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Artw (2)
Rarely does building a treehouse require welding, grinding, painting, riveting, bending, crimping, plumbing, brazing, laser cutting, sound design, printed circuit board fabrication, thousands of lines of C code, distributed network protocols, sewing and embroidery.
Ours did. [more inside]
posted by BZArcher
on Feb 22, 2011 -
51 comments
Ted Taylor, physicist, nuclear scientist, and designer of the deceptively tiny
Davy Crockett nuclear recoilless rifle, is not quite as famous as one of his other projects: nuclear spacecraft propulsion.
Project Orion was intended as an interplanetary (and eventually interstellar) vehicle which could achieve Earth orbit with a series of 800 nuclear explosions, each detonated about a second after the other below the spacecraft. It would propel itself through space in a similar fashion, carrying many orders of magnitude more mass than chemical rockets such as the Saturn which would ultimately take men to the moon.
Taylor and others intended a mission to Mars by 1965, but the
Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 destroyed all hope to see Orion take flight.
For the interested,
"The Curve of Binding Energy" goes into much more detail, including the U.S. Air Force's plan to turn Orion into a nuclear space battleship (!).
A youtube video of an Orion concept test using conventional explosives is
here (flight footage begins around 0:23).
posted by edguardo
on Feb 1, 2010 -
56 comments
UK rocket builder Steve Bennett is working on the worlds first private maned spaceship built by his company
Starchaser with the Nova II announced Thursday. The new rocket will be shipped to the United States and dropped unmanned over the Red Lake Drop Zone in Arizona from 14,000 feet to test its landing systems. If successful, a manned test will take place before the summer, making it Britain's first ever manned rocket capsule. The tests will allow the team to move on to building their ultimate rocket, Thunderbird. Starchaser is confident that Thunderbird will blast off into the history books in 2005, netting the company $10 million from the
X-Prize. Others say it's
suicide.
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 3, 2003 -
4 comments
Freeze sperm, leave the men behind. In this article, a NASA researcher explains how a flight to the nearest star would take place within our lifetimes, but require at least a couple generations. The generation that leaves (which could be entirely female to save on weight and maximize potential for offspring) would die, and giving birth to the next crew. Taking a trip like this would increase our knowledge of space many-fold, but would you be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for mankind? Is a trip like this a bad idea?
posted by mathowie
on May 2, 2002 -
52 comments
