NASA budget shock: Climate studies? GTFO. We're making the Moon great again, says Trump

Not what they say, what they do

Trump's other wall has planning permission. Like most Republican leaders Trump is utterly convinced of the dangers of climate change, but doesn't want any evidence. This is why Earth monitoring satellites have been cancelled.

A fusion reactor in space is well beyond daft. ITER is a technology demonstrator that is far too small to produce more (electrical) power than it uses to operate. It will need 50MW to get started and will produce 500MW of heat. Its core is >5000t and holds <0.5g of tritium. Catastrophic failure will cause the fuel to touch the side of the reactor and instantly cool to the point that fusion stops. We put 400g/year of tritium into things that glow. The strength required to keep the vacuum is small compared to that required to hold the magnets together.

You will not get a license for RTGs in Earth orbit, so ITER in space would required >70,000m² of solar panels - only 5 SLS launches! The core requires 38 SLS launches and >1,400,000m² of radiators to dump the heat need 131 SLS launches. ITER requires a large mass of ancillary kit like helium extractors that will add many more launches. After you get the thing running, you then have to dismantle it, ship bits back to Earth and measure what the intense neutron flux has done to the materials.

I have been using (effectively cancelled) block 2 SLS launches. Double for block 1 or halve for (expendable!) BFR.

"And consider fusion reactor research in space, where they can afford to take bigger risks... and have a natural vacuum to assist them."

Your comment seemed rational up until this point, I realized you were crazy. The current research reactors are massive, and it would take a large fortune to lift one to orbit. And you need a convention power plant to fire the fusion reactor. And the issue holding back research on fusion power, isn't risk containment, but the fact that no one knows how to make them work.

See how all the Sheeple have down voted you. SAD!

"climate changes ALL of the time, like ice ages and warming periods"

How do you know? You take it on trust from the very same scientists who are mostly convinced that we are now seeing an anthropogenic effect. If expertise is only of use to you when it agrees with your per-conceived notions, I suggest you get a job in politics.

Even if you are right, and they are wrong, the idea that they are clueless, or that AGW is 'ludicrous' is untenable. [As is the idea that there is a giant conspiracy theory (if you've met any academics you'd know they couldn't possibly disagree in private and put on a united front in public).]

It may, of course, possibly be the case that they have all largely convinced themselves of something that is not really correct, and that you and the minority of skeptics are right. But even if you are right, you are not *obviously* right and your belief that it is all very straightforward, and only an idiot would think otherwise, undermines your credibility rather than reinforcing it.

I think it is also rather telling that you are cheering the demise of the few programmes that could pretty much prove that AGW is false ...

"Mommie, Can We Play Obombie Truth Origami" at FauxScienceSlayer (.)com

There is NO greenhouse gas and the Alarmist/Lukewarmist debate is FAKE.

There is NO peak oil...."Fracturing the Fossil Fuel Fable" at FauxScienceSlayer

There is NO green energy...."Green Prince of Darkness"....at FSS....share Truth

"And consider fusion reactor research in space, where they can afford to take bigger risks... and have a natural vacuum to assist them."

Actually, a fusion reactor in space would face an almost insurmountable problem that Earth-bound reactors solve quite easily: heat disposal.

You see, your common or garden power station generates about twice as much heat as it does electricity and then uses a heat engine at less than 100% efficiency to convert the heat to leccy. The remaining heat then has to be disposed of. On Earth, that usually involves warming up a few buckets of water and chucking it away. In space, you'd need a closed-cycle alternative capable of shedding roughly as much heat as your reactor was delivering in electricity. Since convection and conduction are out (pesky vacuums) that leaves radiation, so we're probably talking about a space station that is "very bright in the near infrared".

I'm not an engineer, but the problem would appear to be Quite Hard.

"He is welcome to. After the Russians and the Eu have detached the American modules and have left them float. AFAIK they have neither life support, nor propulsion of their own."

Well, they are welcome too. But since NASA put in $58B, and Russia and the EU only put in $12B and $5B respectively, it would render the station pretty useless. Plus, Roscosmos (Russia) has only guaranteed funding to 2024, the same as the US. And the Russians were studying the possibility of breaking some modules off the ISS, when the ISS was defunded, and then re-using them for a new station back in 2009, because most people didn't think it was going to be funded even this long. The ISS has become the most expensive thing ever constructed.

The ISS would make a good replacement for Trump Tower if you ask me.

Trump Plasa Moontel

Re: We don't need no education

@Bombastic Bob Hmmn. From this side of the Pond, seems to me that if the US has a very expensive educational system and yet gets poor results therefrom, that surely argues against having a privately run educational system, as companies inevitably charge as much as they possibly can for whatever service they're providing, in order to enrich shareholders. Whereas government is supposed to act in the best interests of ALL the citizens it represents, not just the wealthy few. (although given the US voting system is so open to abuse by wealthy organisations, I guess one could argue slightly the other way, but so far as I can tell the states individually have the same problem as the US as a whole, there..)

Still not seeing what your problem with the notion of human-created climate change is, Bob. Year on year, more data supports that we're having a warming effect on the climate, putting more energy into the system, and thus helping to drive more extreme weather events. One can work out the average amount of heat generated by (or on behalf of) each human on the planet, and as our population increases unless the power/heat generated goes down, the overall effect is to add heat to the planet, affecting our climate and weather. then there's the effect of gaseous pollutants, changes in albedo due to land use, etc. ..

Given that there were just 3,000 million people on the planet when I was born, and there's now more than that number of extra people on the planet, and that the rate of urbanisation has increased even faster, it just doesn't seem credible that there's be NO effect on weather/climate, Bob, which is the stance that you appear to be taking. And as someone not directly involved in the field (but with degree-level education), I have to apply Occam's Razor - if the bulk of scientists doing climate science say that human activities are causing effects on the climate that would not otherwise have happened, then the bulk are probably right, because so many capable minds have looked at the evidence, done the mathematics, checked, re-checked and come to the same conclusion.

Heck, I've had a turn-around in my own thinking about the size of population we might be able to feed thanks to a paper on urban farming that I've seen recently. To my extreme surprise, it does indeed look like technically we could feed far more folk than I'd thought. Whether or not we'll have the political will or let factionalism overcome simple humanity and do so or not is another matter, but technically, I can see that we're not necessarily as doomed on the feeding folk front as I had thought - because I've seen compelling evidence to the contrary.

Still not seeing compelling evidence against human-created climate change, though, Bob...