PB666

That is because there is a potential reward, that undescovered grazing land or pool of fish, or fruit tree. Its not just humans, all foraging and hunting animals have some curiousity about nature. The problem is that the more we become familiar with Mars, the less we really want to go get trapped there. It is likely the that first americans got here (across the McKenzie range) as an accidental sea voyage, the genetics indicate a bottleneck for South American groups, the Bounty is another example. But for most other discoveries the discoverers tend to leave themselves with a way out. The trip to Mars at present is described as a one-way trip. Psychologically it would be bad mojo for NASA or ESA to strand folks in an gamma-ray machine without a way home. You could send them food, but in the end you would be sending them euthenasia drugs or narcotic pain relievers to deal with their ultimate fate.

The increased gravity of Ceres would reduce its effect, if it simply subliming off the surface ice it might not have enough velocity to escape orbit before the dark cycle. Yeah sure eventually it will reach space, but if lingers long enough it can really slow the rate of sublimation. We also have to consider the fact that these could be liquids of higher melting or boiling point. I really don't like it when people try to lead the science with conclusion, just wait, they will answer the question. [Otherwise i might propose they will find negative energy between the monolith and two alien spaceship testing their warp drives in crater]

A cerius lie

Or make the planet move 2000km to the right then spool up the warp drive. The infinite improbability drive, made everyones underwear moved 3 feet to the right, got the physics engineers party going. If we live in a fantasy land, you warp to within 100 ft of the planets surface Parachute to a landing with thrusters, open up a worm hole and walk back, cause who really needs physics engineers having a party, anyway.

Biome Elev and Slope

We need a thread on how to calculate stuff.

He thinks he's got it figured out. Anyway let's not step on his dream to quickly Right, but his problem is exactly worse than that . . . . . . . Imagine you had an engine that could take you from Sol to system X, are we doing this for minerals, nope that would be silly, are we doing it to explore, nope we can do that with much cheaper space telescopes. The reason we are doing this is to assess planets as expansion points.

Yes but when I say I weigh 150 lbs, its factually correct (unless you are in Britian, in which a pound is a piece of paper with an ole lady's face illustrated on it, whose value appears to dive when any number of bank scandals happen, go figure that one). this is an answer to multiple posts not just this one. In the lab we 'weigh' out grams. There is a reason for that usage. A grams weight is subject to change, but for the sake of an experiment if I want a 1 molar solution that is: MW in g/mole * desire M in mole/liter * desired final volume in liter(s) = and so that answer is not in Newtons, the answer is in grams. To state it correctly would be to measure 1 gram on a balance and that was true 40 years ago when we used balances to weigh bigger things, and still true if you are measuring say 0.1 milligram on an analytical balance. But since we don't use balances anymore and the devise is electronic you really are weighing something and converting the weight to mass electronically. When you go to the doctors office and he puts you on a scale (the tall thing with the sliding weights on it), that is actually a balance, he is measuring your mass and the scale units assume that gravity is 9.8m/s. So guess what both are wrong terms. Technically a weight can only come from a calibrated tension measuring device, and a mass can only directly come from a balance, and a pound is not a piece of paper with a lady's face on it. But these restrictions appear to have no meaning in modern lexicon........ The real answer here is that unit conversion is real sucky, we should all convert to the kg m sec newt watt joule system and universally use scientific notation, just like everyone should use IAPUC nomenclature to describe chemicals (unlike some pharmaceuticals that have 2 dozen different names), but we don't and so space-ship on occasion has been known to crash into martian surface, with embarrassed red faces somewhere saying 'doh'. Live with it. You live in a society where they trust garbagemen and oil derrick-trained CEO's opinion on global warming more than that of 99% of scientist and their preacher/reverend/priest more than evolutionary biologist on the topic of evolution, and where they believe the US constitution was written by god's reincarnation on earth . . . . . . . . . then the unit conversion issue is the least of your problems.

