From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: Bootstrap hardware for LunaBase
Organization: TECHbooks --- Public Access UNIX --- (503) 220-0636
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 12:40:09 GMT


In article <1992Oct06.204349.10752@eng.umd.edu> sysmgr@king.eng.umd.edu writes:

>Bringing water to earth doesn't strike me as very profitable.

Well, that's good. :-)

> Even bringing
>water to LEO doesn't strike me as profitable.

First off, we're bringing back water, methane, ammonia, organics, and 
whatever else interesting is on the comet or "wet" asteroid, not just 
water.

It doesn't matter what "strikes" people; what matters is the economics
of the situation, what the rocket equation says, what the equipment
thruput is and if we can aerobrake payload (see my post, "Safety
of flyby and aerobraking of large bodies).  The target orbit is
probably GTO and not LEO, for the record.   GTO is the halfway-point
for commercial payloads to Clarke orbit.  Also polar earth orbit,
Mars orbit and the lunar surface, assuming somebody can find the
$100's of billions for FLO, could be markets.  The project is 
economical without aerobraking, because the extraction equipment 
thruput is high and the ice rocket has practically a zero tankage factor.

>A lunar colony needs to have PROFITABLE EXPORTS and a minimium of heavy
>imports. The only profitable export of the near-term is going to be power. 

You were talking about a lunar "base" with a few astronauts living
in Winnebago-sized modules, not a lunar colony with potentially 
self-sufficient families.  Let's not start misusing the word "colony"
for PR, lest the very goal of space colonization be lost in the process.

Power export is  not near-term, because the up-front investment required is
probably 1,000 times what commerce will spend on any new venture, even after 
NASA gets done with FLO.  Furthermore, the amortization of that investment alone
is far more expensive than building natural-gas and nuclear reactors earthside.
The limiting factor on electricity costs, BTW, is capital cost of plants
not energy supplies.  We don't win on capital costs by using $10 million 
an hour construction labor on the moon.  :-)

>Once you land the initial hardware, LunaOne should be able to use native
>materials to generate its own oxygen and extract metals to produce more
>machines. 

No it cannot do this, because large volumes of volatiles are critical
to such processes and do not exist on the moon.  Study your industrial
processes, please.  

>Where d'ya get $40 mil/ton, laddy? Is that NASA costs?

No, it's an extrapolation of commercial costs by the extra delta-v
needed to land on the moon.  If NASA will be building its typical
astronaut-safety structures, I care not to imagine how expensive
it will be.

>I'm going to subcontract
>to the Russians.

Not if NASA is helping, you won't, except for minor pieces of
tech here and there.

><<buzzer>> WRONG! All my R&D has been done thanks to the folks at Freed 

R&D is only a small fraction of SSF costs.  The cost of launching and
maintaining astronauts dominates even for LEO, and will be even much
more dominating a factor foor the moon.  Besides, FLO is redesigning 
everything -- new suits, modules, etc.  It turns out that astronaut
equipment is designed for special-purpose use; what works in LEO
probably doesn't on the moon.  Besides, the whole purpose of NASA
studying this is to design their next pork barrel project, and
that won't work if they can't get the R&D boys in on it.

>If I don't like the costs here at home, I'll go talk to the Italians, who are
>building smaller modules to be installed on Freedom.

Even smaller than a Winnebago?   Are we now stuffing astronauts
into Honda Civics for 90 days?

>Or the Russians, who have
>lots of leftovers, and hungry families.

May not be a coincidence.

>I respectfully submit the furnace might be the EASIEST thing to construct and
>build now. 

