Tag: space travel

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 10FEB2026 – The Lunar Option

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And now he should change his name to D. D. Harriman. I’ve also always felt the Moon was a better choice. Mostly because with basic chemical rockets, it’s 3-5 days away and there are LOTS of windows to reach it. Mars is 140+ days, and that window is only roughly every two years. If you have a small initial Mars colony, no matter how many ships you have and the Stuff hits the fan, you’re on your own for on average 18 months away from outside help. With Luna its 3-5 days depending on lunar phase and you may be able just to lifeboat back to earth orbit.

Looking the 140 day or so timeline is like the early Europe to American colonies distance from Europe and America had air and food and water. And yet we still had Roanoke and lost 1/2 of Plimouth Colony the first year. Luna lets you learn in a slightly harsher environment with at least some safety net. Mars really has to wait until there are constant thrust engines (be they Nuclear Thermal, Fission/fusion pulsed or straight up fusion) so we can have .01 or .1 g constant and not have to use Hohmann (minimal energy) orbits and have 14 or 4 day transits to Mars/ Nearly every thing Elon (pardon me Delos) had planned for Mars is useful on the moon and can be further refined for future Mars work.

Also, if we’re going to do this, it should be done as G*d, Von Braun and Arthur C. Clarke intended with an orbital station to fuel lunar Starship-like beasts and send them on to the moon. We need the infrastructure. Maybe not immediately but once we try to start moving large quantities back and forth. the division of labor would help.

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.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 07NOV2025 – FTL Drives

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Well at least there is a theoretical model for an FTL drive the Alcubierre drive( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive ) proposed in 1994. At present it has so many reasons we can’t do it (several different flavors of unobtainium, VERY large energies that even Antimatter would struggle to provide, and a likelihood that you can’t really steer the darned thing once you start it) that it is practically unachievable. Depending how all this dark matter/dark energy stuff falls out (and that is beginning to look pretty dodgy) things may get far better or far worse.

That said an antimatter drive (even a pulse antimatter drive, essentially an Orion drive using small matter antimatter/matter explosions) would be a godsend for reaching Mars the Asteroids or any other celestial body outside the Earth/Moon pair. Currently a Hohmann Orbit (minimum energy) to Mars runs 8-9 months of time and the window is only open every two years (26 months I think). At .01 G (a centi-G engine) this takes 64-112 days i.e. 2-4 months and position only affects time. At .1g (a deci-G engine) this drops to 36-76 HOURS (i.e. 1-3 days). The first matches early trips from Europe to the New World (e.g. the Mayflower took 70 days) which were ultimately commercially viable and establishing colonies was possible. The second is like rail trips across the US at rail’s peak in the 40’s and 50’s. That totally changes the relationship between Earth and the colonies.

Ad Astra per Aspera!!!

Which Way; Out or In

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So, yesterday I attached that discussion about how matter/anti-matter annihilation could theoretically act as an energy source with a high enough power density to allow for interplanetary space travel and possibly interstellar travel.  Now something like this thought experiment is so nebulous in its details that even calling it a low probability outcome is being way too optimistic.  The idea that a ship would contain some huge number of ultra tiny anti-matter snow balls in storage for perhaps decades of travel seems ludicrously improbable.  Especially since any one anti-matter snow ball will immediately destroy the space craft if containment is breached for any of a million reasons.

And yet, in a way, the very difficulty of the process somehow makes me think that somewhere hidden in this improbability is an elegant solution to the problem that will be discovered when it becomes time for such a process to move us forward.  It can’t and won’t happen now because we don’t need it now.  Going to Mars or Ganymede isn’t currently something that humanity needs badly.  We don’t even need a Moon base.  But eventually all three of these celestial locations will become important to humanity.  When or how these places will become critical is indeterminate.  But just because we don’t know the when or the how makes no difference.  We went to the Moon in 1969 because German missile technology and American technological curiosity collided during the Cold War and handed us space flight.

Something else will come along and we’ll stumble into the next piece of the puzzle while working on something completely different.  And this pattern will repeat itself over the course of a decade or two and, then voila! A matter/anti-matter rocket will be tested in space.  And then twenty years later it will become old-hat.

