Lunacy from Brussels

I have. Just one philosophical bomb IIRC.

Don't confuse 'science fun' with science fact though.

Graham

Resources on Mars ? It's a bloody cold dead rock you moron.

You're a grand fathead clot of the highest order.

Oh - I calculated that meteroid impact energy of a spacecraft visiting the nearest solar system to ours btw. I used a mass of 50g for the meteoroid.

Using 450 million km/h ( a mere 0.4 lightspeed ) as the average journey speed to make it in 10 years that impact energy works out as

1 tonne TNT = 4.6* 10^9 joules.

Impact energy = 14 * 10^18 tonnes of TNT !!!!!!! Rather more than the yield of all the nuclear weapons on earth !!! By a factor of several billion in fact.

By the same token - a 'speck of dust' would blow your spaceship apart. You would become a nice flash of light though. :-)

Good riddance.

Graham

No we couldn't.

Battleships were already seen as a waste of space by the middle of WW2.

Graham

Read the book.The problem Ginny is mainly concerned about is "the glass ceiling" which leads to women (and minority group men) being under-represented in the higher ranks of our various heirachies.

She argues - pretty convincingly - that people have a picture of the sort of cnadiate who ought to be promoted to these positions, which is largely based on the people who have been promoted in the past. If no woman has ever been promoted to a higher rank, women aren't perceived as possible candidates. You've got to exercise positive discrimination to break through this barrier, and - at least at first - you won't find any shortage of suitable candidates.

The Dutch provided an object lesson a few years ago, with their Spinoza prizes - touted as the Dutch Nobel Prize, but in fact designed to stop the best Dutch researchers being head-hunted overseas. Three or four top academics each get given a couple of million dollars to be spent on research projects of their choosing over the following five years.

The candiatates are nominated by the Dutch universities and academic research institutes. For the first four years of the program, no woman was even nominated, which came to be seen as something of a scandal. Then in 1999 a woman finally did get a Spinoza prize - she was somewhat older than the average of the male winners, and did say, in print, that they had been "playing safe" by choosing her.

The next year, two of the three winners were women, and for the following two years one of the four winners was female. Over the last three years all twelve winners have been male. Granting the basic under-representation of women in Dutch research, they shouldn't be expected to represent more than one in four of the eventual winners - probably fewer though I don't know the exact numbers - and the sudden burst of women winners following the first one clearly represented institutions realising that they had good female candidates they could nominate (who they should have nominated earlier).

A few years ago the Dutch also had the lowest proportion of female professors (5%) of any advanced country - in fact IIRR the only country who did worse had only three professors, all of whom happend to be male. When this became well-known, there was no shortage of promotable candidates and the percentage went up to about 12% over a couple of years - low compared with the roughly 20% you find in most advanced countries, but a dramatic increase, none the less.

-------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

All of which are no use at all. Oxides are largely worthless without huge quantities of energy.

You might care to note that ppl are today dying in Pakistan simply because thay are exposed to winter weather on the planet earth upon which food grows freely, the air can be breated etc etc......

How long do you reckon you'd last on Mars sunshine ?

And there's no point in planetary travel since the other planets are 'dead'. It ain't gonna change.

Face it - we're stuck on this planet.

Time to stop the conflict between cultures and pull together. No getting away from it.

Not so.

I assumed a zero vector of motion on the part of the rock.

It's called luck. Lower velocities helps.

And some spacecraft have indeed ceased to function.

Graham

Yup. I reckon Mars might just about be do-able as a short exploration. Not much more.

Getting a lander to work would be a huge task alone ( if you wanted to return that is ! ).

Graham

Well.... there's fiction number one !

Graham

E = 1/2 mv^2 v = 1.5x10^8 m/s v^2 = 2.25x10^16 m = 0.05 kg

E = 5.6 x 10^14 Joules

Try learning some maths.

Funnily enough, I was almost on the point of saying ' if you can change the laws of physics ' .....

It seems that zwsdotcom has a tenous grasp on science. I doubt he's aware of the results of doping the sums.

It's a shame actually. I'd love to see the NGC1701 for real !

Graham

It is quite a simple idea and a lot of work has already been done on it.

Well, a spaceship that could loft thousandsa of tonnes into orbit and carry crews of hundreds around the solar system is not quite the same thing as a sea going battleship.

"The first serious attempt to design a nuclear pulse rocket was Project Orion (See the article for details, including the vehicle sizes, problems, propulsion cycle and shielding). The design effort was carried out at General Atomics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Orion reacted small directional nuclear explosives against a large steel pusher plate attached to the spacecraft with shock absorbers. Efficient directional explosives maximized the momentum transfer, leading to specific impulses in the range of 6,000 seconds (about twelve times that of the SSME). With refinements a theoretical maximum of

The reference design was to be constructed of steel using submarine-style construction with a crew of more than 200 and a vehicle takeoff weight of several thousand tonnes. This low-tech single-stage reference design would reach Mars and back in four weeks from the Earth's surface (compare to 12 months for NASA's current chemically-powered reference mission). The same craft could visit Saturn's moons in a seven-month mission (compare to chemically-powered missions of about nine years).

A number of engineering problems were found and solved over the course of the project, notably related to crew shielding (good) and pusher-plate lifetime (which was unlimited). The system appeared to be entirely workable when the project was shut down in 1965, the main reason being given that the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water made it illegal. There were also ethical issues with launching such a vehicle within the Earth's magnetosphere. Calculations showed that the fallout from each takeoff would kill between 1 and 10 people. Enthusiasts want to launch outside the magnetosphere, or use clean fusion explosives, which are technically, but not politically feasible.

One useful mission for this near-term technology would be to deflect an asteroid that could collide with the earth. The extremely high performance would permit even a late launch to succeed, and the vehicle could effectively transfer a large amount of kinetic energy to the asteroid by simple impact. Also, an automated mission would eliminate the most problematic issues of the design: the shock absorbers.

Orion's technology is also one of very few known interstellar space drives that could be constructed with known technology.

Some authorities say that President Kennedy initiated the Apollo program to buy off the technical enthusiasts backing the Orion program. The recent book by George Dyson says that one design proposal presented to Kennedy was a space-going nuclear battleship, which so offended him that he decided to end the program. "

Another blinding flash of book-burners' science! Perhaps a Google search for "oxygen partial pressure" would help you, assuming you can put down that guitar and scoot across the hemp floor throw long enough to read what's onscreen.

You reckon that 120 kilotons of TNT by your reckoning won't be a problem ?

Try waking up to reality.

Graham

There has been *zero* work done on nuclear propulsion other than theory.

There is *no* infrastructure for such a plan.

Simply building the infrastructure would be a 10 yr ? project.

Graham

Here's a Mars lander concept; animated.

reach

visit

Dream on....

Graham

long

an

actually have

It seems you don't have anything useful to say in that case. Don't say I didn't ask.

Graham

Well, the actual reality is that space is pretty empty and the chances of encountering a 50g mass are virtually 0.

If cost was really the issue, I believe it would have been better to just mail everyone a gift certificate for a tune up.

Ha! That particular narrow band noise is usually coming from the cell phone user, not the phone! :)

-R