Jump to content

Kaos

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    282

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Kaos

  1. Kaos
    What kind of landing legs do you think is best for rockets that are meant to land rocket powered on legs? The more legs, the more weigh, but if one breaks, you might still stand with more legs. Perhaps legs of different strength can also help? Both SpaceX/Falcon 9 and Blue Origin/New Shepard use four legs and I am sure they have thought about this topic. But four is the biggest number where you do not stand stable if one leg is missing. But on the other hand it is not sure that you stand stable enough with more legs when one is broken. Perhaps that will be no problem anymore, when the technique is mature enough? Or is there a feasible way to help the landed rocket from the ground? I would guess it is technical unfeasible to do so, but are not sure: Could tethers connected from the ground to the rocket in the landing process enhance stability? My personal guess is that 6 legs would be the right number of legs. What do you think?
  2. Kaos
    Regarding the problems of UV radiation and cooling: Perhaps it would be useful to have some uncrewed balloons above the station, high enough to have low temperatures. These balloons are connected to the main balloon colony by kilometer long cables which hold the things together, transport electricity and some cooling gas or fluid. This coolant is cooled down to say 270 K in the upper station and used in the lower station to cool it energetically efficient. Advantage: Main station is UV safe and lower, so it needs less volume for the same lift, but needs less energy for cooling. Disadvantage: Such a large structure is more likely to to experience different wind speed in its components. The connection has to be stable enough to do so. What do you think about cooling balloons?
  3. Kaos
    You could eat maggots. That way you could produce about 5 times the meat with the same feed as when you eat mammals. If the colony gets bigger they will produce some Internet content themselves. So Earth will also need to cache the Mars/Venus Internet Then it is not necessary to send the useful stuff on intervals. The server on the regarding side might just send all new content itself for which can be expected to be requested. Then only one time the communication delay has to be waited until the content is new, not twice. There was already some development to solve the technical issues of an interplanetary Internet. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
  4. Kaos
    The danger depends on the amount of fuel you have with you. Just measuring on danger I'd rather use 12 atoms antimatter than 100 t of hydrogen. The stuff sgt_flyer suggested is also quite dangerous (but it is fluorine and not fluoride). Difficult to store, every two of them go bad in combination and the engine has to insert all three propellants at once. I think it is one of the worst chemical ones. Hydrogen with some fraction of atomic hydrogen in it leads to higher impulse and is even more dangerous, so I would take that combination. Perhaps that works with fluorine as well?
  5. Kaos
    The launch before my internet connection was down for half an hour from 2 minutes before start on. I feel with you. But be patient. Landing video is expected to be available in some hours.
  6. Kaos
    The simplest to terraform is a small asteroid: But a glass ball around it, stabilize it with struts, put breathable atmosphere inside and it is terraformed. If we talk about plans that are way beyond what we are able to do: Venus atmosphere has a mass of 10^20 kg. Earth production of Iron is 10^9 kg. Jupiter has a mass of 10^27 kg. So the factor between iron production (which is a really mass produced stuff) and Venus atmosphere is higher than the factor between Venus atmosphere and Jupiter. So I would suggest, if we manage to terraform Venus, we are halfway there in terraforming Jupiter.
  7. Kaos
    Then I misunderstood you, I thought you meant it is not possible. I think, trade will be a big thing, but not the trade of stuff, only the trade of data. There will be trade of stuff as well, but very marginal in comparison to the total economy.
  8. Kaos
    I am also not convinced about Mars telescopes. Dust storms are not the best friend of telescopes. I consider telescopes on Phobos and Deimos more likely. As well as on our Moon. I also consider a Lagrange point a better place for operating a telescope. But I also consider it to be a worse place for build one, as it cannot be done with local resources.
  9. Kaos
    In that case I will post my reasons for expecting a Mars colony will be constructed eventually. I belief a permanent base on Mars will grow into a colony eventually, as all the mechanisms to live from the land will be developed and brought there, as it is cheaper than the long transportation way. A permanent base will be erected: By some government for research purposes, international as a program like ISS, by some ultra rich person out of personal reasons. Perhaps because traveling into space will be cheaper (SpaceX, Skylon, ...) or because someone will decide to pay the bill. I consider it doable in the current NASA budget (I posted a length reason why I think it is possible in this budget some time ago). I think at least 10 countries are financial in a position to do so. Someone will start and other will do the same out of prestige reason and then no country will stop. Alternatively it will be an international effort. I am sure that not everyone will agree with me here and I also know that I cannot predict the future and can not be completely sure that this will happen, but I strongly belief so, as I have arguments for every part. But discussing out that in full length is out of scope of this thread.
  10. Kaos
    I am sure we can adapt to any day length. If not biological then technological. Artificial light and shadows might do the tricks. Perhaps all of Venus will use only one time zone then. Perhaps even the same time zone as the Moon and asteroids. Only Earth and Mars will orient the sleeping cycle to the sun, as it is of usable length.
  11. Kaos
