plutherus

OK, this is very awesome: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/04/24/asteroid_mining_a_company_plans_to_mine_asteroids_for_gold_silver_and_water.html

And this isn't done by mere idle dreamers. Every one of the people involved (James Cameron, Larry Page, etc.) are people who have a history of accomplishment.

There are, of course, the nay-sayers:
The article points out that:

...the plans rely on new technologies not yet invented and appear prohibitively expensive.


Kennedy said the exact same thing about the original moon launch in his Rice Stadium speech. Only, he said it as a reason to go. History has proven him right: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/apollo.htm

Also,

The AP notes that a NASA mission to return just 2 ounces of asteroid material will cost $1 billion.


Which is frankly a stupid way to put it. It's true, it can cost a billion dollars to get two ounces of material. That number doesn't scale, though. It would also cost about a billion dollars to get two pounds or twenty pounds of the same material. When you get into larger numbers, it will cost more. 20 tons of uranium might cost a billion and a half to get back to earth.

To say nothing of all the advances that would come just from the attempt, even if they fail the first few times to find anything worth bringing back at all.

Did I mention how many new technologies came about because of Apollo alone?

This is, really, the kind of mission that our government should be funding.

I'm rather glad that private industry is doing it without them, though. (Not entirely without, obviously, as NASA did the research and laid much of the foundation for the technologies that these guys'll be using.)

And, as for mining asteroids, I think I've mentioned before how I feel about that:

Some time ago, I asked for some help on some calculations (http://plutherus.livejournal.com/255206.html). I was trying to figure out how interstellar travel times, assuming a constant acceleration of 9.8m/s^2 (i.e., 1G, i.e., all those aboard the space ship will experience Earth-normal gravity throughout the trip.)

I recently revisited this calculation, after the discovery of Gliese 581g, 20 light-years away. I had no better luck doing the calculation this time. (It has occurred to me that in the intervening 7 years, I could have learned enough calculus to make the calculation easy.)

Fortunately, someone else had the same question - physicist Dave Goldberg. Apparently, he did the calculations for Alpha Centauri in his book, A User's Guide to the Universe, and has recently re-done them for Gliese 581.

More details are at his blog. He still doesn't show his work, there, though. I've added his book to my Amazon queue, so I'll eventually see if it's in there. His conclusions, though, are similar to my own:
To get to Gliese 581, while accelerating at a nice comfortable 9.8m/s^2, would take roughly 6.1 years from the traveler's perspective, or 22.4 years from Earth's. (That is, they will get the signal saying the travelers have arrived safely about 42.4 years after they leave.)

A couple of assumptions he makes, though, that I disagree with:

First, he writes:

Even if you have [an anti-matter drive system], you still need to lug all of that fuel around. It turns out that:

* To do the trip above requires (at least) 530 times as much mass in fuel as in the ship and cargo itself.

Right, but why would you lug all that fuel around? Leave it here, and use it to power, say, a giant laser, which could push an interstellar craft along using a solar sail. Also, Goldberg writes that:

The whole trip would require something like:

* E=1.8\times 10^{25}Joules

Or approximately 5% of the sun’s energy output in a second. That sounds reasonable, until you realize that that tiny amount would take approximately:

* 3 million years to collect on earth if the entire surface were covered with solar panels

But, of course, there's no reason to collect the energy on Earth. By the time we've gotten to the point where we're seriously considering an interstellar manned flight, we should be able to build a giant particle accelerator and anti-matter factory orbiting the Sun, somewhere inside the orbit of Mercury, perhaps, where solar cells, plus the gravity of the Sun itself, should make things much more efficient.

EDIT: Turns out he did show the actual math used, in a later post: http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=1249

I'm sitting here eating leftover stir-fry and watching Stargate on TV. Just another fabulous night in the exciting life of the swinging bachelor.

And, since it's Valentine's Day, I will share my love with you. (because, you know, I'm into that sort of thing).

Yes, now it's time for:
( Science and Speculations! )

As many who read my blog might have noticed, I favor it.

