Casey Handmer

I don't know if you read this guy https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/ but he has written great stuff about the prospects for space industrialization, particularly the difficulties with moving a manufactured product from where it is made to where there is a demand. Myself I think those metal asteroids are overrated (if you 1000x the supply of gold you will just get shot by Goldfinger) and that this is the best scenario for space colonization yet https://www.livescience.com/megasatellite-colony-ceres-oneill-cylinder… I have thought a lot about a scenario for making plastic solar shares and sunshades on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid and sailing them back to the Earth-Sun L1 to do something about global warming while everybody else makes excuses. Look up my profile and send me an email.

Space based power arrays with microwave transmission to massive ground fields has been discussed for nearly sixty years. It doesn't make economic sense, at all. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-solar-power-… I would love it to be a thing, but it is not a thing.

If you're interested in this, I recommend reading Casey Handmer's blog. Here is one of several pieces about cost curves and learning rate for solar and batteries: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/solar-and-batteries-for-…

Casey has an article why beaming energy from space to ground is not worth it, due to many compounding issues. Mars can probably only strike off one issue, about beam density and ramp it up, but has many more unique issues - far away to control and replace, less energy density per area, and other issues with small colony size. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-solar-power-…

This is a great resource for why Starship is groundbreaking. So much so, it’s not even really comprehensive to the existing space-industrial complex. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-un…

This is an absolutely ridiculous take. Look at Arianespace: https://videopress.com/embed/DYF1wrn8?hd=1&cover=1&loop=0&… Is there any world where any western government created reusable rockets by 2025 without space x? No chance. And should we talk about the enormous dysfunction of NASA? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-… This isn't because their best engineers get hired by space x, it's because the system is set up to fail and there's absolutely no accountability. Are there some well-functioning organizations? Sure. Would they have been able to accomplish anything remotely close in cost, speed, or safety of space x? No.

SpaceX is the best prayer that NASA has. If you want to read more about how terribly NASA is bungling its affairs: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-…

Eventually it convinces everybody that "quantity in space" is possible. Moving to projects where you don't have to count every ounce. It opens the path to wild schemes, in amount of weight that could be moved. And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness. (The previous one was convincing everyone that there was lots of space for tech improvement. Wake up call achieved just a few years ago also by SpaceX.) See also this blog post: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-un…

The Nordic countries are literally the only places in the world where solar isn't the best option by 2030: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/19/future-of-energy-reading…

The fact that something hasn't been done is not necessarily evidence that it won't work. A few years ago you could have asked why everybody was still using disposable rockets, if reusables would be so great. And coal is not exactly fertile ground for innovation, given that we'd like to stop burning coal entirely. Matching the price of coal, with clean dispatchable power, is not such a bad outcome. There's a bit of wiggle room for extra complexity since coal pays 2 cents/kWh for fuel, and has to handle large amounts of incoming fuel and outgoing ash. For a reliable zero-carbon grid of only wind/solar/battery, we need about 2X overproduction and 4 days of battery storage[1]. Maybe that still ends up the cheapest option, but it's not so obvious that a backup plan isn't worth considering. [1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-batteries-w…

Really exciting for Terraform to hit this mark. Hopefully true, and not an April 1st joke. Casey Handmer (founder) is a pretty interesting guy. He also helped with the initial analysis of the crackle on the Vesuvius challenge scrolls that contributed to the breakthrough of reading the first passages from the scrolls. See https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancient-scrolls/ Highly recommend checking out more articles on the Terraform Industries blog and Casey's personal blog.

Here is an interesting take on California HSR. TL;DR the physics is really hard and California might not be the best place for it. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/10/11/why-high-speed-rail-hasn…

I agree! The best websites are those maintained by individuals without a profit motive. Here's a short list that I've started collecting: - Kevin Kelly: kk.org - Patrick Collison: patrickcollison.com - Patrick McKenzie: kalzumeus.com - David Perell: perell.com - Berthub.eu - Alexey Guzey: https://guzey.com/ - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ - https://dcgross.com/ - Paul Graham: paulgraham.com - https://nintil.com/ - Laura Deming: https://www.ldeming.com/ - Sam Altman: https://blog.samaltman.com/ - Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

You're not in favor of terraforming, full stop? Elon's nukes and ground CO2 idea seems dubious, and like his dome habitats idea (turns out they're very limited in lower gravity and pressure: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rate… I think it will be dropped quickly once SpaceX gets to Mars and starts working on habitation seriously. He talks big but he acknowledges reality eventually. However, I struggle to see a reason to oppose the concept of terraforming Mars. I don't study the planet for a living so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Then I suggest you start following his blog :) Casey's writing is second to none on doing engineering analysis. A few of my favs: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a… https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/supersonic-electric-flig…

