Lifeboat Foundation

Last month a colleague of mine and I visited with Dennis Heap, Executive Director of the National Front Range Airport, at Watkins, CO, the location of the future Spaceport Colorado, and Colorado’s contribution to getting into space. Here is Part 2.

What is a spaceport?

Wikipedia gives a very broad definition of a spaceport, that anything and everything that is used to launch vehicles into orbit, space and interplanetary missions are now termed spaceports. ICBM sites are termed launch sites. There is, however, a distinction between a military site and a commercial site. In the aviation world a military site is termed an ‘airbase’ while a commercial civilian site is termed an ‘airport’. Similarly in the marine world the respective terms are ‘naval base’ and ‘seaport’. In that vein there are ‘spacebases’ and ‘spaceports’. So bear in mind that not everything that is labeled a ‘spaceport’ is one.

As far as I can remember the term ‘spaceport’ caught the public’s imagination only recently with the advent of Spaceport America at Las Cruces, NM. So let’s clarify. A spaceport is port for launching vehicles into suborbital, orbital and interplanetary space whose primary mission is to support and manage commercial activities, not military, not government sponsored launches. And therefore, in the United States there are only 10 existing or proposed spaceports. They are (1)Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Wallops Island, VA (2)Cecil Field Spaceport, Jacksonville, FL (3)Spaceport Florida, Cape Canaveral (4)Spaceport Oklahoma, Burns Flat, OK (5)Spaceport America, Las Cruces, NM (6)Mojave Air and Spaceport, Mojave, CA (7) California Spaceport, Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lompac, CA (8)Kodiak Launch Complex, Kodiak Island, AK, (9) Spaceport Colorado, Watkins, CO and (10)Spaceport Hawaii, HI.

Continue reading “The Fabulous Spaceport Colorado (Part 2)” »

Last month a colleague of mine and I visited with Dennis Heap, Executive Director of the National Front Range Airport, at Watkins, CO, the location of the future Spaceport Colorado, and Colorado’s contribution to getting into space.

On April 19, 2012, Gov. John Hickenlooper signed a bill that limited a spaceflight entity’s liability for spaceflight participants and paved the way for Spaceport Colorado’s development. The Front Range Airport Authority situated on 3,900 acres will allocate 900 acres towards the development and construction of Spaceport Colorado and ancillary facilities. The next steps are the completion of an environmental assessment, and feasibility and marketing study. This is expected to be completed by end of 2013.

In the 1995–96 I was Head of Corporate Planning at Westport, a $1 billion seaport infrastructure project in Malaysia, where I created and deployed the 7-hour port strategy, streamlined financial controls, container handling and container tariffs, reducing incoming (wharf to gate) dwell time to zero hours compared to the then world’s largest container port, Port Authority of Singapore’s (PSA) 18-hours. Westport was able to grow substantially, to the point where, in 2011, Westport handled 6.4 million TEUs compared to PSA’s 29.9 million TEUs. (TEU = Twenty-foot Equivalent Units or half a container)

So it caught my attention when Dennis Heap said Spaceport Colorado will be 33 miles (53 km) east of the city of Denver and about 6 miles (10 km) south of Denver International Airport (DIA).

Continue reading “The Fabulous Spaceport Colorado (Part 1)” »

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

In a previous post on Technological Feasibility I had stated that a quick and dirty model shows that we could achieve velocity of light c by 2151 or the late 2150s. See table below.

That is, at the current rate of technological innovation we could as a civilization reach light speed in about 140 years. More importantly we could not even reach anywhere near that within the next 100 years. Our capability would be 6.3% of c.

The Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformation informs us light speed would require an infinite amount of energy (i.e. more than there is in the Universe!), thereby highlighting the weaknesses in these types of technological forecasting methods. But these models still serve a purpose. They provide some guidance as to what is possible and when. The operative word is guidance.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Technological Feasibility (3b)” »

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

My apologies to my readers for this long break since my last post of Nov 19, 2012. I write the quarterly economic report for a Colorado bank’s Board of Directors. Based on my quarterly reports to the Board, I gave a talk Are We Good Stewards? on the US Economy to about 35 business executives at a TiE Rockies’ Business for Breakfast event. This talk was originally scheduled for Dec 14, but had moved forward to Nov 30 because the original speaker could not make the time commitment for that day. There was a lot to prepare, and I am very glad to say that it was very well received. For my readers who are interested here is the link to a pdf copy of my slides to Are We Good Stewards?

Now back to interstellar physics and the Kline Directive. Let’s recap.

In my last four posts (2c), (2d), (2e) & (2f) I had identified four major errors taught in contemporary physics. First, to be consistent (2c) with Lorentz-Fitzgerald and Special Theory of Relativity, elementary particles contract as their energy increases. This is antithetical to string theories and explains why string theories are becoming more and more complex without discovering new empirically verifiable fundamental laws of Nature.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Technological Feasibility (3a)” »

… overall luminosity during the remaining weeks of operation before the 2-year close-down for upgrading?

Thank you very much.

