Will cause an outcry from those who want to make the Moon into a missile base. Water can be made into fuel and breathable oxygen by splitting the molecule apart using a charge of direct current. Such as can be harvested from Solar Panels. On the moon there’s no such thing as a cloudy day, and one side is eternally night, the other eternally day. Or close enough as to make no practical difference.
This technology has been in existence for over a hundred years. Using DC for electrification was one of Edisons pet projects. He invented the Electric Chair to demonstrate the dangers of Alternating Current. Solar generation of Direct Current was one of Einstein’s inventions. In 1905. It could have been as easily developed, and for a lot less money, a lot less bloodshed, and a lot less ecological and (related) Economic damage than Petroleum.
Hydrogen fuel is as explosive as gasoline but without the really negative side effects, like the fumes from stored gasoline, which are lethal in many ways, depending on the number of additives. Hydrogen was used for the boosters of the Moon Rockets. It’s powerful enough to run any internal combustion engine. But less economic, ecological and political damage… also meant less outrageous profits spread among the very fewest 5% of the worlds population. The profits would have been more widely distributed, just like Sunshine and Water distributed around the world by weather patterns. Weather which is the front end for Climate.
It would have been, to the minds of the Super Rich, Chaos and Anarchy if they weren’t in full control of the economy of the world. Imagine people being actually close to equal in wealth, and that without bloody revolution.
But Standard Oil was subsidized, Solar Energy and its very real stepchild Hydrogen fuel was Not Subsidized.
Welfare for the Greedy, not for the Needy. The Wealthy didn’t care if the scions of the Peasantry were sacrificed in the wars “necessary” to maintain their hold on the Wealth. They themselves weren’t at immediate risk, and their own children, those who couldn’t buy their way out of Conscription, meant nothing to them either. In the Greed Game it’s “Me me me me It’s the Me Show, starring— ME!”
George Bush Senior could afford to buy W’s way out of the draft and out of Combat. Easily.
If it had been more expensive than he wished, he would have cut Junior loose and Junior would have been up to his ass in mud, mosquitoes and VietMinh fighters the same as the “Lower” class soldiers. They don’t care about climate change any more than they care about wars, after all, they expect to be long dead by the time it causes a catastrophe. So what if THEIR kids and grandkids have to live with their bad decisions as well as ours? The Rich Pigg way of looking at his pigglets is “Oh well, it’s not ME that’s going to pay, big deal who cares la di da…”
So we’re now, even with so very little investment (especially compared to the Government subsidies to Fossil Fuel) being given over to “alternatives” like wind, solar and hydrogen in a real position to take advantage of the technology, ours as much as that of the Bigg Piggs.
Splitting the water molecules into Hydrogen and Oxygen would be the fastest and most efficient (and cheapest) method of separating water out of Pollution, instead of the methods we use now to filter the pollution from the water.
And when it burns, two hydrogen atoms reunite with their ol’ buddy Oxygen et voila içi, water once more.
But again, it wouldn’t make the gap between Richest and Poorest any wider, and indeed, would tend to close that gap. Thus, it’s a No-go.
The biggest uses of Hydrogen power and Solar power were for the Space Race, the race to put missile bases on the Moon. Satellites typically use Solar power more than Nuclear, because Nuclear power involves boiling water and using the energy from the expansion (not separation) of the water molecules to turn turbines. Water, which there’s not much thereof you could put into a Satellite the size of your closet. Certainly not enough to run a satellite for thirty or forty years. Solar panels to the rescue.
The case for having a missile base on the moon is illustrated by how easy it is to launch a payload slightly more massive than a Corvette into lunar orbit, accelerate out of Lunar Orbit (lunar mass “specific gravity” being one-sixth that of Terran mass, escape velocity would be one sixth that of a launch from the Earth)
It took those huge von Braun engines Remember them? The crew was in that little bitty eensy weensy tiny small little minuscule nose of the rocket, the rest of it was pure fuel. That’s the amount of fuel and rocket body necessary to launch bombs into orbit and drop them back into the atmosphere and wherever on the surface of the earth you want them.
Hydrogen fuel is tricky to maintain for long periods of time, so the missiles cost and cost and cost and cost even sitting in their silos. Year before last there was a fire at a missile silo on the Range at Minot, North Dakota that the Air Force didn’t discover for a week.
Remember though, any who would carp at this by flying the canard “well, if it’s that dangerous, why should you use it in your cars?” my answer is, Rocket Science. If GASOLINE is too inefficient, tricky and dangerous to use in Missiles, as determined by oh… 8 decades of high dollar Military Research (you know military, yes? The Right Wing Lunatic Fringe WORSHIP all things military)again TOO DANGEROUS to use for fuel in their jet aircraft and their rockets and missiles, why should you park a couple hundred pounds of it in front of your house or in the garage attached to your house?
The answer is simple. Your purchase of that gasoline makes you poorer and the Rich Piggs richer.
