A Place to Stand

   The very estimable Matt Ridley (of whose articles more later) has this on the improbability of our Moon and its influence on making Earth more suitable for life:

David Waltham, of Royal Holloway, University of London, is the author of the very readable Lucky Planet, which argues that the Earth is probably rare, perhaps even unique, as planets go. He is also a self-confessed “moon bore” who has made important discoveries about how the Moon formed.

Ever since Copernicus, the “mediocrity principle” has been scientific orthodoxy: that our planet is not the centre of the Universe; it’s just one of (as we now estimate) a thousand billion billion spherical objects of similar size orbiting fiery suns just like ours.

But in that case, as the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, where is everybody? Why no faint radio messages from our distant neighbours in space? There should be enormous numbers of planets that have been around for longer than us, long enough surely to get to the point of transmitting some interstellar Muzak. Yet not a peep.

Dr Waltham points out that planets where life fails to survive cannot give rise to sentient life forms, so we are bound to find ourselves on one that has managed to be just right. Precisely because we are afflicted with this severe case of observational bias, the mediocrity principle need not follow. We can be misled by what we can see around us into thinking our case is typical, when actually it might be almost impossibly rare. We might be neither special nor commonplace, just lucky.

And indeed, there does seem to be a long string of coincidences behind our existence. The pressure of anti-gravity in our universe happens to be very, very small — not quite big enough to blow the Universe apart before stars could form. Phew. The relative strength of nuclear and electrical forces is just right to allow carbon to be one of the commonest elements, and carbon’s capacity to form lots of bonds is crucial to life. Cheers. The strength of molecular bonds is just right to allow chemistry to happen at our distance from the Sun. Hooray.

Then there’s the climate. Although there were probably at least four times when the Earth came close to freezing altogether or overheating irreversibly, it somehow recovered each time, unlike on Venus or Mars, and for the last half billion years the weather has been astonishingly benign. Periodic catastrophes, caused by volcanoes or meteorites, have set the evolution of life back, but not often enough to prevent intelligence emerging eventually: another stroke of luck.

Spookily, the slow waxing of our Sun’s strength over four billion years should have produced a ten-degree rise in average temperature, but it has not because it has been almost precisely matched by a slow decline in our greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide became progressively scarcer. This has kept the temperature in a small range for a very long time — long enough once again to allow the emergence of intelligent life. (The recent uptick in carbon dioxide levels as a result of fossil fuel burning is still small in comparison.)

Waltham posits three possible explanations for these great strokes of good fortune: God, Gaia and Goldilocks. God does not show His workings; Gaia says living things themselves somehow unwittingly control the thermostat; and Goldilocks says it’s just an almighty fluke that we’ve managed to keep things neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

.... the Moon stabilised the rate and angle of our spinning such that we got a fairly long day and regular seasons to keep warming the poles and preventing the irreversible growth of ice. What Waltham has discovered, however, is that this was an even bigger lucky strike than we used to think.

Had the Earth’s day been a few minutes longer just after the collision, or the Moon’s diameter a few miles greater, then the Earth would have had an unstable spin and life would have been repeatedly wiped out by chaotic climate change. If the day had been shorter or the Moon smaller, then we would have had more and longer ice ages, because too little heat would have reached the poles through air currents.

Very few planets indeed could have collided with an object the right size to produce such a moon and even fewer of them would have ended up with a Goldilocks moon that was just the right size. Since life cannot control the Moon’s orbit, Gaia cannot explain this piece of luck. The Moon therefore shows decisively just how hard it will be to find another planet of sufficiently stable climate to spawn life that could last long enough to develop intelligence.

Waltham has persuaded me that we are “perhaps the luckiest planet in the visible universe”, the only one among billions of billions to have thrown six after six whenever the dice were rolled. Whichever planet achieved this would have thinking beings on it who would think they were special, whereas really they were just lucky. And they would be alone, or very nearly so.

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   This is a fascinating subject, and important for anybody who thinks life the universe and everything are important. I have written before on why we appear to be alone in the universe and come up with another explanation other than God, Gaia or Goldilocks - "the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse theory in which every single unpredictable possibility of every quantum movement of each atom in the universe creates a new universe every instant. Even though the overwhelming majority then reunite with the next quantum movement, it does produce a number of possible universes for which the word infinite is inadequate. However it does mean that it is inevitable that there will be a universe where we evolved and obviously that it is going to have the unusual conditions allowing us to evolve. This is what we see.

Indeed for the more mystically inclined one can combine this multiverse with its meta-infinity of uninhabited universes with Schroedinger (and his cat’s) view that a quantum event only achieves actuality when it is observed by assuming that our universe became real (whatever that means) when we evolved to be aware of it and that the uninhabited ones are merely quantum fluctuations.

