NASA meeting on space and asteroids
First International Meeting On Killer Asteroids
seriously crazy rocket science meeting
Hazard meeting with Carl Sagan
Clear Cutting the Kuiper Belt Comets
space aliens 10 miles under ...
The Iceship And The NASA Space Meeting
Although I really did find a
way to make space ships the size of ocean
tankers, big enough to take hundreds of us throughout the solar system,
the
only product of my entire career struggle working in so-called "rocket
science," was that people wanted to hear the story.
My discovery was of
how to make a massive space transporter, but it would
travel slow. My colleages had found how to make a much faster rocket,
but it
would be small and frail. We were at odds because we did not realize
that we
were different, one trying to make the fastest space ship, the other
trying to
make the most massive transport. We struggled against each other.
The real struggle was with the rest of us. The
rest of us know we are the wrong species. Our schemes all cost far too
much.
And there seems to be no hope of any way to make a clear profit from
space.
We would inhabit, occupy, move
minor planets and other celestial objects.
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/15/zuppero_solar_system/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/15/zuppero_solar_system/print.html
Zuppero's
zingy
tale
of
space
travel
and bonkers weaponry
Posted in Space, 15th
November
2009 10:02 GMT
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Book review The best mad scientist autobiography
this
year, perhaps the only one, is Tony Zuppero's To Inhabit the Solar
System. Better still, it's free and in
time for holiday reading. It's a long but definitely not windy 391
pages.
In
it, Zuppero confirms everything - bad, weird, insane, amusing or simply
astonishing - you might have always suspected about US government crazy
weapons
and the world of aerospace.
"Tony
Zuppero, one of [a few] would-be nuclear rocketeers, tells those
stories as he
recalls them, with sometimes alarming candor, humor, and
disappointment,"
opined Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists after
linking
to the memoir on his secrecy blog.
Zuppero's
dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman
Dyson's
well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a spaceship to the
nearest star
at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi
authors
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien
invasion
novel, Footfall.)
Working
for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called
Orion,
for the Dyson space ship.
"I
was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship]," he writes. "It
showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb
propulsion
device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew... The design seemed to be
really
dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up
inbetween
periods of getting drunk."
With
the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of
thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream's propulsion. But
the bombs
are way too big, he observes, and there's no way to get three million
of them
on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb
room,
Zuppero writes.
To
continue his work on the Orion rocket, Zuppero needs it justified by
attachment
to weapons analyses. A boss first asks if it's possible to tow an
unshielded
nuclear reactor behind an airplane so it spews radioactivity over the
Soviet
Union or
Would
it be possible to blow up the entire
This
would be 5000 megatons or more, something the weapons shops of the
The
technical dilemma was how to get it there fast. Using even more atomic
bombs.
The
reader immediately sees where this is going. Impractical.
Zuppero
is blunt, often humorously so, immediately describing one of his bosses
as a
Nazi. The scientist is so frank because he is an "Aspie", he explains
- "Autistic, Like Mongoloids and Other Weird People" according to one
subchapter. Likening himself to Mr Spock, he concedes that he sometimes
says
things which are inappropriate.
In
the context of the book, it is a bit of an understatement.
After
this preamble, Zuppero is "fired" into a job on spy satellites, one
meaningless to his undying goal, to design a rocket which can get out
into the
solar system.
To
do this, Zuppero needs fuel and gas stations in space, and the answer
to that
is water. With a nuclear-heated steam rocket, he can travel the solar
system,
filling up at near Earth comets. He even provides a map of them.
This
puts him in contact with more interesting people, in particular the
delightfully named Crazy Roger, a colonel in the US Air Force who pays
Zuppero
for an analysis based on his rocket idea.
Roger
was head of Timber Wind, a special Strategic Defense Initiative project
to
build nuclear-powered rockets. The Federation of American Scientists
uncovered
Timber Wind in the early Nineties and the outcry over it - including a
proposed
test launch out of Vandenberg which, if it misfired, could potentially
toss a
nuclear reactor into New Zealand - eventually killed it.
