Space review: The vision thing

"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote in message ...
"william mook" wrote in message
m...
"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...
Paul Blay wrote:

If space industry / habitation is at such a level to make mining and
transport
of uranium from the moon practical then it is highly likely that it
will be needed
and used locally (e.g. on the moon / in space). A kilogram of uranium
/on the
moon/ would be worth rather more than the same amount /on Earth/.
Especially considering how people would think about the risks of it's
transport
off-planet.

Producing enriched uranium on the moon is not a good idea.

Consider the mass of an enrichment plant.

What mass are you considering and why?

I believe the assumption he's making, which in the short term is valid is
that you'll have to bring all the material for your plant from Earth.

You haven't answered the question. Please answer the question. As to
your comment. What is magical about the moon that makes it impossible
to build something there that is easily built on Earth? Clearly by
bringing a toolkit and a worker and plan to the moon, and using lunar
material, you've reduced to a minimum the mass required - no matter
when you do it. Now, I do admit early nukes will be brought
pre-built, but not so later ones, which is the point of the original
post. The original post claimed that it would *always* be better to
bring uranium from Earth. This is absolute rot!



If you're shipping up that mass in the first place, it may make more sense
to simply ship up the Uranium you want.

Early on sure. But later? Clearly saying that its always better to
import stuff from Earth is absolute rot.


The plant will never
(over its lifetime) produce its own mass in enriched uranium,

Really? Do you have figures on the masses of uranium actually
produced? What processes are you considering? Have you considered
the improved capacities possible on the moon?

What would magically make it better on the Moon?

Again, you haven't answered the question. Please answer the question.
In a spirit of cooperation I will answer yours however. What makes
it magically better to process uranium enrichment on the moon? Two
things (1) your biosphere is safely enclosed and encased in a
containment, and (2) you have a hard vacuum freely available. This
makes certain separation technologies - like solar powered atomic beam
separation - industrially useful on the moon, which are just oddities
on Earth.

Figure a typical plant on Earth is probably massing several thousand tons,
at least. (I'd probably say even that is conservative).

What we need is a real figure that relates the mass of the plant with
its throughput. I can estimate what that might be for the atomic beam
separator above. But, rather than argue I'd like to hear your
numbers. If you or the original poster cannot provide numbers, then
clearly you're talking out of your ass.

Now figure how much Uranium has ever been mind on Earth. I doubt it comes
close to that.

Mined you mean. Well, lets see. According to the US DOE

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear...st/gencap.html

349 GWatts electrical capacity will be in place by 2020AD. That
requires something like 1,500 GWatts thermal capacity. And that
requires 457,000 metric tons of Uranium each year!

Now, this amount of material will provide something like 20% of the
world's energy needs in 2020. A person on the moon is likely to
require far more energy than a person living on Earth. So, the
percapita energy consumption is likely to be more. So, even if only
say 5% of the people alive end up living on the moon, they'll likely
need something on the order of 100,000 metric tons of uranium per year
- if they rely 100% on nuclear power.

Now you want to do that on the Moon?

Here's where knowing real numbers and real engineering helps. If that
10,000 ton solar or nuclear powered atomic beam mass spectrometer
operating in the vacuum of the moon can process 100,000 tons of
uranium per year - OF COURSE!

Compared to the other things we're doing on the moon to make a
self-supporting colony of say 50 million people - OF COURSE!

Even if the low-mass containment free beam separator weighed a million
tons - if 90% of the parts were made on the moon from lunar materials
- you'd still only need to bring 100,000 tons of earth made parts up -
and you'd save 100,000 tons PER YEAR! OF COURSE you'd want to do it.
Sheez.


not
even close.

Really?

Now toss in the mass of the uranium mining and extraction
equipment, fuel element fabrication, and so on.

Okay, if you tell me what these are precisely?

It's more economical
to just send the enriched uranium to the moon.

Faulty logic sir. You assume *all* the mass of *all* the
infrastructure comes from Earth. This need not be the case. Clearly
if all the equipment and all the infrastructure you outline were made
on the moon from local resources, it would be more economical to use
those resources to make enriched uranium than send the enriched
uranium to the moon. Zero cost beats some cost every time.

