/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10114132]

Okay, considering how many universities there are all over the world and taking into account that virtually every single one has a physics department, how the fuck don't we have something better than chemical propulsion to get into space?

What are all these people even doing?

Probably thinking of ways to make money for some menial consumerist industry, right?

>Gotta make something "useful"!
>Meaning: Making some rich cunt even richer.

[Anonymous No.10114139]

>>10114132
Rocket propulsion is a very very small subset of physics and like you said there are a lot of physicists, funding is spread thin.
Sayge because OP is a retarded faggot

[Anonymous No.10114143]

>rockets are outdated lol
Kill yourself.

[Anonymous No.10114175]

>>10114143
rockets aren't outdated
rockets are still the best we have, that's the problem

also: the Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket to date

show me some other technology from the 1960s that is better than anything we have today

[Anonymous No.10114285]

>>10114132
There are actually other forms of propulsion.

>nuclear
works like a charm but not allowed due to political reasons

>ion thrusters
highly efficient, but tiny thrust, doesn't really work well on big space ships

>solar sails
same issue for different reasons as ion thrusters

[Anonymous No.10114627]

>>10114285
>>nuclear
>works like a charm but not allowed due to political reasons

I partly agree, partly disagree.

If that shit malfunctioned/exploded in the atmosphere, we could play Fallout IRL.

Maybe if we assembled the ship in space. But that would require to bring all the parts into space using conventional methods.

[Anonymous No.10114638]

>>10114132
That's an engineering problem not a physics problem. Current physics says antigravity is likely to be impractical for a very long time.
>>What are all these people even doing?
a bunch of important basic research, you'll probably never understand, but could benefit your life immensely.

[Anonymous No.10114642]

Rocket technology is still in infancy. Routinely reusable rocketry is coming and will decrease launch costs by two orders of magnitude. Judging chemical propulsion by what it can do today is premature.

[Anonymous No.10114651]

>>10114627
If it exploded in the upper atmosphere it would evenly distribute around the whole globe and increase the background radiation by so little that it would be barely measurable. The real reason is nuclear propulsion could be used for intercontinental bombs, which could trigger a new arms race.

[Anonymous No.10114692]

>>10114175
nuclear weapons

[Anonymous No.10114697]

>>10114692
Project Orion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njM7xlQIjnQ

>>10114175

[Anonymous No.10114699]

>>10114638
>a bunch of important basic research, you'll probably never understand, but could benefit your life immensely.

sounds like something a religious fanatic would say

>don't ask
>god moves in mysterious ways

[Anonymous No.10114876]

>rocket = big pointy thing going up
No.
You cannot escape rocketry. If you want more performance simply use more exotic fuels and methods to utilize them. Plenty of candidates some with promising interstellar capabilities.
Antigravity will not make spaceflight any easier than it did aeroflight.

[Anonymous No.10114907]

>>10114699
Have you converted to Scientism yet?

[Anonymous No.10114909]

>>10114876
>Antigravity will not make spaceflight any easier than it did aeroflight.
Hey, my aeroplane's antigrav lifter just broke down, can I have one of yours since you don't think they do anything?

[Anonymous No.10114918]

>>10114132
>better than chemical propulsion
Physics is one thing but chemistry rules our life too. If chemistry doesn't allow for a substance with properties you want to exist (which in theory you can do from physics but not feasibly with accuracy) then you are done.

[Anonymous No.10114963]

>>10114132
There are lots of different methods for propulsion once in space. Getting from the ground into orbit is harder because all the other propulsion methods are either low thrust or have radiation risks.

Other non-propulsive methods like a space elevator or launch loop are just too big and impractical with current technology (and politics).

[Anonymous No.10114991]

>>10114876
>You cannot escape rocketry.

That's where you are not imaginative enough.

If we really understood gravity we might come up with something to reverse it. Basically the earth itself would cause your spacecraft to fall up - so to speak.

But we don't understand gravity at all.

