What's NASA Up To And Other Space Stuff

[Steely Glint]

So, there we go. The Fermi Paradox: solved by Doctor Who.

[Aimless]

Preferable to it being solved by Nick Bostrom.

[Steely Glint]

Basically this discussion in video form.

[Aimless]

Nah, what's gonna happen is that Earth will be turned into one of those travelling orphan planets

[Steely Glint]

There are some that aren't, but I think they are in the "mitigated by being in any kind of gravity at all" kind, like your eyesight getting messed up. So you may be right.

I always envisioned that with a fully developed Mars colony, people could travel and trade between Mars and Earth for trade and leisure fairly freely which is kinda messed up if people adjusted to Mars aren't good for anything once they get to Earth - but I supposed that's not actually *necessary*

[Aimless]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/...g-to-europa/1/

[Aimless]

Space-dildo took off and landed without falling over:

[Steely Glint]

sub-orbital though

[Veldan Rath]

sub-orbital though

We should change your name to Party Pooper.

[Timbuk2]

pretty ace tech though I thought

[Steely Glint]

Of course, when do it with an orbital rocket twice the size of New Shepard, that is kinda a big deal

[Wraith]

We might be back up to nine planets soon.

[Timbuk2]

We might be back up to nine planets soon.

Is it really a planet if it's so far out of the traditional boundaries of our solar system?

Is anything that orbits sol classified as being a part of the solar system anyway? Regardless of distance and shape of that orbit?

What are the boundaries? The Kuiper belt? The Heliosphere?



I guess that battle will be waged if 'Planet' X is proven to exist.

[Aimless]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/...ast-a-century/

[Flixy]

Well if it orbits the sun, I'd say it's in the solar system.

[Aimless]

Obv SpaceX has been a little more impressive in some respects but I like the Blue Origin videos more

[Aimless]

https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blog/launch-land-repeat

Though wings and parachutes have their adherents and their advantages, I’m a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing. Why? Because — to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space — we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well. When you do a vertical landing, you’re solving the classic inverted pendulum problem, and the inverted pendulum problem gets a bit easier as the pendulum gets a bit bigger. Try balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger. Now try it with a broomstick. The broomstick is simpler because its greater moment of inertia makes it easier to balance. We solved the inverted pendulum problem on New Shepard with an engine that dynamically gimbals to balance the vehicle as it descends. And since New Shepard is the smallest booster we will ever build, this carefully choreographed dance atop our plume will just get easier from here. We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it’s still many times larger than New Shepard. I hope to share details about this first orbital vehicle this year.

[Steely Glint]

SpaceX are years and years ahead of Blue Origin, what they've achieved so far with New Shepard is where SpaceX were with Grasshoper back in '14. They just didn't bother to take it up to the Karmen line. And Blue Origins patent bellendery is more than a bit off putting.

That said, their development approach seems rather different to SpaceX's rapid and public iterations so I would not be surprised if they began gaining ground on SpaceX rather quickly. Their long term goals seem a little different, too, Blue Origins wants to facilitate access to Earth orbit for people, SpaceX wants to start a colony on Mars. So I wish them well, but they really haven't done much of anything yet.

[Wraith]

years and years ... where SpaceX were with Grasshoper back in '14.

So really, year and year?

[Cracky]

It's not just the landing, spacex actually has a launcher that is in service with real payloads. Blue origin is still at the concept stage.

[Steely Glint]

Yeah, all Blue Origin have at this point is test hardware, they have yet to make orbit which is something SpaceX achieved back in 2008.

However, if their goal is, quote, "millions of people working and living in Earth orbit" the slow approach makes a certain amount of sense - the Space Hotels and orbital industries they apparently want to service do not yet exist.

[wiggin]

I don't really get people who think it's ever going to be economical to have SF-level populations in orbit. Even with wildly optimistic assumptions, SpaceX is still probably going to have costs on the order of a few hundred dollars per pound to get to LEO let alone GTO. That's dirt cheap by many standards, meaning satellite launch will be much easier and relatively cheap. The key word here, though, is 'relatively'. It will still take large amounts of money to put people in space on an absolute scale, and we're never going to have millions of people traveling there on a regular basis without a step change in technology (e.g. elevators or catapults or the like)

Cheaper launch costs are great, and I see them being valuable for developing outer space industries - e.g. Trojan asteroid capture and mining, space stations and crewed missions for exploration, etc. But while Earth orbit and the solar system might get a bit more crowded, it's almost entirely going to be unmanned. Space tourism and the like will be the preserve of the very rich.

