White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization" 352
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.
Biggest motivation? (Score:2, Funny)
Prison colonies!
Re: Biggest motivation? (Score:2)
How to bootstrap a solar System civilization: Take all military dounds and give them to nasa.
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Re:Biggest motivation? (Score:5, Funny)
The only problem with that is that their descendents will then come back in 200 years and beat our descendents in all the sports we invented.
Just impractical (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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We don't have to send them all at once, and we can boost payload by leaving out nonessentials like air and water.
Satellites were Once Considered Crazy (Score:3)
This article [thespacereview.com] 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 i
so...... (Score:2, Funny)
where did they find oil now?
Re:so...... (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't speculate on the intentions of OC. But bringing up oil does raise a very legitimate item of concern. For much of the 20th century, petroleum has been the critical resource that drove or enabled much of our civilization and technical infrastructure. If we are going to look skyward, we have *GOT* to start thinking differently about the resource(s) that we are going to use. Unless big oil is willing to shell out the cash for researching the exploration and mining of hydrocarbons in the Jovian system, our government has got to step up and look at what we need to power space travel on an industrial scale.
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Power Source (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Power Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and meant to mention: solar panels are really only promising in the inner solar system, and there's just not much worth colonizing inwards of Earth and its L-points. On Mars you only have 43% of the solar intensity, so you'll be getting only 130W/kg. At about 2 AU the asteroid belt will only see ~25%, and at over 5 AU the Trojans and Jovian moons are seeing less than 4%. And then there's everything beyond Neptune, where the sun is little more than a particularly bright star - lots of mineral wealth floating out there - I've heard estimates that the Oort cloud might extend as far as a light year from the sun.
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Trade studies have suggested that out to the main asteroid belt, aerospace grade solar panels have a higher power/mass ratio than nuclear systems. Only out near Jupiter does the equation shift (but even that is only counting the direct reactor mass. The added mass of shielding, trusses for distance, etc, is usually not included.) And every year, the cross-over distance shifts further out.
The exception is where sunlight is unavailable — Lunar night, Mars winter — where the length of darkness exce
Re:Power Source (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, when it comes to propulsion, nukes are the bees knees. No form of currently-achievable propulsion yields a higher Isp than a fission fragment rocket [wikipedia.org], with the exception of photonic / magnetic sails, which are impractically low thrust for interplanetary travel. Some day I'd love to run some simulations as to whether you could have a spallation-driven subcritical [wikipedia.org] dusty fission reactor get rid of much if not all of the moderator mass (power to drive the accelerator should be copious from a fission fragment reactor), and whether you could run one in an infrared nuclear lightbulb [wikipedia.org] mode (making use of the electrostatically-contained dust's extreme surface area and low IR absorption spectrum to get high output, rather than using extreme, unmanageable temperatures to get high output as in a traditional nuclear lightbulb concept), thus opening up non-dirty high thrust power modes for surface operation (airbreathing, simple fuel heating, etc, including using electricity from fragment deceleration to run a microwave beam to help ionize the air/fuel and make it more opaque to IR) and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)
Re:Power Source (Score:4, Interesting)
We're so far from FFR, we might as well talk about fusion drives, or Harold White's warp drive.
and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)
My previous comments apply to NEP vs SEP. SEP has better power/mass ratios until you are somewhere near Jupiter, and realistically probably somewhere past Jupiter.
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I totally disagree. A dusty fission fragment reactor has been demonstrated using a non-nuclear substitute fuel, which demonstrated proper containment and thermal management. And modelling shows that such a configuration should produce a collimated fission fragment beam. So what's so grossly impractical? Have you come across a paper indicating that it's impractical? Because I sure haven't.
I'm not talking about NEP. I'm talking about generating a RF plasma and funnelling it t
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Very large radiators. [tauzero.aero]
And the radiators must be protected behind a heavy shield, because the radiation degrades them too quickly. Most designs have the reactor, then a heavy shield, a long truss and then the rest of the ship. Running down the length of the truss, carefully shaped to remain in the shadow of the shield, you have huge radiators to dump the heat from the reactor. The truss, the radiators and the shield are all additional mass required for a nuclear propulsion on top of the reactor mass. Solar ar
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>where does the heat go?
