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NASA Has Plans for 2nd Space Station at L1
Keith Gabryelski writes "New Scientist has an article on NASA's unveiling of a "blueprint for the future" of space exploration. It entails a Space Station 5/6ths of the way to the moon. In other news, radiation sheilding on the space station isn't so good."
Why not just build on the moon? Why stop at 5/6 the way to the moon?
radiation sheilding on the space station isn't so good.
but my tan is great!
With the insane ammounts of cost overruns and mismanagement in the ISS project, who thinks that a jaded congress is going to vote a new space station [no matter how much MORE useful than the ISS it may be] any funds whatsoever?
How much for a trip to this baby?
And where can I pre-order a ticket?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
There is only room for three people for extended stays, due to Congressional budget cuts in the habitation module and escape vehicle. The original intention is seven people. That means the crew of three must spend 75% of their time in maintenance with only a small amount for experiments and other innovation. Unlikely the current administration will increase funding. Many republicans hate NASA because of its environmental monitoring programs. And the previous scientific leader of NASA has been replaced by an accountant (cut and slash).
The new IMAX movie about the first three years of space station construction is fascinating.
"If you sent two people to Mars, one of them would die," says Marco Durante of the Federico II University in Naples
I think the key to preventing this is to pack enough food that the astronauts are not forced to resort to cannabalism.
The explorer part of me is saying, "Yay! It's about time we started building more structures in space. The Lagrange point would make a good neutral spot halfway to the moon." But then the realist in me says, "Given that NASA has proven that it can't stick to a budget, how much is this overrun going to cost?" And the article agrees with me.
Government is not the answer to promoting outer space as a new resource -- market forces have shown to be the driving force in all new ventures. We need competition in getting things into orbit, tourism to build hotels, industry to build fab plants, mining on the moon...
space is a harsh place. Radiation, temperature extremes, enormous distances of nothingness. It'll be nice when it isn't almost senselessly prohibitive to go.
I don't understand why NASA does not employ lead shielding to protect its astronauts. This time-tested solution is proven and effective.
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
would it be at all possible too recreate the earths field around the space station ,like give them a field generator or something. i dunno. how much power would it need to be effective at repelling the charged particles?.
Someone file a patent on flying to the moon! I can see NASA paying some major royalties.
Fault loves the past, worry loves the future, but content enjoys the present.
This may be almost a replacement for ISS. It's become fairly obvious that certain nations (*ahem Russia*) are intent on using the ISS as SpaceDisney, letting any jackass with $20M up there. So NASA might be trying to get their own space station back. ISS was really a political animal anyway (Congress loved the idea of unity or some similar crap).
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
After the Sun and Moon. Its been fascinating to watch it get brighter as they add more cylinders and panels every year.
The station is visible in the evenings about one week a month and mornings one week a month, so the orbit can wobble over the US, Russia, Europe, and Japan. Sky & Telescope (set zip code, click on almanac) shows pass times & locations, as do other websites.
Long range, imaginative plans... A next generation telescope at L2, shielded from the Earth's EM output by the moon... This is really exciting. Good luck NASA. I hope we get this done eventually, regardless of how much it winds up costing.
My other sig is also a
If i'm to be modded down for offtopicness, well, I deserve it, but I need to get this off my chest:
.00001% deviation from expected results researching *.*, right after they make clear that most likely it's due to faulty measurement equipment, New Scientist will publish that they found aliens, that they have a draft of the alien invasion plan, that Einstains's GToR is therefore void, and that in fact he himself WAS an alien trying to distract us from the truth. And then they _really_ start speculating and tell you that they infer from the inforamtion that Einstein was a shape shifter and that he was also the first husband of Melinda Gates.
/.er's comments than NS (if you can believe that!)
I simply can't read new scientist anymore. When the site actually loads (regardless of slashdotting), every single article they publish seems to be the scientific equivalent of the paparazzi.
I mean, really, one thing is to have a non-peer-reviewed magazine, and an entirely different thing is to intentionally publish exagerated, ridiculous, absolutely un-proved (and almost always un-provable) "facts". Even the simplest of stories is spinned beyond recognition. If a story comes up of some scientists spotting a
Now, I haven't read this article (not that I could even if I wanted to, NS' site goes DoS when they're linked from my cousin's non-porn website), but I'm sure I'll get more substance out of
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
In other news, radiation sheilding on the space station isn't so good.
