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New Nuclear-powered Spaceship Design Revealed
Iddo Genuth writes "A U.S. based company introduced an
innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months) and enable future spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling. The system, which may dramatically affect interplanetary space travel is called the Miniature Magnetic Orion (Mini-Mag Orion for short), and is an optimization of the 1958 Orion interplanetary propulsion concept."
recently have an article about trip to mars in a week? So.. this is really.. an inferior mode of transport for all those Mars holidayers...
Hopefully this spaceship will be able to slow down before it reaches mars.
Unlike some spaceships... http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/2328233
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
The use of nuclear power in space is banned by treaty.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Jupiter in a year is great but how long does it take to get to Uranus?
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
That's unfair. Gibson's "design" was loose speculation, whereas hard math has been done both on the original Orion and on this potential improvement.
Certainly, neither of them has existed in practice -- but one was wild speculation, whereas the other had (and has) actual engineering.
An WHUMP Orion WHUMP based WHUMP drive WHUMP can WHUMP be a WHUMP bit WHUMP rough, WHUMP any WHUMP study WHUMP on the WHUMP effects WHUMP on cargo/passWHUMPengers?
speeding up via riding the wave of successive explosions is great for an unmanned craft. For a manned craft, though, I have a couple questions:
1. How will people deal with the psychological effect of the never-ending pounding brought by this type of propulsion?
2. Will scientists avoid this issue by instead strapping people into some kind of suspension and using a fewer number of larger explosions to get up-to-speed per day?
3. What effect would that have on a person physically? We know people can take X G's, but what about being subjected to constant hits like that. If they are stronger, it could have some as-yet unforseen effect on our physiology.
...I think someone forgot to tell the sun.
... this just means you get to nowhere faster.
(Sorry, reflexive poke at Wyoming. Wyoming has wonderful people, natural resources, and breathable atmosphere. Mars is 0 for 3. Jupiter doesn't even have a surface to land on, but now we can hurry up to get there and not land on it! Like the robot we're sending had some place it would rather be for the marginal time...)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Oh, quit your bickering you two
We can argue on slashdot all we want but what's The Difference.... Engine
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
.1c, not too bad, I'll take 4 of em.
:-( NASA and innovate are 2 things that aren't going to happen anytime soon.
God was knocking & he wanted in bad.... (Footfall I think)
Be about 70 years (if ever) before it gets off paper tho
Here's a few pics of the Mini-Mag in action. Looks vaguely familiar... Interesting how the cargo capsule seems to release from one end and dock at the other. Very intriguing.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Nuclear weapons, yes.
Power sources, no.
There are plenty of probes and spy satellites that are powered by plutonium-laden RTGs.
Something about a nuclear powered space ship blowing up in the upper atmosphere on take-off/landing just doesn't seem appealing to me...wonder why?
If their gadget for doing the z-pinch thingy is anything like the Z machine at Sandia you won't be putting it on a spacecraft any time soon...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It's an MMO, but how are they gonna deal with the latency between here and Mars? Better yet, what kind of hardware is the server running, and how much RAM will the client require? How do they plan to get past the annoyance of level-grinding?
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
If you unscrew the cap in the stern of the spacecraft, you will find a spare nuclear reactor behind the battery terminal.
First off, I am not a rocket scientist, but I am studying for a BS in Aerospace Engineering.
How exactly is this supposed to reduce travel time? Current lengths of travel are not due to a lack of available thrust or due to amount of fuel available but rather the path taken to reach the destination. Currently in order to travel to say Mars Hohman transfers are often used. These paths and others like them take a certain amount of time to complete, and stronger engines or more available Delta-V allow only for more instantaneous entrances of the transfers or more allowed change in course once at the ship's destination.
In order to reduce time traveled a different orbital mechanic is needed. Even if a ship were to travel in a straight line toward a destination at a rapid enough speed that it would not have to meet up with it too much further along in its orbit it would have to be able to kill relative speed quickly enough to enter a capture orbit.
Anyone know what orbital transfer method they're saying that this engine makes possible?
The original studies performed extensive studies on this problem. They solved it with a double shock absorber system; by tuning the absorbers and the frequency at which bombs were ejected, they could achieve a constant acceleration of 1-2 g.
All sorts of nasty crap will be blowing out the tail end of this puppy. Wasn't this predicted in Space 1999 with the Queller Drive?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This one is going to be built in orbit. It will never take off or land.
OTOH, the "fuel" pellets are going to be made of fissionable materials. I hope they point the nozzle in a direction that doesn't result in un-detonated bomblets burning up in the atmosphere.
Also Homer Simpson is the Safety Inspector for the nuclear parts of the project. He was picked for his Astronaut for NASA and nuclear technician / nuclear Safety job experience.
Niven and Pournelle.
These people are visionaries, except when it comes to anticipating large server loads.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
and enable future spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling.
The New Horizons probe, heading to Pluto, took slightly more than a year to reach Jupiter. However, there was no need to stop (park in orbit) and it didn't need to carry bulky life-support stuff. Thus, it could take the fast train.
