Jacob Davies
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Commented on Back to the Moon?
"if the US had had todays technology and todays GDP, but 1960 consumption and 1960 needs" In other words, if the US was a feudal state where most of the GDP went on things that were completely useless to the...
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Julian Morrison commented on
Back to the Moon?
If people were sensible about interplanetary flight, they'd be assembling "nuclear lightbulb" rockets in orbit, something that could hot rock as reaction mass for the return. Chemical boosters from down the gravity well are like pyramids versus skyscrapers - you can get there with an army of mooks and a king's ransom, but you don't end up creating a technology or a capital base that makes it easier to repeat. Also, if they were sensible they wouldn't be headed to the moon (which is mostly useless and has an inconvenient gravity well). They'd be headed to the asteroids, to mine...
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TP1024 commented on
Back to the Moon?
if the US was a feudal state where most of the GDP went on things that were completely useless to the population Take a really hard look around you in the US and think about whether or not the conditional was the right grammatical device to use in this sentence....
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Charlie Stross commented on
Back to the Moon?
Mauro, nuclear reactors -- not RTGs but full-up reactors -- have been flying regularly for the past four decades ... on military satellites (e.g. the Soviet/Russian RORSATs. (I don't know whether the USA's equivalent -- the NRO Lacrosse satellites -- are nuclear powered.)...
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- Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
- How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
- Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
- Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
- Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
- Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
- The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
- “Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
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