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White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization"
MarkWhittington writes Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for "bootstrapping a solar system civilization." Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose. The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.
Prison colonies!
where did they find oil now?
Start.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Step one: corner the maple syrup market.
Step 1: research on the ISS focused on biosphere components and food production.
Step 2: build a new station to experiment on establishing a small biosphere
Step 3: Expand it to the point that it's food and air sufficient for humans
Step 4: Build a moon base and apply what you learned in LEO to make it self-sufficient
At the same time, work on high efficiency, low reaction mass propulsion systems. This is the real killer. If you can't crack the problem of long distance propulsion systems, we're stuck near earth where we can or make fuel.
they start asking how to get off the planet? Lightweights.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Watch this --> http://youtu.be/ZBrPPnyXc58
Fund NASA to explore the advantages (and mitigate issues, such as waste heat) of using fusion in space vehicles. Let's get new designs in play now, so we can get the ball rolling fast when these compact generators are practical and real. Ion thrusters, magnetic fields, life support... having hundreds of megawatts of power makes the entire solar system within reach for manned space travel.
This is almost the same as asking how we are going to transition to a galactic civilization. From the mile-high-view, quit trying to put humans in places where they have trouble surviving for any period of time. You have to port an ecosystem with you and can still lose it all in a single incident. We haven't even conquered our own biome yet (at least not without a number of side effects). Spaceships with humans is not the answer. Everyone born on Earth will likely die on Earth (with rare exception). This isn't wrong or worrisome insofar as there are no good alternatives yet. System wide or interstellar, it's the same problems at different scales. Ain't nobody helping you halfway between neptune and pluto, nor between the stars.
Durable energy storages that are as simple to fabricate as possible, should be at the top of the list for expansion into the solar system. We basically know what materials are available and what energy sources we can play with. We have long-range communication down to the best case for overriding automation, but our computer science doesn't have a lot of science behind software reliability. One result has been that our automata aren't too bright yet. Let's keep working on understanding the mind while bumping up the work on machine learning. Work on genetics for the far-future possibility of launching biological samples interstellar distances (naturally we will test them in our own solar system first, if we get the chance).
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
You want to encourage exploration/exploitation of space? Fund NASA and point them in the desired direction..
Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal. Dig up a pile of past interplanetary missions and let's start funding them too. Saturn and Jupiter all have possibilities that we need to go look at. How about making a survey of near earth asteroids? What are they made of, is there something there we can use, refine or utilize so we don't have to get it all off the surface of the earth and into orbit? NASA has already suggested all these things and more.
Why are you asking the public for ideas, just FUND NASA and let NASA collect ideas and run with the good ones. All they need is the money....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
When budgets grow at NASA or any other bureaucracy, the admin overhead bloats faster than a new iteration of Windows. It's when budgets decline that folks get creative and make spectacular new ways to soft-land something on Mars, for example. So just vote no for socialized space boondoggles.
Rockets are reasonable in themselves. I don't know why there's this obsession to improve propulsion when that's not the biggest obstacle. The economics of doing stuff in space are. Sure, nuclear propulsion would be nice and useful, but it's not essential.
Seriously, I broke the code, it works. There are a lot of problems integrating modern robotics into useful wholes. Adapting John Von Neumann's work in the 1950's to what we've learned since with Information Science, I have made some theoretical breakthroughs in automation, some as fundamental as adoptiong the use of 1's and 0's was to computing science. The result is an organic whole, enabling self replication to spread across networks of machines, using simple, off the shelf parts and local materials for cheap. It's not just a bootstrap for solar system development, it's a bootstrap for a post-scarcity society.
I'm finishing writing my book and building my prototypes. I have very meagre resources, gladly this system is designed to be cheap. Once my book is complete I plan on realeasing this to the world. Even the first prototypes should be wildly profitable for a very large variety of companies, so I plan on selling DIY kits. I am looking for partners and funding. If you're reading this, Elon Musk, let me know. :-)
If you consider the concept floated (briefly) in the movie: Aliens, the company simply dropped a large atmospheric processing installation on the planet (LV 426, at that time) and began the terraforming process. That's not substantially different than "sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Indeed! The actual key in our current generation is to provide consistent direction and funding to NASA. As it is, every president comes in, makes some big talk about the Moon or Mars or something, no resources are allocated, and the next president in line makes a different set of commitments.
A framework for a large-scale goal that is capable of withstanding our political situation is the thing we lack.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
A 'SimCity' CAD design game (for reg, underground, undersea & space complete living-working spaces.)
What a great opportunity.
Let's take the creative power I've seen in youtube game video such as minecraft and simcity and put that to work.
A simcity type CAD system which allows underground, undersea, and space components with realistic resource needs accessible to other computer analysis.
One the program is designed well, include an interface which would allow others to implement neuro-evolutionary or other weirdly cool PhD computer design research and shit.
An entire education system could be designed around such a tool. Tangents of 'water' resources, as well as most standard scientific concepts. A well designed system would introduce a simplified versions to younger children.
So next will be getting that stuff into space, and for that you build a 'orbital canon' .. space stations, etc. (Will need to work on high-G equipment launch technology, but will need lower G launch vehicles designed and build by NASA or private contractors.
Let's let that be the start. Let me know if you would like more.
Thanks for asking.
