I blame Zubrin for this.
At least there is Bezos who may, once he realizes he doesn’t have what it takes to compete with Musk in launch systems, will start buying capacity on Starship to establish the lunar LOX business. Why wouldn’t Musk just realize he was being stupid and put Bezos’s LOX business out of business?
The Zubrin Mind Virus has done its damage. Musk can’t admit he’s wrong and change course now.
Why wouldn’t Musk just do the lunar LOX business anyway since it isn’t a direct admission that he’s been stupid?
Crimestop
Newspeak word, and one of the central pillars of Ingsoc. Crimestop refers to the ability to stop short of any thought that might be heretical or unorthodox before it is even thought, as if by instinct. It is the ability to misunderstand analogies, fail to perceive logical errors, and be repelled or bored by any train of thought or conversation that might be inimical to Ingsoc. Of course, this process is not unique to Ingsoc, and has been and still is applied by most religious and political extremists.
Crimestop is not stupidity, or at least not natural stupidity. It is the ability to deliberately retard one’s own intelligence, and, of course, to forget the process of doing it by doublethink.
That’s how deeply Zubrin damaged Musk.
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“Crimestop” = the goal of public “education”.
I wonder if, in light of the new information learned from the Starship launch, Musk is reconsidering the mass requirements for many heavy vehicle landings and launches from seriously-unfriendly lunar or Martian surfaces. Much of this mass problem would be solved by moving and using asteroids (as O’Neill described) - i.e. not having to land massive rockets on them.
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The recent novel series “Delta-V” describes the value of retrieving asteroidal mass to bootstrap lunar industry. However, the premise of the novel was that this had to be done without the knowledge of terrestrial governments. This is a popular premise in the recent scifi space development genre. I’m not going to argue against the premise here except to say that there are other premises, such as governments competing to see their agencies (in the worst case) if not private individuals (in the best case) project the power of those governments into cis-lunar space. This actually makes the most economic sense due to the time value capital utilization. If you have to wait for multi-year asteroid belt round-trips, there are enormous opportunity costs during cis-lunar industrialization.
Also, the barriers to totally unmanned partial-self replication of lunar LOX manufacture are coming down. Aside from the ability to simulate the physics of robots under telepresence VR control, there are advances in robotics that include a kind of “the rest is up to you” command interface.
Understand I’m not talking about self-replicating the robots – which would still be transported from Earth – but rather eliminating the need for manned presence on the lunar surface.
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