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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

There have been a wide range of theories about this, but a puffball comet explains a lot about what happened there. From Aliens;

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/tunguska_eve nt_040812.html

to Victorian Era Superweapons testing ala League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the Comic book, not the movie). I have tried to find the site on Google Earth but have not been lucky.

As you say, a Project HARP style launch would be difficult from a materials perspective, but not impossible.

How do you cast the barrel in-situ (certainly you wouldn't ship it!)

You would need a manufacturing presence on Mars first. Everything required for a machine shop could be shipped, leaving smelting as the primary issue. There's certainly enough iron ore on Mars, so it would need to be decided whether to ship a blast furnace and materials, or whether to build primitive forms out of Martian materials and allow the colonists to work their way up to a better design.

How do you make the 1/3 tonne of custom cordite mix (or equivalent) for each 82 kilograms of return mass?

Cordite and other nitrates are probably the biggest issue. Our current knowledge of martian soil suggests that Nitrogen is in mighty short supply. Unless we can find Nitrogen pockets on Mars, we'll have issues trying to manufacture any nitrogren based chemicals.

sulfuric acid
sulfur

Now *that* is easy

O2
H2O

H2O would need to be mined and cracked anyway, so both of these products should be readily available. I don't know enough about Project HARP, but I assume that sealed cartriges are used just like any other modern munition.

ethanol

Grow corn. :-)

Seriously, the colonists need to eat something. Corn is one of the easiest crops to grow, responds well to high CO2 levels (although it affects the taste), and should be easy enough for the colonists to take with. The biggest problem is still Nitrogen.

Which brings me to the point of saying, Mass Drivers just make more sense. You have to bring nuclear power production with you anyway, and the catapults could either be manufactured on Mars (out of martian iron or aluminum) or shipped to Mars using the ION cargo delivery ship. (The reentry would have to be worked out though, since parachutes and water landings are not an option on Mars.)

How do you get a delicate thing like an ion engine to survive launch?

They won't. My point was that a cargo vessel would make the run between Earth and Mars via the Superhighway. i.e. The engines will always be in orbit. They'd simply drop down into LMO, scoop up the packages, thrust back to the L1 point of Phobos, then ride the Superhighway all the way back to Earth. The best place to refuel such a craft (which would be hopefully rare given the efficiencies of ION thrusters) would be in Earth orbit.

Things may be made more efficient through the use of orbital spacestations on *both* sides, so that someone can manipulate the cargo manually if necessary. (Actually, a Mars space station prior to a surface colony may make a lot of sense anyway.)

A lot more required infrastructure, for sure, than rocket return, but potentially a lot cheaper. After all, Mars's atmosphere is paper-thin.

Indeed. I believe that the atmospheric pressure at the lowest points is around 10 mbars, whereas Olympus Mons has a pressure of around 1 mbar. Anything fired from a cannon or mass driver is going to encounter VERY little resistence. :-)

Getting said gold out of low earth orbit would not cost as much as putting it into orbit.

It is if you plan your recovery on the premise of a round trip.

Whether you go to Hawaii by jet to bury gold, or LEO to suspend gold in orbit, you still have to make a round trip.

And if you think that weight will be a factor, it most certainly is. The problem with getting gold into the air is the energy to make reaching escape velocity. The problem with retreiving gold from LEO is the energy it takes to slow down from escape velocity.

Both are very expensive prospects when viewed as a geologist. I can go to Indonesia and mine gold for $300USD and make a profit. Can you take gold from LEO and make a profit? Not if you use the shuttle. It costs $1.3BUSD each time it leaves the ground. If you can move freight for a lower cost than what it takes to put a satellite into orbit, then you might be able to make money from mining imaginary LEO gold.

His conclusion is faulty.

You misunderstood the premise.

If this is true about electrical discharge what is this is a weapon?

Not to mention that all the space junk, spy satellites, LEO satellites, etc. have completely vanished.
 
