12 replies to this topic

[Casanova]

I have attached the address to a website titled: "Space Islands"
Do any of you know what the current situation is, regarding the Space Island idea.
The idea is, or was, brilliant, and inexpensive, compared to the current Space Station fiasco.
Space Islands

[Lazarus Long]

It is a pretty picture and a practical approach except for a minor problem with the promise. There are 12 segments in the ring and these represent twelve launches of a new type of launch. There are not such segments in orbit because ALL previous lauches have had their external tanks dropped back to Earth.

It would require more than one launch a month to complete such a project in a year and the shuttle prgram has never to date been able to do that without a catastrophe. Also to take the tanks up to a stable orbit would mean they could carry virtually no onboard cargo (to offset the mass of the tank) and still require major modifications to be able to lift the mass of the external tank to a significantly higher orbit. There ain't no such thing as a free hot launch (pun not typo).

That said there is nothing in principle that says such a concept should not be an element of future shuttle replacement design. But if I were replacing the shuttle I wouldn't even want to depend on combustible fuels so the concept would become obsolete with payload delivery systems that can dwarf what most people imagine. Reference some of the various theoretical designs that have been suggested.

My own are not included, intentionally.

[Casanova]

This concept is not new. It was first suggested in the early 1980s. One of it's advocates was Norman Spinrad, the SF writer.
Nasa knew about this idea, and rejected it, from the start, to the anger of many engineers.
If it had been implemented when the first Shuttle flights had begun, the Space Islands, would be up there in orbit.
It is probably too late in the day, now, to start this project.
Chalk up another dumb choice made by Nasa.

By the way, I have always loathed the Space Shuttle, and nicknamed it the Shittle. The Space Island concept could have redeemed the Space Shuttle fiasco, to a certain extent.

All, in all, we should have followed Von Brauns ideas for going to the Moon.
Our government choose one of the worst methouds to get to the Moon, and it has all been downhill since.
The time we have lost, for the Manned Colonization of space, is unforgivable, and no amount of happy-facing, can undo the tradegy of that wasted time period; going on two generations now.

Edited by Casanova, 07 June 2003 - 03:24 AM.

[Lazarus Long]

If it is any consolation I happen to agree with you about the negative aspects of the shuttle. Not the basic idea, nor in any manner disparaging of those I see as truly heroic (tragicomically) that operate this magnificent distraction, but of the contemptible pragmatists and politicos that conspired to emasculate NASA after the death of JFK.

I took one serious look at the "shittle" program in the very early 1970’s and knew from its design that our dreams of spaceflight had been co-opted. I knew immediately that there would be no push to follow up on the achievements happening even as I looked at the plans. I knew the tremendous grace and beauty was a compromise with the Devil that meant we would go no further for a very long time and when I proclaimed my dismay and sense of betrayal to any that would listen; I was soundly rejected as somewhat mad. Why?

Because we the people had been conned by a bait and switch and when I confronted people with this perception I was greeted with the same idiotic “articles of faith” I received when in 1984 I began telling people of my fears for the failure of the Solid Rocket Boosters. The response was a sinister echo of the words heard at the beginning of the Columbia investigation with regard to the foam, "impossible"!

Too many looked back at me with contempt when I chided: "They called the Titanic impossible to sink too" and since then both serious problems that have afflicted the Shuttle Program can be said to have stemmed more from this one human character flaw than even the technological defects these all too human characters willfully failed to assess. By the way my other very big concern was re-entry, I saw the tiles as vulnerable and at best a stop gap design measure that we came to rely upon as a standard.

My startling realization about the shuttle was from a simpler observation into the one major flaw in solid fuel rockets I had observed when I had flown them as a child. I was very concerned about what would contribute to sidewall failure, and when I was told in response "not too worry, we have taken everything into consideration" my alarm bells started ringing. The general response was: "So what? They still won't blow up.”

When I responded to that by saying: "They won't but if they direct a jet of plasma at the external fuel tank it will explode". The reaction was as if I had spit on their favorite religious icon. I still remember the look of profound contempt mixed with pity at my idiocy and heretical lack of faith.

Being correct in my concerns has never been much of a consolation; instead it has fostered a personal sense of guilt at somehow not having been able to do more to confront the foolishness I was suspicious of and the corruption that had invaded the design.