Table-ized A.I.
You mean like a plutonium powered vehicle?
I believe they are using the "Journalist Transfer Orbit." This is a highly specialized piece of orbital mechanics: basically, you take the average distance to the destination as given by Wikipedia and divide by the spacecraft's top speed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Reading the (now Slashdotted) article, it sounds like this design came directly out of research done into antimatter catalyzed micro-fission. ACMF is a well-proven technology that uses minuscule amounts of antimatter to kickstart or enhance a fission reaction. Because the technology was fairly straightforward and had good returns for antimatter quantities that are reasonable to produce, NASA was funding research into an engine called ICAN.
I remember that there was some talk of actually launching a small probe based on the concept, but apparently the plan was scrapped. (Probably to help fund manned space travel.) Whatever antimatter confinement technologies they were working on may have led to the development of this new magnetic confinement fission technology. Or it could just be a coincidence.
Either way, nuclear technology of this sort is fairly well developed and is not a pipe dream. At least not from an engineering standpoint. Getting the risk adverse US Government and NASA to actually build one of the many known-quantity engines we have on hand is a completely different ball of wax. They're still trying to get us reliable LEO access (Thank God for Griffin is all I can say), so I doubt we'll be seeing any advanced engines in practice until the CEV/Orion project enters its third phase.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
First, this is a blog troll, to drive traffic to some ".info" site. The actual paper, "Proposed Follow-on Mini-Mag Orion Pulsed Propulsion Concept" presented at an AIAA conference last year, is more useful.
The basic idea is to create a small fission (not fusion) explosion using magnetic compression. Nuclear weapons use chemical explosives to create an implosion, and during the implosion the fissionable material is compressed hard enough to get a 1.5x to (maybe) 2x density increase. With magnetic compression, a small pellet can be compressed hard enough to get a 10x density increase. This allows smaller explosions, around 50 gigajoules instead of the 20 terajoules of a fission bomb. They want to use curium or californium as the fuel, rather than plutonium.
They also want to use magnetic containment, rather than an Orion-style "pusher plate" sprayed with oil. Unclear if that can be made to work.
The experimental work (they compressed an aluminum cylinder with a big magnet at Sandia) was done back in 2002. This isn't really under active development.
It's not a totally unreasonable idea, but it would be a huge job to make it work. For one thing, the plan is to assemble a large spacecraft in orbit, not to take off from Earth. It doesn't help with the problem of putting mass in orbit.
Perhaps we can re-activate George Bush's commission and make him a test pilot?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I have a hard time believing that. I'd have to see their calculations. If true then this technology could make interstellar spacecraft possible (sorry only robots with at least 50 year travel times for now).
Still, this has very little to do with Orion apart from them both being nuclear pulse propulsion. They only call it a successor to Orion because most people are familiar with Orion.
Orion has already been obsoleted by a similar (but much more effective) design using normal-sized nuclear explosions -- Medusa. Medusa reverses the Orion design, having a parachute in front towing the craft, and detonating the explosives in front of the parachute. It uses structures in tension instead of compression (lighter), it allows the explosions to be further from the craft (less radiation), allows a longer acceleration stroke (smoother acceleration), and captures a larger percentage of the explosive energy.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
Anyone else read that as "Miniature Magnetic Onion"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jupiter_interior.png
METAL HYDROGEN. If the pressure didn't kill you, the temperatures would vaporize you.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I was really excited about this until I clicked on the article and found out it only goes .1 warp speed. That's not even half impulse.
Maybe next time.
The company behind the technology is Andrews Space at this site.
From my (admitted limited) viewpoint as an (inexperienced) aerospace engineer, they look like the real thing.
The system is actually described in a 2003 AIAA conference paper linked on this page. The paper is titled "Mini-MagOrion: A Pulsed Nuclear Rocket for Crewed Solar System Exploration."
I've only glanced over the article so far, but it suggests specific impulses in the 10,000 seconds plus range. That's a critical measure of efficiency in a rocket that dictates the velocity it can obtain. The shuttle's SSMEs get about 455 seconds of specific impulse at a high thrust (millions of Newtons) and ion drives, like the one on the DS1 probe, and the like get specific impulses (Isp) of about 3000 seconds at low thrust. (millinewtons). Apparently the Mini-Mag Orion can produce thrust on par with the SSME. Yikes.
--sabre86
...Calculus!! I think it was Destination Moon or Explorers on the Moon (Adventures of Tintin). He had a nuclear powered rocket then. Bah!
It's like that, just for a few million miles.
Bring some asprin.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We keep hearing about all these great technologies that will whiz us around the solar system but none of them are going to be of much use. Anything remotely nuclear is probably not going to be allowed to opperate in atmosphere. The military might be allowed to make and man such vehicles but I doubt I'll be booking a trip to the moon on such a thing.
