New Mars Forums

"If your god is in the sea, then in heaven you would have fish before you. If your god is in the sky, then in heaven you would have birds before you."  A very appropriate quote from the Gospel According to St. Thomas. 

If your god is in outer space...

I'm very emotionally devided about the prospect of Shuttle C.

I think there's some use in a shuttle-derived launch vehicle, and I don't consider it the impossibility that many seem to think it is. 

Unfortunately, it would probably just end up yoked to the international space station.  :bars2:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  Although I personally agree with the sentiment that if you're going to eat it, you ought to be willing to kill it yourself, modern industrial farming practices employ methods that I'd never use on another living creature.  Always know where you're family's meat comes from, and avoid products from farms with questionable practices such as the use of laser powered cow corers.

Technically speaking, I have actually seen a satanist in a helicopter.  Can't say I'd favor him for cattle mutilations any more than space aliens, though.  Oh he's capable, of course, but I'm not aware that he and his buddies have that many helicopters. 

Other strange phenomena that I've actually seen include both ghosts and UFO's. 

For those of you who have never seen a ghost without benefit of electronics and/or photography, I can't really recommend it.  That requires waking dreams or some other rather involved form of hallucination.  Add to that all the extra effort of trying to jump up and grab your spectre by the ectoplasm, and it's really too much sugar for a dime.  Take it from someone who has tried.

UFO's are far less taxing, and can be seen with greater frequency.  Well, unidentified atmospheric phenomena can be seen with great frequency, anyway.  Arthur C. Clarke once observed - very correctly - that anyone who has never seen something in the sky they can't identify is either very unobservant or lives in a very cloudy area.  I can vouch for that.  I've never heard of anyone being kidnapped by a lenticular cloud formation, though. 

I don't know about alien spacecraft.  My own observations are rather recent, but include no recent alien abductions occurring outside of hypnotherapists' offices.  Perhaps the aliens have learned all that anal probing can teach them.  Or, given the prevalence of alien abduction in hypnotherapist offices, perhaps they have merely restricted their sample set.  I can't say.  Maybe avoiding hypnotherapists could affect one's incidence of anal probing?

Please, don't insult Star Trek.

Ah.

Well, the ATO's answer is still the same: aerobraking.

Aerobraking is just the use of atmospheric drag to change a vehicle's velocity.  The drag force can be used to stop the ship and land it, or "skip out of the atmosphere" and change its orbit. 

Thanks to Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and other manned spacecraft, we're in the habit of thinking of aerobraking as its own distinct part of the mission (e.g., launch, orbit, aerobraking, landing, debriefing, etc.), rather than as a physical effect employed for navigation.  That's not necessarily true for an ATO mission. 

The vehicle could conceivably experience substantial drag during its entire flight.  This drag would work constantly to slow the vehicle, just as it does for a typical airplane.  When we start using that drag force to steer or change speed, that's technically aerobraking.  Nobody thinks it's unusual when an airplane pilot throttles back or raises his flaps.  He's just flying the plane.  Likewise, it's no more unusual for an ATO vehicle to use aerobraking as well.

"Landing" an ATO vehicle would be very similar to landing an airplane using just the throttle.  You turn the engines on, and the runway gets smaller.  You turn the engines off, and the runway gets bigger.

GCNRevenger, I can't unreservedly endorse any single photocell structure for airship-to-orbit, except to say that some suitable inorganic cells are available.  The solar panels needed would weigh several tons regardless of structure.  The parameter of interest is not their weight, but their power-to-weight ratio, where organic cells do not exactly shine.  I am also leary of organic cells because I don't know their performance at the temparatures involved. 

The ascent trajectory can be chosen to place the ship in shadow as little as possible, but some power storage is necessary.  It does not need to be 24 hours worth, and can be further reduced by halting the ascent during dark hours.  That's still major power use, though.  Electric rocket engines are always power hungry, even on a diet.

I have little data to suggest ATO is either "too fast" or "too slow".  It's minimum possible turnaround is two weeks, since that's the amount of time it would probably take to get to orbit and back.  Make of that what you will.   

Speaking of getting to orbit and back: Dick, re-entry is going to be a dream.  IMHO, every low earth orbit satellite should have a humongous parachute to ease it smoothly down into the mesosphere without all those messy burn-ups.  There's just one catch - that big envelope may not be intact by the time the ATO needs to come down again.  It's more fuel efficient to dump it once orbital velocity is attained.  (Anything that's still giving the ship lift is still giving it drag, too.)  Also, the lower thermosphere - the atmospheric region where an ATO sans envelope could hope to attain orbital velocity - is the region where atmospheric protection from micrometeorites starts fading away.  Leaks would not be severe at the gas pressures involved, but would be inevitable.  There might be problems with gas loss due to micrometeorite strikes.  Anything short of complete rupture still wouldn't cause the ship to burn up, and maybe not even that - the balloon is just too big.  But it might not be able to remain airborne once it gets back down, which would destroy it just as surely.

In summary, Phillip Johnson goes around scaring anyone who agrees to talk to him.  He also claims to have a wedgie.

Thanks for the heads up, Phillip.   :laugh:

Actually, they're planning to use an airship for the entire ascent.  The system uses a rondevous in the lower mesosphere to change vehicles, then goes single stage to orbit riding on an airship.  The entire airship makes the ascent from mesosphere to orbit.  (No rockoons or further staging.)

Let me find a working link...

http://jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf]ATO *.pdf File

Expect it to be a little vague.  They like to think they're being secretive.  For example, when they first began posting descriptions of their V-airships more than five years ago, they would only show them in profile!    :laugh:

Various other links and speculations exist around the internet, including this thread at Newmars:
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic … 1]Airships To Orbit Thread

As I mentioned, it's performance isn't likely to be what's advertised.  However, we should still be interested, if only because its performance is likely to be better on Mars.

I don't know.  I was munching on some of my kid's multivitamins the other day (Should I be admitting this?  ??? ), and they tasted pretty good to me.  I wouldn't mind one of those on a donut.

They're completely synthetic - mostly sugar mixed with chalk.  A little extra lard and strawberry filling would leave none of that healthy aftertaste.

Check out these microscopic imager photos:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 4.html]Sol 494 at Larry's Outcrop

It looks like just another rock, but according to the corresponding day's forward hazcam images (showing where the image was taken), this looks like a soil target.  It's part of the soil layer that appears to be clinging under the outcrop.

It's holding together remarkably well for a bunch of dust, don't you think?

Dollars or yuan?

Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that the average Russian internet user is still using a Commodore 64 knockoff to type telnet addresses.

The solution could be to open a NewMars branch site in all-text format.

Yes, the dollar has declined in value relative to other currencies.  I'll also admit that we are poised for inflation to come along and knock it down again by the same percentage.  China isn't to blame, though.

China opening their currency to foreign exchange won't help much with the China-to-US trade.  I'll bet this announcement sent a shiver down Walmart's collective spine.  However, the yuan's relative value is so artificially low at the moment that it's inhibiting US-to-China trade, so open currency exchange won't immediately hurt, either - even if the dollar inflates another 30%.  (Besides, they haven't actually done anything yet.) 

China might come in and mop up later, but they will not be the immediate cause of our next recession.