September 21, 2009
Via Rand Simberg comes word that NASA is planning a press conference on Thursday regards some analysis of the data sent back by India's moon probe.
It seems that a lot more water than expected seems to have been found.
This would greatly simplify logistics for all sorts of things.
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July 20, 2009
40 years ago our parents and grandparents did this.
Then they gave up.
Let us not betray our children's birthright the way ours was.
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May 11, 2009
Gahlran puts the task facing the astronauts in some perspective.
STS-125 is considered one of the toughest space missions in decades, repairing equipment that was never intended to be repaired in space. For context, imagine replacing a hard drive in your computer, while in a zero gravity environment, while wearing a space suit, while traveling at 17,500 mph, and oh btw you have to replace nearly 100 hard drives. Don't lose those little bitty screws either, because you have to use them to put the thing together when your done.
The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the few things considered worth this risk. With its replacement not scheduled to be launched untill 2013...assuming no pragram slippage...the Hubble is one of the most important scientific space assets in existance.
The mission is considered sufficiently hazardous that Shuttle Endeavor is standing by in the event a rescue mission is necessary (and possible).
NASA TV is streaming mission control live here.
One of the astronauts is 'Tweeting' and can be found here. (lolwhut?)
Apropos of nothing, this is the 100th shuttle mission after Challengers last flight.
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March 07, 2009
We`ve talked about launch techniques including space cannons before, and we`ve talked about pulse nuclear drive as well. Now in this post Mr. Wang brings these two indescribably cool things together with a touch of Jules Verne. He proposes a cannon powered by underground atomic bombs using underground nuclear testing testing technology. This is akin to Project Plowshare...but rather more sane as the radioactivity can be kept underground. Of course it is unworkable in the current political climate and a failure of the vessel would, of course, be....bad.It is probably best suited for a lunar site but it is an interesting proposal nonetheless.
Rand Simberg has a response here. And Mr. Wang continues his proposal here and here.
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January 31, 2009
More is the pity
Steeljaw Scribe posts on the unsavory fate of Cosmos 1818 an old soviet era nuclear powered satellite that has had what NASA euphemistically refers to as "a fragmentation incident". It seems that the satellites reactor coolant system either ruptured due to wear and tear, or the satellite was hit by debris, possibly from the infamous Chinese ASAT test....in any event the satellite has excreted a cloud of stuff....most likely hardened coolant (it used a liquid metal coolant) forming a cloud of metallic pebbles of various sizes on various courses.
What is worrisome is the fact that Cosmos 1818 is still up there and is in lots of little hard to track pieces on different vectors. This greatly adds to the navigational hazards of an orbital torus already very full of dangerous debris, and it can only add to the overall threat of collisions from orbital fragments.
If this was due to a debris strike then it is a mini example of the sort of thing that could easily lead to something called the Kessler Syndrome. That is debris hit satellites and other structures..thereby causing more debris...which in turn cause yet more collisions....this leads to a geometric increase in the generation of hyper-velocity projectiles orbiting in random directions until it is simply impractical due to the high likelihood of catastrophic collisions to continue in space. This sort of thing needs more attention...As it is, we are reinforcing the walls to our own prison.
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January 28, 2009
Due to the presence of Christa McAulliffe, the first teacher in space, it was watched with rather greater interest than most launches, and around the country, thousands, if not millions of schoolchildren witnessed the explosion and death of 7 brave men and women.
17 of our best have risked and lost everything to open up for us a frontier of limitless opportunity. No words I can write will do these people justice.
There are choice words however for the visionless mandarins in congress and the federal bureaucracy whose venal machinations and lack of foresight have ensured that 20 years after the Space Shuttle Challenger we have done next to nothing to get us farther along in opening the frontier these brave people died to explore.
These same malevolent mandarins chose this somber day to virtually bankrupt the nation, and their priorities revealed in the stimulus package show that investments in our future and moving the nation forward rank far below their greed and visions of power.
It is not by accident that I call these people Mandarins, for the story we see unfolding before us has happened before, as I wrote in a previous post of what happened to China...
...In possession of the largest merchant fleet in history, the oldest and most advanced civilization on earth decided in the early 1400's to stop exploring and engaging the world. The nation rapidly lost the applicable technologies and did not become a world power again until the 1960's...and was not a serious economic power until the early 90s.
