INFORMATION / IDEAS / SPACE

2012-01-07T10:38:00.000-08:00

SPACE / 2011 / 16-19 /

7.16 Falcon Heavy

"There's no point in matching the competition," he said. "We want to steamroll them. We're trying to make this a complete no-brainer."

SpaceX said it can keep its costs down because it manufacturers almost all of its parts in-house, mostly in a complex in Hawthorne where fuselages for Boeing's 747 jumbo jet were once assembled.

Much like the early days of NASA, the company has a cadre of young engineers -- the average age is in the early 30s -- who work for a fraction of the salary they could make at larger aerospace companies. They work for SpaceX because it operates more like a Silicon Valley start-up than an entrenched rocket builder.

Visitors at SpaceX headquarters are more likely to see an engineer wearing a hoodie or a baseball cap than sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a crew cut.

That's by design. Musk, 39, came from the Silicon Valley. He started SpaceX after making a fortune when he sold online payment business PayPal Inc. in 2002. Armed with his personal fortune and venture capitalist contacts, he started SpaceX.

"The best and brightest want to work for them right out of school," said Jay Gullish, a space and telecommunications analyst at Futron Corp., a Bethesda, Md., firm. "They're doing things that in the private sector has never been done before."

http://www.azdailysun.com/business/article_79cda3ce-4c5f-5425-97b5-13609d038fdd.html

7.17 Jane Poynter: Live in Biosphere 2

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=video&cd=1&ved=0CDQQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ted.com%2Ftalks%2Fjane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html&ei=nOuKTcbXIomHcczBzf8J&usg=AFQjCNEeoel2OHHqCxsSmilfSUocYlLggw

7.18 100-Year Starship some way off

Sailor Barsoom wrote:

OK, now for the reason I asked you all to keepreading.
The idea of mind uploading has entered this thread. Well,
what if those five master robots are uploaded human beings?
There could be, say, twenty-five of them, with five active
for one-year shifts, all the way to Alpha Centaurus. Once
there, they are all active and start, with robot nannies
and nurses and teachers and such helping, to raise the
frozen embryos.

- - - - - -

I think it is usefulto seek some clarityin our thinking regarding life as we know it and robots that humans are making;and higher order robots that humans will eventually make. What are thepossibilities? Where are the limits?

The first stepprobably is to set up a table to make an estimate of the order of complexity weare dealing with:

My table would looklike this:

System.................................................................................Complexity

A wheeled device thattravels on earth from point A to point B ............ 10

A human looking robotthat walks on earth from A to B ..................... 1000

A standard precisionmachine tool ................................................... 10,000

Any organic life thatis capable of walking from point A to B ...............1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Intelligent humans.......................................................................... Sameas above ( add or subtract a zero)

.... We don't reallyknow whether humans are more or less complex than other forms of life. Thegenome of an amoeba is larger than the genome of a human: http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/02_01/Sizing_genomes.shtml

The idea of uploadinga human is thus highly questionable. Much of the complexity of a human beingresides in his physical nature and not in his intelligence.

We need not upload ahuman being, all we need to do is to upload the knowledge base of a doctor, forinstance, into a robot. The complexity of such a system in the above scaleshould not exceed say 10,000,000.

Regards,

Selvaraj

7.19 NASA space budget

PresidentBarack Obama has proposed a five-year budgetary freeze on NASA’s spending keepingit at USD18.7 billion levels annually till 2016.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article1457664.ece

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I don't think we are going anywhere with this kind of budget. May be the wayforward is to request the public to directly fund programs.

Eg. Let's say it will take an investment of five billion $ /year for 10 years to put men on Mars. This will require 10 million people tocontribute 500 $ / year.

People may contribute if someone trustworthy can come up with agood plan.

Maybe a philanthropist will have to fund the study phase.

(Personally I would be prepared to contribute some money ifthere is an ambitious program to create the world's first CELSS system havingsay 90% efficiency)

Regards,

Selvaraj

2012-01-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

SPACE / 2011 / 11-15 /

7.11 First Full-frame Image of Vesta

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, the first ever to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt, has provided striking latest images of the asteroid Vesta, the second-most largest in the asteroid belt. in asteroid belt, is spiraling towards its first of four intensive science orbits. That initial orbit of Vesta begins Aug. 11, at an altitude of nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers). Scientists expect that it will provide in-depth analysis of the asteroid.

