Don Bitzer and later CDC wanted to spread it to more. And failed because the technology wasn’t ready. PLATO ran on CDC mainframes and so was not very scalable.
But the idea was there long before it reached the masses. After that usenet reached more people but still not billions.
Can you stay in the air for 30 minutes? Oh that see military , search and rescue ,forest firefighters ,utility companies in remote areas ,land surveys , police special response unit come to mind.
That is news to me.A fuel that bring up a space ship almost as the size of a apartment!! Even the toxic fuels Ozone of Flourine is more efficient but highly corrosive and toxic so NASA never used it and was not single-stage-to-orbit (or SSTO) that alone massive single-stage-to-orbit (or SSTO) like in the scfi movies.
The problem with chemical rockets is they have very low specific impulse around 450.That means they only operate for only a few minutes before all the fuel is gone.The highest specific impulse ever achieved for a chemical rocket was around 500 or 550 using Hydrogen ,Lithium and Fluorine that is highly corrosive and toxic so NASA will never use it.
I would not really call anti- mater a fuel it is more a exotic fuel and no where near prime time for operation even if money was growing on trees.
There is not much benefit economic because it is too costly. It is cheaper to send space probes than manned space mission ,it is cheaper to extract hard to find stuff on earth , costly lots of money than space mining that would cost more than the hard too find stuff.It is easier to have one child policy law and control birth rate than sending people on a space colonization.
If space was cheap there would be all kinds of space mining and space colonization and mix of both space probes and manned space mission.But going in space is very costly.
Why? Two reason.
ONE -The 60’s was a awesome year to live in no where in US history did the government ,schools ,media and people where so interested in space.It was almost fact that space will be for most people and open up space like driving a car or going on an airplane for people ,Most people would say moon base ,mars base , space colonization and space mining would be really real.
TWO- the movies and scfi movies!!!
What gone wrong? Well two reason.
One- Hollywood got it wrong , it takes lots and lots and lots of energy to go in space .Not some magic warp core in star trek where you fuel up once a month or more or a SSTO that can take of and land to a planet two or three times or more to all the magic warp core is gone.
Two going in space is not cheap it is so prohibitively expensive even the super rich and government can not do much in space.
I think there was lot of people that got frustrated. And well computers ,electronics and gadgets are cool nothing was more awesome than flying around in space ship it is too costly.
And any advanced civilization that builds a star-ship and colonization at least two planets will never go extinct well at least too space expansion and all stars die out.
But seems the future is more computers ,electronics and gadgets and entertainment society.Well popular science and hollywood never foresee that.
We don’t need that. We have helicopters, and now drones. Just because you want something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. The problems you are trying to solve have already been solved via different means.
Again, who cares? Things are expensive. You want them to be cheap. That’s economics. Getting out of the Earth’s gravity well is going to use lots of energy. Physics means that if you’re going to use traditional means of transportation you’re going to hit hard limits. Can we improve fuels? To a degree, yes, but why bother? There are other ways to get to space if we really want to. And right now, we don’t really need to.
That fact that you’re obsessing over Hollywood movies is irrelevant.
So helicopters or drones are going to transport firefighters in or out of the woods?Do you realize that many areas helicopters or drones cannot access because of obstacles.
A helicopters is going to rescue someone from high rise building on fire? A power line that needs repairing in woods or bad terrain.
The police chasing a suspect or looking for some one that needs to get much lower than a helicopter.Some one doing land surveys by lots mountains and bad terrain.
If it is only going to last for 3 to 5 minute before the fuel is gone no one will want that.
These people seem to differ and are researching ways to lower the cost.Even if it will not lower it by much or by scfi movies want it to be, because chemical rockets are maxed out at being fuel efficient and cheapest it going get.You can only make it so much more fuel efficient and cheapest to you hit a wall.And chemical rocks are very much at that well at being fuel efficient and cheapest it is going to get.
Next modes will have to be fusion, fission, anti-matter rockets or some other exotic propulsion system.
By that you mean chemical rockets?
Again Blue Origin ,Skylon ,Virgin Galactic ,Lynx ,SpaceX and many more seem to differ that there is demand for space access.
There is even start up companies for mars mission and space mining.Even if this is laughable with today’s technology.
The start of thread was is technology stagnating? And space and airlines got mentioned in the start of the thread.
The technology does not have to mean can you do it , but does technology allow it cheap. The technology we have does NOT allow a moon base ,mars base ,space mining and space colonization that is not cost prohibitive.
OK, I give up. You keep ignoring the fact that if you want technology to advance towards a preconceived goal that isn’t realistic at this point. That’s not the way things work in the real world. Just because something could be useful doesn’t mean that it’s possible or economical. You’ve done this in multiple threads and don’t show any sign of comprehending the flaw in your argument.
Enjoy your holodeck and transporter.
This. Technology evolves much like biological species. There are niches to be filled, but the right mutation/innovation has to come along while the niche is available. In both cases, there is no clear end state.
I have worked for companies that failed to understand that innovation does not happen just because there is a buck to be made.
Actually I agree with you. On the whole thing about superfuels etc, yeah it makes as much sense as wondering why we don’t have a multivitamin that can make you superman yet.
I was just making a broader point because this kind of thread comes up from time to time, and it’s always the same: If you want to say the rate of recent technological advancement has been astounding and say you’re amazed you can shop online and so on: great, no problem.
OTOH if you say you personally find it disappointing, you’re painted as entitled, or ignorant, or worse.
I guess it’s a bit of a hobby-horse for me, but I don’t find either of those positions more reasonable than the other.
That’s true. But it is also true that innovation is less likely to happen if no one sees how a buck can be made.
sweat209 should come up with a business case for his jet pack. Benefit to a few firefighters isn’t going to do it.
I don’t think lack of a business case is really the problem.
Heck, if it came in under, say, $15k, I would buy one. Even if it was just a novelty thing I couldn’t actually use for transport. And I’m normally tight with money.
The problem is to get even near the jetpack (or even hoverboard), of popular imagination, there requires a number of semi-miraculous breakthroughs, and the business case doesn’t work until they have all been made.
The business case would have to include the initial price (a lot more then $15 k) the size of the early adapter market, regulatory issues, and and all sort of other stuff, including range etc.
I have a cartoon on my wall that says “miracles happen, but they take money.” None of the miracle work is going to get funded without a business case. Which include the chance of success.
About 50 years James Bond (or the stunt man) flew a real jet pack in “Thunderball.” I think the reason we haven’t gone anywhere is that almost no one wants one. Would you really want one if it could go only a block?
No market, no research, no miracles.
I think two concepts are getting conflated here, so to clarify, let’s call jetpacks as they exist in the world today jetpack_now, and the jetpack of popular imagination – long range, cheaper and safer – jetpack_pro.
So…yes I agree with you that no-one wants jetpack_now, for lots of reasons.
However that’s not the reason jetpack_pro doesn’t exist. jetpack_pro doesn’t exist because it can’t be made.
I also disagree about any suggestion that jetpack_now needs to become popular before any work would go into jetpack_pro, or any breakthrough is possible. It would help attract funding, certainly, but it’s not a prerequisite.
Right. And the problem is that there appears to be no path between useless jetpack now and useful jetpack pro which will sell enough to make the development cycle worth funding.
I know nothing of fuel research, but we have plenty of sensors and smart control systems now so that we could stabilize a jetpack built today much better than the Bond one, which will let more people fly it without extensive training. So we definitely could do better today if there was a market.
I would say the personal computer and the Internet are the sweeping inventions of the post 1950s, however, I would also agree that the people who lived from 1900 to 1950 saw MUCH more sweeping changes in their lives than the people who lived from 1950 to 2000. We went from horses to cars, from gas lamps to light bulbs, from fireplaces to oven and central heat and air conditioning, from books to radio, television and movies … it was freaking FANTASTIC, what happened in that span of time. (And don’t piddle me about dates of inventions, I’m talking about widespread availability to members of developed countries.)
There have been many technological innovations since then, mostly medical breakthroughs, but NOTHING that matches the sheer scope of the technological change that occurred. If the same breathtaking pace of technological innovation had occurred from 1950 onward with some unguessable advances in technology, we’d BE in the technological singularity instead of wondering if it will occur.
(P.S. Moon landing doesn’t count. How many men have landed on the moon? Less than a dozen, I’d guess. BFD for the rest of us.)
you know, i have come to realize… oh what the heck, it’s already been pointed out to you plenty of times that you’re a dense-minded mule, so let’s get on with some points that will obviously be totally ignored…
Why yes, helicopters currently transport firefighters in and out of the woods. So do planes making parachute runs. An area that a helicopter cannot access, would in turn, be an area that a man on a jetpack (or fanpack, since the currently available model is a pair of giant fans…) would be wholly unable to access for the exact reasons that a helicopter would be unable to visit.
I’m sorry, myself and, well, let’s say the majority of the earth’s population has recognized that scientific fiction movies were, well, fiction. I suggest you to think on that point for a moment, before we move on to the next point…
Fusion propulsion for spacecraft has been discussed in the past, however… there is the slight inherent problem of detonating hundreds of nuclear devices within the planet’s atmosphere. Fission propulsion would likely have the same problem.
as far as antimatter goes, let’s just hypothetically say that we could actually produce the tons upon tons of antimatter for pennies. Now we have to store it, and then store the material that the antimatter would be interacting with- antihydrogen would need normal hydrogen to react with, anticarbon would need carbon to react with, etc. Storage systems for antimatter would also be fairly bulky, making other options far more viable due to weight and other restrictions.
But, Right now it would cost about One-Hundred-Billion dollars to create one milligram of antimatter. One milligram is way beyond what is needed for research purposes, but that amount would be needed for large scale applications. To be commercially viable, this price would have to drop by about a factor of Ten-Thousand.
carrying on…
Hmmmm… Yes, there is a demand for space travel, but have you taken a look at what they do? For example, the White Knight II pops up into LEO for a few minutes, then comes straight back down… Which, by the way, is technological innovation… The tickets are so expensive that i don’t even want to look at them right now. HOWEVER… If you compare the number of people who really, really want to spend 5 minutes in space to those who would rather be firmly grounded, there’s more that like to be grounded. As for privatized companies delivering materials into space… Well, they have a lot less people worried about money money money money, and more people worried about efficiency. Some of each on both sides, but hey.
Let’s take a 50+ year old aircraft and pit it against that… the B-52 stratofortress.
50 years ago, the B-52 Stratofortress had sextants, analog computers, analog computers, analog computers…
Present day, due to massive upgrades, including the revolutionary INS units, GPS units and digital computing systems coupled with the removal of the sextant and miles upon miles of now redundant wire, the weight of the aircraft has been reduced an amazing amount, allowing it to fly slightly faster and more accurately.
If, for some godforsaken reason, someone decided they wanted to build a B-52 from scratch with present day technology and fly it side by side with the ones that fly today, but were built 54 years ago, you would notice a massive difference in speed, payload, operational range… But it’s not all about speed, nor is it about fuels, because we can look at the B-1 Lancer as well for this.
The B-1 Lancer is a supersonic Bomber.
The B-52 Stratofortress is a subsonic bomber
They both can carry similar payloads
You need 6+ Lancers to launch 3-4 of them reliably, cannibalizing parts, like the whole engine from other aircraft.
You could have 20 Stratofortresses and have 18 fly guaranteed, the 19th and 20th as a maybe, or cann bird.
What’s the difference? The Lancer is so much more complex, and it flies oh, so much faster, so it takes more damage.
I rambled a lot, but faster is not better. In fact, with the above example, the Lancer was too fast for it’s own good, so it’s role as a nuclear weapons carrier was stripped away from it.
There are some slight to moderate problems with simply living on the moon, or trying to mine resources from giant tumbling space rocks… Here are just a few of them.
Radiation
Heat, both generating it and dissipating it
Water
Oxygen
Pressure
Microscopic pieces of material traveling at near c
Living in close quarters
Let’s end this by going full retard… I’m sure I’ve already sufficiently demonstrated that I go on random tangents and ramble on…
A ship with the design of the fictional (and i say again, fictional) ‘Enterprise’, if someone were stupid enough to use that design, would not be built nor launched from the ground as it would rip it’s engines off fighting gravity.
