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Subject: SPACE Digest V13 #716

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 13 : Issue 716

Today's Topics:
               Re: Martian Face
         Re: Astro-Nugget worth $$$ trillions
        IGY and the beginning of the Space Age
               Re: NASA Budget
               Asteroid Safety
                   Re: ASRM
      talk.politics.space (was Re: sci.space.moderated)
                  Re: Survey

Administrivia:

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 06:12:31 GMT
From: cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!mintaka!ogicse!milton![e-mail]  (William Lewis)
Subject: Re: Martian Face

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Lon Stowell) writes:
>
>   Geez, when I asked for a copy of the "face" I didn't mean to
>   start a religious war...
>
>   I just wanted a postscript, xbm, GIF copy of it emailed to me
>   so I can put in in my background on an Xterminal....
>
>Do you have an electronic copy of the face?  If so, would you
>mind e-mailing it to me?

   *Somewhere* around here I think I have the actual raw image
from the spacecraft, and a short list of image enhancements required
to see the face (mostly contrast enhancement and smoothing the
faulty pixels in the image). It's about 100x100 by I think 1 byte.
I'll dig around for it after finals and post it if I find it.
*PLEASE* don't send me email asking for it; if I still have it I'll
post it, else I can't.



--
 [e-mail]       Seattle, Washington
     (William Lewis)   |  47 41' 15" N   122 42' 58" W
 "Just remember, wherever you go ... you're stuck there."

------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 06:05:11 GMT
From: sequent!muncher.sequent.com![e-mail]
Subject: Re: Astro-Nugget worth $$$ trillions

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Doug Mohney) writes:

>>From the Washington Post, June 7, 1991 (y114#184), p. A11:
>>
>>                 Nearby Asteroid Worth a Trillion
>>
>>     "  An astronimical El Dorado containing some 10,000 tons of
>>      gold and 100,000 tons of platinum has been found orbiting
>>      the sun tantalizingly close to Earth, according to a report
>>      in today's issue of Science...
>
>Now all Nick needs to do is get Pournelle and $2 billion dollars and
>he's got it made ;-)

Well no, I need some vacuum/microgravity mining equipment which
NASA has never bothered to prototype.  This is non-trivial engineering.
I also need a source of volatiles for fuel and chemical processing,
which means looking for burned-out comets among the earth-crossers
and/or comet fragments in the Encke/Taurid meteor shower orbit.   NASA
hasn't done that either (and won't, as long as it spends the bulk of
its money on astronaut programs).

Given the right kind of fragment, a volatile mission pays for itself
via fuel, heat sinks, shielding, and scientific samples distributed
in GEO and other orbits.  The factor of 1,000 reduction in fuel costs
provides a true rationale for a refueling infrastructure.  Ice mining is
trivial compared to metal mining, and provides its own reaction mass
via solar thermal engines.  The next step would be to bootstrap the
volatile fragment captures until we can lift the heavy mining and
carbonyl furnace and transportation equipment to the asteroid without
bankrupting the company.

The platinum group and gold aren't really worth a trillion, since it
would flood the market, but they are probably worth at least $10's of
billions, the world market for a decade.  Gold and platinum at
1/100 of today's costs would revolutionize petroleum refining,
semiconductor production, environmental protection devices,
and many other industries.  They would also eliminate dependencies on
volatile Soviet Union and South Africa, since stuff made in space
can be delivered to any spot on Earth regardless of political,
economic, or military interdictions.  Furthermore, the other metals,
silicon, and rare earths, along with the volatiles, provide the raw
materials for a much lower cost space manufacturing infrastructure:
semiconductor fabs with microgravity and a limitless vacuum,
new metal alloys, pharmaceuticals, etc. etc.  The platinum and gold by
themselves would be profitable, but it's only the start.

Until NASA or somebody else gets serious about earth-crossing
material exploration (asteroids, meteor showers, etc.), space
automation, mining and manufacturing technology, etc. instead of the
obsession with astronauts in LEO, this is all idle dreaming.
This is large-advance, long-range stuff where we really do need
government research and exploration to lend a hand.  Too bad the
current NASA leadership and astronaut groupies are even more
short-sighted than private industry.


--
Nick Szabo                [e-mail]
"If you understand something the first time you see it, you probably
knew it already.  The more bewildered you are, the more successful
the mission was." -- Ed Stone, Voyager space explorer

------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 06:38:06 GMT
From: ogicse!sequent!muncher.sequent.com![e-mail]
Subject: IGY and the beginning of the Space Age

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] ("Allen W. Sherzer") writes:
>Nick, the ICBM and the cold war had far more to do with it than
>the AGU.

