I get to sit in Mission Control Center and watch the upcoming EVA on tuesday.

7/4/2013 11:03:58 PM

^ hate you.

Just saw a thing on TV though about theoretical black hole engines. Seems like that might be our nearest "exotic" space faring technology to me.

7/4/2013 11:18:49 PM

Yeah, I got to visit the lab that they're working on the proof of concept for it. It looks insane.

7/5/2013 12:26:24 AM

is that like the Romulan warp core that uses an artificial singularity?

7/5/2013 8:21:52 AM

Quote :

"Just saw a thing on TV though about theoretical black hole engines. Seems like that might be our nearest "exotic" space faring technology to me."

I read an Arvix paper about this some time ago. There's no doubt that black holes could be used for energy, but propulsion is fought with other problems.

To begin with, the general scale of mass you need is about the size of Mt Everest. And this is put into a subatomic space. Now, you can imagine using this as propulsion, but how do you "grab" onto it? A gravitational tug would be difficult, and the radiation you're using is extremely high energy and hazardous. Plus, if you're going to feed it more matter, you still have to deal with that subatomic target.

We need a quantum gravity to understand them in the first place, and the basic state of things is that it might not be very useful for propulsion, depending on what a complete physics theory says about them.

No one disputes, however, that they could be used for energy. There's a tradeoff between power output, mass of the BH, energy of the radiation, and stuff like that. We just don't know how well that balance can be struck, which new theories will tell us. But regardless of how that goes, it's still possible to get energy as per E=mc^2, a true Mr. Fusion, it just might be really really hard.

More than likely, an unintended evaporation would destroy our solar system if it happened anywhere close. So the time-frame and scale is far enough out that it's irrelevant for humans as we exist today.

7/5/2013 10:19:55 AM

http://imgur.com/a/UWgEe#0

The full album of the pics I took at the NBL

7/7/2013 7:15:19 PM

^^ The clip i saw mentioned oil-tanker mass black holes, and they weren't anything you had to "feed" they dissipated on their own and would have be refueled with a new black hole.

I imagine you grab it with a magnetic field, and propulsion is done by using the black hole to accelerate ambient particles through an engine (like a jet engine, but for space, instead of air).

Pretty far out at this point, but theoretically we might already be making tiny black holes in colliders.

7/7/2013 11:12:52 PM

Quote :

"^^ The clip i saw mentioned oil-tanker mass black holes, and they weren't anything you had to "feed" they dissipated on their own and would have be refueled with a new black hole."

I feel obligated to state the logical objection - that black holes of that size do not occur naturally as far as we know. We've done surveys looking for them and found nothing. If they do exist, either they are extremely rare, or our theory is wrong.

Moving it with E&M would be an attractive option. Certainly better than a gravitational tug. But there are a few complications when you think about it deeply. Firstly, you have to give it both an electric charge and an angular momentum to get a magnetic field, which would be ideal. The angular momentum should not be very difficult, but the charge would be more challenging. It's the same problem with fusion - that adding more charge to something already charged means you have to defeat the Coulomb barrier. In this case, get past it to the gravitational well, as opposed to fusion where you're trying to get past it to the nuclear well. Hitting a subatomic black hole with your accelerator would be hard enough to begin with, hitting it with electrostatic repulsion working against you would be harder.

But then again, at least part of that is wrong. Black holes universally have the constraint that in relative units Q<M. This would imply that the gravitational force is greater than the electric force for any given particle that also has Q<M, but I think that's not true for electrons actually. So maybe just don't use electrons, and use ions. But wait, the black hole is subatomic to begin with. If it's charged, it'll rip apart the atom and take the parts it likes.

Of course, this hints on the other reality - that black holes actually don't like to have charge or angular momentum and would prefer to get rid of it. This isn't major for large black holes, but I remember briefly reading that small black holes may dispel these quantities extremely quickly. Well, maybe that's still proportional to the total quantity of it. So it's still possible that a sufficient Q and L for navigation will be small relative to the total M and they'll stick around long enough. That's still subject to quantum gravity revisions, of course.

There are other problems, however, aside from just the ability to "grab" the black hole. Notably, the tradeoff that comes with its mass. Too small, and it gets hard to add mass (or create in the first place). Both because its size is vanishingly small, and because of a wall of radiation blowing away incoming matter. Too large, and it's inertial mass becomes a problem for a spaceship. The last point isn't a problem for energy production though.

[Edited on July 8, 2013 at 10:50 AM. Reason : ]

7/8/2013 10:48:38 AM

http://www.space.com/21876-spacex-grasshopper-jumps-over-1000-feet-hexacopter-video.html

SpaceX's 'Grasshopper' Reusable Rocket Prototype Makes Highest Flight Yet

http://www.space.com/21881-spacex-grasshopper-rocket-highest-test-flight.html

7/8/2013 4:40:20 PM

My audio feed selection during the spacewalk today

7/9/2013 6:06:04 PM

Eva, as in



?

