Future of Humanity Rests on how fast FAA moves for SpaceX approval for Starship launches at Boca Chica

This is the public comment for SpaceX Super-Heavy plans for Boca Chica that I sent to spacexbocachica@icf.com:

Please Allow SpaceX what it needs and the save the Planet

The future of humanity rests on us as human-beings overcoming our differences and uniting as one species. And in order to unite as one, we also need to have a broader perspective - so that we can understand what sets us apart as people from different regions is far tinier than what makes all one people.

As a species trying so hard to give up our parochial past, and rise as a single global civilization, we can either look inward and backward, or we can look outward and forward. Just like for any living being, our modern civilization cannot grow stagnant if it wants to survive. It can either grow outward with new vigor and off-shoots, or grow old and withers and dies - suffocated by its own stale substance when there is no room to grow. Earth in some sense, with humanity, is transitioning from being oblivious to its own existence until recently, to becoming semi-conscious with the dawn of modern internet and space age. We have a physical perspective of the pale blue dot (see the famous photo taken by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot), but we also have the ability to rise as one voice on Tik-Tok, or other social media to make positive change - fast. But these new social tools also drown reality and can cause trouble. Unless we keep expanding our perspective, and inspire our children to expand into science and technology and knowledge.

From here, where we go is all up to us. We can either get stagnant, then get infected with self-doubt, polarization of differences, perceived lack of resources, and pandemics - both physical and mental - that destroy us, or at best set us back to the medieval ages. Or, we can use the power inspiration for knowledge, and leverage science and technology to discover new science and build new technology that will provide Earth self-awareness that will make the planet truly sentient - eventually not acting like a brawling toddler who gets fits of anger, but as a cohesive intelligent being reaching out to the Cosmos - as one voice.

The recent polarization of politics and people across the world, the pandemics, and the climate disasters, have shown that the window of opportunity to expand beyond Earth and provide a new perspective might be limited and starting to close already. If we don't get out and settle multiple planets in our solar system right now we may never get this chance again. Having all our eggs in one basket is not good.

What SpaceX is doing in Boca Chica with the Starship and Super-Heavy system is something we have now waited for 50+ years. People have not left Earth since I was born, and no woman or a non-white person or a civillian has ever landed on another planet. Though Apollo was great as a cold-war victory and inspiring for all of us, the promise of lowering the cost of space exploration enough to enable this new frontier for a mass settlement has not been realized.

SpaceX has already lowered the cost of orbital transportation by around 10x. We need to lower this by another factor of 10 to 100 before everything I described above will come to pass and we will be safe from an extinction level event, and perhaps even provide the inspiration needed to unite Earth as a single nation of all humans, regardless of their language, where they live, or skin color - in a united front dominated by liberty and justice for all.

Keep in mind, beyond helping humans become multi-planet species, this 100x lowered cost of transportation to space will move several dirty industries off-Earth (precious metals), allow us to focus on Earth remote-sensing, bring high-quality internet to remote places saving thousands of lives every month (think all those people who die every year in the mountains, oceans and other remote forests because they cannot even get a phone signal!), provide better education to kids in remote places (cheaper higher quality internet), allow us deorbit all of the massive debris in space (ironically what you need to clean up space debris is to make launching cleaning systems - massive nets and other processes to deorbit junk, cheap enough) that is inaccessible due to prohibitive cost of launching to space, invention of new space materials at scale, provide massive space telescopes to astronomers, especially the one on the far side of the moon that may help us find other planets with advanced civilizations (by shielding from Earth-based radio noise), help us find 100s of habitable planets (easier since much larger space based telescopes can be launched), and more. Because of the dramatic reduction in cost of access to space, the list is shockingly large and comprehensive.

Starship is close to achieving the next step to this now, but without Elon Musk and his leadership this may have never happened. However Elon is already 50 years old, and one can argue whether the window of opportunity will close because something happens to Elon personally as he gets older, or because there is a much larger pandemic, or because there is a much larger war or civil unrest in our closed littled world that does us in. We are literally running out of time. There is a lot of steps after this one (the one FAA is approving) before we get there, but if we slow things so much down that SpaceX builds their ships from scratch (what NASA could not do in 50 years due to bureaucracy) faster than the super-slow FAA approval process, then what would FAA be remembered as if we fail because of them? Go down in history as an enabler, or another organization that failed to upgrade itself with time?

And it is not enough for SpaceX to succeed over the next 3-5 years with FAA's help to get to Moon and then Mars with one or two missions; the other babies they are inspiring (Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly and others) also need to grow up fast and compete with them before we can be sure that there will be stable and sustainable ecosystem of self-supporting companies and economy that will allow humans to become multi-planet species - permanently.

