h a l f b a k e r yYour journey of inspiration and perplexement provides a certain dark frisson.
add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random
news, help, about, links, report a problem
browse anonymously,
or get an account
and write.
register,
|
|
|
Please log in.
Before you can vote, you need to register.
Please log in or create an account.
|
The fissile material is fed into the chamber in wire form
instead of pellets and continuously ignited. This limits the
pulsing problem that would shake a standard Orion
spaceship
apart. There would still be some shaking unless you could
feed the wire in at the speed of light but the pulses
would
be much
shorter.
I'm aware of the utter innocence of this idea. How do you
cool the combustion chamber? How do you feed the
material
into the chamber? How do you sustain a nuclear reaction
where the material explodes at the speed of light and
needs
to be replenished just as fast? How do you get the stuff to
blow up in the first place? Dhunno.
I guess the idea is to look at the possibility of creating a
sustained nuclear burn rather than a series of explosions.
Admittedly a bit like inventing a hovering skateboard
without
wheels and saying: "Let scientists figure out the floating
part." so this is more just wondering if this is something
that's
been looked at or is worth looking at.
The 'Davy Crockett' rifle
http://en.wikipedia...tt_(nuclear_device)
How small? At least this small. [Alterother, Jan 14 2014]
Here's one being tested.
http://www.youtube....watch?v=eiM-RzPHyGs
[doctorremulac3, Jan 14 2014]
Other nuke drive ideas
http://en.wikipedia...ar_pulse_propulsion
[doctorremulac3, Jan 14 2014]
Here's project Orion
http://en.wikipedia...nuclear_propulsion)
[doctorremulac3, Jan 14 2014]
Atom bomb cutaway
http://www.atomicar...sion/Fission9.shtml
[doctorremulac3, Jan 14 2014]
Goodbye to all that
http://grammar.abou...a/goodbyegraves.htm
About 1 paragraph down the description of a canister bomb. Have these, but instead of false teeth have the French load them with heavy atoms. Provide them with tweezers. [bungston, Jan 15 2014]
For [DIYMatt]
Fusion_20Beam
My take on "continuous fusion" propulsion - deuterium-loaded palladium wire + lasers. [neutrinos_shadow, Jan 19 2014]
Fission-fragment rocket
https://en.wikipedi...ion-fragment_rocket
Mentioned in my anno [notexactly, Oct 24 2016]
[link]
|
| |
Orion works because the vaporized bomb (casing,
accessories, fissile products and remaining fissile
material) provide the reaction mass, shoving the
craft forward. It works better in atmosphere,
where the air can do the same. |
|
| |
Your approach doesn't have most of that material,
and doesn't have the explosive force to throw
what little there is against the pusher plate. |
|
| |
There's also the fact that fission doesn't really
burn, as such, you either get a slow output of
heat, a faster output of heat, or a boom. You can
cause the wire to "burn" with a high ouput of heat
by surrounding it with a neutron reflector, but it
doesn't throw off material to provide thrust, and
definitely not directional thrust. |
|
| |
//Your approach doesn't have most of that material// |
|
| |
I'm saying have the same amount of material, just
feed it into the reaction continuously instead of in
chunks and in such a way that it booms, not burns.
The idea of a nuclear drive is that you take your
reaction mass and move it much faster than you can
with a chemical explosion. |
|
| |
I guess the analogy is this: you could have a ship
powered by sticks of dynamite thrown out the back,
or with one continuous reel of primacord fed very
quickly into the explosion. |
|
| |
Could there be a nuclear equivalent? |
|
| |
It would be hard to channel neutrons without having
some sort of gravity affecting field (the availability of
which would negate the need for Orion) |
|
| |
You could use nuclear power for a variety of other
non-pulse techniques -- for instance to power a laser
that is lighting a sail. |
|
| |
There are very few places, other than the HB, where
the phrase "a standard Orion spaceship" can be used
casually. |
|
| |
If you have most of that material, then you are just
as well off using vaporized aluminum as your reaction
mass, and a standard nuclear reactor as your fuel
source. There's no benefit to the boom, and a
significant loss, in that it's less directional. |
|
| |
//There are very few places, other than the HB, where the phrase "a standard Orion spaceship" can be used casually.// |
|
| |
I've just googled "standard Orion spaceship" and apparently the only other place on the web is Ebay.
