Who, besides me, is tired of all the sniping, the camps, the programs that get funded this year and cut the next, the pork barrel money tacked onto budgets so a representative will vote favorably? All while resources dwindle here? Shall I change my name to Nero and take up the fiddle?

Space based nuclear reactors. Lunar colonies, Mars colonies. Space solar power. Tether systems. Tourism. Winged vehicles. Capsule vehicles. Two-planet, three-planet economies. Isn�t there a thread that ties all these together, with the greatest return on incremental investments?

First, understand that the people with money and power will continue to look for ways to increase their money and power, but also understand that they are very short-sighted. Our first task, then, is to incorporate our long-term goals into their short-term plans. We show them how they can get what they want, and along the way, many small incremental steps add up to a powerful and prosperous future for all of us. For example: The Nuclear Power Industry is hugely powerful, and survives and sometimes thrives despite tremendous negative popular pressure. Look how long it took to get our space station to get funded and partially built, and then notice how quickly nuclear space propulsion is moving forward. Why? Advances in nuclear power have an almost immediate financial and national reward, so certainly there is support for Prometheus/JIMO, even with projected costs in the $9 billion range.

How do we grab the coattails and sow seeds for the future? Do all the readers want colonies off the surface of the Earth? These nuclear reactors are just the ticket for powering Mars colonies and the first Lunar colonies. Space is already so full of hazards, the increment added by a nuclear reactor is far less significant than it is here on Earth. As a matter of fact, the relationship between harsh environment and nuclear-power submarine is a very good analog for space and a space colony. A sub�s reactor operates 24/7, a small crew maintains the reactor, the structure, each other, and does a job, too.

An attack sub costs less than $2 billion, and weighs about 8K metric tons. If we paid current launch prices to get it to Luna, it�d be over $100 billion to get it there (and then we�d still have to assemble it). Wait a minute: who would send a sub to the moon? No one� but a nuclear sub gets built with fewer pork-barrel funds than a space probe does. A real lunar colony would have an initial mass only one eighth of a submarine, and so its overall cost to get set up is around $15 billion. That�s still about double the projected cost of developing a space based nuclear reactor� we need to get the price of our pork down.

Does a space based tether transport system offer any benefit? Assume a design complexity less than this nuclear power plant, but greater than Mars Pathfinder. A good design I�ve seen uses a high-mach winged vehicle to deliver a payload to an earth-orbiting tether, which then flings the payload to a lunar tether for a zero-velocity touch down at the moon�s south pole. A back of the envelope computation shows that it could probably be built and operational for half a billion dollars. That�s a figure that�s at least in the ballpark for tacking on to the $9 billion nuclear reactor project. Now how do we sell it?

We can use both popular pressure and legislation.

Most environmentalists are strongly anti-nuclear. Never mind that nuclear power is a technology which could provide the human race with all the energy it needs for the next thousand years (but it keeps us firmly on our planet�s surface. We need an expansion technology!), and set aside the waste issue (look. The radioactive ore is already in the ground, making parts of the earth less hospitable. We dig it up, refine it, get some usable energy out of, and in 500 years the half-life decay has rendered the material back to its original background radiation level. Put the spent material back in the mine, and quicherbitchin�). We can use the collective willpower of the save-the-earthers to do a little pork of our own: we establish a trajectory for eventually performing all nuclear research and development in outer space, saving the surface of the earth from that nasty ol� nuclear energy.

Nuclear research in space? Banned on Earth? Consider then, that a nation would have to be space-faring in order to be part of the nuclear club. Along with global monitoring, this added measure of complexity would surely reduce rogue states� capacity for nuclear armament. I like the feel of that idea.

The other part of the strategy: a space-based nuclear reactor needs to get tested as the power supply for a human colony, doesn�t it? Why build a single 100Mw system and launch it out to Jupiter�s moons when we could build two and keep one close to home, supplying the initial power for a human colony on the moon?

To get that reactor and the parts for a colony to Luna, we fund a tether system as a rider in the nuclear project. For an increase in program cost of less than 10%, we can have the first real piece of space infrastructure emplaced. The tether system then becomes the highway for building a lunar colony, the cost of which comes down from $40 billion to a more manageable $3 to $5 billion, plus the reactor.

How can a lunar base cost less than the ISS? It�s a question of willpower, leveraging technology and limiting the program increases. We can build a nuclear sub for $2 billion, with a crew of 150 people. Surely we can build a moonbase for twice that, for a crew of 20? Heck, give it to the Navy to make it happen!

Once we have people on the ground, in a lunar colony, everything else begins to open up: manufacturing solar panels from lunar materials (while the reactor is a great initial source of energy, solar power wins in the long run in a place like Luna). Solar panels are lifted via the tethers back into orbit and delivered to GEO for robotic assembly into power satellites to beam power back to Earth (GEO is the obvious place to put these things. The low-density energy beams will be an order of magnitude easier to manage from earth orbit than from our moon�s surface). 1,000Mw solar power satellite systems beaming energy to a distributed power grid sets us up to become free of fossil fuels, and very likely increases the reliability of the entire grid. How much are we looking to spend to patch up our energy grid? $50 billion? $100 billion? Let�s add a rider to develop a space-based infrastructure onto that, as a plan to truly get our electricity needs met responsibly by investing in collecting the fusion energy of the sun. From this direction, we�d start with the tether system again, but this time loft parts made with earth resources rather than lunar. The whole thing would still only cost about $10 billion to get the capital campaign and first build in place, again a 10% program increase.

To recap and expand, the development arc goes like this: tourist-class high-mach winged vehicles provide RLV to an orbiting tether�s tip. Space based nuclear power is the initial, compact power source for a lunar colony, which then develops lunar resources for use in Earth orbit. Space hotels and Power Satellites get assembled at lower cost from non terrestrial resources. Nano-tube technology matures and the first space elevator gets delivered to GEO, at which point everything really starts to open up. The number of Power Satellites grows to a point where we can supply the multi-terawatts we�ll need in 30 to 50 years, while the nuclear reactors outside our biosphere also grows to provide energy to Mars colonists and asteroid miners.

Instead of letting our society grow in a complexity disassociated to our needs, we can harness the disparate goals from many creative organizations and work synergistically to get the most from our efforts. We start by noticing who has the power to really get things done, then we sell them on how they can increase either or both their dollars and public goodwill by incorporating a few well chosen enabling technologies. We finish by capitalizing on these first demonstration efforts and opening ourselves to investment and building clients. We have a couple of opportunities right now, with the dawning awareness of our energy frailty and the Prometheus nuclear project. We can show that for a small program increase, the seeds for future opportunities are sown.

We can take the first steps towards a powerful, robust future of abundant energy in a three-planet economy simply by aligning our goals with the willpower of people in current projects. I challenge everyone reading this to think about how their specialty, their focus, can contribute to the goals and dreams of other people in other programs, so that together we can build a truly remarkable future.

Robert van de Walle is a long time reader of SpaceDaily and can be contacted via bob @ pixelrangers.com.

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