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I listened to some guy on a radio show a few years ago touting this idea. He wanted to have hilton hotels be the sponsor, and reuse the shuttle boosters as building blocks. I googled this now and found this about the hilton hotels, and this on reusing the shuttle tanks I think the latter is the guy I listened to on the radio. His idea makes a lot of sense, the shuttle booster tanks are pretty clean after expending the fuel, and are there for the using with a little attitude and altitude adjustment. Big ole nice structures going to waste.

If we were really organized, we'd get a very high-power surplus laser with equitorial-tracking mirror mount and get the domain moon-the-mpaa.org

Possible launch in 2008 or 2009. The idea is to build a sistership to the Pluto New Horizons mission, maybe adding some new instrumentation. But AFAICT this is just speculation, and not actually a planned mission (yet). Even New Horizons itself could still be axed to free funds for the Moon/Mars stuff.

We better get training because apparently the Death Star is in orbit around Saturn.

http://www.space.com/imageoftheday/image_of_day_04 0727.html

Although not a pop, you could hear a hissing sound. There was a /. artical about it quite a while back (that i could not find) but here are a few that talk about hearing a hiss as the meteor is going through the atmosphere. There is also a method using reflected radio signals to hear a meteor, though that requires equipment and not just your ears.

KH-12 satellites are reported to have a 3 cm resolution for objects on earth. That would translate to a 30 m resolution for objects on the moon (1000x the distance, remember?), so even a KH-12 wouldn't be able to see a LEM.

And even if they could, do you think the "space program is a hoax" morons would believe the CIA?

Technology developed for space travel has been adapted for uses on Earth for a long time. But today, three articles report that some current customizations can save lives. For example, SPACE.com writes that space technology is entering hospitals. It says that a system originally intended to keep clean the space station Mir, and later the International Space Station (ISS), is now used in hospitals to build temporary 'clean rooms' -- virtually bacteria-free -- around patients. And a video infrared camera developed by NASA's JPL to study Earth is being modified into a brain scanning device searching for tumors. Elsewhere, National Geographic is saying that satellites are starting to aid earthquake predictions. And of course, these ESA satellites are identifying these 'rogue waves'. You need to read the articles mentioned above to realize how all these bleeding edge technologies can really help us on Earth, but if you have a limited time, please read this summary for selected excerpts and photos.

The russian version costs around $2000 per person for a run of about 15 parabolas.
(Based on ~10 participants). (from a space.com article)

There is also a themepark considering setting up its own version for a few thousand per person.

Initially, I thought the same as you about this, but NASA have had this program up and running, making kids throw up for a few years, it can't cost that much, and from what I've been reading its given the kids fantastic memories.

A comet or large asteroid could pull Venus' ejectae and send it into a higher or irregular orbit that could eventually cross paths with earth.

Well, this article is pretty fascinating, and not only for its content - None of the other space exploration sites I visit regularly seem to have this information - At most, they talk about Opportunity's discovery of the Razorback feature, but no discussion of analysis. Has NewScientist scooped everyone on this discovery, or was this publicized prematurely?

No tinfoil required, really, just an observation.

What is really interesting is that back in the 1960's NASA had plans for an even bigger rocket than the Saturn V. I think it was called the Jupiter rocket or something like that. About 5x-10x the lift capacity of the Saturn V.

I think you're a bit confused. "Jupiter" was the name of some ICBMs of the time. As a fast track to building one of the biggest rockets of all time, the engines from these ICBMs were clustered together into a single shell known as "Juno V". Believe it or not "Juno V" eventually took us to the moon! You see, Von Braun had suggested a name change after the Juno V diverged enough from the original rocket platform. The new name? Saturn V. (See: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/Saturn _rocket.html)

The experiments were so successful that clustered rockets are still a common way to launch payloads. From the small Deltas, to the large Energias, they all provide more power and greater mission flexibility by offering a larger number of rocket engines instead of a few very large engines.

Here's what I know about Von Braun's future plans for space travel: Von Braun wanted to launch an Orion on the back of a Saturn V. This would allow the Saturn V to continue as a practical launch solution, and allow the Orion to become a practical form of interplanetary travel. (Actually, the Orion they would have launched would have been the least efficient design, but it still would have been a significant improvement over chemical rockets.) About that time, the government told NASA to shut down the Saturn V program and Von Braun left in disgust.

