I'd just like to step in and make a few corrections and clarifications:
"Obviously a project named after the inventors."
Judge for yourselves, The original AJC posting had a picture of us, as did the actual article. The article also included a nice illustration of the MADMEN.
"But if you ask me, the whole thing sounds like something cooked up by Hubert J. Farnsworth."
Since I designed the MADMEN nodes, does that mean I know officially qualify as a mad scientist?
"NASA really has beaten Congress in the stupid name department."
NASA did not come up with the acronym, nor did they have anything at all to do with this project. The acronym was concocted by AC (the guy on the left in the pic). I'm working on the design for the landers, but managed to write an entire paper on the system without using the acronym. We (SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc.) are not partners with NIAC. They are a group which sponsors far out research like this. We are a completely independant company from them or NASA.
NASA has done some work in asteroid detection, and has similar groups which have done some work on asteroid deflection (with giant lasers I believe) but no dedicated organization for this sort of stuff.
"In short they are paying 75k for a group of people to sit around a brainstorm ideas.
Neat concept, call me when we are actually past the idea part of it."
Hopefully we'll win a NIAC phase II for this and actually build something and get more in depth with the concept.
"If some of them breaks, there's a lot more to carry on."
That's pretty much the whole point of the swarm.
"How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max."
More like 1300 kg, but the in space transfer stage weight a lot more than that
"Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity. "
The MADMEN would definitely have to be located around the asteroid and would obviously only fire when on one side.
And landing on an asteroid is not really that hard, its already been done by a spacecraft not even intended to land on one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to step in and make a few corrections and clarifications:
"Obviously a project named after the inventors."
Judge for yourselves, The original AJC posting had a picture of us, as did the actual article. The article also included a nice illustration of the MADMEN.
"But if you ask me, the whole thing sounds like something cooked up by Hubert J. Farnsworth."
Since I designed the MADMEN nodes, does that mean I know officially qualify as a mad scientist?
"NASA really has beaten Congress in the stupid name department."
NASA did not come up with the acronym, nor did they have anything at all to do with this project. The acronym was concocted by AC (the guy on the left in the pic). I'm working on the design for the landers, but managed to write an entire paper on the system without using the acronym. We (SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc.) are not partners with NIAC. They are a group which sponsors far out research like this. We are a completely independant company from them or NASA.
NASA has done some work in asteroid detection, and has similar groups which have done some work on asteroid deflection (with giant lasers I believe) but no dedicated organization for this sort of stuff.
"In short they are paying 75k for a group of people to sit around a brainstorm ideas. Neat concept, call me when we are actually past the idea part of it."
Hopefully we'll win a NIAC phase II for this and actually build something and get more in depth with the concept.
"If some of them breaks, there's a lot more to carry on."
That's pretty much the whole point of the swarm.
"How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max."
More like 1300 kg, but the in space transfer stage weight a lot more than that
"Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity. "
The MADMEN would definitely have to be located around the asteroid and would obviously only fire when on one side.
And landing on an asteroid is not really that hard, its already been done by a spacecraft not even intended to land on one.