DARPA funds 100 Year Starship to develop human interstellar flight capabilities
An ambitious effort for an interstellar travel planning organization officially kicked off this week, after DARPA awarded $500,000 to form the 100-Year Starship initiative. Former astronaut Mae Jemison, whose proposal was selected earlier this year, will lead the new independent organization. The goal is to ensure that the capability for human interstellar travel exists within the next 100 years. […]
A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.
A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to fill more than seven thousand music CDs.
Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65,000 individual parts. Many of these parts have a large number of “equivalent” smaller parts such as transistors. One computer memory alone contains over one million equivalent electronic parts, with each spacecraft containing some five million equivalent parts. Since a color TV set contains about 2500 equivalent parts, each Voyager has the equivalent electronic circuit complexity of some 2000 color TV sets.
Both Voyagers were specifically designed and protected to withstand the large radiation dosage during the Jupiter swing-by. This was accomplished by selecting radiation-hardened parts and by shielding very sensitive parts. An unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during its Jupiter encounter would have received a radiation dose equal to one thousand times the lethal level.
A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.
Voyager’s fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle’s 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2’s great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune resulted in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon).
Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to “talk” with the Voyagers for another century or two!
And it was built in the 70’s! Think of what we could build today, given the funding.
We can tell our children that school is important until we’re blue in the face, they’re not stupid. They see the loudest applause is for the kids on the field. They know teachers are paid poorly and don’t drive fancy cars. They know people plan Super Bowl parties but mock the National Spelling Bee. In other words, they see the hypocrisy, and we can’t expect society to correct itself. If we want to have any lasting influence on the way our kids approach education — the way future generations approach education — then we have to grab our pom-poms and paint our faces and celebrate intellectual curiosity with the same vigor we do their athletic achievements.
I teach some classes at the local university and I have watched as the shrinking budget resulted in cutting the nursing and the German department…yet I haven’t heard anyone even suggest cutting athletics. Explain to me how football is more important than learning a foreign language or training nurses???
The compulsory school event days are always for sports. Athletics Day, Swimming Sports - where’s the day for the art students? The science kids? There’s nothing, and forcing them into a pool and yelling at them to participate is never going to get anywhere.
It’s also interesting to note that sports are an instinctual analogue to war. If you look at our national budget, national defense (the money we spend on war) is almost always our largest expense. In 2011 it was 20% of the budget (~700 billion). How much did we spend on education, you ask? 2%.
Paralyzed Patients Move a Robotic Arm With Their Own Thoughts
With the BrainGate interface, Cathy Hutchinson, who is paralyzed from the neck down, moved a robotic arm toward a coffee cup, grasped it and was able to take a drink. It was the first time in 15 years that she was able to drink her coffee on her own. […]
Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years
In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years. “We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan. This “Gen1” Enterprise could get to Mars in ninety days, to the Moon in three, and “could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse – rovers, special-built planes, and satellites.” (via Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years)
![futurescope:
DARPA funds 100 Year Starship to develop human interstellar flight capabilities
An ambitious effort for an interstellar travel planning organization officially kicked off this week, after DARPA awarded $500,000 to form the 100-Year Starship initiative. Former astronaut Mae Jemison, whose proposal was selected earlier this year, will lead the new independent organization. The goal is to ensure that the capability for human interstellar travel exists within the next 100 years. […]
[read more @popsci | @gizmag] [100 Year Starship] [Project Icarus] [image credit: Adrian Mann]
So essentially anyone under the age of 20 or so will potentially be able to travel between the stars.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4jeg6bnvH1r08k60o1_500.jpg)
