Questions about "The High Frontier"

On Oct 25, 3:14 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

If that's the model you want to emulate... religious nutcases who burn
witches, predatory corrupt aristocrats, slavery, and drug lords...for
colonizing space - be my guest.

We have our religious nutcase already, the rest is just details :-)

On Oct 25, 6:56 pm, Michael Turner wrote:

Actually, some people here on Earth are trying to squeeze water from
coal; mainly to improve the coal's energy yield but also, in arid
regions like Australia, to reuse the water.

"Arid regions *of* Australia", if you please :-) Calling all of
Australia arid is like calling all of Africa wet.

On Oct 26, 7:01 am, Pat Flannery wrote:

We've sent manned expeditions to the Moon, which is easily as
ambitious as Columbus's voyage.

He didn't need to build a whole new kind of vehicle to do it,
though :-)

Mike Combs wrote:

Certainly. I wouldn't expect us to start before costs dropped
to 1/20 or 1/50 current costs. But even with that assumption,
there'd still be a big difference between the cost of a
helicopter ride to the shore, and going back and forth between
HEO and the surface.

But there's an equally big difference between working in space (or
an oil rig) and living there *permanently*.

I may have let myself be misunderstood. I was drawing a
comparison between living in a small aluminum cylinder perhaps
comparable to a ISS module (what we might call the offshore oil
rig analog of space habitats) vs. a Stanford Torus or Bernal
Sphere, where the inhabitant lives under sunlight and surrounded
by greenery. Certainly a step upward.

I don't think you quite grasp it, Mike. You are not *living* in a
small aluminum cylinder any more than you are *living* on an oil
rig or *living* in Antarctica or in an office building or in a coal
mine. You are living (and spending your money) on *earth*. You are
*working* in a small aluminum cylinder (or an oil rig or Antarctica
or at sea or wherever).

Because if you're living in a small aluminum can in HEO, what
are you going to spend your newfound wealth on?

You spend your newfound wealth, like every other working stiff,
when you get home to earth after *work*.

You'd have to
come back to Earth to start spending your money on a nice car,
fine restaraunts, or European vacations.

You make that sound so...unpleasant.

But if there was at
least some pale version of these things in space,

To put it *very* mildly, indeed. Masterful understatement.

maybe you'd
stay put, continue to accumulate and spend your wealth in space,
and maybe even put down roots.

This is where you *completely* lose touch with reality. Spend your
money *where*? Your scenario requires that a space worker
*permanently* physically isolate himself from the vast bulk of
humanity. The potential for possible monetary transactions (to say
nothing of *social* transactions) are comparably circumscribed.

If there's no potential for a family life in the oil-rig-type
space habitats,

Mike, you really don't get it. Workers in oil-rig-type space
habitats have the same potential for family life as workers
in...well, oil rigs. You don't seem to grasp that *many* people are
very attracted to careers where the 2000 odd working hours per year
are heavily concentrated. Many people will cheerfully work 80 hour
weeks for six months away from home if the other six months are
free. (Indeed, for many personality types such an arrangement is
about the only hope they have for a family life.) For many people,
working 8 hours a day pretty much kills the entire day. For many
people, the more days in the year that they don't have to think
about showing up to work tomorrow the better they like it.

It is madness to suggest that someone who lives on earth will have
less potential for a family life than someone who lives in a
Stanford Torus or Bernal Sphere. I think you, in common with many
others, would recognize the absurdity if it wasn't for the strong
emotional attachment to the subject.

many won't choose to have long-term careers with
you in that era.

And yet there are numerous terrestrial examples where that is
precisely the case. But of course space will be different.

Jim Davis

Neil Gerace wrote:
"Arid regions *of* Australia", if you please :-) Calling all of
Australia arid is like calling all of Africa wet.


Down at the pubs the whole country is pretty wet from what I've heard. :-)

Pat

Neil Gerace wrote:

He didn't need to build a whole new kind of vehicle to do it,
though :-)


I was going to call his ships "rust buckets" but they were made out of
wood of course, so maybe "rot buckets" would be more fitting. Anyway,
the whole voyage cost Spain almost nothing in relation to it's overall
national budget, as the ships were decrepit and getting close to
retirement and scrapping. So cost would mainly be provisions and crewing.
I hadn't realized that the names of Columbus' three ships were on the
racy side till I read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_M...ADa_%28ship%29
One big difference between Columbus and Apollo was that Columbus hoped
to pioneer a route via the Atlantic that would prove highly profitable
for Spain once spices could be transported via it. It wasn't for the
sake of exploration, it was to make a buck. On the other hand, Apollo
was designed to go to a place that we already knew was desolate,
airless, suffered temperature extremes, and was bathed in radiation.
There was no way possible that it was ever going to recoup the costs of
going there.

