Mirrors on the moon don't have to be 30m. They can be arrayed to boost their strength. You can't do that in orbit but you can on solid ground. If they are on the Moon, they had better build it. Besides He3 mining, geology and solar power collection, there's not much else to do up there.
Fair enough but I maintain that it's the atmosphere that is the limiting factor. If there is bending or whatever that happens due to gravity, you can deal with that in the mirror's construction. You can't do anything about the atmosphere but leave it as Hubble did and a Lunar array will. Lunar telescopes will have only 10% of the gravity to deal with and when that is taken into account, mirrors can be built to compensate for any curvature that gravity might impose. An atmosphere can't be compensated for.
Like I said to the other guy, I'm all in favor of keeping Hubble up. I've signed the list at http://savethehubble.org/ too. I'm just saying that O'Keefe bungled this one, not Bush and it's O'Keefe who has to fix it and fix it he should.
I'm all about keeping the Hubble up, I'm just trying to place blame where it's due. We're on the same side. O'Keefe has some pointy-ass hair.
As for the military aspect, I think you're being a bit paranoid on that one. Bush will be out of office before this really gets rolling if it rolls at all. If he wanted a stronger military space presense, he would have funneled more money into the pentagon's space program. They already get more funding than NASA as it is.
distorting effects of gravity on the mirror? dude, what the hell are you talking about? The big selling point of Hubble is not that it it's outside of Earth's gravity, which it is not but rather outside of it's atmosphere. ground based telescopes don't have to worry about being bent out of shape, they need to worry about all the air they have to look through. No air on the Moon remember? Besides you can put an array on the Moon which you can't do on Earth. Finaly, a radio telescope array on the "dark side" of the moon won't have to contend with all the EM noise that Earth-based ones do.
This wasn't Bush's call. This was NASA trying to appear "decisive" in implementing the new space push. Mismanagement on their part as usual. Don't be so dismissive of it either. If we do establish a presence on the Moon, we'll be able to build a telescope that will make Hubble look like a 25-cent plastic magnifying glass.
Since you grew up thinking of the way you read and write as "correct" it doesn't really strike your attention that the fit is rather poor and that there is no proper English alphabet. This makes a difference.
I don't know if I completely buy this explanation that since English doesn't have its own alphabet, it's not phonetic. Several European languages are completely phonetic like German and Spanish and they use that same alphabet (with a few alterations) that English uses. I don't think it's a failing of the alphabet but rather the stage that English is going through at this point in history. German was similarly screwed up before it was standardized under Luther.
Also, I thought we used a Latin alphabet rather than a Greek one.
I might be wrong. Linguistics is just a passing interest of mine.
I wonder if an "I'm Spartacus" type movement would clear this guy's name if they try to bust him. If everyone claims to have written it, they either have to convict (crucify) everyone who does or dismiss the whole mess.
This was done almost step for step in one of the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think it was in either Green Mars or Blue Mars but folks back on Earth were dumping iron dust into the ocean off of Antarctica to boost the plankton population to act as carbon fixers. He presented it basicaly as terraforming on Earth.
First, you don't need tens of tons of metal radiation sheilding. The radiation is such that you can survive if the craft is built with the water needed for the voyage surounding the humans. a small shielded coffin/chamber is enough to survive solar flares. between that and advanced plastics you're safe. That kills the weight argument.
You don't need to assemble in orbit. that's the Werner von Braun plan that killed the Mars push in '91 and it's an outdated model. Mars Direct is a plan for launching directly to Mars and living on the land. It was developed by actual rocket scientists at the Martin company rather than Slashdot speculators and it's been adopted in one form or another by NASA, the ESA and the Russians.
Landing on the moon is easier yes but living on Mars is far easier. If politics were taken out of the equation, humans could be on Mars in 10 years within the current budget of NASA.
His support is exactly what Mars exploration needs. Anyone who can terraform the planet in 2 minutes as opposed to 2 thousand years knows what he's doing.
Very interesting stuff. I think we should launch another 6 or 10 of these things all over mars after fixing the problem spirit has.
I'd suggest sending 4-6 humans next. As advanced as these probes are humans will be able to do vast amounts more science. Not only will they be able to do in 5 minutes what it takes the probes 2 weeks to do, they will be infinitely better equipped to deal with the unexpected.
The tech has been around for 30 years. I'm glad humans to Mars is a priority again since dollar for dollar and pound for pound, it's a much better investment.