[Anonymous No.10115030]

>What are all these people even doing?

From what I've seen, there's a lot of indolence. Universities for whom science departments are just a storage space for engineering prerequisite courses do not have the funding nor the desire to contribute much to their fields. They often become waste channels for a few professors' ego projects.

[Anonymous No.10115612]

>>10114132
Because chemical propulsion is energetic and energetic is fast. If we want to move people, or do anything within a single lifetime/generation, fast is good.

If we give up on sending humans.. Turns out fast is still good because of the rad-hardening needed to keep computers computing predictably, and also current power requirements/storage tech make the slow and steady options a bad idea.

Chemical propulsion is fast, well studied (so kinda safe), and has existing infrastructure.

Didnt even mention anything about profitability. Which is a whole nother branch on why chemical would likely be preferred even after some university gets something else to work in a lab

[Anonymous No.10115879]

orion drive when?

[Anonymous No.10115904]

>>10115879
If/when it becomes practical to manufacture spacecraft in space.

[Anonymous No.10115908]

>>10114132
Talk to engineers. The technology most likely exists, just not put together in a profitable, sellable package

[Anonymous No.10116308]

>>10115879
>single rtg is enough to throw the greens in rabid ksc destroying antifa frenzy
>building orion

[Anonymous No.10116331]

>>10114991
>If we really understood gravity we might come up with something to reverse it. Basically the earth itself would cause your spacecraft to fall up - so to speak.
Back to /x/ with you, brainlet.

[Anonymous No.10116471]

>>10114132
As it is now space is not profitable. The only way to get money for space exploration is beg governments.

Can that change in near future? Who the shit knows.

[Anonymous No.10116475]

>>10116471
>As it is now space is not profitable.

And why is it not profitable? Partly because you have to burn massive amounts of fuel to even get into orbit.

[Anonymous No.10116482]

>>10116331
>Back to /x/ with you, brainlet.

read this
https://curiosity.com/topics/believe-it-or-not-science-still-cant-explain-gravity-curiosity/
you might learn something, brainlet

[Anonymous No.10116491]

>>10116482

Or here, an actual astrophysicist writing about this topic

https://www.space.com/32147-why-is-gravity-so-hard-to-understand.html

[Anonymous No.10116492]

>>10116482
>Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of the Standard Model
Stopped reading there

[Anonymous No.10116535]

>>10116475
The fuel is an absolutely tiny fraction of the cost to get into orbit compared to throwing away a launch vehicle that costs tens-hundreds of millions of dollars. To put this in perspective the fuel for a Falcon 9 launch costs all of 200k.

[Anonymous No.10116539]

>>10116492

Stop flaunting your ADHD like that.

[Anonymous No.10117011]

>>10114132
>Why don't have something better than the best way to get into space

[Anonymous No.10117016]

>>10114132
>how the fuck don't we have something better than chemical propulsion to get into space?
The world has limitations anon. Notice how hoverboards don't exist.

[Anonymous No.10117136]

>>10114132
Gas core nuclear rockets would be a great step up from chemical. Not as much thrust but possible isps of 3,000-5,000. They're also viable with modern tech. Fusion or antimatter propulsion could come around in the near future.

[Anonymous No.10117175]

>>10117011
>the best way to get into space

as if we had multiple ways to chose from and chose the "best" one

it's the only one we came up with and successfully implemented so far

[Anonymous No.10117181]

>>10117016
Hoverboards do exist, get a vaccum a trashbag and a wooden planl. BOOM! Hoverboard

[Anonymous No.10117247]

>>10114991
Gravity is not a force, it is a consequence of curvature of space-time. To reverse gravity you need to invent negative mass and get a big enough amount of it in one place to cancel out the curvature being produced by the mass of the Earth, and then a little more so that the curvature goes negative and you're pushed away from the source of negative mass.

