What is Digg?44 Comments
- Unriggable, on 08/18/2008, -0/+25The sad thing is that many of these couldve come so much sooner, if it weren't for such severe budget cuts to NASA.
- dha07030, on 08/18/2008, -1/+11Yeah ***** earth, gravity and the atmosphere are overrated imo.
- Sornos, on 08/19/2008, -0/+9Just imagine the Apollo program was never retired. Or if the original Orion project had funding.
- Sornos, on 08/19/2008, -0/+7It's pretty ***** big considering we shot it up in pieces and built it while it was falling.
- ghidorahnotweak, on 08/18/2008, -0/+6I want my orbital and I want it now.
- 15thPD, on 08/19/2008, -0/+6I think space exploration should be one of our biggest goals, and faster-than-light travel would be the most important of all human inventions. Achieving this could literally lead to a new era in human development. NASA is the last organization that should have their funding cut.
- shutaro, on 08/18/2008, -0/+5Really! Who needs oxygen, anyways?
- BuckNutty, on 08/18/2008, -0/+5Build me the bridge of the Galactica and I'm there.
- ABadPerson, on 08/19/2008, -1/+6The ISS is tiny, please don't call it massive, it is a humble little beginning lets just call it that.
- spectre_25gt, on 08/19/2008, -0/+4+1 for thinking outside the box
- CColtManM, on 08/19/2008, -0/+4Shows like Enterprise (in the first season at least) showed the realistic availablility of metals and materials to build a small ship.
Also, I'll never forget the quote in First Contact, where the black woman from Earth is on the Enterprise and she says, "It took me 2 years of scraping enough metal (the good metal) to build the cockpit of the Pheonix." - tschau, on 08/19/2008, -0/+4A part of me wants to call you crazy.
But it's people like you who have really good ideas sometimes. - tschau, on 08/19/2008, -0/+4It's 191 feet long and 240 feet wide (counting the solar arrays). That's pretty dang big to have launched into space. It's not the science fiction from the movies and books, but those are just that - fiction.
- zooey1234, on 08/19/2008, -1/+4DEXTRE is CANADIAN! I am CANADIAN! I actually worked on the original designs of this (called SSRMS, Space Station Remote Manipulator System) and it nowhere looked near as monstrous as it does now. The original one was based more on the Canadarm but had two end effectors (the Canadarm only has one) that would allow it to "walk" in space. I'm glad to see there has been great technological advances since its inception.
- bosssmiley, on 08/19/2008, -0/+3Smart-ass magnetosphere! Taking it upon itself to protect us from solar radiation, like it's doing us a favour or something...
Deep Space: stark, majestic, deadlier than anything on our jewel of a planet. - MacSuxWindozSux, on 08/19/2008, -0/+3The plans are not in the main computer!
- morepinklemons, on 08/19/2008, -0/+3I find it funny that sci-fi which served as a sort of prediction of the future is turning out more like a rough blueprint for what we want to do with the future.
- smurfsahoy, on 08/19/2008, -0/+2Problem - if it's close enough to the sun to melt all those alloys, why wouldn't it be close enough to melt your attitude thrusters, or any spaceship that gets close enough to retrieve the thing when you're done?
- baseballbear, on 08/19/2008, -0/+2still waiting on the dyson sphere
- Telmarine, on 08/19/2008, -0/+2HOW WILL WE BUILD TEH DEATH STAR?
- 15thPD, on 08/22/2008, -0/+1We would have to reach hundreds of times the speed of light to visit the nearest stars in our galaxy.
- bosssmiley, on 08/19/2008, -0/+2Now *that* starts to convey just what a magnificent piece of work the ISS actually is. It might be the 'first log canoe' of orbitals; but it's still a stunning achievement in and of itself.
- inactive, on 08/19/2008, -1/+3Why not injection mode things in space???
No really. Find an asteroid that is the right size and shape of metal alloys that you need. bundle it all together and send it on an orbit close to the sun, where it all gets smelted together.
At the same time develop some space concrete or plastic or silicone bonding agent, and fabricate a giant mold for the structure you want out of some carbonaceous asteroid.. Add attitude thrusters so you can give the thing a good spin, send it on an intercept orbit.
The two things collide, the smelted alloy is injected into mold and voila, you have just fabricated giant thing in space. Sure you need to add some features, but you can build really intricate molds. - bsl587, on 08/19/2008, -0/+2According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive
The crystals are used to facilitate the matter-antimatter reaction in the warp core which heats the plasma that goes through a warp coils in addition to powering the rest of the ship. Since the Pheonix used a fission reactor to achieve this effect, dilithium was not required.
No, I did not know that before right now. - MacSuxWindozSux, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1How many Meters is that?
