Slashdot Mirror
Return to the Moon
apsmith writes "No matter what the subject, one has to admire a book written by an astronaut and former US senator, illustrated with photos of the author at work on the Moon. When the subject is one as potentially important to the future of our civilization as the energy resources geologist Harrison ("Jack") Schmitt sees buried in the lunar surface, along with our future in space, it becomes all the more daunting to take issue with it. Unfortunately Schmitt's potentially inspiring commercial justification in Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space rests on a shaky foundation." Read the rest of Arthur's review.
Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space
author
Harrison Schmitt
pages
336
publisher
Praxis Publishing Ltd. and Copernicus Books
rating
7
reviewer
Arthur Smith
ISBN
0387242856
summary
Harvesting Helium-3 from the Moon
With NASA now planning a lunar return and several other countries planning missions, the time is certainly ripe for a book titled Return to the Moon. In fact, last November also saw the release of Rick Tumlinson's collection of essays from experts on the subject with the same title, and the Space Frontier Foundation has been running regular Return to the Moon conferences.
Schmitt's book acknowledges that context but sets out in his own direction arguing that the Moon will provide a critical contribution to our civilization's energy needs, and the lunar return discussed is primarily one of industry and commerce, rather than grand national programs. The argument for industrial use of our celestial neighbor hinges on the utility of helium-3 fusion. However, that technology and the science behind it is dealt with in a perfunctory 4 pages in this book; Schmitt leaves the main argument to scientific papers from the University of Wisconsin Fusion technology Institute that has been promoting it.
Helium-3 fusion, while having the advantage of lower radiation levels, is considerably harder than deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion: the extra proton in helium means the ideal fusion temperature for He3-D mixtures is over four times as large. An alternative hydrogen-boron reaction would require almost 10 times the D-T temperature. That makes the traditional approaches to fusion reactors, creating very hot and dense plasmas, essentially impractical for He3 fusion. Non-traditional electrostatic confinement ( "Farnsworth fusor") technology gets around the high temperature problem by essentially shooting the nuclei directly at one another in a steady-state fashion. In principle any kind of fusion is possible with such a design. However, in practice the maximum power output obtained so far is 1 Watt - you would need a hundred of them just to power a light bulb!
So that leaves a huge and unknown technology gap in scaling things a factor of 1 billion or so to power plant size. Schmitt lightly skips over this problem with the note that "much engineering research lies ahead" and then bases an economic analysis on the assumption that such a plant would have to compete with fossil-fuel plants; we know roughly the numbers there. This does provide real constraints on the costs of retrieval of He3 from the Moon, so it's a useful analysis. But there's still the fundamental question of whether He3 fusion could ever be economically practical.
Schmitt doesn't let those questions slow him down; cost estimates for the "much engineering research" piece are folded into capital cost estimates for building up to 15 fusion plants, building and launching (and staffing) 15 lunar mining settlements, and operational costs for the whole system to reach the conclusion that it could, after the 15th set of facilities was completed, be close to competitive with electric energy from coal. That's not a bad accomplishment, but it rests on a lot of assumptions of unstated but likely very high uncertainty.
Ironically, the best reason for replacing coal, the threat of global warming from atmospheric CO2 release, is given short shrift as an "international political issue" in Schmitt's introductory chapter on our energy future. In this and in a bias toward non-governmental solutions, Schmitt's text unfortunately betrays the caution of an incompletely recovered politician.
Organizational approaches are covered in detail in chapter 8, where Schmitt compares models ranging from all-government to various public/private partnerships, to an all-private approach, analyzing each model according to over two dozen financial, managerial, and external criteria. After giving each a 1 to 10 rating, he multiplies by another subjective weighting factor and adds them all up. Somehow, the all-private model wins every time. The text surrounding these numbers suggests that, despite what the numbers say, several of the public-private partnership approaches make a great deal of sense. This ranges from the Intelsat multilateral model to simply encouraging government funding of the necessary research, development, and testing, and passing technology on to private industry to earn a profit.
