Second the captain could has simply ordered the oxygen levels to be reduced or to induce unconscious by releasing a sleep agent/depressant into the air.
I've been tainted by watching FireFly. When the leader of the cult fanatics said that all he had to do was give the order for his men to blow themselves up, I shouted, "Shoot him NOW!" That way he won't be able to tell anyone and security teams can quietly sweep up the remaining imbeciles.
From a scientific perspective it really makes limited sense. (e.g. Geologists could be on site to study rock formations and figure out more about our solar system's history.) From an economic standpoint it makes plenty of sense. Our economy has grown so much that the last major boom was over intangible resources (i.e. computer programs).
Space travel to Mars and asteroids would bring about new resources and technological developments that could bring about a new industrial age. The economic benefits of such progress can not be overstated. Simply put, there are more easily accessible raw materials on a single asteroid than are mined on Earth in 10 years. While the economics may say that it isn't cheap to bring them back to earth, it would be cheap enough to start building new craft, stations, and other outposts in space.
The only limiting factor to this progress is propulsion. We have to have a way to travel the solar system cheaply. On the bright side, there already exists a technology that can generate a constant energy output in the multi-megawatt range. That same technology can be used with many of the resources readily available in space. But that same technology is the most feared and misunderstood technology in all of history. That technology is nuclear power.
We already have NERVA engines. Gas Core Nuclear Engines have been under development for the past decade and promise to be even more efficient and powerful. But until the public at large starts to understand these technologies, they will fear them.
It should start with schools. Stop keeping nuclear power such a "big secret". Explain to school children how Nuclear fission and fusion work. Define what a nuclear pile is. Explain what Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Neutron and X-Ray radiation are. Send a rock of plutonium (specifically a non-fissible isotope so no one gets any bright ideas) around schools so kids can see what nuclear materials look like. Once they understand nuclear power they won't fear it and the tide will shift in favor of nuclear power.
Can't we pause and take time to develop safe nuclear power for any space application?
You mean like the "Clean Nuclear Launches" article I posted last week? Honestly, we have the technology. WTF are we waiting for?
Oh, that's right. Anti-nuclear activists who think plutonium is so dangerous that it can only be transported in 500 tons of lead. (Plutonium is actually safe to hold in your hand. Some people have accidentally ingested it and survived with no ill effects.)
Don't be so sure about valuable assets. NASA proposed a space tug when it was building the Space Shuttle. The idea was that a tug would pull satellites to a lower orbit where the Shuttle could reach them. At that point, the shuttle would be responsible for repairing, refueling and refurbishing. If necessary, even bring them back to Earth.
Here's the problem: No one wanted their satellites back. By the time their fuel was spent, they were old technology that would be replaced by a new satellite. The shuttle had bet the bank on the economic theory that people wanted their space-stuff back and lost.
I'm sorry? Enterprise? Long term plot? Apparently you haven't been paying attention. Even Berman admits that they're making this shit up as they go along! That's why you have examples like the episode "Shipment". The episode ends with a big man-hunt to find the Earth destroying Xindi (which we know is important because the next episode shows mankind getting destroyed in the future because of it). But what happens? NOTHING! Zip, zilch, none, nada. These big, bad Xindi that are going to blow the Earth to kingdom come are supplanted by trips to the past, galavanting around more Spheres, and evil cult aliens who can't agree on how many day it took to make a sphere.
WTF? Where's the chase? Where's the excitement? Why isn't Earth destroyed yet? Why isn't Enterprise destroyed yet? Is it some insidious plot? NO! It's the fact that no one's at the helm of this show and they very well can't destroy "Enterprise". Blech. Maybe, just MAYBE they'll fire Berman and make a show worth watching. Or maybe not.
Someone just came up with the most recent report on Chernobyl. In short? You're full of shit. Every person on site at Chernobyl is being tracked even to this day. Most illnesses were in small children who developed Thyroid cancer. This is due to radioactive Iodine isotopes taking the place of regular Iodine in the diet. Most of those children were treated, and very few died. (BTW, radioactive fallout was one of the reasons for adding Iodine to salt. If you get enough regular Iodine, your body will ignore the isotopes.)
At this point, people in Norway are getting higher radiation doses than those in the Chernobyl area. As one final check, I asked my wife (who's from Russia) what she knew about "Chernobyl disabilities". She did know a few people from the Chernobyl area, and her opinion was that you're full of crap.