The lead in economics and power the US currently enjoys is infinitesimal in comparison to the lead in technology, knowledge, and both hard and soft power that China enjoyed in the 1400s. Other nations were literally centuries behind, and yet a group of visonless bureaucrats, for reasons of both well intentioned but short sighted idiocy, and the most venal self interest, stymied through legislation (or simply outlawed) not only emerging technologies, but existing ones as well. China was leapfrogged and became the plaything of the nations who had put her inventions to good use. In a last fit of bureaucratic group think, the descendants of those who had brought this about, ended the modernization efforts of the Tang Dynasty solely because they feared that the new ministries and corporations focused on technological development would threaten their power and relevance. The result was 70 years of blood, culminating in the worst mass murder humanity has ever seen.
We are very close to repeating one of the most calamitous mistakes any nation has made. We have leadership that does not like free enterprise and due to today's events, we face a generation or more of severe parsimony on the government side as well....if we are not to completely bankrupt the nation.
There is hope of course.
Like a farmer facing drought we can muddle through this and prosper in the end, but only if we don't eat our seed corn. Technology investment is the seed corn of a modern nation. We would do well to remember that and see to it that future leaders encourage rather than stymie it.
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December 21, 2008
This was somewhat similar to the “Colliers†space program as envisioned by von Braun and others… just not so small and limited.*
Not so limited indeed...the station was half a mile long and the gravity deck (centrifuge) was 1500 feet in diameter. This was the size of an O'Neal colony...in 1956!
*Explanation of the irony in this statement can be found at this awesome site. dedicated to the "Colliers Space Program"
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November 03, 2008
Brickmuppet's crack team of science babes heads to medical to be
checked out for any...umm...side effects (oh dear) ...er, but not
before pointing to this interesting if utterly blasphemous post at Chizumatic.In it Steven Den Beste takes up the Sagan argument, namely that we should not be sending people into space because exploration can be done much more safely and efficiently via robots.
I heartily agree that many, applications can be done better via robots, but I part ways with the assumption that that is the point.
To me the ultimate point of a space program is not exploration per se' but settlement. While it is easy to pooh-pooh the idea that we shouldn't put our eggs in one basket, the fact is that Earth is a small place in the great scheme of things. If we believe that there is any intrinsic value to humanity and its works then we should begin to decentralize our population. This is not an irrational view.
There are other reasons to go into space of course....
A society in the hostile environment of space is not likely to embrace luddism to any great extent as there will be no doubt that technology and its advancement is necessary to survival. (Even the most human friendly non-terrestrial environment in the Solar System....Titan...will require some serious technical skill to live on).
Frontiers are the birthplaces of liberty and innovation. Our own history here in the USA is a fine demonstration of that. Note that these 2 things, Liberty and innovation, are getting stymied world wide by expansive government regulation on one end and rising Islamic radicalism on the other.
Now a space colony is not likely to be the libertarian slackers paradise that some seem to think. Everyone will have to pull their weight and there will be a few things like smoking, serving natto and opening windows that will be disallowed with extreme prejudice. However, what regulation there is is likely to be practical and necessary as opposed to inane.
This last bit is speculative to be sure and is based in those most irrational of human traits hope and aspiration. However these qualities are intrinsic and necessary to Humanities survival...and they don't figure well into auto-cad.
What can be modeled empirically are the cold equations and they are not nearly as pessimistic as Mr. Den Beste suggests.....
It is true that launch costs are currently exorbitant, but that is due to a series of bad decisions dating from the early 70s. There is no reason that the cost of launching a person into space cannot come down dramatically in a decade or two.
A while back we posted a brief primer on how to get to space without using vaporware like space elevators or anything involving a long lost Tesla patent. Nothing there is terribly far fetched and most has been developed to one degree or another. The problem is misdirected priorities.
Getting to orbit is 3/4 of the battle. Once there the energy expenditures to get anywhere else are pretty modest.
As for long term survival and settlement, assuming that we are using nuclear power, there are places with enough metals, air and water to sustain us if we are clever. With no major breakthroughs necessary, Mars, Ganymede and Titan have everything we need to build large settlements and Titan is particularly benign due to its thick nitrogen atmosphere, which provides good radiation shielding as well as (obviously) nitrogen. There is nothing particularly far fetched about this. All that is lacking is will and money.
Note though that while the math has been pretty well worked out, and the hurdles are not nearly as difficult as they appear such an endeavor is not nearly as easy or as inevitable as some of the advocates assume.
