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.
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.
The EMdrive is still being worked on. There are private, and secretive, efforts to develop it, in addition to NASA research at Eagleworks. They're building test apparatus which eliminate any possibility of error from gravity, heating, etc. But they're working with very low electrical power, so the thrust they're dealing with is miniscule. There's a theory that thrust is not linear, and that the maximum efficiency is at an electrical power of 50kW, and that it's a LOT of thrust. My *hunch* is that there are groups working with EMdrives which are tens of kW, but not superconducting (but as high Q as a room-temperature RF cavity can get)...just to see what happens. Working with superconductors is difficult and expensive. The commercial superconductor industry is developing MgB2 technology for high-field magnets used in MRI, fusion, and particle accelerators, and once some of this fabrication expertise is gained, I believe that we'll see EMdrive using it. I'd give a rough estimate of 4-5 years. I don't see hi-temp (cuprate, etc) superconductors in this application for some time.
The revolution of a practical EMdrive will disrupt the propulsion industry, which may be one of the reasons NASA is putting such little money into the projects which are the subject of this article.
I agree, in that if the only difficulty with high-TC superconductors was burnout (assuming burnout happened after the time needed to conduct the experiment), then it would be worth constructing. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the high-Tc superconductors are ceramics, and getting them annealed at the proper dimensions and smoothness is difficult. An insufficiently constructed RF cavity of this type wouldn't burn out, it just wouldn't function with sufficient efficiency to properly demonstrate the capabilities of the EMdrive.
Compared with the difficulties of working with other materials, machining the RF cavity out of niobium titanate is not difficult. Maintaining the near absolute-zero temperature necessary for it to superconduct would be a problem, in that much liquid helium would be consumed - and not just because of the penetration of outside heat, but also because of heat generated internally when the device is used: any imperfections in the RF cavity's construction or the frequency and shape of the signal applied would end up causing part of the power to be lost to heat. However, if the device was at least sufficiently well constructed so that the heat generated was little enough to be compensated for in the cooling system, then the magnitude of the EFdrive's acceleration should be strong enough be readily observable, and well in excess of any thermal effects which might otherwise overwhelm the EMdrive effect.
Wow, such anger, much distortion! It HAS been replicated. there IS published experiments, peer reviewed. Are Tajmar and Fielder not respectable enough for your tastes? Some people, which may include 'gavron', call themselves physicists but are really just engineers who took some physics in college, and now don't want to think that there's so much more physics that they have to learn. There are huge frontiers in physics, but there are usually are abstract and at one end of the scale or the other: cosmologic or subatomic. This area of exploration is human-scale, potentially disruptive, and that makes some old farts nervous.
Unruh effect may be responsible for the EMdrive effect, and also may explain why galaxies don't fling themselves apart, without the need for bizarre concepts such as 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'. The problem with Unruh's theory is that we have lacked the ability to test it, until, perhaps, now - with the EMdrive. See this paper by McCulloch: http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2015/PP-40-15.PDF
Eh, don't like your characterisation of 'mental masturbation', but I'll skip over that and agree with other things you have said. In particular, the superconducting part.Niobium is old-school, and has to be cooled so close to absolute zero that it is expensive and cumbersome. That being said, it should be sufficient for a test of an emdrive - if thermal effects can be properly addressed. Magnesium diboride does not require quite as low a temperature, but is still difficult to get into the ultra-smooth, ultra-precise shape that a high-Q RF cavity needs to be. The cuprate superconductors, with their much less strenuous cooling requirements, are even more difficult to deal with, and superconductivity in them is destroyed under intense magnetic fields. The newest superconductor, plain old Hydrogen sulfide, only superconducts under extremely high pressure, and I don't see how that it's even remotely practical because of it.
No sum up: Please do use niobium now (niobium titanate) for an EMdrive. I believe that the Magnesium diboride (MgB2) fabrication methods will soon (in a year or two) be sufficiently advanced for use in an EMDrive, especially if there is more attention (money) put into the project if the niobium EMdrive is successful. Don't wait for other superconducting technology to mature before designing a practical EMdrive.
