Professor Reynolds has some questions about the legal status of space elevators.

Here are some more. The problems associated with anchoring such a beast in an unstable and/or corrupt equatorial country has caused many of those planning such things to put them instead on floating ocean platforms, in international waters. This raises some new issues, because now, instead of (as Glenn notes) the structure simply being a very high tower, it would be a tall ship that would put to shame all of the previous false claimants to that designation, with their puny little sticks for masts. This thing would have a crows nest above geosynchronous altitude. It would also imbue an entirely new meaning to the old phrase, the “high seas.”

Presumably, maritime law would apply to it, absent any codicils to the Outer Space Treaty. Thus gambling would be legal, the person in charge of the facility would be captain of the ship with all implied powers (including wedding officiation), etc. He would also keep the keys to the gun locker.

As to whether such an object would be “launched” or not, that depends on the construction technique. Most plans for these things would in fact involve launching them, in the conventional usage of the term. It would be only after the initial mass had been deployed at geostationary orbit that it would be slowly lowered and attached to the planet. After that, more mass would be added via the elevator route, so it would really be a hybrid creature, partially launched and partially constructed from the surface.

It would get even more interesting if the orbital anchor were a captured carbonaceous asteroid, and the diamondoid materials needed for the tether manufactured from it. In that case, it would be more akin to a grappling of the earth from another planetary body. I’m not sure what the legal implications of that would be. Would its status somehow change once it was actually attached to the planet? And what does “attached” mean, if the bottom of it is simply floating on the ocean or, even more tenuously, in the atmosphere?

This is one that will indeed keep the lawyers happily busy for years.

[Update at 8:30 AM PDT]

This strikes me as a loophole in the sovereignty restrictions of the OST. If an asteroid were the orbital anchor for the beanstalk, and it were designated a ship (flagged, perhaps, in Panama or Liberia), then the property rights to mining (and owning) it would presumably be settled. Or at least much more so than they would be for it as a freely orbiting body. And one could protect additional objects in like manner by simply attaching them.

Keith Cowing says that NASA continues to dig itself deeper into its hole of irrelevancy to our future in space.

[Update at 9:15 AM PDT]

As Keith correctly notes in comments, those are my words, not his. I should have written that he provides evidence of that (in my opinion), not that he says it.

Thomas James has a lot more discussion of the ET manufacturing facilities that were in the path of Katrina. There was also a story at Space Daily about it.

Michael Huang tries to smooth over ruffled feathers in the Human vs. Robot space exploration debate by playing the colonization card. I vote humans. Nevertheless, there can be self-replicating nanobots or, before those develop, self replicating macrobots. If we are too busy or craven to leave the planet, then maybe we can settle the universe with ‘Cylons’ (the future human-created silicon cum wetware nemesis race from TV show Battlestar Galactica).

Come to think of it, DNA makes us digital life. An argument for Intelligent Design is that if you were trying to colonize a new world like Earth, you would probably arrive at something very much like life as we know it. Genetic algorithms work pretty well at solving ecological problems. Are we some other race’s expendable robot explorers?

Thomas James asks a question in comments that I’ve been wondering about as well. If the manufacturing facilities for the external tanks in Michoud, Mississippi are destroyed, maybe Shuttle will be retired sooner than we think. It may also put paid to Mike Griffin’s ambitions about Shuttle derivatives. It wouldn’t be as devastating as a hit on the Cape, though. They could probably rebuild tank manufacturing facilities, but if the orbiters were wiped out, the program would truly be dead.

[Update late on Sunday night]

Thomas James points out correctly in comments that Michoud is in Lousiana. That’s what I had thought, but I made the mistake of checking it on line. That’s what I get for relying on NASA web sites for information.

Let it be noted and time stamped that Dwayne Day and Clark Lindsey have proposed an interesting wager. Though Dr. Day may still back down, given Clark’s definition.

It’s not a surprise, really, but Virgin Galactic has publicly announced that the next goal after a successful SpaceShipTwo commercial suborbital service is an orbital system. I wonder what the projected schedule is for first service, and if it will end up beating the CEV into space?

Clark Lindsey has a powerful rejoinder to a recent pessimistic article about our future in space in the Wall Street Journal, which they printed.

Glenn points out an article touting space elevators at IEEE Spectrum. I like space elevators, but I think that their proponents overstate the case when they say things like this:

SO WHY CAN’T WE DO ALL THIS with rockets? And why is the space elevator so cheap?

The answer is that chemical rockets are inherently too inefficient: only a tiny percentage of the mass at liftoff is valuable payload. Most of the rest is fuel and engines that are either thrown away or recycled at enormous expense.

Well, it’s a myth that “WE CANT DO ALL THIS with rockets.” Space elevators are clearly better, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t open up space without them. They are a sufficient technology, but not a necessary one. Rockets are still far from a mature technology, and the costs that he claims for the initial space elevator ($200/kg) are achievable with rockets as well, once we start flying them enough to get suitable economies of scale.

Today’s NYT reports that Iraq and Afghanistan if they drag on for another five years will comprise, “The Trillion Dollar War”. World War 2 was a multitrillion dollar war. Every war with more than a million casualties is a trillion dollar war if you take the value of a life at a million dollars. That might not be reasonable some time and place where the median income is less than ten thousand dollars, but I would call for measuring by purchasing power parity. While the article is a pretty poor analysis considering opportunity costs. First, that veteran’s health costs would have been big without the war. Second, that salary and so on would have to be paid without the war. Third, that there would be some major price to pay in blood and coin keeping the prior regimes in place in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Seen in that light, a trillion dollar war is a bargain. Especially if it results in friendly economies (if not friendly polities) in Iraq and Afghanistan going forward.

As I have stated before, we should step up to the plate and spend the next trillion colonizing the Moon and Mars. $50 billion a year could launch 20 times as much stuff into orbit as was launched last year and colonists could pay for their own payload. With the long bond rate at 5%, the net present value of $50 billion a year forever is a trillion dollars.

There are a bunch of good reasons why the Moon would be a better bet than Iraq. Colonizing the Moon would not face any guerilla warfare. There are no existing users of Lunar resources. There is no government worthy of note to displace. There are no Lunar sympathizers that would start violent revolution if we went. (If you are out there, keep quiet until after the colonization gets going so you can have your fifteen minutes while I have my colonization.)

No air on the Moon? Oxygen is there and nitrogen costs $0.50/gallon on Earth. Let’s say we imported 11,000 liters of air a day and just vented it into space. A liter of air weighs about 1.25 grams. Importing your 14 kg of air a day is not a big deal. $50 billion a year could deliver enough air for 1,000 people to just vent every single breath to space at today’s launch rates. Don’t you think a thousand people could work out a way to recycle and replace air from local materials? There are 4000 kilograms of nitrogen in every 1000 tons of regolith. At 1300K, some of it will come out as Nitrogen gas (a ton worth of various gases). If I could get $50 billion a year for selling air on the Moon, I would sure as heck work hard to figure out how to do it for less.

So we could have our lunar colony and if people consumed two pounds of earth imported food per day (which should be plenty) and we can get air and water recycling down pat, we could support 7,000 folks. If we can get food production going then we can support a lot more for $50B/year. We would need to get the cost of the mass to the Moon down to $100,000 per year if we wanted to support 500,000 on the Moon like we have in Wyoming for $50 billion/year. That would either mean just 5 kg in Earth imports at $20,000/kg to the Moon or about 20 kg at $5000/kg to the Moon which is roughly what Elon Musk is promising by 2010.

By Sam, not Rand