NASA Tests New Moon Engine

Iddo Genuth writes "Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of West Palm Beach, Florida has successfully completed the third round of its Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine (CECE) testing for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). CECE is a new deep throttling engine designed to reduce thrust and allow a spacecraft to land gently on the moon, Mars, or some other non-terrestrial surface." NASA is also set to launch a new satellite on Tuesday — the Orbital Carbon Observatory — that will monitor the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. On the research front, NASA has announced this year's Centennial Challenges. $2 million in prizes are available for a major breakthrough in tether strength (one of the major obstacles for developing a space elevator), and another $2 million is being offered to competitors who are able to beam power to a device climbing a cable at a height of up to one kilometer.

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Re:Space elevator power?

[Anonymous Coward]

i call bs.
for sheer impracticality, chemical rockets are one of the silliest ideas ever. and look, they still managed to catch on.

ust not bother????

[spineboy]

Why then try to do anything? Artificial light, nuclear power, cars, organ transplants? They were all impractical at first.

If this was a rhetorical question, then I lost and bit, but otherwise, with this attitude, not much would have ever been invented or tried.

The space elevator might be the best and most efficient way to get large amounts of material into space, unless we invent anti-gravity.

Re:Space elevator power?

[khallow]

Why should it make more sense to not bother? Even if a space tether from Earth proves to be too difficult to bother with this century, we currently have the materials to make less ambitious tether strutures in orbit or a space elevator on the Moon.

Re:Space elevator power?

[Kleen13]

And you are? What if he owned a hardware store? Would that count?

Re:Space elevator power?

[robthebloke]

A large metal wire cutting through the earths magnetic field is all you need to generate electricity (ask anyone who plays the electric guitar). All you need to do is find a way to harness the current that would be generated in the space elevator cable.

If you attempted to stick a current through the elevator cable, my primitive understanding of physics says, oscillations will start to occur in the cable due to the way magnetism and electricity are related?