New Mars Forums

Having a chinese aunt, i can say without a doubt that youre wrong josh.  the chinese are fiercely nationalistic, and anything they say about "free space for all" is political crap, at least until they move away from totalitarian oppression.

when a government sends people to work camps for published dissent, i dont think its a safe assumption that they would hold space to a different standard.

Yeah, but they will be much larger and less efficient per space taken up.  You waste a lot of land.  If we used the land needed to create 1,000 MW of power for nuclear plants, we could probably generate many times that, and recycle the fuel through breeders. 

i never said you were being unreasonable.  my point was that regulations are often taken far and away too far.  yucca mountain material should be sent through breeders.  i dont see how these environmental groups can protest high level wastes and breeders at the same time.  its a circle of false logic.

Source: New Scientist.
19:00 22 January 03

The journey time from Earth orbit to Mars could be slashed from six months to less than six weeks if NASA's idea for a nuclear fusion-powered engine takes off.

The space-flight engine is being developed by a team led by Bill Emrich, an engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He predicts his fusion drive would be able to generate 300 times the thrust of any chemical rocket engine and use only a fraction of its fuel mass.

That means interplanetary missions would no longer need to wait for a "shortest journey" launch window. "You can launch when you want," Emrich says.

The principle is to sustain an on-board fusion reaction and fire some of the energy created out the back of the spacecraft, generating thrust. Of course, harnessing fusion is no easy task. Scientists have struggled to contain the super-hot plasmas of charged ions needed for fusion reactions.

Bare nuclei.

To achieve fusion, scientists heat the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium to at least 100 million kelvin. This strips electrons from the isotopes, creating a plasma of bare nuclei. If this plasma is hot and dense enough, the two types of nuclei fuse, giving off neutrons and huge amounts of energy.

Fusion jet.

However, the plasma can only be contained by strong magnetic fields, and creating containment fields that do not leak has proved very difficult. What is more, no one has managed to generate a stable fusion reaction that passes the "break-even" point, where the reaction is generating more energy than it takes to sustain it.

Fortunately for Emrich, the reaction would not need to go far beyond the break-even point to generate thrust. And containment is less of a headache because you actually want some of the plasma to escape, he says. "That's where the thrust comes from."

The problem is 100 million kelvin is not hot enough to generate thrust. At that temperature, the fusion reaction only generates neutrons, which are uncharged and therefore cannot be steered and fired through a magnetic jet nozzle. To produce thrust, you need charged particles.

Bold solution.

Emrich is proposing a bold solution. He wants to use microwaves to heat the plasma to 600 million kelvin, triggering a different kind of fusion reaction that generates not neutrons but charged alpha particles - helium nuclei. These can then be fired from a magnetic nozzle to push the craft along.

Emrich has tested the idea with a scaled-down version using an argon plasma. He found that he could get around many of the containment problems by using a long, cylindrical magnetic field with powerful magnets at each end (see graphic).

In a fusion drive, the fields at the end could easily be controlled to release the highly energetic alpha particles and propel the craft.

If fusion researchers can ever achieve stable, break-even fusion, Emrich believes a full-scale fusion drive - perhaps 100 metres long - could be ready and waiting within two decades. He will reveal his plan in full at a space technology forum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, next week.
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there, i made the effort to get it 

He said it takes simple chemicals and combines them to power cars, making water.  he said that a child born today might run on a car that is completely clean and runs on hydrogen.

i dont have the exact words in front of me though-but he comitted 1.2 billion to it.

like i said before, im no republican or democrat.  it just bugs me when either side just spits out the party line as if its fact.

its funny, ive been saying we should cut our dependence on the middle east's oil for 3 years.  but when our president says it, hes somehow a genius.  it doesnt take that much guts when youve got the best military in the world.

What's illegal about adultery?  the fact that it was even investigated is ludicrous.  there was nothing illegal about whitewater, which is why the republicans had to turn to monica to salvage their investigation and political face.

And I would say that the deportation of people who renewed their visas, for no reason, is illegal.  as well as the powers he granted himself in the patriot act.  dont get me started on ashcroft.

blatant disregard for the UN borders on illegal.  he has set forth plans to use nukes, in certain situations, preemptively, this is illegal as per many treaties.

these are all things bush has done in office.  i really hope you dont blindly follow bush the way your words imply.

you know, if you burned it as a dvd, you could get about 12x as much data per cd.  just a thought.

o'reilly actually took on bush big time.  people complained that we should leave him alone in this time of strife.  i think he was making a point as to the blind following of the president in times of war. 

we need to improve our education so that we can think for ourselves, not let politicians think for us.

Its not anti-environmentalist josh.  i believe he did say that we should be environmentally responsible.  i believe he was saying that global warming is used as a political ploy more than a scientific fact...which at this point we dont have enough evidence to prove.

if global warming is so bad, why has the earth naturally been hotter and colder than it is now, which less intense sunlight?

Oh dear, caltech is reciting the bs party line.

um bill o'reilly is a hell of a lot more objective than the guardian.  he was making a point.  you would have to actually watch his show to know about his ojectivity, which i actually have done.

I've heard that the president is sometimes a mouth for the VP.  ive heard that especially so in the early part of bush's presidency.
in fact, ive heard it said that they are actually protecting cheney.

whitewater was a sham.  when the republicans couldnt find anything wrong with it, they discovered monica lewinsky.  there was nothing to find with whitewater, just a politcal ploy gone sour for the republicans.  enron, however, is a completely different story.