Putting a reactor in space of sufficient size could be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.
Should NASA Have Retired Shuttles?
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Putting a reactor in space of sufficient size could be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.
The OST has all the thought and presence of a snot-filled napkin filled that's still on your table at Denny's. It throws away the reality of human behavior accumulated over tens of thousands of years in favor of an abstraction of two state actors that it doesn't name, for a purpose it neglects to mention, with ramifications that it doesn't consider, creating massive flaws it doesn't suspect.
Yeah but in the end it's still international law and the US is obligated to follow it.
"Nice guys finish last." And "gun free zone" signs will stop criminals from using guns.
That's why in one of these threads (maybe this one) I said that a later objective of private enterprisers will be to get away from earthly restrictions. No doubt the governments of Earth will still try to claim jurisdiction, but if the governments have to turn to the private space companies to send their badges out to arrest the people experimenting with advanced engines...
Incorrect. OST only bans the use of nuclear weapons, not nuclear energy for civilian purposes.
Besides, this is the United States we're talking about. When have WE ever gotten in trouble for violating a nuclear weapons treaty?
The OST is going to last exactly as long as it takes someone to figure out that they can wipe out a good-sized city by slingshotting a large asteroid at it. Then it'll be a matter of who can slingshot the biggest asteroid.
An asteroid is hardly a precision weapon, unless you have a setup like that described in Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. (In other words, some kind of mass driver and steering rockets—oh, and a conveniently passing asteroid timed to fit your political needs.)
Or are you suggesting that OST will be quickly repealed if an asteroid comes our way so that we can blast it into rubble with a nuke, a la ARMAGEDDON? Then we'd have a huge cloud of cosmic buckshot coming our way.
Try again.
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My heart and mind are with NASA, but my money's on SpaceX.
Or if one of the thousands of O'Neill-type colonies in Earth Orbit becomes really pissed off at some ground-based nation and decides to attach rockets to one of their space colony cylidners to send it hurtling towards the Earth like a giant missile.
Seig Zeon.
Why do scientists keep saying crap like that? Bukcshot is NOT as dangerous as a deer slug, and a shower of tiny meteorites is not anywhere near as deadly as an ground-penetrating impact by a massive one.
As bad as Chelyabinsk was, nobody actually died as a result of the explosion and the damage was relatively minor. I'd rather suffer a hundred of those spread out over the entire planet than seventy megaton ground blast over a major city (unless, of course, you can guarantee me that the asteroid will land in Texas. In which case... meh.).
True, the "buckshot" might be completely survivable, but there's no guarantee that simply nuking an incoming asteroid will turn it into harmless buckshot. How big is the asteroid? What is it made of? Suppose the blast vaporizes only a small portion of the body, thus leaving one or several large masses still headed toward Earth?
If the mass(es) are deflected randomly, will their new orbit eventually bring them back to Earth?
Blowing up asteroids is for videogames and Hollywood movies. ARMAGEDDON whipped up an Orion (Dyson's design) spacecraft to get the oil drillers out to the asteroid. Such an engine has power to spare. Why didn't they use it as a mass driver to put the asteroid on a safe, predicted orbit? Because that's not spectacular.
That's an excellent question. If an asteroid were blasted apart while in the course of its orbit, how long would it take for the chunks to establish a new orbit? Or, would their tendency at that flailing, uncertain stage to be drawn to a nearby gravitational source (i.e. Earth)?
You're confusing Armageddon with Deep Impact. Common mistake.
In Deep Impact they tried to sink a dozen nuclear warheads o drilling robots into a comet. They took too long, one of the warheads was ejected from the comet and so the blast failed to destroy it, but simply split the thing in half with both halves still headed to Earth. At the end of the movie, the first smaller chunk hits the ocean and the resulting tsunami kills half a billion people; the larger chunk is intercepted by the Orion-equipped spacecraft which kamikazes into it with the remaining warheads and manages to finally break it down into pieces small enough to burn up in the atmosphere without killing everyone.
I retell this particular plot because it remains a fact that the smaller chunk did not do nearly as much damage as the larger one would have if it hit the ground. If Tanner's crew had only succeeded in breaking the comet into a dozen similarly-sized fragments, the damage would still be catastrophic, but it wouldn't necessarily lead to the extinction of all life on Earth (which the singular large impact DEFINITELY would).
