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Hyperdrive and Space Propulsion
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Mar 12, 2006 01:29 AM
from the to-the-moon-alice dept.
from the to-the-moon-alice dept.
Interested reader writes "MSNBC has an article covering the recent Space Technology and Applications Forum in New Mexico, which included a frontier physics session on hyperdrive, wormholes, and other blue sky ideas. The idea is a revival of NASA's long-dead (and heavily criticized) Advanced Propulsion Project."
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The hyperdrive works by skipping ahead (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The hyperdrive works by skipping ahead (Score:3, Funny)
Wrong Terminology (Score:4, Funny)
I believe the proper technical term is: pie in the sky ideas.
Re:Wrong Terminology (Score:3, Informative)
*(For those who don't know, the sky in Santa Fe & Los Alamos -- due to the extreme altitude -- is a very deep shade of blue, brighter and darker than the typical light-blue you see at normal
Re:Wrong Terminology (Score:5, Funny)
I was referring to the imminent practicality of those ideas. There is indeed Blue Sky in New Mexico but in that conference it was mostly obsucred by cloudy pipe dreams. I do wonder if they handed out bongs at the reception.
Re:Wrong Terminology (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wrong Terminology (Score:3, Funny)
I must insist that, in this case, the term used by such upstanding, trustworthy, honest an generous businessmen, such as used car salesmen, f
Why does the summary link to page 2? (Score:5, Informative)
Prior Art (Score:4, Funny)
NASA has no comment, but are reportedly checking into the technology of Lost in Space to determine the validity of Star Trek's claims.
Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you doubt a breakthrough will happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
We wont find this breakthrough if we dont look for it. As long as the false and impossible ideas are shot down, whats the harm in listening to these wild ideas?
Afterall, some day, someone my actually be on to something. It would be a shame to disregard the idea just because it sounds impossible on the face of it.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:Do you doubt a breakthrough will happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Careful with that. Sometimes even the false and impossible ideas are what work. Consider that nearly all of society at one time knew that the universe rotated around Earth. In fact, to preach otherwise was a death sentence.
After that came mezmorize (hypnosis), which all solid psychologists said could not happen, but 100 years later accepted it as occuring.
Now adays, we have cold Fusion. When Pons/Stanley? first announced it, Physicists stated that it could not happen (as well as unable to duplicate it). The 2 were basically ruined professionally. Now, a number of groups are doing it, including the navy, and it is being thought of as not being impossible.
The point is, just because something is considered impossible, does not make it so.
Re:Do you doubt a breakthrough will happen? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a big difference between co
Re:Do you doubt a breakthrough will happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTL is not bunk because gawd/allah/odin/yahweh/ram said so. FTL is bunk because it ameaningless state in a classical timelike metric. I won't burn you at the stake for trying to work on FTL. However, I will write a sternly worded letter to the NSF recommending that they don't give you any money for it.
The problem is: with this thinking you kill off many breakthroughs.
Remember that theories are just models. Now if by any chance one model is false, and a guy thinks he can prove it AND fix it, he won't get any support because the established model doesn't predict his claims. To prove his claims, he might need some pretty expensive equipment, with the NSF has, for example. But, if YOU prevent this from being tested, you may be killing off one breakthrough. You NEVER know if something works or not in advance for sure. Thats why scientists perform experiments. Of course there are many crackpots, but if science remains in its established, comfortable theories, then nothing will advance.
Re:Do you doubt a breakthrough will happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is something I really dont like; scientists with ruined reputation equal banned heretics. Of course there are tons of crackpots, but IMO no one should be punished for theorizing in "unserious" areas (even the definition of "unserious" and "serious" is dangerous IMO). One should be banned when the great free-energy device X will be ready in two years and you can preorder it now, or because the entire work was a hoax (like that Hwang guy did), not because one said that "it might be possible that ABC is possible, I'm quite skeptical though, I'm looking into this". Of course, once somebody can successfully demonstrate working electrogravity that can be replicated in at least one independent lab, reputation is back. But what if by banning everyone in this field no one has the chance of reaching this stage?
I have an idea, over here!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not FTL but baby will it get the ball rolling. I'll just run this by everyone here... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a sort of recent slashdot discussion [slashdot.org], just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch? I contacted the man responsible for a similar idea, the skyramp [skyramp.org] (warning: hideous javascript menu may break firefox), Carlton Meyer, and had a dialogue in which he pointed me to a tower launch archive [yarchive.net].
