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Not if this comes our way :)

SkyNet not Skylab. Skylab fell back to earth in 1979.

Note: If we did make greenhouses that covered several sq. miles, we could easily get cheap eco-friendly electrical power as a side benefit - solar tower.

I.V.

You, sir, are a Prince among men. Thank you.

Stefan.

Could this be used to solve that nasty space junk problem? As I understand it, there is no known way to clean this stuff up.

From the link above: The oldest debris still on orbit is the second US satellite, the Vanguard I, launched on 1958, March, the 17th, which worked only for 6 years.

NASA should take it down with one of the shuttles and sell it on Ebay... I bet some billionaire would buy it.

Even the HIGHEST prediction is "only" 1200 per hour. While this is a superb shower, it does not qualify as a storm. The moon, as noted, will wash out the fainter ones.

Meteor prediction is a young and inexact science, so don't plan on setting your alarm for the exact time of the peak and then seeing it. Go out early and stay late!

Great page here at space.com.

I'm hoping for CLEAR SKIES!

Even the HIGHEST prediction is "only" 1200 per hour. While this is a superb shower, it does not qualify as a storm. The moon, as noted, will wash out the fainter ones.

Meteor prediction is a young and inexact science, so don't plan on setting your alarm for the exact time of the peak and then seeing it. Go out early and stay late!

Great page here at space.com.

I'm hoping for CLEAR SKIES!

Could this be used to solve that nasty space junk problem? As I understand it, there is no known way to clean this stuff up.

We're going to get a 'Storm' this year because we're hitting an old meteor tail dead-on. Every 33 years or so, the Earth will go straight through the center of the particle cloud, rather than just skimming it. Also, if you're planning on checking this out before midnight, forget it -- you have to wait till the Earth rotates into the cloud of sand-like particles. Be ready; in 1833, the storm was so intense that it looked like rain (see pic).

NASA has posted a little Palm OS applet to aid people who want to try counting the meteor rate.

You can find it here.

And information about it over on Space.com.

sun.html
see this too space.com
-----

In case the above site gets roasted, space.com also has pics and article.
This article has the links.You can also zoom in and use the viewer.

Columbia has been renovated, should be able to get there now. Look here!

Does this mean that NASA has decided that they don't need a Moon Hoax Book because they can just redesign their web site with more eye-candy?

losing "most of what you send" is less of a problem. In fact, the inexhaustible nature of the power + the lack of cost for real estate are just two of the advantages orbital solar has over earth based.

However, from my reading of the subject, most of the loss is actually in the conversion from AC/DC to microwave, so again, having an inexhaustible power source at the sending end makes this much less of a problem, & also suggesting that the sending end might try other methods than conversion to AC/DC. If you have links discussing loss during transmission, I'd be most interested.

In any event, research into wireless energy transmission is steadily improving in efficiency and making SPS more and more attractive (Bright Future for Solar Power Satellites.

Further, most of the 'green' power methods involve extracting only a fraction of the available power (windmills shut down in high winds, for instance, so I think my original point stands.

I remember crashing comets into Mars in SimEarth too:-).

But the proposals for satellite solar power involve wide, low power beams, not enough per square meter to cause a fire or even burn the skin.

The beam, with many times the energy per square meter than unamplified sunlight, hits a large photovoltaic receiver.

Hanging out under the beam would not be good for you, but it would not be instantly fatal, either, and as another poster pointed out, a simple fix would be to turn off the transmitter if the ground station was not receiving the beam.

One can point out greater dangers involved in hangliding around windmills or diving near tidal generators: the best rule is 'don't do that' (or as Ogg said to Mog: fire is hurts!), but like the others, & unlike nuclear & fossil, no toxic exhaust or poisonous waste is made.

As far as a rogue power taking over a beam station, simply staying indoors would be a decent protection until anti-satellite weapons took out the very large target.

More: The World Needs Energy from Space

con? Maybe you live in australia or something, but I saw TONS of meteors last year. It was probably the most amazing thing I've seen in the sky (other than this daytime fireball from last summer)...I've got tons of pictures that I'll be posting to my website later tonight when I get home...as you'll be able to tell from the pictures, there was a lot more than one or two shooting stars (several pictures we took have up to 5 at once!). Check the space forecast for your area. Not all places in the world will have a good view of it...

