Re: Juno yes, Moonrise no

"Pat Flannery" <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:11a1f2oaagtfgf3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> It would be fun if the Earth moved in the sky; it doesn't.

This doesn't make any sense to me. I've often reflected that one thing a
person could do on a lunar house (or hotel) is build an "Earth window" which
always looks out on the Earth.

> The cost of the ticket will be rather high also; even Earth orbit looks
> cheap once you figure out the total amount of energy required to get the
> tourist there and back.

Once you're in LEO, you're half-way to anywhere, remember?

Bigelow has made the point that the energy to do a free-return trajectory
which takes you around the far side of the moon is only a fraction of what
it takes to land and then take off from the surface. That might represent a
viable interim form of lunar tourism.

> And can talk the world in to shutting off their lights around the time
> of the New Moon each month; in fact the power arrival is going to be
> limited to around twelve hours fifty minutes per day to any point on
> earth no matter what the phase of the Moon is.

LPS advocates posit ways around these problems, but personally, I view them
as Rube Goldberg solutions. Power generators should go in GEO, in my
opinion, even if built from lunar resources.

> assuming you are talking about using mass drivers to move lunar soil
> into GEO to build solar arrays, the total cost of the lunar soil
> factory and launch facility, plus the cost of manufacturing the arrays
> in GEO would probably far exceed the cost of simply shooting everything
> prefab from Earth straight to GEO.

Well, it depends on the scale of the operation. To build one prototype, or
even half-a-dozen, I'm sure you're right. To build enough SPS to make a
significant contribution to global new energy needs, you can be sure the
savings in lift costs will begin to exceed the expense of the initial setup.

> When they get a fusion reactor powerplant running, and can show that
> they can mine and bring helium-3 back from the Moon in a way that makes
> it economical to use, that might be worth considering.

I, too, wish people would leave that off their lists at least until designs
for commercial reactors get to the paper stage.

> Let's just build a big-ass Antarctic or Australian Out-Back colony, or
> one on the continental shelf; any one of these would be far cheaper to
> do, and far easier to get to and from.

This oft-heard argument proceeds from a common misperception, and it's that
we want to build colonies in space because it's getting to be
standing-room-only in currently-settled places here on Earth, and we need
new places, not currently filled with people, to put the excess population.
This is demonstrably untrue. We want to build colonies in space because we
want to have a destiny that lies beyond this one tiny part of the universe
which we currently find ourselves in.

> Now mind you, there may be some risk
> involved with this idea, unlike moving asteroids around the solar
> system, which would be perfectly safe.

Asteroids could be moved without endangering the Earth.


--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Member of the National Non-sequitur Society. We may not make
much sense, but we do like pizza.


.

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