In the early 1960’s Aerojet invested millions in very large monolithic solid rocket boosters built with submarine hull technology. Unfortunately, the politics involved dictated that any large Solid Rocket Boosters for the space program would be coming from Utah. The Aerojet booster shells would have come from Sun shipyards in Philadelphia by barge– while Utah production had to be transported by rail in separate segments.

So sure was Aerojet of the superiority of their new boosters that they built a factory in the everglades to pour the propellant. Aerojet was so confident because these boosters of over four million pounds of thrust would cost about one dollar per pound of thrust. These pairs of reusable boosters would have put out more thrust than the 1st stage of the Saturn V for about one fortieth the price.

The politically chosen Thiokol segmented boosters would severely limit any vehicle using them and in the case of the space transportation system also going with the space plane concept would strand the U.S. in Low Earth Orbit to this day. The Aerojet factory sits abandoned with the remains of the most powerful booster ever fired, the AJ-260, sitting in a test silo.

Along with the failure to use monolithic boosters came the second strike against space exploration; the failure to utilize wet workshops. This use of empty fuel tanks for use as spaceship compartments and for rendered alloy would have allowed for large structures to be readily available. Solar energy to melt down these stages into more massive components would have allowed the building of pusher plates for atomic bomb powered spaceships in earth orbit. The third strike was this failure to adopt the only practical interplanetary propulsion system available at the time.

A half century after atomic bomb propulsion was first evaluated the situation has not changed at all. There is still no other method of propulsion that has any chance of providing the necessary performance. Prohibiting nuclear devices by space by treaty was yet another political stumbling block in the path of human space flight. Detonating nuclear devices in earth orbit may have been feasible at the north and south poles where there were magnetosphere exclusion zones. In these areas it may have been possible to boost out of orbit without contaminating the earth’s atmosphere.

Sadly, the money being funneled into just a single troubled DOD program, the F-35 stealth fighter, would finance a Beyond Earth Orbit Human Space Flight program with these technologies that have been waiting for over half a century to be utilized. The defense industry continues to realize immense profits by producing weapons that cannot , for example, keep the straits of Hormuz open when facing anti-ship missiles.

It is a question the easy money of weapons and classified programs vs. the hard money of building spaceships that work. We can train our young people to clear buildings with automatic weapons and invest in brain trauma rehab or we can train them to build spaceships. The money will be spent either way.

Telemach’s only drawbacks are (1) his youthfulness and (2) his simplicity as an outgrowth of Einstein’s happiest thought.

The world press club is kindly requested to stage a public discussion between black-hole hero Stephen Hawking – or nobelist Gerard ‘t Hooft – who like everyone else in science reserved judgment so far and Telemach’s father. So the public gets a chance to judge whether CERN’s 2008 decision to not quote the published danger-proving results from Tübingen (a decision which allowed it to go ahead) was a wise strategy or not. Deliberate non-quotation is a big no-no in science.

A shortcut would be to ask Netanyahu’s and Ahmadinejad’s opinion about the CERN cover-up. I predict that both will in response to being asked this question postpone the planned war until Telemach has fought his battle with goliath CERN. A common enemy from outer space – or the depths of the earth – unites humankind.

The general consensus is that Venus was more like that of the Earth several billion years ago, with liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect may have been caused by the evaporation of the surface water and subsequent rise of greenhouse gases.

It poses not just a harsh warning of the prospects of global warming on Earth, but also a case study for how to counter such effects — reversing the runaway greenhouse effect.

I have wondered if anyone has given serious thought to chemical processes which could be set in motion on Venus to extract the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The most common gas in the Universe is of course hydrogen, and if sufficient quantities could be introduced to the Venusian atmosphere, with the appropriate catalysts, could the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere be eventually reversed back into solid carbon compounds, water vapor and oxygen? The effect of this would of course not only bring down the temperature, but return the surface pressure, with 95% of its atmosphere removed, to one more similar to that of Earth. Perhaps in adding other aerosols the temperatures could be reduced further and avoid a re-runaway effect.

I’d like to hear others thoughts on this. It would be a long term project — but would perhaps make our closest planet our most habitable one in the future — one we could turn into a habitat that would be very accessible, with ample oxygen, water and mineral resources… The study of such a process would also greatly benefit Earth in the event that theorized runaway greenhouse effects start to occur on our own planet, the strategies learned could save it. Other issues to address regarding Venus: lack of magnetic field and  its slow rotation would have to be considered, though hardly off-putting, and 150ppm sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere would need to be cleansed — surely not insurmountable.

