My names James. Im new to this group. I've been reading about
Tuckers plan in the Himilayers. Sounds very costly, time consuming
and the amount of power needed would be incredible. Taking in to
account the mass you have to move and the velocity needed. I very
much doubt that this would be a viable project to do. I think anti-
gravity engines of some sort would be of far greater value. Not only
in the atmosphere but in space travel also. Does anyone have an
opinion on this.
--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, atchisonjames@h... wrote:
>
> My names James. Im new to this group. I've been reading about
> Tuckers plan in the Himilayers. Sounds very costly, time consuming
> and the amount of power needed would be incredible. Taking in to
> account the mass you have to move and the velocity needed. I very
> much doubt that this would be a viable project to do. I think anti-
> gravity engines of some sort would be of far greater value. Not
only
> in the atmosphere but in space travel also. Does anyone have an
> opinion on this.
same, regardless of the method used. The problem with conventional
rockets is that most of their mass is fuel, engines, and tanks. Only
a small fraction of the mass that must be launched is payload.
If a sattelite must go from the US Space Shuttle to geosyncronous
orbit, then it must also pack along fuel and a motor. Only one third
of the mass of a geosynchronous sattelite launched from the STS is
payload, the rest is fuel, tanks, and engines.
As the STS accelerates, its mass decreases due to the use of the
fuel; it also lightens itself by dumping the solid boosters when they
are expended and re-using them in other launches.
The STS program also has a policy of dumping the external fuel tank
in a remote part of the Indian Ocean. To do this, it must make an
orbital correction, drop the tank, and then accelerate again. This
is highly inefficient, it would take LESS fuel to bring the external
tank into LEO. The external tank is actually two tanks, one sphere
containing about 1000 kg of leftover Hydrogen, and one cylinder 18m
long containing about 10000 kg of unused oxygen. The walls are made
of Aluminum, and are thicker than the walls of the space shuttle.
Such a waste!
In the end, using the STS you are not just paying $20kUSD/kg for your
payload, you are also paying to accelerate the solid rocket boosters,
the (wasted) external fuel tank, and the engines.
With a mass driver, all of your fuel and propulsion systems stay on
the ground. All that you launch is payload. You would use the same
amount of energy to launch the shuttle once as you would to launch
the same mass of pure payload from a mass driver.
The more I look at the map, the more I think the Canadian Rockies are
the place to build it...
http://www.geopedia.com/online/maps/physical/Canada.htm
As for antigravity, I think that if you ever tried to use large
quantities of it anywhere near the Earth, people would be screaming
for your head on a silver platter! It will likely be used in
missions which are outside the earth-moon system.
:) ed
Although everything you say about Tuckers plan is correct, at least ituses known physics and there are working subscale models. There isn'teven a viable theory for anti-gravity much less anything that works atany scale.
atchisonjames@... wrote:
My names James. Im new to this group. I'vebeen reading about
Tuckers plan in the Himilayers. Sounds very costly, time consuming
and the amount of power needed would be incredible. Taking in to
account the mass you have to move and the velocity needed. I very
much doubt that this would be a viable project to do. I think anti-
gravity engines of some sort would be of far greater value. Not only
in the atmosphere but in space travel also. Does anyone have an
opinion on this.
Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html
The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.
I think we should:
1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failurerate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels willneed to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.
2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroidare
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about500 times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand spacecolonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.
3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need theircolony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearbystars.
Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.