Well, if you're on a planet, moon, or sufficiently large asteroid you can dump it into the ground. I free space, as others have said, honking big radiators.
Or... you use p-B fusion. The energy is released as high-speed He4 ions with a narrow range of kinetic energies, which can easily be converted directly to electricity with near 100% efficiency. Plus with negligible radiation you don't need much shielding. We're a ways away from a break-even reactor yet, but the Polywell wil
Re: Power Source (Score:2)
What about a simple nuclear reactor where the fuel is recycled? From a size and weight to energy prodution/output, would be ideal. Given space ship construction and sub construction, doesn't seem like a difficult or costly modification to use existing reactor designs and convert to space uses. Course there is dealing with no gravity aspect, but shouldn't be to tricky.
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Funny you mention Subs. I was thinking about that this morning.
Subs are built for very hostile environments, and that's without people shooting at them. Take the principals of sub building and modify them appropriately...aluminum instead of steel, structures to hold air in instead of water out, etc. and you have a pretty good game plan for building an actual space ship instead of a soda can with windows.
One word: (Score:5, Insightful)
Start.
Re:One word: (Score:5, Funny)
I think we would be better off going 100% silver bullets. That would instantly fix everything.
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even if we were to go 100% solar tomorrow, we wouldn't have enough energy for this world. Period.
You're way off. [washingtonpost.com]
Solar insolation is 150,000 TW, we need 22 TW (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:One word: (Score:4, Insightful)
Comments like your always scare me - the last thing we need is for people to think that "100% solar" (or, "100% some powersource") is in any way relevant to meeting our powerneeds.
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Step one (Score:4, Funny)
Step one: corner the maple syrup market.
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some one tried to steal the strategic maple syrup reserve a few years ago. probably was you
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If you want to make the serious money, look into frozen concentrated orange juice futures.
Baby steps (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Step 2: build a new station to experiment on establishing a small biosphere
I think this is a problem that we need to confront first: Figuring out how to live in a sustainable closed system.
Were people ever successful in those bio-dome experiments? Are we now able to build an enclosed biosphere that can function sustainably, indefinitely, without bringing in materials or resources from the outside once you get started? There's not much point in trying to build something like that in space until we know how to build a sustainable closed system, reliably, without fail, here on Ear
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Step 0: Put men & women into space for 3-5 years and see if anyone is left functionally able to continue doing work at the end of that time. It is already highly suspect that people would be able to see by the end of 3-5 years. We have one heck of a lot to learn yet.
If people can't stay alive for 3 years, then figure out how to do it before you continue further.
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It makes far more sense to skip the space station beyond simple research and head straight back to the moon. Gravity helps, rather than hinders when it comes to colonising and space has no resources to use unlike the moon. Self sufficiency research can be done quite effectively on the earth, the moon is all about achieving launches in a far lower gravity well. When it comes to radiation protection et al light weight earthmoving (moon dust) equipment can achieve much more than trying to get that mass into o
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People always overlook the need for a thermodynamic sink...
Sheesh. Five cases of Ebola and (Score:4, Funny)
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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 . . . ?
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I was thinking the same thing. Does this mean we are screwed>?
Begin planning use of Lockheed's fusion power (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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We don't have to wait 10 years for Lockheed to make the fusion reactor work. Fission rockets are plenty powerful, enough to rule the solar system.
Plus there's always the chance that Lockheed fusion turns out to be a dead end and we're left with nothing.
Behold, the gaseous core nuclear thermal rocket, Liberty ship [nextbigfuture.com]
3,060 ISP
1,000 ton payload to LEO
But since it's eeevil nuclear power (and fission at that), it will never get built in the US. But hopefully in the future China or some other country not under the t
Re:Begin planning use of Lockheed's fusion power (Score:4, Insightful)
Those wimpy environ-liberals are so weak they fear being irradiated by exploding rockets. Where is the fun in that. I look forward to having three eyes and a tail.
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Great! Now you just need to invent an actually functional confinement method for the absurdly-hot gaseous/plasma nuclear fuel to stop it from destroying its containment vessel or leaking out its fuel in short order. And while you're at it, you should probably go ahead and invent a way to stop the quartz / fused silica bulb from undergoing blackening when exposed to a neutron flux, something it's so prone to doing that people deliberately expose quartz to nuclear reactors to make opaque black quartz for jewe
Re:Begin planning use of Lockheed's fusion power (Score:2)
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They do on a shoestring in a month what NASA does for billions in 20 years.
