Re: food from space

On Apr 26, 6:12 am, "G. L. Bradford" <glbra...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
  Pay no attention to Guth. Continue to dream and work on the details.
Continue to press! We differ sharply on many subjects but share the want to
get humanity [in mass] going out there, soonest! It doesn't need to do much
of anything different than it does on Earth (except of course to design,
construct and otherwise develop the wherewithal in outer space to not do
much of anything different than it does on Earth).

  Those who believe humans have to become, and do, something vastly
different out there are insane. They are the same ones who plan for and work
toward forcing humans to become something quite unnaturally different (than
life) here on Earth. The cost of that, and the cost of trying to keep it
from reverting to nature forever, will be disastrous. So the actual result
will be simply the plagues, the wars and famines of totalitarianism all over
again. In other words, the world is already getting there (disastrous).

  Getting out there 'enmasse', soon, is not only important, it's imperative.
There are too many among us who would far rather "rule in Hell," and plenty
enough more of the rest of us who would resolve to grimly make it just that
("Hell") for any kind of total authoritarianism whatsoever. That is the
[nature] of that beast.

GLB

Thanks for the kind words. Guth is best ignored. As I said elsewhere,
I respond to him when such response is helpful to him.

The issue for space access is merely cost of momentum and the momentum
requirements for space habitation.

In this regard we have the NASA space colonization studies of the
1970s - which show that NASA using 1970s technology could build a
space habitat for 337.5 kg per square meter. Deeper in those studies
you will find that agirculture only pressure vessels massing only 58
kg per square meter. Industrial engineers givev the basic design and
charged with reducing the mass would likely reduce asses to 30 kg or
so for the ag satellite and 150 kg or or for homes and industry at 1
gee. A stationary pressure vessel encasing an asteroid that is being
mined or smelted, might mass even less.

This translates to, in the NASA studies, 53 metric tons per person and
23.5 metric tons per person - for the habitation side.

So, these are the 'fixed' mass costs of space habitats in the current
age.

The recurring mass costs are approximately 1 metric ton per person per
year to stay alive without any recycling or use of local materials.
This is the minimum. The average American consumes 4 tons of products
a year not counting coal and oil - which is a source of heat - and
provided by sunlight or some other nuclear source in space. This
gives a range of 'recurring' mass costs for space habitation.

Farms in space can feed 20 people per acre. That's about 202.5 square
meters per person. This is the low end. At the high end, 100 people
per acre can be supported. This is 40.5 square meters per person.
The average person consumes about 650 kg of food per year. The
average farm - not counting fuel - consumes 1.65 times the productive
mass. So, that's 1.07 metric tons per person per year. This gives
the 'recurring' mass cost for an agsat.

So, we're talking

202.5 sq m x 337.5 kg/sq m = 68,343.7 kg
40.5 sq m x 58 kg/sq m = 2,349 kg

As a fixed mass

and

1,070 kg per year input
650 kg per year output

So, to support 6.6 billion people with agsats requires 15.5 billion
metric tons of satellites (51,678 of those 100 m diameter harvested
fragments returned over the course of two and a half years) and to
feed it requires 7.1 billion metric tons of feedstock each year.. The
annual rate is a constant 223.7 metric tons per second spread across
the entire polar ring area. We start at a high altitude and deliver
raw materials there. That material gets processed and fed to lower
orbits, where food is grown and delivered by rail gun and gps guided
package directly to people anywhere on Earth - typically within +/.- 3
hours of sunrise and sunset.

Now the question of the cost of that mass. At today's aerospace
engineering costs each ton costs $5.3 million to build, and $10
million to place in LEO - with costs increasing exponentiall as you
move beyond LEO.

Larger scale prodcution of payloads and vehicles, combined with higher
launch rates, and reusability, might reduce these costs by a factor of
10 to 100 for chemically fueled vehicles. from $15 million per ton to
$150,000 per ton. Reliance on chemical fuels still imposes a stiff
exponential cost increase as you move beyond LEO.

Nucleaer pulse changes all that. 2 tons of borane in the form of a
series of ICF bomblets can move over 300,000 metric tons of payload
from the asteroid belt to MEO at a cost of less than $100 per ton. A
comparable system lifting materials from Earth's surface to MEO can
deliver payload at $300 per ton. Allowing for seeds and livestock and
specialty material from Earth, including telerobotic factory elements,
a mix of materials on MEO would be $130 per ton.

