Tag: space

Proxima Centauri

The new planet we’ve found there is so very near our own that its night sky shares most of Earth’s constellations. From the planet’s broiling surface, one could see familiar sights such as the Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter, looking just as they do to our eyes here.

2012-10-19: Saturn as viewed from the moon vs Proxima Centauri viewed from Saturn

2020-04-25:

The proposal assumes a peak spacecraft velocity of 10% of the speed of light. Once launched out of Earth’s gravitational well, the remaining spacecraft is composed of 2 stages. The first stage accelerates the spacecraft to 0.1c, detaches from the second stage, and performs a smaller perpendicular burn to deflect its trajectory toward the Proxima Centauri AB binary system for a flyby of that solar system. The second stage decelerates a scientific payload and provides power and support during a decades-long period of exploration.

2022-03-15:

Why is it so difficult to detect planets around Alpha Centauri? Proxima Centauri is one thing; we’ve found interesting worlds there, though this small, dim star has been a tough target, examined through decades of steadily improving equipment. But Centauri A and B, the G-class and K-class central binary here, have proven impenetrable. Given that we’ve found over 4500 planets around other stars, why the problem here?

Proximity turns out to be a challenge in itself. Centauri A and B are in an orbit around a common barycenter, angled such that the light from one will contaminate the search around the other. It’s a 79-year orbit, with the distance between A and B varying from 35.6 AU to 11.2. You can think of them as, at their furthest, separated by the Sun’s distance from Pluto (roughly), and at their closest, by about the distance to Saturn.

The good news is that we have a window from 2022 to 2035 in which, even as our observing tools continue to improve, the parameters of that orbit as seen from Earth will separate Centauri A and B enough to allow astronomers to overcome light contamination. I think we can be quite optimistic about what we’ll find within the decade, assuming there are indeed planets here. I suspect we will find planets around each, but whether we find something in the habitable zone is anyone’s guess.

Why we explore

When a human stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, we changed, fundamentally. Our human horizon popped out 300K km. Forever, we would see the Earth differently, because we had seen it from someplace truly foreign. This is why Mars is important. When we get a human to Mars our horizon will expand 1000x farther, and it will never go back.

Rocket mail

what ever happened to this? i want my zappos order delivered by rocket! same day delivery is so last century.

1959: “Rocket mail” becomes “missile mail” when 3000 pieces of mail are delivered by a cruise missile fired from a US Navy submarine.

Experiments in delivering mail by rocket had met with mixed success since the first rocket mail was sent between 2 Austrian villages in 1931. The first successful delivery by this method in the United States occurred in 1936, when 2 rockets fired from Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, landed on the New York shore ~300m away.

Moon bootstrapping

bootstrapping can be achieved with 12 tons landed on the Moon during a period of 20 years. The equipment will be teleoperated and then transitioned to full autonomy so the industry can spread to the asteroid belt and beyond. The industry grows exponentially due to the free real estate, energy, and material resources of space. The mass of industrial assets at the end of bootstrapping will be 40k tons. Within another few decades with no further investment, it can have millions of times the industrial capacity of the United States.

Making life multi-planetary

It is important that we take action now to make life multi-planetary, because this is really the first point in the 4B-year history of Earth that it has been possible. That window of possibility will hopefully be open for a long time, but it may only be open for a short time. That’s why I think urgent action is required on making life multi-planetary.

2012-11-12: This guy has more vision (and execution) than all the web 2.0 kiddies together.

Elon Musk wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80K people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500K a trip. In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

2013-10-03: My latest toy to mess with tiny Luddite brains

2015-08-17: Long but worthwhile read

I’ve always envied everyone who was alive during the excitement of the moon landing in the late 60s. When I’ve thought about The Story of Humans and Space, the 1960s always seemed like a fluky 10 years of supreme excitement in the middle of an otherwise calm and steady trajectory: But now, I’m seeing the moon landing more as a precursor of something much bigger. Without realizing it, we may be standing on the precipice of one of the great leaps in biological history, and the moon landing may later be seen as the first labor contraction in the birth of an entirely new era for life on Earth. And somehow, we may actually be alive as that new era dawns.

2017-06-15: More details have been published

SpaceX is estimating they will be able to achieve $140K per ton for the trips to Mars. If a person plus their luggage is less than that, taking into account food consumption and life support, the cost of moving to Mars could ultimately drop below $100K. Cost will be brought down 5M % with fully reusable rocket, orbital refueling, propellent production on Mars, CH4 / O2 DEEP-CRYO Methalox fuel.

2018-08-31: Using Starship for habitation

SpaceX plans to live out of the BFS ships initially on Mars and then build out the facilities (habitation, power systems, mining and landing pads). The BFS would land on Mars with 100 tons including the ship.