Obviously, the main competition was "my ICBM is bigger than your
ICBM".  However, the impetus to turn it into a _civilian_ space race
was provided by the IGY (International Geophysical Year).   There
was no space race and very little space research funding until the
Soviets launched Sputnik for the IGY, shocking the U.S. into joining a
space race.  That the astronauts and their groupies managed to gain
power is a relic of Kennedy's Apollo and Nixon's Shuttle which we
are only now beginning to recognize and fight off.  The astronauts
did not contribute positively towards NASA's funding; indeed NASA
funding started to drop after 1966 when the astronaut flights started
to swing into full gear.  The wastefulness of Apollo was apparent
to the 60% of the American public that opposed the flights and wanted
NASA's funding cut from 1968 until the mid-1970's when manned spaceflight
was replaced by automated exploration.

Incidentally, the IGY was a major international cooperative
scientific endeveavor; there is nothing new about modern proposals
along those lines.  Scientists and explorers continue to strive towards
cooperation against a backdrop of societies that see the very same
projects as threat and competition.


--
Nick Szabo                [e-mail]
"If you understand something the first time you see it, you probably
knew it already.  The more bewildered you are, the more successful
the mission was." -- Ed Stone, Voyager space explorer

------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 17:45:50 GMT
From: prism![e-mail]  (Matthew DeLuca)
Subject: Re: NASA Budget

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:

>With all due respect, you don't know what the hell you are talking
>about.  The AGU was one of the main forces behind the 1957 IGY, which
>led to Sputnik and Explorer and started the whole civilian space
>program off in the first place.  Much of the subject matter and
>experimentation in the field of geophysics takes place in space.

Sputnik and Explorer had their origins in the days after World War II, long
before anyone thought about the IGY.  Read some of the RAND reports (well,
read *about* them...some are still classified) from 1946, or the intelligence
agency reports in the early 50's...the space race was under way the day
V-2 rockets were captured from the Germans.

>Calling the AGU "non-space" is like calling Boeing "non-airplane"
>or Toyota "non-automobile".  Pretty silly.

The 'G' is for Geophysical, not Space.  As far as AGU and space interests
coincide, fine...they'll support them.  But don't for a minute believe
the AGU has any special love for space, above and beyond that reserved for
other interests.
--
Matthew DeLuca
Georgia Institute of Technology      "I'd hire the Dorsai, if I knew their
Office of Information Technology      P.O. box."  - Zebadiah Carter,
Internet: [e-mail]    _The Number of the Beast_

------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 18:33:33 GMT
From: agate!headcrash.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (George William Herbert)
Subject: Asteroid Safety

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (David Lowe) writes:
>>[re: amused posting about christic institute and asteroid mining]
>
>I have been enduring all the romance about imminent asteroid
>mining and waiting for someone to discuss safety.  Finally the
>above cheap shot.

    Quote of the Year:
    "...and it gets even energetically cheaper if we aerobrake the asteroid
    at earth!"
        -Jon Welte (who to his credit immediately changed his mind)

    Safety, all jokes aside, is a significant issue.  It has been addressed
but not well or publically.
    For a good idea of a 'minor' accident scenario, see Clarke's
"The Fountains of Paradise", where the issue of a previous accidental lunar-
metals shipment landing on a small mexican village was brought up.  Even if
the number of deaths were to be trivial (compared to say people killed on
the highways each year by trucks transporting similar amounts of material),
accidents from space that kill people on earth are always going to have a
huge PR impact.

    If we're returning chunks of resources (not whole asteroids, just
large amounts of water/metals/whatever), then it becomes important to bring
them back in a safe manner.  This may include using small-sized shipments that
will burn up on improper reentry, targeting arrival windows on the Pacific
Ocean so that accidents are likely waterstrikes (we're talking tons here, not
megatons... water landings only hurt in really large impacts), etc.
    If we bring back whole asteroids, it's a whole new ballgame.  We have
to avoid hitting the earth at basically any cost.  The best/safest way probably
would be to first circularize the asteroid's orbit, then very very slowly
transfer it to earth's orbital radius.  The worst problem with actually
bringing one to earth orbit rather than earth's Earth-sun L4/5 point is that
to stop it in close will require significant delta-V in any case, which is
difficult with very large masses, even using nuclear propulsion techniques.
I'm not sure that it's possible to really safely return an asteroid whole
to earth orbit.

