Slashdot Mirror
New Lab Consolidates Propulsion Research Areas
zoid.com writes: "Nuclear-fusion drives, anti-matter protons and solar sails? NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center broke ground on a new administration and lab building for the Propulsion Research Center today. This lab will will be used to develop new propulsion concepts and techniques for the future of space exploration."
Do I have the honour of second post?
Rep. Cramer compares the old lab to an old car garage, with concrete floors and tin roofs. Hopefully a more appropriate working environment will be more conducive to thought and research. It would be great if they actually managed to design a functional anti-matter thurster.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Fusion reactors and anti-matter drives sound cool, but do the math ... assuming these drives can propel a craft at one-tenth the speed of light, which is a speed of approximately 66.9 Million Miles Per Hour, it would still take 30 years to reach the nearest star.
What's the point of messing about with antimatter right now? The amount of antimatter that has ever been made is smaller than a pinhead. The use of this for a propulsion system- that dog does not fly.
I mean, cmon; NASA is an aging, flabby, inept (X33), and misguided, accident prone (Challenger) and not well managed (ISS) organization.
Costs in most other parts of the world are far lower, and this is not simply because their engineers are cheaper; there has been studies on that. The ISS is predominately of Russian build and launch, and again Russia managed it for a tiny fraction of what it would have cost NASA.
America deserves far better for their money. Space is important, NASA achieves little with their huge budget.
True private launch infrastructure is the way to go; how a left wing organisation like NASA has survived this long in a country like America is completely beyond me.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Fusion reactors and anti-matter drives sound cool, but do the math ... assuming these drives can propel a craft at one-tenth the speed of light, which is a speed of approximately 66.9 Million Miles Per Hour, it would still take 30 years to reach the nearest star.
Even if we don't reach the nearest star (and 10 percent of C is very optimistic for any drive built in the near future), we'd be able to reach anywhere in the solar system with much, much better transit times and fuel to mass ratios than we currently can. This is what we'd need to do widespread exploration/colonization.
Assuming we _can_ get to 10% C, it would _definitely_ be worth it to send probes to nearby systems. We know we can build craft that last that long, and it's very unlikely we'd find a better drive in only 30 years.
In short, advanced drives would still be very, very useful.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that you perform keeping the system clean and building is what provides the platform for the obsessives and the prima donnas to have their moments in the sun. In the end, we need you all; in order to go forwards we must first avoid going backwards.
To the paranoid conspiracy theorists - yes, I work for Apple too. No, my resignation wasn't on Steve's direct orders, or in any way related to work I'm doing, may do, may not do, or indeed what was in the tea I had at lunchtime today. It's about real problems that the project faces, real problems that the project has brought upon itself. You can't escape them by inventing excuses about outside influence, the problem stems from within.
To the politically obsessed - give it a break, if you can. No, the project isn't a lemonade stand anymore, but it's not a world-spanning corporate juggernaut either and some of the more grandiose visions going around are in need of a solid dose of reality. Keep it simple, stupid.
To the grandstanders, the prima donnas, and anyone that thinks that they can hold the project to ransom for their own agenda - give it a break, if you can. When the current core were elected, we took a conscious stand against vigorous sanctions, and some of you have exploited that. A new core is going to have to decide whether to repeat this mistake or get tough. I hope they learn from our errors.
Future
I started work on FreeBSD because it was fun. If I'm going to continue, it has to be fun again. There are things I still feel obligated to do, and with any luck I'll find the time to meet those obligations.
However I don't feel an obligation to get involved in the political mess the project is in right now. I tried, I burnt out. I don't feel that my efforts were worthwhile. So I won't be standing for election, I won't be shouting from the sidelines, and I probably won't vote in the next round of ballots.
You could say I'm packing up my toys. I'm not going home just yet, but I'm not going to play unless you can work out how to make the project somewhere fun to be again.
= Mike
--
Trolling
I like poop!
I'm not so sure what I think about this. I'm all for increased spending in advanced propulsion research, but it should be done with caution.