Casey Handmer has a great blog taking hard analysis of what activities will be practical in space. He argues there is no real reason for asteroid mining to bring resources back to earth. So the challenge is to identify a large market for resources to be used in space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-known-commo…

Casey Handmer argues [0] that The best solution is an “air mattress” structure where anchor cables are spaced throughout the structure to resist the pressure load. The anchor cables can scale linearly with area just like the pressure does, while a perimeter wall anchor scales with radius and therefore sets a limit on enclosure size. The cable anchor approach also lets you build arbitrarily high ceilings, like kilometers up hypothetically. I really wish someone would build one of these on Earth. It would actually be easier because you’d just set the pressure high enough to resist wind loads. You could make an incredibly gigantic greenhouse in some otherwise inhospitable climate [0]: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rate…

Space advocates seem to have been going off the idea of that over the past few years. I'm not sure how much of that is due to a better appreciation of the downsides, and how much is due to the very rapid improvements we've been seeing in ground-based solar. A couple of recent (late 2019) articles from Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-solar-power-… https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/no-really-space-based-so… It's worth reading the comments too; there are some interesting points there, although I think the game-changing ones rely on new tech and/or well-developed lunar industry.

This article from October 2019 also does a great job explaining the enormity of vision. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a…

For more technical information, I recommend reading this: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/star link-is-a-very-big-deal/ Strange enough the title is similar: starlink is a very big deal

> Ground based mirrors are very large, in the 10s of meters, and those mirrors are extremely heavy, like tons. Seemingly fantastically - SpaceX is currently constructing a system designed to launch 100 tons to LEO, for as low as $35/kg [1]. Musk says this capability is what the Starlink business is to pay for. It appears lately, more realistic than it has sounded. [1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a… ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397285 )

So I'm confused, because according to https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-very-big-d… "Based on the Starlink website, that all satellites will be deployed below 600km. In this case, satellites may be visible during twilight but not after nightfall, greatly reducing the potential impact to astronomy." Can anybody verify this?

A good reading on why you should understand your building blocks: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/on-reasoning-backwards-f…

> Aware of such criticisms, NASA is defending the Gateway. In May, the agency quietly distributed a white paper titled “Why Gateway?” [PDF] that makes the case for the space station. Casey Handmer's take on that document, the best I know and strongly critical, is here: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/the-lunar-gateway-nasas-…

> Instead I've followed him and directly what he says for about the last 8 years. and you are comparing that to the first hadn experience of some of his closest associates. The dude pays 3 different PR companies full time salaries, you haven't followed him, you have followed his propaganda. > him doing mostly the same things he did before When he said that he was proud Tesla got 100% on the lgbtq score 4 years in a row, and that homophobes should nt buy his cars in 2017 has that not changed? > And every common argument against him is so easily shot down if "you sound like chatgpt" is your idea of shooting somethign down, then yeah everything is easily shot down. > Tesla benefits from selling some carbon credits yes. thats not what I said though. I said the company was saved from bankruptcy due to goverment contracts. For Tesla the credits where only part of the equation. First of all they got a 480 million loan, on almost no interest in 2010. The EV credits of around 7,500 per car totalled a goverment investment of over 3 billion of free money. Despite this Elon said the company was around 1 month away from bankruptcy in 2017 when making the Model 3. He took 480 million almost for free, and 3.4 billion for free and still was weeks away from insolvency. That company is literally unviable without goverment funding. > Tesla operates in a system that anyone would call very capitalistic Goverment funded sports car for tech bros is not a system anyone would call…

What you just wrote reads like bad LLM output. I read very little "puff pieces". Instead I've followed him and directly what he says for about the last 8 years. And I've seen how the media has turned against him, and him doing mostly the same things he did before is now somehow bad. Nah. He's the same man. And every common argument against him is so easily shot down. But you don't seem to care and act like a flat earther, given my first link shoots your "counter-argument" down given it's about people you as a HN reader should know saying that the praise said about him is just quite simply true. >Most of those companies have been bailed out by goverment contacts. To be devil'ls (yours) advocate, NASA did save SpaceX. But. NASA is one of the very few agencies that could hire SpaceX, especially due to things like ITAR. But it is obvious to anyone that SpaceX has always more than deserved those contracts, delivering value that is about 20x as high when compared to NASA's own efforts in cost to orbit, a figure that is bound to go 100x with Starship which is progressing not unlike Falcon 9 which is by far the most successful and most used launch system in the US, and the world. Tesla benefits from selling some carbon credits yes. Which is by design. Remember that they were THE guys who managed to turn EV's from compromises to cars that can surpass ICE's. Actual good cars instead of inferior hippie mobiles like the G-whiz. Tesla operates in a system that anyone would call very…

