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Fly To Mars In A Plastic Ship
saskboy writes "NASA reports that an old polymer may be the spaceship material of the future. Polyethylene is in household garbage bags, and it is also an effective solar radiation shield. I learned three years ago in astronomy class that polyethylene is used in the sleeping quarters on current orbiting space vehicles, but now NASA has developed a way to toughen the polymer into a product they call RXF1 which is 'even stronger and lighter than aluminum'. As you may know, radiation in space is currently a major obstacle to manned missions outside of the Earth's magnetic field, so better radiation shielding is essential to planned manned missions to Mars and beyond.
Get the mp3 podcast of the article here."
It's not a podcast, it's an MP3 file. It's only a Podcast if it has an RSS feed for the audio files. Quit using words if you don't know the correct context in which to use them!
Because we are too busy spending our childrens inheritance on finding Iraqi WMD um err.... well no actually we are fighting the terrorist over there so that we do not have to fight them in street here err.... no well because we are bringing peace and demoracy to the middle east err.... look it is a noble cause ok just dont ask Bush why because he is still searching for the answer.
All these stories where NASA managers promote the discoveries of an unseen group of engineers as the solution to everything sound similar. After the superstar finishes promoting the discovery and by the way, the knowledgable people are never interviewed, we never hear about the discovery again or the discovery ends up failing. By then, the manager has been promoted and the engineers who invented it laid off because it didn't work.
Seems 90% of NASA's work ends up garbage with no impact for anyone except the management payroll. Sometimes the garbage ends up insulating external tanks and killing people or being meant to hold tile gap fillers in and falling out.
In the case of polyethylene a manager holds a brick of the stuff and promotes it. Have a feeling it's as brittle as, well, polyethylene and would shatter on contact without enourmous additional funding. Also there are the issues of decomposition, machine tooling for it, cost of manufacturing it, which will require enourmous amounts of funding and management.