But....
While we strongly disagree with Steven on the practicality and benefits of becoming a multi-planet species, he is right that there is a strong streak of religiosity to some of these space advocates...and not only can they get tedious, they can lobby for and get space programs to go into utterly counterproductive directions.
One of these is the idea that pushing space based solar power will open the stars to us all. Space solar power involves big solar collectors (about the surface area of Manhattan) gathering solar energy, converting it to microwaves and beaming it to big antenna farms on earth where it is converted into electricity. Now the reasoning goes that putting these heuge solar power satellites in orbit will solve all our energy needs and build a space infrastructure that will make manned exploration of the planets an incidental expense....
OK there are a few problems with this cunning plan....
Launch costs are currently ridiculous...(admittedly that is fixable, see above.)
Additionally, a space based solar power array is likely going to be built by robots.
Well this is about as useful for building a human friendly infrastructure as the current program. Assuming the launch costs are brought down THAT would help but this alone nixes a lot of the appeal that the program has to my fellow space cadets.
"But space solar power will solve all of our energy needs"
Alas no...while space based solar power is theoretically possible it is unlikely to ever be practical. Even given very cheap launch costs or the handwavium of a space elevator it is not going to be competitive with terrestrial power sources such as nuclear power. You have to build these things in GeoStationary orbit...which is pretty crowded and more expensive to get to than the moon.
You have to maintain them on station and repair meteorite damage.
Geostationary orbit is a high radiation area and degrades solar panels so the satellites must be replaced regularly.
Station keeping is a hurdle I've never seen dealt with in the literature. Peter Glasser's baseline SPS designs have the area of Manhattan and the mass of a battleship...the broad face must be pointed toward the sun. This light structure has huge sail area and little mass. What you have is a big, expensive and inefficient solar sail. (Space exploration bonus...hitch a ride to L-5
)Then there is the environmental impact statement necessary for beaming microwave radiation into an area the size of the National Mall at orders of magnitude the intensity allowed for human exposure. The idiot Luddites currently frenzy over power lines...a rectenna array will get their knickers in a wad and their lawyers rich to be sure. Finally one problem with a rectenna array.....the microwaves will interfere with regular WiFi and cell transmissions...not part of the equation in the 60's and 70's when these were proposed.
This does not even look into the wisdom of putting the nation energy infrastructure in one very fragile exposed basket in geostationary orbit. A basket that a few ASAT devices could smite with little trouble.
SPS arrays are not he key to space or energy independence. To the contrary they are most unhelpful and a waste of time, rescources and mental capital.
And I say that as somebody who would move off planet in a heartbeat and considers that only slightly far-fetched....
UPDATE: Space elevators are frequently brought up as a solution to all things spacey. They certainly have potential in theory but there are sufficient hurdles that we should continue development of reusable rocketry. Now everybody's favorite killjoy has a long, informative post explaining why even assuming we get needed breakthroughs in materials, they are not entirely straightforward in their execution.
No source available for astronekonaut
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October 15, 2008
On the 9th NASAs Casinni probe successfully flew to within 16 miles (!) of the surface of Enceladus and managed to pass through the tenuous remains of a guyeser plume! Samples were collected and are being analyzed now by the probes dust analyzer. Previously, spectroscopic analasis had confirmed that the big guysers at the moons southern hemispere are very rich in organic matter as well as water. The probes dust analyzer may well give a better idea of what sort of organic matter it is.
NASA is also working on the Hubble Telescope which has suffered a major problem and are attempting to switch to redundant electronic systems. The Atlantis mission to service the historic telescope one last time is already delayed until next year.
Space X successfully launched its medium lift launcher several days ago. Brickmuppet Blog was remiss in not covering it at the time....but here is a You Tube in atonement.....
Often overlooked when talking about commercial space are suborbital sounding rockets, but these are potentially a growth industry as well and have some potential to be stepping stones to greater things for their respective countries. One such outfit is Garvey Spacecraft Corperation which recently launched a science paload designed by college students from Kentucky.On the other side of the pond, the UK minister of science is endorsing the creation of a UK Astronaut corps, This is a sea change for the Brittish space program . More here and here.
France is studying microsatelites launched from a Rafael fighter. The Aldabran program is discussed here (HT RLV News) and there are other inexpensive small launchers proposed in this report.