Given the massive burden faced by SpaceX already with limited NASA budget, legal battles caused by changing administrations, limited commercial market, and sheer difficulty of moving large cargo into space, not to mention developing all of the technologies for fully reusable reusable rockets that did not exist, we should focus on what is important, what is critical, and what cannot be replaced.

It is true that the area SpaceX is working at is a wild-life refuge. I spent six years in Texas and often visited that area for vacation when I was in the PhD program at UT Austin. But it's a vast area, and SpaceX is using a tiny section of it. The minor effects to the environment around Boca Chica are dwarfed by what would happen to Earth if humanity itself gets messed up, or we don't inspire the world to unite as one. We may lose many of the species that nest around Boca Chica all over the world, and we may lose half or more of Earth's population.

There is one chance. The ships look beautiful, have a massive positive effect on the local economy and tourism, and most locals are proud of hosting the civilization-changing level of rocket ships being built there.

Perhaps Space-X should pay a few million dollars to buttress the local wild-life preservation and enhancement plans - and this should be a voluntary suggestion which I am sure Elon will agree to and should be given directly to the local state park funds. Plans for increasing support for the park to improve areas away from the location may benefit a lot more than spending it for just that location. Such fees or payments however should only be attached to as a fraction of the revenue generated from such launches and NOT for developmental launches. Any charges during this crucial R&D phase would just reduce the budget available for actual development and increase odds of failure.

To put it bluntly, FAA and EPA got to get their shit together and get out of the way. Sure - do your assessment but defer any contributions from Space-X to commercial launch cadence not right now. You are blocking the country and the world from getting back to the Moon and Mars, and from humans becoming multi-planet species.

Please go focus your energies on the massive stink that comes from Corpus Christie from unburnt oil-leakages. Not clean-burning launches of a few dozen ships in a relatively empty area around Boca Chica.

Approve SpaceX to have enough launches for fulfilling their urgent national and planet-scale security missions. Find a way to work with them on commercial higher volume percentage fees for environmental improvements if you will. Not right now!

- Gunjan Gupta, PhD Bellevue, WA

Circular vs Linear accelerator for launch

Today I came across an article about Spin Launch , a secretive startup working on spinning a payload to supersonic speed to  get a ballistic first stage launch boost thus lowering the size and cost of the rocket booster needed to get to orbit.

Having seen other ideas of accelerating to orbit on a rail gun before, and knowing how huge centrifugal forces can be, I found the idea of spinning very disturbing due to the massive centrifugal force that will be created on the payload virtually crushing it or any delicate payload inside it.

So as I sat waiting for my dry cappucino, I decided to quickly do some math using the angular velocity vs force formula to see how big the diameter has to be of the spinner to make sure you get no more than 10 g of centrifugal force to accelerate to just about speed of sound of 333 m per second.

Shockingly that turns out to be a circle of 2 km (1.65 miles) diameter!

And if you want to accelerate 3 times that speed the diameter grows by square so 9 times of that !

This follows from the formula that the radius = velocity^2 / (Max angular acceleration allowed) - (1)

But here is the good news. Instead of trying to build a cyclotron if you simply had a straight linear accelerator rail that can accelerate at 10g, you only need 3.33 seconds to accelerate to speed of sound (approx 333 m /s) resulting in a rail of only 500 m or half a km in length! That's tiny! (S = 0.5 x a x t^2) - (2)

And if you want to go 3 times faster using this method you also need a length 9 times longer but it's only a manageable 4.5 km and no crazy circles. Moreover you can angle the ending part of ramp gently to make sure you release payload at an increasing altitude.

In many flat deserts this would be very easy to accomplish. And no crazy engineering to build a smooth circle !

So why is this company doing it the wrong way? Well my guess is they decided to only support payloads that can handle 1000 gs or more. Notice that in equation (1) one saving grace is that if you keep the velocity fixed and decide to shrink radius then 10 times smaller radius only increases force by 10 times.

So a 100 g would require only 200 meter cyclotron

And a 1000g limit would require only a 20 m diameter device to accelerate payload to 333 m/s.

So my guess is they are building this tiny centrifuge of few meters in diameter to launch tiny payloads that are really robust on crushing and launching them on tiny second stage rockets and letting their customers know to expect 500+ gs.

May work for some payloads but clearly they must be planning larger circles and straight lines in their secret roadmap to have any hope of competing with ever cheaper traditional launchers or even space ship 2.

The future of SETI is finally here, and why a Tech Plateu instead of a Singularity might help us detect Aliens!

