Tag: space program

Elon Musk Bows to the Scientific and Economic Wisdom of photog and Pivots to Luna City Goal

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Last June I wrote a post called Moon Mining in which I made a lot of hyperbolic statements about my future as a miner of precious metals on the Moon.  But in a more serious vein (no pun intended?) I said, “But seriously, I think there is a lot more likelihood of the Moon becoming economically useful to humans than Mars.  The difference in distance alone makes Mars almost impossibly difficult for manned flights.

The Moon on the other hand was reached more than fifty-five years ago by men whose technological capabilities were rudimentary compared to what we have at our disposal today.  Imagine what improvements modern computing power and automation could do to make reaching and working on the Moon safer and easier.”

And then there’s this post from last week, “It’s Shiny and New” where I talk about Luna City.

And here we are a few days later and this headline appears:

“In a reversal, SpaceX prioritizes ‘city’ on the moon over Mars project, Musk says”

In the article it says, “Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a “self‑growing city” on the moon, which could be achieved in less than 10 years.

SpaceX still intends to start on Musk’s long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, “but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

What else do I need to say.  Elon, there’s no shame in admitting you’re wrong when someone gently reminds you that wisdom is still a higher authority than Midas-like wealth.  Well, he’s still relatively young and there’s time for him to learn what’s really important, namely building Luna City and naming the main street Neil Armstrong Blvd.

Seriously, I was starting to doubt whether he wasn’t just blowing smoke with all the Mars mission talk.  That stuff is a generation away.  Building and maintaining a permanent Moon base is an achievable goal that will show us whether human habitation beyond the Earth is feasible and profitable.  If it isn’t it’s better to learn that from a place where retreat takes a couple of days rather than a year.  Trillions of dollars and, more importantly, lives would be saved.

So, get going Mr. Musk.  Sell the boys in Washington a plan to build something like a town on the Moon.  You’ll make a whole lot of money and you’ll spark the imagination of a generation of boys whose grandfathers thrilled to the Apollo landings.  Just make sure you do a good job on the accounting so it won’t come back to haunt you when the Democrats come back into power.  They’re a vindictive bunch and they love to punish people whom they hate and from everything I’ve read they hate you now even more than they hate people like me.  And that’s a whole lot of hate anyway you stack it.

I have to confess I’m actually kind of excited to hear this goal.  I think he can get this done.  I’m guessing Trump would like to have his name involved in it too.  That quite a combination.

It’s Shiny and New

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So, it hasn’t snowed in a week and I’ve got a good four or five days to relax.  I guess, life is good.  The news kind of bores me at the moment.  The courts are going back and forth on the ICE arrests and the protest riots.  I guess it’ll take a while for that stuff to get sorted out.  I’ll let Trump get on with his work.  He doesn’t need my applause to do his job (I hope!).

So what else is going on?  Well, we’re sending a rocket around the Moon I hear.  They’re sending four astronauts and one of them is a girl.  Well, what can you do?  She can make sandwiches for the return trip, I guess.  I’m glad they’re planning missions to land on the Moon again.  I think the Moon is a better location for space missions than either the space station or Mars.  Mars is currently too far for our current capabilities to be attempted safely and effectively.  The space station doesn’t seem to be very interesting or useful.  A moonbase on the other hand has definite possibilities.  I think they can start by using robot equipment to transport lots of equipment to the lunar surface and then have a few manned missions to set up a permanent base.  Using unmanned flights to accumulate fuel before humans begin inhabiting a base would provide more of a safety factor.

As for what purpose the base would fulfill, I’d say it would be almost completely scientific experimentation.  Personally, I have a theory that somewhere below the surface of the Moon we’ll find bacterial life.  Specifically, it will be terrestrial life that reached the Moon as spores.  There is supposed to be frozen water on the Moon and below the surface there may be more moderate temperatures.  Of course, there is no atmosphere but I’ve got this feeling that somehow all the life on Earth must leak out into space over time.  Of course, Mars is a better place to look for wandering terrestrial micro-organisms.  But I want to put in my claim for Moon bugs early.  Maybe they’ll even name them after me; E. coli photogiensis.  But I think the Moon would also make a great location for astronomical observatories.  And in terms of the astronauts, having one sixth gravity on the Moon would be many times better for them than the micro-gravity of the space stations.

Finally, they could call the base Luna City.  Robert Heinlein based a number of his short stories and one of his best novels on the Moon (“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”) I think Luna City is an excellent name.  Of course, when it gets big enough for a main street, that should be Neil Armstrong Boulevard.  Of course, it may turn out that living on the Moon isn’t healthy for humans.  If that’s the case we’ll know soon enough.  Then the Moon will be the domain of robots.  And since it’s so close that will someday happen.  It’s a very large rock that’s very close to Earth and eventually we’ll think of lots of things to do with it.  But right now, it’s shiny and new and waiting for us to walk on its surface again.  Maybe even girls.