Please mod parent -1 Asshole. Had he taken the time to read the replies to my post, he would have seen that I was already informed of my mistake and asked not to use the colloquial meaning again. I agreed and have been using the correct term of "prompt-critical" since, usually including an explanation as to how "prompt-critical" is different from "critical. The parent obviously feels that berating others will somehow make him a better person and that the previous, intelligent discussions on the mistake are somehow beneath him.
You seem to be forgetting that coal kills a lot more people through cancer, poisoning, and bronchitis. From the University of Michigan:
To date, the largest number of noticeable deaths from coal burning was in an air pollution incident (London, 1952) where there were 3500 extra deaths in one week. Of course the nuclear accidents are hypothetical and there are many much worse hypothetical accidents in other electricity generation technologies; e.g., there are hydroelectric dams in California whose sudden failure could cause 200,000 deaths.
Not to mention that the figures for accidental deaths are way high. Depending on who you talk to, the figures of cancer from Chernobyl range from 10 to 200. A far cry from the hundreds of thousands claimed. And in the surprisingly few nuclear accidents that have happened, only on site operators have died (excepting Chernobyl).
Based on the real-life evidence, nuclear rockets used over the oceans would be highly unlikely to kill a single person on the ground. Even in a catastrophic failure.
While that's a feasible option, the problems I see are "cost" and "not good enough". Cost is an issue because you still have to redevelop the rocket. Unless those experienced in building them are still around to build more, new engineers are going to have to reverse engineer things. (Anyone notice how much time you can spend reverse engineering "mature" code? Now imagine if you had to port that code from COBOL to Java.)
The second cost issue is the disposability of the rockets. When we were sending men to the moon, cost was not an object. It made sense to burn up a multi-billion dollar rocket. In today's world, such waste would limit NASA to nothing but a single launch per year. Not good.
As for the "not good enough" aspect, the Saturn V has the power to put a lot of mass in low orbit, some mass in high orbit, and very little mass to escape velocity. The laws of physics say that you can't have the same mass and expect the engine to get you to a higher orbit. This means that the time and money spent on the Saturn revival would take away from the technologies needed to make a permanent moon base and a mission to Mars.
Now if you want it done right, accelerate the GCNR program. You get massive launch capacity at a cheap price, and an engine that performs just as well for interplanetary travel as it does as a launch solution. It's just a better bang for yourbuck.
Despite a best effort from Sun, x86 Solaris sucks (in comparison to Sparc Solaris) and will always suck. The reason is not because Sun is incompetent, but rather because Sparc hardware is so awesome. Solaris is designed to work with the OpenPROM, high-end hardware Sparc platform at a level that PCs can never even hope to touch.
PCs are still stuck with BIOSes and pathetic 8x8 text modes. Sparcs boot up into an interactive graphics mode with pretty looking terminal fonts. The only difference between text-mode and X-Windows are the graphics being drawn. (As anyone who's seen the console output print over top of X-Windows can attest.) Not to mention that a system can be rescued or installed from remote locations thanks to the beauty of OpenPROM/OpenBoot.
Face it, Sparcs win on the "total package" level. PCs win on the "play around as a hobby" level.
The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers, not mass produced generic clones like Dell etc
No, the great selling point is that you don't have a hardware failure every 6 months like with Dell hardware. Dell hardware costs less, but you're getting what you pay for. Unfortunately, the CPU is actually the least of your worries. It's usually something like a disk controller or memory DIMMs. We had a RAID controller go on a Dell disk array and managed to corrupt the production database. Thankfully, not much had changed since the last backup. Still, that managed to defeat the entire purpose of a RAID array.
if we need to have lower powered electrical items to be able to use alternative energy sources, then those should, and would, be developed as part of an alternative energy plan. everything needs to evolve together. i guess conservatives just don't think about evolution.
We have highly power efficient devices such as Gas heating, LCD monitors and laptops. Refrigerators have been modified to be as power efficient as possible (Energy Star certifications, etc). The problem is that a given task takes X amount of power. While we can get rid of inefficiencies in our designs, there's still a ceiling on how efficient the device can get. Thus the only way to reduce power is to use fewer devices, not more. Unless you can effect a radical change in consumer lifestyles, you're not going to even make a dent in the 13 MWH average consumption.
as for going to other planets, i am for exploration. but we better take care of this one first.