... Launched in September 2007, the Dawn spacecraft has travelled 1.7 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers) so far. It has been captured by Vesta's gravity, and now the distance between the asteroid and the spacecraft is 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers). From Earth, they are approximately 114 million miles (184 million kilometers) away.

The Dawn spacecraft will depart for Ceres in July 2012 and will arrive in 2015.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/190671/20110802/nasa-dawn-captures-first-full-frame-image-of-asteroid-vesta-asteroid-belt-sapce-earth-big-bang-giant.htm

CERES:

With a diameter of about 950 km (590 mi), Ceres is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt, and contains almost a third (32%) of the belt's total mass.^[19]^[20] Observations have revealed that it is spherical, unlike the irregular shapes of smaller bodies with lower gravity.^[12] The Cererian surface is probably a mixture of water ice and various hydrated minerals such as carbonates and clays.^[13] Ceres appears to be differentiatedinto a rocky core and ice mantle,^[7] and may harbour an ocean of liquid water underneath its surface.^[21]^[22]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)

7.12 One step backwards (Step zero)

Before we discuss 'Step one' in more detail, it is important to have an estimate of how much it will cost to take material from the Earth and from the Moon, to the site we have in mind for our first space hab.

Let's assume that we have a modest space hab which has a volumetric displacement of one cubic Km.

Then, we need one cubic Km of air at normal temperature and pressure to fill the void!

The mass of one cubic Km of air, assuming a density one Kg/m^3 = 1000*1000*1000 Kg = one million tonnes.

The cost of taking one million tonnes from Earth to orbit at the rate of 10,000 $/Kg or 10,000,000 $/tonne
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-launch-costs.htm
will be = 10,000,000,000,000 $ = 10 trillion $ (an impossible cost)

Assuming that the cost of operations from the moon would be less by a factor proportional to the square of the escape velocities, this amount would have to be divided by (11.2/2.4)^2 ie 21.8

Cost for launching one million tonnes from the moon would then be 10/21.8 trillion$ = 458 billion $

-----------------------
Calculating cost:

One may suggest, that for all space operations, costs will be incurred only when material is taken from Earth.
All work done on the Moon will be taken as zero cost. If food is taken from Earth to feed people on the moon, that would figure as cost.

----------------------

Is one million tonnes a lot of mass?

Actually one million tonnes is a small mass if seen in perspective.

1. One cubic Km of water weighs 1000 million tonnes

2. One cubic Km of 'moon material', assuming a density of 3 gms / cm^3 will weigh 3000 million tonnes.

3. Assuming that we have a space hab weighing 30 million tonnes, for which all the material has been obtained from the moon, with one cubic Km of the moon material we could construct 100 such space habs!

4. If a thousand people could be accommodated in each hab, these 100 habs would accommodate 100,000 people.

5. To accommodate the earth's 7 billion people, we would need 7 million such habs. That would amount to scooping out 70,000 cubic Km of the moon. Which would amount to a cube of about 41Kmx41Kmx41Km in dimension. The moon has a mass of 7.36E19 Tonnes. If we took out this chunk, the mass of the moon would reduce by 2.1E14 tonnes. In other words the mass of the moon would reduce by 0.000285%!!! This amount of material could be provided by scrapping 1.846 meters from the surface of the moon.

6. If we can capture a suitable asteroid of 41Kmx41Kmx41Km in dimension, we can get rid of all the pesky humans from planet earth! The bigger problem would be getting them of earth : - ) If each person on an average weighs 60 Kg, 7billion people would weigh 420 million tonnes. At the above launch cost of 10,000$/Kg, the total operation would cost 4200 trillion $. (The easier way to arrange the transition will be to launch babies, or to launch the genetic material, and parents on earth can follow the progress of their children in space with the help of CCTV).

------------------------------
Overcoming earth's gravity:

There is a limit to the extent by which we can reduce the cost of launch from earth. The space settler's group has rightly emphasized the danger of getting caught in a gravity well. Will such ideas as space elevators reduce launch cost substantially?

