Radiation is not a showstopper, really. Usual background levels are manageable; add to that early detection of solar events + sleeping quarters (doubling as radiation bunker) essentially inside water and fuel tanks...and you should be fine.
(reconciling such design with the most straightforward means of generating artificial gravity en route, a tether between crew and propulsion portion, might be harder; but since such tether also greatly complicates systems of propulsion working with low thrust over long periods of time, we'll probably use more permanent arrangements)
Sedna would be interesting; discoverers are calling it a member of inner Oort cloud, maybe even captured from another system.
With its closest approach to the Sun around 2075, and at least a decade or two before that well within great period for probe arrival, there's even decent possibility to see not only launch...
So large part of those was some ideology, hopes (often unsubstantiated obviously). That can still work, I think... (note: only for very few; but it doesn't need more)
But it's probably much easier and straightforward than interstellar travel. Requires similar ingredients, but much less of them (much lesser energy densities, no such time constraints, less resources, etc.), on the order of almost any other place within the system except very inner ones (and direct interstellar travel would very rarely give something better). With perhaps even a trillion objects just in our cloud (not to mention inevitable hitchhikers after close stellar encounters), there should be enough resources and fuel for a long time.
BTW, have you seen pictures of some Norwegian prisons?
Thing is how extremely small the probability (that it might) is - and we are exploring it, just by crosschecking with tons of other experiments or piggybacking on any probe that looks suitable but has other primary purposes. Prioritizing above those something which might very well be a spacecraft design artifact or methodology error wouldn't be exactly a sign of long term vision and commitment IMHO. Wishes for completely new physics or FTL only go so far in the face of all the evidence our Universe provides to the contrary.
Pioneer mostly. Probes to gather data about this very slight anomaly would need to be almost dedicated, to have long periods of cruise without the use of thrusters. And this very slight anomaly, if it exists, might very well not have much impact outside of our understanding of cosmology...
That ignores how many interesting targets beyond outer planets are well within 100 years of probe travel with current capabilities. How speed of Voyagers was determined by their mission and budget, not only technical limitations (a Saturn V with NERVA upper stage and on the probe, borrowed from the Soviets, ion xenon thruster with nuclear reactor could all give a much higher speed, and nothing worse from what we can do few decades later; but it would actually limit their usefulness, limit flyby times during Grand Tour)
Generation ships are overall a horrible idea - if we'll even do direct interstellar travel, it will be probably by the means of embryo colonization. Even then at most 0.2c or so, possibly not more than 0.1. And probably just gradual spread across our scattered disk and Oort cloud; ultimately also other Oort clouds. What's the point in "overtaking" in such setting anyway? Contrary to wishes, we will almost certainly not find a nice semi-habitable planet nearby, there's no reason to rush just to move your space habitat in a virtually identical place.
Or a few tons of reaction mass for some sort of nuclear powered ion engine (for example), which never has to deal with landing on the surface, at most aerobraking gently.
Flammability is the least of problems. Bigger issue is how it is "very" cryogenic and of low density (necessitating large structures, especially problematic when trying to perform an atmospheric entry) - there are good practical reason why no booster needing to remain viable in space for more than a few days (or even hours?) used LH2.
Average members of our specie had lots of practice in abandoning friends and family; we can cope with that. And in this case even a decent communication would be possible, if a bit far from realtime.
Too bad the financing in the style of New World colonists probably can't work, there'll be probably nothing which could repay the debt in a reasonable amount of time. At least there's always place for "spiritual" reasons, I guess - which faith is willing to claim the Mars for itself with a first temple/etc.?;p
How are explorers of small area of cosmos relatively far from the nearest star (distance two orders of magnitude greater than the diameter of said star), generally aiming away from it (but AFAIK without the goal of finding oneself even on the "surface" of another one), an "astronauts"?
Hydrogen isn't the type of fuel that lends itself well to long storage and bringing it down on some planetary surface. In fact, it's probably close to most problematic in those regards.
How do you think most of serious colonization on this planet looked like? People generally weren't coming back.
It won't take direct journeys to other stars to form semi-detached human societies; most asteroids, moon systems around gas giants of our system (maybe except Jupiter), scattered disk or Oort cloud objects will be more than enough. Among the last group, some should eventually make the jump to Oort clouds of passing stars - but by then they could be at least a light year away already, not much point in big farewells.
