GeSp634

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Number: 634 Name: CONCEPTUAL SYNTHESIS

Address: J.E.D.CLINE1 Date: 881120 Approximate # of bytes: 21420

Number of Accesses: 29 Library: 4

Description:

Description of the cognitive process of doing Technological Conceptual Design, as applied to exotic space transportation system concepts. Includes brief history of doing this creating "Mooncable Project", "Energy/Transport", "Microelevator (GEO's Umbilical), and ends with a new conceptual teaser to enjoy.

Keywords: synthesis, mooncable,starbridge,launchloop,NCS,transport,design

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88K19JEDCline

Doing Technological Conceptual Synthesis On Exotic Space Transportation Systems

Technological Conceptual Synthesis is the designing of connectednessbetween composite ideas, to form a concept which has a functionalitythat none of the separate ideas have. It forms a pattern ofconnectiveness. Analogies and morphological similarities are itselements, so it constantly seeks out general patterns in one's incomingexperience and attempts to evoke the leaping insights of seeing awholeness with the missing parts experimentally filled-in. While at thesame time, the left-brain is busy identifying specific significances ofthe same incoming experiencial data, analyzing and comparing with goalsstep by step.

The right hemisphere of the brain plays a dominant role in cognitivesynthesis; contemporary Western education might well improve itsstrengthening of right-brain cognitive functions, so that we can moreeasily see the big-picture implications of what our linear thinking lefthemisphere is planning. (A word of caution here: the right brain has avulnerability to a form of invasiveness quite unknown by left brainexperience; the myelin sheaths are different in the two hemispheres.Although in another sense, that which is "invasive" can become a form ofconnectiveness that has the satisfaction of belonginess to a largerwhole, also an arena quite unknown by strictly left-brain linearthinking.) Technological Conceptual Synthesis shapes a gameboard, amap's design, for R & D, Engineering, manufacuring, and application toplay upon, so as to provide a new functional system available forachieving humanity's goals.

Acknowledging that Technological Conceptual Synthesis is a stage whereeasy mutability and smooth morphological change exists, it must beunderstood that it is not yet where careful engineering analysis hasdetermined the size of its nuts and bolts, and is at risk of beinglabeled "Half-Baked Ideas" by the more pragmatic. Mistakes are notthings to be avoided, for they are considered the valuable results of anexperimental change, results to guide the shaping of the nextexperimental change toward greater pattern perfection. Patience isperhaps due here, for where there is greater wisdom in the conceptualsynthesis, the greater the ease the resulting nuts and bolts will fittogether ultimately. (And there may not be any nuts and bolts needed;the parts might be designed to snap together instead.)

With this in mind, and with the understanding that the followingstatements are but relatively crude "linear thinking language"approximations of the right-brain's nonverbal complex design synthesisactivities in the land of visual/sensual imagery, I will recapitulatesome of my precedent conceptual synthesis work, and then launch intoguiding you into the shaping of another design. (It has been said that apicture is worth a thousand words, so I get a thousand words todescribe each picture, right? No?? And it might take a thousand pencilsketches to describe one full-sensory right-brain imagery design, too.)Yet I try.

My first effort at synthesizing a space transportation system turned outto be "re-inventing the wheel"...the Russians had already done it, Ifound out later:The most urgent space transportation need was that of getting from Earthsurface out into space, getting out of a deep gravitational well.Viewing the rotating Earth as being analogous to a person twirlingaround, completion of the pattern for something leaving the twirler notonly could be a thrown rock, but also a long rope would hold itselfoutward due to centrifugal force. Extending back to the specificrotating Earth, this suggested that a long enough cable, fastened at theequator, would hold itself up by centrifugal force. But calculationsshowed that no real material was nearly strong enough to support thisspace elevator structure from the Earth. (I later learned that othershad thought of this many years before I did.)At the time of the later Apollo lunar landings, the ability for mankindto really connect with Earth's moon felt very real, opening up thethoughts of how to use the lunar resources. The cost of chemicalpropulsion, demonstrated by Apollo, was prohibitive of the movement ofthe enormous payloads needed to build space colonies and Solar Power Satellites. The science-fiction concept of "hyperspace" lurked in theback of my mind, analogous to a tunnelling-through spatial barriers.Could a tunneling -through of an energy barrier work in the movement oflunar materials into space, even to Earth's surface markets?In 1971-72 came the "Mooncable Project: Gravitational-Electric Siphon inSpace" conceptual synthesis, a structure to create an energy tunnel fromthe lunar surface across througn the L-1 balance point, to a placedominated by Earth's gravitational field stronger than the lunar surfacefield. A tapered, constant-stress crossection fiberglass cablesupported a maglev track coupling ascending and decending payload massesfrom the Moon toward the Earth. Ref. Spaceport RT file #530.(This was followed by an extended time period experimenting with the"better-mousetrap beating a path to your door" effect, resulting in theempirical data that what really happens is the world takes your wife,your house, your job, and leaves you to nearly starve to death...in manyways...lots of despair...and be grateful for a small room to live in, inothers' apartments, mateless. So don't expect to make a living at this!But you might make the conceptual breakthroughs that put us in space forreal.)