I tried to conceptualize this problem by imagining a mythical mount Everest that reaches up to geosynchronous orbit. All that one has to do is to take an object to the peak of this mythical Everest and set the object adrift - it will be launched into a geosynchronous orbit.

When one does the calculation however, the results are scary. The geosynchronous orbit is 35786 Km above the earth's surface (approximately 36 thousand Km; you have to climb that high! The circumference of the Earth in comparison is 40,000 Km!). Let's say you are taking a mass of 1 Kg to this height, you will be fighting the force of gravity all the way, which will reduce from 1 Kgf to 0.22 Kgf as you climb. The work done will be about 5,400,000 Kgfm. This works out to about 5.4 tonne Km. Lifting one Kg mass to geosynchronous orbit is equivalent (in this very idealized calculation) to carrying a load of 5.5 tonne to a mountain one Km high. Say a person can carry a load of 50 Kgf. Then, he will have to make 110 trips up the mountain to achieve the equivalent of taking one Kg mass to geosynchronous orbit!

(Much greater efficiency than rockets provide, is needed to enable large scale projects such as
SPS in GEO. **Yet the energy given to mass by putting it into GEO** is quite small, so there is
the potential for economically building SPS in GEO.... this quote is from http://www.scribd.com/doc/14093583/Energy-Given-to-Mass-By-Lifting-From-Ground-Up-Into-GEO ... I would not agree with this statement)

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Step zero:

1. We need to once again rethink where we will build our first large space hab. An asteroid is a better place.
2. We can probably build technology intensive small habs in Earth or Moon orbit.
3. To build large habs in Earth or Moon orbit we will need powerful rockets/thrusters that can ideally use any material as reaction mass.
4. Clearly, from above considerations, it would be advantageous to build major manufacturing facilities on the moon - if material can be sourced from the moon - to build larger futuristic space ships.
5. The space ships we can construct using Earth as base will be (small). From Moon it will be (bigger). From Asteroids it will be (biggest).

Regards,
Selvaraj

7.13 If you lose your tool in space you can print another one

If you lose your tool in space you can print another one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uobuBc2GO0o&feature=autoplay&list=PLE08A987C71F24636&index=1&playnext=1

7.14 Robotics for conquest of space

Putting men into space is costly (at least initially). Can weuse robots to do the job for us?

.. We also have the problem that no one knows how to designan efficient CELSS that will keep humans alive. This could turn out to be abigger problem (till it is solved) than any other issue.

If we use robots, maybe the economics of the whole thing may become more manageable.

Instead of having a human lunar colony for instance, why not start with a roboticlunar colony.

Modest facilities toset the ball rolling:

1. A materialsprocessing unit of 100 tonnecapacity / year

2. A machine shopcapable of processing 100tonne / year

3. An assembly shopcapable of assembling 100tonne of components /year

Once we have the above established and running we canforget 'Earthly' economics.

Use the above facility to create less modestfacilities to process 10,000 tonnes / year .... and so on.

Use similar strategyto expand into the rest of the solar system.

(May be, for setting up solar powered satellites inorbit around earth, this strategy will yield quick results. Creating space habitats forhumans will be more demanding. In eithercase, the key strategy isto start small and use robots to scale up, without any transfer of$$$ from Earth. )

Regards,

Selvaraj

7.15 Good reason to mine the Moon

According to Moon Rush, even the smaller of the Iron-Nickel NEAs contains more
metals than all that has ever been mined in all of history. Further, our Moon, riddled with craters from such collisions is likely to be rich in such resources, as well. A single ‘‘Diablo Canyon’’ size impactor would have left between 450 million to 1.77 billion tons
of economically recoverable nickel, iron, cobalt, &=platinum group metals materials, worth around $20 trillion.

http://billionyearplan.blogspot.com/2009/02/will-need-of-rare-earth-metals-for.html

2012-01-06T02:01:00.000-08:00

SPACE / 2011 / 6-10 /

7.6 Global exploration roadmap

Speed read the 'Global exploration roadmap'.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/about/isecg/

Pretty dull reading.

Not at all surprising that space related activities are not supported by the public at large.

