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I think it was the Daily Show that said more or less.

It would suck if the space program had to be canned because a boy band member couldn't pay his bill.

This is referring to the Russian program having deep financial troubles and Lance Bass not being able to pay the agreed upon $20M for him to go into space.

Wasn't Halley's comet recorded as having an incredibly low albedo too? There were mutterings about it being mirror matter or some such......

We may soon be using Candle Wax to power our rockets.

Carmack needs to look into the latest technology for rockets, candle wax: purified (oilless) paraffin, with some additives. He could then get either gaseous or liquid oxygen from just about any welding supply house.

The most successful laser launch to date, using the biggest continuous laser in the US [fas.org], lifted a 50 gram vehicle two meters. And that took a laser that cost $800 million to build.

Your data appears to be inconsistent with press releases on the subject. The release at spacedaily.com says that the test used a 10 kW pulsed CO2 laser. You can buy these off the shelf as industrial cutting lasers, for substantially less than $800M.

A MIRACL-style chemical laser would actually be poorly suited to laser launching, as the laser launch schemes I've heard of use a 10-100 Hz pulse rate. The MIRACL would be difficult to pulse (I suppose q-switching might work, but that's typically done at much higher frequency).

High-powered CO2 and chemical lasers are now substantially cheaper than $800M to build, also, largely in part to the basic research done for projects like MIRACL.

You're totally right, except maybe on the Wallpaper thing (I use a Mac and we called them "Desktop Pictures" first -- what the heck is this "wallpaper" thing anyway? It's a desktop, not a wall. :) I thought of Voyager later. A lot of Voyager was overshadowed by the Shuttle, both its successes and, directly, the Challenger catastrophe.

Viking had more of that "defining moment" quality with the actual landings (two!). The idea of these robotic human-designed craft setting down on MARS was amazing to me in a way I suppose Apollo touchdown to have been. I thought the Pathfinder "hard landings" were cheating a little. :)

Yet I don't have any real interest in sending humans to Mars, not because I'm older and wiser but because the inefficiency and mortal risk are just too huge for a "gee whiz" moment. Apollo can be described uncharitably as a "stunt" -- a damn cool one but also a damn lucky one for loss of life. Apollo 13 wasn't the only close call; Apollo 12 avoided total breakup when it was struck by lightning because of accident of design. Look at the extremely expensive double failure in 1999 -- at least no one was killed. Even NASA's unmanned plans for Mars are stumbling badly.

Voyager -- that those things are still functioning 25 years later! -- and doddering Galileo -- also well past its design life -- are what draw my attention. The brilliant Galileo tape recorder repair is mentioned here.

Manned spaceflight, specifically the Moon landing, is an amazing accomplishment that will always symbolize so much, but it can't compete now with the performance of the engineers in these ingenious probe projects. I don't want the the program gutted, I want it refocused and improved with modern sensibilities adn technologies.

Even ISS can be serviced mostly by "dumb" rockets, as was Mir, if we must go the route of a space station. (Yes, the Mir resupply vehicle had a fender-bender, but humans could have done that, too.) The shuttle's role there has been overemphasized so that the shuttle would have a role as all.

Zubrin's proposal would put astronauts on Mars within ten years, let them stay up to eighteen months per trip, and cost less than $40 billion. (...which sounds like a lot, except that NASA currently spends $15 billion a year, including $6-7 billion on manned space flight.) For the money we're spending today, we could be on Mars by 2012.

Cash-strapped Russia wants to mothball space station: press

MOSCOW (AFP) Sep 25, 2002
A top Russian space official has proposed temporarily shutting down the International Space Station (ISS) because the cash-strapped country can no longer pay its bills, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday.

Now the US may also have reason to want to mothball ISS...

According to this Spacedail article the databases of astronomical research have been salvaged, the team will keep building their instruments, probably on the main ANU campus and Stromlo will be rebuilt (though I'm guessing minus the telescopes).

I've written down some of my own memories of Mt Stromlo observatory.

