Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite, a Project Moon Hut podcast series. For those of you who don't know, Project Moon Hut, as of today, is a 5 year project where we've been working with teams around the world, including NASA and NASA Ames facility, so a team there.
And we're focusing on developing self sustainable life on the moon through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem to change how we live on Earth or within Mearth as we call it, moon and Earth, for all species. Today, we have a great guest on the line, John Strickland. How are you, John? Fine. You're fine. That's good. I hope you're you're much better than you find today when we go through the program.
The the title that John and I have come up with for this program is the logic behind the moon, power satellites, power satellites, and solving climate change. Now you've heard me mention a few times the National, Space Society. John is a on the board of directors of National Space Society. He's been an advocate for the Space Frontier Foundation. And as he told me just a few minutes ago, he has been interested in space since he's been 10 years old.
So I guess there's a reference point we have to put here, John. How old are you? I am 76. 76. So that's quite a few years ago. So, John, you have a few bullet points for us. What are they? Okay. The first one is global warming from a deep time perspective. From deep time. Wow. Deep time perspective. Okay. Next. Okay. Alternate energy on the ground and its problems. Alternate energy on ground and its problems. Next. Alternate energy in space and its promise. Ah, energy in space and its promise.
Okay. Next. New space opens the door to space. Next. Moon to the rescue. Love the moon. Okay. And next. The rationale for a lunar polar mining base. Lunar polar mining base. And you had told me you have 6, so I'm assuming that's it. That was it. Yep. Alright. So I'm this this first one, global warming from a a deep deep time perspective, hit me. I'm I'm I'm smiling. I'm ready to hear what you've gotta say about this.
Okay. So, you know, deep time simply means geological time, millions and millions of years of time. Right? Well, now I do. So thank you. So, for question number 1, what is the ice age? What is the ice age? Can you describe what the ice age that people can see of when they hear the word ice age is? Okay. So I'm going to I'm gonna screw this up royally because there's definitely an answer that I don't know even though I've studied some of these things in university.
The ice age is a period in time in which, for a multitude of reasons, the atmosphere had changed the possibly the rotation of the or the slowing of the earth or the axis of, one of those has caused the earth to cool or first added humidity into the air and then cooled and created ice that went all the way down as far as, for example, in the states to the middle of the country. And I know I screwed that up really bad. Well, you got a part of it right.
So Okay. First of all, we're we're we're are living in a the warm cycle of the current ice age, which with the cycle lasts a 100000 years, of which the warm cycle lasts about 12 to 15000 years maximum. So you got about 90,000 years of cold cycle. But that's just one of the current cycles of the current ice eon. And I could ask you what an ice eon, but since I made that term up, to to fill a gap in terminology, I'll let me describe it. Then I would not get it right. So I appreciate the help.
Simply a period of time, say, longer than a 1000000 years. It's for humans, that's eons of time. But Okay. Yep. Just so we have some idea. So what may most people don't understand that we're still living in the place to see geological period. And there have been couple dozen of these 100000 year and earlier about 55000 year cold and warm ice age cycles since the start of the Pleistocene about 3000000 years ago. But the big issue, of course, is what causes an ice age.
Now the the the normal, axial rotation of the Earth, creates things called Milanovic Cycles, which match the 100000 year, current ice age warm cold and warm cycles. Okay. But the bigger the bigger period is the ice in itself. During most of ice Earth's history of the least a half 1000000000 years, 500000000 years since the end of the Precambrian, we have been, about 3 quarters of the time roughly in a period with no ice eons at all where the ocean is about 250 feet higher than it is now.
No continental glaciers anywhere on earth. You'd have mountain glaciers certainly, but you'd have these shallow seas, that would cover, many of the lower low lying parts of continents. And where the dinosaur relatives love to to play and and get food in these shallow seas like plesiosaurs and metmosasaurs and so forth. So, the question is what causes the ice eons themselves?
Well, you know about plate tectonics, how the Earth's, core drives the the convection currents in the Earth's mantle, which is made out of Yeah. Like, very hot silly putty, which drives the continents like the scum on on a on a boiling pot of of a stew or soup and makes it move around. It moves around to a really clear pattern, but in terms of where the Earth's poles are, it's sort of like a random pattern.
So, essentially, about one quarter of the time a pole of the earth is covered, or is it has has a continental mass over it because there's roughly 1 quarter of the surface is continental mass a little bit more than that and about 3 quarters of it a little bit less is water. So on an average period you've got about 25% chance that that a pole be covered by, land and 3 quarters of quarter 75% chance it'll be covered by water.
Now imagine you you look at the current situation where you have the South Pole right in the middle of Antarctica. And, of course, I glaciers conform on the land and the ocean can't sweep sleep sleep the ice away because it's on solid ground even though that ground is is, you know, extremely depressed by the way to the ice. The other the other one is the Arctic Ocean, which is hemmed in out by all the continents around it.
So the ice pack there can't be easily swept away by ocean currents either. So you have actually although you have an ocean over the North Pole, it's as if you had a continental mass there because the ice can form around that around the pole and it can't be swept away. But imagine if you had a pole as you often do, let's say in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, what would happen? If it was in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean Or Pacific.
If you had a if you had a North or South Pole and and the ice tried the water got real cold and the and the and it and it tried to form packed ice floating Wouldn't it wouldn't it change the road wouldn't it change the rotation of the earth because the No. No? What would happen is the corrosion currents would continuously sweep away the cold water and ice. The cold water would sink to the bottom, create a completely different pattern. Yeah. The oceanic movement.
Yeah. The whole pathway would be different. So you so we are actually living right now in a very rare period of Earth's history, only about 1 tenth of Earth's history, how we living in an era of 2 ice eons. Effectively, an ice eon affects 1 hemisphere at a time, but we're living in this period for at least the last 3000000 years called the Pleistocene where we've got 2 of them.
And the other one started about 30000000 years ago when Antarctica started to move over the South Pole and started to form its ice cap. So if you know, they're they don't they're not synchronized at all. It's sort of random. So this is really important to understand that we're not only living in this very rare period of a double ASEAN, but and then we will be in that period for many millions of years to come because of the continents don't move very rapidly. They move a few inches a year.
So it's this Do you this is an aside question. Do you think that humans' ability to develop came about because this rare condition. It's possible that the climatic conditions such as the creation of arid areas in Africa and all, could've had if it had happened at just the right time. But, it's also true that primates are extremely adaptable animals, and humans have adapted to a very wide range of habitats.
And even during the periods of supercontinents over a 100000000 years ago is the latest one, you did have enormous deserts and dry areas because it was hard for moisture from the oceans to get to the center of a supercontinent and make rain. So Mhmm. It it the the the this these conditions are not unique, but, it it is that you do you do have the stresses created by the the the cold the cold weather and all.
And humans have been since since, I guess, like, over a 100000 years ago, have been living in Siberia where it get down to, like, 80 degrees below 0, which is amazing that that cavemen could do that. Okay. I get it. So, yep. I'm sorry I interrupted. You're you're doing great. I love this. So where My my my I was a biology major. So one of my favorite classes was biology of vertebrates. So we went all the way back in history. So this is bringing back a lot of memories.
I had a class, the evolution of vertebrates with the the textbook by Colbert, famous. But just just just remember, you're you're 70 years old. You're Yeah. You're 70 some odd. I'm 55. That 20 year difference, I mean, makes a difference in what we were taught. You were at the beginning phases of it when and I was already they were developed.
So the basic the basic lesson I'm trying to explain is the periods of high carbon dioxide level and periods of warm temperature are actually more normal for the Earth than than the current cold pit paradigm that we're the long term cold pair that we're in, which is the ASEAN. But right now, we're in the middle of an interglacial. We're actually near the end of it. So without without global warming, within a 1000 years or even less, we would go back to a 90,000 year long ice age.
And that would that would be very bad because it would end up with all the trees and plants being scraped off of North America and parts of Europe and ground into the ocean. If you want environmental disaster, think of an ice age. Okay. So, however, the global warming in terms of where we are right now is gonna cause a problem. It's not threatening the Earth.
It does not threaten life on the earth because life has been through even periods of almost complete freezing and periods where the, carbon dioxide level is maybe 20 or 25 or even 50 times higher than it is now where there were no clay no continental glaciers at all. And on top of that, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It's a greenhouse gas just like water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Your body is made out of carbon atoms from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gathered by plants, which have over a 1000000 of years have lowered the carbon dioxide level enough to allow ice ions to affect the whole globe. Typically, ice ion affects the area around the pole the polar cap, but we've got the the carbon dioxide level down low enough now. So to some extent, it can affect the whole globe and even lower the equatorial temperatures a little bit.
Okay. Okay. Now we're going to the second bullet point. The alternative energy on ground and its problems. Okay. So the people who believe in in green energy always talk about wind and solar, and I've been a supporter of of alternate energy, gosh, for, like 30, 40 years, I got interested in it back in the in the seventies. But it's not a perfect solution. In fact, there may mighty problems involved with it when you're using it as a major source of energy.
Sunlight is a very diffuse source of energy. It takes a huge amount in terms of millions of tons of equipment. Maybe 100 of millions of tons that has to be fabricated and built and and and play and constructed to gather and store the energy. So think about it. Sunlight on the Earth's surface is available on average less than 1 third of the time in most areas due to nighttime, clouds, low sun angle, and fog. Wind is intermittent and hard to predict, so you have to have a backup system.
Currently, backup systems consist of fossil fuel plants, which you have to like, typically a natural gas plant, which you can turn on in a hurry if the wind dies away. But if you know if if if a weather system brews up, the cars may move in and the sun may go out, and then you have to get your your backup system on in a hurry. So it's really expensive to maintain a system like that.
And in some in some areas, you may only get 3 effective hours of full sun in the winter, which means you have effectively 21 hours of no sun at all in terms of your total amount of energy which requires a very very large, backup system if you want to have a pure, alternate energy which means no fossil fuel backup which would break the bank of every country on Earth. So if we definitely want, alternate energy as part of our mix.
It's very useful, if you can use it in the summertime for like, on your roof to run a, a, air conditioner when the sun is shining, but for as a centralized, energy source, it has real problems. Also, the storing energy of electricity is extravagantly expensive. I mean I mean, extravagantly expensive.
Even though they'll get the cost of the batteries down, there's gonna be millions and millions of tons of of stuff mined, smelted, fabricated, and turned into all these batteries, which are gonna cover enormous areas with battery plants. So the 3rd major bullet point, alternate energy in space. A a space I wanna I wanna add to the last one that you spoke about. I'm trying to find it, and it was taking me a second to go through my I kept this window open.
