New Mars Forums

You can find the Highlift site http://www.highliftsystems.com]here.  The space elevator won't be anywhere near as expensive to use as an HLV especially when it comes to getting payloads to GEO and beyond.  The current elevator design only carries 20 tons to GEO but it'll no doubt lead to bigger, better, and less expensive elevators. It will make supplying bases on the Moon and beyond particularly cheaper since once you lift the payload to a certain point it can automatically be thrown on a trajectory to other destinations in the solar system without the need for rocket engines (except little ones for minor course corrections).  You might also check out the http://www.robotics-society.org/climbing.shtml]robotic climber competition and the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/space-elevator/]Yahoo space elevator group.

Yeah socialist countries and third world dictatorships aren't big on dumping insane amounts of funding into their own militaries.  I guess that explains why the Soviet Union slaughtered 50,000 Afghanis and conquered most of Eastern Europe and that China just must be jesting when they threaten to blow away Taiwan if it officially votes to declare independence from Taiwan and invaded Vietnam for a short while in the late 70s.  Yeah, and I guess China and every other country on Earth doesn't have big military budgets.  Only the evil USA would put so much money into such a thing.  I'm sure Saddam cares more about his own people then building up his own military and dreaming about attacking sovereign countries.  That little incursion into Kuwait must have been just training exercise gone awry or it was invoked by some evil American conspiracy.   Maybe we should just hand the whole Middle East to Saddam on a silver platter, cuz you know, he's just a nice guy.

It's a shame the Chernobyl style nuclear plants ever came into existence.  People are quick to use them as fodder against nuclear power even though most Western plants don't use that dangerous design.  The Chernobyl type plants used graphite instead of water as a moderator which means that once the water is gone the reaction steps us and causes a meltdown.  And I know water is a moderator but meltdowns are a lot less likely in modern designs because water acts as both the moderator and the coolant.  Once the water is gone the reaction stops.  The Chernobyl plants also lacked a lot of the containment features that Western plants have.  As far as the statistics on death and environmental damage go fossil fuels are definately th worse.  If we switched to hydrogen fuel produced by nuclear power plants the chances of giant oil slicks like those that happened in Spain and Alaska would be greatly reduced and no longer would our lungs be tortured by the toxic, acid rain and global warming causing chemicals that are constantly pumped into the air from coal and gas burning plants.

Mark S thinks a crew of four is too small for social reasons.   It does seem like a small crew for such a long mission and there could be dangers if members of the crew have critical specialities or skills that the other members don't have or aren't good at.  Zubrin wants to split the crew up by having two technicians who would basically keep the equipment ship shape among other necessary duties and then have scientists who do the field work.  I'd support sending more people.

I bet politics will kill the commercial production of antimatter even before it becomes a reality.  If people go nuts about fission and fusion they're definately going to demand the end to antimatter production since it helps create the ultimate nuclear reaction. My crystal ball shows treaties rolling down the pike that prevent the use of antimatter in space and just about anywhere else.

I'm a little surprised myself that the Soviets screwed up their attempt to get to the Moon so bad.  Not only did they rush their rockets into service without static testing them thoroughly they went with putting something like 30 engines on the first stage of the N-1 as compared to the five engines on the Saturn V.  What the hell was Korolev thinking when he gave the green light for the 30 engine design?  The engines they used were reliable but they all had to work flawlessy or the rocket just self-destructed.  You would think that they'd first try to develop engines more suitable for that particular rocket than dealing with the complexity of using a bunch of little ones.  Oh well, that's Murphy's law for you.

It's interesting how the Soviets covered up some of their mishaps.  My favorite is how they sent one probe to actually impact on the Moon but when it missed and instead just flew into interplanetary space they changed the goal of the mission from an impact on the moon to a flyby.

If you get a telescope get the biggest aperture you can afford.  I bought a huge 8" aperture beast even though it's not a Celestron.

Soph seems open to the possibilities of nuclear power but I share his cautious outlook on using orions for ground launches.  If we could build nukes that could explode without producing any fallout that would solve a lot of the environmental problems but I still worry about things like emp pulses.

It would be hard to beat an orion type ship for sheer lifting ability and power.  Mauk2's concept of a gas core nuke rocket seemed like an interesting alternative even though I have to admit that I'm still sold on the idea of building giant space elevators.  It would take longer to put big payloads into space but they would still get there and cheaper nonetheless.  There are chemical rockets like the Sea Dragon that are designed to be cheap and could lift 500 tons into LEO.  A far cry from the thousands of tons of cargo an orion could theoretically carry but still no small amount to sneeze at.

LOL, I could see them voting for the Regan rover.

I agree with soph.  Even though I used to support the idea of using Orions for ground launch the problems with fallout and emp blasts seem insurmountable.  I think Orion type propulsion would be ok once your safely away from Earth but I'd be wary of using it for ground launches.

I used to mock the idea of living in big freespace colonies as impracticle but I'm starting to change my mind.  I wonder how you will generate the effort and motivation to build one.  At least with a Mars colony you can build it up just a little over time and you don't have to do anything drastic like rip up whole asteroids and build huge superstructures even though those types of things would likely naturally come into play later on.  And issues like overpopulation relief probably wouldn't be an incentive either.  There would have to be some economic or other reason that would motivate the building of these massive things.  I guess you could start small and maybe build something like hotels or retirement communities based on these freespace designs in orbit and then see if it just snowballs into bigger and bigger settlements.  A space elevator would make these things a lot easier to build and stock.  I believe space elevators will eventually be like the ship and rail yards of today where cargo is hauled and then distributed to their various destinations even though a big free space colony wouldn't rely on this technology eventually.