Morning, in Tranquility

( 5/11/11)

After mowing grass last night, I sat heavily in the chair outside the garage,

And looked up at the Moon, high and in the first quarter this May evening.

It is morning in the Sea of Tranquility- that thought led to others;

Space is not over for us (it is hardly yet even begun!), forty-odd years

After the Eagle stooped over the lunar regolith and came lightly to rest.

Many dreams have come and gone, and many disappointments.

Take a deep breath, do not despair, let hope back in.

It is morning, in Tranquility.

My Dad is in the Hospital

My dad went in the hospital last Friday. He's had health problems and things haven't been good the last few weeks; diarrhea, weakness, and infection in his left leg. He's been huffing and puffing, can't breath well, and passed out in the kitchen Friday afternoon while I was still at work. An ambulance came and took him down to Dover, where they determined he had an irregular heartbeat (why he passed out), COPD ( the huffing), and that swollen leg needed antibiotics.

            Being self-centered the whole thing made me feel guilty, as it should. I'd been looking at my dad a lot lately, and noticing the muscle mass he's lost in his arms, the way one leg or the other is swollen, the look in his eyes. I had to bring up the diarrhea when he was talking to the doctor; he doesn't want to talk about his accidents. Or the fact that we've had to help him stand, to get up from the toilet. I didn't call, but that had me worried all yesterday, the thought that he'd be stuck in the bathroom all day.

            But when I got home, mom and dad weren't there, the kitchen table was pulled out from against the wall, and there was a little blood on the floor. Dad had fainted, had hit his arm and bled a little (he's on coumadin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfarin), a blood thinner), and that was where he was when the paramedics came for him. Mom didn't have time for a note, I finally got a hold of her on her cell phone and learned all this.

            I drove down with that blankness that isn't calm, with jags of emotion. Didn't get in an accident or lose it, but it was bad. Wandered through that maze of a hospital complex until I found the ER. I just wandered around and I was about to ask after my dad, Thomas Cleaver, when I saw my Mom in one of the rooms, with my Dad. He wasn't comfortable, but he wasn't dead. That's a big deal. It didn't register, that possibility, until just that moment.

Two Guys and a Solar Power Bubble...

(The 4th Part of 73!)

 What I had in mind for the plot hook/story idea segment of this is a little hackneyed; I recognized a little Spider Man and a little bit of every other 'Two Geeks Save The World' plot I've ever seen, and you know? That's okay.

But I'm gonna make the two guys into two science geek girls, so there! 8-P And then, well... they have a freind who's a bit of a trustifarian, and his/her dad is the rip-off from Spider Man I and II; the business/ scientist and the guy who becomes Doc Octopus. The Trustifarian is a play-boy/party-girl a lot like 'That-Idiot-Ivan' from the Vorkosiverse; always dodging responsibility, hiding a decent brain...

The old man is every noble scientist/innovator/entreprenuer cliche in the entire book. I'll need to tone that down, but he is a follower of Buckminster Fuller and the Wizard of Omaha (did I get that ref right? 8-). A big heart, too much so, and various reasons why he and his kid are living the hedgehog's dilemna. Sigh. I need to put them in threat at some point, do the bonding thing...

The Old Man wants to dehumidify the Gulf of Mexico and kill hurricanes; and pay for it by selling water to thirsty cities. Man, do I find some crazy stuff! The SPB interests him and he wants them working for his company.

Yeah, needs lots of work, and sounds just like I've been watching old 1930's movies, but with big science/big engineering ideas!

3rd Part, sort of an interlude

Find a way to pay for your dream, or it will never happen...

            I need to sneak up on this whole spaceflight, 73-Part Conquest of the Solar System crab-wise. There has to be a way to pay the way, so to speak, one that makes at least some sense. The Solar Power Bubbles I've postulated, are 100 meters in diameter and mass 3 kg/m^3 times 31,000 m^3,  ~10^5 kg or 100 tonnes of material. At a $1/kg, $1,000/tonne, that's $100,000 for structure. The things generates 100 KW, possibly a one tonne turbine @ $2/watt, for $200,000. Plus 10% is $330,000 and 111 tonnes. About 650,000 kg of air needs to be warm enough to lift 111,000 kg of stuff, 17% (actually 1/(1-.17, roughly 6/5)), or about 20% above the ambient temperature of 288 Kelvin, 58 degrees, 73 C, or 163 degrees F.

