Dennis M. Bushnell and LENR (Nasa)

Any project to send people to Mars that takes more than a few days and cost more than $1 billion is premature in my opinion. We are (in the States) at 105% debt to GDP after all. We have more important precursor work to invest in that is a lot more reasonable for our current economy.

We first need to work on energy production and storage methods to make the trip less boring than sitting ballistically in a "capsule" for months.

Unfortunately we are currently stuck in this gravity well called earth and our only clean way out is a LOT of chemical fuel. We need to develop better propulsion technology first.

NASA currently uses less than 1% on the national budget.

That is a meaningless metric. Implicit in that comment is that the Federal government has only 100 important things to do with its money. That is 1% of the budget. The government has many tens of thousands of things that it funds, most of which take far less than 1% of the budget. Every Dollar in the Federal budget is in competition with the Dollars allocated for other spending items. The NASA budget may well be a priority worth spending the money on, but to attempt to justify it because it is less than 1% of the federal budget is no justification at all.

Quote from Curbina

Is interesting to see NASA still considering LENR as a future technology.

I very much doubt that Bushnell speaks for more than his own group at NASA. In an organization like that, the messaging and policies will not necessarily be coordinated, much as they are not tightly coordinated at a university. A professor or research group at a university does not speak for the university as a whole. This kind of flexibility is a good thing, for it enables the creation of skunkworks that are permitted to explore all manner of things that are little more than remote possibilities.

Get out of one Gravity well only to fall down another?
Is there no end to the absurdity?
Gerrard K O'Neal has worked out the buisness plan to colonize the le Grange points.
It's all paint by numbers from here on in.

OK. Granted. You haven't ever seen a space colony. Had Captain Cook ever seen a Jumbo Jet?
Christopher! Humans are a work in progress.

There is more room at one le Grange point to house (in splendid luxury) many orders of magnitude more people than are living on this two dimensional surface.

Orbital airships to get them there. $1per tonne per vertical mile.
But how to handle re-entry?
That is handled in the first line. You don't. They are not coming back.
What is it with you humans with your gravity wells?
Sheesh!

Dear Dennis,
I have consulted your paper, it's a very good job
please find enclosed Glycan SpaceXRHeliotorr project
I hope this will help to move forward and share with NASA as in the past !1981-82
www.glycangroup go to Glycan R&D section
my mail is :allied-[email protected]
004179 213 77 18-- 00 41 22 700 58 73
kind regards
Christian

:)Robert sorry
I apologize for your name missing in my reply to Denis
kind regards
Christian

/* The rejection letter is interesting to read, if you haven't already */

The truth being said is, the Zawodny/NASA patent application on LENR was extremely vague.

Quote from Arthur

le Grange

Please: "Lagrange"

Joseph-Louis Lagrange, born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia or
Giuseppe Ludovico De la Grange Tournier, was an Italian Enlightenment
Era mathematician and astronomer. (Wikipedia--- non controversial biography, so OK).

Not only "Lagrange" points between massive objects in space. But also "Lagrangians" happening to be a Richard P. Feynman favored treatment of subjects dear to us in LENR as opposed to the other alternative analytical tool, the "Hamiltonian".

"NASA currently uses less than 1% on the national budget."

NASA is burning $19 billion a year. About half is the equivalent of "durable goods", i.e. IP that we can use in the future. The rest is essentially turned into heat energy, i.e. entropy that we won't get back anything useful but the memories.

This Mars thing will double that to $40 billion per year.

I unfortunately see our economy on the verge of going into an exponential "runaway" where the debt service grows faster than we can tax to pay for it. We essentially are on the verge of blowing up.

We need to pay down that debt and invest for the future in good equity, not just burn it with bridges to nowhere, cash for clunkers, or Mars for Mars.

We will get to Mars and the entire solar system with efficient LENR or some new kind of nuclear soon enough. Let's invest in that, not putting Matt Damon on a one way mission to sit around and write reports from the surface. It's a boring mission anyway compared to going to Europa or better to another star system with a Bussard Ramjet or something. Our Eugene Mallove was into starflight (before he was murdered for evicting a tenant from his single family rental). We have better economic uses for our money than burning it into entropy. We need to think efficiently.

Quote from anonymous

Any project to send people to Mars that takes more than a few days and cost more than $1 billion is premature in my opinion. We are (in the States) at 105% debt to GDP after all.

If the U.S. stopped stupidly wasting a trillion dollars every year on military adventures then it could establish self-sustaining settlements on Luna and Mars in 10 to 20 years.

/* If the U.S. stopped stupidly wasting a trillion dollars every year on military adventures then it could establish self-sustaining settlements on Luna and Mars in 10 to 20 years. */

If it would redirect the money thrown into hot fusion projects like ITER or NIF into a cold fusion research, they could also fly to Luna and Mars regularly. The other question is, what such a settlements would be good for?
We settle the Antarctica neither, which is much cheaper and more comfortable place for life. Every human activity should have some reason.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Every human activity should have some reason.

Oh dear, how boring!

/* Every human activity should have some reason. */

OK, so better: every human activity payed from mandatory fees of tax payers should have some reason with respect to responsibility. If we would consider the scientific research in this way, we wouldn't get the pile of useless if not nonsensical research at one side and one century standing ignorance of the useful findings at another. Because every useless activity consumes the rare resources at this limited planet and it delays the reaching of another ones. The fight for resources is the primary reason of wars and many suffering of human creatures at the very end. Every fun comes at its price at the very end.

http://pesn.com/2012/01/15/960…on_Cold_Fusion_Holocaust/