Posted on 12/08/2015 11:11:12 AM PST by simpson96
“Still don’t see how this pases the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which unambigiuosly states that whatever is found is the property of everyone.”
Maybe they are trying to get investors to do the hard work to develop those space resources with this law, so they can be confiscated under the treaty later.
If you cannot claim territory or occupy it, how do you acquire the legal right to mine in the first place?
In any case this was litigated many decades ago (pre-internet) and the upshot is mining can only be done if all parties agree and all parties benefit. It was so long ago, I do not remember who what or where - you will have to find that info on your own.
No investor would invest the money it will take on such a poor bet. We can take up this argument when they have working tech which can actually do the job - and that will not be any time soon. Perhaps some decade after China colonizes the moon ...
No differently than fishing in international waters.
It appears the US government doesn't agree with you.
Obama agrees with you that you can keep your doctor ...
Perhaps it is a simple case of some businessmen buying the kind of legislation that benefits their business plans.
Will.
Never.
Happen.
Neither Russia nor China will be bound be this idiotic treaty, but as always the US will honor it, and no US HQed company will be able to compete.
It is as simple as a superpower - see above - just doing it. The US was long a nation and country of exploration, but by 1974, we had become a consumer country, no longer interested in anything beyond our collective navels. every innovation was labeled “too expensive” and “we can’t afford it” ... “there are homeless to feed”, or now “there are refugees to take in”.
To really explore, data needs to be collected and analyzed. Data collection is easy and cheap, but analysis is difficult and expensive; along the way, various oxen tend to get gored - so no one analyzes the data now, they have careers to think about.
What data does get analyzed is done to fit a preconceived notion, anything outside of that is discarded. The famous example of this is when the first Mars Lander sent back its first pictures from the ground to the waiting press - after the techs had fined tuned and color tested the monitors, the first color pictures came back -— the sky was an azure blue and the ground had green lichen on it -— quickly, the presenters twisted the color settings until everything turned red as it should be ...
During the first Bush II term, he proposed the Moon to Mars program - the various seminars were carried by NASA TV. The upshot of the conferences for bright young people wanting to get into space exploration was go to some other country - opportunity here was very limited to non-existent. This has not changed, but worsened. We produce no engineers anymore, just software developers and CEOs.
All you see now is the dying embers ...
I think that we are still strong in science and engineering - about 9 million bachelor degrees each year and the world’s highest Ph.D. production. And we did do the whole Internet and Silicon Valley things since 1974.
Yes, we did export a lot of manufacturing, but some has come back, and we lead in other areas, like the commercial space industry.
Don’t let the bastards get you down, there is still great strength here, if we just get some good leadership and policies for a change.
And China at last count was graduating 10X more engineers than the US - BA’s are mostly worthless these days. PhDs are mostly going overseas. Heavy industry cannot get enough engineers to satisfy demand - salaries are 6 figures just to start.
Only by going back to space full time - in a nationally focused way - can this even begin to bring back the skills, education, and industry we had in the 60s - not to mention hope. Good leadership and policies can only go so far. It must be a national endeavor with naysayers taking the hindmost.
They got me down when the killed the original Project Orion - not the farce they are attempting today, hope was abandoned at Apollo 17s end.
I guess the hope is shifting to private endeavors, as the technology ripens and the costs drop into the range where corporations and rich individuals can fund their own spaceflight. They call it becoming a spacefaring nation.
Even as NASA is cultivating a competitive commercial industry for heavy lift and establishing commercial spaceports (eight already available), they are still developing more basic technology in-house, and doing deliberate planning for big objectives like permanent bases.
One thing that I have been excited about, has been a bit of a revival in nuclear power for space applications. Both the US and Russia have new small nuclear reactors being developed for space use (10 KW to 1 MW), rather than the relatively low power nuclear batteries that have been in operation. These power levels could support long term bases or even electromagnetic drive (EM Drive) propulsion, which now seems increasingly plausible.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/
EM Drives would allow spacecraft to not carry tons of fuel for in space propulsion or orbital control (they would still need chemical fuel for takeoff or controlled landing). Small nukes the size of a couple of five gallon buckets could drive continuous thrust for ten years or more. With continuous acceleration, the trip to Mars could be cut to a matter of weeks.
Small nukes? See Project Orion - nuclear pulse engines. “Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970”
Smallest ship would have carried a crew of 150 ... Fresh water by the tons used on outer shell as insulation from particles. Interstellar versions planned. Killed 1965
“Sixteen stories high, shaped like the tip of a bullet, and with a pusher plate 41m in diameter, the spacecraft would have utilized a launch pad composed of eight towers, each 76m high. Remarkably, most of the takeoff mass of about 10,000 tons would have gone into orbit. The bomb units ejected on takeoff at a rate of one per second would have yielded 0.1 kiloton; then, as the vehicle accelerated, the ejection rate would have slowed and the yield increased, until 20-kiloton bombs would have been exploding every 10 seconds.”
The whole of this rested on designing very small, efficient, reliable nukes - the only guy who could do it well left the field ... has someone else picked it up? Don’t know, but these are also tactial battlefield nuclear weapons. The other problem was steering the ship precisely.
To Mars By A Bomb - The Secret History of Project Orion (Nuclear Propulsion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYoLcJuBtOw
I guess that Orion was just ahead of its time.