No kidding. First manage one presidential term without killing anyone in other countries, and then consider diverting resources to lofty goals.
And why waste money on even collecting ideas? It's not like the republicans are going allow a massive NASA budget increase anyhow, unless it's weaponized.
Yes, but by the time anyone reads your post, that number will be up to six cases.
And by the time anyone reads this post, that number will be up to seven cases.
So if the White House is building a rocket in Area 57 to take mine shaft gap folks into outer space, to, um, "re-spawn" civilization . . . maybe they know something about Ebola that we don't . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Unless you have a few trillion dollar coins stashed away somewhere that'll fund thousands upon thousands of chemical rockets, it's just not possible to do this. The only hope we have of actually getting to a place like Mars, or even the Moon, on a large scale (even with sufficient economic incentive to be there) would be new physics or a wild breakthrough in engineering, at least 30dB more than a re-usable SpaceX rocket would be. There's no guarantee that the former is even possible, and there is a guarantee that the latter won't happen without lots of deep thinking and hard work that needs an economic incentive to be worth-while, because it'll be very expensive and involve lots and lots of failure along the way. You can't force it, and you can't afford it, even if you confiscate everyone's possessions and tax everyone's income at 100%.
I was thinking the same thing. Does this mean we are screwed>?
it isn't just rockets in space that is the problem. when you need 20 pounds of fuel to carry every pound of material to orbit you have a design limitation that needs to be changed.
We need better earth to orbit tech. once we have that the rest becomes much much easier. The ISS took 36 separate launches and we basically have a 10,000 sqft house.
Solve SSTO and watch as we can suddenly start launching more stuff up there.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
NASA is terrible. They take too long to do anything,
Yet, they actually do something.
Once companies takes pictures of Neptune or puts a man on the moon, I'll be suitably impressed.
Until then, they're leeches riding on NASAs skirt, playing around in LEO using NASA-derived designs, and not pushing any boundaries except executive bonuses.
I wish I could believe he was serious.
What else is there to say. When I've been lied to enough I stop believing. Sometimes cynical is just realistic.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Buddy" is punctuation?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. And fuck them up, too.
Current laws make it difficult to justify capitalism when it is known that the results of your efforts may be disallowed. Add the total uncertainty of tax treatment and you have 2 strikes. Add regulatory uncertainty 3 strikes. Hope may spring eternal, but big money investors would like a reasonable chance of return.
Tax dollars could fund prizes, research etc. but governments incentives are frequently little more than politically motivated distractions that distort the marketplace by specifying "how" not "what".
Promise a contract of x number of pounds delivered into LEO for y dollars (gold equivalent) by the year 2025 and you might get something more useful out of your public funding.
Promised contracts for other infrastructure advances -- energy, food, water, education, medicine, etc. could have dramatic economic impacts that would certainly help support space exploration as well as improve things on the ground.
Proper Incentives to solve social issues would also be very positive: curing generational welfare dependency, curing various forms of addiction, preventing crime.
Stopping negative incentives which abound in government -- e.g. war on drugs, huge amounts of money spent, direct and indirect. Say you like using cocaine, limited use may not be destructive at all. But if the behavior is destructive, there is a problem. Can you make it non-addictive, maybe never; we could change policies to limit the destructiveness. The criminal treatment is clearly not working too well for society as a whole. Crony capitalism? Comcast is an exemplar hate by liberals and conservative (though politicians benefit, the public does not). Lots of other possible examples. All of these waste money here and now, freeing up the capital to do better things would clearly help transition to a space economy.
I've ranted long enough.
Nothing will happen until you can build and loft a real power source that can generate hundreds of megawatts of energy to drive the ships and once there, power the outposts.
Solar can be part of that but putting up a solar farm to generate enough power to provide for an actual colony would take hundreds of tons of material as compared to a compact nuke or a fusion device like recently discussed by Lockheed. Think Nuke Sub reactors.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Many of our manufacturing staples: engines, refrigeration, microwave ovens etc are "good" but not "robust".
We will need air scrubbers, heaters, chillers and ventilation systems for air quality. And liquid recycling systems for, well, waste water and gray water processing. There once was a vibrant research path in Closed Loop Environmental Support Systems. Start those up again.
In order to live in space, we need to be able to survive. We will need better and more reliable technologies than we have today. Our current space station is in our bubble, inside the Van Allen belts, we "really" need to move out to the wild west of the general solar system in order to test our ability to survive.
President and Congress direct NASA to carry out such and such programs but fail to provide enough budget. Yes, same whiney post like everyone else.
mfwright@batnet.com
4 years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
From there:
My suggestion for a "Game Changing" project is that NASA (possibly in partnership with NIST) could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore (developed under free and open source non-proprietary licenses as progress towards "open manufacturing").
NASA showed the basic technological feasibility of this with work in the late 1970s on space habitats, and also in a 1980 study called "Advanced Automation for Space Missions".
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on Earth due to long supply lines and the inaccessibility of key manufacturing data (because it is considered proprietary) is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. Addressing such fragility would have immediate benefits to improve intrinsic and mutual security globally, and would help humanity survive in the face of plagues, wars, global climate change, asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and whatever other disasters might strike unexpectedly. As the loss of New Orleans showed, Mother Nature remains a formidable adversary even when people are not fighting amongst themselves over perceived scarce resources.
