It is really small, and much smaller than it once was when it was a regular train watering station, and Route 66 was a major national road, but Amboy is NOT a ghost town! It has a population of 4, it has a gas station, and it has a post office!
It is just about the darkest site in Southern California, and good for doing astronomy in the area.
The velocity excess of 26.33 km/sec makes it 'faster' (more total energy) relative to the Sun than any man-made object. This velocity is fairly typical for random stellar motions relative to each other in our region of the galaxy (with 5 km/sec of the average). This is a bit less that 0.01% c so travelling a few light years takes a few tens of thousands of years.
Now if this an alien spaceship that was travelling much faster but simply braked to this velocity before making this approach to the Sun, to study us, it is interesting to think when they might have completed the braking maneuver. If it did so 10 AU out then it completed the maneuver a year ago, if it was 100 AU out then it was a bit less than 20 years ago. Of course now we know where it is and where it is going we are going to "keep watching the skies" where it disappeared so it a propulsion motor turns on it will have to be quite some distance out to escape detection.
It's a beautiful engineering challenge that you pose. Landing on it, as others have pointed out, is probably a no-go, as the closure speeds are barely imaginable. However, if you can get a tether to stick to it (think the harpoon that NASA is looking into) then letting that tether drag your spacecraft to "slowly" accelerate it, then you've got a chance.
Having something "stick" to the asteroid is exactly the same thing as "landing on it". Anything touching an asteroid at astronomical velocities turns into a cloud of vapor.
But it seems to me this would be a, somewhat, easy shortcut. We've already landed on an asteroid, the next logical piece is to find a way to launch from it.
All space travel is nothing but things in ballistic trajectories. It is all about the velocity vector, and velocity requires rocket propulsion which is expensive. Landing on an asteroid requires two major velocity changes - getting on a solar orbit that intersects with the object, then matching velocities (in addition to getting away from Earth's gravity field). You only go through all that energy-expense to investigate the object, there is no other reason. It is not like a piece of land, where airplanes land and take off, since airplanes do have to land sometimes. This is just an object you matched velocities with at great expense.
The reason why we know this is from outside the solar system is that it is moving much too fast for anything that was ever part of the solar system. `Oumuamua has a solar velocity excess (V_infinity) of 26 km/sec.
The fastest thing (in terms of V_infinity) we have ever sent by rocket technology is the little New Horizons probe at 16 km/sec. Even rendezvousing with any of these objects is going to be a major undertaking. This would require a mission (or more likely missions) kept ready to go on mere days notice to send a probe in chase as it heads back out. The extremely high probe velocity required would probably call for an ion drive or other exotic propulsion option.
...This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
Funny how nuclear power nutters insist that nuclear power is safe, because of all the safety features the plants have (containment vessel, etc.) but at the very same time complain that those safety features are making the plants too damn expensive and should be eliminated.
Also odd, as other posters note here, that nuclear power plants are expensive everywhere in the world.
Its those all-powerful hippies crushing capitalists everywhere under their Birkenstock clad foot! Will the hippie domination of the world economy never end?
Well, unfortunately, it was his own party which jumped on Three Mile Island to torpedo nuclear power in the USA. That pretty much -caused- climate change, when you think about it.
Pure fantasy.
Nuclear power installation stopped in the U.S. due to simple economics. Electricity demand did not keep growing as expected, after the energy crisis of the 1970s, and the need for lots and lots of new (very expensive) capacity disappeared. That is why the famous WPPSS ("Whoops") project collapsed. Nuclear power has not revived because hard-nosed capitalist businessmen think it is a poor way to invest money. There have been licenses for the taking continually, there has never been a time they were not available to anyone willing to apply for them. Several have actually been applied for and granted, but the projects never get built.
Isn't it odd that 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and then 8 years of Bush II, staunch nuclear power supporters all, could not get a single new nuclear power plant started?
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Providing nitrogen is a readily solvable problem. I am a bit puzzled by the assertion that "there are limited places to get it on Earth" since most air is nitrogen, and it is fixed synthetically as you note. The Wikipedia link indicates that it is only 1-2% of world energy consumption, but 3-5% of natural gas consumption. This suggests that it is really a non-problem going forward. Haber process plants are huge industrial facilities, and the carbon in the methane is currently released as CO2, but a huge centralized chemical plant is the perfect place to install carbon capture technology so that the nitrogen fertilizer production can be zero carbon emitting.
Facebook knows what you look like
Facebook knows your location
Facebook knows who your friends are
Facebook knows your interests
Facebook knows if you're in a relationship or not
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
There is but one inescapable conclusion: Mark Zuckerberg is Santa Claus.
