On Sunday 29 October 2006 14:37, Jones Beene wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Standing Bear"
>
> > There is a company called JP Aerospace that has an idea of
> > going to space in a balloon.... This space
> > ascender would then leave and ascend in a slow circular pathway
> > gaining speed with each orbit, more so after leaving the last
> > traces
> > of atmospheric friction for practical purposes. Ultimately the
> > space ascender should arrive at a true rigid space station in
> > space in synchronous orbit about 20,000 miles up. From there
> > it would return for another load, taking with it anything
> > needing
> > transport back to the surface. They do this, possibilities are
> > endless. This plan places all its parts at one time or another
> > in this hydrino region,
> > and all of these parts could take part in such a hydrino
> > harvest. This
> > comment involving the use of others' technologies and ideas
> > named above
> > together in a useful and practical form is copyrighted by me,
> > Lee M.
> > Castleton, USAF retired.
>
> Very interesting, and thanks for putting this piece of the puzzle
> into place. If you are personally in contact with these
> individuals, I hope you will write them privately to express the
> same sentiment.
>
> That 'puzzle', mentioned above being - how to get space
> exploration out of the hands of a top-heavy bureaucracy and
> perhaps into the hands of a nimble corporation or small wealthy
> country. If for no other reason - then to make it competitive by
> offering the lowest cost option. NASA is too focused on
> man-in-space, when instead, space is the perfect environment for
> artificial intelligence.
>
> Actually several candidate countries come to mind - which are
> possessed with both a top-flight (pun intended) education system,
> a history of efficient and pragmatic government (desirous of
> international recognition) and most of all - wealth - particularly
> oil wealth. Norway would be one. Among companies - one would
> presently need to merge several types of corporate expertise -
> Virgin (Branson) with say Chevron and Intel.
>
> I suspect that this concept, as complicated as it seems, could
> still be pulled-off in the short-term for the quarterly profit of
> Chevron - spread out over five years - if (BIG IF) the ionosphere
> can be harvested for solar hydrinos. Even if the supply is tinier
> than the optimists suspect - if there are any at all, that
> resource could be put together as a step in yet a bigger package -
> one that would put a population of micro-robotic drones on the
> moon - to harvest lunar 3He, a proven resource, and then that
> would be another step-wise wrinkle in a more complicated hybrid
> system.
>
> I don't see the JP "balloon thing" as being very advantageous,
> otherwise; unless there is this kind of "harvestable" propellant
> in the ionosphere.
>
> And BTW - I'm sure Robin has been thinking about hydrino-induced
> fusion more than I have, but the Hy+3He reaction would seen to be
> a "natural" (or Hy + 11B, or Hy + 7Li) given the very small atomic
> size of the type of solar hydrino-hydride, hypothesized in the
> original post (i.e. N= 1/7 or 1/8) should they be in the
> ionosphere. You could probably get to breakeven fusion levels with
> those using a device as small as a Farnsworth Fusor ... Needless
> to say, any type of breakeven fusion in a small device in the
> ionosphere - using air buoyancy to shuttle smaller payloads up
> with reusable gear - that almost guarantees the availability of
> lunar payloads for about cost of terrestrial rail transport -
> seriously: pennies per pound instead of hundreds of dollars per
> pound.
>
> Hey, Branson may be the man ... if can step-back from his numerous
> overload of involvements, and focus on what is needed in the
> big-picture for private space exploration. He says that it is his
> number-one priority.
>
> Jones
JP Aerospace has their own website: jpaerospace.com. They bill
themselves as "America's ..other.. space program. They got a
contract from the government to build a ground takeoff ascender
prototype as a model for the real thing if a contract for it materialized.
They actually have a working ascender about ninety feet long and
about a hundred feet wide in the shape of a 'V'. A picture of it is
on their site. Positively dwarfs people standing next to it. Of course
the real thing would be an order of magnitude larger.
