posted
Wouldn't a hybird ion/rocket engine have the advantage of both worlds?
A booster stage, with a rocket firing and getting you up to a certain, fast speed, then the IPS taking over and giving you a constant rate of acceleration from that. You'd probably need rocket stage at the end to stop unless you flip before the half way point...
Oh wait, I didn't mention I'm thinking about the 9.81m/s/s acceleration gravity ship... oh well.
-------------------- Later, J _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ The Last Person to post in the late Voyager Forum. Bashing both Voyager, Enterprise, and "The Bun" in one glorious post.
posted
Hyrbid solution? No becuase the ion drive needs to catch up with the booster rocket in order to be effective.
There has to be an exotic material, fuel and propulsion layout to make intersteller travel possible.
-------------------- Matrix If you say so If you want so Then do so
Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged
Amasov Prime
lensfare-induced epileptic shock
Member # 742
posted
Things they probably don't want to do are: lifting anything nuclear into orbit, spending billions of dollars on such a project and doing this without any reason. Jup, you read it right; where's the sense behind all this? The US government didn't fly to the moon to do the next step in human evolution or something, they did it to piss off the sovjets and show them that they were better. We didn't built the ISS to bring the world peace and friendship, we did it because it helps us to develope some nice weaons tech and materials which can be used to make industrieal production cheaper. Or medicine most of us will never get to see. And we wont go to Mars without any reason. The government cuts NASA's budget to buy more weapons, and until there is a good reason to fly to mars, we wont do it. Same for warp. Even if it was possible - flying to the next system takes more than four years at warp 1, flying to the next system that might have colonizable planets could take hundrets of years. For what? It wont solve any problems here on earth and it wont be any kind of advantage sending some scientists to a rock some billions of kilometers away from us.
For the matter/antimatter: We have Deuterium, a bit expensive but we have it. Anti-deuterium OTOH could be a small problem; and finding some Dilithium (or better: creating some dilithium crystal) could be a small problem, too. Furthermore, I don't think you can use any crystal for this. M/A reaction is a critical process and the controlling and emitting of the reaction energy created can only be handeled by a special sort of crystal (think this is from the TNGTM). You can't put matter and antimatter in a bottle, shake it, put it into your drive system and hope the energy exhaust will boost you to the next star system.
So I think maybe we'll see something like that one day, but it wont be a governmental experiment but some privat firm doing it (I do think the same regarding the mars mission: private sponsoring will be the only possibility of getting it done and the money needed.)
-------------------- "This is great. Usually it's just cardboard walls in a garage."
Registered: Nov 2001
| IP: Logged
posted
Small ion engines might be usable in a long-term program of interstellar exploration.. to chart nearby systems, with small, light, sophisticated unmanned probes. I forget what DS1's speed was when they turned it off. I think they said it was by far the fastest thing ever built by human hands.
Would we get a faster result with other ions? More engines? a more sophisticated drive? I dunno.
The reason to go to space is best seen in the spinoff technology we develop from it. There was a news item recently about a new technology for determining types of cancers. The stuff to do this came from NASA-developed tech.
-------------------- "The best defense is not a good offense. The best defense is a terrifyingly accurate and devastatingly powerful offense, with multiply-overlapping kill zones and time-on-target artillery strikes." -- Laurence, Archangel of the Sword
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Matrix: There has to be an exotic material, fuel and propulsion layout to make intersteller travel possible.
Since those involve changing the laws of physics or discovering massive loopholes, I'm all for the alternatives - extending the lifespan of the travellers and/or reducing the mass of the cargo.
Reducing the travellers to a stream of bits (i.e. going digital) addresses both problems; the ship can consist of a processor, memory banks, and an ion drive. It doesn't matter how long it takes, since you just keep the crew "on hold" during the journey. And if you're paranoid, leave a backup copy of yourself at home which is reactivated if the travellers don't send an ACK back in time.
Failing that, simple immortality and a closed ecosystem seems more more plausible (if less dashing) than waiting around for warp drive to show up.
posted
Of course, by the time we could easily reduce ourselves to bits and beam to the next star, we might no longer need or want to.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Thirty years later, I am having difficulty in understanding why we made the journey from the 'Earth to the Moon'. I know the political and social reasons. Yet, as I look back, these realities seem foreign, even alien.
I wonder how school children in the mid to late 21st century will view this brief moment in history when humans left the Earth. I think they will have an even more difficult time in understanding the Apollo missions. This is if they are taught this period of US history.
As for going back to the Moon or traveling to points further away, I am of the opinion this will not happen. The Congress has passed legislation which limites the involvement of private companies in the development of space ventures.