Definitely not. It has been thoroughly established that Zuckerberg has no concept of "good" or "bad" (i.e. morality).
Nah. The argument collapses when the physicist (arguing that economic growth cannot become radically decoupled from energy consumption) claims:
But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt.
Only if a market existed such that everyone with energy was willing to sell it to a single buyer, leaving themselves with none. Why would they do that?
Currently the value of food production in the U.S. is only 1% of GDP. That means someone with 200 billion could buy all the food in the country making everyone starve. The top three billionaires in the U.S. have that much money. Are we in danger of them getting together and forcing the nation to its knees by buying all of our food? Suppose they wanted to do it - how would they actually manage to do that?
In a world where energy production is a negligible fraction of the economy, power production would be ubiquitous. There would be no market where it could all be bought.
Our demand for party balloons, helium filled disks and Goodyear blimps will never run out right? So after US stocks run out what then? Could fusion power possibly make helium a renewable resource?
Betteridge's Law strikes again!
No.
In 2013 world electricity production was 23,322TWh, but lets allow for power production growth and assume 100,000TWh. How much helium would be produced if all of that was produced by D+T fusion? One watt-hour is 2.25*10^22 eV, so 10^17 Wh is 2.25*10^39 eV. D+T fusion produces 17.6 MeV per helium atom. Assume an overall conversion efficiency of 25%, so that we get one helium atom for each 4.4 MeV of electricity produced. So we get 2.25*10^39/4.4*10^6 = 5.1*10^32 helium atoms a year. This is 8.47*10^8 moles. Meanwhile the world currently uses 150 million cubic meters of helium a year which is 6.7*10^9 moles, so this extremely high fusion production level will only satisfy 12.6% of current world demand.
Good summary. Nuclear power is simply uneconomical compared with the newest, and rapidly developing, renewable technologies. There is a reason that world nuclear power production (not just in the US) has been nearly level for about 30 years. The era of nuclear power plant construction has passed, and super-expensive fusion ain't bringing it back when (and if) it becomes available.
A 21st Century electrical grid looks like this: high voltage DC power lines that ship electricity across an entire continent (800 KV lines can transport electricity from one U.S. coast to the other with losses under 5%), solar and wind power deployed in excess capacity (but still cheaper than the nuclear "base load"), pumped water storage to provide additional power leveling which, again, serves the entire continent. No need for expensive batteries, but you can build them too, and the technology continues to improve there as well.
The larger the grid the better because local conditions will average out, and you can take advantage of peak solar production in one place when evening demand peaks elsewhere, and so forth.
The notion that fusion research requires special licenses that the U.S. government, under both parties, across 11 administrations has refused to provide is pure delusion.
Another thing everyone should remember when complaints that the we don't have fusion because the U.S. government hasn't been spending enough on it is that the U.S. government is NOT the only source of fusion energy funding in the world. 90% of the ITER funding is not from the U.S. If it just because the U.S., across eleven administrations has been a laggard, why has not the rest of the world raced ahead and delivered?
I’m been hearing fusion is only 20 years away for at least 30 years now.
It is worse than that. The time until we get fusion power is a monotonically increasing function of calendar year. In the early 1950s, when Project Sherwood was started, it was highly classified because it was thought that it would produce fusion power so soon (i.e. less than a decade) that it would be a valuable military technology. By the late 1960s they were talking about it being achieved in 20 years. By 2000 the timeline had grown to 30+ years.
In 2014 the projection for DEMO, the ITER follow-on, which is described as a system that would bring us to the "threshold of a prototype fusion reactor", i.e. short of being an actual prototype fusion power reactor, which in turn is short of being an actual commercial power reactor, was projected to start operating in the 2040s, i.e. at least 30 years, if no further schedule slippages occur. Currently, PROTO, the actual prototype fusion power reactor is not envisioned before the 2050s and likely later, which brings us about 40 years, and we still aren't talking about an actual commercial power plant. Allowing for the established 20 year cycle for each iteration of a major fusion reactor project, we might get that commercial power plant in 60 years. But it will be too expensive to compete with other sources of power.
Is some other new fusion design going suddenly break us out of this pattern? There is no law of nature against it, so it is possible. But literally hundreds of fusion schemes have been investigated, and without exception every concept has proven much harder in practice than on paper (or computer). Engineering by press release does not cut it (Lockheed Martin I am looking at you), until an actual demonstration unit is operating with predicted performance all claims on new breakthroughs should be ignored.
