One of the ways to have cheap power storage on the Moon is to use local materials to store energy. One thing that works well on Earth is “pumped storage” where water is pumped up hill when power is cheap and run down hill when it is expensive. This probably won’t be the best idea if water must be sealed and trucked in at enormous expense.

But what about glass marbles? If silicon or basalt balls were formed that were small, they could be used to turn a water wheel. Then they could be scooped up by the same wheel and pumped up hill when the sun is shining. All of this can go on outdoors without evaporation and minimal Earth imports. Anybody have another design that beats Lithium ion batteries for kWh storage per Earth import kg to colonize the non-poles? Ideally less pricey than a nuclear submarine too–I’m told the new ones cost $2 billion each in 1995 dollars.

Ever get a spam like this?

I have a patent pending from 2003 for visual spam that would parse this via OCR, then filter the text as usual. Call me 1-512-853-9123 if you want to license it. You’d be the first licensee so you’d get generous terms. Check it out at USPTO, it’s 20050050150. It’s just one step in the spam arms race. Next will be audio and video spam. Money paid to readers by mailers is the only way to halt spam, but it will take decades for that to get deployed. This patent is the only one that comes up if you search for “aural recognition” and “spam”.

(via Instapundit) Are we going to run out of power? No. Ronald Bailey thinks we can solve the power problem and the carbon problem in a decentralized fashion: “eliminate all energy subsidies, set a price for carbon, and then let tens of thousands of energy researchers and entrepreneurs develop and test various new technologies in the market.”

Make that carbon price market determined too. It’s a fallacy that we can’t support the Chinese and the Indians in a 9 billion person world in 2050 at US 1970 standards (about half of the US standards now and about twice what they will be for China and India in 2020 or four times now). Hybrids make cars more efficient. Sequestration will take the carbon we put in the atmosphere back out. Nukes, wind, solar, tides and biomass will all play a part. Excess demand? More exotic cases like wind farms in the open ocean, space solar, methane hydrates, shale, coal gasification, and so on open up. Note that if people want 35 TW of electricity in 2050, they will be willing to pay a little less than ten times what we pay now ($280 billion) to get our 3.5 TW. The reason they would pay less is because everything will be 44 years more efficient even though we are richer. That is, energy will be less expensive and energy services much less expensive in terms of human time if the past is any guide. In 1970, we were promised we would run out of everything by 2000. Nope. Standards of living will keep rising forever. Read The Ultimate Resouce 2 by Julian Simon.

Space Daily says robot helpers are willing to work for $450/hour. Watch out for Luddite receptionists that get paid $500/hour.

The Russians are looking.

Wired says “about 200″ suborbital sales. That would be about $40 million in sales which was last reported at about $20 million recently. Maybe ‘about’ is like the ‘about’ in the Quicken mortgage radio commercial that says the mortgage rates are “about 5%”, but then reports an APR higher than 7%. Using the same formula, maybe they really have more than 280. Note that at a rate of 50,000 in ten years as reported at space.com, 280 is less than a 3-week backlog. At one flight for six per week from Mojave, that’s nearly a one-year backlog, but that’s a low utilization rate (<15%) if they are building five craft that can be flown with a shorter turnaround time than Space Ship One’s demonstrated 5-day turnaround.

David Livingston told me that Marsha Freeman was someone I must talk to. “China Maps Out Next Five Years in Space” presents US China Space taking a jaundiced view of the White House space policy. I think that space policy is a minor part of overall defense policy, but gets disproportionate press. Also, policy and views of China space policy are watched a little too closely. Reminds me of the Cold War. That said, China should catch up to the US GDP in 2020 even if per capita GDP will still be 1/4 ours. China’s “leapfrogging” of US and Soviet space accomplishments has yet to put them fewer than 50 years behind those achievements in many respects.

Russia says it’s sold out* on Space Station flights through 2009. To do more than the ISS Soyuz replacement runs, it has to raise prices to pay for the full cost of the Soyuz launch and production. I think that’s where the $45 million for 2 price came from announced a while back–a whole new Soyuz purpose built for tourism on a special tourism only mission. So far the 3 year wait list has not got people to pay the higher figure–no “special” Soyuz tourist flights announced on the manifest yet. So if you can make money at the price Russia is charging ($12 million? $20 million?) at two flights a year for three years, the market’s been proven. Futron says if it’s a US option, you can probably get twice as many folks. That’s over $100 million for orbital. A nice sweetener for a transporter that wants to service the Space Station. $20 million for a 100kg package is $200,000/kg. Seems like some room there for profit. No word on whether the ISS is sold out for tourist stays so Bigelow may need to offer some extra amenities to lure travelers his way. Given how the Russians have stiffed their gas customers, I would recommend that would-be tourists who want to go sooner up the bid price. Maybe some of the others in the queue will develop medical problems the same way some oil companies developed environmental problems.

(*nod to spacetoday.net and spacedaily.com)

WSJ calls for tradeable fishing quotas too. Here’s what I had to say about this when NY Times columnist Tierney called for it too.

This is at odds with Futron. 50,000 seats is a flight every other day for each of his anticipated fleet of five. If the $200k price tag holds, that would be $10 billion in ten years. He anticipates a big price drop. His customers may not be there for him when he’s ready to fly. The $20 million reported in Virgin deposits are refundable. It may be difficult to hang onto all those customers if it does take Virgin “an extra year” to make it to market. It will only take him one week to fly off all of his $20 million in deposits for his 80 paying customers and 20 non-paying customers at the rate needed for 50,000 in ten years. 6 people times 5 ships times 3.2 flights (1 of the 5 flies on both the first and last day of the week). The price may drop quickly indeed.