DailyDirt: Plenty Of Spaceships... Sorta

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

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]

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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

DailyDirt: I'm Givin' Her All She's Got, Captain...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Space travel is filled with all kinds of complex challenges -- microgravity, radiation exposure, fuel constraints, etc. Thankfully, engineers and physicists are coming up with creative solutions to some of these problems, and new propulsion systems are being put through a battery of tests to verify their safety and reliability. Here are just a few cool propulsion designs (that may or may not work at all).

• NASA can't explain how it works, but there's a propulsion system that seemingly violates conservation of momentum -- and it actually produces a small amount of thrust. There are a few different versions of this propellant-free thruster, called a "Cannae Drive" or EmDrive.. and there's even a Kickstarter project to try to build a similar system. Is it April Fool's day every day? [url]
• NASA is looking into every possible means to improve space travel, including the very speculative faster-than-light "warp drive" that proposes to bend space-time to get to distant destinations in a matter of weeks instead of decades. Alcubierre drives are purely theoretical, and NASA explicitly states any kind of FTL warp drive is firmly in the speculation realm. [url]
• Vortex rockets provide a practical solution for reducing the weight of a traditional liquid-fuel rocket. Conventional rockets require some (heavy) complex cooling systems to prevent parts of the rocket itself from melting and/or vaporizing away, but a vortex rocket eliminates the need for cooling by creating a mini-tornado of burning fuel where the hottest temperatures are kept away from rocket structures. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: alcubierre drive, cannae drive, emdrive, propulsion, rockets, space, space exploration, vortex rockets, warp drive
Companies: kickstarter, nasa