"Anti-matter is several years out," Rodgers said
HAHA several YEARS out? yeah right! Currently, it would cost more than the GNP of the United States to merely light a 75 watt light bulb with current Antimatter Power Techniques. (This is what I have heard, maybe this is no longer true, but I don't think anti-matter production techniques have improved that much in the last six months since I heard this).I would say it's more than just a few years out.
The work on anti-matter will be at the level of the atom, so there will be little safety threat in case of an accident, said Harry Gerrish, a chief research engineer at the lab.
Although Anti-matter power techniques may not leave a risk of nuclear fallout which is a major concern with Nuclear Fission, it still involves harnessing a ridiculously large amount of energy. We should be more concerned about a technology like this falling into people with malicious intent in mind, or those who simply don't know what they are doing. I'm sure that once anti-matter technology progresses to a certain level, it will be possible to annihalate the planet with relative ease. Perhaps technologies like anti-matter should be developed only after our society becomes mature enough that it can use and harness technologies such as anti-matter without the risk of destroying itself in the process.
The ultimate form of propulsion technology may not lie in making faster and better propulsion systems, such as antimatter, but the ability to control the mass and inertia of an object moving through space.A relativly new theory of inertia, in which the electromagnetic energy in the Zero-Point Field interacts with the electromagnetic and strong forces of atomswould provide a reason for inertia to happen. Until now we have known that inertia occurs, but beyond the fact that it is directly related with the mass of an object, scientists haven't been able to find the mechanism for it to occur. If these interactions could be controlled, those between the zero-point field and the electromagnetic bonds of atoms, an object's mass could be deminished to zero, and the object could travel at very close to the speed of light with almost no energy propeling it.
See Inertia as a Zero-Point Lorenz Force by B. Haischfor further information.
just work out the improbability of someone who's pro-Microsoft getting a first post on a Linux story and saying something nice about open source.
________
"I just want to be a good engineer." -- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech at the 1988 AppleFest
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
That way we can brew a *really* hot cup of tea, not limited by any puny 100C boiling problems. Good superhot tea should yield a drive that would leave the Heart of Gold in the dust, and maybe even pass the Bistromath.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
HAHA several YEARS out? yeah right! Currently, it would cost more than the GNP of the United States to merely light a 75 watt light bulb with current Antimatter Power Techniques. (This is what I have heard, maybe this is no longer true, but I don't think anti-matter production techniques have improved that much in the last six months since I heard this).I would say it's more than just a few years out.
Doublecheck your source.
Antiprotons (the type of antimatter we care about for fuel) are produced at about 1e6:1 inefficiency in current accelerators. Assume a system-wide inefficiency of 100:1 on top of this for good measure. That gives you 1e8 watts of power for every watt that goes into your hypothetical light bulb.
That's 7.5e9 watts for your light bulb. At 5 cents per kilowatt-hour (3.6 MJ), that's about $100 per second (for 2.1e3 kW/h).
Substantially less than the GNP.
Hybrid antimatter/fusion craft (that use antimatter to trigger inertial confinement fusion) require on the order of one microgram of antimatter (actually a few hundred nanograms, but let's be lavish). At the efficiencies and costs listed above, it would cost $125 billion to produce the required amount of antimatter.
The US's GNP, by comparison, is about $6.7 trillion.
You'd still have to pay for the production facilities if you wanted to produce the antimatter quickly (it would take a century with our existing accelerators), but this would be at worst a comparable cost to the power used (the SSC was estimated at $20 billion, and it was a thousand times more powerful than needed).
In short, antimatter production for spacecraft is feasible (maybe even better than I've painted, as production rigs built specifically to produce antimatter are more efficient than standard accelerators).
Just curious... don't we already have a national propulsion lab in JPL? I'm just going by the name as I don't know too much about it... ?
Have there been any successful reproductions of a zero-point experiment?
I'm not trying to come down on someone like 'the establishment' and laugh at that-which-is-different.
Any experimental data to back up this theory, or is it all just a paper on a web site?
Fooz Meister