KESTS to GEO

The basic technology principles involved are:

1. The spacecraft are dragged up from the ground to GEO by a high velocity upward-moving mass stream.

2. The weight of the transportation structure with its loads including spacecraft, is supported mostly by excess outward centrifugal force of the high velocity mass streams.

3. The power for abundant space access thereafter efficiently comes from the sun, via solar satellite power plants in GEO.

4. Creation and development of a "high velocity sliding armature energy-momentum technology" is important for this project, and has many other useful possible applications.

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Explaining in a bit more detail:

It took decades for the average person to understand what makes a rocket travel upward. Equal and opposite reaction forces are created in the rocket engine, the relatively tiny exhaust mass producing such high thrust since the energy is proportional to the square of the velocity. And that until the thrust force exceeds the force of gravity on the mass of the rocket, despite the expenditure of energy the rocket does not move upward at all. Took time to understand by a folk previously familiar to propellers much like swimmer's hands, only through the air, made the craft go. And people need to have a sense of purpose for these things: rockets are for 4th of July celebration fireworks, for military missiles, for getting to the Moon before the enemy got there to put nuclear-armed rockets aimed at us from there, like had been so recently tried in Cuba.

So it is reasonable to expect people to not immediately understand how KESTS to GEO would work, similarly, or why to do it, what good is it for.

Here is a brief, simplistic, description of KESTS to GEO purposes and way it would work:

GEO is a very unique place, an orbit where its occupants appear motionless to the earth surface. It is the one place where lifting structures can put payload off, and it will stay there. It is where our communications satellites are put these days. It is also the place ideal for Satellite Solar Power Stations which would gather the endless abundant high intensity solar energy found there, convert it into a form which would pass easily through clouds, and deliver it via a beam to any place on the earth, any nation's receiving antenna, to be then converted into commercial electrical power to light the homes and power the industries, without producing the Greenhouse Effect CO2 load on the environment, nor radioactive waste materials to be guarded, nor damming rivers for hydroelectric power, but blocking the flow of creatures in the river's aquatic worlds.

Other very valuable applications can be created there in GEO too, such as solar powered total recycling plants and high spaceports for huge rockets destined to far places and back; even maybe great cities of abundance in space, easy commute to the ground from there. Depends on enough people adequate to the task

KESTS would be a transportation structure that bridges between the ground and GEO, in this case, and delivers the lift energy for the transportation process. Thus the spacecraft riding it need no fuel to lift, nor engines, fuel tanks, none. Such spacecraft are there just to provide a safe environment for the payload cargo and people during the trips, otherwise just to go along for the ride.

The initial reasons to bother to create KESTS to GEO initially are:

1) enable the construction of enough solar power stations in GEO to supply all the world's electrical power needs, without further depleting fossil petrochemical reserves, nor adding to the environmental CO2 burden.

2) If this can be achieved quickly enough by a world that currently is apathetic to the idea of KESTS to GEO and prefers righteous violence as the answer to all problems, then up there in GEO we can build solar powered total recycling plants, using mass/charge ratio separation of waste materials into their component elements, doing what nature cannot do to our accumulating toxic hazardous industrial wastes.

3) in a world thusly re-focused on mutually beneficial constructive purposes (yes, I am still a dreamer), then spaceports can be built there in GEO, so the SSPS-solar-powered KESTS can electrically lift the rockets to those spaceports, 91% up out of the earth's gravitational energy well, far above the impeding atmosphere, high gateway to the solar system's resources.

4) of special possible interest to real estate people and to somewhat fringe ordinary people wanting to have families and homes, rings of huge space cities can be built there in GEO, initially of Earth materials, then once perfected, built mainly of lunar and asteroidal materials, and the KESTS can be used to supply the energy to deliver the energy top such a ring of habitats so as to prevent its collapse in the distant future.

If you consider these worthy potential achievements, then look at how the KESTS to GEO would work.

1) The materials and workers needed to build SSPS in GEO are lifted up (safely contained in spacecraft) from the ground along half of an elliptical path, extending, say, from a tunnel in the Ecuadorean Andes mountains, halfway around the earth up to GEO on the far side, by dragging electro-magnetically against a stream of electric motor armature segments traveling upward at meteoric velocities, somewhat analogous to a San Francisco Cable Car being routinely dragged up a hill street by the distantly powered moving cable onto which it clamps.

In other words, the spacecraft are dragged up from the ground to GEO by a high velocity upward-moving mass stream.

2) Those meteoric velocity armature segments need a hard vacuum to travel in, even in the part of their path which lies within the earth's atmosphere. They also need a defined path for their endless loops around the earth, while they lift and lower spacecraft. The mass of the vacuum-enclosing tubing, and of the maglev tracks defining the pathway loop up around and back, has weight in the earth's gravitational field, so the armature mass streams have exactly enough excess velocity above orbital transfer trajectory velocity, to provide the outward upward centrifugal force required to balance the force of gravity on the earth-motionless stator track part of the immense perimeter motor structure.

In other words, the weight of the transportation structure with its loads including spacecraft, is supported mostly by excess outward centrifugal force of the high velocity mass streams.

3) the energy which is used to lift payload and support the structure, comes from solar energy received by SSPS in GEO and beamed down to the Andean tunnel accelerator site. It is a solar powered space access gateway from that point, on into the future. (A quite different scenario from termination of spaceflight activities due to lack of fuel needed for launch, dwindling economically recoverable fossil fuel supplies being more desperately needed elsewhere.)

In other words, the power for abundant space access thereafter efficiently comes from the sun. (Not from fossil fuels; if still unaware, see National Geographic June 2004 cover and article pp.80-109.)

Just as would the power to cleanly enable the world's civilizations to thrive, and to process toxic waste materials back to component elements for renewed pure uses.

And if need be, the power to lift households up to new homes in GEO, to temporarily remove mankind's environmental burden while the restoration of the earth's ecosystem goes on (we thus need to prepare for doing this, now, saving the genotypes and knowledge of the interconnected web of life, given the possibility of it's opportunity happening.)

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My grumpy plea for help on this task:

A grumpy comment: In 20 or so years, maybe some people would prefer to have homes without electricity to power the lights, to wash the clothes, to power the TV, stereo, computer; no adequate fuel supplies for your SUV, or bus to get to work or buy groceries, nor to heat your home; not fuel from which to make ammonia to fertilize crops needed for food, or to run farm machinery or power delivery trucks to stores for you to buy food and goods. No adequate energy available to pump water to drink or to flush toilets or to power garbage trucks. Want to find your little secure niche living back to nature? Want glorious fun fighting over the scraps of what is left... if so, enjoy, if that is your sport.

Or, if you have more respect for the future of your loved ones, please consider what I have offered on these web pages and elsewhere on this subject, offering all of you an opportunity to continue a fine life on into the next generations. I'm not trying to beat you at some business game; I don't deserve your continued hostility as if I were dangerous and immoral, upsetting your hard-earned ways of life; I am attempting to help you and myself, and everybody else, life ought to be more comfortable and fun that way. And maybe this getting-older man can find a woman interested in companioning and helping with this task, too.

Is there anybody for KESTS to GEO, besides me? I cannot do this all by myself. Corporations are all too busy off doing their own thing on something else, playing the monopoly game, can't see the bigger picture I have shown here now, and elsewhere for the past 15 years.

Hello, hello, anybody awake yet? Who is dreaming more, me or you? Wake up, let's make sense together!

reply to Jim at jedcline@kestsgeo.com

Copyright © 2004 James E. D. Cline