The International Space Station (ISS)

CasualBystander

Celestial
and something more exotic than chemical fuel

There is EMDrive and the various NASA Ion Drive projects.

They all develop less than 1/10000 the thrust of chemical fuels.

EMDrive uses no fuel and Ion Drives use about 1/10 the fuel of rockets (specific impulse is 10x).

Useless for getting off the planet.

But rockets only carry a couple of minutes of fuel.

Scale exotic engines up to say 1/500th the thrust of rockets and it doesn't take long space before you are passing a rocket.

Can ion thrusters be scaled up?

NSTAR engines weigh 48 kg including the thruster, power processing units, xenon feed system, and control interface. Three of those and 475 kg of xenon will impart delta V of over 10 km/s to the Dawn probe, itself weighing about 600 kg without those thrusters.

The Dawn engines have a specific impulse of 3100 s and thrust of 90mN (270 mH total).

The Dawn spacecraft (the rest of it) weighed 600 Kg. 10 km/s is about 3 km/s over escape velocity.

Just for comparison the Lunar Lander weighed 16000 Kg, 11,000 Kg was fuel and 500kg was rocket engines, tanks, etc. The descent stage produced 45.04 kN of thrust. The ascent stage produced 16 kN of thrust.

The LEM engines had a specific impulse of about 311 seconds.

So it is just a matter of improving the specific impulse and total engine output.
 
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CasualBystander

Celestial
Just a note on rocket fuel and the practical limitations. The RL10B-X has a specific impulse of 470 seconds and is 80% efficient. So around 500 seconds is about as good as rockets will ever get.

The specific energy released by combusting hydrogen and oxygen is 13.4 MJ/kg. Other rocket fuels produce pretty similar energies per kilogram.

The specific energy released by detonating TNT is 4.612 MJ/kg.

Rocket fuel could be viewed as 3 times as powerful than TNT.

Another fun fact: being an astronaut is exciting. The LEM propellants were so corrosive the engines could only be used once. All the Apollo moon landings used untested engines.
 

Toroid

Founding Member
A robot the size of a medicine ball will be sent to the ISS.
IBM is sending a floating robot head to space
ibm-watson-space-robot-ai.jpg
 

CasualBystander

Celestial
It appears a camera aboard the ISS is taking video of Mars. A platform around that planet could have taking the video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFv8LbmPdMk


Believe that is the Soyuz escape vehicle so that is the ISS.

Urban Dictionary: Pink Cloud

12 step recovery jargon referring to someone new who talks about how great life is, now that they're sober. Usually meaning that the person is out of touch with reality.

That is an area of earth that is out-of-touch with reality. It could be focused on California.
 

CasualBystander

Celestial
no the glow is too similar to an dust storm, and we can't see any signs of the terminator (the place where day ends and night begins)

.

I just supplied a period. Now you have a terminator.


This is a dust storm from space.

ISS015-E-07874.jpg


Dust is generally dust colored.

This is monsoon season:

Monsoon-Dust-Storm-Pink-Rainbow_photo_medium.jpg
 

Kchoo

At Peace.
We could travel to Jupiter and Saturn for about the same price as a wall between Mexico and the U.S.

We just need a reason to go.
 

CasualBystander

Celestial
We could travel to Jupiter and Saturn for about the same price as a wall between Mexico and the U.S.

We just need a reason to go.
You mean we could go to Jupiter and Saturn for less than the cost of a single year of the Obama era global warming program.

We should just fold the global warming funding into NASA and repurpose it for exploration.

You obviosly are talking robot missions not manned or womanned missions.
 

Kchoo

At Peace.
You mean we could go to Jupiter and Saturn for less than the cost of a single year of the Obama era global warming program.

We should just fold the global warming funding into NASA and repurpose it for exploration.

You obviosly are talking robot missions not manned or womanned missions.
I see no point in sending man into deep space until we find a comparable breathing atmosphear and a nice source of fresh water to drink from.
 

CasualBystander

Celestial
I see no point in sending man into deep space until we find a comparable breathing atmosphear and a nice source of fresh water to drink from.
Finding a place with all the comforts of home is a good plan.

However we can make Mars livable, and shorten its day by bombarding it with comets, then dispersing hardy plants

No one cares if we rearrange Mars to our liking.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
All the Apollo moon landings used untested engines.

Seems legit, especially the first couple or three Apollo missions, we should to go back to the moon and commercially there should be long term plans to mine the moon...
 
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