Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Orbital Disassembly 2023 - Part 2 Strategic Partners" video.

To All - just to give a different perspective on a person mentioned at one point in this. Jeff Greason is mentioned several times in this video. He was a founder of XCor which has CSS rightly points out went bankrupt. Anyone can check that on XCor's history on Wikipedia. I'd just like to point out something that anyone can also check on Wikipedia. You'll see that XCor was closely associated with Burt Rutan who designed and built the X-Prize winning Space Ship One. Yes XCors entrant in the X Prize (the Lynx) failed to fly but then so did all of the other contestants. Peter Diamandis the person who ran the X-Prize also tried to get the Rocket Racing League started. He chose XCor to build the prototype for the Rocket Racing League. That prototype not only flew but once flew 7 times in a single day and to the best of my knowledge that has never been equalled or surpassed by anyone, government or private. I just wanted people to know that in his day Jeff Greason was one of the top aerospace engineers in the world. FULL DISCLOSURE - I had some limited contact with Jeff regarding his rocket motors circa 2018. I've had no contact with him since. At that time he seemed a reasonable person and very knowledgeable, which makes my quite surprised to see him associated with these people. If he does reply to CSS I hope that CSS will give him a fair opportunity.
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And for anyone who's interested. As an engineer I agree 100% with CSS's summation of the NASA assessment of OAC's CLD proposal. My bet it took more time for someone at NASA to write up the assessment than it actually took to reject the proposal. Also CSS's assessment of the docking issues are spot on as are the balance issues he points out. This is exactly the sort of thing I wished more people in the media would point out regarding space subjects. My pet subject for unrealistic space issues is space mining and here's the basics of why. I'm Australian but did my degree in America. After meeting Harrison Schmitt in 2002 who spoke about mining the Moon for Helium-3 I went into the Australian mining industry to learn how to build and operate remote mines. I have over 15 years of first hand on site experience building and operating mines and I can state in all honesty that even the boffins at NASA haven't got a clue. I written to several people who have done TEDx talks on space mining and the one who did reply was actually an architect. He is actually a decent person who did the TEDx as a public speaking exercise. He was quite honest that he didn't know the subject that well. He sent me the main source of material for his talk which was the published papers from a NASA Conference on future lunar activities. It included quite a bit on mining and I can tell you all the NASA people need to actually spend some REAL TIME on mine sites seeing how they actually work. The biggest giveaway for anyone interested is to look at how they plan to do maintenance. If they say nothing then that shows they know nothing about mining and if they say robots then they know nothing about maintenance of heavy duty machinery. At its most basic mining is about getting what you want out of rocks. Just digging rocks and dirt out of the ground puts wear and tear on the machinery. After that you smash those rocks into smaller rocks and in some cases into powder. Yeah - at its most basic mining is about smashing rocks and that is incredibly hard on all the machinery. Anyone who thinks there's no maintenance is delusional and anyone who thinks it can be done with robots is ignorant of heavy duty machinery. And if CSS wants me to help on a "Why space mining is bunk!" video - then YES I WILL HELP IF HE ASKS.
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@commonsenseskeptic Case 2 of Space BS: Mining Asteroids Part 2 - Maintenance Iron Ore is about the simplest thing we mine. Dig it up crush and screen it down to size and put it on the train to send to port. If its a poor grade or you want to value add then you put a wash plant between the crushing & screening and the stockpile. A wash plant is pretty simple. You mix the ore with water and let gravity separate the iron from the dirt because iron is heavier than clay and dirt. So you have diggers, truck, crushers, screens, conveyors, stackers that make stockpiles, reclaimers that reclaim ore form stock piles and train load outs. No mater how well you blast it (or not) just digging up iron ore puts wear and tear on the digger. No matter how hard and tough the teeth and leading edge of diggers are they will wear and they will need replacing. If you are drilling for blast patterns then those drills will wear and need replacing. Having 100s of tons of rock and ore dumped in the back and then sliding it all out at the crusher puts wear and tear on the trucks. Plus they go through a set of tires every 3-4 months. Plus they need fuel, oil and general maintenance. Conveyor belts wear and need replacing water pumps, slurry pumps all wear. Even if you are mining with space lasers things will still wear out, because there will always bee some sort of processing. Even if you start chasing after rare low volume high value resources you will then need even more complex processing equipment will require even more maintenance. The moment you start dealing with rock things start wearing, because rocks have this one quality - they're hard. No matter how large or how small they are hard. It will never matter were you go the moment you start mining for resources is the moment you start wearing out equipment that will need replacing and or maintenance and that leads to the NEXT PROBLEM. Go an ask any mechanic if any 2 engines were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask any electrician if any 2 machines with wiring issues were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask a plumber if any 2 pipes were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask any carpenter if any 2 pieces of wood are identical? Robots are exceptional if the task is REPEATABLE. Maintenance is never exactly repeatable because every maintenance task has its own unique differences. IT CAN BE similar but NEVER identical. I have worked in industrial robotics in the past and its hard trying to explain to people that robots excel at doing the same thing a million times in a row. They do not handle a million similar tasks well, because every time a variation that's outside the norm happens they crash, they stop or they crash and stop. One of my bosses used to say "automated machines are great at finding bad parts and lousy at handling them." The origin of this issue is that NASA does not do maintenance except for stuff they have on earth or for software. Once they lite the rocket fuse there is NOTHING any NASA engineer can do to except software. So there is almost zero experience in off world maintenance except from things like the MIR Space Station, The ISS and the Hubble Space telescope AND NOEN of that involved smashing rock. Basically if any of the space mining people don't mention maintenance then they are delusional and if the claim they will use robotic maintenance they are ignorant.
