

Perhaps humans will form binary personalities and then even larger composite minds. This joining of minds is not my idea and has been around since E.E. Doc Smith wrote his space operas in the 1930’s. When my wife is washing dishes I often rest my chin on her shoulder. I will then ask her, “would you let them transplant my head onto your body  to save my life? Then we would always be together. Wouldn’t that be great?” She does not think it would be so great. And that is my-hoped-for-imagined-future. Kind of.

A proposal to create an artificial black hole propelled starship using a parabolic reflector to reflect Hawking radiation was discussed in 2009 by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland. This is the most likely “fast boat.” There is a possibility many slow boats will head out and then be intercepted a century or so later by these fast boats. It has always been a mystery to me why the entertainment industry cannot take these most likely scenarios and build stories around them instead of the garbage that passes for science fiction. It is depressing because it seems we are a basically stupid species which means my imagined best future is a throw of the dice…at best.

It is not just our bad science fiction not providing any expectations of success, it is actual threats to our species we simply ignore. Despite continuing evidence of the rock that ended the dinosaurs, we are not worried. Despite continuing evidence of past volcanic epics that caused mass extinctions, we are not worried. Despite continuing advances in genetic engineering that could create a doomsday plague, we are not worried. From heaven above, from hell below, and from test tubes in modest labs around the world, we turn away and ignore these most serious threats.

The problem, of course, is we are already on death row in this great open air prison called Earth. Why should we waste our time worrying? As long as every story ends with execution we are not likely to focus on the rest of the human race ceasing to exist- and will continue to watch bad science fiction.

 

My (now slightly edited) comment on https://phys.org/news/2019-09-europe-teaming-asteroid-deflection.html

“Nothing will work better than a nuclear device. Yet there are several entities who are pushing their “gravity tug” or other concepts and they have hijacked this train.”

However, the train has not left the station yet.

A human crewed Nuclear Pulse Propelled spaceship capable of interplanetary missions would necessarily carry a couple thousand “pulse units” (bombs). Those devices would be just as effective deflecting a rock as pushing a spaceship.

The Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum states only a kiloton range water shield can make Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit practical (Parker). Only a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion system can push such a shield around the solar system (Dyson). The Moon is the only place to acquire the water for shielding (Spudis), assemble, test, and launch nuclear missions.

The NASA Space Launch System is the only human-rated Super Heavy Lift Vehicle with an escape tower that makes launching fissile pits direct to the Moon an acceptable risk. SLS launch cadence needs to expand to 6 per year.”

The proposed “Space Force” is not about space at all, it is about Earth orbit and mostly about Low Earth Orbit. This NewSpace marketing technique of calling LEO space has always been a trick, a ruse, and it needs to end. Exploring LEO is not space exploration.

The best demarcation between space and Earth orbit is the distance where an object at the equator in a circular orbit will remain stationary over the surface. This is Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) at 22,236 miles up. Just as the ability to see out to the horizon originally determined where international waters begin, the minimal energy required to leave GEO makes this distance the ideal “edge of space.”

By this measure cislunar space, between the Earth and the Moon, would be comparable to “coastal waters” and GEO and the cislunar sea would properly be the domain of the space version of the Coast Guard. Call it the “Space Guard.” This could include a fleet of Lunar Cyclers flying around the Earth-Moon and providing a superhighway in space. The space counterpart to the Air Force would be the “Space Force” and would fly Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). If a space counterpart to the Navy is required there are always the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants and their subsurface seas to drive submarines around in.

A Space Force could serve the very useful purpose of removing nuclear weapons from Earth, a fantastic and impossible dream for many. The over a trillion dollars that is going to be spent in the coming decade on the U.S. nuclear deterrent makes relocating that arsenal to deep space not so fantastic or impossible. For over half a century the superpowers have been on hair-trigger alert and poised to launch on warning. There have been close calls. By placing the nuclear arsenals in deep space months away from Earth on human-crewed spaceships, we no longer face those few minutes to decide whether or not to destroy civilization. The other superpowers will follow America.

There are arguments against space-based-deterrence of course, but the pros, in my view, far outweigh the cons. One of those pros is a dinosaur killing rock will not be ending civilization while fleets of spaceships are on patrol ready to deflect any impact threat with nuclear devices.

