Bye Bye Cassini

[Okeefenokee]

I think the comparisons to colonial America have it backwards. When America colonizes space, it will be more like America moves into space.

The Earth in a lot of ways sucks because of all the other people on the planet. This is Warworld. We constantly have to deal with stupid shit here that we wouldn't have to deal with if we moved most of our population to sustainable colonies offworld.

America was destined for this in my opinion. It's in our DNA. We are the ones who need to constantly expand. We are the ones who always seek to dominate the high ground as well. We are the ones who obsess over technology and innovation.

The only reason the Chinese are doing this shit is to prove they are our equals. They wouldn't care if we didn't already do these things. Europe is going to be Arab and North African before long, so they are out.

It is what it is. We have to move on.

I'm already working on it. So long, and thanks for the fish.

[heydaralon]

I'm already working on it. So long, and thanks for the fish.

I don't think those dolphins are going anywhere...

[Speaker to Animals]

I think the comparisons to colonial America have it backwards. When America colonizes space, it will be more like America moves into space.

The Earth in a lot of ways sucks because of all the other people on the planet. This is Warworld. We constantly have to deal with stupid shit here that we wouldn't have to deal with if we moved most of our population to sustainable colonies offworld.

America was destined for this in my opinion. It's in our DNA. We are the ones who need to constantly expand. We are the ones who always seek to dominate the high ground as well. We are the ones who obsess over technology and innovation.

The only reason the Chinese are doing this shit is to prove they are our equals. They wouldn't care if we didn't already do these things. Europe is going to be Arab and North African before long, so they are out.

It is what it is. We have to move on.

If you were President of the United States, or in a major congressional or cabinet position, what would the Speaker to Animals plan for outer space colonies entail? Would you try to encourage the private sector to expand into space first, or would you try to set up some kind of Manhattan project? In your opinion, how much would this cost? Most importantly, how would you sell the American people on paying for this?

Also, you have talked about asteroid mining before on DCF. How do you bring the minerals back to Earth? It seems like you would have to break off a piece of the bigger asteroid and send the smaller one through the Earth's atmosphere. If it was too small, it would just burn up in the atmosphere and be worthless, but if it was big enough to survive the journey, wouldn't it make a huge impact on Earth and cause massive amounts of damage? Another thing I've wondered about is what importing precious metals from outer space would do to the markets of those metals on Earth. I've read stuff that talks about the sheer amount of these metals on certain asteroids dwarfs the current supply on this planet. That would wreak havoc on many markets. If we could mine space, that would be incredible, but there are logistics and social problems I can't wrap my head around.

I would shut down NASA and start over with a new agency that is run by engineers rather than planetary scientists.

Then I would organize industry -- namely companies like Boeing, SpaceX, Blue Horizon, etc. -- under a single umbrella in which we figured out together how to divide contracts and duties. The overall authority would be the space colonization agency, however. But we would pool public and private capital into one collective entity. In truth, our space program already works a little like this. The space shuttle program, for example, was run by NASA, but the people who built and maintained them were the United Space Alliance, which was a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The entire space program is built by these kinds of joint ventures between corporations in conjunction with NASA or USAF. But I would just make this one big joint venture in which the US government is a co-owner along with every major aerospace and technology industry in our nation.

First project on the table: we mine Eros 433. That rock has more precious metals on it than we could possibly extract from the entire crust of planet Earth. I would want to figure out the most economical way to extract those precious metals and bring them to the surface of the Earth for processing. I would use them to pay off the US debt and essentially wreck all the other nations by making most strategic metals a common commodity. This insures nobody else can easily catch up with us and we won't have to compete for a while. It also pays off the national debt.

From the Eros project, we would still have a sizable chunk of resources in space, especially base metals like iron, aluminum, and nickel. I would also scout around for a carbonaceous asteroid to extract carbon. Asteroids also contain elements like vanadium. All of this together gives you the ingredients for super steel and aircraft aluminum alloys.

Second project: Build a refining colony on Luna. We need to be able to refine these metals and fabricate the alloys necessary to build ships and colony structures without having to fuck too much with Earth's gravity well. We can do this on the Moon. I am unsure what the best way to go about this would be, but I suspect it would involve going to a large crater and digging into the side of it to create a living space pretty deep beneath the surface, but easily accessible to the wall of the crater. Doing this would also allow us to eventually build a maglev launcher in the crater that goes across the basin and up the wall. This would allow us to launch vehicles pretty far above the surface before we need to fire any rockets. This could save us on fuel, and would only cost us the nuclear reactors needed to power the magrail.