Casey Handmer did a couple of excellent articles on this topic: - Space-based solar power is not a thing: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-solar-power-… - No really, space based solar power is not a useful idea, literature review edition: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/no-really-space-based-so… You can get into the weeds of the detailed costings, safety, etc, but I think the clearest argument is this: > The problem with beaming power using microwaves is that the monetizable value per Watt is incredibly low, because essentially unmetered electricity comes out of the walls of every building. The trick is to increase the value per Watt, by increasing the value and decreasing the power. The value is increased by modulating the microwaves with high speed data, and the power can be reduced by a factor of a million or so without hurting this method. Indeed, customers pay only for the data, and not for the transmitted electrical power, which is pathetically low at the receiver. Communications satellites remain the killer app for the commercial space industry And then you look at the fact that almost every satellite communications company has gone bankrupt at some point. SpaceX with Starlink being a notable exception, but OneWeb which superficially looks pretty similar has already gone bankrupt once. If communications, which is many more orders of magnitude more…

agree on the stupid decision. but more important: the way forward. - building up new nuclear reactors takes _many_ years and is still quite expensive, so its not a short-term solution. long term due to climate change the cooling might be a problem (like france already has issues in the summer when rivers run dry and they had to throttle nuclear reactors) - fossils must be phased out, not an option - hydrogen is at best a storage option for surplus energy (like solar), but highly inefficient to begin with - renewables are already cheaper than everything else and prices are dropping still [1] so either people want to believe climate crisis doesn't exist and want to double down on fossils, or believe nuclear will solve it but it can't right now, or hope that some miracle happens somehow and energy/climate will be a solved problem somehow. I'd prefer to focus on the here and now, which means renewables, plus some storage in any form, instead of beating dead horses over and over again. --- [1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/radical-energy-abundance…

Nuclear, coal, and gas powerplants only differ in how you produce heat. After that they work the same (heat water, make steam, drive turbines). There is usually a few stages of turbines to extract as much work as possible. Reaction time is 1 hour or more. The waste heat can be used for district heating no matter how you produced the heat (in my city they use coal powerplant for this). It's not just gas. And it's not "perfect efficiency", it's about 80% for the best cogeneration powerplants compared to 60% without cogeneration. It's a little less in practice cause most powerplants aren't as modern and as efficient. All of these is usually used on regular (not peaker) powerplants, because it's only useful if you use your powerplant for long periods of time. There are also peaker powerplants. They work differently, and they are optimized for quick reaction time (so the energy they produce is more expansive and efficiency is lower). Reaction time is about 15 minutes. They don't only burn gas - they can also burn any liquid fuels (but gas is indeed the most common). Usually the efficiency of peaker powerplants is about 30-40%, can be almost as good as the regular ones but it's not worth it to install cogeneration if your plant runs for few hours a day. I'm not sure which kind you were talking about. If they use cogeneration it means they must run for long time, and peaker powerplants running constantly is wasting money and fuel. Do you know what reaction time (from 0 to 100%)…

Starlink gets a lot of bad press from astronomers, so I want to leave this here to balance it out. It's written by Casey Handmer, an (ex) NASA astrophysicist. Source: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-stars… Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it's worth reading: Starlink will ultimately be a network of tens of thousands of satellites connecting to hundreds of millions of user terminals located all over the Earth. Its radio encoding scheme adapts the signal rate to measured atmospheric opacity along the signal line of sight across 10 different frequency bands in real time. Collectively, the system measures trillions of baselines of Earth’s entire atmosphere every day. This data, fed into standard tomography algorithms such as those used by medical CT imagers, can resolve essentially all weather structure in the atmosphere. No more careful scrutiny of remote weather station pressure gauge measurements. No more reliance on single mission oxygen emission line broadening. Instead, complete real time resolution of the present state of the entire atmosphere, a gift for weather prediction and climate study. Starlink satellites are equipped with perhaps the most versatile software defined radios ever put into mass production. Each antenna allows the formation of multiple beams at multiple frequencies in both send and receive. With sufficiently accurate position, navigation and timing (PNT) data from GPS satellites, Starlink satellites could…