So how do you have such clear image of, at best, quite distant future? (and we have decent idea of how to deal with "gravity problem"; structures we're building to date aren't of the scale justifying implementations)
At least there were recently news about smaller racks; one of nice things with tech progress & miniaturization, I guess (and why the past rack standard was preferred to be rather big)
And hey, Russians just used what they deemed sufficient (considering small sizes of resupply ships and how the big stuff goes up inside its own module) on a hardware that was long in the making - it's not like what is basically Mir 2 was meant to use ISPRs, or that they would have problems with implementing either of essentially their standards, if they wanted to (though they still did in one case, Zarya has both probe & cone and APAS - and who knows, maybe it was still built like that for docking with Buran).
Plus Chinese use APAS, apparently (in the linked article there's nothing about their docking mechanism, so I'm not sure why it was linked to...); even if this new version isn't strictly compatible, it certainly looks like another evolution of APAS (after quite a few already - original from RKK Energia used in Apollo-Soyuz, Buran version used by Shuttle in Mir dockings and its modification used currently, or the Orion one) / since the Chinese opted for it already, it shouldn't be too hard to get them aboard, so to speak.
I'm listening to a lot of Swedish music - they are the only country in the world with sustained physical sales, and for very good reasons (though it is ignored because labels think in the terms of few superstars, not many great indies); all it takes is large numbers of good, innovative music.
Hm, Orthodox excommunication seems to be generally something rather mild, almost a routine reprimand. I guess he's aiming more at anathema? (a "curse", somewhat more interesting than apostasy and dull formal excommunication in the Catholic Church - though in their formalism, they give few fun ways: maltreatment of the Eucharist(*), physical attack on the pope (problem: those doing it recently seem to be simply declared mentally ill by Italy), breaching the secrecy of the Conclave (though only by auxiliary personnel, it seems...) or of a confession (again, only by the confessor, it seems))
(*)hm, those wafers should be good for a little sculpture-making...
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I'm afraid only competing militarily in space would work, in the end. Outer Space Treaty largely getting in the way, theoretically at least.
Radiation is not a showstopper, really. Usual background levels are manageable; add to that early detection of solar events + sleeping quarters (doubling as radiation bunker) essentially inside water and fuel tanks...and you should be fine.
(reconciling such design with the most straightforward means of generating artificial gravity en route, a tether between crew and propulsion portion, might be harder; but since such tether also greatly complicates systems of propulsion working with low thrust over long periods of time, we'll probably use more permanent arrangements)
Actually, how is that moon effort going along?
Sedna would be interesting; discoverers are calling it a member of inner Oort cloud, maybe even captured from another system.
With its closest approach to the Sun around 2075, and at least a decade or two before that well within great period for probe arrival, there's even decent possibility to see not only launch...
Ignoring how enormously wasteful would be slowing down to rendezvous with the fleet...
So large part of those was some ideology, hopes (often unsubstantiated obviously). That can still work, I think... (note: only for very few; but it doesn't need more)
But it's probably much easier and straightforward than interstellar travel. Requires similar ingredients, but much less of them (much lesser energy densities, no such time constraints, less resources, etc.), on the order of almost any other place within the system except very inner ones (and direct interstellar travel would very rarely give something better). With perhaps even a trillion objects just in our cloud (not to mention inevitable hitchhikers after close stellar encounters), there should be enough resources and fuel for a long time.
BTW, have you seen pictures of some Norwegian prisons?
Thing is how extremely small the probability (that it might) is - and we are exploring it, just by crosschecking with tons of other experiments or piggybacking on any probe that looks suitable but has other primary purposes. Prioritizing above those something which might very well be a spacecraft design artifact or methodology error wouldn't be exactly a sign of long term vision and commitment IMHO. Wishes for completely new physics or FTL only go so far in the face of all the evidence our Universe provides to the contrary.
Pioneer mostly. Probes to gather data about this very slight anomaly would need to be almost dedicated, to have long periods of cruise without the use of thrusters. And this very slight anomaly, if it exists, might very well not have much impact outside of our understanding of cosmology...
