billvon 3,120 #26 October 6, 2009 >So what ever you make it has to get past our atmosphere first . . . That's not that hard; we have dozens of designs that will do it, and have launched thousands of satellites. Heck, there are at least two privately built spacecraft that can do that nowadays! The problem is that there's nowhere to go. The only place anyone (outside national space programs) has wanted to go is the ISS, and not too many people can afford vacations there. >H3 a lovely little isotope of hydrogen that has some very fun properties >with respect to cold fusion. H3 is actually a "hot" fusion fuel, and it's not any easier to ignite than, say, D-T fusion. Its one advantage is that the radiation it emits is easy to shield against and easy to use to make power. Still, getting the plasma to around a billion degress Kelvin is not a trivial problem (which is why fusion has not made much headway in the past 50 years.) Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shah269 0 #27 October 6, 2009 At $100k a KG for the USAF rocket and $100k for a quick 20min trip on Galactic one I would hardly call either cheap nor efficient. Can we do it? SURE! Can we afford it? no. Hell we can hardly afford to send water into orbit let alone on it's way to the moon! As for H3 last I knew there were some very interesting properties regarding it and cold fusion. I hear the Navy Nuclear Labs hit on something a bit strange regarding H3 and some metal....who's name escapes me at the moment...that loves to bond with H and at some given critical density the H3 readily forms He under "cold" conditions.Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay. The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 3,120 #28 October 6, 2009 >At $100k a KG for the USAF rocket and $100k for a quick 20min trip >on Galactic one I would hardly call either cheap nor efficient. Costs range from $5000/kg (Long March 2E, Soyuz, Zenit) to over $10,000 per kg (STS) to LEO. Still quite pricey, but doable. The problem is not that we have no way to get there. The problem is we have no place we really want to go. If Fedex could make money delivering stuff to (or from) the moon they'd have a 747-based delivery system in place in a few years. >I hear the Navy Nuclear Labs hit on something a bit strange regarding H3 >and some metal....who's name escapes me at the moment... You're probably thinking of palladium. >that loves to bond with H and at some given critical density the H3 >readily forms He under "cold" conditions. You may be thinking of muon-catalyzed fusion. Which is a cool idea (pun intended) but is not a net energy generator. In other words it takes more energy to make the reaction happen than it gives off. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dreamdancer 0 #29 October 8, 2009 QuoteWhen Jules Verne wrote about a gigantic gun that could be used to launch people into space in the 19th century, no one expected it to become a reality. Now physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of such a gun that he says could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second. Now Hunter and two other ex-LLNL scientists have set up a company called Quicklaunch, based in San Diego, California, to create a more powerful version of the gun. At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17931-blasted-into-space-from-a-giant-air-gun.htmlstay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Coreece 190 #30 October 9, 2009 Quoteorbital production of antimatter OPA!Your secrets are the true reflection of who you really are... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