For all the environmental complaining, we're not actually doing too bad of a job. I'll grant you that most people didn't become aware of the problem until the 80's. Since then, however, pollution has been steadily decreasing. Nuclear power has helped that. I know that nuclear activists have spread FUD saying that nuclear power is going to pollute the earth and eat your children. However, it's all a big lie.
For one, there's no such thing as nuclear waste. Modern reactor designs such as the "breeder" reactor can reuse the fissible products to continue producing power. Unfortunately, the US government has decided not to allow these designs for fear that the extra processing steps would allow infiltration by terrorists.
For another, a single coal plant puts out tons of uranium per day into the atmosphere. (Uranium is a very common substance. Most coal deposits contain quite a bit of it.) All the nuclear plants in the world don't put out as much waste as a single coal plant. Something to think about anyway.
We don't have cold fusion or antimatter yet, so the only alternative is fission.
We don't need Cold Fusion. We actually have quite a few ideas for plain old "hot" fusion drives. I can't find a link right now, but the most promising one I've seen is an engine that fires a small pellet of fusion fuel in front of a pusher plate. The pellet will then intersect with high powered lasers that will force fusion. However, the engine has a high ISP (very efficient) but very low overall thrust.
Antimatter thrust is only limited by our inability to produce antimatter.
Now, Nuclear Thermal fission rockets have the potential to have high thrust and high ISP (although not the highest). NERVA was a completed design with about 1000 ISP and 75,000 pounds of thrust. I comparison, the Saturn V had an ISP of ~450 and the Space Shuttle boosters have an ISP of ~250. GCNR rockets, a design that has been under careful development for over 10 years, promises an ISP of between 3000-5000 with a similar mass throw as a chemical rocket. That means that you can power significantly more launch weight with less fuel. (Remember, force = mass * velocity2. If mass remains consistent, the power will increase at an exponential rate.)
Once in space, there are options for even more efficient thrust and ISP combinations like Orion and Nuclear Salt Water rockets.
doesn't make sense to land a few million ton craft
Sorry, I'm getting tired. That should read "few million pound craft". Only Orion has ever been shown to have the power to efficiently push around millions of tons. In fact, Wikipedia states that the largest conceivable design was 8 million tons powered by high yield fusion bombs.
8 million tons would be an entire city in space! Battlestar Galactica anyone?
You're still better off with a GCNR engine. Given that the engine can "breath" different forms of gases, you can build it to power a horizontal takeoff and landing craft using *only* air. When the air supply is not high enough (during sub-sonic speeds and near orbital periods) hydrogen or oxygen fuel could be pumped from fuel tanks. Plus, the craft would have the power and fuel to make a more gradual ascent so that the airframe doesn't have to be strong enough to support Mach 12 atmospheric conditions. Instead, it can accelerate to those speeds as the air thins.
Another advantage to the nuclear solution is for interplanetary craft. It doesn't make sense to land a few million ton craft, so small GCNR transportation "shuttles" could be launched from the main craft. Since no oxidizer is necessary, the shuttles could fly in O2, CO2, Methane, or just plain no atmosphere.
Oh, and the military already built a nuclear ramjet that ran off of air for fuel. Do a search for "Project Pluto". The actual design was a little disgusting as it considered it a "bonus" to spew radiation all over Russia. Still, it was 1950's technology. With our modern resources, simulation abilities, and exotic materials, there's no reason why we can't build a far better design.
Scramjets are looking to be at least a decade away from usable designs. We have the technology to build a nuclear space plane now.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever even tried to generate usable amounts of power? I never realized how much a single watt of energy was until I started trying to find ways to generate it. Wind power, Geo-thermal power, Solar power, etc. simply can't cost-effectively put out the megawatts to gigawatts that a coal, oil, and (yes) nuclear plant can put out.
Now you can argue the evils of nuclear technology till your blue in the face, but until you're willing to help lower the (ever rising) average usage of electricity from 13 megawatt hours per home, per year, you're going to have to get used to it. And if you're actually progressive enough to want to visit other planets, you're going to have to start LIKING high energy to low mass ratio solutions.
Thanks for your support.:-) As for some boilerplate text, that's been a little difficult so far. I keep learning so much more from actual nuclear physicists, that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the constant corrections and improvements I'd need to make. Perhaps when my knowledge reaches critical mass.:-)
The space program is nothing without popular support and the populous currently believes the mantra "Nuclear = Evil." Sad, but true.