Pat

Jim Davis wrote:
This is where you *completely* lose touch with reality. Spend your
money *where*? Your scenario requires that a space worker
*permanently* physically isolate himself from the vast bulk of
humanity. The potential for possible monetary transactions (to say
nothing of *social* transactions) are comparably circumscribed.


This brings up the interesting question of currency; if you're not going
back to Earth, what's the point of having money accumulating in a bank
account their?
This almost sounds like a 19th century whaling ship - the money sounds
good, until you realize that the owners charge you for all of the
supplies, food, and drink you consumed on board; so if you don't get
many whales, so that your share of the profits is something substantial,
you can actually end up not only not making a profit at the end of the
voyage, but being in debt to the ships owners.
So on the space factory...you may have to buy breathing air for
instance. Of course it's up to you, and the company can't force you to. :-)

And yet there are numerous terrestrial examples where that is
precisely the case. But of course space will be different.


Service in the sail-driven Royal Navy could take you away from home for
a period of years at a time.

Pat

On Oct 26, 2:18 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

So on the space factory...you may have to buy breathing air for
instance. Of course it's up to you, and the company can't force you to. :-)

Reminds me of the diving scene from Blazing Saddles (TV version) :-)

On Oct 26, 3:44 am, "Mike Combs"
wrote:

I'd say a rotating station orbiting an asteroid would have extremely easy
access to the asteroid. One imagines an astronaut could perform a "deorbit
maneuver" by squatting in the airlock and jumping. A bit more seriously, a
steel cable might link the two objects, with a cable car running back and
forth.

If you didn't mind a really long cable, and the asteroid was rotating
fast enough, you could have your gravity just by attaching living
quarters to the asteroid at the end of the cable. A period of once
every 8 hours (I think that's the average for asteroids) might make
for a long commute, admittedly -- about 14km if you wanted something
like 1 gee at the tip (unless I dropped a decimal point somewhere).

Which makes me wonder: if you extend a cable even further out from the
surface, how much delta V could you get at the end of it? This is
obviously dependent on size of payload mass, cable tensile strength,
etc. If delta V is significant, you have transportation possibilities
gained from bleeding off the rotational kinetic energy of the
asteroid, maybe even asteroid-to-asteroid. If you can solve the
tether rendezvous problem acceptably, the possibilities would open up
even more. I've read about proposals to lob stuff off the moon using
solar-powered tethers, and without particularly exotic tether
materials either (like that perpetual unobtainium design element, CNT
thread). With the right asteroid, you'd already have the rotator
motor you need: the asteroid itself.

There are probably NEAs out there that

(1) embody virtually inexhaustible rotational kinetic energy,
(2) live in just about the same orbital plane as the planets,
(3) rotate around an axis fairly close to perpendicular to that
orbital plane.

Harness these for inner solar system propulsion and maybe they'd make
great transport hub. And then you might be able to redraw Hop David's
little Tree of Yggdrasil to have a lot more leaves and branches.

-michael turner

On Oct 25, 5:01 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
We've sent manned expeditions to the Moon, which is easily as
ambitious as Columbus's voyage.
So I think that classifies us as a spacefaring nation.

Well, it certainly makes the U.S. more of a spacefaring nation than
any other.

But it will be a spacefaring nation if not a year goes by without some
Americans being on the way to, or back from, the Moon or Mars or
somewhere else in space. That's for the future, unless one counts the
ISS.

And at some point, someone asks "What the hell is the point of this all?
We've got thousands of ships and the only thing we use them for is to
find more wood to build more of them."

And that's the problem with space mining...you can get the materials far
cheaper on Earth than you can in outer space, so it doesn't make any
sense to bring them to Earth from space, and that means you only use
them in space.

And what do you use them for? To build things to find and move around
more of them, so you can build yet more things to find and move around
more of them.

It's pointless in the long run.

Well, besides materials to build outer-space habitats, from comets
instead of asteroids, one can find materials needed to support life.
So, while establishing a space colony may not lead to exports to
Earth, it can lead to a community surviving. This community might
share the values of the nation that established it.

Besides the Solar Power Satellite, if a population of a few thousand
initial colonists grew to trillions, they could send knowledge and
entertainment to Earth.

John Savard