The discussions of where to place the next station/colony has revolved around two choices Moon and Mars. Lately mars has been the choice of private foundations or corporations. Its largely a public relations move to date. Selecting astronauts for a mission to mars that will not launch for at least a decade. The Mars mission in the video (c.1990) was not to launch untill 1999, of course never launched. In not trying to discount the value of a lunar facility, or someday a martian research facility, but one thing that researchers and explorers do not want to do is lock themselves into concretized thinking, particularly when it comes to choosing future research opportunities. 1. From a scientific point of view I like Lagrangian L2 -L2 is in a small gravity well that is half in earths SOI, it is a few more dV than reaching the moon -There is no need for rescue vehicles of the like needed for mars and moon -We have seen the great scientific benefit of observations from these orbits, but what we really need are much larger space telescopes. -Imagine not having to fly to Ceres or have 10-20 year missions to explore the outer solar system, just point your telescope -We could have an array of space telescopes searching for asteroids and short period comets that can be exploited. -It is still partially in earths magnetic shield. -there is nothing there to exploit but it is theorized that passing NEO sometimes get trapped in the Lagrangians, so it may be possible to capture these smaller objects and collectively exploit them with out need large sums of dV. -Problems - No gravity, radiation. Insolance is diminished -Best Infrared observations in proximity to earth excepting the outer solar system. - Very useful visible and UV observatory. 2. Trojan asteroids and NEO asteroids. -Right, intersecting NEO from earth is a challenge, the logic is that if an asteroid is closes to earths elliptical, it eventually gets sucked into earth or thrown into the outer solar system. -But with some of the new highly efficient technology coming we could actually steer and asteroid into a more favorable orbit (say between earth and mars, or earth and venus) or even park the asteroid in L2 or L1 (a dangerous proposition). -A parked asteroid in L1 or L2 would be the best of all worlds. Close to earth energetically, close to earth in terms of distance (though still to far for a true emergency) -A parked asteroid could shield crewmen from dangerous radiation from the sun. -A mined asteroid could shield crewmen from all directions. -Can also be used for observatory but the rotational velocity needs to be killed, better placed in tidally locked rotation with sun. -Problems. Initials fuel costs, lack of gravity, initial exposures to radiation. 3. The smaller satellites (Deimos or Phobos) or planetoids of the asteroid belt. -We already seen that Ceres is showing signs that it may have volatiles under its sooty skin, this may be the best places to search for targets that produce lots of hydrogen. - There should be other asteroids that have similar compositions with high percentages of volatiles suitable for conversion to water and hydrogen. -As opposed to NEO asteroids, larger belt asteroids tend to have reasonable rotations. -Problems here include frequent impactors, but these could be intercepted. -It is suggest that the surface of these planets is soft, which may make it easy to dig down.

Skyscrapers on the earth have to worry about earthquakes and hurricanes. On the moon no such worry, only the occasional sheep-sized projectile (obviously Monte-Python fans on the moon creating havoc). The problem is the pressure differential, none of those 1/2" glass windows on the moon, In fact, probably no windows at all. But seriously, skyscrapers. You wouldn't catch me out on the terrace of a 600 story building hanging my nuts to the 'wind' on the moon, space suit or not. Im digging down. More temperature control, you can get your light with a one inch thick piece of plex. You want to catch the view, go to bora-bora. - - - Updated - - - Romantics and Lunatics (or should it be Martinatics)

You can remove m and convert this to e/m for the satellite, you can also solve for thermodynamic energy change by taking the integral of the mgh equation from r1 to r2 (altitudes + CBs radius) to get velocity. So it can be done either way depending on what information one has. I think it is GM/r2 - GM/r1 (been 35 years so I might have gotten partially wrong)

Yeah but the problem is getting hydrogen from those rocks. Every fuel that we have is a redox reaction of some sort. You can use aluminum such as in the shuttles SFRBs but really you need to crack hydrogen off of something. If you could turn the entire moon into a solar hydrogen scavenger (still terribly slow) you might be able to combine hydrogen with aluminum and other light metals harvested on the moon to create a reactant. - - - Updated - - - How much did the chinese use on their most recent descent unmanned mission?

