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I didn't get to say everything in the last rant on space, so here is the rest of it. The first part of the rant was about colonization. This part is about technology. Let me first talk about the space shuttles. The space shuttles are 30 years old. There were originally four of them, Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, and Discovery. The prototype for these four was the Enterprise, named from the show(if I need to say which show, you should not be able to understand this rant so please go to www.hamsterdance.com). When the Challenger exploded 1986, Endeavour was commmisioned. When Columbia exploded earlier this year, each orbiter had more than 30 launches, even Endeavour, the newer one. They were designed with 100 launches as a goal before being replaced. Which means that they could go for another 60 years according to the people who made them. When they were put into service, we got rid of our heavy-lift capabilities. The shuttles were meant to 'shuttle' people and supplies to and from space stations. But up until a few years ago, we didn't have a space station to shuttle anything to. So what had we been doing the last 25 years with these orbiters. As far as I can tell, didily squat. We have been doing 'experiments' that can only be done in space. Sure ;-). I would think you would run out of excuses that you aren't doing anything after 25 years, but the public keeps lapping up the fact that they are doing 'experiments'. We need new technology. We need the Saturn V of today. The Saturn V was the biggest lifting rocket the United States ever had. It was enough to propel 3 All-American-Air-Force-drop-outs to the moon in 3 days. It was considered to have heavy-lift cababilities. I don't think many of us have computers that are 30 years old, so why should we think that something exponetially more complex should be keep around for even longer. What we need is ion drives for long range space ships. Before you start saying 'Ion drives? That sounds like science fiction to me.' let me explain. An ion drive is is a engine that shoots one arom at a time out the back of the machine. This gives you a very tiny amount of thrust but over time that can build up over time. If you coupled this with a conventional chemical rocket just to get going out of a gravity well, you could easily reach a tremendous speed given enough distance. The only problem is stopping. If you are going at great speed, you need either a long distance to stop, or something that can cancel out g-force on a body. Or you can try to use a planets gravity to stop you. We have all heard about sling-shoting around a planet to gain momentum, you can do the same thing to stop. You just burn your engines at a different point on the trajectory. So we need to have new technology to do anything reasonable mentioned in the last rant. |
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