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“Approximately 130 known dwarf planets inhabit the trans-Neptunian region. Dwarf planets are the most common type of planet in the solar system, far outnumbering giant planets and terrestrial planets. They are also the least explored. Ceres, Pluto, Charon, and Triton (the latter two often considered as both satellites and dwarf planets) remain the only explored dwarf planets,” the document said.”
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion using the gas and ice giants as gravity slingshots could send a human mission out there. That would save on bombs on the way out but slowing down to land, then speeding up again, then slowing down again near Earth….that’s a lot of bombs.
Even if the acceleration gained from each pulse was as high as 200 or 300 mph, it would still require thousands of pulse units. Perhaps as many as ten thousand. For example, a thousand pulse units to get up to speed using gravity assists, three thousand to slow down, three thousand to speed back up, and the last three thousand to slow down upon return to cislunar space. And it would still be a multi-year mission. The good news is that the spaceship could be really huge, in the hundreds of thousands of tons, because the problem with Nuclear Pulse is the minimum size bomb, which can be juiced with a few teaspoonfuls of tritium to deliver tremendous energies and thus push a really immense ship using the same amount of fissile material as a small one.
Have to build Battlestar Galactica on the Moon.
I remember the 1980 article by Gregg Easterbrook about the space shuttle that almost perfectly predicted its flaws and inevitable failure. Many were upset about it criticizing the shuttle then and a few are even now still bitter- despite it being accurate. The “Debunking Starlink” YouTube video by Common Sense Skeptic seems to be a repeat of the Easterbrook article. A phenomenon I have seen throughout my life is when people who promoted something that was obviously not going to end well forget they were all for it.
Actually, that the crew will include a female and person of color is an incidental aspiration and not the “Number One Goal.”
“Woke” is about recognizing social injustice and it is used as a pejorative by those who have no problem with racism and discrimination.
That “it does not matter what it costs” is a nod to the Ayn-Rand-in-Space Libertarian NewSpace cult that has flooded space forums with a toxic neoliberal ideology for over a decade.
The big lie is that these far right death-to-SLS comments, literally libraries of them over the years, mean anything except that people are gullible. That people can be propagandized into supporting the death of the middle class and bashing their nations premier space program in the interest of advertising for a private company.
To NASA it is a ticket to the Moon for it’s astronauts after over half a century of turning away from the vital mission of expanding humankind into the solar system. That is absolutely worthwhile. No longer trapped in LEO, Human Space Flight is back…and the crewed flight around the Moon will mark the beginning of the second space age.
Costs can change in future iterations with a higher flight rate. The Shuttle flew for thirty years at a billion per launch and it is not a big challenge (unless you are a spacex fan) to lower the SLS costs. That it sends a large payload direct to the Moon with one launch makes it far superior to any scheme involving multiple Super Heavy Lift Vehicle tankers. When it is realized all the hype is concealing an unworkable scheme of unacceptable complexity and difficulty then the SLS will be considered the solution. It is just that simple.
My point was they already went cheap. It was what killed two crews and made the Space Transportation System so expensive. And SLS is just shuttle components repurposed in an attempt to avoid the cost of new engines. Because the money to build a new SHLV went to other programs. Setting space exploration back more than a decade.
Those who have allowed themselves to be sucked into the NewSpace ideological black hole have addicted themselves to anti-American NASA-bashing and cult worship of their Howard Roark/John Galt/Tony Stark hero. It is so sad that politics and gullibility have sent the U.S. Space Program down so many dead end roads. LEO space stations, space tourism, Mars fantasies, megaconstellations, shiny new versions of the failed Shuttle concept- and the damage is accumulating.
The single narrow gate to salvation, exploiting lunar resources as the solution to climate change by way of Space Solar Power, is ignored as civilization stumbles toward catastrophe. The last hope is a Green New Space Deal and the disease of global Neoliberalism wrecking the planet is working directly against that. And the NewSpace fan club is a willing partner in the destruction.
No, actually Starship is just a new version of the Space Shuttle with some of the same problems and a couple new ones. The amount of water required for cosmic ray shielding can only come from the Moon due to the 20 to 25 times less energy needed to bring it up into space. Since only nuclear energy can push such a massive construct around the solar system that also means it would have to be assembled, tested, and launched in the vicinity of the Moon, outside of Earth’s magnetosphere.
“Ultimately, in a capitalist society, the resources go to the most effective and efficient use, as long as the government does not contractually mandate those uses. In the case of the SLS, the government seems to have saddled its space agency with the development of a massively over-budget launch system that might already be obsolete by the time it enters service. That won’t change no matter how many Congressional hearings are held about it.”
In a “capitalist society” there would be no space exploration. This is all part of the big lie, that the United States is “capitalist” and NOT “socialist.”
Actually, the United States is a “Mixed Economy”:
“A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise. Common to all mixed economies is a combination of free-market principles and principles of socialism. While there is no single definition of a mixed economy, one definition is about a mixture of markets with state interventionism, referring specifically to a capitalist market economy with strong regulatory oversight and extensive interventions into markets. Another is that of active collaboration of capitalist and socialist visions. Yet another definition is apolitical in nature, strictly referring to an economy containing a mixture of private enterprise with public enterprise.”
Far right Neoliberals have never stopped propagandizing for a pure “free market economy.” And that would inevitably lead to an autocratic oligarchy of the kind seen in Russia and China. That is what Americans are being manipulated into promoting. Fascism.
“NASA hasn’t said, ‘Our mission is to land a woman on the moon,'” NASA astronaut Nicole “Duke” Mann, a test pilot and member of NASA’s Artemis Team, told Space.com in an interview. “Our mission is to return to the moon for sustained lunar operations as part of the Artemis mission.
Why is NASA sending a woman to the moon? | Spacehttp://www.space.com/nasa-moon-landing-woman-artemis-pro…
Billionaire hobbyists are not going to expand humankind into the solar system. That is the NewSpace scam used to promote subsidizing their projects. Only the government has the resources to do it and NewSace fans work directly against that with endless NASA-bashing. The worst thing that ever happened to space exploration.
They need to fix that. I would say 3 Raptors with one Merlin that can throttle down enough to hover in the center. Four engines instead of nine and having to carry the RP fuel for landing in a separate tank should work out much better than over twice that number of engines. This might be something they want to work on because there is some doubt that Starship is going to be all they say it will be. In fact, the system might end up not being used at all if it is suddenly realized Starlink is not financially viable. Could happen.
I have no idea what is available in terms of material for the Spinnaker. Getting the fissile pits into space is no problem if you they are packaged appropriately and transported with a capsule/escape tower. The Orion has an extremely powerful abort system and that would be the lowest risk. One of the reasons I support SLS.
Not only does the bomb technology exist, but there was a mountain of treasure spent on “directed energy weapons” for Reagans Star Wars program and that data is still classified. We don’t even know how money was spent. Classified. And much of it had to do with directing the energy of a nuclear weapon. So, I would speculate they could make super-efficient pulse units.
The speeds attainable are spectacular. The faster you go the shorter the mission. And to justify not having massive cosmic ray shielding or artificial gravity the mission would have to be very short; not more than a couple months. Mars is too deep a gravity well but Ceres is perfect and probably the only suitable destination with Medusa due to the short mission requirement. In my opinion. Let’s GO!
Ice on the Moon 