I could imagine building a trackway on the moon that accelerates objects to lunar orbit - circularization energy via mass accelerator.

This is a red herring argument. With the moon we have proven technology to get people off, with mars Nope, not by a long shot. The hope I see would be a VASIMIR that over several years transports a lander and drops it close to a station, with a station in Mars SOI then the lander to hop its way back to Earths SOI. In an emergency, Mars is a suicide trap. 1. Any mission to the moon begins with returnable lander on the moon. This is not there to rescue 100 people, its there to take folks back who have a medical need that cannot be treated on the moon. 2. dV. THe moon is a few hundred dV, mars is a few 1000 to land. Getting a lander back in space and back to earth is a challenge. This challenge to a mars landing can be circumvented if Phobos is selected instead of mars. Mars may slow down reentry (not much for the really heavy people movers) but it has alot more dV to stop, more with aerobraking than the moon has without, but the big killer is getting off. On the moon we can do a suicide burn with accuracy, on Mars you going to have to burn above the target and then reburn to land. 3. CO2 without water does not make mars a better choice than the Moon. You can, with difficulty make O2 from CO2, its simply easier to make O2 from water, and you get hydrogen, which can react with CO2 at high temperature. Even if you use plants to make O2, the reaction requires water. Just because Mars has an atmosphere does not make it a better choice. Unless you have a probe that has discovered liquid or frozen water on mars at a high enough density, making fuel for return trip is nearly impossible. The water that is in the martian soil would be depleted quickly for any productive effort without a full fledged surface manipulation technology designed for that application. 4. Establishing a base on Mars moons first makes alot more sense, it is essentially a grounded space station. 5. Time, time is essentially. I am scientist, my objective is collect science, not spend 18 months in flight time doing nothing for a 20 day mission. I would suspect that the type of science done on moon now would be of a probative or astro-observational, the second has a 15 day cycle no need to keep scientist there full time. 6. Micrometeors - dig down on moon, kill 2 birds with one stone, radiation and micrometeors. Or transport a moon dozer and doze moon sand on top of a grounded station. Need to get Dozer to mars through the atomsphere but we see from our studies, Mars does not have enough hv to run serious equipment off of solar. The moon has 15 days of 1.3 kw/m2 7. Both Moon and Mars have O and H trapped in their rocks, it a matter of finding an efficient way of getting it out. If you dug a hole deep enough into the moon you could create an atmosphere that would easily be trapped by a trapdoor or lasers. Drawbacks of the Moon, it solar cycle is 30 days, which mean that solar needs either a massive lithium Ion battery or nuclear assists 8. Technological proving ground-Most important. Its not about CO2 or O2, this is overemphasized, its about surface manipulation. The tools you apply on the moon will fail, but new technologies can be brought in a cycle of a few weeks, and structural failures can be returned to earth within a few days for analysis. You bring a tool to mars it breaks, you make a new one on Mars it breaks again, finally you can't make any tools. It breaks on the moon, send it back on a space teather to a space station, see if the can figure out why it broke, if not place it on a small scale re-entry vehicle and send it back to earth for analysis. 9. Productivity, once again tether the space station to an orbit between the earth and the moon and if you can manipulate the moon surface it can be potentially be used to create new objects in space.

Not in your lifetime, the only planet that becomes independent is the one that has the same orbit and atmosphere as earth, which means some other star system at some later time and independent out of necessity.

Silicon Valley is done. Austin, North Carolina, San Diego. The whole central California thing is a big disaster waiting to happen. DiagX QuantumEx(ploration) OrigiMark Cloud19 tDilation

The whole point of cfg's is to make crafts in new interesting kinds of ways (there is no right answer), you can ask me for my *.cfg, but if you need me to hold your hand for a craft file, you're playing the wrong game.

