Mazon Del

For the most part I imagine the vast majority of the 'extra' mass budget that NASA would gain from using a Mars rocket to fly to the moon would be utilized to send cargo to aid in construction/experimentation. Presumably they would math out how much of that should be devoted to extra food (if any, given what the crew module was already going to store for a Mars trip).

In the case of an actually underutilized system, certainly. I am assuming that what would be done is instead of taking the mega rocket to lob X number of people and Y tons of cargo at Mars and instead point it at the moon to launch X+? number of people and Y+? tons. You still fully utilize its capacity as far as a launcher is concerned. Now as far as the capsule goes, that certainly can be an issue. But if they are sneaky they could poke at their requirements to make it easier for this sort of thing.

Last time I had snagged some packs, I went through HobbyKing International. I emptied Switzerland's supply of the 5700 mAh batteries. ^^ Shipped without any issue.

It isn't that Russia can't build space stuff. It's that right now their economy is not in a good position and actually spending the billions on refitting or constructing new modules probably just doesn't exist in their budget. The only arguments one could reasonably make with their technology is that even Roscosmos has admitted that they have had a fairly severe brain drain, where their experienced engineers have left over time and a lot of their current engineers are mostly experienced in keeping the current production lines running. The other issue is that modernization programs for their rockets and systems have been continuously pushed back due to funding reasons. Both of these issues are solvable for Russia but they WILL take significant funds which, to an outside observer, it does not look like Russia has.

Not to derail, but if there was any part of the ISS I would have preferred for them to have made, it would have been the orbital drydock module. Technically it wasn't going to be connected to the ISS to keep the vibrations from the construction work from interfering with the experiments on the ISS, but it was supposed to always be around 100 yards away. NASA had hoped to build the Earth-Mars transit craft there. Unfortunately budget cuts... As far as animals in space, I could kind of see that one fur-less cat being good. All the advantages of cats, and no fur shedding. Plus, cats are actually surprisingly capable of being trained to go to the bathroom in odd ways. There actually is a system where you can train your cat to use a toilet as its litter box. Admittedly an Earth toilet, but the point stands. It's probably mostly an engineering problem to find a way to make this convenient for the cat.

In all of my robots that use Li-Po batteries I make sure to toss some diodes on them to prevent cross charging of the batteries. If you put two packs in parallel and one is significantly more/less charged than the other, the two batteries will attempt to charge each other as fast as they are capable of dumping/gaining energy, which is most emphatically NOT at levels the batteries were designed to handle. It is rather inaccurate to say, but a simplistic explanation is that its kind of like taking a battery, designed to discharge a lot of energy relatively slowly, and discharging it like a capacitor. Things don't like this. This is actually the issue that the Dreamliner aircraft had with their Li-Pos. They assumed they could use QA controls to ensure that this would never happen, and in the end this IS possible. But it turned out their QA wasn't good enough to make sure of it. And you have this to thank for everybody panicking over lithium batteries in the mail and planes. But if the batteries are disconnected from anything (and prevented from shorting with each other or other things) they are perfectly safe. So you don't need to worry when you lie to the post office that you didn't include lithium batteries in your package that you might be risking the plane.

Really, my thought about the Mars mission is that in a way it is a pretty great method of giving us a tool to go elsewhere. If you have a rocket capable of launching a ship over to Mars, down the gravity well, stick around for a couple months, then rocket itself back up (even if it had to do some ISRU) and then back all the way to Earth. You can use that same rocket (with between 0-100% redesign of the human capsule/ship part, I'd say around 30% if they wanted to do it cheaply) in order to get to other destinations, such as asteroids or whatever. And imagine if we decided to use that rocket to lob cargo at the moon! In short, just because the launcher/capsule are designed to go to Mars, doesn't mean you cant reappropriate the system to go somewhere else.

As a fun note on perpetual motion devices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-time_crystal

There are many reasons we need our own way to get there, but to prevent Russia from stealing it is somewhat on the lower end. Even with all the posturing between us, there really isn't much chance of one of us actually taking the ISS 'by force'. If anything we might just offer to buy the Russian modules if we really wanted them.

Qualified? Certainly not. However as others showed, depending on how you read the laws, then in the most stringent of cases you treat modules you own as sovereign territory (land). And in the most relaxed of circumstances you treat it as though it were a ship flagged by your nation. Stealing/annexing the module in either case is an act of war. Now don't get me wrong, just because someone commits an act of war doesn't mean that war breaks out. It basically means that if you decide to fight over it, you DO have something the international community recognizes as a 'valid reason' for going to war. My point is that it counts. Usually in such situations people get a little...annoyed. Thus the statement. Lets say Russia were to declare the ISS is theirs, no US astronauts are going up to it anymore and they will be denying non-soyuz docking. They could probably make it happen in the current world. NASA would likely continue on working with them to keep the ISS running in the hopes that things would fix themselves. The US would use it as an excuse to pour hideous amounts of guns onto the Ukrainians, and would add more sanctions to Russia. I could even see the possibility (very, VERY low possibility) that maybe they try to forcibly retake it. It wouldn't be that hard to get to a stalemate situation. "We've got a shaped charge on it. We go back to the way things were, or we poke it full of holes you won't be fixing." Chances are though, we'd just stick with the sanctions and guns. Don't get political about if the US should or should not do the guns part, just accept that it's the strongest thing the US could do against Russia right now and we'd be in full on vengeance mode.

