Goodbye Shuttle & Government Parasites - Hello the Individuals Who Want to Make Space Accessible

 

Seeing as America's last Shuttle is in orbit and their government's ability to launch a man into orbit is gone, for the first time since the 1960s, I am posting some links. Optimistically this will be seen as the moment when space development ceased to be primarily or entirely a monopoly of governments, whose prime interest in space is to persuade us to give them money which they then use on pork barreling. eg "less well publicized – it did not, as the Saturn/Apollo approach did, mean the reindustrialization of the South. It was important to the Moon Mission that Lyndon Johnson be on board. ....Johnson insisted that most of the heavy work be done in the South."
How to do it Immediately
Jerry Pournelle on How to Get to Space - X-Programmes, which includes prizes
Lazar launching, both for space and for suborbital travel round the Earth
Magnetic rail launching cargo and high G tolerant cargo only but inexpensive and do-able now
Nuclear pulse launch from underground
Ion engine from Earth orbit to Mars in 39 days
Sea Dragon - a very large conventional ship taking advantage of the square cube law

Can We Build An Elevator To Space? - The Royal Institution Christmas Lecture 2010 - BBC Four video. Not the sort of thing that gets mentioned on the main news

How it is being done - How Space-X will put a 737 in orbit in 2013/14 and save NASA's bacon bnut Space-X will be in the driving seat
How Government Refuses to Do It
2/3rds of space money comes from the private sector (by comparison 50% of ALL money in Britain is spent by government)
Although governments have made space agencies responsible for commercialisation of space activities, their efforts are not sincere. Most importantly, although they acknowledge that passenger space travel is likely to become the largest commercial activity in space, they are delaying its development by Patrick Collins who came up with this inexpensive sub-orbital craft got £50 million, which our government don't want.
Private Lunar X-Prize drives the new Moon race

Nearly 50 years wasted by Government ecofascist parasites but we are back on track
2 Technological Developments
Moon found to have a liquid core - typical of the British press that only the Daily Mail were interested in reporting it
James Woodward's Mach Effect - if you have mass moving at relativistic velocity inside another mass, then the internal moving mass can make itself heavier or lighter depending on how fast it's moving.
So then if you make the overall system oscillate (surrounding mass), and you time the movements of the inner mass with the oscillations, then you can selectively impart more momentum in one part of the oscillation than in another, for the overall system. This would create a net change in momentum for the system.
In other words a true inertialess space drive

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2011/07/goodbye-shuttle-fovernment-parasites.html