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This part of the operation is a proposal for a new international space program starting properly in 2016 or 2017, but ramping up from about 2013 or 2014. Now although it is being said that this is a proposal, it is not a proposal in the traditional sense. This proposal is not being put to any government agency, nor will it ever. This part of the operation, which has the working title of ONE HQ, is part of the larger H3 agenda that will deal with a great many of the world’s biggest problems.
A discussion of what H3 is all about, what it will do and how it will be funded, is not a subject for this page. There are links below if you wish to follow that up.
Physical space exploration has stalled for about thirty years. Yes there have been developments, but since we put Enterprise in the air in 1977 and Columbia into space in 1981, there have been no significant breakthroughs. Indeed, the record for the fastest spacecraft is still held by Helios, thirty-five years ago.
In spite of the fact that the Lunar program had just been cancelled, the mid seventies really were the salad days for NASA: Viking landed on Mars, Pioneer and Voyager to the outer planets and beyond, Pioneer Venus, Helios took us inside the orbit of Mercury, and Skylab was occupied for about one hundred and seventy days in orbit. Is it any wonder that with people taking the Lunar landings for granted and all of this occurring, that we thought we’d set foot on Mars sometime in the 1990s? “Man’s mind and spirit really do grow with the space in which they are allowed to operate.” We are long overdue for our next major advance in space exploration:
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Go straight to book page
From Saturn V
to tks Propulsion
and Plasma ALP
Try to imagine what we need to define and the steps we need to take in order to commence a significant and sustained move out into the universe: We need advanced radiation shielding, new spacesuits, new power systems, new spacecraft designs (Earth orbiters and interplanetary), new propulsion systems both space and atmospheric, collision avoidance systems, new communications systems, artificial gravity (real life rather than Star Trek but better than rotation), impact protection systems, new space station designs, a vacuum cleaner to clean up the orbital junkyard we have above us, a whole range of new protocols, and all the operational elements designed from scratch without alluding to any other space program in anything more than a superficial way. We need the next, or first, generation in all of this.
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It is hard to know what to include in here from fear of scaring you off, but one significant part of this proposal is a new propulsion system that takes us away from the traditional notion of propulsion. Helios has held the space speed record for thirty-five years, but the first space based test of the tks Propulsion system will break this record about three or four hours after the test has begun. This record, which we will shatter, will not even stand for thirty-five days this time, let alone thirty-five years. By the time we build our first tks Class spacecraft, four or five years later, we will have sent this working model to do a run out past Voyager 2 and back as a symbol of the future we're heading into; this new propulsion is very, very fast.
Every aspect of ONE HQ will be different to what came before, and one of the most notable differences will be that scientists will be slotted in ahead of the air force captains and colonels; there will be no serving military personnel inside the ONE HQ operation. We are no longer going to go somewhere, “just because it is there”; what can we learn, what do we add to the sum of human experience and knowledge by going there? Even though it sounds so, it is not derogatory to say that pilots cannot give us these answers.
This proposal, which has been put in book form and published, is showing our future in space exploration, right now. When we went to The Moon in the sixties and seventies, it was a culmination, an end; when we next go to The Moon this will not be the case. Nobody is prepared for what is inside this proposal/book.
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