Either option is possible; it’s the traditional random mechanistic universe that is unbelievable. "
Also on Panspermia - theory that life started elsewhere but only developed beyond the microbes(propagated across the universe by light pressure) on this planet & possibly others, because it is hospitable.

Life first appeared on Earth almost as soon as the surface cooled which suggests either that the actual formation, rather than getting complex, is comparatively easy or that it came from elsewhere.

In 2009 I referred to this as the Craig Paradox (ripping off the term Fermi Paradox).

A much more recent benefit (one which would only have shortened our development by thousands rather than billions of years, so not important except to those primarily concerned about human timescales) is that the regularity of the phases of the Moon brought a mathematical order to early Man's universe which was certainly vital to developing mathematics (see the Antikythera Device) and possibly to the entire concept of a rational universe.

  The Moon looks a pretty good explanation for our uniqueness. Apart from the stabilisation of our orbit, the high and varying tides give a very good mechanism for evolution to put life on land. Tides vary because of the mixture of force from the Sun and Moon which sometimes work together to create high tides and sometimes counteract. This means that there is consistent evolutionary pressure for life to be able to survive on the shore for periods varying up to 2 weeks waiting for the tide to rescue them. Life that can live on land for 2 weeks is close to being able to live there forever.

   Another possibility is that it is lunar tidal pull that has kept the Earth's magma mobile and molten. If so this produces 2 gains - (1) continental drift which means we have many small continents with more equitable weather and with nutrients being replaced (2) volcanic outgassing produces excess CO2. On several occasions the planet has come close to being covered by ice (in one case probably more than close). It is assumed that this was reversed by outgassed CO2 increasing, with no plant life to consume it, till it increased global temperature enough to melt the ice. Without that an iceball Earth would have been stable. If, without a Moon, we would have had no liquid core we have no volcanoes.

   So without this big a Moon no advanced life. Nobody really has a good explanation of how the Moon came about - best is that it was hit by a Mars sized comet and bits knocked into orbit, but that doesn't fit well either. So whatever the explanation for our Moon it must be incredibly unlikely.

  Therefore we are incredibly unlikely. Fortunately we live in an Everett infinite multiverse where everything, no matter how unlikely, has happened. But perhaps only once per Universe.

  I got this comment from an engineer whose competence has been well demonstrated in the way that matters:

    I got a notification (and a pen) from the Daily Mail that mine had been chosen as their letter of the week. Published 13th May. That is pretty cool. All the moreso since the letter, below, is one I am extremely proud of and which contains a proposal that could be literally world changing (the world being Mars). The letter had gone out to 30 odd British newspaper and not appeared when I googled it so I assumed it had not been used but the Mail don't put their letters online.

   I would, once again, like to take the opportunity to say that I think the Mail is the only real newspaper in Britain. The only one that goes looking for real news rather than rewriting press releases and "reports" from government, or government funded sock puppets (or in the Guardian's case, under the counter smears from Conservative central office or assorted genocidal Nazis). This is presumably why it is relentlessly denigrated by the propagandists at the Ministry of Truth BBC.

   I've shown it as printed in normal type normally, with my originals in italics. That makes it more difficult to read but the original article it was derived from was on my blog here.

   The editings have been done with respect for the content and must have taken time. I suspect they have improved my grammar a little, though sometimes the most grammatical is not the most impactful. The editor dropped the "Westminster" from "Westminster MPs" - I assume because it was used in the Mail across the country not just Scotland though local references to Clydespace and the Forth bridge cost were kept in, which is good.

  It was slightly shortened, remaining the longest letter of the day (May 13th).

   I am happy with that editing.

   Google still indicates no other Scottish or UK paper found it reached their literary standards. I may be biased but I think the Mail's literary judgement is better than theirs.

    I also trust their judgement on what is popular with readers more than the other papers - and on that I have the support of their rising number of readers as competitors readership falls.
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   OK, following on from yesterday's Big Engineering. Here is a secondary effect it implies.

  It gives us not only mobile phone but also internet coverage everywhere in in the world (well possibly not at the north and south poles because they aren't visible from the equator).

   It does so for relatively simple receivers because with the signal capability up to a million times stronger than current satellite broadcasters picking it up is easy. That, plus mass production, means 10s or even hundreds of millions of receivers could be produced at relatively small cost.

    As regards mass production this is a relevant recent comment by Jerry Pournelle.

After 1940 America mobilized, Detroit began to turn out tanks and trucks and artillery, airplane factories sprang up, Kaiser finished Hoover Dam and put in shipyards where there had been nothing but mud flats, and GM’s Knudsen showed everyone that if you could produce one of something, you could produce a million of them, and do it with workers who hadn’t been trained – this was the time of Rosie the Riveter. Hitler never really believed that Sherman tanks were being built by women, and where did we get all those bombers?