Henry Ford showed that in the early part of the 20th century that mass
production of any item no matter how sophisticated is possible for
about the cost of the raw materials that go into the item. There is
no reason to doubt that once designs are standardized and means of
mass production are created, that this cannot be done for space based
assets. The mass of the original factories are likely to be about
1/100,000th the mass flow rate and cost on the order of $150,000 per
ton to build.

So, we're processing 7 billion metric tons per year - and that means
the original 'seed' mass - will be around 70,000 metric tons, and cost
about $10.5 billion. This is the fleet of the first ICF ships -
which mass 2,000 tons each, and the original tooling they used on
orbit.

The agsat ring itself will cost $2.015 trillion to build and $855
billion per year to feed. Since humanity spends a total of $9
trillion per year on food, this represents a huge savings and a huge
profit opportunity. Most of this savings will be in replacing the
supply chain with space based direct delivery. Owners of these
assets on orbit could easily eliminate world hunger, since this
infrastructure produces roughly 5x the amount of food currently
produced by humanity. That is, the average American consumption of
food product is 5x greater than the world average consumption.

To promote higher levels of consumption, we take a small poriion of
the profits made among the the wealthiest 20% (which includes
America's 4.3%) and allocate them toward subsidizing food purchases
among the poorer 80%.

This merely is an accounting transfer in the operation of the farming
system - akin to markups made in present distribution systems. This
in order to avoid the logistical cost involved in securing the 20%
deliveries from the 80% who are going hungry.

That is, since 95 cents of every dollar spent on food presently is
spent to distribute food to those with the money to pay for food,
through the market - any system that eliminates this logistical
overhead easily makes food freely available while reducing costs.

That is, using credit checks and banking information thats freely
available its possible to determine if one can afford to pay market
rates for food or not at the time of purchase. Delivery of food to
anyone who wants it any time any place - relieves the logistical
burden of people trying to game the system for illicit gain - which
reduces costs for everyone who pays.

Furthermore, a steady supply of nutrious high quality food available
to all, improves the likelihood that everyone will participate in the
market at some point.

One could do this on Earth. I have designed a system of solar powered
green houses tended by telerobotic workers

The only place on Earth where they might operate un-fettered by
various rules is Western Sahara. Its a region about 1,100 km long and
226,000 sq km in area. Before 1976 it used to be called Spanish
Sahara. Morocco annexed the Northern 2/3 of the country in 1976 -
largely unopposed. It is inhabited by fewer than 400,000 people, half
of which are under the age of 16. No government, no hospitals, no
schools, no natural resources, literacy rate is unknown, fewer than
2,000 telephones in the entire region, a single 70 MW power plant near
the major runway.

In many ways sending people to Ceres would be preferable than sending
them here.

There are a surplus of oil tankers these days. One could buy some
tankers, fit them out with a variety of equipment built using the
factories I use to make solar panels. And build a factory system to
build tele-operated robots and other systems. Hire a crew and sail
for the Azores. Arrange and organize telerobotic drive centers in low
wage nations around the world. Train everyone with gaming sorts of
software.

Make land fall along the entire coast with a handful of ships, and
erect 10 m wide and 200 km long plastic green houses with solar
panels, water piping and so forth built in - fed with fresh water from
each of the ships. So, solar power is collected in the desert - fed
to the ship, which runs a desal plant/recycle plant, and feeds the
water back to the greenhouse interior. teleoperated robots with seed
crops and livestock proceed to work the soil, enrich it, and plant
crops. At the far end of each 200 km long greenhouse is a barn -
where livestock is fed and tended. manure is harvested processed and
used to fertilize the growing crops.

Each greenhouse is basically an optical film of coated PET that forms
a10 m wide and 5 m tall semi-circle attached to the ground and
stabilized by high pressure. The base of the circle is held in place
by a few cm of soil, and it houses water lines, power lines, and so
forth. The base of the semicircle form plastic rails that are sunk
into the Earth. Arcing over the semicircle is a mobile electrically
powered cross beam that carries things at high speed along the length
of the greenhouse. A similar system inside the green house carries
harvesters and planters and so forth - all are teleoperated by remote
workers.

Water and robots and equipment arrive from the ships moored near the
shore. Greenhouses grow food along the 1,100 km of coast line up to
200 km inland. West of the greenhouses, are barns for livestock which
are fed a portion of the food,and provide manure for the fertilizing
the food. Micronutrients are brought in from off shore East of the
greenhouses. The entire network is solar powered.

