[ExI] Fwd: [luf-team] Re: maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects not working?

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 5:42 PM
Subject: [luf-team] Re: maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects
not working?
To: luf-team at yahoogroups.com


I can only speculate on causes of stagnation with other groups like the
Seasteading Institute (though I have my suspicions. Objectivists don't play
well with others...) but I don't think there's much mystery to our own slow
pace of progress and I would expect others to be facing many of the same
issues.

Money is the perennial problem but it's more symptom than cause. The
availability of money is a reflection of the size, trust, and commitment of
the community of TMP supporters and those things are all quite low and have
been for a while. The reasons for that are many but the core issue is plain;
membership. There simply aren't enough people here and who otherwise know
about TMP given the very small margin of capable people in the general
population. Communication is critical to increasing membership. We need
public attention. But I can't cultivate that from just web sites with a lot
of words when we now live in a reading-averse culture. The original TMP book
was our chief generator of membership for most of our history and worked
remarkable well. It's draw was far above the average for space futurist
books, putting it up there with Gerard O'Neill's "The High Frontier", Robert
Zubrin's "Entering Space", and Wernher von Braun's "Man Will Conquer Space
Soon!" But it couldn't reach and continually sustain a big enough audience
by itself. Now the book is out of print with nothing to effectively replace
it. THAT is the root cause of our group's current ennui.

Bottom-line; we MUST increase membership and to do that we MUST create new
and copious media to communicate our vision. For that to have broad appeal
that media needs to be visually oriented and have high production value.
People will read novels. They won't read anything more sophisticated and
'dry' without the lubrication of a lot of visual media. That's why the
near-term objective of TMP2 is a very visual book compared to the original
TMP and long term I plan for many kinds of media deriving from that. This is
a work in progress. It's happening. Though my pace of work on the TMP2 site
has slowed this past year, its foundation text is approaching completion.
But the critical thing is elaborating on that visually. We need art
-illustration especially- and a hell of a lot of it. We have to communicate
the TMP narrative through many media forms -cultivate a meme from it. And we
also need physical projects and events that visually demonstrate activity
and give people something to participate in even if it's not absolutely
relevant to building rockets. It's still an important part of holding
people's attentions. I understand many people have a hard time comprehending
how this relates to actually building things and getting to space, but you
have to understand that we need a very large body of supporters to find the
modest number of Heinleinesque 'competent people' among them and to impress
upon people who might support -with capital- our efforts that there is
something here that matters, economically, culturally, and historically. We
are out to build the biggest space program ever. That's not a back-yard
project. And that means we have to sell the world our story.

Even in the 1950s, amidst of a post-war wave of American cultural optimism
about the future, Wernher von Braun understood that in order to get his
vision of a civilian space program across to the society he needed more than
papers, talks at engineering conferences and dry technical books. He needed
to cultivate a very awesome story about the future and present that story,
visually, tangibly, to the whole world. That's why he teamed up with artists
and designers, went to mainstream magazines like Collier's, and ultimately
teamed up with Walt Disney. Disney understood the potential entertainment
value in narratives about the future. And no matter what you think space is
about, space advocacy is ultimately show-biz because if you want people to
support what you want to do, you have to show them what you intend to do in
a way that holds their attention and motivates their support and
participation. You've got to be down with your Robert Preston schtick. Thus
a plethora of media and even the theme park attractions of Tomorrowland all
worked together to turn this idea of a civilian space program, this
narrative about our future in space, into a mass cultural meme and a
societal aspiration. And that's why we today have NASA and not a US Space
Force as an extension of the Air Force, which von Braun understood would
never get us past Earth orbit. (there is no strategic military value to
space exploration and settlement) If you want to understand why space has
lost its cultural relevance today and why most nations' space programs are
on the rocks, just go take a look at Tomorrowland. It's now 'retrofuturist'
Tomorrowland. The theme there is no longer the future but the past notions
of the future we now, in our current mass cultural dystopianism, consider
quaint, funny, and nostalgic. In the Tokyo and Paris Disneyworlds,
Tomorrowland has actually gone Steampunk! I often say that the Haunted
Mansion is now more about the actual future than Tomorrowland. (if you've
read Cory Doctorow's Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom, you know what that
means)