ESA is looking into a means to bring things the other way..from space to earth..with an eye to a manned system as well as other aplications. To that end they are studying something with the rousing name of Intermediate Experimental Vehicle.....This is hoped to , amongst other things, allow for a rescue capability from the Space Station independant of soyuz.
Finally in a less near term time frame. International Space University has conducted a study of the engineering challanges of outer planet exploration , mainly with regards to the systems of Jupiter and Saturn. Report one from Project Theseus is mainly concerned with a Europa mission, though the ambitious spaceship design is scalable to loftier goals.
Wow!
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September 19, 2008
Arrrrr.....one of the Brickmuppet's crack crew of alchemaic wenches 
has picked up this bit of scuttlebut from that thar scurrvy dog Brian Wang.
It seems that a bunch o' 'lubbers at ESA have been lookin' into spacejammers, and have figgued ot how to get more speed outa their sun sails by usin' St Elmo's fire!
This here sail there talkin about doesnt ride the light from the sun like other spacejammers, it rides the suns own westerlies!
That might not be of any interest to us 'ceptin that this Wang feller has figgured out how to use this here contraption to find treasure amongst the planets. Real treasure mayties, not just gold and silver mind you, but platinum and fresh water too!
If'n this thing works it'll be fast too! ...about 1, 494, 625 kts faster than one of them new fangled 15 kt clipperships!
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September 05, 2008
all dressed up, with nowhere to go..and this pisses them off!They point out that while we have had the math worked out on reaching space for a century and we've been doing it for about half as long, it is still too great a hurdle for cheap access and large scale development.
This is a side effect of expendable launchers, which make sense from an engineering standpoint (they have maximum fuel efficiency and the highest payloads) but in an economic sense...they make no sense.
The problem here is that with the most current launch vehicles we are doing the equivalent of flying to Japan in a 747 and then blowing up the plane......every time. If that were the process for a transpacific flight..I could not have afforded to go to Japan last month.....just about no one could have.
So how do we fix the problem? Well obviously we make the damned thing reusable so you can fly it more than once!
While it may seem at first blush to be a dispatch from the department of "Duh!", that task is not as easy as it sounds...nor as impossible as some suggest.
more...
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August 29, 2008
60 odd days till the election...
Kossacks...
UPDATE: HAH! I Love it!
UPDATE 2: Steven Den Beste posts on....Hell, just go look.
UPDATE 3: The Anchoress has put together everything one needs to know about Palin-noia.
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July 20, 2008
If we could send people to the moon 39 years ago you'd think that today we could....well...you know.
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April 23, 2008
Holy crap!
Despite the harrowing entry, the capsule somehow did not incinerate on reentry (w00t!) but landed hundreds of miles off course with no working radios and had a very rough landing.
Fortunately, all three crewmembers, American Peggy Whitson, Korean Yi So-yeon, and Russian Yuri Malenchenko were safe.
But then there is this... (HT Rand Simberg)
The Russians chastised the crew for not radioing...(I refer you to the 'melted off antennas' bit) and....as a precaution to ensure that this sort of thing never happens again...
" "You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,'' he said. "Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass'the number of men. "
Saydowhahuh?
So the problems have been identified as Peggy Whitson, who was the first female commander of the ISS and currently has the American record for number of cumulative hours in space and Yi So-yeon who is the first Korean in Space.
Oh good....I was worried they'd waste money on something silly like the attitude control system or GPS...but that was no doubt my cynical nature talking.
An accurate representation of what female astronauts reentering the atmosphere do not look like.
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April 12, 2008
47 years ago a human being first entered Earth orbit.
In 8 years the human race went from one low furtive orbit to landing on another celestial body. The difference between the low orbits of Vostok and Mercury and what was required to get to the moon was vast. The difference in energy between getting to the Moon and getting to Mars, Ceres, or any of the other worlds this side of Jupiter is actually quite small. The solar system was open planets and moons beckoned and the future seemed to have arrived!
Now, 47 years after one man wen where no one had ever gone before we have, instead of SIX FLAGS ON THE MOON...six flags...on the moon. surrounded by the footprints of the only twelve to walk on its surface.
47 years later we do send several people a year into space. They are confined to low earth orbit just as Gagarin was. there are plans to return, but it is pointed out that it will take more than a decade more to do what was done in 8 years from scratch 39 years ago.