So as usual until we get some serious work put into cheap methods to get out of the gravity well nobody is going to have any real dreams fulfilled. Maybe some people think it's enough for scientists to get info out of it but even for someone very pro science like me that doesn't cut it at all. Not even close.
from the Article, It's non-nuclear, uses explosives, magnetic field nozzle. Claims 50% more efficient than Space Shuttle engines. Starship drive. Think about that for a moment. They are claiming better Isp than a hydrogen/oxygen engine using solid explosives, and proposing a chemically powered starship. They don't have a working model, or even a real process yet. Using explosives will result in relatively massive exhaust particles, meaning low Isp. I'd like to see how their physics works out. Seems like a rocket version of perpetual motion to me. Apparently they got a little NASA money, so they must know a congressman. But, I can see no way they can deliver on these promises.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
a bundle of smokes and an interesting tip to allow you to smoke em all at once...
Oh you're no fun.
WHUMP ! WHUMP ! Giggle!
The common thread that we keep coming back to is that to really do spaceflight, you must have some form of nuclear power. The laws of physics are profoundly strong on this point. Space is too far and gravity is too strong for chemical rockets to really be successful.
The ideal solution is to find a source of uranium in space, beyond Earth's gravity well, such that, we can mine the uranium in space, and fuel nuclear powered spacecraft from perhaps the moon. I don't see that happening any time soon, as, it is my understanding that its is practically a fluke that a relatively small body like Earth should wind up with such a heavy ore at all. The gods were kind to us during our solar system formation, and it feels unlikely that any asteroid should have a significant uranium deposit.
That leaves us to launching live reactors into space from Earth. Unfortunately, despite safety precautions, the environmental movement makes the development of nuclear powered spacecraft a political impossibility. We can't even build a reactor on land without a mountain of red tape and lawsuits from the greens, even when we know that building such reactors are necessary to combat global warming. Putting a nuclear reactor into something that flies is unthinkable to them, and they would surely think that putting a nuclear reactor into a rocket is downright crazy. Even RTGs, relatively benign, are met with protest. Were it up them, there would be no pictures of Saturn at all from Cassini.
In this one area, the left wing claim to scientific curiosity falls flat on its face. The science is not worth the risk. I think the key to be able to do this, really, is going to be to engage the right wing instead and paint such research as a matter of national security. The right wing, despite its proclaimed conservatism, has a penchant for throwing caution into the wind when it suits it. Heck, they'd blow off global warming just to be able to keep driving trucks. Put a nuclear reactor on a spacecraft to get to Mars in a few weeks, sure, why not? For them, though, the issue is going to be why. Doing it just for the science isn't going to cut it. However, the right does have a penchant for engaging in enormous projects for ideological goals - witness the cold war with Russia, the current war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. None of THOSE projects were cheap or short term, and honestly, only the right wing has the zeal needed to overcome failure after failure as would occur in a really long term space colonization project. Even if you disagree with it, religion is an enormously powerful motivator.
Thus, you'll never get many righties to buy into space for the science, or the future profits, because both don't really do much. But if you could sell them space as a religious duty, then by God, they will say screw the left, throw a hundred billion dollars a year into building nuclear rockets that this country needs, all to create christian colonies on planets and take resources from asteroids. If anything, one could always further argue that with the Russians claiming the North Pole, then, the USA has to claim (something), and it may as well be Mars and the asteroid belt. Asking them to void the UN Treaty on claiming stuff on space would elicit an automatic yes - as the right is already predisposed against the UN.
Surely such a project would be better for the world than the war on terror.
The point is this, and this goes for both left and right. We are entering a time of great consequence for the United States, if not the world, and, it is time for us to stop seeing each other as enemies simply because we have different ideologies. We can make our differences work for us, so long as we express what we want for ourselves as individuals, not as collective party members, and from there identify those strengths we have in each other.
In my case, I selfishly want to see the USA building a fleet of nuclear, manned, rockets, mining asteroids, and colonizing other planets. And, if I have to read the
This is my sig.
The best way right now to travel around the solar system is on the interplanetary transport network: slow but low cost transports that are great for moving robotic probes efficiently around the solar system.
I think it's premature to worry about building nuclear powered rockets like that; by the time we will actually be ready to send a human to another planet, we'll have completely different technology. Or, perhaps, we can use suspended animation and use the ITN even for human cargo.
I imagine that the Martian lifeforms we're going there to look for might care.
Looks like an interesting company. The CEO and President are married.
However, there have been numerous Slashdot stories that have been about companies looking for investors. It would be more comfortable if such stories would have a statement that no one at Slashdot or Slashdot's parent company took money to run the story.
All nerds will like MMO, even those who do not play.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
James Follett's novel 'Torus', in which the Soviets build a weapon that works on the same principle: detonate a nuke and use a magnetic field to contain and direct the particles into a beam.
Aren't we trying to eliminate the gas engine with more efficient engines? Now we are building a way larger one? Go, detroit!!!!
