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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Feb 20, 2002 12:41:19 GMT -5
Love it or hate it? Are we spending too much money, or not enough?
I'd like to see more effort going into developing interplanetary spacecraft, and interstellar craft. I'm all for increasing the budget for NASA, since it's only two percent of the U.S.s' national annual budget. Yes, there are problems on Earth but we've spent billions upon billions of dollars on social programs but the organizations endowed with the money have wasted it, and the results have been spotty and discouraging.
Space exploration has given us alot of trickle-down technology and we now have computers and cell phones and the means to make everything wireless, as the Internet will soon be. The International Space Station is nice, but you know the saying, "Been there, done that." We've had Skylab and Mir. It works, we can live in space for months at a time.
We've been to the moon, but that was three decades ago, and we haven't left the atmosphere since. We've sent spacecraft out in hopes that a passing visitor will play a golden record. Put a needle inside a groove, the same as dragging a rock through a ditch, and this will tell whomever who we are. They didn't have compact disks in the 1970's
We keep talking about a mission to Mars. But I don't see much going towards it. I guess Con-gress, which is the opposite of Pro-gress, has something to do with this.
Anyway, would you like to see a mission to Mars? We have the technology to go there and put down a settlement. Just think, your grandkids can help pick up all the McDonald's hamburger wrappers out of the Martian soil.
We haven't left Earth yet and it the year 2001. Our rockets still use kerosene. Well a version of it on steroids. But it's still kerosene. Russia built the longest lasting ship, Mir, ever and now they have the most powerful rockets. The U.S. has been to the moon first. Great! Fine. It's politics, get over it.
The U.S., Europe, Russia, Canada, and other countries should get together and pool the talents and money to go to Mars. Maybe even a nuclear fusion powered space craft to get there. It's complicated but it can be done.
What say you? Would you like to see more effort or progress, going into space exploration.
Or would you rather not, and why?
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Feb 20, 2002 14:24:08 GMT -5
well, nuclear fusion hasn't been invented yet. They're trying, but haven't yet i don't think. Besides, that'd....well, i suppose the ABM treaty doesn't come into play anymore. NASA is working on Ion drives, which would provide tremendous speed, but very slow acceleration. Thing is, it never stops accelerating. That's for deep-space though.
NASA has plans to be on Mars around 2121. I think it'll be a good thing when they do.
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Feb 21, 2002 9:13:44 GMT -5
How fast can these ion engines propel a ship, once it gets up to speed?
I'd love to see a mission to Mars and as far as I know we already have the technology. We just need the money, assuming it's spent wisely.
Then again, when we settle Mars, do we really want McDonald's wrappers blowing all over the Martian surface. We'd have to keep a checks and balances of what and who should go to Mars, and other planets.
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Feb 21, 2002 19:51:06 GMT -5
how fast...how fast indeed....I can't quite remember. Ok, well i remember a comparison. The voyager space probe or whatever moves at 27 miles/sec. This would move at thousands of miles/sec i think. What's the speed of light again? 3 * 10^6 km/sec? can't remember. It can't break the speed of light because the lorenz calculations prove that to not be possible, unless it's broken, in which case they better look those equations over. I remember the speeds it could reach would be no where near C, but would be extremely fast none the less. It would be able to accelerate for years on end, but eventually it would run out of fuel. hah, however, with hardly any friction in space, moving at thousands of miles/hr, as if it wouldn't go far after it ran out of fuel.
There's another form of propulsion too. Photons. Sounds crazy doesn't it? NASA tested it out with super-light materials. Hung some of the material and pointed an extremely powerful (high photon) light at it, and it did move. If they were to do that, they would construct something with massive solar sails. I mean huge. Damn huge. After all, it's gotta catch trillions of photons to get up to a speed that would make it worth it. They would send the device as close to the sun as possible. Good source of photons, wouldn't ya say? It'd pick up some major speed there. However, i see a problem. When it's getting closer to the sun, wouldn't the sails have the opposite effect and push the thing the wrong way? I don't know how they would get it to the sun but it would have to involve a lot more than just pointing it at the sun.
My opinion, the ion drive makes more sense.
haha, good call on that mcdonalds thing. Don't forget Starbucks. Think aliens like gourmet coffee?