Old programmers don't have to work. We're "consultants", sitting on the beach, collecting big fat fees for making the occasional modification to legacy code written in some obscure language. The best is, har har, when they hire us to document the code....we throw in so much bullshit into the docs that only a brother in our secret order can decode it. Do you remember Y2K? Yeah, that was us! The year 2038 problem is also going to be a big money-maker, even moreso than the pile of IPv4 space we're sitting on. Of course, it doesn't work out as well for all who enter the field. I see some old VMS programmers begging for beer money and looking for scraps of VT102's in Maynard...tough for them. Others have moved on to new careers, such as real estate agents, journalists, or porn stars, I know one feller that leveraged his way into being a big-city bus-driver, and pulls in just as much doing that as he did slinging bits at Wang, but for a lot less effort.
I've been following this invention for years; since the first announcements from Shawyer through his being trashed by various physicists and wanna-bees, through his redemption through work in China and NASA. It used to be very difficult to get information, but since the burst of activity on the NASA Space flight forums, there's now too much information to digest, especially for someone like me who only has an undergrad level of schooling in it. If you want lots of details and discussion, check it out - but please don't post unless you really know what you're talking about, as there's already been a hell of a lot of noise. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37642.0
LiFePO4 are a class of lithium batteries which do not have this thermal runaway problem. The disadvantage is that they have less energy density when new, but because other lithium battery technologies quickly lose capacity, this disadvantage is eliminated at a year of age, and thereafter, LiFePO4 has a higher energy density. LiFePO4 batteries are what should have been used in the Boeing 787 in the first place, in order to prevent the problems that grounded the fleet.
This is a 'donation', not a tax. If it were a real tax, it would be written into law and/or tax code, and wouldn't be a one-time thing. The taxpayer does not get to decide how the specific taxes they pay are spent, and certainly a corporation doesn't.
They should have just donated the remains of Nokia to its employees.
We don't need a sexist training program. We don't need more computer programmers - we need better ones. Society would be better off if the money were spent for training in healthcare professions.
Many, many years ago I was a temp doing data entry for the sub-sub contractor for military night-vision goggles. the company was making the high-voltage power supplies. they had a QA spreadsheet in Lotus 123 that the results of QA test failures were supposed to be entered into, and because of bad 'programming', only the first 20 tests failures were tabulated, giving them results which showed a lower failure rate the more units they made. I pointed this out, was ignored, complained, was fired, tried to blow the whistle, got no response. But the company has since gone out of business..ha ha ha, they deserve worse.
Actually, that's only sort-of true. I started with MCC interim release, but couldn't get it to work properly. So then I spent a few days downloading SLS and it worked just fine - well, as good as you could expect with only 4MB of ram. But I didn't notice any alignment issues, and I wasn't instructed to reinforce the floor so I didn't. I had problems with overheating during compilation though, which I fixed by a powerful floor fan pointed at the air intake of the PC. I later fixed this more gracefully with a home-made triple-sized heat sink. Maybe that's what NASA should do, build a giant heat sink onto it.
When I was last shopping for a car (two years ago), I had narrowed it down to either a used Prius or a use VW TDI. I chose the VW only because I found a good one available locally at a decent price. I did a hair amount of research on the issue of battery reliability. What I found is...batteries are lasting far longer than their warranties, which are pretty long. I also found out that it's likely that a single cell will fail before the whole pack. The dealer may tell you that you need a whole new battery and want $10,000 for it, but often, for less than $50, you can just replace the faulty cell. Also, if you search for non-dealer entire battery pack replacements, they can be had for $1200 new. What's interesting about this is that there are ten year old Priuses out there for sale 'parts only, battery needs to be replaced', for reasonable cost. The reasons I didn't go this route was because I didn't have garage space to work on it, and I needed a car quickly and the cheap Prius I was seeing were kind of far away.
It's worth noting that the price of electricity makes this economy variable. The place I live now just had electric rates rise by 30% because they shut down a nuclear power plant. In other, more responsible areas of the US or in other countries, the situation may be better (or worse).
I already knew about this, but glad to see it posted here. I am sad that it has to be a Russian one instead of a US/Japan or French one, and wish it could be Thorium instead of Uranium, but those aren't available yet. They originally were going to build it at Aqaba, their only sea access, to make use of the seawater for cooling and also desalinate it with waste plant heat. I wonder why they moved it.
Who let the Green party run the place? All sorts of demands. What if I want a skylight? What if I want traditional roofing? No freedom of choice on how to make my home.
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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.
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.
