SpaceX News

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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Betruger
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Joined: Tue May 06, 2008 11:54 am

Post by Betruger »

Didn't Paul March say one of the last trial hardware revisions gave inconsistent results?
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Yes, but that's got nothing to do with the noise floor. They're completely different issues. There is still certainly a lack of mastery over the force production based upon the difficulty matching the two resonances. There is not however, any sort of issue with the noise floor, measurability, resolution of the balance, or anything else best termed "experimental error". The current problem is not error; it is lack of control.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

I agree and I dont think that the Mars One businessplan makes that much sense either. I also think that we have to solve the biggest issues first, which is cheap access to orbit. It is the one thing that is holding us back. For this it is mandatory that we have RLVs. Only if we manage to lower the cost to orbit, we can consider going on trips to mars. Personally, I would not even bother going back to the moon without that in place.

KitemanSA
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Location: OlyPen WA

Post by KitemanSA »

GIThruster wrote: The current problem is not error; it is lack of control.
Kind of sounds like what folk claim about Rossi.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

I don't see how the two have anything in common. Woodward's theory has passed peer review for 20 years. Rossi hasn't a clue why his scheme should work. Woodward has almost 20 years of lab results reported every year in professional conferences. Rossi has never been transparent about his work. Woodward has a patent issued more than a decade ago. Rossi has nothing but excuses and a failed patent attempt. Woodward has a huge mailing list he posts to weekly explaining in great detail what he's doing, and sharing data on a weekly basis as well as analysis, photos of the apparatus, etc. Rossi can't ever be counted on to say the truth. Anyone can look up Woodward on campus and pay his lab a visit--he does open science. Rossi invented stories about labs and factories which were all lies and if you ever found him he'd throw you out on your ear. Woodward is a PhD university professor working in his special field of gravity physics. Rossi paid for a fake sheepskin in order to get people to believe him. Woodward hasn't ever solicited funds. Rossi makes his living soliciting funds. Woodward knows why his apparatus is not producing consistant results and how to fix this. Rossi hasn't a clue.

What did you think the two had in common?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Betruger
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Post by Betruger »

Kite comparison with Rossi's very lacking for one reason if nothing else: Woodward & co aren't liars. You can effectively give them benefit of the doubt as to what the data coming out of experiments is. There's no ECat data to compare that ME data to.
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

emanroga
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Joined: Wed Dec 24, 2008 5:37 am

Post by emanroga »

1. The ICE would never have happened if everyone in 50,000 BC had said, "You know, we could make the long and difficult journey over those mountains, but I'd rather just wait for someone else to invent four wheel drive." Your analogy begs the question.

2. Radiation flux will be higher on Mars, but with a full atmosphere it should be manageable. Higher mutation and cancer rates without intervention or precautions (and awesome auroras too), but not planetwide radiation sickness every time a solar flare hits. The fact that humans have lived successfully around Earth's magnetic north pole for millennia should tell you all you need to know. The main utility of Earth's field is to preserve the atmosphere over periods of >>1e8 yrs. Mars' gravity may not hold an atmosphere for 4 billion years, but it will hold one for tens or hundreds of millions of years. Long enough on human timescales (and on the timescale of any reasonably conceivable terraforming project) to be forever, especially assuming continued technological advance. If we can get the atmosphere there in the first place, sustaining it indefinitely should not be an issue.

3. I'm with you on electric cars. I think they are ridiculous affectations for people who want to look environmentally conscious because it's fashionable (but don't want to do the math to check the numbers themselves). I agree that hydrocarbons are really the way to go for portable energy storage, and if we were serious about "electric cars" we'd be figuring out how to inexpensively manufacture hydrocarbons out of atmospheric CO2 using grid power and pumping into good 'ol gas guzzlers. However, that kind of thing isn't sexy and takes too much 'splainin for the common folk to vote for it, and since the only way to finance competition with oil is government subsidies, well, here we are.