Now, Wouldn’t That Be Something

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When I was a kid interstellar exploration was something that people talked about as if it were only a matter of time before we figured it out.  Fifty years later and I think we’re all a lot older and wiser.  Even completely automated space craft reaching the nearest stars has begun to look like an improbability anytime within the next millennium.  The scope of the resources needed to get something from here to even Proxima Centauri is staggering.  Of course, I’m talking about a total project time that only totals into decades of time.  If we’re interested in a 40,000-year round-trip, we could start working on it right now.  But something like that is so laughably useless that I’d be embarrassed to even admit considering it as one of the options.  To make the trip in a time frame that makes it useful the ship would have to accelerate to and decelerate from some considerable fraction of the speed of light.  Let’s postulate 30% as the fraction.  With that capability the trip would take something like twenty-five years round-trip.  Sure, that’s a long time but our civilization should have a long enough attention span to follow up on the project and mine the results when the probe returns (if it returns).  But the scope of such a project is too titanic for our current technological stage.  It’s too grand.

Let’s look at more manageable projects.  What’s doable?

I don’t have much enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s manned trip to Mars.  Four or five years in space is a lot of radiation for astronauts to absorb.  I don’t see the sense in it.  I prefer the robot exploration thing we’ve been doing with the Voyager and later probes.  The recent flyby of Pluto was very impressive.  But I think much more ambitious unmanned exploration of the solar system is warranted.

I think the best bang for the buck is finding out if Europa has life in its ocean.  I can imagine a series of visits.  The first should be an orbiter that sends down a probe to take reading.  Once the presence of water oceans has been confirmed a lander can be sent to try and find life.

I realize this is a large order to fill.  I don’t know exactly how thick the ice crust is over the ocean.  It may be many miles.  If that is the case a very creative solution may be needed.  Possibly a nuclear powered “drill” might be an option.  Of course, if all else fails we could set off a nuke.  Then again if there really are “Europans” we might start an interplanetary war.  So maybe some thought will have to be expended thinking about the best way to search for life there.  But I see a series of missions to attempt to answer this question as one of the most meaningful and exciting challenges that currently exist for mankind.

Of course, I’ve been talking of the cuff.  Doing a quick AI search I see that the exact thickness of the ice is estimated to be between 5 and 20 miles thick.  NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, launching in October 2024 and arriving at Jupiter around 2030, will use radar to penetrate the ice and measure its depth more precisely.  So, chances are I’ll be old and broken down before much of anything is known about this ocean.

But I still find the prospect exciting.  Imagine if some kind of multicellular life exists in that ocean.  I hesitate to even imagine intelligent life there but it’s not impossible.  We might find that wherever there’s liquid water and organic molecules life tends to develop from spores that float around in outer space.  Now wouldn’t that be something?

One Shining Moment

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Today I put up a link to that video of SpaceX’s booster rocket returning to the launching pad like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  It was beyond amazing.  It was preposterous.  How could the control system of this rocket have it fall out of the sky like a stone, then brake and maneuver under power and stop in mid-air exactly at the docking station and be caught by a mechanical hand as if it were a ballpoint pen.  It’s beyond technology it’s some kind of black magic.

Well, it did me good to see something positive online for the first time in years.  Sure, it doesn’t really impact my life in any way that can be measured.  I don’t even own any stock in SpaceX.  And I don’t really think that going to Mars has any benefits for humans that could be identified in the next hundred years.  But what I am seeing is men using their intelligence to do things and make things that have never been done or made before.  And every time this happens the side effects from such an endeavor always produce benefits that no one had even considered.  Computers are the side effects that accrued from trying to crack codes during WWII and building missiles and rockets.  We needed machines that could do the ballistic calculations faster than humans could.  If Musk manages to convince the US government to send a mission to Mars, I don’t doubt that the fallout from that project will be more useful than the information we get from going to Mars.

Humanity is a misbegotten collection of mostly psychotic apes.  Every time I look online, I see examples of brutality, depravity and stupidity that should cure anyone of having hope for this world.  But something like this gives me that rush of excitement and reminds me of what seemed possible back in the days when I was young.  Instead of the drab, hopeless world that the Al Gores and Greta Thunbergs try to convince kids to despair about; where we eke out a miserable existence under pathetic wind turbines and solar panels, we could have a world where the world’s energy needs could be completely provided by any number of powerful technologies.  Instead of the phony equity of fake scientists selected by racial and sexual quotas we could go back to a meritocracy where the best would be rewarded by the chance to achieve real breakthroughs in all the STEM applications.