Denying the US access would be a fascinating legal issue. Namely, it would TECHNICALLY constitute an act of war. My understanding of space law (which is by no means definitive) is that while you cannot own celestial bodies (like the moon, asteroids, etc) the things that you put up there are in fact your property unless sold. An addendum to that is actually that the question of 'What countries common law applies on the ISS?' is answered by 'If you are in a section owned by the US, US common law applies, if you are in the Russian sections, Russian common law applies.'. This is because effectively the inside of modules is pretty much legally considered the sovereign territory of the country that owns the module. Therefor, if Russia were to declare 'Nope, US cannot use the ISS anymore.' this would constitute, in the court of international law, a land grab. Annexation of US territory. It would....certainly be an interesting problem.

The new President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute gave a pretty great presentation on what we could do with material brought back from Mars. If we were able to bring back a single grain of sand, we have the tech to slice it into about 30 pieces which could be sent to various labs around the world to tell us pretty much every bit of information we could possibly learn about that grain of sand, and thus a load about Mars itself.

The price is only like $34 on Steam. The collectors edition was about $100. The combination is more than simply the sum of its parts here. There are definitely a few bugs to be worked out, but for Noame117...welcome to the Homeworld series. That's what it's like. The escape part I agree is annoying and confusing, but the rest of it is their control setup. I've personally never had any issues with it and once you play with it for a few missions of the campaign, it becomes pretty intuitive. For ColourOfFire, Gearbox has made it pretty explicit that the point of doing the Remastered version is twofold. The first is to put the game(s) out on Steam, the second is that they are using it to decide if they think a Homeworld 3 is economically viable. zgrillo2004, the game itself is not early access, ONLY the MULTIPLAYER is. This is because they had to completely redo the entire internet play system. Originally they used GameSpy which is now defunct, so they had to replace it (which I hear from the devs was an interestingly...lets just call it an interesting experience. hah). As they get in bug reports and such from the internet play they will be making adjustments and may redo the multiplayer deathmatch system to find what is enjoyable for the players. On the whole, I am quite happy with it, the balance between HW1 and HW2 races is pretty nice.

From reading the thread that has been linked to a few times, they are actually in an annoying spot of trouble. Their current funding basically ends the first week of March unless they can get the test article to produce thrust over 100 micro-Newtons in order to pass it to the next lab for verification. Now this doesn't mean that the funding is cut entirely, but that it will drop low enough that one of the physicists they brought out of retirement 4 years ago just to work on this project will be unable to continue working. Though he has a home lab that he was working out of on this exact technology before NASA snagged him again and he says that if it happens, he'll just jump back to that. It sounds like they are attempting to change out the radio emitter for one of a much higher frequency in the hopes of kicking it up a couple notches. They are looking at something in the gigahertz range I believe. Additionally, they are discussing the possibility from some test data that the effect might be casimir related. (WARNING: Not a physicist, this description will not be as good as ones on the thread.) They note this because of the following observations. When in vacuum (with air inside the engine, but not outside) the engine works. When in vacuum (but no air inside the engine), the thrust is drastically reduced (but not to zero). When in vacuum (inside and out), but they have a block of PTFE snugged up near the emitter on the inside of the engine, the thrust is comparable with when the air is inside. When in vacuum (outside) and they have the block of PTFE AND air inside, they get the best performance. If the engine is in vacuum, but has air inside, and there is a small gap between the block of PTFE and the emitter, they see reduced performance. Now, they have checked to make sure that none of this air or matter is leaving the closed engine area to ensure this. So one of the theories is that whatever effect is going on inside the engine might be utilizing the Cassimir effect and that the denser material of the PTFE is better at this than the air itself was. There was a humorous anecdote that during one of the tests the nylon bolt (on the inside of the engine) used to hold the PTFE broke and so this several kilogram block of plastic fell down to the inside of the chamber. Considering the system was designed to measure in the micro-Newton range, this was like a magnitude 9 earthquake as far as their sensor was concerned. This event is actually what tipped them off to the fact that the thrust was being influenced by the presence of the PTFE.

