I've lost count of the number of times I've posted the following to /., well anyway another try with my idea, a further thought, if we can control robots 70 odd million miles away on Mars, why can't we control mining robots an average of 238,857 miles away on the moon, some estimates have put the amount of oxygen in moon rock at 40%, there is also aluminium in moon rock. As well as being able to create rocket fuel from water, you can also create rocket fuel from oxygen + aluminium.

The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with the equivalent of bathroom tiles.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel, because of Newton's third law.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safe vacuum of space, no atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.

Less bathroom tiles + insulation foam = less rocket fuel = less pollution in the Mexican Gulf.

Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from outside of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.

A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.

Just discovered via Wikipedia, he died of a heart attack.

The chess player Bobby Fischer also died at 64 and it could be said, he committed suicide. All the news media said, he died of kidney failure, but he refused dialysis, it would be a weird coincidence if Hart also died of kidney failure.

Just for the record, what did he die of?

Regards,

Peter

We do not know how easy it would be, or how hard it would be, because my route to the human colonisation of space, has not been tried yet. It is possible to control a robot, millions and millions of miles away on Mars, think how much easier it would be to control a robot on the moon, only around 238,857 miles away. We build a system on the earth that can prospect for water on the moon, we build another system on the earth, that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen and store the two gases in separate tanks. Some of the mass required to build a water prospecting system and elemental mining separation system, can be constructed from the elements that constitute the moon's surface, this lowers the payload costs substantially much of the moon's surface consists of aluminium and oxygen. With the Saturn 5 design, we can have a payload of around 40 tons, this is our design constraint, how many Saturn 5s would it take to build a rocket fuel plant on the moon?

The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with the equivalent of bathroom tiles.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel, because of Newton's third law.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safe vacuum of space, no atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.

Less bathroom tiles + insulation foam = less rocket fuel = less pollution in the Mexican Gulf.

Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from outside of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.

A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.

One route to sort out the mess in the middle east, is not to fight over useless desert, but to provide water to make much more land usable.

The founders of Israel had a plan.

    http://discovermagazine.com/1994/nov/bettermedorredth452/

Why they have not carried it out, baffles me.

If the Jews set this plan into motion they would attract love and respect from the Arabs and the rest of the world.

My reply to both of you, is the mouth parts of slashdot are controlled by the mouth buying parts of people who own things, instead of loving them. The fact that my slashdot story is shunted off to the subscribers siding, speaks volumes as to the principles that control Slashdot. anonymous coward don't make me laugh, the people who run Slashdot disagree with people thinking for themselves. Perhaps Besos with his billions is greasing Slashdot's rear end entry point.

Hello Slashdot,

Yes its me again, periodically I say this on this august forum, but none seems to take heed.

Instead of dragging the rocket fuel up out of the earth's gravity well to reach escape velocity, set a plant up on the moon, to separate the water there into hydrogen and oxygen.

Fly a rocket from the earth to the moon, controlled from the earth, fuel the rocket from the moon.

Launch the moon fuelled rocket to towards the earth, start decelerating the rocket once it nears the earth

Fly something akin to Rutan's 'Spaceship one' to the vacuum of space carrying some very fragile and valuable human beings.

Hook the SS1 to the moon tug, light the blue touch paper and accelerate SS1 to escape velocity in the safety of the space vacuum 'coz relying on bathroom tiles is bad design.

Do it for Christa McAuliffe.

The bit about the blow job sounds very suspect to me, not that I'm into rape, but if I was, I would not stick my dick in some ones mouth - ouch, even if she had no teeth, she could cause me an awful lot of pain with her gums.

Yeah back in the day, I could think in 6502, beautiful simplicity - why on earth they did not keep the same register arrangement and zero page arrangement, but scale everything up will always baffle me.

Just imagine a zero page with 65536 registers and 16 bit a,x and y registers, a missed opportunity surely.

