Fair enough, although I'm a little surprised when you say there's no statistical difference between genera.
We haven't previously encountered such a strong negative reaction to the "wingbeat hypothesis," but it's obviously an issue. As a physicist, I appreciate the comparison to perpetual motion machines, and have no desire to make unsupportable claims. I'll point our more mosquito-knowledgeable folks (yes, we do have some involved) at your post and references.
As the lead inventor of this particular piece of bogus technology (Tom N. worked on the project under my direction) I'll politely disagree. Of course, popular articles oversimplify -- we don't expect to be able to identify the species of a single mosquito on the wing with 100% accuracy.
We can, however, measure the frequency at which an individual mosquito flaps its wings, and, on average, that differs from species to species, and differs quite a lot between males and females of a given species. So we can indeed tell individual males from females, and with wingbeat frequency and other data we expect to be able to get a pretty good statistical estimate of the population distribution among species in a given area. And indeed, we are very interested in applications of the system, without the killing mechanism, to collect data on insect populations.
Diffraction. Lasers have a wavelength of around 1 micron; the shortest-wavelength microwaves we can make at high power (using gyrotrons, incidentally; unlike lasers, masers are low power, and are now quite obsolete as microwave amplifiers) are around 2 millimeters, 2000 times longer. The antenna/telescope diameter is proportional to wavelength, and the aperture *area* (which is what costs money) is proportional to the wavelength *squared*.
Actually, not much would happen -- metallic mercury is pretty innocuous. I had a pretty extensive chem lab in the garage at age 9 or so, including about 5 lb of mercury in a bottle -- I'd pour some out and play with the loose drops on a plate. Demonstrating the formation of amalgams by dipping a penny in mercury used to be a common chemistry demonstration.
Mercury vapor is toxic if inhaled, so heating mercury (or working with lots of mercury for a long time) in an enclosed space is bad. And mercury dumped into the environment gets converted to organomercury compounds (which *are* very toxic) quite a bit faster than people thought back in the 60's, which is why most places treat mercury as hazardous waste: they want to discourage people pouring it down drains. But small amounts of metallic mercury? no big deal.
Current technology, low technical risk, capital cost in the $1B - 10B range depending on system size and the cost scaling of the lasers. (The nominal number is $2 billion for a system with 3000 tons/year capacity). Marginal launch cost at least as low as the first generation of space elevators. Growth path to any desired payload size and annual launch capability, and to marginal costs well below $100/lb.
For that matter, fully-reusable rockets can have marginal costs in the same range as the Space Elevator. The capital costs and technical risk are higher than for laser launch, but probably lower than for the Space Elevator.
Space elevators may (or may not) be the cheapest route from Earth to space once transport costs are close to the raw fuel (energy) cost, but we're a very long way from that point.
Sadly, very few of the NIAC ideas have gone very far beyond NIAC Phase II, mainly because NASA does not have the resources to fund both its current and near term activities and put serious money into developing new technologies. (Heck, they don't have enough even for the current activities.) In a competition for budget between a Shuttle or spacecraft program manager with a launch schedule to meet, and an engineer proposing to develop something that will be really useful in 10 years, it's not hard to guess who wins.... And the resources that are available for R&D are mostly "owned" by well-established program areas like electric propulsion and hypersonics. Now and then a new idea will be adopted into NASA planning -- Zubrin's Mars Direct idea of in-situ propellant manufacture comes to mind -- but it's rare.
As a concept development program, NIAC doesn't expect a high success rate. It's much like venture capitalism -- you fund 20 business plans/ideas, and 15 turn out to be failures; 4 are successful enough to keep going as small businesses/R&D programs, and if you're lucky, one is a Google or a Space Elevator (NIAC's most visible success so far.)
Seriously. I've gotten two NIAC phase 1 awards; the final report on one has been cited previously on Slashdot here. The other was for an interstellar propulsion concept; details here
NIAC has put out these calls once or twice a year since the late 90's. It's a cool organization, and I'm not saying that just because they've given me grants -- they've funded lots of really good work in many fields. Now if only NASA proper would follow up on more of it...
