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Personalized Moon Crash
Ich Bin Zu writes "Do you want to create your own crater on the moon? CNN has an article about a company putting a personalized moon crash for sale on ebay. The bid opens with $6 million which will enable the highest bidder to stuff up to 10kg worth of stuff on a space craft and lob it to the moon. The condition of the cargo is not guaranteed as it crashes on the moon at 4000 mph."
...and add some brakes? I'm sure there'd be takers for the opportunity to put a telescope on the moon, instead of just crashing something into it.
libertarianswag.com
Hey if you're gonna die soon (no I'm no trying to be morbid) and you have wishes to be cremated, why not do it this way? You'd be "craterated". Or just have your ashes sent up. "Yep, my dear old Dad, he's moon dust by now..."
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Thanks for posting the first "bah, humbug" post. I'll take my shot at the first "Jane, you ignorant slut" post.
You don't have to take visible-light pictures only. You could do something else cool, like bombard the surface with neutrons, looking for hydrogen (= water).
Actually, if you put pretty much any vehicle in the vicinity of the moon, you will probably find a scientist who will want to do an interesting experiment with it. Scientists are ingenious that way.
There was also a story not long ago about an effort to deliberately crash things into the moon to liberate clouds of debris, which could be analyzed by ground instruments. In that case the useful payload could be nothing but bricks.
And a "burst resistant container" may be useful if you want to do science in the millisecond that the probe has to survive on the surface. Seriously! A recent Mars mission had a couple of probes that were supposed to work this way (they failed).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
At first I thought, well, I'll just off myself and then I can be the first person buried on (in?) the moon!
But I see there is a 10kg weight limit...
Thus, I have decided to cut off my head, and have just it sent to the moon! Eat your heart out, Walt Disney!
Seriously, for $6 million dollars, I would want to add my cremated remains to the fusion reactor that is our sun. If they can escape Earths's gravity and send a craft on a trajectory towards the moon, surely they can aim for the sun as well. Nobody cares about the moon except Bush. I say we aim for the sun.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If you could find a way of making someone pay you 6 million to dump a bucket full of 'stuff' in your yard, you'd do it. If someone payed you 6 million to dump a bucket full of stuff somewhere in yellowstone park, subject to some restrictions, then you'd likely do it in a heartbeat. Why is the moon so special? When spaceships can pollute a large portion of the moon, they'll be able to take people there and the pollution will happen naturally. But the pollution from this one 'hit' will be so small that you'll actually have to look for it, you aren't just going to stumble across it.
-Adam
I'd send up an optical 10gbps repeater (otherwise know by it's more technical term, "corner cube" though the active version could also have storage of its own) and store 3.2megabytes of data in flight between the earth and the moon. If the feds ever call, it'll be erased with absolutely no trace in 2.56 seconds.
-Adam
I think we can safely guarantee the condition of just about any cargo which hits the moon at that speed.
Implying that it will be destroyed, right?
Not necessarily.
This is just an extreme case of the "egg drop" problem used by the UofMich ingineering school ion their packaging class one year (and no doubt other engineering schools from time to time).
Problem: Package a raw egg with less than (x) grams of packing material so that it can be dropped from the roof of the four-floor engineering building to the concrete below and arrive intact.
A number of solutions were tried. Some I remember hearing about:
- Suspended inside a ball by rubber bands.
- bubble wrap variants
- foam peanut variants
- Stuffed into the top of a stack of styrofoam cups with kleenex, fins added to last cup to insure bottom cup arrives end-on. (Energy absorbed by friction of cup stack cracking and collapsing).
(That last one was a winner and led directly to the nested-sheetmetal protectors you sometimes see on freeways in front of overpass support piers.)
Then we have NASA's recent "airbag" landing on Mars.
4K MPH is a bit extreme. But you've got a LOT of space to, for instance, blow up a LARGE airbag/bubblewrap analog, and plenty of time to do it.
Encapsulated electronics, and even moving parts if packed correctly, can handle thousands of Gs easily. (Think about MOOG's final test for his synthesizer components: Three feet to a cement floor, must stll be fully operational and still correctly tuned afterward.) 4000 MPH = 5867 fps. Bullets are routinely accellerated to that velocity in a few feet without distortion from the g forces involved (though that is a bit extreme), and bullets with moving parts (such as spin-armed explosive rounds) to maybe a couple thousand FPS ditto.