The Telemach theorem renders CERN’s detectors blind to the production of artificial mini black holes while making the latter both much easier to produce and infinitely dangerous.

The fact that CERN already did its best to produce them for almost a year becomes excusable only if Telemach is absolute nonsense, as CERN and the whole planet are praying for.

So please, dear best young or old physicist of the planet: do come forward to prove Telemach wrong. The age of the tactfully silent physics community is over.

Ceres is a much better deal. A multi-year mission is a multi-year mission and if you are going to Mars it makes more sense to go farther to Ceres. No problem landing as it has very little gravity, but may have liquid oceans. Solar resources on Mars are not very good.

The Moon has ice and is the first place to go for the simple reason that any human missions outbound will require massive shielding and that shielding will require nuclear propulsion.

Building and lighting off a nuclear spaceship in earth orbit is not acceptable and bringing up all that water is problematic. The moon has water for shielding and no restrictions on nuclear activities.

The safest way to transport fissionables to lunar orbit is a direct launch of a human-rated HLV with an escape tower and the material packaged in a capsule.

My essays on Lifeboat also talk about nuclear energy in space:

Water and Bombs talks about nuclear propulsion,

Plowshare in Space talks about nuclear excavation of colonies,

How to Build a Spaceship is self-explanatory.

One thing everyone agrees on is that local resources will have to be used. We now know that There has been a lot of geological and hydrological activity on Mars that has segregated and concentrated useful ore bodies that can be exploited with current extractive technology. One type of mineral of interest is the occurrence of iron and magnesium carbonate formations on the surface. Magnesium carbonate is easily converted by heating to magnesium oxide, the primary component of a type of cement that I am researching as a construction material for Mars. The widespread occurrence of sulfate salts also gives reason to believe that metal sulfide ore bodies are also available there. This type of ore can easily be refined with simple electrolytic equipment. The same metal refining on the Moon would require grinding and processing basalt with a lot of heavy equipment.

I would argue that Mars also has a more friendly environment. First, it has higher gravity than the moon, at 38% of Earth’s gravity. This may prove to be significant in minimizing the health effects of reduced gravity. The higher gravity would also aid in many industrial processes such as ore separation and concrete consolidation. Mars also has an atmosphere, however thin. While 4 to 8 millibars may not sound like much, it is enough to burn up a lot of micrometeorites before they reach the surface, reducing the danger of micrometeorite damage. It may also help reduce the danger of galactic cosmic rays, but that will need to be tested. One thing that is certain from my own research is that the thin atmosphere is enough to allow magnesium oxychloride cement to cure before a significant amount of water has evaporated from it, and prevent boiling during the curing process. On the airless Moon, this type of cement would boil violently and the water would evaporate before it would cure. The total lack of atmosphere on the Moon would preclude the use of any cement that depends on water for curing.

Dust will be the biggest challenge to machinery in either place, and I argue that it is much less of a challenge on Mars. We have already studied lunar dust, and it is composed of fractured particles that retain sharp edges and points, with no mechanisms for smoothing the surfaces such as wind or water movement. This makes Moon dust very abrasive to machinery (and air seals) and very irritating to human tissues on contact. Mars has annual wind storms that blow dust around the planet, and has had flowing water recently in it’s history. This would serve to smooth out Martian dust particles to something more closely resembling the kind of material found on Earth, which we can more easily deal with. As further evidence, we have had rovers survive multiple dust storms and keep operating. I would say this is as much a testament to the Martian environment as it is to NASA engineers. Additionally, the dust has been found to be largely magnetic, meaning that magnetic filtration could be used to keep it out of habitable spaces.

Some would argue that solar power is more abundant on the Moon, but the problem there is that it intermittent. 14 days on, then 14 days off. Power either has to be stored for two weeks at a time, or produced from other sources. On Mars, you just need to get through a single night. The dust storms can cause problems of course, but that is at most a month out of every 22.

Finally, there is the question of water. On the Moon, water ice is probably at the bottom of some deep craters near the poles. It can probably be mined beneath the surface, we are just not sure how far down we need to go. On Mars, snow has been observed made up of water ice, and water ice has been seen just beneath the surface in rover tracks. It appears to be everywhere, just below the surface.