A NASA-coordinated effort to organize manufacturing information and use it to design such habitats (or seeds that would grow such habitats), as well as improve the state-of-the-art in collaboration software, could thus help meet needs both currently on Earth and in the future in space.
Nothing NASA is doing now compares with this at all in terms of gaining the excitement and participation of the world's technologists and technically-minded youth, given this project would have the scale of the entire FOSS movement applied to manufacturing (and simulation). Achieving this goal of a self-replicating space habitat could justify literally trillions of dollars in effort to create a technological infrastructure that could support quadrillions of human lives in space, making nonsense of current worries of "Limits to Growth" or "Peak Oil" or "Overpopulation" or whatever else.
While NASA could coordinate this effort, many other organizations including NIST (and its SLIM program), DARPA, universities, and manufacturers globally could also participate in this effort.
As a whole, this project would help increase US security as a sort of public outreach by helping the global security community transcend ironic and outdated visions of what security means, given that so much abundance is possible through modern technology and this NASA effort would demonstrate that:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
See here for more details:
http://groups.google.com/group...?
This effort could also be done in conjunction with this other proposal I made:
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA "
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Politicians often discover that when the issue they wish to move forward is resisted by their peers, they can appeal directly to the public. Explain their plan and encourage input from everyone. If they build enough support among the voters, then their peers may be forced to support the plan as well.
Kalil may or may not have support from the White House or anyone, but if he gets a big response to this challenge Obama and others will have to reconsider their reluctance.
Yes, ask the Public, ask schoolchildren in particular. Five million responses from fifth graders is a force to sway elected officials. Furthermore it inspires a new generation to reach for the stars (and distracts them from daily news of terrorists and disease).
[I offer this as a tactic for those who support this sort of thing. I am not convinced that colonizing planets is in our best interest at this time.]
...omphaloskepsis often...
Indeed. I doubt however that with leaders like the human race tends to chose that this is a realistic goal.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
the US is already indebted to the tune of $700,000 per person - colonizing the solar system isn't even a pipe dream at this point.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"bootstrapping a solar system civilization with no additional money"
FTFY.
Invent a space drive. The UFO space aliens already have one. Rockets equal failure.
...funnel money to donors who then go bankrupt shortly after...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
What you propose is impossible. We sill never have a perfect terrestrial civilization.
However, overall when you average out all the global situations, things have never been this good. Where do you draw the line before you say "Good enough. Lets set our goals higher"?
Now it is China that is steadily building a stairway to the moon, while America focuses on a few scientific projects that are charismatic, but underfunding science in general.
1) Destroy instutionalized education and rebuild it with features like Oh, I don't know...how about not penalizing people who think differently and degrees based on contribution to society and not paper exams?
2) How about not destroying our economic base by giving bankers hundreds of trillions in benefits for raping society and well, maybe using that money to build something we need...like a new propulsion tech not based on Newtonian Physics?
I would be willing to bet with 17 trillion dollars that the Bankers go we could probably do something interesting....like open the entire resource base of the solar system to a growing humanity with lots of problems.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
it isn't just rockets in space that is the problem. when you need 20 pounds of fuel to carry every pound of material to orbit you have a design limitation that needs to be changed.
What is the design limitation that needs to be changed? If you need 20 parts propellant to 1 part payload, then just use the 20 parts of propellant. It's not particularly costly.
" send autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"
So we send robots to terraform and prepare a new habitat for humans.
Eventually, after many years, the robots send us a message that says "Everything is ready. We are waiting to meet you all for dinner."
Anyone see a problem with this?
Hey, if it was good enough for Columbus and the European powers in their colonization of America and Australia, "send robots first" is surely good enough for our colonization efforts for the moon and Mars...
We get *this* planet civilized first...?
I think we'd happily ship you off to Somalia or Iraq to help with that...
We've seen this move before. Failing presidents love to propose stuff that they know won't happen in their lifetime. That way, they can't be accused of failure until everyone's forgotten them.
If you really want to accomplish something, you set your sights on something that can happen within a decade, like Kennedy did with a man on the moon.
When you go beyond that, you have no guarantees that some future President Jackoff will think that space exploration is against God's will and shut the whole thing down.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. Light gas gun to get mass preferably h2o into orbit at the lowest $/lbs possible. Opens up fuel, water, and food off world.
2. Some type of lift system: space fountain, space elevator, sky hook chain, or ???
3. Inflatable habitats.
4. Large linear accelerator, e.g. two spinning rocks with a cable in between.
5. IXian no-ships
6. Diaspora
7. Golden Path
Memo to White House: how about tending to our Ebola problem for right now, okay?
1. Universal human rights, including access to clean water and food, or at least arable land and the means to grow food crops.
2. Universal and complete economic and social human equality.
3. Ending (at least virtually) all sickness and disease.
4. Non fossil-fuel-based energy technology.
Once we lick all that we can go out to the other planets and beyond. There would be nothing left to stop us.
Provide low-cost federal insurance for colonization and asteroid mining missions, like we do for nuclear power plants.
Play Command HQ online
To be fair, they are pushing economics boundaries. Which are the only boundaries really holding us back from colonizing the system (and then galaxy).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
A good start would be to actually fund a space agency to do space work. It's just a thought...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
We already had a SSTO it was called the Saturn V.