(Air masses 1.2 kg/m^3 @ STP- http://wiki.answers.com/Q/1_cubic_meter_of_air_weigh)
    

            A one km SPB would scale up two orders of magnitude; 10 MW, 11.1 million kg, $33M, but .65 billion m^3, so the air only needs to lift 1.7% of its own mass, instead of 17% (1/(1-.017), roughly 60/59), only about 5 degrees above ambient, 20 C, 68 F. People could live in the floor of the balloon and the support crew might have a hydroponic farm as part of the ballast...

            If a 1 km SPB operated more efficiently, at 2.5%, it would generate 25MW, 300 MW/day, ~110M KWH/year, $5.5M @ $.05/KHW, and pay for itself in 6 years. The 100 KW SPB are mobile and less of a hazard. They could transmit power to the ground via microwaves; the rectenna farm concept from solar power satellites. This would be very good for FEMA, the military and other remote operations. The 100 meter SPB might be less vulnerable than it seems; a big target, but also able to soak up damage.
            Mass times velocity squared is 10^5 kg*(12*10^3 m/s)^2; 100 tonnes to 12 km/s. 12*10^3 m/s divided by 24 m/s^2 is 500 seconds, T^2*Acceleration /2 is (25*10^4 s^2)*(24 m/s^2)/2 is 2.5*10^5*12 m is 3*10^6 m or 3,000 km. 3,000 SPB! 75 GW! I need 144*10^11 w/s per launch, 4*10^6 KWH, $200,000 worth of electricity @$.05/KWH, just a little less than $6/kg, $3/lb (I'll rough out an estimate of operating costs, but it's pure vapor, too!). I need 4 GWH, and have ~900 GWH per day, enough for 225 launches. At 110-plus launches per day, ~50% of capacity, that's 40,00 per year, 1.4 million tonnes or 4 million passengers...

***

            The first decade' is all about cheap access to space, and let me break it to you gently... there isn't any. The best I can work up is a scenario were costs and risks are contained enough that people can start working in space; economic activity, followed by habitats and settlement. The model I'm going with is less civil aviation or sailing ships and more railroading.

            Civil aviation is a popular model, but it ignores the fact that passenger airlines don't make money! And the sailing ship model ignores the fact that an age of sail ship carried with her al the tools and skills necessary to repair and even, in the fullness of time, to rebuild itself.

            Railroads, on the other hand, failed, a lot! They couldn't be counted on to operate, but they did tend to fail, get bought out, lay track and operate a little, and fail; a cycle that continued for a while. Like the earlier turnpike and canal systems, they were a public utility that provided transportation. Folks with wealth, status, civic hope and pride, financed them to help secure their piece of the pie, making money of the value-enhancing aspect; roads, canals and railroads made land and industry worth more. The big railroad efforts to cross North America made their money off of land speculation, only later operating off of freight and passenger service.

            I see the whole thing playing out this way-

0) Private Staged Rocketry, where we are right now.

1) Private Spaceplanes, where we will be in a few years, with same day service to anywhere in the world, as well as orbit.

2) Mass Transit To Orbit, which is basically railroading to space. I see a lot of efforts failing, and the public disillusioned with the whole thing before somebody finally makes it work- sort f like were we are with spaceflight today.

            I don't think that a space elevator will happen because there's so much debris in near earth orbit. It should work fine for the Moon and Mars, but not to GEO; we need to police our trashy skies!

            Mass Transit-

* Mass Driver @22 km altitude.

* Orbital Ring System with Jacob's Ladders from the ground, as in Paul Birch.

* Much, much later- Space Elevator.

            Services and small-scale Industry dominate this 'Middle Early Space Age', where the Early, Early Space Age was everything before the X-Prize. Services, as in Tourism and Science, and Industry, as in Energy and Materials.

Discover Magazine 'Finding Other Earths'

http://discover.coverleaf.com/discovermagazine/201105?u1=coverleaf#pg1

            What are the chances of man-habitable worlds? The guy quoted in the article says that 30% of the 200 billion star systems in the Galaxy may have earth-like planets. I think that that may be about right, but MHW are more than just Earth-sized... they have to be the right surface temperature, which means the right distance, and have air, water, life; it just goes on and on. I tend to suspect that life is the exception, rather than the rule, but I could be wrong and comets may regularly infect worlds with life, in which case most worlds are, were, and will be again, living, if conditions broadly so allow! We're talking extreme-life-as-we-know-it here on Earth versus what we 'normally' tend to think of, plants and animals and good weather, probably an order of magnitude more common than MHW.

            So, boundary conditions? From one half to one and a half Earth Masses, from .9 to 1.1 times the insolation Earth gets, from a little less than one half to a little less than 100% water-covered, and about one half to one and one half atmospheres, with a partial pressure of O2 around one fifth of an atmo.