Lead and tungsten are your friends.
(I suppose that this might be a good time to come out in favor of developing a cheap, non-man-rated left vehicle, suitable for lofting dense, space-station-module-sized things into LEO...?)
Do you know how much it would cost to lift the amount of lead you'd need into space? The earth's magnetic field deflects something on the order of 95% of cosmic rays. To acheive that in space you'd need tonnes of lead (educated guess... no figures to back this up).
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
The time between when Columbus "discovered" the new world and Magellen circumnavigated the globe was 30 years. It has now been 30 years since Apollo 17, the last time man visited the moon, the last time man left low earth orbit. I think it's a great failure of our race that we've dragged our feet such.
To think that technological advance is blazingly fast in this day in age is misleading. We're not doing too well at hitting the important targets. NASA might just now be waking up to this, but it's yet to be seen if their budget wakes up to it. (Nasa funding was 4% of the national budget at the height of the Apollo program, it's less than 1% now)
So I applaud their very recent efforts to finally mention some vague goals away from Low Earth Orbit. L1 is a fine stepping stone, but Mars is where the public eye is. Nasa administrator Daniel Goldin had some brave words about the possibility of sending men to Mars in this decade or the next, but Bush put a bean counter in charge of Nasa pretty quickly to throttle cost overruns from the ISS.
What we really need is a president giving NASA a kick in the pants, and the funding to follow, as Kennedy did. Either that or wait around for private space exploration to become worthwhile, and we're going to be waiting quite a while in that case. Another space race? maybe China? I hope so. Because the current NASA schedule is anything but ambitious.
Apollo was not built around science. It was built as another battlefield of the Cold War. The space program wasn't even important until the Soviet Union beat America into space. When NASA can make routine, scientific trips to the moon, then they can concentrate on building a space station at L1 and worry about getting to Mars.
The Space Shuttle is routine now, and usually stays within budget. NASA should build on this technology, slowly and gradually. We will learn so much more this way rather than putting a thermometer and a seismometer on the moon as quickly as possible.
To the tune of "Home on the Range"
Home on Lagrange
Oh, give me a locus
Where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved
Where the microwaves play
Down at 3 degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Useful in what sense? There's nothing on the moon that we need or want, at least not with current technologies at hand. If you put some kind of space station in a gravitationally unstable point, like L1, then you can use it to launch trips to points elsewhere very inexpensively. (Assuming the cost of maintaining the orbit of the L1 station turns out to be manageable.) Once you're at L1, you've basically spent all the energy you need to spend to get out of the Earth-moon system. Refueling or restaging at L1 for longer trips to Mars and elsewhere makes a lot of sense.
Science fiction from the late 1900's aside, moon bases just don't make that much sense right now.
I write in my journal
Did any of the astronauts who went to the moon come down
with cancer? They got beyond the earth's magnetic field and
the shielding on the apollo spacecraft might not have been
good enough either. (guess we need the deflector array off
the USS Enterprise?)
Water is indeed a better shielding material, plus you can mine it on the moon (or from comets and asteroids, too) and avoid the gravity penalty of bringing up Terran water. Plus, you can use it for all sorts of other things, like growing food, storing power, and drinking. Try doing that with lead.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Yes, it is true that the International Space Station has taken a horrendous amount of money that could've been spent on real science. I admit that I'd like to see more money spent on real science missions like probes to Pluto or Europa or on more Space-based telescopes, but unfortunately as these devices increase in size (satellites, space telescopes, probes, etc.) it becomes infeasible to launch them in a confined shuttle (I believe Chandra X-ray telescope reached the volume limits on what could be launched in one piece).
That said, we need to be building an infrastructure for launching larger and more complex devices into space. This requires places where things can be assembled once in orbit, places such as the ISS or another station at a Lagrangian point. In and of themselves, these stations aren't spectacular, they don't produce good science and they are very expensive, but they need to be created to assist other scientific endeavors as our technology continues to develop. As an example, routers, fiber, and transcontinental backbones are expensive and to the layman, they produce no real science or pretty pictures, but they are necessary as an infrastructure over which people can do some really cool things.
Anyway, I think that even if this doesn't get passed by congress or the things run behind schedule, it is good that we are at least PLANNING to do some really cool stuff like this.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
uh, I don't mean to point out the obvious, but you don't need thrusters to stay in a stable 'orbit' on the surface of the moon. If they built a station on the moon, I really doubt it'd go very far on it's own.