  If this were truly be the case, the following article would be considered disinformation.

I know some of their stuff (i.e. the MER rovers) use VxWorks. See http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /mer_computer_040128.html and http://www.windriver.com/news/press/pr.html?ID=355

They are 1MP. A good lens is more important than the number of pixels. This article discusses the issue.

BTW, the CCDs are Canadian. :-)

Hm, seems like slashdot has some kind of protection for that crap. Oh, well now it works.

Space.com's image script is ridiculously exploitable. Click for yourself.

Talking about the conspiracy... Smart-1 is suposed to be taking pictures of the moon sites http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050304_moon_s noop.html. I wonder why are they taking so long to reveal these pictures.

But he hasn't cut NASA spending. It went up from $16.2 billion in 2004-5 to $16.45 billion in 2005-6. That might not have kept up with inflation, but it's not a cut.

Or if by that you meant that fluctuations in solar output somehow magically gets smoothed over by the ecosystem, sorry. I'm no expert on thermodynamics, but if you increase the energy you're pumping into a system, there must be some effect. Energy doesn't just go away. The system's processes must somehow take it in, but they're not going to be unaffected. The energy equation must balance.

But yes, there are indications that Mars is also experiencing global warming. That means our own problem may be self-correcting in the short term -- or it may be a new long-term or permanent state of affairs, to which we may well be contributing to some degree but over which we may not have much control regardless, at least at this particular point.

To which I would reply, So what? That we can get away with polluting our atmosphere isn't a good reason to keep doing it. If this does turn out to be a false alarm as far as anthropogenic global warming is concerned, then I hope it's taken as a warning or wake-up call rather than an excuse to pollute more. Because if it's not our fault this time, there may yet come a time when it is. I'd prefer that we never reach it if we haven't already.

Maybe the case of Google purchasing its own fiber optics is not for "evil" intensions and quite reasonable for future plans - I'm quite sure that I read somewhere Google is developing some kind of astronomy datacenters to map the complete sky and universe and that computing the teraflop databanks may take hours, if not days and/or months! This would probably seem to be the reason to own such unused fiber optics and be able to transmit gigaflops of data from and to different locations. After all, i don't believe Google can just map the entire universe and sky from its headquarter locations. Then again, Google always seems to amaze me.

Maybe Wayne Rosing and Google still have a connection and common interest after all.

Maybe i read wrong or i may be the only one paying a little bit too much attention to some print articles. Hence, i might also have read it recently on Wired Magazine (sorry but i dont have Wired Mag copies this moment), but you may correct me on this one =)

The above idea and understanding of Google's action and what i read in a glance just 'googles', err Boggles, my mind.

So I'm just wondering: does this delta-omega have anything to do with the fact that the Earth's magnetic field reverses itself every 200,000 years or so? Please begin rampant conjecture and wild speculation. Extra credit to anyone who can credibly bring Roswell or right-wing conspiracies into the discussion. Fnord.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ mars_ice_021205.html

I dont know. I find it frustrating that the article provides just about no details. However, I did a quick Google search, and came up with this:

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/june2000/

And:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ mars_ice_signs_010614.html

The first page is dated in the year 2000! I wonder if this is really news after all! The second page is dated 2001. It states basically the same thing as the article the submitter linked to, however it says how long ago "recent" is--10,000,000 years!!

is that it will be the ones from the X-33. It was designed to be inexpensive and work better than the shuttles.

As to propulsion, he is first launching horizontally from an aircraft some 90-100K km up there and with sub sonic speed. He will probably have a simple H2/LOX rocket for boosting it from there. It will almost certainly be a standard engine rather than something new and innovative.

Keep in mind, that he is not going to be launching a shuttle. He is looking to send 3-6 ppl into space. Very little load. Probably just a capsule.

Any real innovations will probably come for cargo which will use a space elevator.

Yep...there's no way engineers would waste billions without making sure everything was planned in the same units.