Props to the people on this project but I know for a fact that at least a few of the people on the Spirit/Opportunity team agree with me after seeing a presentation they gave at the local planetarium.
Since steel is just iron and carbon (as far as I know), you've got all you need in the air and dust of Mars. First you react out the oxygen from the CO2 air, collect the graphite, breath the oxygen. That's old school chemistry. The soil contains a good amount of what amounts to rust dust. You can also react off the oxygen to get pure iron or this new magic machine may be able to do it.
Once you've got the iron from the dirt and carbon from the air, this new do-hicky seems like it'll take care of the rest with the help of your local nuclear reactor.
It sounds to me like a self sufficient Mars settlement just got quite a bit easier at least from a construction point of view.
This guy is a dipshit. I've written to him and got back a pretty weak argument in return. He said he's a physics major but he didn't catch a huge error in something that I wrote and caught later. Here's our corespondence.
I'm willing to bet that we'll still be working on getting a mining opperation up and running on the moon by the time we are ready for D-He3 reactors. It just makes good sense to start laying the groundwork for a mining opperation if it will take 10-15 years to get going.
It's just like cooking dinner, you don't wait for each thing to finish cooking, you start things off at next to each other so when you want things to be done, they'll be ready at the same time.
I think India is planning something like this. It's an ion drive powered robot. It would be able to tub things into the right orbit and perform some limited maintenence tasks. It wouldn't be a cure all but it would probably pick up a lot of slack on the cheap. I'm guessing it could be refueled with a tank of fuel launched up hear it.
It would be a nice private venture. I could see a realistic market for it with all the telecommunications stuff up there.
interesting. one nit to pick though: we'll have more carbon than we know what to do with on Mars. The atmosphere can be processed to give us oxygen and carbon. We'll have more pencil lead than we know what to do with.
I'm not positive either but then again, I'm not a rocket scientist. Robert Zubrin is however and he describes the downfalls of building in obrit or on the moon in The Case for Mars. The moon thing is nuts, that's almost a given. The Von Braun model of building a craft in orbit and then launching from there has a lot of problems.
I think the basic idea is that it is possible to launch about 100 tons of stuff to Mars on a 6 month voyage with enough stuff for 4-6 people to survive the trip and stay. Another rocket delivers the return craft unmaned to Mars. Thus, why not just do it in one shot? If you don't need a huge craft why build one? building in orbit with lots of little assembly trips won't be cheap. Look at how the ISS has run over budget. The cost of getting to LEO isn't driven by the cost of the rocket fuel but rather the cost of the hardware and maintence (that's not to mention fluffed up design costs). Thus, more trips means more money time and points of failure.
Things will have to be shaken up anyway to get them into LEO. The high effencicy trhust can be used once you escape the gravity well and direct yourself to Mars.
I might be getting some technical details wrong but read The Case for Mars. He uses numbers and math and everything:)
NASA is already doing work on closed system water recycling. Again, I'm too lazy to get the link but it's off the the main rover page.
It's really nothing space-aged. just good resource management. it would be foolhardy to bring 10 gallons of water for every time you want to flush the toilet out into space.
The ice caps are water. It was believed for a while that the south cap was pure CO2 but this is currently not believed. Every winter part of the C)2 atmosphere freezes down on the surface of whatever cap is going through a winter. So it's just a coating 6 martian months of the year.
I'm too lazy to dig up the links but do a google, look at the NASA mars site and search the slashdot archives for info on the Martial polar caps.
And I'd be the first one to sign up. This is after all what the ultimate goal of space exploration should be. It's the ultimate goal of life itself after all.
Seems to me one of the biggest issues is sending enough water.
Mars has two ice polls and probably underground water. No need to send anything and in fact, you can make a lot of stuff just from the air water and dirt that you find there.
And I've been bothered by politicians who claim launching from the moon is cheaper. While the moon might be a decent staging area, stuff to launch still has to get there from Earth's gravity well before it goes.
me too. I've read that even if there were spaceships fully built and fuled waiting on the moon, it would still be cheaper in every way to just launch straignt to Mars. I think you should read up on Mars Direct
The point of space exploration isn't just to get into space for the sake of being in an airtight container. It seemed like it was for the past 20 or 30 years but being out of space for 4 years in the interest of going out and exploring for theright reasons is well justified.