7/9/2013 11:44:25 PM

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/07/dream-chaser-opening-tow-tests-dryden/

Quote :

"Dream Chaser ETA completes opening tow tests at Dryden Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) have completed the opening salvo of tow tests on their Dream Chaser Engineering Test Article (ETA) at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC). These opening test objective are being used to validate the performance of the spacecraft’s nose skid, brakes, tires and other systems. ..."

7/12/2013 12:41:07 PM

About to do a video conference with Astronaut Karen Nyberg who is currently on the iss..what should I ask her?

7/12/2013 2:17:39 PM

Now Karen, we all know that the moon is not made of green cheese. But what if it were made of barbeque spare ribs, would you eat it then? I know I would. Heck! I'd have seconds and then polish it off with a tall cool Budweiser. I would do it. Would you?

7/12/2013 2:26:45 PM

Hey everybody! Check out the kid in the sombrero!

7/12/2013 3:00:16 PM

http://xkcd.com/1244/

7/29/2013 8:08:01 AM

7/29/2013 12:55:01 PM

http://mashable.com/2013/07/29/nasa-55th-anniversary/

8/1/2013 12:39:46 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Alq08Poqb0

"Curiosity's first year on mars in 2 minutes"

8/1/2013 2:27:56 PM

NASA's Massive SLS (Space Launch System) Rocket passed a HUGE milestone recently... the Preliminary Design Review (PDR).



http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/08/sls-completes-pdr-rocket-science-missions/

8/2/2013 4:14:25 PM

http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/1stbday/?go=20130803

8/3/2013 3:36:09 PM

Curiosity captures one mars moon passing in front of the other...

http://www.space.com/22392-curiosity-sees-martian-moon-s-phobos-and-deimos-time-lapse-video.html

8/16/2013 2:12:20 PM

^^^Just saw your post about PDR. A lot of my work is in that bad boy! We're already working on CDR, lol.

8/16/2013 3:05:53 PM

well kudos for you. in all of this budgetary and political uncertainty, nasa is pulling off some sound engineering it seems.

8/16/2013 10:30:30 PM

truckin

8/19/2013 9:52:47 AM

It's interesting how it can look both sandy in some places and rocky in others. I guess even the moon is a little like that.

8/20/2013 5:43:53 PM

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17355

8/28/2013 12:56:19 PM

8/29/2013 9:48:47 AM

I work for the company that built the WISE telescope and its being recommissioned to hunt for asteroids. Exciting.

8/29/2013 9:57:36 AM

9/3/2013 4:59:07 PM

i saw that on the Kerbal Reddit post... awesome!

9/4/2013 1:30:56 PM

9/4/2013 3:17:26 PM

From Opportunity!

Sol 3405 and
Sol 3415




And apparently ^ wasn't recent. It's made it much further than that.

http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html

9/5/2013 9:24:49 AM

11:27pm tomorrow night a rocket is expected to launch from eastern VA.

The destination is the Moon. More on the mission here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ladee/main/index.html#.UijWHT_4LcO

[Edited on September 5, 2013 at 3:06 PM. Reason : .]

9/5/2013 3:06:15 PM

hard to believe these are on Mars

9/9/2013 10:18:08 AM

So there is a lot of talk on one of the forums i read about using the proposed "Skylab II" idea as a deep space habitat to connect with the Orion capsule for trips to far off destinations such as an asteroid (mid 2020's) and then perhaps even on to mars (mid 2030's), as well as other in-space uses.




The quick and dirty on this thing... It will use a Hydrogen tank build for NASA's SLS "monster rocket" converted on the ground to a habitat and stuffed with supplies and launched on an SLS flight. The benefit is that the tank would offer a sturdy and roomy pressure vessel with enough supplies crammed into it for "4 missions" (but I'm not entirely sure of the duration of these missions). Life support systems would be derived from the life support systems on board ISS modules.

http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Griffin_3-27-13/Griffin_3-27-13.pdf
This is a powerpoint outlining a proposal of the "Skylab II" design. We discussed this a few months ago, but I don't think I posted a link to the proposal in part due to NASA shutting down access to a lot of it's documents for a while.

Other options for the "Deep Space Habitat" would be an ISS derived module and a couple of other ideas. According to a source, they have been given the go ahead to start building a simulator based on the SLS tank design only.



[Edited on September 10, 2013 at 5:59 PM. Reason : ]

9/10/2013 5:58:24 PM

Recently, I discovered this blog:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/beyondapollo/

It is a blog of old NASA proposals that didn't make it.
The proposal for a Venus flyby sounds an awful lot like ^

I mean, it was based off the original Skylab.
You strap a booster on it, and then it's "see you in a year or so".

9/10/2013 6:05:56 PM

^oh man i need to read that site when i get a chance. The venus flyby was part of the apollo applications program if i'm not mistaken, correct? I think it's probably good we didn't go through with it at that time... we've learned a lot more about radiation dangers since the 60's!

9/10/2013 6:23:37 PM

Wait, that Venus mission might have been from this very thread.
maybe not. Can't remember.

Quote :

"we've learned a lot more about radiation dangers since the 60's!"

