NASA space ship

The E wrote:

Zakharra wrote:Room to expand and another place for the human race to live. It gives added insurance of the human race to survive, and it also gives us added resources and a base closer to the outer system.

There is no room to expand there, unless we build it. Which is easier to do in the Earth/Moon portion of the solar system than it is out by Mars or Jupiter.

Again: What is out there that you can't get closer to home?

HB of CJ wrote:Discoveries that will knock our socks off and viewed from today will be very very close to magic itself. Power sources beyond our wildest imagination and I have a lot of that. Private Star Ships that can go ANYWHERE, are self aware and are no larger nor more $expensive$ than a private car. Multi dimensional. Smart, Safe. Fast. Cheap. That is our future.

Oh god. You do realize that putting enough energy to do space travel in the hands of J Random Moron is a really bad idea, right? There's a reason why flying cars haven't taken off.

You really do put a negative spin on space exploration, don't you?

It's enough that one big enough asteroid hits Earth and humanity is toast, that's one of the primary reasons for settling other planets. Having a settlement on Moon will help mankind to move further out and Mars is a natural stopover for exploring even further out in the solar-system. This indeed means we do need a presence on the Moon for making trips further out in the solar system easier, but the Moon isn't a very practical place to settle (no carbon and nitrogen) since it would require outside resources to function. Compare that to Mars which has all the elements needed for functional agriculture.

First of all, if you want to build things in Earth/Moon orbit you have to lift all the resources out of a gravity well. Having a presence on Mars will make it easier to access the asteroid belt which has for all practical purposes endless resources. Bootstrapping that kind of industry is of course going to be very very expensive but the ROI is astronomical. Another factor that makes Mars attractive in this instance is that it has less than half the escape velocity compared to Earth and due to its thin atmosphere you have less problems with air friction/resistance when launching payloads into orbit.

And regarding private star ships, when the time comes when that type of vessel is practical I doubt J Random Moron will able to pilot such a craft since it most likely will be done by something akin to a limited AI. And the reason flying cars isn't practical today is because of a number of reasons (of which J Random Moron isn't a factor), for example: they are severely impractical, you still need a pilot license (ie. excluding most of the J Random Morons out there), they are technically barely feasible and on top of that expensive.

Can not tell it from magic. Why would it take that much energy? It might not take that much energy at all. Maybe none. Tapping into alternate universes.

I was first going to make the cheap fast safe family star ship no larger nor expensive than a cell phone, but re considered it being about the size of a car.

Made up of force fields. Ties into dozens of neighboring universes. Smart. Self aware. Actually qualifies as a living thing. Much larger on the inside than the outside.

My further point is that by then we might just be able to do anything just by thinking about it. No star ship needed at all? Go somewhere where you want to and create your own personal environment? Just me. HB

Rotating a spaceship for artificial gravity is trivial, the "Mars Direct" proposal had the expended transstage kicked off on a tether to provide a counterweight so the Hab could rotate under gravity. For the limited amount of manoeuvre needed in free space, small "kicker" impulses could be used from the Hab, and when the final large application of deltaV was needed, the transstage was cut away and the Hab fired the main engine.

For very large spacecraft of the future, a central truss to hold the reactor and remass would have a series of tethers swinging the hab pods outwards, much like a ride at the midway. Tension structures are very light.

Using water as remass has the advantage that you do not have heavy and expensive equipment to break the water apart, liquify the O2 and H2 and cryogenic tanks to hold it. Once again, less mass, less expense and fewer failure modes, but the price is lower available ISP.

Why go "out there"? Resource wise, there is far more water, CHON and other useful materials on the asteroids and moons of the Gas Giants than on the Moon (which is really resource poor in comparison). Lots of distance, so the settlers will be quarantined from any potential disaster that threatens Earth. As well, the distance will allow them to develop their own social, religious or economic systems without interference from Earth. Experimenting with new forms is virtually impossible when you are under the authority of one polity or another, orbiting Jupiter, politicians and bureaucrats from Earth have much less ability to interfere (much of the commerce "out there" will be internal, to develop the place). What they come up with could be quite world changing (for comparison, it is sometimes thought that the Greek experiment in Democracy might have been inspired by their overseas colonies, where everyone was automatically allotted an equal plot of land...)

It is most likely that 90% of these colonies will be company towns or replicas of existing Earthly organizations and systems, but having that 10% gives you the ability to look at experiments and see what work and what does not.

Joat42 wrote:You really do put a negative spin on space exploration, don't you?

It's enough that one big enough asteroid hits Earth and humanity is toast, that's one of the primary reasons for settling other planets. Having a settlement on Moon will help mankind to move further out and Mars is a natural stopover for exploring even further out in the solar-system. This indeed means we do need a presence on the Moon for making trips further out in the solar system easier, but the Moon isn't a very practical place to settle (no carbon and nitrogen) since it would require outside resources to function. Compare that to Mars which has all the elements needed for functional agriculture.