Up to then the limit to mass production was the skilled work needed to make machine tools; in the period leading up to WW II American industry learned how to make machine tools – tools to make the machinery for mass production machines – and to get past the limit that had previously been imposed by the requirement that workers had to be highly skilled to make tools to the precision – one thousandth of an inch – needed to build precision machine tools.  That opened the way to true mass production.  Incidentally, we are still learning that lesson, but it isn’t fully learned yet: that is, it takes highly skilled workers to build some of the production facilities required in modern large chip production.  That limit is being overcome, and Moore’s Law continues to be a good approximation of reality, with the inevitable consequence that fewer and fewer workers are required to produce more and more goods. 

     Then all that is needed is a teaching programme. Multiple choice questions may not be the only way to run tests but they work and you would only need 1 programme to teach millions of people that way. Might not be the best education system in the world but it would certainly be far from the worst.
      Imagine a world where 100 million kids across Africa (& India, China, Indonesia and South America) have internet readers, provided free at a cost of £1 billion instead of the 10s of billions in "aid" their masters get to put in Swiss banks.  Learning everything from reading to nuclear physics with multiple choice testing.   

      Julian Simon always said that population growth was good because human beings are the only real wealth producing resource. We can find out.

      This (and tomorrows following from it) come from something proposed by Joseph Friedlander some time ago.

      He pointed out that the amount of information that can be transferred by transmission from orbit is a multiple of the power of the transmitter and of the receiver, OK and the distance.

       Our current satellite broadcasters rely on satellites whose solar collectors give them around 2 kw - ie about 15 square feet.

       There is no real limit to the size of collectors or anything else we can build in orbit because they don't have to stand up against gravity, wind, rain etc. Mirror that collect and focus sunlight could easily be a couple of miles across (call it 90 million square ft).

        That means no limit to what information can be transported. The limit is more likely to be all the information humanity can produce.

        There is a speed of light limit - it would take about 1/4 of a second for a signal to go to Geo and back. A matter of some importance for scientific measurement and selling shares but not for normal people.

         Note also that if you have big expensive transmitters you can have very cheap inexpensive receivers down here.

         All that is needed to cover the planet is 3 bases in geosynchronous orbit, 120 degrees apart.

         I would also suggest that a large base in orbit would be able, using laser transmission, to provide individualised programming/telephones to small areas, dividing the planet on a grid. That,in turn, further increases the amount of information that can be sent to each individual spot.


       Once we build a shuttle that can get to low Earth orbit at commercial rates, something we can do at any time, we could have a, possibly unmanned, tug, powered with an electric ion rocket, to move material from low orbit to Geo. At which point building the 3 bases is simply a matter of keeping going.

 Yes one we could have had 13 years ago

       In addition to communications this gives us somewhere that people can live and replace or repair other satellites. Together with a tug we have the infrastructure to connect to anywhere in near orbit.

       It would not be suitable for zero-G manufacturing, because a base as large as is needed here starts to produce the sort of microgravity that is not absolutely perfect for manufacturing, but it does work as a transfer point to such manufacturing bases. An ion rocket is slow but steady. It can be powered from nuclear electricity or even solar. Either way it has virtually zero fuel costs so that, once it is in place, actual running costs are low.

       I have previously written about space elevators and while we will get them this is can be put in place much more quickly - indeed it follows directly from having a working shuttle or indeed the Russian Soyuz production line, which has been in place for decades. Essentially we could do it tomorrow,

Rockets could take off from a spaceport in Britain within five years after ministers launched a search for a suitable site.

The UK Space Agency has been tasked with opening a site by 2018, with the first flights having lift-off within a year.

A remote site, away from homes and businesses, will be required in the plan to better prepare the UK to deal with threats from space – and offer trips to space tourists.
Mr Willetts said: ‘We want an area where there is not much civil airspace, where it is not very busy,” said Mr Willetts.

‘It might be smaller airports, it might be underused or disused RAF airfields.
‘We’re starting to look at relatively remote parts of the country,’ he told the Telegraph.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2617763/Rockets-lift-UK-five-years-government-remote-spaceport.html#ixzz30f5dfico
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7 years ago I made a rather more ambitious proposal for a British and indeed world spaceport which could have been running by now. Even the commenting environmentalist (& several "environmentalists") who objected had no doubt it would work. Ah well.

I have written this to David Willets and we will see:

Dear David Willets,
                                  I am very pleased to see that you are now actively promoting the development of a British spaceport. I would like to repeat a suggestion I made to the previous government and to our space agency (& I believe also to you when appointed).

       It is ancillary to your current proposals, which I very much hope will result in a British spaceport being set up at Lossiemouth or similar in Scotland. I am informed that the reason Virgin went originally to Sweden was because nobody in the Holyrood government was remotely interested in helping them get through the Luddite regulatory morass that affects so much here (& makes even Westminster look efficient by comparison). Indeed an announcement on that basis before the referendum might be opportune.

        However with space industry growing at 10% annually in Britain and the potential for much more we will need as much spaceport capacity as possible.