-george william herbert
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 18:06:51 GMT
From: agate!headcrash.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (George William Herbert)
Subject: Re: ASRM

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (George William Herbert) writes:
>>     The main reason for building the ASRM is that the SRM, even the
>> redesigned one, isn't very safe.  Pushing the payload up a bit is nice too.
>> As for the claim of putting Thiokol out of business or putting a plant
>> in the back woods of Missippi:
>
>ASRM will be no safer than than the redesigned SRM. Bet on it.

    The SRM was an engineering failure.
    The RSRM is a somewhat patched engineering failure.  It's still
intrinsically flawed, though less likely to break.
    The ASRM has less joints of a obviously less failure prone concept than
even the RSRM... how can it help but be safer (barring detail design or
production flaws...).???

>>     A. Thiokol could have bid on the ASRM; they had a design, and it was
>> technically OK from what I saw, but they wanted out of the business.
>
>Ok, it took me 5 minutes to stop laughing. But I'm OK now.  I going to
>try to be nice, because you don't deserve a flame. But, you really
>don't know what is going on.
>[...]

Ok, fine, but some of us don't have close friends in every aerospace
company and have to rely on Av Week and secondhand sources. 8-P 8-)

    Seriously... everyone out there with relatively inside information
on some aspect of spaceflight needs to remember that everyone else doesn't
have the same acess they do.  If you've got more info than I or the net do,
then tell us, don't flame us for not knowing your friends 8-)

-george william herbert
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 91 17:26:55 GMT
From: hsdndev!dartvax!mars!nic!kira!emily![e-mail]  (Garrett Wollman)
Subject: talk.politics.space (was Re: sci.space.moderated)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Jim Bowery) writes:
>The problem is the U.S. space program dominated by politics.

The proposal under discussion, for a talk.politics.space, would
provide a perfectly nice place for people who hold this view to
discuss their political beliefs, without being such a bother to those
of us who do not care to wade through all this stuff.  [I get enough
of the politics on space-investors, thank you!]

>  You
>don't solve that problem by shutting down political free speech on
>the net.

The proposal under discussion, which I intend to vote for and hope
will pass (and I think it will) when put to a vote, would not do so.

>  You do it by talking about the nature of the problem to
>see how you can change the rules of the game so space becomes less
>political.  Changing the rules of the game requires political
>action.

Which those of us who aren't particularly interested in the
politicking would just as soon not have to wade through day in and day
out.  sci.space makes me thankful for trn every day, and I pity the
poor impoverished users at other sites who don't have access to it or
another advanced thread-following newsreader.

Here's what I would eventually like to see:

talk.politics.space - all this political stuff

sci.space - back to what it was meant for - substantive discussion of
space activities

sci.space.announce - announcements from Peter and Ron (where have they
    been these days?), self-approved periodic postings of an
    informational nature (e.g., Mark's and my acronym lists, the FAQ,
    Gene Miya's postings, the geomagnetic stuff, SpaceNews,
    Jonathan's Space Report, and all the rest), and other
    moderator-approved postings which would make sense there.  Who
    would be the moderator?

sci.space.tech - the equivalent of the present space-tech mailing list

sci.space.commercial - [perhaps] eqivalent of space-investors?

-GAWollman

PS:  Please cross-post followups, as I have no desire to read
news.groups and am not about to start.  Remeber Sexton?

Garrett A. Wollman - [e-mail]

Disclaimer:  I'm not even sure this represents *my* opinion, never
mind UVM's, EMBA's, EMBA-CF's, or indeed anyone else's.

------------------------------

Date: 9 Jun 91 02:49:35 GMT
From: haven.umd.edu!socrates.umd.edu!socrates![e-mail]  (Raul Rockwell)
Subject: Re: Survey

Tom McWilliams:
   I started a survey a while back, but no-one responded!

Mailer-Daemon:
   Batch SMTP transaction log follows:

   220 MITVMA.MIT.EDU Columbia MAILER R2.05 BSMTP service ready.
   050 HELO lilac.berkeley.edu
   250 MITVMA.MIT.EDU Hello lilac.berkeley.edu
   050 MAIL FROM:<[e-mail]>
   250 <[e-mail]>... sender OK.
   050 RCPT TO:<[e-mail]>
   250 <[e-mail]>... recipient OK.
   050 DATA
   354 Start mail input.  End with <crlf>.<crlf>
   554-Mail not delivered to some or all recipients:
   554 Mail to MAILER   is not allowed.
   050 QUIT
   221 MITVMA.MIT.EDU Columbia MAILER BSMTP service done.

It seems there is a little disagreement here, about standard mail
format.

Raul Rockwell

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V13 #716
*******************