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Hyperdrive and Space Propulsion
Interested reader writes "MSNBC has an article covering the recent Space Technology and Applications Forum in New Mexico, which included a frontier physics session on hyperdrive, wormholes, and other blue sky ideas. The idea is a revival of NASA's long-dead (and heavily criticized) Advanced Propulsion Project."
Well, I don't know about the hyperdrive, but I clicked on the hyperlink in the article and I was immediately on page 2! Amazing!
I believe the proper technical term is: pie in the sky ideas.
that they're planning to conquest other worlds instead of fixing the one they live in :-/
i hope gauss hears me ... they're bean counters.
sh1t it can be like a inch in size!
is it scaleable? somehow? fund it!!!
"heavy criticised" my a$$. come on! everyting has a loop hole.
everybody noteworthy (newsworthy) a(c)knowleges it.
no, dont worry its not ur job, its.. maybe ure future job?
-(long gone dead(tm))
NASA has no comment, but are reportedly checking into the technology of Lost in Space to determine the validity of Star Trek's claims.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
... we could see our grand children zipping to Mars and beyond for their honeymoon or school picnic....
Interesting but scary
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I agree that we should be taking care of this planet as best as we can, but that should not stop us for pursuing the means to find and reach others.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
We wont find this breakthrough if we dont look for it. As long as the false and impossible ideas are shot down, whats the harm in listening to these wild ideas?
Afterall, some day, someone my actually be on to something. It would be a shame to disregard the idea just because it sounds impossible on the face of it.
END COMMUNICATION
Did they discuss how we can reduce the risk of jumping/exiting hyperspace/getting out of warp and ending up into large mass concentrations (planets, stars etc).
...
It is a real problem. One of the BSG raptor crews ended up in a mountain two weeks ago
If we stay stuck on Earth we are going to continue to overpopulate the planet until we consume ourselves to death. Population control is inevitable if we do not expand, and with population control comes the cheapening and commoditization of every human life.
Of course the alternative is we can find new worlds to populate.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Kuwait's largest oil field has peaked and is now in decline,
And...
there is serious speculation that Saudi Arabia's giant Ghawar oil field is either at peak or is very close,
And...
Global warming is clearly a fact,
And...
The antarctic is melting off at an uncomfortable clip not to mention Greenland
And...
Population growth continues unabated
And...
The freakin' idiots in TFA want to go merrily galumphing about the galaxy like a bunch of wide-eyed disease ridden nuclear weaponed kindergartners. All they need to do is SNEEZE on a foreign planet and they could wipe the whole place out and turn it into one giant slimy stromatolite. That's my idea of being a good will ambassador. As if we have enough stored solar power (petroleum) to fuel such silliness.
On a daily basis I battle the darkest nihilists - whether of the Olduvai Theory Peak Oil variety or the Eco-Catastrophe Variety. And when a clueless bunch of science geeks go prancing about like some fourth grade ninnies playing "Star Trek" and cheerfully yapping about the intricacies of hyperdrives, when most of the world can barely feed itself and the privileged fat few use Microsoft Windows... well... it makes the case of the doom-mongers that much stronger.
Hyperdrive, my ass. It's this same inane idiocy that cut jillions out of the NASA science budget so we can send some space cowboys somewhere they don't really belong.
RS
Of course I fully expect the clueless technological fan boys who all to often spend their sad empty lives begging for mod points will give me a -1 Flamebait, regardless of the fundamental merits of my argument.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I keep getting an image in my head of Newton's Laws of Whittlin', and it won't go away.
My hyperdrive is so fast, I will be out of the solar system by the time this comment gets modded up.
Here's what people said about other blue sky ideas:
You will fall off the edge of the world.
Man cannot fly!
I can go on, but I'll just leave this as a quote from someone else.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Arthur C. Clarke
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/03/12/busines s/news/20_27_233_10_06.txt
Charging customers to send them into space is a lofty goal for any business owner, and perhaps particularly in an area whose economy draws much of its strength from the availability of cheap land.