Yeah, but nothing has really changed. Even at that time they worried about solar flairs.
Supposedly a part of the window in the 70s for the Venus mission was a period of low solar activity.
Thus the radiation would have been lower just that one year.

But with Mars, we're not really going to "solve" the radiation problem.
Of course people will bunker in the center when there are solar flairs.
Still, anyone who goes will probably go way beyond current NASA limits and increase their chances of cancer like what smoking does.
I mean, that's a large increase. But we've kind of established that some people are willing to die to go to Mars.
Cancer doesn't seem so bad in comparison.

9/10/2013 6:52:05 PM

We might have discussed the venus mission... I'm a HUGE fan of all apollo-era spinoffs (such as skylab)... But you are right that radiation is still a danger but not a show stopper - especially with strategic timing, shelters, medication, etc.

9/10/2013 7:38:57 PM

Holy cow!

http://www.space.com/22712-stampede-spacex-s-grasshopper-startles-cows-video.html

9/11/2013 7:10:45 AM

^ that's really cool

9/11/2013 7:50:53 AM

lol @ solar flair

...picturing the sun waiting tables wearing a bunch of buttons

9/11/2013 9:38:03 AM

lol funny you should post that Skylab II thing, Smath, I just started a rotation a month ago working on Deep Space Habitat stuff, including Skylab II concept demonstrations. In fact the guy who created that pdf you posted is on our team. Just last week I was working on programming some of the lights on the ISS derived mockup. We just got a gigantic ET section that was sitting in storage at JSC to build the mockup for Skylab II. Once FY14 starts next year we'll be starting the actual construction. The other two mockups we have in the high bay are the ISS derived meant for EML2 (Just had a big review last week on that) and an extended stay mockup (meant for 500 days near an asteroid). We have tons of pictures but I'm not sure if they are allowed to be posted on a public forum -- I'll ask my boss today.

[Edited on September 11, 2013 at 9:40 AM. Reason : ]

9/11/2013 9:38:37 AM

9/11/2013 9:51:04 AM

A few shots I managed to get. You'll have to excuse the low resolution, my phone is old and doesn't have the best camera:

ISS Derived 500 Day Habitat:



ISS Derived Cis-Lunar Habitat:
Entrance

Aft End


(better pictures, taken from a coworkers camera)
Inside one end:

Close up of what looks like a hygiene rack:



3D Printer in Action, making a structural component for the 500 day habitat:



And if you are really bored here is me pretending to know what I'm talking about with 3D printing on the space station (although I don't know if this link will work):
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151578549541073

I may be giving a tour next week, if so I'll get some shots of the SLS tank section to be used for another habitat concept and get some better shots of the interiors.

[Edited on September 12, 2013 at 5:45 PM. Reason : pics]

[Edited on September 12, 2013 at 5:45 PM. Reason : ]

9/12/2013 5:36:20 PM

nice... looks like this presentation is right up your alley...

http://prezi.com/e19djllcahkc/deep-space-habitat-to-fp/

There is one slide where it says the DSH might be canceled? Do you have any info on that?

[Edited on September 12, 2013 at 6:41 PM. Reason : (i saw your name in one of his other prezis )]

9/12/2013 6:34:08 PM

Wraith, is that the Deep Space Habitat prototype?

9/12/2013 6:38:05 PM

Just got to my home computer and realized that half of those pictures I posted were red x's. Here they are again (although I guess it doesn't really matter since the prezi that Smath posted actually has a lot more nicer pics):

Cis-lunar/ISS derived habitat:


3D printer in action:


The guy who made that prezi is actually my immediate supervisor on the project. That looks like the actual slideshow we had going on in the background today while we were talking to people at the expo. The one you saw my name on was probably the full presentation he gave to some important folks from JSC and HQ last week. I've only been working on the project for about a month now though.

There is one slide on there that says DSH is canceled ... it isn't as bad as you think though. The concept of a project in which we investigate long term habitats in space is not canceled, just this SPECIFIC project. Think of it kind of like how Ares/Constellation was replaced with SLS -- since this is a lot smaller project though, it doesn't have as much as an effect. One of the issues with the previous concepts is that they were shuttle/ISS derived and designed with components that were originally designed to be delivered to space on a shuttle. Obviously that isn't an option anymore. The new hotness is called the Exploration Augmentation Module. Different name but same basic concept. The major difference is that this new project hasn't been fully defined and it is still in early concept phases. The good news is that we are still hoping to pursue an SLS-tank derived concept (Lots of people were originally referring to it as Skylab-II but that isn't the official term). I'll post a pic or two of the SLS external tank section we'll be using for that when I get a chance.

bbehe, these aren't prototypes per se... a prototype would still be fully functional and flight ready. These are more considered conceptual mockups. They include the physical structure of a design and the same interior layout but the actual interiors aren't gonna be made out of spacecraft grade titanium or have functioning computers and stuff in it.

9/12/2013 11:20:29 PM

http://scishow.tumblr.com/post/61022385465/discoverynews-invaderxan-postcards-from

Surprisingly, not a single one of these is from Curiosity.

9/13/2013 10:05:22 AM