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jlf1961 -> RE: Just happened across something for all the scientific folk in her (6/15/2008 12:43:00 PM)
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First of all, we wont be here in billions of years, since the sun only has about 63 million years to go before it goes "Kaboom!!"
Now the explosion will follow the sun turning into a red giant, which will mean it will have expanded in size beyond the orbit of earth, which would have been burned clean before that.
However, there is hope... if we dont blow ourselves to bits first.
When Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001, he described the technology he actually expected to see in the late 80's. The US could have single handedly built the space plane, the station, the moon base AND Discovery, except for one slight expenditure.... we were dropping billions into Vietnam and the cold war.
Granted, we had the shuttle, but we had the one that congress chose, not the one that NASA wanted.
There were two designs in the running, the one that we ended up with and one designed by a joint project team assembled from Lockheed, Mcdonnel-Douglas, and Gruman. There design was based on the lifting body program and there would have been no external fuel tank and no external boosters, the drawback was 50% more cargo space, the ability to carry twice the crew into space, and a less than 15% chance of catastrophic failure.
Congress said no because it was 30% more expensive, and would have needed a runway at kennedy, not a launch pad. When the contract went to Rockwell, Lockheed bought the contracts of the engineers and rights to the design and moved the project to the skunkworks.
Now, at the present time, a 1/10 scale prototype is still being plaid with. Instead of ceramic tiles over aluminum hull, it is 100% composite, a ceramic/metal compound that will take 10 times the maximum heat exposure during re-entry.
Rocket engines have gone from the old chemical fuel flying bomb mixture to a H2O 2 based fuel developed by the Germans for the V1 and ME Komet rocket powered fighter.
Now, we are faced with a really bad exhuast gas problem, at the beginning of the flight, the exhuast would be steam, your basic hot fresh water, nasty stuff we dont want around in the air or on the ground....
In the upper atmosphere, instead of destroy Ozone as the shuttle does, it would do something even worse, leave thousands of tons of Ozone in the ozone layer, really horrible thing to happen.
And they can now build it bigger, say the size of a 747, god forbid we put something into NASA's toy box that could carry enough cargo to actually PAY for itself.
Then there is the fact that, thanks to modular construction, 75 trips with this particular craft could put a 2001 style space station at the L1 point in orbit. (The L1 point is the point in space where the gravitational pull of the moon and earth on an object is equal) Which means a station that cant fall from the sky. And god forbid that we would have the thing spinning so that there is no possibility of zero g related health issues....
And the lunar express ship seen in the 2001 movie could be built in orbit for half the cost of a new luxery liner. Cost of establishing a colony on the moon would be a bit extreme, but the low gee environment would allow the manufactor of near perfect crystals for electronic components.
As for the nuclear powered plasma drive seen on the Discovery, that is already been tested, and one probe launched by Japan used it, we also have a working efficient ion drive. Good bye liquid fuel restrictions on space craft to mars and beyond.
Then we have one last hurtle for Intersteller flight, but then some lamb brain scientist type discovered that particle accelerators created a massive gravatational field, which could be used to create an artificial worm hole if there was enough particles to create the proper effect. We just dont know how to make sure that you end up where you would want to go instead of someplace like the inside of a star.
But hey, we put Greedy in as General Director of the projects, and let her pick her own staff of people to insure everything is done right and on time....
I wonder if congress would turn a blind eye to project administrators using whips on engineers and scientiests to get all this stuff done on time and on budget.....
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