Tag Archives: space

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The space race and the Presidential race

Space-rocket-launch As far as I can tell as an outsider, the space program isn’t a big feature of any of the presidential candidate campaigns at the moment. But that’s not to say there aren’t people who would like it to be – Space.com reports on the space policy geeks who are leveraging the internet to get their questions onto the agenda.

Meanwhile, the game is still afoot in the private sector, with SpaceX reporting a successful firing test of their Falcon 9 multi-engine reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle. A full launch test of the Falcon 9 is tentatively scheduled for later this year. [Image courtesy NASA]

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Sun shield developments may allow man to travel to Mars

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Sunshine provided a relatively realistic depiction of space travelSpace is a dangerous place. All that vacuum that looks like nothing actually contains huge amounts of solar radiation. In an orbit around Earth or a short trip to the Moon, this is not usually a life-threatening problem – although the Apollo 16 astronauts just missed a solar storm that could have killed them. But in the eight months or so it would take an expedition to get to Mars, a few solar wind storms could easily kill any humans on board. The shield is a common solution in science fiction – from the near-magic forcefield of Star Trek/Wars to the realistic mirrored disk seen on the craft in last year’s Sunshine.

Scientists at Oxford University are aiming to create a similar shield. By creating a magnetic field similar to that of the Earth’s, which protects us from radiation, the scientists found they could successfully deflect intense beams of charged particles. The technology has been proven to work and now needs to be energy-efficient enough to be run by a spacecraft with limited resources – such a development could well provide technology useful in increasing the efficiency of more mundane technologies as well.

[via the Guardian, screenshot from ‘Sunshine’ via Moving Pictures ]

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Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo images released

Whatever you may think of Branson, Virgin Galactic, Burt Rutan and space tourism in general, you have to admit that there’s something deliciously skiffy about the look of SpaceShipTwo.

SpaceShipTwo

I don’t care about practicalities when I see images like that – I just want to take a ride on the thing. Like, today. [Image from linked article – click through for a few more, including construction shots.]

[tags]space, tourism, SpaceShipTwo[/tags]
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The monsters at the bottom of black holes!

BlackHole No, it’s not the title of some best-forgotten B-movie, but some high-brow astrophysics that – in all honesty – I can’t say I fully understand. But it’s something to do with quantum physics, entropy and super-massive black holes:

“Although Hawking radiation implies that black holes contain all this disorder, scientists have been puzzled as to where it all comes from. The collapsing stars that turn into black holes do not start out with nearly enough. How does the matter become so scrambled?

Frampton’s team argues that the extra entropy is generated by the random nature of quantum physics. This should sometimes allow a collapsing ball of matter to spontaneously transform into something called a “monster” – an arrangement of matter that has maximum disorder, with particles travelling at high speed in random directions.”

These “monsters” could help explain our way to a quantum theory of gravity, apparently. It’s times like this I wish I’d stuck with science instead of engineering. [Image courtesy NASA]

[tags]space, black holes, monsters, physics[/tags]
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Freakonomics asks – Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost?

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Freakonomics has an excellent quorum of space experts and economists talking about a very interesting question – Is Space Exploration Worth The Cost? There are some interesting points made although all of the participants are in the field of space science, so naturally they all agree it’s a good thing! It would have been nice to have a few dissenting views but even so there are some good quotes here.

G. Scott Hubbard: “We explore space and create important new technologies to advance our economy. It is true that, for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit. Space exploration can also serve as a stimulus for children to enter the fields of science and engineering.”

Keith Cowing: “Right now, all of America’s human space flight programs cost around $7 billion a year. That’s pennies per person per day. In 2006, according to the USDA, Americans spent more than $154 billion on alcohol. We spend around $10 billion a month in Iraq. And so on. Are these things more important than human spaceflight because we spend more money on them? Is space exploration less important?”

John M. Logsdon: “In the longer run, I believe that human exploration is needed to answer two questions. One is: “Are there activities in other places in the solar system of such economic value that they justify high costs in performing them?” The other is: “Can humans living away from Earth obtain at least a major portion of what they need to survive from local resources?” If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then I believe that eventually some number of people in the future will establish permanent settlements away from Earth.”

Personally I agree with Charles Stross that living away from Earth has so many things to overcome that it’s unlikely without huge discoveries but the value of space exploration in our lifetimes may be in asteroid mining – with many new technologies like solar cells rapidly using up some of Earth’s more scarce elements.