Let’s look at fuel. For shits and giggles, let’s take a look at the now retired space shuttle. Assuming that a fully fueled and loaded shuttle was bound for LEO, it’s actually 99% launch system, 1% payload.
Now, you may add in some fairly innovative technology… Unfortunately, you’re going to have to use some imagination for the numbers that follow, but most people would get the idea…
Mounting the rocket onto a mobile, flying platform to bring it up several thousand feet. This would do two things, reduce the gravity by a small, but noticeable amount… and reduce the distance it needs to travel, both of which will in turn reduce the amount of fuel required, reducing the weight, allowing higher toxicity fuels with higher impulse, reducing drag, allowing the rockets to be calibrated for a lower pressure (which increases efficiency)…
Reducing the weight of the mobile flying platform while increasing thrust…
Well, crap, you now have something like the Pegasus… Which, using said toxic fuel, brings us up to 98% delivery and 2% payload.
Technology wholly unrelated to FUEL allowed us to USE previously developed fuels too toxic to use on the ground. The two combined allowed the efficiency to effectively nearly double.
Now then, onto largescale space construction…
You could blanket it’s problems under cost limitations, but then if you throw enough money at any problem, you will get some sort of solution. It is cheaper and far smarter to build in space those structures that will stay in space, with no need to perform atmospheric entry or exit… But there are some barriers.
Delivery of materials
Radiation
Objects traveling at high velocity
Construction crews
Thermal stress
You look at too small a picture. Stop focusing on Science Fiction and ultra cheap, ultra powerful fuels, because… quite frankly… the first already has people working on it, and of the second… it won’t do nearly as much as you think, as well ass being limited to few applications. You can’t use rocket fuel in your car after all, nor can you use gasoline in a rocket engine.
At pressed this thread is at a still mate. I’m scared to reply to the thread because I seem to be frustrating members more and more with every reply and risk of no reply or thread getting locked.
I think this is a major communication problem.
I think the problem is the way I came across in this thread. I said why we don’t have x and got a reply why!!! because of problem Y!! But still interested in why problem Y is problem and solutions to problem Y even if it is theoretical.
But I did not communicated proper and come across I have answer to it and know it all and some members are getting frustrated.
What I was looking for was a response along the lines has a scientists or engineers we don’t really have the answer how to do it , it well could be this or that ,but we really don’t know , and for this to work we will need this or that and well we don’t know if that will ever be or not. But getting response along the lines OP we don’t have this because of this or that so move on we have this and it is much better is not the answers I’m looking for so see blow:(
And well because I’m the OP and trying to get that response and not really getting it , I’m saying this or that and it is coming across I have answer to the problem.So in other words I should go and fix the problem and work for NASA or the airline.
I may also be posting to this message board thinking it like some of the other message boards deal with more theoretical talk where some of the topics are too oogly boogly for this site.
Where some of other science threads talk about scfi topics theoretical talk of what will be needed for it to work or this or that if it even possible in the future for it to work.
And yes one day we may find a super fuel or never find a super fuel because it does not exit.And large star ship enterprise may never exist because it takes large amounts of energy to take off and well we may never find a energy source like that or if we do the energy source will be too much and the ship will explode.
Looking for more theoretical talk. But members thinking OP is mad we don’ have this or that and he has a solution find a super fuel and problem fixed.So you fixed it.
It not that I’m ignoring your replies that one day we may find a super fuel or never find a super fuel and **I know that **is that I was looking for more theoretical.And still interested in why problem Y is problem and solutions to problem Y even if it is theoretical and we may never come to be in the future because it does not exist in nature.
I don’t see problem talking about scfi. I’m well aware probably most of it will never come to be. And for it to come to be we will need this or that and well we never may find that because it does not exist in nature.
Well bing talks about may far out stuff even scfi stuff many PHD’s and scientists so why can’t we talk about it here. And turn this thread around.
I know this thread got side track on fuel because I was not understanding basic fuel that alone better fuels.
In terms of availability, it will probably stagnate due to lack of material resources and energy.