Re: Fw: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Actually, the original rationale for periodic Japanese temple burnings is much simpler than this: burning these temples was the easiest and (on a windless day, at any rate) safest way to demolish a structure made entirely of wood and susceptible to the degradation that an open-air wooden structure suffers in a climate that gets quite humid (as I can tell you right now, sitting in our family's pre-war, and rather porous, wooden house in Tokyo, worrying about the next big earthquake). In the west, churches and cathedrals were built for the ages, and some cathedrals took decades to erect. In China and Japan, the perpetual edifice was reserved for the static, immortal State. While I'm sure there has been some after-the-fact mystical or philosophical rationale for a rite celebrating temple burning, the real reasons are practical ones at the root. Seymour Cray, father of the supercomputer, endured some similar mythicalization. He liked wooden boats, but one day had to retire one on a lakeside beach, and figured out that the cheapest and safest approach was incineration. Someone noticed this, word got around, and a romantico-mystical myth grew: that Cray built a new boat every year, and burned it at the end of a year. He was at loss as to how to debunk this urban legend, and I guess he finally gave up. I'm frankly skeptical about all this "lost art" handwringing over the Saturn V vehicles. Sure, some of the people who applied poorly documented techniques are dead or senile, but a 25 year old technician who, in 1969, actually practiced what a 50 year old engineer came up with is very likely to still be alive and kicking in 2003, and a 25 year old recent engineering graduate, upon being shown what was possible then, has a very good shot at reinventing it if necessary. These people weren't demigods. The main obstacle at NASA (then as now) was people who *thought* they were demigods. -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: Gary McMurtry To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; europa Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 5:27 AM Subject: Re: Fw: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V Larry,Thanks for posting that informative piece on the Saturn V. In Japan, there is a temple made of local pine that is periodically burned to the ground and rebuilt. The rationale is the technology and "know how" (i.e., the important details not on the blueprints) to make a replacement are thus passed along to future generations. I note that the abstract below was presented over ten years ago. The last time an F-1 engine was fired was over 30 years ago.GaryAt 01:15 PM 9/7/2003 -0400, LARRY KLAES wrote: Larry: That all the blueprints were destroyed is, I believe, an urban legend. The following annotations from my Romance to Reality website (http://rtr.marsinstitute.info) might go some way toward answering Mr. Bradbury's questions. "The Saturn V F-1 Engine Revisited," AIAA 92-1547, B. W. Shelton and T. Murphy; paper presented at the AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference, March 24-27, 1992, Huntsville, Alabama. The authors are engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell, respectively. Marshall designed the Saturn V rocket which propelled Americans to the moon, while Rocketdyne built the F-1 engine. Saturn V had five F-1 rocket engines in its first stage - together they developed 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Sixty-five F-1 engines launched thirteen Saturn Vs from 1967 to 1973 with "100% success." Shelton and Murphy point out that the SEI Synthesis Group recommended considering the F-1 for use on SEI heavy-lift rockets. They propose changes in the F-1 design reflecting 20 years of manufacturing and materials advancements to produce an upgraded F-1A engine. Upgrades include strengthening the engine bell, thrust chambers, and turbine exhaust manifold, and replacing undesirable materials such as asbestos. Suppliers exist for all major parts, and Rocketdyne has 300 active personnel who participated in F-1 production, test, and flight operations in the Apollo era. Five spare F-1s in storage are available as "tooling aids" and "pathfinders" for test stand activation. The authors point out that the Atlas and Delta production lines were revived after shutdowns lasting about 20 years. Shelton and Murphy estimate that reviving the production line and test facilities will cost about $500 million, and each F-1A engine will cost $15 million if eight engines are manufactured per year. "Launch Vehicles for the Space Exploration Initiative," AIAA 92-1546, Stephen Cook and Uwe Hueter; paper presented at the AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference conference held in Huntsville, Alabama, March 24-27, 1992. NASA's Exploration Program Office (ExPO) launched
Re: Humanity finally waking up to the importance of SETI