The EMdrive is still being worked on. There are private, and secretive, efforts to develop it, in addition to NASA research at Eagleworks. They're building test apparatus which eliminate any possibility of error from gravity, heating, etc. But they're working with very low electrical power, so the thrust they're dealing with is miniscule. There's a theory that thrust is not linear, and that the maximum efficiency is at an electrical power of 50kW, and that it's a LOT of thrust. My *hunch* is that there are groups working with EMdrives which are tens of kW, but not superconducting (but as high Q as a room-temperature RF cavity can get)...just to see what happens. Working with superconductors is difficult and expensive. The commercial superconductor industry is developing MgB2 technology for high-field magnets used in MRI, fusion, and particle accelerators, and once some of this fabrication expertise is gained, I believe that we'll see EMdrive using it. I'd give a rough estimate of 4-5 years. I don't see hi-temp (cuprate, etc) superconductors in this application for some time.
The revolution of a practical EMdrive will disrupt the propulsion industry, which may be one of the reasons NASA is putting such little money into the projects which are the subject of this article.
I agree, in that if the only difficulty with high-TC superconductors was burnout (assuming burnout happened after the time needed to conduct the experiment), then it would be worth constructing. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the high-Tc superconductors are ceramics, and getting them annealed at the proper dimensions and smoothness is difficult. An insufficiently constructed RF cavity of this type wouldn't burn out, it just wouldn't function with sufficient efficiency to properly demonstrate the capabilities of the EMdrive.
Compared with the difficulties of working with other materials, machining the RF cavity out of niobium titanate is not difficult. Maintaining the near absolute-zero temperature necessary for it to superconduct would be a problem, in that much liquid helium would be consumed - and not just because of the penetration of outside heat, but also because of heat generated internally when the device is used: any imperfections in the RF cavity's construction or the frequency and shape of the signal applied would end up causing part of the power to be lost to heat. However, if the device was at least sufficiently well constructed so that the heat generated was little enough to be compensated for in the cooling system, then the magnitude of the EFdrive's acceleration should be strong enough be readily observable, and well in excess of any thermal effects which might otherwise overwhelm the EMdrive effect.
Wow, such anger, much distortion! It HAS been replicated. there IS published experiments, peer reviewed. Are Tajmar and Fielder not respectable enough for your tastes? Some people, which may include 'gavron', call themselves physicists but are really just engineers who took some physics in college, and now don't want to think that there's so much more physics that they have to learn. There are huge frontiers in physics, but there are usually are abstract and at one end of the scale or the other: cosmologic or subatomic. This area of exploration is human-scale, potentially disruptive, and that makes some old farts nervous.
Eagleworks is NASA. Not anyone can't just 'rent a NASA facility'. The crackpot, here, is you!
Unruh effect may be responsible for the EMdrive effect, and also may explain why galaxies don't fling themselves apart, without the need for bizarre concepts such as 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'. The problem with Unruh's theory is that we have lacked the ability to test it, until, perhaps, now - with the EMdrive. See this paper by McCulloch: http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2015/PP-40-15.PDF
Eh, don't like your characterisation of 'mental masturbation', but I'll skip over that and agree with other things you have said. In particular, the superconducting part.Niobium is old-school, and has to be cooled so close to absolute zero that it is expensive and cumbersome. That being said, it should be sufficient for a test of an emdrive - if thermal effects can be properly addressed. Magnesium diboride does not require quite as low a temperature, but is still difficult to get into the ultra-smooth, ultra-precise shape that a high-Q RF cavity needs to be. The cuprate superconductors, with their much less strenuous cooling requirements, are even more difficult to deal with, and superconductivity in them is destroyed under intense magnetic fields. The newest superconductor, plain old Hydrogen sulfide, only superconducts under extremely high pressure, and I don't see how that it's even remotely practical because of it.
No sum up: Please do use niobium now (niobium titanate) for an EMdrive. I believe that the Magnesium diboride (MgB2) fabrication methods will soon (in a year or two) be sufficiently advanced for use in an EMDrive, especially if there is more attention (money) put into the project if the niobium EMdrive is successful. Don't wait for other superconducting technology to mature before designing a practical EMdrive.
Old programmers don't have to work. We're "consultants", sitting on the beach, collecting big fat fees for making the occasional modification to legacy code written in some obscure language. The best is, har har, when they hire us to document the code....we throw in so much bullshit into the docs that only a brother in our secret order can decode it. Do you remember Y2K? Yeah, that was us! The year 2038 problem is also going to be a big money-maker, even moreso than the pile of IPv4 space we're sitting on. Of course, it doesn't work out as well for all who enter the field. I see some old VMS programmers begging for beer money and looking for scraps of VT102's in Maynard...tough for them. Others have moved on to new careers, such as real estate agents, journalists, or porn stars, I know one feller that leveraged his way into being a big-city bus-driver, and pulls in just as much doing that as he did slinging bits at Wang, but for a lot less effort.
