Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 21:10:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Lunch with Buzz
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Rich Lynch <rw_lynch at yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/rwl/9943.html
> (The only other WSFAn there was Keith.)

Sitting next to Rich was Bob Hershey, who is involved with two other
groups I'm in (WMOD (http://www.infiltec.com/wmod.htm) and LES
(http://keithlynch.net/les/)), and with the Philosophical Society
(http://www.philsoc.org/), whose talks I sometimes attend, and who
also known by Ron Kean, who I was surprised wasn't there.  I had
discussed the Aldrin event with Ron when I ran into him on Monday at a
used book sale.  (I also saw WSFAns Adrienne and Jim at that book sale.)

I hadn't known that Rich and Bob knew each other.  Small world.

Is it just me, or does it seem ironic that you can get a Free Lunch at
a libertarian organization?

"Edwin" hasn't been Buzz Aldrin's first name for years.  He had it
legally changed not long after Apollo XI.

As for solar power satellites, the original idea was to make them
mostly out of lunar materials, rather than lifting everything needed
out of Earth's gravity well.  Installing a solar powered mass driver
on the moon will be expensive, but once it's there, it should be able
to launch unlimited amounts of material for negligible additional
cost.  Yes, even less than it would cost to FedEx the same amount of
mass from DC to Baltimore.

Any number of solar power satellites can be built of any size, to
provide a source of energy that does not depend on Middle East
politics, that does not enrich people who want to kill us, that will
not run out for billions of years, that does not result in significant
amounts of global warming, that does not produce ionizing radiation,
that does not produce waste matter of any kind on earth, and that,
unlike ground-based solar, does not depend on weather, and doesn't
stop working at night.

Downsides:

* While such plants scale up quite well, they don't scale down.
  It's not practical to build a small demonstration satellite.  A ten
  megawatt SPS would cost almost as much as a one ten gigawatt SPS.

* Getting the power to earth involves (harmless) microwaves, which,
  being a form of radiation, will get some environmentalists upset.
  And environmentalists currently have the power to halt projects
  indefinitely with billions of dollars of red tape.
--
Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
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