NASA Contracting Development of New Ion/Nuclear Engines (nasaspaceflight.com) 70
schwit1 writes: NASA has awarded three different companies contracts to develop advanced ion and nuclear propulsion systems for future interplanetary missions, both manned and unmanned. These are development contacts, all below $10 million. However, they all appeared structured like NASA's cargo and crew contracts for ISS, where the contractor does all of the development and design, with NASA only supplying some support and periodic payments when the contractor achieves agreed-upon milestones. Because of this, the contractors will own the engines they develop, and will be able to sell them to other customers after development, thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
Experimental engines (Score:1)
Whatever happened with the emdrive?
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They're still detecting small amounts of thrust, but haven't yet been able to rule out measurement error.
Think "Different" (Score:5, Funny)
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NASA's Eagleworks Laboratory keeps finding that the thing produces thrust, but nobody has any idea why.
http://www.biztekmojo.com/001550/nasas-new-tests-confirm-impossible-em-drive-thruster-can-really-work
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The point is that they are real scientists, following scientific rigor, with no financial interest in rigging the tests.
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They are producing a minuscule thrust on the order of what might be EM field leakage from power supply, vapors because of vacuum and heating, etc.
Wake me up when they can produce a pound of reactionless thrust in stead of the micronewtons of near-nothing.
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The EMdrive is still being worked on. There are private, and secretive, efforts to develop it, in addition to NASA research at Eagleworks. They're building test apparatus which eliminate any possibility of error from gravity, heating, etc. But they're working with very low electrical power, so the thrust they're dealing with is miniscule. There's a theory that thrust is not linear, and that the maximum efficiency is at an electrical power of 50kW, and that it's a LOT of thrust. My *hunch* is that there are
Re: Experimental engines (Score:1)
The EMDrive is impossible and every real physicist, who studies the world based on the known experiments, knows it. And scifi fans who don't know about the history of science, but have a head full of philosophy and wishful thinking, hold out hope.
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It's all so easy to come in here and throw around such grandiose claims as an anonymous coward. Why don't you log in with a real account, and details your claims of hogwash.
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Note my slashdot id#: I've been here for a while. I've been using this nick for thirty years. Oh, maybe you have a real ID as well, but don't want to get downgraded for your choice of vocabulary and your tone.
Whatever. Here's the science you don't deserve. It's possible the EMdrive function is due to the Unruh effect.
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2015/PP-40-15.PDF
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There have been tons of reasons proposed for how it works. Given that its thrust seems to track its temperature, not the power being supplied to it, it's clearly a thermal effect. And there are much better ways to make rockets driven by thermal effects.
I'm amazed that there are still people talking about this thing here.
Anyway, obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]. And again [xkcd.com].
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I guess I should have learned by now, that the level of physics knowledge of Slashdot users ends at Newton, and they have unshakable faith in him. Ultraviolet Catastrophe is probably an alien term to many of them. But yet somehow they buy into the ideas of "dark matter" and "dark energy". I really don't have the patience or time to squabble on here. If anyone has a serious interest in this, and can plough through tons of posts by actual physicists on the matter, I will direct them to the NASASpaceFlight.com
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I can see why they're being cautious. I just wish they were a little less so. I never claimed any conspiracy, and even though the results were difficult to believe at first, and there continues to be doubt, no other explanation for the observations has been adequate. So, better experiments are performed. That's what's happening now. Because of all of the flak that the idea has, much of the work goes on in quiet.
If you're looking for a possible explanation, here is one: http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files
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This device is starting to sound like the old Dean Drive, but with less oiling required.
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Isn't it lovely to have a stalker who mentions you in threads even when you're not around? Everyone should have a stalker. :)
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Their syntax is similar to my stalker. They sometimes post while logged in. Do you get strange down-mods from time to time but only three of them? (I make enough off-topic posts, they should be able to legitimately use up those mod points with just a little effort.) I'm starting to wonder if meta moderation has impacted them? They could moderate five down but now it's just three. They're usually within ten minutes of each other, I made it a point to try to observe them out of curiosity.
It kind of strokes th
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They should do this:
1. Attach chemical and ion engines to the ISS.
2. Add modules to grow vegetables to have unlimited food. Plants can help produce O2, remove CO2, and can consume feces and urine. You can also grow potatoes and lemons to generate all the electricity you need (like a potato clock).
