Did I create the KESTS to GEO idea, she asked

Did I create the KESTS to GEO idea, a new acquaintance asked me.

Yes.

Sometimes people ask if the KESTS to GEO idea is my idea, apparently noting that I live on the edge of poverty, and am a college dropout, clearly not a wealthy leading-edge PhD scientist who might be expected to produce such a large scale advanced idea. Doesn't seem to match.

Pointing out that all ideas are built upon the shoulders of the ideas that came before them, yes, the idea is mine, built on the shoulders of my own ideas of the 1970's, as well as the giant ideas of Loftstrom, Hyde, and Smith in the mid-1980's. Their ideas fascinated me, and it was in search of why the National Commission on Space ignored
my 1985 testimony to them in behalf of those other's great ideas, that led me in search of their conceptual weaknesses and strengths, and ultimately a new idea occurred to me, using the workable parts of those other ideas as some parts of the new idea, which I first shouted to the world (I thought) in a small text file I uploaded (using my 300 Baud modem on my Adam Coleco computer) to the GEnie public information computer network's Space Library: "Power + Transportation", file #553, dated 1988-09-24. I naively thought that little text file would provide the key for aerospace to create the implied project; when the file seemed to have fallen into a "black hole", I wrote more files describing more details of the transportation structure and how useful it could be, such as file #747 "Hwy to Earth GEO Ring" on 1989-02-09, which I thought ought to get people to wake up to its potentials and get going, no time to waste, species were needlessly going extinct every day. The little response I got was typified by one who said he refused to live in space or anywhere he couldn't go sailing. Obviously people missed the point entirely, so I kept writing; the concept developed and expanded in my mind too over the years. But an impoverished and getting-older man, college dropout with Asperger's Syndrome's social struggles and extreme Tinnitus since Freshman year in college, is easy to ignore. It was not until 2000 that I finally got a formal technical paper accepted on KESTS to GEO published in a professional conference proceedings, the "Space 2000" conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers ... the concept really is more of the nature of a bridge than of a conventional aerospace vehicle. Two more technical papers on the subject have been published since then, I presented at the ASCE space conferences in 2002 and 2004. However, it mostly seems to have stimulated renewed interest in the "Space Elevator" concept, an anchored earth tether space access concept, basic idea had been independently though of by many people back in the 1960's and 1970's, one of which was myself in 1969, all set it aside when calculations showed near-impossible strength-to-mass material for the tether extending from the ground into space beyond GEO where counterweight would centrifugally balance the weight below GEO. (I did continue on with an alternate form and wrote it up several ways, including the tapered fiberglass lunar anchored tether "The Mooncable: Profitable Space Transportation System" in 1971-72, which also got ignored, and rejected by the financially strapped NASA in 1972.)

So to answer the question did I create the KESTS to GEO idea: I created a pivotal integration of concepts to form a new concept which itself is integrated with its potential applications intended to enable mankind and the diverse earth ecosystem all thrive and expand greatly, a path quite different from the path we are currently vigorously following compulsively, driven by the fear reaction mindset. It reminds me of back at the end of WWII, when the solitary confinement cage doors were opened during the liberation of the war concentration camps, but the inhabitants of the cages refused to come out, unable to comprehend any other kind of life , so brainwashed they had become. Similarly, people nowadays seem cooped up in the mindset of interpersonal conflicts ranging from office hierarchical drama to war's violent destructiveness galore, led by the dream that surviving winners take all. Where went mankind, the great builder of homes, machines and agriculture? That mankind is the one I need to find to correctly build and use KESTS to GEO with its applications, to wonderfully live in, far into the future. Where is that mankind? Ought to be around here somewhere.
- - by Jim Cline on 2004-10-12