Slashdot Mirror
Ion-Propulsion Craft Reaches The Moon
Rollie Hawk writes "It ain't warp speed, but it's exciting new technology at work! The European Space Agency put an ion-propelled rocket into lunar orbit today. While not much horsepower is generated, this method of propulsion could be ideal for travel in near-weightless space as it does not require any combustion to occur."
this method of propulsion could be ideal for travel in near-weightless space as it does not require any combustion to occur
What were you trying to say here? That combustion rockets are not a good way to travel through space? Maybe they're not the best, but it's going to be some time before anyone seriously considers getting people to the moon with ion engines.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
I'm also pretty sure that no one could do anything about it if the U.S. built a base and claimed to own 10 miles in every direction around it.
Yes, but Apollo 8 didn't accelerate all the way, and couldn't accelerate all the way from here to halfway to Alpha Centauri. You'd get there a lot faster on ion drive.
Sure they could. China could send up a "scientific mission" that just happens to fail and crash into the US Moon base. Do you really think the USA would start WWW (III/IV/V) over it? Humm, if the president at that time happens to be a Bush, maybe "we" would.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You honestly think the US will remain the leading superpower forever?
You poor thing.
JPL has an open house every year. A few years back, they were in the middle of a multi-year burn test and during the open house, you could see the engine's blue glow as it sat there chugging out ions into a vacuum chamber. It was totally silent (vacuum has that effect...) and the exhaust looked like it came off the front page of Analog.
"It ain't warp speed, but it's exciting new technology at work!"
Ion propulsion isn't "new" technology at all. It's been around for fourty years or more, in one form or another. The only "new" thing about this ion propulsion is that it is being used as the motive power for a spacecraft.
See this article from the August 1964 edition of "Popular Mechanics".
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
There is no friction in space so inertia will carry they ship at a constant velocity, that is unless its constantly accelerating as is the case with the Ion drive. It would take a long time but you should eventually be able to reach near relativistic speeds seeing as you are accelerating constantly albiet at a very slow pace.
Unless you want to carry a few solar masses worth of xenon, you cannot get to relativistic speeds with an ion engine. The exhaust velocity of DS1 was 30km/sec. Now, C is 300,000 km/sec. This means that the stuff travelling out the back of the ion thruster is going a mere 1/3000 of lightspeed. Using Newton's laws, you can see that it is completely impractical to reach such a speed with an ion thruster.
A better idea would be a laser sail, in which a multi-terrawatt orbital laser would propel a spacecraft many miles wide composed of gold film. Due to the fact that it would carry no fuel, it could reach near lightspeed. Other, slower options, include very advanced fusion engines, although that might not be that efficient in practice.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Of course there's no army to back this up. But if you built a base on the moon and claim anything inside plus 5 km around the perimeter your own property, it *should* be yours.
It's as simple as that: if you made new land habitable, it should be yours. Maybe I'm a little romantic here, but making some land habitable comes first, then it becomes your property, then you defend it against possible intruders.
As long as there is enough land left on the moon, there will be no conflicts, if the people involved have the slightest hint of moral obligatons left. What they may or may not have anymore, considering this will be 20 years from now at a minimum.
In general, humans all alone on a vast amount of land, totally devoid of people, in a situation of need and struggle, they tend to build friendly relationships instead of murdering each other for a piece of land. Supply and demand. If there's enough resources, land in this case, left, people don't value that land high enough to commit crimes against their moral standards. Example: Australia. Even outlaws built a society, because they couldn't survive otherwise.
Sooner or later, people will fight their wars in space, of course. But not as long as there's millions of square kilometres left for anyone to take.
s/weight/mass/g
We _are_ talking about space here, afterall.
This space intentionally left blank
Unfortunately this small percentage of real paranoids are the ones calling the shots in the white house right now...
I don't really care how it happens (The US gets weaker or the rest of the world becomes stronger) because in the end it's the same thing.
I simply believe that a US military presence in countries like South Korea, Japan, and of course Germany is no longer needed. Prior to WWII we didn't have soldiers stationed in those countries (though of course we had them in the Philipines as we owned them at that time) and now that things in those areas are more than stable I see no reason to continue it.
Sure North Korea is a friggin nightmare but honestly isn't that the problem of the nations in that particular region? What keeps their army from coming south again? Is it the physical presence of US troops stationed in the south? I no longer think that's true. The players in that part of the world are interdependant now. NK's biggest (and maybe only) friend is China. China's biggest market is the US. SK's biggest friend is of course the US and economically we're tied tightly to China. Nothing is going to happen and if anyone should be hard at work keeping a lid on Kim Il it's China, not the United States.
Japan and Germany can easily defend themselves and both do. The defense budget in the US has been exceedingly large for far too long. I'm not espousing isolationism either. One can be involved in the affairs of the rest of the world to a reasonable and not inflamatory degree without keeping soldiers around the globe. The money spent doing this would be better spent elsewhere.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.