Schmitt's discussion of lessons from Apollo is almost reverential, including a proposal for a "Saturn VI" heavy-lift rocket, to lower launch costs. It seems unlikely that the Apollo conditions can be duplicated, but he does have an interesting argument in favor of in-house engineering talent and having a large pool of young engineers. This and the letters of chapter 10 are perhaps too bluntly put to have an impact on NASA directly, but could certainly help inspire organizational virtues in a private venture, so NASA's more recent mistakes aren't repeated.
There is much that is good here. The book covers some ideas in detail, including the lunar geology issues for helium-3 recovery. Designs for mining equipment, the idea of finding markets first in space, and only later on Earth, and the proposal to make the miners permanent settlers, rather than just temporary visitors are all interesting concepts developed here. The author has included copious citations for more in-depth reading.
Much of the infrastructure Schmitt calls for could be applied to any other commercial utilization of the Moon, for example to help develop solar power satellites or lunar solar power facilities, to provide lunar oxygen (or hydrogen) for in-space use, for lunar tourism, and so forth. Schmitt believes the He3 approach provides easier access to capital markets due to lower start-up costs, so less government involvement may be needed than for those other commercial justifications for a lunar return. However, the status of He3 fusion itself seems sufficiently uncertain that relying on private equity to make it happen could still be a very slow process, at least once development reaches the point of billion-dollar space missions.
This vision for a new day in lunar exploration is very different from what we have been hearing from NASA, even in recent years when a human lunar return has been on the table. There is considerable evidence we have an urgent need for new energy sources. The possibility of exploitation of the Moon for human benefit has hardly crossed public consciousness yet, but it's something that we will increasingly be turning to as humanity reaches limits here on Earth. We should all be grateful Dr. Schmitt has helped here to get that ball rolling.
Arthur Smith is a part-time space advocate and volunteer with the National Space Society."
You can purchase Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
With NASA now planning a lunar return and several other countries planning missions, the time is certainly ripe for a book titled Return to the Moon. In fact, last November also saw the release of Rick Tumlinson's collection of essays from experts on the subject with the same title, and the Space Frontier Foundation has been running regular Return to the Moon conferences.
Schmitt's book acknowledges that context but sets out in his own direction arguing that the Moon will provide a critical contribution to our civilization's energy needs, and the lunar return discussed is primarily one of industry and commerce, rather than grand national programs. The argument for industrial use of our celestial neighbor hinges on the utility of helium-3 fusion. However, that technology and the science behind it is dealt with in a perfunctory 4 pages in this book; Schmitt leaves the main argument to scientific papers from the University of Wisconsin Fusion technology Institute that has been promoting it.
Helium-3 fusion, while having the advantage of lower radiation levels, is considerably harder than deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion: the extra proton in helium means the ideal fusion temperature for He3-D mixtures is over four times as large. An alternative hydrogen-boron reaction would require almost 10 times the D-T temperature. That makes the traditional approaches to fusion reactors, creating very hot and dense plasmas, essentially impractical for He3 fusion. Non-traditional electrostatic confinement ( "Farnsworth fusor") technology gets around the high temperature problem by essentially shooting the nuclei directly at one another in a steady-state fashion. In principle any kind of fusion is possible with such a design. However, in practice the maximum power output obtained so far is 1 Watt - you would need a hundred of them just to power a light bulb!
So that leaves a huge and unknown technology gap in scaling things a factor of 1 billion or so to power plant size. Schmitt lightly skips over this problem with the note that "much engineering research lies ahead" and then bases an economic analysis on the assumption that such a plant would have to compete with fossil-fuel plants; we know roughly the numbers there. This does provide real constraints on the costs of retrieval of He3 from the Moon, so it's a useful analysis. But there's still the fundamental question of whether He3 fusion could ever be economically practical.
