Space Sustainability - Problems and Solutions

16th of January 2025 SpaceX Starship disintegrated over the Caribbean Sea. This reminded the problem of space debris and environmental hazard on EARTH to explore the rest of the Universe. It is funny to make Earth uninhabitable (for humans) just to send a handful of people to extremely uninhabitable extraterrestrial objects. We cannot nix out Space Exploration all together. We have to come up with solutions to problems and discuss them.

1. Spaceships should be more reliable and their failure rates should be reduced. (Look at aviation)

My solution is to use more reliable solid boosters which are simpler and have low failure rate. For sometime forget the idea of reusability of rocket stages. Except for the Stage Zero I proposed earlier.

2. In case of failure, disintegrating rocket stages should have minimal impact on people and environment.

My solution is to use glass rocket casing which would disintegrate into small pieces (tempered glass). Also glass is environmental friendly.

Hope more people start developing and discussing ideas. Problems are not solved by complaining but discussing solutions.

The Poles are The New Straits

A polar orbit is one in which a satellite passes above or nearly above both poles of the Earth.

More and more satellites are utilizing this orbit such as Starlink, Iridium and GPS satellites (not all satellites use this orbit but some) making the arctic circles critical regions for satellite security like a strait for the navy. Increasing the importance of Alaska, Canada and Scandinavian countries.

Solar Parachute and Atmospheric Skipping

Space Capsules returning to Earth have very high speeds.  Capsules slow down using the atmospheric drag which heats them up to very high temperatures. I recommend we use Solar Sails to slow down the capsules like a parachute.  Solar sails utilize radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. Coupled with the atmospheric skip maneuver the capsules would experience much less heat, less g-force and much higher accuracy in the landing location. (You may check Orion Skip Maneuver)

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2022/orion-skip-maneuver.html

Nine Men's Morris against Nikola Tesla

Nine Men's Morris using Wireless Led pieces. I designed and created to play it against Nikola Tesla. He would have loved that.

Robot Built Modular Piezo Wind Electric Generator

All my construction ideas are based on automated swarm robots powered by wind turbines. Current wind turbines are designed to be manually constructed by cranes and human workers. I propose a new generation of wind turbines that is build using smaller parts that can fit in a container. Their connectors would be designed such that the automated robots can easily construct them. The construction should be from inside out. The construction robot would move inside the hallow shaft of the tower and built it like LEGO tiles. One important feature of these wind electric generators is that they will generate electric using leaves attached to piezo electric generators. The movement of the leaves will generate electricity. This design allows the wind electric generator to be build in small modules compared to giant blades and dynamos and gears. The wind harvesting area can be increased using branches like in a tree. The electric will be generated during the construction. Therefore the tower can be build in stages depending on the power need. The lack of bearings and gears is also beneficial in desert areas where fine sand particles from sand storms wear out them fast.

The main goal of this idea is to come up with a design that can be fully robot build using smaller parts.

Sustainable Construction of Single Stage Panama Canal

To travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, ships must bridge a 26-metre height difference. The ships go through 3 locks: the Miraflores, Pedro Miguel and Gatun locks. 82km long Panama Canal transit can be completed in approximately 8-10 hours. I propose the swarm construction robots to enlarge the canal and decrease the lock stage count to one. 26 meter water level difference can be high for a single lock but I suppose engineers would find a clever way of solving it. The locks can be build in the lake section of the canal to allow more than two locks to be build to speed up the canal transit. Wind farms would be build to power the all electric construction robots. After the canal construction finishes they would power the cities nearby.

Sustainable Construction of Dual Lane Suez Canal

Suez Canal is a long narrow and single lane canal. I propose an extension of the canal using autonomous robots. The robots will be all electric and their batteries will be charged from the wind farm build on the banks of the canal. The enlarged canal will be separated with floating walls to make it dual lane. The robot based construction will allow 7/24 work with minimum number of workers required. No need to supply fuel, water and food. No need to construct temporary housing for the workers. The construction rate can be increased gradually by increasing the number of robots and wind turbines. Once the canal is finished the wind turbines would power the cities nearby.