Despite last mission in mid 70s the lunar samples still produce science, not just for the US but for many countries. The primary limitations on our space program is that during the 1980s our government started taking a backward quasi-luditic view of science and medicine. They started a highly targeted view of science in attempt to undermine things that disaggreed with thier life-perspectives on religion, etc. So we get highly targeted stuff (Breast Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes) and alot of science gets mocked. Its all a justification so that the richest in our society can find ways of not paying the same proportion of income as their workers. If the government came to me-space program director- a just gave me a ton of $s, in an instant I would do the following 1. Massive full spectrum space observatory, 100 times larger than the largest known. 2. Lunar colony test colony platform. It would have a secondary science goals including a 'dark side' observatory, subterranean objectives etc. 3. Phobos mission. (because you can leave, any mission you can do with as a suicide mission can be done with robots) Every single mission would be comprised of objects that create paybacks over decades in terms of samples and science. 4. I really don't care if there was life on mars, the only real question is will colonizing mars as an ends and not a means have a payback or is it vanity. 5. Our 'robots' have done a considerable amount of science, and they have overextended there mission times so . . . .. . . 6. If we get to phobos, we could assist the private sector on a mars mission, but I think a mission focus should be on deep space, really deep space.

Funny story. I have a garage, essentially what we call here a tear down, it had huge cracks in the floor and ~11" (~28 cm) of subsidence in the back, when it rained the garage became a pond, that's how much subsidence had taken place, there was no way to tear the slab out. So I jacked up the garage walls and poured lightweight concrete under the edge with rebar, and the poured light weight concrete on Styrofoam sections (IIRC 4'x1.5"x15"; stack as needed) with occasional beam. I was really conservative about concrete use because of the weight and expense, and so the top-slab tended to range 3 to 4 inches (7.5 to 10 cm). I did this in order to keep the weight of the material down, the soil in our area is more or less a spongy mud so you don't want to put alot of force on one side of the foundation. During the last 2 hurricane, my wheels were bone dry. Worked so well I jacked up the adjacent slab and slid Styrofoam 1/2" x 4' x 8' sheets underneath and compressed sand to fill and that hasn't lost level in 10 years. Given one had moved 12" in 45yr and the other 6" (3' of tilt) in 45yr I would say its holding quite well. The stability I attribute to the styrofoam, it absolutely stopped wicking and I believe the wicking between rains was causing the soil to deorganify faster and shrink. It also absorbs shifts better than concrete (which tends to crack). I was sure the floor would crack and subside where the Styrofoam was, but to date no cracks, got a fully loaded pleasure boat wheels and a car wheels setting on it so . . . .yeah styro holds. Smartest thing you can do if you have to build up on soft soils. Do an experiment yourself. Take a long pipe and a flat piece of Styrofoam (shipper foam will do), seal a cap on one end of the pipe, hold it strait up on the styrofoam and add water to the other end (or get help) you will see that it will take alot of water. You can remove the pipe and see how much the stryofoam has given, your are probably going to have to buy another section of pipe before it seriously damages the stryofoam. Now imagine the weight if you had a room filled with that much water (and proportional weight of pipe). When they pour the concrete on the foam beads there will be some dimpling (small rocks, aeration damage, etc) but after that it will resist compression. Where you will see perturbations of the foam is on the bottom, where roots, critters, cracks and deformations of the soil occur. If that was your concrete slab, there would be a good chance it would have cracked, the stryo is a buffer between the hideous DoT forces that occur underground and your slabs desire not to be bent or twisted (it only likes to be compressed).

You put all your delicate scientific equipment like gravity and seismic sensors and diffraction gradient spectrophotomenter on the end of a bomb that accelerates the craft to 30g. The egg test, place the egg in a compatible bowl and cover it. If you can get the egg into space and hatch it, you are probably safe, if the egg comes out smashed or hard-boiled, or sizable percentage of its atoms all rearranged into free-radicals, then you prolly should rethink your go-to-space-today strategy.