4. I agree with the dick size assertion, but then you lost me by asserting that CERN, ITER, etc are not the same thing. It's George Carlin's Big Dick Theory of International Diplomacy, just more sciencey. Then you invoke "we" like I'm involved somehow. The point of SpaceX and newspace in general is not to make breakthroughs in science and technology, and it's not to do anything for a country. It's to build an industry that is self-sustaining because it is profitable. Same is true of most of the fusion projects discussed here.

5. Musk is making space cool again for kids of all ages; that is worth more to the prospect of STEM education than another ten-figure initiative to prevent civil servants from having to try too hard. The multiplier on reality is always better than the multiplier on politically correct B.S.

cuddihy
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Post by cuddihy »

GIThruster wrote: There are no ways to generate constant 1 gee acceleration for more than a few minutes while using propellant. For space travel to enter its golden age and finally become safe, quick, convenient and economical, we have to have a "space drive" as defined by Marc Millis in his original BPP work.

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/1997-J_AIAA_SpaceDr.pdf
Till this quote GIThruster I always thought you WERE Marc Millis!
Tom.Cuddihy

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Faith is the foundation of reason.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

I'm a strong supporter and proponent of the kind of work Millis did back in the day. I would note though, that I am somewhat an antagonist as well, since I personally think BPP sold out to the then fashionable ZPF nonsense.

Almost all funding to date of advanced (read "propellantless space drive") propulsion is tied one way or another to ZPF theory, and the urgent and important fact of the matter is that for 15 years, no ZPF theorist has been able to answer the challenges to that theory. In science, when you hold a theory and someone puts forward objections and arguments against, you are bound to answer those objections. Yet, no ZPF theorists have done this in all the years these objections have existed.

This is why ZPF physics is taken as fantasy by the conventional sort. It's why you can't get your PhD by studying ZPF physics. Physicists make fun of ZPF because it never has answers to those who object to the theory. It's not science. It's pseudo-science. Yet, it dominates all the advanced propulsion conferences such as the 100YSS. If you're a ZPFer, you have a ride into the conference. If you are not a ZPFer, you do not.

And Millis put all this in place more than a decade ago, so about this, I am critical. Nothing has hurt the advanced propulsion scene worse than this ZPF pseudo-science masquerading as real science.

If you want to know why NASA is supporting Sonny White's QVF research over Jim Woodward's M-E research despite White has never published a single paper, now you know why. This is the legacy of BPP, continually carried forward by administrative decisions inside NASA for lack of vision or common sense.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

zDarby
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Post by zDarby »

First, concerning electric cars. I don't like them and never did. My problems with them are several fold. First among them is the batteries. Not because they don't allow for long ranges --more than 90% of my driving is well withing 100 miles a day. Not because of the time it takes to charge the batteries --100 miles worth of charge happens within the timeframe I usually find myself sleeping. No. My biggest problem with the batteries includes what happens to them after I'm done with them and that they must be replaced every 5-9 years, depending on the chemistry of the battery.

Supposedly LiIon batteries can be recycled. But that's not exactly true.

But even when a battery *is* recycled, the process is ugly, at best. And when they're not recycled, they become an awful source of pollution.

For these reasons I do not look forward to the idea of replacing our fleet of ICE drive cars with battery driven cars.

Of course, that's assuming chemistry like the SiO batteries aren't realized.

A better alternative, IMHO, is compressed air. It would work well for 100 mi/day driving, which is the norm, and hybridization with ICEs. Compressed air is non-polluting --even if you use non-oil-less compressors, it's by far better than current-chemistry batteries. It's an extremely mature technology, being used for at least 140 years. It does, of course, have many problems, not the least of which is low power density and energy escape via cooling of the air while in the tank.....But enough of that. Y'all likely have your own opinions on the subject and I need not expound further on mine.

As to GIThruster's opinion that the colonization of Mars, "Still needs propellantless propulsion, IMHO." I simply do not agree. Even if it takes 6 months to get there, in short order there would be people lined for their ticket and I would be among them. From a historical point of view, the exploratory journeys of Europe from the 1500s to 1700s could take years and the same with civilian travel. Of course a sailing vessel could be expected to travel several times from home to a port of call several times, where a rocket launcher can not. This is why SpaceX's Grasshopper is so exciting. As is Skylon, for that matter....The point is, however, that colonizing another planet does not depend on travel times shortened by 1g acceleration or reactionless engines.