West of the livestock barns and yards are the food processing
centers. These butcher livestock and process foods - recycling wastes
- and producing finished food products. Packaging is a problem. The
system I'm describing can feed 1.1 billion people at US standard. 725
million tons of food, and about 14 million tons of packaging are
distributed each year. This means 1,600 tons per hour of packaging
materials must be delivered to the site. This means that an offshore
handling facility to receive 100 large container ships filled with
packaging must be supported. One could grow switch grass or some
other fast growing product to make a sort of paper or plastic and put
a package manufacturing system in place here. This would reduce
output about 50% - which is nuts on a world already well suited for
the production of packaging. It doubles the cost of the food however.

West of food processing and packaging area are the airfields for the
Predator-like automated aircraft. These unpiloted aircraft are fueled
by liquid hydrogen made from sunlight and water, and they are capable
of circumnavigating the Earth at 90,000 feet at 670 km/hr ground
speed, delivering 10 tons of food over their 60 hour flight that
circumnavigates the world. 2 million tons of food must be delivered
every day to 1.1 billion customers - and response time between order
and delivery is up to 60 hours - not 10 minutes - and so, lots of
aircraft, lots of food in transit. Not everyone can be served by this
system, so, lots of opportunity for conflict, and the farm, the supply
chain, and the delivery system is subject to attack anywhere by anyone
for any reason Seaborne attack, ground attack, air attack, surface
to air attack.

Anyway, with 10 tons of food cargo per plane and a 60 hour flight
cycle, each plane delivers 4 tons of food per day. 2 million tons of
food are produced and delivered, this requires 500,000 planes.
Allowing for ground maintenance of the planes - 700,000 planes. There
are 2,500 airstrips all running east to west - spanning the 1,100 km
length of the country. There is a landing or take off at each strip
every 9 minutes. Each plane is directed to one of 7 vectors assigned
to each strip. The northern most strip is directed due north. The
southern most strip is directed due south. There is a 7 degree band of
directions assigned to each strip. As the plane flies its assigned
great circle route, is releases its cargo to land JDAM style near the
delivery point specficied.

You can see by not being on orbit the logistics have increased
dramatically. First off, you have to load 10 tons of food in the
right order. Second, you have to deliver food to a place someone
specified 60 hours or more earlier. Third, you have to worry about
people not getting food they paid for - since in this supply chain is
vulnerable - and that means you've got to add more costs and
logistical headaches to the system.

You could just fire food packages to end users - in a way similar to
that indicated for the satellites. While this has the same terminal
flight problem, the initial flight is quite different. That is,
deorbiting a package requires very little energy. Tossing a package
from one point on Earth to the antipodes - requires nearly orbital
velocity. This is hundreds of times more energy than needed in the
orbital case - and so, requires another solution - like a high flying
aircraft. Think about it this way. Its cheaper to harvest asteroids
with nuclear pulse rockets than toss 4.3 billion tons of food
ballistically around the world each year. It takes about 8 km/sec
ideal delta vee imparted on a mass to toss it to the antipodes. It
takes about 5 km/sec ideal delta vee imparted to a mass to bring it
from Ceres to Earth orbit.

Getting a bag of groceries from the air twice a week at about the same
cost as it costs today, might be something that's workable. But its
inferior in many ways to building agsats as I've already described.

If Morocco and Mauritania, Algeria and Mali could be persuaded to join
Western Sahara in this scheme, we could expand this system to feed the
entire world. This will require the addition of 3 million long range
hydrogen powered aircraft - to arrange 60 hour delivery. One could
use off shore loading of foods on cargo ships- and deliver through the
existing system - but this restricts what can be grown and sold to
what is in short supply in the market - not what is needed by the bulk
of humanity outside the market - and it undercuts the ability to use
the market to reduce logistical costs which now dominate food
production..

Another possibility, which others have looked at are floating
greenhouses in the ocean, again solar powered, that are supplied
materials by robot subs mining the floor of the ocean - with submerged
free floating processing centers.

The advantage of this sort of system is that it can be erected
piecemeal near consumers and flight times can be reduced dramatically
to about 6 hours in most cases - which reduces the size of your air
fleet.

The disadvantage is that large regions far from oceans will not be
served by this system, and it is still subject to seaborne attack.

All terrestrial systems also suffer from disease, weather, pests, and
so forth.







.

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