"If you could say life arose twice, independently, in one solar system," [Rees] said, "that would tell you straight away the origin of life didn't involve a rare fluke and there must be some sort of life on millions of other planets." I suppose one could say that our system already qualifies, except that the second time life arose on Earth, it wasn't quite "independently", but rather depended on a waste product (oxygen) from the first time. -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: LARRY KLAES To: setipublic Cc: BioAstro ; europa Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 3:48 AM Subject: Humanity finally waking up to the importance of SETI http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2003/09/07/178380-ap.html New-found respect for ET hunters as the search for life in the galaxy expands By ANDREW BRIDGES For the tiny cadre of scientists probing the cosmos for signs of alien life, the most difficult question isn't always, "Are we alone?" Sometimes it's the shopworn, "What do you do?" from a fellow airline passenger. Jill Tarter generally doesn't like to answer that question when she first meets someone. She's director of the Centre for SETI Research, as in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But after four decades of frequent ridicule, the astronomers seeking signs of life in the heavens are gaining some respect. Since 1960, when Tarter's colleague Frank Drake first pointed a radio telescope at a pair of nearby stars in hopes of dialing in an alien broadcast, there have been about 100 searches for ET signals. No aliens have been found. But new planets have, more than 100 outside our solar system since the first was discovered in 1995. Whether those distant worlds teem with life, let alone intelligent life, remains unknown. But each new discovery further energizes the search for ET. Some scientists are beginning to talk in terms of when, not if, they'll be able to answer a question that's vexed humankind probably since we first peered upward at the stars that pierce the dark. For Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, finding that answer represents the main exploratory challenge of the next half-century. "Our cosmic importance depends on whether we are alone or not," Rees said from Cambridge, England. It's also worth answering simply because it is such a big question, Rees added: "The main aim of science is to take steps toward answering the big questions." It's that sentiment that keeps the hunt going, even without positive results. "It's a great goal. That is a lot of what sustains you - the payoff," said Kent Cullers, director of research and development for the Centre for SETI Research. "That's why we keep the champagne on ice." Even SETI skeptics, like Ben Zuckerman from the University of California at Los Angeles, concede it's three things - cosmology, black holes and the search for life in the universe - that drive public support for his field. "And a substantial fraction of the funding comes from the third of those," Zuckerman said from atop Mauna Kea, where he was using the Keck Observatory to investigate the formation of planets around young stars in the Milky Way. So how do you carry out such a search? Directly listening for a signal has by far been the most popular approach, at least judging from its appeal to the general public. As of early August, 4.6 million people have signed on to one SETI project alone, run by the University of California, Berkeley. The Web-based project enlists idle computer time and processing power to scan packets of data collected by the mammoth radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, for traces of alien signals. That level of interest is not matched by employment in the field or the modest private funding, which is merely in the millions of dollars. The SETI Institute's Drake estimates that just 20 people work full-time on the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence, with maybe 40 more working part-time. "It's tiny," Drake said, quickly adding that the field has never been larger. SETI's not likely to grow much bigger any time soon, but it is about to get a whole lot stronger, faster and cheaper. When he started out in 1960, Drake used a 26-metre diameter dish in West Virginia to check out just two stars. This fall and coming spring, SETI hopes to wrap up a survey of 1,000 nearby stars similar to our sun, listening to each for five minutes for a trace of an alien signal. The survey's completion would mark the finale of a project initially funded by NASA but dropped after a year. The SETI Institute picked up the search. It uses equipment at Arecibo and Britain that is one quadrillion times more powerful than the operation Drake cobbled together 43 years ago. Further advances in computing power and a
Fw: Hubble Finds Farthest, Faintest Solar System Objects Beyond Neptune