    I am not for terraforming at all. We should build domes, because we can start to colonize much earlier and do not have to wait for the lengthy process of terraforming, we can then better control the environment and we have less loss of atmosphere to the outside. Furthermore, we do not understand many of the processes involved in terraforming enough. Then I do not see the advantage of terraforming weighing more than these problems. I admit it is possible this will change or I might be proven wrong here, but this will not happen in the short run. Then for political reasons: When we say "We need to terraform before colonizing the mars" I strongly doubt it will ever happen. When we say "Just build some domes and live there" the chances strongly increase that it will be done. And when we have a large Mars population it will be up to them whether they try to terraform Mars and not up to the population of Earth. All in all I find it more likely that we on Earth will start to construct lots of domes to live there than complete terraforming processes on any other planet. Partial processes indeed are plausible, for example I consider it likely that the population of Venus will decide to reduce the radiation transport to the surface to cool Venus down.
  12. Kaos
    E = mc^2 can be used with the particle at rest for rest energy and rest mass, it can be used for the total energy and relativistic mass. There might be controverse about it I am not aware of, but it is surely not settled that this concept is obsolete. And as it is widely believed that energy conservation holds and one can violate it, if photons in motion have no gravity effect, I would suggest, that this concept has some point. But I do not want to start a discussion about relativity theory here (it is off-topic and not every discussion that can be made has to be made). The relevant thing I wanted to point out, is that photons carry impulse, which is why I would not call this reactionless.
  13. Kaos
    That is true, someone has to hand over the money to start the colony. But I did not want to argue here, why I think a colony will be started, but what I belief it will export as soon as it has grown big enough.
  14. Kaos
    Photons carry energy (as you can see for example as photovoltaic works) and E = m c^2, hence Photons have relativistic mass. They have no rest mass, though. Which I already said. One photon of green light weighs for example about 4 * 10^-36 kg.
  15. Kaos
    Photons have mass, they just have no rest mass.
  16. Kaos
    I think there is a sound economic reason for mars, but only in the very long run. To construct a self-sustaining colony you have to pay a high price tag. But after that is done, the colony will grow on its own and you profit a very long time from it. Nearly regardless of how incredible expensive the construction of the colony is and how little they can sell back to earth (which will not be little in my opinion): In the very long run, it is an economical profit.
  17. Kaos
    In fact, production of Pu-238 has just started again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238#United_States_supply Old Pu-238 is less pure. If it is not pure enough, it is not very useful anymore. Besides, I doubt that there are enough pacemaker batteries to gain a significant amount.
  18. Kaos
    Governments can fund these things. They just do not do so. Perhaps this is a result of a lot of people not interested in anything and the governments not wanting to fund stuff which no one is interested in. In fact, many countries do not even fund their own infrastructure properly, because some people fear taxes more than anything else and do not want to see where this kind of behavior leads.
  19. Kaos
    Best case scenario? People would get more interested in space, we send satellites to all planets and various minor planets and asteroids. We build up permanent colonies on Moon, Mars, Venus, and quite some Asteroids in the next 30 years. The additional technology we are forced to develop by doing so helps to solve a variety of problems on earth. Then we reach out for the stars. But that is best case only. I would not totally exclude it but consider it very very unlikely.
  20. Kaos
    It was not suggested to land at night, but perhaps the experiments should work more than 2 weeks, in that case you need to bridge the night and not freeze to death in it.
  21. Kaos
    One can get 100 lightyears in a human lifetime with near-term technology, considering the effect of time dilation. It would require ridiculous large crafts in the start, though. Bridge the gap between 0.002 ly and 5 ly is much more complicated than between 5 ly and 20 ly. And I see no serious plan to move there. In fact there is no plan I know of even building satellites around Neptune, Pluto, Eris or Sedna, because of high delta-v requirements.
  22. Kaos
    No. It is not that a difference between traveling 5 lightyears or 20 lightyears. We surely have plenty of habitable planets in the range of 20 lightyears, but that did not motivate us, either. We have reached 0.002 lightyears of distance with Voyager 1 and no mission that I am aware of is even planed by some space agency to build some craft that flies faster outwards than Voyager 1. So I do not see any plans to go there in the near future, unless we develop some means of warp drive, teleportation or other non-predictable scifi-technology. With orion drive or high density laser combined with better miniaturization or something I consider it possible to reach other systems, but I do not think this will happen in the near future, as this still would be a huge effort.
  23. Kaos
    Then we know that a habitable planet orbits Proxima. Presumable someone will listen with some radio antenna there and find nothing artificial. Other than that, not much will occur the next some years. Of course, this would be interesting and a good place to look for signs of live via some advanced telescopes or compare the differences between this planet and Earth. But not a lot will happen.
  24. Kaos
    We would send a lot of missions to minmus to find out, what makes it so incredibly more dense than anything else in the solar system.
  25. Kaos
    Solar sails use mostly charged particles and not just the photons. The advantage of the magnetic sail is that you do not need to cover the whole area with material but just with magnetic fields. As generating this fields requires complicated electronic systems there is a base weight to this propulsion system which has to be compensated by bigger sails. In principle it is even possible to start with this concept from earth at the magnetic poles, but I do not know of any project that has seriously considered this.
×
×
  • Create New...