It
is retold in the chapter, "Crazy Roger's Secret Nuclear Rocket". In
effect, this was a flying nuclear reactor, one that some assumed would
be an
orbiting radioactive garbage scow, raining down waste in places with
unfortunate luck.
Even
though space travel of the kind dreamed about decades ago had died, To
Inhabit
The
Solar
System is perfectly
suited for movie-making, possibly as art house fare.
Replete
with unusual characters and characterizations, good portions of it are
laugh
out loud funny, sometimes unintentionally so. One learns that being in
space is
a bummer, spaceships a bit like combined orbiting vomitoriums/outhouses.
"This
is not sci-fi," Zuppero tells readers right off.
Zuppero
presents the reader with a collection of photos of ice moons he thinks
humans
could inhabit but believes "we are still the wrong species": it's too
expensive and "we're broke". In the end the dream passes him by, but
he clearly had a hell of a time chasing it.
You
can read To Inhabit The Solar System
here (pdf) (http://www.neofuel.com/inhabit/inhabit.pdf).
===================================
Daniel Abraham, author
http://danielabraham.com/, wrote most of this about Anthony and his
story:
An Aspie Story:
To Inhabit the Solar System
Anthony Zuppero was recently diagnosed to
be an "Aspie", "on the Autistic spectrum" with Asperger's Syndrome. Now
a semi-retired rocket scientist, with a PhD in solid state physics he
had worked for the US
Department of Energy national laboratories and large aerospace
companies, and spearheaded teams investigating how humanity could not
just visit the solar system but occupy it. He hyperfocused on the
potential of near earth objects: neos.
With typical IQ above 130, Aspies hyperfocus. About 0.5% are Aspies:
"different," are often irreverent, socially inappropriate, difficult to
work with, charming, annoying, discover artistically elegant solutions
-- quite like Spock of Star Trek. These symptoms have both served him
and undermined his work.
Anthony hyperfocused on ways to harness the unexpected and abundant
forms of water in the neo's. He discovered how to use small,
nuclear-heated steam rockets to propel spaceships the size of
supertankers. His spaceships would reach and colonize the nearly two
dozen giant ice moons in the solar system. He envisioned humanity
travelling a thousand people at a time between the planets in cheap,
slowly spinninig ice-igloos. He would leverage the peculiar orbits of
the abundant neo's to divert asteroids and comets from killer
collisions with earth, using steam rockets and without nuclear warheads.
His speeches and presentations on his work consistently transfixed
audiences who pestered him with incessant questions. But when he
approached mainstream colleagues, his often poor reception perplexed
him. Aspie interfered. His steam rockets were slow and cheap. Theirs
were fast, flashy, technologically superior, and wildly unaffordable
compared to his. Perplexed, he explained with precise detail to deaf
ears how his could enable humanity to afford to inhabit the solar
system. He accessed the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, directors
of national laboratories. But he could not move these mere
neurotypicals.
As is typical of people with Asperger's Syndrome, he went from step one
to step ten, assuming that the neurotypicals listening were equally
smart and would therefore see the logic of omitted steps. His
work therefore sometimes sounded like mere fiction and speculation -
the work of a crank instead of a professional scientist. Literally
unaware of social cues, Anthony rigorously detailed the calculations,
but apart from a few equally rigorous minds, he couldn't persuade
neurotypicals and his NASA competitors to act.
Equally a modern Cassandra and a character from a Philip K. Dick novel,
Anthony's autism gave him the ability to see and understand this narrow
technical field in uncanny depth and simultaneously robbed him of the
social skill to make his case. Unruffled, Aspies often work for their
own satisfaction, like artists. Asperger's autism made him an excellent
engineering and science visionary with a long and illustrious career,
and afforded him a glimpse of a possible future in which mankind
shrugged off gravity and mastered the whole solar system. The autism
denied him the social skills to convince "neurotypicals" that the key
to mankind's next great expansion were there before them.
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