Or risk another Sputnik. The European Space Agency Has it's sites on Mars for 2025. Some Russian scientists want to be there by 2015 - And good luck to them!
Here's some links:
The BBC
Space Daily
Deutsche Welle

Editorial Comment.
I've concluded the recent sabre rattling is a ploy to raise $675B to get the nation on course to Mars. After everyone realizes we don't need to war with Iraq or North Korea.
Divert that war chest! GO USA!

aren't there easier/faster ways of propulsion already in existance than even nuclear?

Right now, nothing even comes close to uranium/plutonium for energy density. There are really two issues: power and reaction mass. A rocket combines the two, but a nuclear propulsion system doesn't. If ice is the reaction mass, then you can "refuel" on a comet. The more energy per unit of reaction mass you can get, the less of it you need.

There are already ion engines in existance, solar powered, but they are very low powered, incapable of moving significant mass through space at a useful speed.

In the mid-80s, the American Govt. denied Indians access to the Cray (XMP 14 ?) and it resulted in a spurt of supercomputing activity. By mid-90s there were at least 3 Indian supercomputers developed independently.

1. NAL Flosolver
2. CDAC Param
3. Anupam

Though it is a matter of pride for most Indians to have supercomputers made indigenously, one should not loose sight of the following facts.

1. It takes a lot more to produce a micro-processor than to build a supercomputer
2. With the slightest hint of potential competition, the American Govt., pulls out all stops to ensure that its technological edge in "force multiplier technologies" is maintained, a la Microsoft. Apart from denying Indians the Crays, the American Govt. also arm-twisted the Russian space agency, Glavcosmos into curtailing the cryogenic engine technology transfer deal. This delayed the Indian space program by 5 years. (Indians have since successfully tested an indigenous cryogenic engine.)
3. Indian computers still have American chips in them. It is high time the Indians started building their version of the dragon chip.

The new homeland security department will require a massive global network. But transoceanic fiber is easily cut and the $800 million TDRS replenishment program with three satellites doesn't have the bandwidth. Intercepted SIGINT data is reportedly transmitted to Earth on a 24 GHz downlink using narrow-beam antennas. But the frequency swaths allocated for links are less than consumers can get on cable television. More bandwidth is needed.

One might speculate that a secret optical/IR satellite network downlinked in Hawaii might be developed. The European Space Agency, not to be outdone, says they're thinking of building miniaturised optical systems that fit onto a microchip. These optical networks might use optical CDMA which encodes each pulse,across a segment of wavelengths.

I am an astronomer, and no, the formation of the moon was caused during the settling after a giant impact in the same dust ring (around the proto-sun) from which the Earth was formed. The reason that meteor showers recur yearly is because the Earth passes through the comet's tail remnants, which orbit the sun much more slowly, once every year at roughly the same spot. When the Earth's atmosphere hits these sand-sized bits, they burn and streak into meteors.

Yes, the Proton puts 20 tons into LEO but the Ariane 5 puts 10 tons into GTO (Proton : 2.4 metric tons) which is the geostationary transfer orbit, a high elliptic orbit with an apogee near the geostationary orbit.

You can of course construct satellites with enough fuel and strong enough engines to lift itself from LEO to GEO, but the common approach is to let the launcher "shoot" its payload into GTO so the sattelite only needs a small kick engine and few fuel to accelerate to geostationary orbit.

And the Proton launch you mentioned was a failure of the launcher - instead of putting the satellite into GTO it released it in a low "parking orbit" (LEO) since the upper stage ("block DM") failed to ignite for a second burn. The satellite did not blew up or anything like that. See here for more details.

Although China has announced that it's planning a permanently manned space station this seems like a waste of time, effort and money. I think it would make more sense to let China either take Russia's place or just let them join the ISS program. But I guess relations between the US and China need to improve before this could happen.

The discovery has no immediate practical value but is important because it adds a new dimension to the study of superconductivity, Stewart said.

"You can't make practical materials out of something as radioactive and chemically poisonous as plutonium," he said, "but John Sarrao and this collaborative team have made a big leap in understanding superconductivity from a fundamental point of view."