Even if this craft can reach speeds of 10% the speed of light we would still be limited to interplanetary exploration and exploitation (human nature dictates this). As far as interstellar travel goes it would still take about 45 years to send a spacecraft to the nearest star, not to mention the 4.5 year transmission delay. Still interplanetary travel is a big breakthrough if this article can be believed.
:-)
The real breakthrough would be an interstellar spacecraft (the realm of Science Fiction at the moment) and this would really open up our galaxy, however a person would have to live for thousands of years to visit each solar system in our galaxy for just one day even assuming travel between each solar system is almost instantaneous. Think "Star gate technology. Well I did say in the realm of Science Fiction
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
From the article:
"Due to the magnetic compression thrust technology, spacecrafts could be smaller and less heavy."
Now can anyone tell me the technical term for that? Anyone? Yes, Johnny, the term is "lighter."
And the plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft."
The solar system is a big enough place for exploitation, and when we're done with the planets and their moons we can look at the Kuiper belt. That should keep us busy for the next couple of centuries, at least, and also allow us to use technologies to actually analyze nearby star systems without having to send probes there just yet.
And once the solar system gets too small for use, we probably have the necessary technologies, experience and infrastructure to send something on an interstellar voyage (probably a generation ship or even a small planetoid outfitted with propulsion systems).
Man, I long for the days when men were men, women were women, and any serious space exploration project had his own 8,000,000 tons spaceship powered by 1000 bombs of 3 tons !
Go for the Super Orion !
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Uhm... Yeah... Right... Innovative indeed...
I have an innovative optimization for the slow running windows system. It's a random mixture of the letters cmfroat.
I also have a very innovative bit of beach in northern texas.
And of course my innovative system of election by sniper rifle is always a good one!
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Do some reading in the following site. Being a nerd meens dropping preconceptions.
http://www.nuclearspace.com/
or
http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship.htm
It has been thought out.
If a accident in a flight pumps out in a worse case scenario a small nuke test would you be willing to fly in space the mass of 100 or a thousand conventional flights ? I can tell you burning coal pumps the highest level of radioactivity to our atmosphere. There was a time when we were setting off hundreds of times this in our atmosphere.
If after 1000 successful flights with no accident, you can then load them with thousands of tonnes of nuclear polution and actualy chuck it in the sun.
In the end we become pollution negative !!!
Don't worry, given time and a few generations this will become fact.
Giorgis
10% the speed of light, huh? Time dilation effect would be quite visible then...Now THAT is a spaceship!!
No more thought experiments. Rejoice physics students everywhere.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
A frequently occurring debate on /. is with the question whether or not we should have space-exploration (and as a subset: human vs. robotic space exploration). This involves the "we should spend the money on other things, like combating worldhunger"-arguments, as the more subtile arguments which is better: human or robotic exploration.
;-)
I have pondered a long time about this, and this is my conclusion:
We all heard the reasoning for abolishing space-exploration (particular human-based) before, and I think the major flaw in all these 'arguments' why we shouldn't go into space is that they always set economic factors as a premise.
But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrow-minded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things. It's the same view that makes progress on medication for very rare diseases, or for diseases that are prevalent in continents that are poor, so slow: corporations can't see how they are ever going to get profit out of it, so they all turn their backs on it.
If ppl (including states) are only going to do something when they are sure of an immediate profitable return, the world has become a sad place. (And we should leave it the sooner
Arguments based on such a viewpoint fail to recognize other incentives apart from economical ones.
And the reason why we shouldn't (only) rely on robots? You can explore, but you can not colonize with robots. The will to explore is deeply entrenched in the human race, but with a reason: it has survival advantages.
A species that doesn't colonize new territory and adapt, will perish. I think it's paramount that humans always keep their spirit of adventure and keep exploring and expanding, because the moment we will go "ah, let's sit back in our sofa's and let our robots/droids do it", we're basically finished, even when not being aware of it at that moment.
So, to to all the people saying we don't *need* space-exploration (human or otherwise); we don't *need* the pyramids neither, nor all those great buildings and artworks, nor any luxury, etc. The only thing we 'need' is food and shelter. Based on what we truly 'need' thus, we should go back living like cavemen. But of course, we don't, and the reason is that we, as humans, look beyond our immediate needs and have (and should have) grander visions.
So, economics (and also the ratio of costs/science output) is often less good with human space-travel then robotic ones. Contrary to some zealots, I do not dispute that. But, as I have indicated, I do not think one should measure everything in terms of economic benefits. Even if you could send a hundred, or a thousand robots for the price of one human mission, it still would not change the fact that robots can't colonize planets, and augment the survival chances of the human race (and earths' ecology) through interplanetary spreading.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Didn't Dr. Robert Zubrin cut it down to 6 months in one direction already? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437325/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin
Using like... 19th century technology and not... you know... like... those banned nuclear thingies?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Any study on the effects on the rest of the plane-WHUMP AAAAA!! MY FACE IS MELTING!!!
Why should we send one person to explore the lot ? Use the wonders of exponential growth. Send 100 ships with the means to travel and build ships them selves. In no time at all ... say a few thousand years we will have infested the whole galaxy.
