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SpaceNow, a New Space Education Initiative
Avacar writes "SpaceNow has officially launched their new website. It contains fairly detailed and technical explanations on how standard rocketry works, as well as orbital mechanics for interplanetary travel. They advocate putting fusion engines in space as a clean, cost-effective way to travel between planets. They also have a full curriculum for educating youth about space, and will soon be starting up weekly debates on touchy issues with space travel on their forums."
Then we stopped.
Some may say that it was a waste of time and money, but a great deal of practical good was done by the space program. Many space-age foods, polymers and foams were created and found to do as much for our planet as they did for those who orbited it. Besides the ocean, it is the last frontier available to us, and unarguably the one whose exploration will do the most for us.
I applaud the concept of bringing these ideas to a new generation who will, hopefully, not forsake them as ours has. I was just thinking about this today during my ruminescing about the crazy and sometimes haphazard ways in which the scientific process is refined -- in it's own way, the question about continuing space exploration is tied in inexorable fashion to the battle against entrenched interests that new theories must undergo before they become the accepted norm.
Take, for example, the struggle of Galileo against the church to permit society to recognize the fact that the world is round. Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it -- answers and proof to the contrary must be found out there, because like the proverbial blind men describing the elephant we find ourselves struggling with only our piece of the jigsaw puzzle to determine the complete picture.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Hey, is that a Virgo rising or are you just happy to see me?
Dog is my co-pilot.
some of the basic science is just plain wrong. in the "fundamentals of rocketry section" it claims that a rocket's exhaust "pushes on it's environment", which in turn pushes back - and that's how rockets go! it claims that in space, where there's nothing to "push against", a rocket must carry its own "resistive medium". this is pure rubbish, and reasoning much like this led many to claim that rockets could never fly into space in the early days of space exploration.
which such deep flaws, i have no confidence that the rest is any better.
So what's the point of the site? It seems useful as a study guide for an intro astrodynamics or celestial mechanics course, but it explains no better than any textbook I've seen ("Fundamentals of Astrodynamics" is my preference, it's only $10 too). In fact, by avoiding derivations it skips the physical ties that impart a real understanding of the subject. It could be used as a quick equations review, but certainly not for teaching.
The elementary physics of the site (newton, momentum etc.) isn't specific to astronautics. It can be found better explained elsewhere on and offline. So I see there's no real use for that, and it's certainly not a new attempt at "space education" (what ever the heck that is).
The nuclear propulsion section is kind of cool but falls into science fanboy/activ-ism. So is this a site for teaching about space or pushing science fads?
Throwing out equations won't attract anyone to aerospace engineering, astronomy, cosmology or related fields. These pages seem convenient for exam reviews but nothing more. They're passing off a lame study guide as a revolution in astrodynamics teaching, but they avoid any real teaching. Exercises? Team projects? MATLAB coding assignments? There are none, and students learn nothing without practice.
This site will not attract new aerospace engineering majors and addresses absolutely no problems in current teaching methods. They throw out a lot of good information, but it's presented in either standard or inferior ways.
The only people I see benefitting from this site are current or former aero majors who have lost their textbooks and don't know how to use google.
P.S. The site's design is a nasa.gov knock-off, which just bugs me as a web designer.
The question is, is space exploration a good national investment? I happen to think "yes", you think "no".
I'm serious: We're talking about survival of the species here. One big rock, and we're all boned. We need to get off this rock, and we need to not be jacking around. The costs are trivial (relative to, say, farm subsidies, or the defense budget) and the payoffs are, like, uh, big.
Humans are at their best under adverse conditions. Does it make sense to get technological advancement from fighting each other, or fighting the elements on a hostile planet? I vote for #2. Too bad there's nobody I can vote for who agrees with me.
In principle, I agree with you: Private enterprise is the best mechanism to develop and exploit space. However, NASA can and should be developing the raw technologies to enable that to happen.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
No, all fusion requires is a magic bottle somewhere in Utah.
Hey, I'm all in favor of fusion engines - but they don't exist - unless you count the Mr. Fusion option on my DeLorean. The closest we have to fusion is... zip? In spite of multiple megawatt laser facilities working very hard on the problem.
In the meantime, some very good work has been done on fission engines - work that has been discarded. But if we really want TRUE heavy-lift capability, if we really want TRUE long-distance propulsion, fission seems like a technology we are going to have to get rational about.
The fact is, if we could build workable coal-powered rockets today, we would - in spite of the fact that black-lung disease alone has killed far more people than all of the fission reactor meltdowns in the history of power generation.
Is the potential of a fission accident a factor? You bet. But if the options of serious space utilization are either chemical, which is at it's limits now, or fictional (see Mr. Fusion) then we are going to have to take a long hard rational look at much more proven and feasable technologies.
Sigs? We don't need no steenking sigs!