Schmitt doesn't let those questions slow him down; cost estimates for the "much engineering research" piece are folded into capital cost estimates for building up to 15 fusion plants, building and launching (and staffing) 15 lunar mining settlements, and operational costs for the whole system to reach the conclusion that it could, after the 15th set of facilities was completed, be close to competitive with electric energy from coal. That's not a bad accomplishment, but it rests on a lot of assumptions of unstated but likely very high uncertainty.
Ironically, the best reason for replacing coal, the threat of global warming from atmospheric CO2 release, is given short shrift as an "international political issue" in Schmitt's introductory chapter on our energy future. In this and in a bias toward non-governmental solutions, Schmitt's text unfortunately betrays the caution of an incompletely recovered politician.
Organizational approaches are covered in detail in chapter 8, where Schmitt compares models ranging from all-government to various public/private partnerships, to an all-private approach, analyzing each model according to over two dozen financial, managerial, and external criteria. After giving each a 1 to 10 rating, he multiplies by another subjective weighting factor and adds them all up. Somehow, the all-private model wins every time. The text surrounding these numbers suggests that, despite what the numbers say, several of the public-private partnership approaches make a great deal of sense. This ranges from the Intelsat multilateral model to simply encouraging government funding of the necessary research, development, and testing, and passing technology on to private industry to earn a profit.
Schmitt's discussion of lessons from Apollo is almost reverential, including a proposal for a "Saturn VI" heavy-lift rocket, to lower launch costs. It seems unlikely that the Apollo conditions can be duplicated, but he does have an interesting argument in favor of in-house engineering talent and having a large pool of young engineers. This and the letters of chapter 10 are perhaps too bluntly put to have an impact on NASA directly, but could certainly help inspire organizational virtues in a private venture, so NASA's more recent mistakes aren't repeated.
There is much that is good here. The book covers some ideas in detail, including the lunar geology issues for helium-3 recovery. Designs for mining equipment, the idea of finding markets first in space, and only later on Earth, and the proposal to make the miners permanent settlers, rather than just temporary visitors are all interesting concepts developed here. The author has included copious citations for more in-depth reading.
Much of the infrastructure Schmitt calls for could be applied to any other commercial utilization of the Moon, for example to help develop solar power satellites or lunar solar power facilities, to provide lunar oxygen (or hydrogen) for in-space use, for lunar tourism, and so forth. Schmitt believes the He3 approach provides easier access to capital markets due to lower start-up costs, so less government involvement may be needed than for those other commercial justifications for a lunar return. However, the status of He3 fusion itself seems sufficiently uncertain that relying on private equity to make it happen could still be a very slow process, at least once development reaches the point of billion-dollar space missions.
This vision for a new day in lunar exploration is very different from what we have been hearing from NASA, even in recent years when a human lunar return has been on the table. There is considerable evidence we have an urgent need for new energy sources. The possibility of exploitation of the Moon for human benefit has hardly crossed public consciousness yet, but it's something that we will increasingly be turning to as humanity reaches limits here on Earth. We should all be grateful Dr. Schmitt has helped here to get that ball rolling.
Arthur Smith is a part-time space advocate and volunteer with the National Space Society."
You can purchase Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Basing policy on technology that doesn't exist seems rather silly at this point.
If the energy crisis is so severe, why isn't America investing in things like pebble bed reactors? With the Iraq war potentially costing $2 trillion dollars, that's a lot of money that could be invested in alternative energy sources.
I know this sometimes seems silly but we need to invest in any projects that lead to plausable human habitation of the moon. Whether it be for resources or for recreation. Earth will NOT be here forever and any steps we can do to begin the transition of being less reliant on the Earth's resources the better off the human race will be in the long run.
Why not just send up the thousands of criminals filling our penal system? Have them work the mines. We'll give them a ticket home when they've served off their sentance.
><));>
The longer a return to the moon is debated, the greater the chance that somebody else out there will just get up and do it. Let's hope that the U.S. private sector hasn't been fettered by legislation at that point so that they can be the ones who finally decide to bite the bullet, or at least follow in the footsteps of whatever nation did.