Two problems, negative mass doesn't real and even if it were you need approximately 1x Earth of it

[Anonymous No.10117266]

>>10115904
Also you'd need to design nuclear pellets that cannot be used as bombs on their own but can be triggered into a fission explosion with an outside pulse of energy. Think Z-pinch with a little hollow marble of plutonium coated in beryllium oxide, or maybe lasers with the plutonium marbles coated in tungsten (lasers heat the tungsten and the reaction of the outer layers vaporizing and blowing off crushes the plutonium until it becomes a supercritical mass).

It'd have to be like a pellet-fusion rocket except with fission instead. Fission is way easier than fusion so there's no reason why it wouldn't work. You wouldn't get nearly a much thruster power but the efficiency would be there and governments would be less concerned if they had a potential radio-logical disaster above their heads than that amounts to a world-ending nuclear arsenal which can dodge any missile aimed at it.

[Anonymous No.10117272]

>>10116475
Getting to space is expensive because we throw away vehicles worth millions of dollars every time. Propellant is fuck all, if we can figure out how to cheaply reuse the exact rocket technology we have today then going into orbit would cost as much as flying around the world.

[Anonymous No.10117280]

>>10116308
Consider the following.
Why not build it anyway.
What are they gonna do? Nuke us? Not likely.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous No.10117285]

>>10117280
No, it can be launched from the arctic or the already irradiated pacific ocean using Musks sea launch pad.

>:O

[Anonymous No.10117313]

>>10117247
What's the difference between mass and space-time?

[Anonymous No.10117340]

>>10117313
They're completely different.

Mass is mass, and is warps space time, curving it so that otherwise straight pathways through space are bent. This is why orbits exist. The problem is, all mass curves space the same way, 'towards' itself. That means you can't get anti-gravity from mass, you conceptually need negative-mass, or mass that curves space in the opposite direction. However, even though we can imagine negative mass and what it would do, in reality it doesn't exist. Therefore anti-gravity is not a thing.

[Anonymous No.10117377]

>>10117272
>Getting to space is expensive because we throw away vehicles worth millions of dollars every time. Propellant is fuck all, if we can figure out how to cheaply reuse the exact rocket technology we have today then going into orbit would cost as much as flying around the world.

Then why did every single start of the reusable Space Shuttle cost about 1.5 billion dollars?

[Anonymous No.10117404]

>>10114697
>dude nukes lmao

[Anonymous No.10117519]

>>10117377
Gee maybe because the space shuttle was a garbage fucking design and they practically had to rebuild it every fucking time it landed? Meanwhile in 2018, A Falcon 9 has a turnaround of a few months and this is getting shorter and shorter. Please educate yourself.

[Anonymous No.10117566]

>>10117377
>SpaceX

[Anonymous No.10117590]

>>10114132
Were going to be dinking around our solar system with chemical rockets for a long time. Probably hundreds of years before we see a paradigm shift.

[Anonymous No.10117602]

Reusability is a great nearterm solution for chemical rockets but the next real step change will come with nuclear powered propulsion

[Anonymous No.10117638]

>>10117602
Chemical rockets are pretty much always going to be used for getting off the planet, in space, sure it's different, but no country will let a nuclear rocket launch in it's borders.

[Anonymous No.10117666]

>>10117638
As is often the case, it's politics that slows progress, not the technology

[Anonymous No.10117691]

>>10117377
>Then why did every single start of the reusable Space Shuttle cost about 1.5 billion dollars?
Because it wasn't reusable fuckface, it was partially refurbishable.

[Anonymous No.10117706]

>>10117638
Nuclear rockets aren't even good for reaching orbit, they're only good once you're actually in orbit and you need to make big velocity changes without having to directly accelerate against gravity.

Nothing can beat the thrust to weight ratio of a chemical engine, unless you make the leap to Orion nuclear pulse thrusters, which are frankly never going to be used on launch vehicles anyway. For getting into orbit you need really good thrust to weight ratio engines, and once you're in orbit you can use much less powerful but more efficient engines to move about.

[Anonymous No.10117713]

>>10117706
Engines weigh a few tons, thrust to weight ratio is pretty insignificant.