Some here have mentioned the recent apparent 'success' of the Zeitgeist
movement and the related Venus Project. I think there are some important
lessons for us in their story. But I'd hazard to call it a success because,
in fact, while they have been very successful at gathering attention,
they've so far failed quite miserably at doing anything constructive with
it. The name Zeitgeist is very apt because that's the key thing in their
story. For something around 50 years -yes, 50 years- Jacque Fresco has been
cultivating one of the largest bodies of futurist media work ever created,
all produced almost entirely by himself. And the production value of this
one man's labor is incredible. Though some of his design has become
stylistically anachronistic, there is no question of this man's genius. I am
so envious of his talent, skill, and energy. The things we could have done
with that in the FMF/LUF! And all of this has been done to try and
communicate and sell one idea; the great rewards of adopting a
Post-Industrial culture based on a sustainable scientifically managed
resource based economic system. It's basically the same cultural model
Marshal Savage described in TMP as the basis of creating a spacefaring
civilization. The same idea for recovering and repurposing the vast amount
of social productivity that we squander today on other people's profit and
an endless cycle of war and social/racial oppression. Savage just couldn't
get into it to the same depth -how much can you pack into one book?

But in those 50 years, after the production of a book, countless designs,
works of art, and models, numerous media interviews, and a whole series of
very nice documentary videos, the only physical accomplishment of The Venus
Project is the construction of Fresco's own futuristic home/studio compound
in Venus Florida -and they nearly lost that as it went up for sale a few
years ago. (folks here may remember I was actually toying with the notion of
buying it to use as the LUF HQ because I feared what the knuckle-headed
developers in Florida will do with such lovely architecture and because we
desperately need the same kind of studio and workshop facilities) What went
wrong? Well, the key problem is that the Venus Project narrative is
critically incomplete. Fresco is a designer and thinks like one. He does the
'visioneering'. The messy details of implementation is someone else's
department -and that someone else never materialized. He believed that if he
could just paint a sufficiently compelling picture of the future it would
make everyone realize the abject squalor of contemporary life and demand a
revolution. But pictures of lovely architecture and sexy cars, planes, and
boats don't tell you how to get from A to B. The Venus Project is like a
beautiful matt painting of a wonderful city propped-up on the horizon but
with no obvious path going there. It's a Greek temple on a golf course model
of the future. And so the public never got it. (do you remember when I once
suggested here that every settlement in TMP should plan to include a Greek
themed miniature golf course?)

What has now brought The Venus Project back from the brink of oblivion is
Peter Joseph; the man who made the Zeitgeist films. Whatever you might think
about the content of these films, you have to respect his talent and their
ability to draw attention. (personally, I think the first films were a bit
dumb. The latest should have been the first one, because it finally gets to
the heart of the concept of a mass social pathology as Fresco has always
characterized the contemporary situation and clearly defines what a resource
based economy is) The reason these films have been so much more effective
than the 50 years of work done by Fresco is that they clued into the actual
contemporary zeitgeist. All his life, Fresco has been swimming upstream
against a current of middle-class complacency and Cold War propaganda
inspired paranoia about alternative cultural models. It's hard to get people
to realize they live in abject squalor when everything else around them
keeps reinforcing the delusion that they live in the best of all possible
worlds and anyone who suggests otherwise is trying to take it away. One
aspect of Post-Industrial cultural theory Fresco missed was that the modern
middle-class -particularly in the US- was very deliberately cultivated as a
stop-gap measure against the tide of cultural revolution that began to rise
in the wake of the Great Depression. A big middle-class was, quite
literally, created to keep the working and underclasses down. The
middle-class is the foreman class -which is why cops always identify
themselves as middle-class. (could they be cops otherwise?) I often joke
that America positioned itself over the 20th century as the Pointy Haired
Boss of the world. But that's not just a joke. We became the world's
clueless self-absorbed middle-mananagement. Only now the jig is up. The
inherent unsustainability of Industrial Age economics has -as anticipated as
far back as the end of WWII- caught up with us. We are in an era of
accelerating successive economic and environmental catastrophe and the
ruling class is desperately trying to circle the wagons and cash-out in
advance of the ultimate collapse they've engineered. And the cultural result
of all this is a wave of middle-class anxiety throughout the industrialized
world.

