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#81
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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