@mechajutaro said:

The US is back in space, and as long as Putin remains power, Mother Russia will effectively remain Back In The USSR

@Nexus71 said:

Nice to see this thread so active seems like I initiated something. 😁

Guess folks are paying attention after all.

At least it lightens up the boards

A live stream of the launch;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMsvr55cTZ0

Are Tom Cruise and Elon still planning to shoot a movie in space or on the ISS?

I'll bet Scientology has enough money to pay for the ticket 😁

@sunshine62 said:

by Knixon:

Last things first: that electric cars "don't pollute" is claptrap nonsense.

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They pollute far less and in years to come how the electricity is generated will be far more eco friendly....also as time goes by the electric car will become more efficient too.

Quote:

Scientists from the universities of Exeter, Nijmegen and Cambridge conducted lifecycle assessments that showed that even where electricity generation still involves substantial amounts of fossil fuel, there was a CO2 saving over conventional cars and fossil fuel heating.

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This seems interesting .. as you can see scientist are experimenting ...

The only way you’d be able to have artificial gravity, both to shield you from the effects of your ship’s acceleration and to give you a constant pull “downward” without needing to accelerate it, is if somehow you discovered a type of negative gravitational mass. All the particles and antiparticles we’ve ever discovered have a positive mass, but those are inertial masses, or the mass you talk about when you accelerate or create a particle. (That is, the m in F = ma, and the m in E = mc2.) We’ve demonstrated that inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same for all the particles we know of, but we’ve never tested this sufficiently for antimatter or antiparticle

There are experiments working to do this right now! The ALPHA experiment at CERN has created antihydrogen: a stable form of neutral antimatter, and is working to isolate it from all other particles at very low speeds. If it becomes sensitive enough, we could then measure which way it falls in a gravitational field. If it falls down, the same as normal matter, then it has positive gravitational mass, and we can’t use it to build a gravitational conductor. But if it falls up in a gravitational field, that changes everything. With a single experimental result, artificial gravity would suddenly become a physical possibility.

If antimatter has negative gravitational mass, then by setting up a ceiling of antimatter and a floor of normal matter, we could create an artificial gravity field that always pulled you down. By building a gravitationally conducting shell as the hull of our spacecraft, everyone inside would be protected from the forces of ultra-rapid acceleration which would otherwise prove lethal. And most spectacularly, humans in space would no longer suffer the negative physiological effects, from balance disorders to the atrophy of your heart muscle, that currently plague today’s astronauts. But until we discover a particle (or set of particles) with negative gravitational mass, artificial gravity will only be brought about through acceleration, no matter how clever we are.

Do you understand what might be the single biggest obstacle there, even assuming such a thing is actually discovered?

BLAST OFF!!!

Just happened to encounter a couple interesting videos, hopefully they aren't duplicates.

How SpaceX and Boeing will get Astronauts to the ISS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqLNIBAroGY

Mars Colony Documentary | 1 Million Residents by 2060 | NASA Vs Elon Musk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpXvQaQ9ktc

@Nexus71 said:

BLAST OFF!!!

I didn't know when I posted earlier that it's a private company that would launch the ship and rocket. It was pretty impressive, hell, even Trump clapped after they blasted off. I didn't think that guy would respect anything bigger than himself.

I didn't know when I posted earlier that it's a private company that would launch the ship and rocket. It was pretty impressive, hell, even Trump clapped after they blasted off. I didn't think that guy would respect anything bigger than himself.

Trump probably thought it was an ode to his penis.😝

Ewww. First vomiting in space now this.

Laugh all you want, but just remember that Obama directed NASA to make "Muslim Outreach" a top priority.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/322918-how-barack-obama-ruined-nasa-space-exploration

One of the tasks that President Donald Trump has before him, along with revamping immigration and trade, repealing and replacing ObamaCare, and rebuilding the military, is restoring America’s space exploration program to its former glory. Press reports suggest that the administration is looking at an early return to the moon, using commercial partnerships.

To understand the task that the president and whomever he chooses as NASA administrator have before them, it is useful to look back on how profoundly and adroitly President Barack Obama crippled the space agency’s efforts to send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. When Obama came into office, he did what a number of other presidents have done to determine their goals for NASA: he formed a presidential commission to study the space agency and come up with some recommendations.

The Augustine Commission, so named after its chairman former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, returned with a set of recommendations some months later. The commission found that the program then in existence, Project Constellation, was not executable under any reasonable budget. The program, started by President George W. Bush, had been underfunded and had faced technical challenges for years. The commissions offered two alternatives. The first was Moon First, which would have focused America’s efforts on a return to the moon. The second was Flexible Path, which would have sent American astronauts to every destination besides the moon—the asteroids, the moons of Mars, and so on. Both options would lead to the holy grail of space exploration enthusiasts, a mission to Mars.

The kicker was that both options would cost an extra $3 billion a year for NASA to execute. For the Obama administration, which was not shy about spending money in areas that it cared about, this price tag was too dear to bear.

