Tag Archives: space travel

Richard Branson

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Richard Branson is going to space. Which doesn’t particularly interest me. But what I find interesting is how his spaceship works. First, it is strapped to the bottom of a normal (but big) plane which takes off from a normal runway.

Once Unity reaches an altitude approaching 50,000 feet (15,200 meters), it will detach from Eve and ignite its single rocket motor. It will go supersonic within eight seconds and power up to 2,600 miles per hour (4,200 kilometers per hour), or beyond Mach 3.

After 70 seconds the engine will cut out, with the spacecraft coasting to its peak altitude, which for Sunday’s mission will be a height of 55 miles or almost 300,000 feet, according to Virgin Galactic.

MSN

When it is ready to come down, it spreads its wings into a sort of “feather” which sounds like a parachute, drifts back into the atmosphere (which starts at 50 miles according to NASA, but closer to 60 miles according to some international standards), then folds its wings back into airplane mode and returns to the runway as an unpowered glider.

Jeff Bezos’s version takes off as a rocket, apparently. Like I said, I don’t particularly care about the egos of these men, but it does appear that the era of private space flight is upon us.

who’s going to Mars?

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Here’s a rundown from The Week:

  • The U.S., China, and UAE are all sending unmanned missions to Mars at the moment.
  • It takes about 7-10 months to get there.
  • There is water on the surface of Mars right now, in the form of polar ice caps. I guess I sort of knew that, but not really. I thought there was evidence that there used to be water (there is, and it’s indisputable) and/or that there might be water underground.
  • “NASA’s timeline calls for a crewed mission to the moon by 2024, a lunar base by 2028, and flights from the moon base to Mars sometime in the 2030s.”
  • Elon Musk says he is planning unmanned and manned missions to Mars.
  • If you go to Mars, you pretty much have to accept that the radiation will shorten your natural life, and it is unlikely you will make it back to Earth.

the Overlook Hotel

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Ever wonder if the Overlook Hotel from The Shining is real, and where it is? It is real, it’s in Oregon, and you can stay there. Its real name is The Timberline. The interior is not like the movie though, those shots were done in a movie studio. That’s probably good, unless you are looking for a creepy Halloween experience. There is no hedge maze, but the mountain setting and snow are real. It is most certainly not shut down for the winter, because it is a ski resort.

Delta-v

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I recently read Delta V, a near-future space exploration saga by Daniel Suarez. I recommend it as a really entertaining and thought-provoking book. The story is about an expedition to mine an asteroid for water, metals, and other minerals in the early 2030s. There are no technologies in the book that seem implausible – in fact, I would say if anything that the author was conservative and assumed only technology that would be available today. (I’m writing this in 2020, just in case you are an anthropologist reading this in the impossibly distant future.) The story doesn’t have a villain per se other than “investors”, but there is a character that seems to be some combination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, a sort of semi-villain with redeeming features. The author obviously did a lot of research on the physics, biology, and even chemistry of life in space, so be warned that while being entertained you might learn something by accident.

suspended animation

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This article in New Scientist (I don’t know anything about this publication) suggests that people who arrived at the hospital technically dead by any standard definition have been chilled to very cold temperatures for a couple hours, operated on, and resuscitated. This is not too surprising because you do occasionally here of people who drown in very cold water and get resuscitated after longer periods of time than you would think. Also, if bears, chipmunks, and frogs can do it with basically the same organs as us, why not us? But still, this is something new that could change the traditional definition of death and maybe lead toward the idea of hibernation present in every space travel story ever.

April 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.

Blue Origin and The High Frontier

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I was listening to a Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast focusing on Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin. He doesn’t publicize his space activities as aggressively as Elon Musk, but he is serious apparently. The interviewee is Christian Davenport, author of a book called The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. He says that one of Bezos’s inspirations is an older book called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard O’Neill. Here’s an excerpt from the Amazon description of that book:

In 1974, Dr. O’Neill put his three-pronged plan of Space Colonization, Space Solar Power and Large Scale Space Construction into easily accessible form with the release of the book The High Frontier. Fourteen years later, The Space Studies Institute, founded by O’Neill, re-released the original text, unchanged except for the doctor’s addition of the Appendix “A View from 1988…”

This is one of the milestone and timeless classics of Space Habitation, Alternative Power and Human Potential, all made possible with technology we already have. A Must-Read.

Oumuamua

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I tracked down the Harvard astrophysics paper that suggests this object could be an alien spacecraft or probe. They never say that it is one, only that its behavior would be consistent with one. Sadly, it seems like we missed the boat and it is too late to train our telescopes or send probes of our own in time to get a good look at the thing, so the best we can do is be on the lookout for others like it in the future.

space hotel opening by 2022?

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This article is about a space hotel possibly opening in 2022. Sounds cool but apparently ideas like this have come and gone in the past, with no space hotels actually materializing. Still, seems like a cool idea – if going into space is on your bucket list but being an astronaut is not a realistic career choice, this starts to seem like something within the realm of possibility in a typical person’s lifetime. Right now the projected price is, well, astronomical, but you can imagine that coming down in future decades as prices for new technology tend to do.

Then again, I’m watching The Expanse right now and maybe near-future space travel doesn’t look all that fun.