Maybe the bad news is good news

Discussion in 'Science' started by (original)late, May 26, 2020.

  1. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    NASA is finding problems with spending long periods of time at the Space Station.

    It's not all that surprising. If you think back to the movie, 2001, which was way back in the 1960s, the space station in the movie had rotating sections to create an artificial gravity.

    That's not going to be good enough. What I expect we will need is several feet of rock. We could melt rock on the Moon into sections, and then throw them to L5 where the station will have to be built. It would look like the one in 2001, but the rotating section would be mostly rock.

    You don't need to eliminate radiation, just get it under control. To do that, you could shape it like a bicycle tire. The bottom would be several feet thick, with prob a few inches of lead. The rock would taper as it wrapped around, but the lead would keep going.Cabling would hold it together.

    You'd want the station oriented so that the floor always faced the Sun. Then the fun part is deciding how much spin is needed. Pure guess, but I suspect 1/2 of a g would be enough to stay at the station for years. But that might not be practical, as you increase rotation speed, when something goes wrong, the potential for the station to rip itself apart increases.



     
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  2. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I hope we can use asteroids so we don't have to hoist anything from the Moon

    Also, I don't see a lot of reasons to have humans on the Moon - beyond proving we can do it.

    One might guess that a reason for moonmen might be to turn a crater on the opposite side of the moon into a gigantic telescope shielded from Earth radiation - somthing that is being thought about seriously. But, it may be possible to do that without human presence, too, before we figure out how to have humans slaving away on the lunar surface without being pickled.

    I suspect the first construction on the moon will be done without humans. Humans could hide out in a lava tube, but once they come out to do some real work, things get even more dangerous that they already would be.
     
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  3. robot

    robot Active Member

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    We can do mining on the moon. One thing we can get is Helium 3. This is very expensive on Earth. We can also make solar cells from the moon. Then convert the water that is in various places to rocket fuel.
     
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  4. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    A rotating annulus or ring has long been a design concept; so that sufficient centripetal force or artificial gravity can be generated through rotation.

    Recently some interesting ideas to protect astronauts from radiation have been suggested. By generating a magnetic field around the station using an electromagnet powered by a nuclear reactor, it may be practical. That is how the earth is protected. The field on a space station would have to be much stronger than the earths field to be effective. But the earth's magnetic field is very weak. Consider for example that the field generated by a standard medical MRI magnet, can be hundreds of thousands of times stronger than the earth's magnetic field.
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2020
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  5. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    [​IMG]

    A wonderful, classic, sci-fi adventure about life on the inside of a ring.

    One of my personal favorites.
     
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  6. jay runner

    jay runner Banned

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    One thing's certain. Thick sheet lead is very expensive and it takes a lot of extra fuel to escape gravity.
     
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  7. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    Business in Space grows every year. It will continue to grow indefinitely. It's in the billions now, but the potential dwarfs the dreams of avarice.

    Makes sense to be one of the countries making a buck off it.
     
  8. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    We have to be a little careful about what we count.

    I agree there is significant revenue in telecommunications, with there being an important satellite component. GPS is used world wide and is a contributor to Earth based businesses. Musk will probably do well with his project to provide fast iternet to everyone in the entire world - a huge multiplier.

    Mining on the moon is going to be fabulously expensive. I seriously doubt there is anything so unique about the moon (which came from Earth) that we can make money by going there to mine it.
     
  9. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    It's the next step, and it's not really optional. We will need a space station that can respond to killer asteroids. We have a couple generations, maybe more, but it will need doing.

    But that's just the next step. We will need resources, and what is in short supply here is available in absurd quantities elsewhere in the solar system. That will take a century, or two, but that will literally be the next gold rush, and heavy metals and...

    "The space industry is in the middle of a widespread transformation, as the last decade has seen a number of young companies begin to seek to profit in an area where most of the money was made from military contracts or expensive communications satellites.

    The estimated $400 billion space economy is still largely dominated by large aerospace and defense companies, serving government-funded interests. But investors say that’s changing, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and UBS each issuing frequent research for clients on how the space industry is growing. Wall Street’s consensus is that space will become a multitrillion-dollar economy in the next 10 to 20 years..."
    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/09/how...ete-guide-to-rockets-satellites-and-more.html
     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2020
  10. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I don't believe we need a space station for targeting killer asteroids. We do need to detect killer asteroids, and there are some really clever ways to do that. And, we may well need a few kinds of devices in space for pushing asteroids out of our way. But, that doesn't require astronauts or space stations.

