Well of Souls Forums

IF here's life in Europa's oceans, we can assume it going all the way to the bottom of the ocean, as light will be no factor in the lifeforms swimming in the upper layers of the ocean... Such a reactor willinfluence local life. Likely even positively, as a source of heat and warmth. Just hope that ...

SSTO's a grand step in the right direction, but IMO, SpaceX is going to shoot themselves in the foot with their Spaceship design. It's one of my main gripes with SpaceX now, along with cancelling stuff like Red Dragon. SSTOs, in the niche of repetitively getting people from the ground to sub-orbit ...

Also, why the #%&^ weren't we doing this a whole lot earlier... though yeah, I know, the Big Gov't Contractors just don't have any financial incentive to innovate in this way. I think that the automated control systems that allow for perfect booster landings (or self-driving cars) just weren't prac...

A reminder that spaceflight is still hard, despite SpaceX making it look easy. Watch their blooper reel and remember when everyone was suggesting parachutes and airbags, big nets, giant robot arms, physically improbable cable arrangements... It's interesting how quickly they went from not being abl...

Imagine what you could do if you could add a couple telescopes on the moon to this setup. If you built your telescope at the wrong latitude, it wouldn't ever be able to point at the target. If you happened to build it at just the right latitude, it'd only be able to observe the target for days per ...

I think the Sag A* data is still being processed. Maybe due to there being more dust etc. in the way? Yeah, the issue was despite being a thousand times closer, Sag A* is a thousand times smaller than M87* and also less active, so it's actually apparently dimmer, and the interactions with nearby st...

Unfortunately, the Beresheet lunar probe crashed. It had some kind of fault that shut down the engine during descent. They were apparently able to restart it, but it was unable to recover at that point and impacted at around 1 km/s. They did at least get some good images. http://www.planetary.org/bl...

The high specific impulse of air breathing engines is exaggerated by a factor of 2 to begin with, in short because it's only that high at low speeds and falls off roughly in inverse proportion to speed. On top of this, you need both a good hypersonic L/D ratio and good acceleration (high T/W) or yo...

NTRs are actually heavily reliant on having liquid hydrogen. Water drops you down to barely better than hydrolox chemical, while leaving you with the poor mass ratios and T/W of nuclear systems, and requiring you to deal with an oxidizing working fluid. High temperature CO2's also oxidizing, and wel...

Sure, they're making progress. The Chinese space program is impressive, especially compared to Roscosmos who seems content to feed off the rotting 28-year-old carcass of the Soviet space program (I say that without meaning to offend any of our Russian readers... NASA was not in a much better state ...

There's some bad mojo going around the SLS, the current administration is putting up cuts for the SLS, NASA is pushing expanded upper stage to the 4th mission - if it ever flies that many - and all booster upgrades have fallen into historical silence. Orion is being mused to being put onto a commer...

I was watching the InSight Mars landing today, and they mentioned that New Horizons (the spacecraft that did the Pluto flyby) is scheduled to reach its next target (Kuiper Belt object 2014MU69 or "Ultima Thule") in January 2019. It's already almost there. Just to note that the Johns Hopkins Univers...

Bit funny though. If I understand this "planet X" theory well, they should look for it in roughly the opposite direction of where all those dwarf planets align their orbit to, and still they're going for other KBO's in parts of the sky previous ones were found. All of the objects found are at aroun...

hi hi The surprising thing for me was the low velocity smooshing together. When I saw that it was elongated, I had assumed that it was stretched out due to spinning. Collisions out that far are expected to be low velocity for the most part. Solar orbital velocities are low to begin with, and there'...

The shuttle probably has several spare spacesuits, if they come with rebreather systems (we already have these and they are pretty reliable, except the old Soviet designs) then it should be possible to jury rig a system to extend the oxygen supply considerably. Hell, it should be standard for the l...

I'd concocted a descendant of the NSWR, the Antimatter-Catalyzed Fusion Boosted Nuclear Saltwater Rocket, which uses small amounts of antimatter to induce fusion as a neutron source to allow subcritical fissile salts to be used, in part as an exercise in stacking letters onto an acronym, and in par...

I'd concocted a descendant of the NSWR, the Antimatter-Catalyzed Fusion Boosted Nuclear Saltwater Rocket, which uses small amounts of antimatter to induce fusion as a neutron source to allow subcritical fissile salts to be used, in part as an exercise in stacking letters onto an acronym, and in part...

Ah, Mjolnir, I see you too are amn of engines :D Admittedly I was trying to calculate powers of ten at 01.00 AM, so I messed up. The isp is waaaay too high. Muh bad... In my mind there is a hierarchy of engines: you start with chemical, proceed to solid core NTR (such as NERVA; the only reason we a...

Ok, ok, so I've just had an exciting idea for space travel, and I thought that this would be a good place to share it. Some opinions (maybe there are some nuclear engineers or such browsing this page) are welcome. Some background: first, I was watching the presentation the liquid fluoride thorium r...

Ok, ok, so I've just had an exciting idea for space travel, and I thought that this would be a good place to share it. Some opinions (maybe there are some nuclear engineers or such browsing this page) are welcome. Some background: first, I was watching the presentation the liquid fluoride thorium r...