Re: We Are Prisoners Of Fire

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:24:34 GMT, Monte Davis <monte.davis@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote, in part:

Yep -- a vicious anti-manned-space campaign if I ever saw one. And of
course, the several pages that the Parker article spends on possible
shielding methods

I tried to make my criticism of the magazine mild and guarded.

I am not trying to say that it is a worthless leftist rag, but rather
that there is a tendency for a liberal bent to show itself in its
content from time to time.

And, it might be noted, while the article certainly does explore the
possible ways to shield a spaceship from cosmic rays, one is left with
the conclusion that they are all impractical.

In this I do not dispute the credentials and competence of the author. I
am willing to accept that he is, or may be, entirely right both about
the extent of the danger and the difficulty of dealing with it.

My only cavil, for the moment, is that even *if* things are that bad,
one can make mass shielding more practical by the simple expedient of
launching the large mass required from the Moon rather than the Earth. A
small modification of some proposed designs for O'Neill colonies permits
one to both admit enough sunlight to grow crops, and provide shielding
heavy enough to block cosmic rays and their secondary radiation from all
directions.

Of course, water for the mass shielding design shown in the article can
also be obtained in space - but from comets, which are somewhat further
away than the Moon. So the author's design is more practical than it
might seem were it to be launched in its entirety from the Earth for a
mission to Mars.

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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