DailyDirt: Plenty Of Spaceships... Sorta

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Jul 29th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The number of ways to get a person into space is pretty limited at the moment. Only Russia and China have operational launch systems that can escape the Earth's gravity (with people as passengers). There are a bunch more spaceships in development, though, so if you really want to get into space without a Soyuz or Shenzhou, you'll have to be patient. There have been a few recent accidents, but it looks like engineers have figured out some of the problems.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crash was evidently caused by human error. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury prematurely unlocked the ship's braking system which deployed and led to a catastrophic structural failure. This spacecraft was designed with minimal automated systems to reduce complexity, but Virgin Galactic has added a safety feature to prevent this from happening again -- and the design philosophy that favors manual systems may need additional tweaking. [url]
EmDrive is a theoretically impossible propulsion system that produces "anomalous thrust" which has been observed by at least two independent labs now. It's still not clear what is going on, but if this technology actually works, it would completely change the timetables for space travel. An EmDrive-powered vehicle could reach Pluto in 18 months -- instead of the years that it took New Horizons to do so. [url]
If you want to just see the edge of space, there are more and more helium-balloon-like ways to get there. Stratospheric ballooning for space tourism might be a bit safer than a rocket to LEO, and maybe a little bit cheaper. (Who's counting ~~pennies~~ c-notes when we're talking about traveling to the edge of space?) [url]
Blue Origin has tested its New Shepard suborbital system successfully, but it didn't recover its reusable booster stage. Ultimately, the New Shepard spaceship will hold 3 passengers and reach an altitude of 62 miles, but further unmanned testing will be done before passengers are allowed onboard. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

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Filed Under: emdrive, leo, new shepard, propulsion, shenzhou, soyuz, space tourism, spacecraft, spaceships, spaceshiptwo, stratospheric ballooning
Companies: blue origin, virgin galactic

6 Comments

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Roger Strong (profile), 29 Jul 2015 @ 5:21pm

Stratospheric Ballooning
Of course you have to define "The Edge of Space" in a Comcast sort of way.

Space is generally accepted to start at the Kármán line, about 62 miles up. Those "Rides to Space" balloon flights will only take you up 19 miles.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2015 @ 5:53pm

EM drive has been "validated" by 4 labs. One in the UK where the idea originated, one in China, one at NASA and now one in Germany. All of the labs, except possibly the Chinese one, have questionable pasts.

However, that doesn't mean it doesn't work. Contrary to what a lot of people say, the EM drive doesn't have to violate any laws of physics. It just means that if it works, no one has figured out what it is pushing against yet.
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- JoeCool (profile), 29 Jul 2015 @ 8:04pm
  
  Re:
  Actually, it's pretty simple to understand how the EM Drive works - it's just the microwave version of mounting a fan on the back of your sail boat to blow in the sail. And yes, that actually works, as Mythbusters demonstrated.
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  - FauxReal (profile), 30 Jul 2015 @ 11:07am
    
    Re: Re:
    That is NOT how the EM Drive supposedly works. It's a closed system. The microwaves are not ejected out of the back, they remain in the chamber. If it works, it appears to somehow violates the conservation of momentum.
    Conservation of momentum: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/conmo.html
    
    But unfortunately it seems that the data and methods from the German lab are shaky.
    
    http://io9.com/no-german-scientists-have-not-confirmed-the-impossibl-1720573809
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2015 @ 7:19pm

EM Drive
I plan on powering mine with a Molten Salt Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactor with Magneto Hydrodynamic plasma extraction. It is the most energy dense solution I can come up with given current tech.
Current reports are giving the output around .2 newtons of force per watt of power, but theoretically 2 newtons per watt can be achieved. I would be very happy with the latter, but can work with even the former as long as I am out of the earths gravity well to begin with.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 29 Jul 2015 @ 9:32pm

I Don’t Think EmDrive Has Been Confirmed To Work
The one experiment I heard of, the “anomalous thrust” was observed both when the EmDrive was supposed to be operating and when it wasn’t. Which meant there was a problem with the measurement.
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