The Moon may be closer as the bird flies, but in terms of energy to get there, Mars is not much further. The biggest challenge will be getting humans there alive, but once that is done the learning curve once we get there is much shorter. Instead of developing new and untested industrial processes to exploit lunar resources, we can use proven technology to exploit Martian resources with much less effort. The prize is there for the taking, and there is no point in stopping on the way to build a temple to Luna.

There must be one person in Israel who believes me.

The issue on hand concerns scientific ethics: CERN refuses to offer a counterargument for nearly 4 years. And, to the best of the present writer’s knowledge, no scientist speaks up in person on behalf of CERN by offering a scientific counterargument that he or she would be ready to defend. The much simplified 2010 theorem proving the danger was not even attempted to be defeated by a scientist.

Einstein’s famous gravitational frequency shift is accompanied by an equally strong change in particle mass and particle charge, both locally undetectable too. The new-found corollaries to Einstein’s famous “happiest thought” endow black holes with radically new properties. These properties not only render CERN’s detectors blind to its most hoped-for product (black holes) but do simultaneously enhance the probability of the successful production of black holes – an ominous combination. The first sufficiently slow specimen produced will take lodging inside earth – to grow there exponentially leaving nothing but a 2-cm black relic of our planet after a few years’ time.

The decisive “Telemach” theorem is maximally simple as mentioned and therefore maximally easy to refute if false, but no one has come forward. The visible physics community refuses to discuss the proven results while the very few best are on my side.

Although the highest administrative bodies on the planet chose to rely on an invisible science pope’s word given to them with the kind request not to be mentioned by name, the planet has after a year of maximum-energy operation by CERN perhaps earned the right to learn about the identity of the father figure who took the responsibility for everyone into his able hands. And: What is his precious argument so we all may learn from it?

To return to the beginning: I can only say that I trust a man who with the greatest personal sovereignty survived Dr. Joffe’s mercilessly punching questions 9 days ago in a live “Zeit” interview. The planet is waiting for a personality of this caliber demanding to be publicly informed.

Please, do not refuse to help the planet, dear Mr. President Dr. Christian Wulff.

THE FINANCIAL FEASIBILITY OF A LUNAR BASE
Commentators generally made fun of his speech with the most common phrase used being “grandiose”.  Perhaps.  But in 1996 the Human Lunar Return study estimated $2.5 billion from NASA to send and return a human crew to the Moon.  That was before SpaceX was able to demonstrate significant reductions in launch costs.  One government study indicated 1/3 of the cost compared to traditional acquisition methods.  Two of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavies will be able to launch nearly as much payload as the Saturn V while doing so at 1/15th the cost of the same mass delivered by the Shuttle.

So, we may be at the place where a manned lunar base is within reach even if we were to direct only 10% of NASA’s budget to achieve it.

I’m not talking about going to Mars with the need for shielding but rather to make fast dashes to the Moon and have our astronauts live under Moon dirt (regolith) shielding while exploiting lunar ice for air, water, and hence food.

IS A SMALL COLONY WITHIN REACH?
But the point of this post is this.  If a small lunar base is within our reach, how much more would it take to achieve something that most of us realize would be the single most important step in ensuring the survival of the human species should a truly existential event strike Planet Earth.  So I’m describing a small, self-sufficient colony.  I would say that the difference between a base and a self-sufficient colony is fairly small.  Small enough to make it worth our while to attempt to achieve.

THE MOST ESSENTIAL REQUIREMENTS
So, what are the requirements for a self-sufficient colony?  The most critical would be air, water, and food.  But understand, oxygen and water can be produced from the 600 million metric meters of water ice estimated to exist at the north lunar pole.  So there’s no shortage.  And with recycling, the amount of daily required input could be pretty small — small enough to easily be within a day’s task for mining.  But food also requires fertilizer.  Fortunately for us, the LCROSS results showed that there is also methane and ammonia in the ice and the regolith contains other minerals such as phosphorus and potassium.  So, the most critical components for a colony would already be present with a manned base at a lunar pole.