- Original Message - From: Ron Baalke Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 8:03 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Hubble Finds Farthest, Faintest Solar System Objects Beyond Neptune http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/2003/25/textEMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 3:00 P.M. (EDT) SEPTEMBER 6, 2003CONTACT:Steve BradtUniversity of PennsylvaniaPhone: 215/573-6604; Pager: 215/524-6272Donna WeaverSpace Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.Phone: 410/338-4493; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]PRESS RELEASE NO.: STScI-PR03-25FARTHEST, FAINTEST SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS FOUND BEYOND NEPTUNEAstronomers using NASA's HubbleSpace Telescope have discovered threeof the faintest and smallest objects everdetected beyond Neptune. Each objectis a lump of ice and rock - roughly thesize of Philadelphia - orbiting beyondNeptune and Pluto, where the icy bodiesmay have dwelled since the formation ofthe solar system 4.5 billion years ago.They reside in a ring-shaped region called the KuiperBelt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftoverbuilding blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solarsystem's creation.The results of the search were announced by a group ledby astronomer Gary Bernstein of the University ofPennsylvania at today's meeting of the Division ofPlanetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif.The study's big surprise is that so few Kuiper Beltmembers were discovered. With Hubble's exquisiteresolution, Bernstein and his co- workers expected tofind at least 60 Kuiper Belt members as small as 10miles (15 km) in diameter - but only three werediscovered."Discovering many fewer Kuiper Belt objects than waspredicted makes it difficult to understand how so manycomets appear near Earth, since many comets werethought to originate in the Kuiper Belt," Bernstein says."This is a sign that perhaps the smaller planetesimalshave been shattered into dust by colliding with eachother over the past few billion years."Bernstein and his colleagues used Hubble to look forplanetesimals that are much smaller and fainter than canbe seen from ground-based telescopes. Hubble'sAdvanced Camera for Surveys was pointed at a region inthe constellation Virgo over a 15-day period in Januaryand February 2003. A bank of 10 computers on theground worked for six months searching for faint-movingspots in the Hubble images.The search netted three small objects, named 2003BF91, 2003 BG91, and 2003 BH91, which range in sizefrom 15-28 miles (25-45 km) across. They are thesmallest objects ever found beyond Neptune. At theircurrent locations, these icy bodies are a billion timesfainter (29th magnitude) than the dimmest objects visibleto the naked eye. But an icy body of this size thatescapes the Kuiper Belt to wander near the Sun canbecome visible from Earth as a comet as the wanderingbody starts to evaporate and form a surrounding cloud.Astronomers are probing the Kuiper Belt because theregion offers a window on the early history of our solarsystem. The planets formed over 4 billion years ago froma cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the infant Sun.Microscopic bits of ice and dust stuck together to formlumps that grew from pebbles to boulders to city- orcontinent-sized planetesimals. The known planets andmoons are the result of collisions between planetesimals.In most of the solar system, all of the planetesimals haveeither been absorbed into planets or ejected intointerstellar space, destroying the traces of the early daysof the solar system.Around 1950, Gerard Kuiper and Kenneth Edgeworthproposed that in the region beyond Neptune there are noplanets capable of ejecting the leftover planetesimals.There should be a zone, the two astronomers said- nowcalled the Kuiper Belt - filled with small, icy bodies.Despite many years of searching, the first such objectwas not found until 1992. Since then, astronomers havediscovered nearly 1,000 from ground-based telescopes.Most astronomers now believe that Pluto, discovered in1930, is in fact a member of the Kuiper Belt.Astronomers now use the Kuiper Belt to learn about thehistory of the solar system, much as paleontologists usefossils to study early life. Each event that affected theouter solar system - such as possible gravitationaldisturbances from passing stars or long-vanishedplanets - is frozen into the properties of the Kuiper Beltmembers that astronomers see today.If the Hubble telescope could search the entire sky, itwould find perhaps a half million planetesimals. Ifcollected into a single planet, however, the resultingobject would be only a few times larger than Pluto. Thenew Hubble observations, combined with the latestground-based Kuiper Belt surveys, reinforce the ideathat Pluto itself and its moon Charon are just largeKuiper Belt members. Why the Kuiper Beltplanetesimals did not form a larger planet, and why thereare fewer small planetesimals than expected, arequestions that will be answered with further Kuiper Beltstudies. These studies will help astronomers understandhow planets may have formed around other star