On the other fateful day in February, I was in North Palm Beach and watched with my own eyes as I was vindicated for my naive fears. I watched the Challenger shred itself apart in a beautiful and horrific instantaneous pyrotechnic display, on a clear and gorgeous semi-tropical morning and I wept for I knew the greatest setback would not be just in the technology and funding but in people’s hearts, it would be the subversion of hope.

It was this same sense that overwhelmed me somewhat like déjà vu while I was standing on the roof of twenty-story building in Mid-Town Manhattan on an exquisite fall morning of startling contrasts and observed with my own eyes the burning and crashing Twin Towers of the World Trade Center some three miles away.

You are correct about the bad design of the shuttle because it was never supposed to be an end in itself but a means to go on to even greater achievements. It was a bait and switch because it was allowed to become an end in itself and this "bait & switch" happened even before the ink was dry on its first designs and that is why I knew that we would forgo the dream and that we were being lied to.

There was no true commitment to the "ends" and there never was one. There was only a commitment to a "means" that could be subverted to another purpose once built; a militarist and downward looking purpose that didn't need to go to the stars, by those that felt the Moon was irrelevant. It was all visible in the design and still is for those that know how to read engineering to derive purpose from application.

You are correct to lament about all the discarded dreams of the period from Apollo to the "Shittle" but what you haven't looked deeply enough at is the "why" this conspiracy of ignorance occurred. It occurred because of a bizarre agreement between seemingly opposite forces, luddites and military strategists, taxpayers and budgetary analysts, social reformers and political spin doctors.

During the Vietnam War our nation had lost its will to strive for greatness and this had been corrupted into a popular insulation and isolation. We retreated into our shells as a people and made silly arguments about how Space Programs were bad for education and the poor, how we should stop the military industrialists from fighting the cold war by not paying for Scientific Research & Development and the militarists and manifest destiny minded that wanted to win “token” battles to reinvigorate the lust for war and not “peacetime pursuits of progress.”

So after Challenger, out with the bath water went the baby and the shuttle program began to shift to its rightful owners, the group that had really designed it in the first place It became more and more a part of the defense department and it is they that will inherit total control soon if people do not wake up to what is going on. But the vast majority of people are satisfied with armchair realities, they prefer vicarious experience to cold and hostile frontiers, they think we can go forward through remote control.

But the average person does not really want to go forth and this is where the problem truly lies. Most people are in our society are quite comfortable and complacent comfort is their common goal. It is very uncomfortable to seek new frontiers, to travel beyond imagined horizons, to willingly endure interminable unknown hardships and threats to one’s existence; it is like a never quenched thirst, an itch that accepts no end of scratching, or a lust never satiated by any amount of lovers. It is the secret well spring of madness, our Fountain of Eternal Youth that has paradoxically been the true source of inspiration and effort for all human progress and what too many sanctimoniously call greatness.

The building of colonies into the unknown requires BOTH a desperate people demanding change and a few obsessive/compulsive monomaniacs that may never reach Canaan but are willing to die trying. This is never a very politically correct attitude and makes “normal people” very uncomfortable to be around. So uncomfortable that sometimes they will pay to get rid of you; if after they first try to cure you, cage you, or kill you, they don’t succeed.

[Casanova]

Only one error, in what you wrote;
I have dug deeply, and considered all that you mentioned, since the early 1970s. There is a great article at the end of a book on the film, "2001: A Space Odyssey", that explains some of what went wrong.
Post-Moderism gets a well deserved bashing.

So what does this say for human nature, in general? Here we had the most advanced country on earth, do a great retreat into nihilsm, and petty self indulgence, at the very moment when it could have aquired glory, and magnificence, as the first peoples to colonize the new frontier, outer space.
I still say we should have followed Von Braun's ideas, but the Apollo program had a name that fit what happened perfectly, namely; the across the board death of the Apollonian spirit.
We have become a country, indeed a world, of Dionysian slobs, who have all the charm, and dignity, of street thugs.

Edited by Casanova, 08 June 2003 - 02:33 AM.

[Lazarus Long]

Yes there exists a strong parallel to what Nietzsche described as the distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian archetypical characters of mankind. There is more than enough complicity to be spread around on this one.

