Are we just going to sit here.
Fellow humans, With all this brain power we got here, We must be able to find some way to get the big break.
like warp drive or who says it have to be a engine,
Why not just stop the crafts and let the galaxy spin alittle.
a planet would be able to rise over the 30.000km/s problem. right
Well, the problem is, when the galaxy spins, everything in the galaxy goes with it. 
So, if you want “not spin” with the galaxy, you still need to produce enough energy.
There is some interesting stuff on this topic at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website’s science section. It covers four pages, so make sure you click the links at the bottom of the page to continue.
Well, if we’re talking about nothing more than a probe, we could build a huge rocket type vehicle in space. Say, 10 times the size of a saturn 5. Launch it in the direction of Alpha Centauri and have it steadily accelerate until the reaction mass is gone. Problem one. The probe would be going so fast by the time that it got to the AC system that there would be a very minimal amount of time in which to observe anything. Problem two. How do we ensure that a brope of ANY type would survive the impants of micro meteroites that would be inevitable on any interstellar voyage? Problem three. Say that we DO get the probe there. How are we going to ensure that any information that the probe may have would be transmitted back to the solar system?
I’ve read (and of course, can’t recall where) that with enough reaction mass to expend, we could reach every planet in the solar system within a reasonable amount of time. Problem is, once you use reactionj mass, it’s GONE.
Now then…if you’re talking about a MANNED expedition to AC, then we open up a whole different box. I’m gonna steal this idea from Larry Niven because it just might be feasible…
First, we somehow grab hold of a good sized asteroid primarily composed of nickel-iron. Then, we start it spinning at a controllable speed. Then you drill a hole along the axis, stuff the thing with barrels of water, and plug the holes. Then, we use a solar mirror (nothing more than a weather ballon, blown up in space, injected with a stiffening glue, cut in half and then mirrored on the inside), to heat the outside of the asteroid. Over time, the asteroid will heat up and as the heat migrates to the interior, the barrels of water will heat and eventually explode. By this time, the outer portions of the asteroid would be molten and this would cause the thing to expand like a ballon.
Now, all you have to do is bring in soil and more water and voila! Instant space habitat. It could also be retrofitted with some type of mass accelerator in order to move it around.
My fingers hurt from typing all this stuff so I’ll leave it to the big brains around here to describe how this could be used as a bridge-gap to a true interstellar exploration vehicle.
Xploder, you’ve just described a ‘generation ship’, where the first people on don’t expect to get to the destination in their lifetime, but hope their descendants get there eventually. Niven’s idea calls for a planet turned ‘inside-out’, so the rotation acts like gravity and the living space is protected by a few (hundred) miles of metal/rock wall/floor. It would go slow, have its own ecosystem, and essentially be a colonization, rather than exploration, vehicle. After all, the people who make it to the distant planet have no memory of Earth, only knowing the inside of their generation ship and (hopefully) learning about the mission from history lessons. I liken them to seeds, carrying bits of Earth to habitable worlds, hoping to start a new civilization there.
As for overcoming C (the speed of light in a vacuum, also known as Einstein’s Constant): Well, doing it by acceleration has pretty much been ruled out by experiments with massive subatomic particles (like protons and electrons). Some hope lies in ‘bending’ space, creating an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a.k.a. a wormhole. Of course, that would require some pretty exotic circumstances (some theories on their construction call for materials with negative mass), but I’m an optimist: I think we’ll be using them to transport things before 5000 CE (CE=Common Era, the current year being 2001 CE). Of course, we’re staring into the singularity when we talk of times that far into the future.
I’m well aware of the Generation Ship concept which was actually well covered by Robert A. Heinlein. What i meant to convey was more along the lines of a ‘bridge’ in the sense that this would be something that would contribute to the first real interstellar voyage. Without this type of bridge, which would teach us just what problems to avoid, I don’t really see any type of long-term space voyage succeeding. There’s just too many things that could go wrong. Also, without the knowledge on how to go about manufacturing things in zero gravity, which could only be learned in space around here, you will end up dooming any prospective space voyage before it even begins.
Sorry if I sound like a preacher here…I am an extreme space fanatic and still can’t figure out why we went to the moon and then just stopped :mad:
Think about the possibilities of homes in orbit for people with heart problems! With no gravity, the stress on ht einternal organs would be that much less. Even if there’s a strong possibility of calcium loss due to no gravity, I don’t really think that the people that have been given a new lease on life would be overly concerned with it.
My point is, that if we send out ships without learning of at least some of the possible problems, we’d end up learning about them by making a mistake and losing a whole ship filled with irreplaceable personnel.
As far as gneration ships go, we’d have to have something more along the lines of an asteroid that was not hollowed out, but was instead, honeycombed with passageways and chambers in order to support the large population that would be needed to prevent genetic drift.
