NASA Tests New Moon Engine 75
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the rocket-fuel-green-cheese-hybrid dept.
from the rocket-fuel-green-cheese-hybrid dept.
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.
Space elevator power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it just make more sense to have solar panels in orbit and transmit the power along the space elevator? If I remember correctly, this is what Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned with the space elevator in his science fiction novel Red Mars [amazon.com] . Being able to bring power down would be a nice bonus for a tool to get up to orbit easily.
Re:Space elevator power? (Score:1, Insightful)
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???? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Space elevator power? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Space elevator power? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?