It's going to be a long time before there is that much infrastructure on the
Moon. In the meantime, how do you power that infrastructure?

How long? Why that long and not some other time? How much? If you
don't have precise numbers, you're just pulling **** out of your ass.
Clearly, you don't have numbers - and neither did the original poster
- so why should we believe these baseless conclusions?

Look, super tanker sized nuclear pulse rockets were designed in the
1950s that were capable of using nuclear power to carry 500,000 tons
throughout the solar system. A fleet of say 600 of these gargantuan
spacecraft, using modern technology to clean up their exhaust, could
place a million tons a week on the moon. These rockets would cost
less than our species current nuclear arsenal and pose a significantly
lesser threat than that arsenal does. Such a fleet could put 50
million people and all the things that they need on the moon, and
install all nuclear industries there. THIS IS AN IDEAL PLACE FOR
NUCLEAR INDUSTRY. FAR BETTER THAN EARTH'S BIOSPHERE!

From this base, using our current nuclear arsenal as a fuel feedstock,
we could;

(1) place in orbit 20 trillion watts of solar collectors to beam
energy to Earth,

(2) place a self-sufficient colony of 500,000 on the moon, which
would quickly grow to an exporting colony of 50 million,

(3) place a self-sufficient colony of 100,000 on Mars, which would
quickly grow to an exporting colony og 10 million,

(4) survey and catalog all the small bodies of the solar system, and
taking the richest to place in orbits above Earth, the moon, and Mars,

(5) place remotely controlled robotic factories in orbit above
Earth, the Moon and Mars, using these very rich asteroids as
feedstocks, then, populations in place at these locales would drive
the factories to build up industrial capacity on orbit, and drop to
the surface of each world, whatever the people demanded - eventually
large scale farms, forests, and consumer product assembly plants -
will produce all products, food and fiber in space. This will leave
the natural environments of all world's touched by humanity in place,

(6) expand space access with laser sustained detonation rockets and
laser light sails, powered by very large laser power stations - and
extraordinarily large sun orbiting laser power stations, this will be
the age of the personal spaceship,

(7) expand space living with the construction on orbit of large
numbers of space colonies - which are owned and operated by
individuals,

(8) attach laser light sail based propulsion systems to these space
colonies to give their owners access to the solar system in their own
personal mother ships, each possessing a fleet of personal laser
powered landing craft - this will be the golden age of interplanetary
travel,

(9) Expand the size and scope of the laser beaming apparatus by
putting a beam steering device beyond Neptune, and beyond 1000AU - to
use the gravity lens of the sun to focus laser light in support of
interstellar travel,

(10) personal space colonies are adapted to interstellar range and
operation by the attachment of some sort of bio-stasis technology, and
artificial intelligence that reliably operates on behalf of its owners
while in stasis,

(11) Thousands of stars surrounding sol are colonized and
industrialized - ultimately, light sail technology is used across a
handful of these stars to create an interstellar collider that
compresses matter to black hole densities. Artificial black holes are
studied to create a brand-new sort of technology - that has the
potential to achieve the dreams of the earliest visionaries of space -
warpdrive, timetravel, etc. The beginningsof what Kip Thorne calls an
ultimate technology.




Paul


You are arguing from generalities and have no specific knowledge to
back up any of your claims. I would be surprised if you could detail
the three most important processes to enrich uranium on the moon, and
could tell me their mass needed for each unit of production per year.
You don't know these figures because you just spouted off trying to
convince people of something you feel must be right, but don't know a
damn thing about yourself.

The same sort of argument could be applied to food production. You
could say without really giving figures that the weight of a farm on
the moon would always weigh more than the food it produced over its
lifetime. Without any specific knowledge people might believe this
bull****. Why? Because farms are big ass things while meals are not.
Then you could go on to say that obviously it makes more sense to
grow food on Earth and ship it to the moon.

This logic would suffer from the shortcomings of your uranium logic.
First, without figures of the lowest mass systems avaialable or likely
to be developed, we don't know the first part is true. Second, the
other part assumes all the equipment comes from Earth. Clearly this
need not be true. Local sources of soil, water, oxygen, and so forth,
can be tapped and used to create farms - or mines or uranium
enrichement plants for that matter.

Why does any of this matter?

Because if we subscribe to the faulty logic you are putting out, we
tie ourselves forever to the surface of the Earth. Space turns from a
limitless resource that has the capacity to enrich every man woman and
child on Earth, to a limitless money pit that the limited resources of
Earth can only support in very small ways.

Whether we limit our growing regions to Earth's surface, or limit our
industrial regions to Earth's surface - doesn't matter. Because by
doing so, which is what you suggest we should do with uranium, we do
nothing to change the fundamental economics of our industrial society,
while burdening the limited resources of Earth with space faring
humanity.

This is a recipe for disaster and failure - and the logic you propose
we should follow, leads us directly there with zero opportunity for
growth.

No, whether its building farms or nuclear power industry, the choice
is the same, use local resources to build everything you can locally,
and export whatever surplus you don't need for growth, offworld - to
enrich Earth and everyone.

william mook wrote:

[ a great deal of dishonest bull**** ]

Your misrepresentation of my argument about geological processes is
utterly disgusting. Geological processes affect the quality of the
ore, which affects the difficulty of extraction. The processes on
earth that led to high-quality, low-cost oreas require conditions that
have not been present on the moon. You, however, interpreted this
as my saying that geological processes require labor! Ridiculous.

You display the same utter lack of integrity in the rest of the
thread. Since I doubt any intelligent person reading your response
could fail to see this, I will not bother to dignify it with anything
more than an expression of contempt.

My anger at your response is tempered only by the realization that
a person of your character is unlikely to have achieved much success
in life, and is unlikely to have any satisfaction in pursuing your
deeply flawed goals. In that you have what pity I can muster.

I had stopped responding to you long ago, and this interchange
reconfirms the wisdom of that decision. Your noise is best ignored.

Paul

In article ,
Paul F. Dietz wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:

Probably not. There's not that much difference between a 100MW
nuclear plant and a 500MW plant. The difficulties lie in places other
than those affected by size.

There's one big difference -- they would have built many more
100 MW plants. They would have been much farther down the experience curve.

How much that would really have helped is questionable. Learning from
experience requires making mistakes, and in the nuclear industry,
mistakes are not allowed: when there is even a hint of one, a new
regulation gets slapped on, forbidding the practice that might cause it.
(An actual mistake that causes serious harm, even if it is only economic
harm, as in the case of Three Mile Island, prompts not just one but a
forest of new regulations.) And no politician or bureaucrat is willing
to take the risk of repealing any of the regulations. In such an
environment, experience is likely to increase costs, not decrease them.


--
Norman Yarvin

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message ...
william mook wrote:

[ a great deal of dishonest bull**** ]

Now you're trying to fool us into believing something totally untrue
made out of whole cloth, while dismissing a lot of unfortunate truths
about your behavior. Tsk tsk.

Your misrepresentation of my argument about geological processes is
utterly disgusting.

I couldn't misrepresent your argument about geological processes
before because you didn't have an argument about geological processes.
You were trying to fool everyone into believing what you said about
*industrial* processes were really about geological processes. Now
you're trying to continue to fool people by dismissing everything I've
said as bull**** and now selling us the untruth that I misrepresented
what you did over the last two posts. Shame on you.

Geological processes affect the quality of the
ore,which affects the difficulty of extraction.

This may be true, but it has nothing to do with our earlier discussion
and you know it. You just hope that people reading this will read
tone, and not content, and somehow conclude that you are not trying to
fool them. People who routinely try to fool others should not be held
in any regard whatever.

The processes on
earth that led to high-quality, low-cost oreas require conditions that
have not been present on the moon.

Please. In general I agree with this statement - tangential as it is
to our original discussion.

You, however, interpreted this
as my saying that geological processes require labor! Ridiculous.

Nonsense. Paul, on Nov 28, here is what you said, and this is what I
responded to;

Now figure how much Uranium has ever been mind on Earth. I doubt it comes
close to that. Now you want to do that on the Moon?

GREG MOORE SAYS:
In fact, the moon is a *worse* place to mine and process uranium
than the Earth:

PAUL F. DIETZ SAYS IN DIRECT RESPONSE:

(1) Uranium ore is concentrated by processes involving liquid water
(and, in some cases, molecular oxygen and organic matter), which is
not present
on the moon.