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@commonsenseskeptic Fair call. I put together a proposal for the Australian Space Agency and I contacted him via LinkedIn. It was only a few conversations because I was interested in the reusable rocket engines. It didn't go far as he'd not only left XCOR but put it all behind him. Its why I see this as a shame because what he did achieve with the Rocket Racer was pretty extraordinary. If you are interested I'll give you 3 Space subjects below. Pick 1, pick none pick all 3 - your choice.
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@commonsenseskeptic Case 1 of Space BS: Mining Asteroids Part 1 - Logistics. Other than the fact nobody has ever brought back to Earth any more than a few grams of space dust there's the simple task of logistics. Most people have no idea how much stuff we actually dig up each year and turn into cars, boats, planes and all the other toys our society wants. Just so you know current world production of iron ore is just over 3,000,000,000 or a 3,000 Mta (million tons per annum) of which China does 1,200 Mta and Australia 825 Mta which accounts for 2/3rds of world supply. According to Forbes: "16 Psyche—a 140-mile-wide/226-kilometer-wide asteroid—could contain a core of iron, nickel and gold worth $10,000 quadrillion." Other than the logistics and for the sake of math we assume that only 50% of that value is iron. At $100 USD per ton of iron ore that's something like 100 Quadrillion tons equivalent of iron ore. When we only need 3 Trillion tons a year a 100 Quadrillion tons is 33,000 years worth. Even if someone at Forbes got there comma in the wrong place and its only $10 Quadrillion in value not 10,000 then its only 100 trillion tons or 33 YEARS of iron ore. Australia has a single deposit called Yandi creek. Its a part of the earth that split open at some point way way back in time and a pile of magma flowed out and formed an ore body that winds it way over 150km across the Australian outback. Its 100s of meters wide and 100s of meters deep. Yandi has more than a century's worth of iron ore and its just one of our major iron ore reserves and NOBODY needs to fly million of kilometers across space to get it. Plus we ALREADY have the train lines and ports to get it out to the rest of the world. Plus NOBODY needs a space suit costing millions for their PPE.
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@commonsenseskeptic Case 3 of Space BS: Star Wars - the Ronald Regan Type. Just a week ago an Australian journalist warned that we need these new AUKUS submarines because China was building a new high tech military including SPACE LASERS. Only a week before that at a military conference and trade show the head of Australia's military space program said "they were looking at satellite soft kill systems" So you know I did my degree in aerospace in the late 80s when Ronnie Brainspace Reagan was spending huge on space lasers and anything else anyone could suggest that might knock an ICBM out. Other than all the ridiculously hard classes in math, aerodynamics, propulsion,... etc the hardest class I had was one of my electives. Most people did orbital mechanics but a few of us did "Space Craft Dynamics" because we thought controlling how space craft flew about would be "cool." We were so very very wrong. 3/4 of the class were post grads and they struggled. Its applied maths at a level that is staggering high. BUT, One of those post graduates was easily the smartest engineering mathematician I have ever seen and that includes the guys who were doing the funky Computational Fluid Dynamics on the Cray Supercomputer. His specialty was being able to get a space craft turn, point and track WITHOUT wobbling. ALL spacecraft FLEX when they roll, pitch, and yaw or are under thrust and that flexing results in wobbling. Most of the time that's irrelevant, but if you are trying to hit an ICBM that's several 100km (at best) to several 1,000km away with a speed differential measured in kilometers per second its required to point very accurately. Laser, microwave of projectile is irrelevant - you have to point accurately. This postgrad worked out how to cancel out wobbles with counter moves. Don't aske me to explain that math its on the verge of insane. Its involves simultaneous partial differential equations in 3-D polar coordinates with transformations into the cartesian Roll/Pitch/Yaw/translate of the vehicle. Then it has the anti-wobble dynamics on top of that, which is another set of 3-D simultaneous partial differential equations. Yes I spent 4 months in a class with the one guy and his professor who could make space based weapons POINT well enough to be on the fringe of feasible, but even after that there's some very basic problems. ISSUE 1 - Space Lasers. Despite the fact we might be able to make a space laser point where it needs to point and we might even be able to give it enough power to do something at range, there's 2 very simple counters to a space laser. 1) be shiny because light reflects off shiny surfaces. 2) roll slowly because lasers need time to burn through which means they need to be very much on the same spot NOT just on target. ISSUE 2 - Microwave & EM interference with onboard electronics. Despite how snazzy this sounds people forget that space is already an environment needing lost of shielding from EM and other radiation. So trying to punch through with Microwaves or EM is like trying to punch through a tank with a bow and arrow. ISSUE 3 - Hard Kill also known as the dumbest thing anyone can do. Yeah not going to happen unless you want to make Space unusable for everyone for decades. Been tried and can work but also has disastrous consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Anti-satellite_missile_tests