    My problem with the Moon is that it is made of the same stuff that Earth is made of, it's a strong gravity well, and it is not a place that any human is going to want to be. The "next 100 years" thing hits me as irrelevant, because there is nothing we can do today that would be of particular interest in 100 years.

    The Spacex spacecraft was designed from ZERO. After a fairly short number of years our space shuttle technology wasn't even worth LOOKING at.

    At least with mining asteroids one doesn't have to figure out how to build and launch rockets to lift weight out of the lunar gravity well.

    We have to be careful in counting the defense and NASA contracts, as those don't have to do with profiting from space - it's just our chosen expenditure of tax dollars.

    Building ICBMs doesn't provide opportunity for US Business other than just building those ICBMs.

    Other stuff we build can cost the same and employ as many people, BUT also have continuing benefit. To me, THAT should be a major focus of counting benefit of one investment over another.

    To end our great depression we had federal projects like WPA. We are STILL hauling goods on those roads. We're STILL using those bridges and park infrastructure. Etc. Had we build ICBMs with that money (had we known how) we would now have nothing to show for it.

    I like NASA for science (astronomy, cosmology, physics, ISS, Earthly weather/climate, help for agriculture, education, and their other such work). But, I don't see sufficient benefit in human space travel to the Moon - or Mars. We can go there without humans and do ALL the same science without the stupendous expense of taking humans for the ride.

    Humans to Mars could EASILY kill all NASA does other than that one useless bit of nonsense - catastrophic.
     
  11. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I suspect I'm in the minority on this opinion -

    I just hope we can still have a NASA science budget.
     
  12. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    Depends.

    If you assume we want to get good at it, that's a good way to do it. I expect there will be stages. We need to develop adequate tracking and a basic way of dealing with dangerous asteroids, prob using a tractor. But that assumes we have years to work with.

    There is the less probable event of missing one, that comes around the sun, and we have days or even hours to deal with the situation.

    It's not something I think will happen soon. But as time goes by, a station will make more and more sense.

    Btw, you keep talking about the Moon. I was talking about the Belt. When we decide to get the resources in the Belt, we're going to need more than a station.
     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2020
  13. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    We already have a system in place and have for a long time. I even "manned the guns" at one point.

     
  14. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    We'll, we went to Pluto with no station and we hung aroung Jupiter and Saturn.

    Japan has landed on an asteroid and picked up material to bring home without humans or a station.

    If we want to nudge asteroids out of the way I donl't know why we would need a space station for that.

    As for finding threatening asteroids, you're right that we're getting pretty good at that. It's been the case so far that asteroids get found be amatures But, that time is coming to an end.

    Also, the same kind of approach might be taken with attempting to actually visit one of these objects that comes in from outside our solar system - place an interceptor in space somewhere and send it off when we detect an object we want to visit.

    Do we really know how to move an aseroid yet - I mean, in practice, not just theory?
     
  15. Monash

    Monash Well-Known Member

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    Problem is they have to be 100 meters plus in diameter to counteract the nausea effects which is a lot of mass to boost into space and assemble there. And the bigger your station is the higher up it has to be to avoid atmospheric drag. Build something that size in LEO at the same altitude as the ISS and you have huge drag problems. So higher up it goes - and then you now have radiation problems because as you noted you are no longer protected by the Earths magnetic field - so you need more mass lifted up to generate artificial magnetic 'force fields' around all manned sections of the station i.e. most of it.

    Plus there are host of unrelated engineering problems associated with keeping large numbers of people up in orbit for months at a time we haven't solved yet, in construction materials, hydroponics and waste recycling for a start- the ISS doesn't even a washing machine on board, all the clothing gets warn till its rank then stuffed into garbage bags for return to Earth in a garbage run. (If you think anyone is going to want to share a bunk room in high orbit with someone whose been wearing the same flight suit for 3 months strait you've got another thing coming.)

