From: wingo%cspara.decnet@Fedex.Msfc.Nasa.Gov
Subject: Re: Nick Szabo Disinformation debunking (Re: Clinton and Space Funding)
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: University of Houston
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1992 21:05:00 GMT

In article <1992Sep27.122955.25347@cs.rochester.edu>, dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) writes...
>In article <26SEP199222073863@judy.uh.edu> wingo%cspara.decnet@Fedex.Msfc.Nasa.Gov writes:
> 
> 
>  > 1. Shuttle is not a failure 49 out of 50 ain't bad.  Look to Congress
>  > and Cap Wineburger for the high operational costs of the shuttle.
> 
>In other words, "the shuttle's not a failure, and it's not NASA's
>fault anyway!".   Can you write two sentences without contradicting
>yourself?
> 
>The purpose of the shuttle was to reduce the cost of getting into
>space.  The shuttle has been a dismal failure in meeting this,
>its primary goal.

Only half right.  The primary reason for the Shuttle is REGULAR access to
space.  Cost was also supposed to be lowered but that went out the window
with Cap Wineburgers redesign, in 1971.  The shuttle has been an awesome
success for one reason.  It keeps people interested in space.  I have not
seen a single spacecamp set up anywhere by anybody to do planetary flybys,
or robotic exploration.  Each year 40,000 kids go through space camp here in
Huntsville, a similar number in Florida.  Spacecamps have been and are being
set up in Japan, France and Russia. The stimulus for all of these as been man
in space and execpt for the Russian the central motif is shuttle and space
station operations. How many lives have been changed in childhood because
of these spacecamps, especially Huntsville's? I know personally of several,
most of them women that have dedicated their lives to the space program 
because of your "failure". Nothing more needs to be said

> 
>  > 2. Clinch River Breeder.  Congress cut the money due to Three Mile
>  > Island and the anti-nuclear hysteria.
> 
>Wrong.  The CRBR was cut mainly because it was completely unnecessary.
>The need for a fast-track development of breeders was predicated in
>the assumption that world-wide uranium consumption would grow much
>faster than it has.  Today, the spot market price for uranium is
>around $10/lb.  Breeder reactors makes no sense at all at this price.
> 
The French do not seem to think so. They still have an active breeder program.
My sister happens to live near the CRBR and your memory has to be real short
not to remember the political wrangling that went on with the anti-nukers 
and that project.


> > 3.  Synfuels.  Jimmy Carter's idea to destroy mountains in the west for 
> > shale oil.  Would have been so toxic to the environment that even the
> > oil companies did not want to deal with it.  Bad idea pushed by so called 
> > environmentalist President (can you name his latter day descendant?) Of Gore
> > you can.
> 
>Oil shale was only one part of the synfuels program.  Petrochemicals
>from coal was another.  Note that we are still mining huge amounts of
>coal, so the environmental effects are occuring anyway.

Oil shale was the major portion of the Synfuels program. No we are not still
mining huge amounts of coal. We are mining less coal today than in the
seventies. Most of it from huge open pit mines in Wyoming that are non union.
They used to pull ten million tons a year out of the ground in Alabama. Now
it is down to about five. Most of our coal that we mine here in the east goes
to Japan because it is to high in sulfer to burn here.  The stuff out west
is nice clean low sulfer coal and that is what we burn most of here.

The Oil Shale program was to "cook" millions of tons of hydrocarbons from 
shale deposits out west.  This process would be thousands of times more
polluting than simple coal mining and would take huge resources in water that
is very scarce out there to make it work. So the comment stands.

>Synfuels failed because the price of oil dropped, not because
>environmentalists complained.  Oil companies were leery of oil shale
>development because they could make no money on it.

No synfuels was abandoned as not cost effective and polluting. Remember it
was the Democratic congress and gas rationing that would have made this work.
It was Ronnie Raygun that killed the beast even before gas prices started 
coming down.

> > 4. Fusion.  Still the best long term solution to both terrestrial energy 
> > needs and intra-solar system propulsion systems.  No failures in the
> > technology just failure of will in Congress to fund this needed technology.
> 
>Nonsense.  Fusion has turned out to be a hell of a lot harder than the
>hucksters had promised us.  The reactor concepts are engineering
>nightmares.  Since availability of fuel is not the problem with
>fission -- capital cost and scale of the plants is -- fusion is
>solving (or, rather, promising us it will solve) the wrong problem.
> 
>As for intra-solarsystem propulsion, it would be economic idiocy to
>work on fusion just because we might have a use for fusion rockets in
>100 years.
> 

Well then Paul there are some awfully smart idiots out there proposing that
very thing.  I saw a wonderful IAF presentation on this subject at the World
Space Congress.  The technology is near term and actually easier to achieve
than a fully contained fusion.  The delta vee is so high that a Mars trip
is 90 days and a Jupiter trip was only 120 days.  

There are two seperate cost factors for space transportation. One is to get
out of the gravity well. Two is to get everywhere else.  Fusion will be the
tech of choice to reduce trip time between all points and LEO. It is no longer
fantasy, these guys actually were working on components testing the feasibility
of the design.  So I guess the idiots might be smarter than you think. 

I changes my mind slightly while writing this.  Fission will be the tech of
choice in Cislunar Space and Fusion for everthing else. We ain't gonna
have either one if you keep pushing it back into the future with unsupported
statments.  There is a NEED for fusion propuslion systems today.  That is to
open up, at least the inner solar system to human development. Why? Look
around you.  The blood and Gore scenario will take place if we fail to 
continue to push forward.  It is fun to see that the predictions of the
doomsayers in the 60's and 70's were off so bad. This happy result is
due to advances in technology, many of them space flight oriented. If this 
trend does not continue we do have a large chance of falling into the 
gloom and doom scenario.

Dennis, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Xref: sparky sci.space:13959 talk.politics.space:1345 alt.politics.bush:7626 alt.politics.clinton:8341