But that's the goal that Bill Sprague has set, and he even said that he chose Temecula largely because of its low cost of living relative to the coastal cities where his aerospace suppliers are based.
Sprague is building a 52-foot rocket. By October 2007, he hopes, passengers with $250,000 to spend will be able to ride it to the edge of outer space, where the curve of the Earth is visible and where the planet's gravity is slightly weaker than at the surface.
"If they look in any direction except at the Earth, they'll see black," Sprague said. "It'll be just the sun sitting in a sea of blackness. The stars will be visible."
Cool article, although the fact the rocket parts are only valued at $3mil right now would make me concerned about riding in it.
Why not deal with a quantum mirage or other quantum mechanical effects than to try to accelerate ourselves to fractions of the speed of light? Special relativity tells us that the faster we go the massive we get, and not to mention the acceleration itself would be a huge stress to the occupants or payload, unless you want to take weeks to accelerate to high velocities.
Why bother with those complexities when you have the possibility to "travel" faster than the speed of light by using alternative methods?
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
The owls are not what they seem
John Campbell and the rest of them got caught in the Bell Curve Effect - just like when Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office, Gene Roddenberry beat the others because the others got caught in a time dilation field where time slows down when you approach the speed of light. Gene Roddenberry's "Warp Speed" uses Deus Ex Machina technology to nullify time dilation and thus Captain Christopher Pike made it to the front steps of patent office first. Technically speaking, that is.
But then he had an... accident... and Captain Kirk actually got into the office and filed the patent.
Of course we heard Captain Pike had an accident in space and landed on a distant forbidden planet, but that was just a cover up.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
how could they leave infinite improbability drive? no wonder we are not going anywhere.
Nothing is impossible!
It came to me in a dream... The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it!
we edon't sUx0r as
The problem I see is that while it may be possible to break the light barrier without breaking causality and using up infinite amounts of energy (and getting infinite mass), we ourselves may be keeping us from discovering it. He's right; this needs non-mainstream thinking. Creativity is severely dampened by this-is-impossible cries. Some might see a challenge in it to disprove this, but even then, the fact that it is considered impossible is cemented in the mind, thereby having an impact on creativity. Also, the fact that sometimes, the scientific community behaves like the church condemning heretics (just read the part with the difficulties getting a hearing about this exotic propulsion concepts), and that consequently, there are MANY crackpots in these "forbidden zones" which create an enormous noise, do not make things really easier. This might be too complicated for an innovation made by some weird genius in his basement, but the powers that could handle it might be too narrow-minded.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Speed of light this! Expansion of humanity that! Materials and resources, the other.
These horrendously low-falutin' ideas about conquest and congestion of other planets (or worlds) are A. socially unfeasible, B. practically impossible, and most importantly C. disasterously myopic.
For the moment, let me get down to tabling A and B. They've been hashed and rehashed many times. Let me get down with the nitty gritty with C. The con job here is that "physical space is important". In no uncertain terms, physical space is increasingly irrelevant. And when I say "information space", I'm not talking about some Jason Lanieresque vision of virtual reality terminals. Try surfing wikipedia these days.
Human information space is increasing in size at a nauseatingly rapid rate, and undergoing immense topological transformations that are simultaneously completely
physical in character (that are subject to the investigations of physicists) but the
retranslation into purely physical terms is so expensive that it is more efficient simply
to think of it as a separate space.
To summarize:
physical space exploration: let's go faster and farther and take over as much of the territory as possible! Yay us! Emphasis on "take over". Makes you wonder if the speed of light is a kind of natural sanity reasons (from an anthropic principle perspective): if you are building a territory for algorithms to live in, and you have little colonies, you want the barrier to communication/contact between them to be high enough so that when the time comes around that they're ready to get in contact with other self-aware entities, you don't want the first action to be to blow the other up!
informational space exploration: more interesting.
A isn't true, B might be (we don't know yet). Also, in order to expand "information space", you need to expand in physical space. And by killing off dreams about the last real frontier, you aren't doing any good. Just like the farmer boy who always dreams about moving out and becoming something greater, but who is forced by his parents to remain in the farm.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
...will be dead when this all happens. Could be a pitty... but the discovery's and new techs made and found in my time -- and those that will be 'active' short term where and will be shocking enough. Always nice that tech is and will be used to kill each other in another million ways.
heck we cant even return to the moon!
