Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-04-20 10:15:47

I thought that was interesting, she mentions this movie several times in this interview:
https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/taylor- … 11094.html
Maybe someone from the Mars Society should extend to her an invitation to the next meeting.
Taylor-Swift:-2015-GRAMMY-Awards--01-662x995.jpg

SpaceNut · 2016-04-20 18:06:55

Celerities in general have been onboard with space flights both when space adventures was booking flights and with sub orbital as well....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism

The publicized price for flights brokered by Space Adventures to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft have been US $20–40 million, during the period 2001–2009 when 7 space tourists made 8 space flights. Some space tourists have signed contracts with third parties to conduct certain research activities while in orbit.
Russia halted orbital space tourism in 2010 due to the increase in the International Space Station crew size, using the seats for expedition crews that would have been sold to paying spaceflight participants. Orbital tourist flights are planned to resume in 2015.

But that has not happened yet....

Space Adventures in Russia

Host of celebrities have signed up to take ride on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space flight

Stars who want to reach the stars include: Katy Perry, Russell Brand, Ashton Kutcher, Leonardo DiCaprio and more

These eleven celebrities are willing to risk life and limb in order to observe the stars for the mere cost of $200,000.

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-04-21 00:46:28

My second thought is maybe she might be persuaded to do some volunteer work, such as a benefit concert for example to raise funds. Just a suggestion. That is another thing celebrities can do, besides being the first customers for space tourism. Taylor Swift has a huge fan base after all, her contribution could be valuable, if someone could talk her into it!

SpaceNut · 2016-04-21 18:53:27

And yet there has been no fund raising done for space....why is that?

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-04-22 08:09:05

SpaceNut wrote:

And yet there has been no fund raising done for space....why is that?

1) There is competition with NASA
2) Any project we funded would be a drop in the bucket compared to what NASA is doing
3) the best projects that are self-funded are those raising awareness and establishing publicity which might stoke support for an expanded space program. The biggest lever we have that we can effect is public opinion. Now would could Taylor Swift do to help if she could? The best thing I can think of would be a music video, since that is up her ally, to raise awareness. I think the movie The Martian helped bring more awareness about what we could do in space, as opposed top something like Star Wars or Star Trek, which is pure fantasy! Taylor could do a benefit concert, and even possibly act, if we can get another producer to do a movie, and get Taylor to act in that movie, that would generate publicity, since acting is not usually what she does. She was a voice actress in the Lorax, I think there is some possibility in her getting involved in a project which may be of mutual benefit to her and us.

Antius · 2016-04-22 09:37:55

Her favourite movie of all time is 'Love Actually'? Quite possibly the worst film ever made. It makes any other film look good in comparison. :-)

SpaceNut · 2016-04-22 17:31:44

Tom we are not in any sort of competition with Nasa and nor should we be as we do not have the resource or funding to think that we are....

We raise awareness with a movie such as the Martian or with Amegedon.....but these are all for corporate profits and not fund raisers....

Fund raising of this type goes on for quite a long periodof time and needs to be open to the public to see what is happening with collected funds and how they are applied towards the goal....

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-04-23 10:29:06

Armageddon was about diverting an asteroid the size of Texas with nuclear bombs!

If this asteroid, Ceres was on a collision course with Earth, and we had to diverted it with an Orion Spaceship made out of used shuttle parts, that would describe the movie Armageddon. It is frankly, not something we could realistically do. The Movie the Martian is.

GW Johnson · 2016-04-23 13:56:02

Don't get too enamored of movies as models for what we want to do. I would like to point out that just about every single thing depicted in the movie Armageddon was wrong, when it comes to asteroids and their deflection. So also both of the other movies on this topic.

Nothing about asteroid deflection has changed since I went to the planetary defense conference in Granada, Spain, back in 2009. The number of asteroids that are actually solid rocks is just about zero. Most are dry flying gravel and cobble piles held together very weakly by mutual gravity, and would fly apart into a shotgun blast of small particles, even if you just shine too bright a light on them.

We already know from the Philae lander that none of our harpoon and stake schemes for latching on to these things works, either. We don't know why yet, but the point is, they don't work. We do not yet know what does.

Some are rubble piles bound together strongly by the adhesive / cohesive strength of ice. Those you can actually push on, without losing too many little cobbles or gravel particles. Those are the ones that shed comet-like tails close to the sun. In fact, there is no real difference between comets and asteroids; there is only a spectrum of small-body compositions from dry to icy. Bigger usually is icier. But not always.

If one had to use nuclear weapons as a last ditch defense, one absolutely would not land and drill. One merely explodes the weapon alongside the asteroid, to shine a very bright light on a smaller patch of its surface. There is no blast wave in vacuum. You do not blow it apart the way such weapons destroy things down here.

The bright fireball radiation vaporizes (explosively) a chunk of the asteroid's surface, which sudden spallation produces a thrust on the object by Newton's law of motion. That changes its course, enabling the means to convert a hit into a miss.

It is still unknown how much thrust is produced, as the vaporization characteristics of these things are as yet undefined. There is a serious risk of disruption of the body, which is the last thing you want to do as a last ditch defense, since the entire "shotgun blast" of debris still hits the Earth.