The ideas I see bandied about there are similar to what I had in mind, which would be essentially an 11km tall tower (think pylons rather than skyscrapers, based at sea), with evacuated airless launch tubes, using nuclear reactors to power a maglev or pulley system to accelerate vessels to escape velocity. These would then emerge above the end of the troposphere [gatech.edu], with it's associated weather and air pressure, and have little to no fuel needed to escape the earth's gravity, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. At 1m/s acceleration, you would be at escape velocity when you exit the top of the tower.
Not only would this enable multiple launches daily, it is, unlike the space elevator, readily achievable with today's technology, and financially viable as well. Given NASA had an annual budget of $16.2 billion for 2005 [space.com], and a nuclear power plant costs a cool billion to build, give or take, we could have this up and running in a few years. And once we are up there...
Space has got vast, essentially unlimited resources. One recent story pointed out the trillion dollar iron asteroid up there. The thing has about 5 tons of steel for every man, woman and child on earth. And thats just one of god knows how many... billions more?
Once we leap the cost to escape hurdle (as I think I have managed), we can proceed to use these resources. There are several obstacles in the way of this, first of which is zero gee mining, we have no idea how to do it. We can either mine the ore out there, or bring the asteroid back into orbit and slice it up there. Or slice it up and send it back to orbit. I would be opposed to moving it back into orbit for processing, purely for the debris issue. Perhaps a lunar base would have some merit there.
So we set up a mining and processing operation either on the moon or in deep orbit, and start cutting and processing one of those bad boys. Whats the first thing we build? A bigger processing and mining operation. Space exploration, much like the internet, has to be a largely incestuous affair at first, existing solely for its own benefit.
Once we have that mastered, we can move to algae pods in orbit for food production, oxygen refining, and fuel production (biodiesel or chemical engines), all of which can be powered by the immense energy of the sun, and use the raw materials abundantly available in space. Whether you ship that stuff back to earth or use it for further colonisation, its a vital step.
The production of automated scouts is also a high priority; a vast amount of surveyor and prospector drones to sweep and map every square inch of every rock and gas in the system, out to the Oort cloud, and figure out what they are made of. I'd err on the side of quantity rather than quality, still no reason not to have either. This could be combined with deep space observatories that would make hubble look like the end of a coke bottle.
So now we have a manufacturing bridgehead, a good idea of what's interesting out there, and a cheap means to launch to orbit. Actual manned system ships would come next, to either colonise or investigate the system. The rest, as they say, is (future) history.
A lot of this would require automatio
Re:I have an idea, over here!! (Score:4, Informative)
Evacuation is also a challenge. If you want to park it in an ocean trench, you'll need to deal with the pressure at the bottom (approximately 15000 psi at the bottom...there's a reason Trieste is the only manned vessel ever to go there). Even if you find a way to build an 11 km tall tower standing above the water, you've got to pump air out faster than it flows in the open top, or add the mass of a cover to the top... which means stuff moving at the end of an 11 km long moment arm.
I also went ahead and did some quick math. 1 m/s/s acceleration over 11 km is not enough:
s = s(0) + v(0)*t + 0.5*a*t^2, where s(0)=0 and v(0) = 0 so:
t = ((2*s)/a)^0.5 = 148 seconds to traverse the 11 km
v = v(0) + a*t = 0 + 1 m/s/s * 148 s = 148 m/s = 331 mph
Woefully short of escape velocity.
So then I tried 1 G and got 1040 mph, which still doesn't cut it. Next I went for 5 G's, which is on the order of what astronauts experience during a launch, and that gave me 2,326 mph. It's still not escape velocity, but surprisingly enough, it is sufficient kinetic energy to loft an object to a height of 22,000 miles, or the altitude of a geosynchronous orbit. Unfortunately, when it gets there it doesn't have sufficient tangetial velocity to stay there, so it follows a funny elliptical path 22,000 miles to the hard ground. I ran out of scratch paper before I could quantify that, however. I did have one line left to note that a 1000 kg payload accellerating at 5 G's requires 2.4 MW of power, not accounting for losses, which is one capability we do easily have.
It's a pity, because all of these ideas show some measure of original thought and are theoretically feasible in some fashion, but the technical challenges are rather mind-numbing. So far the only problems I see with the space elevator are a sufficiently strong ribbon, a reliable method for weaving the ribbon in place, absolute reliability of a car during the 22,000 mile trip, and power to the car. Naturally, none of these are very trivial.