Joseph has clued into that. Clued into that aspect of Fresco's versions of
modern history and economics that basically explain how and why the world
got f-ed up. And then he played-up the angle of conspiracy because that very
effectively pushes people's buttons. Fresco only talked about a
socio-economic pathology inherent to a culture that evolved with the early
Industrial Age unable to fully shake-off the vestiges of feudalism and a
peasant psychology. Other progressives aren't so moderate. They will point
fingers at specific people and institutions benefiting from social
exploitation and start declaring it time to build guillotines. I can't say
if that's right or wrong, but it's been effective at motivating people by
turning unfocused mass despair into directed anger. Combine this with the
novelty of the Internet as an alternative to the now tainted and dubious
corporate mass media, and you've got a 'movement'.

But anger directed to what? As I understand it, the Zeitgeist movement loses
people at about the same fast rate it now wins them because once these now
motivated folks start joining groups and forums and going to Venus Project
conferences and lectures, they discover there is nothing for them to
actually do because Fresco simply never had a plan to build his model
future. Just a design. Just a Futurama exhibit. Zeitgeist leadership seems
to be becoming aware of this problem and is trying to address it, but
they've been in denial and operating in a vacuum relative to the larger
global progressive movement for a long time. They have a lot of ground to
cover while the enthusiasm they've finally won rots on the vine. I wish them
the best of luck because their objectives are complimentary to ours and the
the world in general needs working solutions to its rapidly escalating
crisis.

The key lessons here for us are that, while media is critical to
communication and motivation, engagement and participatory activity are
critical to sustaining that motivation. And this can be difficult when your
objectives are very large in scale and/or distant in time. With space
advocacy this is exacerbated by unrealistic expectations and that basic and
ubiquitous lack of knowledge about how things work in the real world. That
delusion that anything short of starting the construction of the first
starship in your back yard is irrelevant. We have to stop pretending there
are magical shortcuts, because there aren't. We need to accept that space
development is the work of civilizations and lifetimes, need to be realistic
about what we can actually do in the near-term, and seek the fun, personal
accomplishment/empowerment, and larger benefits to society that can be found
along that path, not just at the finish line.

But, really, it's become rather unproductive for us to forever discus what's
'wrong' with the LUF. We can analyze the situation forever. For a change,
I'm going to start telling you people what we need to do -what YOU have to
do now, today, if you give a damn about the objectives of TMP.

The A#1 task for this group right now is building membership. There is only
one way to do that; grabbing eyeballs. We MUST create a replacement for the
TMP book and we must elaborate on that far beyond anything the FMF ever did.
You simply cannot motivate people with vague ideas. You have to show them
what you intend to build. We have a complete and compelling narrative. We
have as awesome a story about the future as Wernher von Braun ever did. We
have to tell that story to the world. What are the goals here?

•A TMP2 wiki well illustrated in line art.

• A TMP2 book with roughly a 3-4:1 graphics to text ratio and 50% color art.
It will look like this in format and visual content;

http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Motors-Spaceships-Another-English/dp/1933492279/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299696852&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Syd-Meads-Sentury-II-Mead/dp/1933492481/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299696896&sr=1-9

With a critical mass of illustration for the TMP2 wiki, we will establish
Kickstarter and/or Rocket Hub sponsorship drives for this book's independent
publishing in print and eBook forms should no other publishers step forward.

•Art and CGI models from this project will be used to develop an expanding
portable media exhibit to be used as aerospace shows and space/SciFi events.
It will start small like this;

http://www.planetsolar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/gallery/village/village-yverdon-2009/jmp_20090905_151025.jpg
http://www.planetsolar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/gallery/village/village-yverdon-2009/jmp_20090905_151001.jpg
http://www.planetsolar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/gallery/village/village-yverdon-2009/img_0290.jpg

It will end up like this;

http://www.spaceworld2000.com/exlist.html?section=sw%2Dvideo1%2Eswf

•MiniSpaceWorld Exhibit. MiniSpaceWorld (http://www.minispaceworld.com/) is
a developing museum in Hungary intended as a space-themed version of
Germany's Miniatur Wunderland. (http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/) They
want exhibits. We can tell our story there and use the experience for our
portable exhibits. (the artists of Minatur Wunderland have been very open
about the systems they have developed. Their techniques are applicable to
our projects and will provide a useful entry into robotics development)

•Art and CGI from the book project will also become the basis of a video
series that can be distributed individually on YouTube and Vimeo or
collectively on DVD. They will look something like this, but with our
narrative;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozkl1OvNvEc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr7GtaU3v5I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVJmZmo6kzI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf07e5h8474
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBZSN_OIamo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrBydwDpl4

Some have suggested starting out with low-production-value videos based on
the TED talk model. That might work, but I probably can't do them myself.
Too many years of re-occuring bronchitis thanks to NJ pollution has ruined
my voice and I have no stage presence. There is also a problem with the fact
that the original TMP imagery is out of date. It is obviously anachronistic.
You still need new artwork, even if you're doing a slide presentation. But
this is still perfectly feasible.