So I've been thinking about this quite a lot, tossing around the concepts I've been reading up on. One issue I've been having to try and circumvent is this. For all intents and purposes, a cannae/em Drive is no different than just a random directional microwave radio. The only special thing it has going for it is the enclosed cavity. So, unless we suddenly find out that directional microwave antennae have been found to have thrusts like this, whatever theory we are operating on needs to address the difference between an enclosed cavity and a freestanding emitter. If it was simply that the microwaves were pushing off of virtual particles, great! But then why is the boxed emitter gaining more thrust than a free emitter? If the microwaves push off the virtual particles, then we should be able to see this effect with a microwave emitter that is not enclosed. It is quite possible that nobody has hooked up a microwave emitter in such a way as to test the thrust it generates and noticed the discrepancy between the thrust detected vs what a photon drive should be emitting. I find this a 'little' unlikely, but it isn't exactly outside the realm of reality. Actually, if this turned out to be true (that a freestanding directional antenna observed the cannae/em Drive effect) then I would actually expect a freestanding directional antenna to work BETTER, simply because it doesn't have the 'counter thrust' of the microwaves impacting against it (the whole tossing a ball backwards inside your own ship thing) to slow you down. Unless of course, the effect is super minimal, but the reflections inside the drive itself causes a sort of macro-buildup. This could quite possibly be the case since they actually saw that the cannae drive (the one with slots) had a slightly worse output than the one without the slots in the technical documents I read. Very slightly worse, but consistently slightly worse. If this is the case then that might mean some interesting ways on how to design the drives for better performance, such as utilizing surfaces/materials designed to maximize reflections. Just some mad ramblings. Thoughts? Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not trying to disprove the virtual particles thing, I'm just trying to figure out this discrepancy.

The issue Rakaydos that N_Las and others point out, is that if the engines DO work by converting virtual particles into real, current physics still says that there is a maximum efficiency that this can operate at which is being broken by the input energy to thrust of this drive. I of course am hopeful that maybe the drive system is doing something new or unrealized, but only time will tell. Within the next couple of months they will likely have shipped the test article off to at least one alternate lab for verification purposes, and probably 2-6 months after that we should have their report.

In a video I watched a while back where Harold White was giving a partial update on information about the test (I think this was back in Dec?), he stated that the working theory (as we know) is the virtual particle one. One method he proposed to try and test this was to set up two of the drives in various configurations (back to back, follow the leader, etc). If the theory is true, he believes the drives should be creating 'wakes' in the virtual particles that will interfere with each other. Just tossing that out there.

It's called a radome (pronounced Ray-Dome) and it is there to protect the radar from inclimate weather such as snow buildup.

The problem has never been that we couldn't genetically engineer or surgically modify ourselves to live in strange and fascinating environments. It's that we want to find a place where we don't have to AND live in comfort. The human tests with the liquid filled lungs had some success, but they had the downside that the users lungs CONSTANTLY felt like they were on fire. If we wanted to, we could colonize a lot more of Earth than we do now by throwing money at GE or the tech to do so. You occasionally get a few people interested in trying it out or willing to be there for a while to collect science data, but the vast majority of people don't WANT to live in those situations. Not to mention that human-based GE is still in its early days.

It may increase the cost quite a bit, but chances are it also increases the reliability. If nothing else, all it does is make the investors rest easy at night knowing that a random computer glitch isn't going to shut down their billion dollar investment. Besides, as I've said before, the real value in getting into asteroid mining right now is not the value of the returned materials, but the value of that asteroid in the near/far future. The standard idea for asteroid mining involves covering the asteroid in a tarp-like object. This minimizes cast off debris from the mining operations which can be a navigation hazard. Even though currently a company/nation cannot own an asteroid, by wrapping one up, you claim it as your own by virtue of the fact that someone else has to damage/destroy your property (the tarp) to get to it. You de facto own the asteroid because nobody can get to it without damaging your property and nobody has the authority to make you leave.

In my periods of fantasizing about such things, one idea I've had for a while is to dig a hole in the ground, build a concrete & rebar dome, bury the whole thing (except for an access stairwell/elevator to the bottom of the dome) and build my home on the inside. One of the many upshots of doing so is that I can have a projector array on the house that shines on the inside of the dome, so I can set my sky to be whatever I want. I have long imagined getting up at night, shuffling to the bathroom and pausing to look out as Jupiter or Saturn slowly rises above the 'horizon'.

Just dropping in here for others. This is an article from July of last year, so no new info as of yet. Vindaloo, prepare yourself, these threads tend to explode into some fairly heated fighting on why the drive is impossible and NASA should just ignore it and groups that insist NASA should pour vast quantities of funds into testing it out thoroughly. Thanks for the attempt though!

The problem with all the stories where this actually takes place, is that through some route or another, humans have become hyper peaceful, and the 'hyper violent' aliens are...just human grade violent. I agree that this is somewhat frustrating.

Heh, in one of Spider Robinson's book, the big bad disaster the crew was trying to prevent was a situation where a VERY unlikely series of events occurs, causing a momentary creation of a (and I probably have this wrong) 'more perfect quantum vacuum'. Which would collapse the quantum states of the entire universe (racing out at the speed of light from the point of occurence) into an altered state with this new more perfect quantum vacuum. The issue being is that any matter hit by this would be torn apart at the subatomic level. Most of the universe would probably remain in terms of mass distribution, but atomic distribution would be wildly altered. Supposedly this doomsday scenario was based off of something a real scientist thinks could happen.

I'm pretty sure those are fuel hoses, but they only disconnect them at a point of no return because there are a variety of scenarios under which the launch could be scrubbed and they need to empty the tanks in a hurry. Thinking about it, I'm actually pretty unaware of any major launch that was given an in flight problem because say, the fuel hoses failed to detach. I know one of the early SpaceX launches scrubbed in the last seconds (the engines lit and everything) because of an issue with the hoses detaching incorrectly.