That ignores how many interesting targets beyond outer planets are well within 100 years of probe travel with current capabilities. How speed of Voyagers was determined by their mission and budget, not only technical limitations (a Saturn V with NERVA upper stage and on the probe, borrowed from the Soviets, ion xenon thruster with nuclear reactor could all give a much higher speed, and nothing worse from what we can do few decades later; but it would actually limit their usefulness, limit flyby times during Grand Tour)
Generation ships are overall a horrible idea - if we'll even do direct interstellar travel, it will be probably by the means of embryo colonization. Even then at most 0.2c or so, possibly not more than 0.1. And probably just gradual spread across our scattered disk and Oort cloud; ultimately also other Oort clouds. What's the point in "overtaking" in such setting anyway? Contrary to wishes, we will almost certainly not find a nice semi-habitable planet nearby, there's no reason to rush just to move your space habitat in a virtually identical place.
Or a few tons of reaction mass for some sort of nuclear powered ion engine (for example), which never has to deal with landing on the surface, at most aerobraking gently.
Flammability is the least of problems. Bigger issue is how it is "very" cryogenic and of low density (necessitating large structures, especially problematic when trying to perform an atmospheric entry) - there are good practical reason why no booster needing to remain viable in space for more than a few days (or even hours?) used LH2.
Average members of our specie had lots of practice in abandoning friends and family; we can cope with that. And in this case even a decent communication would be possible, if a bit far from realtime.
Too bad the financing in the style of New World colonists probably can't work, there'll be probably nothing which could repay the debt in a reasonable amount of time. At least there's always place for "spiritual" reasons, I guess - which faith is willing to claim the Mars for itself with a first temple/etc.? ;p
How are explorers of small area of cosmos relatively far from the nearest star (distance two orders of magnitude greater than the diameter of said star), generally aiming away from it (but AFAIK without the goal of finding oneself even on the "surface" of another one), an "astronauts"?
Hydrogen isn't the type of fuel that lends itself well to long storage and bringing it down on some planetary surface. In fact, it's probably close to most problematic in those regards.
On the plus side: interplanetary that-what-we-don't-talk-about should live again.
How do you think most of serious colonization on this planet looked like? People generally weren't coming back.
It won't take direct journeys to other stars to form semi-detached human societies; most asteroids, moon systems around gas giants of our system (maybe except Jupiter), scattered disk or Oort cloud objects will be more than enough. Among the last group, some should eventually make the jump to Oort clouds of passing stars - but by then they could be at least a light year away already, not much point in big farewells.
So how do you have such clear image of, at best, quite distant future? (and we have decent idea of how to deal with "gravity problem"; structures we're building to date aren't of the scale justifying implementations)
Yeah, just goes to show you the standard of /. submissions; this new thing seems to be a version of APAS, which Chinese use.
Joint missions being relatively rare? It's almost all that everybody does for more than a decade.
They've done Everest, but didn't stay there for long.
At least there were recently news about smaller racks; one of nice things with tech progress & miniaturization, I guess (and why the past rack standard was preferred to be rather big)
And hey, Russians just used what they deemed sufficient (considering small sizes of resupply ships and how the big stuff goes up inside its own module) on a hardware that was long in the making - it's not like what is basically Mir 2 was meant to use ISPRs, or that they would have problems with implementing either of essentially their standards, if they wanted to (though they still did in one case, Zarya has both probe & cone and APAS - and who knows, maybe it was still built like that for docking with Buran).
Plus Chinese use APAS, apparently (in the linked article there's nothing about their docking mechanism, so I'm not sure why it was linked to...); even if this new version isn't strictly compatible, it certainly looks like another evolution of APAS (after quite a few already - original from RKK Energia used in Apollo-Soyuz, Buran version used by Shuttle in Mir dockings and its modification used currently, or the Orion one) / since the Chinese opted for it already, it shouldn't be too hard to get them aboard, so to speak.
I'm listening to a lot of Swedish music - they are the only country in the world with sustained physical sales, and for very good reasons (though it is ignored because labels think in the terms of few superstars, not many great indies); all it takes is large numbers of good, innovative music.
Hm, Orthodox excommunication seems to be generally something rather mild, almost a routine reprimand. I guess he's aiming more at anathema? (a "curse", somewhat more interesting than apostasy and dull formal excommunication in the Catholic Church - though in their formalism, they give few fun ways: maltreatment of the Eucharist(*), physical attack on the pope (problem: those doing it recently seem to be simply declared mentally ill by Italy), breaching the secrecy of the Conclave (though only by auxiliary personnel, it seems...) or of a confession (again, only by the confessor, it seems))
(*)hm, those wafers should be good for a little sculpture-making...