Even sadder is that the space program will go nowhere without nuclear. Of all the propulsion methods that have been theorized, only nuclear powered ones (be it fission, fusion, or matter/antimatter) produce enough power and thrust to make space travel a feasible option.
Not to mention that no other solution provides a way to "live off the land" and create your own fuel from just about any source. A GCNR rocket could conceivably run off of hydrogen, oxygen, xenon, water, CO2, Iron Oxides, or just about anything else that can be cracked into a gas.
I really would give up this crazy crusade if I thought there was another option that was "good enough". Unfortunately, large amounts of energy are just plain scary. There's nothing we can do about that other than to handle that energy with care.
That's why I keep reiterating the need for nuclear powered launchers. Development would cost less than building a new Saturn V, and with 6 million pound launch capacity (2 million cargo) we could send an entire space station up in one go!
The same nuclear power could take us on round trip excursions to Mars in a fraction of the time it would take a chemical rocket! ...
Ah, fuck it. No one's paying any attention anyway.
It is the only rational way to approach manned exploration of of Mars.
I disagree. The only way to encourage colonization of Mars is if you set up a "train" between the two planets. Anyone who decides they want to go home can simply take the next ship back to Earth. That ship will (of course) arrive loaded with new colonists and supplies.
Remember, while many of the early colonists to America wanted to stay, some were only here on multi-year contracts. At the end of those contracts, they got to go back and spend all the money they'd gained. There's no reason (propulsion not withstanding) that we can't do this. We have the technology. We just need a plan for a new space-based economy.
You might find this link interesting. Just because you see the characters on Back to the Future in rad suits, doesn't mean that's how they actually handle plutonium.
Slashdot Mirror
Second the captain could has simply ordered the oxygen levels to be reduced or to induce unconscious by releasing a sleep agent/depressant into the air.
I've been tainted by watching FireFly. When the leader of the cult fanatics said that all he had to do was give the order for his men to blow themselves up, I shouted, "Shoot him NOW!" That way he won't be able to tell anyone and security teams can quietly sweep up the remaining imbeciles.
From a scientific perspective it really makes limited sense. (e.g. Geologists could be on site to study rock formations and figure out more about our solar system's history.) From an economic standpoint it makes plenty of sense. Our economy has grown so much that the last major boom was over intangible resources (i.e. computer programs).
Space travel to Mars and asteroids would bring about new resources and technological developments that could bring about a new industrial age. The economic benefits of such progress can not be overstated. Simply put, there are more easily accessible raw materials on a single asteroid than are mined on Earth in 10 years. While the economics may say that it isn't cheap to bring them back to earth, it would be cheap enough to start building new craft, stations, and other outposts in space.
The only limiting factor to this progress is propulsion. We have to have a way to travel the solar system cheaply. On the bright side, there already exists a technology that can generate a constant energy output in the multi-megawatt range. That same technology can be used with many of the resources readily available in space. But that same technology is the most feared and misunderstood technology in all of history. That technology is nuclear power.
We already have NERVA engines. Gas Core Nuclear Engines have been under development for the past decade and promise to be even more efficient and powerful. But until the public at large starts to understand these technologies, they will fear them.
It should start with schools. Stop keeping nuclear power such a "big secret". Explain to school children how Nuclear fission and fusion work. Define what a nuclear pile is. Explain what Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Neutron and X-Ray radiation are. Send a rock of plutonium (specifically a non-fissible isotope so no one gets any bright ideas) around schools so kids can see what nuclear materials look like. Once they understand nuclear power they won't fear it and the tide will shift in favor of nuclear power.
Can't we pause and take time to develop safe nuclear power for any space application?
You mean like the "Clean Nuclear Launches" article I posted last week? Honestly, we have the technology. WTF are we waiting for?
Oh, that's right. Anti-nuclear activists who think plutonium is so dangerous that it can only be transported in 500 tons of lead. (Plutonium is actually safe to hold in your hand. Some people have accidentally ingested it and survived with no ill effects.)
Nuclear boogeymen? Bah, humbug.
Don't be so sure about valuable assets. NASA proposed a space tug when it was building the Space Shuttle. The idea was that a tug would pull satellites to a lower orbit where the Shuttle could reach them. At that point, the shuttle would be responsible for repairing, refueling and refurbishing. If necessary, even bring them back to Earth.
