Posted on 05/20/2005 8:41:38 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
I'm with you on that, but my program is slightly more ambitious. I could save them more money than they will have in their next 100 budgets.
And I could make them more money than they could ever hope to spend!
The guys at NASA should do more reading at Free Republic.
pimpin' tha Keep, yo?
Well, my plan is modestly ambitious, anyway. What else could you call using electrical energy to not only go into space, but to go all the way to Mars?
"practical application of plasma theory"
How about "Bullet train to Mars"?
Ditto... I don't want to pay for a program for a bunch of Saganites who they think that humans don't belong in space. If they want space for themselves they should pay for it..
can't be a "train"
trains run on fixed rails between static teminals.
:)
yep. if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing for profit.
I can hear it now...
the shrieks, like damned souls in the fires of hell...
when the eco-nazis realise you intend to turn the Valles Marinaris...
into a dam reservoir.
Exactly...
Emphasis more on the bullet than on the train.
A bullet is accelerated, and confined within a barrel for a short time, and then it proceeds ballistically.
My "package delivery" to Mars would have a perhaps relatively lengthy period of acceleration, proceeding up a gradual slope at an incredible pace.
Eventually, it would also proceed ballistically, hopefully all the way to Mars. We need some powerful mathematical analysis, and we have to scale way, way up from our usual ways of thinking.
Would either of you gentlemen like to collect the receipts from the ski slopes on Olympus Mons?
We need to remember that science is exploration . and exploration incorporates science."
Seems they forget about PROFIT, the engine that has driven
exploration since man first looked over the hill for a better cave/woman/spear/pelt/dog or whatever could be traded
to get them.
It would seem also the the lesson of the two MERs is lost
on them as far as the MEL mission goes.
One, you have a back up unit.
Two, if both succeed, you get perhaps FOUR times the return
or better.
Baah, Bill Gates should get off his ass and do it just for
a lark, not to mention the patents.
well, so long as any form of reaction drive is used, there will have to be ballistic segments of flight path.
what are you cooking up?
um. wow. that's a thought.
The plan starts small, as described in the above link. At first, we would content ourselves to deliver water on a contractual basis to the Australian Outback. Presumably, they will know what to do with it.
Then with a little more push, we gain a sub-orbital flight path, and we can provide irrigation to any place on Earth. The loads would be launched as large cylinders of ice, and upon re-entry could be fractured by an internal explosion into fragments small enough to melt completely during their fall through the atmosphere, (friction you know!)
The final stage, launch into interplanetary orbit, may involve some special rigging. A control cabin could be buried deep inside the ice, with a small nuclear engine to either provide steam for steering thrusters, or energy for the crew. This would constitute an interplanetary spacecraft, and so far, would have used no rocket fuel!
The manned section could detach from the rest, which could be allowed to impact on Mars either gently or as a means of waking up the planet's volatiles. The detached manned section could then land like a space shuttle, or prepare for a return trip to Earth, using the steam rocket.
Technical solutions, but what is the problem? The problem lies in the legal domain or has at least one foot in there, not the engineering domain--consider that. One clue is that we already have the technology to do all this, but it is not happening. Why not? Why is nothing being done by private industry--forget about gov't doing any of this.
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