Giorgis
So if the occupants were to live, and stand, on the base of their living quarters - the base being the 'lower' part of the module that connected to the top of the shock-absorber part, perhaps the 1-G force would be like gravity here on earth? The surging, if standing on it, seems like it would be the rhythmic up and down of the deck of a boat whilst on the ocean. Heck, if that's the way it is, Shiver me timbers! - it'll be their sea-legs, matey, that'll be the weird part when they finally land and start walking around the surface of Mars. Yarr.
A policy of going to the moon then further makes sense with this technology, because you can build a reusable engine for the trip. As long as the engineering solid, it should last for a long time, and be adaptable. Plus a short trip to the moon is a good way to test it for a much more challenging journey.
Its about time they pulled out Orion. Its a solid idea that's worth a try and will hopefully lead to the first true (and permanent effectively) manned interplanetary spacecraft.
But hey, a robotic version would be a good idea as a preliminary test. Particularly as a reusable cargo vessel in future. We may need a lot of them.
"The experiment validated the physical process behind the MMO concept, substantiating MMO's potential of enabling shorter interplanetary trip time for near-term space travel" - said AS&T Principal Investigator Ralph Ewig. "We are still far from constructing an actual vehicle, but the present research will chart the course for human missions to other planets in the near future."
With the average time between when space-related hardware is conceived and when it is finally developed and launched, I wouldn't expect to see one of these sitting on the launch pad until at least 2030. Considering that it's meant to carry humans and other specially-designed habitation hardware, that would push it back even further, maybe 2050 or beyond.
That's not am impossible obstacle. If the will was there, we could colonize the galaxy with current technology.
I am trolling
The slashdot affect is in place ... has anyone found a mirror?
"This is it! This is the answer! It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 PM next Saturday Night! If we could somehow... harness this lightning; channel it into the Flux Capacitor, it just might work."
That's one hell of a lawn dart.
It looks like you're trying to eject a live nuclear bomb due to detonate in 2 seconds from the ship. As the ejection system is not Vista-certified, I thought I'd check if you really want to eject it as DOING SO MAY CAUSE INSTABILITY TO YOUR SYSTEM. # YES! YES! YES! Are you su ...
Microsoft: "Where do you want to blow today?"
Yes, rocket jump to mars! I knew all those years of playing Team Fortress would get me into NASA one day.
For a bit of background on the original Orion concept, and an all-around interesting read, check out The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower.
Neat concept, except I don't think I want the nuclear explosion to be between the "sail" and my ship. Especially when the addition of a small nuclear reactor to the ship for power appears to have had noticeable effect on performance.
Another issue is the fact that this is a mechanically complicated system (tether that has a winch to play out during the pulse and retracted post pulse. That's a recipe for multiple failure possibilities. It would be more reliable if it were on something like a crankshaft that would use simple circular motion to control the linear motion, yet both of those are far more complicated than the relatively static system of Orion.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
And the President said, "Lewis, Clark, I want you to walk around the block of the White House, its plenty big, and there's probably a lot for you to see. When you're done with that, check out Virginia. Once that is done, I want a complete survey of everything east of the Mississippi. That should keep us busy for a century."
Lewis replied, "What about the vast unexplored reaches of the west?"
To which the President slammed his fist into the desk, "Slow down, Sparky, that would take lots of money that would be better spent on the vast wasteland of New Jersey. And, it would take a long time and nothing good would come of it, I'm sure. And, it would take you forever to get the results back to us. And, you'd smell when you got back. Hell, Clark smells already. Now, you guys do as I told you, none of that 'Vast Vision' stuff."
Knowing they were beat, Lewis and Clark resigned themselves to taking a walk around the block.
"Besides," the President said, "When you finish up, you can both do commercials for Lost Horizon Airlines."
Hey, why does exploration have to be serial?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Sorry, Prometheus was canceled.
Not a bad idea, but I think you got the time frame wrong. The Milky Way has a diameter of 1E5 light years. Exponential growth of the number of ships does not allow you to cross that distance faster than a single ship. It only helps to cover more volume than a single or a few ships in a given time. If you start out in the centre of the Milky Way the lower limit for covering the whole would still be 5E4 years. This is assuming the ships are travelling at the speed of light. More realistically (if that makes any sense in this context) it would take something in the order of a million years. Of course, if you consider 1000 "a few", your estimate would be valid.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
Show me the weapon.
A laser pointed at someone with the intent to cause harm - Weapon.
A laser pointed out the backend of the space craft for propulsion - Engine.
A rocket launched into a schoolyard from a neighboring territory - Weapon.
A rocket strapped to a frame with wheels on a Utah salt flat - A really stupid but exhilorating way to die, and an Engine.
So, Einstein, show me the goddamned weapon ! Too many of you freaks out there saying, "We shouldn't...", "But there's a treaty...", and some such nonsense. But you are all for saying things like, "Well its a bad law or treaty," when its something that you want.
Show me the goddamned weapon!
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
detonating the explosives in front of the parachute
Actually, from looking at the site, it detonates the explosive behind the 'parachute', between the ship and the chute.
It doesn't make sense any other way.
Still, you are indeed free to have miles and miles of cable, at which point the radiation striking the craft would be minimized, and at those lengths the cable doesn't need much stretch at all to give the necessary flex.
I don't read AC A human right
Why not use springs along the tether?
I initially missed the fact that they proposed using a winch. Still, a winch is known technology, and they could have multiple ones for backup purposes.
Design them so they fail open, and the computer simply tightens the remaining ones as necessary to compensate.
Heck, use the initial accelleration phase of the chute to provide power by 'regenerative braking' to provide power to the ship, IE you're making use of the energy differential between the speed of the chute and the ship. You then spend some of it in the reeling in of the chute back to it's original position.
I don't read AC A human right
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Yes, we did see that article, but the prototype could barely produce enough thrust to push a peice of paper, if that, and to power a spacecraft to mars in a week it was going to have to be scaled up to a point that some think is impractical. This design has a much greater chance of being usable and production ready in the near future.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Actually, substituting an electrical braking/rail type system is a much better idea than any winch system as it would be much less likely to break. For a probe this might be fine, but for moving people, I'd think there's still some issues.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You want to talk about chance of component failures, what do you think having to have a compression-stroke system would be like? Tension is much easier to handle.
Lighter craft, more thrust, and less need for shielding and damping = many fewer explosions for the same level of acceleration.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
I guess I will sound like a monster but anyway:
What is the point to send human beings in their current form into deep space?
Our body is strictly unadapted for such a journey. It is fragile, it requires highly complex maintenance and it needs a strict environment. Common stuffs in space like gamma ray, radiation and all are lethal.
I guess the most reasonnable things for the future generations will be to design a body totally adapted to space and ready to survive such a long period.
There was actually a scale model of Orion, that worked with conventional explosives, to test the pulse/explosive thrust concept. From the pictures I've seen, it looks to be 25'-30' tall. I don't think it went more than 50' up but they proved the concept.
Ever since reading FootFall, I've wanted to see (from a long ways off), an Orion take off. Hell, I'm surprised someone hasn't animated it yet, for some cheesy anime.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Stick your head in a jar and send it off. You don't need to actually land on the planets out there, just launch the terraformers and wait a few thousand years until it's time to defrost the dna and start growing yourself some colonists. Once they're up and running, you have your own little world, ruled by 'the big giant head'.
Brilliant!
I drank what? -- Socrates
What a good idea. Of course, if the nuclear powered shuttle encounters technical difficulties and (worst case scenario) explodes in flight, the atomic bomb fallout could kill millions of people.
But what am I worried about? It's not like a space shuttle has ever exploded. These things are safe, right?
And the President said, "Lewis, Clark, I want you to go explore the moon. The country needs inspiration and I am going to provide it for them"
:)
Lewis replied, "But, sir we have no way to get to the moon. Why don't we explore all that land out west that we just purchased. Few if any european has ever seen it. Meanwhile we can learn more about the moon with new telescopes, which will make us more prepared if we ever do go there."
To which the president slammed his fist into the desk, "You have no vision! Besides, building telescopes and taking long trips like that would actually cost real money. I want you to work on some inexpensive pipe-dream that sounds good in political speeches, feasibility be damned."
Knowing they were beat, Lewis and Clark resigned themselves to designing successively large cannons. The never reached the moon, and the midwest filled out slowly, but few ever crossed the rockies, much to the delight of the native tribes, who were successful in fighting off the settlers for quite some time. Until the large cannons came of course
> Orion has already been obsoleted by a similar (but much more
> effective) design using normal-sized nuclear explosions -- Medusa.
1) Given that neither exists, it is a bit hard to say that Orion "has been", rather than "may be", obsoleted. Bang-bang was tested in scale models using dynamite sticks rather than A bombs, and performed well, whereas Medusa is still just a gedanken experiment.
2) Medusa cannot lift off from the Earth's surface, and THAT is the difficult part. Now, I do think that there are probably ways other than setting off the first couple nukes in the atmosphere to get the fully fueled spacecraft into orbit, but until they are tested they remain just ideas, not practice. Economical ways, that is. Obviously it could be done with heavy chemical rockets, and just as obviously, it cannot be, due to cost, unless you have a Dinosaur Killer coming at you and cost no longer matters (in which case, Orion still beats Medusa launched conventionally).
> Still, this has very little to do with Orion apart from them both being nuclear pulse propulsion.
Agreed. This looks to be more like Daedelus, the British Interplanetary Society design from the late 1970s, except used in-system rather than interstellar.
That's kinda what I was picturing. A series of electric motors/generators hooked to the cable, able to pull it back in, push it out, or act as a generator to slow it down. All controlled by a computer.
The only real 'winch' would be at the back, to ensure that the cable feeds in/out properly.
I don't read AC A human right
Sounds kind of familar you could be "The head". What a great way to run a colony or research institute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength
What about the effect of the radiation on the parachute and its tethers?
The Orion has the advantage that an oil can be sprayed over the surface of the pusher plate and it will not ablate at all, and being made of a very heavy material (uranium is often posited, since you can use it at a destination as fuel for a nuclear reactor) there's a LOT of matter to soak up the radiation.
With something thin and lightweight like the Medusa parachute+ropes design, you'd have to worry that the structural integrity of the materials would be compromised as radiation from the blasts continually struck it, breaking atomic bonds and sometimes transmuting elements within the structure.
Be a shame if your parachute eroded and snapped off after a while.
NU-CU-LAR. It's pronounced NU-CU-LAR.
the spacecraft runs into an object the size of a dime while traveling at 1/10c?
I was thinking of 3rd Rock From The Sun. The same thing happened to me!
I drank what? -- Socrates
The most important thing in this system though is the manual override. It has to be a concealed lever about four times the size of the human hand and you have to enter a special 4 digit code into a control panel with no labels. You get extra points for requiring that two people need to pull it and by placing it in a crawlspace no bigger than a human and a half. Only then will it be space worthy.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The BFG9000!!!
So THAT'S what those noises at the beginning of Serenity are ...
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
No doubt archival internet sites will bear this out. I probably first mentioned it on GEnie, before the web, though.
My notion of "front" was different than yours :) I generally consider the "front" of a chute to be the concave side -- the side that you see when looking at it when tethered to it.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
Can you tell me where to find the nukeweer wessels? The nuke-we-er wess-sels. Hey, I'm talking to you!
Doesn't matter if the parachute erodes. So what if you get holes in it? As long as it's a ripstop design, there's no problem. It's not like some sort of sieve where all of the water will leak out. All that matters is the integrity of the tethers, and you can make those as strong as you want.
The weight of Orion is precisely the problem. Lots of weight means bad acceleration and unreasonable cost to build/launch. Not to mention, that weight is located immediately behind your crew, which means that you have to shield, which means even more weight, as well as "jolting" acceleration.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
Orion can't lift off from Earth's surface realistically. Nobody would ever allow that; the scale of contamination would be too huge. Just from our (limited) atomic testing, we already increased Earth's background radiation and modified atmospheric isotopic ratios to the point that objects from the 1950s to present (and well off into the future) won't ever be able to be reliably carbon dated.
Even still, how exactly is detonations beneath the craft somehow more doable than detonations above it? As though we can't hold a craft up by its chute in no fewer than a hundred different ways, just like we could hold Orion up so that there's airspace beneath its pusher plate? In fact, having the chute aloft makes it much easier (if it's high enough that the atmosphere is thinner), because a spacecraft designed to be propelled by nuclear explosions in space will be poorly designed to tolerate atmospheric nuclear explosions. In space, almost all of the force of the blast is radiation. The radiation spreads out for obscene distances at great intensity. Here on Earth, much of that radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, making tremendous atmospheric heat that causes the huge shocks/blast waves that contain the energy of the explosion. Very, very different situations. Really, I don't see how any sort of craft designed for space operation with such a system would function at all in the atmosphere. And this isn't even considering gamma scattering, which would be a problem for Orion (not for Medusa, due to the long stroke length keeping the explosion far from the main body). Both systems would pose huge EMP problems.
The facts are that from a design standpoint, Medusa beats Orion on pretty much every front, from ISP to system mass to radiation exposure to reliability, to smoothness of acceleration, and so on down the line. Not just by a little, but by orders of magnitude. Just because there was some preliminary (and very limited) work on Orion in the 50s/60s doesn't change that it is a vastly inferior design. Orion is stuck in the old "rocket" mentality; they made it look like a rocket, with the weight on top and the thrust in back. That's not an optimal design in this case.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
The religious duty is right there in the creation mandate in Christian theology. Not to mention making the desert bloom. Last time I checked, Mars was a desert. Mars ought to have uranium deposits. Volcanic activity plus long-term thermal water features (and Mars has lots of water) should result in the deposit of veins of uranium salts, as well as all sorts of metal salts and metal sulfates (yellow cake?). That's mostly how it happened on Earth, but on Mars, the volcanoes tend to stay put. That would result in the deposits being localized and much larger. We've imaged hydrologically-produced veins from orbit with Mars Recon. So that process does/did occur. I am amazed by how many slashdotters don't have the foggiest notion of how fission explosions happen, or how this rocket engine works. They keep thinking that it would blow up. What if the sun blows up, guys? Or the oceans, I mean there's all that deuterium in the oceans and that is nookleear fuel!?
but isn't this similar to the engine of a firefly class spaceship?
Isn't the moon believed to be spun off from the same blob of magma as the earth? If so, it should have the same ratio of Uranium as this mud ball, and zero environmental concerns.
I'd think a moon satellite could detect surface deposits from it's radiation?
As might be well unknown to most Slashdotters, many women really like a good pounding!