            The likelihood of planets in that mass range is tied to the mass and the fraction of heavier elements (ahem, 'rocky stuff') in the star system. Smaller suns will tend to have smaller worlds, all other things being equal, but are more common than bigger suns... I have a quick and dirty method for roughing this out which will stop a statisticians' beating heart; I take the inverse of a number between 1 and 0 to the fourth root, subtract one from the result and roll with it. Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of ten thousand, that returns a number less than nine... One sixteenth of all outcomes are greater than one, and fifteen sixteenths are less, sometimes much less. About 5% are between 1 and 2, and ~17% of the planets above would be between .5 and 1.5 Earth masses. I'm going to make another guess and say that there's about a 20% chance of a planet being in the Goldilocks zone, neither too close and hot nor too far out and cold. Water is a crap-shoot; call it even odds, whereas it's probably more likely than not (my Quick and Dirty Worlds method is to take the square root of a random number from 1 to 0, which averages ~71%! 8-). For the right mass, the chances of the partial pressure being right are pretty good; again, even odds, where it's likely I'm being overly pessimistic. Proper levels of O2 are a function of photosynthetic life. The level is probably self-regulating and 'seeks' one fifth of an atmosphere... Too low and animal life lags until O2 builds up. Too high and fires rage, lowering it. Call that even odds, too. That works out to about .4%, one in 240 star systems, but there are 200 billion in our galaxy; about 850 million MHW!

            Incidentally, 1 out of 40 stars mass between 1.1 and .9 Sols by my method, so it's not very close to the real, but in my universe there would be ~21 million MHW around Sol-like stars; enough for me to spread Humanity out in 300-person packets! Which is just about twice the number that we humans are 'designed' for, but, yeah, we'd probably still be killing each other...

            Let's look at two possible planets, cleverly calling them Morris and Leslie-

            Planet Morris is 1.5 Earth masses and has a gravity of about 1.15 times that of Earth, 1.3 times the surface area, 663 million square kilometers. It has more water surface, having managed to get and hang onto more, 86% (~3/4^1/2), so the land area is only 93 million, but most of it is arable, nearly half again as much as on Earth. It's a little farther out and cooler, but has more atmosphere, ~2 bars, 1.8 N2 plus .2 O2, which makes it warmer all over.

            Planet Leslie is .5 Earth masses and has a gravity of a little under .8 times that of Earth. 332 m km^2, 50% water, so the surface area is about 10% more than Earths' and about a quarter of that is arable, some 42 m km^2, a little bit more area than Africa or the Moon. Leslie is a little closer and hotter, but with less water vapor as a greenhouse gas, and less atmo over all (.2 inert plus .2 oxygen for .4 bar), the temperatures tend to swing more to extremes over the course of a day or a year.

            People from Morris and Leslie wouldn't stand out much in a crowd of Earthlings, but over all, Leslies are taller and scrawnier than Morrisites, who are more heavily muscled, with less body fat, stronger and faster. They probably live a few years less, too, in a maritime environment, coastal farming, deep-sea mining perhaps, but warmer and milder temperatures. Probably no appreciable snowfalls, but monster storms race across the oceans, sometimes going around and around the planet, getting stronger and stronger until the they spend their fury upon the land...

            Leslies live a little longer, in a more extreme climate with few big storms, but probably lots of desert, and lots of places where tornados stalk the land. The planet's core is more run-down than Earth and the surface more worn-down, too, so there are few mountains and more coastal plains and low, wet, flat marshy and swampy lands by the seas or ocean.

            (I do believe I might be ready to write some stories about Earth, Morris and Leslie! 8-)

2nd Part of My 73 Part Conquest of The Solar System

(These are my notes from last week, when I was thinking about this; these are little embarrassing, but this is how I play with numbers! 8-)

            I didn't find out how much a given volume of air masses, but I believe it is 1.25 kg/m^3. I can live with that. I estimate that a car, with 5 m^3 of air and 5 m^2 of surface area, heats up 15 degrees C rather quickly; easily 5% Kelvin above the ambient temperature (288 K). I guesstimate that hot air in such a car masses ~5% less than in a car with open windows, and provides ~60 g/m^3 of 'lift' (I'm mixing the wrong units- sue me!). If I had a 1 m^3 balloon with a 1 m^2 cross-section and massing <60 g, it would rise.

