[ExI] Why no space colonies or lunar bases? was Mooon.

[Giovanni Santostasi]

If one does this cost analysis to Columbus or Magellan's missions what would
obtain?
Were economical missions in the short range?
Giovanni



On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 4:24 PM,  Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>
> wrote:
>
> > And here we are on the 42nd anniversary of the first Moon landing. Two
> > generations later, just about. No Luna City. Not even a Luna Hovel. Sigh.
>
> Freeman Dyson explained why in 1979.  I talked him (and the
> publishers) into letting the L5 News print a chapter from _Disturbing
> the Universe._  You can read it here:
>
> http://www.nss.org/settlement/L5news/L5news/L5news7908.pdf
>
> The bottom line is that transport into space is 10,000 times too
> expensive for space to be colonized.
>
> That's largely due to the small payload fraction, which in turn is a
> direct consequence of an exhaust velocity which is half the delta V
> needed to reach earth orbit.
>
> Chemical fuels just won't do it.
>
> But in recent years other ways have opened up, relatively low cost,
> high efficiency, solid state laser diodes and low cost microwave
> generators.  It's not entirely clear how to best exploit such beamed
> energy sources, but they both offer exhaust velocity up in the same
> range as the 9 km/s needed to get into orbit.
>
> It's still too expensive for self funded space colonies, but if this
> works out, it will only be 2 orders of magnitude too expensive rather
> than 4.
>
> Keith
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110722/baf73a96/attachment.html>