The data is not conclusive, but it is unwise to be too attached to scientific theories that happen to be considered "proven". Not enough evidence yet to consider C=Constant false perhaps, but several scientists are concluding this as most likely based on several different kinds of observations.

Even something apparently simple as graviton exchange can result in experimental observation that the orbit of planets around the sun would decay if gravitons are limited to C. From experimental observations of the planets and the lack of decay. Here is an article that suggest gravitons must be at least 2E10 times C. This is the reason that gravity is typically described as a warping of space, though graviton particle exchange makes more sense in other contexts.

BTW, from what I have been able to see, none of the modern science for C!=constant helps the creationists.

"But the US won't be joining in on this effort because their shuttle program is state of the art and more advanced than any russian next-generation program could ever hope to be!"

Wrong. The US won't be joining because a self-imposed law that was meant to "punish" the Russians for collaborating with Iran forbids them to. What's more, starting next year Russia is no longer obliged to ferry US astronauts from and to the ISS; that may mean that NASA will decide to stop having an astronaut stationed at the ISS at all.

Hm... maybe we'll see SpaceShipTwo or SpaceShipThree made out of this stuff?

After reading a little more, maybe not:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /nanotube_concepts_020206-2.html

Smalley readily concedes, "for all of the wonders of carbon nanotube, it does have an Achilles Heel. It burns."

But that's only in comparison with their famed tension strength. Space vessels designers have avoided flammable materials ever since the Apollo 1 disaster that claimed the lives of three astronauts. But carbon nanotubes aren't particularly prone to flame - they burn at 900 degrees Celsius. And they conduct heat largely into one direction, a quality called anisotropism, so carbon nanotubes could conduct heat away from a wing's leading edge, rocket's nozzle, or from electronic components.

But for extremely high temperatures, Smalley notes that carbon nanotubes have an unsung cousin, boron-nitride nanotubes. These two elements can combine to mimic the carbon nanotube form, and can withstand much greater heat. It may prove our only fallback in this field. "After you've finished with carbon and boron-nitride, there's nothing else," Smalley said. Other shapes, patterns of atomic bonding, aren't as ideal. "A pentagon would provide curvature, but it would be an odd number," meaning that vulnerable edges would remain, he noted.

Yowell shares Smalley's assessment. "A molecular tube of pure carbon offers some really wonderful and unique advantages, but for certain applications - at very high temperature for example - we want to consider other materials (such as Boron-Nitride nanotubes). The benefits really come from the unique properties of structures at the nano-scale. Regardless of the constituent elements, it makes sense to design and manufacture materials from the atom up."

That's not my understanding. What I've read and seen, is that the larger Andromeda Galaxy will plow through the MilkyWay, tearing both apart, with some of the galactic arms being shorn off and dismemebered and tossed into intergalactic space, with the two larger destroyed galaxies colliding again and then collapsing into a giant active galaxy, similar to M87.

Simulation HERE

What's left and flung out of the galactic collision would be of little consequence, as it would be stripped of most gas and not be able to do any second generation star formation.

Of course, that's all goign to happen in about 4 billion years, and only about 18 billion years after that the whole fucking shithouse is going to go to flinders thanks to the BIG RIP.

RS

Has anyone taken a look at the artists rendition of the Milky Way in the article?

Could that be an early version of the total perspective vortex? :)

There's a good article over on Space.com about this news, too!

Companys have been formed to massproduce the carbon fibres necessary to build the space elevator cables. http://www.liftport.com/nanotech.php

Granted this guy I quote below is a promoter of his own cause, looking for funds - but I like to think his guesstimate of the timescale isn't too far off. Anyone (who knows anything) think he's wrong?

"Edwards told SPACE.com that he's been wrapped up in space elevator work for some three years, supported by grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. "I'm convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload every three days, at just a little over a couple hundred dollars a pound," he said."http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/tech nology/space_elevator_020327-1.html

Her name is Elena. Here's a picture of the Krikalev family. Sergei, Elena and daughter Olga. http://www.space.com/images/h_krikalev_family_03.j pg

So it must be true that human activity is increasing CO2 levels on Mars, right?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html

one additional point of note. The sun's output has been increasing. So our "constant out from the sun" has been increasing, helping to contribute.