In 1968, Hollywood imagined the year 2001 to be one of casual space travel with huge moon cities, massive Space stations and the ability to send people as far afield as Jupiter. Given the rate of progress to that point this was seen as utterly reasonable. And yet....
The reason often given is that we have too many problems here.
That was the reason given by the bureaucrats of the Ming Dynasty when they decommissioned Zheng Hu's treasure fleet which had massively stimulated trade commerce and cultural exchange. The results of that unenlightened decision were rather unfortunate for the nation whose bureaucrats made it but it consolidated their power in the short span of their petty, venal lives so they no doubt thought it was a wise move.
A rather more eloquent set of refutations for this sad attempt at an argument can be found here.
With that in mind, tonight we reject these visionless Mandarins as people all over the world celebrate the first instance of a human leaving out atmosphere and entering orbit.
As an added bonus, he future has been long in coming, but its finally getting here.
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March 29, 2008
Over at Colony Worlds, Darnell Clayton wonders if the inflatable Spacehab type modules that Bigelow Aerospace are using can be adapted to artificial gravity.
Now, one of the Brickmuppets crack team of science babes points out that, somewhat surprisingly, the numbers have already been run on this idea and it is quite doable.
The study, in pdf form here, is quite interesting and relevant to human exploration in ways that the ISS simply is not.
Designed as an exercise by a team of students from the University of Maryland (at College Park) the proposed Clarke Station is a manned, variable gravity research facility intended to determine exactly what gravity level is needed to sustain long term human health.
Given that all of the planets and moons with resources that make human settlement possible have substantially less gravity than Earth, this is a nontrivial question. Lunar Gravity can, of course, be tested on an off the shelf satellite...the moon...but it seems prudent to test physiological effects of other gravities at a location no farther than the moon where the bail and scramble back to earth time is measured in days not months (or years in the case of Titan). A variable gravity facility can of course be used for training in say, Martian gravity to learn any tricks and unwelcome surprises of a particular gravity level. It bears remembering that the 1/6th gravity of the moon required some considerable adaptation by the Apollo Astronauts to simply get around.
(boingy boingy boingy..)
We need to find out some very basic things....
Does gravity in the ballpark of the moon have the same long term effects as 0 gravity? If so, what is the lower limit of tolerable gravity? Can we have permanent settlements on the 1/4 g environment of Mars for instance? Can low gravity effects be mitigated by exercise or drugs in ways that actual free-fall cannot? (this seems likely....to a point....but we have no reference for where that point might be). What are the actual maximum rotation rates that a crew can reasonably adapt to? This has a big effect on how wide and therefore big and heavy the centrifuge habitat in a spacecraft needs to be I've see reports that suggest a 30 foot diameter is adequate (Zubrin referring to his Gaiashield mission) and some that say 100 feet or more is necessary....we need to KNOW this stuff.
None of this can be found out on the ISS or current spacecraft because they are in free fall. A proposed gravity deck on the ISS was omited for budgetary reasons (and I'm not sure it would have been useable by people). Manned space exploration is going to require these sorts of questions answered
The station is interesting for another reason. Its choice of radiation protection.
The station is positioned at a Lagrange point (L1) which leaves the crew without the protection of the Van-Allen belts. This is compensated for by filling the walls of the inflatable modules with water. A few trips will pump the water into the walls to give superb protection. The original NASA inflatable concepts (going back to the 80's) had this as a feature so it is well within the design parameters of the materials involved. Water is heavy, but it is easy to handle and is well tested as a radiation shield. Given the existence of an inflatable module, pumping in water is just one more thing that needs to be pumped, simplifying assembly. Outside cislunar space on a mission to another planet or an asteroid, this sort of rad shielding will be a real asset. This is not a new concept at all, and it is elegant in its simplicity but it has never actually been done.
The position of this station at a liberation point is of more significance now than it was when this plan was developed, as we now have as a national goal a return to the moon. As John Goff points out, orbital propellant depots at a Lagrange point have the double advantage of enabling greater payloads to be carried to the moon and learning important, practical hands on lessons about one of the primary technologies for spacefaring....transfering fuel and other fluids between spacecraft. More on this architecture here and here is Boeing's proposal, focusing not just on the nuts and bolts but its commercial viability...in this case of a low earth orbit facility. Things break, so if an orbital propellant depot is built having one of these nearby allows the crew to do double duty as gas station attendants!
