[FPSPACE] (no subject)

[Keith Gottschalk]

The debate between Dwayne & others raises at least two of the really big issues. I have long struggled as to how one puts these into words, but this debate has triggered some thoughts off.

1. One whole clutch of assumptions used by one strand of space flight lobbyists, who advocate space colonization, strikes me as being even more of an economics anachronism than neo-Malthusianism, which is one reading of the "Club of Rome" 1970s literature. I think the correct economics terminology is extensive development v. intensive development.

     This is aggravated by some US popularizers who mechanistically extrapolate into the future & into space the US grand colonial experience of 18th-19th century "winning of the west"; pioneers "homesteading the west". So this time, without the moral complication of native Americans, we have proposals for the homesteading of Mars etc.

       And by no means only Americans. Some issues of Spaceflight had a feature near the back page which was usually their most embarassing feature. (Let me add Spaceflight is my monthly favourite read, eagerly looked forward to like a ration of chocolate :)   It was where mostly youngsters were invited "to think out aloud".

       Start by considering the most elementary facts of engineering and accountancy. To rocket engineers and budgeteers, the cruellest of all taskmasters is mass. Each gram returned to earth from the Moon or Mars might require a kg. launched from Earth. Distances are vast, with travelling times of decades for return trips even within our solar system.

	Therefore surely the most likely and the most feasible items for interplanetary trade and interstellar trade between space colonies is software and similar intellectual property, which is as virtually massless as photons and can be transported at the speed of light?

	Surely the most unlikely & least feasible items for interplanetary trade are those of the highest mass, such as metals, minerals & building materials? Yet almost every advocate of interplanetary trade seems to be fixated on mining asteroids etc. 

	Take the world's largest oil tanker built to date. For part of its career it was one megaton. What is the cost of transporting one megaton of oil, or titanium, or molybedenium* from an asteroid to LEO? In SSMEs? In mass of propellants?  In $?  

	Yes, I'm aware of the counter-intuitive point that it costs less delta V to transport from Martian moons or some asteroids to LEO, than from Cape Canaveral to LEO.  On the other side of the equation, don't forget to factor in the cost of transporting up from Earth either all those SSMEs / nuclear-ion engines, or the factory and workforce to build them on site.  I suspect the break-even point must require at least the largest of the three sizes of orbiting cities O'Neill proposed, or a whole series of them.

	But another point those with this argument fail to see is the continued advance of technology. Faced with the bill for mining, smelting & transporting one million tonnes of molybedenium from an asteroid, would we not substitute holmium or niobium or whatever?  Would orbiting solar power stations be built not by a workforce occupying 20 000 strong O'Neil colonies, but by future robots? Remember why MOL was scrapped three decades ago. Not to mention that anything you can import from an asteroid you can mine from the Antarctica, or filter from seawater, at less cost.

	Also. I am also surprised how many people do not seem aware that "a hydrogen economy" is a net consumer of energy, not an electricity producer. It is simply fancy batteries, until battery technology improves.

2. 	I can guess at the reasons why some persons clutch at the above arguments like straws. How do you motivate increased spaceflight budgets in the absence of both treasure chest arguments, and the absence of cold war beat-the-demon arguments?

If your argument for spaceflight is only scientific research, you will remain on a civilian research budget, that is about one-hundredth of the Pentagon's budget. If there is no treasure chest in space, bang goes any free market arguments above comsats & LEO space tourists.

     Arguments about needing to emigrate from Earth when the sun enters its red giant phase four billion years from now are unlikely to galvanize Govts. Into immediate action. Even though we know four billion years is scant time to appoint a committee to write a report to refer to a sub-committee to refer back to..  :)  :)
And by that time it might be feasible technology to shift the Earth itself into a slowly expanding orbit.

 	So space flight lobbyists need a more immediate argument. Necessity over decades, rather than necessity over mys. or bys.  I apologize that I present problems rather than solutions, but I hope this contributes to our thinking.

Keith

* Dwayne, molybedenium is used in toughing steel alloys. You can find an International Molybedenium Association website. Before they, & the international titianium website, were reworked to be more narrowly commercial, the IMOA website had a photo of the molybedenium-clad European Court of Justice in Straussbourg. Also, you would have needed a box of tissues for the tear-jerking click from IMOA to "Moly does the job".

   This gave you morally uplifting stories of how corrosion tragedies in chemical factories, once the part concerned was replaced by a  panking new, molybedenium part,ended Happily Ever After.   :)