From: alizard@pil
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Space, the final frontier
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 01:51:42 PST

Re: Re: Space, the final frontier
 
> From: altheimm@nextnet.csus.edu (Murray Altheim)
> Newsgroups: alt.pagan
> Subject: Re: Space, the final frontier
> >Removing heavy industry from this planet, replacing fossil fuel, nuclear
> >power, and hydro from the power grid isn't environmentally feasible? The
> I repeat my most important point -- _industrialization_ of space involves
> both heavy expenditure (heavy industry is what we're talking about, not
> communications and exploration) and high environmental impact. If you 
> think the cost of shipping heavy industrial materials across the country
> by rail or truck costs a lot to the country in both money and pollution,
> think what transporting huge payloads into space might cost.
> Approaches to energy conservation and generation that are clean and 
> renewable are available without going into space. You may be aware that
> much of the research in the past 20-30 years into small-scale cold fusion 
> has been squelched by both the oil and fission industries. I believe that

OK, I agree with most of the unquoted portions of your posts, disagree
with others, but my disagreements are probably more in viewpoint than
content in most places. 
My interest in moving heavy industry to space is because there are quite
a few industrial processes that work more efficiently in zero-g or with
direct access to large amounts of radiant energy than their earthly analogs
do. Many of these processes are the sources of our favorite forms of
pollution, either directly (if you ever have a semiconductor plant in your
neighborhood that has been around for a while, NEVER drink anything from
local wells!) or indirectly, in terms of energy usage, whose end result to
the environment is acid rain (see also Four Corners power plant) due to the
massive quantities of energy used. Moving these processes into space makes
sense from both an economic (more efficient = cheaper = more profitable =
reduced consumer prices) and there are some rather interesting materials
based on crystalline growth that can be made in zero-g, ultrahigh strength
steels, that sort of thing that can't be done at all here. 
As for space transportation, I see the most important initiative we can
take in this area is a large scale launch vehicle that can turn space from
a difficult to access area to a relatively easy one, the point being to
reduce the price of space transport to a few dollars a pound, which may
well drop in the future, making more projects affordable. At $3600/lb,
this can't happen. At $10/lb, the infrastructure for space industrialization
CAN be built cost-effectively, we can ship stuff into orbit in knocked down
form for assembly in space. This makes a tremendous difference in what's
possible; at this point, anything going into space has to be assembled and
shipped into space in a form that isn't necessarily most efficient for its
intended purpose so it'll fit the launch vehicle. If a solar power satellite
is built using conventional means, it has to fit into a single launch vehicle.
If it can be shipped into orbit in several mass produced modules, we can
quickly build large scale systems... if we have people up there to bolt them
together. Heavy industry can be done the same way, this method generalizes
to any large scale structures.
blessings...
                                                 A.Lizard
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