Water
Balloon
Space
Ship
to
bring
train
loads
of
things
back
to
orbits
around
Earth
Imagine an ice cave inside some near Earth
object, with
water dripping into pools and collection tanks.
Imagine a Space Shuttle nudging a water balloon
as big as the 85 yard line of a football field,
silently, through the black night of space.
Imagine someone in orbit around earth getting hold of
five long train loads of anything,
like 50,000
tons of steel or water,
to
use
for
making
space
ships,
rocket
fuel
propellant,
shielding,
solar
power
satellites,
really
big
space
ships,
and all
kinds
of
imaginative,
spacey things.
Imagine the Shuttle uses water in steam rockets
heated by small
nuclear reactor heaters.
Imagine a
nuclear water heater melting the ice cave.
50,000 tons is about as much mass as 400 Space Shuttles all at once.
If humans are lucky, the near Earth object will be a moon of Mars called Deimos.
We just recently realized water is
almost
everywhere in the space relatively near Earth. (recently = last 20
years -- things happen slowly in space)
If we are lucky, the water will enable a human
Exodus to elsewhere, not Earth.
You don't need to read the calculations in the Appendix showing that the water ship to deliver 50,000 tons to LEO is relatively simple. The simplicity and relatively familiar hardware masses would suggest that the mission becomes "inexpensive".
However, I use "inexpensive" to make you think you can afford this. I do not actually include a cost estimate because I have no recent experience at costing space missions.
If I sold that stuff to you for $50 per pound, I
would
only get
about USD $5.5 Billion per trip. That is not a lot of money.
I settled for "$5.5 Billion" and " $50 per pound"
because that is all I think I can get from you at one time.
When I first showed this scheme to peers at a
space meeting, I
used a million ton payload ( 1,000,000 tons). That made sense to me. If
I got
$10 per pound for whatever I brought back, I would get
USD $22 Billion per
trip.
(--- that was 3 July 1991, San Juan
Capistrano, CA, at the first International Near Earth Asteroids
Conference)
You would not pay me any more than that.
My million ton scheme
would nudge a water ballon just a little bit bigger than 2 football
fields
across. In space, that's not so big. I would use nuclear
reactors like in our nuclear submarines to make the hot steam for the
rockets.
This was so incredibly simple.
I was only using heat. I did not need the exceptionally expensive
electric generator to split water. I did not need an exceptionally
heavy and slow space refrigerator and compressor to make liquid
hydrogen and liquid oxygen. I did not need to contain the high pressure
of liquid hydrogen. I did not need to make tanks so thick and heavy and
strong that they would hold a cubic football field of water on the
earth's surface.
I was proposing a giant water balloon in nearly zero gravity in space,
nudged by a steam rocket.
I was naive. I was showing them how to make a
supertanker to go between continents,
and we were still making wood rafts to cross a river.
Back in the old days, 1991 July, that million-ton scheme was the only
one that made sense. I knew
how to arrange it. I had discovered how to use the water from
space
directly in a steam rocket. Proudly I had proclaimed that bypassing all
those NASA-type water
splitting and refining steps would reduce the cost of rocket fuel
propellant in
space by a factor of 10 or 10,000.
I could prove that we could initiate the Exodus to space.
We really wanted to inhabit space, like Mars, the moon, interesting asteroids laced with 10 times as much gold and platinum as the best platinum ore on Earth. Or some local comets which are supposed to be laced with water ice, silicates, and some kind of oil shale.
But it just did not work out that way. When I was all done, Paul
Sturrock would not
return my
emails for 3 days.
It was not enough. I could not show how to make
money now,
money later, or make space affordable. All I could do was to make it
"inexpensive", so to speak.
Maybe we need to wait until we are Androids or Avatars.
cheers,
Anthony
click here to go to the Appendix, where the
water ship from Deimos is detailed.
exodus
dark stormy
night 20100625
< 6/25/2010 11:35:12 AM a zuppero
it was a horrible, dark and stormy night
and when morning came
almost everything was gone.
We were
doomed to stay here
trapped
on Earth.
Everything we thought we had
to let us Exodus
to Inhabit the Solar System
was gone.
Like clams trapped in the water
on the shores,
so close to freedom,
we were trapped here
on the shores of Space.
Clams,
trapped by water and ---:
they are clams, for cry sake.
They have no eyes, no ears,
no way to run.
They are clams.
People,
trapped by air and ---:
they are people, for cry sake.
They need the Earth,
the water, trees,
birds chirping,
the smell of fresh
leaves after a light summer
rain,
others to love,
amber waves of grain.
They are people.
They can't live in a
porta-potty for 3 years
while they travel to some
airless rock in space
or an airless ice ball
moon of Jupiter or Saturn
where ice is so cold
it is hard like granite.
They are people.
They can't stand the deadly
Galactic Cosmic Radiation,
or the weightlessness,
or the isolation.
We are People.
Once again I had to
relearn what I forgot
and I was the one who had to go figure,
because I was the one who found out
how to use the water in space
to deliver megatons Back to Earth
and how
it was just not good enough.
Paul, he gave me $5,000
that I did not even ask for.
I resisted him.
He sent it anyway.
It made me go figure again,
anew.
So I did.
And the answer came
out the same
as it did a dozen years ago:
you can't leave till you are another species,
till you change what you are.
The only thing left
after the horrible,
dark and
stormy night was
that our Earth is very
nice indeed,
a wonderful, interesting, complex, exciting place to stay
while we
metamorphose.
>
< poetry: imagine a water rock
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