         My option requires some spending on port facilities, possibly a launch site (though there is an airport already) and limited road and power infrastructure but these could easily be paid for out of a bond issue, redeemable from their use. It would be more likely to augment a UK mainland spaceport, being able to handle larger, including non man-rated cargos.

         It would also have the potential to be the chief spaceport of the western hemisphere. I am assuming Singapore, which has no more potential than this, will be the eastern one.

         This is the proposal I made:


Ascension Island is an unimpressive 35 square mile rock extruded from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge though fortunately not currently tectonically active. It is one of a number of small left overs from the British Empire situated just 7.5 degrees south of the equator. Currently its main importance is that it has a substantial Anglo-American airbase big enough to handle regular Hercules flights to the Falkland Islands. Current British government practice is to discourage migration, tourism & development, presumably to prevent the locals being able to object to the base. "In order to gain an entry to Ascension Island, people need the written permission of the Administrator. It is nearly impossible to take up permanent residence. Employment is a requirement to stay on the island. The UK government has asserted that no inhabitant of Ascension Island has a "right to abode".

The values I am concerned about are, in order, that it is near the equator, that it is under British legal authority & that it is an island far from the nearest shore. The UK rule & isolation mean that it & any business activities on it are secure. The position on the equator & being surrounded by sea make it one of the best places in the world for 1 particular business.

Developed properly it could be Earth's prime spaceport.

The Earth rotates & the equator rotates at 1000mph, which is 10% of the speed needed to reach orbit. From the equator costs to orbit are therefore much more than 10% less than they can be elsewhere. This is why Cape Canaveral & Baikonur are located in the southernmost parts of their respective countries. Moreover the automatic position reached in orbit from the equator is an equatorial orbit which is easier to match to than orbits starting at some other point & would allow communication satellites to hold a relatively stable position in the sky.

Developing the island conventionally would not be hard, which is why our government have had to actively prevent it. 3 of the world's richest territories are places with few natural resources which have become wealthy as British colonies. This is because our law ensures contracts are worth the paper they are written on & because being part of the Empire keeps them safe from predatory neighbours & even more importantly from police chiefs & political leaders, not necessarily more irresponsible than those of Springfield but who should not be trusted with the power of absolute sovereignty. The 3 are Bermuda, the Cayman Islands & Hong Kong (Hong Kong may not be British anymore but it got rich that way - in 1948 it got 2 million Chinese refugees, without the "aid" provided to the much less numerous Palestinians to keep them refugees). The success of these places, now richer than Britain, supports the libertarian view that beyond upholding the law most of the rest of government is parasitic & the old fashioned imperialist view that the natives generally benefited from our Empire.

Thus much of what is needed is merely to do nothing. No bans on immigration & development, allow commercial & tourist flights, don't charge corporation & most other taxes (the place is hardly a source of revenue currently). To develop it into a space port we would first need the UK government to have set up an X-Prize Foundation as I have previously suggested. Beyond that a little infrastructure - a good harbour & an Ocean Thermal Energy Converter (OTEC) able to produce enough power to hydrolyse as much hydrogen & liquid oxygen as might be needed or indeed to run a laser launching system. An extra effect of an OTEC is that by bringing nutrient rich deep ocean water to the surface it can facilitate algae & fish industries. Marshall Savage's book The Millennial Project details how & I have borrowed extensively from him for this idea, which is considerably less ambitious than his floating islands proposal. The US would have to be squared but if Pearl Harbour does not have to be isolated I don't see this base as presenting insuperable security problems, indeed good harbour facilities should make it a more useful base.

I am envisaging a spaceport in perhaps 10 years, launching a fleet of shuttles developed from "3 operational spacecraft which have achieved low earth orbit, returned to earth, and flown to orbit again three times in a period of three weeks" (as Dr Pournelle's X-Prize proposal suggests) relatively accessible from the North Atlantic shores of Britain, the USA & Europe. It may sound very Dan Dare but I see no reason why a forward looking self confident nation couldn't create it. I would welcome criticisms & refinements. Isn't the island's name a magnificent example of serendipity.

    As I say I would welcome any criticism. All the discussion on the subject has confirmed that it would work - even those who don't want it to.

    Because I have had no reply to this from various government sources when suggested over the last 7 years; because a previous enquiry showed that the government had simply binned, without consideration, a 2009 proposal for an X-Prize Foundation which would probably have made us leader in space industry by now if that had been desired; and because, on another occasion, I was informed by the Scottish executive that they would never, under any circumstances, give any consideration to any concept that did not come directly from the brow of the leadership I am forced to make a formal request.

      Under the Freedom of Information Act I request all documentation relating to the Ministry's/Agency's consideration of this, or of the decision to bin it without consideration, specifically including all reasons for doing it, or for deciding not to bother.