The next decade or so was mainly concerned with sheer survival, "living on the edge", it is said. Attempts were made to get others interested in Mooncable, though as the potentially available moon launch vehicles, Saturn V's, slowly dwindled to zero, the urgency faded. The L-5 News would not publish my Mooncable Project concept unless I had previously presented it formally before a professional aerospace society (I was terrified of getting up before an audience...and I feared that aggressive left-brained academia driven by instincts of rivalry instead of co-constructivity would easily discredit my concept in the eyes of others...so that requirement by Carol Henson dropped that option out.) I didn't get a manuscript finished for Ben Bova as Analog's editor of the time before the despair of matelessness sunk me again; but eventually I rewrote it and got a "soft-rejection" from Stanley Schmidt when he became editor of Analog...he recommended I try teaming up with Donald Kingsbury to describe it in a science fiction adventure story built around it.

Time went on and creativity persists despite the world's deprivation. I thought of combining the electrical power delivery capability implied by the solar Power Satellite concept with the need for the Space Shuttle Main Engine's need for oxygen and hydrogen fuel: an SPS could bededicated to the task of electrolyzing seawater to make the shuttle'sfuel, closing the energy cycle for the shuttle, the main engines,anyway. And the microwave beam would be there for experimentalmicrowave-powered spacecraft, perhaps using the air being passed throughas reaction mass for space vehicles.Carol Henson of the L-5 Society had put me in touch with Hans Moravecwho was working on his "Skyhook" concept in the early '80's. The Skyhook conceptualized a long space tether which would spin as itorbited around a planetary body, grabbing up payload as one of its endsgrazed the planetary surface, then haul the payload up as it spunaround. Hans kindly supplied me with background published info onrelated concepts by Artsutanov, Isaacs, Pearson, and his own Skyhookgeneral concept.

Another concept began forming in the back of mind, which I will begindescribing as the finishing subject of this document. I secretively called it "tight-orbiting at sea level", in an attempt to get someinquiries, as people still didn't seem to know I existed as atechnological conceptual synthesizer. I was a physics major collegedropout trying to horn into an arena dominated by Ph. D's, or so itseemed. No one asked about it.

The thought came to me that a Moravec-Skyhook might be used to transportpayload from the moon , using the greater gravitational field of the nearby Earth as an energy pump to sustain the process. A long spinning Skyhook would orbit past the moon, grabbing awaiting payload as it's endbriefly touched on the farside of the moon; then the combined whirling masses would continue on past the Moon in an orbit that passed near theEarth. At the precise instant that the whirling tethered mass pair hadthe payload decending the fastest in the varying earth gravitationfield, the payload would be released, restoring the kinetic energy thatwas lost when the pickup was made off of the moon; the skyhook would continue back to pick up another payload off of the moon.

