Congress Calls for Time-out on NASA’s Human Space Flight Funding

Keith I was very impressed with your presentation at the ISDC and would love your slides. --Mark
Mark I. Wallach
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For four decades power satellites have gone nowhere because people
could not think up a way to do them that was low enough in technical
risk and cost.

We, particularly Dr. O'Neill, tried to sell SBSP (and space colonies)
as necessary for the survival of humanity. He proposed using
materials from space to reduce the extreme cost of lifting that much
tonnage from the earth. It didn't work.

In these decades lasers have gone from milliwatts to low hundreds of
kW. It's not much of a jump to build them in the low MW size, and
combining thousands of MW scale lasers gets GW scale laser banks. For
a given laser we can get an additional payload size increase of 4-6 by
popping the laser stage up on a low mass ratio rocket.

If we can get cargo to LEO, even at considerable initial expense,
laser propulsion can smoothly increase the fraction of lift off mass
that gets to GEO as more lasers are installed. (The lasers start in
the MW range providing 4 km/sec of the 14 km/sec needed to reach GEO.
As time goes on and the lasers reach GW scale they provide 10 km/sec
to a stage 4 times as heavy using the same booster.)

Space settlements naturally grow out of the presence of thousands of
people at GEO building power satellites and building and unjamming
automation to make them. A little later the demand for nickel makes
mining asteroids an expected path.

Is "do it from the ground first" too much at odds with the SSI goals?

If it is, please let me know so I won't bother this list.

If it is not and there are people on the list who grok reaction engine
physics and/or working with financial spread sheets and would like to
help, let me know. I am especially looking for people who can
understand this well enough to talk about it to people in industry and
governments.

I can send anyone who wants them my slides from making this
presentation at the ISDC, the spread sheets and more writeup
materials.

Best wishes,

Keith Henson