[Flixy]

I don't really get people who think it's ever going to be economical to have SF-level populations in orbit. Even with wildly optimistic assumptions, SpaceX is still probably going to have costs on the order of a few hundred dollars per pound to get to LEO let alone GTO. That's dirt cheap by many standards, meaning satellite launch will be much easier and relatively cheap. The key word here, though, is 'relatively'. It will still take large amounts of money to put people in space on an absolute scale, and we're never going to have millions of people traveling there on a regular basis without a step change in technology (e.g. elevators or catapults or the like)

Cheaper launch costs are great, and I see them being valuable for developing outer space industries - e.g. Trojan asteroid capture and mining, space stations and crewed missions for exploration, etc. But while Earth orbit and the solar system might get a bit more crowded, it's almost entirely going to be unmanned. Space tourism and the like will be the preserve of the very rich.

Agreed, though the modular smallish hotels like Bigelow Aerospace suggests do make sense, as a vacation for the (very) rich. It'd probably be a lot cheaper than buying your way onto MIR, and people did that (just looked it up, they expect about $30 million for the flights, and $25 million for a 2 month lease of a third of their station - very pricy, but I bet some people are willing to pay that, and it would presumably get cheaper over time). But yes, more importantly it can be used for any commercial use in space, while being cheaper and more available than, say, the ISS.


- Just looked up what people previously paid for orbital tourism, seems to be $20million - $40 million, for maximum 15 days.

[Steely Glint]

I don't really get people who think it's ever going to be economical to have SF-level populations in orbit. Even with wildly optimistic assumptions, SpaceX is still probably going to have costs on the order of a few hundred dollars per pound to get to LEO let alone GTO. That's dirt cheap by many standards, meaning satellite launch will be much easier and relatively cheap. The key word here, though, is 'relatively'. It will still take large amounts of money to put people in space on an absolute scale, and we're never going to have millions of people traveling there on a regular basis without a step change in technology (e.g. elevators or catapults or the like)

Well, I don't think people are going to be commuting to LEO any time soon, but your company might pay to send you up for 6 or 12 months to work on some project they have going on up there.

[wiggin]

Well, I don't think people are going to be commuting to LEO any time soon, but your company might pay to send you up for 6 or 12 months to work on some project they have going on up there.

At the cost of, say, $1 million? You'd need to be doing fantastically productive work to make it pay off. I assume the vast majority of work will be done using robots and teleoperation.

[Steely Glint]

Musk reckons he can sell people tickets to go all the way to Mars for $500,000, so apparently he thinks the cost of LEO can go much lower than $1 million a head.

As for your robots, I do agree that most work in space will be done by robots but unless and until they can match the manual dexterity of a human being it will be desirable to have some people on hand, and thus organisations interested in space will do so if they're able.

[EyeKhan]

Robotics and AI are progressing incredibly fast right now. I think commercial asteroid mining is coming and it's going to be 100% robotic with mostly-autonomous machines. Maybe we'll see space energy production, but that will be robotic too. People in space will be doing research and vacationing, that's pretty much it. There might be an attempt to colonize Mars, but it will be for the sake of doing it, not for any kind of economic benefit. Bummer too, I've always really wanted humanity to become some kind of MOO-like space faring civilization.

Probably the key to the Fermi Paradox, and our future, is either self-destruction, or something like going "into the box." Once we can replace our brain's sensory input with computer generated telemetry, we'll soon lose interest in the outside world. And probably go extinct from neglect of our actual-reality needs. That scenario, if typical, would explain the lack of signals, the lack of big mega-structure projects, the lack of colonizing and terraforming in the cosmos.

- - - - - - -

In other news, KIC 8462852 (aka Tabby's Start) is even weirder. Apparently it's been dimming for the last 100 years, by like 20% -- the entire time period there are observational records. I so wish this is what all us sci-fi fans hope it is. But not very likely. Weird star, though. Really weird.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...t_century.html

And we just found out it’s even weirder than we thought.


Bradley Schaefer is an astronomer at Louisiana State University. He’s a clever fellow and has a habit of thinking outside the box when it comes to astronomical mysteries. When it came to Tabby’s Star, Schaefer realized there might be older observations of it that could help inform its study.


He found that Tabby’s Star has been photographed more than 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 and 1989. Using two different methods, he examined those observations and measured the star’s brightness over time.



Tabby’s Star is fading over time. The blue diamonds are measurements made between 1890 and 1989. The solid line is a linear (straight-line) fit to all the data while the dashed line is just a fit to the starting and ending points. The gray points are from two other stars as controls; they don't fade over the same period.
Graph from Schaefer, 2016


What he found is rather astonishing: The star has been fading in brightness over that period, dropping by about 20 percent!


That’s … bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. If they change, it’s usually on a timescale of millions of years, not centuries. Schaefer examined two other similar stars in the survey, and they remained constant in brightness over the same time period.


The long-term fading isn’t constant, either. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady.


So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.


Again. That’s bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen.


So what’s causing this? Well, think Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is probably the best place to start, and in this case that means one thing is probably behind all this weird behavior. Schaefer looks into this in his paper and concludes that the comet family idea doesn’t explain all the behavior. It might explain the short-term dips (maybe, kinda) but are hugely unlikely to be behind the long-term fading. You’d need truly vast numbers of comets, and they’d have to be huge, much larger than reasonable. And they’d have to be slamming into each other just as we happen to be looking.