The most important objective of this group is to look for life in the solar system?? (Even as thousands of life forms on planet earth are becoming extinct every year - not at all convincing).

Selvaraj

7.7 Eyes on the Solar System

Eyes on the Solar System:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes/intro.html

7.8 Saving NASA

Heightening concern is the new focus in Congress on spending cuts, leading many to think that NASA's 2010 budget of $18.7 billion won't be repeated. The White House already has asked agencies to submit 2013 budget requests that are 10% below their 2011 levels, essentially a $1.85-billion cut to NASA.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nasa-budget-20110911,0,3512587.story

While the astronaut office costs only tens of millions of dollars annually -- NASA won't say exactly how much -- the years ahead look increasingly tough as Congress looks to cut spending and the White House asks agencies to submit budgets 10 per cent below current levels, a nearly $2-billion cut to NASA's current $18.5-billion funding level.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/sci_tech/nasas-woes-becoming-astronomical-129577783.html

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It is indeed disappointing that when humans should be aggressively positioning themselves to step into space, the world's premier space faring nation is not able to raise their funding for NASA beyond what seems to be a meagre amount. Considering the capabilities that NASA has built up, the opportunity cost of not using these capabilities to the fullest is a loss not only for USA but also the rest of the world.

It is interesting to compare the tobacco consumption statistics to the level of funding of NASA, in USA:

Tobacco-Related Spending

Tobacco companies spend billions of dollars each year to market their products.

In 2006, cigarette companies spent $12.4 billion on advertising and promotional expenses in the United States alone, down from $13.1 billion in 2005, but more than double what was spent in 1997.³
The money cigarette companies spent on U.S. marketing in 2006 amounted to approximately $34 million per day.³
The five major U.S. smokeless tobacco manufacturers spent $354 million on smokeless tobacco advertising and promotion in 2006.²

U.S. consumers spent an estimated $90 billion in 2006 on tobacco products.¹

Approximately $83.6 billion was spent on cigarettes.¹
Approximately $3.2 billion was spent on cigars.¹
Approximately $2.6 billion was spent on smokeless tobacco (e.g., chewing tobacco and snuff).²

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/economics/econ_facts/

How to save NASA?

1. The US government can save it.

2. The people of USA can save it. All they need to do is to contribute 10% of their expenditure on Cigarettes and Alcohol to NASA.

3. If USA is no longer interested in NASA, the rest of the world should think of buying it out. With the rest of the world chipping in (most of whom do not have space programs) the budget can easily be beefed to $ 50 billion.

Selvaraj

7.9 The moon's uneven gravity

Zuber said the Grail findings should eliminate cliffhangers like the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. They overshot their touchdown site in part because of the subtle gravity changes in the moon’s surface below.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2011/09/11/for_lunar_mission_a_rousing_send_off/

7.10 Why Mine C-Type Asteroids?

Because of their composition, C-Type asteroids make ideal sources for strategic metals. Besides iron (which makes up about 22% by weight of a typical C-Type asteroid), most have high concentrations of such important and/or valuable materials as aluminum, magnesium, nickel, cobalt, platinum, and titanium ...

http://www.goldprice.com/detail.asp?id=platinum199

(Surely a lot of these asteroids would have crashed on the Moon.)

Selvaraj

2012-01-06T01:49:00.000-08:00

SPACE / 2011 / 1-5 /

7.1 NASA's Mars rover begins space radiation monitoring

The unmanned Martian rover - the biggest, most sophisticated robotic explorer ever built - is carrying the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) to monitor high-energy atomic and subatomic particles from the Sun, distant supernovas and other sources.

... Unlike instruments fitted at or near the surface of the spacecraft to monitor space radiation in previous Mars missions, the RAD is placed deep inside Curiosity and shielded by other components on board the craft.

"RAD is serving as a proxy for an astronaut inside a spacecraft on the way to Mars," said Don Hassler, RAD's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"Understanding the effects of the spacecraft on the radiation field will be valuable in designing craft for astronauts to travel to Mars," the scientist said.

http://brahmand.com/news/NASAs-Mars-rover-begins-space-radiation-monitoring/8657/1/21.html

7.2 50% efficient CELSS

I have a question? Evidently there will be very few people who will have the necessary skills to run a 50% efficient CELSS all on their own. To make such a project a reasonable success, there must be at least a village with quite a few people having diverse skills (100 people?).