[Anonymous No.10117729]

>>10117713
It's not insignificant at all.

The best TWR in a chemical engine is around 180 for the Merlin 1D. The best TWR for a nuclear thermal engine is 7.5. A thrust to weight ratio of 7.5 may not be bad for a jet engine, but for a rocket engine it's abysmal, especially for a rocket engine weighing almost 12 tons. It's even worse when you consider that the 7.5 figure comes from the expected vacuum thrust of NERVA, not the sea level thrust, which was far lower.

A nuclear thermal engine would be useless for launching off of Earth and would not out perform a regular chemical engine as a second stage accelerating to orbit. Nuclear thermal engines only make sense on very large orbit to orbit stages where the TWR doesn't matter, because in that case the Isp becomes much more important.

There's a reason that the only proposed uses for NTRs is on large vehicles constructed in space, and it's not simply because the exhaust can be radioactive, because the first of such designs was drawn up way back when they still thought manned Mars missions would be happening in the 80's and Shuttle was going to be cheap.

[Anonymous No.10117735]

>>10114651
We already have tons of nukes.

Russia and the US should sign a new treaty to retrofit existing warheads for Nuclear propulsion.

[Anonymous No.10117745]

>>10114697 >>10117735 >>10117706 >>10117638
UN big5 (USA, SovietU, France, UK & China) banned Nuclear propulsion & Nukes in Space

If Trump, Putin or any nation withdraw from the agreement, other countries would be threatened, scalating into a Nuke arm race (or worse, into a Nuclear War).


>>10117666
>As is often the case, it's politics that slows progress, not the technology
Checked & True

[Anonymous No.10117771]

>>10117745
Kek implying China gives a fuck, they probably have some samson option MIRVS in space already.

[Anonymous No.10118975]

>>10117377
Because that was the whole point.

[Anonymous No.10119434]

>>10117340
What is the space time made out of?

[Anonymous No.10119447]

>>10114132
physics isn't magic

the achievable is limited by the possible

[Anonymous No.10119453]

>>10117377
the gov't was doing it so everything was expensive
they should have gone private space companies back in the 60s, we'd already be on pluto by now if they had

[Anonymous No.10119454]

>>10114132
>how the fuck don't we have something better than chemical propulsion to get into space?

Because when you've got a surplus of chemicals there is no capitalist incentive to find alternatives

[Anonymous No.10120001]

>>10114132
we don't have the money to implement it cause spending money on space is worse than throwing money into a volcano

[Anonymous No.10120010]

>>10119447
Yeah, all these geniuses can't do shit, but some literal who invents the emdrive which is going to propel humans around the galaxy.

[Anonymous No.10120234]

>>10120010
Tests with the emdrive having it's own battery pack demonstrate it doesn't produce any force.
>>10117340
Antigravity is allowed by general relativity. A torus rotating inside out very fast can pull accelerate mass through due to frame dragging. Alternatively, a flow of mass accelerating or decelating about about a torus can be used to make a gravitational dipole. The magnitude of either of these effects is incredibly small at non relativistic speeds and normal densities. In both cases, the force produced isn't that great outside the torus. So you can accelerate stuff to high speeds without pulping it because gravitational forces are applied uniformly, but it's hard to make a flying saucer. See "Guidelines to Antigravity" by Robert Forward. The conclusion is especially worth reading. TL;DR antigravity through this method is possible, but it won't be cheap and probably ain't happening anytime soon.

[Anonymous No.10120246]

>>10114132
Nuclear thermal propulsion was trialled in the 60s and was a phenomenal success. It was shelved because the space race ended. We sadly still need to develop it further for any sort of manned Mars mission.

On the other hand we literally have the technology to FEASIBLY accelerate to an appreciable % of the speed of light - it's the Orion drive, needs work but entirely viable.

[Anonymous No.10120253]

>>10114132
Jews. They own most of the money we need. Simply assassinate and donate to SpaceX. BOOM! We are now pic related.

