100-Year Starship some way off

On Feb 18, 2011, at 8:53 PM, brooksn wrote:

> On SSP I am in favor of increasing research money to give it a
> reasonable chance of success. 2 to 3 orders over nuclear is very
> expensive,

I don't think it's that expensive, or even close to that expensive,
given a little R&D. See http://space.alglobus.net/papers/SSI2010SSPpaper.pdf
for an approach to SSP where the launch cost runs about the same as
nuclear measured in $/watt installed power. The cost of the satellite
is harder to pin down and is probably greater than nuclear operating
cost -- but that's after essentially no SSP R&D.

See http://space.alglobus.net/papers/FetterResponse.html for arguments
indicating that the multiple-orders of magnitude costs problem is not
nearly that large.

I would like to see SSP get roughly the same R&D funds as fusion,
which is around $400 million per year (vs 0). It's very hard to argue
that fusion is anywhere near as close to practical systems as SSP.
SSP is, after all, routinely used for spacecraft and fusion has never
produced a positive watt of power.

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~150 times the surface area of the Earth
in usable real estate. See http://space.alglobus.net for details.

Al Globus
http://alglobus.net

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.