Re:calculations (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mmm, orbital cannons (Score:3, Informative)
Happily, this system produces 1/3 to 1/4 the acceleration of an average car. [hypertextbook.com]
:D
Frontier physics? (Score:4, Funny)
Blue Sky ideas? (Score:5, Insightful)
You will fall off the edge of the world.
Man cannot fly!
I can go on, but I'll just leave this as a quote from someone else.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Arthur C. Clarke
Re:Blue Sky ideas? (Score:3, Funny)
I propose an experiment to verify your claim.
Step 1: use an elevator in a tall building and travel to the top floor.
Step 2: obtain access to ther roof.
Step 3: Make sure not to be in possesion of any material objects on your person, nor to b
We're so much closer than most people think (Score:5, Informative)
Charging customers to send them into space is a lofty goal for any business owner, and perhaps particularly in an area whose economy draws much of its strength from the availability of cheap land.
But that's the goal that Bill Sprague has set, and he even said that he chose Temecula largely because of its low cost of living relative to the coastal cities where his aerospace suppliers are based.
Sprague is building a 52-foot rocket. By October 2007, he hopes, passengers with $250,000 to spend will be able to ride it to the edge of outer space, where the curve of the Earth is visible and where the planet's gravity is slightly weaker than at the surface.
"If they look in any direction except at the Earth, they'll see black," Sprague said. "It'll be just the sun sitting in a sea of blackness. The stars will be visible."
Cool article, although the fact the rocket parts are only valued at $3mil right now would make me concerned about riding in it.
Quantum mechanics (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not deal with a quantum mirage [wikipedia.org] or other quantum mechanical effects than to try to accelerate ourselves to fractions of the speed of light? Special relativity [wikipedia.org] tells us that the faster we go the massive we get, and not to mention the acceleration itself would be a huge stress to the occupants or payload, unless you want to take weeks to accelerate to high velocities.
Why bother with those complexities when you have the possibility to "travel" faster than the speed of light by using alternative methods?
Re:Quantum mechanics (Score:4, Interesting)
Infact, there are objects in the universe that are moving away from us and we are moving away from them right now, with a speed near the speed of light. Do you feel anything?
Why would we need to accelarate to such speeds? Why not warp space infront of us instead? Both the warp drive in startrek and wormholes, work with this idea. We wouldn't feel any accelaration because there wouldn't be any.
Re:Quantum mechanics (Score:3, Insightful)
Good quote (Score:5, Insightful)
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
Re:Good quote (Score:3, Insightful)
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
Well quite. A lot of people s
Re:Good quote (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... you need to explain how come we keep inventing esoteric math (imaginary numbers, fractal geometry, etc.) and then eventually finding places in the real world well-modeled by them.
The q
The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No problem: you just need a Paradigm Shift (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that DOES have to happen is that enough anomalies have to build up in the old theory that people start looking for a new one. Then that new theory
Uploading and interstellar travel (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the most likely way we're going to get intelligence to other stars is to send AI computers, since they wouldn't mind the long wait. Even if creating AI is hard, if Moore's law holds, in 50 years we'll be able to simulate every neuron in a whole human brain on a computer in real time, so even if we don't understand intelligence, we'll be able to reproduce it. And if biological life is so important to you, send some frozen embrios (or info about their DNA on hard drives, and stock chemicals for building embrios from scratch) and artificial wombs with the computers too - let them build a colony, then defrost their kids.
Far-fetched? In my opinion, it's much more likely than being able to keep whole humans happy on a 100 lightyear trek. Yes, Moore's law might not hold up, but I predict we'll be able to upload brains before sending our fragile bodies intact to distant stars.
Patrick
Only one basket? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that we should be taking care of this planet as best as we can, but that should not stop us for pursuing the means to find and reach others.
Re:Only one basket? (Score:3, Insightful)
So do you think it is a good idea to keep all of our eggs in one basket? There's not much we can do as a species if something from the outside, like an asteroid, comes along and makes the planet unhabitable for humans. However,
Re:Only one basket? (Score:5, Funny)
Right...procrastination is always a good policy.
Re:Only one basket? (Score:3, Interesting)
stop being such a fool (Score:3, Insightful)
You will not get off this planet, and neither will many generations to co
Re:Only one basket? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the scoop...
