New Mars Forums

Why wouldn't a pressurized inflatable greenhouse work? Sort of like the biglow modules only less extreme and made out of Mylar film. Maybe an unpressurized sheet could be laid over the whole thing to protect it from dust and be easily replicable. That would also give it excellent insulation, if you had a lot of layers.

A massive rocket is by no means needed for building that size of a reflector, 20 tons of mylar is a sphere with a 500 m radius. Send up you genorator and transmiter on other rockets and you're set. But why do you want a SPS, weren't you just saying that fusion power was going to produce net gains?

I thought that it would probably be a rotovator in low orbit so it could touch down any where if the orbit was highly inclined, but I guess the answer is  that this really isn't on NASA's radar. Probably they'll stick with expendable landers for saftey's sake anyway. A reusable lander will be hard to service when it eventually breaks down.

Possibly, what I don't understand is why it says the areodynamics are so difficult, it's not too much different from a ramjet missle right? What I'd like to see is a sor of strap on booster ramjet augmented rocket out of some composite. It might help current boosters it it was cheap and self contained. You might even be able to sell it to altspace companies as the sole engine, since they won't go past mach 5 anyway.

So it's simply a ramjet on the bottom of a rocket to help with the acceloration? That sounds so simple, why aren't these all over the place? I hate to think that people just forgot about them!

Since this seems to be the place to post crazy ideas, how about this, take methane and oxygen and mix as liquids. Then take a really heavy duty cyrocooler and cast a solid fuel rocket at say, 40 K. Then use water ice for the walls, and keep it in a refrigerated lanch silo. Then you can have a strait shot to the moon with a single stage rocket and bring water instead of steel from the walls. No pumps and high isp.

If we really need to stop fishing wild fish, we probably need to change the type of fish we eat, like if we were content to eat catfish we could just feed them corn and that would be it. Another way to prevent overfishing the oceans fo aquacultre feed would be to build enclosed areas and put extra nutrients in the water like iron to trigger a massive algae bloom, like those folks were going to do in the pacific to stop global warming. Then your fish could eat that and the sludge at the bottom could be sold as fertilizer for land farmers. It's interesting that the limiting nutrients in water ecosystems are so different from those on land.

I guess I really didn't explain it properly, my idea was that a large plastic pipe opened on each end could be a fuel tank. The engine assembly, probably an aerospike engine would have a gasket and large ring so that it could just fit in the bottom of the pipe to be a plug, then at the top, the payload would cover the top of the pipe. The interior cavity created could be filled with oxidizer and fuel, and maybe pressurized to avoid turbo pumps, though that wouldn't be absolutely necessary. Then the bottom engine assembly would burn the propellant and as the tank emptied, could climb up the walls of the pipe, maybe by spinning and having the inside of the pipe threaded, of some other way. This would expose some of the pipe behind the engine, where it could be burnt sort of like a hybrid rocket, or since the engine will probably be an areospike just left there to burn off and reduce weight as it goes. If there was a problem with too much of it burning quickly, the outside could be covered with some fire retardant that the engine assembly scraps off as it climbs, but I don't think that will be a problem since it can only burn where there is oxidizer, that is at the end of the pipe.

Здравствуйте Сери,
Я говорю немного по-русски и игода зтот плохой русски хорошо для тебе? Так, Я думаю что мы не едем к Марсу потому что никто хочет давать деньги за этот полёт. Так, вы нужен находите много деньги, или обнаруживаете ехать к косиосу с мало деньги. Я думаю что рокеты слишком дорого стоит.
До свидания, прощайте мой очень плохой по-русски.

Hum, yes I didn't even think of the spiraling from drag, bit of an oversight. :oops:  However, if we add one more "Rube Goldberg" step, pephaps it could work? The problem seems to be that the drag would be far too high for the centripidal force to counter and prevent spiraling correct? So what if electric cables were placed in the cable and it had some kind of electrostatic propulsion system ever meter or so, that could counter the drag? Since the power could come from the ground, it would not have to be terribly efficent.

Why not a rocket? I think rockets are dandy for what we do now (puttering) but to bring a good number of people into space, I'm not sure they can ever be made cheap enough. Pephaps not safe enough either, though that's debatable.

Well, it might work... I don't really understand how the ribbon holds the cargo up though when it's the ribbon is horizontal, wouldn't the ribbon sag and then quickly slow down due to drag? Probably worth watching though IMO since the structural materials are close to what is comercially avaliable today.

I'm not sure that re-creating the biosphere is possible on a small scale, or if it is it's probably not going to be practical. However, I went on a tour of Biosphere 2 and the thing that sunk it was the bacteria that grew on the foundations while it was half built, that shouldn't be such a large problem in space . In all probablity though it won't be that simple to get rid of the foundation bateria. The one thing that struck me when i was there though was that though the land based ecosystem failed misserably and the people were barely scraping by, the little "ocean" worked fantastic. It wasn't highly productive, but the fish hadn't been fed in 10 odd years. So, as far as space goes, I woúldn't try to recreate the whole ecosystem. It's too hard. I'd just have a whole wack of shallow ponds with lighting, plancton, and some catfish if people don't like the all alge diet. It's easy to add the nessisary trace elements to the water as nessisary, unlike soil, and quite a few of those extra ellements could be mined from the asteroids and the moon. Perhaps we will never have a completly closed cycle, but one that can be resupllied easily from the surrounding resoures is almost as good.