       I trust this is not an insuperable inconvenience - perhaps it will even give you the leverage to get the civil service to give you an honest answer on feasibility.

Neil Craig

 structures and compositional features within the a 30-pound (13.7-kilogram) Yamato meteorite suggest biological processes might have been at work on Mars hundreds of millions of years ago.

Analyses found that the rock was formed about 1.3 billion years ago from a lava flow on Mars. Around 12 million years ago, an impact occurred on Mars that ejected the meteorite from the surface of Mars. The meteorite traveled through space until it fell in Antarctica about 50,000 years ago.
The team found two distinctive sets of features associated with Martian-derived clay. They found tunnel and micro-tunnel structures that thread their way throughout Yamato 000593. The observed micro-tunnels display curved, undulating shapes consistent with bio-alteration textures observed in terrestrial basaltic glasses, previously reported by researchers who study interactions of bacteria with basaltic materials on Earth.

The second set of features consists of nanometer- to-micrometer-sized spherules that are sandwiched between layers within the rock and are distinct from carbonate and the underlying silicate layer.

Similar spherical features have been previously seen in the Martian meteorite Nakhla that fell in 1911 in Egypt. Composition measurements of the Y000593 spherules show that they are significantly enriched in carbon compared to the nearby surrounding iddingsite layers.

A striking observation is that these two sets of features in Y000593, recovered from Antarctica after about 50,000 years residence time, are similar to features found in Nakhla, an observed fall collected shortly after landing.

The authors note that they cannot exclude the possibility that the carbon-rich regions in both sets of features may be the product of abiotic (non-life) mechanisms: however, textural and compositional similarities to features in terrestrial samples, which have been interpreted as biogenic, imply the intriguing possibility that the Martian features were formed by biotic activity.

“This is no smoking gun,” said JPL’s White. “We can never eliminate the possibility of contamination in any meteorite. But these features are nonetheless interesting and show that further studies of these meteorites should continue.”
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    Indeed not a smoking gun but another in a lengthening series of meteors originating on Mars that show formations that could be life and for which no other explanation holds water.

   Also the similarity with the Antarctica meteor found shortly after landing supports both. If some life process on Earth (or any other process) was causing this then the size of the effect would be expected to be much greater in the current sample than the previous one:

      Effect X 50,000 years = Effect X "shortly after landing" 
             works only when Effect = 0

     It is possible to believe life is unique to this planet. It is not possible to believe it is unique to the first 2 planets we know. If life exists, or existed on Mars it is almost certainly common across the universe. Theoretically it could have formed once in our solar system and not survived any trip on a comet or moved by light pressure to another system but I do not believe that EVERY bacterium on that journey would have failed to survive and once you accept it happening once a geometric expansion is inevitable.

     And if that isn't important enough to spend a few billions on pure research then I cannot think of anything that ever would be and we should settle down to the advantages of living like pigs in muck.

    I have previously here and here and here, oh and here written on this, particularly with regard to life on asteroids, comets and open space but Mars looks like the best place to look.
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    Finding life on Mars was the objective of the Beagle 2 probe in w2003 (cost £44 million, half paid by non-government donations). It failed like 19 of all 38 probes sent to Mars.

   Despite failing it had proven immensely successful with the people and Colin Pillinger proposed to send 2 more in 2009 - this was the Beagle 3 proposal. Since all the development work had been done this would be cheaper than the original.

   Naturally Parliament stepped in and ran an enquiry so that the MPs, with their deep scientific knowledge, could tell him where he went wrong. They and ESA agreed they should take over and, devote £200 million to a successor to ensure it worked and not sending anything until they were sure it could be done successfully. Still waiting.

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   Perhaps it is time, or more than time, to try again. With launch costs dropping and SpaceX existing to put Elon Musk on Mars before he dies (and also produce a spacegoing civilisation) and with the normal reduction in costs of cutting edge technology I suspect it could be done now for no more than half the original cost (correcting for inflation). That matches the commercial donors who paid for the original. Or smaller governments like those of Singapore or Abu Dhabi.

   This idea reported by Next Big Future is rather neat. A conventional space elevator from the Moon suffers from the fact that it doesn't rotate (well OK only rotates in time with the orbit round Earth) so there just isn't the centripetal force to keep it up. Pity because the lunar gravity is so much lower that there is no real difficulty now in constructing strong enough cable.

   However if we place the station at the L  point just above the centre point facing Earth and lock it in place with a weight (ie small asteroid) we have a stable system.



         The proposers say this could be in place by 2019 and while I am sure they are technologically right (there seems to be nothing there not technologically possible today) it would require quite a lot of moving mass around and to have a market big enough to justify it would need a fair bit of space industrialisation. On current trends that means way beyond 2019 (on prsent trends, if we rely on NASA/ESA/etc it means never but lets not go there).