Pulling all this off will take many people. I need help. I can only do so
much by myself. Find me a design and production team! Get me a contract with
Aldo Spadoni's Aerospace Imagineering. Find me a bunch of Pat Rawlings and
Doug Drexlers. Find me a Peter Joseph. James Cameron financed a Mars
reference mission and is actively interested in marine colonization. Find a
way to get to him! I need artists and designers to collaborate with who have
a passion for space, technology, and the future. Enough passion that we
might get some volunteer effort to start things going and enough competence
that they can keep up with me -people who can read. I have been working on
this myself for many years and have spent a lot of my own money on it. But
I'm just one person living alone in the desert -literally. My success rate
with individual artists has been very poor because there just aren't enough
of them in the US with an interest in real space anymore, have skill in
industrial design, skill in actual illustration, anything above a
high-school level science education, and any effective work ethic. The few
that are suited to this are so in demand in the aerospace industry that they
have little free time. I currently have a commission in the works for a new
front page image for the TMP2 wiki site, but it's proving to be a very
protracted project because I can't hire the artist I've found full-time so I
cannot get more than small sporadic bits of his spare time. We MUST find a
solution to this problem!

Next, we need to create events. In TMP2 I describe a mass cultural festival
for all TMP settlements celebrating the theme of space and have chosen
Yuri's Night as a logical date for this. I want to see someone host a
TMP/LUF Yuri's Night party this year. I know it's getting late for that and
it's OK if it's a small thing. But we have to start somewhere. I don't care
if this is two people meeting up with a plastic Moravian star, a Dobsonian,
an iPod, and a bottle of vodka. Let's do this.

http://yurisnight.net/

Next, we need activities to engage people with and to foster
entrepreneurship. We want people to look at TMP as a career path. I have
many concepts for this and several I've been working on lately. Let me set
them out and tell you what I want us to do with them;

•Fab Labs. We need production capability if we are to start making real
things. I am the first and only person in this group to have started working
on this. I've been studying this technology for over a decade and, saving my
pennies, I've started work on creating the collection of tools for my own
fab lab. This should be a task every member of this group is engaged in.
Every one of you reading this! If you're not making stuff or learning to
make stuff how the hell do you think you're going to get anywhere -let alone
off this planet? If you don't yet know what a fab lab is, what are you even
doing in a space advocacy group? I want everyone in this group building
and/or learning to use the tools of the fab lab; fabbers/rapid prototypers,
CNC cutters (router, hydro, plasma, laser, sign/paper, PCB cutters), CNC
mills, multiple types of printing, digital looms/knitting machines, and all
the basic tools of simple carpentry, metalworking, electronics, and the
various forms of casting and molding. Everyone in this group needs to
cultivate a working knowledge of the basics of mechanics, electronics,
computing, software, the principles of propulsion, the principles of energy
production, the families of fabrication methods, and the families of
building systems. Certainly, these digital machine tools have been very
expensive up until now. Few people can afford them all and the ideal
situation would be to have a common place -like the many hackerspaces and
shared fab labs popping up around the globe- where we can collectively
assemble and share these tools. But we're too dispersed so we have to do
what we can individually until we have some community setting to do it in.
Luckily, all these tools are going open-source as people learn to use them
to replicate them. There are DIY kits for just about all of them. This is
bringing their individual costs down to the level of a personal computer.
Everyone here knows what a Makerbot and RepRap are, right? Right? One clever
thing we can do is exploit that self-replication capability to enable our
community. Anyone who can effectively collect and build enough of these
tools has the means to replicate and disseminate them to others. That's one
of my objectives for my own personal fab lab.

Relating to this, I think everyone in this group needs hands on experience
with some of the following; gardening, hydroponics, permaculture, aquariums,
mariculture, algaeculture, Living Machines, and renewable/alternative energy
systems like wind, PVs, fuel cells, Sterling and Rankin cycle systems.
Everyone here should have experience with building at least something like a
sub-irrigation planter, a 5 gallon bubbler hydroponic planter, a table-top
flood-drain unit, and know how to assemble a home PV/wind power system. This
is some of the practical stuff you're going to use all those new tools for.
Ultimately, we are going to want to create a sort of Functional University
through TMP. A program of public education in science, technology, and
industry to cultivate industrial literacy globally. That's a critical aspect
of TMP's Foundation efforts toward cultural development.

