Daily science stuff

[Alelou]

Gee, and I was thinking y'all might be excited at the idea of faster engines for space travel.

Trip would be.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

I don't think fast is the right word. Powerful is what counts when you want to haul stuff into space, and you cannot get much more powerful than the current shuttle engines. Well, we could go back and rebuild the old Saturn V engine (the F-1), which is still the most powerful liquid rocket engine ever developed. Alas, in a fit of destructive spirit, that whole production line was scrapped when the Apollo program came to a pre-mature halt.

Sigh! I sometimes envision what the space program would've been like if the had kept using the Saturn rocket...

[Elessar]

"This is a pretty substantial change," said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley, who was on a special panel that looked at the future of spaceflight for the White House. "It is more change than I thought they'd take on."
Crawley said the Bush moon plan was well thought out, but based on existing technologies and underfunded.
"We didn't lose the moon today; we very subtly lost the moon a long time ago when the amount of money disappeared a few years ago," Crawley said.

I agree with this guy. It's possible this is good for the science because I've always said that going back to the moon on glorified Apollo rockets was a big dumb mistake. It's like going back to college and getting another undergraduate degree because you got one 30 years ago and now you forget it all. Screw that, just enter a graduate program from the start. Yes it'll be harder, you'll have a lot of fundamentals to develop in the new area, but why relearn all the basics?

This "new rocket technology" could mean anything. It's probably just a diversion to put off the anger in the space community at the fact that they're basically axing the moon mission... BUT, I am favorable to it if it means the potential for a new era of propulsion research.

[Entilzha]

A great rocket engine is the NK-33 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33. It's the most powerful engine design to my knowledge developed for the USSRs moon program.

[enterprikayak]

Gee, and I was thinking y'all might be excited at the idea of faster engines for space travel. Trip would be.

Well, if Trip jumped off of a bridge, would you?

(Wait, don't answer that.... )


I think this is the Klingons:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010 ... ?list32589

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Re: Going back to the moon. The idea of Project Constellation was not just to glorified repeat of Apollo, but to establish a continuing presence, even if the vehicles looked like Apollo on steroids. Learning to put a manned base there would then help when pushing further outward to Mars and beyond.

Re: The Soviet moon rocket. The problem with that one was that the individual engines were too weak and in order to get the enough thrust they had to have a lot of them on the N1 rocket. That's what caused their failure since it only takes one engine to act up and the whole rocket crashes and burns (which they also did). The Saturn V had only five engines, whereas the N1 had a cluster of 30.

[Entilzha]

The NK-33 engine achieves the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any Earth-launchable rocket engine, whilst achieving a very high specific impulse. NK-33 is by most measures the highest performance rocket engine ever created

I don't think they could have made a bigger version of the engine at the time. In the west they thought this type of engine impossible and never even tried to test any similar design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle_%28rocket%29. The RD-170 is a derivative of the NK-33 technologies and has more thrust than the Apollos F-1 although it has more nozzles. I think they could make a really powerful engine using the NK-33 design and scaling it up using modern manufacturing materials and techniques.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

^ They're welcome to try. I wouldn't mind. The more the merrier. I'm convinced that nothing short of a space race will get us (meaning "in the west") a proper space program.

But why don't the Russians try it? Are they so comfortable with what they have?

[Entilzha]

The Russians don't have the money or the need at the moment and it is a tough design to get right

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Yeah, of course. Pity though, I want a space race!

[enterprikayak]

Re our earlier mentioned tris big brother farm concept, we could alter it so that we get shot off into orbit and see how do space nuts who are from very different physical and subjective background and have never been in space behave together. Yeah, so it would cost a few billion to produce. It would still be fun.

[Entilzha]

That idea has some merit.

[Silverbullet]

Iran just sent a mouse into Space. This is not time for the US to be dropping out of Space. It is getting criowded, India, Japan, Iran who knows what Country will be next. Brazil?

Not bothered by Japan and India but Iran, well they aren't exactly bosum buddlies with the US. Wonder what they will put up after the Mouse?

[Entilzha]

Meteorite yields carbon crystals harder than diamond http://www.physorg.com/news184402061.html

[Entilzha]

National Ignition Facility Achieves Unprecedented 1 Megajoule Laser Shot http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100129121823.htm