... using NASA designs as the foundation.
If they had to research everything from scratch, they would go nowhere. It wasn't a public company that sent up the first space vessel, nor the first satellite, nor the first manned spacecraft, nor the first satellite, nor the first interplanetary vessel, nor the first manned trip to another world, nor.... Catch my drift?
Private enterprises are good at cashing in money on other people's work. But they seldom push the envelope or break boundaries.
Robots (Score:2, Interesting)
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 is
You want an idea? How about we fund NASA? (Score:5, Interesting)
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....
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Re:You want an idea? How about we fund NASA? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You want an idea? How about we fund NASA? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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To be fair, they are pushing economics boundaries. Which are the only boundaries really holding us back from colonizing the system (and then galaxy).
I've got the problem solved. (Score:2)
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 fo
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I wish I could, but I've made the commitment not to share until my literature is done. I also don't have anything saleable, as my prototype, modest that it is, is not finished. The only thing that would help me speed up right now is an angel investor, as I'm totally cash strapped. My current stretch goal is to save up for a 3D printer, as I found that there are some features that macguyvering from my local hardware store just won't do. Yes I'm that poor! LOL (Disclaimer: While very useful, my work ha
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I almost forgot, a link! LOL If anyone wants to contact me, my email is spatialautomation at the usual Google domain.
not really a radically new idea (Score:2)
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"
Get real (Score:2)
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Unless you have a few trillion dollar coins stashed away somewhere that'll fund thousands upon thousands of chemical rockets
Maybe they're looking for a cover story for "thousands upon thousands of chemical rockets" that they're planning to build anyway.
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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
this is, of course, 100% true.
but, in light of this administrations total incompetence on so many issues, i think the plan is just...
"hey, dream whatever ideas, we will get funding and then make announcements and speeches about how smart we are, and it doesn't even matter if they ideas succeed or not, we will just say they did!
it's our intentions that
Your forgot the part where they... (Score:2)
...funnel money to donors who then go bankrupt shortly after...
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What will enable exploration and development on a modest budget scale is use of local resources or (ISRU -
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I wish I could believe he was serious. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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If I really wanted to do something the world generally thought of as ridiculous, I would try to get something moving under a lame duck term. It's not like he can accomplish anything major, but setting things in motion.
Unfortunately, it's easier to post "It's a distraction from X" than it is to come up with a few reasonably sane ideas based on all of the science fiction ever.
What little we have learned in our lifetimes, we should be able to put to use correcting the errors in what we have read.
fund NASA to match programs directed? (Score:2)
Suggested self-replicating space habitats (Score:2)
4 years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... [ideascale.com]
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 habi
best idea: ask for good ideas (Score:2)
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
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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.
Absolutely true.
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.
Now you're not being cynical enough. I think this challenge is likely to be the result of a direct White House request to come up with some good "news for nerds." I don't think it's a coincidence that we are weeks from an election that Democrats are dreading (publicly or not). It's aimed at a core voting/donating demographic that largely supported Obama but now is ticked off about the NSA, the IRS, government transparency, the Middle East, and a bunch of other things. There's no commitment,
That's not quite what they want: (Score:2)
"bootstrapping a solar system civilization with no additional money"
FTFY.
invent a space drive (Score:2)
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Don't you read?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
http://beta.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Sunset over an Empire. (Score:2)
Mars, bitches! (Score:2)
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
Easy. (Score:2)
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
Borders (Score:2)
Human Rights and Equality (Score:2)
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.
Insurance (Score:4, Insightful)
Provide low-cost federal insurance for colonization and asteroid mining missions, like we do for nuclear power plants.
Nasa (Score:2)
space gets defunded all the time... (Score:3)
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.
Basic plan (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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 t
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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 [wikipedia.org] 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
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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.
Re: How about... (Score:2)
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.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Indeed. I doubt however that with leaders like the human race tends to chose that this is a realistic goal.
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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"?
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" 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...
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" 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.
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We get *this* planet civilized first...?
I think we'd happily ship you off to Somalia or Iraq to help with that...
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Trying to live on life support in a radiation bath that vacillates between freezing and boiling.
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500 million for the light gas gun.