A ping out to the Texas Ping list, founded by Windflier.
Another special Texas winter edition for your perusal.
As always, please FReepmail me if you want on or off the Texas Ping list.
Blessings, and stay warm!
Posted on 01/21/2025 3:39:34 AM PST by texas booster
CEDAR PARK, Texas - Among the starry nights of Central Texas this week is a little bit of home.
A company out of Cedar Park launched a spacecraft on the SpaceX Falcon 9 on Wednesday.
The launch from Cape Canaveral was a success.
"The work is just getting started, and we've got an exciting mission in front of us, about sixty days in front of us, and we're digging in hard in all that work," said Scholtes.
(Excerpt) Read more at fox7austin.com ...
Cedar Park company sent a spacecraft to space
The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 to space on Jan. 15
Spacecraft will spend the next 45 days orbiting the Earth before touching down on the moon for two weeks
A ping out to the Texas Ping list, founded by Windflier.
Another special Texas winter edition for your perusal.
As always, please FReepmail me if you want on or off the Texas Ping list.
Blessings, and stay warm!
What’s next:
The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander will spend the next 45 days orbiting the Earth before touching down on the moon for two weeks.
It will collect data for more rocket science, too.
“A lot of investigations into the material properties of the moon, lots of investigations into electromagnetic properties of the moon and of the earth as well,” said Scholtes.
NASA will use this data for projects that are simply out of this world.
Take the Artemis Mission: NASA’s quest to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars.
NASA hopes this mission will also break barriers by sending the first woman and person of color to the moon.
But before all of that, it starts at home in Cedar Park.
“It’s a tremendous feeling of satisfaction to get a chance to prove our capability and to demonstrate that we are worthy of the responsibility that we’ve been entrusted with and to see this mission through to the end and see what kind of exciting data we can get back,” said Scholtes.
The fusion energy released from just 1 gram of deuterium-tritium fuel equals the energy from about 2,400 gallons of oil.
“NASA hopes this mission will also break barriers by sending the first woman and person of color to the moon.”
Methinks those priorities have expired.
NASA hopes this mission will also break barriers by sending the first woman and person of color to the moon.
—
A DEI mission, hopefully cancelled
I understand the moon’s surface has a thin accumulation/coating of HELIUM3, due to solar winds.
While there may be tritium, as a radioisotope it decays by emitting a beta particle (electron) with a half life of just over 12 years. Also it is (obviously) a very low molecular weight atom and is usually a gas, and with the moon’s low low gravity i doubt it would stick around.
Be good to see the science of the surface. Cool mission here.
There was a "person of color" on both shuttle disasters. I heard a black comedian claim NASA = "Negroes Ain't Supposed to be Astronauts"
The vehicles form factor looks very familiar...
CC
...aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. That's what's known has a NON-DEI hire.
A dear childhood friend’s son is on the engineering team that built the lander. I lost my buddy threes ago. I know he is smiling in Heaven for his son’s achievements.
It’s snowing in Galveston County Texas! Very rare event.
My bad math on that would be:
If oil is $75 per barrel and assuming 453.59 grams/pound, 1 ounce of H3 Tritium is the equivalent of $180K of oil. That’s $8.16B equivalent cost of oil at 100 pounds of tritium.
Not at all my area of expertise (assuming I do have one), but I read that when H3 tritium decays is releases crap-ton of keV. Probably enough to run my A/C in Texas for next 10,000 years!
I say screw the lunar module, take an F-250 up there and a crew of West Virginia hillbillies and start digging.
They do not say which color, however. Could be Chinese or Mexican
Blue Origin END GAME!! Top GENIUS Engineers Escape Jeff Bezos to Join up SpaceX & Elon Musk
YouTube ^ | August 24, 2021 | Great SpaceX
Posted on 8/24/2021, 10:58:10 AM by SunkenCiv
As we all know on July 20, Blue Origin successfully made a flight to the edge of orbit, making Jeff Bezos one of the first two billionaires to go to space. This seems to be the resounding success of Blue Origin so far. However, after the billionaire space founder came back to Earth, the company’s internal affairs became chaotic, many key engineers and leaders decided to leave the company.
At least 17 key leaders and senior engineers have left Blue Origin this summer, with many moving on in the weeks after Bezos’ spaceflight.
Two of the engineers, Nitin Arora and Lauren Lyons, this week announced jobs at other space companies: Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace, respectively. Others quietly updated their LinkedIn pages over the past few weeks....
When that happens it shouldn't be just because they are a "woman and person of color," but because they are truly the best person for the job. Otherwise, it makes no difference their sex or ethnic origin.
“The fusion energy released from just 1 gram of deuterium-tritium fuel equals the energy from about 2,400 gallons of oil.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435121002075
“The 3He abundance is estimated at about 30 μg per g of regolith.9 Taking into account a depth of 3 m (3He is implanted from energetic particles and therefore concentrated near the surface), the lunar reserves would be of the order of 1 million tons, corresponding to 600 ZJ (1 Zettajoule = 1021 joules) i.e., about 1,000 times the annual world total primary energy consumption. “
D-T makes more sense there oceans have unlimited amounts of D and you can breed T with lithium in the blanket of the reactor. There is also from a fusion stand point unlimited amounts of lithium in earth’s crust, and oceans.