There's a gentleman, I can't remember his name, and maybe I'll find it while we're looking. He had for 30, 40 years, he had been studying solar power, and he was a big advocate of it, huge advocate of solar power. The challenge that he or and wind power. And he at one point, he started to realize that solar power required football fields, large of facilities, so they would have to destroy entire ecosystems just to be able to put them up.
That solar power, the panels in 20 years or 30 years will have to be sent to some third world country or be destroyed or whatever, and they have chemicals in them, and they're gonna be challenging to be able to, to work with. And when he did all the math of how endangered species are being killed by windmills, especially large species, He came to the conclusion that the French did, and he says he hates to admit it. He did a TED talk on this.
He hates to admit it, but he came to the conclusion that these texts do more damage to the ecosystem. And what he talked about was the the the challenge to manufacture, the challenge to move, the cost of the utilization of the product can create millions of, respiratory diseases and challenges in the air because there's toxic gases given off. And then he said he showed a picture and he said, this is a nuclear facility and this is the room that you could store everything in for 30 years.
And nothing is spout out into the atmosphere. And he said, I've I hate to say this, but I've come to the conclusion that this little tiny building as compared to football fields and getting and tortoises happened to be pulled out or, out of their their nests and and areas having to be stripped out. He said, it's better than everything we have on the table today. So I'm adding that to your alternative energy. I'm looking into it, but it was a real neat TED talk.
So what he's talking about there is what I refer to as energy density. Energy density refers to how much total mass of physical equipment does it take to make the energy, And how much land area does it take to collect and store the energy? And my my I came to the conclusion by civil arithmetic that the area of solar panels is much larger than the area of the city that it would supply.
And that you have to then put the the, solar farms 100 of miles away from the city and have giant power lines carrying the electricity to the city because there's nowhere near the city that you could put this the the solar farms. They're they cover 100 of square miles, not football field sized areas. And people don't understand the scale of a of a global, a pure ground solar, system.
However, we'll point out that wind power is, I think, significantly more efficient in terms of materials and energy density, than, than solar power. That's a little nod to wind power, especially wind power near, oceans or in wind areas which have wind most of the time. So that that's a nod to them. Okay. So now remember, we don't have a crystal ball. So we're not trying to prognosticate.
We're showing possible pathways, one one possible solution to the glow to the, global warming problem, life, in fact, several pathways lie in space. But one of them involves the moon and here's how how it works. So one of the sol one of the solutions to the physical space problem on the ground and and also to the problem of nighttime is put your solar panels in space. If you put them in geosynchronous orbit, that's the 24 hour orbit.
So if you go around the Earth 24 in 24 hours and you're above a city, the city goes around in 24 hours. Your satellite stays right over that city that is aimed down to a receiver on the ground picking up the ray radio waves that transmit the energy down. And you it's not take up any physical space on the earth and because it's not subject to wind, hail, rust, dust, nighttime, fog, snow, rain, corrosion, all the problems. Take take your TV set. You put your TV set outside for 30 years.
Is it gonna be working? Of course not. But you put a satellite in space, for 30 years. We have satellites that have been out there for, like, about 50 years. They still work because, it's they're they're they don't they're not easily damaged. It's not for meteorite hits it, but the total number of meteorites are are kinda low.
So these units are these huge assemblages of solar panels in GeoSigmas orbit or other locations are called solar power satellites, and the concept itself is called space solar power. And it's simply getting your power from above the Earth in space instead of on the surface. So it gets rid of all the problems and you get 247 energy. You get, the the, the earth goes I'm trying to think. It it it goes through the, the shadow, I think, of the moon occasionally.
And so they may have, like, 1 hour, every few months. I think it's twice a year, where you you don't have any any energy. But all the rest of time, 247, like, 95% or more of the year, you're getting energy out of these systems. So they when you're when you're up there in in orbit, you're things don't have any weight. The gravity field is still there. But you're in orbit, so you're essentially weightless. They call it microgravity. So you can build very large structures.
So these structures would be arrays of solar panels miles long, and they the the the panel array would face the sun all the time. They would face the sun at 90 degrees, so they'd be getting the full sun. And the sunlight in space is actually 30% stronger than on the ground. So on the ground and on in at noon on the earth in a desert, you get about 1,000 watts per square meter. In space, you get almost 1400 watts per square meter, about 13 13 70 watts something like that.
So you can build these things and assemble them in space. They do not have to track the sun because they're aiming at the sun all the time. There's almost no moving parts. The solar panels will last many decades, and and, they would they, you know, you can probably recycle the material more easily than on the ground.
The total amount of physical mass that you need to create a solar power satellite system is at least a 100 times less than on the ground because you don't have to support the solar power. Any infrastructure to hold it up. No. And you don't have any wind, so you don't have to stiffen it against wind damage. And you don't have hail. You don't have to worry about hail damaging the solar panels. Imagine what baseball sized hail with duty due to your solar panels.
We we've just had some hail over here in the last week or 2. So now the power is generated turning it turned initially into electricity. It it it's fed to a very large transmitter dish, typically about 1 kilometer across. Again, it doesn't weigh very much because it's in space, which then aims the power down at the ground. And at the ground installation, the ground receiver is, like, less than a tenth of the size of the equivalent ground solar power plant.
A few miles across, it has to be spread out so you don't want your, radio energy coming down to concentrated form. Typically, it's about 1 quarter as strong as sunlight is, so it can't hurt anyone. Birds can sit and perch in it, and they won't they won't be harmed. In fact, birds have noted notably been found sitting in radar beams because the radar makes them warmer. So that it doesn't even hurt birds.
So one of these large power satellites, say a 5 gigawatt power satellite can supply all the power to a very large city. And we would want probably at least a 100 of these for the US that would make equivalent of 500 gigawatts of power. They can come in different sizes. You might have 1 gigawatt, 5 gigawatt, 10 gigawatt sizes of the satellite.
But it takes so much less material to build them that the the the energy density of a space solar power system is much higher and especially because it does not use anywhere as near as much land area as on the ground and and even more amazing because they because they a solar power satellite receiver is like a whole bunch of little spidery TV antennas up above, say, about 15 or 20 feet above the ground on a network of of, of thin beams.
The most of the sunlight hits the ground, and so you can use the ground under this array for grazing or or growing crops. You're you're not losing the land. Right. Yeah. Which is a huge benefit. So it's so let me get the the the energy is being let's call it beam down. Yes. Exactly. Just like beaming And it's Beam me down, Scotty. Right. And it's beaming down an energy wave. Right.
It's not beaming down a laser or any You could do a laser beam, and that that may be used in in a low power lasers for emergencies of supplies of power. Say like you have a earthquake disaster zone. You can set one of these things up with a laser beam system over a like a large area. Say several 100 feet across and get several megawatts of power out of it.
But you probably can't it's you don't wanna do that for really big lasers and also a a a laser powered by such a system theoretically could also be used as a weapon. So people are kind of a little skittish when it comes to transmitting the power via laser beam. Although they you can make the beam so it it has to spread out over a wider area. Also, clouds could could theoretically could block block the beam and make it bounce bounce away from the ground just like sunlight.
And so a a cloud could theoretically stop the beam, but it's it's much more difficult, to stop the the radio beam. I mean, the radio waves go right through everything. Right. So the so the radio wave is coming at a less intense energy delivery system, but still you're getting because of the size and mass of the dish in the air in the in geosynchronous orbit and the size of the receiver on earth, you're getting ample amount of energy transferred for a city.
Yeah. But and even more you say it's 1 quarter as strong as sunlight is what you think is very weak but that energy is there 247. All during the nighttime around sunset when the sun is rising, and so forth, you're getting and when it's cloudy, that energy beam is still there. So it's much more efficient. And the materials used to build the receiving antenna are being used more efficiently because they're getting energy all the time, instead of only part of the time. That's really important.
Now I don't know if you're going to go over this, so I'm gonna ask this now. What are the, what are the people who believe that this tech won't work saying? Well, we've been we've been, supplying our satellites with solar power, space solar power for, gosh, most of my lifetime. Since since they put put the first satellites up, they started using, solar, cells on them because they they battery server would run down in a day or 2. Right. It's solar power.
So that my question is, are there people out there who are saying this tech won't work? And what are they saying? Well, it's mostly a political thing The people even when the whole idea first came out, there are people said people would be irradiated by these by the by these beams. And, they had visions of people being boiled in their own blood by by super powerful beams. But you can't the the the the problem is, of course, you can't focus a beam like that.
It would take a transmitter probably a 100 miles across to be able to even focus a beam, so that it would really do damage or at least 10 miles across. And if you're building something that big, people would know about it right away. And Right. It's not you're you're not gonna hide a 10 10 mile across or what? About, 20 kilometer across item, and you're not gonna be able to hide that.
And in fact, the beam itself, cannot even focus unless you have a guide transmitter on the ground sending a little signal up to the satellite telling the beam come and aim at me. And that's how that's how it works. It can't otherwise, the beam just spreads out harmlessly in all directions. And again So is it so on a on a global scale, I can understand the US. You've got, interested parties who don't wanna have, a very inexpensive in long term, inexpensive delivery of energy.
On other other countries around the world, their biggest challenge is that they're not in space and that's why? Yeah. But we would build these facilities for any country. The whole idea, it it it actually see, a lot of the problem of ground solar power is that 80%, 70% of the energy gets turned immediately into heat and you're talking about global warming.
So these hut thousands of square miles of solar panels, maybe a 100,000 miles or more of solar panels would be dumping 70% of their energy directly into the Earth's atmosphere creating an enormous amount of extra heat. And Oh, they they they've even starting to do that, areas on Earth which were, they were positive in terms of being able to absorb energy. They were able to absorb sunlight. They were able to convert, to c o two.
And now because of deforestation and land reclamation, that, we're maybe that's the wrong word, but wherever we're destroying habitats, these are now producing additional heat for the earth. So this wouldn't help to have an entire solar array adding more to the entire infrastructure. And when you're talking about each city would require several 100 square miles depending on the size of the city. The solar panels and probably a 100 square miles of batteries covering the land.