In 'collectables'. |
|
| |
I have to disagree and agree with [MechE]. Let's just say I have my moments. The big thing about an Orion drive is its ability to exert force on a pusher plate. The pusher plate is usually made of Unobtainium. I don't think that this force on the pusher plate can be attributed in any significant way to the mass of casings/accessories (disagree). Atmosphere I can give, lots of light particles imparting a specific moment. But the main bit is fissile material and to a smaller extent 'unspent' fissile material. I know Orion is touted as a reaction mass vehicle, and so it should be, but....in the conversion of mass to energy one takes into account that mass that was converted to energy, but also that mass (usually a very heavy nucleus accelerated to very high velocities) not converted to energy but delivering a momentum, or at least a specific moment. |
|
| |
Now herein lies the rub, me hearties. Momentum must be conserved, so must mass and so must energy. We mix all of that in a pot, and what we really want is a bang, not a slow fissile (sic: fizzle.) Unfortunately you really need that big bang for Orion to be Orion. Else you have invented a way to power an ion/plasma drive, which is baked. |
|
| |
[Edit: [MechE] alluded to vapourising (x)with the nuclear power, which is similar to this idea] |
|
| |
//I've just googled "standard Orion spaceship" and
apparently the only other place on the web is Ebay.
In 'collectables'.// |
|
| |
Not only that, but somebody seems to have bought
it - it's no longer listed. |
|
| |
The pusher plate is not unobtanium. It's a few
yards of steel, frequently backed up with concrete
or water for neutron absorption. Then the
massive shock absorbers. |
|
| |
The problem with Orion was
political/environmental, not technical feasibility. |
|
| |
As far as what provided the thrust, I quote an
article by Michael Flora |
|
| |
"Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett eliminated
the combustion chamber entirely. Instead, bombs
would be ejected backwards from the vehicle,
followed by solid-propellant disks. The explosions
would vaporize the disks, and the resulting plasma
would impinge upon a pusher plate." |
|
| |
"Taylor adopted Ulam's pusher-plate idea but
instead of the propellant disks he combined
propellant and bomb into a single pulse unit. The
propellant material of choice was plastic, probably
polyethylene." |
|
| |
The accessories are rather definitely a critical part
of the thrust. |
|
| |
[MechE] So you would agree that the big thing is to apply force on the pusher plate? |
|
| |
I do like the idea of a continuous nuclear bomb. |
|
| |
How about this as a configuration: start with two
very long rods of enriched uranium. Each rod is
just narrow enough that it doesn't go critical (ie,
neutrons leak out just faster than they're
produced). |
|
| |
You bring two of these rods together to form a V.
At the tip of the V, the geometry is just good
enough for the thing to go critical. As the rods
vapourize, you feed more in - sort of like welding,
only rather more so. |
|
| |
[Max...] I am not against sustained fission or fusion reactions. You must already know that I am of the firm opinion that a continued fission reaction masquerades as a massive liquid/solid ball of iron at the core of our very Earth. And, of course, there is the sun (fusion). I am not convinced, however, that we could feed fissile material into any V shape, whatever shape, continuous reactor. Just the back pressure will ameliorate the feedstock. It would be like trying to push a granite block up a hill with a rope. |
|
| |
That may well be true. But I'm pretty sure you didn't
mean "ameliorate". |
|
| |
Quite so, I meant Amelia Earhart . |
|
| |
Yes, and the point is that nuclear explosions, by
themselves, don't exert a lot of thrust. |
|
| |
//nuclear explosions, by themselves, don't exert a lot of thrust.// |
|
| |
Yes [MechE] and neither do ion propulsion systems. Lets carve Orion into two distinct uses. Leaving Earth's gravity well, and interstellar propulsion. I am a big fan of its use for both. Detonation of nuclear fissile products aside. This is really the best way to get from A to B when A is on the surface of Earth and B is somewhere else. |
|
| |
However, a slow burn is not it. Sure, you could use the extreme temperatures to ablate some light metal in a particular direction. But, well, well, well. Maybe that is what the good doctor was hinting at. After escaping the heliopause, maybe slow burn orion is good, not seeing it myself... |
