If our favorite Sci-Fi Spaceships were real...

If they were real, you might be able to go visit them at an Air-show.  This web site pretends that the ships were created for real for the TV shows they were in, and that you can go visit them in the real-world:

Sci-Fi Air Show

The SCI-FI AIR SHOW’s purpose is to preserve and promote the rich and varied history of Sci-Fi/Fantasy vehicles. Through display and education we seek to celebrate the classic design and beauty of these ships and the rich imaginations that created them. When the cameras stopped rolling, many of these proud old ships were lost and forgotten. Please join us in working to keep these rare and beautiful birds soaring!

       Follow the link and visit some of your favorite spacecrafts from TV and Movies. The Jupiter II from Lost in Space, various space crafts from Star Wars, Start Trek, Space: 1999, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other assorted shows and films:

They have photos of the interiors too!  It's a real stroll down memory lane, for Sci-fi fans.

What a real spaceship would look like

Or could look like, based on technology we already have or have within our grasp:



The video is from 2011, so no doubt there have been many revisions since. A similar, but more advanced looking ship was used in the movie The Martian. No doubt based on this design.



So when are we going to see this ship for real? Not in my lifetime, I expect. In a world where industrialized, technologically advanced nations are over budget, bordering on bankruptcy and/or currency collapse, I don't realistically see funding for projects like this for a long, long time. If ever. It may remain just a dream, only fulfilled in movies. CGI special effects are so much cheaper than reality.

For more photos from the movie, and commentary of the science, follow this link: SCIENCING THE MARTIAN
     

A real "Warp Drive" for Space Travel

I had posted about this previously. Here is a video, talking about a possible prototype, if experiments on earth justify further research:



     

A propulsion drive without fuel?

Yes, and it may take us to Mars:

EmDrive Is an Engine That Breaks the Laws of Physics and Could Take Us to Mars

An experimental engine is gaining acceptance among scientists, and could introduce a new era of space travel — it only had to break a law of physics to do so.

The picture, below, is of the EmDrive. It uses electricity to generate microwaves, which then bounce around in a closed space and generate thrust. The drive does not need propellant, an important part of current space-travel mechanics.

The force generated by the drive is not particularly strong, but the implications are big. Multiple independent experiments have now replicated the drive's ability to generate thrust, albeit with varying success. Using panels to convert solar energy into electricity and then into thrust, opens the door to perpetual space travel fueled by the stars.

Scientists were slow to warm up to the EmDrive since it violates the law of the conservation of momentum. In addition to not being sure why it works — current theories rely on quantum mechanics — scientists also have some pretty good ideas why it shouldn't work. [...]

Follow the link for pics, video and embedded links.
     

The Moonbase That Almost Was

Moonbase Apollo (1968)

[...] Not widely known is that in 1968, as it prepared its first piloted Apollo flight – Apollo 7, which flew in September 1968 – and its Fiscal Year 1970 submission to the Bureau of the Budget, NASA briefly considered an alternate approach to Apollo. Had it been pursued, it might have laid the technological foundation for a permanent moon base in 1980. After perhaps three Apollo exploration missions to different landing sites, NASA would have dispatched a series of Apollo missions to a single site.

In addition to intensively exploring the selected site, the astronauts would have performed engineering and life sciences experiments, assessed the lunar environment for radio and optical astronomy, and experimented with resource exploitation. The single site revisit missions would have played the role for a permanent lunar base that Gemini played for Apollo; that is, it would have enabled NASA to acquire operational skills needed for its next step forward in space.

The single site revisit concept – sometimes called the “lunar station” concept – got its start some time before 30 April 1968, when the NASA-appointed Lunar Exploration Working Group (LEWG) presented it to the Apollo Planning Steering Group. Lee Scherer, director of the Apollo Lunar Exploration Office at NASA Headquarters, asked mission planner Rodney Johnson on 7 May to chair a 10-man Single Site Working Sub-Group of the LEWG. He directed Johnson to present a progress report at the LEWG meeting scheduled for the third week of May. The Sub-Group held a two-day meeting on 12-13 May and presented results of its brief study at the 22 May LEWG meeting. It issued a revised final report on 4 June 1968.

The Sub-Group’s report began by declaring that a 12-man “International Lunar Scientific Observatory” in 1980 could become a new “Major Agency Goal” for NASA. The single site revisit missions, it continued, would pave the way by demonstrating the value of a permanent lunar base. The Sub-Group then examined four options for carrying out its single site revisit program, which it labeled 0, A, B, and C. All would employ spacecraft and standard Saturn V launch vehicles the space agency had already ordered for Apollo. [...]