Re: Fw: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Larry, Thanks for posting that informative piece on the Saturn V. In Japan, there is a temple made of local pine that is periodically burned to the ground and rebuilt. The rationale is the technology and "know how" (i.e., the important details not on the blueprints) to make a replacement are thus passed along to future generations. I note that the abstract below was presented over ten years ago. The last time an F-1 engine was fired was over 30 years ago. Gary At 01:15 PM 9/7/2003 -0400, LARRY KLAES wrote: Larry: That all the blueprints were destroyed is, I believe, an urban legend. The following annotations from my Romance to Reality website (http://rtr.marsinstitute.info) might go some way toward answering Mr. Bradbury's questions. "The Saturn V F-1 Engine Revisited," AIAA 92-1547, B. W. Shelton and T. Murphy; paper presented at the AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference, March 24-27, 1992, Huntsville, Alabama. The authors are engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell, respectively. Marshall designed the Saturn V rocket which propelled Americans to the moon, while Rocketdyne built the F-1 engine. Saturn V had five F-1 rocket engines in its first stage - together they developed 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Sixty-five F-1 engines launched thirteen Saturn Vs from 1967 to 1973 with "100% success." Shelton and Murphy point out that the SEI Synthesis Group recommended considering the F-1 for use on SEI heavy-lift rockets. They propose changes in the F-1 design reflecting 20 years of manufacturing and materials advancements to produce an upgraded F-1A engine. Upgrades include strengthening the engine bell, thrust chambers, and turbine exhaust manifold, and replacing undesirable materials such as asbestos. Suppliers exist for all major parts, and Rocketdyne has 300 active personnel who participated in F-1 production, test, and flight operations in the Apollo era. Five spare F-1s in storage are available as "tooling aids" and "pathfinders" for test stand activation. The authors point out that the Atlas and Delta production lines were revived after shutdowns lasting about 20 years. Shelton and Murphy estimate that reviving the production line and test facilities will cost about $500 million, and each F-1A engine will cost $15 million if eight engines are manufactured per year. "Launch Vehicles for the Space Exploration Initiative," AIAA 92-1546, Stephen Cook and Uwe Hueter; paper presented at the AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference conference held in Huntsville, Alabama, March 24-27, 1992. NASA's Exploration Program Office (ExPO) launched the First Lunar Outpost (FLO) study in late 1991. Initially, ExPO invoked an Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR) mission scenario using four heavy-lift rockets, each capable of placing 120 tons into low-Earth orbit (LEO), to establish its lunar outpost. By the time this paper was presented, however, ExPO had opted for a direct ascent mission profile using two heavy-lifters, each capable of placing more than 200 tons into LEO. The authors, engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, note that this is roughly twice the requirement imposed on the Saturn V rocket used to launch Apollo missions to the moon. The authors analyze FLO launcher configurations based on both Saturn V and projected National Launch System (NLS) technology. They assume that the FLO booster will eventually launch piloted Mars missions (thus raising the LEO payload requirement to about 250 tons). Both the NLS and Saturn V-derived vehicles use an upgraded version of the Saturn V F1 engine designated F1-A. Saturn V-derived launcher: The 12.4 million pound rocket includes two strap-on boosters with two F1-A engines each, a stretched first stage derived from the Saturn V S-IC stage, a stretched second stage derived from the Saturn V S-II, and an upper stage for Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) with one engine derived from the Saturn V J-2 engine. The Saturn V used for Apollo moon missions stood 363 feet tall; the FLO derivative stands 40 feet taller (403.2 feet). The rocket can place 254 tons into LEO and launch 95 tons out of LEO to the moon. NLS-derived launcher: The 12.4 million pound rocket includes four strap-on boosters with two F1-A engines each, an "NLS Core" consisting of a stretched Space Shuttle External Tank with four engines derived from the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), and a TLI stage with one SSME. The NLS-derived FLO launcher stands 372 feet tall. The rocket can place 265 tons into LEO and launch 95 tons out of LEO to the moon. Both designs could be launched from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, the authors find. They assume that NASA will launch two FLO missions per year, each requiring two FLO heavy-lift rocket launches, and will fly eight Space Shuttle missions per year during the FLO Program. They find that new facilities and changes to existing ones, such as the twin Complex 39 Shuttle l
Humanity finally waking up to the importance of SETI