Now the Sea Dragon was a super-simple rocket that could have carried a massive tonnage (~550 metric tons) for about 1/4th the cost of the Saturn V. It was conceived of in 1962 as a study on how to make rocket launches cheaper. Again, by the time the study was taken seriously, the US was already winding down its production of large rockets. (The concept was later proven as the "Excalibur" rocket, but was largely ignored.)

Following the rise of the Regean era of space travel, NASA began research into using the Shuttle's engines as a massive booster. (The Shuttle's engines are currently some of the most powerful rockets in use today.) The result was the Shuttle C program; a pure cargo Shuttle.

With Clinton's Presidency, plans for space stations, moon bases, and Mars missions were all scaled back or put on hold. It wasn't until Clinton's term was up that NASA again began looking at ways of getting to Mars. Their current design is the Magnum launch vehicle which looks suspiciously like everything the Energia program was trying to accomplish.

And also asteroids within the main belt that get to close to a resonant orbit. This phenomenon is invoked to explain how the remnants of collisions in the asteroid belt can arrive at Earth so quickly. It's better to think of the giant planets as orbit randomizers than as Hoovers.

Methane and ammonia are supplied by comet impacts. These gases are then frozen into the polar caps or into even lower latitude subsurface ice in bubbles or as hydrates. They are slowly released whenever Mars warms up. This is not the first time I've mentioned this theory.

There was some evidence that Viking found
life on Mars back in the 1970s.

Indeed they were. See the original here. I quickly saw the last ones that caught my eye in the ending sentences -- changing "we're" to "were". These errors are particularly onerous as they change the whole tone from the positive "we are" to a partial sentence without a subject but placed in the past.

I don't know about fourteen but at least we could shift the blame. Some Yahoo somewhere.

I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly.

As you yourself mentioned, the jury is still out on this one.

The general consensus of the scientific world is that gravity probably travels at the speed of light, but the important point is that no-one has been able to measure it. Einstein's theory predicts that gravity travels at the speed of light, but if some experiment shows the speed to be something else, then the theories have to be though out again.

A little over a year ago, a group claimed having measured the speed of gravity to be close to that of light, but many have disputed the study as having measured another physical effect, not the speed of gravity.

I have no idea what studies the article mentioned in the grandparent post refers to, as I haven't heard anything about it before, and the article doesn't have any references. Though I haven't researched the subject, I wouldn't hold it very reliable. If somebody had reliably measured the speed of gravity by 1998, it would certainly be in general knowledge of the scientific world.

While measuring the speed of gravity is an important step in science, I wouldn't hold my breath for it to provide FTL communication. The most probable outcome of the measurements will be to confirm it to be very close to the speed of light. However, gravity is a very troublesome force also regarding the unification of forces and making the Theory of Everything, so knowing the speed of gravity for a fact would help along a lot.

Of course, the cost of space missions hasn't gone down like computer hardware did, but still one wonders if a better and more advanced space telescope couldn't be built at the same price a maintenance mission to Hubble would cost.

Here is one relevant link: Life on Earth could have come from a Mars rock Also check out NASA's Astrobiology Institute. Parent may have overstated the concensus on this issue, but he/she was certainly not incorrect that such theories are believed by quite a few people.

in recorded history no human alone was ever hit by a meteorite

Not quite true. Nobody that we know of has been killed, but there have been a couple of hits.

Kare, who's been plugging this idea for decades, writes "A rule of thumb for laser launchers is that the unit payload is 1 kg per MW of laser power." The Apollo lunar module (all the stuff that went to the moon) massed about 6500 Kg, of which 2500Kg made the round trip. So we're going to need several gigawatts of laser power for a moon shot.

Kare is talking about using continuous diode lasers in the 1KW range. These don't exist, but 60W units are available, so this isn't totally unreasonable. Kare proposes to use maybe 150 of these future 1KW units in a prototype. That only launches a 150g craft.

Launching something the size of the Apollo lunar module would take six million such units, and about 12 gigawatts of electrical power for several minutes. This is twice the power output of Grand Coulee Dam, the biggest single power source in the US.

The power storage problem might be overcome using ultracapacitors. You can get 2600 farad capacitors (not ufd, farads) at 2.5V today, and you can take current out fast. Auto engines can be started with six of these things, weighing a total of about 3Kg. With a big budget, a laser launch system could have enough energy storage to do the job.

Six million lasers, though, is a bit much. The prototype doesn't put enough mass in orbit to be useful, and the real version is too big.

If you want to launch a microsat, you call Orbital Sciences Corporation, and they launch a Pegasus rocket from a L-1011 for you. The X-prize guys get all the press, but Orbital actually puts stuff in orbit. They've launched 45 payloads so far. Click here for their user manual.

