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nuclear space engine - would it work ??



 
 
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  #81  
Old October 8th 06, 11:29 AM posted to sci.space.history
Henry Spencer
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Posts: 2,170
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

In article ,
Leonard C Robinson wrote:
What these extremists have done is push back the exploration, and
settlement, of Space by generations.


I doubt it. Political difficulties in using nuclear power in space have
*not* been the major obstacle to exploration and settlement. They'd have
become significant eventually, but other things -- like transportation
costs -- have been bigger problems, and still are. (No, incanting the
word "nuclear" doesn't magically solve those problems.)

When Private Enterprise (The Ansari X Prize, Bigelow Prize, and others) are
successful, the establishment of the first Extra-Terrestrial Community is
going to be a headache at UN, the American State Department, British Foreign
& Commonwealth Office, and their equivalents all around the World.


No, an extraterrestrial community is already reasonably well provided for
in international law -- it's more or less an extension of the nation
establishing it. (In international law, private enterprise is always
subject to, and under the supervision of, some nation.) What will cause
some headaches is when one declares independence, a situation that current
space law doesn't really contemplate. Even that will probably be sorted
out fairly quickly, though, because it's not as if there aren't some
Earthly precedents for colonies declaring independence...
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |
  #82  
Old October 8th 06, 01:14 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Robert Kolker
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Posts: 83
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

Pat Flannery wrote:
At the moment; but what around twenty or thirty years in the future? We
are getting steadily better at automating things as well as
miniaturizing robotic devices, and you can see a point in the future
where robots pretty much can do everything a human explorer can do, as
well as having the dual advantages of not needing weighty life support
equipment or a means of returning home from its planetary target. Both


You realize that once missions at distances greater than the Moon are
undertaken, the robots would have to be autonomous or semi-autonomous.
The distances are so great that the delay in radio transmission would
make "hands on" control by a human impossible.

One really neat outcome of developing autnomous robots for space
exploration is that it would stimulate the development of AI at a
greater pace than AI has been enjoying.

Bob Kolker

  #83  
Old October 8th 06, 01:15 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Robert Kolker
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Posts: 83
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

Steve Hix wrote:


An awfully high bar to "useful", don't you think?

You're expecting a lot for a handful of days of hands-on checking; the
sort of thinking that bring "perfection paralysis" to mind.


Forget perfection. How about sufficient in the practical sense? No
water; no colonies no habitats. We must find water or we are stopped in
our tracks.

Robots don't need water. Humans do.

Bob Kolker
  #84  
Old October 8th 06, 03:19 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Bradley K. Sherman
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Posts: 4
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:

One really neat outcome of developing autnomous robots for space
exploration is that it would stimulate the development of AI at a
greater pace than AI has been enjoying.

They can't even make a robot that can get the butter out
of the refrigerator, the bread out of the toaster, and
spread the former on the latter. Give me a call when
they get that far and we'll talk about autonomous robots
for multi-decade space exploration.

--bks

  #85  
Old October 8th 06, 04:00 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Pat Flannery
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Posts: 18,465
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??



Bradley K. Sherman wrote:

They can't even make a robot that can get the butter out
of the refrigerator, the bread out of the toaster, and
spread the former on the latter. Give me a call when
they get that far and we'll talk about autonomous robots
for multi-decade space exploration.



And the problem here is that you are using machines to interface food
with a person in the way you'd expect it to be done, so that the
buttered slice of toasted bread will show up on your plate.
From a nutritional point of view, grind the bread up into bits, toast
it, mix it with the butter, and exude it through a tube as a paste. That
could be easily done by machinery alone and wouldn't need any computing
power at all.
We keep trying to make robots that walk around on legs like people, even
though we don't use mechanical legs on our vehicles, but rather rely on
wheels or treads. A legged planetary exploration robot may look neat,
but I doubt it's going to be able to go cross-country at 30 mph like a
M1 tank can. :-)


Pat
  #86  
Old October 8th 06, 04:12 PM posted to sci.space.history
Neil Gerace
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Posts: 326
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

We keep trying to make robots that walk around on legs like people, even
though we don't use mechanical legs on our vehicles, but rather rely on
wheels or treads. A legged planetary exploration robot may look neat, but
I doubt it's going to be able to go cross-country at 30 mph like a M1 tank
can. :-)


I doubt that a robot can solve differential equations in three dimensions
fast enough to catch a ball let alone drive a tank


  #87  
Old October 8th 06, 05:37 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Steve Hix
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Posts: 64
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:

Steve Hix wrote:

An awfully high bar to "useful", don't you think?