         But if some country decided it was going to put 1% of what was put into owning Afghanistan (ie about $40 bn)(£25bn - 1/3rd of HS2, 10 Forth bridges) into this project it could be done even by that early date. It would establish the builder as, if not owner of the Moon, the nation able to exploit it FAR more easily than anybody else because only they could easily land and take off virtually unlimited amounts of material.

        Couple of other gains:

1 - Lunar material is effectively unlimited in quantity. Moving it into orbit, where there is zero-G, means it can be processed (for example melted down using mirrors)  gives enormous opportunities for manufacturing in zero G - both small, materials with a molecular structure that can only be formed in zero-G, to vast orbital O'Neill colonies miles long.

2 -  The cable stretches beyond the stable point. Drop a spaceship off the end of that and it will fall towards the Earth. Earth being 250,000 miles away and 8,000 across is, so long as the ship produces a little lateral thrust, easy to miss. Indeed a ship launching from there will get a strong slingshot effect (building up speed by falling and then being pulled into a curve by gravity while passing Earth) which would give it enough extra speed to go (slowly) almost anywhere in the solar system.

     Not bad for 1% of Afghanistan.

   Recently I did an article for ThinkScotland  summarising the space current development field.

   After I had completed it I found this which Brian kindly allowed me to add. On my site I highlighted it.

     The reason a relatively small asteroid can hold more water than Earth is because all our water, being lighter than rock, is on the surface which, if you compare our planet to an apple would be no thicker than the skin, whereas with virtually no gravity field asteroid or cometary water can be all through it.

    The reason I think it important is that some years ago I did a Big Engineering about mass production of O'Neill space colonies. In that I said that because building such settlements are endlessly scalable so long as there is lunar soil left, and automatable or run by remote handling from earth, we could build hundreds of millions of them, enough, as I said, to make a Ringworld.

     "A recent paper in Nature says that there are enormous amounts of water in Ceres the 2nd largest asteroid in the belt beyond Mars  perhaps more than in all Earth's oceans. If so, particularly since this is just 1 asteroid, we have enough water to supply a virtually unlimited human population in space, certainly larger than Earth's population."

    But I was wrong. I assumed lack of water (back in 2008 we didn't know how much water there was on the Moon) would be a constraint, even if we brought it in from the Asteroids. This discovery, which since it is only 1 asteroid of thousands means the amount of water is only slightly short of incalculable. Being closer (much closer in terms of the energy needed to change orbits) than comets or the outer planets) it is easily available. "Easily" for a spacegoing civilisation that is - but we can have that anytime for a fraction of what we spent owning Afghanistan.

   That means we could build billions, very many billions, of such settlements. Far more than 1 for every human now living. At the time I said that at 10% annual growth there could be a Ringworld by 2195AD. That means 1 dozen Ringworlds (put them each 3 million miles further out than the last and we still fit them within the orbit of Mars) by 2022. Actually the traffic congestion would probably make it longer but you take the point.

   This is up on ThinkScotland. Please put any comments there


    The European Space Agency probe Rosetta was recently switched on and is going to land on a comet, a rock which was old when the planet Earth was new.

    The Chinese space agency recently landed its Jade Rabbit probe on the Moon, though it has now malfunctioned and it may well be unable to complete its mission.

    NASA's Mars probe continues to send back data from that planet.

    Less newsworthy but perhaps more important for opening up space to humanity generally is that SpaceX recently put their rocket in geosynchronous orbit. This is a much more difficult task than putting it in low Earth orbit, around 200km up, because geosynchronous is at a height of 36,000km. On the other hand it is commercially much more valuable because satellites in geo are constantly in the same spot in space and any spot on Earth it may want to transmit to is also on the same spot from its vantage. SpaceX has already resupplied the International Space Station and

    India has managed to annoy those British politicians and leader writers, of "left" as much as "right" by having the presumption to prepare a probe to Mars which their erstwhile British rulers can't, or at least can't be bothered, doing.

    A recent paper in Nature says that there are enormous amounts of water in Ceres the 2nd largest asteroid in the belt beyond Mars  perhaps more than in all Earth's oceans. If so, particularly since this is just 1 asteroid, we have enough water to supply a virtually unlimited human population in space, certainly larger than Earth's population.

    Richard Branson hopes, hopes by the end of the year to have taken himself and  his family into suborbital space., though to be fair this has been real soon now for some time.

    And companies have been set up to mine the asteroids and settle the Moon.

    Unlike the first space age of the 1960s the diversity is obvious. We have very expensive space programmes from NASA ($18 billion a year), ESA ($11.2bn including the closely connected French, German and Italian ones). The intermediate Chinese ($1,3bn) and British ($414million). And the commercial ones which come out ahead (or go bust). Even NASA is not spending remotely as much as it did in the 1960s and NASA and ESA appear to be getting rather poor value for money.