:)
and they are thinking of other stars
one step at a time people (look at the chineese at the rate they are going they will get to the moon faster that the US, im sure by 2020 the chineese will have the biggest economy in the world while the US fight of some war in YET ANOTHER MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRY)
anyways thats my rant [itll probably be modded down out of existence...]
Your opinion is yours. but it sounds awfully like the 19th century opponents of trains. "ooh the human body cannot sustain speeds in excess of 20 mph, it's just unnatural". Railway travel (general) "I see what will be the effect of it; that it will set the whole world a-gadding. Twenty miles an hour, sir! - Why, you will not be able to keep an apprentice boy at his work! Every Saturday evening he must have a trip to Ohio to spend a Sunday with his sweetheart. Grave plodding citizens will be flying about like comets. All local attachments will be at an end. It will encourage flightiness of intellect. Veracious people will turn into the most immeasurable liars. All conceptions will be exaggerated by the magnificent notions of distance. -- Only a hundred miles off!--Tut, nonsense, I'll step across, madam, and bring your fan'...And then, sir, there will be barrels of port, cargoes of flour, chaldrons of coal, and even lead and whiskey, and such like sober things that have always been used to slow travelling -- whisking away like a sky rocket. It will upset all the gravity of the nation...Upon the whole, sir, it is a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harm-scarum whirligig. Give me the old, solemn, straight forward, regular Dutch Canal - three miles an hour for expresses, and two rod jog-trot journeys -- with a yoke of oxen for heavy loads. I go for beasts of burden. It is more formative and scriptural, and suits a moral and religious people better. -- None of your hop skip and jump whimsies for me." Source: From the Western Sun of Vincennes, Indiana, July 24, 1830, as quoted by Seymour Dunbar in A History of Travel in America, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1915, Vol. III. p. 938. http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.htm l
Just keep your horse then...
Other than that, the biggest shock I got out of the article was NASA in the same paragraph as "heritage technologies". Supporting the technologies of the past is NOT what we're paying taxes to support NASA for. Particularly since we're not going to get space industrialization with launch costs of a few thousand dollars a pound, and that's about as good as we can do with rockets.
Tech Public Policy stuff
This is what Paradigm Shifts are all about.
Paradigm Shifts are moments in history when the truth, as seen by the majority, changes to an other one.
No one can force one of these to happen as they are bound by the passing of the generations (sometimes many: see religion), when old encrusted ideas literally die with the oldest generation.
This means it take time, there is just no way arround it, but eventually a new "The Truth" arrises (which can also be a revived old truth, and will include some new false things), which will replace the old one.
And suddendly (maybe) the light speed will be a problem no more.
Have faith (and patience)!
Ernest.
Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
Look at the physical volume of your computer.
Remember the physical volume of ENIAC.
The physical volume of the DataVault of a Connection Machine is much, much greater
than that of a 250GB SATA disk.
The last real frontier isn't that big thing in sky! People stare up at the sky and think
of colonizing foreign worlds. We're too immature yet for that. The whole species is.
Remember Q in the last episode of ST:TNG, at the end, in the courtroom.
Vector spaces of financial data, vector spaces of word frequencies. Spaces of files. Spaces of ideas. That's where we're at.
In no uncertain terms, physical space is increasingly irrelevant.
Tell that to the asteroid that's barreling down on us (and make no mistake, there is one - we just don't know where or how far away it is).
This navel-contemplation point of view is interesting. But that nasty "real world" will get in the way from time to time.
If you want a more esoteric argument, also consider that it's entirely possible that human information space is limited by physical space. That is, we simply don't explore possible avenues because of the physical space we're in. This is usually called "necessity is the mother of invention."
The MPAA is not cool enough to have ninja lawyers. And they're all employed by the EFF anyways.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Sure, a few blackboards for a few mathematicians and physicists might seem like a cheap way for NASA to look like it is doing something today but stabilizing the wormhole is going to be a bitch in 24th century dollars.