Take it as an object lesson, Xploder. If you leave it to others to fill in the blanks, it will go in a different direction than you intended.
I agree with practicing in our own backyard, and I wish we did it more often. Space, even the local variety within the Sun’s radius of influence, holds valuble possibilites, and we are seriously under-utilizing them.
But you have to realize a few things: The moonshots were a publicity stunt and a desperate bid to beat the Soviets in a propaganda game. Once we’d been there a few times, funding dried up and all those rosy predictions (moon cities by 1980 is one that springs to mind) were relegated to the ‘never gonna happen’ bin. The Mars Pathfinder, with the JPL and the Better, Faster, Cheaper philosophy, was hopefully the opening success that will get the ball rolling for private-sector space exploration beyond the rather limited automated satellites in use now. It will take time. It will take money. It will be a gamble. Corporations don’t like any of that. I hope for space-based economies and humans living off Earth fervently, but if nobody can see anything but costs for the short term, it won’t happen.
Unfortunately, I know the poloticians and corporations are always looking after the bottom line, so of course we won’t be doing anything important unless SOMEBODY makes money somewhere along the line. Which truly DOES suck though. We have the technology NOW to get out there and start to learn what it reallt takes to survive and flourish in space and what do we do? This bastardized version of a space station…
We could charge people for quick flights into space on the shuttle by filling the cargo space with seats like an airliner. The government could realize a HUGE amount of money this way. If, of course, you kept the tax people out of the equation. For that matter, declare a moratorium on ALL taxes for ANY direct space research.Make it valid for ten years and see what happens. Let corporations explore new ways of achieving near orbit!
Sheesh…I’m gonna start preaching again so I’ll stop for the nonce.
Along with my thoughts… When you go into orbit or outer space it’s not that there is no gravity- it’s that
a)If you’re in orbit you’re at a speed equal to the square root of (gravity times the distance from the center of gravity)- ie. radius of the earth. Apparently it likes freefalling constantly or when you go over a hill on a rollercoaster and you get that wierd feelign in your stomach
b) you’re far away from most large planetary masses and experience little gravity relative to the rest of the galaxy.
Personally I think space travel is possible. When I read about the current space station i couldn’t help but think: what a pos. It’s not like we don’t know of ways to create artificial gravity on space stations… but as far as the fat cats in washington are concerned- that costs more money. Sure… i haven’t designed any better space stations recently, but I think that we as a species can do a little better. Out of curiosity- does anyone knows how they power the current space stations? I’m tempted to say nuclear but I doubt it. Maybe a combo of solar energy and combustibles? It’s my guess that most of the power plants we use produce too much waste and require too much space/heavy machinery. I always wondered- did they ever explain how they suppsoedly got to warp speed in star trek? The answer “fusion power and worms holes” is not what I’m looking for lol. What if we somehow bent time. Then we could get there in what seems like seconds but is actually years. Of course then we would have missed years of events going on back at home. Well I don’t knwo what i’m tlakign about anyway. Is it possible to bend time?
Theoretically, given enough energy you can get anywhere you want as fast as you want.
As your velocity increases with respect to your starting point the passage of time wrt to that point slows down and the distance in your direction of motion decreases. Ergo everywhere is accessible to you in your lifetime.
Of course there’s one small problem……thousands or millions or bazillions of years will have past on Earth or wherever your starting point happened to be.
I well at our percent time, We can conclude that.
we do not know of any real way of breaking the 30.000km/s problem. which is that at speeds over 30.000km/s any atom thats is still standing in space, compaired to our ship would start a chain reaction and blow it up.
So there for our only ways to get there in time must be, by some kind of warp tech or if we could make a massive force field that would keep anything away from the ship.
We all know that ships might be able to use zeropoint energy
for speed, but who says we have to move fast to get there fast.
what if we could
Which leads to the inevitable question: what society would fund a prohibitively expensive deep-space mission whose scientific findings wouldn’t be known for thousands of years?
Big problem with this idea. The cargo bay doors are opened once the Shuttle achieves orbit in order for the spacecraft to vent waste heat. This page from NASA describes the doors in GREAT detail, but the first line reads:
I can’t say it’s impossible since I’m not a NASA engineer, but turning the Shuttle into the equivalent of a 747 would seem to require extensive re-designing.
Photovoltaic panels (LOTS of photovoltaic panels!) for electricity (+batteries to account for periods of shade or panel repair); refillable thrusters + gyroscopes for maneouvering and orientation.
Electricity for Space shuttle in-orbit: Fuel Cells.
Electricity for Soyuz-class spacecraft: combination solar panels and fuel cells.
jrd