Surprisingly cool thing

[fivemack]

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep533/SPRING2004/lecture N .pdf

for N ranging from 1 to 44

is a lecture course from the University of Wisconsin, supposedly about future space exploration but rather more a fannish agglomeration of Cool Facts, given by Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17 geologist).

There's about 100MB of it, since he's fairly liberal with the huge images; from what I've seen, it's something everyone setting a story in the near-future solar system needs to read. It's got lots of reasonably useful statistics all gathered together in the same place.

It's boosterish, though at least it pays some attention to economics (though it talks about resource depletion on Earth, which may cause james_nicoll to lose hair manually, it does so reasonably sanely); I suppose, once you've walked on the Moon, you're allowed to be boosterish.

Comments

Re: Aw, maaaan.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

At a very wild guess, it's people who saw what pull-out-all-the-stops engineering effort applied to the hard problem of putting men on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth was able to achieve in a decade, and can't convince themselves that fusion is intrinsically a harder problem.

I don't know whether fusion is intrinsically a harder problem.

My prejudices make me think that a working fusion reactor will resemble JET in the way that a Space Shuttle Main Engine resembles the engine of a WAC Corporal; given how expensive JET is already, it then seems reasonable to guess that the break-even point at which a Sufficiently Advanced fusion reactor produces electricity cheaper than current fission would involve a reactor larger than Kitchener and costing much more than total world wealth.

Also, I believe Schmitt is the person who discovered the orange soil which turned out to consist of glass beads with substantial adsorbed solar-wind 3He and 4He, so there may be a level of pet-project here.