Uh, no. You're confusing HLLV (heavy lift launch vehicle) with SSTO (single stage to orbit). Saturn V dropped two stages on the way to orbit.
The original Atlas was the closest we've come to an actual flying SSTO, it only dropped the two outboard engines, the tankage and sustainer engine made it the rest of the way.
Now, as a thought experiment you could take the Saturn V second stage and replace its five J2 engines with a Shuttle SSME (and move a bulkhead to allow for the different LH2/LOX burn ratio) and it would make orbit as a single stage. Ditto with the Shuttle External Tank and six SSMEs. But none of those would have reentry and landing capability, and if it's not reusable there's not much point to SSTO.
As for not seeing the point, it must be sad to live in a mind with such limited imagination. My condolences.
-- Alastair
The propellant, by itself, is not costly.
The rocket big enough to launch a meaningful mass of payload when only 5% of what it carries actually makes it into orbit is absurdly, exorbitantly expensive.
Launching tiny payloads isn't that hard. It still costs a lot, per unit mass, but the absolute costs are affordable.
Launching small payloads (a few tons) is pretty bad, price-wise. You may be able to combine your launch with a few others on a medium-sized launch vehicle, but it's still not something that can be done lightly.
Launching medium payloads (a few dozen tons) is basically the state of the art. Actually, nothing flying today can loft even two dozen metric tons, and the best launch vehicles under construction right now can only manage a few times more than that. Even these barely-into-double-digit-payload-tonnage launches are expensive enough that a company can do well making a few such launches a year, while undercutting all their competition and plowing a ton of money into R&D. Governments and large corporations are pretty much the only clients.
Launching large payloads of over a hundred tons hasn't been possible since the Saturn V stack lofted an entire mobile-home-sized space station into orbit. We have nothing that could manage this today, or even on the near horizon; we might have such a thing within two decades.
Launching something huge - for example, anything even close to the size of the ISS, much less anything bigger - will require either an extraordinary breakthrough in rocketry or a completely new launch system.
The biggest human-built object in space right now is the size of a large house, and sleeps six. It took dozens of launches over more than a decade to get it this far, at a cost exceeding the GDP of many nations. It has almost no propulsive capability and is not self-sufficient over long periods. If we ever want to put something much bigger and better in space - even just as a series of small-to-medium launches, like it was - we are going to need to bring the cost to orbit *WAY* down.
Now, in fairness, SpaceX has a pretty good angle on that. As you say, the propellant isn't terribly costly. If we can avoid throwing away the entire rocket with each launch, that will have an enormous effect on the cost of getting stuff to space. With that said, though, we'll still be stuck with a max payload to orbit barely in the triple digits until we come up with a better way to reach orbit than relying on chemical rockets.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Republicans.
Tell them the space program is an effort to protect the one percent from ebola, and to get away from all them do-gooder, pesky Democrats. And all them immigrants. That would shake the money tree.
Will
Trying to live on life support in a radiation bath that vacillates between freezing and boiling.
" send autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"
So we send robots to terraform and prepare a new habitat for humans. Eventually, after many years, the robots send us a message that says "Everything is ready. We are waiting to meet you all for dinner."
Anyone see a problem with this?
Hey, if it was good enough for Columbus and the European powers in their colonization of America and Australia, "send robots first" is surely good enough for our colonization efforts for the moon and Mars...
There's a big difference between Columbus and space exploration. Columbus was going to a place with air, water, and life. It was already self-sustaining. Space is a much harsher mistress than the West Indies.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The subject line says it all, but just to clarify it a bit more, the global power requirement for 2020 is projected to be under 22 TW (we use 20 TW or so right now, depending on how you measure it).
In contrast, mean solar insolation on the planet is around 150,000 TW at ground level. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out from this that our civilization's power needs are completely insignificant compared to the power arriving from the Sun, by orders of magnitude.
Of course we can't harness those 150,000 TW, but 22 TW could be captured using very little acreage (0.015% of the Earth's surface) in any sunny desert, and there are lots of those available. Only a tiny fraction would be needed.
So, I don't know where someone got the idea that solar energy cannot meet our needs, it's so hugely wrong that it's funny.
But wait, the above figures are at ground level . Do you realize how much power could be harnessed in Low Earth Orbit and beamed down safely at low power density? (Design studies for this have already been made.) The amount of power available in LEO is so mind-blowingly enormous that doing a calculation becomes completely pointless. It's astronomic. And we don't have to stop at LEO.
Sorry to burst the bubble of your misconceptions, but you're wrong. Solar energy is, for all human intents and purposes, limitless.
Hey, if it was good enough for Columbus and the European powers in their colonization of America and Australia, "send robots first" is surely good enough for our colonization efforts for the moon and Mars...
There's a big difference between Columbus and space exploration. Columbus was going to a place with air, water, and life. It was already self-sustaining. Space is a much harsher mistress than the West Indies.
Are you sure there's going to be air, water, and life, after you sail off the edge of the world?
It turns out he *ended up* in a place with air, water, and life, but it's not true that there was a guarantee that that's where he was headed when he left port. When he got there, he actually assumed (incorrectly) that he'd gotten to a different place with air, water, and life than he actually ended up going to.