- kaosethema, on 08/22/2008, -0/+1according to most sci-fi, we should've been at least as far as Jupiter but we're stuck here.
humans having become lazy teenagers and we refuse to leave the house. - smurfsahoy, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1I was just crunching some numbers, and for an asteroid made or iron that is only 1km in diameter, it doesn't seem possible for the sun to heat it up quickly enough to melt it before it escapes back away from the sun again. If you make it further away, it will take forever to heat up, and thermal radiation will cool it off too quickly (plus construction of your spaceship would take a loooong time), and if you make it closer, it slingshots around too quickly to melt.
I calculated it out with a graph in excel, and no distance from the sun worked out that took less than 10 years of melting time (that's as high as I checked).
It's possible that being inside of the sun itself (a REALLY close pass) would introduce new variables that I didn't account for, like the iron participating in nuclear fusion, perhaps? But that close to the sun, the tidal forces of gravity would probably warp the molten asteroid out of shape anyway, and if fusion really does start to chain react with the iron, it would probably just vaporize the whole thing.
Not to mention, the mass of a 1 km diameter spherical asteroid made of iron is about 4 trillion kilograms. Even if it's only moving a few km/hour faster than the mold, I can't really think of any mold that wouldn't just be completely obliterated by that kind of momentum, if not entirely, than at least all the fine details.
And if you did make a mold big enough to not be ripped apart, then why couldn't you just have used all the resources you used to build the much larger mold to work with the iron asteroid to begin with? - MacSuxWindozSux, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1Maybe when they're painting, or playing with play doh.
- JITerraza, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1If things continue to go like this, we're going to find out pretty soon... :(
- tschau, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1this is from Wikipedia, not the article, but, regarding the ISS...
"At the station's orbital altitude, the gravity from the Earth is 88% of that at sea level. The state of weightlessness is due to the constant free fall of the ISS, which according to the equivalence principle, is indiscernible from being in a state of zero gravity."
that's so amazing to me. - xtothepowerofx, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1they most definitely did not launch it one piece
57.9m X 72.7m for the rest of the world :P - MacSuxWindozSux, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1Only question is where did they mine their Dilithium crystals?
Edit:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Warp_core
They didn't! ... Answered my own question. - inactive, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1Couple of things... And again... all extremely hypothetical... Just throwing it out there for fun. Please don't assault my character because you don't like my idea;)
The tidal forces of the sun would tear liquid metal into a noodle shape. This would be desirable. That would give you the opportunity to isolate the portion of the stream that was slag. It would also limit the amount of material you had to deal with at any one time. It also gives you a chance to See comet Shoemaker Levy 9
Second... The beauty of the parabolic orbit is that it orbits... is the large difference between apogee and perigee. It can cycle more than once.
By my quick calculations, to make a cylinder space habitat pressure tube, 100 meters in diameter and 1 kilometer long with a wall thickness of 1 meter, you would only need an asteroid about 100 meters in diameter. I use those dimensions because those proportions are similar to an off the shelf propane bottle used as a utility torch. I am assuming (...) that has a much higher pressure differential potential than would be needed for a space habitat. Additionally, you get the meter of metal between you and outer space. Again, not doing the math, and assuming a lot... But that is much more shielding than is used on nuclear reactors, so it is going to be a pretty good radiation shield as well.
Finally, as long as you have and can process the investment material in space(mill it to a fine sand like powder), I think you could build the mold on earth as an inflatable structure then use the properties of space to distribute the investment material throughout the mold(cycle air in and out of the inflatable until it is filled).
Obviously there is still lots to work out... and my whole reason to post was just to have fun.
I like your idea to use a 1 kilometer asteroid though, you think way bigger than me!!! - inactive, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1The metal slug doesn't need attitude or impulse thrusters. You just send it on a parabolic orbit around the sun. The mold piece in put in an orbit that never gets that close to sun, and intersects with the trajectory of the molten metal
- IanPR, on 08/19/2008, -0/+1SCV's?!?!?! :D
- Telmarine, on 08/19/2008, -1/+2Wow um, his comment was funny, but your just being an uncreative attention seeking desperate fool.
And I'm dead serious when I'm not using caps. - xtothepowerofx, on 08/19/2008, -0/+0why recycle at home when i can terraform abroad? :)
- inactive, on 08/19/2008, -0/+0no dyson sphere.
- Wildthing, on 08/19/2008, -1/+1She must have hidden the plans in the escape pod.
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: : : : : : :¯’’~~~~~~’’’ : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : | : : : : : : : : : - jaytea90, on 08/19/2008, -3/+1The budget cuts were for a reason. Think, space exploration and construction may not impact beneficially on society in the near future, but improved budgets to schooling, medical communities etc can.
Not that i'm saying that's where the budgets are going....it's probably used to fund the stupid war on terror - CColtManM, on 08/19/2008, -8/+1First, stop insulting yourself by calling yourself a Canadian, who cares, not me.
Second, don't make the capital mistake on the Internet of claiming you did something crazy impressive like work on the original designs of a Space Station module.
I mean, I'm a rocket scientist and worked on the Space Shuttle rockets, but you don't see me bragging.
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