PB666

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-s-sdo-peers-into-huge-coronal-hole There was an article linked in r/EverythingScience, but it was too sucky to repost the link here.

Algae need mass. Its a deeply held secret that Kerbals don't eat algae.

The heat in this case is transferred by light, which directly heats the boundary layer. Or to put this a different way the molecules of gas inside to pressure chamber are everywhere including next to the container, when light strikes these next to the container to heat them to 5000K the molecules next to them can immediately absorb that heat. This is opporsed to a NTR whose heats the gas at the core and there is a gradient to the outside. Working with electron microscopes the idea of frequency is everything, because its frequency that determines resolution. If you want to get those really high frequencies you need to use charge, and an electron microscope its between 40,000 and 1 million volts. I don't think we can pretend that light will do the same, even if you fired X-rays at the gas, some of the energy is going to go into ionization, which is great, but ultimately you are going to lose ISP. The difference between UV and IR is just not that great. The second thing is that reflectors need a certain structure, or are massive like a Fresnel lens. A solar panel loose alot of energy but it can convert that remaining energy to much higher static voltage potentials, and thats what you need to accelerate.

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-spacex-postpones-rocket-tiny-glitch.html

At 5k K alot of things are simply a gas, the surface starts turning tongas even if you cool it.

Youre on a shield volcanoe probably the is a gas seep, the sulfuric acid very hygroscopic melts ice.

http://gizmodo.com/life-in-red-dwarf-systems-may-be-rarer-than-we-thought-1778917829 Says that hydrogen helium burnoffs are not as rapid as should occur to support life. Not going to agree, just posting another point of view.

"LIve stream is starting soon". I still have some fingers left before I hit knuckle. Need to see boom-boom.

But I think they are talking about main sequence timeline only.

And get a sun-tan, like superfast.

I was just correcting the facts about using other fuels, not promoting hydrogen. Personally I am not a fan of NTR, there is alot more fiction than fantasy concerning its potential use, and mostly as one limits it to liquid hydrogen or hydrogen gas, its not very useful compared to the alternatives, which do not carry political consequences.

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/stories/what-faint-young-sun-paradox Describes how earth avoided being a snow ball planet.

Not really our area of science, but makes you want to first cringe, then giggle. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/05/people-hated-clippy-because-he-made-them-feel-powerless.html Cringe cause you had to see that annoying paperclip again, giggle cause M$ did not really pay attention to what they did.

The figures they give for the NTR we for a 600 ISP engine temperature, the new engines are of course much hotter, You can run and ISP up to a 1000 in the NTR with a nozzle refit, you would just shorten its life. The RP-1 would really clobber the NTR core with carbon, no doubt. Hydrogen is much much better because it undergoes plasma conversion at a much lower temperature, so you've got the sweetspot, and second and probably more important it only can bond with one other atom using its outer shell electron, so that the most it can do is coat the metal with a single atom thick layer of hydrogen. This is not as bad as it may look because in doing this it can inefficiently absorb neutrons and increase the surface heat relative to the core heat, carbon 12 on the other hand is not a big fan of neutrons. I have never heard of anyone proposing an NTR as a recycling space tug, I suppose that is as good as use as any, but even at 600 ISP is has a rather short life. EDIT: BTW I was using the average composition formula for RP-1 not kerosene, just using kerosene as a generic term to describe the fuel. RP1 is listed as a form of kerosene.

Yeah the progression is silly, that is one of my major beefs with game play, you already land on the moon and finally you get the first wheel, really? F'give us a donkey cart at least, childs wagon. I forgot there are no animals on kerbin, guess we will have to enslave cadets as wagon engines. Seriously the launch pad should not be available until you have flown a certain distance and some carry missions with the aero stuff. But, alas, it is a space exploration game.......... i need wheels, worse of than fred flintstone..

You had to go there, it is not an alternative, although it has an infinitely high ISP, the it requires >30 MW per newton, whereas an 10000 ISP ion drive only requires .05 MW per newton, its a great thing for deep space with a fusion reactor, its not such a good thing for getting humans to mars. It could be used with solar panels as to provide a permant, low variable cost goods a fuel transporter between Earths L2 and Mars L1. The reason I say low and not costless with regard to its use is that because the mars transfers take so long and because this sucker might take 2years to transfer and its solar panels may only allow 12 transfers or less before the solar panels have to be replaced. So you have about an 8% per cycle replacement cost of solar panels. The drice costs themselves are practically immaterial and could be replaced every cycle.