Does this mean that I believe that we can do anything?  No.  We’re not God or all powerful.  Notice that I haven’t stated that faster than light travel (FTL) is possible.  As far as I know humans lack the ability to reprogram the universe to increase the speed at which matter may travel to something faster than 186,000 miles per second and probably never will.  But reaching a technical solution that allows us to get as close to that limit as possible is what we’ll do.

What I envision is a robot ship powered by matter/anti-matter annihilation.  The first applications for this capability will be unmanned reconnaissance of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.  And this will be followed by manned missions.  Eventually, there will be a robot mission to the nearest star.  What we find there may decide the trajectory of our race into the unforeseeable future.  If we stumble upon a planet with life already present then that planet will become the focus of the imagination of our world.  And eventually we will send men there.

But if we search planet after planet and never find life of any kind that may cause mankind to turn inward and look for progress of a different kind.  And maybe that is the higher wisdom.

Come On Elon, Baby Steps

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So, what to talk about tonight?  I’m kinda at a loss.  I’m not in the politics mood.  I haven’t figured out the next chapters in the stories I’ve been spinning.  Not much going on around the Compound today and even the First Selectman has been on his best behavior and hasn’t eaten anyone in a few weeks.  I guess things are in a lull right now.

So, I was thinking with all the talk about Elon Musk getting us to Mars was that really the space mission we need?  I think not.  What would be better and much easier would be to build a Moon base.  The space station we have now is a lame piece of junk that is more trouble than its worth.  And living in free fall is really bad for humans.  But a permanent base on the Moon is much easier than a Mars trip, much cheaper and much less risky for the astronauts.

Of course, the real reason why this base would be so valuable won’t appear until a magnetic survey is performed and a strange “anomaly” discovered.  Once this mystery is investigated and the signal is tracked back to a Jovian (or is it a Saturnian) moon the real exploration of the solar system will begin in earnest.  All we need to remember is not to drive the ship’s AI psychotic with conflicting mission requirements and also make a point of not teaching it to read lips.

But seriously (or semi-seriously), I think a Moon base is a much more realistic space project and putting stuff on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit is probably a good idea in general.  There’s just too much junk floating around up there.

As for the name, Luna City is one obvious choice.  I could be convinced that Sheepshead Bay would sound good.  After all there are a lot of Mares up there so a seaside name makes some sense.

But the most important thing that a lunar base would provide is a chance to see if space travel is useful at all.  Can a base on the close-by Moon come up with anything useful that can’t be done better and cheaper on Earth?

One thing I can think of are particle accelerators.  Maintaining a vacuum on the Moon will be a heck of a lot easier than on Earth.  And the lower gravity might have some advantages in certain kinds of construction.  And there are probably other scientific experiments that can be done better on the Moon.  Maybe the long lunar night would be a great time to do telescopic observations.  Instead of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes maybe we could build a really big telescope on the Moon and see right out to the edge of the universe.  Of course, we might not like what we find on “the edge.”  We might find that the galaxies are arranged to spell out the words, “TO READ BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MUST BUY A SUBSCRIPTION!”

Well, anyway, that’s what I was thinking.  The Moon’s the perfect compromise between the fantastically risky Mars mission and the useless and boring International Space Station.  Come on Elon, baby steps.

16APR2025 – Wednesday Coffee Walk Zoom Call – To Boldly Go Where No Hag Has Gone Before

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It’s always good talking to the boys.  What will be the topic for the week?  What will be the funniest or the craziest or the most annoying topic for the Left?  There were several candidates; NYC subway necrophilia, General Flynn’s call for Obama’s arrest and NY AG Leticia James’ real estate fraud scandal.  But everyone’s favorite by a lot was “Leftist Hags in Space!”  We all got a good laugh out of the likes of Gayle King, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, washed up pop star Katy Perry and nobodies Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen squealing around on top of a comically phallic “Blue Origin” rocket that rose to an unimpressive 62 miles above Earth and then parachuted back.  The whole roundtrip took place within a ridiculously short 12 minutes.

This all female “crew” followed in the footsteps of 90+ year old fake rocket man James T Kirk, (AKA William Shatner) as he also failed to reach Earth orbit in the painfully underpowered suborbital rocket.  It was the opinion of all on the zoom call that a better effect could have been achieved if Bezos had instead equipped the ship with a female crew composed entirely of professional strippers.  There was disagreement as to whether weightlessness was a problem or a bonus from the point of performance.  Also, it was debated whether a stripper pole would be a safety hazard in the “cockpit.”