Until propellantless propulsion is invented any long range space travel is just a hallucination of virtual reality.
As long as we're appropriating money for nonsense, can I have $40 billion to discover the slow-motion Gravity Bubble? Lifts Immense Loads In Total Silence, trading gravity particles for time. The equation is T=Gc^2.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
> Sure, a few blackboards for a few mathematicians and physicists might seem like a cheap way for NASA to look like it is doing something
Administrator #1: "If we start a Department of Mathematics, all we'll need to buy is pencils, papers, and erasers."
Administrator #2: "If we start a Department of Philosophy, we wouldn't need to buy the erasers."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How does population control cheapen life? We selectively breed all sorts of animals, much to their own benefit. We have many animals that are far stronger and healthy than the average human on this planet.
It is technology and unrestricted population growth that cheapens life. Where once only the most fit survived, now the most depraved and monsterous get by due to the genius of higher forms of humans. Billions are alive only due to the generosity of a few.
How are billions of people living in barracks style housing projects not cheapened? When we look at the beauty and vigor of more healthy civilizations of the past, are these people not total contradistinctions of say, Classical Athens? Will we have timeless statues of these creatures? And what of the lowest forms? Are we to imprison 1/4 of our population, when we could have prevented them from ever being born?
Eugenics is the safest, most sane, AND humane way to deal with the desires of human nature, the power of our technology, and the constraints of our world.
Only the best should survive, and the only way to do that is to arbitrarily set standards of physical fitness; both psychological and aesthetic. Only the intelligent and beautiful should be allowed to reproduce. Criminals, the mentally deficient, the insane, and the ugly should all be sterilized.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Its not FTL but baby will it get the ball rolling. I'll just run this by everyone here... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a sort of recent slashdot discussion, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch? I contacted the man responsible for a similar idea, the skyramp (warning: hideous javascript menu may break firefox), Carlton Meyer, and had a dialogue in which he pointed me to a tower launch archive.
The ideas I see bandied about there are similar to what I had in mind, which would be essentially an 11km tall tower (think pylons rather than skyscrapers, based at sea), with evacuated airless launch tubes, using nuclear reactors to power a maglev or pulley system to accelerate vessels to escape velocity. These would then emerge above the end of the troposphere, with it's associated weather and air pressure, and have little to no fuel needed to escape the earth's gravity, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. At 1m/s acceleration, you would be at escape velocity when you exit the top of the tower.
Not only would this enable multiple launches daily, it is, unlike the space elevator, readily achievable with today's technology, and financially viable as well. Given NASA had an annual budget of $16.2 billion for 2005, and a nuclear power plant costs a cool billion to build, give or take, we could have this up and running in a few years. And once we are up there...
Space has got vast, essentially unlimited resources. One recent story pointed out the trillion dollar iron asteroid up there. The thing has about 5 tons of steel for every man, woman and child on earth. And thats just one of god knows how many... billions more?
Once we leap the cost to escape hurdle (as I think I have managed), we can proceed to use these resources. There are several obstacles in the way of this, first of which is zero gee mining, we have no idea how to do it. We can either mine the ore out there, or bring the asteroid back into orbit and slice it up there. Or slice it up and send it back to orbit. I would be opposed to moving it back into orbit for processing, purely for the debris issue. Perhaps a lunar base would have some merit there.
So we set up a mining and processing operation either on the moon or in deep orbit, and start cutting and processing one of those bad boys. Whats the first thing we build? A bigger processing and mining operation. Space exploration, much like the internet, has to be a largely incestuous affair at first, existing solely for its own benefit.
Once we have that mastered, we can move to algae pods in orbit for food production, oxygen refining, and fuel production (biodiesel or chemical engines), all of which can be powered by the immense energy of the sun, and use the raw materials abundantly available in space. Whether you ship that stuff back to earth or use it for further colonisation, its a vital step.