It's an entiring mining and processing system you're talking about,
not just a furnace.   The furnace has be cleaned often,
eg how are you going to clean the condensate off the furnace cover?
The inflexibility of astronauts for fixing the myriad Shuttle problems, 
even those that could have been fixed in a shirtsleeve environment, 
demonstrates that this stuff can't be fiexed.  We have to have stuff 
that works autonomously, whether astronauts are there or not. 
The astronauts have no magic fix-it capability; for every dramatic
fix they've done in space there have been over a dozen Shuttle problems
they couldn't fix.  Mining and extraction of specific elements
from soils takes hundreds to thousands of specialized craftsmen and
millions of tons of tools and equipment to do in shirtsleeves,
air-filled environments on earth.  We have to start bootstrapping
with the simple processes, and unfortuneately that means leaving
the tough stuff like breaking apart silicate regolith until later.

>Let's see, we get air from our O2 plant.

Air is mostly nitrogen, unless you're planning to repeat the Apollo
fire.  Plants also rely on nitrogen and carbon dioxide to grow.

It would be also fun to see that O2-air used to lubricate the
machine tools.  :-) :-)

Alas, this lunar scheme doesn't just fail the basics of
business economics; it also fails frosh chemistry.

>No Nick. The base is infrastructure.

Ah yes.  That magic word "infrastructure", which releases us from
all fiscal responsibility.  In the real world, somebody has to
pay for that "infrastructure", hopefully the people who benefit
from it.  If nobody who can pay benefits, as in this case, then
some other kind of infrastructure should be built for someone else
who _can_ make a paying proposition out of it.

>[solar cell beaming, I'm castigated for "ignoring it"]

I didn't mention it because the budget was already above $500 billion even
before we started to try to pay for things like mass drivers, big
solar cell plants, etc.   The prereqs were sufficient to demonstrate the
absurdity of the project. A solar cell plant alone would more than
double that budget -- we are talking huge amounts of chemical
plant to purify the silicon, for starters.   Furthermore, just
passing the safety hurdles and building the rectennas will take
up most of the typical powerplant budget, if the ecofascists will
even allow it at all.

>I'm going to skip this, because there's no "market."

Well then who is shelling out the $500 billion, and why?  Congress
won't even pay four orders of magnitude less than that for SEI, last 
I heard.

>The Szabo comet express, which is high-risk, and bases itself on the need for
>what? Alleged U.S. government needs, such as inflated SDIO "needs."

I never denied government as market. The military is our primary user of s
pace; both its current and future operations would benfit greatly from
cheap propellant.  Cost of large Mars missions would be reduced an
order of magnitude, with the radiation dosage greatly lowered.  Moon
base would benefit tremendously, as well, but it's not likely to
be an initial market, since it just doesn't make any economic
or political sense until the cost of large-scale space operations
has been radically lowered, primarily with a cheap supply of
volatiles.

BTW how is the need to protect against $trillions in damage and
millions of lives lost from a small nuclear war "inflated"?

There are many large commercial markets as well. Comet organics can 
be turned into a wide-variety of materials, including urea-formaldehyde 
resin and carbon fiber, for building very large comsats.  The project provides 
raw materials that make large-scale space manufacturing economical for the 
first time.   I've found over twenty markets; the rate of return after
adjusting for market risk and technological risk (with insurance)
is 30%/year, assuming very modest but important gains in technology
and knowledge of comets from exploration.

Volatile extraction would greatly lower the cost of doing this
lunar base.  If you want to help make it a reality for that reason,
that's great.  Let's work together to fund Spacewatch, an asteroid
and comet composition survey, NEAR, and a comet sample return. 
All that put together is less than 1% the cost of FLO; you
wouldn't even notice the funds.  I'll even help work for
Artemis and Lunar Scout as a return favor.

>[Comsats]
>Which was built on a goverment-constructed infrastructure and R&D.

Government R&D done for other, useful reasons, not done in a
vague hope of setting up some sort of comsat industry.  I'm
not objecting to government R&D in support of volatile extraction;
I'm calling for it!


-- 
Nick Szabo					 szabo@techboook.com
Hold Your Nose: vote Republocrat  ////////  Breathe Free: vote Libertarian