HABITATS
Besides this, the colony would also need protection from the vacuum and cosmic radiation — i.e. a sealed habitat.  This should not be too difficult.  For a base, options include inflatable habitats and using fuel tanks as durable, sealable compartments.  Radiation protection is as simple as piling regolith over the structures or even digging trenches or caves into the sides of hills or craters.  That’s fine for a base.  But a self-sufficient colony requires that future colonists be able to construct their own habitats.  This could be achieved in the intermediate term by simply caving out habitats, supporting them, and then inflating a liner.  Many such liners could be delivered in a single 5,000 kg payload.  In the long term, such liners could be produced as plastics from volatiles resulting from the production of water from lunar ice.  Broken liners could be patched or even melted to produce new liners.  Alternately, metals can be fairly easily produced from the regolith.  Run a permanent magnet through the soil, extract iron, melt it using solar concentrating mirrors and then process the molten metal to sheets, wires, cast forms, etc.  Glass could be made the same way along with fiberglass.  Natural lighting could supplement electrical power by using aluminum mirrors and glass.  Supplemental heat could be provided in a similar manner along with locally derived insulation.

ELECTRICITY
Thin film solar panels can provide > 1,000 W/kg.  So a 5,000 kg payload could provide a very large amount of onging power (if my math is correct, enough for perhaps 500 colonists).  Excessive solar panels could be stored under ground and then used as needed thereby giving the colony decades of power.  Eventually, a self-sustaining colony would need to produce its own power from silicon in the regolith.  Storage of energy during the lunar night could be accomplished through the use of electrolysis of water to oxygen and hydrogen.  These could then be recombined in a fuel cell to produce electricity and heat. Alternately, the colonists could simply travel every two weeks to the other side of the hill near the pole to another sunlit habitat.

CLOTHING
Again, to buy the colony time to be able to develop the ability to produce its own space suits, many years’ worth of thin airproof liners to space suits could be delivered in a single 5,000 kg payload.  Again, a self-sustaining colony would need to eventually produce their own.  Between the use of fiberglass, metals, and locally produced plastic or silicon sealants, eventually the colony could produce their own.  Of course plants could be grown to provide fibers for clothing.

EQUIPMENT
To avoid day-long exposure to cosmic radiation while mining surface ice, mining could either be conducted underground or telerobotically.  But regolith is very gritty and can wear out teleoperated mining equipment.  But if a colony is able to produce its own metals and had machining equipment which could be used to produce more machining equipment, then the colony could stay ahead of equipment wearing out. 

High-tech equipment (computer chips, cameras, and radio equipment) is certainly useful but I believe that there are ways around needing them.  Still, in the interim, a single 5,000 kg payload delivery could provide centuries worth of computer chips, camera chips, and critical radio equipment components.  For example, the Voyager craft have been exposed to 30+ years of 360 degree space radiation yet still work fine.  So, an apple box worth of computer chips could last centuries.  Eventually the colony would need to produce its own high-tech equipment.  Perhaps they could use 1940’s technology such as vacuum tubes.

GRAVITY & PREGNANCY
The Moon’s 1/6 gravity is probably not enough to prevent bone and muscle loss.  Experiments on the international space station (ISS) show that an exercise program can do much to prevent bone loss.  A recent study indicates that Fosamax prevents bone loss in astronauts.  A 5,000 kg payload could give 83 million doses of Fosamax.  Stored in a permanently shadowed area, it could provide for a very large number of future colonists.  But also, a basic centrifuge or even a tether ball-like contraption could provide artificial gravity for colonists for part of the day.  Trenches dug along its path could provide partial protection from cosmic rays.  Alternately, space forums have discussed completely underground centrifuges using various ingenious approaches.

Of particular concern is how fetal children would develop given limited gravity.  Studies of animals on the ISS indicates that this is a real concern.  We don’t know enough about this issue.  Perhaps pregnant women would need to spend significant amounts of time in a centrifuge perhaps in all trimesters.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
I have started with the most essential requirements and have worked down.  I propose that there are technologic solutions for each of the requirements but perhaps I have been unrealistic in one or more areas or perhaps have neglected to address an important requirement.  Feel free to comment below.

GENETIC DIVERSITY
For a truly self-sustaining colony, for humans, the Minimum Viable Population (MVP) is in the realm 1,000.  I personally suspect that it is actually less than that but a solution here could be for a single payload delivery of frozen embryos for surrogate parenting to be frozen long-term in permanently shadowed areas.  Although this may strike some as being unethical, these would only be needed in the event of a truly existential event on Planet Earth. 

PRESERVING THE BIOSPHERE
I envision the colony as not only securing the human species but a good representation of Earth’s entire biosphere.  But discussing the details of that topic would extend this post much longer than it has already become.  More on that later.

“The house is burning but no one takes notice” (Buddha).