What about NASA? NASA is dying. Simple and clear. In the next decade or so, we will hear news of one of the orbiters, most likely Columbia, being retired. There will be reports of astronauts receiving 'pink slips' and NASA's operations reduced. Functions which were associated by NASA will be outsourced to private companies.
Our space program I think will be the following:
1. military applications 2. robotic probes 3. humans doing routine repair of the station and satellites
Before I close, I would like to say one last point. I don't think our democratic-republic is effective when there are long term commitments. Commitments are subjected to the vicissitudes that defined the peaceful changes of regimes which our country experiences every four or eight years. For a successful space program to exist, and one in which humans are actively exploring the solar system, we would need to have the agenda of a former Administration accepted in full by a current Administration. I have rarely seen this in our country's history. Far too often, for reasons only known to politicians it seems, agendas are altered or erased by a new Administration.
45,000 YA Our species has migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe. I do believe that we were settling Australia as well.
This is nearly 55,000 years of history when our ancestors for the most part decided to remain in Africa. Why did they elect to migrate from their homeland? The climate was undergoing change.
7,000 YA First civilizations emerge in the 'Old World'.
500 YA The civilizations of the 'Old World' initiate first contact with the natives of the 'New World'.
I think these two examples reflect a commonality in our species. We take our sweet time in leaving a place.
Space exploration is tentative in our current period. It is dependent on the government's good graces. What will change the nature of space exploration?
Climatological or economical changes in the status quo. I am not talking minor changes. I am talking severe ass-whooping changes. I don't forsee either occuring for the short term.
Will humans colonize space? Sure. It just won't be the Americans who will do the colonizing. The political-social entity which will do this act doesn't exist and won't exist for a very long period of time. I am talking hundreds or even thousands of years here.
I tend to view our Moon forays as akin to the Viking explorations of the 'Old World' in the 900's CE. They explored a very small portion of the North American coast and left archaeological records of their forays.
When humans colonize space, the Moon missions will seem as distant to them as the Viking missions were to the Europeans who set sail in the 1500's. (Note the time difference between the 900's and the 1500's.) The astronauts who visited the Moon have left valuable archaeological records of the Apollo era and of American involvement in the first explorations of space.
posted
Well, this is just another reason why I should be dictator of the U.S. (NOT the world). If I reigned until, say, I was 70, that'd be 40 years, or 10 administrations worth, of single-minded progress in Space Exploration.
If I passed it along to a handpicked worthy heir, we could double that, and so on. (Because benevolent dictators tend to pick successors as similar to themselves as possible)
That should get us out of this jam within a human lifetime.
First of Two for Dictator: Progress, or else!
[ February 28, 2002, 13:57: Message edited by: First of Two ]
-------------------- "The best defense is not a good offense. The best defense is a terrifyingly accurate and devastatingly powerful offense, with multiply-overlapping kill zones and time-on-target artillery strikes." -- Laurence, Archangel of the Sword
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
quote:The reason to go to space is best seen in the spinoff technology we develop from it.
quote:Well, from NASA-written press releases, anyway.
Well no money spent on a space programme is ever spent in space, it is spent on the ground. And none of us would be even talking to each other if it weren't for NASA needing compact computers for space travel. The spinoffs from a space programme are defining the next century. Someone once said, JFK, Vietnam will be just footnotes in history but last century will be remembered because we went to the moon.
-------------------- "and none of your usual boobery." M. Burns
Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged
posted
IMO, I think historians will write that the 20th Century is when a single nation arose from two terrible wars and the defeat of an empire to lead the world into the 21st century. The space race will be included as, either a footnote or as a chapter, part of that single nation's efforts to defeat an empire.
Registered: Sep 1999
| IP: Logged
OnToMars
Now on to the making of films!
Member # 621
posted
Humanity doesn't have thousands of years left.
That is, if we don't begin to expand to new lands.
The only new lands left are other planets, principally Mars.
It took thousands of years before humanity invented the car. Did it take us another ten thousand to invent the airplane? No.
Human technological progress doubles every ten years. The combined knowledge of the homo sapiens doubles every ten years. Or so I've heard.
Our pace is rapidly expanding on average. In our example, you picked out specific dates where easily distinguishable events have occurred. What you neglected however, was that in those interims, the human race was constantly expanding in the space it had avaliable. Those events happened because a threshold had been reached.
Sorta like these days.
And Grocka's right. What people seem to think is that we are literally building rockets, filling them with money and launching them into the Sun. But in fact, every cent stays on Earth. Unless they the crew takes up a dollar and signs it as a commerorative thing.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
If I reigned until, say, I was 70, that'd be 40 years, or 10 administrations worth, of single-minded progress in Space Exploration.![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