Pulse Jet - So called V-1 rocket "Buzz bomb". - - - Updated - - - Exactly. No need to launch a weather satellite with a nuclear bombs, definitely you would not win a popularity contest and probably instantly become public enemy #1. But even moreso, if you had say a VCF sized ship you could make a bowl at one end and detonate the bomb and the focal point of the bowl, it would be more efficient. But if you tried to do the same on the booster engine of a saturn-V rocket, you would simply blow off the engine and the other 4 engines, and the end of the rocket. This was getting at something I mentioned in the other thread. The types of reactions that will generate the most energy per given starting mass are also the most difficult to control. For example recreating a supernova reaction would generate a hell of alot of energy and in particular, if it could be directed, momentum (the players involved are heavier than tritium). The problem is that initatiing the reaction is more difficult than simple fusion, and once you have created that force, then how do you control it. The problem with a pulse charge is that if the impulse is say for 5 seconds (generous) and you are limited to 8 g of force, then the maximum acceleration you can get from a blast is around 400 m/s. A nuclear bomb is not simply nuclear material. The hydrogen bomb is made of explosive lenses than electrons, there are outer layers of fissile materials, there is a neutron generator and layers of other material that include inate material such as lithium, and the fissile/fussile material are not completely or efficiently utilized. So to make this viable one would have to find a way of 1. Making a more efficient bomb with no inert reactants (Since you have to carry the weight of bombs just like fuel) 2. Scale down the size of the bomb so it does not blow of the end of your ship 3. And use isotopes bomb that maximally translate in classical work better than heat.

This thread isn't dead yet, curious. Maybe I can blow it up then. Physics can explain the movement of energy everywhere, but it cannot explain everything, it gets back to CMBR. So therefore it assumes how energy moved before CMBR. It is plausible that the direction of matter and energy was reversed prior to the CMBR and that everything compressed and the laws of physics - reversed, again and it expanded. During the reversal process, the speed of light was not longer a barrier, but once complete our universes physics took, no-one else the wiser. Entropy is a measure of disorder, its sort of like a childs bed-room (or my sisters some people never grow up). Once the room reaches a certain level of disorder its not longer functional as a room, and someone; hopefully the child, cleans the room up. Then the room begins the process over again. The first process has been philosophically called Heat Death of the Universe. Thats right, not only philosophy but medieval and renaisannce philosophy, from the ranks of Occam and the like. All that radiation poured away into the vacuum of space particles spread so far apart they ceased to gravitationally interact or even be notice, naer to be seen again. Everything that can decay has decayed and everthing else is infinitely stable. Even blacks holes fail to emmit x-rays. So either the Universe goes into the Death State (which includes not debating the state of the Universe on a animated space game web forum) or it reverses itself and heads back to a state of complete cosmic annihilation. There is the concept that vacuum space expanded in advance of cosmic expansion, this advance may be what drives disorder. It might be possible that vacuum space contracts, and brings all space, matter, light and everything back with it. The contraction of vacuum space drive reordering the universe. We may find ourselves living the lives of Merlin.

Yeah it's racist, . . . . . .uh .. . . . . .colorist. Just call the asteroid belt police and tell the people on Ceres left their lights on and you can't sleep. Problem solved.

I do things the right way.

You people get excited about the wierdest things How to make ISS a closed ecosystem. Set free the rats, let the rats eat plants, then humans eat the rats. Once you get out of your system, sell ISS to Chinese and build better station without plants or rats. What I would want in a space station: 1. Artificial gravity 2. Bathtub/shower (Jacuzzi) 3. Cloths washing machine, dryer to but that would be asking alot, just hang the clothes out and they will dry fast enough. 4. One of those rooms like in trailer for Barbarella, complete with . .younger version of JF.