The point is that there was a risk of losing all three ships and their entire crews.
Throwing a colony onto the moon is much less of a problem than, say Mars, but given that people are willing to go to Mars, even knowing ahead of time that it's a one way trip, and that they'll get (at most) six months science out of it before they die there, should tell you something: your obsession with safety, and NASAs obsession with safety, is not shared by everyone.
If you want to send robots, fine: by all means, pay for it yourself. Or if you're so good at robotics, throw up a couple dozen robot factories in Detroit where land is pretty damn cheap, do a bunch of product manufacturing, and have the robots pay their own way. If you want to send people, and make it permanent, however, I'm happy to chip in on it.
Most things can be broken down into sub-100 tonne parts. The problem is not the launch, at least once we stop throwing away our rockets, it's the cost of on-orbit operations. That requires a change in how we work. Ending the standing armies on the ground to support every spanner-turn in space.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
"the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council" Does that even fit on a business card?
Fusion and the following are some of the current research being conducted in this area.
There are others, but the above are the main ones.
.
The other being Molten Salt Reactors in particular Liquid Thorium Floride Reactors
And if you do not have one of the above you can forget about creating a space civilisation, let alone saving mankind from a fate worse than death.
The more I know, the less I know
Why not use the same way they was used in colonised the planet 500 years ago. With the best endeavour ships were constructed and people got on for the new lands. Some didn’t make it, some new towns didn’t make it, but humans did and we now colonise the whole planet
As a baby-boomer, still waiting for my toga and flying car [and unlimited leisure with good pay], I love this.
However I think a clear sub-text is that the 'powers that be' have finally realised that we're fucking this planet over and we're going to need a few other places. No apologies for the language, it's an accurate description of what we're doing.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Such a device would be helpful, if not critical, for the success of colonies away from Earth. It doesn't matter if it's not very efficient, as long as it works, since it could help expand the colonies power generating facilities, life support, etc., and it's probably easier to outfit a colony with a big power supply than with all the chemical products in might possibly need.
I don't find such statements credible unless they put the money where their mouth is on the issue. If they blew what they've blown on the war on drugs on the space program we'd have a colony on mars. Think about that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The best suggestions I have heard consist of two things:
- Clearly defined X-Prizes for private industry: First company to achieve X receives Y prize money, second company receives fraction-of-Y. The total cost of the X-prizes will be a tiny fraction of what a bureaucratic government effort would cost.
- Remove as many regulations as possible from private industry - let it be a "wild west". Example: plenty of people want to volunteer for high-risk space missions. Currently, worker-safety regulations cannot be disregarded, no matter how many waivers the people sign. Get rid of that - as long as people know what they're signing up for, the government should stay out of it.
The de-regulation bit also includes lots of other things. Just as an example, the endless environmental impact assessments required before you can build a launch facility. There are mountains of regulations that stand firmly in the way of actually making progress in space...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't think we can make a spaceship large enough to hold congress and the supreme court at this time. Your idea will have to wait.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We can't even keep the atmosphere on our planet clean. We certainly can't manage to live on other planets. We're going to have to teach our people not to shit where they eat before they're ready to go into space
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Launching everything we need from Earth is too expensive.
True! And yet for 50 years, I could never help noticing, we have de-orbited everything we've sent up! It seems as though noone has given any thought to making things we spend $$$$$ billions and billions $$$$ putting up there so that it will be useful in the future.
It wasn't that long ago that they were talking about de-orbiting the ISS in 2016 !! Gosh, I wonder if there's anything long-lasting enough in the ISS that might be useful later. Gosh, maybe Henry Ford was ONTO something when he discovered standardization of parts. LEGO seems to have figured out how to make a whole lot of stuff work together. Maybe they could hire LEGO.
Huh. I wonder if a plan would be possible. If there were only a bunch of smart guys sitting around in fancy government buildings looking for something challenging to do something that lasts longer than the next election. Instead of looking for more ways to throw more money into the Right pockets.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The problem isn't space. The problem is zero-G.
So you can make a ring and spin it. You can hollow out an asteroid and spin it. Or, presuming you have lots of power, you can simply accelerate in some direction and then decelerate the other way. Any of those ways, the zero-G problems can be made to go away. It's an engineering problem, not a show-stopping, unbeatable environmental problem.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Launching something huge - for example, anything even close to the size of the ISS, much less anything bigger - will require either an extraordinary breakthrough in rocketry or a completely new launch system.
No, it doesn't. The ISS wasn't launched or assembled that way and any other large space station isn't going to be launched in one piece either. Existing rockets can easily launch something like the ISS, piece by piece.
And the price of putting something in orbit has already dropped a considerable amount. Shuttle was crazy expensive, I gather something like $20k per kg for an optimal payload. Falcon 9 is something like $3k per kg.
Further, chemical rockets make a great technological stepping stone to other launch technologies. First, they can create and prove a market for fancier infrastructure. You don't have to do the "build it and they will come" assumption, hoping that your space elevator or whatever will have enough business to justify its existence when there's a thriving rocket market to point to.
They also can be used to launch the initial infrastructure you may need for other approaches or launch stuff that increases demand for more launch infrastructure.
where all the people and things are?
That's the problem. You can't experiment where people live, or where there are things you care about.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
the robots send us a message that says "Everything is ready. We are waiting to meet you all for dinner."
