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NASA new engine test....
A2597
Fanboy
in Zocalo v2.0
[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPxHXzd4iM0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ewired%2Ecom%2Fscience%2Fspace%2Fmagazine%2F15%2D09%2Fst%5Frocket[/url]
Boo yea baby! (Crank the bass...don't usually here such good sound on Youtube...)
Boo yea baby! (Crank the bass...don't usually here such good sound on Youtube...)
Comments
Any word on which spacecraft is going to be fitted with those new rocket engines?
Worf
Any word on which spacecraft is going to be fitted with those new rocket engines?[/QUOTE]
Don't know but I'm sure it will be destined for one of those designs that never materialize. I'm convinced we'll never see anything past the shuttle for space exploration within our lifetime :D
[URL="http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/c/ca/Sovereign_Warp_Core.jpg"]Call me when they test this.[/URL] Now THAT would be really cool. :cool:
Space Ghost: hell yeah, give me warp 9 any day!
You said "I'm convinced we'll never see anything past the shuttle for space exploration within our lifetime." You never specified NASA-only. Thus we have already seen stuff past the shuttle for space exploration. As for the Constellation, NASA has no choice there. It may not go to the Moon, but it'll happen.
1) Antimater production is very little, and matter of fact extremely expensive
2) What the hell is deridum(sp?)
3) Dylythim(sp?) doesn't exist.
I think our best hope of interplanetary or intersolar travel is possibly some type of wormhole or interdimentional gate system. With our current "problems" with power and money demands, unless someone breaks the string and membrane theory's completly apart, were stuck here.
Interplanetary travel is entirely possible using current-day technology. It just takes a while. We don't need wormholes or warp drive to get to Mars.
Yes our current technology can get us there, but what country is going to spend the billions to trillions to do that? There is no safe "buffer" zone still to even attempt a mars landing. So much can happen inbetween the earth and moon alone. If one little thing goes wrong, they are stuck out there with no help because of money matters, the only thing that can possibly help them is the ISS. Then also there's the matter of the crew. How are they going to accomlish the long months they are going to be gone? I doubt anyone will pour enough money into an artificial gravity ring to keep muscle tone and bone mass. Who would be crazy enough to spend months in a small space with the same few people? We are fragile creatures physically and mentally. And the world isn't deticated enough to push the means needed for interplanatary exploration. If we were to make a mission, we would need two ships. Both that were able to travel there and back in a fairly short time (days, not months), one for the primary mission, and one for rescue. There is just so many steps that need to me made (and discovered) before we truely can go boldly where no man has gone before. The US shuttles are getting near the end of their lifespan, none are being planned to be built. Yea NASA is testing all of this new stuff, but what are they doing for what we got here at home to support such a huge mission? No one really knows what they are doing for an interplanatary flight because the data made for the apollo missions died with their creators, they are all restarting from scratch. I might be wrong in some of my details, but that's my understanding of the whole deal.
So in my belief, unless someone can pop a few space stations around the moon, a new type of interplanatary drive, some efficent and inexpensive way to produce gravity, and dish out more dough than any government has anymore, all completly pulled out their ass, going to Mars is out of our dreams.
As far as crew...I imagine a lot of people would be up for the mission if there were one, and I'm sure we could find individuals who would have the necessary psychological conditioning to survive that mission's extreme length.
And I'm really not sure what you even said in the last third of your second paragraph. Please clarify.
And all the crazy people that have been up in Mir and the ISS too! :p
Deuterium is actually the second most abundant element in the Universe (after Hydrogen)
Deuterium (D, which is H +1 neutron) is also quite abundant on Earth. There's a sizable concentration in sea water (I'm too lazy to check how much, but that's the original source of most deuterium). The same methods used to get hydrogen from water apply to get deuterium from "heavy water" (D2O).
The correct anti-matter for deuterium would have to be anti-deuterium (a nucleon made of one anti-proton and one anti-neutron, with one positron around), otherwise you'd have excess matter or anti-matter as Sanfam said.
I once attended a talk by Lawrence Krauss (who authored a Science of Star Trek book among many science divulgation books), which dealt partly with SF and space travel (including some wild claims by the UFO=alien-spaceship crowd versus actual science), afterwards I asked him about how much antimatter a spaceship would need to travel between the stars, his answer: about 7 times the mass of the spaceship.
I can't recall exactly if I asked him to provide a rough figure for a certain fraction of the speed of light he mentioned, or if it was a figure for travel to a near star, but the point is the same: even with antimatter as fuel (a fuel that gives you a 100% conversion to energy) the energy requirements to travel between the stars within a lifetime are so huge that you need a large amount of mass.
Generation ships are the way, unless some exotic physics comes around and allows us to tunnel through the 11-dimensional branes (which are the fabric where superstrings vibrate)...
I have to note that [b]Methane is odorless[/b]. A sulfur compound, of a type of chemical substances called thiols is added to methane, or propane or natural gas. Such simple hidrocarbons are totally odorless. Thiols are among the stinkiest substances on Earth, ask any skunk to spray you if you must have definitive proof :D). The closest thing to an actual hydrocarbon smell is to burn an unscented paraffin (heavier hydrocarbons) candle.
Sorry for the lecture, as a chemist it bothers me that such piece of misinformation is so widely believed.
For direct intra-system travel, you don't even need rotation, simply the ability maintain an acceleration of 14 m/s^2 for continous periods of time. In traveling between two planets, if fuel was unlimited, you would spend first 1/2 the distance accelerating and the second 1/2 deccelerating
Of course to be practical this requires a propolsion system that does not require the expulsion of material as the reaction mass, but rather the ability to make use of some ambient mass.
Jake
It uses a series of very strong magnets in a tunnel configuration (think particle accelerator), it would release particles like hydrogen down the accelerator and hyper accelerate them to as fast as is possible then detonating the particle when it reaches the end of the tunnel.
The problem was that to really get any momentum we need stronger electro-superconductors. Right now our strongest magnets are chemical superconductors like MRI Magnets, but to create the magnetic field a cryogen like Liquid Helium is involved. This makes it so the magnet cannot be turned off in the pattern required to create a particle accelerator. These chemical superconductors have field strengths from .4T to the 9.4T supermagnet. In contrast, electro-superconductors have field strength at a maximum of .3T.
We need to further our knowledge on superconductors and find a way to create higher electrical fields.
I don't know how well it would work, Hell, I don't even know if I explained it right, but it sounds cool.
Why 14? Since the acceleration of gravity on earth 9.8 m/s^2, the only reason I could see for going faster and having more powerful gravity was if someone was interested in making even bland, everyday tasks into a workout.
It uses a series of very strong magnets in a tunnel configuration (think particle accelerator), it would release particles like hydrogen down the accelerator and hyper accelerate them to as fast as is possible then detonating the particle when it reaches the end of the tunnel.[/QUOTE]
As I recall, there's a lab set up in America running tests on that particular engine configuration.
Also, to get "any momentum," we don't need stronger magnets. Just more time. Time is something we have plenty of on a trip between the planets. The figure for a plasma drive (think ion drive, but with lots more ions, powered by a nuclear reactor because solar panels don't provide the necessary power levels) powered spacecraft to get to Mars is 1 month, versus 6 or more months using a conventional rocket boost.
It's running on methane, not cow farts. :D
Hehe, that is what I meant, just used the wrong figure.
Jake