So, yeah. Unlikely.


Now, again, let me be clear. I am NOT saying aliens here. But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this general fading is sort of what you’d expect if aliens were building a Dyson swarm. As they construct more of the panels orbiting the star, they block more of its light bit by bit, so a distant observer sees the star fade over time.


However, this doesn’t work well either. Why did the star dip so much in the 1910s, then regain brightness a few years later, for example? Also, blocking that much of the star over a century would mean they’d have to be cranking out solar panels. The star has a diameter about 1.6 times the Sun’s. To block 20 percent of its light would take solar panels equaling an area of over 750 billion square kilometers.


That’s 1,500 times the area of the entire Earth. Yikes.


And that’s only if they happened to place those panels perfectly between their star and us. More likely they would be in a ring or a sphere, so the actual area would be far, far larger. Several trillion square kilometers at least for a ring, and much more than that for a sphere.


That’s a heckuva long-term project.

[EyeKhan]

In other news, KIC 8462852 (aka Tabby's Star) is even weirder. Apparently it's been dimming for the last 100 years, by like 20% -- the entire time period there are observational records. I so wish this is what all us sci-fi fans hope it is. But not very likely. Weird star, though. Really weird.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...t_century.html

A new theory has been tabled regarding the odd dimming at Tabby's star. While planet gobbling is still pretty neat, it's nowhere near as fun as aliens building a mega-structure. This theory relies on incredibly unlikely timing, but because the competing mega-structure theory is even more incredible, this one has to be considered more plausible.

A strange new theory may finally solve the mystery of an “alien megastructure” that has confounded scientists for months
WRITTEN BY Akshat Rathi

There isn’t a star like KIC 8462852. For the past 18 months, ever since a group of astronomers introduced the world to its strange, seemingly unnatural fluctuations in brightness, scientists have been obsessed with it.

What’s kept the interest so high is a hypothesis that the fluctuations happen because the star is surrounded by some alien megastructure. Unlike most alien hypotheses, it has so far stood up to challenges because no known natural phenomenon could better explain what astronomers are seeing.

That might be about to change. A study to be published on Monday (Jan. 16) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that, if KIC 8462852 were to gobble up one or more of its own planets, that could create the patterns of light that put scientists on the case.

What are these patterns? Between 1890 and 1989, the mystery star lost about 14% of its brightness. In cosmological terms, that’s far too quick for any known natural dimming. Stranger still, over the few years before 2011, the Kepler space telescope caught the light from the star dipping for periods of just a few days, some times by as much as 22%.

The “alien megastructure” hypothesis, as Quartz explained previously, is this:

In the 1960s, renowned physicist Freeman Dyson argued that the energy demands of any intelligent race would, within a few millennia using advanced technology, outstrip whatever supply were available on the planet. In that case, the most effective way to start capturing more energy would be to build a solar-panel contraption to capture the star’s light. Such a structure would start small, but in theory eventually cover the whole star, in what is now called a “Dyson sphere.”

The suggestion, then, was that Kepler might have started observing KIC 8462852 while aliens were building a Dyson sphere around it. Hence the gradually declining brightness, as more of the star was surrounded by the sphere, and intermittent darkening as construction activity went on.

Brian Metzger of Columbia University and his colleagues have instead put up the planet-gobbling theory. Planets don’t usually fall into their stars, but one could if, say, a large body like a comet knocked the planet out of its orbit and sent it to its doom. They reason that when a star swallows something as large as a planet, for a cosmologically short period, between 200 years and 10,000 years, its brightness increases as it burns away the planet’s matter. Then it would decline again. So if we happen to have started watching the star towards the end of such a period, it might explain the 14% fall in brightness over 100 years.

Also, an eaten-up planet could leave behind large debris, such as its moon or large pieces of the planet that for some reason weren’t sucked in. These large bodies could be passing in front of the star in orbit, blocking some of its light and causing the brief dips seen by the Kepler space telescope.

As with all the other explanations about KIC 8462852, this is still just a hypothesis. However, if KIC 8462852 is indeed gobbling up planets, some other stars must do it too. Finding another one would be one way to throw away the alien-megastructure hypothesis. (Unless, of course, the other star also just happens to have a Dyson sphere being built around it.)

Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University at University Park, who suggested the alien-megastructure hypothesis, believes that the planet-gobbling explanation from Metzger and his colleagues is a strong one. “This paper puts a merger scenario on the table in a credible way,” he told the New Scientist. “I think this moves it into the top tier of explanations.”

Link: https://qz.com/884106/tabbys-star-al...=yahoo&ref=yfp

[Aimless]

Aliens or no, I'm always happy to see you're still alive and geeking Choobs

[Wraith]

1.6 mile tall towers of ice in Saturn's rings: