NASA formally unveils lunar exploration architecture

tomcat wrote:

This is not a theoretical concept. It has been done at the University
of Wisconsin. If that simple He-3 reactor was replicated a few hundred
times and a source of He-3 secured, our energy problems would be over.

Utter bull****, tomcat. Where do you get these bizarre
false beliefs?

Check out the University of Wisconsin web site.

What a wonderfully non-precise reference. How about you
give a URL with this mythical claim of a working, greater
than breakeven, 3He-burning, reactor demonstration?

I suggest you are misremembering a web page that talks about
a concept that might work, maybe, if someone built it (unless
it's that IEC concept, which is known to not be workable
as a power-producing reactor, even with DT.)

Paul

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

tomcat wrote:

This is not a theoretical concept. It has been done at the University
of Wisconsin. If that simple He-3 reactor was replicated a few hundred
times and a source of He-3 secured, our energy problems would be over.

Utter bull****, tomcat. Where do you get these bizarre
false beliefs?

He's probably conflating two completely different things. First is the
marketing material from UW's Fusion Technology Institute, and second is
the demonstrated D-3He reaction. It's a shame that the reactor they use
has absolutely nothing in common with a power source.

Check out the University of Wisconsin web site.

What a wonderfully non-precise reference. How about you
give a URL with this mythical claim of a working, greater
than breakeven, 3He-burning, reactor demonstration?

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/MOV/safeclean.mov has the mythical claims,
and http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/Research/iec.html has the working
3He-burner.

Of course, the working model does nothing to validate the claims, and
there doesn't seem to be anything at UW about demonstrated break-even...

I suggest you are misremembering a web page that talks about
a concept that might work, maybe, if someone built it (unless
it's that IEC concept, which is known to not be workable
as a power-producing reactor, even with DT.)

As it happens, IEC is exactly what he's talking about. The
"breakthrough" is that it does D-3He fusion on demand. That's actually
kind of neat. It's expensive, though.

Alan Anderson wrote:

As it happens, IEC is exactly what he's talking about. The
"breakthrough" is that it does D-3He fusion on demand. That's actually
kind of neat. It's expensive, though.

And it isn't do anything you could do just as
easily with a particle accelerator/target arrangement
(which also could not reach breakeven). Getting fusion
*reactions* to occur is easy; it was first done in the
1930s by Cockcroft and Walton!

Paul

"Alan Anderson" wrote in message
...

As it happens, IEC is exactly what he's talking about. The
"breakthrough" is that it does D-3He fusion on demand. That's actually
kind of neat. It's expensive, though.

Hey, let's not confuse tomcat with facts. He's quite entertaining as is.

Jake McGuire wrote:
Derek Lyons wrote:
Ah. We can't find a market ourselves, so it behooves the Goverment to
provide us one.

It *has* worked before, with air mail.

Yes, we need the modern equivalent of air mail.

Guaranteed markets could be more effective for getting
the interest of investors than one-shot prizes. I am
planning to float the following idea before some Congressional
aides I have met (comments invited):

Congress would establish potential guarantees in the
amount of $1 billion or more for the transport of
water or equivalent payloads to LEO at a price not to exceed
$2000/kg. These market guarantees would be open to any and
all companies that are able to deliver--not promise--at that
price or lower. Lower prices would enjoy higher priority in
accordance with an economic elasticity of 2. For example,
a company delivering water (or equiavalent payload) for
$500/kg would be paid for eight times as many kg of water than
a company charging $2000/kg.

The water would be available for electrolysis into propellants
for deep-space exploration--the cost of which should be highly
dependent on the cost of propellants in LEO. Within limits,
NASA could specify other payloads in terms of water equivalent;
however, the launch company would have the option of delivering
either water or the equivalent payload. This plan takes the
bureauracracy out of the decision loop as to which companies
get business. Any company of any size could compete for the
guaranteed business. This plan also prevents all of the
gaurantees being soaked up by cheap promises. Performance, not
promises, would count. No money would be paid out--or even
committed--except for actual performance.

Look at Len Cormier, for example, who has decades of experience and some
very innovative ideas and patents for reducing launch costs and
increasing safety and reliability. But he's not independently wealthy
(unlike the founders of most other recent space start-ups), and has been
entirely unsuccessful finding investment, so his innovative ideas remain
unused. That's a sign of an unhealthy market, a situation which NASA
could change by simply resigning from the launch business. (posted by Joe Strout).

That he can't stay with a design concept more than a few months might
also have something to do with it. Investors are wary of someone who
can't keep his eyes on the prize for any length of time.

There is a proper balance between focus and flexibility.
We've discussed this before. IMO, the financial community
is much too focussed on "focus"--and too wary of flexibility.
There is one thing worse than not getting investors interested
in a good project, and that is getting them locked into a
poor project.

Within my limited resources, the best use of my capabilities
seems to be improvement on the conceptual design level. As
long as there is steady improvement on the conceptual level,
there should not be a stigma attached to it. Once serious
money is committed, it is time to shoot the engineer--as
Dutch Kindleberger used to say. I hope to unveil our
Space Van 2010 shortly. If the design and analysis work on
this version continues to hold up, I feel that it will be
definitely superior to anything that I have done in the
past 45 years--and perhaps superior to any other conceptual
design of which I am aware.