Project three: We need to build shipyards in one of Earth's Lagrange points. We use our mining systems to get the materials from asteroids, send them back to the Earth-Moon systems in blocks with an attached control device and a solar sail. They get picked up by automated tugs that put them into lunar orbit and then degrade those orbits so the blocks crash into the surface somewhere. Then we extract the materials from the surface and transport the materials back to our refinery. The materials are separated and we fabricate the raw materials we need. Those are bundled into cargo containers that are launched via magrail and then fire boosters to get them to the shipyard at something like L1. We can park these things in that location indefinitely (the beauty of a Lagrange point). When the shipyard needs the material, it gathers the cargo pods it needs and brings the refined materials to the docks to be used to build ships and colony sections.

From there, the sky is the limit. That's how you could bootstrap the program. I think it might take us a good century before we seriously began to build colonies around the solar system from that, but we would have a profitable space program that could make it happen. The trick is to make it profitable from day one. That will never happen when the space program is run by planetary scientists. They are not engineers. They suck at engineering. They are terrible managers of a space program.

[heydaralon]

Holy shit. That would be awesome if we could wreck the economies of other countries by bringing precious metals back from space. Why are planetary scientists not fit for NASA? It seems like they have accomplished some impressive engineering feats, even if their activities have been more modest now versus what NASA was doing in the late 60's and 70's.

[Okeefenokee]

Holy shit. That would be awesome if we could wreck the economies of other countries by bringing precious metals back from space. Why are planetary scientists not fit for NASA? It seems like they have accomplished some impressive engineering feats, even if their activities have been more modest now versus what NASA was doing in the late 60's and 70's.

Man hasn't gone beyond low earth orbit, which isn't even really orbit, in decades. NASA's purpose is to conduct experiments now. When Congress mentioned going to Mars it made their heads spin. They aren't interested in practical operations. They aren't interested in asteroid mining or colonization. NASA wants to launch telescopes to learn the origins of the universe, which is fine, but that's all they want to do.

They pretty much seem like ancient seers who aren't really interested in anything other than propping up their own importance.

[Speaker to Animals]

Holy shit. That would be awesome if we could wreck the economies of other countries by bringing precious metals back from space. Why are planetary scientists not fit for NASA? It seems like they have accomplished some impressive engineering feats, even if their activities have been more modest now versus what NASA was doing in the late 60's and 70's.

Okie described the problem pretty well.

When NASA was run by engineers, we landed men on the Moon.

The planetary scientists took over in early 1980s (really began to happen in the late 1970s). They decimated the space program. Planetary scientists wanted probes and telescopes. That's all we got. All space colonization missions canceled.

Sagan was the worst of the bunch. The guy would go on television and lie through his teeth about the practicality of colonization and the even things like nuclear propulsion. He flat out would lie. It's really unbelievable how dishonest that guy was. Even today, if you look at interviews with DeGrass Tyson where the question comes up, he flat out says he would rather have a bunch of unmanned planetary probes than a manned mission anywhere because they could collect more data that way. These people care about publishing papers in their journals, and they hold the destiny of our people hostage in order to keep doing it on our dime. It's a travesty what these people have done. The lying, though, to perpetuate it really gets to me. I really hate how they constantly lie and deceive people about space travel.

[heydaralon]

Holy shit. That would be awesome if we could wreck the economies of other countries by bringing precious metals back from space. Why are planetary scientists not fit for NASA? It seems like they have accomplished some impressive engineering feats, even if their activities have been more modest now versus what NASA was doing in the late 60's and 70's.

Okie described the problem pretty well.

When NASA was run by engineers, we landed men on the Moon.

The planetary scientists took over in early 1980s (really began to happen in the late 1970s). They decimated the space program. Planetary scientists wanted probes and telescopes. That's all we got. All space colonization missions canceled.