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2003/09/07/178380-ap.html New-found respect for ET hunters as the search for life in the galaxy expands By ANDREW BRIDGES For the tiny cadre of scientists probing the cosmos for signs of alien life, the most difficult question isn't always, "Are we alone?" Sometimes it's the shopworn, "What do you do?" from a fellow airline passenger. Jill Tarter generally doesn't like to answer that question when she first meets someone. She's director of the Centre for SETI Research, as in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But after four decades of frequent ridicule, the astronomers seeking signs of life in the heavens are gaining some respect. Since 1960, when Tarter's colleague Frank Drake first pointed a radio telescope at a pair of nearby stars in hopes of dialing in an alien broadcast, there have been about 100 searches for ET signals. No aliens have been found. But new planets have, more than 100 outside our solar system since the first was discovered in 1995. Whether those distant worlds teem with life, let alone intelligent life, remains unknown. But each new discovery further energizes the search for ET. Some scientists are beginning to talk in terms of when, not if, they'll be able to answer a question that's vexed humankind probably since we first peered upward at the stars that pierce the dark. For Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, finding that answer represents the main exploratory challenge of the next half-century. "Our cosmic importance depends on whether we are alone or not," Rees said from Cambridge, England. It's also worth answering simply because it is such a big question, Rees added: "The main aim of science is to take steps toward answering the big questions." It's that sentiment that keeps the hunt going, even without positive results. "It's a great goal. That is a lot of what sustains you - the payoff," said Kent Cullers, director of research and development for the Centre for SETI Research. "That's why we keep the champagne on ice." Even SETI skeptics, like Ben Zuckerman from the University of California at Los Angeles, concede it's three things - cosmology, black holes and the search for life in the universe - that drive public support for his field. "And a substantial fraction of the funding comes from the third of those," Zuckerman said from atop Mauna Kea, where he was using the Keck Observatory to investigate the formation of planets around young stars in the Milky Way. So how do you carry out such a search? Directly listening for a signal has by far been the most popular approach, at least judging from its appeal to the general public. As of early August, 4.6 million people have signed on to one SETI project alone, run by the University of California, Berkeley. The Web-based project enlists idle computer time and processing power to scan packets of data collected by the mammoth radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, for traces of alien signals. That level of interest is not matched by employment in the field or the modest private funding, which is merely in the millions of dollars. The SETI Institute's Drake estimates that just 20 people work full-time on the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence, with maybe 40 more working part-time. "It's tiny," Drake said, quickly adding that the field has never been larger. SETI's not likely to grow much bigger any time soon, but it is about to get a whole lot stronger, faster and cheaper. When he started out in 1960, Drake used a 26-metre diameter dish in West Virginia to check out just two stars. This fall and coming spring, SETI hopes to wrap up a survey of 1,000 nearby stars similar to our sun, listening to each for five minutes for a trace of an alien signal. The survey's completion would mark the finale of a project initially funded by NASA but dropped after a year. The SETI Institute picked up the search. It uses equipment at Arecibo and Britain that is one quadrillion times more powerful than the operation Drake cobbled together 43 years ago. Further advances in computing power and a drop in price should allow for searching even more stars over a greater number of frequencies and with vastly improved sensitivity, Drake said. He estimates SETI's power doubles every 250 days. To capitalize on that, the SETI Institute and Berkeley together are building an array of six-metre diameter radio telescopes in northern California that should be capable of surveying one million stars over a decade. Three of the dishes are in place now; it should bristle with 350 by 2006. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is bankrolling much of the cost. And a slew of teams around the world are proposing building an array of telescopes 100 times larger. Tarter predicts that such advances will allow SETI to canvass much, if not all, the Milky Way and its 100 billion-plus stars within several decades' time. Drake, using an equation he devised and which now bears his name, estimates there could
