NASA flashes cash at advanced aerospace concepts NASA has announced the eight projects with "the potential to transform future aerospace missions" which will receive funding under Phase II of its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program. The awards of up to $500,000 over two years will allow the recipients to advance their ideas, which "successfully demonstrated …
"So not 'hibernation,' but 'hypothermia,' apparently. Lovely."
Yes. We need you chilled but conscious so you can feel the cold all throughout the voyage (but much more importantly, so when aliens or future humans board the craft and lean close to your frosty not-quite-cryo-chamber you can scare the hell out of everyone by moving a bit)...
"Sadly for fans of tremendously cool if somewhat improbable space tech, California's Made In Space didn't make the Phase II cut with its 'Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata' proposal, "
then linking up with the project later would have truly been a Rendezvous with RAMA...
Dating ourselves here I think...
I'm re-reading Ringworld. Haven't read it in probably 20 years! Still just as good as when I first turned a page. And it got me thinking about the RAMA series. Might just have to pick up a copy of that series, after I read Ringworld Engineers of course. :)
This kind of stuff is why NASA was invented. It is about driving basic research when private industry wouldn't do it, themselves. It is terrific that SpaceX brings such an entrepreneurial approach that causes more of this work to enter the commercial sphere FASTER than in recent history.
From an engineering standpoint I'd much rather do Venus. It's much easier to take stuff away if not convert it to something useful. For starters, seed the upper atmosphere with the stuff that likes living in volcanic fumaroles. Add to the brew as you come along.
I wonder how much trouble you get into doing such as a private citizen?
Anyone who starts a post or comment with 'sigh' get ignored for the rest of their life.
It's SAD and INSULTING to people who know a LOT more than you about the subject.
Try reading up on the subjects prior to posting. VASIMR and NERVA are decades away, and even if built (and then perfected), are still not good enough for humans to outer planet trips, so this Torpor tech will still be needed.
Given the apparent ubiquity of tensegrity structures in nature I have long wondered whether passing an A.C. current through an appropriately tuned/dimensioned mesh might produce an electromagnetic field capable of economically and effectively shielding spacecraft from ionized particles.
electromagnetic field capable of economically and effectively shielding spacecraft from ionized particles.
If you get the shield to 10^9 volts in an economical fashion, yes. See page 7. It appears that (for 1961 state-of-the-art niobium-tin superconductors) magnetic shielding would likewise be quite heavy, in the vicinity of 10^6 kilograms of shielding to enclose a 1000 cubic meter volume (i.e., akin to the ISS). See page 29 ibid.
Thank you cray74 for your response but the referenced approach appears quite different. A tensegrity mesh as hypothesised would generate and contain the desired electromagnetic field within it's volume. Perhaps one could arrange an outer mesh to extract work and generate power from the passage of charged particles through it's volume while an inner mesh could then block the consequently less energetic charged particles.
Long duration, presumably low-cost high-altitude flight over a region to provide "...surveillance capabilities (e.g., NASA’s earth science missions) and communications bandwidth and availability (e.g., for underserved remote areas of the US, emergency communications), at a fraction of the cost of orbital satellite networks."
I think that will be a winner, at first here on Earth, and then later elsewhere in the solar system. A Mars Eye-In-The-Sky, anyone? A Venus (very) High-Altitude long-duration radar mapper?
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