My worry about the hydrino if it existed arises from the idea that
energy, like manure, rolls down hill. Energy always seeks the down
ward path from a higher energy level to a lower. From previous
descriptions by Randall Mills in Vortex and on his site, the production
of hydrinos is accompanied by a hugely exothermic reaction greater
than any chemical reaction yet a bit less than nuclear thermal output
weight for weight of reagents involved. This would lead one to believe
that given that our planet is a ...water...planet and has a ...lot...of
hydrogen, such a reaction if it got started on this planet would have
converted us to a kind of small star for a while on our way to becoming
a dead cinder a long time ago and we would not be contemplating
our navels here about it. So making hydrinos must be a little harder
than Mills has admitted. Other than that, hydrinos would make excellent
rocket fuel, as was found out by a Dr Marchese at Rowan University
when NIAC funded a phase I study of a 'Black Light Rocket'. A final
report was issued, but no further public work was done on something
that ought to have been a natural for fuel for a Star Trek type of one
stage to orbit shuttle craft. Possibly it was a good experiment and
government officials, most of them with large industry backgrounds,
buried it out of fear that the world would change if this was developed
and their old industry buddies would be out of a job, not being able
to sell expensive failure prone junk for astronomical prices to Uncle
Sucker.
The same job was done on the Tactical High Energy Laser,
a truck mounted laser capable of bringing down artillery shells and
small 'manpads' that would have saved lives in Israel in the last
dustup they had with their religious fanatic jihadist friends last summer.
The THEL was quietly shelved in favor of expensive failure prone
one-shot-oops-I-missed-spend-another-million-dollars-Harry 'anti-missiles'.
The dirty secret of these Patriot missiles and just about every other
'anti-missile- missiles is that they do not work most of the time except
to back up propaganda for more government sales. A laser like the
THEL and its stepchild the 'Skyguard', a civilian airport version of the
same can aim and shoot at the speed of light. It sees it, it kills it; end
of story, period. No misses, and even if it did, a reload is just a recharge
away. With good design those re-charge times can be minimised.
There is also the Free Electron Laser being worked on by the HasyLab
in Deutschland. This jewel now is being developed to put out over a
hundred thousand watts of steady state lasing power. The only reason
these projects have been shelved or delayed can only be to benefit
some alternative system whose intellectual property is owned by
monopoly interests.
Good point about the helium three. The Chinese are working on going
to the moon to get it. They get there first and they will lay territorial
claim to as much of it as they can. With enough nuclear warheads in
MIRV configuration to back up this land grab, I would say that the Americans
are in a nuclear space race whether they like it or not, AND whether our
President wants to admit it or not. The stakes are nothing less than whether
you and I want our grandchildren to live under Chinese hegemony. A political
leader that did not realize this would have to be a fool or a 'Manchurian
Candidate'. I have a grandson who will be military age in a few years, and
shudder to think that he may end up on a military front line crossing Asia
from Vladivostok to Tashkent with we Americans and our allies the Russians toe
to toe with 75 million Chinese Army troops screaming for our blood. Unlimited
energy from helium three would make them strong, and there are ...other...
shortages in their country.......water.....food......strategic
minerals...............and the shortages are.......growing.
There is an American space program critic from the University of Hawaii
that calls himself a 'recovering space cadet'. He does not miss any
opportunity to criticize our space program. He wants us to drop it
altogether, often coming up with reasons that only could be gotten from
inside information from sources within the present administration. The
current actions of NASA seem to reflect these policies. Like taking two
years of fruitless investigation with no action to improve safety of our
shuttle fleet, then sending them back with minimal changes. Its almost like
the government is hoping for another disaster so that they CAN drop the
program and abdicate their responsibility to the American people.
This 'critic' goes about his 'rocket equation' with all the tenacity of
a crank, and can see no further than the same tiresome chemical rockets
that we have been using for decades. Rest assured that some large
power like China that has demonstrated having no compunction for
slaughtering its critics at home will also have no compunction for using
nuclear thermal propulsion as main propulsion for its earth boosters
if it needed some extra lift and more payload space per craft. And
here we sit with some technologies like the Shawson device and appear
to do nothing about it. I know that political rants are not really what
this list is all about, but some it this is inseparable from the very things
we like to look into. I am just saying out loud what many people
must be also thinking. The shuttle needs safety. We should make it
safe. Better propulsion systems could possible use the same spaceframe.
Can you think of a black light booster set in the place of the shuttle main
engines. Get us from earth to orbit to mars and back on one re-fueling!
Would'nt have to drop that big tank! Just take it to mars and back and
park it at the space station. Trip ought to take less than a couple of
months! And that is just one idea.
JP Aerospace's system could also be used to provide transport to build
in space a large interplanetary exploration ship with its own internal gravity
to take us anywhere in this system to prospect for minerals, helium three,
or whatever we wanted.