My moment of opportunity came when I heard Bill Dale mention at an L-5meeting that there were opportunities for anyone to testify before theupcoming National Commission on Space hearings, and where to write ifone wanted to do so. My moment of truth came as I quaked before the National Commission on Space's panel and the audience, wearing my interviewing suit acquired for my year-long interview stint trying toget out of unemployment then ongoing (living too much in the future canmake daily survival tough). I read my 10 minutes' worth from myprepared speech about the need for international cooperation in space,the need for use of the right-brain in planning and operating complexfuture space missions, and 5 space transportation concepts: theMooncable, the SPS-seawater microwave lift synthesis, the whirlingkinetitic transfer lunar-Earth Skyhook-like lift, the "tight orbiting atsea level" tidbit, and on Hyde's "Starbridge" dynamic Earth towerconcept. For this I was rewarded by great applause, being asked for acopy of my speech by Dr. Paul Coleman on the NCS panel there, and being asked by people in the audience for copies of my speech, as I wobblymade my way to my seat in the back of the auditorium. A fellow L-5er (nicknamed "Tee" for short) sitting in front of me with his wife and baby, commented to me that I was a "master of the understatement". Andto round it out, in the hallway next to where the NCS testimonies were being given, the humorous science-fiction movie "Howard the Duck" was being filmed during the proceedings. At last, some interesting drama asa reward for my efforts! (This speech can be found in the Congressional Record and in GEnie Spaceport library file #475, called "Space Inspiration").

I had fortuitiously attended a lecture given at an L-5 Society meetingin Silicon Valley by Ron Hyde,in 1984 or 85, where I learned aboutHyde's concept he called "Starbridge". This was anEarth-surface-to-space elevator, supported dynamically by the flow ofhigh speed mass ...billions of berylium disks with magnets... flowing upand down an evacuated tube; the energy of the stream provided theenergy to support the tube. Elevator cars traveled up and down thetube, powered also from the flow within the tube. Hyde envisioned onesuch structure, consuming the electrical power of a large city, couldlift payload mass equal to the combined mass of every human being onEarth, into space during a two week operating period! This looked likethe first real chance to get enough people off-planet fast enough to getthe terrible ecological load we now put on Mother Earth.I had also read an article called "Texas and Universe Railroad" by EarleSmith in the L-5 News. I saved this magazine and lost it several timesduring my many moves from rented room to rented room in my struggle tosurvive physically, and again found it when feeling like getting seriousabout GEnie's potentials. This Texas Universe Railroad article alsodescribed a large-scale surface-to-geosynchronous orbit transportationsystem, derived from Keith Lofstrom's Launch Loop concepts referred toin the article.

I decided that I would try to stir up some interest in this generalclass of transportation systems, due to their fantastic potential forsolving some of mankind's upcoming problems...much more humanely thanthe other options I see...(if earth has 4 billion people now, but canonly support only about 100,000 people in a total recycle closed ecologyaborigine lifestyle indefinitely...high-tech civilization makesnon-recyclable garbage which ultimately chokes off or runs out ofsomething essential...that means only one person out of every 40,000people gets to stay on Earth in the long run...I feel more comfortablewith the option of them living in space in an advancing civilization, ascompared to the other obvious answer in which Zero Population Growthdoesn't even begin to solve the problem, not at all.)So I would put my two cents' worth into attracting attention to theStarbridge/Launch Loop potentials. Unfortunately, my efforts to contactHyde in the past hadn't gotten any reply, and a letter sent to theaddress mentioned in the Texas Railroad article came back as addresseeunknown. I felt on shaky technological ground, but I was determined todo what I could.

So I started to try doing re-synthesis of their concepts. A basicprinciple of Starbridge and Launch Loop (Texas Universe RR version)seemed to boil down to a stream of mass moving slightly above orbitalvelocity through an evacuated tube. Some of the energy of the highvelocity mass stream was tapped off along the way to support the tube itwas passing through. Both concepts had the returning part of thestream electromagnetically re-accellerated where it connected with Earthsurface. Starbridge had the stream go essentially straight upward andback down the same way; TxURR went in a quasi-elliptical orbit touchinggeosynchronous orbit above the far side of Earth from where it contactedEarth surface, so the geometry was quite different between the two.Both consumed enormous amounts of electrical power derived from nuclearor fossil fuel resources on Earth.Focusing on the morphological essense of an orbital velocity mass streamflowing through an evacuated tube which the stream supported, thethought occured to me that it could be used to transmit power for otherpurposes than just holding itself up and running an elevator along it.Thus it could be powered from anywhere an accellerator could be builtalong its length. How about powering it from a Solar Powered Satelliteat its GEO terminal? That sounded great, because it would take theentire energy load off of Earth's dwindiling resources, and even surplusSPS power could be sent down to Earth to be tapped off byelectromagnetic drag coils and fed into the Public Utility power grid,and make money. That electrical power source, without the original SPSconcept's environmentally objectionable huge microwave beams to Earthrectennas, seemed more likely to catch public attention than spacecolonization was currently doing. Non-polluting electrical power forPublic Utilities, and a space transportation system as a freebie...even the pieces for building the SPS could be hauled up the space elevator.