|
| |
They also don't have a high specific impulse. There is
nothing a continuous nuclear detonation could do for
a launch vehicle that a ground based laser couldn't do
better. |
|
| |
Absolutely, it seems we are actually on the same side. |
|
| |
I don't see a way to sustain a continuous fission
reaction without using more energy than it will
produce. If we're going to the trouble of inventing
new technologies to produce a nuclear reaction why
not skip fission altogether and make a fusion engine? |
|
| |
However, I disagree with those of you saying that
fission won't provide enough thrust. The orion drive
concepts I'm familiar with utilize Beryllium in the
pusher plates to reflect neutron radiation, which is a
significant part of the reaction, maximizing the
amount of radiation thrust produced. It may not be
as spectacular as a nuclear bomb going off in the
atmosphere but it could still provide more thrust
than current ion/plasma engines for a long period of
time. |
|
| |
This would be fission, not fusion. Basically an atom
bomb stretched out into a thread many miles long
and coiled up for storage aboard the spacecraft. |
|
| |
It might sound like what you'd get if Salvador Dali
were
designing spacecraft but is it possible to
have a long skinny nuclear bomb that you detonate
an inch at a time? Then could you throttle it up and
blow up it up by the foot, yard etc? You're just
slamming two materials together, it seems like you
should be able to do that in linear form. Have one
side be the core of the cable and the other side be
the cladding then compress them together as they
enter your ignition area. |
|
| |
Associated question: how small can you make a
nuclear bomb? Because the core of this idea is
basically having an atom bomb about the size of a
pencil except several miles long. |
|
| |
The device itself? Small enough for one man to carry onto a
battlefield. See <link> for the Davy Crockett, a 'nuclear
rifle' that launched a 76 lb. tactical nuke about three
miles, which, as it turns out, puts the three-man crew
inside the blast radius. |
|
| |
Well, it's not a perfect system. |
|
| |
Only a small fraction of a nuclear explosion is
neutron radiation. Much of it is thermal, and more
is photonic (not even Gamma). Without an
atmosphere for the thermal to push out, only a
very small fraction of the thermal is going to act as
thrust, and only the portion of photonic directed
at the pusher plate would provide energy input.
In order to maximize the thrust from an Orion
nuclear reaction, you need to convert as much as
possible of the energy into kinetic energy
bouncing off the pusher plate. |
|
| |
There's also the issue that I've never heard of an
Orion design with a neutron reflector pusher
plate, probably for the simple reason that it is
such a small fraction of the bomb's energy. |
|
| |
Thanks for the link Alt. Added another one to follow
up. Pretty interesting. |
|
| |
RFK was at that test as a spectator. The device was
launched by remote control, as apparently there were a
lack
of volunteer operators. |
|
| |
// launched a 76 lb. tactical nuke about three miles,
which, as it turns out, puts the three-man crew
inside the blast radius// |
|
| |
Was the word "duck" included in the instructions? |
|
| |
I think your biggest issue is one of criticality. How is your continuous wire achieving criticality out in the open, and not on the reel, inside your spacecraft? |
|
| |
Criticality in modern nuclear weapons is achieved with much less than the "open sphere critical mass" of fuel. To further complicate things, you actually need a "prompt critical mass" to get an explosion, which is much smaller (or larger, depending on how you look at it - you need more neutron flux, put it that way), and impossible to achieve without assembling the reaction mass very very quickly ie via explosives. It is generally achieved by compressing a smaller ammount of fuel to a much higher density, and also assisted by cleverly using neutron reflectors, neutron flux "initiators" ("whizzers") etc and tampers (and some really clever combinations of the above, yes I'm looking at you, Uranium tamper). Think of modern, post - Teller-Ulam weapons design as essentially being "how little (expensive) high grade fissionable material can I get to detonate, in order to initiate a (relatively cheap, and rather scalable) fusion secondary device, to produce massive neutron flux to fast-fission my (cheap) fissionable bomb casing". If a primary could be made that was 1/10 the size of existing, it would still be useful for the above, the energy budget is that sufficient, especially with boosting. |