Well, we can hope that there's something to this story on Space.com. Who knows... maybe Burt's got it all figured out on a napkin somewhere and he's just waiting to move ahead with it after the whole X-Prize thing is done.

Well, we can hope that there's something to this story on Space.com. Who knows... maybe Burt's got it all figured out on a napkin somewhere and he's just waiting to move ahead with it after the whole X-Prize thing is done.

...there will be another prize put up for the first private flight into orbit...

no, I'm afraid Huygens is totaly unsterilized as well. It is clean but not sterile by any means. From ESA "The European Space Agency-built probe was not sterilized to a high standard". We are relying on the cryogenic temperatures of it's final resting place on the surface to do the sterilizing.

http://www.space.com/searchforlife/lifesigns_spots _020103.html

or in outer space (fungus on Mir)
The fungus was actually growing inside the space station, not outside in the nether voids. It was a combination of Aspergillus, Penicillium and Fusarium species of fungi and bacteria.

Fact check. They DID build a shuttle , called Buran, just so they could say they did. Didn't want to lose fact to the USA. However, only flew it once. Too expensive to operate. Now THAT's thinking like a business, whereas NASA is old-style wasted government program that doesn't learn. see www.space.com/news/spacehistory/buran_auction_0205 09.html

Dude, this is a student project.... It can be improved a lot if a company works on it. Actually, the japanese already came up with this

Exciting research into superconductivity using carbon nanotubes coupled with the space elevator using carbon nanotube based cable would lead one to the conclusion that they should use a set of parallel cables/conductors, abondon the whole laser lights the elevator to get it power concept and just pas the power through the elevator cables, with the excess delivered to the ground.

Don't these scientists talk to each other or leverage each others work? This is why we are not getting to space at an acceptable pace while solving rather than causing problems on the Earth as a result ... IMO.

NASDA, NAtional Space Development Agency of Japan too had plans for harnessing energy through satellites.

Just hope that the NASA effect doesn't reflect upon NASDA

I'm still waiting for my robot maid, holiday on the moon and flying car.

Flying cars are already here, you can't spend a holiday on the moon (yet), but this guy got the next best thing, and there aren't any fully fledged robotic maids out there yet, so you'll have to do with this sucker.

The 21st century has only just begun.

One big engineering project deserves another...

The reason small groups of humans were cut off from each other was a supervolcano that caused a nuclear winter effect for many years, killing off most humans and keeping the rest separate long enough for superficial traits to become geographically dominant. This article on the Toba supervolcano talks about this theory:

Some 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba erupted with a force estimated to have been 10,000 times that of Mt. St. Helens. The sky darkened around the globe as ash blocked out the Sun. Temperatures plummeted by as much as 21 degrees at higher latitudes around the planet, said Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University.

Rampino has estimated that three-quarters of the plants in the Northern Hemisphere may have died.

Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution, a phenomenon observed by other researchers who study DNA: The blueprints of life for all humans are remarkably similar given an evolutionary timeline known to stretch back more than 2 million years.

Ambrose thinks that early humans, struggling as always against the elements, were pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption. Perhaps only a few thousand survived, Ambrose says. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot of evolution occurs in 74,000 years.

At the least, however, we evolved enough to gain the capacity to invent satellites and employ them to warn us of the next Toba, if it is to come

The eruption of pent-up energy will cover half the United States in ash, in some places up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep. Earth will be plunged into a perpetual winter that would last years. Some plant and animal species will disappear forever.

dbirchall remarked....I think I can put a spin on this, though, like so: "Why yes, I did learn in 2004 that I had been operating with an incorrect conversion factor for going from inches to meters. At that time I researched the extent of use of such incorrect factors, made public my findings, and of course corrected my own notes so as to avoid error in any further calculations.

Oh, so you're the guy responsible for the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter!

Would it be too much trouble for Slashcode to automatically make links out of text starting with http://? Just a thought.

Would it be too much effort for posters to make hyperlinks?

<a href="http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launche s/rocketry_future_000823.html">this</a> and <a href="http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2003-02-28/fea tures/body.html">that</a>

I've always liked the idea of using origami for spacecraft. I can also envision universal constructor machines that convert asteroid materials into flat sheet and robotic systems that then fold long pieces of flat sheet stock into any shape that's needed (such as full size versions of these Star Wars spacecraft).