For the east coast the peak will be the morning of the 19th from about 4 or 5 o'clock local time until the sunrise is bright enough to block all but the biggest ones. CHeck out your local forcast

We also get hit by CMEs that are caused by "backside events," which are flares or other disturbances that erupt behind the limb of the Sun and we didn't see them occur. STEREO is supposed to help there.

One researcher in the field of solar weather forecasting put the maturity level of space weather forecasting 50 years behind that of terrestrial weather forecasting. That was the state in 2000 and not much has improved since. The biggest difference is that for Earth weather forecasting we have continuous global weather observations on both the ground and from space. There is only a tiny fraction of coverage for space weather, and as I mentioned in my first post it still isn't clear what kinds of instruments are sufficient.

Good information resources on space weather can be found at the Space Environment Center at NOAA's web site. They have a nice education page on space weather. For a look into what the space weather field priorities are, one place to start is the Living With A Star program page.

An alternative description of the image, far more insightful.

No wonder the Russians lost the Cold War, their submarine fleet has no sense of perspective.

Yeah, or they can give the the naysayers (h04X0rz?) a telescope and they can watch the Chinese building a colony there.

It's been awfully hard to keep the Space Race going since the Soviet Union self-destructed and we're left with a Russia so strapped for cash that they're considering launching a boy-band's lead singer (not that shooting Lance Bass into orbit is a Bad Thing... the Bad Thing is bringing him back).

But I think things are about to get a lot more interesting... while the US press has been busy watching our Dubya waffle belligerently about Iraq, the Chinese have been quietly building their own manned space program. Operating under secrecy that would have made the old Sovietskis proud, China has built a city outside Beijing and has already made three launches of human-capable spacecraft.

Being the last superpower is like being the top dog in the pack... it's a nice place to be, but you've got a big ol' target on your head. With Russia in complete disarray, the US busy picking fights with third-rate dictators, and the EU still finding itself, China is really the only major power still interested in becoming the top dog.

If the Chinese manned launch rumored for next year materializes as planned, the space race could begin again... or the US could keep its head up its butt and wait for all those grave predictions from the first space race to come true.

It's been awfully hard to keep the Space Race going since the Soviet Union self-destructed and we're left with a Russia so strapped for cash that they're considering launching a boy-band's lead singer (not that shooting Lance Bass into orbit is a Bad Thing... the Bad Thing is bringing him back).

But I think things are about to get a lot more interesting... while the US press has been busy watching our Dubya waffle belligerently about Iraq, the Chinese have been quietly building their own manned space program. Operating under secrecy that would have made the old Sovietskis proud, China has built a city outside Beijing and has already made three launches of human-capable spacecraft.

Being the last superpower is like being the top dog in the pack... it's a nice place to be, but you've got a big ol' target on your head. With Russia in complete disarray, the US busy picking fights with third-rate dictators, and the EU still finding itself, China is really the only major power still interested in becoming the top dog.

If the Chinese manned launch rumored for next year materializes as planned, the space race could begin again... or the US could keep its head up its butt and wait for all those grave predictions from the first space race to come true.

It's been awfully hard to keep the Space Race going since the Soviet Union self-destructed and we're left with a Russia so strapped for cash that they're considering launching a boy-band's lead singer (not that shooting Lance Bass into orbit is a Bad Thing... the Bad Thing is bringing him back).

But I think things are about to get a lot more interesting... while the US press has been busy watching our Dubya waffle belligerently about Iraq, the Chinese have been quietly building their own manned space program. Operating under secrecy that would have made the old Sovietskis proud, China has built a city outside Beijing and has already made three launches of human-capable spacecraft.

Being the last superpower is like being the top dog in the pack... it's a nice place to be, but you've got a big ol' target on your head. With Russia in complete disarray, the US busy picking fights with third-rate dictators, and the EU still finding itself, China is really the only major power still interested in becoming the top dog.

If the Chinese manned launch rumored for next year materializes as planned, the space race could begin again... or the US could keep its head up its butt and wait for all those grave predictions from the first space race to come true.

Doom wrote:

"Okay, what can you export from the moon that would make any economic sense? My suggestion would be solar power satellites that you then station near the L1 point so they double as sun shades. "

OK. Why exactly would we need a moon colony to put solar power satellites in L1 orbit?

To act as "sun shades" these things would have to be frickin' huge.

I know very little about solar satellites,

No kidding. The only way your suggestion of building them on the moon makes sense is if that substance were ridiculously abundant and easily accessible on the moon.