|
| |
I could imagine bringing two or more long rods together at an apex and achieving a sustained reaction, perhaps inside some special reaction chamber, but a) it would not be explosive but rather energetic at best and b) said rods themselves would be close enough to critical on their own to be a dangerous radiation source. |
|
| |
Unless, of course, you can come up with an ideal Neutron reflector. My "Unobtanium fission rocket" was my take on what you could do if such a material existed, and perhaps a continuous reaction solution. |
|
| |
I'm thinking the you'd make it go critical the same
way you do in an off the shelf nuke. Conventional
chemical explosion. |
|
| |
Have your fissile core, cladding and explosive
wrapped around it doing an implosion thing. |
|
| |
Picture an implosion nuke cutaway. Now just picture
that as a cutaway not of an orb, but of a long wire,
everything being pretty much the same only
different. The different part being how do you keep
the whole thing from blowing up at once. |
|
| |
Again, like I said, this is kind of like the hover
skateboard with the part about how it floats not
quite worked out. |
|
| |
Would this not be more like a standard orion spaceship but with a small star mounted on its behind instead of a bomb? i.e. shiney but not doing very much useful work? |
|
| |
No, there would be a lot of force slamming into the
back of the spaceship propelling it forward. See links. |
|
| |
Ignoring all of my above concerns, if you are
feeding rod into an active nuclear explosion, you
must have: |
|
| |
A) One heck of a study gasketing system. |
|
| |
B) Very sturdy rod, such that back pressure
doesn't shatter or jam it into the feeding
mechanism. |
|
| |
C) A rather complex convoluted neutron barrier
that the rod feeds through, such that you don't
periodically get an exceptionally high neutron
pulse detonating the rod further up. |
|
| |
d) no particular advantage over a discrete device system, but with a multitude of additional complexity, of which a) through c) are probably the easiest to deal with. |
|
| |
//Have your fissile core, cladding and explosive wrapped around it doing an implosion thing// |
|
| |
Um, you do realise there's a hell of a lot more going on in the pit of a detonating nuclear device, than a solid sphere of fissile material with an explosive cladding, right? I thought I hinted at that with my previous anno. |
|
| |
I mean if you're happy with fuel consumption efficiencies at below 5%, sure, get on with it, use a solid. But the technology has moved on a long way from that. |
|
| |
You physically cannot, with conventional explosives, get a solid core of fissile material, to become dense enough, and stay together long enough, to achieve high percentages of fuel consumption. It simply dissasembles itself before enough fuel can be consumed. The problem lies with inertial confinement, and all the trickery and skullduggery needed to hold enough material together, for long enough, under the right conditions, to get adequate burn up, otherwise you just get a fizzle, of one sort or another, approximating a fairly bad sort of dirty bomb (which both of the WWII devices were, essentially). |
|
| |
Modern Teller-Ulam design "thermonuclear" devices are THE most efficient use of both expensive highly fissile fuel (U235 or P239), fusionable fuels (Deuterium, Lithium isoltopes, and traces of Tritium), as well as fissionable secondary fuels (lower grades of Uranium). The design is so neat it almost looks on purpose, as it's basically the "sweet spot" of most if not all of the competing requirements. Project Orion proposed to use efficient, small thermonuclear devices, and it's fuel efficiency would be orders of magnitude above anything you could possibly conceive in a "monolithic" arrangement you're talking about. It just doesn't work that way. |
|
| |
//You physically cannot, with conventional
explosives, get a solid core of fissile material, to
become dense enough, and stay together long
enough, to achieve high percentages of fuel
consumption// |
|
| |
Not sure what you think they use to trigger an atom
bomb but it is conventional explosives. See link. |
|
| |
Anyway the idea is to stretch that cutaway shown in