The world has lots of water, lots of desert, too much carbon dioxide, far too many people who do not have enough to eat and insufficient clean water. What follows is a possible solution.

I have posted my idea here
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Water_20transportation#1287975564

To save the above website from being slashdotted, here is my idea plus a few edits.

Deliver water and electricity anywhere on the planet cheaply

In Iceland they have built a vast hydroelectric system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkavirkjun

They are using the electricity to smelt aluminium. I propose a different plan, that they use the electricity to smelt hydrogen from the sea.

The three beautiful attributes of hydrogen are, it can be used to lift things, make electricity and it is one of the two elements that make up water.

Why not combine all three attributes of hydrogen to improve the planet and undo some of the harm, our species appears to be doing.

Put the hydrogen in a vast balloon, attach a motor driven propeller and a hydrogen compressor, both driven by the hydrogen in the balloon, navigate it automatically using GPS.

Fly the balloon into the jet stream using the compressor to control the height of the balloon, use the jet stream to transport the balloon encased hydrogen most of the way, to where water is required on the planet. When the hydrogen is as close to where it is wanted as you can get it, using the oxygen hydrogen reaction, start compressing the hydrogen and the balloon will sink.

In one cubic mile of uncompressed hydrogen, there is potentially 744316795 gallons of water, which is enough water to fill over a thousand Olympic swimming pools.

Water is very heavy so would be expensive to transport about, simple just transport the hydrogen 'coz the oxygen is already there!

Once we can get the water to the dry areas of the planet and grow oil palm plantations there, we can stop the absolute scandal of chopping down jungle in Indonesia to plant oil palm plantations and in so doing - destroy the orangutans environment.

Imagine a plentiful supply of water in the middle of Australia or in the Sahara.

More water in dry areas means more plants means less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

If the water is stored at the top of mountains then hydroelectricity could be made when the water is needed at the bottom of the mountains.

The electricity generated when the hydrogen and oxygen are combined in a fuel cell, could be used to create fertilizer and if there were any juice left over, you could always smelt aluminium with it :)

The price of scrap aluminium is very cheap, the planet has little need of smelted aluminium.

Little Iceland, needs an economic lifeline so as to pay off its debts.

People like you make me think that the rumours that NASA never reached the moon in person, are true.

Several things increase my suspicions, my original post has now been demoted to a '0' and your reply to it is nonsensical, getting to escape velocity from the moon, is in terms of cost and safety, negligible when compared to the cost of achieving escape velocity from the Earth, my only explanation for your daft negativity is that - you have a hidden agenda.

Goebbels once said "Make a lie big enough and you will get away with it", Goebbels learned his craft from the double nephew of Freud, Edward Bernays.

It makes no sense that the human race has not been back to the moon since 1972, imagine how much easier, it would have been in the 60's, had NASA had the technology we have today?

I'm not saying NASA did not go to the moon, how on Earth would I know for sure? I'm the English equivalent of 'Joe Sixpack', I'm saying comments like yours make me more suspicious.

 

There is lots of He3 on the moon, getting to the moon is not hard, the hard, dangerous and expensive part is reaching escape velocity, make this far cheaper and safer and not just He3 becomes more available, but a whole universe.

The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the danger and complexity, of reaching and leaving escape velocity, within the earth's atmosphere, the reason for this is the shuttle has to lift off with over 700 tons of fuel, the whole thing is made even more complicated, by the fact that to survive the heat of around 17000 miles an hour reentry into the atmosphere, by covering the surface of the shuttle, with the equivalent of bathroom tiles

There is lots of He3 on the moon, getting to the moon is not hard, the hard, dangerous and expensive part is reaching

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.

The moon is the door to the solar system.

Going to Mars is like 'trying to run before we can walk' we need to build a base on the moon first.

There is lots of silica on the moon, silica is the main component of glass, what we could do is build a huge glass dome with an aluminium skeleton and live under it, some estimates have moon rock, with around 40% oxygen, thus we can breathe if it is extracted.