This is an interesting development in materials science, but helium diffusion weakening of containment vessels is pretty far down the list of critical problems standing in the way of producing commercial energy from fusion any time this century.
The key obstacle, even more important than the fact that no power producing fusion reactors have yet been built, nor are likely to be in the next 30 years, is that they will not be able to compete with other sources of electricity. Fusion power is going to be much more capital intensive than fission power plants that already have trouble competing with other sources of electricity due to their construction costs. No new material for a container wall is going to fix this.
The reactor is heavy. The radiation shielding is heavy - these both mean that you need a very large spacecraft before you have a net win in performance.
You probably don't want to turn one of these on before you are in orbit due to the potential problems with an accident (and the thrust to weight is pretty small anyway).
An additional problem is that its difficult to store hydrogen for long periods of time - you would need a complex and heavy refrigeration system. Or you can just use the nuclear rocket for leaving earth, and conventional storable chemicals for arrival.
Its a reasonable idea but with a lot of engineering tradeoffs that need to be considered. Its.... rocket science.
NERVA was heavy, but it was a primitive design. The Timberwind reference design is not heavy, it has an impressive 30:1 thrust to weight ratio. The shielding problem is much less than you think. Until you consume nearly all of your fuel, it provides lots of shielding, and the nuclear-thermal propulsion systems are high thrust, short burn time systems. The crew would enter a small shielded shelter during the five minutes or so of the final arrival "burn". And of course, your stores (food, water) would be arranged for free shielding.
Project Timberwind was a far more advanced system design than NERVA (although, unlike NERVA, they never built a prototype). The thrust-to-weight ratio of the NERVA engine was 1:1, for Timberwind it was 30:1. The notion that Timberwind is derived from NERVA does not stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. The designs are entirely different (other than, you know, both using a nuclear reactor and hydrogen propellant). Any new effort in this direction is likely to use Timberwind as a reference design for a jump-off point.
Slashdot Mirror
'Nuff said.
Move along folks, nothing to see.
With no desert
That must be why he is so keen to launch this thing in the desert, because his mom wouldn't give him any.
But she gave him plenty of dessert, which is why he didn't become a pastry chef.
It is really small, and much smaller than it once was when it was a regular train watering station, and Route 66 was a major national road, but Amboy is NOT a ghost town! It has a population of 4, it has a gas station, and it has a post office!
It is just about the darkest site in Southern California, and good for doing astronomy in the area.
The velocity excess of 26.33 km/sec makes it 'faster' (more total energy) relative to the Sun than any man-made object. This velocity is fairly typical for random stellar motions relative to each other in our region of the galaxy (with 5 km/sec of the average). This is a bit less that 0.01% c so travelling a few light years takes a few tens of thousands of years.
Now if this an alien spaceship that was travelling much faster but simply braked to this velocity before making this approach to the Sun, to study us, it is interesting to think when they might have completed the braking maneuver. If it did so 10 AU out then it completed the maneuver a year ago, if it was 100 AU out then it was a bit less than 20 years ago. Of course now we know where it is and where it is going we are going to "keep watching the skies" where it disappeared so it a propulsion motor turns on it will have to be quite some distance out to escape detection.
It's a beautiful engineering challenge that you pose. Landing on it, as others have pointed out, is probably a no-go, as the closure speeds are barely imaginable. However, if you can get a tether to stick to it (think the harpoon that NASA is looking into) then letting that tether drag your spacecraft to "slowly" accelerate it, then you've got a chance.
Having something "stick" to the asteroid is exactly the same thing as "landing on it". Anything touching an asteroid at astronomical velocities turns into a cloud of vapor.
But it seems to me this would be a, somewhat, easy shortcut. We've already landed on an asteroid, the next logical piece is to find a way to launch from it.
All space travel is nothing but things in ballistic trajectories. It is all about the velocity vector, and velocity requires rocket propulsion which is expensive. Landing on an asteroid requires two major velocity changes - getting on a solar orbit that intersects with the object, then matching velocities (in addition to getting away from Earth's gravity field). You only go through all that energy-expense to investigate the object, there is no other reason. It is not like a piece of land, where airplanes land and take off, since airplanes do have to land sometimes. This is just an object you matched velocities with at great expense.
The reason why we know this is from outside the solar system is that it is moving much too fast for anything that was ever part of the solar system. `Oumuamua has a solar velocity excess (V_infinity) of 26 km/sec.