The capture maybe efficient, but the fission lifetime of thebpellets is much longer than the burntime of gas in the rocket. For all intents and purposes above 2500'c most everything will be ionized in some form or the other the gas phase transition between diamond is 3600'c, so effectively carbon is atomized even from diamond at that temperature. However the ionization energies of the C-H bonds are lower and thermal denaturization begins around 800'C and includes cracking of the C12H24 sized carbon chain into succesively smaller bits. thttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry) This the produces free radicals of different types that includes elements of plasma. . The process can be favored by the radiation process, particukarly neutron flow from the core and heat ionized reactants result from fission. This of course would cause alot of the carbon free radicals to preciptitae at high temperatures and sort of gum up the reactor, but at least for a small period you could achieve reasonably high ISPs with kerosene. Again its not a recommendation for use, of all the evils you can through into an NTR hydrogen gas is the least.

I know, but when we mix economics and politics, and we can also throw in patent law and international one-ups-manship, it really gets into the pedantic range. The whole thing about SpaceX was some Russian director thought Musk was a newbie and dreamer, so Musk took the engineering problem to heart, I wonder if that Russian director still has his job. In the long run better engineering beats penny-wise pound-foolish spending. If you say to someone, no 'Im just going to screw you at the highest cost your are willing to pay' which sounds like the case for Orbital attempt to bid out a payload launch, what you are in-fact doing is encouraging that person to either give-up, or if you sufficiently T them off, encourage them to engineer around you and your competitors. That is not wise risk management, for good sales you want your clients to develop a trust with you so that you do not become or encourage their competitor(s). For both you see outside motivation to go-it-alone thinking, which usually fails, but can sometimes be spectacularly successful. SpaceX and Orbital did (although in the case of Orbital the competition, as many of them did in the period, went flat). The person not to challenge is someone who can build an new car company in a very competitive US car market. One of the critical mistakes I noted during college business classes (my premajor) was in economics they often treated the supply curve as fixed, but as we know in observing our economy is that workforce efficiency is almost always going up, that means that the supply curves are continuously shifting downward (generally by adding more features to product). Just about every calculation you make is based on a fixed curve (not line but curve as it also includes economies of scale and decreasing economies of large scale). That unfortunately feeds into the dreaded business cycle toward the end of the peak business become inefficient. On a global basis this flexes with the business cycle and other factors (such as material availability) but, key point, in any given sub-industrial sector, supply curves often step (take computer memory and costs). If you are a white swan economist and you are thinking oh, my supply curve is quite stable, and demand is high, therefore I will just jack-up the price in according to the supply demand intersection (such as pharmacueticals), you'de better be real sensitive to potential fluctuation in markets supply curve. Many companies handle this by undercutting prices in order to limit the competition. But in the long run no company is immune from outside innovations. If you read specifically what Musk says, he thinks he can shift the supply curve down by 90% (I presume that to be NASA costs), not globally available cost. Not supporting that believe, just saying that from an economic perspective that is what is driving his decision making, he thinks he can beat the Russians and everyone else out of the mid-large size rocket game. More than anything else one meeting will not change your mind, but if you see systemic inefficiencies of various types scattered in different market places, and, you know the smell (bureaucracy, excessive pride and arrogance) of those inefficiencies before you see them then you might be inclined to probe the cost structure and see if you can see the inefficiencies. There is always a entry cost to be paid, space is not a lemonades and rockets are not cardboard stands, but in many industry that appear protected by entry cost, they expect that competitors will not succeed (at any cost), so that creates a systemic black swan risk. If spaceX makes it right the risk/reward ratio coupled with entry cost may be so high he effectively blocks new entries. I think he's about to hit a multiyear wall on production, but we have to see maybe what his long term expansion plans are. The only thing that is really critical, you either got to buy patents up or make and patent things that cannot be confused as patent infringement, otherwise you end up duplicating whatever failures you see in the marketplace but at a higher price. Along with this you have efficiency processes in production, those also have to be patented and continually improved, otherwise your competitors can just wait you out. Those patents however have value to your competitors, so its not a good idea to shift the supply curve as low as possible when you are well below the competitors price and demand is robust.

