Tommygun

I'm assuming the carbon is coming from the engine bell and impurities, but was just wondering if there was anything else created even if it's just trace amounts.

I think they do this to stay impartial. While this is junk, sometimes it isn't so obvious and this puts the patent office in an awkward place. Where do you draw the line between nut cases and something new that may just seem odd. I can imagine the patent office in 1900 getting patent applications for flying machine parts.

Would anyone happen to know what the typical average percentages are of the different compounds in the exhaust of a Lox/LH2 rocket engine? I know it's mostly water vapor with a bunch of H2, some CO2 and maybe a few other things, but I can't find any references. Thanks.

I think an electrodynamic tether is as close as you will get to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether You would then need to beam the power down by microwaves or lasers. Even solar and wind generation would be a lot cheaper right now, but maybe sometime in the future.

An Oculus Rift type of device could have a place in training. If you are running a flight school or something similar with 200 plus students, you can't put one or two students in a big simulator for 20 some hours a week. You also can't buy too many of the big simulators at 10 to 20 million ether, but you can supplement their training with an Oculus Rift like device. A student can get the basics down before going into the full simulator.

So is it supposed to push against a planet's magnetic field? If it is, it sounds a little like the electrodynamic tether they tested on the shuttle. They talked about using it to rise and lower the station and even possibly for Interstellar travel, although Interstellar travel turned out to be impractical. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050215611.pdf

Well maybe we will get an actual mission for Orion and the SLS then.

I'm not sure, the SLS is quite big for NASA's current budget.

With current technology a space plane does not make any sense other than as a research tool for future space plane technology. If we get to a point where we can reasonably safely launch and recover a spacecraft on a daily basis at an affordable price, then there may be an opportunity for a space plane. If you want to launch and recover somewhat close to a city, then a winded space plane may be more desirable. I'm imagining something like Skylon that doesn't take off and land with roaring rocket motors.

It will be interesting to see what comes of it over the next few years. Hopefully this start up will go smoother than the first one did.

In that case, I guess you need some way to make tools. So hands, tentacles, dexterous pincers or someway to craft tools. Some kind of communication and that comes in many forms. You can use sound, sign language, light changes, physically tapping each other and many others. I guess you would need an organ or two that can emit and receive the type of communication used or both in one organ. A way for reproduction and of course an intelligence good enough to plan ahead for future events.

Well we have seen what happened during the oxygen fire on Apollo 1 and Apollo 13's oxygen tank failure, but I think you are asking for more of a Apollo 1 type of fire if too much oxygen is released into the station? Even a small explosion's shock wave confined inside a small metal tube is going to have a huge effect on the crew's bodies. It might take hours or days to kill sometimes. So if the explosion doesn't kill the crew or depressurize the hull right away, the smoke might well be more of an immediate danger to the crew. The ISS has fire respirators on the station for this and that's usually the first priority for the crew to get them on and then fight the fire. Low and micro gravity fires do behave differently than on Earth, but they have developed fire fighting procedures for the ISS that should be applicable to a Moon base.

Too complicated, much of the structure wasn't designed to take accelerations needed for a planetary transfer. Just getting the center of mass at the right spot would be hard, the air tight joints wouldn't like all the flexing motion and it's probably a bit too heavy for the job.

I personally have some worry over the "newness" of GMO modifications and how stable they will be over the long term. Old style selective breading has been in use for thousands of years and it has a known history we understand. GMO is a very new field by comparison. It doesn't have that long known history, so will these modifications be stable over many multiple generations? If I had to bet on it, I'd say it will probably be OK, science gets it right far more often than it gets it wrong. But we do need to be very careful about how we go about it.

I don't have any issues with eating GMO foods. I know some may develop allergies to some of them, but that is also true of natural foods as well. There is need for concern with unintentional cross pollination with non GMO crops that we need to pay more attention to. If we can't find ways to stop cross pollination, then I wouldn't have any issues with banning the GMO crops that are causing it. Edit: My issue with unintentional cross pollination is that a new GMO strain might develop or have unwanted issues like being more vulnerable to a disease or pest. Then that weakness gets pass onto other crops.

Yay!!

I voted for Vulcan, but Zeus isn't a bad option. I still think Prometheus is cooler.

Yes its oily nature might make it burn like a smoky road flare instead. I wish I could experiment with it, but I live in California where the fire season lasts about 51 weeks out of 52. Nice looking launch though.

I'd go with Prometheus. It stays with the Greek theme and has a fire related story.

I had a random thought the other day and I was wondering if anyone in the Model Rocket thread might be able to answer it. Would it be possible to use dehydrated fat powder instead of sugar with potassium nitrate? I was thinking with fat's higher energy density it might be stronger, but chemical reactions aren't always that straightforward.

This doesn't stop projectiles or shrapnel, just the concussive force from the blast. The blast wave or sound wave from the explosion can be more destructive than the shrapnel and debris coming from it. I have no problem with the basic idea of how this works, but I can't see a car or even a ship being able to generate enough power into this air pocket to deflect enough of the blast to be practical. I had another thought about something similar to this. During a rocket launch they spray water into the exhaust to create steam to buffer the sound waves from the engine to keep the sound from damaging the rocket. That steam buffer is doing a similar job as the plasma buffer. The problem is that those rocket engines consume massive amounts of fuel. A humvee or ship can't carry around enough fuel and equipment to pull this off and still do its job.

Now that I think about it, a few years back there was a company that was trying to promote a duel laser device for nonlethal crowd control. I think the two lasers fired at different frequencies in such a way that they created a pyrotechnical display (Induced Plasma) in the air. So the technique isn't that new, they are just tweaking it and using it in a new way and purpose. http://www.navysbir.com/n11_3/N113-171.htm

Unless I'm not understanding this, it will only work inside an atmosphere. It almost sounds like they are artificially creating something a little bit like an atmospheric inversion layer in the air?

I wonder what the differences are in the carbon footprint and other pollutions (including making the batteries) of an electric car that gets its power from a high efficiency power plant, that uses good stack scrubbers, versus a high efficiency gasoline car. What I'm wondering about is scale of efficiency. Can you make a big high efficiency power plant run cleaner than a large number of gasoline cars. As an example: The power planet powers a 1000 electric cars, that move 2000 people 200 km for x amount of pollution versus 1000 gasoline cars moving the same amount of people and distance for x amount of pollution.

I don't know what Neptune's atmospheric radiation levels are, but keep in mind it's still an "Ice Giant" (related to gas giants), so it is basically a failed star that didn't acquire enough mass to go fully nuclear. It still has a good amount of fission going on in its interior and maybe some fusion too, so I can't imagine it's too safe that close to the core.