Of course, it'd be easier to leave from L1, as they would have to fight the gravity of the moon to get back into space. I hope that's what you meant...
-Space for rent
Home, Home on Lagrange
Where the Moon and the Earth fight for sway
If these comets don't stop
my space station might pop
and I glow just a bit more each day
I'm working on a version of 'Ice, Ice, Baby' in honor of Mars.
The New Scientist is to Nature what the National Enquirer is to the New York Times. But, hey, lots of people read the National Enquirer for fun as well. Only that when people start taking it seriously that people get hurt.
This!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I don't get your last paragraph... Why isn't everything in Earth orbit being gradually drawn towards L4 and L5? Why isn't there some large body captured there already?
But how do we get the images back or control it? Wouldn't we have to have a repeater station on the moon or at L4 or L5?
Sure, it would be fun to go into space in person. But that's entertainment and tourism, and the best way to finance that is through private funding. It's the science, the big questions, that require government funding, and there we should concentrate on what gives the biggest payoff--and that is unmanned space flight with robotic probes.
IANARS (rocket scientist) but what are the possibilities of utilizing the asteroid just discovered that shares the earths orbit for some form of station. A snippet from this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2347663. stm
"Although only about 100 metres across 2002 AA29 may play a role in the manned exploration of space out of all proportion to its size.
Already researchers are speculating that it could be visited by an unmanned spaceprobe or even become the first object after the Moon to be stepped on by astronauts.
The object could tell us a lot about the composition of asteroids.
Some have speculated that it could be nudged into a permanent Earth orbit where it could be studied at greater length."
If you could nudge this thing into the right orbit wouldn't it make a wonderful station? Lots of room, some raw materials, and you could burrow into to escape the radiation. I understand that some asteroids are nothing more than loose collections of rocks and dust. But it's an intriguing, and plausible idea.
A more useful approach, instead of building the station 5/6 of the way, would be to simply build it on the surface of the moon
:-)
Hell no! Didn't you ever watch that TV series Space 1999
Do you want to blow the moon out of orbit?
Anyone remember Aliens (Ripley, space marines, etc)?
Gateway Station was in L5 orbit... just saying...
[o]_O
now that you have publicised the radiation risk, there is no way that Nsync singer will go into space ... and there dies our last chance of getting him sterilised and stopping him from having offspring ...
Hmmm. How exactly does the water become contaminated with radiation, though? It isn't from radioactive material like uranium or plutonium, that's for sure. And you can't make an isotope of hydrogen from knocking out neutrons, cos it doesn't have any. I guess that leaves oxygen atoms, which I suppose could be changed into isotopes.
I'm pretty sure alpha and beta radiation would be stopped by the hull of the ship. Does anybody know if water is actually likely to become radioactive when exposed to energetic gamma radiation?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
I've long felt that human progress into space has been on some form of hold since the 1960s. JFK announced that we would goto the moon not many years before we actually did. Then we went back a couple of times. Then not much.
The major achievement of the late 70s was the Space Shuttle. The major achievement of the turn of the century will be the ISS. Obviously these are significant achievements but why we haven't been back to the moon in 40 years is baffling.
I'm very happy to see a station being considered that won't just be in orbit. I hope it is a sign of things to come. I'd really like to see a moon base in my lifetime. I don't know much about space but I'd expect it must be easier to build a big station if you build it on something.
We need to be up there. In large numbers. We need private industry up there. NASA should be focussing on putting human living quarters in space and providing transportation up there. I think there should be some kind of space oriented general contracting agency focussing on getting as many people up there for as long as possible. We need scientists, professors, entrepeneurs, the media...all sorts of people to go up and see what we can make of it.
If space really is the new frontier, it should be accesible. I hope this is a step in the right direction.
Maybe the magnetic fields required are too strong to be practical. IANA physicist.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I thought Lagrange points collected a lot of dust, which would be bad for optics. Its not like you can vacuum that stuff up either. If you are 5/6ths of the way to the moon already, why not just go the rest of the way? A luna's gravity keeps the dust down and provides many other benefits. I expect Luna would also supply SOME building materials, like maybe 10 foot thick rock walls to stop cosmic rays, for example. The lunar gravity would be a disadvantage for launching other missions from there, but perhaps that could be compensated for.
