Re: OT - Last Flight Out


Message posted by Mark Lincoln on July 10, 2011 at 21:13:26 PST:

Andre, I have the entire Winston Science Fiction collection as well as all of the Tom Corbett Space Cadet series. Yes, the last 80 years of science fiction need to be subject to the last 80 years of science. When I was a kid there were guys like Bob Truax, Milton Rosen and Werner von Braun who were 'space cadets.' I was just a kid disciple. Long before then a guy named Tsiolkovsky had published his 'rocket equation.' Another equally 'mad man' named Goddard had published an article "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," I have a copy. The FACT is that Apollo was propelled by tilokovsky's optimum propellant of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

His rocket equation remains the limit of human space exploration. The specific impulse and mass fraction remain the limits upon how far we might pursue space flight. We have managed to propel small vehicle out of the solar system but we cannot send men to Mars

Radiation remains something that can be coped with if men are willing to risk a high probability of cancer or an possibility of discharging their guts into zero-g following a solar flare.

The deterioration of human bone and tissue in zero-g can be limited for a while, but not prevented over the long run.

The Earth shaped humans just as much as the universe shaped Earth, and the fact is that what we all wished was a hopeful future has been shown to be a grim reality.

I hope that all of these seeming intractable problems may be resolved as easily as the ridiculed concept of space flight of my youth was.

Yet that dream, of men flying in space was easily, if expensively, overcome between the mid-1950s (when all who dreamed of space flight were deemed 'space cadets') and the late 1960s. Since then we have strove to make space flight inexpensive, cheap and easy (as in STS) and worthwhile (as in having need to exist) and have failed.

We need a much better mass fraction, specific impulse, and system reliability than either physics, chemistry or technology may now provide.



In Reply to: Re: OT - Last Flight Out posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on July 09, 2011 at 14:24:59 PST:

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