Watching that rocket land on a dime in mid-air was like a shot of adrenaline.  These things can still be done and they should be done.  Hell, I would rather the US government had given SpaceX every penny of the 200+ billion dollars that they threw at the senseless and barbaric Ukraine war that we ginned up.  If we had, we’d probably already be on Mars.

Okay, I know this was all just pure emotion.  I let myself get caught up in that “Right Stuff” rah-rah feeling.  It reminded me of the sense of wonder I felt reading all those science fiction stories that Heinlein wrote back in the stone age.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with present day America.  The land of illegal alien cannibals that we pay billions of dollars to invade our country.  But for one shining moment it felt good.

This is the Validation of Science Fiction in Its Best and Truest Form

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This truly is magic.  Even the booster rocket is precisely controlled by the remarkable technology of Musk’s SpaceX.  This is science fiction come to life.

Science fiction was looking at the world and imagining how humans could use science to push the boundaries of what we could know and do.  This is the fruition of that imagining.  Jules Verne and H G Wells and Robert Heinlein and all the other visionaries led up to this.  And Elon Musk is the one who decided to make it happen.

Well done.

Here’s the Stupidest Guilt Trip for Americans Ever

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As a child of the 1960’s Space Program I’ve always been very excited by the JPL robotic missions to Mars, Jupiter and beyond.  Seeing closeup views of Jupiter and its moons or Saturn was mind-boggling for a science fiction junkie of my generation.  Now the Mars Rover missions always seemed a little disappointing because the landscape just looked like Nevada without the gambling.  But I had no idea at the time that I was witnessing a crime against the Cosmos.

You see we were guilty of planetary cross-contamination in the first degree!  I didn’t know we were guilty until I read this ridiculous article.  But now I’m hoping that somehow, we’ve already wiped out all the extraterrestrial lifeforms in the solar system solely because I know it would devastate Sofia Quaglia, the authoress of this drivel and all the space ecology weenies that she consulted on this fake crisis.

Now, understand.  I highly doubt that any organisms that can’t trace their ancestry to Earth will be found elsewhere in the Solar System.  But if I have to worry about them succumbing to the COVID virus then my take is they deserve extinction.  These geniuses want to somehow ensure that the probes we send up are somehow 100.0000% sterilized of all biological organisms.  This would probably end the space program.  And if it didn’t, it would require enormous expense to add all these requirements to the missions.

But what makes it especially stupid is that Earth organisms have most probably found their way to other parts of the Solar System without our help.  Not that any of them probably were able to thrive on Mars or the moons of Jupiter.  But if they did are we supposed to be worried about it?  And if these terrestrial descendants somehow outcompeted the native Martian or Jovian flora and fauna should this upset me for some reason?  Well, if it’s supposed to then I have a bulletin; it’s not working.  I don’t care.  If these extra-terrestrials are such lame losers that they can’t survive e. coli, then they deserve to go extinct.  Let them get on the ball and discover penicillin like we did.  And anyway, seeing them all wiped out is the surest defense against them catching up with us on the evolutionary ladder and pushing us off.  As the Legionnaires in Galaxy’s Edge put it KTF, kill them first.

Honestly, don’t these snowflakes have anything more important to do than fret about space paramecia being outcompeted by their terrestrial cousins?  Lord help us.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – On Boys’ Books and Real Rocket Ships

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Loved the book (Treasure Island) as a lad. In fact, I read it to my brother who was not old enough to read at the time and we played pirates for months on end. One of the greatest boy’s books ever written, true. I’d put it up there with Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Billy Bud, Call of the Wild, Johnny Tremain, Old Man and the Sea, Old Yeller (and Savage Sam), Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Red Badge of Courage, the Time Machine, War of the Worlds, White Fang, both Jungle Books, Have Space Suit – Will Travel, Tunnel in the Sky, Podkayne of Mars and Rocket Ship Galileo.

Along with the old Boy Scout Handbook, circa 1950-ish.

There was another series, the title/author of which I cannot remember, written for boys. The hero was a Poindexter-like young genius who solved issues such as he broke a case because the witness said they saw a squirrel backing down a tree. Squirrels always run down a tree head first, so the witness lied. A bit Sherlockian but set in Middle America. A bit like the Hardy Boys but better written, I thought. The hero used his brain and his studies and as a skinny young lad never resulted to violence or other like heroics.

One of my favorite Jules Verne novels was turned into a classic comic. “Steam House”, about a group of British nationals traversing India in a trailer thing pulled by a stem powered, mechanical elephant. I read all of Vern’s novels as well as a lad. I was amazed at seeing things he predicted in his novels come true.

I read Big Little books as well “Phantom”, “Mac and the Marines”, “Alley Oop” etc. Heck, I practically taught myself to read on the pulps like “Amazing Stories”.