If there are more informed people out there who see what I don't, I'd love to hear it.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I've wondered about this too. I would imagine that the power required could be generated with a combination of solar cells and a decay reactor. Both for redundancy. This would also have the advantage that you could allocate more or less power to the shield depending on whether the station was occupied, or if you needed it for other things, or if there was a solar storm, etc.
The disadvantage is that the radiation would only be redirected toward the poles, so you would still need protection there. Hopefully this would still lower costs. There is also the issue of how strong the field would have to be? Would it affect electronics in the station? Would it take away a lot of usable space with a magnetic iron pole running through the station? Is it even feasable to generate?
But perhaps we should really be timing from Yuri Gagarin's first flight...
and then compare that to something more like the time between Leif Ericsson and Jamestown. Prior to Jamestown there were several failed attempts at colonies. Maybe Skylab and Mir compare to Roanoke.
I'd rather not, because I'd rather see something *real* and sustained before I'm gone. One of these months I half expect to see the Administration (Executive or Congress, pick either) elect to abandon and de-orbit.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Just how big is the Lpoint before you are not in it anymore?
If the L4 and L5 are stable, would they not have accumulated junk over the last 5 billion years? Rocks, dust etc that came near and slow enough would be captured and accumulate like gravel at the nexus of a country road.
Many here have spoken of the "insane" "horrendous" "crazy" amounts of money spent on IIS. How many think that this money was spent *mostly* to make sure that no one died?
.005% of risk reduction? Unwise, because we lose the ability to pursue our dreams. We're deadlocked.
Was it a good thing to spend that money on? Is the IIS over-engineered in favour of preventing un unfortunate death? (Aside - How many of you, after viewing the interior of an Apollo era craft, would still go into space in one of those?)
Let's look at a little history. If during the 18th century, we had spent an equivalent amount of dough on sailing ships (with the (un)stated goal of preventing deaths (monarchs HATE to look bad)) I think we'd still be looking for our assholes with a mirror. We'd never have left Europe. The economy of the day would not have tolerated it.
My father-in-law was one of the Canadians who helped develop the nuclear power station system called CANDU. His stories are quite telling. His take on risk? - during development of CANDU the engineering studies required would fill a couple of banker's boxes. Today, those studies would fill a small stadium. With a exponential rise in cost. Why? What's the return? A couple of lives? A dozen lives?
My point is - we have tried to reduce the risk to zero and this is not only stupid, but unwise. Stupid because there will always be a risk. How much money are we going to let timid politicians/bureaucrats spend on that last
"Acceptable risk" is a term that has been lost from the West's vocabulary and it is time to bring it back.
Stoptional
While reading about the problems with radiation shielding, I came up with perhaps one way they could reduce exposure: Add improved shielding to the sleeping closets. If they can cut out 90% of the radiation in an area that the average astronaut will spend 30% of his or her time in, that`s a significant savings for relatively little added weight.
It's good to see the L1 (and L2!) buttons getting more use.
Now if they could also implement R1 and R2.
How do they focus gamma rays in those gamma ray observatories? Could the same methods be used to shield a spacecraft?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Given the feebleness of the human race's attempts to leave the planet, I'm pretty happy about any plans for any type of space exploration. But, for God's sake, why can't we pick a place to go to? The shuttle is a 30-year old truck, and the space station is a purpose-built truck stop.
Anyone laboring under the impression that space travel is about scientific research is wrong. Space travel is about all the things that marked the great Earth-bound explorations of the 15th-19th centuries: adventure, pioneering spirit, money, greed and opportunity.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"Conspiracy Theory: Did We Build a Space Station at Lagrange?"
FOX's special Investigative Coorespondant Mitch Pileggi speaks with experts who reveal that radiation in spce cannot possibly be conquered, and that the whole thing was faked in Lagrange, North Dakota.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When Columbus sailed across the open ocean, the technology was ready. The will was ready. All it took was somebody throwing off the fear that had kept ships close to land since ancient times... and it was still hundreds of years before technology advanced far enough for open ocean voyages to be made in relative safety, after the Harrison chronometers were invented and the role of citrus fruit in preventing scurvy was discovered. Until then, sailing on the open ocean was always a real gamble.
In contrast, when the USSR and US developed their lunar programs the technology was NOT ready. You can make a strong argument that the technology is STILL not ready. (Develop single stage to orbit reusable launch platforms with a cost under $100/lb and get back to me.)