And that those those actually do cover the land so efficiently. You have although they actually to to avoid shading one collector by another in the ground, you have to space them so that they're a solar power set site on the ground is only 25% covered by collectors, and the rest of it is spacing to avoid one collector shaking the other ones. So it it does kinda waste a lot a lot of ground. Okay. So So we're so I I had stopped you on that point. So we we got some good more information.
So the alternative, this space energy opens the the the alternative energy in space and its promise. Is there anything else to add to that? Well, I don't like to denigrate anyone, but there are some people who who are ideological about, you know, like, mankind is evil. It's a blight on the universe, and we don't want mankind to get more energy.
And and they they consider that providing more energy is bad, but it actually the people on earth who have the highest population growth rate are the people who live in areas with the lowest per capita energy use. So if you actually give them more energy in a clean way, of course, their effect within a generation or so, their population growth rate slows down.
So actually population growth and the occupation of wild land that was previously wild land by permanently by humans is actually get destroys more wildlife than global warming does because it's permanently occupied land by by humans and that's what population growth does. Especially areas like Africa where the many people are still basically living on their human muscle power alone. Those areas have the highest population growth rate right now.
So that, you know, if we wanna save, the wildlife in Africa, we better get the most people some energy pretty quick. I like the idea. So let's go on to this, the new space opens the door to space. Okay. So as most people don't realize that almost every beautiful rocket you see taking off from Cape Canaveral or Gvannenberg or wherever, when it's done launching the satellite, it goes splat into the ocean and smashed into lots of little pieces and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
And it's it's completely smashed and useless. So that's called an expendable rocket. All rockets are treated like a weapon, like an artillery shell. It's what we call the artillery shell mentality. You fire a rocket away and it does it it does its job. Now a rocket costs as much as more as a whole airliner. So imagine if you hit an airliner that you had never flown had never flown before on a test flight, and you get a 100 people on it.
You fly it to LA, and and all the people get off, and then you and they turn that airliner to scrap. And then you get a brand new airliner to fly back to Washington or New York. And then when when they get off the plane, that airliner is turned into scrap. How long could could you afford to run such airline, and how much would each ticket cost? Well A lot of money. If you had to say 200 people, the ticket just to build the airliner would be half a $1,000,000 per ticket. Real simple.
So that explains why spaceflight is so expensive because we've been throwing our rockets away every time for 60 years. Okay? It's just, you know, it's mind boggling. We've tried and tried over the years to get the government to try to build reusable rockets. And I was present back in September 11, 1993 when the first big rocket, the DCX, took off from White Sands and landed again intact. And it over the following years, it did it successfully, 9 or 10 times.
And and it was it worked just the same way that the Falcon 9 rockets do. Yeah. And there's there's video online for anybody who is interested. You can look up the DCX, and you could see that what Elon Musk and what Bezos are doing today, was done in 1996. 90/93, actually. The first flight is August 93, and the second flight was was publicly open, to reporters and stuff. It was in September 11, 1993. I was there. So we we spent a long time. Which been like the the long twilight struggle.
Those still small voices in the world is calling out to the big powers. Why don't you try why don't we build reusable rockets so we can afford to build power satellites so we can afford to stop global warming. But they wouldn't listen because the big big boys, had wanted to do it their way. So there is again, there's another way to do it. So, Elon Musk came along and perhaps more than anyone else, he had a specific reason to build reusable rockets.
He wants to to start a, a colony on Mars and be able to do lots of other things in space. So he he didn't know he did he didn't even know how to build a rocket himself. He learned how to be to be a rocket engineer, which is not easy, and has built up this company of about 6,000 people. And they're now busy building. You're getting ready to test launch a rocket that is 30 feet wide down in South Texas, and it will take off and land just like the Falcon, 9 rockets, which are about 12 feet wide.
So this this rocket will be much heavier than the Saturn 5 rocket when it when it when the full size rocket finally takes off. And it'll be able to launch, payloads very, very cheaply because they get the whole rocket back. The the first stage will land, and the second stage will land. So you'll it's be even cheaper than a than a Falcon 9 because you get the entire rocket, just not the first stage back. Right. So that's a really big a big deal.
So the new space companies, especially SpaceX, are now building, flying, and recovering, and landing reusable rockets. So if you want to build a power satellite, the first thing you do is you fabricate the parts, which are just thousands thousands of identical parts so they could be mass produced very easily. And you get them into, low Earth orbit where, like, this is basically where the space station is, but you can put them into equatorial lower Earth orbit where it's even cheaper to reach.
It's right over the equator. So then you need to get them from lower Earth orbit up to the 24 hour geosynchronous orbit, but that takes a lot of energy in space. That what they call delta v or change in velocity is sort of similar to the distance of a trip on the ocean or in the air because it takes energy to go a certain distance on on on the water, on land, in space to get to it to change your velocity a certain amount takes energy.
And so it takes, 4 kilometers per second of delta v change in velocity to get up to geosynchronous orbit. That's a fair amount of energy. So the other problem is that because of carelessness, we've allowed a lot of space junk to accumulate in low Earth orbit in the area immediately above it.
So they say up to about a 1000 miles or so with all these communication satellites and used rocket stages and others thing other things, which are creating space debris, which if it hits you at 5 miles per second, is could could destroy a whole satellite or a whole spacecraft. So what we want to do is to get the stuff, the equipment, the parts up to geosynchronous orbit as quickly as we can through this shrapnel zone, which is not that massive that it will immediately destroy something.
But it's a it's a financial risk to bring it up to it if you do it slowly. So you wanna get bring it up fast. So the next then the next thing is the moon itself. Moon to the rescue. So every people might may know by now the moon was created by a giant collision about 4000000000 years ago. Actually, longer ago than that. When a when a small planet hit the Earth and it turned both planets into molt into liquid, like, lava and a lot of it into into rock vapor.
And the moon was born out of this huge ring of rock vapor circling the Earth. So almost all the water in the moon was driven off because the moon was formed from a hot cloud of gas and but the Earth and other planets typically were formed out of cold, clumps of gas into and and and and dust. So the Earth is and other planets were formed and Mars were formed normally accreted, into a larger planet. So the Moon was formed out of this hot gas, so it has almost no water.
But they've recently discovered at the poles of the moon, especially in craters where the sun never hits, where the they'd say the sun never shines, the so the solar wind and, and comet impacts and other things have created deposits of water which when the water atoms or molecules hit these cold trap areas in these crater bottoms near the moon's poles, they stick to the surface because it's it's down at about 40 degrees Kelvin which is something like 400 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.
It's really cold. It's only 40 degrees above absolute 0. So So so the the way the way you're describing it, just for clarity for individuals, is that we've got craters on the moon At the poles. And those craters wherever, especially on the poles, are subject, or the craters throughout the the moon are subject to the sun's intense heat Which drives on water. Right. Which scrapes off the water. But at these certain places where they're hidden from view, if you want to call it that Yeah.
Where the sun never stops. Right. And they this way, in those specific places, there's water on the moon. So we've been able to identify it, and I've gone over this in the past, but we've been able to identify that there's actually ice crystals and water on the moon. And, there could be billions of tons of water up there. It's enough to support a very large amount of space traffic because water, if you turn that water to hydrogen and oxygen, you have a completely safe, non toxic rocket fuel.
Oxygen and hydrogen. You liquefy it and you can use it immediately as rocket fuel. So that's a source of rocket fuel. Now, you turn this, what what you have to purify the water first because there's other stuff besides water in in these deposits. Even there's even elemental mercury, which is a liquid, of course. And those mercury atoms get stuck there too. So you purify it, turn it into rocket fuel.
So you turn the rocket fuel, and you bring it up to a a what we call a propellant depot, which is called, in an area called L1, Lagrange Point 1. It's about 50,000 miles away from the moon turned to Earth, which is sort of a gravitational null point, and you can put up there. So so let's just slow down for a minute for those who've never heard that term before. You'll hear people in the space industry calling it, there there's, I believe, 5 of them, the L1, L2, L3, L4.
This one is a space between the moon and Earth where the gravitational pull between both of them is almost neutralized. Or to some degree, if you thought about it, you'd be floating in the middle of both of them where the gravity would pull just enough one way and just enough another so that you can sit in stasis. And you because you have to have a a small amount of of reaction gas to to sit.
Imagine if you're sort of sitting on a frictionless hill, so you need to stay right in the center of that hill or you slide down one way or the other. Once you start sliding down, then it takes a lot more, propellant to get you back where where you should be. So just tiny amounts of propellant can keep you right in the center of it, but it's a very, very it's a it's a good point. It's a what we call it, it's high in the gravity well. I know people may not have heard the term gravity.
So so let me just, the gravity well, is the the depth of the gravity on the planet or sphere or whatever object. Right. So one of the challenges with space is that Earth has an extremely deep gravity well. Well, we're the gravity well challenges. The gravity was the same strength all the way to the top, and it suddenly stopped. The gravity well is about 4,000 miles deep. It gives you an idea of how imagine climbing a 4000 mile high hill. And that's one of the challenges on earth.
You I I was sitting with Bruce Pittman and Dan Rasky, and Dan came into the room. These are 2 people at NASA Ames. Dan came into the room right after Elon Musk's rocket had, crashed at the 2 minutes and 19 seconds. I think that was a number. And he says to me, CC David David, space is hard. And I looked at him and I said, I've gotta bet you that space Earth is hard. We have politics. We have gravity. We have manufacturing. We have human nature. We have all of these challenges.
We're fairly good when we get to space. It's a challenging environment, but earth is a challenging space to get out of, and there's a lot of things dragging us down. Like, you just described, the reason we're not in space, even though we had the the development of the DCX, it didn't move forward. And that's human nature stopping the progress of space. That was that was politics that stopped that. We could have had Falcon nines, like, over a decade or 15 years earlier if that had moved ahead.
Right. So that's the this this gravity well is a significant obstacle for for space development. So you want your fuel depot should be at the top of the gravity well, But you it it all you can then use this fuel if you get it down to lower the orbit to use the liquid fuel to get your payloads up past the space debris zone quickly and up, into the geosynchronous orbit where there's very little space debris and where the satellites move a lot slower.
So it's that the space debris, right, so far, is not a problem in geosynchronous orbit. In speed? What's the difference in speed? Well, gosh. You're probably going well, in in lower orbit, you're going about 18,000 miles an hour. And so your synchronous orbit, you're probably going, I don't know, between 5, 10000 miles an hour. I'd have to do a calculation. Wow. That's that's a lot slower. Okay. Yeah. I just wanna get a reference.