Check out Rotary Rockets..

Last I heard the Rotory Rocket company's assets had been seized, including the Roton prototype, and that XCOR had bought at least some of them, including the IP rights to the design.

From looking at the XCOR Website they've pretty much shelved the Roton in favour of their own suborbital spaceplane design, the Xerus, which they're prototyping with the EZ-Rocket.

In any case it looks like the Roton is dead, which is a shame, it was a novel and interesting design. Which isn't to say it was going to work when they scaled it up of course...

But really, how many fatal accidents has the Soyouz TM had? (0) how many the US shuttle? (1)

Actually...
ISS flight in doubt as Russian space launch explosion kills one.

-Coach-

ISS flight in doubt as Russian space launch explosion kills one.

So I guess it's all tied up at 1-1.

-Coach-

The Space Station's Cost

INITIAL DESIGN PAPERWORK -- $10 billion
HARDWARE -- $25 billion
SHUTTLE SERVICING COSTS -- $20 billion
MAINTENANCE -- $41 billion
YEAR 2001 COST OVERRUN (disclosed immediately AFTER the presidential election of 2000): $5 billion.

Scrap the Shuttle Program

documents how the USA slipped to just 29% of the world's launch market share in the year 2000, even though we had 48% of it in 1996, and apparently all of it the decade before.

How did this happen if NASA has a larger space budget than all other civilian space agencies combined, as well as its Congressional mandate to: "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space"? How did some countries evolve from non-players in space two decades ago into dominant commercial players today?

Perhaps NASA should build a "Sea Station" 1000 feet below the sea and use submarines to take foreigners and other salaried government tourists on "missions" to conduct "experiments" and set "endurance records" while "improving international relations". This idea may seem crazy, but it would be much cheaper than the shuttle program and accomplish just as much.

Imagine what could happen if the $4 billion a year and 30,000 shuttle experts were diverted to R&D?

I just can't help but feel the whole ISS and Shuttle Programs are a waste of money. I'm much rather see NASA's time and money spent researching other ways of getting into space.

Imagine no more!

> And before you flame me for not reading the article, I didn't read the article.

And now that I have, you can flame me for replying to myself :-)

The article talked not so much about ditching the CPU business, as partnering with other companies on non-desktop-PC applications--Gibson for digital audio workstations (using the MAGIC network protocol, covered here), JAK Films/ILM for video/storyboarding gear, and Cray for a new Sandia Labs supercomputer--the first two of which look more or less like specialised versions of desktop PCs anyway. So presumably you'll still be able to throw together a 1337 Athlon box for your own use, but they may be treating the Dell/HP/whatever market as a lost cause.

Proponents of this theory describe how near the very center of the explosion the trees were unburnt. They say that the gas squirted out from the underground deposit under such high pressure, over a number of days, that an ice dome formed around the hole -- just like your can of canned air gets cold. This ice protected the most central trees.

The explosion is said to be right over a natural gas field. The region of Siberia has huge natural gas reserves .

This is almost as bad as the Russians turning one of the Burans into a tourist attraction.

Yeah, it's only a prototype, but it's still funny.

I assume this is Morton Thiokol doing the testing? I'd sort of forgotten they still built the things after the Challenger disaster (not that it was their fault, I know NASA waived its own temperature regs), this article indicates they have a $2.4 billion contract through 2004.

Geez, 1+ million lbs. propellant per booster! Interesting, isn't it that Goddard developed liquid-fueled rockets as a modernization of solid-fueled rockets, then we later went back to solid fuel for so many applications. I guess solid fuel's biggest disadvantage is that you can't turn it off...

IIRC there were, at the outset of the shuttle program, proposals for a one-piece SRB casing. The only reason for a segmented booster was to facilitate shipping; a 1-piece could only have been delivered by barge. I think some politician or other was from UT, and well you get the picture.

combine the money and the political will into orbital solar

Ever played sim city 2000? Ever built a microwave power station? Ever had the beam slice through your airport and into a commericial zone?