What we had was a proxy war. The German V-2 rockets were an annoyance to London, but only killed people in the immediate vicinity of the bomb. Sputnik foreshadowed a day where somebody anywhere in the world could drop a hydrogen bomb in any city, and it (rightly) terrified the leaders of both countries.
Then 40 years ago today came the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the time, people panicked. Then we thought that it wasn't really that bad after all. Now we are learning that it really was - at one point a US warship thought that a Soviet sub had fired a torpedo at it and was seconds away from returning fire when they determined that it was a noisemaker, not a torpedo. The Soviet sub captain was out of contact with his commanders and did not know whether his country was at war... but was authorized to use a nuclear-tipped torpedo. It would have been suicide, but it would have also taken out every US warship in the area.
Furthermore the US did not know that the local Soviet commander had moved the warheads from their storage area at the dock to the launch sites, and I'm not sure that the Soviet military command knew this either. He did it on his own initiative, not waiting for orders.
After this, there was no doubt that a direct confrontation between the US and USSR was far too dangerous. The countries could (and did) continue to fight proxy wars, but couldn't be too public without risking the proxy war becoming a direct confrontation.
This was a real problem... until Kennedy made an incredible claim (considering the state of the US space program at the time) that the US would put a man on the moon, and return him safely to earth, within a few short years. The US and USSR space programs (including the secret Soviet lunar program) were then a proxy war that allowed the two superpowers to compete, but without the risk of a mid-level field commander making a bad decision and having half of earth's population go "fzzzt" as a result.
So we made it to the moon far earlier than our technology would normally allow, both the US and USSR suffered casualties (Apollo 1 for the US, and two manned Soviet missions), and we avoided disasters on Apollo 11, 12 and 13 (the first two from faulty flight software on the LEM, the last by the explosion in one of the tanks) by sheer blind luck.
But this was at a tremendous cost. It turns out that space is so damn useful that we've been able to support a NEO program anyway, but we really need to develop the ability to cheaply and reliably get into orbit before we can start the clock on returning to the moon, establshing bases, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
L1 is about 5/6 of the way to the moon, along a direct line from the earth to the moon.
L2 is opposite the L1, over the far side of the moon from the earth.
L3 is close to the moon's orbit around the earth, but on the opposite side of the earth from the moon.
L4 and L5 are also in the orbit of the moon around the earth, but one is 60 degrees ahead of the moon in its orbit and the other is 60 degrees behind.
You can find more information at this web site and there is even more detailed information to be found here
Sapere aude!
If you want to funnel huge quantities of money into the usual set of bloated aerospace companies, you build 'Oases in Space'.
In the '80's, President Bush said 'Let's go to Mars'. NASA said 'Gravy train!! The Space Exploration Initiative will give us a massive infrastructure, including a Moon base, all for less than a trillion dollars. And once we have that, we might go to Mars.'
Bush passed on that plan at that price. Perhaps he actually wanted people to go to Mars.
Zubrin's Mars Direct plan would cost $50 billion to get to Mars, but wouldn't build an empire. NASA has shown little interest.
Read up on Lagrange points. In a two body system, there are 5 of these points, their positions dictated by the relative masses of the bodies, where the gravitaional interactions do funny things to the net gravitional pull. L4 and L5 are kinda funny in that stuff that finds their way in is more likely to stay put than at L1 L2 and L3. In fact, for the Earth-Moon system, an orbit at L1 or L2 becomes unstable after about 3 weeks.
Dyolf Knip
The best shielding is the kind you measure with a yardstick, not a Gauss meter. EM shielding won't help against uncharged particles, high-energy photons (e.g., gamma), or really souped-up cosmic rays. It would probably be very useful for keeping clear of space garbage, but even then you'd need a nuclear power source. And we can all imagine how well the public (American, at least) would react to that. Nukes are bad, m'kay?
Dyolf Knip
Well, I don't like it. What gives NASA the right to squat on what is probably one of the five most valuable places in the universe (from our perspective)? Will there be a deal arranged that in 50 years, when a better space agency comes up with a better project for the liberation point, they'll move their junk out of there? There had better be. Seriously, the UN has to get on this fast. Right now, the USA has basically called dibs on two of the five liberation lunar liberation points, plus there's that second-generation telescope that they want to put into the liberation point behind the earth, where it is always shielded from the sun. Well, this is the ideal place to build a telescope, and once something is there, everybody else, even people with a better telescope idea, are shit out of luck. They'll have to spend billions to make heat shielding because NASA is squatting on the one spot where the heat shielding is natural (permanently in the shadow of Earth).
