Gingrich pledges moon colony during presidency

Moon colony, good!

I will definitely retreat to the moon.

I am so completely fed up with this planet, I will deal with moons only, in the future.

I WILL vote for Gingrich now (as a result). The science/engineering jobs this will create alone will be enough to bring back the US and a few others from total deindustrialization. And, this is even more interesting than Roosewelt's industry projects to handle that recession.

This is good. (But .. this is too bad that this is only an election campaign sound bite.)

Some benefits: from the moon, we can launch a few space crafts 100 times cheaper than from earth, to collect the Gold-rich asteroids, one of them containing 100 times the Gold that was ever mined on earth. Financially, the Moon project is well worth it. Then, the moon minerals are rich in rare isotopes too, so the Moon can be the new energy source for Earth's "civilizations".

Side note: can we write a movie for the SciFi channel where wild-west style punks use today's private rocket technology (or just a notch more advanced) to race in an asteroid-belt gold rush, shooting at each other, like in the wild west movies?

 

I still get my notification and first place seat on the Enterprise right??

He's got good ideas here. I'm all for a moon base actually. Can't live in the past forever.

 

Space escapism is an intentional waste of money. Practical development of Nature will spread prosperity and take away the advantage of the ruling classes.

Antarctica is the most outrageous example of pseudo-environmentalist hoarding of wealth. And it was declared a Forbidden Zone back in 1959, which shows how long this scheme of forced scarcity to put the majority in its place has been going on. Nature is a pretty sight only to those who are sitting pretty.

 

I like Atomic Rocket website.

But it isn't the last word on Faster Than Light travel.

The theoretical basis for faster than light drive has already been established. Read the work of Miguel Accubierre and others.

 

The theoretical basis isn't the problem. The practicality is. There is just no way to generate the energy output needed to reach FTL speeds with a reaction drive.

 

Who said anything about reaction drives?

They are not the last word in power sources.

 

Exactly what reactionless drives do you know of that aren't 100% science fiction?

 

assemble it in obit. the only limit to it's size would be the will to build it

 

Assembling it in orbit is a given. It doesn't matter. If you build it big, then it will need more reaction mass, which means less space for mission payloads.

Size really doesn't matter in spacecraft. Weight does.

 

I was referring to power sources for an FTL drive.

Antimatter generally being preferred.

 

I agree. If I have to live on the moon to get away from all the crazy people on earth so be it. Traveling to the new world wasn't exactly a picnic but it was still better than staying with all the crazies in Europe... oh and I know how crazy what I just said would sound to the majority of people

 

Even if you fired anti-matter out of your ship as a rocket (aka a "Bussard Ramjet") you still wouldn't break the speed of light.

Breaking FTL would require either a reactionless drive (which means that you don't need to have reaction mass, but are entirely fictional) or some kind of exotic super-theoretical travel like quantum entanglement or some way to convert all of the matter in the craft into a wave and then reconstitute it.

 

weight doesn't exist in space, it's mass that matters. that mass can later be used as fuel. reaction engines don't care what gets thrown out the ass end, only that it does.

 

Seriously? Seriously?

You are going to argue that anything can be used as fuel?

 

Once again, we are not talking about using antimatter as a reaction mass but using matter-antimatter reactions to power what you call a "reactionless drive".

And as I pointed out, the theoretical underpinings of faster than light space drives that operated by contracting and expanding space around the spacecraft has already been done.

It might take a couple of hundred years to iron out, but the end result is probably inevitable that eventually the technology will exist to reshape space time in a way that effectively allows vehicles to move faster than the current speed of light.

 

He is right.

In terms of reaction mass (what you throw out the back of a spacecraft to push it along) anything can be reaction mass.

A flashlight put outside of the shuttle is pushing photons out and that is its reaction mass.

As one engineer pointed out out

"reaction mass could consist of a monkey sitting on the hull of a spacecraft throwing rocks".

 

there's a plan out there for redirecting asteroids that uses the asteroid as the ejected mass.

 

I wouldn't mind a colony on the moon. In fact, I think it would be pretty cool. I WOULD mind Gingrich being in charge of anything other than a cell.

 

Okay, sure. And Communism could work if everyone was perfectly altruistic.

In practical reality, (you know, the one we live in) engines require specific fuels to work.

 

At the speed of a coasting asteroid, it would take you tens of thousands of years (maybe even hundreds of thousands) to reach an Earth-like planet.

 

Reactionless drives are nothing but science fiction. They don't actually exist. There are as many theoretic models that dispute folding space as there are one's that support it.

Like I said, there are ways to move at FTL speeds, but unless we figure out a way to convert a human into energy and then convert them back, they won't work.

 

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulP1UB5PIN0"]Hexagon Lifter - Electrogravitic Propulsion - YouTube[/ame]

 

You've obviously read nothing about the work of Miguel Accubierrie.

If you can distort space around a spacecraft so that space contracts in the direction of travel and expands in the area behind it, then the area between does not move faster than light but the spacecraft nevertheless moves faster than the speed of light.

There is no need at all to convert matter into energy in the form of a spacecraft and crew and what not.

 

deflecting an asteroid from earth doesn't require relocating it to another system. you just have to nudge it.. the quicker you get to it, the less you have to nudge.

 

There's no solid proof that you can fold space. There are lots of physicists out there that dispute the idea.