If you're talking about the nuclear-powered spacecraft from "Deep Impact," the very simple reason is that they couldn't figure out a way to dock the thing to the comet in a way that would be reliable enough to guarantee deflection. No one had ever even ATTEMPTED a landing on a comet before (and Tanner barely manages to pull it off), let alone the sort of complicated EVA work that would be required to attach the booster. The space mission itself was kind of a crapshoot and they had to keep things simple.
In Armageddon's case, there's the fact that 1) they didn't find out about the asteroid until two weeks before it hit and 2) it's a Michael Bay movie, which means it cannot be resolved by anything other than an explosion.
Generally, no. If the thing's on an impact trajectory anyway, then having them miss Earth the first time would drastically reduce their chances of coming back around and hitting again. Primarily this is because Earth's gravity will act on the fragments as they pass, accelerating them into new orbits. Mainly, though, this is because any object that is moving on the right trajectory to hit the Earth is probably not on an orbit that is all that SIMILAR to Earth and will take a considerable amount of time -- several decades, let's say -- before it comes close again.
That's an excellent question. If an asteroid were blasted apart while in the course of its orbit, how long would it take for the chunks to establish a new orbit? Or, would their tendency at that flailing, uncertain stage to be drawn to a nearby gravitational source (i.e. Earth)?
I vote for both/and not either/or.
Never depend on another guy for your rides--we should have learned that from the current Ukrainian crisis.
So I'm all for in-house solutions--but if Musk inherits LEO from ULA--so much the better.
As far as Kaku--he started all that anti-Cassini crap
NSFW http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku
Perhaps the better question for this thread is whether the Shuttle should've been retired in the late 1980's or during the 1990's, in keeping with the original plans. At the intended flight rate of about a mission a week, they would've flown 150 mission (more than they achieved) in just a three-year span.
That's what Kraft wanted--he wanted to take more risks.
Now I seem to remember a small shuttle-like stack for a smaller spaceplane--not the early Dream Chaser, but another spaceplane. Hypergolics reduce the drop tank size after all.
Any ideas as to what this was? I seem to remember it years ago in the Journal of Spacecraft and rockets. http://arc.aiaa.org/loi/jsr
Some thoughts
http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/1...amese-vehicles-and-sea-dragon/comment-page-1/
Now I seem to remember a small shuttle-like stack for a smaller spaceplane--not the early Dream Chaser, but another spaceplane. Hypergolics reduce the drop tank size after all.
Any ideas as to what this was? I seem to remember it years ago in the Journal of Spacecraft and rockets. http://arc.aiaa.org/loi/jsr
Some thoughts
http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/1...amese-vehicles-and-sea-dragon/comment-page-1/
It was after shuttle I'm sure.
Here is some spaceplane stuff for those of you who aren't model makers.
Take a look at this shuttle concept:
http://fantastic-plastic.com/RockwellC-1057BreadboxShuttlePage.htm
Other rocket-planes
http://fantastic-plastic.com/FDL-6SOMVPage.htm
http://fantastic-plastic.com/X-24CPage.htm
Here is some spaceplane stuff for those of you who aren't model makers.
Take a look at this shuttle concept:
http://fantastic-plastic.com/RockwellC-1057BreadboxShuttlePage.htm
Other rocket-planes
http://fantastic-plastic.com/FDL-6SOMVPage.htm
http://fantastic-plastic.com/X-24CPage.htm
Hitching rides from the Russians only makes sense when the US government isn't doing everything it can to piss off Russia. Now we have no means to get to space ourselves and those American astronauts on the ISS are stuck there at the mercy of those very same Russians that our government is poking in the eye.
So while the shuttle program was just becoming a deeper and deeper money soak that was proving to be just a space truck, there should've been a vehicle to replace it, an AMERICAN vehicle, before the shuttles were retired.
So while the shuttle program was just becoming a deeper and deeper money soak that was proving to be just a space truck, there should've been a vehicle to replace it, an AMERICAN vehicle, before the shuttles were retired.
