NERVAfan

The moss can't really go below freezing though*. So if the moss can survive then it should be fine. *Even if it can theoretically survive below freezing (depends what species we use) it probably won't grow well (or at all) if it gets below freezing every 90 minutes. On Earth the day/night cycle is a lot longer.

While unpleasant, and screwing up all kinds of ecosystems due to the seasons being off schedule and all sorts of adaptations to the seasonal cycle suddenly being inappropriate... that's probably actually survivable. The global temperature won't be that high since the perihelion is brief and the oceans have lots of thermal inertia - they won't have time to heat up fully (this is why the hottest/coldest time of year is well after the summer/winter solstice). I'd avoid continental interiors though - they will probably be crazy climatically extreme. Agriculture will have to adapt A LOT to the weird seasons and ecological chaos, but humanity should survive, I think.

I'll set up a gmail account in the next couple of days then. Well... best of the cameras listed in the doc. There might be other good ones I don't know. I'm not a camera expert - but the other ones listed are a real stretch dimensions wise. Near IR or thermal IR? http://www.goelectronic.com/SONY%20XCEI50.html?source=googleps&gclid=Cj0KEQjwiJiiBRDh3Z-ctPfS5MgBEiQAAlkbQip0tMNd2_3M3WBkNpxGc7ycf5jJfEYv5FCUR13jgNUaAikE8P8HAQ Needs a near-IR light source (LED suggested). 50 or 60 grams (page is inconsistent). 29 (W) x 29 (H) x 32 (D) mm. $589.95 Thermal IR: http://www.optris.com/thermal-imager-pi160 195 grams. 45 mm x 45 mm x 62 mm. 2,960 Euros and up (ouch). FLIR makes tiny thermal IR cameras but I don't know how expensive they are.

Do you have a source for that? I have definitely seen it described as a complete stoppage: I believe the book "Winter World" describes this sort of freezing, in frogs and insects, as a reversible death. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/costanzo-cryobiology.html "However, later in the freezing process the heart stops completely. Ice encases the organ and forms inside the muscle and the chambers. There's no need for a working pump now because the blood, too, is frozen. This state of arrested heart function can be tolerated for many days and perhaps months, but upon thawing the contractions spontaneously resume. Imagine our amazement when we witnessed those first few blips on a thawing frog's EKG!" I agree it is not applicable to humans though. EDIT: I'll drop the soul discussion as not relevant to this thread/forum. Sorry. EDITx2: Hmm. It does seem the cells aren't completely shut down though, though organ function may be...

OK, I read the Sandy Antunes books and added some comments to the Google Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jR2B_M67cITTBtV_PDMoioVQp3bnCTR85ecQeVKmpWI/edit

Yeah, Mars One is not "certain death" except in the sense that all life is.If they could somehow get enough money to send people to Mars, it could work. I don't know how good the chances are (nor does anyone, as the on-Mars part probably hasn't been designed in all THAT much detail yet). EDIT: I think we tend to overestimate the necessary complexity of long-term life support. The ISS water recycling breaks down a lot, but that is likely a problem with that specific design, not the general concept. And it is much easier in gravity IIRC. Also, the NASA one is probably overengineered in terms of the standards for water quality it is designed to meet, and it has some odd choices like using really toxic stuff as biocides, that then need to be removed (why not just heat the water in a pressure cooker/autoclave instead?)

I'm pretty sure a wood frog has no metabolism when all the water in its body is frozen. (And soul is a philosophical concept, not subject to scientific proof or disproof.)

This study is too strict on the limits of what's an acceptable oxygen level IMO (30% as maximum?). And if you have too much oxygen, light a candle. This is something that can be dealt with. - - - Updated - - - Plants still have a net production of oxygen, though. It can be tested easily enough on earth in a sealed habitat.

Artificial elements are very short-lived, but they aren't just nuclei. I'm skeptical of nanobots being able to do big things (like create a body) quickly - by the very nature of being incredibly tiny, nanobots would probably have trouble surviving high energies. If they ever exist, viruses are probably a closer analogue to how they'd work than the kind of do-anything transformations you see in some fiction (IE specialized to a specific function, requiring a very specific "host" or at least environment). However, if you had the ability to regenerate nerves, you could transplant a severed head to a new body if you did it fast enough (before the brain died). Dog and monkey head transplants have been performed, but the head wasn't able to control the new body.

No, some animals can actually revive after total freezing or near total desiccation - not "slowed down" but zero metabolism (anhydrobiosis, cryptobiosis). However, doing this for humans is a huge, huge, huge stretch and I'm very skeptical.

Ah, sorry Well, let's just keep this thread alive till then... If you can start doing the sensor/GPS next week, what would the timeline for the Kickstarter be?

Sure we do - growth in Moonlike (and/or Marslike) gravity as opposed to growth in Earth gravity. I do. And Mazon Del was talking to a professor who works with moss. I really don't think this is all that complex as cubesats go, as given the short lifetime most of the 'life support' is passive. EDIT: I still have some qualms about the choice of moss specifically (we might want to use the most temperature-variation-tolerant small plant or alga we can find) but I think the general plan is good.

For some reason, in 0.25 when I take a Kerbal on EVA he tends to lose his grip on the ladder and drift off into space... even without my hitting Spacebar. Is this a new bug?

I think we may have serious thermal control issues: So it sounds like we are going to need MUCH more thermal control than the "typical" cubesat, since we probably need to keep the moss between -- at the most -- 0 and 25 C, and probably between something like 10-25.

