Space Piracy
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Audacious Space Pirates |
We're not actually planning to attack space vessels or take their contents by force.
We do, however, plan to engage in stream capture, aka "river piracy" – "a geomorphological phenomenon occurring when a stream or river drainage system or watershed is diverted from its own bed, and flows instead down the bed of a neighbouring stream". The parasitical river of capitalism is in need of hijacking, and space access is part of our plan for that.
The key element is a cooperatively-owned launch loop, which will serve the following purposes:
- to allow escape from the global hegemony
- ensure the survival of human civilization in the event of global catastrophe
- serve as a revenue stream for further gay space communist activities
We hope to do this with a minimum of capital investment by utilizing networked cottage industry worldwide.
- The proof-of-concept model will require about $600k in parts.
- The fully-automated starport will need about $9.7 million.
The design since at least 2019 has called for the loop to be suspended over the Pacific Ocean. Aside from making the loop assembly somewhat portable, it provides a minimum level of danger to life and property in the event of suspension failure in that the chunks will most likely hit open water, where they can potentially be recovered for reuse. Each booster ring will contain a parachute system to provide for a soft landing.
A core requirement is for the entire system to be powered sustainably. While the endpoints will use encapsulated molten salt reactors as auxiliary/boost power, with secondary and tertiary backups, the entire loop will serve as a solar cell platform. Between the reactors and the energy efficiency gains from having less atmosphere between the photovoltaic cells and the local solar object, our best guess is that anything short of about 2/3 capacity will result in energy excess while in sunlight.
Notes
Some of the details here were discussed on Mastodon (thread), especially here, here, and here.