Other than a picture of Harrison Schmitt and borrowing of his title, I'm not sure why this link appears in this review. Her "ISS is a white elephant" is indeed true. I wonder what Schmitt thinks about this?
doesnt that means we had to go there in the first place? dur
Old news... I've already got the title for my acre of lunar turf.
www.lunarembassy.com
Han shot first.
When the subject is one as potentially important to the future of our civilization as the energy resources geologist Harrison ("Jack") Schmitt sees buried in the lunar surface, along with our future in space, it becomes all the more daunting to take issue with it.
Ok, so we're already screwing up the ecological system of one planet, so all the more reason to start mining the moon too! What a wonderful present to give to future generations. "Sorry about that ozone thing son, we didn't think it would turn out this bad. Oh, sure, the moon is 1/5th it's original size now in due to all the mining, but you can still find it with a telescope in the night sky."
I'm sorry, but isn't it this "let's just mine the blasted thing!" line of thinking that's stifled the advancement of newer energy resources for so long?
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
Mankind has always and will always explore. That's how people spread across the globe. People braved massive oceans and inhospitable conditions just to see what lies ahead. It's who we are. None of the early explorers new if it would be worthwhile or profitable, but they did it anyways.
With that said, humans have scoured this planet pretty well (except the oceans) and space seems like the natural next step. Do we know if it will be worth it? Of course not, but there are never any guarantees.
http://religiousfreaks.com/http://moon.google.com/
Schmitt's potentially inspiring commercial justification in Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy
:)
I can't believe it! That's my "three E's of space travel!" philosphy! The primary difference is "Economy, Energy, and Exploration" (in that order). Which is pretty much the same thing as "Enterprise".
The only thing I don't understand is: What's with this obsession with fusion? Screw fusion. It's perpetually 20 years away. When the eggheads get it working, then we'll worry about going to the moon. Let's think a little more realistically. For example, massive mylar mirrors could focus gigawatts of energy on a space-based, close-cycle Brayton generator. The power can then be beamed back to Earth OR to all the other ventures happening in the solar system. And cheap power in space can mean cheaper costs for manufacturing and propulsion. Cheaper manufacturing and propulsion in space means $$$ for returning valuable materials from Asteriods. Of course, just like with the power, you need an infrastructure to support all that and bring prices down further. So a booming economy appears overnight to support this stuff. Venture capitalist smell money. Before you know it, we won't even remember what it was like when we didn't have space travel.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Has the current consensus really ruled out tokamaks for D-He3 fusion? My understanding is that though it is obviously more difficult, that the benefits of this reaction might make it worth it. Anyone have any decent recent references?
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
After half a century of building big rockets, we now know that they don't work very well. Half a century ago, they were use-once-and-throw-away devices, and they still are. Payloads are still tiny compared to the launch weight, even for the Shuttle. Compare the figures for jet aircraft, which can be half payload.
Reliability is still lousy, too. This is because so much weight reduction is required just to get the things off the ground that they don't have adequate safety margins. About 10-20% of satellite launches still fail, almost half a century after the first one. That number isn't improving, either; in fact, it was a little better in the 1970s. There have only been a few hundred Shuttle flights, and it's crashed once. (Update since I wrote this in 2002: twice). Commercial aircraft flights, by comparison, fail a few times per year, out of millions of flights.
Half a century in aviation took us from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the B-52. Half a century in rocketry took us from the Atlas I to the Atlas V. There's been little progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s. All the major launch systems were created decades ago. So chemical fuels just don't have the power-to-weight ratio for useful space travel. People knew this in the Orion nuclear rocket days; it's a straightforward calculation. It's unfortunate that an Orion wasn't launched once or twice, just to demonstrate that nuclear propulsion is possible.
Coz it is close to us.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Pebble bed reactors offer few, if any advantages over conventional light water reactors. They are safer than old-fasioned reactors, but Generation IV light water reactors would probably be just as safe. Likely they would be more safe because we know more about them from past experience.