Think this is all busy-work? Ever actually read any serious work about space
settlement? I've just described the basic package of knowledge every space
settler must have to survive. Anyone who considers himself serious about
space advocacy is obligated to be as industrially literate as possible, or
they are just a passive audience. So, like Generic Asian Dad says;
"Facebook? Why don't you face book and study."

•Utilihab. You've all heard me talk about Utilihab, you've all seen me post
the link to the Utilihab wiki (http://utilihab.wikia.com/wiki/Utilihab_Wiki)
I spent the past year putting together, but I don't think many have gotten
the point of it. People, I invented Utilihab to be the bootstrapping
construction kit with which to start the physical development work of TMP.
This is our toolkit for starting everything. A tool to build all the initial
facilities we need using even dispersed group effort. Studios, labs,
workshops, housing, factories, you name it. It's a platform for our founding
entrepreneurial businesses. The world needs new housing technology. There's
money to be made here. It's our starting industry. It is the basis of
construction for our first marine settlements, the infill retrofit
construction supporting full-scale Aquarian construction, and the basis of
interior construction for space habitats. Utilihab is the branded
architecture of TMP. This is the real deal, folks. This is the Mercury
rocket in the barn all you aspiring astronaut farmers keep expecting. And
most of you haven't even noticed! Why? Because I haven't been able to
constantly shower you with pretty pictures of it.

So let me tell you what we're going to do with this. Utilihab is not yet a
complete system. On the wiki I've laid out the development framework as a
catalog of basic components and systems that, individually, need to be
prototyped, tested, and refined. Every one of those components is an
individual project -and a potential entrepreneurial opportunity. This is our
first hardware development project -one that is intended to be readily
attainable with modest skills and tools. If you can't handle this, forget
about rockets. Utilihab extends the strategy of cultivating industrial
literacy to a functional means to build communities and facilities. Everyone
who knows how Utilihab works and who knows how to use the tool set of the
fab lab knows how to make their own advanced home and community.

The first goal here is to build something like this;

http://images.wikia.com/utilihab/images/6/6e/T-SlotPavilion1a.jpg

The next goal is to build something like this;

http://www.dwell.com/slideshows/it-house-joshua-tree.html

It won't necessarily be a house -we might do a workshop, lab, or studio- and
it might not need to be permanent. (of course, no Utilihab structure is
'permanent' They are all perpetually demountable and their parts reusable)

Next, we will put that on these;

http://www.nextmarina.com/english/sub01.php

And if we can build enough gravitas and sources of capital with these
demonstrations, we go on to this;

http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/File:MarineEcoVillage.jpg

I call this Hyokkori Hyoutanjima. This last step is the Aquarius Seed
settlement, intended to evolve into the full-scale equatorial Aquarius
settlements.

Next, the Dymaxion Sea Tent. This is a very modest demonstration project
intended to help us get our feet wet, so to speak, with marine construction
while developing a kind of structure that will be a useful tool for many
applications in both sea and space activities. The structure is a SPAR or
pylon buoy that supports a simple radial building based on cable-stayed deck
platforms. It is called a Dymaxion Sea Tent because it employs the same
structural concept as Buckminster Fuller's original Dymaxion or 4D
cable-stayed house design;

http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images/112558/410588.jpg
http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/fuller-3-lg-87527993.jpg
http://www.scene.org/~esa/search/dymaxionpatents/03_4DHouse_0_0.png

Early forms of this may use a single deck and a tent-like enclosure and
would be intended for temporary applications and events -much like the
Global Warming awareness events of Future Islands. Larger structures may
employ many decks and could feature component sets derivative of Utilihab.
These would be suited to many research, industrial, and communications
applications and so offer potential for entrepreneurial use. Their space
applications would include deployable down-range telemetry networks. The
largest could rival large oil rigs and be quite permanent structures, though
they are probably not suited to concerted marine settlement because they are
simply too inconvenient for transportation and cannot self-replicate. (at
least, not with available technology) The Dymaxion Sea Tent or Sea Tower, by
the way, is the concept the Seasteaders organization appropriated from my
earlier FMF articles for use in their designs, though we no longer get any
credit for that on their web sites.