Yes, boost phase only lasts a few minutes -- even less for short-range theater ballistic missiles. ABL is designed mainly to counter theater ballistic missiles in wartime (such as the Iraqi Scuds launched during the first Gulf War). It's not really an anti-ICBM system. ABL needs to be within a few hundred miles of the launch site -- though not "directly over" it -- so yes, you need to know roughly where the missiles are likely to come from and have the aircraft deployed nearby. You can do the same job with interceptors (countermissiles) carried on an airplane, but the laser has longer range and costs less per shot (a real problem when you're shooting at Scuds, which are pretty cheap) so the Air Force prefers a laser.
A major advantage of a laser antimissile system (as opposed to, say, an intercepting missile) is that it can strike missiles in the "boost phase" while their engines are still burning, and before they can deploy decoys.
I'd certainly expect to see production of beam modules distributed among several companies, though I suspect the startup cost would be high enough that the optimum number of producers would be 3-10, rather than ~100. My telescope price estimates were based on discussions with a couple of optics and telescope makers, and extrapolation from prices on smaller mass produced telescopes, but I tried to err on the conservative side; the overall system cost is dominated by the lasers even at $100K per telescope, so there wasn't much point in trying to shave the telescope costs (yet).
You've made a few pessemistic assumptions. The required lasers are available -- 60 watts is the power from a single laser diode "bar" but that's irrelevant; 1 kW is already available from a single diode pumped fiber laser.
One would not (initially) try to launch multi-ton payloads; the baseline concept is to start with roughly 100 kg payloads and let the system grow as investment is available. Contrary to your comment, 100 kg is a useful payload for many applications, especially at a marginal launch cost of perhaps $20,000, as compared to $15 million for a Pegasus. However, a laser launcher would not immediately replace all other launch systems; at least to start with, rockets would still be preferred for heavy single payloads.
When and if we do build a big launcher, 12 GW would be a large power load, but not terribly hard to supply. At the moment, the least expensive storage medium is truck batteries (!) at somewhere around 1 cent/watt, but flywheels or superconducting magnetic storage would probably be preferable for an operational system. Ultracapacitors tend to be better for shorter-duration loads than the few hundred seconds required for a laser launch.
And if you read the dedication, "The Big Lifters" is dedicated to me -- well, to LLNL, where I was just starting what became the SDIO Laser Propulsion Program.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, although I'm a little surprised when you say there's no statistical difference between genera. We haven't previously encountered such a strong negative reaction to the "wingbeat hypothesis," but it's obviously an issue. As a physicist, I appreciate the comparison to perpetual motion machines, and have no desire to make unsupportable claims. I'll point our more mosquito-knowledgeable folks (yes, we do have some involved) at your post and references.
As the lead inventor of this particular piece of bogus technology (Tom N. worked on the project under my direction) I'll politely disagree. Of course, popular articles oversimplify -- we don't expect to be able to identify the species of a single mosquito on the wing with 100% accuracy. We can, however, measure the frequency at which an individual mosquito flaps its wings, and, on average, that differs from species to species, and differs quite a lot between males and females of a given species. So we can indeed tell individual males from females, and with wingbeat frequency and other data we expect to be able to get a pretty good statistical estimate of the population distribution among species in a given area. And indeed, we are very interested in applications of the system, without the killing mechanism, to collect data on insect populations.
Diffraction. Lasers have a wavelength of around 1 micron; the shortest-wavelength microwaves we can make at high power (using gyrotrons, incidentally; unlike lasers, masers are low power, and are now quite obsolete as microwave amplifiers) are around 2 millimeters, 2000 times longer. The antenna/telescope diameter is proportional to wavelength, and the aperture *area* (which is what costs money) is proportional to the wavelength *squared*.