If I were the UN, I would set a squatting limit of 30 years on any given liberation point. If somebody wants to use it after that, whoever was there before has to get the fuck out and clean up after themselves. I think it's likely that in 30 years all the liberation points will have something, and in another 30, countries will be duking it out over who gets to go there next. The people who want it most will have to compensate the other people who want it. In any case, this is not too soon to be thinking about making international laws about this.
L1 is an ideal point to test-drive a solar power satellite - rather than beaming the energy to Earth, beam it to a colony on the Moon. The distance is about the same as from GEO to Earth, and the one, big, primary problem with a lunar colony (other than near the poles) is the 14-day-long lunar "night". With an L1 power satellite for energy, there's no need for elaborate energy storage systems or running a nuclear power plant; just tap into the solar stream. And if it works well there, it should work equally well on Earth!
One of the primary purposes of a lunar outpost then would be to test the usability of various proposed processes for making use of lunar materials; a primary market for those materials would be solar power satellites, so an L1 SPS system for lunar power would be both a proof of concept and a way to bootstrap general SPS construction. And then: no more need for oil!
[Credit for this idea has to go to Charles Radley]
Energy: time to change the picture.
The article talks about IONS colliding with atoms and causing secondary radiation. I would like to get clarification on this point.
If it really is ions causing the problem then a strong magnetic field should provide some protection, just as the earth's field does. In fact the article talks about a significant increase in radiation when outside the earth's magnetic field.
A strong magnetic field might be enough to allow deep space travel. If it's primarily electromagnetic radiation, i.e. photons then your screwed, of course.
Absolute statements are never true
My take on the subject is that we don't have any materials heavy/stable enough to reflect high energy radiation.
The problem is that conventional materials of all types misbehave as photon energy substantially exceeds the chemical binding energies. You go from having materials acting like ideal classical conductors or dielectrics interacting with photons that act more or less like classical EM waves [normal reflection and transmission], to having materials that act like a set of quantum energy levels and photons that act like particles [photoelectric effect], to having materials that act like a diffuse sea of particles that scatter photons which also behave like particles [Compton scattering].
As the valence shell binding energies in atoms are at most on the order of a few tens of eV, there is a hard upper limit on the frequency of radiation that conventional optical elements made of normal matter can handle.
The limit's mushy in one respect, in that grazing-incidence devices see an effective frequency that's inversely proportional to the angle of incidence. However, practical devices limit the benefit of this to between a factor of 10 and a factor of 100 (so you can see some x-rays, but gamma rays are still tricky).
Non-conventional optics made of normal matter can still work under some conditions. Because the inter-atomic spacings in crystals are in the same ballpark as high-energy photon wavelengths, you can get diffraction occurring when an x- or gamma-ray beam passes through a crystal (due to scattering off of inner-shell electrons and the nuclei). This is commonly used to identify materials (x-ray diffraction patterns have been used to image atoms in everything up to and including crystals of viruses). Gamma ray telescopes using crystalline blocks to construct diffractive optics have been built.
Lastly, the final and most difficult way to cheat involves using plasma as a mirror. As it's a gas of free ions, it should have near-perfect reflection even at high wavelengths (subject to a few probably-nontrivial conditions). Keeping a cloud of ions confined to an optically flat surface is left as an exercise for the reader.
True. But the dynamics in that halo orbit are very messy. Just getting to the orbit is a pain - the trajectory requires a lot of work before the mission - and if you need to perform a maneuver while you're in your halo (e.g. to rendezvous and dock), well, good luck. One small delta-v in the wrong direction and you're on the unstable manifold of the halo and an express elevator to whoe knows where.
There are plans for a probe at the Earth-Sun L1 point (about 4 times farther than the moon)that will similiarly orbit that L1 point but for different reasons. If it were precisely at the L1 point, then we would have point our antenae directly at the sun to communicate with it. The noise from the sun would make it essentially impossible to communicate with, hence the offset.
Actually, I can almost guarantee that the reason the probe is going to a halo or lissajous orbit is that it is well nigh impossible to stay at the Sun-Earth L1 without burning an insane amount of fuel. The Sun-Earth L1 is unstable. I would however not be surprised to find that the particular orbit selected (the size of the halo) was driven by the need to achieve a certain angular separation from the sun.
