LEO Toroidal Space Station Builder (SARGON)

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In other words, if I understand that right, the whole subject and everyone involved in it needs to be scrapped because there's nothing real on the drawing board. That's sort of what Mikah was saying.

I guess my own trouble, at least when it comes to this sort of tech, is I'm not with the times enough to know that it's all grift all the time almost everywhere now.

With the original topic/video, it just didn't cross my mind that it was the sort of thing that I needed to research as a potential scam (the world as I feel like I used to know it - people might make wild projections that were maybe overhyped for media and financial backing but they delivered roughly what they promised, not simply a PO Box at a mall - enter the brave new Youtube era I guess).

It is physically impossible to accelerate mass to 17,400 mph using chemical rockets at anywhere near Elon's pricing.

A few less-publicised facts about reusable rockets...

In order to land the rocket using propulsion, you have to reserve some fuel, or course, and this reduces your payload by 30%.

Most of the launch weight of the vehicle is fuel. Only 1% is payload. The balance is the vehicle. If you can reduce the weight of the vehicle by 10% you can double the payload. That's why Starship is so fragile it is collapsing as it makes its pivot landing maneuver.

The cost of reconditioning used rockets cuts into the savings of reuse. Naturally. Musk's current pricing on Falcon suggests it is breakeven. For human-rated launching, he's not actually beating the space shuttle. In comparisons, he's compared the per-mission amortized cost of the whole shuttle development to his individual launch costs.

The current Starship design does not have heat shield, a way to cool the interior in space, a power system, or radiation shielding. Musk's claim of a 200-person capacity is off by a factor of about twenty. To launch it to Mars requires refueling in Earth orbit, and requires between four and six Starhip launches for each one that will head to Mars. Musk's planned method of fuel transfer is sketchy at best, and hasn't been built or tested yet.

His wanting to use it for point-to-point transport of people on Earth at the cost of airfare is complete fantasy.

Last edited by TenMinutes on 25 May 2022, 2:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I blame crowdfunding. It's a lower level of difficulty compared to parting money from serious investors.

TY for the details.

My sense is that we do have to, somewhere in the next couple decades, start doing mining in other places - whether the moon or even asteroids. I get the sense that we aren't going to have a reliable way to make our economies closed-loop, our rare earths that we need to foster a 'green' energy revolution are insufficient (here's hoping Ambri's calcium antimony is up to the task of grid storage, maybe lean on lithium ion a lot less), it just sounds like the humbling that's likely to hit us in that regard is more likely to cause mass war and famine than proper learning and I'm hoping we can both find some ways to have a slightly softer landing in a lower (or at least less) tech future and potentially still have our fingers out into space where we might be able to start solving some of those issues.

I'm still hopeful that demographics will force the US to move to a democratic socialist oversdsight of its oligarchs, and that once the US has been reined in, progress everywhere else on earth will be more possible.

The challenge is with the media, not with the politicians. As long as the media keeps telling us our problems are caused by other powerless people, we will keep voting for friends of the oligarchs. This is the biggest problem we face. How to wrest the truth from the media.

Yeah, the media's been bought and paid for. I even worry about the whole woke thing as it blew up seven years ago - seems like that started amping up soon after Occupy Wallstreet and GameB started moving (it technically disrupted/hijacked Occupy), and I really like Pia Malaney's hypothesis (as her husband Eric Weinstein) often promulgates - that big donors in the DNC said 'Wages are too expensive for votes - what else do we have?' and they realized that celebrating diversity was free, required little more than words and meant that large corporations could also keep paying people crap while looking like paragons of virtue.

The demographic collapse, and that collapse being just about everywhere that isn't central Africa, means we'll be hard pressed for cheap labor - which means there's likely to be a desperate ramp-up of automation. The good news: that should have happened a long time ago, decades of cheap labor slowed it down, and it might be part of how we stop a massive energy decrease (19TW to 5TW) from causing all Mad Max to break out. The biggest thing is - we have to figure out how our materials economy stays in bounds to where we can still have enough of what we need available as more energy-temperate technologies come to the forefront.

First thing is to wrest the media away from the corporations of the oligarchs and then you have to keep the government from barging in and filling the resulting power vacuum.

Curious how many non-engineers are experts on what is impossible. My grandmother used to say “it takes no mean talent to criticize”.

OP was talking about a plan for a space station. Not Elon or Communism.

So far no math, no science just Elon bashing.

A few non-fiction books on space and cost/benefit as well as solid physics I happen to have on hand:
“The Case For Mars” by Robert Zubrin. Zubrin was a Engineer at Martin Marietta. “Space Settlements A Design Study” edited by Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, Gerard K. O’Neill Technical Director. O’Neill was a professor at Princeton (where Albert Einstein also was - though their Physics program may not come to mind as quickly as, say, Cal Tech) and a pioneer in magnetic mass acceleration (he did work on the first particle accelerators). O’Neill also worked with Nasa.
Cal Tech, by the way, is doing real work on Space Based Solar.
Both books I mentioned talk about some of the costs involved and the benefit side of the equation. They also go deeper into the math and physics.
Even if you ignore the USA entirely there are other countries doing work in these areas as well - but like the early days of aircraft dollars and colourful individuals do have a tendency to move things forward.
The big brass ring in space is Space Based Solar. Like the gold rush there will be a lot of people who gamble and loose. But the one or two who gamble and win will win big - very big. Mars AS A RESOURCE / AS A BENEFIT is another prize - same logic applies - one can gamble and win or gamble and loose. It will be more akin to Europeans coming to America than you or I going to the supermarket.
Hate Elon if it makes you happy - he is one of the first but he won’t be the last. (Unless we all blow ourselves up - that might kill things).
He has sent more people to space than I have.
I try to focus on the science.

Well, I did post a Link to a PDF of the Stanford Study , which itself contains maths and tables relevant to build a space habitat.

But I guess no one is really interested in such things.

It helps to add an explanation of contents.

Here is the original post, WITH an explanation of the link.
Do you want me to click the link for you too?

I might say reread your own post - it doesn't tell us anything about what the link conveys, other than that you're still waiting.

You saw the link in the same post as the text, and both under the same subject header.  What did you think the PDF was, a Chinese cookbook?

Here's what it doesn't convey:

When you see a restaurant, do you need to also see a sign that says, "We Sell Food"?

When you see a fire truck on the road, do you also need to also see a sign that says, "We Extinguish Fires"?

When you see a house in a residential neighborhood, do you need to also see a sign that says, "People Live Here"?

Are you really incapable of deriving meaning from context?

You're saying that every Stanford publication is a feasibility paper? Otherwise the logic doesn't follow.