Stories tagged space travel
Lost and not found: Private rocket disappears just minutes after take off
We've had a number of post about private space travel recently. Here's the story of a private rocket shot off over the weekend that's disappeared just a couple minutes after launch. Where did it go? If it was one of those model rockets I shot off when I was a kid, it would be wedged between some tree branches.
Tags : You may have read about this here in the Buzz a while back, but the first public viewing for Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo aircraft will Monday. That aircraft will carry a separate craft – SpaceShipTwo – to a high altitude from where it will blast free and carry space tourists on a few laps around the Earth 62 miles up. Here are the full details.
Soaring to space: The dual-hulled WhiteKnightTwo will soar through the atmosphere to an altitude of 50,000 feet where it will then launch SpaceShipTwo, cradled in the middle, off to space. WhiteKnightTwo should be ready for initial testing next month.
Courtesy Virgin GalacticWhile we’ve been getting cranked up here at SMM about this week’s opening of the Star Wars exhibit, where people will be able to get the virtual feel of what it’s like to be in one of the popular sci-fi movies, the folks at Virgin Galactic are frying up some bigger space fish.
Next month in the anticipated date for the roll-out of WhiteKnightTwo, a mother-ship aircraft that will be fly high into the sky to launch smaller crafts into space. The first big application of this technology, space tourism flights, are targeted to start in 2009. You can plunk down a down payment of $20,000 for a $200,000 ticket on a flight by clicking here to get to the Virgin Galactic website.
A shuttle for tourists: This diagram shows how SpaceShipTwo will work once it gets into space and also how it prepares for re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
Courtesy Virgin GalacticHere’s how it works. After taking off from a conventional airstrip, WhiteKnightTwo will climb to about 50,000 feet carrying the craft SpaceShipTwo in the space between its twin bodies.
SpaceShipTwo then fires its rockets and releases from WhiteKnightTwo roaring into a suborbital path 68 miles above the earth. In space, it can reach a speed of more than three times the speed of sound.
After giving its six passengers a unique view of space scenery and the experience of weightlessness, SpaceShipTwo turns back to Earth. Moving into the atmosphere, it extends its wings and aerodynamically flies back to the airstrip as a conventional plane landing.
Reservations have already been made by 254 people to take part in the flights. Virgin Galactic is shooting at booking 500 to 600 passengers before beginning flights. And the company’s business model shows that with that kind of participation, the endeavor will be profitable.
In the meantime, Virgin Galactic will be doing testing on the WhiteKnightTwo, with 130 to 150 test flights on the docket before commercial operations. Preliminary tests on SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne were done in 2004.
Operations are currently being based at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, but an official terminal for the “spaceline” is currently under construction in New Mexico. SpaceShipTwo will be brought out to the public sometime early next year.
Along with carrying passengers in SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic foresees WhiteKnightTwo being able to carry other payloads up toward space, including microsatellites. Also, WhiteKnightTwo could be used to carry huge water tanks for flyovers of forest fires.
Is anybody out there?: If not, it'd be fine by me!
Courtesy NASA
Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? That’s a hot topic, both among astronomers and right here on Science Buzz. The argument goes like this:
• There are about 100 billion galaxies in the known Universe
• Each galaxy has about 100 billion stars.
• Even if only a small fraction of them have planets, that’s still an awful lot. Ya gotta figure at least some of them developed intelligent life.
And thus we go looking for signs of life in outer space: probes to Mars, searches for organic molecules, even scanning the skies for radio signals. So far… nothing.
Nick Bostrom is glad. This Oxford professor argues that finding life on other planets would be bad news for us here on Earth.
The way he sees it is this:
• The Universe is about 14.5 billion years old.
• Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
• That’s plenty of time for intelligent life anywhere else in our galaxy, or even a nearby galaxy, to come pay a visit.
• They haven’t.
This convinces Bostrom that interstellar travel must be impossible – if it wasn’t, someone would have stopped in by now, if only to ask for directions.
What makes interstellar travel impossible? Bostrom and economist Robin Hanson theorize (or “theorise” – they are British, after all) the existence of one or more “Great Filters.” The evolution of life, from primordial ooze to galactic explorer, requires a vast number of steps, some so complicated as to be virtually impossible. Obviously, one of those steps has been preventing interstellar travel for the past 14.5 billion years, so it must be pretty good.