Wow! I knew IIS had its bugs but I never thought that some of those bugs were life threatening! I'm also a bit worried that you think they have only *mostly* eliminated them.
That's why we need a new and cheaper space launch system.
Or to establish a moonbase, to get our materials for about 1/20th of the theoretical energy cost per kilogram, from an airless environment where devices like rail-cannons are practical. Send rock, aluminum, glass blocks or fiber, or anything you like up to the station to be used.
A station in the vicinity is the most logical first step, as it would provide a springboard for emergency rescue and would be a warehouse for supplies en route to the ground base. An emergency rescue or resupply mission from Earth would take far too long to reach a moonbase.
An earth-orbit-to-lunar-orbit-or-L1 shuttle could use slow but energy-efficient drives for cargo transport, eliminating much of the cost of supplying a moonbase, as well. A space station on either end is a winning proposition.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Why is this stupid? Here's why:
So what do you have when you break it down: A dynamically complex region of space that will make proximity maneuvers extremely difficult to perform. And if you make one small mistake in those difficult maneuvers, you're basically headed for Pluto. Bottom line: L1 is just about the stupidest place to put a space station that you could pick.
Will there be a deal arranged that in 50 years, when a better space agency comes up with a better project for the liberation point, they'll move their junk out of there?
I doubt this will be a problem. Do you know of any manned space stations that have stayed up for fifty years? It's not like the US or Russia just put some mothballs in Mir and Skylab and locked the door on their way out.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
If the habitation module was built in annular form, it would be possible to have on the outermost layers offices for administration (they get the windows) and keep the scientists/engineers in the middle. Thay way administration gets to absorb the radiation first (a nice radiation burn will add to their tan).
I don't think you understand how Lagrange points work: once you put something there, it stays! That's the whole point! So it will stay up, automatically, even long after it's been rendered totally useless.
Because they will get there first!
What sort of moronic principle is that? Just because NASA can get there first doesn't mean they have any right to squat there. I mean, it wouldn't be very expensive to stick something into a liberation point (L4 and L5 make more sense, but whatever). In two months, China could gunk up all the liberation points if they wanted to by sticking some useless crap there. But that doesn't mean it would be right--I mean, for one thing, it would completely kill our planned telescopes and space stations. So it's not about who gets there first. There is an obligation that if you occupy a liberation point, you have to have some 1) peaceful 2) scientifically important 3) internationally open and 4) big project. I'm not saying the space station or the telescope don't qualify, though I'd like to see details. In any case, countries can't just have the right to stick anything there. Like I said, there should be a comission like right now that makes a ruling on the responsible use of our liberation points.
I don't think you understand how Lagrange points work
If you read the other replies in this thread (for example, this one), you will discover that an object at L1 behaves differently than you think it does.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
L2 is about 1/6 further from the Earth than the moon, and L3 is a tiny bit further from the Earth than the moon. Normally, a further orbit will take longer to go around the earth than a closer orbit. But at L2 and L3, a little extra gravity is provided by the moon, but in the exact same direction as the Earth's gravity, and that is enough to speed the further orbit up so that it takes the same time as the moon to go around.
The "missing" force you are looking for might be thought of as the "centrifugal" force, which isn't a "real" force but feels real to someone going around in a circle.
Why not just boost the existing space station to a Lagrangian point?
I know we have some NASA types around here - please explain to me the virtues of an inflatable space station.
I'm a 2000 man.
How can the gravitational pull of the Earth and Moon be balanced at points L2 and L3? Maybe the gravitational force from both bodies is the same at those points, but both points, the Earth is on the same side of the point as the moon, making them not-so-ideal for satellites or space stations I would think.
The forces wouldn't cancel each other out. Right?
(Actually, I can see how L3 would work, if the satellite had the same orbital period as the moon. But L2 confuses my little general-arts-degree mind.)
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
How did we know that we needed new trade routes? How did we know that there was something of value "way out there" in the first place?
Because someone got off their bloody ass and went there, either out of curiosity, or out of dire need.
Now, I don't know about you, but considering the harshness of the environment we're talking about, I'd rather go there because I'm curious, not because I'm fighting for survival.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
What about Luna? Is the Moon still within the Earth's magnetic sheild? It is many times farther out than the ISS. We sent a couple of people there, or so they tell me. Did they have any adverse health problems? I would think that the shielding used on that trip was probably not as advanced as todays sheilding.