It's unbelievable that soon we will have a SETI program running that can detect, within 200 light-years, any signal that was originally as weak as an aircraft radar ping is on Earth; it means that if there were such radars operating within 200 LY cube around these 10k normal stars (not counting brown dwarfs), they would be detected.

http://www.space.com/30566-alien-civilization-signals-ska-radio-telescope.html

Of course you have to keep in mind that most SETI researches now believe that a sentient civilization may only exist in our current post-industrial primitive form (before hitting singularity or death) for a short time, so a negative signal would actually tell us a lot on the upper bound for how many such transitional civilizations are out there. 

But there are couple of additional reasons why this may just work; the most important than any - singularity never happens and technology rapidly plateaus then we would find a signal! 

Recently scientists have started believing that the black-hole singularity is actually no singularity; it is just a breakdown of our current physics under such extreme conditions. Similarly, we now know now that there is a limit for how dense and big our biological brains can get before they stop getting smarter. The speed of light is a fundamental limit not just for space-crafts making star-trek difficult at best, but is also a major handicap for how smart an AI can be, due to literally a speed limit on how fast processors can run (true an optical processor will be 100 times faster than an electrical one due to speed of light being higher than electric current, but it is not that much more). The promise of quantum computers seems more like relegated to specialized computations. Moors law has also come to an end for chip-densities as we hit the scale of individual atoms.

There are signs everywhere that the universe does not like singularity. However, it does not mean that things will not get really advanced tech-wise, it just means that there will be no singularity, and technology will advance much more at star-trek pace than at a pace that destroys our world and causes singularity as recently warned by several influential thinkers, including Ray Kurzweil,  Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking. Though there have also been thinkers such as Carl Sagan, and Michio Kaku that probably would agree to this more hopeful view I am proposing here.

Why would a tech plateau be good for longevity of Earth-like civilizations? It may give the needed time for our brains and social fabric to mature with technology thus preventing us from destroying ourselves. Contrary to what scientists estimate right now (see article above), we may keep using radars for 1000s of years (albeit in more advanced manner), and their intensity might increase as every ship, air-craft, car, and space-craft starts using self-driving robotic tech. Additionally our populations would grow because of longevity and cure of aging (no singularity needed there as the tech is relatively simple), yet our not-so-advanced tech requires huge resources making us easily expand within our solar system. This would again dramatically boost the number of such weak signals emanating from millions or billions of devices.

One could even imagine a cacophony of passive signals being the first one detected as they might add up to detectable range if there is a narrow band of transmission from billions of devices. I am not sure those if this "long-exposure" is used for radio telescopes; a quick search on google did not reveal such tech. Hmm a good question to ask Seth Shostak :-)

More advanced SETI hopes to broaden searches to anticipate high bandwidth laser communications which we expect to become common between devices in space and that would not attenuate but I think such a search would come out empty because the lack of dispersion of the signal, which makes it stronger, also makes it less likely that it would be pointed towards us for very long time.

So if we do find negative signal, it can also mean that singularity hits and the type of communications after it is reached are difficult to detect.

How can we distinguish the absence of signal at such a huge scale of search to imply that (a) civilizations are rare and short-lived, (b) civilizations pass through singularity quickly as Ray Kurzweil suggests, and stop using low-tech such as radar as they don't need it.

This is all thanks to the donation from the Russian billionaire: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/russian-tycoon-spending-100-million-hunt-aliens/

Astronauts to enter Dragon in orbit soon- the world just changed!

At a significantly lower development cost, and per-launch cost than any government or government-funded program ever managed, Flacon 9's flawless launch today once again proved that under the right conditions, where engineers and entrepreneurs are allowed to focus on what they are best at (thanks to Elon Musk and helpful recent NASA policy on not blocking but enabling private launch development), wonders can happen to an area made inefficient for innovation by government bureaucracy and handicapped by a fickel-minded senate and congress.

Congratulations to all of the Space-X team, look forward to the next stop (ISS), upcoming Dragon COTS launches, and tests of the human-rated Dragon, which, like SpaceX has made no secret about, can land on "any solid surface in the solar system".

See more on: https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=SpaceX

A shaded sun-powered future for Earth

The huge decrease in sun-spot activity for the next few decades will be a big savior for us. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOAAsourcebutnotofficialsunclimate_3b.gif

and

http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html

Nice ! I guess good timing. 70 years would be more than enough (if it lasts that long) for humans to get rid of fossil fuel burning. But I wonder if we become a Type 1 civillization and convert most of the solar power on Earth's surface to heat, would that not be identical to reducing Earth's albedo, and thus cause global warming any way?

Well, it depends on whether the new panels' albedo is lower than the average albeldo of the area on which they are installed, which will surely be the case since they will be installed in a lot in sunny, sandy places.

I can see us having to setup some really serious cooling solution for Earth then. Basically if you are consuming 40% of sun's light as a Type 0.4 civillizaion, and those panels an albedo of 0.2, i.e. only reflecting back 20% of light, then you will cause an albedo to reduce to 0.2 from present 0.3.