Ummm...
Anyone see a problem with this?
...yeah...
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
In a way they did. They sent expendable seamen and some Italian loudmouth on a few small off-the-shelf commercial ships. Only when the destination was proven did they risk their more valuable people on more valuable ships.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Presently working or theoretical? If you want "presently working", then that would defeat the point of asking for suggestions, would it not? If you want theoretical, there's tons. I kind of like the Launch Loop concept - sort of like a space elevator except that it doesn't require unobtanium, avoids or reduces the countless other problems with space elevators (micrometeorite damage, oscillation modes, power transfer, lightning and ionospheric discharge, and about 50 other things), and it gives you much more ideal/customizable orbital momentum, plus is 1-2 orders of magnitude more energy efficient at lifting cargo (space elevator climbers have to rely on beamed power, there's no practical way to send it through the cable, and beamed power over great distances where one receiver is only a few square meters at best is very low efficiency) AND offers a far higher launch rate.
Earth-based space elevators, the stuff of sci-fi nerd dreams, really are an awful solution when you start looking at the details. There's far better solutions out there.
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
Step 1: Build permanent habitation in orbit. In a way that can easily be converted to a "space dock".
Step 2: Use it as a launch pad for permanent habitation on the Moon. Build the infrastructure, build large (mega-engineering projects). Once it's done, THEN move people in permanently. Use this method as the basis for expansion elsewhere in the solar system.
Step 3: Once permanent habitation has been done within Earth-orbit, send out automated devices to construct a similar space dock in Mars orbit, and possibly one in Venus orbit.
Step 4: Use the Mars dock as a launch pad for permanent habitation on Mars using the Moon's habitation as a template. Due to Venus' EXTREMELY unfriendly atmosphere, I'd likely say convert the Venus station into a solar power-to-battery facility.
Step 5: Once the Moon and Mars colonies are firmly established, use the template for occupying the moons of the outer planets.
Basically the orbital facilities would be staging areas for occupation of the various planets/moons. They serve as fall-back points in case of catastrophe. And, once the colony was safely established, they'd become fuel depots.
Going with a "launch from orbit" model also saves fuel and wear and tear on interplanetary vehicles.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Oh, that Obama! The only President ever to play golf while in office.
The shuttle wasn't thrown away, nor were the boosters - only the (rather simple) ET. How did that work out, price-wise?
It's simply not fair to pretend that launch costs are a minor issue. They are the limiting factor, and progress in reducing costs has been lethargic over the past decades. "in orbit operations" are expensive precisely because launch costs are so high. Bargain basement, pay-out-the-nose-for-insurance launch rates are $4-5k a kilogram. More typical Russian rates are about $6-7k, while typical US and European rates run about $10k. And that's for large payloads, for small payloads expect in the (very) rough ballpark of $20k. How do you expect to live affordably in space if launch costs are even within an order of magnitude of that?
That's not to say that rockets fundamentally can't provide cheap access to space. But today's rockets certainly can't.
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
Ask the guys who make Fischertechnik instead. LEGO ist mostly for architects (with a little bit of engineering stuff thrown in); Fischertechnik is solely for engineers.
The space shuttle was a 100+ ton space-plane launched on a Saturn V class launcher. Built without any real precursors, from 1970s technology. Every aspect of it pushed the technology beyond the state-of-the-art. No part of it was built to reduce operating costs. The original proposal sold to Nixon may have been to develop a low cost "space truck", but that was never part of the actual program development goals.
OTOH, Falcon 9 was intended solely to be cheap. And is already the cheapest launcher on the market as an expendable. Even partial reusability (first stage) is expected to lower launch costs significantly. Musk claims that launch operations costs are a small part of his launch costs, and even that will probably drop once his team controls their own site and range.
This gets back to moving away from the "standing army" model of spaceflight operations.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Everyone is cracking jokes, or discussing how it can be accomplished, but has anyone wondered why the interest all of the sudden? Do they know something that we don't?
If it does have this "critical mass" of assets, it has the potential to grow exponentially.
.. and are questionable boot strapping projects.
The biggest cost and therefore barrier to Space exploration is launch costs. These needs to be side stepped.
Launch a design prize for low cost probes to be sent in their dozens, hundreds or perhaps even
thousands to the asteroid belt on low energy transfer trajectories. These need to include cheap & reliable ways to analyse the asteroids for useful materials.
Have a second round to design low cost extraction 'bots' to follow up the analysis probes to 'mine' those materials. These could hoard the supplies or even again use low energy transfer to Earth/Lunar Lagrangian points.
Sell futures to fund the next step based on the value of those materials.
We don't need (and probably don't want) full functional Von Neumann machines.
Oh, the hibris of politicians. Once self-sufficient space colonies exist, it is highly unlikely terrestrial governments will have any hold on them. There will be a solar system civilization, but the USG will not be a part of it for long.
And it's pretty cool:
The integrated space plan is an update of the document originally drawn up in the 1980s, and has been variously rediscovered since.
It's a long-view look at where we need to go and what we need to get there. In the 1980s, commercial spaceflight was envisioned somewhat differently than it's happened, and robotics have gotten way more capable, so the refresh is definitely needed.
Does it really beat SeaLaunch? I can find no hard numbers.
