The Morning Summary, 8/3

Well, it is time to move on from this political stuff, now that the budget battle is over. As you may have noted, I have begun writing a little more about space. It so happens that on Next Big Future yesterday, there was a write up about thorium. Thorium is present in significant quantities on the moon, and to mine and process it should be much easier than uranium.

In addition, a nuclear thermal rocket system could be employed on the moon for lunar transport.  The nuclear energy would come from thorium.   I have an idea for a lunar transportation rocket that would employ some concepts that I've read about with respect to the space cannon- John Hunter's concept.   Supplies could be sent from one location to another on the moon this way.

I'll be writing more about this today, stay tuned.

Update:  Just a few moments later...

Kirk Sorensen's new Forbes blog is linked from that Next Big Future post.  I want to put it on the sidebar here because I think it is important for this idea that I'm cooking up.

Update:

I've been reading Sorensen's blog on Forbes.  I noted that 1 megawatt hour of electricity is worth only 40 dollars.  It would appear that energy is cheap, maybe too cheap to export to Earth.  That was my idea that I posted in the comment section of Next Big Future's Sorensen post.

Running the numbers on what you would need in terms of power output, it would take at least 3 gigawatt power stations to generate each billion dollars in revenue.  That's a lot of power.  Not only that, some of that revenue has to finance the station itself.  The profit off of selling the power at 40 dollars per megawatt hour would be much less.  Therefore, you would need more than 3 power stations.

Looking at it that way, you couldn't make it profitable.  However, not all hope is lost.  The key here is the energy production that is possible.  It could still power activities on the moon, which will make it self sustaining.  That is ultimately the idea.

Update:

Since beaming the energy from the lunar surface isn't that profitable, what else could you do?  I got an idea to beam power to a VASIMR so that it could do cis lunar missions.  The amount of energy that could be beamed to VASIMR could be orders of magnitude greater than could be developed with solar power.  That would make it much more powerful and faster so that it could transit the Earth Moon system on a frequent basis.

This will be the last update to this post.  I will set up another post and continue from there.