the last link into a
long pencil shaped cable and feed it out rather than
shooting individual bombs. |
|
| |
But annos starting with "Um," are starting to come in
so that's typically when I lose interest in the idea and
move on. |
|
| |
Nuclear bombs aren't very efficient. |
|
| |
Can't think of anything more efficient than a 5 foot
long device that can blow up an entire city. |
|
| |
Stars run for billions of years on single tank of fuel. That
seems pretty efficient. |
|
| |
Yes, but it's a 3.72218422 × 10^29 gallon tank. |
|
| |
In terms of potential energy in the core to total
energy out, it really is bad, and the sub-optimal
geometry would make it worse. [Custardguts] was
entirely correct. |
|
| |
a 4 foot long device that can blow up an entire city? |
|
| |
Perhaps it's a question of velocity and scale. If two
(or more) very, very long rods of fissile material
approached each other at relativistic velocities,
could an efficient, bomb-like reaction be
sustained? In other words, is this idea impossible
or merely highly improbable? |
|
| |
Sure, you can't push a granite block up a hill with a
rope at ordinary speeds; but if you fire a steel
cable at the block faster than the speed of sound
in steel, the block will be pushed uphill (or, more
likely, disintegrate). |
|
| |
//Not sure what you think they use to trigger an atom bomb but it is conventional explosives. See link// |
|
| |
Did you read my anno? Fat man had a simple core (which still wasn't monolithic, it has a tamper, air gap, and initiator) surrounded by a prodigous ammount of high explosive, and achieved ~20% consumption of it's fuel. A modern device has a much more complex core, and consumes a much higher fraction of its fuel, but additionally, with the use of a fusion secondary element, as well as other refinements, produces orders of magnitude more yield than would result from only having the primary component. |
|
| |
There isn't really any way to implement these features in a "continuous rod" design. |
|
| |
I'm very, very confident there isn't any way to implement the concept you're proposing either, that is a continuous rod core that can be detonated in a controlled fashion, along it's length. You could possibly design an arbitrarily long nuclear device, but it would have to be detonated in one go (and in fact you'd have to do a lot of work on the detonation timing, or rather wiring of the detonators, to get it to go off at all). |
|
| |
There's no advantage to having a "rod" or "wire" nuclear bomb, and in fact, it almost certainly wouldn't work at all. We already have well established designs for somewhat efficient, and certainly reproducible and cost effective, scalable nuclear devices, down to fairly small sizes (although efficiency definitely goes up rapidly with size at the bottom end of the scale). |
|
| |
Anyhow, take a step back. I think you/we are confusing the very different scenarios of continuous and discrete processes. |
|
| |
There's no middle ground between reactors, which operate in effectively static conditions with respect to density and criticality, and bombs, which transiently achieve (and vastly excede) critical conditions in a discrete event. |
|
| |
If, after all, you're talking about in some way sustaining reaction energetic enough to be ejecting fission products out as reaction mass, that you slowly feed fuel into, that for some reason is best fed in as a rod rather than balls or cubes or something, you haven't explained how you would maintain criticality in your reaction chamber (which is why I pointed out my previous idea, which indicated one way to do exactly that, albeit with an imaginary substance). Especially when you're trying to produce maximum thrust, which would only be achieved at maximum chamber pressure and temperature (which points towards the "bomb" rather than the "reactor" design). |
|
| |
I just don't get what this is trying to achieve. |
|
| |
I'll try to keep the Um's to a minimum in the future. |
|
| |
But [custardguts], leaving aside any particular
application, are you ruling out a bomb-like but
sustained reaction as merely unachievable using
any foreseeable technologies and scales, or as
theoretically impossible? What if the rods were
allowed to be arbitrarily long and arbitrarily rapidly
moving (in particular, faster than most of the
particles leaving the reaction, and faster than the
speed of light in the rods)? What if the reaction
were to occur near a black hole or neutron star?
