The Space Thread

Just putting this here. A plan for a firm specifically designed to build space hardware and rent it out. Start at the 31-minute mark; it runs for an hour, but I've rarely been so pumped in my life as I was watching this.

Hail Martin Septim!

Somehow I doubt that plan is going to take off any time soon. And yes they are fucking selling space tourism. It's just you have to pay to be a member of a club to do it.

And you can blame the risk averseness of the government on politicians voting to decrease funding toNASA. Kind of hard to put people and equipment in space without funding.

edited 14th Dec '12 7:46:12 PM by AceofSpades

Oh I do.

hence- Tyson / Nye 2016!

I'm baaaaaaack

I'm referring to something that guy said in the video. He's great at talking up his business, but he doesn't seem to be getting into the science of it. I get him not showing diagrams and stuff, as this seems to be some sort of radio show that he also broadcasts on Youtube.

He's pitching a very pie in the sky vision. I mean, it'd be cool if he could do this, and I fully support private developments for space travel, but I don't think he's going to get enough people to sign up and pay the monthly subscription. Also, this "safety third" bullshit is going to get people killed. There is a fucking reason NASA focuses on safety first, and that's that people have fucking died doing this. It is bullshit to risk people's lives without taking every single precaution you plausibly can.

Oh my GOD this guy is pissing me off with this risk shit. Yes, people die. No, space travel is not a reason to ignore safety and get them killed. No, it is NOT RISK AVERSION TO MAKE YOUR SHIPS SAFE YOU MORON.

edited 14th Dec '12 7:57:05 PM by AceofSpades

No kiddingg. I don't like his attitude though. he basically said the Apollo mission were a fluke because of the technology used. newsflash- you don't need fancy computers to land on another planet. our cars today are probably almost more complicated(electronically speaking) then the apollo rockets.

Safety third? really? what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

edited 14th Dec '12 7:59:10 PM by Joesolo

I'm baaaaaaack

Well, okay, it is risk aversion. But it's reasonable risk aversion. We have far more to gain from getting our people and our equipment back in the same pieces they left in than having them experience a catastrophic accident up in space or the air.

Doma, I don't quite understand what got you excited about this guy. You really want to put the future of space exploration in a guy who isn't going to take precautions to make sure his people and coworkers come back alive? And sounds rather callous about it in the process?

Yeah this entire process is gona blow up in his face. Even if he manages to get the required number of people they will only stay on until he has his first big disaster. He might be willing to risk his life and the lives of pretty much everyone else, but a lot of people are not gona sign up simple because their wives/husbands/families will beg them to not throw their life away.

Edit: Wow, now he's gone for the China card, he's admitting that he plans to scare people with "CHINA IS GONA GET BETTER THEN US!!!" so as to make them join up. Cus racism always works... Now I’m really disgusted.

Edit 2: Wow... now it's "US is genetically superior because we take risks and that's in our DNA". The racism coming off this guy is too much for me.

edited 14th Dec '12 8:21:31 PM by Silasw

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

I think I'm spending too much time in the US politics thread, because I keep trying to figure out this guy's political orientation. Then I realized it doesn't matter. His plan is unlikely to happen because he's unlikely to get enough subscribers that nine dollars from everyone will actually help him much.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/rockets/what-ion-propulsion-means-for-boeing-and-our-future-in-space-7685623?click=main_sr

Popular Mechanics suggests we might be using ion engines. Not quite sure what ion means, honestly.

edited 15th Dec '12 12:23:49 AM by AceofSpades

They're charged particles. Plamsa, for example, is essentially a bunch of ions.

Ion thrusters

Keep Rolling On

We already use them on some satelites and probes.

Who watches the watchmen?

The guy who runs that show is a Tea Party birther(I checked an earlier show out of curiosity) so I would take anything he says with a salt mine.

edited 15th Dec '12 6:23:52 AM by tricksterson

Trump delenda est

^

His Political views doesn't stop ion engines being a viable means of powering a spacecraft.

Keep Rolling On

True.

Trump delenda est

The piece on ion engines is a completely separate thing published by a magazine from the guy in the video Doma posted, guys. Although I guess that guy could be interested in developing ion thrusters.

So do ion engines have some kind of advantage over the Alcubierre drive for space exploration?