LCROSS crashed an expended stage into one of the permanently shaded craters and detected water in the ejecta - IIRC about 5%. That probably means a much more significant (EDIT: amount) than the hydroxyl or bound water on the surface of moon rocks.

Wow. That;s much lighter than I would have expected - is he hollow?

I agree. And that hardly anyone except for really serious space fans knows they exist (well, unless they watched that one Mythbusters episode...). I think that's a bigger barrier. Depends on how ironclad the VG contracts are, and whether the survivors saw a point in suing. People die climbing Everest and the commercial Everest expeditions haven't been shut down. Current FAA regulations are "informed consent"; if that remains true, I think the industry could survive. The press by itself is only a factor if it convinces people not to fly. (I do think VG is setting itself up for trouble by claiming to be so safe, though. They should be clearer that it is in fact dangerous, and I don't think that would really discourage many people from going.) It wouldn't be driven just by tourism demand - the same launch vehicle (either F9R or Skylon, or both) would be used for comsats, NASA missions, etc. And why are you assuming no destination? I don't expect orbital space tourism to start that soon, and I think Bigelow is planning to launch their first BA330s pretty soon after the Commercial Crew vehicles start flying. Those inflatables look more spacious than an ISS module -- I think a Dragon v2 trip to a Bigelow station would be a lot more comfortable than a Soyuz trip to ISS, and people pay like $50+ million for that. Also, if SpaceX does get that reusability working and the costs down, they could probably do flights around the Moon for much cheaper than it now costs to go to ISS. Dragonv2's heat shield is supposed to be good enough for a lunar reentry. - - - Updated - - - I agree. And that hardly anyone except for really serious space fans knows they exist (well, unless they watched that one Mythbusters episode...). I think that's a bigger barrier. Depends on how ironclad the VG contracts are, and whether the survivors saw a point in suing. People die climbing Everest and the commercial Everest expeditions haven't been shut down. Current FAA regulations are "informed consent"; if that remains true, I think the industry could survive. The press by itself is only a factor if it convinces people not to fly. (I do think VG is setting itself up for trouble by claiming to be so safe, though. They should be clearer that it is in fact dangerous, and I don't think that would really discourage many people from going.) It wouldn't be driven just by tourism demand - the same launch vehicle (either F9R or Skylon, or both) would be used for comsats, NASA missions, etc. And why are you assuming no destination? I don't expect orbital space tourism to start that soon, and I think Bigelow is planning to launch their first BA330s pretty soon after the Commercial Crew vehicles start flying. Those inflatables look more spacious than an ISS module -- I think a Dragon v2 trip to a Bigelow station would be a lot more comfortable than a Soyuz trip to ISS, and people pay like $50+ million for that. Also, if SpaceX does get that reusability working and the costs down, they could probably do flights around the Moon for much cheaper than it now costs to go to ISS. Dragonv2's heat shield is supposed to be good enough for a lunar reentry.

True, as is. But if they'd been developing Orion for FH - rather than following the SLS path - they could have given FH a third stage/kick motor, or Orion lots more fuel. SpaceX claims 53 metric tons to LEO for Falcon Heavy. According to the Wikipedia article, Orion is 21,250 kg total mass with 7,907 kg Service Module propellant (those numbers aren't cited though); if that's correct, that would leave over 30 metric tons for more fuel/a third stage/kick motor/whatever. And developing a 3rd stage/bigger service module/etc would probably be a lot cheaper than developing the whole SLS. (And even 2 Falcon Heavy flights - say to take up a habitat and even more fuel - would be cheaper than 1 SLS flight.) I just don't think that at this point, there's any percentage in developing a new LV that isn't either very reusable or some other innovation to be massively cheap.

Given that Mazon Del was talking about the entire petri dish being 5-10 mm tall, the phytoagar might be thinner than that. Well, it's still a much better approximation of lunar/Martian gravity than you can get on Earth, so for a first experiment, yes, I think it's quite acceptable. If this goes well and we get more funding we can do a later experiment with a 3U which is spun so the long axis is the spinning diameter, if we want to. EDIT: also, I think the gravity difference will be less at Lunar gravity, and since we really won't have time to test 2 different gravity levels (due to orbital decay of the satellite) and get much data for each one, I think we should just stick to Lunar.

For 0.38 g (Mars) I get 82.4 rotations per minute with the same calculator.

Yes. I'll see what I can find that's relevant.

I dunno. I thin there is more demand than that. Not necessarily. It depends on what the FAA would do - I don't think it would stop everyone from wanting to fly. "Back to the Moon" by Travis Taylor and Les Johnson. EDIT: It's a long way off, but if SpaceX (or Skylon, etc.) succeeds in making reusability work, it'll happen someday, IMO.

FH is currently scheduled to fly in 2015, SLS in 2017 maybe 2018. NASA could have easily reserved an FH flight in 2017 or earlier if they'd gone that path. Orion isn't really the problem (though IMO it would have been much cheaper to pay SpaceX to give crew Dragon longer-trip capabilities). SLS is the problem - it'll be obsolete before it ever flies. They should have done a lunar lander & deep space habitat with the money spent on SLS.

The website doesn't list weight, just height, width and depth. But it says it's made of sandstone which is (from a Google search) about 2.5 g/cm^3. Jebediah Kerman on IVA is "5.888 w x 8.896 d x 5.754 h", so if he were a solid rectangular object, that would be about 750 grams. So that's an upper bound anyway... so it's probably about a pound...