Haughton Mars Project EcoSphere

Haughton Mars Project (HMP) is an international research project carried out near the Haughton impact crater on Canada's northern Devon Island. The project's goal is to utilize the Mars-like features of Devon Island to study the human dynamics which result from extended contact in close quarters. I propose an extension to this project to build large EcoSpheres. An EcoSphere, is a sealed glass aquarium in which a self-sustaining ecosystem exists which by definition means energy is free to leave and enter but matter must remain confined within. Basic EcoSpheres do not accommodate humans but the large one should be optimized for humans as well. One step closer to colonizing the other planets.

Wildfire Avoidance Using Golden Eye

Hot "hairdryer" winds that whip down mountainsides play a role in devastating heatwaves and wildfires. Previously I had proposed a global consortium to deploy and control solar concentrators on geostationary orbit to stop the formation of hurricanes before they turn into Category 5. Namely Golden Eye, can also be used to divert the hairdryer winds so they have less impact on the wildfire formation.

Sustainable Military and Civil Marine Patrol

I had previously proposed an air patrol network using wind turbine posts. This idea can be extended to marine patrolling as well. Offshore wind turbines can be utilized to recharge the patrolling all electric boats. The wind turbines don't need to be that close to each other like in the picture but cover the whole coast of the country. Wind turbine posts would also be used to recharge the patrolling all electric submarines. Additionally posts allow high speed network connection to dump in the data acquired during patrolling. This network would allow 7/24 patrolling of the coasts with renewable energy.

Finally I propose these patrolling boats and submarines to incorporate sensors to monitor the life under the sea. These data collected would allow the scientists to monitor the countries valuable marine life.  Develop system to serve both military and civil. Scientists should not try utilize other robots to monitor mineral levels at sea, just at those sensors to the military bots.

Sustainable Military and Civil Patrol

Patrolling is a necessity for all countries. Patrolling over air is quite effective due to larger are coverage. I propose the use of Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) planes for patrolling (they don't need to be that small like in the picture). The VTOL posts would be vertical wind turbines. Vertical turbine design allows the poles to have a safe docking nest for the VTOLs. The wind turbine posts would charge the VTOLs and allow high speed network connection to dump in the data acquired during patrolling. This network would allow 7/24 country wide patrolling with renewable energy.

Waste Recycling using Renewable Energy

Garbage collected within a city are dumbed in a waste management facility. Sorting them is usually very expensive. I propose the garbage to be shredded into very fine pieces in multiple stages. As the particle size goes down, automatic systems can make the sorting very effective. As always I propose these processes to be conducted using automated robots. We should stop using diesel work machines and operators seated in a cabin. We should start using fully automated robots that can be instructed remotely. The goal is to fully automate the process of recycling and use only electricity as energy source. Than renewable energy sources can be used to power the whole system. The process rate would depend on the electric available at that time. No need to store the energy.

Dry Ice Fire Fighting Drone

Countries that allocate billions of dollars to armaments have stock pile of weapons stored waiting to be used. I propose them stock pile dry ice bombs as well. It serves dual purpose. The main goal is to fight against the fire. Dry ice by its cold temperature cools down the fire. The heated dry ice change from solid to gaseous carbon dioxide which is heavier than oxygen isolates the burning material from oxygen in the atmosphere. The result is a very effective way of putting out the fire. The dry ice bomb may include a small explosive in the center to disperse the dry ice to a wider area. The bomb would be dropped from autonomous drones and planes. The bombs would be just an environmental friendly seal, dry ice and a small explosive in the center. The second benefit of the bomb is, it's a storage medium for the carbon dioxide. Coal power plants would produce these bombs as a by product and emit much less carbon to the atmosphere.

RoboMining

Traditional mining is mainly opening tunnels following the ore vein and excavating the ore to the surface. My proposition is to use very long warm like robots that is modular and expands for a long distance. Some of the sections are: drilling bits with motor shaft, XRF analyzer and flexible section connector.  After a potential mining site is found, the mining robot will be send to drill the ground. As the robot drills down the ground the drilling screw skin will push the drilled rocks to the surface like an Archimedes screw. XRF analyzers build on the robot sections will detect the composition of the rock being drilled and direct the robot to drill in the ore vein direction. When a vein ends, the robot would reverse the drilling direction and move back to the surface and search other directions. Depending on the mining field's size more than one robot can be deployed.