I am actually all for space exploration. What I have my problems with is space colonization. It's not that hard to send a bunch of canned monkeys to the Moon, or Mars, or elsewhere in the solar system; the problems associated with those endeavours are well defined and understood and, for the most part, have available solutions.
Building permanent outposts at such distances is a very different kettle of fish, however. It involves designing life support systems that can pretty much run themselves (including the ability to regenerate themselves should something catastrophic happen) and designing everything in such a way that these colonies are completely self-reliant. That, I believe, is a problem domain that we haven't yet come to grips with, and while it may be possible that we make the necessary breakthroughs one day, I am not holding my breath for it.

As Bruce Sterling once said: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach."

First of all, if you want to build things in Earth/Moon orbit you have to lift all the resources out of a gravity well. Having a presence on Mars will make it easier to access the asteroid belt which has for all practical purposes endless resources. Bootstrapping that kind of industry is of course going to be very very expensive but the ROI is astronomical. Another factor that makes Mars attractive in this instance is that it has less than half the escape velocity compared to Earth and due to its thin atmosphere you have less problems with air friction/resistance when launching payloads into orbit.

The ROI is astronomical, but only if your investors do not mind waiting a century for that return to arrive. And again, there doesn't seem to be a need for humans to be on-site for any of the work.

And regarding private star ships, when the time comes when that type of vessel is practical I doubt J Random Moron will able to pilot such a craft since it most likely will be done by something akin to a limited AI. And the reason flying cars isn't practical today is because of a number of reasons (of which J Random Moron isn't a factor), for example: they are severely impractical, you still need a pilot license (ie. excluding most of the J Random Morons out there), they are technically barely feasible and on top of that expensive.

It is impossible to build a completely failure-proof system. As such, accidents will happen (never mind the potential for malicious acts). The more energy is involved in those accidents, the worse they'll be, and since starships require a whole lot of energy, accidents involving them will be plenty destructive. By making starship travel an everyday thing, as HB of CJ imagined, you are ensuring that at some point, you're going to be losing a whole lot of people.

As well, the distance will allow them to develop their own social, religious or economic systems without interference from Earth. Experimenting with new forms is virtually impossible when you are under the authority of one polity or another, orbiting Jupiter, politicians and bureaucrats from Earth have much less ability to interfere (much of the commerce "out there" will be internal, to develop the place). What they come up with could be quite world changing (for comparison, it is sometimes thought that the Greek experiment in Democracy might have been inspired by their overseas colonies, where everyone was automatically allotted an equal plot of land...)

Ahh, yes, the "we can get away from all the oppressive governments" dream. Have you never stopped to consider how draconian and intrusive a government has to be in order to ensure the safe, continued existance of the space station it governs?

HB of CJ wrote:Can not tell it from magic. Why would it take that much energy? It might not take that much energy at all. Maybe none. Tapping into alternate universes.

I was first going to make the cheap fast safe family star ship no larger nor expensive than a cell phone, but re considered it being about the size of a car.

Made up of force fields. Ties into dozens of neighboring universes. Smart. Self aware. Actually qualifies as a living thing. Much larger on the inside than the outside.

My further point is that by then we might just be able to do anything just by thinking about it. No star ship needed at all? Go somewhere where you want to and create your own personal environment? Just me. HB

As much fun as the gimmick with alternate universes, multiverse and diverging universe etc etc can be as plots for stories, sorry they don´t exist. And even if they could exist, there´s infinitely near zero chance that we could ever interact with them in any way.

There may be some extra dimensions to play with but it´s not something i would rely on for anything beyond academic interest.




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There is no room to expand there, unless we build it. Which is easier to do in the Earth/Moon portion of the solar system than it is out by Mars or Jupiter.

Mars has lots of raw materials the moon lacks, or can´t be accessed as easily, while it still has much lower gravity than earth, allowing better use of the materials in space.

There´s also the issue with the near earth area becoming cluttered, if you try to just keep putting more and more there, you WILL end up causing catastrophic orbital debris incidents.

Then, Jupiter and Saturn provides easy access to effectively unlimited amounts of fuel/reaction mass raw material, and the moons of those planets are also where the best chances of finding life away from earth in our solar system(with Mars being the only other quality contender), that potential by itself is a huge science matter.

Tenshinai wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:Can not tell it from magic. Why would it take that much energy? It might not take that much energy at all. Maybe none. Tapping into alternate universes.

I was first going to make the cheap fast safe family star ship no larger nor expensive than a cell phone, but re considered it being about the size of a car.

Made up of force fields. Ties into dozens of neighboring universes. Smart. Self aware. Actually qualifies as a living thing. Much larger on the inside than the outside.

My further point is that by then we might just be able to do anything just by thinking about it. No star ship needed at all? Go somewhere where you want to and create your own personal environment? Just me. HB

As much fun as the gimmick with alternate universes, multiverse and diverging universe etc etc can be as plots for stories, sorry they don´t exist. And even if they could exist, there´s infinitely near zero chance that we could ever interact with them in any way.

There may be some extra dimensions to play with but it´s not something i would rely on for anything beyond academic interest.




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There is no room to expand there, unless we build it. Which is easier to do in the Earth/Moon portion of the solar system than it is out by Mars or Jupiter.

Mars has lots of raw materials the moon lacks, or can´t be accessed as easily, while it still has much lower gravity than earth, allowing better use of the materials in space.

