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NASA preps '100-year spaceship' program 
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NASA preps '100-year spaceship' program to boldly go where none have gone before
By Peter Farquhar, Technology Editor From: news.com.au October 21, 2010 9:35AM 4 comments

Planetary travel "within few years"
Funded by DARPA, NASA
First stop - moons of Mars
A SENIOR NASA official has promised to deliver a spaceship that will travel between alien worlds "within a few years".

Speaking at a conference in San Francisco on Saturday, NASA Ames director Simon Worden said his division had started a project with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the "Hundred Year Starship”.

The project was kicked off recently with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA and hopes to utilise new propulsion ideas being explored by NASA.

Star Trek fans, prepare to get excited - electric propulsion is here, according to Mr Worden.

“Anybody that watches the (Star Trek) Enterprise, you know you don’t see huge plumes of fire," he said.

"Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds.”

Mr Worden said the space program was "now really aimed at settling other worlds”.

“You heard it here,” he told the crowd at the “Long Conversation”.

“Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

Mr Worden said he hoped to "inveigle some billionaires" such as Google founder Larry Page to help with further funding for the project.

Another possible source of propulsion being funded by NASA was by using microwave power from a planetary base to heat hydrogen propellants on board an orbiting spaceship.

"You don’t have to carry all the fuel," he said. "You use that energy from a laser or microwave power to heat a propellant; it gets you a pretty big factor of improvement. I think that’s one way of getting off the world.”

Mr Worden had an interesting take on how we would settle other worlds when we found them, suggesting it would be easier to adapt humans to an alien planet than changing the planet to suit humans.

“How do you live in another world? I don’t have the slightest idea,” he said.

“If you’re a conservative, you worry about it killing us; if you’re a liberal, you worry about us killing it."

Despite his ambitious vision to push further out into the galaxy, Mr Worden said there was still plenty of work to do in our own backyard first.

First stop, he said, was the moons of Mars, from where the planet itself can be explored using telerobotics.

“I think we’ll be on the moons of Mars by 2030 or so," he said.

"Larry (Page) asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’

"So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”




http://www.news.com.au/technology/nasa-preps-100-year-spaceship-programme-to-boldly-go-where-none-have-gone-before/story-e6frfro0-1225941547507

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Wed Oct 20, 2010 11:54 pm
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Solar sails? Or Ion drives? Both would be better for longer inter stellar journeys.

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Thu Oct 21, 2010 8:13 am
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This is the reason why there will always be a part of me that admires the USA. They're the only ones who still have the adventurer spirit.

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Thu Oct 21, 2010 8:38 am
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Amnesia10 wrote:
Solar sails? Or Ion drives? Both would be better for longer inter stellar journeys.

I was reading about the NASA mission Dawn CLICKY! the other day and it is using an ion drive as propulsion.

I heard about the tech years ago but I didn't actually know it was in use.

It has recently broken the record in self proppelled acceleration and is travel 9,600 miles per hour.

Towards the end of its mission it will have accelerated (using ion drive) by an increase of 24,000 miles per hour whilst only using 165kg of fuel!

This looks like an interesting mission though :D

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Thu Oct 21, 2010 8:51 am
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adidan wrote:
This is the reason why there will always be a part of me that admires the USA. They're the only ones who still have the adventurer spirit.


+1

Although a lot of that is due to them having the money for such things.

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Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:45 am
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Fogmeister wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
Solar sails? Or Ion drives? Both would be better for longer inter stellar journeys.

I was reading about the NASA mission Dawn CLICKY! the other day and it is using an ion drive as propulsion.

I heard about the tech years ago but I didn't actually know it was in use.

It has recently broken the record in self proppelled acceleration and is travel 9,600 miles per hour.

Towards the end of its mission it will have accelerated (using ion drive) by an increase of 24,000 miles per hour whilst only using 165kg of fuel!

This looks like an interesting mission though :D

With ion drives the 165kg fuel is actually the propellant the real fuel is the nuclear reactor that creates the ions in the first place. That can last for years and is one reason why there have been issues with launches of ion drives.

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Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:53 am
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adidan wrote:
This is the reason why there will always be a part of me that admires the USA. They're the only ones who still have the adventurer spirit.
Adventurer's budget more like. ;) :lol:

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Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:29 am
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l3v1ck wrote:
adidan wrote:
This is the reason why there will always be a part of me that admires the USA. They're the only ones who still have the adventurer spirit.
Adventurer's budget more like. ;) :lol:

Hmm. the Chinese seem to finally be showing some serious interest in 'the space race' as us oldsters like to refer to it.


Thu Oct 21, 2010 12:02 pm
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The above article is just awesome 8-)

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Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:53 pm
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l3v1ck wrote:
adidan wrote:
This is the reason why there will always be a part of me that admires the USA. They're the only ones who still have the adventurer spirit.
Adventurer's budget more like. ;) :lol:

True but they are actually willing to do something. We end up trying to do it on the cheap and it is a disaster.

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Fri Oct 22, 2010 8:52 pm
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Amnesia10 wrote:
We end up trying to do it on the cheap and it is a disaster.


I half remember a quote from one of the Apollo astronauts - Imagine being sat on the end of a million components, all sourced from the lowest bidders.

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Fri Oct 22, 2010 8:59 pm
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Don't know how true it is, but it's said that the guys at NASA said Concorde was more of a challenge than Apollo.

Sounds apocryphal to me, but even so, we had the spirit not so long ago.

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Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:05 pm
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tombolt wrote:
Don't know how true it is, but it's said that the guys at NASA said Concorde was more of a challenge than Apollo.

I remember a quote from Top Gear About the Bugatti Veyron. Clarkson was interviewing one of the main designers of the McLaren F1 team and Clarkson said to the bloke 'Well, the Veyron is good but your cars have to be better engineered, surely?" Guy says "Not really. See, we build a gear box, it has to take 1000BHP and last two races. They build a gear box, it has to take 1000BHP and last 10 years."

Both the Saturn rocket and the Concorde are fantastic pieces of engineering, but the Saturn was essentially disposable. You only ever flew each one once. Concorde was designed to fly pretty much every day, for an extended period of time.

Mind you, I've been to CC and they have a lot of stuff about the history of the moon missions, unsurprisingly. One of the things I didn't know was whenever they had the Saturn 5 on the launchpad fully fueled up, they used to tell the Russians about it. Because with all the fuel loaded, a Saturn 5 had the same explosive potential as a 100ktonne nuclear warhead. If one of them ever blew up on the launchpad, they wanted the Russians to know they weren't conducting nuclear tests, it was just a space rocket.

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Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:48 pm
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ProfessorF wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
We end up trying to do it on the cheap and it is a disaster.


I half remember a quote from one of the Apollo astronauts - Imagine being sat on the end of a million components, all sourced from the lowest bidders.

And if it goes badly the legal impact of any astronaut dying would destroy the agency if there were inappropriate cost savings.

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Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:13 pm
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