extraterrestial infrastructure – mammoth // building nothing out of something

extraterrestial infrastructure

“A Space Program for the Rest of Us”, a brief history of the American space program to date and an interesting case for why the next step should be the development of an open and robust space refueling infrastructure, instead of recycling the technologies and methodologies of the Apollo program.

This entry was written by rholmes, posted on October 21, 2009 at 11:33 am, filed under asides and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Responses to “extraterrestial infrastructure”

  1. J.D. Hammond says:
    October 24, 2009 at 12:01 am

    I found the article rather heartbreaking. A lot of it is thought-provoking, though I’m not sure that I agree with the corporatist sentiment that keeps peeking through his attempts at third-way posturing.

    While I think it’s an interesting idea, I’m not sure how it would help to reduce costs for reaching low-Earth orbit. Once you’re in orbit, you don’t need fuel unless you’re attempting to go further, and we’re having difficulties advancing even that far. Perhaps a space elevator is in order…?

  2. rholmes says:
    October 24, 2009 at 1:09 pm

    I thought the author engaged in a bit of “the market will do it” hand-waving occasionally, too.

    But his argument is that we ought to become a space-faring civilization, and for that, developing an extraterrestrial refueling infrastructure (whether in low orbit or on the moon or further) does seem essential. Whether that’s a good goal or not is an entirely different matter (and one that I don’t really have any way to evaluate, as I know very little about how realistic a goal it is).

  3. Fake Buildings says:
    May 23, 2010 at 12:45 am

    […] Today M.ammoth pointed me toward an article in the New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger.  Simberg lays out the fallacies as he and many in the aerospace community in NASA’s re-tread of the Apollo program.  In short, he calls the space agency and government to task for its monolithic bloated-ness, declaring NASA a stagnant protector of jobs in crucial congressional districts that needlessly monopolizes human spaceflight.  As an alternative, he suggests aggregating an orbiting and deep space fueling infrastructure, supplied and maintained by the private sector.  Thus the burden of lifting all of a mission’s fuel (read: weight) at the time of launch is eliminated, and the marginal cost of getting into orbit is drastically reduced. […]