Our knowledge of the universe is imperfect. Therefore, all our theories, hypothesis, and speculations about the universe, and its contents, past, present, and especially future, are necessarily imperfect. Thus, our all our hopes, concerns, and fears about the future that are based in our knowledge of the universe may or may not change as we come to a better knowledge of the universe.
In the fifties an thought of 'extinction level events' was dismissed by the general scientific community. It wasn't till the mid-late seventies that the whole ELE thing got much exposure. There currently seems to be a trend in astronomical, and planetary science circles to moderate the whole asteroidal doom jag, such as has been hyped by that the Discovery Channel, et al..
Consider the whole Popular Science/Mechanics 'Flying Cars' phenomena. ("Flying cars are always ten years in the future.") What I'm seeing on a lot of the 'educational channels' is the hype of science related speculation. There's much more entertainment than education on most of these channels. While I at it I'd like to point out that Scientific American is rapidly headed in this direction. I've seen way to much politics, and other silliness in SA in the past twenty years than what I'm comfortable with.
Finally, remember Just because it is not logical, does not mean that it is not true.
Humanity must expand (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Humanity must expand (Score:3, Insightful)
Get with the program; the majority of industrialized countries are now below the replacement fertility (almost all of them if you discount immigration) and there's no reason to believe the rest of the w
Re:Humanity must expand (Score:3, Interesting)
You disagree on that? Then ask the baby girls in China. That is, the ones that survived the gender selection
Re:I find it somewhat disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which sounds like a real argument but isn't. While it would be nice to fix this world, the one and the other have nothing to do with each other. And I'd rather the high and wild physics guys would keep their attention fixed safely somewhere outside the solar system I'm living in thank you (just joking, but a grain of real concern nevertheless
This planet is unfixable, nobody cares enough. A lot of people care, just not enough. And apart from some professional care takers' opinions and programs, the average solution put forward by your average shocked person are laughable. So if we're really messing it up too far, well, maybe we'll try and clean up a little. Let's hope we find viable alternatives for our more messy activities before we pass some critical treshold.
For the rest, just look at every humanitarian, ecological or political issue that in itself forms a sizeable threat to us or this planet. See if you like how we're "fixing" it. Not that some people aren't doing what they can and some organizations aren't great. Just, if you look at it all, you realize it isn't a bad idea to have some mad scientists look outside the solar system as well. They wouldn't be any good anyway in finding "solutions for this planet".
Most things are easily fixed anyway. It just takes investments (paid with money), sustained effort and lots of coordinated actions. Starting with good will between people with opposing viewpoints and different interests. Ahahahaha.
Simply put: take the combined budget of the US and Europe on military spending for ONE year, and you already have the money to fund half a century of all programs on acknowledged "big" problems like poverty, disease, education, clean water, most environmental issues etc etc etc. on a world scale, yes sir.
Problem is, even saying this is deemed political, liberal etc etc etc. So, while most problems are easily solved, we think it makes more sense to invest in a better club to hit our neighbor with. And well, for a talking monkey society that even makes a sort of horrible sense. After all, how can you trust that other alpha male and his friends NOT to kick your country in the bollocks and steal your mates? You can't, you just can't. Even Bush starts to make sense with his pre-emptive strike thing (the bloody uber-religious idiot fascist), which is fancy for "I saw you looking at my mate, so I'll kick you inna fork FIRST".
So, in short, without all the emotion: let's just try to do what we can on ALL fronts that aren't at least directly geared at killing us off as fast as possible, eh? Warp? Bloody good idea. Helping mankind? Sounds great.
Bet you half a dollar we'll have warp drive first.
Re:I find it somewhat disturbing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I find it somewhat disturbing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:In Short ... (Score:2)
According to the article, it is predicted that we won't even be testing projectiles that reach 10% of the speed of the light (about 70 million mph)
Re:Mod me down (Score:5, Funny)
Re:something about a bridge in New York... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:why the speed of light is not a barrier to brea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not obligatory, but I feel compelled... (Score:3, Funny)
OK team, it's like this: the science guy says rip the engines off the ship and bolt them to the universe. We can't move the damn ship 6 inch
The old joke... (Score:4, Funny)
Administrator #1: "If we start a Department of Mathematics, all we'll need to buy is pencils, papers, and erasers."
Administrator #2: "If we start a Department of Philosophy, we wouldn't need to buy the erasers."