OK, a little extreme. In reality the beam would be no more powerful then a cell phone.

I have read that Japan plans to launch one in the next 40 years. It will be capable of producing 1GW (although the article says 1GW per second ;) - same as a nuclear plant. Unfortunatly the cost per kWh is arround 2 - 2.5 times that of a nuclear plant, at the moment.

In 40 years? Who knows.

This just in.... the picture take is picture of a dust particle on the camera lense and not of a dust partical in space.

...we are trying to build stuff like this

No reason such a weapon can't be scaled to appropriate targets. It is already a scaled up version of the MTHEL.

This article appeared on SpaceDaily over a year ago, and provides a bit more detail:

New Evidence Of Living Bacteria From Space
Cardiff - July 29, 2001

Claims of evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists.

The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life will be reported on Sunday, 29 July 2001 at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, USA by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University. He will speak on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.

Samples of stratospheric air were collected on 21 January 2001 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad. Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analysed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd and assisted by Melanie Harris.

Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said: "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometres, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."

The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space. The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a tonne over the entire planet.

This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.

"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," said Professor Wickramasinghe.

--
1 Corinthians 1:18-31 makes even more sense since Watson and Crick, doesn't it?

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.

Of course, now I'm just feeding you.

The post that I responded to was talking about 'native forms' of life on venus, not transplanted ones.

Besides, many of those bacteria are extremely hardy. They can withstand both hard vacuum and cosmic rays and still remain viable. We sent some up on a satellite a few years ago and bacteria were able to survive fine with just a little soil for protection.

That's the kind of sh*t that pisses me off, I don't pay taxes to have the government simply hand that money to a corp.

Actually, that's exactly what you do. Of course you could delude yourself into thinking that your particular share of the money was going into Condoleezza Rice's pocket, or perhaps Colin Powell's paycheck instead.

Of course, your money is probably going to TRW, Lockheed Martin, or Boeing, or perhaps all 3.

Remember, it might be neat to think about Bill Gate's money, or how much cash Microsoft has, but really. Call me when Microsoft gets awarded a multibillion dollar contract that has the potential to blow up or get shot down.

I've never seen Windows crash quite like that.

I'd hate to see what got rejected.

Well spacedaily had an article about another theory about the Tunguska explosion . It presented some interesting evidence that the explosion was due to a massive release of an enormous high pressure reservoit of natural gas.

In my opinion it really deserved to make it to the front page. Tunguska was important. This summer's slashdot had dozens of articles about asteroids that might crash into the Earth. I am sure the theory that the Tunguska explosion was the result of an asteroid impact coloured every one of those discussions.

Yeah, I submitted this story, and it was rejected.

I saw a report on the global warming flash points within earth. Basically the idea traced the carbon output of rainforests. Geologically global warming was gradual but intensived at certain time periods. These time periods were centered around forest fires in the rain forest areas. The general map is this. Rain forests can only act as a carbon sink for so much carbon before the dead material created by the forest begins to add to carbon output instead of the plants breath cycle decreasing it. In natural historic global warming (without man made intervention) the increase of life on earth slowly moved carbon distribtion until the atmosphere warmed this slow warm hyper excelerated in the last phases. This caused quick changes in temperature followed by a dramatic cold period. The key was the current rain forest model. It appears rain forests hold more carbon than predicted. In tracing this carbon it was found that dead organic material was carried by the rivers and decayed producing methane. But instead of the gas being released in the atmosphere this material was pushed into the sea depths and froze. Methan ice packs have been hit by oil drilling before and than come up a boil. The theory is that this extra carbon sink accounts for the rapid period of global warming in the geological evidence. Slow global warming slowly raises the rates of forest fires releasing more carbon from the forests when temperatures hit a point of affectin sea temperatures the methane in the ocean becomes gas. These large storages are dumped almost instantly creating a dramatic and quick rise in temperature which melts the ice caps and glaciers. This changes the saline levels of the ocean changing the heat distribution of the currents and flipping into a cold period. So it is best to not bring up these carbon sinks but to leave them untouched. Again the drive should be to move away from carbon based fuel. Related links
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/12 18_earthbelch.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/early-earth-01k.htm l
http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/ 3_Methane.htm
http://superstringtheory.com/forum/warmboard/messa ges2/116.html

A site with more information is here.