The fastest thing (in terms of V_infinity) we have ever sent by rocket technology is the little New Horizons probe at 16 km/sec. Even rendezvousing with any of these objects is going to be a major undertaking. This would require a mission (or more likely missions) kept ready to go on mere days notice to send a probe in chase as it heads back out. The extremely high probe velocity required would probably call for an ion drive or other exotic propulsion option.
...This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
Funny how nuclear power nutters insist that nuclear power is safe, because of all the safety features the plants have (containment vessel, etc.) but at the very same time complain that those safety features are making the plants too damn expensive and should be eliminated.
Also odd, as other posters note here, that nuclear power plants are expensive everywhere in the world.
Its those all-powerful hippies crushing capitalists everywhere under their Birkenstock clad foot! Will the hippie domination of the world economy never end?
Well, unfortunately, it was his own party which jumped on Three Mile Island to torpedo nuclear power in the USA. That pretty much -caused- climate change, when you think about it.
Pure fantasy.
Nuclear power installation stopped in the U.S. due to simple economics. Electricity demand did not keep growing as expected, after the energy crisis of the 1970s, and the need for lots and lots of new (very expensive) capacity disappeared. That is why the famous WPPSS ("Whoops") project collapsed. Nuclear power has not revived because hard-nosed capitalist businessmen think it is a poor way to invest money. There have been licenses for the taking continually, there has never been a time they were not available to anyone willing to apply for them. Several have actually been applied for and granted, but the projects never get built.
Isn't it odd that 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and then 8 years of Bush II, staunch nuclear power supporters all, could not get a single new nuclear power plant started?
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Providing nitrogen is a readily solvable problem. I am a bit puzzled by the assertion that "there are limited places to get it on Earth" since most air is nitrogen, and it is fixed synthetically as you note. The Wikipedia link indicates that it is only 1-2% of world energy consumption, but 3-5% of natural gas consumption. This suggests that it is really a non-problem going forward. Haber process plants are huge industrial facilities, and the carbon in the methane is currently released as CO2, but a huge centralized chemical plant is the perfect place to install carbon capture technology so that the nitrogen fertilizer production can be zero carbon emitting.
Take a moment, if you will, to compare the two:
Facebook knows what you look like Facebook knows your location Facebook knows who your friends are Facebook knows your interests Facebook knows if you're in a relationship or not
He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you're awake He knows if you've been bad or good
There is but one inescapable conclusion: Mark Zuckerberg is Santa Claus .
Definitely not. It has been thoroughly established that Zuckerberg has no concept of "good" or "bad" (i.e. morality).
Also, no presents.
Nah. The argument collapses when the physicist (arguing that economic growth cannot become radically decoupled from energy consumption) claims:
Only if a market existed such that everyone with energy was willing to sell it to a single buyer, leaving themselves with none. Why would they do that?
Currently the value of food production in the U.S. is only 1% of GDP. That means someone with 200 billion could buy all the food in the country making everyone starve. The top three billionaires in the U.S. have that much money. Are we in danger of them getting together and forcing the nation to its knees by buying all of our food? Suppose they wanted to do it - how would they actually manage to do that?
In a world where energy production is a negligible fraction of the economy, power production would be ubiquitous. There would be no market where it could all be bought.
Our demand for party balloons, helium filled disks and Goodyear blimps will never run out right? So after US stocks run out what then? Could fusion power possibly make helium a renewable resource?
Betteridge's Law strikes again!
No.
In 2013 world electricity production was 23,322TWh, but lets allow for power production growth and assume 100,000TWh. How much helium would be produced if all of that was produced by D+T fusion? One watt-hour is 2.25*10^22 eV, so 10^17 Wh is 2.25*10^39 eV. D+T fusion produces 17.6 MeV per helium atom. Assume an overall conversion efficiency of 25%, so that we get one helium atom for each 4.4 MeV of electricity produced. So we get 2.25*10^39/4.4*10^6 = 5.1*10^32 helium atoms a year. This is 8.47*10^8 moles. Meanwhile the world currently uses 150 million cubic meters of helium a year which is 6.7*10^9 moles, so this extremely high fusion production level will only satisfy 12.6% of current world demand.
Good summary. Nuclear power is simply uneconomical compared with the newest, and rapidly developing, renewable technologies. There is a reason that world nuclear power production (not just in the US) has been nearly level for about 30 years. The era of nuclear power plant construction has passed, and super-expensive fusion ain't bringing it back when (and if) it becomes available.