(2) The processing of uranium ores involves water. Again, difficult
to do on the moon.

(3) All industrial processes on the moon suffer from the difficulty of
shedding
waste heat. You can design radiators of various kinds, but they
will
be more expensive than on Earth.

(4) Labor on the moon is orders of magnitude more expensive than on
Earth,
and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Paul

**********************************

Clearly, you are still trying to fool us into believing you were
talking about geological processes when in fact you were talking about
industrial processes. Shame on you.

You display the same utter lack of integrity in the rest of the
thread.

Look in the mirror when you say that bub, I'm calling you on your lack
of integrity, and without a blink or an ounce of shame you repeat and
enlarge your original misdeed. Have you no shame? Sheez.

Since I doubt any intelligent person reading your response
could fail to see this,

Any intelligent person who reads our interchange since November 28,
will see precisely what you are doing, then and now - and the depths
of dishonesty to which you stoop.

I will not bother to dignify it with anything
more than an expression of contempt.

Of course not because silence is the only way you could continue to
fool anyone, since a brief review of our exchange since Nov 28 would
expose you for the fraud you are.

My anger at your response

Your anger derives from your fear of being found out for the fraud you
are - and the shame that will befall you, and which you so richly
deserve.

is tempered only by the realization that
a person of your character is unlikely to have achieved much success
in life,

This recalls for me something Joseph Addison once said, "Fame is
vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing. Only one thing
endures
and that is character."

On this basis you are on shaky grounds on this one Paul. I can see
why you're angry and sink to calling me names.

and is unlikely to have any satisfaction in pursuing your
deeply flawed goals.

Ha, ha, ha! That's a good one. jWhich puts me in mind of the old
German proverb, "A man shows his character by what he laughs at." And
I'm laughing at you and everything you say here Paul. Sheez. A good
one. Hmm.

In that you have what pity I can muster.

And for you Paul, I'm reminded of Mr. T, "I pity the poor fool!" That
fool would be you Paul.

Have a nice day!



I had stopped responding to you long ago, and this interchange
reconfirms the wisdom of that decision. Your noise is best ignored.

Clearly, you are hoping beyond hope that others will too, because if
they do otherwise, they'll see you for the Fraud you are. Well, if
Holly and allo the folks at Motorola don't reaad your crap here,
you'll still have the respect of those closest to you!

Cheers.

-William


Paul

"Mary Shafer" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 28 Nov 2003 21:45:58 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

(4) Labor on the moon is orders of magnitude more expensive than on
Earth,
and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Even CATS won't bring down the price, (unless CATS = much lower than
current FedEx rates).

It seems to me that instead of waiting around for governments to bring
the world CATS, the world should be hoping FedEx will (before 1030 the
next business day, in fact).

The money might not work for it.

My older brother works in the logisitics business and used to run a
significant portion of the world's next day air courier business but getting
it to make money was a pain even on turnovers of multiple billions.

A DIFFERENCE IN VISION:

RECAP
This thread originally started out with the idea that you could mine
Uranium, and other stuff on the moon and using these lunar resources,
establish and expand a lunar community. I support this notion, others
do not.

WHAT'S GOOD ON EARTH NEED NOT BE GOOD IN SPACE
To me its obvious that lunar conditions will be taken into account by
engineers who work there to create processes that cost-effectively
make use of available resources. To others this is not so obvious.
They would have us believe that the best engineering practices on
Earth should be adapted to the moon at great expense and that every
difference between lunar and terrestrial conditions spell a costly, if
not impossible challenge. I maintain this is rot. Sure, conditions
are different on the moon and in space than on Earth, but any engineer
or scientist worth their salt will face that challenge and create new
industrial processes appropriate to local conditions that will be as
cost effective, if not more cost effective, than the best industrial
processes developed on Earth.