I noticed Camera Girl looking disapprovingly at me as she walked by at this point during the zoom call but free speech is a cherished right of the coffee walk tradition so I ignored the implied censorship and laughed along with the rest of the jackasses.  Ah, good times.

So, we compared the press coverage of this absurdly unimpressive publicity stunt and compared it to Space-X planning and executing a critical rescue of actual astronauts from the orbiting space station where Boeing’s failure stranded them for over half a year.  Basically, other than Fox News the rest of the media performed a virtual black out of the Space-X mission while the Bezos stunt was given 24/7 coverage by all the news stations as if it were something worthy of discussion.

And it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that Jeff Bezos has managed to make space travel uncool.  Now I’ll qualify this.  Suborbital rocket flight is not really space-travel.  It’s really just air travel of a very inconvenient and useless kind.  But he has managed to attach a taint to rocket flight which I wouldn’t have thought possible.  And I should have expected nothing less from the founder of Amazon.com.  After all, the company who has his annoying trucks delivering things at my house seemingly before I order them would obviously be able to make rocket ships annoying too.

Well, I can always hope that the next all female crew will be Democrat politicians.  Let’s say Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters.  Put all four of them in blue jumpsuits and at least for ten minutes I can hope against hope for some real excitement.  Engine, O-ring, parachute, whatever.

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?

26JUL2023 – More Silly Season

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So here’s another round of articles on the Congressional hearings on UFOs (excuse me, unidentified aerial phenomena):

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/07/26/watch_live_house_oversight_committee_ufo_hearing.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-hearing-congress-uap-takeaways-whistleblower-conference-david-grusch-2023/

Look, I don’t believe that there is anything behind this except misdirection.  The only way there could actually be a spacecraft found and unreported for a long interval afterward is if somehow we’ve been reverse engineering it for all this time and we think we’re close to solving all the problems and are stalling until it gets done.

But let’s face it.  If we were on the verge of having some incredibly powerful technology that would allow us to travel around the solar system or even stellar distances with ease, would we be whining about CO2 and global warming?  Would we be investing in solar power and battery technology?  Of course not.  We certainly wouldn’t be filling up the mountain passes and ocean bays with windmills.  We wouldn’t let Greta Thunberg shriek and stomp her little stunted feet and whine about how we haven’t eaten enough bugs.

By now defense contractors would have bought up the technology from our elected officials and Grumman and Boeing and Raytheon would be selling jet packs or whatever cheap rip off of the alien tech they could pirate.

I guess it’s remotely possible that many years ago a crashed spacecraft was discovered and it was so ruined that nothing useful was learned from it.  But after more than seventy-five years is it even possible that such a secret could have been kept?  I just don’t believe it.

And that’s above and beyond the improbability of either advanced lifeforms existing elsewhere in the solar system or that a workable interstellar drive has been developed.

Look, our government has been run by nitwits for decades.  By now some pajama boy would have spilled the beans to TikTok or Instagram by taking a selfie with ET’s corpse.  Somebody would have robbed some fragment of unobtainium and sold it on eBay.  By now Hunter Biden would have  already had drug fueled sex inside the spacecraft and accidentally flown the craft through the side of the Pentagon.  We’re not a serious people and we couldn’t keep the secret this long.

Now of course it is possible that advanced life has listened to our radio transmissions and maybe even studied the speeches of our great leader.  If so maybe that explains why they haven’t tried to contact us out in the open.

Fifteen Years to Proxima Centauri

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How’s that for a cool title!

H/T to Hans G. Schantz for the retweet on this that brought it to my attention.

This guy is researching a propulsion system based on “quatised inertia” that he says would allow a probe to reach the Oort Cloud in a year and Proxima Centauri in 15 years.

That’s a pretty bold statement.  Watch his video if you’re interested.  He says he was given a million dollar grant from DARPA  to study it.

I wonder if they’ll give me ten million to do my research on cold fusion.  My data looks pretty good.

Seriously, he says there’s company putting an experiment into space to test this thing out.  I guess we’ll know if it works.