I would like to read the section you refer to, but post modernism as a concept that has limited benefit from extreme application, is not a new one and there are numerous historical examples of how too much success can be harmful to personal and social health.

It is also more than a little ironic how Nietzsche gets subverted to the purposes of his sister and her neo fascist allies like her anti-Semitic husband. The truth was that he was lamenting at the end of the 19th Century the same social shift from the Apollonian to the Dionysian spirits that would come to completely subvert his own German people within a few short decades, and paradoxically through the complicit subversion of his own work by his sister.

It is no small irony that it was shallow reading and corrupted transcription of his work that facilitated the shift he had written to define and prevent. For example, two books were standard issue for the rucksacks of German soldiers during World War I, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gospel According to St. John. Hard to say which author was more compromised by this gesture.

Although he was a passionate foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by Fascists to advance the very things he loathed.

And the triumph of meaninglessness is the triumph of nihilism: “God is dead.” Nietzsche thought, however, that most men could not accept the eclipse of the ascetic ideal and the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence but would seek supplanting absolutes to invest life with meaning.

He thought the emerging nationalism of his day represented one such ominous surrogate god, in which the nation-state would be invested with transcendent value and purpose. And just as absoluteness of doctrine had found expression in philosophy and religion, absoluteness would become attached to the nation-state with missionary fervor.

The slaughter of rivals and the conquest of the earth would proceed under banners of universal brotherhood, democracy, and socialism. Nietzsche's prescience here was particularly poignant, and the use later made of him especially repellent.
encyclopedia Britannica 2003

There is a sinister darkly humorous line that describes a behavioral attitude of those that secretly desire something they can never consciously admit to through self denial. It is not very politically correct, so please don't forgive me in advance if it offends you.

"You can't rape the willing".

We the People cannot cry rape of our minds for we were all too willing to submit on this, whether from fear, sloth, greed, envy or the victim’s secret passive/aggressive lusts it doesn't really matter the end result was the same.

Von Braun's plan by today's standards is obsolete; however it was "practical" in its time and I suspect that it was in order to PREVENT going to the Moon by that plan that we built the shuttle. We closed up shop on lunar exploration after Apollo and never looked back. Hell we never even sent anymore probes to the easiest place of all.

Why isn't there a continuous down-look radar mapping system in orbit above the moon?

Why aren't there even plans to put the equivalent of a GPS system in orbit there as a means of planting and controlling robotic ground devices capable of beginning the assay of terrain and materials for better determining where to begin building true bases?

Why aren't we contemplating plans for orbital stations around the Moon capable of acting as the spring board to the planets? To position and supply Lunar ground facilities there? To springboard for Near Earth Asteroids that can be captured? Von Braun is the past and we have the perspective now of a vista of immensely greater magnitude before us.

What is lacking is the will; a will that has been all too easily subverted to porcine pleasures, simplistic vice and/or hatreds, and decadent excess. We should start by shooting the television set and maybe our SUV’s, then try to learn to think and travel under our own power again. Did you know that the most efficient machine designs for converting energy to work ever designed are still some of the oldest?

The bicycle, the canoe, the simple sailing skiff, the wing and the balloon.

The reason I want the computer jack directly interfaced with my mind is so I can return to the run and get away from this chair. So my mind can interact while I am involved in numerous less cerebral endeavors.

I want to fly under my own power and travel to the Stars without permission. There are other ways than those that are generally being adequately explored.

[Casanova]

Well said.

Yup, Nietzsche's sister is the "villian" in this case, along with her, "New Germany in Paraguay", Jew baiting, idiot, husband.
How do the radical feminists feel about this, would be an interesting study. I can just see the enormous contortionists, logical, flip-flops they would do to turn Nietzsche's sister into an abused, tortured, mis-understood, heroine.
In the light of what happened to Nietzsche, thanks to his dingbat sister, his diatribes againt women are not completely without value, and do apply in many cases, but not in all cases of course.

One wild theory, is that something was discovered on the Moon; a kind of "hey monkeys, you better stay on Earth, or we're going to wipe you out" kind of message, in some form, or another.
A kind of quarentin barrier for humankind.