Actually, not much would happen -- metallic mercury is pretty innocuous. I had a pretty extensive chem lab in the garage at age 9 or so, including about 5 lb of mercury in a bottle -- I'd pour some out and play with the loose drops on a plate. Demonstrating the formation of amalgams by dipping a penny in mercury used to be a common chemistry demonstration. Mercury vapor is toxic if inhaled, so heating mercury (or working with lots of mercury for a long time) in an enclosed space is bad. And mercury dumped into the environment gets converted to organomercury compounds (which *are* very toxic) quite a bit faster than people thought back in the 60's, which is why most places treat mercury as hazardous waste: they want to discourage people pouring it down drains. But small amounts of metallic mercury? no big deal.
is one scheme: http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fe llows/mar04/897Kare.pdf
Current technology, low technical risk, capital cost in the $1B - 10B range depending on system size and the cost scaling of the lasers. (The nominal number is $2 billion for a system with 3000 tons/year capacity). Marginal launch cost at least as low as the first generation of space elevators. Growth path to any desired payload size and annual launch capability, and to marginal costs well below $100/lb.
For that matter, fully-reusable rockets can have marginal costs in the same range as the Space Elevator. The capital costs and technical risk are higher than for laser launch, but probably lower than for the Space Elevator.
Space elevators may (or may not) be the cheapest route from Earth to space once transport costs are close to the raw fuel (energy) cost, but we're a very long way from that point.
Make me a mole of helium atoms cheaply on an industrial scale? Now that's difficult.
I think you're making a mountain out of a mole(He)
Why, thank you!
As a concept development program, NIAC doesn't expect a high success rate. It's much like venture capitalism -- you fund 20 business plans/ideas, and 15 turn out to be failures; 4 are successful enough to keep going as small businesses/R&D programs, and if you're lucky, one is a Google or a Space Elevator (NIAC's most visible success so far.)
NIAC has put out these calls once or twice a year since the late 90's. It's a cool organization, and I'm not saying that just because they've given me grants -- they've funded lots of really good work in many fields. Now if only NASA proper would follow up on more of it...
Yes, boost phase only lasts a few minutes -- even less for short-range theater ballistic missiles. ABL is designed mainly to counter theater ballistic missiles in wartime (such as the Iraqi Scuds launched during the first Gulf War). It's not really an anti-ICBM system. ABL needs to be within a few hundred miles of the launch site -- though not "directly over" it -- so yes, you need to know roughly where the missiles are likely to come from and have the aircraft deployed nearby. You can do the same job with interceptors (countermissiles) carried on an airplane, but the laser has longer range and costs less per shot (a real problem when you're shooting at Scuds, which are pretty cheap) so the Air Force prefers a laser.
A major advantage of a laser antimissile system (as opposed to, say, an intercepting missile) is that it can strike missiles in the "boost phase" while their engines are still burning, and before they can deploy decoys.
I'd certainly expect to see production of beam modules distributed among several companies, though I suspect the startup cost would be high enough that the optimum number of producers would be 3-10, rather than ~100. My telescope price estimates were based on discussions with a couple of optics and telescope makers, and extrapolation from prices on smaller mass produced telescopes, but I tried to err on the conservative side; the overall system cost is dominated by the lasers even at $100K per telescope, so there wasn't much point in trying to shave the telescope costs (yet).
One would not (initially) try to launch multi-ton payloads; the baseline concept is to start with roughly 100 kg payloads and let the system grow as investment is available. Contrary to your comment, 100 kg is a useful payload for many applications, especially at a marginal launch cost of perhaps $20,000, as compared to $15 million for a Pegasus. However, a laser launcher would not immediately replace all other launch systems; at least to start with, rockets would still be preferred for heavy single payloads.
When and if we do build a big launcher, 12 GW would be a large power load, but not terribly hard to supply. At the moment, the least expensive storage medium is truck batteries (!) at somewhere around 1 cent/watt, but flywheels or superconducting magnetic storage would probably be preferable for an operational system. Ultracapacitors tend to be better for shorter-duration loads than the few hundred seconds required for a laser launch.
-- Jordin Kare
And if you read the dedication, "The Big Lifters" is dedicated to me -- well, to LLNL, where I was just starting what became the SDIO Laser Propulsion Program.