Yeah. But remember, you're pacing Because you're pacing the Earth as you go around. So so the satellite orbit is a lot bigger than the than the surface of the Earth, but it has to go around to the same circle at the same rotation rate that the Earth does. Right. It's it's, you wanna I guess the way to think of it for anybody who's not heard of geosynchronous orbit is it's it's it's mirroring the earth. It's right there. So if you live if you live in London, that satellite will follow London.
Exactly. That that source would follow London no matter where it is. So it would be an expansion of the earth's, crust to this level where you'd it'd be spinning at the same rate. Everything would would follow. And if you have DIRECTV, you have a, a comm sat that your that your intent is aimed at. It's always there in the same spot. The satellite knows to stay right in the same spot so that your your tiny antenna will point at it, and you're always getting your TV signal.
The words exactly That's a good way to describe it. Good way to describe it. Thank you. Okay. So if you it turns out that getting the lunar propellant down from the l one down to the lowerth orbit is much cheaper.
It only takes, less than 1 kilometer per second of delta v or change in velocity to get down to to lower the orbit because then you can then what we do in called an arrow capture using the Earth's atmosphere to slow down into the lower the orbit, than it does to bring it up from the Earth which requires about 9 kilometers per second, which is vastly more energy than to come down.
It's, it it it gets real technical, but if you double your double It's not it's not so it's well, I think on the on an easier way because if you look at you could do the math, but what you're saying is if we manufacture or do our work on Earth, then we have this huge challenge of getting it out to atmosphere because of this gravity well. Let's just use that as the the the major challenge. But the moon doesn't is 16 gravity to the earth.
Therefore, getting it off the moon Doesn't take much energy. Doesn't take much energy. And what I tell people is if you have a if you have a marble on earth and you try to throw it up, it might go, 5 kilometer, 5 meters or 7 meters up. So it's 20, 15, 25 feet up. But on the moon, if you did the exact same thing and it was 20, it would now go a 120 feet. So it's significantly easier to be able to, work off of the moon.
So, you know, your like your typical space capsule that you put into orbit is, say, 10 tons. Right? So it takes 100 and 100 of tons of rocket to launch that 10 ton capsule from the Earth. But on the moon, for 1 ton of of cargo, including propellant brought up to l one, you know, it takes about 2 tons of of lunar propellant to launch 1 ton of lunar propellant to l one, and that includes going back and landing back at your lunar lunar base around trip. Mhmm. So it's very, very efficient.
And then it takes even less than that to bring it down to the earth because you're coming down the gravity well instead of trying to climb up it. So that's very, very efficient. That means you can get your solar power satellite parts up to the 24 hour geosynchronous orbit quickly and safely without being damaged by space debris and allows you to start building, all these huge power satellites. So in order to do this, we need to build what we what I refer to as a lunar polar mining base.
And that's the, the heading number 6. Yeah. So the reason for building a base, you wanna be able to have a human outpost or base at one of the lunar poles. Either pole will do because there's water in the in the cold trap crater areas at both poles. And you need a you need a bunch of equipment that has to be brought to the moon, for people to safely live there. You need a crew habitat.
It has to be buried under under the regolith, a few meters of regolith to protect the crew from space radiation. You need some spare crew vehicles. So if some vehicle has it breaks down, the crew can always take another vehicle and get back to earth. You need a energy source. You need a energy source. 1, to power the base itself just like McMurdo base. It takes about 2 megawatts to run the base itself. But you'd also need multi megawatts to turn a power to turn the water ice into rocket fuel.
So you go ahead. No. I was just gonna say yes. You need you'll need a lot of energy to be able to do that also. But we're then again sitting on the moon and And you do have a certain amount of solar power available because in many of these areas, they're what they call areas where the that are illuminated most of the time because the sun is right at the horizon most of the time. It's only in the deep craters that the sun can't reach, which is it's very interesting situation.
You have areas which are lit, as much as 70 to 80% of the time, and then there are areas nearby which which the sun never touches. If it did, all that water would disappear very quickly. So then you need excavators to dig the the the and and and lift the, the the the water ice and mixture, water ice and moon dust out. You need a purification plant to separate the water. You need an elect an elect electrolysis plant to turn the water purified water into hydrogen and oxygen.
And you need a liquefaction plant to liquefy those gases. And you can actually store the liquefied gases down in the cold trap crater if you want where it may be so cold. The gas might even freeze solid, at least the oxygen would. At 40 Kelvin, believe me. You'd have solid oxygen. You have to be careful.
You need storage tanks and pumps for the fuel on the moon, storage tanks and pumps for the fuel that's been taken to l 1 and taker rockets, reusable ones of course, to move the fuel to l 1 and then go back to the moon to get another load. You just just use like a regular truck. It goes back and forth. It carries a load one way and goes back empty. So So the the this is, I believe, what Dallas is working on? Dallas Baynoff. Yes. Yes. Dallas Baynard is working on this.
This is one of his, his initiatives. And I remember I was sitting in a meeting, and he was calling it depots. And I said, we have gas stations. We have gas depots. Let's use, propulsion depots. Let's use words that are common so people on earth can understand it. Right. So, yes. This is yes. I understand it.
So think about this as a, a refueling system with an ecosystem that delivers product from the moon to geosynchronous orbit or into, geosynchronous so that we're constantly being able to be able to keep and and supply the world with energy. Exactly. So, the if we can have such a system and with the inexpensive rockets that we have now that that would be able to operate inexpensive because you get the rocket back.
The same rocket can make dozens of trips from the Earth to orbit and the same tanker rocket can make dozens of trips from the moon to l one. And another tanker rocket can make dozens of trips from l one down to the Earth's orbit and go go back again. Because when it goes back to l one, it doesn't have any propellant in it except just the propellant it needs to get back to l one. So the it's very efficient.
This would mean probably in about one generation, we can build enough power satellites to completely replace the the the vast majority of of our liquid current liquid propellant and carbon based fuels that we're using to to generate electricity, and therefore, we can stop global warming. And that that that will get and it will also you know, a lot of people talk about global warming as if the materials produced are are pollutants.
But, like, for example, if you're burning, many of these plants, the most of the product is water vapor and carbon dioxide because they have really good scrubbers now. They get rid of almost all the actual toxic pollutants that that used to be produced. So, we'll be able to, produce clean energy. The energy obviously being produced on the moon. You're use you're using the energy to make the rocket fuel. You're not using fossil fuel to make it.
And if you use the energy from the power satellites to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen on the earth, that rocket fuel could be made without using fossil fuels too. Currently, a lot of hydrogen is produced using fossil fuel, but we can end that by by using solar energy from space to produce all our rocket fuel, from electricity, from electrolysis. So let me add 1 ask one question that has to do with the moon. Are there resources on the moon for the building and development of the satellites?
Well, now it will will take us a while to build up a wider variety of industries on the lunar surface. Remember the moon is a what I call a refractory world because it lost the vast bulk of its light elements. Elements which are easily evaporated. There's very little, native carbon and things like that, and gases of any kind on the moon. But there are things like it has aluminum, it has iron, it has enormous amounts of silica and oxygen in its rocks. And there are other And platinum?
Platinum is in the hydrometer, so there's enough, iron ore? Yeah. They they call they call those elements siderophile, which means iron loving. Like a siderite. It's like a meteorite. So you've got iron, nickel, and then you've got platinum, osmium, iridium, palladium, and several other of these iron loving minerals which are quite valuable and are mixed in with nickel iron meteorites. And as much as 1% of the lunar dust is this nick nickel iron powder.
So you you've if if that is sufficiently dense to make it ore. Remember, an ore is defined by, can you make money if you retrieve it and purify it? If it's not dense enough, it's not an ore. It's a rock. It's what what we call a levarite. A levarite means leave it right there. So that there I mean, having this what we call a cislunar transportation system. Cislunar simply the space between the Earth and the Moon's orbit and which includes all of the, the l points.
L l one That's what we have the that's what we have the Mearth that we spoke about, moon and Earth. The l five society itself was used the name l 5 as as the name of the society because it was proposed to build a space colony there. You can actually build the space colonies in many locations.
And in the further in the future, we may find huge numbers of space colonies built in the asteroid belt because there's a very large supply of nickel iron asteroids in the asteroid belt itself, which are closer. And you may even want to build a a a a settlement in the same orbit as an asteroid where you be get you could get your your, raw materials almost for free. Because when you go along the orbit of something, it takes almost no propellant to go along an orbit.
It's only when you leave the orbit that it takes propellant. So there's it opens a very, very wide array of Yeah. It's it's I I gotta tell you, John, this is this is absolutely what I was looking for. This was brilliant. You walked me through this in a way that I understood it. I had I had heard all sorts of stories from different people, pieces, as I think I've shared with you the one of the first events that I had gone to or spoke at was a National Space Society.
And I've learned a lot over the years, but this was the first time that I felt the I felt the logic coming together. And I really appreciate I truly appreciate your historical reference to, DeepTime and how that's impactful in, understanding some of the challenges that we're going through today. So remember, this is not a crystal ball. This is not locked in. Politics could derail it.
If we get fusion power, the fusion power would be a fantastic substitute, and we also need fusion power for terraforming and interstellar travel. So I very strongly support fusion power research, along with all the other, all the along with the other types of research in space and in space science too. Oh, I I have I'd have a lot more questions for you, but I'm gonna end it here. But thank you so much. You did an amazing job of walking this me through the understanding of this.
So I absolutely appreciate the information and and, the way you wove the story. It was it was brilliant. Thank you. So with that said, again, very quickly, Project Moon Hut Foundation is, has been working for over 5 years. We have people all around the world who have been helping us from Israel and Dore to people in Germany, Moscow, United States, Hong Kong, South Africa. We've had people helping us all over the world. And our directive is to create sustainable life on the moon.
And it's not self sustaining life, so here we're supporting it, just as if we talked about these rockets through the accelerated development of an Earth and space Earth and space based ecosystem. So our initiative is to help drive this tech, these types of techs that end up doing one thing. They change how we live on Earth for all species. As far as we know in the earth today, the the earth today is the one place on earth that's really our home.
And the more I can learn, the more we can learn, the better able to make better decisions moving forward as to where we should spend our energy as the world shifts and changes. So once again, thank you for being on the show. There there's a few things, projectmoonhunt.org. You can go to the website, sign up for a space related database. You can go to facebookforward/projectmoonhut. You can go to Twitter and you can tweet to us at projectmoonhut. And you can email me at [email protected].