But from the Moon to the Earth, why, they wouldn’t need tons of Hydrogen to launch hundreds of pounds of Bomb. All they have to do is accelerate it to twice the speed of sound, against one sixth the gravitational pull and exactly zero percent of the atmospheric drag of the Earth, to escape lunar orbit and drop into Terran orbit. And from there, as demonstrated by the recovery of the astronauts landing capsules, the “goodies” can be dropped to within a few meters of where you want them to fall. Plenty close enough for a bomb that would lay waste to a couple MILLION square meters of surrounding city.(couple thousand square Kilometers)
All of this demonstrated by the good offices of NASA and Space Command.
The only thing that kept the Moon Missile Madness from erupting in the early 1970s was there was no water on the Moon, or so it was thought.
The technology is there, though, for US to harvest it. Solar panels are cheaper and cheaper every day. Separating oxygen from hydrogen is a simple process like making the rust travel from one nail to another with Electroplating.
The Electric current needed to do it is provided by old Mr Sun, the water, well, we’ve got plenty of Polluted Water laying around that’s not doing anything but Poisoning us and our children for thousands of years to come.
What stands between us and that? Lunatics. Again with a Moon reference. But the same people who brought us the Town Hall Stupidity against the Health Care Public Option are at it again, this time wanting to mine the national park lands for Shale Oil and Coal, so they can dump more Chemical Crap into the drinking water. And keep the gap between Richest and Poorest growing every minute of every day.
Their rabid addiction to the Status Quo is like the Monkey Trap. My mom and her sisters had a pet monkey named Moe when they were on Formosa in the mid 50s. The reason for him being one handed is the Monkey Trap.
You take a gourd and tie it to a tree trunk, branch… whatever will hold it securely. You drill a hole in it just big enough for a monkey to put his empty hand in. Then drop in a rock that’s almost as big as the hole. Monkey comes, rattles the gourd. Aha! says Monkey, something good that the humans have hidden away from me, it must be really good… sticks his hand in and can’t pull it out with the rock in it. Monkey doesn’t know it’s just a rock like the thousands of small rocks around him. Keeps trying to get his hand out. Makes enough noise that the Vilage Poacher knows he has something in his snare, comes up, and even in that much peril, holding on to the most worthless thing imaginable, the monkey won’t let go.
Usually the monkey gets a fast trip to the supper table. Moe was treated special because they knew they could sell him to the Yankees for a pet.
It did so much damage to his hand that it had to be amputated.
Monkeys are incredibly smart, Moe could untie knots (except for a simple square knot, because you need both hands to undo it) using the one hand.
But they don’t even have to move the snare, even if other monkeys in the troop are watching what happened to Monkey Dinner #1 each in turn will try to steal that incredibly worthless rock from the gourd.
Kind of like the Tea Party Monkeys with their insistence that the Old, proven to be worthless way is somehow Valuable and they’ll hold on to that little worthless Old Way Of Doing Things as long as they possibly can.
And if they can arrange it, have a missile base on the Moon.
They’ll swell out their chests with Pride and Jingoism, “Why, look at what WE have!”
Even though they own no more of it than they do the Missile Bases or Army Cavalry Bases or Cheyenne Mountain. They, the Shock Troop monkeys, don’t matter any at all to the Rich Piggs. They can get all Jingoistic and say “Look at OUR Cheyenne Mountain!” and know they’ll get no closer to the front gate than the Zoo on the other side of the mountain.
There’s a town just outside El Paso Texas called “Moon City”, the Slick Real Estate Developers got the locals real good, told them and sold them that they wouldn’t have to pay city taxes . They also didn’t get city services. Like Fire, Police, Ambulance, Transit, Road maintenance… WATER…
You could look out from Moon City and see every morning and afternoon thousands of gallons of Water being poured on a Golf Course owned by the very richest. The golf course borders right on the City Limits.
But as far as getting city services was concerned, the Real Estate Scam Victims might just as well have been on the Moon.
Same way the Local Tea Babblers with that “look at what WE have!” …
They can’t take any more possession of Cheyenne Mountain or Ft Carson or Pete Field than they could flap their arms and fly to the moon.
They don’t own any more of it than they do the Oil they’re so proudly trying to force the rest of us to buy, burn, drink breathe and eat for as long as they can.
All they own is the Freedom to say and do exactly what their Masters tell them.
And in return get fed Moonbeams.
There’s a song “poor little black child, living on the street
no place to call his home and not near enough to eat
but you know that kid was proud, one July afternoon
cause some man named Armstrong done walked on the Moon”
What does it mean that the stars we see in the sky represent light coming at us from millions of years before? The images we have of Earth, of ourselves from space, reflect a distant past too actually. Although we’re accustomed now to visualizing our planet from above, as a quilt of satellite photos wrapped around a globe, viewable from any distance on Google Earth, the actual vision they mimic is a single thoroughly ubiquitous NASA photo called “The Blue Marble.” 