But, that kind of theory let's dumb human decisions, off the hook. It places the blame somewhere else, instead with us.
For me, the most chilling reason for our failure to colonize space, is the mediocrity of human beings, in general. In large numbers, we seem to evolve backwards into hair scratching apes, and I include the scientists among the scratchers, too.
If we can't even raise our heads, collectively, out of the mud, then all this hope for heaven on earth in the digital singurality, seems like another pipe dream.
Rod Serling seems to have been the most accurate SF literary predictor of where we were, and are, going.
In the early 1970s, when there was "cheer-leader" techie talk about how wonderful things would be by 2000, Serling said, "no..., in 2000 there will be war, greed, hatred, stupidity; the world will be much the way it is today ( 1970s )"
Serling was right, and the techie cheerleaders were mostly wrong.

Sadly, I don't buy most of the predictions on these pages, although I find them fascinating.
Fifty years from now, things will be much the same, with war, greed, hatred, stupid, as common as they are, now.
Of course technology will have advanced, but technology has advanced since I was a kid, in the 1950, 60s, too, and the human race, in genersl, is as self-destructive, and foolish, as ever.

Most citizens will use the the brain/computer connections, if they are possible, for trivial pop culture nonsense, in the same way that most desktop radios are not used for playing Beethoven, or Mahler, but for playing some discordant, moronic, "bing, boom" trash.

High-Tech, most likely, will continue to be used for moronic purposes, and if morals, and ethics, continue on their downward slide into relativism, the High-Tech future will be a High-Tech jungle, filled with violence, rage, boredom, and meaninglessnes. It will be worse than we can imagine; a kind of digital barbarism.

What if the super computer takes one look at us, snorts with digital disgust, and banishes the entire human race into a "virtual reality" hell, a kind of digital Dante's Inferno, or the like.

Edited by Casanova, 11 June 2003 - 03:51 AM.

[Mind]

Here is a story about space colonies, just that it is on Mars and not a "Space Island".

Colonizing Mars

I have always felt that in the spirit of exploration that someday there would be a base on the Moon or Mars, and even that we might terraform Mars. I always felt it was one of those grand challenges that humans would undertake within my lifetime. Unfortunately the neo-bio-luddites are standing in the way here also. I understand the need to tread lightly. I don't feel we should just go wiping life off of other planets, but for crying out loud, so far there is zero evidence of life on Mars. Even if there are fossilized bacteria somewhere, or even a few living bacteria, I don't see why we cannot go there and set up camp. I kill many thousand bacteria everyday right here on earth, just by eating. The neo-bio-luddites are going to make an infinite lifespan very boring if we cannot even leave this planet.

According to Dr Chris McKay - based at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California and a participant in this week's terraforming debate - either method could provide the terraforming project with a crucial kick-start. With a thicker, warmer atmosphere, ice trapped in the Martian soil would melt and could be used to sustain agriculture. With plants and trees imported from Earth growing and producing oxygen, the atmosphere would become slowly more Earth-like. 'We should get serious about sending life to Mars,' McKay said.

Other scientists remain cautious. 'We now know Mars used to have an atmosphere, but it disappeared for reasons that are still unclear,' said Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, London. 'If we restore Mars's atmosphere, we could easily find it disappeared again. We would have done some devastating things to the planet for a temporary effect. That is certainly not ethical.'

The point is backed by Pratt. 'If we find life on Mars, the philosophical implications will be profound,' she said. 'If it is unlike Earthly life and has a different genetic code, this will show that living beings evolved separately on two neighbouring worlds. Life is therefore likely to be ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.

'If it has the same genetic code, however, it will indicate that one planet must have contaminated the other - probably by rocks being blasted across the solar system following meteorite impacts. We may really be Martian in origin.

'Given the importance of these issues, we simply cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious sensitive evidence we are seeking,' she added. 'This is just not on.'

[th3hegem0n]

What if the super computer takes one look at us, snorts with digital disgust, and banishes the entire human race into a "virtual reality" hell, a kind of digital Dante's Inferno, or the like.

Haha... I liked your post. Did anyone else notice how much this sounds like The Matrix? I could someon creating AI which became smarter than us and threw us into a matrix-like slavery.