You don’t even need fusion Q=10 for fusion fission hybrid breeders to work. Q=0.5 is enough if you surround the plasma by uranium you get 80 to 200 times energy multiplication via the 14MEV fusion neutron slamming into U238 and releasing 200+MEV of fission energy that original neutron didn’t stop it ricocheted and will induce on average 3 more fast fission events with each U238 event releasing on average of 3 additional neutrons you can see how this turns into a critical cascade rapidly. You drive a fission blanket of uranium with the starshine of the fusion plasma. When all those neutrons slow down they get absorbed by the uranium in the outer blanket being U238 it cannot under go slow neutron fission those are captured and that uranium now has an extra neutron which rapidly decays to a proton forming Pu239 << this is the way. Pu239 is the perfect fission fuel it has the lowest critical mass and when it fission it kicks off 3.5 neutrons at 200+ MEV in a fast spectrum it will all by itself breed 1.4 times as much fuel as is burnt from the uranium it is mixed with in that fast reactor. The net result is a single fusion fission hybrid feeds 20+ fast spectrum breed reactors that each one then produces 40% more fuel than it burns at every fuel reloading. In short order each of those fast spectrum breed reactors have spawned a daughter reactor as well. This doubling continues indefinitely with the fusion fission hybrid spawning 20 daughters every time it’s unloaded. The amounts of PU239 created is staggering.
Pu239 a single grams worth produces 1.2 megawatt days worth of energy. That’s 1,200,000 watts for 24 hours solid. U235 makes 1 megawatt day per gram itself. A single fusion hybrid burning D/T at Q=0.5 would breed 2500+ kilograms of Pu239 per year thats 2,500,000 grams which is also 2.5 million megawatt days worth of energy. There is no reason to go the moon for fuel our own world ocean has a billion years worth of deuterium ,lithium and uranium in it.
2500kg @2.5MMMwh\Days is 6.8 one gigawatt sized reactors running flat out for a year continuously. But that’s not the whole story for PWR reactors they have a conversion ratio of 0.6 meaning for every gram of heavy metal fuel they breed 0.6 grams of additional PU239 this doubles the energy from the incoming fuel by burning U238 converted to fissle fuel in situ. So one fusion fission hybrid feeds 14 PWR of similar size. It gets better if you use Canadian CANDU heavy water reactors they have a CR of 0.8 you can feed 20 CANDU reactors from a single fusion fission hybrid.
Texas could be like France with 54 reactors of 1GW each using CANDU tech which the Koreans build on under 60 months for less than $2800/KW capex. It would take two 1500MW fusion fission hybrids to fuel those into infinity. Those two hybrids would only need 56 megawatts of fusion plasma to drive a 4500MWth uranium blanket at an 80 to one multiplication rate that’s on the low end of what’s possible with metal oxide fuel, salt fuels go into the 200s. We have the technology today for a 60 megawatt fusion plasma core you don’t even need to have power turbines on the hybrid if you don’t want too you could just dump the heat of the blanket and buy 60 mw off the grid. The amount of fuel that hybrid is making is 20 GIGAWATTS per hour for a 120 megawatt investment the ratio of plasma heating to fusion output at Q=0.5 is two to one obviously negative for power generation with pure fusion but that uranium blanket changes everything as it breeds huge amounts of plutonium all day every day. We have the technology today right now , what is lacking is the political and financial will.
Texas could go nearly fully nuclear baseload of 54 gigawatts which is our average baseload over a yearly basis peaks into the 90s in summer and 70s in winter with dips into the 30s at the ducks back. With two hybrids and 50 CANDU since we ha e four PWR already Texas could go nearly fully nuclear power with a unlimited fuel source for all eternity. The oceans will never run out of D, Li or U238 there is a ten thousands year stockpile of depleted uranium from enrichment plants sitting in waste piles so only the D and Li is needed for the hybrid to turn into prime reactor fuel.
Tritium when fused with deuterium yields 14 million electron volts in a single high energy neutron. It would be a crime against humanity to use it’s single digit kilo electron volts decay for anything other than glow in the dark gun sights or watch dials in nanogram amounts.
Tritium is best used to breed plutonium from depleted uranium then feed that to either a super cheap CANDU reactor or a very fast to build ABWR reactor both of which can eat 100% MOX fuel. The Japanese built their last ABWR in 39 months from first concrete to first fueling they could crank them out like that anywhere they are licenced to do so...UK,Japan,USA
One fusion fission hybrid feeds 14 ABWR since those can use tight lattice to get to a CR of 0.8 like a CANDU the 4.5% vs 1.2% MOX makes the difference. Either way you want to turn 14MEV tritium into 3X Pu239 at 200 MEV per atom. Fission is an order of magnitude higher in energy per atom. Pu scares the dogooders that’s the reason the tech has been ignored they crow endlessly about proliferation blah blah. The genie is out if a country wants weapons there is much easier ways than engineering a 100 million degree plasma hybrid, just get some heavy water reactors or easier still use graphite, aluminum and air cooling like the USA did in the 1950s it’s ludicrous to let a technology go unused because of a small loud group of killjoys.
We should be using more nuclear energy, evolving the technology along the way. Our dependence on electricity certainly isn’t diminishing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.