There´s also the issue with the near earth area becoming cluttered, if you try to just keep putting more and more there, you WILL end up causing catastrophic orbital debris incidents.

Then, Jupiter and Saturn provides easy access to effectively unlimited amounts of fuel/reaction mass raw material, and the moons of those planets are also where the best chances of finding life away from earth in our solar system(with Mars being the only other quality contender), that potential by itself is a huge science matter.

Actually, given the quantum mechanic interpretation that whenever a wave function collapses, all of the possible states occur could provide for alternate universes (a multiverse). This is in fact the interpretation that David has used in the War God series as well as the Apocalypse Troll.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Actually, given the quantum mechanic interpretation that whenever a wave function collapses, all of the possible states occur could provide for alternate universes (a multiverse). This is in fact the interpretation that David has used in the War God series as well as the Apocalypse Troll.

That idea is based on wave function NON-collapse.

More importantly, have you considered what that concept actually requires?
First of all, the most basic requirement is that every single quantum state possible, DOES happen somewhere.

Even just every molecule can change to ridiculous numbers of quantum state every second, and to fulfill previous requirement, you will have to have as many ADDITIONAL alternate universes per second, as the number of possible states multiplied by the number of possible states for every other molecule(or whatever particle you want to use for comparison). Then there´s the quantum states of non-particles to add in as well.

The effect is that every second the universe will have to create the mass and energy for a silly number of universes.

Universes which for some reason does not overlap or exchange information(ie. completely cuts all ties instantly, or we would already be able to detect the fact that new universes does happen), yet still manages to continue to spawn new alternate universes to infinity AND "keep track" of what has happened everywhere as otherwise there is no guarantee that the basic claim of the concept really does happen.

Then there´s the problem of prediction, if there is any way to predict what quantum states need to spawn new universes, then the idea is already epic logic fail because if it IS possible to predict, then there is already at least one state that WILL happen, which would mean that we instead get back to a single linear universe, because nature doesn´t bother to spend infinite energy just to make some mathematician happy.

Oh right, and the problem of dimensions. The many-worlds concept requires there to be or continually appear an infinite number of dimensions which is connected whenever a universe appears, but NOT connected afterwards. Yeah, not gonna happen.

Anyway, there´s hordes of reasons why this idea is so totally not real, including a bundle of evidence showing it as impossible, the only reason it remains an official part of some theories seems to be historical inertia from the time it made possible some otherwise impossible things, stuff that has since been explained in other, SANE, ways and fanboyism among a small number of physicists who thinks it´s such a COOOOL idea.

Like i said, it´s a fun concept to use for a story, but if you actually try to make it work internally, you will find that the concept stumbles and crashes incessantly often.

The E wrote:Ahh, yes, the "we can get away from all the oppressive governments" dream. Have you never stopped to consider how draconian and intrusive a government has to be in order to ensure the safe, continued existance of the space station it governs?

Governments don't have to be necessarily oppressive for people to still think they would be better off somewhere else. You could look at the English dissenters who settled (and largely created) America, or the Mormons setting out to Utah. American companies are using various means to "leave" the United States due to what they and their shareholders have decided are onerous taxation policies. And the experimentation that the Ancient Greek colonists practiced does not seem to have been driven by oppression, since the entire rational for colonizing in the ancient Greek world was to find more land for citizens of overcrowded city-states.

As well, we are now entering an era where the space infrastructure might not be the domain of governments at all. SpaceX is pretty much finding R&D for their various projects based more on what their founder, Elon Musk. believes rather than what NASA wants to buy. My example includes "company towns", and I suspect that many company towns will see a distinct change in structure as people aboard realize what the company management wants isn't possible, or at least not possible using the systems and procedures management has been given to use.

The other thing to consider is that truly oppressive governments will not be giving their citizens any means to leave Earth at all. The time delay in information transmission (particularly beyond cis Lunar space) starts to degrade the ability of the central organs to dictate and manage what is happening in the hinterlands, and of course any punitive expeditions will take a long time to arrive at the rebellious colony. Far better to have the oppressed directly under your thumb, lest they get ideas, or worse yet, time and resources to act on these ideas......

Just to show how "easy" getting around could actually be, the neofuel site http://neofuel.com has detailed papers demonstrating how you could use a NTR with water as the remass/ coolant and deliver a 10.000 ton payload to Jupiter in roughly 3 years. The start mass is an astonishing 358,000 tons of water, but the calculations seem pretty straight forward.
http://neofuel.com/index_neofuel.html

Thucydides wrote:Just to show how "easy" getting around could actually be, the neofuel site http://neofuel.com has detailed papers demonstrating how you could use a NTR with water as the remass/ coolant and deliver a 10.000 ton payload to Jupiter in roughly 3 years. The start mass is an astonishing 358,000 tons of water, but the calculations seem pretty straight forward.
http://neofuel.com/index_neofuel.html

Assuming that there was no additional overhead for anything, this shows just how bad the rocket equation is for getting around the solar system. Basically best case is
2.7% of the original vehicle is delivered payload, and that is assuming that the reactor and engines massed nothing.