Fw: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Larry: That all the blueprints were destroyed is, I believe, an urban legend. The following annotations from my Romance to Reality website (http://rtr.marsinstitute.info) might go some way toward answering Mr. Bradbury's questions. "The Saturn V F-1 Engine Revisited," AIAA 92-1547, B. W. Shelton and T. Murphy; paper presented at the AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference, March 24-27, 1992, Huntsville, Alabama. The authors are engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell, respectively. Marshall designed the Saturn V rocket which propelled Americans to the moon, while Rocketdyne built the F-1 engine. Saturn V had five F-1 rocket engines in its first stage - together they developed 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Sixty-five F-1 engines launched thirteen Saturn Vs from 1967 to 1973 with "100% success." Shelton and Murphy point out that the SEI Synthesis Group recommended considering the F-1 for use on SEI heavy-lift rockets. They propose changes in the F-1 design reflecting 20 years of manufacturing and materials advancements to produce an upgraded F-1A engine. Upgrades include strengthening the engine bell, thrust chambers, and turbine exhaust manifold, and replacing undesirable materials such as asbestos. Suppliers exist for all major parts, and Rocketdyne has 300 active personnel who participated in F-1 production, test, and flight operations in the Apollo era. Five spare F-1s in storage are available as "tooling aids" and "pathfinders" for test stand activation. The authors point out that the Atlas and Delta production lines were revived after shutdowns lasting about 20 years. Shelton and Murphy estimate that reviving the production line and test facilities will cost about $500 million, and each F-1A engine will cost $15 million if eight engines are manufactured per year. "Launch Vehicles for the Space Exploration Initiative," AIAA 92-1546, Stephen Cook and Uwe Hueter; paper presented at the AIAA Space Programs and Technologies Conference conference held in Huntsville, Alabama, March 24-27, 1992. NASA's Exploration Program Office (ExPO) launched the First Lunar Outpost (FLO) study in late 1991. Initially, ExPO invoked an Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR) mission scenario using four heavy-lift rockets, each capable of placing 120 tons into low-Earth orbit (LEO), to establish its lunar outpost. By the time this paper was presented, however, ExPO had opted for a direct ascent mission profile using two heavy-lifters, each capable of placing more than 200 tons into LEO. The authors, engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, note that this is roughly twice the requirement imposed on the Saturn V rocket used to launch Apollo missions to the moon. The authors analyze FLO launcher configurations based on both Saturn V and projected National Launch System (NLS) technology. They assume that the FLO booster will eventually launch piloted Mars missions (thus raising the LEO payload requirement to about 250 tons). Both the NLS and Saturn V-derived vehicles use an upgraded version of the Saturn V F1 engine designated F1-A. Saturn V-derived launcher: The 12.4 million pound rocket includes two strap-on boosters with two F1-A engines each, a stretched first stage derived from the Saturn V S-IC stage, a stretched second stage derived from the Saturn V S-II, and an upper stage for Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) with one engine derived from the Saturn V J-2 engine. The Saturn V used for Apollo moon missions stood 363 feet tall; the FLO derivative stands 40 feet taller (403.2 feet). The rocket can place 254 tons into LEO and launch 95 tons out of LEO to the moon. NLS-derived launcher: The 12.4 million pound rocket includes four strap-on boosters with two F1-A engines each, an "NLS Core" consisting of a stretched Space Shuttle External Tank with four engines derived from the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), and a TLI stage with one SSME. The NLS-derived FLO launcher stands 372 feet tall. The rocket can place 265 tons into LEO and launch 95 tons out of LEO to the moon. Both designs could be launched from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, the authors find. They assume that NASA will launch two FLO missions per year, each requiring two FLO heavy-lift rocket launches, and will fly eight Space Shuttle missions per year during the FLO Program. They find that new facilities and changes to existing ones, such as the twin Complex 39 Shuttle launch pads and Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), are required. New facilities include a Lunar Payload Encapsulation Building for placing FLO landers inside their streamlined launch shrouds. A new Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) Stacking Building would permit SRB operations to be moved from their current place in the VAB to make room for FLO stage stacking. Alternately, a new Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) sized to assemble eventual Mars program rockets might take on FLO payload encapsulation and stacking, le
New Moons for Uranus and Neptune
