Yesterday, in Bratislava, there was held the ceremony of Anatoliy Yunitskiy’s awarding with the Slovak International Peace Prize. In his speech, dedicated to this event, he highlighted the need to rethink the concept of industrial development of humanity:
“We must think boldly and apply solutions that yesterday seemed impossible to us. If to save the planet we need to create an alternative to cars with an internal combustion engine, it should be done now. If for the future of the mankind the industry should be taken into the Earth orbit, the development in this direction should be started as soon as possible.
In the center of the presented concept, there is the idea that already now it is necessary to start the development of industrial space exploration. At the same time, the widespread rocket cosmonautics of today is not able to cope with this task.
Today, on 12 December, 2018, we publish Anatoliy Yunitskiy’s Open Letter to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other aerospace industry entrepreneurs. Below, there is the full text of the letter:
To: Jeff Preston Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, Inc. and Blue Origin,
Elon Reeve Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, and also to all those, who intend to explore space in large -scale in the future with the help of rocket launchers.
Dear Sirs!
Your names are widely known all over the world, mine is less known. We are representatives of different cultures, citizens of distant countries and bearers of different mentalities, and we have different financial opportunities for investment in space exploration. However, there is something in common between us: just like you, I am sure that mankind has no other way of development than the exploration of outer space, but at the same time, I believe that all environmentally dirty industry should be taken out of the planet into there. Like you, I have dedicated quite a few decades to the alternative implementation of the program on space exploration. On this way, as an engineer and scientist, I have achieved significant results and made a number of important conclusions, which I consider necessary to share with you to warn against mistakes that can become critical for all of us, the Earth people.
То еxplore the cosmos with the help of rockets is inefficient and environmentally harmful.
The rocket path of space exploration, which humanity is following today, and which you also chose to go, is a dead end direction. According to open sources, the main goal you are pursuing today is reducing the cost of launches by creating reusable launch vehicles. But even if you manage to achieve significant results and reduce the cost of delivering cargo into orbit, for example, to $ 2 million per ton of cargo, large-scale space exploration will still be expensive. Here you can draw parallels with the earthly reality, where it is pointless to try to build a plant at the price of one brick, comparable to the price of the car.
Another circumstance that makes it meaningless to try to industrialize space with rockets is, less than 1%, taking into account all the costs and energy losses, including pre-flight and post-flight ones, for example, to obtain fuel and manufacture the dropped and lost stages. It sounds like a paradox, but the transport performance of the entire modern rocket and space industry is comparable to one horse-drawn cart. Such a cart, carrying 1 ton of cargo to a 300-km distance (which is appropriately equal to the distance from Earth to the orbit), continuously since 1957, would have been delivered as much cargo into space as all the rockets together.
The rocket space exploration, in addition to inefficiency, also creates. The speed of the rocket-engine blast at the launch of the rocket reaches 4 kilometers per second, which is five times higher than the speed of the sniper rifle bullet. The temperature of the jet blast reaches 4 thousand degrees, which is almost three times higher than the melting temperature of steel. All this power is released into the extremely vulnerable ozone layer in the form of a chemically active flame. Each launch of a heavy carrier rocket makes a hole in the ozone layer the size of a large European country such as France.
Even 40 years ago, it was estimated that the space Shuttle of ozone in a single launch (depending on ionospheric conditions) because it uses. Given that there are about 4 billion tons of this gas in the Earth's atmosphere, it is easy to calculate that for the complete destruction of the ozone layer it will be enough to launch 100-200 rockets of this type at a time. In addition to ozone depletion, rocket launches also change the physical chemistry of the upper atmosphere, causing ionospheric turbulence and even affect the geomagnetic field in the pitch plane of the launch.
The re-use of rockets and the transition to new types of rocket fuel will not solve these problems. The industrialization of space with the current carrying rockets' capacity will require launches, several orders of magnitude more than it is today - it will simply kill life on our planet. The forecasts for the next 10 years of spacecraft launches are not encouraging at all: 180 launches per year is more than a twofold increase compared to the current level. I do not want to believe that such a scenario is seen by you as a humanistic mission and the main cause of life, implemented in the framework of your projects.
Man will kill the Earth if industries are not taken into in outer space.
I assume you understand and share my belief that the Earth will be doomed if the Technosphere – the entire industry – is not taken out into space, beyond our common home - the Biosphere, in the near future. This will happen because it is fundamentally impossible to create closed technological cycles in the industry. That is about the same as looking for a way to ban the cow to produce, besides milk, such products as manure, urine, methane and CO2. It will be impossible to veto the release into the environment of what remains as a result of subtraction from the finished product (milk) the raw material (grass).
All industrial technologies work in exactly the same way - take raw materials, extract products from it (sometimes carrying out tens or even hundreds of process stages), and what is left is thrown back into the environment.
Even the Biosphere as a whole is not a closed system - after all, it transformed the previously dead Earth. Similarly, the Technosphere as a whole cannot be a closed system in the conditions of a single planet. It will unavoidably and imminently transform the planet for itself, as it does not need either oxygen or soil, or other components necessary for Human life on the Earth. In the end, the Technosphere will kill if not all life on the planet, but humanity for sure. Already today, the industry of the USA and China consume more oxygen than green plants produce on the territory of these countries. They live in debt: consume oxygen, produced by the Russian taiga and the Amazon jungle. There is a forty-year the day of ecological Debt (Ecological Debt Day) to the beginning of the year, and when maintaining that during 2-3 generations, the Technosphere will irrevocably "eat" the Biosphere.
