From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sat Jan 18 2003 - 17:58:00 MST
Realistically, this is all going to be no more useful than the moon landings
were if it goes through the normal NASA process. The people working now on
lowering the cost of getting to orbit are the ones to be watching; that's
the big technical hurdle that really needs to be dealt with. Mars would seem
to offer us little more use than the Moon, and it's a lot further away. Walk
before running, says I.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of JAY DUGGER
> Sent: Saturday, January 18, 2003 4:15 PM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Re: Zubrin must be pleased
>
>
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2003 16:45:07 -0600
>
> So much as I wish to believe this--and I came to
> transhumanism through the L5 Society--I can only think of
> four cynical things.
>
> 1) President Reagan challenged America to build a
> permanent space station by 1990.
>
> 2) President Bush, Sr. announced the Space Exploration
> Initiative (later renamed the Human Exploration
> Initiative), which would have placed infrastructure from
> LEO to Mars's surface. For those of you who follow
> Zubrin's arguments, this is the idea he derided as
> "Battlestar Galactica" in The Case For Mars.
>
> 3) Richard Hoagland, author of The Mounments of Mars, must
> also feel great pleasure.
>
> [snip]
>
> >the collar suddenly. An opportunity to break nukes in
> >space treaties in a
> >big way? (Are they still active?) Something a probe
>
> IIRC, the conventions only forbid placing nuclear weapons
> in orbit, not power sources. Lord knows the Soviets put
> reactors in orbit, and both they and the Americans put
> RTGs aloft. I had a cousin working for GE on a liquid
> sodium-cooled space-based reactor design in the early
> 1990s.
>
> 4) Having just read Dyson's Project Orion, my last cynical
> thought revolves around the US government designing a new
> generation of small, low-yield nuclear charges. Now that
> they have them, they need a rationale for their mass
> production. An Orion-class spacecraft sounds good, and the
> idea of ~1500 _tons_ to Mars sounds better.
>
> Saturn by 2012, anyone?
>
> Jay Dugger, who indulges in cyncism because he just broke
> $4000 worth of electronics at work.
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