Here is a paper about how frozen methane may offer hope as alternate fuel

But the thing is... old satellites don't die. They just sit up there, cluttering up the orbital space. The GPS system, for example, expects to retire satellites at a regular rate into "parking orbits". In fact recently, as this article in Space Daily shows, it was discovered that the parking orbits chosen will degrade and pose a threat to the operating GPS satellites in 20 to 40 years. This is a long-term problem that is only getting worse.

Refueling satellites at least gives us the control of them needed to take them out of orbit if required.

Anna B

more accurate to paint them white and let the sun do the work.

I had a similar sighting experience.

However, before I would label it some sort of skunk-works / UFO hallucination, I would first keep in mind that 1.) it's very hard to establish the relative size of an object in the sky, especially at night and 2.) there are aircraft flying that have that sort of triangular looking shape, notably the B-2 bomber and FB-117. What I saw was probably a B-2.

Also, there is ongoing research in unmanned vehicles, many of which seem to be triangular in shape for low radar observability. Here's an example.

And, yes, they'd tend to be very quiet, just like the FB-117.

Excuse me? You ask me for proof and I cite four references. I ask you for proof and you tell me, "Go see Bob. Bob knows all."?

Scramjets cannot replace rockets

And you know this how? Oh, right, Henry told you.

Nice links. None of them give proof of a real-world scramjet showing positive thrust, though. You tried to point out that scramjets are 3X more efficient than rockets.

You are unbelievable. So because the second working prototype doesn't outperform the technology that has had billions dumped into it already, you say, "Throw it away"?

Furthermore, there has been a scramjet test that produced net acceleration. Exhibit A. Not much, but it worked.

[Scramjets can't not accelerate]

Drag does decrease the higher you go. I realize that with anything air-breathing, that also limits your thrust, but it does allow for higher speeds. And I'm not suggesting they try to reach orbital velocity in the atmosphere. I'm well aware that it's stupid to try with air around anyway. Rocket assists can be used for the last bit.

scramjets have materiel limits imposed on them that rockets do not

I think fuel qualifies as a material. Rockets have fuel efficiency limits imposed on them that scramjets do not, at least not to the low level of rockets.

Do you contend that systems failures will dissapear because scramjets are used?

Rockets just don't scale well. Sure, for fireworks (or adding the last 1 or 2 kps to a launch vehicle) they're fine. But if you want to rocket any significant payload, especially to orbit, the mass of the fuel has to exceed the mass of the payload by orders of magnitude. You're right, cost of fuel isn't a problem, but mass and space is. To make a rocket vehicle capable carrying enough fuel to get to orbit and the fuel needed to get this huge mass of fuel up(true for even scramjets, but less fuel and oxidizer), it's gotta be absolutely huge. And insanely complex. And expensive. Chemical rockets are about as fuel efficient as they will ever get. Find the cheapest per-kilo rocket-based booster we've ever built and that's about it. A scramjet, needing less fuel, doesn't have to be built to even close to the same scale and can end up being simpler. Simpler systems usually mean less systems failures. Also, rockets are fairly unique regarding guidance in that your thrust is taking place entirely at the bottom of the vehicle. This is not just a 'systems failure'. This is a fundamental, inescapable problem of rockets that makes guidance very difficult, and therefore more failure-prone than something that is air-breathing and thrusts from closer to the center of mass.

Scramjets can be better than rockets. That we don't have a working orbit-capable one yet is irrelevant. We know this because aerospace engineers are bright guys and have done the math.

You propose spending billions to "solve" reliability problems in rockets by using scramjets made out of unobtainium.

Never said anything of the sort. I said that rockets were nowhere near as efficient as scramjets and that rockets suck for getting to orbit. I've provided links for the former and today's $10k/kilo pricetag on launches demonstrates the latter. Will scramjets be cheaper? If we can get them to work, the theory says they will be. No way to know for sure without trying.