Only providing the Technosphere with an ecological niche outside the Biosphere, will ensure the latter's preservation and development according to the laws and directions formed during billions of years of evolution, as well as the harmonious interaction of the community of people as biological objects with the Biosphere. There is no such ecological niche for the Technosphere on Earth, but it is in space, very close - at a distance of 100 kilometers from the surface of the planet, where there are the ideal conditions for most technological processes: zero gravity, vacuum, high and cryogenic temperatures, unlimited raw materials, energy and spatial resources.
With the industry on the Earth's orbit, nobody will have to run away from his home to other planets in other star systems. Of course, I can offer an alternative to such an escape: the infrastructure development of more suitable for living areas of land on the Earth: mountainous areas (above 3,000 m) or Antarctica. The cost of colonization of terrestrial mountain ranges and Antarctica is thousands of times cheaper than Mars, and to live here, is much more comfortable: it is warmer by 100° degrees, there is familiar to us air and oxygen, food, fresh water (just melt the snow), and it is still our native Earth! And the plane ticket will be a million times cheaper than the interplanetary ticket: a thousand dollars instead of a billion.
As you can see, humanity does not have too much time left for large-scale space exploration: there are only a couple of generations before the point of no return in the development of our technocratic civilization. After that, nothing will be able to restore the disturbed balance between nature and industry: due the technocratic oppression of the Biosphere, there will begin its irreversible destruction and degradation, and with it, the degradation of the human race. After all, our civilization on Earth lives by the principle of "Mold in a Petri plate": when having eaten all finite resources, it will die.
The large-scale space exploration and bringing the earthly industry into the orbit, will require geocosmic transportation in the amount of many millions of tons per year. Neither today's thousand, nor tomorrow's ten thousand tons of cargo per year (as planned in the rocket industrialization of space) will solve the global problems of humanity, living on the planet. By the time we have reached such a volume of transportation, 10 billion people will live on the planet, which, in terms of one earthly soul, will give us only 1 gram of space products per year or 3 milligrams per day.
There is a solution - General Planetary Vehicle
As a result of the analysis of these problems more than 30 years ago, I came to the conclusion that the only possible transport technology for large-scale space exploration for mankind is the non-rocket method. You probably know the idea of a space lift and other similar concepts. All of them are difficult to implement, at least in the foreseeable future, besides their productivity does not exceed 10 thousand tons of cargo per year. But I have my own solution, which you've probably also heard of.
It became widely known after at the non-governmental meeting of the American and Soviet public, organized by the Soviet Peace Committee. This meeting was held in 1987, more than 30 years ago, and was devoted to the problems of bringing the Earth's industry into space without the use of rockets, as well as the development and settlement of other planets. Since then, I have done a lot of work, there has been created my own research and development school, on the basis of which this decision was investigated and verified by calculation methods. Due to this, the project can be implemented in the foreseeable future - with the political will and business consolidation.
The project was called the General Planetary Vehicle (GPV). This is a geospace transport complex of reusable non-rocket exploration of near space. It will make it possible, without any negative interaction with the environment, both the Earth and space ones, to put into orbit about 10 million tons of cargo and 1 million people in one flight, who will be involved in the creation and functioning of the near-Earth space industry. In one year, GPV will be able to go into space up to 100 times. To achieve what GPV can do in one year, it will take over a million years for the modern world rocket and space industry, in which trillions of dollars have already been invested. At the same time, the cost of delivering each ton of payload into orbit using the GPV, will be thousands of times lower than that of rocket carrier launchers: not more than a thousand dollars per ton.
Environmentally friendly GPV, working exclusively on electric energy, will really implement the industrialization of the near space. After that, it will only be necessary to shut down all industrial production harmful to the Earth's Biosphere on the planet, by that time having created them in the near-Earth orbit using new, environmentally friendly principles for space. This will open up tremendous opportunities in the field of information and energy communications. Taking out industry from the planet, will radically improve our common habitat, our common home: the Biosphere of the planet Earth, especially in industrial regions, without any restrictions on production growth.
The project will unite humanity
Almost all engineering solutions used in the project are widely known, tested in practice and implemented in the industry. The project budget, designed for a 20-year period, will be about two trillion dollars, which is not so much: that is. Such a global geocosmic programme will once again bring all the developed countries of the world together with common goals and objectives, involving them in the financing of this super-ambitious project, designed to save humanity.
Due to its technical features, the project will directly affect the territory of dozens of countries, mainly located along the equator, and for political and economic reasons, the project will affect the whole world. GPV will also become an indispensable platform for the long-term exploration of deep space by reusable space vehicles, such as those which are being developed by your companies today. The project implementation period will be about 20 years, taking into account the socio-political, research, development, design and survey, construction and installation works.
I sincerely hope to find like-minded people in you who are not indifferent to the future of humanity and are motivated to action not only by the interests of profit. You, as very few, should understand that in case of the death of our common home, the Earth's Biosphere, no money will save the lives of people on the Earth, their children and grandchildren. I invite you to cooperate for the benefit of all mankind. I hope this letter initiates the start of the main event in your life.
The Earth is the best planet in the Universe. We must preserve it for its descendants!
President of SKY WAY Group of Companies,
Chairman of the Board of Directors and General Designer of SkyWay Technologies Co.
Engineer Anatoliy Yunitskiy