I'm glad that the bush cabal is going to try to cash in on this new wave of excitement over the recent Mars landers. It beats the hell out of their usual cashing in on people's fears and prejudices instead. I'd like it even more if they could have come up with a better reason to support it than the fear of the Chinese doing it instead. But, whatever works. That's right, Mr. Bush - if we don't have a manned Mars program soon, we'll wake up one night to see: Red Mars!

But I digress.

As much as I would like NASA to do more, I do applaud what they are able to do on the relative shoestring budget they are given. The Mars landers are great tools doing real science, and will help gather the information we're going to need if we ever send people up there. I look forward to next week when the rover starts...um...roving.

But I still want more manned space exploration. And not just this, "let's go up to low earth orbit and study the effects of microgravity on...um....how about spiders this week."
Last year we "celebrated" the 30th anniversary of the last man on the moon. Thirty years since Apollo died. Think about it. In just over 60 years, we went from the Wright Brothers' to the Moon Landing. There are people who lived to see mankind leave the surface of the planet for the first time, and go on to land on the moon. And then, just a few years later, we retreated back to low Earth orbit, and have stayed there for three decades.

This isn't NASA's fault. NASA is doing an incredible job on what budget they have. We have the money, we have the technology. Like many things, the only thing lacking is the will. It doesn't cost that much compared to other things we spend money on. For the cost of a single stealth bomber, we could land another man on the moon. If we stopped the Iraq occupation now, withdrew our troops and turned the whole mess over to the UN, and spend all that money on space instead we could be launching the beginning of our Mars colony from our permanent moon base inside of two years.
Hell, if we just confiscated all the money that Kenneth Lay and Dick Cheney have stolen from the American people, we could give it to Buzz Aldrin and he could build his space hotel inside of a decade.

Anyway, the general public's lack of will towards grand endeavors, as opposed to merely killing people to persuade ourselves that god likes us best, put me in mind of this song by Mary Creasey:
( Warning: Filk lyrics ahead. Click at your own risk )

But there is, of course, still hope. As Al Gore pointed out shortly after the 2000 election, when Bush started pushing his anti-science agendas:
"We don't have to worry about science in general. As the United States falls behind in various fields, other countries will pick up the slack."

We'll see if the forthcoming announcement actually amounts to anything real (I tend to suspect he's just gonna push SDI again, or create a project that looks good at first glance but gets no funding, like his Africa AIDS initiative). And, if it doesn't, I guess it doesn't really matter, because China, India, and Europe will still be going, even if the US isn't....

Cosmos I - take 2: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&ncid=96&e=1&u=/space/20030806/sc_space/ridingthesunmaidenflightloomsforsolarsailsatellite

The Planetary Society is launching a satellite which is propelled by a solar sail. A slow, but exceedingly cheap way of moving around in space.

The coolest thing about this is that it's a purely civilian group doing this, developing the technology with no government money, and launching it using an old submarine-launched ICBM that Russia is launching for them...

More detail and better hype can be found here.

The following are some of the people who have lost their lives in the service of mankind, to bring us into space:

( Read more... )

"Man must rise above the Earth - to the top of the atmosphere and beyond - for only
thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives."
Socrates 500 B.C.

Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

I'm sitting here in my bathrobe at the computer, behind this window the TV is showing commentary on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
It was lost this morning with all hands. It apparently broke apart and disintegrated on re-entry.

I don't even know what to say. I was barely holding back tears, then I gave up. This just sucks. I mean, really, really, really sucks. I'm sorry for all those astronauts, and they're families and friends. But also for the space program itself.

I was in my bathrobe when I first heard about the Challenger disaster in my sophompore year in college. I had just gotten out of the shower, and was walking back towards my room on the third floor of the dorm at UOP. A girl who lived down the hall from me came out of her room, looking stunned. Looked up at me and just said "it blew up" then went back into her room. I didn't know what she was talking about until I turned on the TV and understood.

The challenger disaster. The World Trade Center. The Columbia. These are events that I will always remember where I was when I first heard about them.

They're talking about evacuating the space station (they may have to ground the shuttle fleet for a while. If they do, they can't resupply it).

I have several friends coming over for a D&D game in a few hours. I don't feel like playing D&D today. I feel like curling up into a ball on my living room floor and crying.