Dark the force, ready it was not.

Basically nothing you see in the night sky is significantly red shifted other than the random star that happens to be moving away from us. Most of the red-shifted stuff can only be seen by telescopes built after the 1920s. This that appear redder in the deep field, such as Hubble Deep Field, appear redder because they are moving, specifically, away from us. More importantly we are moving away from them those stars are emitting light of one frequency, similar to our sun and we are observing another frequency. If you take an absorption line from hydrogen in the corona of a star, it means you have frequencies of light above and below. But light can only travel one speed independent of the observer, what happens is that the wavelength we observe, moving away from that star, increases. More importantly its frequency decreases, this makes sense because light is an energy delivery system, if we move away we get less energy per unit time. But this is distorted by quantum mechanics, we observe E = hv. So what we see is the frequencies above and below the absorption line decrease, they have less energy. That is the wave quality of light, but since when we detect light we only detect photons, thus the individual photons have less energy. Things get redder with distance, at least for a while, if the universe is accelerating or not. Let me explain. There is a thing called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. The radiation resulted when protons and electrons combined, it was one of the most powerful light events the universe puts forth, had you been there you would have been instantly blinded and cooked by the light, but from our point of view all the sources have moved to the edge of the visible universe and because it has spread so far its now really dim. In fact the CMBR defines the edge of the visible universe. This is important because the Universe is tremendously bigger than the observable universe at least 5 times probably much more, but the sphere defined by the CMBR when it was emitted was tremendously small, it was about a 100th of the size we perceive it to be now, this is because space has expanded. Expanded is the key word, because the expansion implies some aspect of momentum of the massive objects within, the stuff inbetween space-time is expanding. Not an explosion or bang, just material drift and the workings of space-time. The bang part of space is that which preceded the CMBR These proton-electron couplings emitted ultraviolet light, but this happened at points along a radiating surface (the virtual object that is the shell of our visible universe) at such an radial angular displacement from us that as they are moving outward such as to move away from us. They are moving outward and we are moving outward; everything is embedded in space-time moving outward, even supermassive black holes and this the landmarks of the universe, galaxies, are generally moving away from each other. By the time the high frequency radiation reaches us, from our perspective, it is red shifted so much so that its in the microwave part of the spectrum. These photons have been traveling through different comoving space-times for 13.8 billion of our years. Hopefully that was not too confusing. That CMBR is relatively uniform across all the observable sky. And if the universe exploded, then this radiation would not be uniform, it would be shaped like a edge of the head of a cauliflower propagated to cover an entire surface. So prior to expansion scientist have inserted a thing called Cosmic Inflation, this occurred from the central point (they replace this word because it implies something, distance, that may not have existed, with a word called a singularity, to imply its quantum nature and lack of space-time) in fact the only point, of all mass momentum in the universe, a place we cannot either detect or our travel relative to it. The reason we cannot detect it is that during inflation every point moves away from every other point at a rate consistent with distance and time (space-time), it is in fact the point in the evolution when space-time formed (quantum gravity that held the singularity, held being a faux because it implies time, which did not exist), before that our measures of distance and time cease to help us. As a consequence every perspective in our visible universe seems to see itself as the center of that universe, the center of the expansion. From this perspective we are not accelerating from each other or are we? So according to classical/relativistic physics, such a universe has mass and mass energy equivalents, its rate of expansion should slow dependent on the mass of the entire universe, massive objects attract each other. But the Hubble Deep Field observations revealed that when you get away from the Milky Way about 5 billion light years, deductions of star sizes in galaxies shows that more distance stars are moving away faster than an inflation drift model would predict. The apparent force or faux tensor in the drift model is that energy equivalents(mass and energy) in space time causes it to try to contract, just as the pulse from two merging black holes cause a measurable flex in space-time observed recently. Some other tensor, dark energy, is superseding that force, as a consequence there is a faster acceleration seen. The idea is about 8 billion years after expansion started, the universe started ever so slowly inflating, space-time between galaxies started to move apart at a faster rate. Its not really clear if this is uniform, or only occurs in the most evacuated parts of space, but it was a major game changer in the last 15 years. So in summary, what we 'see' when you turn the Hubble on the deepest objects in space, and rf antennas looking at the background radiation is a shell first of early galaxies, and then early hydrogen of a sphere that is inside a sphere of unknown size that is our Universe which the 'big-bang' formed. The only thing we can really say, is that the sphere that we can see was once very much smaller, initially expanded outward at a rate consistent with the laws regarding space-time but then, much later, began to accelerate outward. There is a common belief that because space-time is expanding because of two unknown processes, inflation and dark energy (infusion), the only thing that we can know is that things 'currently' many billions of light years away (the future generations of stars whose galaxies we see in the deepest of the deep-field) were once so close that from a physical point of view they and us were virtually superimposed. But that belief has to be tempered against the basic fact that we cannot observe anything earlier than the CMBR, and that occurred several hundred thousand years after inflation ended, and many models have all kinds of bizarre, exotic things happening in between.* *Some scientist suggest, that with proper experiments we can see neutrinos from before CMBR, and it might be possible to say something about the exotic material that came into our universe at our earlier time. The general believe is that exotic material eventually decayed into a prolonged dance between matter anti-matter annihilations and high energy gamma formation. At some point our visible universe became filled with matter (not anti-matter), protons, electrons, a few neutrons. These later combined to form atoms and molecules. ,