The production of automated scouts is also a high priority; a vast amount of surveyor and prospector drones to sweep and map every square inch of every rock and gas in the system, out to the Oort cloud, and figure out what they are made of. I'd err on the side of quantity rather than quality, still no reason not to have either. This could be combined with deep space observatories that would make hubble look like the end of a coke bottle.
So now we have a manufacturing bridgehead, a good idea of what's interesting out there, and a cheap means to launch to orbit. Actual manned system ships would come next, to either colonise or investigate the system. The rest, as they say, is (future) history.
A lot of this would require automatio
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Texas Instruments has announced plans to revive its flux capacitor project.
Yup... Because we know stuff like transparent aluminum can never come true. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
When cryptography is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy
correct?
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Disclosure: I am a neuroscientist.
I think the most likely way we're going to get intelligence to other stars is to send AI computers, since they wouldn't mind the long wait. Even if creating AI is hard, if Moore's law holds, in 50 years we'll be able to simulate every neuron in a whole human brain on a computer in real time, so even if we don't understand intelligence, we'll be able to reproduce it. And if biological life is so important to you, send some frozen embrios (or info about their DNA on hard drives, and stock chemicals for building embrios from scratch) and artificial wombs with the computers too - let them build a colony, then defrost their kids.
Far-fetched? In my opinion, it's much more likely than being able to keep whole humans happy on a 100 lightyear trek. Yes, Moore's law might not hold up, but I predict we'll be able to upload brains before sending our fragile bodies intact to distant stars.
Patrick
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
They're perfectly safe.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Bah, you know what will happen is that they'll try to build this stuff, can't get it working, and then revert to Apollo-era technology again.
It originally appeared on Space.com where it occupies only one page.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The problem with the NASA hyperdrive program is not that it costs money, the problem is that people like you think it's going to be an alternative to cleaning up our act here at home.
You will not get off this planet, and neither will many generations to come. There won't be self-sustaining space colonies, and there won't be interstellar travel. We either live on this planet or we die on this planet. Deal with it.
It's one thing to deal with the very real fact that we can't just up and leave. It's quite another to argue against researching ways to leave on the basis that we shouldn't ever because we can't now.
.001% want to work on some pie-in-the-sky plan instead of the ordinary mundane make-work, why should we stop them?
We only need 2% of the population to be productive to pretty much support everyone else. So if
Oil & efficiency has brought us into the age of Science and Art. I say to the artists: stop trying to tell the scientists what to do.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I know this is kind of pointless but it's nice to see Dr. B mentioned in a normal article. He taught my Space Systems Concepts class a year ago at UCF and I have met with him a few times as an advisor for our senior design project with the Nanosat-4 competition. He's pretty heavy into the propulsion side and is developing an operational Microwave-Electro-Thermal thruster. Interesting guy but a bit obessessive with the aliens thing. He always throws klingon references into his school lectures/presentations. I won't give his precise work location but it's at Cape Canaveral.
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
Here's another way to view the math - if you start at standstill (i.e. v(0)=0) and expect to be moving at 11km/s at the exit of the tube, your average velocity is Vaverage = (v(exit) - v(0))/2 = 5.5km/s. Using this number you can calculate the time to traverse the launch tube: t = distance/Vaverage = 11km / 5.5 km/s = 2 seconds. You can also calculate the acceleration: a = v(exit)/t = 11km/s / 2 = 5.5km/s^2. So relative to 1 g = 9.8m/s^2, your launch system will require occupants and payload to sustain about 561 g's for the 2 second launch.
For electrical and mechanical payloads, that's achievable. Many small atmospheric-study payloads have been gun-launched to orbital altitudes, but on ballistic trajectories. Cited accelerations are on the order of 12000-14000 g's for very short durations.
For people and critters: pink goo.
Wait something is fishy here. 2 seconds to traverse the launch tube is wildly out there. Even to accelerate to 30m/s would take a lot longer than that. What you are looking at with this system is a slower initial acceleration, and then power being applied every meter (perhaps in increasing amounts) via a maglev system (one or more rails). So the time taken to cross each 1m second becomes shorter and shorter, but the actual speed increase (in terms of pressure) stays the same. Its not like a cannon blast. And how do cars reach 27m/s in 3 or 4 seconds? I think your numbers are a little off, there.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Quantum theory is still not connected to the theory of relativity. Until we have a unified Physics model that explains the universe, we can not be certain if it is possible to 'warp space' and travel to other stars.