Being election time, I tried to get as an election issue, and sent letters to both Bush and Dukakkis. I quickly wrote up the conceptual synthesis and uploaded it to GEnie (Spaceport files #553 and #563) and started talking it up on the Spaceport roundtable ongoing). But this "half-baked pie-in-the-sky" idea wasn't getting the interest I thought it deserved. So how else to get public attention to the basic concepts of Starbridge and Launch Loop? A physical demonstration, a functional model, to show to reporters, getting the media to help gain the necessary public support. What kind of demonstration?

How tiny could it be made? I had just gotten Eric Drxler's "Engines of Creation" but had only time to read a few facinating pages, but I could think real small by then. How about a tube say 20 mils in diameter? (It could become a nanomachine, in truer Engines of Creation fashion, consisting of of a tube made of a interlinked helical coil excluding air molecules and providing a tubing-like sheath for a stream of molecules within it; it would be invisible to the eye, but uncoiled from where it would sit in the palm of one's hand, it could reach all the way up to GEO, and modulate the stream of molecules within it to communicate to a switchboard in a GEO satellite...). Quick calculation showed it would fit in a volume of a cube 50 feet on a side, could fit on somebody's ranch out in the desert away from air traffic routes. Going to morphological essences, it seemed that the enclosed mass stream could use electrostatic repulsion to keep the tube walls away from contact with the stream, and use iron inclusions periodically along its length for use in electromagnetically accellerating the stream. Tagging it "Microelevator", I decided to try to get support for it by making it a group creativity project, using GEnie's Spaceport Roundtable to co-ordinate it. That is ongoing as Bulletin Board Catagory 3, Topic 7, for interested participants. GEnie files on it so far are #578; "Microelevator Vers.1", #581 "Microelevator Vers. 2", #592 "Microelevator Import", and #629 "GEO's Umbilical".

The last conceptual synthesis I have to show here and now, is the promised "tight orbiting at sea level" concept. Let me lead you throughthis one. An orbiting satellite stays up in orbit because itstangential velocity (the urge to continue moving in a straight line offat a tangent from a circle) is exactly balanced by the gravitationalpull toward the center of the circle. An object could orbit the Earth atsea level if there were not things to run into at the necessary 18,000mph, such as mountains and air molecules. But if one were to build atube that bored through the mountains and kept the air out, an objectcould orbit the Earth at sea level. Each such orbit would be on what isknown as a "great circle", a circle that has its center as the centerof the Earth. Actually circling the Earth with such a tube seemspointless, of course. But looking for a moment at just one small section of that tube, say a centimeter long: instantaneously the stream moving within it at 18,000 mph is in orbit there. If one were toconsider a ring spinning horizontally at sea level, with itscircumference moving at 18,000 mph, each point along its circumferencewould be in orbit on a great circle about the center of the Earth. Thiswould seem to indicate that the spinning ring would consider itself inorbit, and float appearantly weightless. If it spun faster, it wouldtry to go to a higher orbit, farther from Earth's center, and thus couldlift payload with it. But could such a ring be made strong enough? Would it explode from the centrifugal force on its rim? How small couldit be made...if dozens of feet in diameter, starts to look suspiciously like a flying saucer...? Except at the North or South Pole, coriolis force as the Earth turns would cause it to precess powerfully... could this be balanced by coupling a pair of spinning rings each spinning inopposite directions? More basically, is there something wrong with the reasoning that each point on a horizontally spinning ring can beconsidered as being truely on a great circle? Will it go up, really?

My cherished hobby of doing "Technological Conceptual Synthesis" has not been a profitable one, although some part of me believes they perhaps can provide key "maps" to solve some of mankind's urgent problems. I suspect that Conceptual Synthesis will become an essential management and scientific cognitive tool. Would you like to try doing it? Remember, here mistakes are just data for continuing to evolve the concept toward greater pattern unity with the ideal.

I hope you have enjoyed, and gained some wisdom, from this disclosure.

by James Edward David Cline Nov. 20, 1988

An Excalator Hi page titled GeSp634 by J E D Cline started on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 8:07:09 AM US/Pacific

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