Sagan was the worst of the bunch. The guy would go on television and lie through his teeth about the practicality of colonization and the even things like nuclear propulsion. He flat out would lie. It's really unbelievable how dishonest that guy was. Even today, if you look at interviews with DeGrass Tyson where the question comes up, he flat out says he would rather have a bunch of unmanned planetary probes than a manned mission anywhere because they could collect more data that way. These people care about publishing papers in their journals, and they hold the destiny of our people hostage in order to keep doing it on our dime. It's a travesty what these people have done. The lying, though, to perpetuate it really gets to me. I really hate how they constantly lie and deceive people about space travel.

I am not super familiar with Sagan, but I do think it would be extremely expensive to colonize a planet or even somewhere close like the moon. I've argued as much earlier in the thread. That doesn't mean its not worthwhile, but the public would have to be made to understand that they might not get a return on their investment for decades at least. It takes a long time to travel anywhere in space let alone set up a complex colony.

As far as Tyson goes, I think he's kind of a dipshit. He veers into politics and philosophy too often, and its a mental away game for him. His idea of a society run on science and reason is basically a complete ripoff of Positivism from centuries before, though he is probably not self aware enough to realize this. He is well liked on reddit, which is usually a bad sign imo.

I don't know as much about space exploration as you guys, but I really like your asteroid mining idea. How would you actually get the minerals back to Earth without creating a huge impact crater though?

[heydaralon]

Holy shit. That would be awesome if we could wreck the economies of other countries by bringing precious metals back from space. Why are planetary scientists not fit for NASA? It seems like they have accomplished some impressive engineering feats, even if their activities have been more modest now versus what NASA was doing in the late 60's and 70's.

Man hasn't gone beyond low earth orbit, which isn't even really orbit, in decades. NASA's purpose is to conduct experiments now. When Congress mentioned going to Mars it made their heads spin. They aren't interested in practical operations. They aren't interested in asteroid mining or colonization. NASA wants to launch telescopes to learn the origins of the universe, which is fine, but that's all they want to do.

They pretty much seem like ancient seers who aren't really interested in anything other than propping up their own importance.

That defies everything I understand about government. Usually government agencies or branches of the military always want to expand their influence and budget. They are constantly fighting for new programs and weapons, even if they are of limited utility. Mission creep is like an iron law of government. From what you are describing, it sounds like NASA is doing the opposite, even if they could have a bigger budget by suggesting manned flights.

[Speaker to Animals]

The reason I said we should start by mining that one particular rock is that doing so would bankroll the rest of the effort. To colonize, we have to do it with a mind of economic exploitation of space resources.

The way the planetary science crowd thinks.. it's always a sunk cost. If they want to send a space probe to Saturn, they get all this money from the government, tell the engineers to build the fucking thing so they can go on television and take credit for it like they have any idea how to build a spaceship or navigate the thing to fucking Saturn in the first place. Then they get their data, publish their papers, and the tax payers just made their career.

I do not like these people one bit. It's not that I doubt there exists a place for such scientific experimentation. I simply think it should be a tiny fraction of our budget. We need to focus on profitable things.

Space colonization is definitely not an unprofitable venture. We can start profiting right away. You have to kick those bozos out and put engineers in charge.



Do you realize we were about to build nuclear propulsion spaceship in the 1960s? Freemon Dyson was talking about sending human beings in relatively short trips to any planet in the solar system. Not just little spaceships. These things were huge.

[heydaralon]

The reason I said we should start by mining that one particular rock is that doing so would bankroll the rest of the effort. To colonize, we have to do it with a mind of economic exploitation of space resources.

The way the planetary science crowd thinks.. it's always a sunk cost. If they want to send a space probe to Saturn, they get all this money from the government, tell the engineers to build the fucking thing so they can go on television and take credit for it like they have any idea how to build a spaceship or navigate the thing to fucking Saturn in the first place. Then they get their data, publish their papers, and the tax payers just made their career.

I do not like these people one bit. It's not that I doubt there exists a place for such scientific experimentation. I simply think it should be a tiny fraction of our budget. We need to focus on profitable things.

Space colonization is definitely not an unprofitable venture. We can start profiting right away. You have to kick those bozos out and put engineers in charge.



Do you realize we were about to build nuclear propulsion spaceship in the 1960s? Freemon Dyson was talking about sending human beings in relatively short trips to any planet in the solar system. Not just little spaceships. These things were huge.

Do you have a link to this? I would like to read about it.