It should be noted that the Bigelow-type inflatables are a fairly mature technology,for instance, here is a paper on inflatables from 1988.
Within the limits imposed by my stock disclaimer, this station seems to be a conservative and robust in design with a good fudge factor regards strength (it can sustain 1.2G) and the inflatable modules should simplify construction. It is a modest near term proposal using off the shelf technology that can bring in huge benefits There are certainly some issues not covered by these engineering students but in order to tweak those would only require NASA to send it to Langley or Glenn. All that would require would be for NASA to be looking seriously at this line of research.
And therein lies the rub.....
Science babe is from Intron Depot (I think) and is, of course, by Masamune Shirow, who's art, books and artbooks can be bought here.
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March 04, 2008
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Popular Mechanics provides these pictures of two massive Martian avalanches, taken from orbit.
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March 02, 2008
dressed up with nowhere to go, but in fact is trying out her new threads around 4 years in advance... in anticipation of this rather speculative story from Flight Global panning out. It seems that the next step in the Virgin Galactic/ Scaled Composites spacecraft evolution is thought to be a point to point hypersonic trans- atmospheric vehicle for super-quick intercontinental passenger service!
Although SS3 has also been referred to by Whitehorn as an orbital vehicle, and a SpaceShip Four as a possible name for a two-stage micro satellite launching rocket, at the New York SS2 and its carrier aircraft White Knight II unveil Whitehorn told me that SS3 would actually be a point-to-point vehicle travelling outside the atmosphere.
Such a point-to-point vehicle could be a stepping stone to solving the technical challenges for a manned orbital vehicle but for now, Whitehorn, tells me, he expects work to begin on SS3 soon after Virgin Galactic's commercial operations are underway.
Interesting if true and it certainly makes sense. This sort of 2 or 2.5 stage point to point rocket liner has been proposed since the before the beginning of the space age and some serious consideration was given to it in the mid to late '50s in the case of the civilian version of the BOMI vehicle. This is both logical and potentially useful IMHO, it has rather lower stresses and heating issues than a full orbital vehicle and it has more destinations (the whole freaking world). It would provide an insanely fast passenger service.
Somewhat related is this Chairforce Engineer post (via Rand Simberg) on what the real Space Race is all about.
[ quote ]Imagine for a second that you're a Congress-critter. You can't get past the giggle-factor associated with landing a man on the moon, but you don't want to look like the Luddite who kept American astronauts grounded. So you've got to pick a system for sending your astronauts to the space station. Do you pick the privately-developed system which carries more astronauts, costs less to operate, and gets America back into orbit faster? Or do you keep shoveling money at the government-run program? The only thing NASA has going for itself right now, aside from the fading lunar dream, is the political implications of laying off the thousands of people whose jobs rely on NASA's manned spaceflight program.
Brickmuppet Blog has mentioned this before. I firmly believe there is a place for government in space exploration but it needs to work with rather than against the private sector...
Which brings us to Bob Bigelow whose Bigelow Aerospace has finalized a deal with LockMart for 50 (!!) launches for stations, their crews and supplies over the next 5 years. These are incredible numbers and it is an indication of how serious and advanced heir plans are. w00t1! (Via Colony Worlds)
One of the more elegant solutions for interplanetary travel is the solar sail, which uses the pressure of sunlight to move it about the solar system. In THEORY they can attain tremendous velocities. With a very close pass to the sun speeds of up to 4% the speed of light are possible (that'd get you to Alpha Centauri in a Century and Pluto in 4 years) of course this requires unobtanium...I mean you'd need to be able to make sheets of carbon nanotubes and thats just science fictiony silly talk....oh wait....
Yay!
Over at Centauri Dreams is this fascinating post on efforts to find extrasolar planets...in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest stars really similar to our own sun. 17 pages of exposition by the scientists involved are here.
Sails and peering through telescopes aren't actually rocket science, so to get us back on track here is George Dyson giving a talk about the most awe inspiring actual rocket ever seriously considered. Every bodies favorite Atomic Pogo stick....project Orion.
...And here is a 3 and a half minute BBC video on the same subject.
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February 16, 2008
I'm drilling this weekend and have scads of homework to boot. As promised, regular blogging will resume in a couple of days.
In the meantime, thanks to Ryu, here is a white haired, green eyed girl in a bikini with two M-1911A1's ....which should punch enough tickets to almost compensate for the recent Patalirro link.
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