We cannot make a Saturn V right now if the world depended on it. Also the Saturn V used basically 1 planetary output of energy at the time to get out of the gravity well. There are much better options.
This article argues that Elon Musk is in many ways like Werner Von Braun or the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev (who pushed the Soviets into space). One thing I got from this article was that the original and primary motivation for building rockets was to make weapons. Von Braun and Kovolev almost singlehandedly pushed their own countries into building rockets to put people into space. Without them, we might not have had satellites as quickly or at all. Placing satellites into orbit and putting humans into orbit was once considered crazy. American government officials considered Von Braun to be eccentric, but they didn't care as long as he gave them better ICBM's. Now our entire civilization is built around satellite technology, and our moon shots have brought us technology advances such as the microchip.
When we talk about putting more humans it can sound a little crazy. However I don't think it is any more crazy than having people climb Mt. Everest, having bases in Antarctica, or sending three small ships westward into the unknown ocean to find a new world. We humans have an inbuilt desire to explore. To ignore that is to go against our fundamental nature.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Well, it *is* a competition, but that doesn't mean that everyone can't be winners, some will just win more than others. And the first group to develop viable technology will have a first-mover advantage, even if the competition piggybacks on their research. There are after all "magic" spots in the solar system that are far more valuable than the rest, and the first major government-backed group to colonize them will likely be able to make their claims stick, international treaties be damned. Some examples:
The Peaks of Eternal Light, the only places on the moon where solar power is available continuously.
Lunar glaciers - water is a valuable and heavy resource in space, and there's only a few known
The closest point on the moon, and Earth-moon L1 point - the combination of which is one of only two regions where you can build a lunar space elevator, and the only one where the far tip can potentially match the tangential velocity of Earth's surface.
The Earth-moon L4 and L5 points - the most energetically accessible spots from the moon, and hence prime real estate for space colonies built with lunar resources.
The Earth-sun L4 and L5 points - home of the most energetically accessible asteroids from Earth, ideal for early asteroid development, and a potential site for long-term space colonies that want to maintain easy contact with Earth.
And of course if we're talking asteroid colonization, not all asteroids are created equal - it will be a race to locate and claim the largest and richest candidates. Likewise on planets there will be competition for the most resource-rich areas.
Oh, and two more - the moons of Mars. Really just huge asteroids, but they would make excellent massive space stations around a planet that will likely one day have it's own thriving economy, and are small enough that a dedicated enough actor could likely claim the whole thing early on.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Easy: first build several *real* space stations, not "outposts in space", that serve the same way airports do, and use orbit-to-orbit ships - true spacegoing vessels. Once those are up, interplanetary travel is *much* cheaper.
Then we build the magelev launchers on the Moon....
mark
The shuttle also wasn't a launch vehicle so much as a general purpose "do everything and none of it well" space platform. It was also the payload, not the rocket. The rockets that got it into orbit were thrown away, the only part reused were essentially orbital maneuvering thrusters - the ones burning that one pound of propellant that cost twenty pounds to get into orbit.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You're off by an order of magnitude there - US debt is currently approaching $18 trillion, or about $56k per person.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Twenty odd countries with "space programs" but no one has the means to put a human on the moon any more (which people did in the 60's!).
Everyone gets more and more ambitious with their goals while related capabilities are being lost forever.
Apologies to the Draper watchers: we really had it better back then.
Anyway, I'd rather keep *my* tax dollars on the earth so I can spend it on my kids and not the religious pursuit of Science.
So long as we only live on Earth we're only one good asteroid impact or unstable bioweapon away from extinction. We know the first happens on a fairly regular basis, and do you really want to bet against the latter?
Plus space is incredibly resource rich - we've got mountains of nickel-steel just floating in space, contaminated with valuable things like gold, silver, platinum, and transuranics. So long as we've got a capitalistic economy space colonization will pay for itself, it's only the initial investment that's problematic.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Once plants, animals, and people can survive off of moon dust and rocks and breath helium, then things start to get easier.
In fairness, managing controlled habitats will likely teach us a great deal about how to manage things here on Earth - experimenting on the biosphere supporting the entire human species is generally considered poor risk management.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal.
Don't think it's possible actually. There's simply too much stuff that still needs to be worked out. Heavy launchers haven't even shown up yet. After that we still had to work out long term deep space habitats that despite the knowledge to even try and build them will take a while to work out the engineering bugs and get them good enough that they'll work for a two and half year trip away from help. Once we actually get to Mars, there is a whole series of problems with getting something capable of carrying a man down to the surface and back due to an atmosphere that isn't quite thick enough to help us and too thick to ignore. Apollo 1 didn't take men to the moon and the first in the Mars mission series won't take people to Mars.
Entertaining myths aside, by the time Columbus set sail time it educated Europeans had known that the world was round for centuries, they had even known how big it was to within a few percent. It's actually a rather simple thing to measure for anyone with a decent grasp of geometry.