A 21st Century electrical grid looks like this: high voltage DC power lines that ship electricity across an entire continent (800 KV lines can transport electricity from one U.S. coast to the other with losses under 5%), solar and wind power deployed in excess capacity (but still cheaper than the nuclear "base load"), pumped water storage to provide additional power leveling which, again, serves the entire continent. No need for expensive batteries, but you can build them too, and the technology continues to improve there as well.
The larger the grid the better because local conditions will average out, and you can take advantage of peak solar production in one place when evening demand peaks elsewhere, and so forth.
The notion that fusion research requires special licenses that the U.S. government, under both parties, across 11 administrations has refused to provide is pure delusion.
Another thing everyone should remember when complaints that the we don't have fusion because the U.S. government hasn't been spending enough on it is that the U.S. government is NOT the only source of fusion energy funding in the world. 90% of the ITER funding is not from the U.S. If it just because the U.S., across eleven administrations has been a laggard, why has not the rest of the world raced ahead and delivered?
Yep it is. And not too bad. Thanks.
Hearty agreement here. It is impossible to look at the proposed schemes and see cost-competitive power coming out of it.
I’m been hearing fusion is only 20 years away for at least 30 years now.
It is worse than that. The time until we get fusion power is a monotonically increasing function of calendar year. In the early 1950s, when Project Sherwood was started, it was highly classified because it was thought that it would produce fusion power so soon (i.e. less than a decade) that it would be a valuable military technology. By the late 1960s they were talking about it being achieved in 20 years. By 2000 the timeline had grown to 30+ years.
In 2014 the projection for DEMO, the ITER follow-on, which is described as a system that would bring us to the "threshold of a prototype fusion reactor", i.e. short of being an actual prototype fusion power reactor, which in turn is short of being an actual commercial power reactor, was projected to start operating in the 2040s, i.e. at least 30 years, if no further schedule slippages occur. Currently, PROTO, the actual prototype fusion power reactor is not envisioned before the 2050s and likely later, which brings us about 40 years, and we still aren't talking about an actual commercial power plant. Allowing for the established 20 year cycle for each iteration of a major fusion reactor project, we might get that commercial power plant in 60 years. But it will be too expensive to compete with other sources of power.
Is some other new fusion design going suddenly break us out of this pattern? There is no law of nature against it, so it is possible. But literally hundreds of fusion schemes have been investigated, and without exception every concept has proven much harder in practice than on paper (or computer). Engineering by press release does not cut it (Lockheed Martin I am looking at you), until an actual demonstration unit is operating with predicted performance all claims on new breakthroughs should be ignored.
This is an interesting development in materials science, but helium diffusion weakening of containment vessels is pretty far down the list of critical problems standing in the way of producing commercial energy from fusion any time this century.
The key obstacle, even more important than the fact that no power producing fusion reactors have yet been built, nor are likely to be in the next 30 years, is that they will not be able to compete with other sources of electricity. Fusion power is going to be much more capital intensive than fission power plants that already have trouble competing with other sources of electricity due to their construction costs. No new material for a container wall is going to fix this.
Good points, all. I have an interest in dark matter research, but I haven't seen make these particular observations..
Someone mod this guy "funny"!
Why doesn't NASA just contract Taco Bell to supply all the inflight meals? Much cheaper and no gamma rays.
How naive you are.
The reactor is heavy. The radiation shielding is heavy - these both mean that you need a very large spacecraft before you have a net win in performance.
You probably don't want to turn one of these on before you are in orbit due to the potential problems with an accident (and the thrust to weight is pretty small anyway).
An additional problem is that its difficult to store hydrogen for long periods of time - you would need a complex and heavy refrigeration system. Or you can just use the nuclear rocket for leaving earth, and conventional storable chemicals for arrival.
Its a reasonable idea but with a lot of engineering tradeoffs that need to be considered. Its .... rocket science.
NERVA was heavy, but it was a primitive design. The Timberwind reference design is not heavy, it has an impressive 30:1 thrust to weight ratio. The shielding problem is much less than you think. Until you consume nearly all of your fuel, it provides lots of shielding, and the nuclear-thermal propulsion systems are high thrust, short burn time systems. The crew would enter a small shielded shelter during the five minutes or so of the final arrival "burn". And of course, your stores (food, water) would be arranged for free shielding.
Project Timberwind was a far more advanced system design than NERVA (although, unlike NERVA, they never built a prototype). The thrust-to-weight ratio of the NERVA engine was 1:1, for Timberwind it was 30:1. The notion that Timberwind is derived from NERVA does not stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. The designs are entirely different (other than, you know, both using a nuclear reactor and hydrogen propellant). Any new effort in this direction is likely to use Timberwind as a reference design for a jump-off point.