Here's the problem: No one wanted their satellites back. By the time their fuel was spent, they were old technology that would be replaced by a new satellite. The shuttle had bet the bank on the economic theory that people wanted their space-stuff back and lost.
*cough* *gag*
I'm sorry? Enterprise? Long term plot? Apparently you haven't been paying attention. Even Berman admits that they're making this shit up as they go along! That's why you have examples like the episode "Shipment". The episode ends with a big man-hunt to find the Earth destroying Xindi (which we know is important because the next episode shows mankind getting destroyed in the future because of it). But what happens? NOTHING! Zip, zilch, none, nada. These big, bad Xindi that are going to blow the Earth to kingdom come are supplanted by trips to the past, galavanting around more Spheres, and evil cult aliens who can't agree on how many day it took to make a sphere.
WTF? Where's the chase? Where's the excitement? Why isn't Earth destroyed yet? Why isn't Enterprise destroyed yet? Is it some insidious plot? NO! It's the fact that no one's at the helm of this show and they very well can't destroy "Enterprise". Blech. Maybe, just MAYBE they'll fire Berman and make a show worth watching. Or maybe not.
Someone just came up with the most recent report on Chernobyl. In short? You're full of shit. Every person on site at Chernobyl is being tracked even to this day. Most illnesses were in small children who developed Thyroid cancer. This is due to radioactive Iodine isotopes taking the place of regular Iodine in the diet. Most of those children were treated, and very few died. (BTW, radioactive fallout was one of the reasons for adding Iodine to salt. If you get enough regular Iodine, your body will ignore the isotopes.)
At this point, people in Norway are getting higher radiation doses than those in the Chernobyl area. As one final check, I asked my wife (who's from Russia) what she knew about "Chernobyl disabilities". She did know a few people from the Chernobyl area, and her opinion was that you're full of crap.
Please mod parent -1 Asshole. Had he taken the time to read the replies to my post, he would have seen that I was already informed of my mistake and asked not to use the colloquial meaning again. I agreed and have been using the correct term of "prompt-critical" since, usually including an explanation as to how "prompt-critical" is different from "critical. The parent obviously feels that berating others will somehow make him a better person and that the previous, intelligent discussions on the mistake are somehow beneath him.
You seem to be forgetting that coal kills a lot more people through cancer, poisoning, and bronchitis. From the University of Michigan:
To date, the largest number of noticeable deaths from coal burning was in an air pollution incident (London, 1952) where there were 3500 extra deaths in one week. Of course the nuclear accidents are hypothetical and there are many much worse hypothetical accidents in other electricity generation technologies; e.g., there are hydroelectric dams in California whose sudden failure could cause 200,000 deaths.
Not to mention that the figures for accidental deaths are way high. Depending on who you talk to, the figures of cancer from Chernobyl range from 10 to 200. A far cry from the hundreds of thousands claimed. And in the surprisingly few nuclear accidents that have happened, only on site operators have died (excepting Chernobyl).
Based on the real-life evidence, nuclear rockets used over the oceans would be highly unlikely to kill a single person on the ground. Even in a catastrophic failure.
While that's a feasible option, the problems I see are "cost" and "not good enough". Cost is an issue because you still have to redevelop the rocket. Unless those experienced in building them are still around to build more, new engineers are going to have to reverse engineer things. (Anyone notice how much time you can spend reverse engineering "mature" code? Now imagine if you had to port that code from COBOL to Java.)
The second cost issue is the disposability of the rockets. When we were sending men to the moon, cost was not an object. It made sense to burn up a multi-billion dollar rocket. In today's world, such waste would limit NASA to nothing but a single launch per year. Not good.
As for the "not good enough" aspect, the Saturn V has the power to put a lot of mass in low orbit, some mass in high orbit, and very little mass to escape velocity. The laws of physics say that you can't have the same mass and expect the engine to get you to a higher orbit. This means that the time and money spent on the Saturn revival would take away from the technologies needed to make a permanent moon base and a mission to Mars.
Now if you want it done right, accelerate the GCNR program. You get massive launch capacity at a cheap price, and an engine that performs just as well for interplanetary travel as it does as a launch solution. It's just a better bang for yourbuck.
x86 Solaris, anyone?
