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."

Comments

Space: it's time to go back and revisit it again.

[Sheetrock]

When I was growing up, astrology was becoming a keen area of study. Theoretical science became applied science as the weapons of war were turned to plowshares of exploration and propelled us into space, to the moon and back to Earth.

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.

Astrology?

[Scareduck]

Hey, is that a Virgo rising or are you just happy to see me?

Re:For the public good?

[47F0]

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!