Next time they shouldn't wait 7 weeks.

You guys n gals are going to love this one http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-think-they-might-have-just-detected-a-fifth-force-of-nature? EDIT:http://phys.org/news/2016-05-case-nature.html So two teams now say they are observing a spike of something between electron and protons mass emitted when protons are bombarded into an isotope of litium. Of course to support the claim Eureka Alert pointed to a wiki page on it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force Of course if you think that there is a consistent thought on the matter think again Some think this is a: dark photon or some form of dark matter, photons of course don't have rest mass so they are proposing some kind of massive dark photon, yeah I said it, don't shoot the messanger. Something about as strong as gravity, here again not sure what the evidence is. These are based on a variance of the gravitational constant by very small values when an object is surounded by increasing amounts of mass, problem is that the constant also varies with temperature and other varieties of change. The constant itself may only be conditionally constant. Something that explains dark energy and dark matter, and gravitational interactions at great distances.

I don't think a cigarette would light at the pressure they are working at right now. In any case astronauts probably didn't bring that along, and could not light up in an EVA anyway.

Well that an area of non-discussion in the forums. There is the assumption that Lf in kerbin has properties of hydrogen or kerosine, but with 5 times the density. So in essense its an imaginary fuel. The problem with KSP is that unless you mod your big-orange tank, there is no suitable storage of a LF only fuel tank, consequently that increases the mass ratio. And of course everytime there is a major update scale mods get ummphed. So its better to create a aerotank model and spec it to carry LF (or hydrogen if you add it to the game). EDIT: I should point out that it is possible to get a high ISP with Kerosene in a NTR engine if the mass flow is decreased, the plasma is allowed to heat to a much higher temperature, meaning everything is made to be more stable. PV = nRT does not place a limit on how fast carbon can move when heated. Everything will be hotter when it exits. This is not theoretically a problem because the overwhelming energy in an NTR is wasted, because decay utilized is much much lower than potential decay.

The problem is that if you introduce too much pressure you might get what in plumbing would be called a water hammer. The momentum of the expanding device could exceed tolerances. The other problem is that if you a hidden retainer that is stuck and 2 or 3 others are not stuck there is flex perpindicular the desired axis of movement, this may prevent the retainer from being released at a later point. One option is to have the engineer suit up, close the door to the interface module, drop the pressure in the module to 23.5, have him open the door and see if he can find what is sticking, maybe manually kick it lose. I don't know enough about the pressure doors in the ISS to know if that is possible. EDIT: maybe someone at Bigelow had a piece of chewing gum they needed a place to put,