The risks of fast tracking that system back in the 1960’s would have been quite high. The bugs had not yet been worked out for living in space. The design was a hugely inefficient brute force approach - the great bulk of the energy was dissipated, with only a tiny fraction providing thrust. And it was pretty dirty - a thousand plutonium bombs to liftoff, with no solution for the fallout. Also, if there was a single Challenger-like malfunction (which were more common back then), it would burn in with thousands of warheads aboard - goodbye to the careers of all decision makers involved. Also, if we developed it, it would be subject to proliferation through espionage - just like our nuclear weapons programs were.
I would guess that after two terms of Clinton, and two terms of Obama, that the Chinese have the full files on this project, as well as the rest of our programs (e.g. Wen Ho Lee), so maybe they will build one for military use.
It is still probably a leading solution for the planetary defense mission of diverting an asteroid impact. if that would ever be funded. I imagine that by now there would be significant refinement of a lot of components, so that a freshly designed system could use and adjust the thrust much more efficiently. George Dyson alluded to that in the video you linked.
An updated Orion-like propulsion system might even be used for heavy lift operations around the solar system, like the mining envisioned in the article of this thread.
There is no doubt in my mind though, that we you want to accomplish big things in space, we need to use nuclear power.
Nuclear power - other than battery supplied - is pretty much a dead issue. There are numerous power plants being developed, sure, but they will never be permitted off the ground - thanks to our local envirowackos’ work in the courts. There is even a very strong lobby to block any further exploration of the moon because it will disturb the ‘pristine’ environment, etc. Nuclear power use in space by the US will never happen unless there is a sea-change in the public’s perception of nuclear use and power, which will only come about if the US returns to classical education, and if the public at large has something other than self- indulgence on its collective mind.
Back in those days bugs were worked out on the spot. People had real classical educations and knew how to fix things, without waiting for some study to be completed. Called self-reliance - a novel concept today.
Now we have committees to study each individual problem, publish papers no one reads, and that’s that until the need or funds get large enough to pursue. It is easier to study the problem than to actually do it. (Which is why it took so long to pioneer west of the Alleghenies - all those committees took decades to figure out if a wooden wagon wheel would be up to the task, and what if one broke? Oh my!)
Yep, accidents happen, and that is why no man should leave the safety of his home and bed. Oh and dread someone steal the tech! Like the Soviet union, perhaps? We would have been so far ahead by that time we could have easily shut them down.
China will make use of those designs for military use (there is no other use for them), but the whole trick - as I mentioned - is in the design of very small reliable efficient small nukes - an extremely difficult task when you cannot actually test one. (Although the Chinese may have tested something on that order timed to coincide with the mysterious huge explosion which happened in NK in 2004). All of this is part of China’s ongoing Project 863 - the search for the next super-weapon.
I hear what you are saying about the risk averse and hidebound culture that has descended over engineering innovation, especially nuclear power. Also, the softening of US higher education.
Part of turning public opinion against nuclear power may well have been successful influence operations by the Soviets through “peace” “disarmament” and “anti-nuclear” front groups.
But I am trying to cheer you up here. Hope springs eternal, and all is not yet lost. Technology is accelerating with the explosion of computers, AI, robotics and biotech. Big changes are coming. Feel the excitement!
One hope, is that the same political involvement which restrains nuclear development, can be turned to permit it, by the bribes of wealthy industrialists with a financial interest in it.
Bill Gates was recently in Paris at the “Climate Change” Conference, lobbying for political support for his nuclear power venture (Terrapower). That particular project might not be a winner due to the collapse of the price of competing oil and gas, but it is an example of a businessman who could buy influence to break a technological logjam (or hire sub-contractors to do so).
I think that the current law was promoted (whether by persuasion, inducements or an artful mix of both) by up and coming asteroid mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, which are already preparing small “cubesat” probes for surveying. This legislative effort was just clearing potential obstacles to their business plan, as a Board of Directors would reasonably require, before big investments are sunk.
When they need the power of strong nuclear propulsion for big hauls, their lobbyists will probably make it happen for them as well. As you pointed out, effective technology has been sitting on the shelf for a long time, just awaiting approval and funding.
One estimate from the late 1990s of the wealth available from asteroid mining (from water for space use and fuel production, as well as the platinum family of elements), was about $10 billion - for every person on earth at the time. One asteroid was estimated to have more platinum than the total cumulative production on Earth so far, and significant quantities of other precious elements as well. With that kind of money at stake you could buy a majority at the UN, let alone congress.
The 2020’s will be the serious opening of the near solar system.
“But I am trying to cheer you up here. Hope springs eternal ...”
Thanks! I’ll try, but don’t have that many years left...
Did you know that there is a diamond many light years from here that is as big as the moon? Interesting things are out there.
It was estimated some years back that US$4 billion would buy the land (Argentina, I think), build the launch pad, and the rocket to return to the moon?
However, there may be other reasons why going to the moon or Mars other than robotically is a very bad idea.
The moon is a very strange place - it is not what most think it is - just a large rock - there’s more to it than that. We have (or had unless NASA destroyed it all as they have of much of the pre-Apollo and Apollo images and data) mountains of data no one has looked at, piles of images no one has studied in detail.
Only a small to vanishing percentage of all of that data has been analyzed.
Much of the US Navy’s Moon Mapping images (Clementine 1994) remain classified - which begged the question at the time - why was the Navy spending precious millions taking hi-res images of the entire lunar surface? That which is now available - all lunar images are very hard to find, harder still to find a particular image and then only in lo-res to medium res - they use the most obscure, the most clumsy of online data bases imaginable (using image names like lhd0363b.032).
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