All posts by Sam Dinkin

General

Financial Times Anecdote

I ordered a copy of the Financial Times from my left-over US Air miles. Today, as usual, Richard Branson’s face in a Samsonite ad stares up at me from my doorstep. It is a mixed motivation to have my major competitor with over ten million in booked sales and tremendous media recognition start my day. It is an amazing standard to aspire to, but humbling at the same time. A big day of getting the word out for my site Space-Shot.com got easier when I saw on the front page of the second section: game company Xfire was purchased by Viacom for $102 million in cash. (The FT version is subscriber only.) Xfire has 4 million members spending 91 hours per month in advertiser supported game heaven. They earned less than $10 million in ad sales last year. The revenue and subscriber numbers are achievable for Space-Shot.com. Back to work.

Space

Optimism and Pessimism at The Space Review

In “Human orbital spaceflight: the ultralight approach,”, Richard Speck looks at a cheap, light, low tech escape system and fleshes out the new rocket adage, “Be the escape system”.

In “The challenges of Mars Exploration,” Donald Rapp assesses the not-too-bright prospects of various technologies on the necessary timelines for Mars exploration.

There’s one I disagree with him on: in-situ lunar oxygen. In-situ oxygen extraction on the Moon need not be a major industrial process. The basic needs are a heat source and vapor recovery. Suppose you have an Earth imported high efficiency pump. Add a lunar glass bell jar and an Earth imported parabolic mirror (later, lunar made). If you make the bell jar big enough, the mirror can sit inside the bell jar. Set the whole thing on a flat piece of lunar glass to make a low efficiency seal.

Operation would be as follows:

  1. Dump some ore on a flat piece of lunar glass.
  2. Point your parabolic mirror at the ore.
  3. Put the bell jar on top.
  4. Turn on the pump.
  5. Dump it out before the slag sticks to the glass bottom.
  6. Repeat.

Some kind of airlock conveyor belt thing where the top layer of the ore is fried might be a more advanced version. It’s ore efficiency would be quite low, but there’s plenty of ore up there.

Space

Exodus Day

This weekend Jews celebrate Passover and Christians celebrate Easter. The latter holiday has its roots in the former as the Last Supper was a Passover feast. Christians celebrate Jesus being seen alive following his crucifiction and subsequently ascending to heaven, the Jews celebrate Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt to the promised land.

The ultimate Earthly oppressor is not Pharoah or Rome, but gravity. This month, my web site, Space-Shot.com took steps to throw off the yoke of gravity. For $3.50 the myriads can compete in a tournament to win a trip to space. If they don’t win, they help someone else do so.

It does not take divine intervention, a miracle or ten plagues to get people into space, just a creative web site. (Albeit praying for a change in the weather can’t hurt.) Now people of all means can ascend to space and soon can reach the planets and the stars.

Let my people go to space!

General

New Orleans Report

I took my daughter on an air and ground tour of New Orleans yesterday to teach her about the largest man-made disaster in the United States since Richmond was destroyed by the Union Army in the 1860s. A lot has changed since August, but much is still to do.

In my tour, I saw that there were many blue tarps dotting the city’s residential sections representing rooves that had not yet been repaired. Many swimming pools in flooded sections were still filled with filth and were completely black from the air. Some sections of town had huge trash piles in front of every house. Trash hauling continues, but my pilot said this generated 30 years worth of trash. One January estimate said extraordinary hauling will continue through Thanksgiving 2006.

Certain sections of town had indications of water levels on the walls that spoke of completely ruining first floors throughout the area. Demolition and gutting of savable structures is starting, but many buildings have not yet had their first floor material removed.

My driver told me an uncorroborated story about gang violence that was darker than the standard reports in the media. Rather than the disorganized food desperation and opportunistic looting that we were led to believe, there was a gang takeover of some buildings and some portions of the city. To stem the tide, there were mercenaries patrolling the streets that had been advised to use lethal force and had to.

The air tour company’s, Southern Seaplane’s, pilot said that they were one of very few companies doing air tours and that demand was only one or two tours a week and they spent most of their time ferrying petroleum employees. That suggests only a few hundred people have seen first hand the devastation of the wake of Hurricane Katrina and hubris. The pilot says he sees it every day and is numb to it.

For those that can’t afford a $500 air tour, there is a Gray Line bus tour for $35 called “The Hurricane Katrina Tour: America’s Worst Catastrophe”. People have mixed feelings about the tour but the plusses are it brings revenue to the city and helps witness an event that we should not try to repeat.

One thing that was particularly poignant in the air tour was the closed Jazz Land Six Flags amusement park. After the tour, my seven-year-old daughter called her Mom on my cell phone and said, “we just saw hurricane devastation, but let me tell you about the oyster shell I found”. It may take her and the nation decades to process this disaster. I am not so lucky and already get it.

Space

Put Your Money Where Your Dreams Are

James Taylor, a graduate student at University of Washington studying human migration, has one of the best records on my site, Space-Shot.com. Said Taylor,

I think I’m managing well over 75%…. Right now, I’m stuck at level 4 with three open plays. I need some more competition to go against me so we can get a flight faster. This is the ‘bring-it-on’ moment. There certainly were enough of us who wanted to be astronauts as children. Now that we have the chance, I don’t see the grown-ups putting their money where their dreams once were.

There is another player that bought in at level 6. It only takes 4096 players at that level to win a trip to space. Regarding his level 4 plays, Taylor said, “I didn’t buy those plays at that level, I won my way there–although I challenge everyone to buy in at my level and try to knock me out!”

Space

SpaceShot Entry for Sale on eBay

I put up a level 9 entry on eBay for my Space-Shot.com tournament to win a trip to space on Rocketplane. This was Joe Latrell’s entry for winning the SpaceShot, Inc. beta 1 tournament and he will get the proceeds of the sale. He is ineligible to use it himself because he is on the advisory board. Face value $750 for an entry to compete against 511 other players for a trip to space, starting price $499. The price needs to rise 15% to be 1/512 of the retail value of the prize ($192,500 ticket plus $100,000 cash).

SpaceShot also received Rocketplane congratulations on a successful launch.

Space

Space Tourism=Space Settlement

We start with the richest among us only able to afford a few minute or a few days in space. As we get richer and space gets cheaper, we can have space studios, then space apartments, space mansions, space palaces and space shopping malls. People live where they are. The spectrum from tourism to settlement is just a measure of time. Where does space tourism leave off and space settlement begin? Two-week time shares are probably tourism. One-way tickets, definitely settlement. What’s the down payment on a one-year lease?

Space Education

Space Journalism Prize Revised

Space Journalism Prize submissions have been light this year. It has been revamped as follows.

  • Deadline has been extended to May 31
  • 3rd party submissions now allowed
  • Author permission no longer required
  • Clark Lindsey is replacing me as judge

Note that the judging criteria are the same as last year except that there is only nine months worth of material to compete against. If you entered last year, do it again this year. Winner will be announced at Space Frontier meeting.