----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 10:27
AM
Subject: RE: This won't help with the
support of JIMO
Another possibility might be that once we
have a moon base, we could obtained uranium from asteroids instead, with
little risk to Earth. There would be some initial difficulty
in setting up the operation but it could quickly become very profitable
indeed, since there are absolutely enormous quantities of various, valuable
metals (fissionable and otherwise) just sitting there waiting to be taken,
without any need to take them out of a gravity well or even to dig for
them. If we were very, very careful about it, we could
send robotic probes to nudge some of the more valuable
ones (like the little one that's essentially 12 tons of platinum, for
instance) into closer orbits, to avoid having to set up a mining operation a
long distance away.
Can you imagine anything more likely to
accelerate the establishment of off-world colonies? I can't. The
potential profits would be irresistable. That's what we need to settle
the new frontier: a new gold rush.
I think that discovery of life on Europa
would be likely to greatly accelerate interest and efforts toward eventual
interstellar travel (because many people would realize that if there is
life on two worlds within our own system, it must be quite plentiful
throughout the galaxy--and in many cases, evolution would have produced other
intelligent life). However, in the short term what we really need is for
private industry to become highly motivated to establish a permanent presence
in space, and to set about developing and refining all of the related
technologies.
Sean McCutcheon
Just a kind of random thought here
....
Getting plutonium safely away from Earth and to
some moon base, or orbital construction facility near the moon, or at a
libration point, seems like a real challenge. To do it economically
might be even more of a challenge. How do you package it for all
scenarios? For fission-powered probes to Jupiter, this might be the
biggest political and technical challenge of all.
I don't think I can address all scenarios with
one idea, but ... I read a book by Freeman Dyson's son, about Project Orion,
in which an interesting experiment was devised at thermonuclear bomb test
sites. They dangled some metal spheres (copper, IIRC) fairly close to
ground zero. These spheres survived with remarkably little
damage. And were used as supporting evidence that Orion could
work.
Last year, a friend of mine, professor of
mechanical engineering, sent me a copy of a formal request for
proposals for some research into demisable satellite fuel tanks, asking if I
had any ideas. I sent him a few, and I don't know what's become of my
suggestions, but it struck me: a hollow metal object is pretty hard to kill
with atmospheric reentry. Most satellites self-dispose of their parts
pretty nicely, and could be made even better in this respect with more
investment. But tanks made of aluminum alloys frequently come back
nearly intact. Getting them to burn up nicely is actually a hard, and
largely unsolved, problem.
Well, so roughly spherical, mostly empty, metal
objects are tough buggers. Make the most of it. Send plutonium
up inside spheres, suspended in a mesh of very strong wire or fiber.
Your rocket blows up? It's OK, so long as you can track the
payload. Launch goes off course and the payload reenters? It's
OK, so long as you can track it. Something hits it (debris, meteor) in
transit ... well, that I can't tell you anything about. But maybe
there are shielding concepts that are both lightweight and strong enough to
handle almost anything at this point.
No point in thinking about patenting something
that almost certainly won't get used within the lifetime of the
patent. Who has time, anyway? And for all I know, somebody else
has thought of this already, and it's full of holes.
FWIW.
-michael turner
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 3:15
AM
Subject: This won't help with the
support of JIMO
And you know the anti-nuke forces will not bother to differentiate
between some old Soviet satellites and the new JIMO.
Science/Astronomy:
* Havoc in the Heavens: Soviet-Era
Satellite's Leaky Reactor's Lethal Legacy