What's next? The IOSI; the International Open Space Initiative. Part of the
problem with TMP is it's implausibly vast scale. It's not that something
that big is impossible. It's that we generally have a limited ability to get
our heads around things that are large and take a long time. This forum is
living proof of that. Many people will never fully get the whole TMP
package. So I realized that we needed to define more specific programs that
could stand on their own independently of TMP while still supporting its
objectives. And so I devised the IOSI. This is essentially the beginning of
the Avalon phase of TMP (and possibly the Asgard phase as well) packaged as
a self-contained program for the creation of tele-robotic pre-settlments on
the Moon and Mars. The IOSI is a global open source space program that will
use a Linux development model to develop the hardware for telerobotic
settlement. The point to this approach is that robotics is highly accessible
to public participation whereas just about everything else involved in space
isn't. So whether or not you think humans are 'better' than robots, it's
irrelevant. Bottom-line, we can develop robots with a dispersed global
participation in development, can send those robots ahead of us on the
cheap, and use them to reduce the cost of human arrival through in-situ
resource utilization. There is simply no way costly flag-planting jaunts by
humans can be more practical than that. The basic technical plan for the
IOSI is outlined in the TMP2 section on Avalon;

http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Telerobotic_Outpost

Asgard ties into this through the MUOL, which in the IOSI context assumes
the role of telerobotic space transportation logistics station -a ship-yard
for assembling the trans-orbital spacecraft sent to the Moon and Mars using
modest scale components lofted on low-reliability high-frequency modest
payload launch systems. There is so much awesome and fun stuff in this
telerobotic outpost project I can't begin to list it all. This is the
greatest Maker project ever. Just look at the TMP2 article. There's enough
to keep a million people busy.

Now, this all ties into the objective of getting everyone in the LUF
industrially literate and fab lab equipped. This program is a key
application for all those tools. Our community is going to be the key
participants building these systems, setting the development agenda, and
hosting the events associated with the development program. And here's what
that program looks like;

•Establish an IOSI development web site following the Sourceforge model.

•Use the same media promotion efforts as used for the TMP narrative to tell
the IOSI narrative, culminating in a portable exhibit. The full exhibit will
include a portable mock-up of the telerobotic bases and demonstration human
habitats. (based on Utilihab construction)

•Establish seasonal and continental expo-events for IOSI development,
showcasing project team demos, kids activities, and X-prize-style
competitions and awards.

•Establish test lab facilities with companion outreach fab labs in
disadvantaged communities. These are an important tool for the reverse-flow
of technology out of the program and back to terrestrial applications.
Remember, figuring out how to inhabit space means figuring out how to go
from rocks, dirt, and sunlight to a western middle-class standard of living
using hardware on the scale of home appliances. There's no Six Degrees Of
Kevin Bacon to that technology transfer. By pursuing space settlement -as
opposed to the flag-planting crap- we change EVERYTHING about human
civilization on Earth. That's the ultimate objective. Since this tech is
open source by definition, outreach fab labs will direct this tech transfer
back to where it matters the most.

•Establish a prototype testbed outpost in the Atacama Desert managed by
Internet. This will be a fully functional outpost free of human intervention
except at special 'drop points'. Designs and systems that make it through
the expo-oriented phases of demonstration and testing will earn
spaceworthiness certification here. The testbed outpost will have no human
presence except in extreme emergencies. Everything is deployed
telerobotically. All equipment will be air-dropped by plane or special
simulated soft landers based on airships deployed from a distance. Several
sections of the outpost will cover beachead, cluster base, and excavated
base phases of development and will including mining sites, agricultural
facilities, and transport systems such as rover trains and banana monorails.
It will be a fully functional outpost prototyped on Earth. The outpost will
be heavily canvased by web-cams for public access. People will watch this
like it was Meerkat Manor. (in fact, meerkats are my chosen prime candidate
for the IOSI mascot) An additional facility in a more accessible location
will cover prototypes and demonstrations of human habitat facilities and
systems based on the use of excavated and built-up shell structures and
using Utilihab-derived component systems for interior outfitting. Testing
for these will be more concerned with ergonomics and comfortable interior
design and so they have no need of simulating a remote location -at least
until the program has advanced to a point where the actual Lunar outpost has
been deployed and critical pressurized systems need to be worked on.

