I’m going to go line by line to analyze Monday’s article, “Just how full of opportunity is the Moon?” by Donald A. Beattie.

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The Wall Street Journal has a front page story on the X Prize tiff between Benson and Rutan. This was pretty heady in 2004 on October 3 when Discover aired its special and Rutan’s team poised to win the $10 million suborbital prize. It’s probably pretty rare in NASCAR for the engine maker and the team to make dueling announcements on the nights before the race. I got to talk to Benson the night before the X Prize during the commercials while he was watching the Discover special. He had the restaurant at the Mariah Country Inn & Suites decked out with a big-screen TV. Benson’s group was already touting its Dreamchaser vehicle which was designed as an orbital vehicle, but was also being offered as a suborbital vehicle in direct competition with Space Ship Two. Benson was moved by the visuals in the Discover special. This was the culmination of his victory over eAc to win the engine contract.

Alas, Space Ship One did not enter passenger service. Perhaps because of the shudder or the cost of the hybrid motor, Paul Allen decided it was wiser to sell it to the Smithsonian.

WSJ’s lateness is forgivable. The story has never really gotten wide circulation. And Rutan, Benson and others still have not tested their passenger spaceships. On the other hand, mistakenly calling the suborbital fight an orbital fight is 25 times as bad.

“beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.” President John Kennedy, addressing a joint session of Congress, May 25, 1961.

And Moon Base dreams? That’s old news, too, according to Wired, 2004! How about some action “within this decade”?

The space economy keeps trying to justify itself with big ideas like Lunar solar power or a sun shade. The price of carbon offsets is only $5-$15 bucks per ton. This is very very inexpensive. We can continue to burn carbon like there’s no tomorrow and sequester it by pull CO2 out of the air. Kind of like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s atmosphere plant. Sequestration could be done for around $200/ton with unlimited tonnage (basically pumping the gas into the ground, like old natural gas fields, or making Calcium carbonate or something). For these other strategies to be worth exploring, they have to have the potential to be cheaper per ton of CO2 equivalent. I.e., less rays is equivalent to less of a greenhouse blanket. As we found out with sulfur dioxide, the cost ends up being less than 10% of what you might expect. (On the other hand, the benefits are also likely to be far lower.)

Earth’s albedo is already 30% according to Wikipedia. To increase the Earth’s albedo to 32%, to first order, we would have to cover 2% of the Earth’s dark surface with light colored material. How about big plastic floating buoys anchored to the sea floor in places where there are few days of cloud cover? Earth is 500 million square kilometers. We’d need to cover 10 million. A 30mx30m blue tarp at Tarp USA would cost about $450 or $0.50/square meter. The total cost would be about $5 trillion. Surely an overestimate given the mass production. Compare that to today’s launch cost of the 20 million tons that Space.com is putting as its lead story or $400 trillion. The story posits we can use an electromagnetic launcher. But most of the energy to run the launcher (and the drag) would end up as waste heat in our atmosphere (an exercise). If we can produce that much power cleanly, how about we just use the $400 trillion (or his number $3 trillion) to buy clean energy that produces no carbon and retire the carbon producing stuff. The cleanup job would also be a lot easier for the ocean tarps if we overshot and started an ice age.

If we can decrease the cost of getting to Earth-Sun L-1 by a factor of 100 to $200/kg, then we can just fly 2% of us to L-1 and generate 2% less greenhouse gas and 2% less waste heat. 120 million people weigh only 12 million tons. Of course there would need to be some stuff there for them to live on, but it begs the question of the need for such a weird brute force solution to solar flux.

Al Gore made some hay Thursday about Bush’s new national space policy. Gore asked space CEOs to read it. I consider myself a space CEO and am happy to oblige (even though I wasn’t present for the request). I also read Clinton’s space policy: