Slashdot Mirror
NASA Contracting Development of New Ion/Nuclear Engines (nasaspaceflight.com)
schwit1 writes: NASA has awarded three different companies contracts to develop advanced ion and nuclear propulsion systems for future interplanetary missions, both manned and unmanned. These are development contacts, all below $10 million. However, they all appeared structured like NASA's cargo and crew contracts for ISS, where the contractor does all of the development and design, with NASA only supplying some support and periodic payments when the contractor achieves agreed-upon milestones. Because of this, the contractors will own the engines they develop, and will be able to sell them to other customers after development, thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
Whatever happened with the emdrive?
They should do this:
1. Attach chemical and ion engines to the ISS.
2. Add modules to grow vegetables to have unlimited food. Plants can help produce O2, remove CO2, and can consume feces and urine. You can also grow potatoes and lemons to generate all the electricity you need (like a potato clock).
3. Biodiesel generated from the plant matter, combined with the excess O2 can be reclaimed to refuel the chemical rockets.
This is a closed system and could allow for very long exploration missions.
Pretty sure solar panels are still a more efficient way to generate electricity than potatoes, and chucking "biodiesel" fuel out the back of your spacecraft sounds like a pretty good way to run out of food and oxygen in a hurry.
Growing crops in space is a cool idea, though.
A bunch of nations pitched in on the ITER fusion reactor. It's already 300% over budget and won't be fully operational until at least 2027. Global cooperator does not necessarily make projects better or easier.
NASA should sponsor a study into harnessing measurement error as a means of propulsion. I always keep hearing everybody talking about it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No. But Donald Trump in charge would make project better and faster and under budget, and eliminate the red tape. If we can get him into the oval office, we'll probably have fusion by 2020 and the big oil companies will be out of business.
What exactly are you proposing, and why? 1) Why do you want to attach chemical and ion engines to the ISS? to maintain its orbit? to move it to a new one? We can already do that; it's not a big deal. It's just expensive. 2) pressurized space (the interior of spacecraft) is very expensive. Agriculture requires a lot of space. It is simply not practical to start these orbiting greenhouses until other problems are solved. The generation of electricity from a potato is very inefficient. Photovoltaic cells do a far more efficient job. 3) If you are talking about using biodiesel for rockets from the Earth's surface to orbit, biodiesel is not nearly powerful enough to reach orbit. If you are talking about utilizing wastes from human processes in orbit for rockets, this is very bad - we need those chemicals and they're expensive to bring up from Earth! This is why ion engines are attractive in orbit: they expel very little matter as opposed to chemical rockets. The EMdrive doesn't expel any matter at all, so it's even better.
I would like to see much more spending on space projects. But a global federation pooling resources will not be efficient. Firstly, space programs are very expensive so only very large or rich nations can afford them. There are many different possible designs for a star-ship like craft, it is impossible to get everyone working on a single design. US efforts during WW2 caused great economic difficulties for the people, and were barely sustainable. I would not want to put the nation or the world through that type of suffering again.
What is needed, is broadly-based support for intensive research into technology to help us expand off of Earth. We need the social and economic conditions which create a large number of people with the necessary skills for these jobs. I see none of this at present. We had better hope for the genius of the very few who are interested and able to do the work.
Is this your first visit to Slashdot since 2006?
Solar panels work when you're got a fair amount of solar radiation to use. That's only really the case in the inner solar system (or the inner part of any star system). For other places, nuclear is needed. Fission fuels will be far more plentiful on the inner, 'rocky' planets - in our system, that's as far as the inner asteroid belt. outer, gas planets will have more deuterium and tritium, useful for fusion. Until fusion gets working properly, we're stuck with fission. That's ok, for now.
Capitalism allowed the US to buy into advanced Russian products like the Russian RD-180.
The product worked, was delivered and the US brand was happy to contract out the platform for US use.
India and the geo-synchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV) effort that the US tried to stop under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).
The UK trying to make its own Skynet military communications satellites, finally having to buy in the US Type-777 satellite system instead.
A lot of nations try and share, create, buy in, offer new products at low prices but the US often sets standards to only 'rent' access to a totally US solution.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
VASIMR has been ready to go to a full-scale trial on ISS for a while now. Then the ISS won't be so dependent upon Progress supply missions to give it orbital boosts. This thing will be powerful enough that they have to have batteries in it because the ISS solar panels aren't powerful enough to run it at full power.
But I'd be happier if I saw a date when it would actually get launched for installation on ISS. It looks like they will still be building the first engines through summer 2016. After that it's not clear if the tests are meant to be done on ground. They're also talking about having it run for 100 continuous hours in the third year of the contract, which is more than what ISS needs, so maybe they'll send one up to ISS in 2017 or 2018?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
First rule in government spending: Why build one when you can have two for twice the price.
Seriously though, it's called redundancy.
... thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
Forgive my bad French, but that's the sort of ideologic bullshit you can't prove. NASA saves money from an embarrassingly tiny budget; that is the only benefit this type of arrangement provides. It does the precise opposite of increasing competition, since one company will have a government-sanctioned monopoly; if it didn't and NASA placed the designs into the public domain, then ANY company could make the engines and sell them to NASA, improving NASA's supply chain. Have you forgotten why our computers are dominated by Intel processors? IBM made the decision to use an Intel processor because Intel had co-fab agreements with other companies, meaning that IBM wasn't solely dependent upon Intel alone for supply, while Motorola was the sole supplier for 68000 processors.
I thought it would get better if I got drunk. But no improvement yet. More whiskey, me thinks.
Drinking doesn't seem to have helped so far. Must drink more whiskey (Jameson)
"Capitalism allowed the US to buy into advanced Russian products like the Russian RD-180" In this case it was Russia being capitalistic. And it was the US decision to not spend money on reinventing the wheel when they could purchase a viable alternative off the shelf while dedicating the savings to the development of the next generation of engine technologies.
well it is not really that far over budget. If you check it properly rather than the media version of budget. But yes it does show that this sort of cooperation is expensive just in overheads alone. I mean they took 10 years to decide where to build it! Shesh. That is a lot of wages that need a budget for something that hadn't even broken ground yet.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Go read Seveneves.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Okay, fair point. I was mentioning solar as a Light->Electricity converter, as that's how potatoes work.