•Negotiation with established space programs/firms for assistance in Lunar
deployment or co-development of an independent launch service capability.
(Exocet and Wizard programs). The Moon is the first target because of
telecommunications latency. There is little function different between Lunar
and Mars settlement beyond latency and the added challenge of Mars orbital
transfer. But at that distance our robotics needs a very high level of
autonomous AI to compensate for latency. Thus the Moon is the logical
systems development environment for Mars.

Next, the Telestat project. The Telestat is a lenticular solar aerostat with
a rigid composite hull shell. It is intended as a telecommunications
platform with small initial research vehicles developed for the initial
application of aerial remote viewing platform and emergency WiFi networks
and solar power while larger platforms will be developed as an alternative
to satellites for wide area telecommunications services and eventually an
optionally manned high altitude research platform and test structure for
TransHab and EvoHab hull systems. The Telestat starts out basically like
Mike Walden's Cambot, only we're going to leap-frog cruder hull technology
and begin working with rigid composite hulls, ultimately looking to
experiment with new nanofiber composites to experiment with vacuum lift.
This will produce a very resilient vehicle that has a duty life of decades
and can operate at stratospheric altitudes for years between servicing. This
project builds on both the robotics experience of the IOSI program and its
use of airship lander simulators. This is a technically sophisticated
project, but can start quite modestly in scale and has huge entrepreneurial
potential. Effective telecommunications aerostats are potentially worth
billions in continuous revenue.

The key purpose of this project in the larger TMP context is to begin
development of the Aquarian Airship as well as provide a telecommunications
infrastructure for Aquarian settlements -because undersea cable systems will
be less practical during transitional settlement development (they still
cost about $25,000 per mile and are immobile) while satellite Internet
really-really sucks...

Next on the agenda; rockets. The Exocet Alpha and Wizard Alpha programs.
These semi-professional programs will develop sub-orbital radial aerospike
test vehicles in pursuit of developing a low-reliability high-frequency
cargo SSTO launch platform that will eventually evolve into the reusable and
then manned versions of these vehicle concepts. These programs are the TMP
answer to Copenhagen Suborbitals. The Wizard Alpha program may be more
immediately accessible a project than the Exocet Alpha because the Exocet is
an in-water-launch system that would require a modified catamaran yacht as a
carrier/command vessel. However, the Exocet may be the only platform
effective at the low-rel launch equation because of the nature of in-water
launch. Places on land that 'fail safe' are increasingly scarce. Beyond the
advanced model rocket scale, the Wizard starts running into bureaucratic
hassle. Both these project will be based on the use of advanced composite
hull structures and so both derive from the Telestat project through the
composite fabrication experience. However, they could just as easily precede
the Telestat project based on personal motivation or the state of
development in the IOSI and its demand for a cheap launch capability.

So there it is folks. This is our plan to get TMP started, presented in
order of what I think is the most to least immediately accessible activity.
This is the list of things I intend to do, am currently working on, and have
been working on for a long time despite the fact that, apparently, only a
few people here have been paying attention. This is what I want you to get
involved in and support. I never want to hear anyone say in this forum that
we have no idea of what to do. I've been presenting this stuff to this group
for years. I cannot make this any plainer without putting it in comic book
form. If this was any more detailed a set of concepts, it would be a stack
of blueprints, circuit diagrams, and disks full of G-code. I can't do all
this by myself and I don't have all the answers to present to you on a
silver platter, but I know what we basically need to do and I've just
presented it here. If you want to see action in this organization, you now
know exactly what has to be done from today on and have no excuse but your
own laziness for not picking up a hammer and getting down to it.

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com



On Mar 3, 2011, at 4:43 AM, luf-team at yahoogroups.com wrote:

> maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects not working?
> Posted by: "steve" rward8 at yahoo.com   rward8
> Wed Mar 2, 2011 2:23 pm (PST)
>
>
>
> i will keep this as short as i can, Why is it i see 1001 very good drawled
concepts. buildings mostly but several other projects as well that are
vaporware.
>
> for instance why is luf/sea-stead/etc we have plenty of good drawings and
i can not even call them articles. they are so detailed maybe books is a
better?
>
> Yet im lets say mildly confessed why this stuff is so hard to create? Lack
of money? That dont explain things too good because there money everywhere.
>
> Even with my own projects most are dead because it seems that it just dont
work?
>
> ...........ugg now i sound like im ranting, i do know that starting small
and growing from there is a good way to do things.
>
> for instance:
>
> make your truck run on X
> then find out how to mass produce?
>
> so why is that so hard? im i missing something?



------------------------------------

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-- 
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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