In addition to the personal aspects of my current concentration
on conceptual design, I firmly believe the country and world,
in general, would gain a lot from more space transport conceptual
design effort. IMO, this effort has been greatly short-changed.
What some may feel passes for "conceptual design" has actually
been large amounts of money wasted on pre-conceived concepts
that had little or no chance of becoming a really cost-effective
space transport.

I think they're more wary of the claims that he'd have no trouble
raising money if it weren't for the SEC rules about qualified investors
for private offerings. I think that the track record of people who try
to sell an interest in risky plans to the public is very VERY spotty
indeed, and voluntarily placing oneself into that group signals unsound
plans. There's a difference between "people with the vision to come on
board with us are hard to find, but we think you might be one" and
"qualified investors as a class don't have the vision to come on board,
so we're going to have to go straight to the public!".

-jake

I think Jake's point is better taken--although I don't
really think I would have no trouble raising money if
only SEC Rule 506, for example, would allow limited public
advertising. I would just like to be able to try to
see if it might work--at least for a "unusual" type
of offering such as deeply discounted tickets for an
11-orbit ride. Many SEC observers feel that the
restriction on advertising for accredited investors is
an overkill. Some states, such as Virginia, do allow
limited advertising. There is essentially zero chance
of jumping through the current IPO hoops for what I
would like to do.

When I was a reappointed charter member
of COMSTAC, the financial members of the committee,
Jerry Simonoff of Citi Bank and Jon Conrad, a venture
capitalist gave me what I still feel is good advice:
"Len, you're going to have to get crazy financing."

Best regards,
Len (Cormier)
PanAero, Inc.
(change x to len)
http://www.tour2space.com

In article , Jeff Findley
wrote:

One more thing to add. SOHO was the first mission to take advantage of a
halo orbit. So if anyone wants to see actual information on an actual halo
orbit, look into SOHO.

Actually ISEE-3. launched back in the 1978 used a halo orbit. So did
Wind launched in 1994, a year before SOHO (although Wind didn't
immediately go into halo orbit, but spent some time in Earth-Moon space
first).

--
David M. Palmer (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)

In article , Paul F. Dietz
wrote:


Bull****. Fusion of D-3He plasmas will produce at least
5% of the output energy in fast neutrons. If you think this
means you don't need shielding, I suggest you subject yourself
to tens of kilowatts per square meter of neutron flux. You'll
be dead in minutes.

Would it help to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow?

--
Chris Mack "Refugee, total ****. That's how I've always seen us.
'Invid Fan' Not a help, you'll admit, to agreement between us."
-'Deal/No Deal', CHESS

tomcat,
I totally agree about He3. However, I'm thinking it'll be worth nearly
a trillion per year by the time we've sucked most of our oil wells dry
and having dug up that last quality tonne of accessible though still
downright nasty coal. By then a gallon of gasoline should be worth $100
if not $1000, with most all other fossil energy related products and
services as equally impacted, if not worse off.

Of course, if someone actually had the LSE up and running, at least
then getting whatever safely and efficiently over the tether distance
of 64,000 km, such as transporting to/from the lunar surface and that
of utilizing the massive CM/ISS should do quite nicely without
involving any of those spendy and somewhat testy fly-by-rocket landers
that haven't even been R&D prototype proof-tested as we speak.
~

Life on Venus, a township w/Bridge & ET/UFO Park-n-Ride Tarmac:
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-town.htm
The Russian/China LSE-CM/ISS (Lunar Space Elevator)
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/lunar-space-elevator.htm
Venus ETs, plus the updated sub-topics; Brad Guth / GASA-IEIS
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-topics.htm

tomcat,
Stop trying to impress these incest cloned borgs with the truth, it
only confuses the holy crapolla that's within their butt-brains into
releasing MOS intellectual flatulence that's causing yet another
massive Ozone hole to open up.

Besides He3 there's lots of other perfectly good news about mining our
moon.

Meanwhile, these rusemaster fools are living entirely within their
perpetrated cold-war past, of which they wouldn't have changed upon one
damn thing if they had it all to do over. They'd even put Christ right
back onto a stick, and laugh their incest cloned butts off at the same
time.

Even without He3, the moon is worth at least a trillion per year, and
that's about ten fold more terrestrial value than what the entire
LSE-CM/ISS infrastructure should requrire per year. Would you like to
help with creating a short or a long list?
~

Life on Venus, a township w/Bridge & ET/UFO Park-n-Ride Tarmac:
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-town.htm
The Russian/China LSE-CM/ISS (Lunar Space Elevator)
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/lunar-space-elevator.htm
Venus ETs, plus the updated sub-topics; Brad Guth / GASA-IEIS
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-topics.htm

"David M. Palmer" wrote in message
...
In article , Jeff Findley
wrote:

One more thing to add. SOHO was the first mission to take advantage of
a
halo orbit. So if anyone wants to see actual information on an actual
halo
orbit, look into SOHO.

Actually ISEE-3. launched back in the 1978 used a halo orbit. So did
Wind launched in 1994, a year before SOHO (although Wind didn't
immediately go into halo orbit, but spent some time in Earth-Moon space
first).

I should have double checked my sources. Here is a site that claims SOHO
was first:

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...haloorbit.html

I've sent David Darling an email about this.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.