Glancing at my copy of "Space Industrialization", the article "Materials Processing in Space" by Waldron and Criswell, says:

For the major mineral constituents of lunar rock and soil -- pyroxenes, feldspars, and olivine -- the compositions are silicates which may be described as addition compounds of metal oxides and silica. Conceptually the processing of such materials may be broken down into separation of the constituent oxides (including silica) followed by reduction of that portion of the metallic oxides and silica desired to obtain structural metals and oxygen (or higher oxides, e.g. Fe2O3). For ilmentie, FeTiO3, the same steps are necessary except that no silica is involved.

Given a source of silicon and aluminum, I think you can probably figure out how to make solar power arrays. Note: the above article was written before it was known that water ice exists on the moon.

In my admittedly limited experience I have never once heard anyone talk about the extreme abundance of photovoltaics on the moon... Maybe they're there, maybe not.

Maybe you should get in the habit of doing a couple of web searches before shooting your mouth off. Just a suggestion.

Next, assuming all other problems with your enormous satellites were worked out, how do you keep a) solar winds from blowing them away since they would have gargantuan surface areas similar to solar sails

Let's see... you'd either pick stable orbits, or equip them with small propulsion systems (my guess would be ion drives).

and b) all manner of space debris from punching holes in them to the point of destruction.

Well, that sounds like an actual problem that you'd have to design around, presumably with redundant engineering and some sort of repair program.

Just think of the Perseids alone!

Oops, for a moment there it sounded like you knew what you were talking about.

Third, you mention "beaming" the energy to earth. Most proposals to do this I have read have suggested microwaves. Two things: 1) not sure whether cancer deaths would rise or fall what with all the stray microwaves bounching around...

My understanding is that this is practical even with relatively low intensity microwave beams. If microwaves don't sound good for some reason then we would use lasers.

and 2) ever play Sim City? You could literally be the "toast of the town"...

Well damn, no I've never played Sim City. I guess I'm grossly ignorant on this subject. And yet I remember hearing it argued that it isn't a difficult trick to add a safety interlock to a microwave beam, so that if you wander off target the beam shuts off.

Finally, I'm not sure if by sun shade you mean filtering the light or blocking it. I certainly don't want any part of an artificial night...

Seriously, we have such a fingernail's grasp on all the variables involved in our weather patterns that I am confident any such attempt to control the weather (global warming) would be disasterous. We either reduce global warming by reducing greenhouse emissions, or not at all.

But why are you confident that reducing greenhouse gas emissions won't be disastrous? It might be you know, it could turn out that the human-induced greenhouse effect is the only thing holding back the next ice-age. Or it could be that Julian Simon was right, and warmer weather is actually a great thing for the human race in general, and the environmentalist catastrophe scenarios (e.g. a sudden diversion of the gulf stream) are totally off base. Or it could be that the catstrophe scenarios are dead on, and that reducing emissions at this point is not good enough to divert them. Welcome to the human condition. Great power without perfect understanding.

I just don't see your super satellites as a realistic way to do that.

That's nice. I guess we should all take your word for it.

I also do not believe we have enough time left to wait for super-de-duper new technology.

Who told you to wait for anything? Feel free to do anything you can think of to reduce greenhouse emissions. If you can convince people to stop burning coal, you'll get a lot less lung cancer deaths out of the bargain. I might suggest switching to nuclear power, but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath while waiting for people to realize that that's a good idea.

OK, there is one quick way I can think of we can eliminate global warming: nuclear winter. ;-)

Just to finish up, here's a few things you might open your mind with a tad:

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200111/msg00144.html:


Topic: Mirrors & Smoke, and Other Shady Schemes


Speaker: Robert G. Kennedy III, PE President, The Ultimax Group, Inc.


About the talk:

390,000 sq.km of solar sails, placed in non-Keplerian orbits around the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, can intercept enough (~0.25%) sunlight to offset global warming and concomitant rapid climate change due to anthropogenic CO2, or if you will, a mirrored Maunder Minimum. Such mirrors can also provide total planetary electricity demand, estimated at 300 quads (quadrillion BTUs) by 2050, displacing all terrestrial carbon-burners.


The capital cost of solar sails is at least an order of magnitude less than the sum of economic, social, and environmental damages/ externalities due to unmitigated climate change over the next century, rough order of magnitude (ROM) estimate US$200 trillion in 1999 dollars. The capital cost may also be less than the already budgeted replacement/expansion cost of the world's energy generation plant (ROM est. US$20 trillion through 2050).


