What Casey Handmer thinks about design
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.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
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.
26 dated positions, 2021 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Casey Handmer has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Our reading · no longer heldManufacturing and mining in space will never be lucrative enough to pay for human settlement of space.
No longer holdsToday, exploding demand for power-intensive AI applications provides enough of an upside to justify producing components in space, providing the economic engine necessary to justify and fund the trillions of dollars necessary to build and sustain space factories.
SaidToday, exploding demand for power-intensive AI applications provides enough of an upside to justify producing components in space, providing the economic engine necessary to justify and fund the trillions of dollars necessary to build and sustain space factories.
↗Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st 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 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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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 readingAfter 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 readingNine 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 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 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 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 wordsactually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just like you can dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or or um or training.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 14th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsYou can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 24th of 24 in this recording
- 8 months earlier
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Their wordsWith the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space telescope.
↗It Is Time To Build The Monster Scopecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsCurrent PhD students will be nearing retirement by the time these missions fly.
↗It Is Time To Build The Monster Scopecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsA battery that’s discharging every day gets great utilization, but one that’s only there in case the sun doesn’t come up for two days in a row, barely gets used.
↗Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 11 months earlier
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Our readingMars Sample Return as designed is too complicated, too slow and too expensive to succeed.
Their wordsThe brief summary is that MSR’s architecture, pictured below, is incredibly complicated, slow, and expensive.
↗What is going on with Mars Sample Return?caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
- 2 weeks earlier
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Our readingThe binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.
Their wordsYet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
↗Permitting Reform Or Deathcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 4 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsPer doubling of production, costs have fallen a consistent 30-40% since 1970, but it’s only in the last few years that this price has become competitive with legacy electricity generation
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 7 in this piece
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Their wordswe will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 4th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsThe default climate discourse in recent years has been congruent to an acceptance that curtailing CO2 emissions would require the regrettable but ultimately impersonal de-industrialization and re-impoverishment of most of the world, which is both morally repugnant and politically impossible to achieve without first use of nuclear weapons.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 5th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsFollowing current trends to second order, >95% of humanity’s energy needs will be downstream of solar panels by 2042, just 19 years away, and alongside enormous expansion in direct use of electricity, fuel consumption will grow to more than $25T/year in equivalent dollars.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 7th of 7 in this piece
- 8 weeks earlier
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Their wordsit is quite obviously impossible to enforce universal adoption of more expensive carbon-free energy through, eg, mandatory carbon offsets, as higher gas prices are political suicide regardless of system of government.
↗How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kgcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordswe have to follow the cheapest solar wherever it leads – in this case away from 100% utilization and high electrical efficiency.
↗How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kgcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 22 months earlier
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Their wordsA dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost.
↗Starship is Still Not Understoodcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsNo, Artemis is still trapped in a pre-Starship paradigm where each kilogram costs a million dollars and we must aggressively descope our ambition.
↗Starship is Still Not Understoodcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
- 8 months earlier
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Their wordsThe required organizational transition is equivalent in scope and difficulty to the Apollo program, and will be made or broken during the tenure of the next NASA administrator.