[ExI] ?Existential hysteria (John Clark)

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 1:35 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I agree with you on the need for cheaper, and thorium might do the job.
>  The most optimistic number I have seen for ground or even
> StratoSolar in future decades is about 8 cents per kWh, more than twice as
> much as coal.


Then it is doomed, nobody will invest the MASSIVE amounts of money needed
to develop it and even if they did nobody would buy the damn thing. And how
is that electricity efficiently stored so it can be used at night?

> On the other hand, have you not paid any attention to my talking about
> space based solar for the last several years?  If it is worth doing at all,
> the eventual cost needs to get down around 2-3 cents per kWh.  That takes
> cheap transport to GEO.
>

VERY cheap transport to GEO! Easier said than done.


> > The artwork on Google drive shows a Skylon cargo container being added
> to a second stage.


People have been talking about hypersonic ramjets for years but they have
proven to be enormously difficult to make;  I'm starting to think they will
always be 20 years in the future, just like fusion power.

> The second slide shows the cargo under way using VASIMR engines making
> the purple glow.  The engines are powered by microwave from the ground.
>

First use this technology to put a paperclip into Low Earth Orbit and then
maybe we can talk meaningfully about how much it would cost to put a
supertanker sized object into Geostationary Orbit.

  John K Clark
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