[AR] Re: 500,000 tons

  • From: Lars Osborne <lars.osborne@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 15:33:28 -0700

Yeah, But are you really satisfied with 500,000 tons to orbit per year? We
will never be able to build a Dyson sphere at that rate, and bring us to a
type II civilization.

No - we need to be launching 500,000,000 tons to orbit per year, as that's
the only way we can start dis-assembling mercury and venus to make the
dyson sphere. The Chinese, the russians, they have performed *studies* and
if we don't get one this right now they could beat us to it. Of course, any
small scale demonstration of this would be a complete failure. That is why
we need to go all in. I can kickstart this with Lasers, skylons, space
elevators and electromagnetic rail guns. We just need 100 Trillion dollars
to get it off the ground, and then it can slowly begin to start paying for
itself, assuming that we never have any maintenance issues with the
collectors.

How could laser skylons possibly launch once every second? It just isn't
enough.

We just need to first start by building enough power satellites to power
the world (about a million GW worth). I suggest we launch all of these on
conventional rockets for speed so we don't need to wait on skylon's
development timeline.

Then we throw them all together in a cluster and use it as an anchor for a
space elevator. The one power sat that wasn't destroyed in the crunch can
power the elevator.

Then we just build elevators everywhere along the equator, maybe some ones
from the poles too (might need some engineering development here).

Once we have that system in place we can begin using all of the elevators
at the same time to lift 500,000,000 tons into orbit per year. And if life
isn't about getting 500,000,000 tons to orbit per year, I might as well
open the airlock right now.

Thanks,
Lars Osborne


On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Rand Simberg <simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > Well, I don't think that's their goal. Elon wants to go to Mars, not
> fill up
> > GEO with millions of tons of hardware.  But he does need low launch costs
> > for his goal as well.
> >
> > I think that if you asked Gwynne how she'd do that, the answer would be
> many
> > launch sites and a high flight rate. Which they do in fact plan to
> achieve
> > their own goals. So it's not clear to me how it differs from Skylon.
>
> One runway can launch at least 150 Skylon flights a day.
>
> Can you launch even once a day from a pad?  That seems optimistic to
> me, what do you think?
>
> > Really, Keith. I've know you for well more than a third of a century. I'm
> > disappointed at your apparent lack of imagination.
>
> It's the numbers that get me.  Even if you don't have manufacturing
> bottlenecks, you would need to launch three times an hour to reach the
> minimum parts flow rate.  Reusable rockets have lower payloads so you
> would have to launch more frequently with those.  A Falcon heavy is
> about half the mass of a Saturn V.  This would be like launching three
> Saturn Vs every two hours.  I would love to sell tickets to the
> launches, but I just can't see it happening.
>
> And 20 fold growth?  You have to have that much growth in the system
> to actually solve the energy problem.  That's a Falcon Heavy launch
> ever minute.  How many pads?  How many people?
>
> Let me send you the economic model and you can fit in SpaceX rockets
> in the place of Skylons.
>
> Keith
>
> >
> > On 2014-04-06 20:49, Keith Henson wrote:
> >>
> >> How do you scale Falcon's to 500,000 tons per year to GEO?  How do you
> >> scale that level to 20 times that much?  If SpaceX can do it, I want
> >> to talk to them.  I don't think they can.
> >>
> >> Keith
> >>
> >> On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 8:44 PM, James Fackert <jimfackert@xxxxxxxxx>
> >> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> skylon is a pipe dream, blue origin is a money sink,
> >>> space-x is taking stuff to the ISS and back.
> >>>
> >>> who would you bet on to  do the near future  heavy lifting? and farther
> >>> future as well?  I think space-x's lead is un-beatable.
> >
> >
>
>

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. arocket
  3. Archive
  4. 04-2014