The mining robot will work with electricity generated by renewable sources established on site.

XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) analyzers are used to identify presence of a wide range of elements, namely every single element that is located between sodium and uranium in periodic table.

A Mad Approach to Solve The Global Warming

The source of heat on Earth is the Sun. Therefore if Earth orbits farther away from the Sun, it would be cooler. The Sun loses a total of 4 million tons of mass via Einstein's E = mc² every second. The loss of this mass causes the Earth's orbit to out spiral by 1.5 cm per year. If we increase this distance a little bit more to compensate for the global warming, the problem would be solved as a whole :)

An approach to achieve this goal comes from the ancient times.

"Give me a lever long enough and a firm place on which to stand and I will move the earth." Archimedes 

Low-Bypass Solid Rocket Booster

An idea came to my mind when I thought about replacing the Turbofan engines with the solid rocket boosters for my Stage Zero design. Turbofan engines are fuel efficient because they utilize the bypass air in their total thrust. Why don't we add a casing around the solid rocket booster like the one around a turbofan engine. The casing will collect and force the air to pass around the rockets nozzle. Unlike a turbofan engine there wouldn't be a fan to compress the air. Therefore it's effect would be minimal at lower speeds, but as the plane speeds up it would add up to the total thrust. This design would only work on Stage Zero solid rocket boosters. It wouldn't work on a Space Rocket launched at high altitude due to lack of air.

Stage Zero and Solid Rockets for Space Conquer

Stage Zero is a plane that utilizes the lifting power of air to reduce the fuel consumption. Additionally take off and landing of a plane is a mature and easy technology compared to a reusable liquid propulsion rocket stage. The plane should be able to lift a planetary rocket to an altitude of 50km or above. Therefore it's fuselage should be able to hold a Saturn V rocket. It's fuselage diameter would be 12 meters and length 140 meters. These dimensions allow space telescopes to be launched unfolded, large Space Station Modules and multiple satellite launch rockets to be carried at once. Maximum payload would be 3000 tones (Saturn V 2800 tones).  A multiplane design would be ideal for such a plane. Multiple distributed wings allow even lifting and multiple rockets distribute the thrust evenly. Also multi wings increase the strength of the wings. The propulsion would be accomplished by solid rockets. Therefore the plane will not have fuel on its wings or fuselage. The rockets would be fired in succession to increase the specific impulse time. At its peak altitude Stage Zero will release the Space Rocket and will return to ground and land like a glider.  Some rockets maybe reserved to be fired on landing. Space rocket or rockets will than fire their first stage. The advantage of this approach is to simplify the space rocket design. When launched at a very high altitude the rocket would experience much less air drag and would not require expensive heat shields. Also you can launch the rocket at way North, no need to approach the Equator. I also propose the Space Rocket to fully utilize solid rocket boosters. Therefore the rockets, including the plane can be launched in short notice. No need for expensive liquid rocket research and manufacturing needed. Liquid rocket designs slow down the advancements in space. Space Launch System (SLS) had so many delays and ate up a lot of budget and we are still waiting. Countries heavily invest in military and need to build as many missiles as possible when needed. When you establish high capacity fully automated solid rocket production infrastructure you can build rockets to launch your satellites frequently and if needed divert the production to produce missiles in mass. It would both decrease the military expenditure and lower the cost of space launch.

My Stage Zero and Solid Rocket approach is scalable. One can build a much smaller version of the plane and make improvements on the design before scaling up. This approach requires minimum new technology. The results can be seen within a year. Finally it would surpass all the liquid rocket alternatives within a couple of years.

2025 - 2049

The second quarter of the 21ˢᵗ century has just began. The first quarter was dominated with some of the follow brands and companies. How many will still continue after the second quarter and how many new will be added to this list.  We will see... 

Google, YouTube, Android, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iOS, Tesla, SpaceX, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, ChatGPT

if we don't use it we loose it

Geoffrey Hinton after receiving the Nobel Prize, he called for urgent research into AI safety to figure out how to control AI systems smarter than humans.

Human beings are lazy by nature. As the machines do more for the humans, humans become more lazy and do much less. If we don't use our muscle like in zero gravity we loose them. Our brain is similar, if we don't use it we loose it.

That is the biggest problem of the humanity in the second quarter of the century.