(That's a genuine question; I don't know the
answer.) |
|
| |
Come to think of it, a supernova is basically this idea
scaled up. So I'm leaning towards thinking that the
distinction between bombs and reactors is a
practical, rather than a theoretical, one. |
|
| |
The best way to achieve the goal of this idea is with a
fusion drive. I we're dealing with "impractical with current
technology" devices anyway, why not go for a more
powerful cleaner burning reaction that could be throttled
up and down more easily? Shirley you could feed a "rod" or
continuous stream of lithium deuteride into a combustion
chamber and ignite it with lasers easier than you could
create a continuous explosive fision reaction. |
|
| |
[spider] - I'll gladly concede that point. It's also not what was proposed. |
|
| |
In fact, some sort of exotic reactor could be used to consume the fuel at even practical velocities of feed, especially if there were many fuel rods being used. However, you'll never be able to achieve the two key goals, which is a) burn up as much of the fuel as possible for both weight and cost reasons, and b) achieve maximum thrust by having the exhaust products as hot as possible (unless you use a working fluid, in which case that's well trodden ground). |
|
| |
//The best way to achieve the goal of this idea is
with a fusion drive// |
|
| |
Maybe, but as far as I know we haven't had any
success in laser initiated fusion, at least to the
extent needed to make a useful rocket motor. Not
that this thing is any closer to reality. |
|
| |
Anyway, the idea behind this admittedly chocked-
full-o-flaws design is to address the waste that occurs
when you blow up a bunch of nuclear bombs and just
ride out the shock waves getting forward movement
from the cumulative effect of the blasts. |
|
| |
With teeny tiny continuous nuclear explosions you
could move them much closer to the ship harnessing
that energy much more efficiently and without
shaking your ship apart. So rather than blowing up a
thousand bombs over a few hours you'd blow up ten
million bombs over a few weeks. It's like sailing on a
gentle tropical breeze for a couple of days rather
than just trying to get where you're going by sailing
through a hurricane for an hour. |
|
| |
I will say this, a big reason the Orion concept was
dropped was because we were scared of nuclear
bombs, a legit fear, but I think traveling to planets is
a much better use for these things than annihilating
cities. Whether it's silly 30 mile long nuclear cable
bombs or just nuke pellets being tossed out the back
there's no denying that, right here, right now, there's
no mechanism that's going to give you a greater
specific impulse than a nuke. |
|
| |
Second on the list of ways to get going very fast in
space right now would be an ablative plate being
blasted by orbital lasers but that would take years to
get up to speed. Then you're on a one way trip where
you fly by the Nibblonions and wave because there's
no stopping once you get going. |
|
| |
// you fly by the Nibblonions and wave because
there's no stopping once you get going.// |
|
| |
Oh yes there is. All that's needed is a really long
crumple zone on the front of the ship. It would also
be useful if the Nibblonions could, in advance, paint
a target on a suitable piece of unoccupied land. |
|
| |
And if that doesn't work, you better wave quick
because the chances of them looking up at the
precise second to see you frantically waving are
pretty small. |
|
| |
Space missions shouldn't end up like Benny Hill
sketches. (with artistic license Star Wars style sound
in space doppler effect)
"grreeeaaTIIIINNNNGS FRROOooommm earrrrrth..." |
|
| |
1. Inefficiency - it seems like a benefit of the Orion system partly turns on that inefficiency. Weighty fuel, casings, other assorted bits hurled out the rear as reaction mass. |
|
| |
In my flight of ideas this reminds me of Robert Graves description of the contents of a German canister bomb. Linked! |
|
| |
2. Pulse vs continuous. A truly continuous nuclear explosion is what HG Wells envisioned in his description of the first nuclear war. But you could approach continuous with weak pulses very tightly spaced - bitty baby bombs. Like an internal combustion engine. |
|
| |
I got the "UM!" part but sort of lost you after that. |
|
| |
There was a proposal for a thing called a Bussard ramjet, that is similar to this idea. The ram jet was to scoop up interstellar hydrogen and feed it into a continuous nuclear fusion reaction for thrust. If I recall correctly. |
|
| |
// scoop up interstellar hydrogen // |
|
| |
That's gonna need one hell of an intake manifold. |
|
| |
Even with superscience technology the ship would be
mostly hood scoop. Here come The Judge! |
|
| |
The Bussard Ramjet was a popular scifi idea 20 years ago,
then we learned that the concentration of hydrogen in
interstellar space is actually too low for that to work. |
|
| |
It's not so much the concentration of hydrogen, it's
the difficulty of fusing hydrogen. Most fusion plans
focus on deuterium, which is extremely rare in
interstellar space. |
|
| |
And the fact that we don't actually know how to
generate a magnetic scoop of the size required. |
|
| |
Well, if we are going to get some new space flight
technology, I'm afraid it won't be from NASA. Just
watching one of my favorite shows "Engineering
Disasters" which featured NASA's hilarious foray into
comedy. In this episode, they slammed two probes
into the surface of Mars after deciding the agency
could be streamlined by cutting back on expensive
calculations about when and how long to fire retro
rockets. I'm afraid NASA is the Old Yeller of beloved
government agencies. We all know it's time to put it
down but nobody has the heart. |
|
| |
I disagree, NASA does good development work.