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Case 4 of Space BS: Off World Heavy Industry a Jeff Bezos favorite. Yeah good old jeff sayin he wants to move things like iron smelting off world where there's unlimited solar power and nobody has to worry about pollution. Remember the Tom Price mine a mentioned a couple of chapters back?? 20Mta (million tons per annum) is a great easy number to use because thanks to the Space Shuttle it makes the math so easy an economist could get it. Reasonable quality iron ore is about 60-65% iron content. Good quality is around 70% really high grades are above that. 70% makes the math easy because 70% of 20 is 14. The Space Shuttle could take off with a payload of 30tons, but it could only land with 14tons of payload. So it doesn't matter how many flights it takes to get the the 20Mta from a mine like Tom Price up to a processing facility in LEO (low earth orbit) its how many it takes to get the 14 Million tons back down. 14,000,000 tons divided by 14 tons per flight = 1,000,000 flights. Now sure we could have something 10 times better or even 100 times better than a space shuttle but that's irrelevant because even at 100 times better than a Space Shuttle its still 10,000 flights or about 200 flights per week and considering in 30 years the Space Shuttle only did 135 flights that's kind of difficult. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. Tom Price is 20 Mta and Australia exports over 820 Mta so Tom Price rounds to about 1/41st of Australia's output. So those 10,000 flights with the imaginary super shuttle is actually about 410,000 flights and the rest of the world almost quadruples that number. Cos trying to bring back around 2 Billion tons of iron isn't easy. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. If you do the kinetic energy calculation of 2 Billion tons of processed iron in orbit doing 7.5 kilometers per second. Its 5.625 x 10E16 Joules or the equivalent of around 950 of the Hiroshima bomb. To Bring that back down all that Kinetic Energy has to be dissipated. That's currently done with Air Friction and its burned off as HEAT. Yeah Jeff Bezos idea to save the planet from CO2 Emissions from iron ore production is to take iron production off planet and then effectively NUKE the upper atmosphere on a daily basis. Yeah - Sorry Mr. Bezos but that's NOT going to work.
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@commonsenseskeptic Case 5 of Space BS: Terraforming Mars. Back in college we had an alum who worked at NASA one day give a guest lecture on terraforming Mars. We were pumped and then he dumped on us some reality. He introduced us to what I now call "planetary mechanics" which is basically calculating how much stuff is present. Making a planet actually work is what I call "planetary dynamics" and involves making things like gas cycles, water cycles and ocean currents work so that life can be supported. Thankfully planetary mechanics is math anyone can understand. One thing that is very easy is to take the surface area of a planet in km² and then simply say the first km of atmosphere above the surface is the same number by km³. Yes you can calculate the volume of 2 spheres 1 with a radius 1km larger than the other and get an answer that's less 1% different. But the real point is to give people an idea of what is the volume of the gas that is in that 1km just above the surface. So Mars where one of your favorite clowns Elon Musk wants to go has a surface area of 144,370,000 km² That volume 1 km above the surface of Mars is 144,370,000 km³. 1 m³ of Earth Standard air is 1.2kg so 1km³ is just 9 zeros on that for kilos or 6 for tons. Either way 144,370,000 km³ of Earth Standard Air is 173,244,000,000,000 tons. So if Elon wants to terraform mars he's gonna need 173 Trillion tons of air and that's only for the first kilometer. Who knows what he will need if someone wants to climb up over the edge of Valles Marineris? I actually had one clown claim Elon would only need the Oxygen and none of the Nitrogen so I asked where Elon was going to get 36.4 Trillion tons of oxygen? I'm still waiting.
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@commonsenseskeptic I hope you like those 5 things. There are more and they aren't hard to find because as you keep showing time and again the basic math does not lie. Sure there are those who yell what about this or what about that and it might move the goal posts, BUT IT NEVER changes the outcome. Best to you. I love the channel. Keep doing what you are doing.
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