At the time of Newton, the theory of Gravity was the ultimate achievement of the human mind. Then came Einstein who showed that Newton's theory was a specific solution for a specific set of states, and that a more generic model exists.
Who is to say that we are not in the same situation now? there are still things unexplained: a) the cosmological constant K, b) the accelerating expansion of the universe, c) the leap from the Quantum world to the macroworld d) the Cassimir effect, etc. Until we can solve all these, and many others, under the same Physical model, we can not really say if we can have 'hyperdrive' or not.
Given that the quantum world is so strange and "unrealistic", my gut feeling is that warp drive is possible. If we ('we' as humans) do not pursuite every possible solution, we do not know what is possible.
And let's not forget the side-discoveries...for example, we may discover infinite energy, or teleportation, or something that will foundamentally alter the situation on Earth to the better (no more wars for material things is one thing that springs to mind!)...
I fixed your statement for you:
"[Until it becomes possible to have an action without an equal and opposite reaction] any long range space travel is just a hallucination of virtual reality."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, let's say you're at the last meter of the tube, and you're going 10999m/s. Over the last meter of the tube, you increase the velocity to 11000m/s. Delta-v is 1m/s, time is (roughly) 1m divided by 10999.5m/s or 0.000090913s. So acceleration is about 10999.5m/s^2, or 1122G. For a 100kg human payload (well, former human, after 1122G), you need 12.1GW at this point of the launch, and of course very few useful payloads will survive this acceleration. This is an even worse scenario than constant acceleration at 561G like an earlier poster calculated.
Back To The Future fans might note that a 10kg payload will require 1.21GW.
But just because your physics don't work out is no reason to poo-poo the idea. Let's figure out the real numbers involved and see if we can make it usable. Let's suppose we want to build a launch tube long enough to accelerate at a constant 5G and reach 11km/s. This will take 224 seconds. At an average velocity of 5.5km/s, we need a tube 1232km long. A 100kg payload will need a constant 27MW power source, but since the acceleration is only needed for four minutes, the energy used is only about 1700kWh. At Alabama Power's rates, this would only cost $117. So now our only problem
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
So an 11km launch tube, going at 5 gees, gets us almost 8% of escape velocity. And you're telling me that a tube 1232km long is needed for full escape velocity? Methinks I need to hire an actual physicist for a couple of days to get the facts here, cos a whole lotta numbers ain't adding up. :D
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Just doing a "back of the envelope" calculation and an understanding of raw structural engineering, I fail to see how you can get a tube up that high.
OK, Mt. Everest is about 9km, and it is in theory possible to construct a tower over 3 km, so in absolute raw theory this may be possible, but highly unlikely. Besides political implications, the Himalayas are also aligned east and west, which is not a very good orientation for spaceflight.
Perhaps more reasonable and something that would be useful in this context is to use Mt. Chimborazo in Equador. Discounting the fact that this is a volcano and not a geologic uplift mountain like Everest (with related dangers that the top of the mountain could blow up at any time wiping out the launch system), building a tube up to its 6200 m summit is goiing to be an impressive feat. Still, if you have it go on an east-west alignment taking into account that it is only 1 degree north of the equator, you get additional tangential velocity from the Earth's spin + some significant height. It might work, but just barely. Even here I think you can get at most about 7 km into the sky, not 11.
Also keep in mind that if you are intending to scar up mountains in this way, you have to find a government that is inclined to bend over and let you repeal just about any environmental impact laws that may exist.
I find it hard to believe that this approach is going to be used unless there is some huge amount of traffic of stuff going into space, and mind you places like Mt. Chimborazo are also going to be ideal candidates for a space elevator as well, which is equally exotic but at least has some significant more engineering which has gone into the design and development of such systems.