Slashdot Mirror
Mirrors on the moon don't have to be 30m. They can be arrayed to boost their strength. You can't do that in orbit but you can on solid ground. If they are on the Moon, they had better build it. Besides He3 mining, geology and solar power collection, there's not much else to do up there.
Fair enough but I maintain that it's the atmosphere that is the limiting factor. If there is bending or whatever that happens due to gravity, you can deal with that in the mirror's construction. You can't do anything about the atmosphere but leave it as Hubble did and a Lunar array will. Lunar telescopes will have only 10% of the gravity to deal with and when that is taken into account, mirrors can be built to compensate for any curvature that gravity might impose. An atmosphere can't be compensated for.
Like I said to the other guy, I'm all in favor of keeping Hubble up. I've signed the list at http://savethehubble.org/ too. I'm just saying that O'Keefe bungled this one, not Bush and it's O'Keefe who has to fix it and fix it he should.
I'm all about keeping the Hubble up, I'm just trying to place blame where it's due. We're on the same side. O'Keefe has some pointy-ass hair.
As for the military aspect, I think you're being a bit paranoid on that one. Bush will be out of office before this really gets rolling if it rolls at all. If he wanted a stronger military space presense, he would have funneled more money into the pentagon's space program. They already get more funding than NASA as it is.
distorting effects of gravity on the mirror? dude, what the hell are you talking about? The big selling point of Hubble is not that it it's outside of Earth's gravity, which it is not but rather outside of it's atmosphere. ground based telescopes don't have to worry about being bent out of shape, they need to worry about all the air they have to look through. No air on the Moon remember? Besides you can put an array on the Moon which you can't do on Earth. Finaly, a radio telescope array on the "dark side" of the moon won't have to contend with all the EM noise that Earth-based ones do.
This wasn't Bush's call. This was NASA trying to appear "decisive" in implementing the new space push. Mismanagement on their part as usual. Don't be so dismissive of it either. If we do establish a presence on the Moon, we'll be able to build a telescope that will make Hubble look like a 25-cent plastic magnifying glass.
Since you grew up thinking of the way you read and write as "correct" it doesn't really strike your attention that the fit is rather poor and that there is no proper English alphabet. This makes a difference.
I don't know if I completely buy this explanation that since English doesn't have its own alphabet, it's not phonetic. Several European languages are completely phonetic like German and Spanish and they use that same alphabet (with a few alterations) that English uses. I don't think it's a failing of the alphabet but rather the stage that English is going through at this point in history. German was similarly screwed up before it was standardized under Luther.
Also, I thought we used a Latin alphabet rather than a Greek one.
I might be wrong. Linguistics is just a passing interest of mine.
I wonder if an "I'm Spartacus" type movement would clear this guy's name if they try to bust him. If everyone claims to have written it, they either have to convict (crucify) everyone who does or dismiss the whole mess.
This was done almost step for step in one of the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think it was in either Green Mars or Blue Mars but folks back on Earth were dumping iron dust into the ocean off of Antarctica to boost the plankton population to act as carbon fixers. He presented it basicaly as terraforming on Earth.
Troll, troll, troll.
First, you don't need tens of tons of metal radiation sheilding. The radiation is such that you can survive if the craft is built with the water needed for the voyage surounding the humans. a small shielded coffin/chamber is enough to survive solar flares. between that and advanced plastics you're safe. That kills the weight argument.
You don't need to assemble in orbit. that's the Werner von Braun plan that killed the Mars push in '91 and it's an outdated model. Mars Direct is a plan for launching directly to Mars and living on the land. It was developed by actual rocket scientists at the Martin company rather than Slashdot speculators and it's been adopted in one form or another by NASA, the ESA and the Russians.
Landing on the moon is easier yes but living on Mars is far easier. If politics were taken out of the equation, humans could be on Mars in 10 years within the current budget of NASA.
Do some reading.
His support is exactly what Mars exploration needs. Anyone who can terraform the planet in 2 minutes as opposed to 2 thousand years knows what he's doing.
Very interesting stuff. I think we should launch another 6 or 10 of these things all over mars after fixing the problem spirit has.
I'd suggest sending 4-6 humans next. As advanced as these probes are humans will be able to do vast amounts more science. Not only will they be able to do in 5 minutes what it takes the probes 2 weeks to do, they will be infinitely better equipped to deal with the unexpected.
The tech has been around for 30 years. I'm glad humans to Mars is a priority again since dollar for dollar and pound for pound, it's a much better investment.