Withan H-2a rocket built by the Japanese NASDA, from their dedicated launch facility....

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/japan_h2a_021 213.html

for one example of the japanese launching an australian sat back in '02....

or http://www.nasda.go.jp/lib/nasda-news/1997/02/seri es_e.html

this series for a history of NASDA rocket development.

Japan apparently has their own satellite launching infrastructure. Otherwise I think NASA and ESA both help with launching commercial satellites, it doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore.

This mission will carry the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise), which is "the largest camera ever sent out of Earth's orbit and will deliver the highest resolution images of Mars yet" according to an article that adds "The camera utilizes a series of mirrors and lenses that project the image onto a cluster of CCDs rendering images with a resolution up to 20,000 pixels by 40,000 lines, an image so large that it would take 1,200 typical computer screens to fully display. The camera's high resolution will enable the identification of objects as small as a coffee table while the camera orbits 300 kilometers above the planet's surface."

Back in January 2004, there was an interesting article at Space.com about the high quality of the 1-megapixel camera used by the Spirit rover; I assume this is manufactured to similar quality control standards (although by a different team), but the article doesn't specify and the cameras are not manufactured by the same groups. The Spirit PANCAM has two CCDs whereas this has at least 14 (28?).

Back when I lived in Texas I saw it when they made a stop on the way back to Florida. It's a really cool sight. Good article about it at space.com . According to the article the largest part of the $1 million is the travel expenses of the KSC employees who have to fly to Edwards on short notice.

The pen that can write upside down (likely the Fisher Space Pen) was completely privately developed and was not funded or supported by the government or space program.

Perhaps the reason you don't see many spinoffs from the space program is that they are literally all around you. You can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Miniaturization is often quoted, and it is quite true. There are many other examples, many in medicine and industry.

I think there may be a few things you have overlooked but they are easy enough to find.

Jim

There's a concept called "metaphor" you should check out. As well as "Lagrange points"; I think that's a good illustration that some space is more equal than others.

From Space.com: The U.S. military tracks about 9,000 big pieces of debris orbiting the Earth. Small pieces, such as micrometeorites or paint specks chipped off old rocket segments or satellites, can't be seen. The shuttle and the debris are zipping around the Earth as fast as six miles per second, making collisions with even the tiniest fragments potentially lethal.

I'm sure once you explain that there's nothing to keep that debris in low earth orbit, it'll fall out of the sky and clear things up.

The point of this thread is "space weapons". These space weapons will tend to orbit the earth, since that's where we keep our stuff. When these weapons get blown up - as frequently happens in wartime - shrapnel will result in orbit. Thus polluting space.

...we'll avoid weapons that blow satellites to pieces. There's already a growing problem with deadly space debris - let's not make it any worse by filling LEO space with junk flying overhead at 6 miles/second.

If the gov't does develop space weapons, I hope they are of the ilk that just fry the electronics and shut them down.

"SENIOR Pentagon officials have warned Brussels that they will not hesitate to blow European Union satellites out of the sky if they are used against America by a hostile power such as China..."

I think a reasonable analogy would be the Allies destroying Sweden's roads during WW2 to stop the Germans using them to get to Norway. Don't you think this would be an act of war?

(I could only find this article 3rd hand, but remeber the original.)

• The Space Tether Experiment -- I assume your solution would have been to build a spacecraft to handle this. Consider, also, that the tether broke on the mission. How would you have returned the unbroken end to Earth in order to determine what had happened?
• There's a neat article here on some of the experiments done on the Columbia mission. How would you duplicate those experiments without the Shuttle?