    Smaller countries may well have an advantage in the new space race because relatively little land area on Earth is needed as a launch pad to achieve an unlimited footprint in space. For commercial space smaller countries are ideally placed to set an attractive tax regime.

    Thus it is sometimes said the Isle of Man is going to be the 4th country to put a man on the Moon, through space companies registered there. But they have competition for that title from California who are also proposing such tax breaks. Also from Singapore and Dubai who have both built their own space centres. When we are dealing with an industry growing at least 10% a year the attraction of getting in on the ground floor and becoming an industry hub is obvious. Well obvious to some - Virgin chose to set their northern launch site in Sweden after finding nobody in the government of Scotland, their first choice, was interested.

    In the long term, permanent human settlement of space must make money or it is ultimately a fashion, subject to being closed down at any time by politics. However it long has made a profit. Space industries (mainly communication and weather satellites) were worth £160 bn a year in 2009 and has been growing at 10% a year.

     It is not now about making space profitable it is now about making deep space industry (ie not linked to Earth) profitable and with one asteroid, out of 10s of thousands containing $195bn worth of ores that looks unlikely to be a problem for long.

    The sky is considerably short of the limit for space industrialisation. The amount of cheap energy from solar power satellites is unlimited; mineral resources far beyond everything on Earth; real estate also unlimited; satellite TV and communications may look like a mature industry but in fact, since the amount of information is directly proportional to the signal power and communication satellites now are powered by a few metres of solar cells, transmissions can still be increased several 10s of times at least.

    That's the conventional stuff.

    Now I'd like to talk about a couple of fairly new ideas, which have the chance to take humanity, or at least our engineering, anywhere in the Solar System. And the major Scottish contribution to it.

    Over the last few years we have seen the development of very small modular satellites in a 10 cm cube. Known as cubesats these are the economic equivalent of shipping containers, except small. Units of self contained materials.


    These work because of Moore's Law. This is the observed fact that computer capacity, and thus also a lot of instrumentation, has been doubling every 2 years since the 1940s. That means a million times since the 1970s. You can buy a mobile phone now that has more capacity than all the computer programming available to NASA for the Moon landings. And you can put it in a device the size of a mobile phone - or several times more in a cubesat. The first Voyager spacecraft, which sent us the first pictures of the outer planets and moons, was launched in 1977. It was 9ft x 21 ft x 57 ft  (a mere 300,000 times the size of a cubesat, well actually much less because it doesn't fill most of that space). A box 4 inches on a side can now hold far processing capacity.

    And a Scottish firm (if I were being chauvinist I would say Glasgow firm) have a major component in 40% of the world's cubesats. Theoretically that is potentially comparable to the time at the beginning of the 20thC  when 90% of all the world's metal hulled shipping tonnage had been built on Britain and 90% on the Clyde. That was when such shipping was at the technological cutting edge.

CubeSats, with their advantages of modularity, are predicted to do for satellites what PCs have done for computing. It's now possible to buy components and assemble them as a kit, and Clyde Space already provides an online credit card purchasing system for items....

Clyde Space is also expert in the design of miniature power systems for CubeSats, for which they have around 40% of the global market.
    
   And as all new ideas generate new ideas of their own, an engine to power such a cubesat is now being designed.

    Benjamin Longmier, Michigan University, is developing the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT), a new rocket propulsion system powered by the Sun and propelled by water, which will push small spacecraft like CubeSats around and far beyond the Earth.

 * interplanetary missions to Mars and Europa for about $1 million
* Ten interplanetary cubsats for a solar system wide internet
* Cheaper satellite wi-fi around the earth
* Future combination with Spacex reusable rockets, Planetary resources cheap space telescopes, Googlex low cost space robotics for radical lowcost space exploration.

   If you can land a cubesat on one of the asteroids, and we can, then we can use ground based sonar to build up a geological (asterological - the language hasn't caught up with our capabilities) picture of what each one contains and how it is made up. For $1 million - oil explorers on Earth wouldn't get out of bed for that.

   If the 1960s space race was the first generation project and SpaceX making commercial trips to orbit and these other things are the second then what is now being worked on - the ability to send thousands of probes to each of the asteroids and moons and comets too, across the Solar System is the opening of the 3rd and it is opening now.
   
3 modules combined approach Saturn - drawing - so far

      Again - not in any way my idea but cubesats are devices 10cm (4") on a side designed to be released by up to thousands, in orbit. The basic point is that, over the decades, technology has improved so much (Moore's law) that capacity which once required tons of satellite can now be fitted in such cubes. That and a similar principle to the way shipping containers revolutionised shipping - prepacking thousands of items together massively reduces handling costs.

     There are also plans to produce even smaller cubes.

    Cubes are only this useful for handling data - moving man sized material is going to keep needing something approaching man size - but data is an awful lot of what we do.

     Then there was this on Next Big Future.

     A tiny sunlight and water powered rocket is being designed which will be able to fly a cubesat from Earth orbit to Mars or Europa, which also means the asteroids and anywhere in interesting bits of the solar system, for $1 million.

