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More Of The "Wright Stuff"



 
 
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  #1  
Old December 17th 03, 03:19 PM
Rand Simberg
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Default More Of The "Wright Stuff"

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0312170856.asp

  #2  
Old December 27th 03, 04:56 PM
Tony Rusi
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Default More Of The "Wright Stuff"...we need a different focus

h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0312170856.asp

Rand once again, you are "Wright" on! For centuries now, it has been
all about landings, as the Beagle 2 has shown us, it isn't that easy
to land safely on Mars. I would suggest that this is again evidence
that the best thing that can happen to the world of aerospace progress
is (if by magic) NASA would be completely axed, abolished forever, and
our minds were blanked out as to its very existence, erased from
History as it were.

How many more lost government funded robotic explorers will it take
for electrical and robotic engineers to admit that they do not
necesarilly operate any more cheaply or more sucessfully than the
government funded manned space projects? (Well their failures cost
less I guess. So we are bleeding taxpayers more slowly.)

I was talking to my relatives about Spaceship One over Christmas. Not
one of them, not a single one, had heard anything about Rutan's team
breaking the sound barrier on 17 December, 2003. And when I explained
to my new Vietnamese father in-law, who was an air traffic controller,
about Rutan and the X-prize, he asked me a very good question. "So?"

Of what benefit is "private cheap access" to sub-orbit in general?
Nearly zero. Maybe it will lead to "PCA" to orbit in the long run?
What good is that to the general public? There I got into some pretty
intense rhetoric (with lots of hand waiving) about Rutan's vision of
neighborhood access to the community rocket for weekend flights to
Austrailia from California for the family on their own private
reusable rocketship. The mythical, elusive, dream- machine, the Mach
25 Personal Private RLV. "So?"

If you have relatives down under it may be nice to go visit them on a
weekend, in your Mach 25 PPRLV, if it doesn't pollute much, and if it
was as cheap to operate as a commercial jet. Is that Likely? I bet not
anytime soon! "So?"

The Euros seem to have a different focus, Scotland announced a
national goal of 40% green energy in the two next decades. They don't
have eco-bird freaks stopping off-shore wind turbine farms in Scotland
I guess. America gets a little more than 1% of its electrical energy
from wind power right now. My friend K. Mark Caviezel, one of Zubrin's
minions, has rightly said that solar cells and wind mills will always
be cheaper right here on mother earth. Even on terra firma,
transportation costs for windmills usually run over 10% of total cost.
Is there any way to acually ever make a dime in space that does not
involve a government organization as "the customer"??

I just became aware of the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter or JIMO project,
it involves nuclear power plants ten times bigger than we have ever
done in space to go put sensors and a UAV submarine with an RTG heated
nose on Europa to bore thru its ice shell and find an underwater
thermal vent and possibly the first evidence of extra-terrestrial
life. (They will also make very good prototypes for space-based SDI.)
"So?" Will this knowledge feed, house, and clothe, and educate my
children? It might in the near term. But they would have to live in
expensive, over-crowded, air-polluted California. (My brother says
that 90% of the visible particulates in California smog are now
automobile brake dust.) He should know, he is VP of a company that
measures air pollution in smoke stacks for companies like Chevron.
California is an environment where even straight A, female
home-schooled college students aspire to be strippers, "because that's
where the money is."

We need to clean pollution out of the air in California actively. We
need for California to set up sea-water desalinization plants to
provide for their own water in the LA Basin, not steal it from the
rest of California and the other states that depend on the Colorado
River. We need more wind farms in California, not less. We need tax
incentives that encourage people in California to buy zero emission
vehicles (including brake dust) not Hummers! These goals can be
accomplished with Energy Towers, invented by Dr. Phillip Carlson, a
former Lockheed scientist. We need a US energy independence policy
more than we need a space policy right now!

http://www.iset.uni-kassel.de/abt/w3.../folie_26.html

Thanks for shattering my dreams of Mars Colonization in my lifetime
Rand!

 




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