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Feb 28, 2002 11:30:06 GMT -5
Pizza boxes stacked up outside a Mars compound. But the wind wouldn't be dense enough to move them around. I looked up Ion Engines on the Google search engine, and came up with several links. The engine can accelerate a ship to up to 70,000 mph. Not bad, but not good. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. I know we can never have FTL ships because they would squish the pilots and crew into jelly, and the dust in space would tear a ship apart in seconds. Even if we could build a FTL ship, we wouldn't be able to operate it because the G Forces exerted on the pilot would be so much he wouldn't be able to move, much less live through it, unless the acceleration was over several days or even weeks. <br> But like CH107 said, as the speed of light is approached by an object, its mass approaches infinity. So forget that one also. We'll also never see ships built like the Enterprise or a Millenium Falcon. We'll be dealing mostly with high-flying model rockets almost big enough for your cat. That's the extent of our space travel unless the technology becomes cheaper. <br> <<It would be able to accelerate for years on end, but eventually it would run out of fuel. hah, however, with hardly any friction in space, moving at thousands of miles/hr, as if it wouldn't go far after it ran out of fuel.>> Wouldn't they be able to cut the engines out to conserve fuel? You wouldn't need a continuous burn once you got up to speed. <br> The Photon idea. Isn't that where NASA wants to develop some sort of solar sail? Yes it would be huge, about a mile on a side and less than the thickness of a plastic bag. This would use the solar "wind," the streams of photons blasting away from the sun. The ship would have to be propelled toward the sun, and to answer your question, the sail would be folded up somehow, then the craft would be postitioned, then the sail deployed. Here's some links. The Incredible Ions of Space Transportation www.science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast15jun_1.htm The photo of the ion engine here is awesome. Right out of Star Wars. Soup-Can Spacecraft and Postage-Stamp Engines By Robert Roy Britt <br>http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/jpl_brophy_010808-1.html Innovative Engines on Deep Space 1 Break Their Own Record www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/deep_space_1_010404.html[ More results from www.space.com ] BBC Space Online - Future Spaceflight - Ion Engines www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/exploration/futurespaceflight/ ionengines.shtml [PDF] 1 ANALYSIS OF HALL-EFFECT THRUSTERS AND ION ENGINES FOR 1 ANALYSIS OF HALL-EFFECT THRUSTERS AND ION ENGINES FOR ORBIT TRANSFER MISSIONS Frank S. Gulczinski III * , Ronald A. Spores ** Propulsion Directorate OL-AC. <br>http://www.engin.umich.edu/dept/aero/spacelab/pdf/AIAA-96-2973.pdf http"//www2.jpl.nasa.gov/files/releases/ioneng.txt DREAMTiME - Bringing Space to Earth as propellant exhaust. Ion engines are currently low-thrust, but can run for a long time providing constant acceleration and hence high target velocities. www.dreamtime.com/solar.html - 22k - Cached - Similar pages
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Post by popcorn on Mar 20, 2002 22:17:57 GMT -5
How is the ion drive going to work? SInce they're in a vaccum, what material will they carry with -- obviously i've missed something.
The "Solar Sail" looked so promising, but they ran into some snags. THe thing is, we have the tech. to do it NOW and its really clever
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Mar 21, 2002 13:53:31 GMT -5
The ion engine fires out a stream of charged particles. It is very effeicient, in the way that the energy produced is more than the energy needed. The energy will probably be nuclear fission or fusion material, once they figure out how to contain it safely. They won't need to "burn" anything to make the energy. Also, as far as being in a vacuum, the ions will push against the ship, since there's not much to push against in space. As said earlier, it takes awhile for speed to build up but once it does, the ship really starts to move out. <br> I think the problem with the solar sail, is like everything else that ruins NASA'a intentions. Cost overruns and everything built by the lowest bidder is junk! Happens all the time. The sail looks great on paper and is feasable, but the legalities, and financial politics that surround something like that get in the way. Sad. Here is a link to some animations for Relitivistic (Faster than Light-speed ) travel. www.fourmilab.ch/cship/lorentz.htmlThere are some lengthy downloads but they're fun to watch.
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Apr 2, 2002 22:11:36 GMT -5
www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/ds1.htmThat's a link to information on DS1 (Deep Space 1). Apparantely, it's not a future project, referring to the ion drive. It's already been used. It's quite interesting how they actually caught up on a comet and closed to within 2200 kilometers of it. Details are on the site, and the whole page is quite interesting, but be sure to read the part entitled "Glenn Ion Thruster Propelled Deep Space 1". That part is especially about the ion drive. Amazing how the thing uses only 3.5 ounces of Xenon (100 g) a day, meaning it takes 4 days to burn a single pound.
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Apr 3, 2002 9:17:43 GMT -5
/\ I saw that DS1 once, wow a pound every four days, sure beats 30 tons a second. Here's a site that shows what things might look like if we could travel near the speed of light. www.fourmilab.ch/cship/lorentz.html
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Apr 19, 2002 8:46:02 GMT -5
Yup, that's correct. Red/Blue shift, due to the compression and stretching of light waves.
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