            Let us make a plastic hot air balloon 10 meters across, with a 78 m^2 cross-section and a volume of ~500 m^3. The sun heats the air enough to raise ~97 kg of air 15 degrees C, or ~630 kg of air ~2.4 C, or 2.4 Kelvin, .9% above ambient, something like 5.5 kg of 'lift'. That works out to 17 g/m^2, or ~1/2 ounce per square yard. Possible, but iffy. On the other hand, if the sun heats the thing all day, we could see 6 ounces of lift per square yard of material. Although, the sun is heating up the ambient air, too...

            I am making the following assumptions-

•                     Passive solar heating provides energy to heat air equal to 60g/m^3 times 150 K above ambient temperature (I really wish I could put that in Joules, Newtons and Calories or BTUs...).

•                     At lower pressures, the air masses less and is heated up more.

•                     The material is thermally opaque, retaining heat fairly well (whatever that means 8-). 24/7, the internal volume is warmer and lighter than the external air.

           

A 100 meter Hot Air Solar Power Bubble (TM 8-) is about 7,800 m^2 of cross-section, 31,500 m^2 of surface area, and half a million m^3 or 650,000 kg of air, which we can probably heat up 60*150*7,800/650,000 = 9,000*7,800/650,000 = 9*7.8/.65 = 9*12 = 108 K. 396/288 or rather, 288/396 = 72/99 = 24/33 = 8/11 is 3 pounds of lift for every 11 pounds of air, ~180,000 kg. 650,000 kg of air weighs 715 tons, or 195 tons of lift. The surface area of the hot air balloon is ~35,000 square yards, at 2 pounds/SY, is 35 tons. There's 160 tons left for an overage of 5-fold, 10 lbs/SY, and the power generation part of this scheme.

            A 100 meter bubble has about 10 MW/s of sunlight falling on it during the day and in direct sunlight; at 1% efficiency, that's 100 KW. Nothing to sneeze about! A 1km bubble should be good for 10 MW, and heat up 1000 times as much air 1/10 as much, 10.8 K, 288/298.8, or ~8/8.3. But that still works out to a hundred times as much lift and a hundred times as much weight in material.

            Now, on to the 'Cheap Access To Space'! If I wanted this bubble up at 22 km for my own purposes, we need to figure out how much lift less dense air, heated more, could potentially generate. That's four halvings, or ½ to the fourth, 1/2^4, 1/16 times, about 80 g/m^3 to 173 K. the ambient is less at that altitude, but we'll go with 258 K, 15 C below freezing. We're talking about 173/431 times 80 g/m^3, ~40%, 32 g/m^3, a little over one ounce of lift. Fortunately, that's ~16 billion grams, 16 million kg, >7,000 tons of lift. The thing weighs in at 3,500 tons, half the lift. Even a 10 MW of wind turbine, at 1kg/100W, is <100 tons (or 25 MW and 250 tonnes). The 4 million kg per km of maglev launcher  (based on SpaeTram) I want to hang under it is a problem, but we can always scale the sucker back a little, 100 tonne orbiter, 35 tonnes of cargo or 100 passengers.

(Whew! Take a breath and say 'paper rocketry', Vinnie!)

My 73 Part Conquest of the Solar System

I have been threatening to do this for 20-some years, and it's time. I'll plot out the whole damn campaign arc here, with plot hooks for games I could run, or stories I could write, but the point of the exercise is that I still have faith in the possibility that people will one day be living and working in space, and that the power and resources of the solar system will provide enough wealth for the entire species. That's all very blue-sky of me, but this is the last gasp of my space enthusiast idealism, so, please, humor me...

The first part is to rob a big piggy bank, of course! 8-P

In the past, space enthusiasts have expected, somehow, that NASA would do all of this, or maybe big corporate America will fund it (in one of the mass-driver scenarios, the Lofstrom Launch Loop, the author has a bit of narrative where a fictional space-worker is going up to be part of U.S. Steels' exploratory mission to the asteroids). Not going to happen, at least not soon. Find a way to fund your dream, or it will never happen.

Space Tourism might be a short-term answer, but I don't necessarily believe in it. I'm going to borrow some bits and pieces from other places, including SpaceTram and high altitude aerostats, and put them together in a different way...

An aerostat is basically a hot air balloon, designed to get lift from passive solar energy. I did some silly BOTE calculations, and I think a 100 meter could be put together for a few hundred thousand dollars, and about 10 MW of solar energy falls across it's cross-section during daylight hours. If we had a solar wind-turbine running off hot air venting at the top, and got 1% efficiency, that's 100 KW, a small demo Solar Power Bubble. Scale it up to 1KM, and it produces 10 MW of power, and is self-ferrying. It also would have some additional uses, Cell and Comm tower, surveillance, etc. Hell, advertising!

That's a lot of portable power, suitable for the next part of the operation to follow in part two of my prospectus...