However, the reduction will be bigger if all the areas getting replaced are bright deserty land which is the case.

As you can see here, the people who answered this very good question just were trying to be politically correct here: http://askville.amazon.com/solar-panels-Earth-retain-heat/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=5919445

True, for our current energy consumption, we will actually end up cooling Earth by using solar power as the alternatives heat up Earth even worse (every ounce of CO2 released by burning fuel stays in the atmosphere for millenia before plants and rain can scrub enough out). But I am talking about Type 1 civillization. Of course all energy in the galaxy comes directly or indirectly from stars and our solar system is no exception; all secondary sources such as nuclear, coal, hydel, wind are derived either from out Sun's solar energy, from from the star that came before (in case of Uranium for example). So a Type 1 civillization has nowhere to go but to become a solar power behemoth, consuming all of the energy it can coming down to Earth, plus some more in Space (on Mars, Moon, orbital stations, nearby stars etc.)

So getting back to how to fix this albedo problem for a Type 1 solar power civillization, which would be us in 100 years, if Earth ends up say absorbing 10% extra heat from all it gets, you would have to shade 10% of Earth to cancel that effect out.

There are several creative early 21st century ways to cancel this effect:

- Zero Albedo Reduction law (ZAR law- OK I coined it firt here on this blog!) for solar panel install: Require the land where solar panels are installed to have 0 overall albedo change. How it is achieved is left to the installer to pick from, e.g.:

- (a) a checker pattern of highly refelective white mirrors (albeo close to 1) alternating the solar panels, in proportion of the ground's albedo.

- (b) shine electromagnetic radiation vertically up in the night in a non-visual but transparent spectrum. This could be radio waves and source for free SETI transmitters back up :-) just kidding- pointing it back at the Moon's poles where the new colony sits would be fun too (again kidding but this could actually work), just kidding. Why would you just not produce less using (a)?

- (c) albeo trading: you could simply install new shiny rooftops in areas of the world where you don't need as much power for other areas where u reduce albedo. Of course this would still cause local climate changes- heating up areas of product, cooling down areas reflected- in fact (a) and (c) together can provide a way to engineer climate.

However, by the time we become a Type 1 civillization, by early 22nd century, we would have a more advanced non-early-21st century way of doing the above :-) A checker pattern robotic self-maintaining and producing asteriod material based solar sun-screen parked in an orbit 1 million or so km away from Earth towards the sun (one of the lagrangian points I believe), and reduce solar insolation to Earth as needed.


Cheers,
Gunjan

Way to go Space-X: first wave of colonization of the solar system starts

I love the way they show Mars and then say: "This enables landing on any solid surface in the solar system.":



The future is (almost) here!

And this certainly helps complete the picture ;-)



The ability to abort launch all the way to orbit will change the way people go to orbit, and the way risk is perceived: this paves way for the first wave of colonization of the solar system. Finally!

Next Generation launch-abort system from SpaceX!

SpaceX has proposed a next-generation launch-abort system to NASA that makes the previous systems look primitive in comparison.

I have been following the COTS launch-abort system that got completed a year ago, and was always wondering why SpaceX did not just bid to use it, since that was the major thing needed for Dragon+Falcon9 to be human-rated. I always thought it was because Elon was interested in keeping their operations simple by keeping minimal dependencies to other agencies/suppliers - which he has repeatedly stated in several interviews,articles & presentations. One could also speculate that it was because Orbital, a competitor for Space-X, built it.

But turns out there was a much bigger reason, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that out the following from http://www.spacex.com/updates.php.

"SpaceX has proposed an integrated launch abort system design, which has several advantages over the tractor tower approaches used by all prior vehicles:

• Provides escape capability all the way to orbit versus a tractor system, which is so heavy it must be dumped about four minutes after liftoff.
  
• Improves crew safety, as it does not require a separation event, whereas any non-integral system (tractor or pusher), must be dumped on every mission for the astronauts to survive.
  
• Reduces cost since the escape system returns with the spacecraft.
  
• Enables superior landing capabilities since the escape engines can potentially be used for a precise land landing of Dragon under rocket power. (An emergency chute will always be retained as a backup system for maximum safety.)"
  

Another related note; recently in his post-mission NASA breifing after the Demo Flight 2 of Falcon 9, Elon Musk had mentioned that they were thinking of controlled landing for future versions of Dragon. I was wondering why they were adding this complexity and how would they actually do that without making the Dragon system heavier- now we know the answer :-) (see above). They are going to use the launch-abort rocket and fuel to do that, since the launch-abort system comes back with the mission- not only does that provide full launch-abort capability all the way to orbit, it provides a free controlled landing! Brilliant!