    These probs are being solved but progress is realtivly slow. What is really lacking is a tangible/pressing reason to go there in a big way. We don't need the resources (yet) and so far zero g manufacturing hasn't been found to produce anything that can't be made on Earth more cheaply. We don't need it for communication, optical fibers and micros stats can/will take care of that issue and we don't need it to deflect asteroids. Assuming you have enough ground and space based observatories to detect threats well in advance you can launch a deflection mission from Earth.

    IMO - the most likely reason for building large scale infrastructure in space will be plain old simple tourism. But the launch cost has to come way down first. As long as millionaires and above are the only ones who can afford to go there won't be enough bums on seats to warrant building large structures.
     
  16. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    If you live another hundred years you will.

    We need to get a lot better. Some rich guys funded a project a few years back so we could find them if they came around the Sun.

    Yeah, that's called a tractor, and is one of our best bets.

    We're in what Brits call early days, the work so far is all preliminary.
     
  17. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    Did you ever play Gravitar? I really liked that one, back in the 80s.
     
  18. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Sure, everything is preliminary.

    And, I doubt you are suggesting that what we spend on today can be justified purely on the premise that we might want to do something like that in some distant future we can imagine.

    We need to justify each step based on reasonably achievable and justifiable near term objectives and their values to us.

    For me, that doesn't include moonmen. We may end up wanting moonmen sometime, but today we don't have objectives on the moon that justify the fabulous expense of doing that. We can send a whole lot of different kinds of robotics capable of doing the vast majority of what any human could do.

    I still see moonmen as an unbelievably expensive exercise without a benefit at the end.

    The cost of that will be charged through NASA, meaning that it WILL reduce the capacity of NASA to work toward objectives that have both scientific and practical value today as well as for the future.

    We need to be doing a better job of determining why specific investments are being made and then using that info to select which missions must be rejected - something NASA does regularly - that would reject a moonmen project today were in not for outside political directives.

    There are SO MANY things that NASA could do with a moonmen sized budget that would produce scientific progress, useful technology and Earthly practical value that a moonmen project just can't claim.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2020
  19. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    You keep saying "moonmen", which is saying nothing at all.

    Let's assume you were smart enough to ask what we should do, since you mentioned getting specific.

    The first step is developing a better way to get into Space. The design goals would be daily launches, increased safety and lower per launch costs.
     
  20. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I have pointed out that the launch vehicle improvements we've seen are FANTASTIC. They have huge immediate use in both industry and science.

    By moonmen I mean shorthand for astronauts doing the specific activity of going to the moon - and all that entails.

    I'm more OK with spacemen, as we can do science on the ISS, for example. That's of near term value. We can point to accomplshments, new possibilities in materials fabrication and other technology, etc. They have a 3d printer that is printing useful parts from raw material lifted from Earth - a technology that is clearly of significant usefulness.

    I would suggest that ISS is progressing on fronts of a number sciences and technologies that are especially important as the cost of Earth launches decreases.

    We've spent $10B and growing to build the James Web telescope - with a huge percent going to the job of trying to assure that it will survive launch while being all rolled up in a tiny nosecone and having the hell shaken out of it during launch. Plus, its size was seriously limited by rocket nose cone size. NONE of those requirements have anything to do with how it will spend its lifetime in space - and those requirements are all avoidable if NASA can succeed at some level of space based assembly.
     
  21. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    Sure. The devil is in the details. Give me a LASER and I will move the sun.
     
  22. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I like that. Amen!

    But, I doubt those are the remaining hard issues of going to the moon with human cargo.
     
  23. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I get your point.

    Bill Nye and others claim we would need 10 or more years between identifying a specific asteroid to move and actually moving it so it would miss Earth - due to design, launch, travel, and actual time to make a diffeerence in trajectory.
     
  24. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    I'm not interested in the current plan to go to the Moon. It's a stunt.

    When we decide to build a station at L5, then the Moon becomes interesting.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2020
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  25. (original)late

    (original)late Banned

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    That's another possibility, but the effective range means developing a platform that can go into the outer reaches of the solar system. Long term reliability is unknown. It would be quite annoying to put a hugely expensive weapon system out by the Belt and have it fail a few years after deployment because the radiation tends to degrade electronics.

    That's not me shooting the idea down, I like it. But the cost could be a problem when this idea is competing against a simpler one like a tractor.
     

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