One Moon for Neptune, Another for Uranus Astronomers discover a small moon of Neptune and recover a long-lost satellite of Uranus. by Vanessa Thomas Last week while most Americans were enjoying a three-day holiday weekend, watching the first college football games of the new season, traveling across the country, or enjoying one last summer cookout, the attention of several astronomers was targeted instead on the outer solar system, looking for tiny blips near giant planets. Their work was rewarded with the discovery of Neptune's 12th satellite and redemption for a shunned satellite of Uranus. On Monday, September 1, University of Hawaii astronomer Scott Sheppard reported the observations on August 29 and 30 of an unidentified satellite around Neptune, made by himself and his colleagues David Jewitt (University of Hawaii) and Jan Kleyna (Cambridge University) with the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea. Later that same day, a team led by Matthew Holman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics also reported finding what appeared to be an unknown satellite of Neptune in images taken on August 19 with the 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile. http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/479nrhte.asp
Space Elevators (Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V)
> On Sat, 6 Sep 2003, LARRY KLAES wrote: > > > Would a Space Elevator pay for itself in the end? > > > > http://www.highliftsystems.com/ > > This remains to be determined. It might be a great way to get > humans into space but still might not solve the heavy lift problem. > I don't know what mass the proposed elevator designs are capable > of handling. While we do now have what can be called bucky-fibers > they are still expensive to manufacture and aren't continuous > molecular structures thousands of km in length -- so I don't know > how this would impact the capacity of a space elevator. There is > also the significant problem of where to put one, what happens to > the bottom levels during a tropical storm and the problem that all > hell breaks loose if the cable snaps at any point. It is claimed here that all of these problems are manageable: http://www.eurekasci.com/SPACE_ELEVATOR/Phase1_Report/chapter1.html By the way, "continuous molecular structures thousands of km in length" is not a requirement. I'm wearing a very durable shirt nearly two meters from cuff to cuff, composed of individual fibers only tens of centimeters long. Carbon nanotube fibers might never exceed their current record lengths (someone held his thumb and finger apart at a conference recently to illustrate; how's that for a citation?) and still be woven into the required ribbons. How? On-chip MEMS technology has already delivered the DMD -- digital micromirror devices, now used in optical projection technology and elsewhere. I worked in the IC CAD industry for several years, and learned to yawn through the revolutions, but it still beats the living crap out of me how we can already have chips in commercial use using invisibly small devices incorporating *hinges*. I helped translate a patent from Japanese a few months ago, purporting to tell the world how DMDs might be used in microelectronic fabrication optics to improve the yield of ICs, and by the same token, DMDs themselves -- and by extension, virtually any MEMS-based device. I didn't see anything implausible, and it may be in production use already for all I know -- the Japanese are pretty secretive about these things. So, in a way, nanotech is already improving nanotech, or is about to. The day may come (sooner, perhaps, than even a jaded techie like me can handle it) when you can pour a bunch of buckytubes in one end of a nanoscale textile mill, and get a continuous ribbon out the other end, at an acceptable rate of production, and at an acceptable cost. For the terrestrial applicatons alone, people will do it if they can. Heavy lift is a non-problem if light lift costs crash through the currently-impermeable floor. If you had to build a car only by poking equipment and materials through a keyhole, engineers could figure out how to do that. A pain? Yeah, maybe, but some people build model ships in bottles, for the challenge. One space cadet's poison is another cadet's red, sizzling steak. If it costs a million bucks to open the door, but only pennies for each keyhole poke, someone will figure out ways to build that car on the other side of the door for well under a megabuck. The real problem (given a penny-a-poke keyhole) is creating demand for the car -- for many cars, really. A space elevator that "pays for itself" only in some accounting based on current launch costs alone doesn't really pay for anything. It just reduces costs for a service with limited demand in the first place. Without sufficient demand, it could never pay back -- and hence, never get funded. Unless, perhaps, some government forks out what's needed for a Mars mission, and the elevator is seen as mission-critical. (Or maybe my crystal ball has been infected by a Bulgarian computer virus. Who knows what the next 20 years will bring?) -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
