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A blog-carnival exposing anti-space silliness for ridicule and scorn, and otherwise showcasing funny space- and science-related news items.
A new twist on the nuclear thermal rocket: forget the uranium, use antimatter:
When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.
Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy…
Positrons are directed from the storage unit to the attenuating matrix, where they interact with the material and release heat. Liquid hydrogen (H2) circulates through the attenuating matrix and picks up the heat. The hydrogen then flows to the nozzle exit (bell-shaped area in yellow and blue), where it expands into space, producing thrust.
Not quite as sexy as the science fiction versions (which, it has to be admitted, are typically a bit sketchy on the details), but whatever works.
Such an engine would be safer for the astronauts and for the environment for several reasons: it would reduce the travel time to Mars, increasing safety for the crew by reducing their exposure to cosmic rays; the reactor would not be radioactive after its fuel is used; and there should be no risk for the public even if the reactor exploded during its launch because “gamma rays would be gone in an instant.”
Uh-huh…as would a good chunk of the spaceport. I don’t want to sound like the Atomic Fearmonger here, but I suspect that being “gone in an instant” would be small comfort to the living things that shower of gamma rays passed through along the way.
(And speaking of Bruce, who I haven’t lampooned much lately, how can someone read the accounts of the recent protests in France against reforms to unsustainable employment regulations aimed at reducing youth unemployment and get the story so completely wrong? I guess the facts don’t matter when you see the world through Marx-colored glasses.)
This is an interesting bit of technological development, but it’s hard to see how it could ever be practical over any distance with a noticeable communications time lag. Still, if you have low-lag communications between far-flung settlements on the Moon or Mars, it may be one way to better utilize diffusely-distributed medical resources.
[via aaron_j]
It seems to have passed unnoticed, but yesterday was the 27th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s proudest moment:
In 1979 the Swamp Rabbit enjoyed a brief stint of notoriety when one of its number had a close encounter with Jimmy Carter. In April of that year, as President Carter was fishing on a small pond on his farm, a visibly agitated Swamp Rabbit approached his boat and tried to board. Carter, used a paddle to splash water at the rabbit in order to dissuade it from swimming towards the boat. The press dubbed this the “Killer Rabbit.” The incident was captured photographically, and the image is in the public domain courtesy of The Jimmy Carter Library.
Weird as that is, this is Luddite Pillory material.
More emerging technology with application to space settlement: Plant Extracts Arsenic from Polluted Soil
The technique of using plants to clean up polluted soil in order to make poisons less harmful is called “phytoremediation,” and has proven viable for removing arsenic. But arsenic collected from the soil is stored in the plant root, which makes safe harvesting and disposal a challenge.
Meagher and his team genetically modified Arabidopsis, a small member of the mustard family, to be arsenic-resistant and to move the arsenic collected in its root up to its shoots. The new method is much more efficient, too, soaking up 16 times more arsenic than normal Arabidopsis plants.
“We want a 35- to 50-fold increase in these plants’ ability to sequester arsenic, and now that we understand the mechanism, we believe that is possible,” Meagher said.
Imagine what further development of this technology will be able to do for settlements on the Moon and Mars, where useful elements may be too diffuse to mine economically by conventional techniques, and where adapting conventional mining techniques to such radically different environments may itself be impractical. This technology would be especially useful in the early years of settlement, as it would employ similar infrastructure to that required for agriculture (or for human occupation, for that matter) rather than the high-energy conventional extraction methods and the complex, integrated industrial base which supports them.
On the other hand, just because the plants concentrate a particular element in their leaves or stems doesn’t mean that you get off this easy. Some processing of the biomass would still be required, and that is likely to be energy intensive.
Of course, phytoremediating bacteria would probably be a better choice for industrial-scale extraction — they could be used in a continuous/bulk process (rather than in discrete growing cycles), and would probably allow a greater efficiency in terms of equipment, energy, and space used.
Too busy with work on the house, and again, not a whole lot of material this week aside from a rant from Elaine re: the Stick.
ADDENDUM: I should point out that Elaine’s rant is based on Jeff Bell’s op-ed based on the now-retracted NASA Space Flight article.
A blog-carnival exposing anti-space silliness for ridicule and scorn, and otherwise showcasing funny space- and science-related news items.
- Checking in on Mr. Lasker.
- Wonder whatever happened to John Carter McKnight? Wonder no more.
- I smell a meme being circulated. I’m guessing that they either don’t understand that short half-life = more radioactive, or they do know and are manipulatively repeating the mantra without context, counting on the general public’s lack of knowledge regarding things nuclear to make DU sound scaaaaary as a result. It’s the usual conundrum with “peace activists”: are they stupid, are they cynically dishonest…or both?
Rumblings on the moon could be problematic for lunar base
Neal and other scientists aren’t exactly sure what causes the shallow moonquakes, although they suspect that the rims of large and relatively young moon craters may slump and cause them.
They also aren’t sure precisely where the quakes are occurring.
“The Apollo seismometers were all in one relatively small region on the front side of the moon, so we can’t pinpoint the exact location of these shallow quakes,” Neal said.
This would be an excellent way for NASA to encourage the development of a private space industry, through a prize system for seismic data from the lunar surface.
Imagine entrepreneurs, developing and mass-producing small seismic stations that could be packaged in large numbers for launch and transit and withstand a semi-soft landing, and then scattering them at sites of interest across the lunar surface — akin to the Mars Netlander project, only with potentially dozens of mini-landers rather than four.
SpaceX says human error doomed rocket
Musk said the mistake was made by “one of our most experienced pad technicians” but declined to provide further details on the error, saying he did not want to get ahead of an ongoing launch failure investigation SpaceX is conducting with the Pentagon, its customer for the mission.
Sources familiar with the investigation said the pad technician had been working on the rocket?s avionics the night before launch and failed to tighten a tiny fuel pipe fitting that had been loosened in order to perform the avionics work.
Interestingly, this Space.com/MSNBC article reports that the Pentagon was “not fazed” by the failure of Falcon 1’s maiden flight. Over at WSJ.com, the story was a bit different (sorry, no link since I read it in the company clip file, but it was probably from Tuesday or Wednesday):
Mr. Musk, the company’s founder and chairman, said he already has spent about $100 million of his own money, and if necessary, is prepared to double that investment by early 2008. But relations between SpaceX and the Air Force, which had been an early supporter of the Falcon effort, have soured. Mr. Musk complained Tuesday that the Air Force’s leadership has become overly cautious when it comes to new rocket technology, saying “the dial may have shifted a little too much to [being] risk-averse.” Without elaborating, Mr. Musk also said some in the Pentagon have a tendency to “cut and run if things don’t go 100%” right when it comes to cutting-edge technology development. Even before the latest difficulties, Air Force support for Mr. Musk’s rocket seemed to be waning. On Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel said, “We certainly are going to look for some success” before considering stepped-up funding for such small rockets.
Here are the initial scans of the nine KSC-related images from my grandparents’ visit to Florida, circa 1965. I’m trying out some cleaning techniques at the moment, so I may end up updating this post with better-quality images at some point.
I’ve taken a crack at identifying what each image shows, but it’s hard to find good reference pictures from that period to compare to, and looking at map of the LCs offers some assistance but not enough — feel free to offer additions or corrections in the comments.
Continue reading KSC, Circa 1965
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