The irony is that I’d just skimmed through Criswell’s contribution in Finney and Jones’ INTERSTELLAR MIGRATION, so I was familiar with his name, but hadn’t realized he’d more to say. So I’ve more reading to do and to think about.

The “trillion dollar jigsaw puzzle” is the only way to provide a western standard of living to 10 billion people. No other scheme I know of even comes close.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Criswell

Bob Clark

And yet, just what was the point of those Elysiums? If we’ve ruled out constructing power stations — and I think we have, for the time being — what purpose did they serve? More precisely, what is so special about life at a Lagrange Point? It’s dynamically stable, I understand. You can stand on your balcony and watch the earth sweep across the horizons at 2 or 3 minute intervals. The phone calls to your broker and your ex-wife in Buenos Aires and your aging parents in Luna City are all essentially local, with minimal time lag. The zero-gee sex in the hotel rooms strung along the axis with your current wife or sight-seeing Pan American stewardesses is fantastic. You can fly — really fly! with your own arms flapping wings like a bird…. All that. But you can do all that — except for the convenient phone calling — anywhere in the solar system. (Well, maybe not the part with the stewardesses, but that was Pan Am’s failing, not yours!)

Which makes me wonder if we could sort of re-purpose L5 colonies, not as an ethereal Shangri La fixed in the heavens twixt Moon and Earth, but as Buzz Aldrin-style cylers, the cruise ships and tramp steamers of a future age, sweeping along narrow cometary orbits precisely adjusted to permit not stopovers, but close fly-bys of Earth and Mars and one or two asteroids, ferrying tourists or colonists or outer bound adventurers to the far reaches of the inhabited solar system.

How did Tennyson put it?

“For I dipped into the future, far as human eye might see,
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that might be;
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails
And pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales….”

A nice picture, also worthy of dreams, if we just keep the “ghastly dews” at bay.

Point 1: just as nuclear power plants have a big public relations problem (“Ugh! Nasty neutrons! Core meltdowns and China syndromes and radiation and atom bombs!”), the same would be true for large solar collection systems (“Microwaves and roasted birds and insects falling out of the sky! And people being burned to death!”) There’s a big Not In My Back Yard problem, in other words.

Point 2: a lot of people see fracking and oil extraction from shale and methane extraction from sea floor formations as a near term panacea, Relatively easy mining projects yielding energy from sources that can be utilized in fairly conventional power plants and refineries, without asking people to accept major changes in their lifestyle. These ideas may pan out, or maybe not, but it’ll probably be another decade before we can see if the promise holds up. But until then, SSPS is going to strike most people as an expensive, pie-in-the-sky sort of idea.

Point 3: the ultra large systems Gerald O’Neill proposed assumed lunar mining of materials and manufacture, with subsequent in-space assembly of solar arrays by human workers. Without a middling large lunar base and without some sort of habitant to house the workers, and without some political framework that allows this sort of thing (meaning, getting past the Moon Treaty), the construction of of large space structures looks prohibitively expensive.

Point 4: ignoring the above points, the prospect of combining a lunar base and a space habitat and building solar arrays and large ground solar collection facilities and constructing major pieces of a new energy distribution on earth, virtually from scratch, looks formidable. That looks like a muilti-trillion dollar jigsaw puzzle, Maybe governments have the money and patience and skills to finance and organize such a thing, but it’s beyond the scope of any single company or any ordinary consortium of construction firms. Maybe, just maybe, anti-trust laws could be relaxed to permit some behemoth Space, Inc. to be formed to tackle the job — but I think it’d take something like a planet-threatening emergency to provide justification. Right now we’ve got a lot of relatively independent producers of oil and gas and power generation companies, with a loosely coupled energy transmission network; maybe that looks inefficient from a God-like perspective, but from a low level vantage, it works, and it’s relatively immune to single-point failures, so it’s reliable, and we don’t want to change it much without good reason.

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All that said…. I can see a couple of places where small to medium solar power systems would work beautifully to supplement or replace temporary power generation needs. Military operations, for example, and disaster relief efforts. Lay out your solar collection panels where convenient, redeploy them as circumstances change, in whatever numbers your need, and then point your satellite systems in the right direction…. simple. easy power production that can’t be tampered with. Not super cheap, perhaps, but trucks with mobile power generators aren’t cheap either and they make much more attractive targets for enemy guns than fields filled with solar cells. Also, in wars and forest fires and massive floods, local objections to your power generation methods can usually be ignored. And governments can tolerate the cost.

So, if the competition is electricity from Southern California Edison at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. solar power may not look that great. But if the competition is a diesel engine on a flatbed trailer in a bunker in Iraq while bullets are flying through the air burning up fifty gallon drums of oil air-lifted in from Wiesbaden by poorly maintained Hercules transport aircraft at maybe a buck twenty per kilowatt-hr overall…. solar power could shine. NASA really ought to push for a fast paced demonstration program!

And if that works, the sky’s (no longer) the limit.

That is an interesting question.

Just truth in packaging, that whole discussion is before my time (I did not arrive in the business until January 1982). I do have an interest in the history of this sort of thing, however, so here is what I think I know. The version of the Apollo system that would have landed the Apollo Command Module directly on the lunar surface would have required a much larger vehicle, requiring a booster larger than the Saturn 5. The fact that the bigger booster could not be provided by the 1970 deadline was the reason that lead to the adoption of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous approach.

I do not think even the hypothetical Chinese 130 Ton Launcher could achieve that goal. Therefore they would have to be planning on an Apollo Single Launch Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or a dual launch Lunar Orbit Rendezvous approach. If the former that would give an approximately Apollo like capability, if the latter (combined with one way cargo launches) it could considerably exceed the Apollo capabilities.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

What is interesting to me is the ship and large engine building industry in Korea and Japan- both countries are completely capable of producing large solid rocket boosters and rocket engines. We will not give them the technology though and since the west dominates the launch industry they will not risk the investment.

A tremendous amount of wasted effort and resources. Just as different companies built the Saturn V, it is possible- not easy- but possible, to have an international space program whose sum is greater than it’s parts. I do not think the ISS is a good example of this because…..I do not like the ISS. That is my own personal bias. But as for a far larger cooperative effort; what would be the purpose, the goal of that program?

Besides planetary protection and survival colonies- which is also my own preference but not popular, there is telecommunications. A cislunar telecom initiative is attractive but for many reasons does not seem to be a big enough attractor to inspire such a global effort. What then?

I keep coming back to Criswell’s Lunar Solar Power. It bugs me. We are definiteley headed for big problems on this planet due to our population growing. We need energy. And the ability to beam that energy down from space could also lead to the holy grail of space travel- cheap lift by way of beam propulsion. And that could lead to that fantastic dream of the 70’s being resurrected; the space habitats of Gerard K. O’Neill.

Call me crazy but sometimes I think it could happen. Sometimes not; like when I read that NASA wa promoting their asteroid mission in the guise of planetary protection. Then I get discouraged.

Not dumping on you, man. You’re right — the Chinese have great potential. Paraphrasing Brad deLong, the most important political fact of the 20th Century may have been that because of a common language and a history of trade, Americans viewed the British as friends and allies; the most important political fact of the 21st Century may be that that because of trade (and emigration?) the Chinese come to view Americans as friends who made possible their own rise in the world.

[gratuitous political comments deleted]

We shouldn’t be letting people in those groups define our space program, I’m trying to say. Space buffs should view the future with both urgency and a long perspective.

In a roundabout way, I’m endorsing Dr. Spudis’ judgements.