Posted on 10/08/2009 3:02:57 AM PDT by Dallas59
Cool
To Mars and back in 78 days, neat.
Too bad Mars does not have much atmosphere. It’s kind of wasteful to have to spend half the voyage braking if there were some other way to achieve the deceleration needed at the end.
The very high speed could spell trouble for the craft if encountering a bit of asteroid or comet dust. I’d want to send the first few to Mars unmanned to make sure it could be safely done.
Yes too bad that NASA has determined that Mars consists of rocks and dirt. You would think that looking at rocks and dirt could be accomplished by going to any number of places on this planet, and yet taxpayer money keeps getting squandered on sending stuff to mars.
Here’s another thing to chew over.
Suppose one of these gets built. Now we have a guided, ultra high speed interplanetary missile, weighing a ton or so, which... could quite well be steered in a U-turn and back onto any site on earth after having achieved some ungodly velocity. Tunguska wherever you want it! Now some of these craft get into the hands of the bad guys. Book of Revelation disasters anybody???
Sounds like another reason for the Anglophone nations to get the high ground first.
Using a Space Hammer could quite possibly be a global suicide scenario because of all the debris it would kick into the atmosphere.
There was a thread yesterday on HAARP which mentioned plasma, magnetic fields and charged ions..........Wonder if there's a connection between the two?
In that test, a large directional antenna emitting a very high power beam of microwaves into the sky excited a humanly visible aurora-like display in the upper atmosphere.
Somehow I don’t think we’re going to beat St Helens on the debris/atmosphere front.
This theory was tested on the big centrifuge at Johnsville PA in the late 1950s. Dr. Clark a researcher there believed man could reach Mars in 46 hours if he were under constant acceleration for half the trip and deceleration for half. This would subject an astronaut to 2 Gs for the entire trip. Dr. Clark brought his recliner in from home and rode the machine for 24 straight hours and proved it could be tolerated. By the way the building is now under conversion to a museum. If anyone should want to see the monster machine they can check the website www.nadcmuseum.org for details.
...of course, it’ll shred a human body to bits moving that fast, but we’re working the bugs out...
There is a pretty lengthy list of planetary probes that never made it to Mars.
A cursory look shows that the Rooskies had a lot of computer chip problems.
The US lost it’s share of probes after the initial Mariner mission. It was getting pretty spooky.
The Earth gets hit with about 400 tons of meteors/day. The space rocks we drop on our enemies don’t have to be megaton range. A guided reentry vehicle with 50 tons of rock would wipe out an underground Iranian nuke facility with minimal damage on the surface.
Dropping a few rocks on the bad guys will not cause “nuclear winter”.
That’s not the same as 400 1-ton meteors!
So you read that Niven book, too?
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