December 17, 2024 Zimmerman/Space Show podcast
The podcast from my appearance on the Space Show is now available here.
It was a interesting show, though I wish more readers and listeners had called in or emailed questions or even their own thoughts. Would have made it even better.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
The podcast from my appearance on the Space Show is now available here.
It was a interesting show, though I wish more readers and listeners had called in or emailed questions or even their own thoughts. Would have made it even better.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Robert mentioned that before his essay, we were discussing the question, “how can we do this particular mission with the vehicles we have?” This is the question to ask if we are going to go to the Moon by 2030, the year the Chinese plan to land their man on the Moon. Robert wanted to move the discussion in the direction of thinking outside the box, where the box is Americans on the Moon in 2030. Outside the box is a bigger picture, where Americans have more than just a robust moon-settlement but also mine the asteroids and spread ourselves out around the solar system.
Goals like these three could use the vehicles we have, but they will also require other vehicles, ones that we do not yet have and do not yet imagine. It is difficult to discuss these goals when we don’t yet know what vehicles we will need in the future. What does it take to mine an asteroid? Are bases or settlements practical on Jupiter’s moons or is Mars the only practical colony?
Starship is designed to get us to Mars, and it could be used to keep a moon-base supplied with men and materiel. Can we do everything we will want to do at Mars with Starship only? I don’t know. What are all the things that we will want to do at Mars?
Starship can get to the surface of the Moon, but it may need refueling (retanking the propellants) to get back to the Earth. Is Starship what we need to mine the asteroids? It could be, because getting to the asteroids is not as difficult as landing and taking off from the gravity wells of planets and moons.
We may be suffering from “planetcentricity,” a word I am making up in order to say that we think we have to live on large bodies with some amount of gravity. It takes quite a bit of propellant to arrive and leave these worlds, worlds at the bottoms of gravity wells. Gerard K. O’Neill advocated that we could live in space-based colonies, large space stations that rotated to generate gravity. Large, as in kilometer diameter size. Large, as in Babylon 5, the television show. Getting to and from them would require very little propellant, especially compared to landing on a small body, like the Moon, which takes a whopping 2½ km/sec delta-v each direction. Did I say that was whopping? Earth takes 9½ to leave, and in order to avoid using that much in order to land, a heat shield is needed to aerobrake in Earth’s atmosphere, reducing the landing’s delta-v.
Outside the box of lunar bases or lunar settlements is a broad and difficult topic to think about. A lunar settlement is difficult enough, because despite what we may think, Starship is not optimal for that mission. It was not designed for that mission. Of course, neither was SLS-Orion, which was not designed for any mission. SLS was designed only to take a large mass to low Earth orbit, and Orion was designed to take four men around the Earth-Moon system for a couple of weeks or so. Gateway was designed as a way station to help get around the solar system, using the Oberth effect (gravity assist from the moon with some thrust to escape Gateway’s lunar orbit).
Rather than lift material from Earth, it would be far easier and cheaper to use lunar material and asteroid material to make orbital solar power stations in order to power the Earth, one of O’Neill’s goals. Don’t laugh too hard, because today’s power stations cost around a billion dollars for each gigawatt (a dollar or so per watt of generation), so billions of dollars for gigawatts from space can be competitive.
One of Jeff Bezos’ goals is to move the polluting heavy industry off world to reduce the pollution here on Earth. Lunar and asteroid materials would be useful for that goal, too. Discussing the vehicles, costs, and values of goals such as this is difficult, right now. It is still just as hypothetical as the Disney/von Braun presentations in the early 1960s.
But we may be able to discuss the possibilities of these goals. Is heavy industry in orbit worthwhile? What are the advantages and disadvantages of orbital solar power beamed down to Earth? Do we really want to live in these gravity wells, or can we make use of dead planets, moons, and asteroids by living near them in artificial colonies, as O’Neill had imagined?
I think that we can agree that telescopes based on the surface of the Earth are not as productive as space-based telescopes, it is merely easier to make them larger than the limitations of launching them into space after making them on the Earth. What if we can make them in space? Even radio telescopes can be placed in locations (orbits) in space that are far from human sources of radio traffic, allowing radio-astronomers to explore the entire range of the radio spectrum, not just the few narrow bands that the FCC has set aside for radio astronomy.