Off Earth
Erika Nesvold 2023 Beav. Lib 629.442 NES
Preface
- vii "We'll worry about that later" is not something I ever expected to hear from a leader in the space industry."
Ms. Nesvold: please learn about how people actually make stuff and solve problem. Your linkedin CV shows zero business or engineering experience.
- That's peachy keen for an exoplanet astrophysicist, but your business/engineering skills may be quite a bit less than my astrophysics and exoplanet skills (8 shelf feet of outdated graduate level texts).
vii "now defunct" ... Perhaps Deep Space Industries CEO (2012-2017) Daniel Faber. I'm skeptical of Faber as a self-appointed "leader", and it is unlikely that he has ever had enough resources or funding to worry about many things now, especially in response to an out-of-the-blue question from an unknown conference attendee. OF COURSE this is a topic that should be addressed long before design and deployment, but NOT long before a lunar mining startup struggles to learn whether lunar mining makes sense to study.
- IMHO, I don't think lunar mining makes any sense at all, not even for filling sandbags (which the sharp dust would abrade to shreds). Lunar crust is oxide minerals; reducing it to elemental Silicon, Aluminum, and Iron requires electricity and carbon electrodes. Practically zero carbon on the Moon. Photovoltaic electricity? Not with a two week night.
- Besides those drawbacks, the Moon is covered with highly abrasive glass fragment dust, which ruins optics and would rip holes in sandbags. The dust is launched upwards by solar UV, perhaps many kilometers, to settle on upward facing surfaces; this has rendered the Apollo retroreflectors almost useless. It would be far worse for efficient PV illumination.
- The Moon is a slagheap. We are very lucky the the Tethys impact stripped that slag off the Earth.
- Lunar escape velocity is 2380 meters per second. Less than Earth, but more delta V than delivering materials from Near Earth Asteroids (a threat worth eliminating) or even Deimos, orbiting distant Mars.
Therefore, if you want Mr. Faber to think about these things, help him think about them. If his plans remain poorly thought out, inform his investors, and help them find better investment opportunities.
- For example, Deimos may also be useless slag, but its tiny escape velocity will not trap abrasive impact bubble dust. Deimos may be cold enough to trap water ice beneath the surface. Will extraction ruin Deimos forever? Deimos is 1.5e15 kg; if extracted rationally and prudently (say 1500 tonnes per year), Deimos will last a billion years.
- We can combine that soda-straw extraction "pipeline" with extensive sample collecting and scientific evaluation - better to pay for Deimos science with judicious Deimos extraction, rather than launching Earth materials through a Tsiolkovsky-equation-narrowed carbon-fueled production pipeline from Earth.
- Sure, Deimos is "years away", but after a delivery "pipeline" is filled (filling may take 20 Earth years), it will be a steady pipeline. Yes, this is an annoying delay, but annoying is better than expensive and fruitless haste.
- Other politically correct questions like "how will workers in space be shielded from exploitation?" Probably the same way we protect graduate students from exploitation (mostly NOT). There are MANY opportunities, and part of the education process (and maturation to adulthood) is learning how to find some least-bad opportunities.
- Nesvold is a Norwegian name; perhaps a great-great-grandparent emigrated from Trondheim to the United States on the same ships that my Swedish grandfather did, for the same "escape exploitation, pursue opportunity, build America" reasons.
- And here we are - pay it forward, by providing better jobs than the exploiters do. If you can't, learn how. If you can't learn how, your opinion is ungrounded fantasy, and you are worse than the exploiters.
What I read in the book (a few samples, not the whole whiny thing) shows similar evasion of responsibility. If you think you know better than the entrepreneurs busting 100-hour weeks for a few tiny gains, find solutions YOURSELF, don't demand their attention like a spoiled toddler.
Space settlement advocates spend thousands of hours thinking and writing about social solutions, in addition to technical problem solving. I have 20 shelf-feet of that. The biggest problem is that societies are REALLY COMPLEX and INTRICATE, and we haven't got anywhere close to "Newton's Laws" of human behavior. Indeed, a model-able mind is subvertible mind, perhaps the explanation for why free minds aren't modellable.
Develop the analytical tools, and ethical engineers will gladly apply them. Sadly, this is VERY DIFFICULT; one brain neuron is more complicated than a Saturn V rocket.
Fortunately, we have enormously capable computers to implement analytical models. Unfortunately, we lack rigorous, reproducible models. If this is the important problem (I believe so), study brains and minds and their interactions, not exoplanets. Avoid politically-correct newspeak, the word-salad phlogiston of human behavioral "science".