This world-saving concept is:

• scalable (twice the mirror produces twice the effect),
• uncoupled (each mirror works independently of the others),
• incremental (pay as you go with immediate benefit),
• unobtrusive (umbra does not reach Earth, so the sails are essentially invisible), and finally
• reversible (sails can be moved off-axis to restore insolation).

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /solar_power_sats_011017-1.html:

In 1995, NASA embarked on what's tagged as a Fresh Look study. SSP feasibility, technologies, costs, markets, and international public attitudes were addressed. In general, NASA found that the march of technology and America's overall space prowess has re-energized the case for SSP. NASA did point out, however, that launch cost to orbit remains far too high - but that this problem was being attacked.

I suggest that one method of attacking the launch cost problem would be to use stuff that's up there already, so you don't have to lift it from earth.

One proposed resolution is the Zookeeper Hypothesis, ie, they could have contacted us but are just waiting and watching for us to evolve, a la 2001.

If so, then wouldn't they want to put a probe near the Earth, which swoops down every few centuries or so for a close look, to see if any thing interesting has happened?

Well, Nasa has stopped their ISS crew rescue vehicle program last year for cost reasons. See here .

Thanks for the info. I found some additional information . There was some talk of using this gold-plated mini-shuttle as the rescue vehicle. Then this design was being worked on. Even though its budget was, as Lars pointed out, cut for 2002, they still test launched it as recently as December 2001. This link has some info on the use of the Soyuz as the rescue vehicle.

I hadn't realized that US budget decisions had cut the ISS back to a skeleton crew. Here is a press release from a US Senator commenting on a recently released independent review of the Space Station's Science programs.

Well, Nasa has stopped their ISS crew rescue vehicle program last year for cost reasons. See here.

> says nothing about the rate of expansion accelerating. Would you like to give us a better reference which demonstrates your point?

Sure. Here's one:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/un iverse_expansion_020320.html

If you need more proof, a google search for "universe accelerating" should be sufficient.

Cheers

Of course if you read The Space.com article
You learn that "An international team of astronomers photographed the star as it zoomed around the galactic center at speeds ultimately exceeding 11 million mph (5,000 kilometers per second). Early this year, the star flitted precariously close to the black hole, coming within 17 light-hours, or just three times the distance from the Sun to Pluto."

Where the totally incorrect SIZE=3x our solar system came from

Damn journalists!

As they say later "'We are far from being able to image the event horizon,' Shoedel said, adding that the star's closest brush with the black hole equates to a radius about 2,100 times larger than that calculated for the event horizon."

So maybe we should Read these articles?

but I had fun playing with astrophysics again...

What intrigues me about the globular cluster black hole (or a galactic black hole) is that the black hole can form around you, rather than you having to enter it. This gets you around the problem of infinite time dialation approaching the event horizon, as well as the hellacious hard radiation and gravitational tides that exist near black holes. So you could postulate fairly normal things like planets, cities, space ships, etc. being trapped inside a black hole that formed around them. Might be a spiffy basis for an SF novel, in the tradition of Dragon's Egg and Mission of Gravity.

Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase

> Bacteria were found outside the mir space station, eating the glass

Actually, they were found inside. They weren't eating the glass (although the by-products of their existence did damage the glass and some other components), they were eating human epithelial cells and sweat. Not to mention you're begging the question of how the mysterious bacteria would be found in the first place...

While we're at it, let's all think for a minute about the housecat/penguin thing. Just for a second. How cold do you think a housecat would need to get before s/he was no longer interested in delicious penguin meat? It's like...Hoth cold in Antarctica, and until I see a cat capable of weilding a Light Saber, cutting open a...penguin, I guess, and wearing it as a coat until a Snow Speeder comes to the rescue, I don't think I'll be buying the Mysterious Feline Penguin Murder theory.

To put it country simple, if they could have gotten here, we'd be living on a reservation already.

So you're talking about Fermi's Paradox?

This was also featured on space.com. Don't know if it's the same story since we seem to have slashdotted the Scotsman.

This is a strange comment from a space.com article on the contest. It explains why a Russian show might be a bit more economical:

Previous attempts by U.S. companies to organize a TV reality show and send the winner to space on board of a Russian Soyuz capsule failed due to the lack of funding. However, Rosaviakosmos traditionally charges domestic customers a smaller fee than that paid by foreign clients.

"Traditionally?" A couple of years ago there was no such thing as space tourism. Now we're told there's even a tradition of targeted price structures!

Yeah that's my point, if we had another star that close *we would notice it*.