Also, it has now been shown that it may be possible to make LWR breeders, which would pretty much solve or energy problems for the foreseeable future.
There is no good reason to waste money on pebble bed reactors when existing solutions are probably superior. If you want to advocate research into obscure reactor designs, you should look into molten salt reactors. The lack of fuel elements makes fuel reprocessing more economically feasible, which may mean reduced waste disposal costs, as well as cheeper breeder reactor alternatives.
You may also wish to look into liquid metal fast reactors, which have a breeding ratio so high that they guarantee a long term supply of future energy. These haven't taken off because of the costs of reprocessing fuel (and the relatively low cost of uranium) but they're much more interesting and potentially beneficial than gas cooled reactors like pebble bed reactors.
Fox says no and so do I , otherwise why is taking a period of 40 years to plan another moon trip.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
No one's played Red Faction?
Really, so if an astronaut becmoe senator writes a cheesy fictionaly thriller novel, or My Ten Favorite Women's Undergarments we'd still have to admire it because of the author?
from wikipedia: Ecology, or ecological science, is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how these properties are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment.
Yes, I would rather we focus not on the moon, but on finding another propulsion method that isn't based on the 'upside-down firecracker' technique we've been using up till now.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
So now you've got a power plant on the moon.... How do you get the power back to Earth?
Because a book review is always far better than reading the book itself.
For thousands of years, mankind thought the moon was made of cheese.
Then we went there and found out it was made of rock.
We haven't been back since.
Behold the power of cheese.
This book is nothing more than propaganda designed to convince us the reason we need to go back to space and the moon is for reasons other than what the government really wants to go there for: maintaining U.S. military supremacy.
;) Seriously though, isn't the future of the world, given the march of technology, productivity, prosperity, more about economics and cooperation than it is about Machiavellian power and control to get the lions share of the wealth produced by that progress? I know, it's hard to tell, isn't it?
They want to establish higher ground in space by making a base on the moon, at L1 and where ever else is useful. They'll also be able to put resources in space that will have 'alternative' military uses or be able to slip in satellites or space based manufacturing with dual purposes.
This is just the first installment of their campaign to create the PR foundation in the public mind, basically tapping into the patriotic glory of the Apollo missions that rightfully lives on in our hearts, to justify the MASSIVE spending 'STAR WARS' will require. Can you think of any other way to accomplish this when we have things like Katrina, healthcare, college costs, the MASSIVE FEDERAL DEFICIT/NATIONAL DEBT?
Now, you might argue that this is prudent on the Pentagon's part because of China, India, etc. who would love to get into space and, they hope, to a level of military power equivalent to the U.S.. There's no doubt China has the money and is getting closer to the engineering necessary every day, but must we continue to up the ante militarily?
Do we really need another arms race? "Can we all just get along?"
This seems to have a lot of similarities to the book "Back to the Moon" by Homeer H. Hickam.
http://www.homerhickam.com/books/moon.shtml
Other then Back to the Moon is meant to be science fiction, the author did explain that the Helium 3 fusion theory that was one of the main plot points in the book was not science fiction. Over all it was a good read and unlike many sci-fi novells most everything in it was feisable with current technology. After all, it was written by a NASA engineer.
If you are looking for a good book you might want to have a look at this.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
for some reason the pic links on spacedaily are wrong. the links are to erosdaily.com - (someone's joke?).
1 280.jpg
this link works-
http://spacedaily.com/images/apollo-schmitt-rock-
Anyone who has seen the Time Machine would know that mining the moon is a really bad idea...
The Chineese have declared that they want to go to the moon, hopefully before 2025. The thought of another communist country establishing a moonbase has forced America's hand. Face it, there is no economic reason to go (other postings here on earth-based HE3 production prove it). The reason is one of image, America is the ONLY country to send humans to the moon and military supremacy. In the same way that Sputnik launched the space race in the 1950s, China's declaration of a moon project spurred NASA to declare that it too will return to Luna.
