The article starts off badly. Franklin's main achievement was in not getting himself killed with that kite of his. Others, like Faraday, Volta, Maxwell and Ampere discovered the "principles of electricity". Which is why we don't have a "franklin" unit of anything. Except some US currency.
Coming back from Mars (or Europa, for that matter), you're travelling at about the same speed as a return from the Moon. That's at Earth escape velocity since that's how you get out there in the first place. About 40,000 km/hr compared with 28,000 km/hr orbiting in low Earth orbit.
Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, your heat shield has to dissipate about twice the energy, unless you do a burn to get into orbit first. Either way, you have to shed a lot of energy.
Coming back from Alpha Centauri, you may need to toss out a space anchor.
Simple solution: purchase seats on the Soyuz to transport people (leave the ant farms behind). Use expendable boosters (US or Russian) for heavy lifting.
The Soyuz is simple, reliable and safe, if a bit cramped. The next-generation space transport will most likely be capsule-like rather than plane-like anyway. Incidentally, capsules are the only way back from a deep-space mission, like Apollo.
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Maybe he's confusing Neil Armstrong with Lance...
The article starts off badly. Franklin's main achievement was in not getting himself killed with that kite of his. Others, like Faraday, Volta, Maxwell and Ampere discovered the "principles of electricity". Which is why we don't have a "franklin" unit of anything. Except some US currency.
And if they can't reach space with nanotubes, they can surely do it by stacking up all the press releases about "nanotechnology".
Coming back from Mars (or Europa, for that matter), you're travelling at about the same speed as a return from the Moon. That's at Earth escape velocity since that's how you get out there in the first place. About 40,000 km/hr compared with 28,000 km/hr orbiting in low Earth orbit.
Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, your heat shield has to dissipate about twice the energy, unless you do a burn to get into orbit first. Either way, you have to shed a lot of energy.
Coming back from Alpha Centauri, you may need to toss out a space anchor.
Simple solution: purchase seats on the Soyuz to transport people (leave the ant farms behind). Use expendable boosters (US or Russian) for heavy lifting.
The Soyuz is simple, reliable and safe, if a bit cramped. The next-generation space transport will most likely be capsule-like rather than plane-like anyway. Incidentally, capsules are the only way back from a deep-space mission, like Apollo.