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From PayPal to Planetary Travel
furnk writes "PayPal founder Elon Musk muses about his plans to send rockets to space and his eventual hopes for making life 'multi-planetary.' 'I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small one, so I started a rocket business,' Musk said. SpaceX is not new, but in a speech at Virginia Tech, Musk talked about the company's troubles and its lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed as he tries to get a slice of the valuable Air Force contracts."
Charles Hill, professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, said the university had a $1 million spacecraft that was mothballed after the Columbia explosion.
Whatever happened to the good ol' days where astronauts had balls and the administrators let them prove it? Spaceflight is a little dangerous, sure; but I'd volunteer if I was given a 50/50 chance of returning alive. I'm sure many other people would too.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
The former CEO of paypal just dropped a $100k matching challenge to the singularity challenge. Transcend humanity first, then the stars are nothing in comparison. Why terraform for oxygen when you can run on antimatter?
Don't get me wrong -- I kind of like the Singularity Institute. However, could you point me towards some of the technological advancements they've been responsible for recently, or some of their research publications? As far as I can tell, there's zero.
Not *nearly* that easy.
First off, boosters typically get jettisoned at unstable altitudes. If you wanted to take the space shuttle main tanks up to LEO, for example, you'd have to fly without payload. You'd need to bring up everything that goes in and on the tank in subsequent flughts.
Secondly, space stations are far more than an airtight container. They're hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, each needing to be attached. Often this involves breaches of your structure, which you would need to make re-airtight at many points.
The shapes are often odd. They often have complicating factors, such as residual chemicals or clouds of insulation or outgassing around them. They may not weld well. And in-space assembly itself is already incredibly difficult (not to mention that an astronaut in orbit is the highest labour cost you'll ever find).
It's much easier just to build it on the ground and launch it. Even Skylab, which was just a modified upper stage, was modified on the ground (even then it had problems). It just makes more economic and structural sense to do your work here on Earth, even if it means more (or bigger) launches. And yes, this has been considered before - what would later become ISS had the possibility of being made of shuttle ETs considered several times.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."