How would you like to wake up one morning and find your credit rating slashed?
Yeah, either one would really have to be constructed in orbit - and probably pushed out of the magnetosphere - before moving out under their own power. Anything else is not politically possible even if the engineering worked.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Isn't the moon believed to be spun off from the same blob of magma as the earth? If so, it should have the same ratio of Uranium as this mud ball, and zero environmental concerns.
The moon is believed to be spun off from the same magnum blob as the earth, but I think the simulations predicted that the moon actually would get all the junky stuff, and the earth would get all the good stuff. So, from what I understand, most of the heavy elements wound up on the earth, and the moon gets mostly crap.
I talked to a geologist about mining once, and he said that water was a sort of prerequisite to get concentrated ore deposits. For example, you get some rock that has some level of gold in it, and its exposed to a water flow for many thousands of years, and the gold washes out, and being heavier, concentrates in places. Then, it gets buried up good, and we go get it.
This is my sig.
An WHUMP Orion WHUMP based WHUMP drive WHUMP can WHUMP be a WHUMP bit WHUMP rough, WHUMP any WHUMP study WHUMP on the WHUMP effects WHUMP on cargo/passWHUMPengers?
Didn't they try this at the end of Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall"? How did they put it...
"God was knocking on the door, and He wanted in, and He wanted in BAD!"
This is the propulsion holy grail we have been looking for high ISP plus high thrust.
Also a zpinch device to make sub critical fission assemblies under go fission would not have to be any where near as powerful as the Sandia Z machine.
This or vasimr or nuclear thermo is how we'll get to mars and beyond.
On the subject anti nuclear in space views the cold hard facts are with out nuclear power and or propulsion in space human space flight will never progress beyond the moon and close NEOs.
Antiprotons are readily produced using particle accelerators (Fermilab can produce 1e07 per second). Production is energy-intensive, however. Unfortunately, the resulting antiprotons tend to be very hot, so magnetic confinement is also energy-intensive. Decelerating hot antiprotons is also very energy-intensive. Consequently, antiprotons are very expensive-to-produce energy stores.
Cold positrons are easy to come by via a variety of nuclear fission reactions, and easy to confine, but are also poor stores of energy compared to the radioisotopes that produced them.
The effectiveness of antimatter as an energy store needs to be weighed (pun intended) against the cost of accelerating the mass to escape velocity.
Spacecraft have the virtue of operating in an environment with very low friction and very low gravitational acclerration, so tiny forces are useful for propulsion. Spacecraft (or component parts) are also so expensive to lift into space -- and the cost is almost entirely due to their total mass -- that trading much greater cost of production per unit mass for much greater acceleration per unit mass is worthwhile.
Antimatter is only attractive because lifting mass into space is expensive. The energy stored per unit of mass in antimatter-matter pairs is several orders of magnitude greater than anything else (e.g., it's at least two orders greater than proton-proton nuclear fusion, six or more greater than transuranic nuclear fission, and ten greater than chemical reactions).
The same logic drives the use of radioisotope thermoelectric generators fuelled by ludicrously expensive (per gram) 238Pu in spacecraft. However, antiparticles are several orders of magnitude more expensive per mass unit than reactor-bred radioisotopes, and currently the savings due to lowered mass does not favour the use of antimatter. Moreover, plausible production scale of antimatter is too small.
An ACMF process would use much less antimatter than a pure annihilation system, and also much less fissile-fertile radioisotope than a pure fission or fission-fusion system. There is a secondary efficiency gain from the ability to produce a small multistage explosion (annihilation, fission, fusion) that is not achievable with conventional fission-starting reactions.
In a conventional fission/fission-fusion system one would physically move two or more subcritical quantities of fissile material close together to create a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. Alternatively one could use a particle accelerator to knock neutrons out a suitable target and into a subcritical quantity of fissile material, causing a self-sustaining fission chain reaction.
Most feasible ACMF processes are more like the second approach, and so require anti-tritium or anti-deuterium (nuclei) rather than just antiprotons. A T/anti-T reaction between the proton and antiproton will carry away most of the annihilation energy in neutrinos and gamma rays, but will also transfer a great deal of kinetic energy into the neutrons, which can be used to trigger fission in a subcritical pile.
Some ACMF processes rely upon an electromagnetic capture of an antiproton by a normal-matter fissile ion. Unlike electron capture, antiproton capture is not stable and results in the release of highly enegetic gamma rays prior to the ultimate antiproton-proton annihilation, which rips apart the nucleus imparting enough kinetic energy to the nucleons to trigger fission and possibly fusion reactions in nearby matter.
The key question lies in whether it is easier to manufacture a store of cold antiprotons or a store of cold anti-T/anti-D. It may be easier to produce cold but fully reduced anti-H/anti-D/anti-T then strip away the positrons to enable electromagnetic confinement, and there are some fission fine tuning advantages to this approach. Today, however, the reverse is usually true -- positrons and antiprotons are acquired separately and then combined into atomic antihydrogen.
The princip