Tag: space

Salvation

Salvation is a terrific series about what could happen if the world learned an extinction-event sized asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. It does a great job researching how governments, the public, and hacktivist groups might respond to such news. (For instance, one government might try to send up something that would cause the asteroid to change course just enough to make it crash into a spot on the other side of the planet in order to minimize the damage in their country. This could cause world powers to consider nuclear warfare to stop that from happening.)

Antimatter cubesat

Antimatter is the most energy dense material in the universe. Positron dynamics core innovations is the ability to generate intense beams of cold positrons using an array of moderators. They use a radioisotope as a source of positrons. They react the gamma particles to get a charged ion which they direct with magnetic fields for propulsion. Rocket engines based on this would have exhaust at 10% of the speed of light.

Google Maps planets

20 years ago, the spacecraft Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral on a journey to uncover the secrets of Saturn and its many moons. During its mission, Cassini recorded and sent 500k pictures back to Earth, allowing scientists to reconstruct these distant worlds in unprecedented detail. Now you can visit these places—along with many other planets and moons—in Google Maps right from your computer. For extra fun, try zooming out from the Earth until you’re in space!

Ice space station

An analysis by John Bucknell (x-Spacex senior engineer) describes an 11 meter diameter robotic vehicle with a 6000-megawatt nuclear thermal rocket in a NTTR arrangement. The rocket would be single stage to orbit and would be immediately be able to refly after landing and refueling much like todays airliners. Even fully reusable Spacex rockets where all stages are reused would need to be re-assembled.

He describes SSTOH missions to place a 21 meter minor and 214 meter major diameter toroidal habitat in space, capable of full terrestrial gravity simulation by spinning at 3 rpm. The habitat begins as 2 thin films defining the interior and exterior surfaces of the torus, which is then inflated with lunar-sourced water in a 1m thick shell and allowed to freeze.

Access to space is driven by the economics of launch vehicles. A previously published rocket propulsion cycle called the Nuclear Thermal Turbo Rocket (NTTR) is able to achieve payload fractions of more than 45% to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This rocket is intended to be completely reusable for the launch mission as it is a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) vehicle, which improves economics vastly. However, providing material to LEO is not always the most economical solution for permanent space-based habitation. In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) has been proposed as a method for avoiding the Earth’s gravity well for space-based construction with solutions proposed using Lunar, Martian as well as other resources.

Moon case

an initial lunar settlement is possible through further development of existing design work, but that a superior option is neither immediate nor obvious. Selecting a single framework (or a specific hybrid of several) is critical to best funnel capital into the most promising technologies. An action path is proposed that leverages consideration of permanence and significance as feedback to clearly characterize the best design choice for initial funding. Permanence seeks to answer, ‘How can we ensure that the construction of the first lunar base is able to expand into the foreseeable future in both population and space?,’ while significance seeks to answer, ‘How can we ensure that the consequences of operating the settlement are economically beneficial to society?’ There is not much literature to answer these questions, despite the importance of the answers.

Parker Solar Probe

The first spacecraft to fly into the sun’s atmosphere will also be the fastest human-made vehicle ever, at 195 km / s.

2019-07-29: There’s a related experiment that simulates the solar magnetic field in a lab:

The twisting loops of the sun’s magnetic field control the flow of charged particles throughout the solar system. For the first time, researchers have created a scale model of this mysterious environment. “Because they’re a lab experiment, they can change some of their parameters, right?. And we can’t. The sun does what it’s going to do.” As the Parker Solar Probe circles the sun over the next few years, it will pass through the corona and collect data that researchers can compare to the laboratory results. “Stuff that they’re seeing, if it’s real, we should see it.”

2021-12-15: This has now happened.

The first passage through the corona, which lasted only a few hours, is one of many planned for the mission. Parker will continue to spiral closer to the Sun, eventually reaching as close as 8.86 solar radii from the surface. Upcoming flybys, the next of which is happening in January 2022, will likely bring Parker Solar Probe through the corona again.

Moon will produce trillionaires

If the single largest asteroid (Ceres) were to be used to build orbital space settlements, the total living area created would be well over 100x the land area of the Earth. This is because Ceres is a solid, 3 dimensional object but orbital space settlements are basically hollow with only air on the inside. Thus, Ceres alone can provide the building materials for uncrowded homes for 100s of billions of people, at least.