Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Dr Ben Miles" channel.

Yeah when the most we've ever done is generate a few stray particles that decay almost as fast as they are made. And these guys are planning on a technology nobody has yet made work outside of a bomb to create the fuel they want which nobody has yet really proven to do something nobody will need for decades. FYI - I have a degree in aerospace and about 20 years ago I was discussing things with a class mate who's at NASA and there's 2 things we need for long duration space flight - life support and propulsion. Yeah its great these guys are looking at one but nobody is even remotely close to long duration life support. Its one of the things Li like to throw at Elon Musk fanbots.
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@t.isurvivalist7537 On actually starting some form off world colony. Its the moon or the moon first. Nobody with a brain is going to spend billions and billions sending people to die on Mars. Its 6-9 months away so if there's any issues its over they all die. The moon is 3 days away so there is at least a chance you can get something there. That's the argument that came out of the Columbia tragedy. they knew the foam had hit the wing. There were engineers who wanted to roll a spy sat over and take a high res photo and some clown said NO there wasn't anything that could be done. That turned out to be complete BS and that clown got 7 people killed on top of losing $3.5 Billion worth of space plane. The whole thing with a lunar base needs a proper plan and from what I have seen so far NASA is either inept at planning that sort of thing or is being hampered in making sensible plans. In 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he told me about Helium-3. So I went off to the Australian mining industry to learn how to build remote mine sites. Its not a bad analogue because there are a lot of similarities. You're essentially 3 days away by road you only get planes according to the schedule so you have to plan everything around those logistics. And it forces you to think quite differently than you do when working in a city. In one of our cities I can generally make a call and get almost anything I want in an hour. Out on a mine site I have to PLAN contingencies and I have to solve problems with what I have at hand not what I might want in 3-7 days. Remember the bit in Apollo 13 with the CO2 filter they had to bodgey up. That's what working on a mine site is like. The other aspect of remote Australian mine sites is paying attention to how dangerous the environment is. basically you treat everything that's alive and not human can kill you - even the insects because an infected bite out there is lethal. The bigger poisonous things just kill you faster. And even if nothing bites you the heat and dryness can kill you in 3-6 hours if you aren't careful. I can tell you from materials I have read that NASA really doesn't understand certain aspects of remote site operations. Most notably in maintenance.
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@today05 No No No the life support issue is way way way way more difficult. Propulsion is just a matter of physics. Life support is biologic cycles which are very complex and are always interwoven with other biologic cycles. Do you know body that nobody as ever been able to artificially make soil AND YES they've tried. Remember that thing called biodome that catastrophically failed and failed several times? Its one of those things 7.8 billion people take for granted. We have a life support system and its called mother Earth and we barely understand a fraction of a percent about how it works except in conceptual terms and a few of the major cycles like the water cycle. The top guy in the field is Jonathan Trent and you can see some of talks here on YT. He calls it upcycling rather than recycling. Recycling is where you just reprocess back into a new version of what it was - like they do with aluminium cans. Recycling is very linear. Upcycling is where you take stuff from the bottom of the biologic processes and process it back up to the top of the biologic food processes and that might take several steps in larger more complex cycles as well as interact with other cycles. That's about as briefly as possible to explain how much harder it is.
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@clementvining2487 Do you know when engineers know that amateurs are speaking shite that they have no idea about? When they start explaining and use terms like "new technologies" that NOBODY has ever developed let alone made work and then add in idiotic claims that we'll build the factory at places like Jupiter when they have no idea what getting to Jupiter entails. Stop reading sci-fi and thinking your an expert.
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