Furthermore, I would like to disagree with GIThrusters assertion that, "Neither fission nor fusion for propulsion will make a large difference here. A rocket is a rocket and any rocket going to Mars is going to coast almost the entire trip." Bussard's studies on what a Polywell might be able to do as the energy source for a rocket engine clearly show (IMHO) that a fusion powered rocket would make an enormous difference to interplanetary travel and colonization. Taking his numbers as granted (which I usually would not, but there you go) a trip from Earth runway to Mars runway would take a month, and the outbound space craft --from LEO to LMO-- would accelerate continuously all the way there. (Though nowhere near 1g.) And if we assume fusion isn't going to happen anytime soon, an Orion type, nuclear pulse engine would still allow for relatively fast movement around the solar system....Keep it away from Earth, though.

Of course, if a 1g reactionless were available, we'd be colonizing the entire solar system in only a few decades. That'd be pretty awesome! :)

Next on the list is terraforming Mars. To say this not an easy task is to understate things to several orders of magnitude. But before we really consider the task, the first question is whether or not there are living things there in the first place. No, it doesn't seem likely. But if there is terraforming becomes out of the question: it must be Aeroformed. It must be turned into a paradise, not for us, but for Martians, whatever they are and whatever that means.

If Mars is dead --and this is likely-- then I say do what you gotta do to make it a paradise for our life, and I don't mean Humans, though that would be the ultimate result anyway. I mean for mammals, birds, fish, trees, moss and waterbears.

Finally, GIThruster has it 100% right: You don't educate engineers & scientists and then give them a task. You excite children about science and engineering by striving to do exciting things with science and engineering. The vision and excitement has come first. Big goals and grand visions, then hard work. That's what creates. That's what educates. "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a flame to be sparked." And you spark a mind --any mind, young or ancient-- with exciting projects.

And I think a large reason a large portion of the public is so jaded on space, with the opinion that Robthebob stated, "I think our attention, right now in this time, should be focused on something else" is that what we have been doing in space since Apollo 13 has been pedestrian and uninteresting. There's no feeling of a genuine opening of space to the average person. *I* don't get to go. Not today, not tomorrow, not my lifetime. My children might. (Even that's unlikely) But certainly not me. Were that one thing to change --and Musk seems to want to change it-- I think we'll find an insurgence of money and people into the industries of space exploration and colonization.

Ok. Sorry. Post got outta hand. :oops:

ladajo
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Location: North East Coast

Post by ladajo »

I would also raise that hydraulic accumulators have also been looked at for hybrid cars. Very effective system that can be added easily to almost any existing vehicle. No batteries, cheap, effective and easy to do.

So why don't we?
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

DeltaV
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Post by DeltaV »

zDarby wrote:Of course, that's assuming chemistry like the SiO batteries aren't realized.
Silicon–air batteries
Good stuff.

JoeP
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Post by JoeP »

zDarby wrote:...Next on the list is terraforming Mars. To say this not an easy task is to understate things to several orders of magnitude. But before we really consider the task, the first question is whether or not there are living things there in the first place. No, it doesn't seem likely. But if there is terraforming becomes out of the question: it must be Aeroformed. It must be turned into a paradise, not for us, but for Martians, whatever they are and whatever that means...
If there are Martian life forms, then why is a responsibility to improving the environment over there on us Earth people? Come on now :)

And if there are even mindless Martian microbes and worms then Earth's advanced life forms should take precedence, especially considering that the stars are orders of magnitude more difficult to get to. So Terraform away, and Martian microbes may have a chance to adapt or perish.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

I have no pitty for some microbial life. My main concern would be that it could turn out to be a pathogen.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Compressed air and hydraulic accumulators do not have anything like the energy density necessary to drive a car unless you want to fill up you tank every 20-30 miles max.

Electric is definitely the next best thing to hydrocarbon ICE and if you want to put an end to smog, air pollution and carbon emissions supposedly related to climate change, there isn't a better option.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

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