So for everybody, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite, a Project Moon Hut podcast series. For those of you who don't know, Project Moon Hut, as of today, is a 5 year project where we've been working with teams around the world, including NASA and NASA Ames facility, so a team there.
And we're focusing on developing self sustainable life on the moon through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem to change how we live on Earth or within Mearth as we call it, moon and Earth, for all species. Today, we have a great guest on the line, John Strickland. How are you, John? Fine. You're fine. That's good. I hope you're you're much better than you find today when we go through the program.
The the title that John and I have come up with for this program is the logic behind the moon, power satellites, power satellites, and solving climate change. Now you've heard me mention a few times the National, Space Society. John is a on the board of directors of National Space Society. He's been an advocate for the Space Frontier Foundation. And as he told me just a few minutes ago, he has been interested in space since he's been 10 years old.
So I guess there's a reference point we have to put here, John. How old are you? I am 76. 76. So that's quite a few years ago. So, John, you have a few bullet points for us. What are they? Okay. The first one is global warming from a deep time perspective. From deep time. Wow. Deep time perspective. Okay. Next. Okay. Alternate energy on the ground and its problems. Alternate energy on ground and its problems. Next. Alternate energy in space and its promise. Ah, energy in space and its promise.
Okay. Next. New space opens the door to space. Next. Moon to the rescue. Love the moon. Okay. And next. The rationale for a lunar polar mining base. Lunar polar mining base. And you had told me you have 6, so I'm assuming that's it. That was it. Yep. Alright. So I'm this this first one, global warming from a a deep deep time perspective, hit me. I'm I'm I'm smiling. I'm ready to hear what you've gotta say about this.
Okay. So, you know, deep time simply means geological time, millions and millions of years of time. Right? Well, now I do. So thank you. So, for question number 1, what is the ice age? What is the ice age? Can you describe what the ice age that people can see of when they hear the word ice age is? Okay. So I'm going to I'm gonna screw this up royally because there's definitely an answer that I don't know even though I've studied some of these things in university.
The ice age is a period in time in which, for a multitude of reasons, the atmosphere had changed the possibly the rotation of the or the slowing of the earth or the axis of, one of those has caused the earth to cool or first added humidity into the air and then cooled and created ice that went all the way down as far as, for example, in the states to the middle of the country. And I know I screwed that up really bad. Well, you got a part of it right.
So Okay. First of all, we're we're we're are living in a the warm cycle of the current ice age, which with the cycle lasts a 100000 years, of which the warm cycle lasts about 12 to 15000 years maximum. So you got about 90,000 years of cold cycle. But that's just one of the current cycles of the current ice eon. And I could ask you what an ice eon, but since I made that term up, to to fill a gap in terminology, I'll let me describe it. Then I would not get it right. So I appreciate the help.
Simply a period of time, say, longer than a 1000000 years. It's for humans, that's eons of time. But Okay. Yep. Just so we have some idea. So what may most people don't understand that we're still living in the place to see geological period. And there have been couple dozen of these 100000 year and earlier about 55000 year cold and warm ice age cycles since the start of the Pleistocene about 3000000 years ago. But the big issue, of course, is what causes an ice age.
Now the the the normal, axial rotation of the Earth, creates things called Milanovic Cycles, which match the 100000 year, current ice age warm cold and warm cycles. Okay. But the bigger the bigger period is the ice in itself. During most of ice Earth's history of the least a half 1000000000 years, 500000000 years since the end of the Precambrian, we have been, about 3 quarters of the time roughly in a period with no ice eons at all where the ocean is about 250 feet higher than it is now.
No continental glaciers anywhere on earth. You'd have mountain glaciers certainly, but you'd have these shallow seas, that would cover, many of the lower low lying parts of continents. And where the dinosaur relatives love to to play and and get food in these shallow seas like plesiosaurs and metmosasaurs and so forth. So, the question is what causes the ice eons themselves?
Well, you know about plate tectonics, how the Earth's, core drives the the convection currents in the Earth's mantle, which is made out of Yeah. Like, very hot silly putty, which drives the continents like the scum on on a on a boiling pot of of a stew or soup and makes it move around. It moves around to a really clear pattern, but in terms of where the Earth's poles are, it's sort of like a random pattern.
So, essentially, about one quarter of the time a pole of the earth is covered, or is it has has a continental mass over it because there's roughly 1 quarter of the surface is continental mass a little bit more than that and about 3 quarters of it a little bit less is water. So on an average period you've got about 25% chance that that a pole be covered by, land and 3 quarters of quarter 75% chance it'll be covered by water.
Now imagine you you look at the current situation where you have the South Pole right in the middle of Antarctica. And, of course, I glaciers conform on the land and the ocean can't sweep sleep sleep the ice away because it's on solid ground even though that ground is is, you know, extremely depressed by the way to the ice. The other the other one is the Arctic Ocean, which is hemmed in out by all the continents around it.
So the ice pack there can't be easily swept away by ocean currents either. So you have actually although you have an ocean over the North Pole, it's as if you had a continental mass there because the ice can form around that around the pole and it can't be swept away. But imagine if you had a pole as you often do, let's say in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, what would happen? If it was in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean Or Pacific.
If you had a if you had a North or South Pole and and the ice tried the water got real cold and the and the and it and it tried to form packed ice floating Wouldn't it wouldn't it change the road wouldn't it change the rotation of the earth because the No. No? What would happen is the corrosion currents would continuously sweep away the cold water and ice. The cold water would sink to the bottom, create a completely different pattern. Yeah. The oceanic movement.
Yeah. The whole pathway would be different. So you so we are actually living right now in a very rare period of Earth's history, only about 1 tenth of Earth's history, how we living in an era of 2 ice eons. Effectively, an ice eon affects 1 hemisphere at a time, but we're living in this period for at least the last 3000000 years called the Pleistocene where we've got 2 of them.
And the other one started about 30000000 years ago when Antarctica started to move over the South Pole and started to form its ice cap. So if you know, they're they don't they're not synchronized at all. It's sort of random. So this is really important to understand that we're not only living in this very rare period of a double ASEAN, but and then we will be in that period for many millions of years to come because of the continents don't move very rapidly. They move a few inches a year.
So it's this Do you this is an aside question. Do you think that humans' ability to develop came about because this rare condition. It's possible that the climatic conditions such as the creation of arid areas in Africa and all, could've had if it had happened at just the right time. But, it's also true that primates are extremely adaptable animals, and humans have adapted to a very wide range of habitats.
And even during the periods of supercontinents over a 100000000 years ago is the latest one, you did have enormous deserts and dry areas because it was hard for moisture from the oceans to get to the center of a supercontinent and make rain. So Mhmm. It it the the the this these conditions are not unique, but, it it is that you do you do have the stresses created by the the the cold the cold weather and all.
And humans have been since since, I guess, like, over a 100000 years ago, have been living in Siberia where it get down to, like, 80 degrees below 0, which is amazing that that cavemen could do that. Okay. I get it. So, yep. I'm sorry I interrupted. You're you're doing great. I love this. So where My my my I was a biology major. So one of my favorite classes was biology of vertebrates. So we went all the way back in history. So this is bringing back a lot of memories.
I had a class, the evolution of vertebrates with the the textbook by Colbert, famous. But just just just remember, you're you're 70 years old. You're Yeah. You're 70 some odd. I'm 55. That 20 year difference, I mean, makes a difference in what we were taught. You were at the beginning phases of it when and I was already they were developed.
So the basic the basic lesson I'm trying to explain is the periods of high carbon dioxide level and periods of warm temperature are actually more normal for the Earth than than the current cold pit paradigm that we're the long term cold pair that we're in, which is the ASEAN. But right now, we're in the middle of an interglacial. We're actually near the end of it. So without without global warming, within a 1000 years or even less, we would go back to a 90,000 year long ice age.
And that would that would be very bad because it would end up with all the trees and plants being scraped off of North America and parts of Europe and ground into the ocean. If you want environmental disaster, think of an ice age. Okay. So, however, the global warming in terms of where we are right now is gonna cause a problem. It's not threatening the Earth.
It does not threaten life on the earth because life has been through even periods of almost complete freezing and periods where the, carbon dioxide level is maybe 20 or 25 or even 50 times higher than it is now where there were no clay no continental glaciers at all. And on top of that, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It's a greenhouse gas just like water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Your body is made out of carbon atoms from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gathered by plants, which have over a 1000000 of years have lowered the carbon dioxide level enough to allow ice ions to affect the whole globe. Typically, ice ion affects the area around the pole the polar cap, but we've got the the carbon dioxide level down low enough now. So to some extent, it can affect the whole globe and even lower the equatorial temperatures a little bit.
Okay. Okay. Now we're going to the second bullet point. The alternative energy on ground and its problems. Okay. So the people who believe in in green energy always talk about wind and solar, and I've been a supporter of of alternate energy, gosh, for, like 30, 40 years, I got interested in it back in the in the seventies. But it's not a perfect solution. In fact, there may mighty problems involved with it when you're using it as a major source of energy.
Sunlight is a very diffuse source of energy. It takes a huge amount in terms of millions of tons of equipment. Maybe 100 of millions of tons that has to be fabricated and built and and and play and constructed to gather and store the energy. So think about it. Sunlight on the Earth's surface is available on average less than 1 third of the time in most areas due to nighttime, clouds, low sun angle, and fog. Wind is intermittent and hard to predict, so you have to have a backup system.
Currently, backup systems consist of fossil fuel plants, which you have to like, typically a natural gas plant, which you can turn on in a hurry if the wind dies away. But if you know if if if a weather system brews up, the cars may move in and the sun may go out, and then you have to get your your backup system on in a hurry. So it's really expensive to maintain a system like that.
And in some in some areas, you may only get 3 effective hours of full sun in the winter, which means you have effectively 21 hours of no sun at all in terms of your total amount of energy which requires a very very large, backup system if you want to have a pure, alternate energy which means no fossil fuel backup which would break the bank of every country on Earth. So if we definitely want, alternate energy as part of our mix.
It's very useful, if you can use it in the summertime for like, on your roof to run a, a, air conditioner when the sun is shining, but for as a centralized, energy source, it has real problems. Also, the storing energy of electricity is extravagantly expensive. I mean I mean, extravagantly expensive.
Even though they'll get the cost of the batteries down, there's gonna be millions and millions of tons of of stuff mined, smelted, fabricated, and turned into all these batteries, which are gonna cover enormous areas with battery plants. So the 3rd major bullet point, alternate energy in space. A a space I wanna I wanna add to the last one that you spoke about. I'm trying to find it, and it was taking me a second to go through my I kept this window open.