They used a leading edge panel from the Enterprise for an earlier test too, but it was a fiberglass panel. The last test was with a real carbon-carbon panel taken from the Atlantis. Link here.

Already

Contrary to the popular view of John Kennedy as a space visionary, the president had little interest in space and strove to put humans on the moon only for its political importance. "I'm not that interested in space," he told NASA chief James Webb late in 1962.

Contrary to the popular view of John Kennedy as a space visionary, the president had little interest in space and strove to put humans on the moon only for its political importance. "I'm not that interested in space," he told NASA chief James Webb late in 1962.

CNN is reporting in a developing story that SpaceShipOne attained an altitude of over 62.5 miles (100 km) in its historic flight earlier today, making it the first privately built craft to fly in space. More information can be found courtesy of Scaled Composites here and Space.com also has a story.

"Space flight is not only for governments to do," Rutan said. "Clearly, there's an enormous pent-up hunger to fly into space and not just dream about it." "We are heading to orbit sooner than you think," he said. "We do not intend to stay in low-earth orbit for decades. The next 25 years will be a wild ride. ... One that history will note was done for the benefit of everyone."

CNN is reporting in a developing story that SpaceShipOne attained an altitude of over 62.5 miles (100 km) in its historic flight earlier today, making it the first privately built craft to fly in space. More information can be found courtesy of Scaled Composites here and Space.com also has a story.

"Space flight is not only for governments to do," Rutan said. "Clearly, there's an enormous pent-up hunger to fly into space and not just dream about it." "We are heading to orbit sooner than you think," he said. "We do not intend to stay in low-earth orbit for decades. The next 25 years will be a wild ride. ... One that history will note was done for the benefit of everyone."

Full Story

Updates

10:51 a.m. ET: SpaceShipOne has been dropped from its mothership, the White Knight. Pilot Mike Melvill fired the rockets and SpaceShipOne is now rocketing toward space. Goal: 62 miles (100 kilometers) up, where Melvill will earn his astronaut wings. Under the rising Sun the rocket firing was visible to the thousands of shouting, whooping enthralled spectators.

10:40 a.m. ET: The White Knight Mothership is at 32,000 feet. In about 10 minutes it will be in position to drop SpaceShipOne. "Hopes are running high," said Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace. "Were' looking forward to this great event."

10:28 a.m. ET: A white contrail is now visible as the White Knight climbs into the final leg of its ascent into high altitude, before releasing SpaceShipOne. The scene is playing out straight overhead for spectators at the Mojave Airport. An interesting aside: Expecting many records to be broken today, an official with the Guinness Book of World Records flew in from England and is at the Mojave Airport.

10:11 a.m. ET: The White Knight with SpaceShipOne attached is circling the airport, gaining altitude and getting smaller and smaller to viewers on the ground. A chase plan is close to it, also circling. They glisten in the bright morning sun, heightening their visibility to spectators.

Did anyone else read the article about the type of
rocket fuel that Space Ship One uses? It's a solid fueled rocket with a gas oxidizer. I'm sure you'll get a laugh out of it.
Here's the link

and that uses a novel propellant mixture

There's nothing novel about hydrogen peroxide fuel. it's been used for ages and deprecated for solid-state fuels on rocket a while ago. It's only easy to manipulate.

The Space Ship One is the one using novel fuel, with a GEL consistency. it's been showcased on Space a while ago:

Details here..

The home page of Armadillo Aerospace says that the rocket is hydrogen peroxide fueled. But hydrogen peroxide (H_2 O_2) is just the oxidizer, right? What is the fuel, I wonder? The rocket produces almost no visible flames .

Beware, geeks, maybe there is no light at the end of the tunnel...

This is an amazingly thorough review - thanks "code_rage"! And you've hit on exactly the point that disturbs me a bit too - if this is all so great, why aren't we planning to spend a lot more money on it, rather than just continuing in the same-old ho-hum manner in space? Perhaps the commissioners felt that was out of their scope, but that seem to be the substance of Kerry's
complaint too - if we're serious about this, lets spend some real money on it!

My thoughts from a couple of days before the report came out are up on sciscoop - I think the report does adopt a lot of the "O'Neill" vision of space. Maybe it's our job to make sure the money really comes through now.

http://www.space.com/news/businessmonday_040524.ht ml

The NASA Transhab design uses "multiple layers, which consist of Mylar, Kevlar, Nextel and foam rubber, provide better protection from micrometeorites than a metal shell."

Source

There is quite a bit of info out there about the Transhabs, NASA are taking this quite seriously.