From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 23:28:06 MDT
>
>
>>Robert: What is the feasibility
>>of launching a mini-external tank, fueling it
>>with resources launched on smaller
>>vehicles -- a Delta IV has about 25% the
>>payload capacity of a Saturn V -- and
>>then sending a shuttle off to the moon?
>>
>Technotranscendence wrote:
>I agree. It's only lack of will and funding that keeps it from
>happening today.
>
To those who like to think about things like this (like me) I have
a request: think mass. Think like a weights engineer. Anything
that is going out to the moon will need to be liiiiiiight light light.
You wont haul aaaaaanything that isnt critical as all getout. For
a vehicle, an aluminum sphere, for instance, very thin walled, with
as little gas inside as possible and still support life. Robert is
one that I know has the engineering sophistication to estimate
the mass of an aluminum sphere of about 2 meters radius,
sturdy enough to contain about a third of an atmosphere
of air mixture, perhaps 150 torr of oxygen and about
100 torr of neutrals such as helium.
The tech I feel we still really need for successful colonization
of the solar system is shoehorning and bootstrapping. By
shoehorning I mean generating scaled down humans with
minor tweaks to the genome. Think of a housecat as
compared to a lion, or a llasa apso vs a wolf. In each
case, I suspect there is a lot of similarity.
If we we able to shoehorn humans down to about 20 kg,
and 1 meter height without excessive loss of intelligence,
then the scale of everything goes down significantly. Recall
the mass of the pressure vessel goes down as the cube of the
linear dimension.
After a successful colony is extablished with shoehorned
humans, they can bootstrap back up to the more customary
80 kg, 2 meter scale.
Space theorists, *think mass.*
spike
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