There's a gentleman, I can't remember his name, and maybe I'll find it while we're looking. He had for 30, 40 years, he had been studying solar power, and he was a big advocate of it, huge advocate of solar power. The challenge that he or and wind power. And he at one point, he started to realize that solar power required football fields, large of facilities, so they would have to destroy entire ecosystems just to be able to put them up.
That solar power, the panels in 20 years or 30 years will have to be sent to some third world country or be destroyed or whatever, and they have chemicals in them, and they're gonna be challenging to be able to, to work with. And when he did all the math of how endangered species are being killed by windmills, especially large species, He came to the conclusion that the French did, and he says he hates to admit it. He did a TED talk on this.
He hates to admit it, but he came to the conclusion that these texts do more damage to the ecosystem. And what he talked about was the the the challenge to manufacture, the challenge to move, the cost of the utilization of the product can create millions of, respiratory diseases and challenges in the air because there's toxic gases given off. And then he said he showed a picture and he said, this is a nuclear facility and this is the room that you could store everything in for 30 years.
And nothing is spout out into the atmosphere. And he said, I've I hate to say this, but I've come to the conclusion that this little tiny building as compared to football fields and getting and tortoises happened to be pulled out or, out of their their nests and and areas having to be stripped out. He said, it's better than everything we have on the table today. So I'm adding that to your alternative energy. I'm looking into it, but it was a real neat TED talk.
So what he's talking about there is what I refer to as energy density. Energy density refers to how much total mass of physical equipment does it take to make the energy, And how much land area does it take to collect and store the energy? And my my I came to the conclusion by civil arithmetic that the area of solar panels is much larger than the area of the city that it would supply.
And that you have to then put the the, solar farms 100 of miles away from the city and have giant power lines carrying the electricity to the city because there's nowhere near the city that you could put this the the solar farms. They're they cover 100 of square miles, not football field sized areas. And people don't understand the scale of a of a global, a pure ground solar, system.
However, we'll point out that wind power is, I think, significantly more efficient in terms of materials and energy density, than, than solar power. That's a little nod to wind power, especially wind power near, oceans or in wind areas which have wind most of the time. So that that's a nod to them. Okay. So now remember, we don't have a crystal ball. So we're not trying to prognosticate.
We're showing possible pathways, one one possible solution to the glow to the, global warming problem, life, in fact, several pathways lie in space. But one of them involves the moon and here's how how it works. So one of the sol one of the solutions to the physical space problem on the ground and and also to the problem of nighttime is put your solar panels in space. If you put them in geosynchronous orbit, that's the 24 hour orbit.
So if you go around the Earth 24 in 24 hours and you're above a city, the city goes around in 24 hours. Your satellite stays right over that city that is aimed down to a receiver on the ground picking up the ray radio waves that transmit the energy down. And you it's not take up any physical space on the earth and because it's not subject to wind, hail, rust, dust, nighttime, fog, snow, rain, corrosion, all the problems. Take take your TV set. You put your TV set outside for 30 years.
Is it gonna be working? Of course not. But you put a satellite in space, for 30 years. We have satellites that have been out there for, like, about 50 years. They still work because, it's they're they're they don't they're not easily damaged. It's not for meteorite hits it, but the total number of meteorites are are kinda low.
So these units are these huge assemblages of solar panels in GeoSigmas orbit or other locations are called solar power satellites, and the concept itself is called space solar power. And it's simply getting your power from above the Earth in space instead of on the surface. So it gets rid of all the problems and you get 247 energy. You get, the the, the earth goes I'm trying to think. It it it goes through the, the shadow, I think, of the moon occasionally.
And so they may have, like, 1 hour, every few months. I think it's twice a year, where you you don't have any any energy. But all the rest of time, 247, like, 95% or more of the year, you're getting energy out of these systems. So they when you're when you're up there in in orbit, you're things don't have any weight. The gravity field is still there. But you're in orbit, so you're essentially weightless. They call it microgravity. So you can build very large structures.
So these structures would be arrays of solar panels miles long, and they the the the panel array would face the sun all the time. They would face the sun at 90 degrees, so they'd be getting the full sun. And the sunlight in space is actually 30% stronger than on the ground. So on the ground and on in at noon on the earth in a desert, you get about 1,000 watts per square meter. In space, you get almost 1400 watts per square meter, about 13 13 70 watts something like that.
So you can build these things and assemble them in space. They do not have to track the sun because they're aiming at the sun all the time. There's almost no moving parts. The solar panels will last many decades, and and, they would they, you know, you can probably recycle the material more easily than on the ground.
The total amount of physical mass that you need to create a solar power satellite system is at least a 100 times less than on the ground because you don't have to support the solar power. Any infrastructure to hold it up. No. And you don't have any wind, so you don't have to stiffen it against wind damage. And you don't have hail. You don't have to worry about hail damaging the solar panels. Imagine what baseball sized hail with duty due to your solar panels.
We we've just had some hail over here in the last week or 2. So now the power is generated turning it turned initially into electricity. It it it's fed to a very large transmitter dish, typically about 1 kilometer across. Again, it doesn't weigh very much because it's in space, which then aims the power down at the ground. And at the ground installation, the ground receiver is, like, less than a tenth of the size of the equivalent ground solar power plant.
A few miles across, it has to be spread out so you don't want your, radio energy coming down to concentrated form. Typically, it's about 1 quarter as strong as sunlight is, so it can't hurt anyone. Birds can sit and perch in it, and they won't they won't be harmed. In fact, birds have noted notably been found sitting in radar beams because the radar makes them warmer. So that it doesn't even hurt birds.
So one of these large power satellites, say a 5 gigawatt power satellite can supply all the power to a very large city. And we would want probably at least a 100 of these for the US that would make equivalent of 500 gigawatts of power. They can come in different sizes. You might have 1 gigawatt, 5 gigawatt, 10 gigawatt sizes of the satellite.
But it takes so much less material to build them that the the the energy density of a space solar power system is much higher and especially because it does not use anywhere as near as much land area as on the ground and and even more amazing because they because they a solar power satellite receiver is like a whole bunch of little spidery TV antennas up above, say, about 15 or 20 feet above the ground on a network of of, of thin beams.
The most of the sunlight hits the ground, and so you can use the ground under this array for grazing or or growing crops. You're you're not losing the land. Right. Yeah. Which is a huge benefit. So it's so let me get the the the energy is being let's call it beam down. Yes. Exactly. Just like beaming And it's Beam me down, Scotty. Right. And it's beaming down an energy wave. Right.
It's not beaming down a laser or any You could do a laser beam, and that that may be used in in a low power lasers for emergencies of supplies of power. Say like you have a earthquake disaster zone. You can set one of these things up with a laser beam system over a like a large area. Say several 100 feet across and get several megawatts of power out of it.
But you probably can't it's you don't wanna do that for really big lasers and also a a a laser powered by such a system theoretically could also be used as a weapon. So people are kind of a little skittish when it comes to transmitting the power via laser beam. Although they you can make the beam so it it has to spread out over a wider area. Also, clouds could could theoretically could block block the beam and make it bounce bounce away from the ground just like sunlight.
And so a a cloud could theoretically stop the beam, but it's it's much more difficult, to stop the the radio beam. I mean, the radio waves go right through everything. Right. So the so the radio wave is coming at a less intense energy delivery system, but still you're getting because of the size and mass of the dish in the air in the in geosynchronous orbit and the size of the receiver on earth, you're getting ample amount of energy transferred for a city.
Yeah. But and even more you say it's 1 quarter as strong as sunlight is what you think is very weak but that energy is there 247. All during the nighttime around sunset when the sun is rising, and so forth, you're getting and when it's cloudy, that energy beam is still there. So it's much more efficient. And the materials used to build the receiving antenna are being used more efficiently because they're getting energy all the time, instead of only part of the time. That's really important.
Now I don't know if you're going to go over this, so I'm gonna ask this now. What are the, what are the people who believe that this tech won't work saying? Well, we've been we've been, supplying our satellites with solar power, space solar power for, gosh, most of my lifetime. Since since they put put the first satellites up, they started using, solar, cells on them because they they battery server would run down in a day or 2. Right. It's solar power.
So that my question is, are there people out there who are saying this tech won't work? And what are they saying? Well, it's mostly a political thing The people even when the whole idea first came out, there are people said people would be irradiated by these by the by these beams. And, they had visions of people being boiled in their own blood by by super powerful beams. But you can't the the the the problem is, of course, you can't focus a beam like that.
It would take a transmitter probably a 100 miles across to be able to even focus a beam, so that it would really do damage or at least 10 miles across. And if you're building something that big, people would know about it right away. And Right. It's not you're you're not gonna hide a 10 10 mile across or what? About, 20 kilometer across item, and you're not gonna be able to hide that.
And in fact, the beam itself, cannot even focus unless you have a guide transmitter on the ground sending a little signal up to the satellite telling the beam come and aim at me. And that's how that's how it works. It can't otherwise, the beam just spreads out harmlessly in all directions. And again So is it so on a on a global scale, I can understand the US. You've got, interested parties who don't wanna have, a very inexpensive in long term, inexpensive delivery of energy.
On other other countries around the world, their biggest challenge is that they're not in space and that's why? Yeah. But we would build these facilities for any country. The whole idea, it it it actually see, a lot of the problem of ground solar power is that 80%, 70% of the energy gets turned immediately into heat and you're talking about global warming.
So these hut thousands of square miles of solar panels, maybe a 100,000 miles or more of solar panels would be dumping 70% of their energy directly into the Earth's atmosphere creating an enormous amount of extra heat. And Oh, they they they've even starting to do that, areas on Earth which were, they were positive in terms of being able to absorb energy. They were able to absorb sunlight. They were able to convert, to c o two.
And now because of deforestation and land reclamation, that, we're maybe that's the wrong word, but wherever we're destroying habitats, these are now producing additional heat for the earth. So this wouldn't help to have an entire solar array adding more to the entire infrastructure. And when you're talking about each city would require several 100 square miles depending on the size of the city. The solar panels and probably a 100 square miles of batteries covering the land.