Columbus's gamble was just that the Indies would be faster to reach by going west than east. As it happens he grossly overestimated the width of Eurasia (measuring longitude directly was almost impossible at the time, so mostly had to be estimated from travel times), and his estimates put the east coast roughly where he encountered the Americas. He was never risking sailing off the edge of the world, though perhaps some of his less educated sailors feared it, he was only risking discovering that Asia was considerably further away that he had estimated and couldn't actually be cost-effectively reached by crossing the open ocean. And mutiny I suppose.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How about we first focus on the dangerous rouge states with large confirmed nuclear arsenals and the better part of a century of history of stirring up trouble all over the world. I'm speaking of the US of course.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
First organization to establish a manned colony for one year owns wherever that colony is, up to an area of 10 million square miles.
I think you mean, first person to set up space snipers to ward off the competition, gets all the space territory they want.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Some of the things that would be really great to launch - say, a "Project Orion"-style nuclear pulse rocket (NPR) - aren't feasible without a tremendous mass. NPRs can actually accelerate faster the more massive they are, because they can take the impacts better.
Putting 1000 tonnes in orbit - which would be a *small* NPR - would take about as many launches to build as the ISS did... if we can use the Flacon Heavy for each one. That's ignoring the cost and risk of assembling it in space (and the cost is high, because that means you need to get the equipment and people into orbit too, plus the infrastructure they require). The pusher plate of an NPR is, by itself, probably going to be too heavy for a Falcon Heavy, so it will need to be constructed in space... which would basically mean an entire orbital foundry!
Some things just don't break down into little pieces in an economical fashion.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Some things just don't break down into little pieces in an economical fashion.
Then I guess we better focus in the near term on things that can be launched in small pieces. I'm not going to support, say, a 200 ton to orbit launch vehicle just because someone can think of peculiar payloads that a 20 ton vehicle can't launch. Capability != utility. We still have yet to have a reason for putting that 1000 ton NPR in orbit.
And I'll note that one can get decent performance out of a variety of competitive propulsion/powerplant combinations which can be broken down into small pieces.
Finally, if we are going to launch large unwieldy structures into space from Solar System bodies, then the Moon is a better place to do so, both because delta v is much smaller, but also because there is no atmosphere and hence, a much weaker restriction on fairing size (it just needs to be able to withstanding the acceleration of launch without damage). A near Earth asteroid might even be a better choice, especially if it can be moved to Earth orbit first.
How about we first focus on the dangerous rouge states with large confirmed nuclear arsenals and the better part of a century of history of stirring up trouble all over the world. I'm speaking of the US of course.
If by "stirring up trouble", you mean "not allowing Arab countries who deny the right of Israel to exist as a nation-state to destroy Israel without giving Israel aid", how about we don't, and they instead just agree to quit shooting at Israel, and Israel agrees to quit shooting back?
I'd go back even further - while it was the UK rather than the US that initiated the action we certainly backed them up when we carved out a chunk of choice territory in the middle of a bunch of recently defeated Arab countries and gave it to the Israelis, who already had a long history of bad blood with their new (and very old) neighbors. A pretty transparent strategy for establish a foothold in the region through a group who would be virtually guaranteed to need our ongoing military support indefinitely. Or how we continue to support them despite the fact that they have been aggressively expanding almost since day one, in direct violation of every treaty they've ever establish with their neighbors.
Or perhaps the many governments around the world that the CIA has had hand in toppling in order to install others more receptive to our interests. Hell, even Saddam Hussein was our man - we toppled the previous democratic government when it looked like they were going to ally with the Russians, and supplied him with much of the training and chemical weapons he used against his populace. We had no problem with his atrocities him until he decided to go independent and stopped jumping whenever we asked.
But at least where global opinion is concerned, it's been our most recent actions in response to (and since) the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen Saudi Arabians, along with one Egyption, one Lebanese, and two men from the United Arab Emirates flew some hijacked planes into some buildings, and we used the event as an excuse to invade Iraq, a nation completely uninvolved in the attacks. And our actions just spiraled downhill from their - you could scarcely have planned a better response to throw the Middle East into turmoil. And everywhere our military goes our corporations just happen to spring up right behind them, siphoning wealth out of the region as fast as possible while we make little more than symbolic attempts to stabilize the region or secure the infrastructure necessary to the health and security of the populace we claimed to be liberating.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A good starting point would be to offer the IS people an Islamic Caliphate in some of the heavenly bodies of our solar system... and not in just any of these heavenly body but it in most important one!! As a sign of our love and appreciation we could offer them a Caliphate in de Sun.
And why wait? we should start right now!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Sounds to me as if Mr. Kalil wants a pony before he can take care of a hamster. I suggest that he first understand the implications of the exponential function and why growth as we know it today has an expiration date. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date You can follow Tom on his blog at http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
Yet another "Ready, Fire, Aim" sally from the blind, deaf and dumb contingent. Please DO go on, it's absolutely fascinating. :)
You might start with your definition of a "libshit"; is that a left winger? A libertarian? A librarian? What?
Also, I was dreadfully sorry to learn that your sense of humor was shot off in the war.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Once we give up our meatbag bodies, a lot of the physics problems go away.
Admittedly, the tech to upload our brains into computers is a ways off, but it doesn't require amazing physics breakthroughs to get there (eg. wormholes, antigravity, FTL travel etc.).
We can send our computer brains off the planet at much higher Gs, not have to worry too much about flight time to other solar systems, and can grow and download back into meatbags at the final destination if we still desire such things.
Title aside, I hate the movie - dude, why didn't you just make multiple backups of yourself?