The rest of the article is about the plans, with some neat diagrams of next-stage Lunar exploration vehicles similar to the originals, but more advanced. But alas, it was not to be. We got the Space Shuttle instead, which was interesting, but in many ways a divergent distraction from real space exploration. If Apollo had kept going... well, we'll never know, because it didn't.

And won't likely start again any time soon. Not by us, anyway. The Chinese like to think they will, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
     

Can a Warp Drive really "fly"?

Some people say definitely "yes":


Why Warp Drives Aren't Just Science Fiction

[...] According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. However, some scientists believe that a loophole in this theory will someday allow humans to travel light-years in a matter of days.

In current FTL theories, it's not the ship that's moving — space itself moves. It's established that space is flexible; in fact, space has been steadily expanding since the Big Bang.

By distorting the space around the ship instead of accelerating the ship itself, these theoretical warp drives would never break Einstein's special relativity rules. The ship itself is never going faster than light with respect to the space immediately around it.

Davis's paper examines the two principle theories for how to achieve faster-than-light travel: warp drives and wormholes.

The difference between the two is the way in which space is manipulated. With a warp drive, space in front of the vessel is contracted while space behind it is expanded, creating a sort of wave that brings the vessel to its destination.

With a wormhole, the ship (or perhaps an exterior mechanism) would create a tunnel through spacetime, with a targeted entrance and exit. The ship would enter the wormhole at sublight speeds and reappear in a different location many light-years away.

In his paper, Davis describes a wormhole entrance as "a sphere that contained the mirror image of a whole other universe or remote region within our universe, incredibly shrunken and distorted." [...]

It goes on to describe a theoretical device called a "Ford-Svaiter mirror", and how it would work to create this "wave". Fascinating stuff.

   

Panarama from Mars

Follow the link and click on the interactive panorama, in full screen mode. It's really cool:

Stand on Mars Next to the Curiosity Rover With This Incredible Panorama
     

Sci-Fi Rockets of the '50s become a reality

SXSW: Elon Musk discusses hovering rocket, Mars and that NYT review

AUSTIN -- Elon Musk says if mankind doesn't make it to Mars by the time he dies, it'll be the biggest disappointment of his life.

Speaking to a packed crowd of several thousand attendees at South by Southwest on Saturday, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX said he might even consider making the journey himself.

"I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact," he said.

For now, he's been focusing his attention on something a bit closer to home. Musk revealed to the crowd that SpaceX is one step closer to developing a reusable rocket, saying the company recently launched a 10-story rocket that burst into the sky, rose 262.8 feet, hovered and landed safely on the pad 34 seconds later using thrust vector and throttle control. To cushion its fall back to the launch pad, the Grasshopper has steel landing legs with hydraulic dampers, plus a steel support structure.

Video of the test, which took place at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, was shown to an enraptured South by Southwest crowd. Musk said it was the first time anyone aside from the video editor and himself had seen the footage, which you can check out below.

"It can land on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter," he said. [...]

I saw the video in the article, it was pretty cool. I used to laugh at those old sci-fi movies of the '50's, showing people landing and taking off in rockets. In my time, rockets have always been disposable. The idea of landing and taking off again in the same rocket seemed unrealistic. But now it seems, it might really have been a vision of the future after all.

Once more, everything old is new again.

Hopefully we will be seeing many more wonderful things from SpaceX.
     

How SpaceX is Saving America Money

By being more efficient than NASA:


Why SpaceX is setting the pace in the commercial space race

[...] Dec. 7, 2012, will mark the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 17. That was the last time the United States ever launched an astronaut beyond Earth orbit. The reason why the operational era of human exploration beyond Earth orbit lasted a mere three and a half years, from July 1969 to December 1972, is that early in the Space Age, and continuing with the space shuttle, the nation tied itself to an infrastructure and a way of doing business that was too expensive to sustain.

NASA acknowledged this reality in 2006, even as it was pursuing its plan to send astronauts back to the moon — known as Project Constellation or “Apollo on Steroids” — by establishing the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. The purpose of the COTS program was to see if there was a better, more sustainable model for achieving access to space by forgoing the traditional approach of top-down, sole-source , cost-plus contracting — and instead harnessing the innovation and drive of private industry while still maintaining a close partnership with NASA.

After plowing nearly $8 billion into the Ares 1 booster program, Project Constellation did in fact prove too expensive to sustain. Instead, it was the COTS approach for cargo delivery to the space station that became the basis for NASA’s commercial crew program.

Success for SpaceX
SpaceX’s first demonstration cargo flight to the space station was accomplished in May as part of the COTS program. That flight took longer than expected, but the results were well worth NASA’s time and money. Thanks to its investment of $396 million, plus a great deal of advice, NASA has made it possible for SpaceX to produce not just a new launch vehicle but something much more profound: a new space transportation system consisting of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the recoverable and reusable Dragon spacecraft, and the infrastructure to support those spacecraft.