And that those those actually do cover the land so efficiently. You have although they actually to to avoid shading one collector by another in the ground, you have to space them so that they're a solar power set site on the ground is only 25% covered by collectors, and the rest of it is spacing to avoid one collector shaking the other ones. So it it does kinda waste a lot a lot of ground. Okay. So So we're so I I had stopped you on that point. So we we got some good more information.
So the alternative, this space energy opens the the the alternative energy in space and its promise. Is there anything else to add to that? Well, I don't like to denigrate anyone, but there are some people who who are ideological about, you know, like, mankind is evil. It's a blight on the universe, and we don't want mankind to get more energy.
And and they they consider that providing more energy is bad, but it actually the people on earth who have the highest population growth rate are the people who live in areas with the lowest per capita energy use. So if you actually give them more energy in a clean way, of course, their effect within a generation or so, their population growth rate slows down.
So actually population growth and the occupation of wild land that was previously wild land by permanently by humans is actually get destroys more wildlife than global warming does because it's permanently occupied land by by humans and that's what population growth does. Especially areas like Africa where the many people are still basically living on their human muscle power alone. Those areas have the highest population growth rate right now.
So that, you know, if we wanna save, the wildlife in Africa, we better get the most people some energy pretty quick. I like the idea. So let's go on to this, the new space opens the door to space. Okay. So as most people don't realize that almost every beautiful rocket you see taking off from Cape Canaveral or Gvannenberg or wherever, when it's done launching the satellite, it goes splat into the ocean and smashed into lots of little pieces and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
And it's it's completely smashed and useless. So that's called an expendable rocket. All rockets are treated like a weapon, like an artillery shell. It's what we call the artillery shell mentality. You fire a rocket away and it does it it does its job. Now a rocket costs as much as more as a whole airliner. So imagine if you hit an airliner that you had never flown had never flown before on a test flight, and you get a 100 people on it.
You fly it to LA, and and all the people get off, and then you and they turn that airliner to scrap. And then you get a brand new airliner to fly back to Washington or New York. And then when when they get off the plane, that airliner is turned into scrap. How long could could you afford to run such airline, and how much would each ticket cost? Well A lot of money. If you had to say 200 people, the ticket just to build the airliner would be half a $1,000,000 per ticket. Real simple.
So that explains why spaceflight is so expensive because we've been throwing our rockets away every time for 60 years. Okay? It's just, you know, it's mind boggling. We've tried and tried over the years to get the government to try to build reusable rockets. And I was present back in September 11, 1993 when the first big rocket, the DCX, took off from White Sands and landed again intact. And it over the following years, it did it successfully, 9 or 10 times.
And and it was it worked just the same way that the Falcon 9 rockets do. Yeah. And there's there's video online for anybody who is interested. You can look up the DCX, and you could see that what Elon Musk and what Bezos are doing today, was done in 1996. 90/93, actually. The first flight is August 93, and the second flight was was publicly open, to reporters and stuff. It was in September 11, 1993. I was there. So we we spent a long time. Which been like the the long twilight struggle.
Those still small voices in the world is calling out to the big powers. Why don't you try why don't we build reusable rockets so we can afford to build power satellites so we can afford to stop global warming. But they wouldn't listen because the big big boys, had wanted to do it their way. So there is again, there's another way to do it. So, Elon Musk came along and perhaps more than anyone else, he had a specific reason to build reusable rockets.
He wants to to start a, a colony on Mars and be able to do lots of other things in space. So he he didn't know he did he didn't even know how to build a rocket himself. He learned how to be to be a rocket engineer, which is not easy, and has built up this company of about 6,000 people. And they're now busy building. You're getting ready to test launch a rocket that is 30 feet wide down in South Texas, and it will take off and land just like the Falcon, 9 rockets, which are about 12 feet wide.
So this this rocket will be much heavier than the Saturn 5 rocket when it when it when the full size rocket finally takes off. And it'll be able to launch, payloads very, very cheaply because they get the whole rocket back. The the first stage will land, and the second stage will land. So you'll it's be even cheaper than a than a Falcon 9 because you get the entire rocket, just not the first stage back. Right. So that's a really big a big deal.
So the new space companies, especially SpaceX, are now building, flying, and recovering, and landing reusable rockets. So if you want to build a power satellite, the first thing you do is you fabricate the parts, which are just thousands thousands of identical parts so they could be mass produced very easily. And you get them into, low Earth orbit where, like, this is basically where the space station is, but you can put them into equatorial lower Earth orbit where it's even cheaper to reach.
It's right over the equator. So then you need to get them from lower Earth orbit up to the 24 hour geosynchronous orbit, but that takes a lot of energy in space. That what they call delta v or change in velocity is sort of similar to the distance of a trip on the ocean or in the air because it takes energy to go a certain distance on on on the water, on land, in space to get to it to change your velocity a certain amount takes energy.
And so it takes, 4 kilometers per second of delta v change in velocity to get up to geosynchronous orbit. That's a fair amount of energy. So the other problem is that because of carelessness, we've allowed a lot of space junk to accumulate in low Earth orbit in the area immediately above it.
So they say up to about a 1000 miles or so with all these communication satellites and used rocket stages and others thing other things, which are creating space debris, which if it hits you at 5 miles per second, is could could destroy a whole satellite or a whole spacecraft. So what we want to do is to get the stuff, the equipment, the parts up to geosynchronous orbit as quickly as we can through this shrapnel zone, which is not that massive that it will immediately destroy something.
But it's a it's a financial risk to bring it up to it if you do it slowly. So you wanna get bring it up fast. So the next then the next thing is the moon itself. Moon to the rescue. So every people might may know by now the moon was created by a giant collision about 4000000000 years ago. Actually, longer ago than that. When a when a small planet hit the Earth and it turned both planets into molt into liquid, like, lava and a lot of it into into rock vapor.
And the moon was born out of this huge ring of rock vapor circling the Earth. So almost all the water in the moon was driven off because the moon was formed from a hot cloud of gas and but the Earth and other planets typically were formed out of cold, clumps of gas into and and and and dust. So the Earth is and other planets were formed and Mars were formed normally accreted, into a larger planet. So the Moon was formed out of this hot gas, so it has almost no water.
But they've recently discovered at the poles of the moon, especially in craters where the sun never hits, where the they'd say the sun never shines, the so the solar wind and, and comet impacts and other things have created deposits of water which when the water atoms or molecules hit these cold trap areas in these crater bottoms near the moon's poles, they stick to the surface because it's it's down at about 40 degrees Kelvin which is something like 400 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.
It's really cold. It's only 40 degrees above absolute 0. So So so the the way the way you're describing it, just for clarity for individuals, is that we've got craters on the moon At the poles. And those craters wherever, especially on the poles, are subject, or the craters throughout the the moon are subject to the sun's intense heat Which drives on water. Right. Which scrapes off the water. But at these certain places where they're hidden from view, if you want to call it that Yeah.
Where the sun never stops. Right. And they this way, in those specific places, there's water on the moon. So we've been able to identify it, and I've gone over this in the past, but we've been able to identify that there's actually ice crystals and water on the moon. And, there could be billions of tons of water up there. It's enough to support a very large amount of space traffic because water, if you turn that water to hydrogen and oxygen, you have a completely safe, non toxic rocket fuel.
Oxygen and hydrogen. You liquefy it and you can use it immediately as rocket fuel. So that's a source of rocket fuel. Now, you turn this, what what you have to purify the water first because there's other stuff besides water in in these deposits. Even there's even elemental mercury, which is a liquid, of course. And those mercury atoms get stuck there too. So you purify it, turn it into rocket fuel.
So you turn the rocket fuel, and you bring it up to a a what we call a propellant depot, which is called, in an area called L1, Lagrange Point 1. It's about 50,000 miles away from the moon turned to Earth, which is sort of a gravitational null point, and you can put up there. So so let's just slow down for a minute for those who've never heard that term before. You'll hear people in the space industry calling it, there there's, I believe, 5 of them, the L1, L2, L3, L4.
This one is a space between the moon and Earth where the gravitational pull between both of them is almost neutralized. Or to some degree, if you thought about it, you'd be floating in the middle of both of them where the gravity would pull just enough one way and just enough another so that you can sit in stasis. And you because you have to have a a small amount of of reaction gas to to sit.
Imagine if you're sort of sitting on a frictionless hill, so you need to stay right in the center of that hill or you slide down one way or the other. Once you start sliding down, then it takes a lot more, propellant to get you back where where you should be. So just tiny amounts of propellant can keep you right in the center of it, but it's a very, very it's a it's a good point. It's a what we call it, it's high in the gravity well. I know people may not have heard the term gravity.
So so let me just, the gravity well, is the the depth of the gravity on the planet or sphere or whatever object. Right. So one of the challenges with space is that Earth has an extremely deep gravity well. Well, we're the gravity well challenges. The gravity was the same strength all the way to the top, and it suddenly stopped. The gravity well is about 4,000 miles deep. It gives you an idea of how imagine climbing a 4000 mile high hill. And that's one of the challenges on earth.
You I I was sitting with Bruce Pittman and Dan Rasky, and Dan came into the room. These are 2 people at NASA Ames. Dan came into the room right after Elon Musk's rocket had, crashed at the 2 minutes and 19 seconds. I think that was a number. And he says to me, CC David David, space is hard. And I looked at him and I said, I've gotta bet you that space Earth is hard. We have politics. We have gravity. We have manufacturing. We have human nature. We have all of these challenges.
We're fairly good when we get to space. It's a challenging environment, but earth is a challenging space to get out of, and there's a lot of things dragging us down. Like, you just described, the reason we're not in space, even though we had the the development of the DCX, it didn't move forward. And that's human nature stopping the progress of space. That was that was politics that stopped that. We could have had Falcon nines, like, over a decade or 15 years earlier if that had moved ahead.
Right. So that's the this this gravity well is a significant obstacle for for space development. So you want your fuel depot should be at the top of the gravity well, But you it it all you can then use this fuel if you get it down to lower the orbit to use the liquid fuel to get your payloads up past the space debris zone quickly and up, into the geosynchronous orbit where there's very little space debris and where the satellites move a lot slower.
So it's that the space debris, right, so far, is not a problem in geosynchronous orbit. In speed? What's the difference in speed? Well, gosh. You're probably going well, in in lower orbit, you're going about 18,000 miles an hour. And so your synchronous orbit, you're probably going, I don't know, between 5, 10000 miles an hour. I'd have to do a calculation. Wow. That's that's a lot slower. Okay. Yeah. I just wanna get a reference.