I'd prefer spending the money on something with a reasonable chance of being useful and feasible

I'm all for it. But the guys with money have spent 50 years putting everything into rockets. That they are even considering something else is an achievement. Laser boosters, beanstalks, whatever. Never said that scramjets were the best, simply that, if they can be made to get to orbit, they'll likely do so more cheaply than any straight-up rocket launcher. I have explained why rockets are so pitiful. I realize the materials problem for scramjets is really, really difficult. But hey, so were the problems with rockets.

Lastly, NASA is the one that spends billions of dollars on programs. Hyshot put this thing together for 1 million. Not exactly chump change, but NASA's test was many times more than that and they have yet to try again.

Here's some links:
Space Dailyarticle about asteroid potentially hitting earth
Pittsburh Post-Gazette article about long odds on asteroid hitting earth
BBC article on how the asteroid won't hit earh
Isn't it funny how things change so quickly? You would think the guy who originally observed this would keep his mouth shut while he finished compiling data. Any amateur astronomers out there who can explain why such a big deal was made out of something that isn't going to happen?

only only that, but according to the article,
"Astronomers have given the object a rating on the so-called Palermo technical scale of threat of 0.06, making NT7 the first object to be given a positive value."

and yet, in this article it says ""Asteroid 1950 DA is a very interesting object," said Dr. Benny Peiser, a spokesman for Spaceguard UK. It's interesting, "because it is the first Near Earth Object that scores higher than zero on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale.""
(this article was dated Apr 5, 2002)

it seems to me that the author got a bit too jumpy a little too early...

I do not thing you are wrong. There are a very limited set of rad hard microprocessors. Intel "donated" and here the pentium to Sandia. Which I suspect is skewing the market even more so to x86 architectures.

There "conservatism" here is fiscal conservatism. Not technological. Although, there is debate as to the suitability of the bleeding edge submicron designs/implementations to rad hard work.

I think one of Darpa's projects used some non rad hard equipment and got away with it.

I do not thing you are wrong. There are a very limited set of rad hard microprocessors. Intel "donated" and here the pentium to Sandia. Which I suspect is skewing the market even more so to x86 architectures.

There "conservatism" here is fiscal conservatism. Not technological. Although, there is debate as to the suitability of the bleeding edge submicron designs/implementations to rad hard work.

I think one of Darpa's projects used some non rad hard equipment and got away with it.

That $1 million-plus bill for Amalthea imaging is based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintaining Galileo's 12-member science team and data distribution system for another year (during much of which they would be idle).

But this, strictly speaking, is not required. The science team does not have to be on hand, and distribution and analysis of the photos could easily be delayed, with the photos simply being stored for later distribution to scientists.

I donated $5 to SpaceDaily for magazine articles, and i've donated to several webcomics. People tend to get upset when you tell them that they have to pay X amount or you won't be able to view it, while they're much more open about giving you some non-exact amount of money after they've already looked at the media and decided they like it. Whether or not the larger number of smaller contributions can counter a smaller number of high cost subscriptions, i have no idea.

Unfortunately, Gaia is not scheduled to launch until 2010. Until then, I wonder if a spacecraft like SOHO, (particularly the LASCO instrument) could look for asteroids? I've asked one of the project scientists (via email) about it. I'll post again if I find out anything good.

In the meantime, maybe one of YOU would like to search back in the archive of LASCO images and find the asteroid? You'll be famous if you find it!

A very good article on this can be found here. Although this is a slightly different advantage that the moon gave the earth, ie the landmass..

I remember a while back reading about a laser powered metal disk that was going to possibly be an alternative to space travel. A laser on the ground would shoot at the center of the craft, which (being a mirror on the bottom) would reflect the light to the sides. The air would get so hot that it would "ignite" and force the craft up a few inches. The great thing about this is that the energy to get into orbit doesn't need to be carried by the craft, rather simply kept on land.

Here's a link to an article about it.