You just change the lbf to newtons. Sometimes, it is even a 1-1 conversion. At least it was on several missions going to mars.

what was there when it all started: galaxy or a black hole?

only benefiting from the high mass to drag ratio of the ISS to prolong orbital life.

Err.. and the fact that visiting cargo ships occasionally give the ISS orbit a boost.

If they keep doing that every couple of years, the ISS orbit will never have a chance to critically decay and will be up there forever.

Try this link.

Try this link.

I think that because of Star Trek, we are all beholden to the idea of anti-matter propulsion. That may come to pass in some distant future, but right now, it is a fairly unrealistic blue-sky idea.

I would put my chips on nuclear fusion as the long-term future, whenever we develop a replacement for chemical rockets. May years ago, Space.com cited some NASA experiments in the field:

NASA engineers are developing a radically new type or rocket engine that harnesses the power of stars to cut travel time to Mars, for example, from the current nine months down to three months. Called the gas-dynamic mirror engine, it traps and heats gas to temperatures as sizzling hot as those found at the core of the sun. That's hot enough to allow for nuclear fusion by combining lighter atomic nuclei into heavier nuclei.

Within a few months, a six-foot long model of the engine will be fired-up by injecting a superheated gas confined between powerful magnets at either end of the engine. Within a couple of years, the engineers hope to achieve a sustained nuclear fusion reaction in the hot plasma.

The article also mentions a fusion/anti-matter hybrid, but the former sounds like it holds more promise in the 30-50 year time frame...and who knows what future developments may hold?

In the near-term, solid rocket boosters put a lot of energy into the nozzle, so to speak. The current Shuttle gets roughly 80% of it's ascent propulsion from the solid rockets that are strapped aside the fuel tanks. That's a pretty powerful combination. The problems with solids are legendary, most notably the lack of any capability of trimming, reducing power or turning them off. The Shuttle is the only launch system that's man-rated that uses solids in a significant way, but this technology is tried and true, considering it is a veteran of many a shuttle launch. While the Challenger failure was a result of the SSRB's, it was a materials issue and not a flaw in the basic package.

NASA should send up vehicles shaped like a giant broom and dustpan. There's a lot of dangerous debris up there.

Space elevator.

They're cheaper, safer, better, awesomer, and nowhere near as Rube Goldberg-esque as the shuttle. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy explores the topic of a space elevator on Mars in some depth. There it's a problem because it makes space travel too easy.

That's actually the SAFER backpack for emergency use during ISS/STS spacewalks in case a tether ever breaks. It is not regularly used for untethered walks but is designed to allow an astronaut to get back from a mishap during a regular tethered walk. It was tested from the payload bay of the orbiter before being put into regular use.

Spacewalkers Suited Up with Advanced Jet Packs

This reminds me of the space probe NASA lost due to confusion over metric/imperial measurements - http://www.space.com/news/orbiter_error_990930.htm l Do we really trust America to mess with standards?

Once again, the media has overblown something! The object is smaller than Pluto. Take a look at the link! http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050729_large _object.html

Space.com has a clarifying article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050729_large _object.html. 1. It apparently isn't larger than Pluto, regardless of how reflective its surface might be. It's mass is only about a third of Pluto. 2. It has a very small moon. 3. It was *just* too dim to have been found by Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.

Rb

Over at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/050727_mro _prepare.html , they describe the Mars Recon Orbitor which weighs about 2 tonnes, and NASA is sending to Mars... abit farther than the moon. I wonder if NASA could use the Atlas to send the $100MMan to the moon if they wanted to?

"NASA researchers tout the MRO spacecraft as the largest orbiter aimed at Mars in the last 30 years. Standing about 22 feet (six meters) tall and spanning 44 feet (13 meters) wide, it certainly outsizes the agency's other red planet orbiters, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey. The orbiter weighs about 4,806 pounds (2,180 kilograms), but came in about 112 pounds (51 kilograms) underweight allowing engineers to fill that weight with additional propellant, extending its flight lifetime out to about 2014."