What does all this have to do with life here on Earth? Simply this: the identity of this filter, and whether it lies ahead of us or behind us, may very well determine the fate of all humanity.
If the filter lies behind us—especially if the filter lies wayyyy behind us—then we’re in good shape. We’ve passed the barrier that has stopped everybody else. But if the filter lies close to us—or, worse yet, ahead of us—then it spells big trouble. For example, perhaps the only way to travel the stars is to harness some great energy source: nuclear power, or perhaps something we haven’t discovered yet. And perhaps every civilization in the history of the Universe that discovered this power ended up blowing themselves up. It’s unlikely that we would be any different.
Bostrom’s conclusion is counter-intuitive but compelling. If, as we explore the Universe, we find life is rare, then that’s good news—Earth succeeded where every other planet failed. But if we find that life, especially complex, intelligent life, is common, then that doesn’t bode well at all. Whatever stopped those planets is likely going to stop us, too.
*(PS: The answer is, Tommy James and the Shondells, later covered by Tiffany -- both proof that intelligent life is exceedingly rare, even here on Earth.)
Industrial sites for sale?: According to some futurists, the moon could be the creation site and launching pad of missions to Mars. Robots would use materials found on the moon to make the spacecraft and then be able to blast off faster and cheaper from the moon's smaller gravitational pull. (Photo from NASA)It looks like our moon could someday be rezoned for industrial use.
That’s what those involved in space exploration learned at a recent conference. For economic and efficiency reasons, robots would lead a team of manufacturers based on the moon building the spacecraft that would go to Mars.
Those attending the Space & Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Ala., learned that a Mars spaceship might be too large to build and launch from Earth. The ideal situation would be to have a team of robots based on the moon doing most of the work in building the craft.
Robots would be needed because the construction work would be too cumbersome for humans to do while wearing spacesuits. Researchers are also investigating ways to process moon soils into metals, such as aluminum, iron and titanium, which would then be used to build the spacecraft.
And due to the moon’s weaker gravitational pull, it will 20 times cheaper to launch Mars missions from the moon than from Earth.
While this all sounds pretty futuristic, aeronautic and space manufacturers are already designing and building the next generation of U.S. spacecrafts, the Ares I and Ares V, which will replace the current fleet of space shuttles. The Ares I will shuttle astronauts in and out of space. The larger Ares V will be used to transport heavier cargos.
What do you think about using the moon as a factory? Share your thoughts here with other Science Buzz readers.
The Moon: Photo courtesy NASA.The new documentary IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON is both inspirational and awe-inspiring in its retelling of NASA’s Apollo program to place a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. The great thing about it is that it’s the Apollo astronauts themselves who tell the story.
Director David Singleton interviewed 10 of the remaining astronauts who had traveled to the Moon and back including Jim Lovell (Apollo 8 and 13), Gene Cernan (Apollo 10 and 17), Dave Scott (Apollo 15), Alan Bean (Apollo 12), Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17), Charlie Duke (Apollo 16), and Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11). Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, is not interviewed, but the notoriously reclusive astronaut appears quite a bit in the film, and of course can be heard taking his famous first step on the Moon’s surface.
Besides the many technical triumphs, the film also touches on some of the setbacks NASA faced in its race to fulfill president Kennedy’s seemingly impossible lunar-landing dream, including exploding Saturn V rockets, the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts, and Apollo 13’s doomed mission.
I’m a big fan of the whole Man on the Moon adventure, so a lot of the NASA film footage used in the film was already familiar to me, but some scenes (especially one when Apollo 11’s command module heads off toward the Moon) were a complete surprise, and just seeing it all on the big screen was a real treat.
Astronaut Alan Bean on the adventure of his life: Photo courtesy NASA.The astronauts themselves – now in their seventies - come off much warmer and more human than I expected. Alan Bean, in particular, seemed like an exuberant child telling you all about the great amusement ride he got to go on.
So if you remember where you were when Neil Armstrong exclaimed “Houston, the Eagle has landed”, and even if you don’t - or even if you weren’t born yet – I recommend you see this really great film. You’ll relive, or experience for the first time, all the excitement of one of mankind’s boldest and greatest achievements.