The better strategy is improving our means of detection, so that we have years of warning. With lead times like that, there are two gentler means of nudging these bodies to change their courses, without breaking them up. Those are a series of small bullet-like impactors, and the gravity tractor. Both require rockets and spacecraft that we mostly still don't have.

We have found 90%+/- of the big ones that might threaten us with telescopes. Those are the 10 km wide things. They cause extinction events if they hit us. The Chicxulub impactor was one of those, 65 million years ago.

We have not found even 1% of the smaller objects +/- 1 km wide. Those are regional destructors equivalent to multiple atomic strikes, if they hit us. You cannot find them with earth-based telescopes, not reliably. They are simply too small, dark, and dim to see very well. Especially if they fly sunward of us, where we are blinded by the sun's glare.

Even smaller things around 100 m size are city busters, about like a single modern nuclear weapon in effect. That's about like the Chelyabisnsk object. We usually almost never see these coming.

Most of these things, being unconsolidated, tend to break up violently in mid-air as they enter. We perceive that breakup as an explosion, with the power of a nuke or more. The more tightly-bound they are, or the steeper the entry angle, the deeper they penetrate before exploding. Some strike the surface, exploding there, again with all the power of a nuke or more. Meteor Crater AZ is one such: a solid piece of iron about 10 m in size, 50,000 years ago.

Another mistake is to equate object kinetic energy with nuke explosion energy, and try to predict the effects from that. While energy is indeed conserved, so also is momentum. The momentum of a falling bomb is essentially zero compared to its explosive yield. Not so with an entering asteroid. Even those that burst in the air have fireballs that continue down-trajectory for quite a ways at high speeds. It may be an air bust, but the traveling fireball can still strike the ground.

The detection scheme we need is an infrared telescope on a satellite (better yet a whole fleet of them) orbiting the sun at about the distance of Venus, looking outward from there. Looking outward eliminates the sun-blinding effect. Using infrared vastly improves detection capability, as these things have far more infrared emission than they do visible. Not one of these detection satellites has yet been launched.

The spacecraft we need divide into unmanned and manned. The manned craft that can reach these things is the same orbit-to-orbit craft that could take men to Mars, or anywhere else in the inner solar system. One ship design, many missions. Lots of bang for the buck equals far more likely to be built.

The launch rockets are coming along. Atlas 5 and Falcon-9 can launch small impactors now. Falcon-Heavy could launch a bunch of them, or possibly a gravity tractor craft. SLS could certainly fling a lot of these things.

So, there’s hope, as long as we don’t screw around too long. Sooner or later, we will be struck again. That’s the lesson of geologic history.

GW

GW Johnson · 2016-04-23 14:05:03

As for "The Martian" (which I enjoyed very much), it too was riddled with errors. For movie-making, telling a good story supersedes facts.

A 200 mph wind on Mars would have a hard time pushing anything around. The "air" is just too thin at 0.6% earth density.

There is no way in hell that a tarp and duct tape plus binder straps is going to hold air (or even pure oxygen) at a humanly-breathable pressure.

The vehicles and equipment depicted are not likely what we will actually send, as these are NASA's half-a-$trillion "wet dream" mission. That includes the enormous ship with the spinning centrifuge.

Pick the right site with some serious ice, and you have plenty of water. Even if you have to dig. Even if you have to desalinate.

Vacuum-flash distillation should be easy on Mars. Repressurizing condensed ice does not require a compressor, not there.

That last is why I have yammered so long about putting drill rigs on these damned landers, so we can REALLY identify the right site to send the men. If you cannot dig or drill deep, you cannot find massive buried ice.

GW

SpaceNut · 2016-04-23 20:45:22

Ever hear about https://www.farmaid.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Aid well this is sort of what is wanted for space celebrities which is not what we are getting from them....

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-04-23 20:47:38

I wondered why you could hear the wind howl in the movie. I think hearing the wind howl and listening to sand and gravel crunch under the astronaut's feet breaks the illusion that it is on Mars. Now I know in modern movies they mix their own sound, it would be hard not to have the sound effects of outside wind noises. In such thin air, if you drop a wrench, you shouldn't be able to hear it go clink when it hits the ground. Also a bit more slow mo, would have been helpful, After all with 38% gravity, if you slow down the scenes showing an astronaut walking to 38%, that would accurately simulate visually what walking under Martian gravity would look like. Basically have the actor run around in a light weight fake space suit and film it, then slow down the picture when playing it back, and the astronaut looks like he is moving around under Mars gravity. I'm sure they did this a lot in the outside sequences of Space 1999 for instance, indoors it was under full Earth gravity at normal speed, but outdoors, the astronauts did slow mo walking.

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#1 2016-04-20 10:15:47

Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#2 2016-04-20 18:06:55

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#3 2016-04-21 00:46:28

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#4 2016-04-21 18:53:27

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#5 2016-04-22 08:09:05

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#6 2016-04-22 09:37:55

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#7 2016-04-22 17:31:44

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#8 2016-04-23 10:29:06

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#9 2016-04-23 13:56:02

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#10 2016-04-23 14:05:03

Re: Taylor Swift is a fan of the Martian

#11 2016-04-23 20:45:22

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#12 2016-04-23 20:47:38

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