3. Biodiesel generated from the plant matter, combined with the excess O2 can be reclaimed to refuel the chemical rockets.
This is a closed system and could allow for very long exploration missions.
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Pretty sure solar panels are still a more efficient way to generate electricity than potatoes, and chucking "biodiesel" fuel out the back of your spacecraft sounds like a pretty good way to run out of food and oxygen in a hurry.
Growing crops in space is a cool idea, though.
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Solar panels work when you're got a fair amount of solar radiation to use. That's only really the case in the inner solar system (or the inner part of any star system). For other places, nuclear is needed. Fission fuels will be far more plentiful on the inner, 'rocky' planets - in our system, that's as far as the inner asteroid belt. outer, gas planets will have more deuterium and tritium, useful for fusion. Until fusion gets working properly, we're stuck with fission. That's ok, for now.
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Okay, fair point. I was mentioning solar as a Light->Electricity converter, as that's how potatoes work.
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What exactly are you proposing, and why? 1) Why do you want to attach chemical and ion engines to the ISS? to maintain its orbit? to move it to a new one? We can already do that; it's not a big deal. It's just expensive. 2) pressurized space (the interior of spacecraft) is very expensive. Agriculture requires a lot of space. It is simply not practical to start these orbiting greenhouses until other problems are solved. The generation of electricity from a potato is very inefficient. Photovoltaic cells do a
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Go read Seveneves [amazon.com].
Re:We need a world-wide effort in space (Score:5, Insightful)
A bunch of nations pitched in on the ITER fusion reactor. It's already 300% over budget and won't be fully operational until at least 2027. Global cooperator does not necessarily make projects better or easier.
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Yep, easy to come in under budget when you abandon the project because of a bankruptcy designed to line the pockets of The Trump.
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Is this your first visit to Slashdot since 2006?
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I thought it would get better if I got drunk. But no improvement yet. More whiskey, me thinks.
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Drinking doesn't seem to have helped so far. Must drink more whiskey (Jameson)
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I would like to see much more spending on space projects. But a global federation pooling resources will not be efficient. Firstly, space programs are very expensive so only very large or rich nations can afford them. There are many different possible designs for a star-ship like craft, it is impossible to get everyone working on a single design. US efforts during WW2 caused great economic difficulties for the people, and were barely sustainable. I would not want to put the nation or the world through that
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The product worked, was delivered and the US brand was happy to contract out the platform for US use.
India and the geo-synchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV) effort that the US tried to stop under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).
The UK trying to make its own Skynet military communications satellites, finally having to buy in the US Type-777 satellite system instead.
A lot of nations try and share, c
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"Capitalism allowed the US to buy into advanced Russian products like the Russian RD-180" In this case it was Russia being capitalistic. And it was the US decision to not spend money on reinventing the wheel when they could purchase a viable alternative off the shelf while dedicating the savings to the development of the next generation of engine technologies.
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First rule in government spending: Why build one when you can have two for twice the price.
Seriously though, it's called redundancy.
Yay, VASIMR at last! (Score:4, Informative)
VASIMR [wikipedia.org] has been ready to go to a full-scale trial on ISS for a while now. Then the ISS won't be so dependent upon Progress supply missions to give it orbital boosts. This thing will be powerful enough that they have to have batteries in it because the ISS solar panels aren't powerful enough to run it at full power.
But I'd be happier if I saw a date when it would actually get launched for installation on ISS. It looks like they will still be building the first engines through summer 2016. After that it's not clear if the tests are meant to be done on ground. They're also talking about having it run for 100 continuous hours in the third year of the contract, which is more than what ISS needs, so maybe they'll send one up to ISS in 2017 or 2018?
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Thereby increasing innovation? (Score:2)
... thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
Forgive my bad French, but that's the sort of ideologic bullshit you can't prove. NASA saves money from an embarrassingly tiny budget; that is the only benefit this type of arrangement provides. It does the precise opposite of increasing competition, since one company will have a government-sanctioned monopoly; if it didn't and NASA placed the designs into the public domain, then ANY company could make the engines and sell them to NASA, improving NASA's supply chain. Have you forgotten why our computers