I wonder whether NASA is conducting studies in group dynamics? Such information will be invaluable for setting up space habs.

NASA could invest money in creating a 50% efficient eco-village to see how matters pan out.

(It is worth keeping in mind that many tribal communities worldwide are already off grid and self sufficient - basically because they have few needs).

Regards,

Selvaraj

7.3 Economy in a Space Hab

Modern 20th --> 21st century economy assumes that multiple players can compete with multiple products in a market place. The assumption basically being that no real constrainst exist on physical resources.

It would be difficult to have such an economy in a space hab, since there would be real constraints on the availability of physical resources.

What form would market competition take in such a constrained environment?

Some possibilities:

1. Competition could take place in the realm of ideas.

2. Products would only be in virtual shelves

3. Advanced manufacturing methods would produce only what a consumer wanted; not the present method where mass production is required to make a product viable. (There would be truly advanced methods to simulate - without the need to cut metal - the performance of any hardware).

4. The other method would be to discipline the population so that they manage with a limited range of products. (Like in the erstwhile Soviet union where only one particular set of knives could be purchased over the length and breadth of the country. Why have multiple brands when one particular brand does the job?)

As our own world enters the more grim reality of resources constraints, perhaps we need to think over these issues. Quite clearly the present economic mantra of increasing consumption just to keep factories running and to provide jobs would be suicidal!?

Any views on the subject?

Regards,

Selvaraj

7.4 restoring the dream

The problem is, humans are engaged in thousands of different activities without any focus and logical structure.

What we should be doing is engaging in activities that clearly point to one of the following three goals.

1. Ensure that humans live healthy, rewarding lives.

2. Have a plan that protects our environment. (Including such unmentionables as voluntary population control)

3. The conquest of space. (Do we plan to convert Earth into a Martian landscape?).

If the activities we engage in do not meet one of the three goals, what is the purpose of the activity any way?

You will be hard put to find more than a handful of the thousands of activities we engage in that will point to the above three goals.

Broadly speaking:

1. Our educational system just glances over all these three goals.

2. Our way of life is putting our personal health in danger and no one seems to have a clue how to change it all.

3. Despite our fancy sciences we are still to see any concrete plans of how we will meet all the needs of seven to ten billion people on the planet .... so on.

We must focus on a couple of simple ideas as detailed above and move to thousands of generalities from there. Instead what we have is thousands of generalities which do not coalesce to form even say ten focused ideas that we can concentrate on.

Regards,

Selvaraj

7.5 3 Pronged Approach

After learning that some astronauts are suffering from problems of vision, I am wondering whether medically certifying both Moon and Mars should be the next step in space colonization.

If so, we should plan to have at least 10 men stationed on Moon and Mars over periods varying from one to ten years to see how they manage.

Growing food etc can be given second priority - the same can be carried from Earth. Whatever exploration they can do during their stay there can be considered a bonus.

Regards,

Selvaraj

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/09/20/Astronauts-reporting-vision-problems/UPI-20861316531550/

2012-01-06T00:12:00.000-08:00

SPACE / 2011

Dear Friends,

The purpose of this blog is to make available to a larger audience my posts, mainly in the IIT Global Current Affairs Group and a few other groups.

Most of these posts refer you to the store house of knowledge - The Word Wide Web. A few of the posts are also my 'bright?' ideas.

This blog is for posts in the category 'Space'.

7. SPACE

7.1 Mars rover begins space radiation monitoring(16/12/2011)

7.2 50% efficient CELSS (19/10/11)

7.3 Economy in a space hab (9/10/11)

7.4 Restoring the dream (7/10/11)

7.5 Three pronged approach (Qualifying moon, mars) (26/9/11)

7.6 Global exploration road map (28/9/11)

7.7 Eyes on the solar system (12/9/11)

7.8 Saving NASA (11/9/11)

7.9 The Moon’s uneven gravity (11/9/11)

7.10 Why mine C-Type Asteroids? (2/8/11)

7.11 First full-frame image of Vesta (2/8/11)

7.12 One step backwards (Step zero)