I think that they consume only a little bit less energy than Alcubierre (depending upon the latter's usage of signatures)

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

No, ion thrusters consume a lot less energy that an Alcubierre Drive theoretically would.

Ion thrusters, as has been said, exist already and are already routinely used. They do not allow for FTL travel, of course, and provide far less thrust than conventional rockets; but the advantage is that they are very, very efficient, and you can keep them going for a long amount of time. It's not the sort of drive you'd use to lift off, it is the sort of drive that you'd use for allowing satellites to make small corrections to their orbits, or to accelerate gradually your spaceship over a span of years.

The Alcubierre Drive, albeit cool, so far is only a theoretical concept. It might allow for some sort of FTL travel; but building it would require having exotic matter with negative mass, which is something that we are not even entirely sure exists, and using it would require a truly absurd amount of energy. Some recent developments, suggest that the energy requirements can be reduced: but even the new version would require the equivalent of the mass-energy of one ton of material. That's still a lot.

It's a cool idea, definitely, but at least for now it is mostly a theoretical subject, while ion thrusters are a proven technology.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, we gotta start somewhere. Maybe the first prototype will need 3 or 4 nuclear reactor, but at some point we'll probably reduce it.

That's what I think anyway.

The example the article gave was that the first nuclear fission reactor produced half a Watt of electricity, but a year later we had ones that could power most of a city. I don't know enough details about the history of nuclear power to be sure about that, but the point is that proof of concept is very important. Even if the first warp drive takes fifty nuclear reactors to operate for ten seconds, that's still something.

It's certainly worth studying more, I agree. And I also agree that a proof of concept would be way cool — not just, and not even mostly, because of its potential future applications, but because it would allow us to learn more about the nature of reality.

But for now, I would be cautious about trying to guess what that kind of drive could or could not do compared to other forms of technology, and at what costs; let alone trying to guess when we'll have them. We just don't have enough information for any of that.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The Alcubierre is pure science fiction, guys. It requires a substance with negative mass. As in, a mass less than zero. We're not coming up with that any time soon.

Ion drives are ridiculously efficient, but their main problem is that they're also ridiculously low thrust. It's like having an engine that gets a million miles per gallon, but only puts out an eighth of a horsepower. It's great for satellites, probes, and other unmanned craft, but we're never going to use it on anything with a person in it.

If you're talking about non-theoretical technology for interplanetary manned spaceflight, then you're talking about nuclear thermal engines. Rockets work by heating their propellant up a whole lot and then flinging it out the back. Current technology uses chemical rockets, which essentially cause sustained explosions in the bell of the rocket nozzle by mixing volatile chemicals there. The explosion provides the heat, and the chemicals provide the propellant. What nuclear thermal rockets do instead is use a nuclear reactor to heat up a dedicated propellant and fling that out the back after running it through the reactor. They're orders of magnitude more efficient than chemical rockets, with the one niggling side effect of (depending on the type of NTR you're using) irradiating the hell out of everything behind it.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

"The Alcubierre is pure science fiction, guys. It requires a substance with negative mass. As in, a mass less than zero."

I imagine someone once said something to the effect of "a nuclear reactor is pure science fiction. It'd require splitting an atom, as in, breaking the smallest thing possible even smaller!"

Remember- it took only 66 years from powered flight to the moon landing.

edited 16th Dec '12 7:47:04 PM by Joesolo

I'm baaaaaaack

And at the time, they'd have been right. Maybe in fifty years when we've unlocked the secrets of the higgs boson and invented element zero it will be legitimate, but at the moment it's all Applied Phlebotinum.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Even then, they were describing something unlikely and unprofitable, not something that violated the laws of physics (to my knowledge, I'm fuzzy on physics at the time). There's a difference between something that violates the laws of physics and something that just beats the odds.

Example◊.

Fight smart, not fair.

I would not say that it is science fiction. It is an interesting theoretical concept, one that deserves further investigation. But yes, speculation about installing warp drives on our spaceships is extremely premature as of this moment.

Nothing in the currently known laws of physics forbids the possibility of negative mass. Mathematically, everything works just fine. The thing is, we never encountered it yet (although there are a few phenomena which could be interpreted in terms of negative energy).

edited 16th Dec '12 9:50:09 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.