Despite a best effort from Sun, x86 Solaris sucks (in comparison to Sparc Solaris) and will always suck. The reason is not because Sun is incompetent, but rather because Sparc hardware is so awesome. Solaris is designed to work with the OpenPROM, high-end hardware Sparc platform at a level that PCs can never even hope to touch.
PCs are still stuck with BIOSes and pathetic 8x8 text modes. Sparcs boot up into an interactive graphics mode with pretty looking terminal fonts. The only difference between text-mode and X-Windows are the graphics being drawn. (As anyone who's seen the console output print over top of X-Windows can attest.) Not to mention that a system can be rescued or installed from remote locations thanks to the beauty of OpenPROM/OpenBoot.
Face it, Sparcs win on the "total package" level. PCs win on the "play around as a hobby" level.
The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers, not mass produced generic clones like Dell etc
No, the great selling point is that you don't have a hardware failure every 6 months like with Dell hardware. Dell hardware costs less, but you're getting what you pay for. Unfortunately, the CPU is actually the least of your worries. It's usually something like a disk controller or memory DIMMs. We had a RAID controller go on a Dell disk array and managed to corrupt the production database. Thankfully, not much had changed since the last backup. Still, that managed to defeat the entire purpose of a RAID array.
if we need to have lower powered electrical items to be able to use alternative energy sources, then those should, and would, be developed as part of an alternative energy plan. everything needs to evolve together. i guess conservatives just don't think about evolution.
We have highly power efficient devices such as Gas heating, LCD monitors and laptops. Refrigerators have been modified to be as power efficient as possible (Energy Star certifications, etc). The problem is that a given task takes X amount of power. While we can get rid of inefficiencies in our designs, there's still a ceiling on how efficient the device can get. Thus the only way to reduce power is to use fewer devices, not more. Unless you can effect a radical change in consumer lifestyles, you're not going to even make a dent in the 13 MWH average consumption.
as for going to other planets, i am for exploration. but we better take care of this one first.
For all the environmental complaining, we're not actually doing too bad of a job. I'll grant you that most people didn't become aware of the problem until the 80's. Since then, however, pollution has been steadily decreasing. Nuclear power has helped that. I know that nuclear activists have spread FUD saying that nuclear power is going to pollute the earth and eat your children. However, it's all a big lie.
For one, there's no such thing as nuclear waste. Modern reactor designs such as the "breeder" reactor can reuse the fissible products to continue producing power. Unfortunately, the US government has decided not to allow these designs for fear that the extra processing steps would allow infiltration by terrorists.
For another, a single coal plant puts out tons of uranium per day into the atmosphere. (Uranium is a very common substance. Most coal deposits contain quite a bit of it.) All the nuclear plants in the world don't put out as much waste as a single coal plant. Something to think about anyway.
We don't have cold fusion or antimatter yet, so the only alternative is fission.
We don't need Cold Fusion. We actually have quite a few ideas for plain old "hot" fusion drives. I can't find a link right now, but the most promising one I've seen is an engine that fires a small pellet of fusion fuel in front of a pusher plate. The pellet will then intersect with high powered lasers that will force fusion. However, the engine has a high ISP (very efficient) but very low overall thrust.
Antimatter thrust is only limited by our inability to produce antimatter.
Now, Nuclear Thermal fission rockets have the potential to have high thrust and high ISP (although not the highest). NERVA was a completed design with about 1000 ISP and 75,000 pounds of thrust. I comparison, the Saturn V had an ISP of ~450 and the Space Shuttle boosters have an ISP of ~250. GCNR rockets, a design that has been under careful development for over 10 years, promises an ISP of between 3000-5000 with a similar mass throw as a chemical rocket. That means that you can power significantly more launch weight with less fuel. (Remember, force = mass * velocity2. If mass remains consistent, the power will increase at an exponential rate.)
Once in space, there are options for even more efficient thrust and ISP combinations like Orion and Nuclear Salt Water rockets.
doesn't make sense to land a few million ton craft
Sorry, I'm getting tired. That should read "few million pound craft". Only Orion has ever been shown to have the power to efficiently push around millions of tons. In fact, Wikipedia states that the largest conceivable design was 8 million tons powered by high yield fusion bombs.
8 million tons would be an entire city in space! Battlestar Galactica anyone?
Now I know that there are RTGs capable of producing enough power to run a house that are no larger than a hot water heater.