For a few million more dollars von Braun would have made Skylab a true wet workshop instead of a dry one. It would have gone up in one launch and been larger inside than the multi-billion dollar ISS which took years to assemble. This does not even take into account the fact that we never should have abandoned the Moon and retreated to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). It was one of the worst wrong turns NASA has ever made.

NewSpace being without a doubt THE worst wrong turn.

What ended the first space age and any hope of a permanent human presence in space was the Apollo 1 fire. While the ISS has been characterized as hosting humans continuously in space this is actually a clever deception. Low Earth Orbit stopped being “space” in 1968 when Apollo 8 left Earth far behind. Low Earth Orbit compared to deep space is like a duck pond compared to the North Atlantic.

The Apollo 1 fire made the aerospace industry realize Human Space Flight Beyond Low Earth Orbit (HSF-BLEO) was going to be hard money. Industry would choose the easy money of cold war toys and the space age was doomed before humans ever left orbit. The prerequisite for humans traveling BLEO is a massive cosmic ray water shield massing in the hundreds of tons and more likely well over a thousand if any practical living space is to be provided.

In addition to dosing the problem of debilitation must be addressed and a tether generated artificial gravity (TGAG) system, which adds even more mass, is the only practical solution. The Double Hulled Workshop (DHW) with a diameter of over 50 feet, a “fat workshop”, is thus the critical piece of hardware for HSF-BLEO.  Spinning the DHW with a TGAG counter-mass is the only practical option for humans on long duration deep space missions. To effect a true spaceship and go Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) will require nuclear pulse propulsion (bombs) to push the mass of the Cosmic Ray Water Shield (CRWS) and TGAG system.

These acronyms are integral to the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum:

HSF- Human Space Flight.

LEO- Low Earth Orbit is NOT space.

BLEO- Beyond Low Earth Orbit, usually referring to cislunar space.

CRWS- Cosmic Ray Water Shield.

DHW- Double Hull Wet Workshop or “Fat Workshop” containing the CRWS.

TGAG- Tether Generated Artificial Gravity.

BELO- Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit, usually referring to interplanetary missions.

SNPP- “Soft” Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, referring to Solem’s Medusa-spinnaker concept.

HNPP- “Hard” Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, referring to Dyson’s Orion plate concept.

ISRU- In Situ Resource Utilization, usually referring to lunar water and other materials.

 

Looked at the news this morning and the Amazon is burning, Greenland is melting, and this evening David Koch is dead. Yesterday spacexnews had an article about nuclear power in space. The comments were truly idiotic. Surprised my name was not brought up since I endlessly commented about nuclear energy and space propulsion. They are the most disgusting creeps on the internet by far. And it seems there are some planets that might be habitable not too far away. Better start building those starships if we are going to send any by 39.

I only expect the one comment so I might as well reply to it with an edit:

39 is a Queen fan thing.
Not really happy with that internet article since it absolutely shows how politically biased the space program decision-making process is. I am pushing 60 and have been reading about this technology and been hands-on in the military since I was 20. I have worked on and crewed several types of vehicle and aircraft as a systems troubleshooter and operator/aircrew. And being interested in this technology and history and being a voracious reader has given me what I believe is a unique perspective. My big five personality profile is high on openness so I see this in a different way than those who are more…conservative. My view is all about what works or will work. And this is what I think:
Due to the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum only nuclear pulse is going to enable humans to travel Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). Nuclear Thermal Rockets are a dead end simply because it is hard enough keeping a chemical rocket from melting. Trying to contain a reaction a million times more powerful results in Isp’s only about double that of chemical rockets. Pathetic. No other term for it except maybe incredibly wasteful. Stan Ulam understood the problem and solved it with bombs which provides Isp’s in the tens of thousands. There are of course intelligent people like Dyson and Solem who have followed Ulam but their work is not being considered. Why? Because of the eye-roll factor of using bombs for propulsion. Very simple details like this are trapping humankind on Earth.

 

Looks like the second quarter of 2021 for the first flight of the Space Launch System, just under two years from now. Plenty of time for NASA to rationalize their Human Space Flight program by abandoning LEO and redirecting that over 4 billion a year into expanding SLS launch cadence. In my view the critical pieces of hardware needed to create a cislunar infrastructure are going to be first 6 to 8 SLS launches a year, then a Lander that can shuttle water up to wet workshops, and of course a double-hull 50 foot diameter upper stage “Fat Workshop.”