[Anonymous No.10121102]

>>10120246
>~doubling isp from chemical while having the expensive nuclear boiler renamed as rocket engine fall apart after one use
>phenomenal success

We can argue about pulsed propulsion but NTR is shit taste.

[Anonymous No.10121170]

>>10120246
Nuclear thermal is not viable for getting off planet though which has ALWAYS been the barrrier, has potential for in-system use if you can solve some engineering challenges though.

As far as Orion goes, yeah sure it's doable, but it needs an absolutely obscene amount of fissile material for a ship of any usable size for interstellar trips. My money would be on laser sails desu.

[Anonymous No.10121484]

>>10116491
>quantum electromagnetic field
Stopped reading right there. How the fuck does a field have a "quanta" of anything? Patently retarded.

>>10114143
Ancient bottle rocket tech will become a thing of the past. Until then you'll just have to rely on electric skate hyperloop boy and his rabid fans of ancient tech.

>>10117313
>>10119434

Mass= density of allegedly indivisible discrete "particles". They're really temporary dynamos of motion.
Spacetime= Some theorized bullshit that relates the arbitrary measurement of time to indivisible particles called "atoms". Even though these mini dynamos are completely temporary, and "space" has never been reified as it's own separate thing of itself and by itself.
So somehow despite having absolute no properties or attributes, this "space" manages to "curve" in the presence of "mass".

>>10119434
Graviolis

>>10117340
>Mass is mass
Things define themselves now. The rest is garbled nonsense. "Space-time"...yeah, space is just a series of pressures and time is an arbitrary measurement so I don't see how combining the two make them any more real.

[Anonymous No.10121605]

Rockets are literally ancient keg powders with fresh paint.

Nobody would ride those other than suicidal military types ordered to do so.

If you think "space colonies" are happening in the next 500 years you are absolutely delusional.

[Anonymous No.10121639]

>>10119434
I've asked this question many times. Space is an object, a really big object, but an object nevertheless that has attributes and can be interacted with (3D movement in itself is a type of interaction with space). I guess it can be considered its own 'type' alongside with matter and energy but I don't understand the insistence that space is just a word. If space can have fucking curves then it's a fucking object.

[Anonymous No.10121782]

>>10119447

the fuck do you know what is possible?

every scientist on earth would have laughed in your face like 30 years ago if you told him about the iphone

I'm pretty sure they would have believed that we have a warp drive by now sooner than believing that we would have something like wireless internet in everybody's pocket.

[Anonymous No.10121803]

>>10121639
how can space have curves?
t. brainlet

[Anonymous No.10121830]

>>10121605
>If you think "space colonies" are happening in the next 500 years you are absolutely delusional.

I'm with you on rockets, but if you think you can accurately project what happens in the next 500 years, you are more delusional than him.

[Anonymous No.10121894]

>>10114132
>Okay, considering how many universities and gymnasiums there are all over the world and taking into account that virtually every single one has a PE department, how the fuck don't athletes run faster than cars?
>What are all these people even doing?

[Anonymous No.10122923]

>>10114132
do you think that if enough unversities get together they can defy the laws of physics?

No, physics already figured out lots of other options to chemical propulsion, its the engineering universities that need to catch up, also it all takes such a ridiculous amount of money that you should also up your amount of economics universities to get this shit done

[Anonymous No.10123034]

>>10121605
>Nobody would ride those other than suicidal military types ordered to do so.
>mfw a private citizen has put down hundreds of millions for the express purpose of riding a rocket to the moon

You may not want to and that's fine, however rocketry is becoming more and more reliable by the day and sooner or later it will be normalised as much as air travel already is. You cannot speak for the rest of humanity, people packed themselves in like rats by the hundreds on glorified wooden bathtubs for months on end across open ocean and you think no one will sign up for a 30 minute rocket ride to gtfo this shithole planet? Lel

[Anonymous No.10123075]

>>10114132
http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-vs19/