    That makes examination and therefore raising money for commercial development, very much a commercial rather than governmental project.



         Incidentally Scots, indeed largely Glasgow firms are in the forefront of the cubesat industry, with up to 40% of the world's cubesats being made or partly worked on here. Theoretically that is potentially comparable to the time at the beginning of the 20thC  when 90% of all the world's metal hulled shipping tonnage had been built on Britain and 90% on the Clyde. That was when such shipping was at the technological cutting edge.

Glasgow space links:
http://www.sdi.co.uk/sectors/aerospace-defence-marine/adm-sub-sectors/space/space-key-facts.aspx
and
http://www.sdi.co.uk/news/2012/06/adm-newsletter/scotland-space-industry.aspx
and
http://frontiersmagazine.org/scotlands-satellite-heading-for-lift-off/
and
 

    I saw this letter, which went out to all and sundry in the Scottish & UK media, in the Scottish Daily Mail on Eve, after I thought it had been rejected:
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 The Chinese automated Moon Lander has been generally described as 40 years late.

  Well it is 40 years after Apollo perhaps but NASA couldn't do it now and it seems likely that it will be of more scientific use than the Apollo landings because the lander has ground penetrating radar and it will work for several months.

This is a long term prediction of global temperature based on observed natural cycles.

      If so we are heading for a temperature decline of about 2/3rds a degree by 2080. Not fun but not "catastrophic" - warmer than the depths of the little ice age. Possibly a good reason to build solar mirrors.

      Is this certain - of course not. On the other hand I think it is far more scientific than the catastrophic warming alarm on which policy has for 2 decades been based.

    Perhaps we will spend 1% as much, based on this prediction, in promoting a spacegoing civilisation, as the several trillion $s governments have spent on windmillery. Certainly if belief in "the science" is a real factor in government parasitism, they will.

       The Chinese automated Moon Lander was last item on ITV and has been generally described as "40 years late" by our media. 40 years after Apollo perhaps but NASA couldn't do it now.

        It does seem likely that it will be of more pure scientific use than the Apollo landings because the lander has ground penetrating radar and since it will work for several months, will cover a much greater area.
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From Wikipedia

The Yutu rover is slightly smaller than the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and carries similar instruments: panoramic cameras and two spectrometers, one operating in the infrared, the other using alpha particles and X-rays (APXS).^[8][14] Yutu is equipped with a robotic arm to position the APXS near the target sample.
The rover has a mass of approximately 120 kilograms (260 lb) and a payload capacity of approximately 20 kg (44 lb).^[1][2][15] It may transmit video in real time and has automatic sensors to prevent it from colliding with other objects.

Power[edit]

The six-wheeled rover is designed to explore an area of 3 square kilometres (1.2 sq mi) during its 3-month mission, with a maximum travelling distance of 10 km (6.2 mi). Energy would be provided by a solar panel, allowing the rover to operate through lunar days. During the lunar nights, the lander and the rover will go into 'sleep mode'.^[12] Heating will be provided by use of radioisotope heater units (RHU) and two-phase fluid loops.^[16]

Scientific payload[edit]

The Yutu rover carries a ground-penetrating radar and spectrometers to inspect the composition of the soil and the structure of the lunar crust beneath it.

Ground-penetrating radar[edit]

The rover carries a ground-penetrating radar on its underside, allowing for the first direct measurement of the structure and depth of the lunar soil down to a depth of 30 m (98 ft), and investigation of the lunar crust structure down to several hundred meters deep.^[13]

Spectrometers[edit]

The rover carries an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer^[14] and an Infrared spectrometer to analyze the chemical element composition of lunar samples.

Cameras[edit]

There are two panoramic cameras and two navigation cameras on the rover's mast, which stands ~1.5 m (4.9 ft) above the lunar surface, as well as two hazard avoidance cameras installed on the lower front portion of the rover. Each camera pair may be used to capture either stereoscopic three-dimensional imaging or range-sensor two-dimensional imaging.
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      It cannot return rocks to Earth but that is promised for future voyages.

     Remarkably China's space budget is low  US$500 million (official); US$1.3 billion (Euroconsult)^.

     That is £320 million or £800 million. By comparison Britain's space budget is £330 million, almost all simply handed over to ESA, whose budget in turn is about half of the $20,000 million NASA spends.

     This makes China's space efforts remarkably small and remarkably successful or NASA and ESA remarkably useless which is probably more likely. That is 60p per person annually. Clearly they are not so much racing for space as engaged in a gentle stroll while the west slides slowly backwards.

      It reinforces my and UKIP's belief that if even only our current space budget was put into an X-Prize Foundation, we might well quickly become the world leader in commercial space development. If we also added the £500 million NERC spends, largely on advertising the warming scare, we would be a racing certainty.