You're expecting a lot for a handful of days of hands-on checking; the
sort of thinking that bring "perfection paralysis" to mind.


Forget perfection. How about sufficient in the practical sense? No
water; no colonies no habitats. We must find water or we are stopped in
our tracks.


Once again, you're basing your argument on a too-small sample.

Worse, on a short-term project that never did expect to be able to
explore areas that had much likelihood of containing usable amounts of
water; they didn't have enough delta-v to permit landing anywhere other
than close to the lunar equator.

We'll ignore for now that strong evidence for water at the lunar poles
didn't show up until some time later.

Perhaps your earlier comments just sounded like "it's too hard now, so
we might as well just give up flying humans at all forever", and that's
not what you meant.

Robots don't need water. Humans do.


Of course humans do. (Actually, so do robots, but they don't have to
carry it around after they're constructed.)

Initially, humans're going going to have to bring it with them, and they
will continue to have to recycle stringently. Happily, fuel cells
generate water, and that will continue to be useful.

It's not so much water that's in short supply, it's hydrogen down here
where we are in the solar gravity well. Oxygen is all over the place on
the moon, hydrogen not so much.

There's lots of water (and light hydrocarbons) in the solar system; we
won't always have to haul it up from earth. Currently it's hard to get
to, but that shouldn't always be the case. The boostrapping process is
going to be annoying for quite a while, granted.
  #88  
Old October 8th 06, 05:39 PM posted to sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Jim Davis
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Posts: 420
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

Henry Spencer wrote:

If all this sounds like it's nowhere near enough to actually do
anything in space, well, you're like a Soviet defector of the
1960s, standing wide-eyed and slack-jawed just inside the door
of a Western supermarket, and asking his host how anyone could
possibly afford all this abundance. The answer is, if you do it
the capitalist way rather than the socialist way, your idea of
what's affordable changes radically.


Does this persuasive argument work both ways?

Can we draw any conclusions about the profitability of schemes like
solar power satellites and space colonization from the amount of
private capital invested in them?

Jim Davis
  #89  
Old October 8th 06, 05:45 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Steve Hix
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Posts: 64
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

Bradley K. Sherman wrote:

They can't even make a robot that can get the butter out
of the refrigerator, the bread out of the toaster, and
spread the former on the latter. Give me a call when
they get that far and we'll talk about autonomous robots
for multi-decade space exploration.


And the problem here is that you are using machines to interface food
with a person in the way you'd expect it to be done, so that the
buttered slice of toasted bread will show up on your plate.
From a nutritional point of view, grind the bread up into bits, toast
it, mix it with the butter, and exude it through a tube as a paste. That
could be easily done by machinery alone and wouldn't need any computing
power at all.


There are reasons why food-in-a-tube isn't getting as much attention as
it did in the early space program era. Yeah, you can get the bare
nutritional requirements that way, but people get tired of it really
fast.

We keep trying to make robots that walk around on legs like people,


And are getting better at them.

even though we don't use mechanical legs on our vehicles, but rather rely on
wheels or treads.


Because they're a *lot* simpler to make.

How many biological organisms use wheels for movement? Other than some
microorganisms?

A legged planetary exploration robot may look neat,
but I doubt it's going to be able to go cross-country at 30 mph like a
M1 tank can. :-)


IIRC, it's 45mph, until the crew rips out the governor and gets going.

Actually, as long as you don't require high speed, leg-based machines
would be able to go places that tracked and wheeled vehicles can't go at
all, or only with great difficulty.

I recall seeing a writeup of a new-ish leg-thing in development
specifically to deal with terrain that isn't suited for wheel/track
vehicles. It wouldn't replace wheels, certainly, but it could supplement
them for some environments.
  #90  
Old October 8th 06, 06:03 PM posted to sci.physics.fusion,sci.space.history,soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if
Robert Kolker
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Posts: 83
Default nuclear space engine - would it work ??

Bradley K. Sherman wrote:


They can't even make a robot that can get the butter out
of the refrigerator, the bread out of the toaster, and
spread the former on the latter. Give me a call when
they get that far and we'll talk about autonomous robots
for multi-decade space exploration.


That is not the best use of robots. Robots can go into an environment
that would kill or disable a human.

Bob Kolker

 




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