“Rolling Stones” was pretty good. Castor and Pollux showed up again in “Number of the Beast” which was definitely NOT a children’s book. I preferred “Between Planets” until I learned what Venus was really like on the surface, which Heinlein could not have known at the time it was written. Blast you, Carl Sagan. 😉

I was an omnivorous reader as a child. Sci-fi, dad’s Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour books, anything written by Sam Clemens and Rudyard Kipling. I went through the child’s section at the local library in short order and then onto anything written about dinosaurs and aircraft/space. Dad worked for North American Aviation, later called Rockwell then Rocketdyne. He helped develop the X-15, OV-10, A-5, B-70 and others, as well as worked on the Saturn V boosters and Dino-Soar reentry vehicle and ICBM’s. He brought home color photos and posters for me to hang on the wall of the aircraft he helped develop. He also recommended many books on jets and space vehicles, as well as westerns (his favorite genre).

Dad and mom had rings made from a reentry missile nosecone that had been in space and suffered the fiery reentry. Whatever it was made from, only diamonds could cut it and it took them time. It was like white gold but never tarnished and no chemicals ever had any effect on it.  It must have been some titanium alloy as it looked like white gold and easily survived reentry.  It had his first name and hers on their rings, and the engraving took a week with a special diamond tip. Both were buried with them.

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Congrats to Elon Musk for Resurrecting the US Space Program

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Space-X successfully launched US astronauts back into space on an American spacecraft for the first time in ten years.

Regardless of whether any practical goals for our space program currently exist it’s a morale boost for Americans to know that we still have the right stuff when it comes to technology.  As an American who as a boy who watched the Apollo 11 landing and saw it as science fiction coming to life I’m thrilled to see a visionary like Musk making technological breakthroughs reality.

At least a small victory amid the chaos and stupidity we are surrounded by.

Trump vs the Martian

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(Scene 1 – White House West Wing)

Mike Pence (MP):  Mr. President, I got your message.

Donald Trump (DT):  Hello Mike.  Yeah, I need some help.

MP:  Yes, what can I do?

DT:  Until our NSF man is appointed I need to get someone to get the eggheads working on something for me.

MP:  Sure I’ll get someone on the phone right away and have them line up the subject matter experts you need.  What is the subject?

DT:  Nukes.

MP:  Mr. President, isn’t it a little early in the term to start rattling sabres?

DT:  No not bombs, power plants.

MP:  But why Mr. President?  With fracking and the lower prices it isn’t economical to build nuclear power plants.

DT:  Think big Mike.  Sure, oil’s cheap now but it isn’t infinite.  We’ve got to look for a fuel that will still be around in a thousand years and solve the problems before we’re already using it.

MP:  Alright, that’s true.  But right now the environmentalists are up in arms about the climate change thing and are ready to start a war with you.

DT:  Exactly.  And that’s how I’m gonna sell it to them.  I’ll make them put their money where their mouths are.

MP:  How?

DT:  I’ll simply say if they believe that global warming is real then they must support an alternative to fossil fuels.  It’s just been shown how useless wind and solar are for practical power generation.  I’ll tell them if they want to save the planet, they’ll have to sign on to this initiative.  They’ll be too scared to admit the whole thing was a hoax so they’ll be backed into a corner.  And once they agree it’ll utterly piss off the Gaia crowd who hate nukes worse than they hate me.  It’s a real win win.

MP:  Sounds like an interesting idea.  Where do you intend to locate this new project?

DT:  Detroit.

MP:  No, Mr. President!  The optics would be terrible!

DT:  Wrong again.  This program would generate jobs all the way from PhD’s down to janitors.  Putting Americans to work is the best kind of optics there is.  And Detroit needs jobs like nowhere else.

MP:  Maybe you’re right about this.  But why are you suddenly interested in nuclear power?

DT:  Because I’m from Queens.

MP:  I don’t understand.

DT:  Have you ever seen the site of the 1963 World’s Fair?

MP:  Well yes.  The Unisphere and the flying saucer towers that they showed in Men in Black.

DT:  Yeah.  Well I was a teenager when my parents brought me to it.  And I saw a vision of the future that included unlimited power, space travel, a cure for cancer and flying cars.  Well I’m seventy years old and the only space age thing I see is the cell phone in my pocket.

That doesn’t cut it.

My grandkids are going to live in a world without limits.  I’m tired of losers whining about why we can’t do the things we know we can do.  And I think it’s about time we start doing them.  I’m also going to restart the space program.  But we’re gonna need a better propulsion system to get to Mars.  I saw Matt Damon raising potatoes in his own poop because it took two years to get to Mars.  With nukes we could get there in two weeks.  That’s what we’re gonna do.

MP:  I’ll get them on the phone.

DT:  Oh, and see if anyone has a background in underwater construction.  I always wanted to build a hotel in the Gulf of Mexico.  Good winter vacation spot.