THE VISION
To me it is also obvious that we have the technical means, and have
had the technical means for the past 50 years, to navigate and make
significant use of resources that occur in interplanetary space. To
me it is obvious that those interplanetary resources have the capacity
to enrich the life of everyone on Earth. Others do not believe this.
They believe that spacecraft, space stations, based on the moon and
mars, can only be supported by industry on Earth. Their vision is one
of limited scope because ultimately, the resources and technologies
are derived from the limited range of Earth's biosphere. I maintain
their vision reduces spacetravel to an expensive hobby for Earthlings.
I say that my vision brings space travel front and center in the
continuation and expansion of industry in the human experience and
allows the promise of science and technology as a human enterprise to
fulfill the promise of its beginnings - namely, to be of benefit to
all humanity.

THE SUBTEXT
As humanity ascended the momentum curve of space travel, the first
rung on the ladder to space was the attainment of sub-orbital travel.
Anyone who has the capacity to travel in space, also has the capacity
to strike at any target on Earth. This fact is not lost on those who
operate defense systems throughout the Earth. For this reason, nearly
every nation has adopted policies that limit the spread of missile
technology. This makes practical knowledge hard to come by, and harms
the ability of businesses to make use of this technology in any way
whatever.

Nuclear power is important to the development of significant
interplanetary travel. One of the first practical uses of nuclear
power has been in WMDs. For obvious reasons, WMDs must be controlled
for any sort of civilization to exist on Earth. For this reason
policies that limit the spread of nuclear technology have also been
adopted. This makes practical knowledge hard to come by, and harms
the ability of businesses to make use of nuclear technology in any way
whatever.

The high-frontier has become an important area of global dominance by
the US, and is important in US ability to project military forces
efficiently throughout the world. Spysats, comsats, navsats, all are
fused into a single global information resource that helps inform,
direct, assess performance of, our forces - and in a host of other
ways. For this reason there is a powerful strategic reason not to
allow private sector operations over-run this resource.

How could this resource be overrun? Well, consider Echelon, the vast
network of supercomputers operated by the CIA that monitor every
keystroke on the internet. Now, consider the importance of NSA and
NRO launches to US space industry.

On the other side, consider Teledesic, the brainchild of Craig McCaw
and Bill Gates - this is a network of 70 some satellites that
communicate with each other, and make use of GPS and other
technologies, to provide direct wireless broadband to everyone on the
planet! It simultaneously circumvents the internet as we know it, the
telephone system as we know it - and carries all the switches into
space. Iridium was Motorola's attempt to do the same sort of thing
with cell phones.

Now, imagine what Teledesic, Iridium, and any new rival arising in
response to their early success - would do to Echelon. Clearly it
would make it obsolete and require the building - secretly - an
equivalent monitoring system. This entails all sorts of political
difficulties, risk of discovery and so forth. It also means there is
a period where 'coverage' is lacking - with attendant risks there. It
also raises the bar, and the cost of doing things - with further
risks.

Now, imagine what 200 launches per year over a decade would do to the
importance of NRO/NSA launch demand of say 10 launches per year.
Plainly, government launches would fall to the background as business
interests took over, and the aerospace sector became totally
independent financially of the government.

Obviously any of these sorts of outcomes reduce government's control
of important strategic capacities while at the same time increases the
costs and decreases the effectiveness of strategic government
programs.

That's why we cannot expect governments to any time soon embrace
concepts of private property and profit in space, or reduce taxes on
space investments, or do any of the other things that would bring huge
amounts of capital into the space business.

Space travel technology and its control are so important, and the
public's attitude toward the potential of space so dreamily positive -
it wouldn't surprise me if considerable effort was made on a routine
basis to shape and direct public attitude about space on all levels -
including controlling and shaping the discourse on things as small as
newgroups.

"william mook" wrote

They would have us believe that the best engineering practices on
Earth should be adapted to the moon at great expense and that every
difference between lunar and terrestrial conditions spell a costly, if
not impossible challenge. I maintain this is rot. Sure, conditions
are different on the moon and in space than on Earth, but any engineer
or scientist worth their salt will face that challenge and create new
industrial processes appropriate to local conditions that will be as
cost effective, if not more cost effective, than the best industrial
processes developed on Earth.

As an example, here's where a scientist has invented a method of separating
ores in space which capitalizes on 0-G, hard vacuum, and the ability to
construct huge-yet-flimsy mirrors:

http://www.spacemanufacture.com/



--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."

Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"