September 23, 2007
Some Space Linkage
One of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babestm reports on several posts from around the 'sphere regarding the development of the final frontier....
Clarke Lindsay does a nice sum up of critical infrastructure technologies that are under development and seem likely to come to fruition to fruition in the short term.
The lists big missing technology bit of course, is any real push for space nuclear power. There is some work being done for the Prometheus Project but that is now a fairly low key program.
For what it's worth, I strongly agree with the sentiments of John Goff and others regarding the importance of developing orbital-propellant transfer technologies. This is absolutely vital to moving forward in space.
Via Colony Worlds comes this link to an article on NASA's current Moon buggy plans. It provides the below picture of a proposed NASA lunar buggy, which is really a mini mobile base.
The external mounted suits are interesting. They seem to be designed towards minimizing the astronauts exposure to lunar dust. This is a problem that has been getting some attention of late. The suits would "dock" with the habitat and the astronauts would enter and exit through a rear torso hatch minimizing dust entry.
In the long term given extensive infrastructure a vastly superior Bio-Suit might be worn under coveralls but this affords very good dust protection.
One idea for shielding early explorers from cosmic rays and solar flares is to put shelters in caves. NASA has now discovered some on Mars (or at least rrrreelly deep holes).
Regards safety, space ships need space lifeboats, but given that spacecraft
today are rather minimalist affairs, an escape system carried by them will tend to be more so....HERE is a selection of wacky, but possibly workable ideas from the '60s regarding how to get to Earth from space in a pinch...If any of the non capsule ideas work, I predict thrill junkies will be doing them voluntarily in 20 years 
Regards current explorations, the Babe in the Universe posts on the recent flyby of Iapetus and links to Sir Arthur C. Clarke's video presentation commemorating it. Sir Arthur is one of the true greats of both science fiction and science fact.( I'm ashamed to say that I'd not realized until this that he'd been stricken with polio.)
Here is a .gif of film taken the little moon during the flyby.
Finally, the latest Carnival of the Space Geeks is up with lots more links to space related stuff.
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One of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babestm reports on several posts from around the 'sphere regarding the development of the final frontier....Clarke Lindsay does a nice sum up of critical infrastructure technologies that are under development and seem likely to come to fruition to fruition in the short term.
The lists big missing technology bit of course, is any real push for space nuclear power. There is some work being done for the Prometheus Project but that is now a fairly low key program.
For what it's worth, I strongly agree with the sentiments of John Goff and others regarding the importance of developing orbital-propellant transfer technologies. This is absolutely vital to moving forward in space.
Via Colony Worlds comes this link to an article on NASA's current Moon buggy plans. It provides the below picture of a proposed NASA lunar buggy, which is really a mini mobile base.
The external mounted suits are interesting. They seem to be designed towards minimizing the astronauts exposure to lunar dust. This is a problem that has been getting some attention of late. The suits would "dock" with the habitat and the astronauts would enter and exit through a rear torso hatch minimizing dust entry.
In the long term given extensive infrastructure a vastly superior Bio-Suit might be worn under coveralls but this affords very good dust protection.
One idea for shielding early explorers from cosmic rays and solar flares is to put shelters in caves. NASA has now discovered some on Mars (or at least rrrreelly deep holes).
Regards safety, space ships need space lifeboats, but given that spacecraft
today are rather minimalist affairs, an escape system carried by them will tend to be more so....HERE is a selection of wacky, but possibly workable ideas from the '60s regarding how to get to Earth from space in a pinch...If any of the non capsule ideas work, I predict thrill junkies will be doing them voluntarily in 20 years
Regards current explorations, the Babe in the Universe posts on the recent flyby of Iapetus and links to Sir Arthur C. Clarke's video presentation commemorating it. Sir Arthur is one of the true greats of both science fiction and science fact.( I'm ashamed to say that I'd not realized until this that he'd been stricken with polio.)
Here is a .gif of film taken the little moon during the flyby.
Finally, the latest Carnival of the Space Geeks is up with lots more links to space related stuff.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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But you know what Jon's and Clark's selection criteria were. If it is nice to have but does not preclude a spacefaring civilization, then it goes off the list, or at least to the very bottom. This is why nuclear propulsion is not anywhere near orbital propellant depots. The key consideration is, we can have the spacefaring civilization and self-sustaining colonies on Mars withouth nuclear propulsion (e.g. a cycler would provide the bulk transport of goods). Now, they still keep an eye on it. I saw a note about the mini-mag Orion just a day or two ago.
Posted by: Author at Mon Sep 24 01:09:56 2007 (9imyF)
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