[macdog]

I'd love to hear some discussion on an idea that is almost never bandied about, but eminently do-able. Terraforming the Moon. There is a high likelihood that water and other volatiles are in abundance in deep shadowed craters on the Moon, as well as locked within lunar breccias. With an atmosphere established, lunar gravity alone would hold it in place for roughly 10,000 years. In that time it would also not be impossible for a massive engineering project to generate a weak EM feild which would further hold in atmosphere. Delivery and detonation of a thermonuclear device to the southern pole should give us some idea of how much water/volatiles we might be able to expect there. The advent of a lunar atmosphere would also make heavier lift capacdity possible, as having an atmosphere to use for aerobraking will likely reduce the propellant to mass ratio by an order of magnitude, since at the moment you need fuel not only to escape Earth's gravity well but to land safely in the Moon's. This kind of a project could happen with remarkable speed if we consider that the Moon is only 3 days away, whereas Mars is a year away. The psychological impact would be profound, and even appeal to decadent tendencies of the masses. You can, after all, see the Moon. Watching the progress of the effort would become a backyard hobby of sorts.

And if there is someone up there, saying "stay away monkeys", I say we bomb the crap out them. It's our frikkin' Moon. And if they think of us as monkeys, fine, let's do what monkeys do and throw some feces. Personally though, I'm with Arthur C. Clark who said something like, "Do not put forth conspiracy theories when stupidity will suffice as an explanation."

I'll also quote Vonnegut here who on seeing an Apollo rocket take off called the space program, "The most expensive massage parlor ever." Meaning it's just there to make us feel good, and not serve any real purpose.

With the impending death of Hubble, for safety reasons which are entirely false (I won't get into all the details unless asked), what we see now is that our space program is an absolute betrayal to the taxpayers and future generations. There are quite literally people who will never get their degrees because of Hubble's death. I doubt that there is a single astronaut in NASA who'd be unwilling to take on the Hubble repair mission. Our world is run by obese power-mad cowards, more concerned with not being blamed for a failure than being remembered for accomplishment.

[kurdishfella]

possible to make your own for example grand canyon mining and using explosive i.e terraforming on earth. But to create space island we would need to use asteroids

[adamh]

@macdog, creating an atmosphere on the moon has been proposed before. The problem has always been where to find the enormous amount of oxygen and nitrogen to bring it about. That and the huge amount of energy it would take to do it. The tiny bit of ice near the poles is not going to be nearly enough even for the oxygen. It should be enough for drinking water which is good. Where do you plan to find the oxygen and nitrogen or equivalent? 

 

Creating a magnetic field around the moon is also too difficult for us right now. Every power station on earth would likely not be enough power to pull it off. Another problem is the gas would have to be produced in a short period of time, a few years at most. If it will take centuries, as I believe it would take even if possible, there will not be the will to do it. The cost would bankrupt the earth and even if a breathable atmosphere was accomplished, there is still the cold of space and intense uv radiation with no ozone layer to stop it.

 

Its the practical nuts and bolts situation that dooms many imaginative and almost doable projects. Even if we have the technology to do something, the cost and other problems have to be solved. A space station on the moon is doable, perhaps not today but in the foreseable future. It will be a conventional type recycling its waste and getting water and oxygen from the ice with people living in pods. I doubt it will be a popular vacation spot.

[Mind]

Only one error, in what you wrote;
I have dug deeply, and considered all that you mentioned, since the early 1970s. There is a great article at the end of a book on the film, "2001: A Space Odyssey", that explains some of what went wrong.
Post-Moderism gets a well deserved bashing.

So what does this say for human nature, in general? Here we had the most advanced country on earth, do a great retreat into nihilsm, and petty self indulgence, at the very moment when it could have aquired glory, and magnificence, as the first peoples to colonize the new frontier, outer space.
I still say we should have followed Von Braun's ideas, but the Apollo program had a name that fit what happened perfectly, namely; the across the board death of the Apollonian spirit.
We have become a country, indeed a world, of Dionysian slobs, who have all the charm, and dignity, of street thugs.

 

Thanks for resurrecting this thread. I had to highlight this earlier comment because it is now 20 years later and US society is even more engaged in "petty self-indulgence and nihilism". Instead of space colonies we have tik-tok. Depressing, an AI is going to make it much worse.

 

Thanks to one person - or just a tiny group of visionaries - including Elon Musk, we might still have a chance of exploring the stars.