[extropy-chat] FWD [Skeptic] Re: defending the Vision for Space Exploration

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 05:54:53PM -0700, Terry W. Colvin wrote:
> Terry forwards:
> > 
> > Come on, this isn't hard. Hard vacuum, small escape velocity, teleoperation,
> > bootstrapping of autonomous industry, launch costs approach zero.
> > Exponentially self-amplifying industry in near Earth space. Clean energy,
> > free food, free habitats, computation effectively approaching infinity (I'd
> > call a cubic mile of personally owned buckytronics effectively infinite,
> > some people here would disagree).
> 
> Jerry belatedly replies:
> 
> This all sounds very nice, but hellishly expensive. The capital outlay

It depends. On the schedule, and who's doing it. Getting self-replication in
a small enough package (ultimatively, using molecular nanotechnology) to Luna
surface will eventually become cheap enough for small groups, and
individuals. 

If we're willing to wait. That can be pushed, considered the ROI, both
economically, and in terms of military power. Lunar teleoperation right now
is several years to a couple decades off for a superpower, assuming lavish
funding -- using today's technology for projection. 

Rapid prototyping cycles are especially profitable, given that they're making
technology (signalling, robotics) advances more rapidly felt. This asks for a
small-scale, focused effort. Something done by a single person (who brings
the money, and the focus), not a large national aerospace venture.

Again, the issues is buying cheapest LEO transport, sufficiently safe landing
on Luna is not all that difficult for a small, sturdy payload.

> of establishing and maintaining regular contact with an industrial base
> on the moon would be huge. Given that a body as wealthy as the US

You'll need a high-bandwidth link to Luna, and control stations rotating with
the night zones. I would use line of sight laser with adaptive optics for the
high-bandwidth connection, and conventional RF for low-bandwidth fallback.
Initially, a number of orbital relays would be nice.

> government cheese-pares on a project as simple (and comparatively cheap
> - comparatively as in "still hellishly expensive") as the space shuttle,

Completely different design space. We're talking about <<1000 kg payload to
Luna, one-way, transfer time a year no problem. Modular systems, economomies
of scale, high rate of loss not a problem.

> what are the chances of private enterprise coming up with that kind of
> ginormous capital outlay with no expectation of any kind of return for
> years/decades to come? 

I haven't done the math but an individual mission to LLO (no landing, some
100 kg payload) is low two megabuck figure (SMART-1 was 126 M$, Clementine
was $80 -- a focused private effort would be a fraction of that). How many
missions do we need, with current technology? Can you cover part of the costs
by selling telerobotics time (moon buggy races, wheeled centaur telepresence, 
whatever)? I think you could.
 
> I don't disagree that these things might work, merely that profit-making
> bodies could afford the years of expenditure (and risk) to get things to

Which risk? Certainly no human risk. It's just money, spent by driven people.

> the stage where they DO work. (They are, after all, beholden to
> shareholders in a way that government aerospace and defence
> organisations are not.) And I would be happy to be proved wrong. But

I'm not talking commercial short-term interest, driven by a large number of
people. 

> private space flight - as someone on the list pointed out - hasn't
> reached the Alan Shepherd level of achievement yet, so I may have a long
> time to wait.

Not so long time, and, again, the idea is not to shoot canned monkeys to the
moon. It's something that will easily make the effort two orders of magnitude
more expensive, and thus out of reach for rich invididuals.
 
> (Of course, if those nice aliens in Area 51 would lend us some of their
> advanced space technology.....)

Chemical and plasma thrusters are not exactly Area 51 technology. Neither is
telecommunication, and microbotics. Making it small and hardened is not
something you can buy off-shelf, but then, if it was, we'd be on Luna 
already.
 
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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