Props to the people on this project but I know for a fact that at least a few of the people on the Spirit/Opportunity team agree with me after seeing a presentation they gave at the local planetarium.
Since steel is just iron and carbon (as far as I know), you've got all you need in the air and dust of Mars. First you react out the oxygen from the CO2 air, collect the graphite, breath the oxygen. That's old school chemistry. The soil contains a good amount of what amounts to rust dust. You can also react off the oxygen to get pure iron or this new magic machine may be able to do it.
Once you've got the iron from the dirt and carbon from the air, this new do-hicky seems like it'll take care of the rest with the help of your local nuclear reactor.
It sounds to me like a self sufficient Mars settlement just got quite a bit easier at least from a construction point of view.
People's memories are so short.
Nothing against SuperBanana but he was the one who used the word sarcastical. I think I just found another person to call dipship.
This guy is a dipshit. I've written to him and got back a pretty weak argument in return. He said he's a physics major but he didn't catch a huge error in something that I wrote and caught later. Here's our corespondence.
I'm willing to bet that we'll still be working on getting a mining opperation up and running on the moon by the time we are ready for D-He3 reactors. It just makes good sense to start laying the groundwork for a mining opperation if it will take 10-15 years to get going.
It's just like cooking dinner, you don't wait for each thing to finish cooking, you start things off at next to each other so when you want things to be done, they'll be ready at the same time.
I think India is planning something like this. It's an ion drive powered robot. It would be able to tub things into the right orbit and perform some limited maintenence tasks. It wouldn't be a cure all but it would probably pick up a lot of slack on the cheap. I'm guessing it could be refueled with a tank of fuel launched up hear it.
It would be a nice private venture. I could see a realistic market for it with all the telecommunications stuff up there.
interesting. one nit to pick though: we'll have more carbon than we know what to do with on Mars. The atmosphere can be processed to give us oxygen and carbon. We'll have more pencil lead than we know what to do with.
but nitrogen, yeah, that's going to be a problem.
I'm not positive either but then again, I'm not a rocket scientist. Robert Zubrin is however and he describes the downfalls of building in obrit or on the moon in The Case for Mars. The moon thing is nuts, that's almost a given. The Von Braun model of building a craft in orbit and then launching from there has a lot of problems.
:)
I think the basic idea is that it is possible to launch about 100 tons of stuff to Mars on a 6 month voyage with enough stuff for 4-6 people to survive the trip and stay. Another rocket delivers the return craft unmaned to Mars. Thus, why not just do it in one shot? If you don't need a huge craft why build one? building in orbit with lots of little assembly trips won't be cheap. Look at how the ISS has run over budget. The cost of getting to LEO isn't driven by the cost of the rocket fuel but rather the cost of the hardware and maintence (that's not to mention fluffed up design costs). Thus, more trips means more money time and points of failure.
Things will have to be shaken up anyway to get them into LEO. The high effencicy trhust can be used once you escape the gravity well and direct yourself to Mars.
I might be getting some technical details wrong but read The Case for Mars. He uses numbers and math and everything
NASA is already doing work on closed system water recycling. Again, I'm too lazy to get the link but it's off the the main rover page.
It's really nothing space-aged. just good resource management. it would be foolhardy to bring 10 gallons of water for every time you want to flush the toilet out into space.
The ice caps are water. It was believed for a while that the south cap was pure CO2 but this is currently not believed. Every winter part of the C)2 atmosphere freezes down on the surface of whatever cap is going through a winter. So it's just a coating 6 martian months of the year.
I'm too lazy to dig up the links but do a google, look at the NASA mars site and search the slashdot archives for info on the Martial polar caps.
And I'd be the first one to sign up. This is after all what the ultimate goal of space exploration should be. It's the ultimate goal of life itself after all.
Seems to me one of the biggest issues is sending enough water.
Mars has two ice polls and probably underground water. No need to send anything and in fact, you can make a lot of stuff just from the air water and dirt that you find there.
And I've been bothered by politicians who claim launching from the moon is cheaper. While the moon might be a decent staging area, stuff to launch still has to get there from Earth's gravity well before it goes.
me too. I've read that even if there were spaceships fully built and fuled waiting on the moon, it would still be cheaper in every way to just launch straignt to Mars. I think you should read up on Mars Direct
The point of space exploration isn't just to get into space for the sake of being in an airtight container. It seemed like it was for the past 20 or 30 years but being out of space for 4 years in the interest of going out and exploring for theright reasons is well justified.