So figure inflating maybe a 50 foot radius cluster of 'way thin kevlar balloons or bubble-wrap with aerojell just before impact, and taking maybe 20kg at the peak of decelleration, and it should be survivable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Furthermore it's a dead rock anyway, and I can't think of a better place for an interplanetary garbage dump. Well maybe dropping stuff into Jupier. Even Venus is interesting.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
I'm sorry to hear you have so little moral fiber in your body and can't fathom why someone finds the idea of intentionally polluting an object we can't even inhabit so despicable. It's unfortunate that there are so many people that think like you, because the underlying problem with that kind of thought process is always the same:
Gee, you're right. I'm going to change my culture and ideals because you took time to insult me and all the people you grouped me with.
So, are you saying that you would not accept 6 million dollars to dump a bucket of stuff in the middle of yellowstone park (subject to some restrictions)? You didn't exactly specify that you wouldn't - you only decided that I must have bad morals because I posited that most people would. would it make a difference if I said I'd put that money to good use - such as donating it to yellowstone park?
Are you principled only when it's convenient for you, or do you make every reasonable attempt to follow your own ideals at all times, in all places, and under any circumstances?
At this point the discussion devolves into Churchill's quote (paraphrased):
"Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?"
"I do believe I would."
"How about for 5 pounds?"
"What kind of a woman do you think I am?!"
"We've already determined that, now we're just haggling over price.
-Adam
Who knows, in the future, it might be a quite lucrative business running an interplanetary junk yard. Not only would it be cheaper (and safer to humans) to run an incenerator on a huge rock with no atmosphere (just as long as the material you wanted to "burn" provided its own oxygen supply, or was destructable when HUGE doses of radiation are applied to it), it would be quite profitable in the long run. Hell, with the way we treat earth, we could almost start doing this today.
When space travel becomes cheap enough, I'm sure we'll this kind of thing popping up on lots of moons. The only thing moons are good for really are the fact that they're magnificent gravity wells, pretty to look at in the sky, most of the time are completely inhospitable (making them good junk locations), etc etc. I for one hate the idea of taking perfectly usable material and moving it to a location where it'll just sit unused, but in a location like space, we could find new ways to recycle the material and ship it back. The only thing stopping us now is the cost of the trip, which, with new technologies like space elevators and possible air breathing, horizonal launch vehicles, these costs should go down quickly. It's a shame we spent more time on innovation of the things we put in space, and not on the things we use to get it there.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I've actually always wanted to go out by being cremated and having at least some of my ashes flung into the general direction of the sun, and open and scatter into the universe. They'd probably drift into the sun and go with it when it explodes. I think it's a nice idea, and what else is a dead body good for?
Emory: Uh..we're still..beta testing that.
Oglethorpe: What you're testing is me and my patience!
Orbdev has been on slashdot before; if you recall, these guys are suing NASA for parking a probe on "their" asteroid. Take a minute to poke around their website - after I realized who these guys are, I realized there's no way they'll ever be able to figure out a way to get some millionaire's 10 kg of trash to the moon. Total and utter crackpots.
What would be cool is to see someone launch a vehicle like this, but instead of pointlessly crashing something into the moon, do some fly-bys of various lunar landing sites and send some high quality pictures back.
If you only canceled out 1 km/sec of the velocity then you would just orbit a bit closer to the Sun.
As for whether the orbit would be circular or elliptical it depends on how the velocity change is done. Remember that velocity is a vector. If any part of the velocity vector has a component which is perpendicular to directly into the Sun then you will continue to orbit the sun. If all of the velocity is perpendicular to a path directly into the Sun then you will have a circular orbit. The more that your velocity is toward the Sun, the more elliptical your orbit will be.
The only way you would spiral into the Sun would be if you were losing velocity perpendicular to a path directly into the Sun. This could be through interaction with interstellar dust or through the action of a rocket. Look at something like a comet. There are many comets that have been orbiting the Sun for millions upon millions of years in highly elliptical orbits. They slow down a little over those years and they do spiral closer to the Sun but it still will be quite some time before they slow enough to crash into it. In fact, most crash into it because their orbits have been changed due to interaction with another large body such as Jupiter which changed the direction of their velocity vector from being partially perpendicular to the Sun to being almost directly into it.
The other thing is that you really don't have to get down to a velocity of 0 km/sec because the Sun is not a point but rather it is a sphere. However, you would need to get down to fairly close to 0 in order to take up a close enough orbit to crash into the surface. I just said 0 because it wasn't worth working out if it was 1 km/sec or 0 km/sec that was needed to orbit close enough.
Sapere aude!