This is a "back burner" project that may or may not get built. The rationale for building a system like this on the Moon, however, is more justified, especially as you can build the "evacuated tube" on the Moon without even having a tube, and the escape velocity is significantly lower. It would also be a good place to build a proof of concept device first before you start to strap people into the launcher for a much harder to engineer device here on the Earth.
And about half of that came true. Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Just hoping to clarify the math a bit more... Mr. Yak injected an extra zero into his calculations.
The relevant formulas are:
Not as bad as ShavenYak made it out to be, but still way hard to accomplish. The real killer in the numbers is that nasty "^2"... To double the final velocity, the tower must quadruple in size (all other things being constant).
A few final thoughts:
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
If you had read my response, you would have realised that the evacuation is a non-issue. And the acceleration is not unfeasable, just incredibly bad for the health. The more people I talk to, the more realisation I have that the acceleration is a serious issue. However it appears now that this system is very useful for getting people and equipment into geosynchronous orbit, at a miniscule fraction of the current cost, and en masse. And keep in mind that this is without chemical rocket assistance. If you add even a small amonut of extra thrust (nowhere near what the shuttle uses) you can go just about anywhere you like. But orbit is sufficient for now. Once there, the rest of my suggestions could easily be put into play. Its a whole lot easier to get from orbit to escape than it is to get from ground to escape, especially when you can shuttle up components at a rate of a few thousand tons a day.
:D
One way or the other I have gotten some wildly variant responses in terms of the acceleration required and its effects, which tell me that a lot of people really have no idea. Also its worth mentioning that this system would effectively shelve any space elevator ambitions for the forseeable future, so I am getting a lot of flak from that crowd. Some serious research shall be done.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Yes, I thought something was amiss, and I barely understood the equation, heheh. I have been thinking about the fact that its relatively easy to insert something into GEO with this system (and very very cheap, comparitively speaking). It would be an idea to build components for further exploration up there, since its far easier to escape the earth's gravity well from GEO than from the surface, especially if you can move a few thousand tons of components up there every day. Not to mention that if you combine this system with a chemical propellant (much less than would be needed for the shuttle, for example), you could go pretty much anywhere you liked.
Also, I discussed building it laying down with Carlton Meyer, the skyramp guy. Apparently almost all of it would have to be vertical or you're dealing with some serious forces that we really don't have the engineering to handle right now.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Zero gee mining, heres a notion. Its like eating a half ton of cheese; you can't fit your mouth around it. So you cut it up into smaller segments, with cheesewire. So lets take say a rectangular frame of adjustable size (from a few hundred meters to many kilometers), power it with solar power, even a satellite ring of solar reflectors which it deploys when it reaches its target. These power lasers or some kind of diamond saw arrangement going from one side of the framework to the other, which slice the asteroid up. That doesn't resolve your problems, however, since now you have slices of asteroid falling all over the shop.
So when a laser passes through a segment of rock, foam of a sticky sort gets pumped in behind it (I don't think this exists right now, but its not impossible, I am sure) to keep the bits stuck together. Then, just keep cross sectioning the rock until you have manageable bits, which can be broken off. Then the third part of the ensemble comes into play.
The refinery, nearby, would be fed chunks of asteroid, and superheat them to seperate components. Not having gravity, a massive centrifuge (centriforge?) would be needed to seperate the parts into their elements. Split up, cooled, and shaped, these ingots of asteroidy goodness could then be shipped back to a manufactory in orbit, or processed on the spot (unlikely given the complexity of the components to be designed, circuit boards, ceramics, the lot). Even bare rock could be used as nutrients for algae pods.
Since we don't know whats out there, I can't begin to say which components could possibly be manufactured in space, and which would need earth based supplies, at least at first. Once we have a vast stream or streams of ore sailing back towards earth, dozens of these rigs slicing up rocks, and more being built, the sky is indeed the limit. Also another factor is that cutting up even one decent sized asteroid might take years, so it might be better just to slice off bits from it, maybe encase it in some kind of foam or resin first for stability.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Convert here
Man, you really need that seminar!
v = 11000 m/s (escape velocity, more or less)
a = 500 m/s^2 (a bit more than 5 gs)
Unfortunately, 1G is about 10 m/s^2, not 100 m/s^2, so ShavenYak is correct.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Suggestion: Build it laying down. A ramp instead of a tower. A 242 km ramp, curving up towards some mountains and a "final bit" that's like your proposed tower clearing the main atmosphere.