How much radiation were the people on the Apollo missions receiving compared to a year on Earth?
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
The Saturn V blueprints are stored on microfilm in a NASA library vault. They weren't lost. That's an urban myth.
The problem, though, is that all of the tooling for manufacturing the Saturn 5 is gone, and much of the componentry is not being manufactured any more either. I'd guess that the entire electrical system would have to be redesigned from scratch, for instance. Plus there were some fiddly bits like the baffles in the engines which would probably have to be rediscovered through experimentation.
At this point, it would be better to build a new heavy lift rocket with only thousands of parts. But in order to do that, you have to get NASA out of the picture.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Funny? Thank you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I, for one, am really hoping that the Chinese go a little space crazy. American space activities need a good adversary to loosen the congressional purse strings and a Chinese space station should do it.
This is obviously a richly researched topic with lots of published papers. Some of them talk about new algorithms for tackling the complex dynamics you're talking about. And of course there's always Moore's Law; the computers used for Apollo missions were about as powerful as (or maybe much less than?) Palm Pilots.
It's probably quite feasible to give the L1 station a radio link to an orbital mechanics cluster on the ground, which can be as big as is needed, and could run equations of motion for a couple dozen nearby orbits in faster-than-real-time.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Also reported as a cure for athlete's foot.
Useful tool indeed.
A lot of people are saying that the problem with the ISS is it's too expensive, and a lot of that comes from it being hard to work on, and the pure mass of it is expensive to get up there. Is there any reason why we don't just land on the moon, and start throwing the (currently dumped) fuel tanks towards it to become storage rooms, and then have the sensitive electronics & specialized labs carried in shuttle bays? We could use the moon's mass as shielding from radiation and debris.
Sure we have to figure out a way to get stuff up and down from the moon's surface, but we do have a space *shuttle* that's sorta designed to do this; besides it's gravity is only 1/10 of ours, so the additional fuel shouldn't be that bad. Hell, we might even be able to figure out how to do a space ladder there before we can get one on earth, it wouldn't have to go nearly as far or as massive.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Using ice as radiation shielding might be a good idea on long-range manned exploration missions, despite the weight/volume issues.
It might be useful to bring along 264000 US gallons of water.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
If you stretch a torus in the right direction, you get something that looks alot like a section of pipe. I don't know far you can stretch it and still have a practical bottle.
Closing the ends would be another problem.
Try this.
In order for the moon to be a useful source of raw materials for spacecraft, we'd have to do an unbelievable amount of work: smelting, refining, fabricating, and so on.
/. a few weeks ago). could provide relatively inexpensive space access for normal people. If each elevator cost 1 billion dollars and could haul up 250 people per day, you would only need to charge $1500 per person for a trip to geosynchronous orbit.
Manufacturing aluminum for the L1 station would not be practical on the moon. However, getting water would be very practical. (There are some crater rims which do contain ice.)
In addition to drinking and such, you can also use water for rocket fuel by splitting the hydrogen and oxygen with electrolysis using electricity from the plentiful sunlight in space. (Which means Mars missions would be much more practical, because you wouldn't have to haul the fuel from Earth.)
I imagine in the more long term, you could have a pretty good civilian transport system. (Like quite a bit more long term. Maybe 40 years, optimistically.)
A few carbon space elevators could be built for less than 1B dollars each (the ones featured on
These carbon nanotube tether would extend out to about 50,000 miles, or about twice GEO orbit. So you could fling spacecraft toward the moon and mars and such.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
On L4 and L5, though, you cannot have multiple occupancy--stuff there would clump together. Because those points inuitively belong equally to all the world, the UN seems like the natural body to regulate their use. I think if the UN made some laws about it now, it might help individual space agencies with making long-term plans.
Actually, the space tether/elevator part was science fact. Didn't you read the stories a few weeks ago about how a 50 k mile long space elevator/tether was being planned for 2015?
It uses a recently developed carbon nanotube composite which is extremely strong.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
In case of a small meteor (or space junk) strike, it has a better chance of stopping the material before reaching the crew's atmosphere than a single sheet of metal would.
Wow, that's fascinating. I can see that. Thanks for taking the time to reply!
I'm a 2000 man.