Maybe we should first raise taxes to build all the antigravity gyroscopes, antigravity superconductors, and static electricity lifters which have ever been invented before we solve all our problems when the helium-3 fusion on the moon.
Be sure to read the fine print. Being dumped part way to the Moon could be uncomfortable.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
From Harrison Schmitt's bio at Nasa (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/schmitt-hh. html):
...
...
"On his first journey into space, Dr. Schmitt occupied the lunar module pilot seat for Apollo 17 -- the last scheduled manned Apollo mission to the United States"
I wonder if he found it
--
The only point of using He3 as a fusion fuel is to reduce neutron production and the consequent radiation hazards. If you're creating He3 using vast streams of fission reactor neutrons, for instance, you're depending on something that Schmitt would like to eliminate.
Not that I think radiation is that much of a problem that it requires this, but there is a rational argument in Schmitt's approach.
Now, would you mind explaining what other "whole range of potential fusors" I omitted in the review? I actually didn't mention magnetic confinement in the article at all, rather I referred to "creating very hot and dense plasmas", which is exactly what magnetic, inertial, and even desktop bubble fusion are trying to do (inertial and bubble create the plasmas for only a brief period, but they are essentially equilibrium systems, as opposed to the highly nonequilibrium case here). Quadrupling the temperature requirement is a pretty darn hard additional constraint on those systems, already struggling to prove they can reach breakeven.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Oh, on point 3 - yes of course at the 1 Watt scale you're putting in a lot more energy than you're getting out. The first step for any energy source is of course to get to the point of positive energy return - but the real point you need to get to is positive economic return; in principle both should come from scaling the technology up to large enough sizes - that is, if the technology even has any potential for positive energy return in the first place. Which IEC fusion may not - sorry if I didn't make that clear in the review.
Energy: time to change the picture.
But the much more reasonable industrial process that cracks stuff into H, O, and leftovers is chemical cracking that uses the nuclear reactor as a heat source, so you can do things that are endothermic. On the moon, that might let you crack oxygen out of various kinds of rock, but if there's no hydrogen in the rocks, then you're not going to get hydrogen. If there's enough nuclear fuel around, it might still be useful, but you've also got the sun as a heat source - it may make more sense to concentrate it using big mirrors, and use the leftover Si/Al/etc. from teh rocks to make more mirrors.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Reactors use fuel to heat water to drive steam driven turbine generators right.
e newable/solar.html#Parabolic%20Troughe o.htm (build 10 of these babies)
How much heat is needed? How many turbines are there? Could we not instead of using uranium, rather
use photos to heat the water from the sun, fed by giant lenses fed by fibre optics, so we could in effect
have lots of collectors 10m wide funnel the light down 1inch fibres all heating the water pipes
which drive the turbines. Sure its only during sunlight, but damn, its 100% free once running. Even during
cloudy days, but not real real dark days. So what surface area do we need to equal a nuke plant? The surface area
of the nukeplant perhaps?
Something like this - http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/sources/r
or http://www.enviromission.com.au/project/video/vid
and http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/QTVapeur.html for more info
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Just make sure we take no religeous people on the moon/mars colonizations. Because it would all just start again 200 years later with another nut case.
When will people learn, instituionalized religeons are dangerous. Personal spirituality never does a crusade.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"Before the time of the great Purification, they will make metal roads for iron horses and hang metal ropes in the air."
"First they will bring back pieces of the Moon which will upset the balance and unleash disastrous forces."
"Near the day of the Great Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky."
"The Purification will begin shortly after humans build a great house in the sky. By then there will be fires everywhere and greedy, selfish, power-mad leaders, internal wars."
~ pre-Colombian Hopi prophecies
Just crazy talk?
http://deoxy.org/omega.htm
We spend $2b/day to handle iraq, yeah we need more taxes.