Yeah. But remember, you're pacing Because you're pacing the Earth as you go around. So so the satellite orbit is a lot bigger than the than the surface of the Earth, but it has to go around to the same circle at the same rotation rate that the Earth does. Right. It's it's, you wanna I guess the way to think of it for anybody who's not heard of geosynchronous orbit is it's it's it's mirroring the earth. It's right there. So if you live if you live in London, that satellite will follow London.
Exactly. That that source would follow London no matter where it is. So it would be an expansion of the earth's, crust to this level where you'd it'd be spinning at the same rate. Everything would would follow. And if you have DIRECTV, you have a, a comm sat that your that your intent is aimed at. It's always there in the same spot. The satellite knows to stay right in the same spot so that your your tiny antenna will point at it, and you're always getting your TV signal.
The words exactly That's a good way to describe it. Good way to describe it. Thank you. Okay. So if you it turns out that getting the lunar propellant down from the l one down to the lowerth orbit is much cheaper.
It only takes, less than 1 kilometer per second of delta v or change in velocity to get down to to lower the orbit because then you can then what we do in called an arrow capture using the Earth's atmosphere to slow down into the lower the orbit, than it does to bring it up from the Earth which requires about 9 kilometers per second, which is vastly more energy than to come down.
It's, it it it gets real technical, but if you double your double It's not it's not so it's well, I think on the on an easier way because if you look at you could do the math, but what you're saying is if we manufacture or do our work on Earth, then we have this huge challenge of getting it out to atmosphere because of this gravity well. Let's just use that as the the the major challenge. But the moon doesn't is 16 gravity to the earth.
Therefore, getting it off the moon Doesn't take much energy. Doesn't take much energy. And what I tell people is if you have a if you have a marble on earth and you try to throw it up, it might go, 5 kilometer, 5 meters or 7 meters up. So it's 20, 15, 25 feet up. But on the moon, if you did the exact same thing and it was 20, it would now go a 120 feet. So it's significantly easier to be able to, work off of the moon.
So, you know, your like your typical space capsule that you put into orbit is, say, 10 tons. Right? So it takes 100 and 100 of tons of rocket to launch that 10 ton capsule from the Earth. But on the moon, for 1 ton of of cargo, including propellant brought up to l one, you know, it takes about 2 tons of of lunar propellant to launch 1 ton of lunar propellant to l one, and that includes going back and landing back at your lunar lunar base around trip. Mhmm. So it's very, very efficient.
And then it takes even less than that to bring it down to the earth because you're coming down the gravity well instead of trying to climb up it. So that's very, very efficient. That means you can get your solar power satellite parts up to the 24 hour geosynchronous orbit quickly and safely without being damaged by space debris and allows you to start building, all these huge power satellites. So in order to do this, we need to build what we what I refer to as a lunar polar mining base.
And that's the, the heading number 6. Yeah. So the reason for building a base, you wanna be able to have a human outpost or base at one of the lunar poles. Either pole will do because there's water in the in the cold trap crater areas at both poles. And you need a you need a bunch of equipment that has to be brought to the moon, for people to safely live there. You need a crew habitat.
It has to be buried under under the regolith, a few meters of regolith to protect the crew from space radiation. You need some spare crew vehicles. So if some vehicle has it breaks down, the crew can always take another vehicle and get back to earth. You need a energy source. You need a energy source. 1, to power the base itself just like McMurdo base. It takes about 2 megawatts to run the base itself. But you'd also need multi megawatts to turn a power to turn the water ice into rocket fuel.
So you go ahead. No. I was just gonna say yes. You need you'll need a lot of energy to be able to do that also. But we're then again sitting on the moon and And you do have a certain amount of solar power available because in many of these areas, they're what they call areas where the that are illuminated most of the time because the sun is right at the horizon most of the time. It's only in the deep craters that the sun can't reach, which is it's very interesting situation.
You have areas which are lit, as much as 70 to 80% of the time, and then there are areas nearby which which the sun never touches. If it did, all that water would disappear very quickly. So then you need excavators to dig the the the and and and lift the, the the the water ice and mixture, water ice and moon dust out. You need a purification plant to separate the water. You need an elect an elect electrolysis plant to turn the water purified water into hydrogen and oxygen.
And you need a liquefaction plant to liquefy those gases. And you can actually store the liquefied gases down in the cold trap crater if you want where it may be so cold. The gas might even freeze solid, at least the oxygen would. At 40 Kelvin, believe me. You'd have solid oxygen. You have to be careful.
You need storage tanks and pumps for the fuel on the moon, storage tanks and pumps for the fuel that's been taken to l 1 and taker rockets, reusable ones of course, to move the fuel to l 1 and then go back to the moon to get another load. You just just use like a regular truck. It goes back and forth. It carries a load one way and goes back empty. So So the the this is, I believe, what Dallas is working on? Dallas Baynoff. Yes. Yes. Dallas Baynard is working on this.
This is one of his, his initiatives. And I remember I was sitting in a meeting, and he was calling it depots. And I said, we have gas stations. We have gas depots. Let's use, propulsion depots. Let's use words that are common so people on earth can understand it. Right. So, yes. This is yes. I understand it.
So think about this as a, a refueling system with an ecosystem that delivers product from the moon to geosynchronous orbit or into, geosynchronous so that we're constantly being able to be able to keep and and supply the world with energy. Exactly. So, the if we can have such a system and with the inexpensive rockets that we have now that that would be able to operate inexpensive because you get the rocket back.
The same rocket can make dozens of trips from the Earth to orbit and the same tanker rocket can make dozens of trips from the moon to l one. And another tanker rocket can make dozens of trips from l one down to the Earth's orbit and go go back again. Because when it goes back to l one, it doesn't have any propellant in it except just the propellant it needs to get back to l one. So the it's very efficient.
This would mean probably in about one generation, we can build enough power satellites to completely replace the the the vast majority of of our liquid current liquid propellant and carbon based fuels that we're using to to generate electricity, and therefore, we can stop global warming. And that that that will get and it will also you know, a lot of people talk about global warming as if the materials produced are are pollutants.
But, like, for example, if you're burning, many of these plants, the most of the product is water vapor and carbon dioxide because they have really good scrubbers now. They get rid of almost all the actual toxic pollutants that that used to be produced. So, we'll be able to, produce clean energy. The energy obviously being produced on the moon. You're use you're using the energy to make the rocket fuel. You're not using fossil fuel to make it.
And if you use the energy from the power satellites to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen on the earth, that rocket fuel could be made without using fossil fuels too. Currently, a lot of hydrogen is produced using fossil fuel, but we can end that by by using solar energy from space to produce all our rocket fuel, from electricity, from electrolysis. So let me add 1 ask one question that has to do with the moon. Are there resources on the moon for the building and development of the satellites?
Well, now it will will take us a while to build up a wider variety of industries on the lunar surface. Remember the moon is a what I call a refractory world because it lost the vast bulk of its light elements. Elements which are easily evaporated. There's very little, native carbon and things like that, and gases of any kind on the moon. But there are things like it has aluminum, it has iron, it has enormous amounts of silica and oxygen in its rocks. And there are other And platinum?
Platinum is in the hydrometer, so there's enough, iron ore? Yeah. They they call they call those elements siderophile, which means iron loving. Like a siderite. It's like a meteorite. So you've got iron, nickel, and then you've got platinum, osmium, iridium, palladium, and several other of these iron loving minerals which are quite valuable and are mixed in with nickel iron meteorites. And as much as 1% of the lunar dust is this nick nickel iron powder.
So you you've if if that is sufficiently dense to make it ore. Remember, an ore is defined by, can you make money if you retrieve it and purify it? If it's not dense enough, it's not an ore. It's a rock. It's what what we call a levarite. A levarite means leave it right there. So that there I mean, having this what we call a cislunar transportation system. Cislunar simply the space between the Earth and the Moon's orbit and which includes all of the, the l points.
L l one That's what we have the that's what we have the Mearth that we spoke about, moon and Earth. The l five society itself was used the name l 5 as as the name of the society because it was proposed to build a space colony there. You can actually build the space colonies in many locations.
And in the further in the future, we may find huge numbers of space colonies built in the asteroid belt because there's a very large supply of nickel iron asteroids in the asteroid belt itself, which are closer. And you may even want to build a a a a settlement in the same orbit as an asteroid where you be get you could get your your, raw materials almost for free. Because when you go along the orbit of something, it takes almost no propellant to go along an orbit.
It's only when you leave the orbit that it takes propellant. So there's it opens a very, very wide array of Yeah. It's it's I I gotta tell you, John, this is this is absolutely what I was looking for. This was brilliant. You walked me through this in a way that I understood it. I had I had heard all sorts of stories from different people, pieces, as I think I've shared with you the one of the first events that I had gone to or spoke at was a National Space Society.
And I've learned a lot over the years, but this was the first time that I felt the I felt the logic coming together. And I really appreciate I truly appreciate your historical reference to, DeepTime and how that's impactful in, understanding some of the challenges that we're going through today. So remember, this is not a crystal ball. This is not locked in. Politics could derail it.
If we get fusion power, the fusion power would be a fantastic substitute, and we also need fusion power for terraforming and interstellar travel. So I very strongly support fusion power research, along with all the other, all the along with the other types of research in space and in space science too. Oh, I I have I'd have a lot more questions for you, but I'm gonna end it here. But thank you so much. You did an amazing job of walking this me through the understanding of this.
So I absolutely appreciate the information and and, the way you wove the story. It was it was brilliant. Thank you. So with that said, again, very quickly, Project Moon Hut Foundation is, has been working for over 5 years. We have people all around the world who have been helping us from Israel and Dore to people in Germany, Moscow, United States, Hong Kong, South Africa. We've had people helping us all over the world. And our directive is to create sustainable life on the moon.
And it's not self sustaining life, so here we're supporting it, just as if we talked about these rockets through the accelerated development of an Earth and space Earth and space based ecosystem. So our initiative is to help drive this tech, these types of techs that end up doing one thing. They change how we live on Earth for all species. As far as we know in the earth today, the the earth today is the one place on earth that's really our home.
And the more I can learn, the more we can learn, the better able to make better decisions moving forward as to where we should spend our energy as the world shifts and changes. So once again, thank you for being on the show. There there's a few things, projectmoonhunt.org. You can go to the website, sign up for a space related database. You can go to facebookforward/projectmoonhut. You can go to Twitter and you can tweet to us at projectmoonhut. And you can email me at [email protected].
So for everybody, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.