Good old Windows continues to excite a lot of guys.  Lions found it strange 10 years ago that  millennials were getting excited about it, after a phase in the 90's when everyone hated windows.  It continues to be much slower & more tedious for lions than Linux.  The current generation isn't interested in using technology to solve problems as much as making a lot of money & being cool.  It definitely wasn't what the cool kids did 40 years ago, but that all changed.

It still doesn't make sense to lions to create a completely free program that requires an operating system which officially costs money, but if you're going to invest a lot into that free program intending it to see wide adoption, it almost has to support Win to justify the investment.

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The lion kingdom's High Frontier project is unlikely to succeed.  It'll either get a copyright takedown or it'll run out of time.  The trick is there's no way of knowing who's squatting on the copyright without testing it.  It was manely about reading it & learning the background behind the memes.

Some of the pictures are public domane but some crusty ones might be owned.  There was a 2nd edition in 1988.  The one on archive.org is the 1977 edition.  The pictures got a lot of revived interest in the last 10 years.

 

1 hour of recording needs 2 hours of editing.  1 hour covers only 25 pages & there are 150 pages left.  The appendices weren't originally attractive, but it turns out they had a lot of nuggets & they were just another 50 pages.  The appendices reveal a lot of people besides O'Neill worked on the concepts for many years.

Most of the middle chapters are very tedious & obvious for those of us alive 50 years later.  They might have always been page count fillers, but a lot of that material wasn't readily available in 1975.  Lions read it a lot faster & less deliberately than the 1st chapters.

 Noted many naive assumptions of 1975 but also many advantages over Mars.  The mane problems were assuming the space shuttle was a stepping stone to bigger & better launchers & the government would reduce the cost of spaceflight.  Everyone believed that in 1975, yet the author still said cynicism was high in those days.

Then there's the huge emphasis on solar power being unlimited.  In reality, the solar panels have to be replaced.  The solar panels on the ISS had to be replaced after less than 20 years.  Truly massive ones on a space habitat would be more difficult.

 The other problem was assuming airport security worked.  The most likely outcome was terrorists hijacking a large space ship with nail files & box cutters, turning it into a weapon.  They would crash it into the windows.  That was completely unheard of in 1975.  The windows weren't solid pieces of glass but millions of tiny glass panes joined by an aluminum mesh.

 There is a misprint on page 118 when hydrogen was being used to suppress fire.  He might have meant water.

There's no propellant in space so he relies instead on mass driver propulsion.  Instead of a chemical reaction, the engines just eject lunar regolith or lunar oxygen.  You could get monopropellant from the moon by launching it with an extremely accurate railgun, but an opposing force is required to slow it down at the destination.  

Maybe they could accelerate a smaller mass to a much higher velocity to slow down a larger mass at a much lower velocity, thus getting a net transfer of mass from the moon to space.  There is a later mention of an ion engine but it was far from a known quantity in those days.  Maybe an ion thruster could build up a reserve of momentum over a long time to arrest an incoming payload.

There's no mention of methane engines.  Methane just wasn't a thing in 1975.  The only bipropellant mentioned was hydrogen & oxygen.

The spinlaunch concept is as close as we've ever gotten to something that could move massive amounts of lunar regolith into space as envisioned & perform the function of a mass driver engine.  The problem is like so many other startups,  their focus is going to be more on getting bought out than creating a functioning solution.

Lions suspect the buckets of the lunar mass driver would have to stay with the payloads, expending a small amount of payload to correct it's trajectory.  Maybe they could return to the moon & recovered with a ground based brake.

The other thing he tends to dismiss is cosmic radiation.  His answer is always just load the space habitats with billions of tons of regolith for shielding.

There's no mention of the giant space habitats interfering with astronomy.  They would be at L5. We can pull up a map a lot easier than 1975.

The JWST is at L2.  They would actually be way beyond the moon's orbit.

There's no mention of rack farming or artificial light for agriculture.  There were no bright LEDs in those days.  Large solar panels in a vacuum powering LEDs in a confined windowless sphere might be a better alternative than a giant windowed field.  Still, it's surprising to see how little space technology has improved since 1975. Robert Zubrin had a point about the zero gravity researchers having a strangle hold on the budget instead of learning how to build structures, grow food, & build mass drivers.

What happens if everyone moves to 1 side of the colony & unbalances it?  Suspect they would always be unbalanced & wobble as they rotated, but animals on Earth typically congregate in just 1 state like Calif*.

The author died in 1992, after much downsizing of the space program.  None of his hopes about the space shuttle & upmass increase came to pass.  The space program had a long way still to fall.  The mere idea of reading it now is only possible because there's a lot more optimism.  The cost of Falcon 9 upmass is still nowhere close to what he predicted was needed in 1975.

Space colonies still have a lot of advantages over planetary colonies.  Gravity & terrain make Mars really energy & mass intensive to get around.  Mars is a lot farther away than L5 so it's always going to cost more to reach.  It can't produce as much solar power.  It's a huge gravity well to overcome.  Why burn so much energy escaping Earth's gravity well only to fall into Mars's gravity well?  We're unlikely to make enough propellant on Mars to bring significant mass back.  Mars still might be easier, given the amount of mass required to build a space colony.

 What's going to be faster: creating all the stuff on Mars required for a civilization to survive or creating all that stuff in space?  In both cases, there's resource extraction & transportation. 

 It raises the question of what our goal in space really should be, colonizing the moon, colonizing Mars, or colonizing free space.  It's definitely colonizing, but it seems the public got caught up on Mars because it was the next farther place to go after the moon rather than the most practical thing to do.

The ending of Contact became clearer on page 169.  The aliens can't give us all the answers & it has to be baby steps, because contact between more advanced & less advanced civilizations always causes the destruction of the primitive civilization's art.

 

The comparison in delta V between asteroid mining & earth mining on page 193 left out the cost of gravity drag.  Gravity drag wasn't well known until Elon popularized it but it would hugely favor mining asteroids.  

 

His space shuttle costs were many orders of magnitude off.  As bad as the predictions of the space shuttle were, it's surprising how much of the book came true.

 Lions have certainly felt the effect of overcrowding & resource scarcity since the book was written.  Most of an animal's entire lifetime wealth must now be devoted just to obtaining shelter.  There really is no more room in the desirable parts of Earth & living there is only attainable with multiple generations of wealth. There are just areas with extreme cold or extreme heat, & no water. 

Somewhat amazing to lions that since the book was written, after all the academic hype he wrote about, no experiments were done with mass drivers, mining on the moon, transporting large amounts of materials, refining lunar regolith, building large structures on the order of kilometers.  Our directions were towards really small time grad student projects in low Earth orbit.  It's hard to believe the cost of launches is the only reason why nothing happened.

Of course, 1 requirement was the return of humans to the moon which they thought was just around the corner in 1975.  We can barely even get anything to land on the moon 50 years later.

After completing the recording & editing in 13 days, lions pondered reading the case for mars & found it to already have been read & definitely under copyright.  That was the book which described Mars Direct, which lions got banned & blocked into the stone ages for not taking seriously.  Even today, it's ridiculous.  The voters would never pay to send animals to Mars on expendable rockets.  They might pay to send humans to the moon or on a reusable rocket to Mars, but the 1996 Mars direct would be an instant cancel.

Mars wasn't as exciting after High Frontier.  It would be an exciting bucket list item but not a great place for settling down or making animals self sufficient. In terms of self sufficiency, the benefit from zero G is going to favor space habitats.

There's still a chance of reading Space Colonies, the elementary school version of High Frontier.

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