nuclear space engine - would it work ??

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:
has traveled *ten kilometers* in just about three years -- a stupendous
accomplishment for a remotely-operated robot. The Apollo 15 crew traveled
that far in their first day at Hadley Rille...

Did our boys find water on the Moon?

No, but then none of the robotic landers did either. Nobody has yet found
water on the Moon. (There are definitely hydrogen deposits of some sort,
especially at the south pole, as sensed from orbit by Lunar Prospector,
but whether they are actually water ice is only conjecture.)

It has been pointed out recently that if you want to explore the polar
regions for water ice, you almost certainly want to do it with manned
landings. Robotic rovers simply aren't up to the job.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
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In message , Steve
Hix writes
In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:

Steve Hix wrote:

It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.

That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

We ought to start a fad for granite furniture. Some with a goodly
fraction of thorium in it.

Judging by the number of hits on Google it's already here.
Uranium glass (Vaseline glass) is highly collectible, and so is
"radioactive red" glazed pottery
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/cwillis/rad/pottery.html and other
types of uranium glaze.

"richard schumacher" wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

NASA will never, ever put men on Mars.

What, they'll never rent Russian equipment or buy tickets on a National
Geographic expedition?

NASA HAVING men on Mars and putting them there are two different things.

The examples you suggest imply Russian or the NGS doing the putting.

On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 18:45:40 -0400, David Spain wrote:

Jonathan Silverlight wrote:
Possibly, but it's my understanding - backed up by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29,
for instance - that the blast wouldn't even seriously damage the pusher
plate, and the acceleration on a crewed craft would be only a few G.
And you can always add reaction mass to the bombs.

OK. My memory is faulty. Plasma Wave. Detonation at 60 meters from the
Pusher Plate.


Clew -- they made it up. That lingo is all made up. It is 200 yrs in the
future and
that stuff does not exist yet

I forget. Either
operation of newest type or an alien cured him or something. No biggie.

Tho, you should have known warp cos they used that term many times on old
tv show.

Warp drive Warp speed. IT IS ALSO MADE UP IT DOES NOT EXIST FOR
REAL@!!!!!

--
"If sun and air damage were reduced you would feel like you were twenty
and look like you were forty because that is the point when your body stops
devolping and just ages."--John Night 6

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

In article ,
Steve Hix wrote:
Politics quite possibly *would* have stopped the use of nuclear
engines, but they were stopped even earlier by the lack of a mission.

It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.

Wrong verb tense. They *used to* get kicked around. The nuclear power
source for MSL has gone through without a murmur.

That's good news.

The only remaining
problem is the massive paperwork overheads imposed as a defence against
now-nonexistent protests. It may be a little while before people get
brave enough to start trimming those back.

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:

Did our boys find water on the Moon? If not, they were wasting time and
money with regard to building settlements or habitats on the Moon. No
water, no colonies or habitats.

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.

"marika" wrote in message
news
Warp drive Warp speed. IT IS ALSO MADE UP IT DOES NOT EXIST FOR
REAL@!!!!!

Next you'll tell me the DHD isn't working right. *My* GDO is working fine.

What these extremists have done is push back the exploration, and
settlement, of Space by generations.
Politically, it will take a President who tells public opinion where they
can display their opinions -- in the primary loop of Chernobyl reactor #4,
or at Ground Zero.

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.

Case in point: Heinlein's fiction, notably "The Man who Sold The Moon",
"Requiem", and similar short stories.

The writer still remembers his Heppenheimer: "The future belongs to the
bold," to those who acknowlege the risks but go forward anyway.

Henry Spencer wrote:


For which we need men in space, for the same reason we generally use
hands-on machinery to build hydroelectric dams: because in the real
world, automation and remote control are not up to such complex jobs.

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
those advantages mean a lot of saved weight, and that means far more
payload on the planet's surface for a given mission mass.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if we never send a human crew to Mars as
we can do a better job of exploring it with robotic devices. At the
moment our two rovers are sending back lots of useful data, and the life
support that would have been required for two human explorers on Mars
for the period of time that the rovers have been operating would be
anything but trivial.
The line of what humans can do stays fairly level, aided by equipping
the human explorer with more and more high technology equipment that
must be designed in such a way as to interface with him. But what
robotics on its own, unhindered by any need to have a human interface,
can do keeps rising toward it...and at some future point it first meets
it, then crosses it...and the machine has the advantage and is more
capable than a human explorer would be.
Remember how we first had to build a space station with many cargo
rocket launches, and then head for the Moon? Everyone thought that would
be the case back in the fifties, but we improved our rockets enough that
no space station was needed, and we could do the whole mission with a
single rocket launch.
Von Braun thought his space station was immune from attack because the
weight of the guidance system that a interceptor missile would have to
carry into space to destroy it would be too heavy for it to get off of
the pad and do its mission.
I think something very much that may happen in regards to robotic
exploration.
We may be making assumptions about future machinery based on the
technology of today that time will show were wrong.

Pat

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:
Nonsense. What we've seen so far (and what NASA is trying to return to)
is just incidental dabbling. The days of real space exploration by free
men still lie ahead, and in fact are getting pretty close. The cartoons
are ending, and the curtain is about to go up on the main feature.

Yoda says: Do not your breath hold else purple turn you will. The tqx
payers will not joyfully submit to being mugged for another Kennedyesque
Space Circus and private firms will not fund foolishness. They are
profit oriented.

Yoda also says: The future from the past predicting, predicts always a
future the past closely resembling, but not always is it so. Sometimes
changes the world, and often most unexpected and insignificant-looking the
cause is, until arrives the revolution and obvious in hindsight it seems.

The aforementioned circus is just another cartoon. Regardless of its
exact ending, it is unimportant, indeed irrelevant.

Private firms fund foolishness all the time, because being profit oriented
doesn't always mean being obsessed with the next quarter's returns. The
insurance firm which supplied the last of the X Prize money, by betting
*against* the prize being won by the end of 2004, expected to lose its
bet... but hoped to jumpstart a new industry that would need insurance.
And Paul Allen lost money by bankrolling Rutan to win it, since he spent
considerably more than the prize total, but you better believe Allen means
to make it back from supplying hardware and services to Virgin Galactic.
NVIDIA is unlikely to *directly* make any money at all by sponsoring
Armadillo Aerospace's participation in this year's X Prize Cup, but you
can bet your booties that they think they'll benefit by it eventually.

Moreover, there are such things as nonprofit firms, and individuals with
priorities other than return on investment. Much of Peary's funding for
becoming (allegedly) the first man to reach the North Pole came from the
National Geographic Society, and Amundsen and Scott both went to the South
Pole with private funding. Anousheh Ansari didn't expect to make a profit
on either the X Prize or her flight to ISS.

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.
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spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
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