/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.1157841]

japanese space agency has successfully launched and deployed their solar sail IKAROS. providing a valuable proof of concept of deep space technology.

SpaceX, an American company has successfully put into orbit their Falcon9 medium lifter, being the first private company to design, launch and orbit a rocket with the intent to take passengers and cargo.

The human sphere of influence is starting to expand beyond our atmosphere, discuss.

[Anonymous No.1157848]

South Korea's second attempt at launching a rocket from their own soil failed, as did the first attempt.

[Anonymous No.1157876]

Wait - solar energy can take man-made solid structures for LIGHTYEARS away?!? You've gotta be shittin' me, Pyle!

[Professor Science No.1157877]

I've been thinking about methods of for larger scale space industries.

It would be a two staged approach, get into some orbit, whatever orbits easiest, presumably lower orbit's are easier, but I've never played around with orbital mechanics quantitatively this would be done with the chemical rockets we know and die on.

From there you use plasma rockets or ion drives to maneuver into higher orbits much more efficiently, you'd use space tugs that are never intended to enter earths atmosphere for this, so it sort of presumes a period of crappier space travel (like we're entering now)

[Anonymous No.1157882]

>>1157876
someone don't get momentum... by the time you get that far away, you'll be going fast as fuck

[Anonymous No.1157888]

Wouldn't it be awesome if some corporation landed men on Mars before any government?

[Professor Science No.1157897]

>>1157888
the likely situation is a government would pay a company to go there.

[Boomer !!MBwbEofHcyx No.1157927]

>>1157888
It is starting to look like that is how it is going to happen.

[Anonymous No.1157962]

>>1157841

>Solar sail
>IKAROS
>Asians

MI6 better get on this.

[Anonymous No.1157984]

>>1157897
yep only way it happens
or maybe an advertising company could put up a big fucking banner on the moon
that'll do it too

[Anonymous No.1157993]

>>1157848

everyone fucks up the first couple launches. guaranteed.

>>1157841

space launches are inherently expensive no matter which way you look at it we're held back by this thing called the rocket equation. (wiki up that shit)

bottom line is, theres a hell of a lot more crazy shit thats gonna happen on earth (strong ai, cybernetics, transhumanism, tech singularity, anti-aging, macro genetic engineering, complete reverse engineering of the human brain and mind) in the next 30 years before space exploration really starts to take off, and we get to colonizing our solar system and beyond.

but good for spaceX

[Professor Science No.1158013]

I was browsing about, looking up lunar mining of volatiles in the solar wind, and there was exactly a page i was interested in.

http://www.moonminer.com/Basic-Chemistry-for-Moon-Miners.html

apparently the university of wisconsin's had plans for a lunar regolith miner and processor on the books for the last 2 decades.

We've got a whole crap ton of plans in place for whenever any of this shit gets remotely feasible. The future is an interesting place to live.

[Professor Science No.1158133]

Does anyone know enough about stellar system formation to contribute to this hypothesis?

Given: a ship with interstellar capacity, and no assurance that there would be an earth like world on the end of the trip.

Wouldn't it be a safer bet that there'd be plenty of asteroids and rocky bodies lined with metals? comets with volatiles? wouldn't it be easier to build space habitats than terraform a planet or inhabit a larger gravity well? If we continue to ship around meat in a can, in the super long haul, wouldn't we evolve to be more or less a null-g species, save for our great ancestors on terra firma?

[Professor Science No.1158169]

bumpin-behossafat!

[Anonymous No.1158178]

"Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?"

[Professor Science No.1158212]

"What's he doing captain?"
"looks like he's trying to have a conversation about space cultures in /sci/"
"That dumb fucker"

[Anonymous No.1158232]

Meanwhile, the Jamaican space agency has announced their plans to put on an iron shirt, chase the devil out of earth.

[снайпер No.1158256]

>>1157841
Stick 3 of the Falcon 9 1st stage boosters together and you get the... Falcon 9 heavy!

Isn't that amazing?

[Professor Science No.1158293]

>>1158256
It's like freaking power rangers in space. The super heavy was just 5 falcon 9's strapped together, but i think they decided against developing that tech.

[Anonymous No.1158333]

Space Fountain. GOOGLE IT!

[Anonymous No.1158382]

>>1158333
Yeah like you're gonna build a nuke plant whose sole purpose is to power that thing.

Rotovators(rotating spacetethers you fly up to, to get into orbit) are cheaper and can be made of materials we have now. Heck, some celebrity divorces are more expensive than the "space bootstrap" version of the
rotovator.

[Anonymous No.1158413]

>>1158382
Unfortunately an Earth-to-orbit rotovator cannot be built from currently available materials since the thickness and tether mass to handle the loads on the rotovator would be uneconomically large. A "watered down" rotovator with two-thirds the rotational speed, however, would halve centripetal acceleration stresses.

Even wikipedia thinks you are a fool.

[Anonymous No.1158432]

[Professor Science No.1158513]

>>1158413
>>1158382
One thing i've never understood about rotovators is how the hell do they actually do any work?

a fully tethered space elevator makes sense, it steels rotational kinetic energy from the earth and turns it into potential energy of the object you're pulling up.

But the rotovator isn't attached to anything. anytime you lift something up with it, you'll the rotor down. i suppose you could use ion rockets as position maintenance, which would be more efficient than chemical rockets, but still, it's not as sound an idea to my mind. Someone care to explain it?

[Anonymous No.1158520]

>>1158413
Notice I didn't say tether that extends all the way down to the ground. So I guess rotovator isn't quite the right word. A sub-orbital to orbit boost tether might be more appropriate. This would allow Sir Richard Branson's suborbital tourism rocket to put stuff into orbit.
So something like this:
http://www.tethers.com/papers/MXERJPC2003Paper.pdf

[Anonymous No.1158542]

>>1158513
electrodynamic tether propulsion bro.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether

[Professor Science No.1158556]

>>1158520
an entire paper? so i take it you don't have a good explanation yourself? and amongst the first line it reminds me of another thing, the things flowing the magnetosphere, the magnetic flux on this thing must be pretty impressive, if it conducts at all that's gonna be one hell of an EMF.

[Anonymous No.1158562]

>>1158556
that's the idea, also I'm lazy.

[Professor Science No.1158905]

>>1158562
but incident flux tends to attract conductors, or at least cause a kind of drag, that should just make it fall into earth sooner.