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

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Nice table of energy units conversions, that lets me say I was unfair to imply in comments to James's torchships entry that a trip costing 500 million kWh at 7¢ a kWh would be $35M.

Why, that's a mere 294,000 barrels of oil, which at $50 a barrel, comes to just $15M.

(that's until the price gets to $100 a barrel)