I've been following this invention for years; since the first announcements from Shawyer through his being trashed by various physicists and wanna-bees, through his redemption through work in China and NASA. It used to be very difficult to get information, but since the burst of activity on the NASA Space flight forums, there's now too much information to digest, especially for someone like me who only has an undergrad level of schooling in it. If you want lots of details and discussion, check it out - but please don't post unless you really know what you're talking about, as there's already been a hell of a lot of noise. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37642.0
LiFePO4 are a class of lithium batteries which do not have this thermal runaway problem. The disadvantage is that they have less energy density when new, but because other lithium battery technologies quickly lose capacity, this disadvantage is eliminated at a year of age, and thereafter, LiFePO4 has a higher energy density. LiFePO4 batteries are what should have been used in the Boeing 787 in the first place, in order to prevent the problems that grounded the fleet.
Who is this Juan de Fuca? How is he applying so much pressure on the United States? He must be stopped. It's not our fault, it's his.
This is a 'donation', not a tax. If it were a real tax, it would be written into law and/or tax code, and wouldn't be a one-time thing. The taxpayer does not get to decide how the specific taxes they pay are spent, and certainly a corporation doesn't.
They should have just donated the remains of Nokia to its employees.
We don't need a sexist training program. We don't need more computer programmers - we need better ones. Society would be better off if the money were spent for training in healthcare professions.
Yes, this topic at the same time as Sony is killing of the Aibo.
what a bunch of hypocritical selllouts
Many, many years ago I was a temp doing data entry for the sub-sub contractor for military night-vision goggles. the company was making the high-voltage power supplies. they had a QA spreadsheet in Lotus 123 that the results of QA test failures were supposed to be entered into, and because of bad 'programming', only the first 20 tests failures were tabulated, giving them results which showed a lower failure rate the more units they made. I pointed this out, was ignored, complained, was fired, tried to blow the whistle, got no response. But the company has since gone out of business..ha ha ha, they deserve worse.
Actually, that's only sort-of true. I started with MCC interim release, but couldn't get it to work properly. So then I spent a few days downloading SLS and it worked just fine - well, as good as you could expect with only 4MB of ram. But I didn't notice any alignment issues, and I wasn't instructed to reinforce the floor so I didn't. I had problems with overheating during compilation though, which I fixed by a powerful floor fan pointed at the air intake of the PC. I later fixed this more gracefully with a home-made triple-sized heat sink. Maybe that's what NASA should do, build a giant heat sink onto it.
race to the bottom...which series is more idiotic?
When I was last shopping for a car (two years ago), I had narrowed it down to either a used Prius or a use VW TDI. I chose the VW only because I found a good one available locally at a decent price. I did a hair amount of research on the issue of battery reliability. What I found is...batteries are lasting far longer than their warranties, which are pretty long. I also found out that it's likely that a single cell will fail before the whole pack. The dealer may tell you that you need a whole new battery and want $10,000 for it, but often, for less than $50, you can just replace the faulty cell. Also, if you search for non-dealer entire battery pack replacements, they can be had for $1200 new. What's interesting about this is that there are ten year old Priuses out there for sale 'parts only, battery needs to be replaced', for reasonable cost. The reasons I didn't go this route was because I didn't have garage space to work on it, and I needed a car quickly and the cheap Prius I was seeing were kind of far away.
It's worth noting that the price of electricity makes this economy variable. The place I live now just had electric rates rise by 30% because they shut down a nuclear power plant. In other, more responsible areas of the US or in other countries, the situation may be better (or worse).
Do you know why they switched the site from Aqaba? They could have used the waste heat from the plant to desalinate the seawater.
I already knew about this, but glad to see it posted here. I am sad that it has to be a Russian one instead of a US/Japan or French one, and wish it could be Thorium instead of Uranium, but those aren't available yet. They originally were going to build it at Aqaba, their only sea access, to make use of the seawater for cooling and also desalinate it with waste plant heat. I wonder why they moved it.
Who let the Green party run the place? All sorts of demands. What if I want a skylight? What if I want traditional roofing? No freedom of choice on how to make my home.
and anyhow, I am more interested i the design and standardization of street signs.
Really...how about Rhode Island? It's a small enough place, so it should be easier to secure.