The cost of flying to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship has increased from $25 million earlier this year to $30 million. Trips planned in 2008 and 2009 will cost $40 million. Five space tourists have paid $20 million to $25 million to visit the space station via the Soyuz vehicles through trips arranged by Space Adventures. The company announced Wednesday that two more Soyuz seats have been purchased for tourists to fly in 2008 and 2009.
The imaginauts take some imaginary air: Forced from the module by a bad smell, their patience is truly being tested. (Image by frogmusuem2 on Flickr)Russian scientists are well underway with 4th dimension mobility research, and expect to have a working time machine within the year. The time travelers, or “chrononauts,” will enter a sealed chamber, and then, supposedly, emerge 520 days in the future. Scientists do not believe, however, that the travelers will be able to return to their “home time” and so will be making a great sacrifice in the name of scientific progress.
The process for moving these people 520 days through time will take approximately 520 days. I have a bathtub that functions on very much the same principals, although it is only capable of moving me about half an hour into the future (or slightly further, if I don’t mind getting a little pruney). Like the Russian device, the bathtub does not allow for one to move backwards again through time, although that lost half hour is not always one I’d want back.
Some in the scientific community retain doubts on the validity of the time travel process. They claim that it is not so much “time travel” as it is “Big Brother, but without cameras.”
The purpose of the research, according to the Russian scientists and the European Space Agency (ESA), is not to see the future, but, oddly enough, to study the effects of a simulated journey to Mars on astronauts.
The ESA and NASA hope to send a manned spacecraft to Mars sometime in the next several decades. The thing is, a trip to Mars would be kind of like a family road trip that lasted a year and a half – 250 days to get there, 240 days to get back, and a month in between at Yellowstone (or Mars). With no stops to stretch your legs. Scientists want to know what happens once the sing-alongs stop and the chex mix runs out. I’m guessing something like “Lord of the Flies,” or “Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in Space.” But I’m no scientist.
Volunteers from all over Russia and Europe have been fighting for the chance to be placed in a 550 cubic meter pod with five strangers for 520 days straight. With the exceptions of weightlessness and exposure to radiation, all aspects of the interplanetary trip will be simulated. The module will not be opened for anything outside of a major emergency, and there will be a twenty-minute communication delay between Earth and the “space ship.” Also, the three volunteers who will be landing on Mars (as it were) will have to spend a month in a separate chamber, “lying on their backs with their heads lower than their feet,” to simulate the effects of zero gravity. Prospective volunteers expect this portion of the experiment to be “super crappy.”
Applicants should be “Healthy and professional… and intellectually tough.” So I’m out, but anyone else who’s interested in a trip to Mars, with no Mars, should get a hold of the ESA.
Space plane: Here's an artist's rendering of what the proposed space plane would look like. (Photo courtesy of EAS Astrium)It’s never too early to plan your next vacation. And I have a trip idea for you.
This week EADS Astrium in Paris announced its plans for a jet plane/rocket that will take passengers on a half-hour trip into outer space, including three minutes of weightlessness. If development plans continue on schedule, the first trips could be made in 2012.
Here’s how the planes work. They will take off from a conventional airport’s runway using standard jet engines. Once the planes get 7.5 miles in the sky, rocket engines will fire to quickly accelerate the craft. How fast? In 80 seconds the plane will be 37 miles above Earth.
You can sit here: For around $200,000 you can buy one of these seats for a 90-minute trip, which includes a half hour in space and three seconds of weightlessness. (Photo courtesy of EAS Astrium)After the rocket blast ends, the plane will coast into a space orbit that will be below satellite traffic, but above airline traffic. Four passengers will be able to ride on each trip which figures to spend about a half hour in space. The plane would then descend back into Earth’s atmosphere, jet engines would kick in and the plane would make a regular landing at an airport, about 1.5 hours after taking off.
Okay, there’s one more small piece of information I need to tell you about. The cost per passenger is estimated at between $199,000 and $265,000. You might need to save some a lot of your sofa change between now and 2012 to come up with that kind of plane fare.
More information about the project is available at www.astrium.eads.net.
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