:-)
In that case, you'll love this design. Wouldn't it be nice to have a laptop or cell phone that never dies?
Perhaps a journal entry then?
Hmm... I'll consider. At the very least I could collect some of the more informative posts into one set of links.
You're still better off with a GCNR engine. Given that the engine can "breath" different forms of gases, you can build it to power a horizontal takeoff and landing craft using *only* air. When the air supply is not high enough (during sub-sonic speeds and near orbital periods) hydrogen or oxygen fuel could be pumped from fuel tanks. Plus, the craft would have the power and fuel to make a more gradual ascent so that the airframe doesn't have to be strong enough to support Mach 12 atmospheric conditions. Instead, it can accelerate to those speeds as the air thins.
Another advantage to the nuclear solution is for interplanetary craft. It doesn't make sense to land a few million ton craft, so small GCNR transportation "shuttles" could be launched from the main craft. Since no oxidizer is necessary, the shuttles could fly in O2, CO2, Methane, or just plain no atmosphere.
Oh, and the military already built a nuclear ramjet that ran off of air for fuel. Do a search for "Project Pluto". The actual design was a little disgusting as it considered it a "bonus" to spew radiation all over Russia. Still, it was 1950's technology. With our modern resources, simulation abilities, and exotic materials, there's no reason why we can't build a far better design.
Scramjets are looking to be at least a decade away from usable designs. We have the technology to build a nuclear space plane now.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever even tried to generate usable amounts of power? I never realized how much a single watt of energy was until I started trying to find ways to generate it. Wind power, Geo-thermal power, Solar power, etc. simply can't cost-effectively put out the megawatts to gigawatts that a coal, oil, and (yes) nuclear plant can put out.
Now you can argue the evils of nuclear technology till your blue in the face, but until you're willing to help lower the (ever rising) average usage of electricity from 13 megawatt hours per home, per year, you're going to have to get used to it. And if you're actually progressive enough to want to visit other planets, you're going to have to start LIKING high energy to low mass ratio solutions.
Thanks for your support. :-) As for some boilerplate text, that's been a little difficult so far. I keep learning so much more from actual nuclear physicists, that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the constant corrections and improvements I'd need to make. Perhaps when my knowledge reaches critical mass. :-)
The space program is nothing without popular support and the populous currently believes the mantra "Nuclear = Evil." Sad, but true.
Even sadder is that the space program will go nowhere without nuclear. Of all the propulsion methods that have been theorized, only nuclear powered ones (be it fission, fusion, or matter/antimatter) produce enough power and thrust to make space travel a feasible option.
Not to mention that no other solution provides a way to "live off the land" and create your own fuel from just about any source. A GCNR rocket could conceivably run off of hydrogen, oxygen, xenon, water, CO2, Iron Oxides, or just about anything else that can be cracked into a gas.
I really would give up this crazy crusade if I thought there was another option that was "good enough". Unfortunately, large amounts of energy are just plain scary. There's nothing we can do about that other than to handle that energy with care.
GCNR, a form of Nuclear Thermal. There was an article on it (posted by myself actually) on Tuesday.
rebooting the rover prolly isnt an option
;-)
Military: "Failure is not an option!"
NASA: "Failure is not in the budget!"
That's why I keep reiterating the need for nuclear powered launchers. Development would cost less than building a new Saturn V, and with 6 million pound launch capacity (2 million cargo) we could send an entire space station up in one go!
...
The same nuclear power could take us on round trip excursions to Mars in a fraction of the time it would take a chemical rocket!
Ah, fuck it. No one's paying any attention anyway.
*sigh*
No news in this neck of the woods i think
;-)
Woods? Like north woods, eh?
It is the only rational way to approach manned exploration of of Mars.
I disagree. The only way to encourage colonization of Mars is if you set up a "train" between the two planets. Anyone who decides they want to go home can simply take the next ship back to Earth. That ship will (of course) arrive loaded with new colonists and supplies.
Remember, while many of the early colonists to America wanted to stay, some were only here on multi-year contracts. At the end of those contracts, they got to go back and spend all the money they'd gained. There's no reason (propulsion not withstanding) that we can't do this. We have the technology. We just need a plan for a new space-based economy.
You might find this link interesting. Just because you see the characters on Back to the Future in rad suits, doesn't mean that's how they actually handle plutonium.