The curving bit sounds a little troublesome. Converting horizontal velocity to vertical velocity requires a force. If that's provided by the curving tube, then the tube, capsule, and their interface would have to be able to support much more force than just launching vertically to start with. Any additional reinforcement on the capsule takes away from payload.
Yes, the only curvature would be at the very bottom, I reckon. The vast majority would be straight up. I would envision eight or ten loading bays arrayed in arms around the tower, leading into a singe central launch tube, so you could load and prep a good few ships while others are launching. Also the arms could serve a double function as structural support.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
DOH!
I stand spanked.
I hereby retract all posts I have made on Slashdot.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
My newsreader would encode/decode the post if you pressed ^D. I sure hope nobody did it using pattern analysis when it was always rot-13.
It's cool that you can do pattern analysis you hblsfd whtu gsi bnjskw.
Man, you really need that seminar!
People who just laugh this away remind me of the "slippery slope" people for gay marriage. So much of what we already have is through impossible ideas, why do we feel the need to be realist now? How much did our ancestors create in the name and pursuit of magic, gods and the divine, which would be seen as impossible to the scientists of today? It is not necessarily the end product, but the journey that matters. Who knows what we'll create along the way. Many medicines where found while looking for the cure to other diseases. This is no different. Even if we don't acieve Warp Drive, we may find something different that could be just as useful. We understand so little about the universe, it's snobbish, in my opinion, to laugh up wonderous theory.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
Nothing fishy; just math and basic physics. You know the boundary conditions - v(initial) = 0, and v(exit) = 11km/s. With an 11km-long launch tube, you've got a pretty well-defined system. If you start with the easiest scenario - a constant-value acceleration, starting from standstill, you can calculate the necessary equations:
... math. It doesn't have an opinion. You may not like the answer, but that doesn't make it wrong. The system you asked for - escape velocity at the end of an 11km launch tube, starting at standstill - defines the environment. The math told you what you'd need to do in order to achieve those goals.
... it's math. Embrace the Math, it's powerful stuff. As for the car accelerating to 27m/s in 3 seconds, it's all about horsepower (or kW outside the US.) Using the same equations above, v = at says (27m/s) = a (3s). Solving for acceleration, a = 27/3 = 9m/s/s, or about 1g (not terribly impressive.) Performance cars have upwards of 300hp (220kW) powerplants, which probably isn't "power at the wheel." Another poster indicated the need to have about 12.1GW to put 100kg through your launch tube ... that's 5 orders of magnitude more power required. Nah, the math is consistent.
a = a (which happens to be a constant)
Integrate to get velocity:
v = a * t (which happens to be the equation for a line intersecting with [0,0])
Integrate to get distance:
d = 1/2 * a * (t^2) (which happens to be a parabola)
If you have an 11km tube, and you enter it at zero velocity, and exit it at 11km/s, the above equations define the *minimum* acceleration necessary to meet the requirements. If you substitute a more complex acceleration profile and do the integrations, you'll come out with similar equations, but the peak acceleration is going to be higher at some points than with the constant version.
And the math is just
Turn it around. I'll give you some "artistic license," too. I'll allow you to have 100g constant acceleration over the duration of the launch, and make the assumption that we invent some tech that allows hyu-mons to survive the stress. The d=1/2at^2 equation dictates that 11km=1/2(100*9.8m/s/s)(t^2). It'll take 4.738 seconds to traverse the tube. You now know "t", so you can calculate the exit velocity as v = at = (100*9.8)*(4.738) = 4643.24 m/s. Unfortunately, that's not quite LEO orbital velocity (7.5km/s), so you're passengers will need additional protection from the ballistic trajectory (and subsequent re-entry).
It's not my opinion