Casey Handmer
Physicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and founder of Terraform Industries, which is building plant to make synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. Writes about energy, space and manufacturing at caseyhandmer.wordpress.com.
Casey Handmer did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsThe skinny: This relatively small alpine lake is about 117 m deep!
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Their wordsThat makes it the 25th deepest natural lake in North America, and by far the deepest lake on Earth for its size.
- 4 months earlier
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Our reading
Starship will bring the price of low Earth orbit down to roughly a hundred dollars a kilogram.
Their wordsStarship promises a near future with launch costs to LEO of perhaps $100/kg.
↗How to build a lunar mass drivercaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsAt even $500/kg, launch cost is only 5% of the total satellite deployment cost, so a lunar mass driver is unlikely to drastically improve the economics of space-based AI, by reducing launch costs.
↗How to build a lunar mass drivercaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsThe economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
↗Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsStarship can lift orbital power generation to about 100 GW with perhaps 10,000 launches per year, or about one per hour.
↗Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsDo we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsOn the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsStoring electricity for months is economically difficult, but storing heat is easy.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsWhile heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 4th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBy 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThe only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 6th of 6 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
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Our reading
A Chinese crewed landing on the Moon before America returns would be a defeat for the free world.
Their wordsI am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
↗NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Our reading
Orion is too heavy for any rocket that exists to carry it to low lunar orbit and bring it home.
Their wordsEven for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
↗NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsIt’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system.
↗NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Our reading
After fourteen years of redesign, Orion's heat shield performed worse than the one it replaced.
Their wordsThe updated heat shield design, after more than 14 years of development, had performed even worse.
↗NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 7 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Nine tenths of the cost of Mars Sample Return comes from a single planetary-protection requirement.
Their wordssomething like 90% of the complexity and cost of MSR is driven by a requirement that the samples “break the chain” on the way home
↗How to get samples back from Marscaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsI would never like hold up a flag saying I'm really good at building highspeed trains. Like that is just a sign that you're really bad at capital allocation.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 1st of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsChina is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 2nd of 24 in this recording
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solarenergyChinaAmericaphysics
Their wordsIt absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 3rd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsso the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 4th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 5th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThey're focused on the chips, right? Because they understand like the key bottleneck is the chips, not the solar power, right?
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 6th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsWe're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 7th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsyou're going to have to build your own power plant for them, which is how it used to work. Like if you if you had an aluminum plant back in the day, you would be building your own power plant for it as well.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 8th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordswell their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 9th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIt is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 10th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsYou you also don't know like in order to make that money back, you have to then operate that plant at that capacity for 20 years, right? And if I was looking at the same charts as they're looking at right now, I'd say what are the odds that in 25 years time we can produce gas turbines at a price that is relevant in a world where solar is already at its current price and batteries at a price where they're already like you cannot win.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 11th of 24 in this recording
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Our reading
Within a few years, the majority of newly broken-ground data centres will be mostly solar-powered.
Their wordsSo I think within a few years we'll probably see that like the majority of new DCs that are going in will be mostly solar
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 12th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsBut then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 13th of 24 in this recording