From Space.com I got a bit more info about it, and apparently Nemesis is a red dwarf (a small and dim star) with an orbit between 1 and 3 light years from Sol. I don't know if that means they have narrowed it down to that range through theory, or if the orbit has a perihelion (closest point to sun) of 1 ly and aphelion (the other extreme) of 3 ly. Probably the latter.

I guess a star that's relatively only a little closer than Alpha Centauri, but much dimmer, would be harder to find.

This is probably posted already buy you can view this video on Space.com Here.

It's pretty sweet.

Just the tank camera, no cutaways, all the way from launch to SRB seperation.

Play it fast (hold the frame advance button down) for another cool view of the whole launch in about 15 seconds.

It seems to me that an object of this size could influence the Kuiper belt substantially. Could this be Nemesis?

I don't think it has rings. I think the news site is wrong. That "ring" you see in the picture is the typical circle used to indicate the interesting feature. The new moon is estimated to be 9 to 12 miles across. It can't have any rings if it's that small. Another article make no reference to a ring. It's an error by the story author, sorry.

NASA influencing a Mars movie? No! That's never happened.

If the RIAA can get MTV icons like Britney Spears to do ads against filesharing, I think they and the MPAA can influence a movie as well, but I could be wrong.

Probably jealousy, that a 22 year old like him makes more money than I a 21 year old like I am, although he (so I'd like to believe) has no talents at all.

But you really should have read the moron Hollywood Producer's comment about the Russian official that's been causing this "difficulty". He whines about the fact how he already had a TV program deal to will follow Bass during his space training (titled "When Morons Go To Space Camp"?) and how they're going to do a big concert when he returns, and that the Russian official was rude and had a big mouth.

Anyway, read the article yourself. Sure I'm taking the Russians side, but if they were characters in a film in which they're stranded in, say, a space station, I bet that Hollywoodian would be the first to be out of the airlock.

OT: I followed the link to your site. Nice Porsche, you make me jealous. :)

NASA could pull my dollars directly if they were to include an IMAX camera setup on their future space missions

Done.

When can NASA expect your check in the mail?

NASA claims to have learned from its mistakes in the 1998 Mars failures, but if we start talking about sending people far away (like the moon), we'd better make sure things are really fixed.

No quick bailout from the moon like they have on the ISS in case something goes wrong.

Hey, why not! It'd sure teach the Bloody Reds to respect AMERICA!

I wish Project A 119 was never cancelled. It would have been a major step in the right direction... nuking other planets.

How are we going to get into fights with aliens if we can't even destroy a simple little satellite?

"Destroy the moon! Blow it out of the sky!"
--Mike Hererra, MxPx

quite true, but based on the article I don't think that's why they are doing it.

The best time to look for an aurora on any given night, unfortunately, is toward the middle of the night and into the morning (If you're an early riser that's okay!). It's always best to look for a weak green glow low in the northern sky. But when big disturbances occur, the aurora can be seen much earlier in the evening and much higher in the sky. If a bright display occurs early in the evening, there is a good chance that another display will follow a couple of hours later. Its colors can vary from green to red, and you can see much shimmering.

It's not about spying or ICBM's or anything, the key factor here is, believe it or not, agriculture. I know other patriotic Indians have problems accepting this, but India is still largely an agriculture-based economy, with the population especially concentrated in rural areas. With the exploding population creating pressure on food resources, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research actively involves itself in creating better yielding food varieties .

Students of Indian history would have heard about the green revolution that created self-sustainence in food; a crucial post-independence achievement considering food scarcity situations such as the 1943 Bengal Famine (the one on which Amartya Sen did economic research and won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics).

Now with satellite technology, ICAR can identify which land areas are suitable for which crops and therefore goad farmers into growing those varieties (remember that India is a sub-continent; you have all sorts of terrain, from deserts to plains to plateaus to, of course, mountains.

So accurately knowing which crop goes best where is critical information for the hungry masses (over-cliched, but it's true). Methinks that this will be the biggest use, followed closely by telecommunications and satellite television AND then by urban planning (Mumbai will have 24.7 million people by 2005).

PS:- Note that I'm not saying that satellite technology wont be used for other purposes; I definitely want India to use cutting-edge technology against a couple of motherfuckers, but talking only about that would be misleading.

most probably spend some of it to go into space or to the Moon

After the philanthropy had worn down, I myself would tile a wall with these these and hook them to a few of these. And I would go absolutely nuts with other technotoys.