In a previous post I explored the feasibility of an industrial base on planet Mercury — an option which on first glance had seemed implausible but on getting down to the detail could be considered quite reasonable. Here I go the other direction — outward to the first of the gas giants — and the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

From a scientific point of view it makes a lot of sense to set up a base in this region as it provides the nearest possible base to home that could start to explore the dynamics and weather systems of gaseous planets — which are quite common in our Universe — and how such planets impact on their moons — as potential locations for off-earth colonies and industrial bases. It bears consideration that only two other moons in our outer solar system are of requisite size to have a gravitational field similar or greater to that of our Moon — namely Saturn’s Titan and Neptune’s Triton — so the Galilean moons demand attention.

The first difficulty to consider is the intense radiation from Jupiter, which is far stronger than the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. Although proper shielding normally protects living organisms and electronic instrumentation, that from Jupiter is whipped up from magnetic fields 20,000 stronger than Earth’s, so shielding would become difficult. It has been considered that such radiation would be the greatest threat to any craft closing within 300,000 km of the planet. At 420,000 km from Jupiter, Io is the closest of the Galilean satellites. With over 400 active volcanoes, from which plumes of sulphur and sulphur dioxide regularly rise as high as 400 km above its surface, it is considered the most geologically active object in the solar system. The activity could be viewed as a source of heat/energy.

Unlike most satellites, it is composed of silicate rock with a molten iron or iron sulphide core, and despite extensive mountain ranges, the majority of its surface is characterized by extensive plains coated with sulphur and sulphur dioxide frost. One can perhaps disregard its extremely thin sulphur dioxide atmosphere as an inconvenience, though is in too close proximity to Jupiter and its extensive magnetosphere even for occasional mining expeditions from the other moons. In this regard one would have to rule out Io and any resources there completely from consideration for such as base. Onto the other options…

Continue reading “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Galilean Base” »

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

In this post I explain two more mistakes in physics. The first is 55 years old, and should have been caught long ago.

Bondi, in his 1957 paper “Negative mass in General Relativity”, had suggested that mass could be negative and there are surprising results from this possibility. I quote,

“… the positive body will attract the negative one (since all bodies are attracted by it), while the negative body will repel the positive body (since all bodies are repelled by it). If the motion is confined to the line of centers, then one would expect the pair to move off with uniform acceleration …”

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Technological Feasibility (2e)” »

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

In this post on technological feasibility, I point to some more mistakes in physics, so that we are aware of the type of mistakes we are making. This I hope will facilitate the changes required of our understanding of the physics of the Universe and thereby speed up the discovery of new physics required for interstellar travel.

The scientific community recognizes two alternative models for force. Note I use the term recognizes because that is how science progresses. This is necessarily different from the concept how Nature operates or Nature’s method of operation. Nature has a method of operating that is consistent with all Nature’s phenomena, known and unknown.

If we are willing to admit, that we don’t know all of Nature’s phenomena — our knowledge is incomplete — then it is only logical that our recognition of Nature’s method of operation is always incomplete. Therefore, scientists propose theories on Nature’s methods, and as science progresses we revise our theories. This leads to the inference that our theories can never be the exact presentation of Nature’s methods, because our knowledge is incomplete. However, we can come close but we can never be sure ‘we got it’.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Technological Feasibility (2d)” »

It was on a long-haul flight many months ago that I recalled a visit to the National Air and Space Museum [1] to a fellow passenger whom I struck up conversation with. Asking if I could recommend somewhere to visit in Washington DC, I recounted how I had spent an entire day amazing at the collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft on my only visit to that city fifteen years or so previous as a young adult — and as always a kid at heart.

Seeing the sheer scale of the F-1 engine for the Saturn 5 rocket first hand, stepping inside an Apollo command module identical to those used during the Apollo program, not to mention seeing full life-size replicas of the Lunar Roving Vehicle, an Apollo Lunar Module and for some reason what seemed most surreal to me… the Viking 1 Lander. This was enchantment.

However, for all the amazement that such a museum can provide, it is also a saddening reminder that what once was the forefront of human ambition and endeavor has now been largely resigned to history. NASA budgets are cut annually [2] whilst military expenditure takes ever more precedence. A planned six percent budget decrease in 2013 is the equivalent savings to three hours of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Instead of reaching to explore outer-space we are encouraged to get excited about the equivalent billions [3] invested on science exploring the subatomic inner-space world. Meanwhile, we tend to forget that the ambitions of space exploration are not just to satisfy some wide-eyed childhood yearning to explore, but the serious and sobering prospect of needing to ensure that we as a species can eventually colonize to other worlds and ensure we are not counting down the days to our extinction on an ever-more-precarious planetary solitude.

In the face of such indifference, such concepts of lifeboats have become marginalized to what is perceived to be a realm solely for loons and dreamers, or ‘space cadets’ as we used to call them back in the days of school. The trillion dollar question really is what it takes to redirect all that military investment into science & exploration instead. It is down to credibility. Governments shy away from investing public funds when there is a lack of credibility.

Continue reading “Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: No Lifeboats Please” »