In 2004, Burt Rutan predicted a vibrant future for commercial suborbital spaceflight. Thirteen years after SpaceShipOne nabbed the Ansari X Prize, suborbital space tourism has yet to take off.
Space is big and the hardware that humans keep sending into the great beyond is comparatively small, but our habit of letting random bits of space vehicles, boosters, and defunct satellites hang ar…
“Today, we find in space roughly 5,000 objects with sizes larger than 1 meter (3.25 feet), roughly 20,000 objects with sizes over 10 centimeters… and 750,000 ‘flying bullets’ of around one centimeter (half an inch),” Rolf Densing, director of operations at the ESA said at a conference regarding space junk, held in Germany. “For objects larger than one millimeter (0.04 inch), 150 million is our model estimate for that.”
NASA's goal of getting humanity to Mars has been developing for years , but while the space agency has been busily building and testing its most powerful rocket – the Space Launch System (SLS) – it's fair to say we haven't heard a lot of specifics...
Only occasionally manned, and for the most part a paper project. NASA’s talking about Moon missions in the late 2020s, SpaceX is talking about ten years earlier (and Blue Origin can’t be that far behind, as they’re even more tourism oriented).
The Deepspace Gateway will consist of a power bus, a small habitat module, docking capability, an airlock, and modules for research purposes, with NASA saying the spaceport could be used for a number of research missions run by both space agencies and private space companies (such as SpaceX and Blue Origin).
NASA proposes a magnetic shield to protect Mars' atmosphere
"This new research is coming about due to the application of full plasma physics codes and laboratory experiments. In the future it is quite possible that an inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind."
…What they found was that a dipole field positioned at Mars L1 Lagrange Point would be able to counteract solar wind, such that Mars' atmosphere would achieve a new balance. At present, atmospheric loss on Mars is balanced to some degree by volcanic outpassing from Mars interior and crust. This contributes to a surface atmosphere that is about 6 mbar in air pressure (less than 1% that at sea level on Earth).
A NASA independent safety committee wants NASA to provide a “compelling rationale” for putting astronauts on the first flight of the SLS.
A NASA independent safety committee wants NASA to provide a “compelling rationale” for putting astronauts on the first flight of the Space Launch System, a proposal NASA is currently studying.
In a statement at the beginning of the Feb. 23 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), chairwoman Patricia Sanders said that if NASA decides to put a crew on the first SLS/Orion launch, Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1), it must demonstrate that there is a good reason to accept the higher risks associated with doing so.
“We strongly advise that NASA carefully and cautiously weigh the value proposition for flying crew on EM-1,” she said. “NASA should provide a compelling rationale in terms of benefits gained for accepting additional risk, and fully and transparently acknowledge the tradeoffs being made before deviating from the approach for certifying the Orion/SLS vehicle for manned spaceflight.”
After months of speculation and leaked documents , NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published . And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.
Okay so this is one of the WEIRDEST FUCKING THINGS humanity has stumbled upon in science and it gives me a nerd boner that can be seen from Alpha Centauri.
As far as we can tell, this fucking thing generates reactionless thrust. Let that shit sink in: The EM Drive does not require fuel. Only electrical power.
It might be warping space. Emphasis on might because nobody fucking knows right now.
Okay I know I said it already but AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL THIS IS A !!REACTIONLESS!! !!THRUST!! !!DEVICE!! you have no idea just how goddamn amazing that is
mark my words this fucking thing is going to REVOLUTIONIZE the design of satellites and scientific probes
and just think of the potential it might have if its thrust increases proportionately to the power fed into it
Reblogging this just to restate how fucking huge this is.
Imagine you blow air into a balloon and tie it off. Then when you untie it, you let the balloon go and it flies all over the place. This is how propulsion works. This is what Newton’s Third Law is based on. That the air is coming out and pushing the balloon forward.
The EM drive is moving forward when the balloon is still tied off at the end.
I heard about this theorized not some time ago and thought it was amazing!
The fact that it’s been thoroughly peer-reviewed and still stands up is nothing short of absolutely astounding.
This device works, and no one is quite sure how or WHY it does. It defies our current understanding of why physics work the way the way they do. Which mean basically means that we need to re-evaluate and refine our laws of physics because we have discovered empirical evidence that we’ve got something wrong. And trying to fix our math to accurately describe the universe is going lead to new discoveries about the fundamental nature of reality. IT’S MIND BLOWING.
Not to mention this device itself, if we can elaborate and expand on it, will change how we do propulsion. This might the next stage of propulsion technology. To the people a few decades in the future, combustion engine propulsion technology will seem as silly, outdated, and quaint as steam propulsion or horse-drawn carriages seem to us.
This is hugely important stuff. A lot of reports on this thing talk about how it “breaks the laws of physics,” but this is an inaccurate oversimplification. The reality of it is much more profound. If this thing indeed works, and the results we’ve gotten thus far can’t be explained by some sort of experimental error, it will redefine our understanding of physics. In other words, the laws of physics aren’t being “broken,” we’ve just been wrong about physics the entire time.
but how did they make it without knowing how it works???? was someone just like “hey guys i was trying to build a car but i accidentally invented this instead, dunno what it does but give it a shot”???
A spacecraft called Dawn just took a giant leap towards changing how we travel through the solar system
While there are several forms of ion propulsion, the version Brophy used on Dawn involves two grids, each about a foot wide and spaced half a millimeter apart. An electrical system powered by a solar array on the spacecraft passes a current through both grids, and the resulting voltage differential between the two is what accelerates the xenon particles as they pass through the grids. Each accelerating particle only provides a tiny amount of thrust — roughly equivalent to the pressure of a piece of paper lying in your hand — but in the airless and frictionless environment of space, a steady stream of that tiny thrust can build up to monumental speeds of about 24,000 miles-per-hour.
In an exclusive interview, Musk said he hopes to land people on the Red Planet in 2025.
But in an interview with The Post this week, Musk laid out additional details for the first time, equating the spirit of the missions with the settlement of the New World by the colonists who crossed the Atlantic Ocean centuries ago. And he acknowledged the immense difficulties of getting to a planet that is, on average, 140 million miles from earth.
The months-long journey is sure to be “hard, risky, dangerous, difficult,” Musk said, but he was confident people would sign up to go because “just as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers.”
…
“Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” he said. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments.”
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SpaceX's 2018 trip would use what the company calls its Dragon spacecraft boosted into space by Falcon Heavy, a massive rocket powered by 27 first-stage engines. When it flies for the first time later this year, it would become the “most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two,” SpaceX says on its website. Falcon Heavy would have more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, or about the equivalent of 18 747 airplanes.
The Breakthrough Starshot project will tackle the difficult engineering hurdles between us and our nearest stellar neighbors
Until very recently, this idea remained solidly within the realm of science fiction. But today the outlook is beginning to change. In April, the physicist-turned-internet-billionaire Yuri Milner, together with Stephen Hawking and other notable scientists and engineers, announced that the Breakthrough Foundation would begin funding work on the concept of a laser-propelled starship, with the long-term goal of reaching the closest neighboring star system to our own, Alpha Centauri. Their initiative, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, is a Silicon Valley take on Forward’s vision that imagines shrinking the spacecraft down to a mass of a few grams. A fleet of such “nanocraft”, each tethered to a light sail a few meters wide, could be economically launched into space and then accelerated toward Alpha Centauri with a terrestrial laser system. Illuminated by tens of gigawatts of laser light, the miniature spacecraft would reach 20 percent of the speed of light in about 4 minutes. After a 20-year cruise, they would zip through the Alpha Centauri system in a few hours and send data and images back to Earth from the brief encounter.
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