They're also doing decently at directing money to
private launch companies. They are currently
driving research in solar sails and ion engine, and
providing technical assistance in developing
scramjets (which is admittedly more launch than
interplanetary focused). |
|
| |
Your description of why the two probes were lost
are inaccurate. Both problems were quality
control issues, one in checking that the output
from a system was to contract, and one in failing
to correct a known bug. In neither case was it a
cost cutting measure. Considering how many
things have to go right for something like a mars
lander to fail, it's hardly surprising that a couple
have been lost. |
|
| |
One of the key developments in the last decade is
moving NASA away from truck driving and back
into it's role in high end research, development,
and exploration. |
|
| |
Yes, NASA's doing a great job as long as we have
Russians willing to take us to space. And to be fair,
the $125 million Mars orbiter allowed
us to study first hand what happens when you put
metric instructions into a system designed using
inches, feet and miles per hour so I'll guess we'll give
them an A for effort. |
|
| |
Both this and the Mars Polar lander crashed under the
faster/better/cheaper program. Sounds laudable
enough but at some point this stuff should probably
work. |
|
| |
//high end research// I'd like to have tried that when
I was a kid. "Hey, did you mow the lawn?" "No, I'm
doing high end research." The job at hand is
mastering space. That means boots
on the ground someplace other than Earth. If it's
"truck driving" that's required to get us there then
that's the job we should be working on. |
|
| |
NASA's battle cry during the 60s was "First to the
Moon!" Today it should be "Great job, you're all extra
special!" I want something other than excuses for my
tax
dollars. |
|
| |
SpaceX will be handling manned launches before
you
know it, they're already handling cargo. As is
Orbital
Science Corp. |
|
| |
NASA does the research that private enterprise
can't
do. Private enterprise, on the other hand, is
really
good at the faster, better, cheaper thing. |
|
| |
Oh, and as far as that stuff working, yes they
crashed two probes a decade and a half ago. Since
then, they've landed a rover designed for 7 days
which lasted 90, a 90 day mission that lasted 5
years, and a 90 day mission that is still ongoing
just shy of 10 years later. You're getting things for
your money other than excuses. |
|
| |
They've also got ongoing research in what's
needed for sustaining long term deep space
missions, which is the key step to "boots on the
ground". |
|
| |
Well Jeeze Mech, we're in total agreement. I see the
future being totally in the hands of private
organizations. |
|
| |
Hey, nobody loves NASA more than me, I just think
they need the occasional kick in the pants. |
|
| |
Speaking of which, I'm going to the gym to burn off
the last of this holiday weight gain. |
|
| |
And if I'm not back by Sunday, Go Niners! |
|
| |
60 year old arks, read it again! |
|
| |
" Both problems were quality control issues, one in checking that the output from a system was to contract, and one in failing to correct a known bug " |
|
| |
" Mars orbiter allowed us to study first hand what happens when you put metric instructions into a system designed using inches, feet and miles per hour " |
|
| |
Don't forget the Hubble optics error while you're at it. |
|
| |
<obligatory QA guy comment on> Funny how these issues always get called quality control issues...you never hear them referred as engineering screwups. <obligatory QA guy comment off> |
|
| |
That's because the term "quality control issue"
predates the existence of an actual "quality
control person". When use it, we're not saying
that "quality control" screwed up, we're saying
that the quality control procedures failed, allowing
some other issue to make it through to
production. It makes no difference if those
procedures are an actual quality control guy, or
simply design reviews (and I've worked in places
where it's only been the latter). |
|
| |
I think the goal is not to explode because that is
uncontrolled populations of reactions. Obtaining the
generation of vast magnetic and electric fields via
controlled nuclear energy would be a step forward. |
|
| |
Because science learns more and more about the
tiny and becomes more manipulative, super fine
control of particles and even nuclear forces will give
us the motor we need to grow out into the universe. |
|
| |
// I guess the idea is to look at the possibility of creating a
sustained nuclear burn rather than a series of explosions.
// |
|
| |
I think a fission-fragment rocket might be what you want.
[link] |
|
| |