The government’s response was formulated in secret. The results of these private deliberations were rolled out in the 2011 budget request that was released in February 2010. Project Constellation would be canceled, root and branch. Instead, NASA would conduct studies of heavy-lift rockets, deep-space propulsion, and other technologies that it was said, in the fullness of time, would make exploring space cheaper and easier.

Congress, which had not been consulted, reacted with bipartisan fury. The Obama administration made two critical errors. It had not consulted with Congress or anyone else when it developed its plans to kill Constellation. The White House also blatantly pulled a bureaucratic dodge that was apparent even to a first-term member of the House from the sticks. To kill a popular program, one studies it to death. Nowhere in the Obama plan was there a commitment to send astronauts anywhere. Clearly, the White House had no intention of doing space exploration. President Obama had expressed an antipathy to American exceptionalism, and nothing speaks to that quality than American astronauts exploring other worlds.

When Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon, and Jim Lovell, the hero of Apollo 13, sent an open letter condemning the cancellation of Constellation, President Obama knew he had a problem on his hands. So, with Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin in tow as a political prop, Obama went down to the Kennedy Space Center to make his big space announcement. We would go to Mars, sometime in the next 30 years and visit an Earth-approaching asteroid before that. We would not go back to the moon because we had already been there.

Of course, Obama was no more interested in exploring space than he was before. The Journey to Mars, as NASA eventually called it, was set so far into the future, the mid-2030s, as to be meaningless. Mars was the bright, shiny object to distract people from the vacuous nature of Obama’s space policy.

Congress mandated the development of the Orion spacecraft and the heavy-lift Space Launch System, with designs meticulously spelled out to deny NASA any wiggle room to play slow walk games. These bits of hardware will be available around the end of the decade along with commercial vehicles.

Obama wasted eight years that might have been spent getting Americans beyond low Earth orbit. The Journey to Mars has been the ObamaCare of space exploration--expensive, unsustainable, and not designed to do what it is alleged to do. Part of the mandate of the current president to make America great again will be to turn that situation around and America back toward the stars.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has just published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. Follow him at @MarkWhittington

I posted:

This seems interesting .. as you can see scientist are experimenting ... The only way you’d be able to have artificial gravity, both to shield you from the effects of your ship’s acceleration and to give you a constant pull “downward” without needing to accelerate it, is if somehow you discovered a type of negative gravitational mass. All the particles and antiparticles we’ve ever discovered have a positive mass, but those are inertial masses, or the mass you talk about when you accelerate or create a particle. (That is, the m in F = ma, and the m in E = mc2.) We’ve demonstrated that inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same for all the particles we know of, but we’ve never tested this sufficiently for antimatter or antiparticle There are experiments working to do this right now! The ALPHA experiment at CERN has created antihydrogen: a stable form of neutral antimatter, and is working to isolate it from all other particles at very low speeds. If it becomes sensitive enough, we could then measure which way it falls in a gravitational field. If it falls down, the same as normal matter, then it has positive gravitational mass, and we can’t use it to build a gravitational conductor. But if it falls up in a gravitational field, that changes everything. With a single experimental result, artificial gravity would suddenly become a physical possibility. If antimatter has negative gravitational mass, then by setting up a ceiling of antimatter and a floor of normal matter, we could create an artificial gravity field that always pulled you down. By building a gravitationally conducting shell as the hull of our spacecraft, everyone inside would be protected from the forces of ultra-rapid acceleration which would otherwise prove lethal. And most spectacularly, humans in space would no longer suffer the negative physiological effects, from balance disorders to the atrophy of your heart muscle, that currently plague today’s astronauts. But until we discover a particle (or set of particles) with negative gravitational mass, artificial gravity will only be brought about through acceleration, no matter how clever we are.

By knixon:

Do you understand what might be the single biggest obstacle there, even assuming such a thing is actually discovered?

my reply

I guess because of $$$$$$$

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCuyCJocJWg

No, it would be the question of gravity being caused by mass. How much mass does it take to produce Earth-level gravity? Why, THE MASS OF THE EARTH! Of course.

So, all we have to do is drag along a mass equal to the mass of the Earth, to Mars, in order to have Earth-level gravity along the way?

By golly, I think you've solved it!

But seriously.

Even if someone invents/discovers "anti-gravity particles" (maybe what HG Wells called "Cavorite" in 1901) and they actually have "anti-mass" too, and you could theoretically combine HALF an Earth mass of "positive" gravity with HALF an Earth mass of "negative" gravity, there are other considerations too. Such as "tidal forces." We don't notice them here on the surface of the Earth because we're thousands of miles from the center of mass. But if you had two "plates" of "positive" and "negative" mass/gravity, say 8 feet apart and intending to walk between them to experience Earth-level "gravity" against the "positive" "plate," the DIFFERENCE in forces between your head and your feet might rip you apart. Or at the least be very... uncomfortable.