There is plenty of money around, its just no being spent wisely, because as we know govt departments are not
run on profit/performance, but laziness 9-5 attitude.
Boeing alone would benefit if it paid its own dollars to make anti-g stuff. Imagine planes weighing 90% less, they could then be
10 times larger with same engines, or use 10x smaller engines on current mass.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Ironically, the best reason for replacing coal, the threat of global warming from atmospheric CO2 release, is given short shrift as an "international political issue" in Schmitt's introductory chapter on our energy future. In this and in a bias toward non-governmental solutions, Schmitt's text unfortunately betrays the caution of an incompletely recovered politician.
Having revealed your bias toward government solutions one wonders if you have completely recovered from energy shortage and price fixing schemes of the 1970's?
an ill wind that blows no good
Anytime someone brings up conservation as a solution to the energy crisis, they are accused of being un-American.
Fission power is a miracle until you consider the nuclear waste. And one could argue that after you've figured in the cost of warehousing all that waste (which we keep deferring onto future budgets) that it isn't much cheaper than coal.
The point to all of this should be that there is NO MAGIC BULLET. We have to pursue conservation, green power, upgraded coal plants (with scrubbers), clean coal, natural gas and of course
Fusion reaction only becomes an option when someone produces a practical reactor. Until that time, the concentration of Helium-3 on the moon as it concerns energy policy is about as important as the price of tea in China.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Bacteria are pretty hardy little things.
Besides, I think that humans WOULD survive living underground. Don't think that the governments of the world don't have deep bunkers with a LOT of food and clean water stocks.
The world humans would eventually be able to enter after a couple hundred years would be a pretty terrible place.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Well, the way I figure it the Sun is supposed to bloat and engulf the Earth in a couple billion years. So I figure we probably could probably start planning in a couple million years.
As a backup plan in case of large earth colliding objects, we could simply build underground shelters at various points around the world at 1/1,000,000 of the cost of colonizing the Moon and Mars.
Both habitats would be approximately the same.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Get it? Got it? Good. Now let's go collect our $20,000 billion in riches, shall we?
Ok, you first, I'll be right behind you.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
A space elevator seems like the best bet right now. Carbon nano-tubes are coming along nicely (unlimited potential in the private sector). The big problem may be powering the climbers.
Once you have a space elevator in place, commercial development of orbit becomes a practical issue.
I also like the idea of Mag-propulsion cannons. Build it on the side of a TALL mountain and get an orbiting vehicle into the upper atmosphere, than the vehicle itself would take care of the last leg.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Hurray for Burt Rutan and Paul Allen: Now It's Time to Deep-Six NASA!!!
http://www.lewrockwell.com/grichar/grichar49.html
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I'm glad to see the private sector wasting their own money. Typically they're at the federal coffers trying to get the government to fund them for the sake of their own profit.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
In the 60s, dreams of the future of men in spaceships dominating the planet with super Ray Guns was what drove people to the space race. The world has since figured out that it's all bullshit.
Most sane people realize that colonizing the moon is a colossal waste of money. And this is PRECISELY why Bush wants to go BACK and FURTHERl. Lots of pork for generous aerospace contributors. If they take the same approach as Halliburton, they will charge 20 times as much as the original effort and never actually get there.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
We have barely scratched the earth's surface with our mines. Most mining operations go a few hundred metres at most into a crust many miles thick. It will be a long time before mining space is more viable than mining earth, no matter what figure you make up.
I have no idea where you get the impression that gold, platinum, lead, and other heavy elements can be found on Eros. Eros is an S-type asteroid [http://www.nineplanets.org/asteroids.html#astype% 5D, meaning its composition is mainly nickel-iron with iron and magnesium silicates mixed in. Nothing spectacular or special, quite pedestrian as floating rocks go - there are millions of them out there.
Also worth pointing out to you is what while Earth is not the largest body in the solar system, it is the largest rocky body known anywhere. Therefore it is unlikely that any other rocky body, from planet to floating pebble, will have a greater amount of any element than is found here, certainly not a 33 mile-long floating rock.
Also, none of the minerals you mention are currently uneconomical to mine on earth, the value of some them is rising not because they are running out, but because demand is rising.
Also worth pointing out here is that as Jupiter is a gas giant, it has no surface at all. There's little point discussing mining prospects on the surfaced of a planet that has no surface, but hey, maybe someone will buy a license from you.
Having met Mr. Schmidt some 28 or so years back up the log, I came away with the impression then that he was so full of himself that there wasn't any room left for common sense. I certainly saw no evidence in the fleeting glimpses I got of him that day that could be used as evidence of The Right Stuff.
This was after Apollo 17, and he was on the campaign trail, paired up for his visit to the tv station where I was the CE with Sen. Pete Dominici. Pete had time to talk to all of us, Harrison popped in and out, only condescending to speak to Pete to ask what time the party was tonight. He wasn't the least bit interested in listening to his potential constituents, while Pete was personally taking notes & even came into my office and sat down long enough to smoke a cigarette with me while he took the time to explain the status of a pending bill I was very concerned about.
You can guess which box on the ballot had my checkmarks in it when it went in the box 7 weeks later. And I still think Pete's a better man than W ever will be. Sadly, an honest man doesn't seem to gather enough political clout to muster up a run for the white house.
Anyway, thats my take on Harrison Schmidt. Anything he is promoting should be looked at very very carefully, and then I'm sure that thinking people will give it the thumbs down sign.
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Cheers, Gene
Ok, forget chemical rockets. Here is an interesting article about a 100% reusable nuclear rocket design based on the Saturn V form factor, capable of launching 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit (30x the space shuttle's capacity) and returning an equal size cargo to a soft landing. No exploding atomic bombs (I never could take the Orion concept seriously myself). This design involves a "nuclear lightbulb" engine, consisting of a quartz bulb containing a cloud of gaseous uranium that emits intense energy in the ultraviolet range. Liquid hydrogen flowing over the outside of the bulb absorbs the UV without becoming radioactive, superheats and shoots out of the rocket nozzle.
See e.g. the fusion faq.
This He3 thing keeps coming up as an economic argument for a Moon base. But in addition to the point made in the review, that much development remains to make a He3 fusion process feasible, it also requires that, during the same time, nobody finds a better solution that does not require He3. This seems like a real slender thread to hang a big Moon infrastructure project on.
Let me add one other factoid. The last time we bought some He3, it was somewhere around $5000 per mole. So even if you went with straight He3 + D, which yields about 18 MeV, the cost for the He3 alone would come to around 1 cent per kilowatt hour. My electric company charges me a bit over 4 cents per KWh, so this seems in the ballpark already, without involving the moon. Of course, global He3 production will have to grow by a zillion times if people start using it for electricity, but the resulting economy of scale should make this cost even lower.
Whoever can establish a base on the Moon will also be able to catapult big rocks towards their competition ... way cheaper and cleaner than building and using atomic bombs. The only expensive part would be getting enough people and gear there to get the things started.
... showing China that US and/or Europe are able, have the willpower and also the money to build a Moon base would delay somewhat the nationalization of their Chinese assets in case the leaders in Beijing decide that that would be the only way of staying in charge.
Now, forgetting a moment about Heinlein, all the US and European companies than invested in China should voluntarily pay a tax to help their countries put people on the Moon
Blah blah blah Bremsstrahlung losses, yada yada. Go read the Rider's paper, Todd Rider's, "Fundamental limitations on plasma fusion systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium". Here, have a link.
Aneutronic fusion is "impossible". 3He is silly. I just see little reason to go fusion at all if its going to be heavily neutronic, significantly more neutronic than fision. Just built some molten-salt fision reactors and start burning the nuclear waste we've already got. I dont think we'll run out anytime soon.
I'm obviously not a nuclear engineer, but I got my aneutronic fusion hopes basically dashed. I still havent seen anything to give me hope.