For comparison’s sake, the cost to NASA for doing this was less than what the space agency spent on one suborbital test launch of the Ares 1-X booster in 2009. It was less than NASA has spent on the development of its deep-space Orion crew capsule in the first half of this year alone.

Now SpaceX has a contract to launch 12 cargo flights to the space station at a cost to the American taxpayer of about $133 million per flight — putting America back in the orbital transport business. The SpaceX Falcon-Dragon transportation system arguably represents the best investment NASA has ever made. In light of that success, a failure to include the company in the top two for NASA’s commercial crew program would signal an almost unfathomable retreat, unworthy of the best of American ingenuity.

The stunningly low-cost and expansive nature of the Falcon-Dragon system represents much more than a rare bargain for taxpayers, in an era when most such stories have a very different ending. It offers indisputable proof that a new approach to space transportation can work far more effectively than the old ways. It’s absolutely vital to keep the company and the space transport system which has pioneered this path in the vanguard. [...]

I did a post about SpaceX last year. It's a truly amazing company.

NASA was necessary to get manned space exploration started. It's done that. But now it's role is changing; it gets to hold the door open for others to follow.
     

The Unpredictable Variables of Solar Storms

About the solar storm that ended last Friday:

A Strong Backhand Slap From End of Solar Storm

[...] The latest storm started with a flare on Tuesday, and had been forecast to be strong and direct, with one scientist predicting it would blast Earth directly like a punch in the nose. But it arrived Thursday morning at mild levels — at the bottom of the government's 1-5 scale of severity. It strengthened to a level 3 for several hours early Friday as the storm neared its end. Scientists say that's because the magnetic part of the storm flipped direction.

"We were watching the boxer, expecting the punch. It didn't come," said physicist Terry Onsager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's space weather center in Boulder, Colo. "It hit us with the back of the hand as it was retreating."

Forecasters can predict a solar storm's speed and strength, but not the direction of its magnetic field. If it is northward, like Earth's, the jolt of energy flows harmlessly around the planet, Onsager said. A southerly direction can cause power outages and other problems.

Thursday's storm came in northerly, but early Friday switched to the fierce southerly direction. The magnetic part of the storm spent several hours at that strong level, so combined with strong radiation and radio levels, it turned out to be the strongest solar storm since November 2004, said NOAA lead forecaster Bob Rutledge. [...]

Apparently, we can only find out about the composition of the magnetic field of these flares headed toward Earth, when they come in contact with our ACE satellite which is a million miles out, monitoring this for us:

Our only solar storm warning satellite ‘could falter soon’

Washington: A US satellite that offers the only advance warnings of incoming solar storms is more than a decade past its expected orbital lifetime and is possibly on its last legs, researchers say.

Stationed around 1 million miles from Earth, NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, nicknamed ACE, cautions about incoming high-energy particles from the sun which can wreak havoc on radio, GPS, satellite communications that are now embedded in modern life.

“It would be a very bad day for us if that spacecraft was not working,” the Discovery News quoted William Murtagh, program coordinator for NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., as saying.

“When an eruption occurs on the sun, there are still quite a few question marks as to if it’s going to hit the Earth and when it’s going to hit the Earth,.”

Until the sun’s free-flying and highly energetic outbursts, known as coronal mass ejections, hit the ACE spacecraft, forecasters are not acquainted with the orientation of their embedded magnetic fields.

Depending on the polarity, or alignment, Earth’s magnetic shield will either peel away, giving the highly charged particles more freedom to disturb electrically sensitive equipment and communications, or rebuff the particles, like what happened during this week’s outburst. [...]

The aging ACE spacecraft is scheduled to be replaced by the Triana spacecraft, which has a target launch date of June 2014. Lets hope the ACE spacecraft can last for us until then.
     

NASA's Space Shuttle Program Winds Down; What is likely to replace our space fleet?

Next-to-last space shuttle flight lands on Earth

[...] Launch managers marveled Wednesday over how good Endeavour still looks.

"It looks like it's ready to go do another mission," Kelly noted. He said he'd fly the space shuttle every couple months if he could — heck, every week if possible. "But it's 30 years old ... and we've got to grow and adapt and build new things."

Atlantis will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a tourist stop, following one last supply run to the space station. Liftoff is set for July 8.

Discovery, the fleet leader, returned from its final voyage in March. Its next stop is a Smithsonian Institution hangar outside Washington.

Moving Atlantis to the launch pad as Endeavour landed helped temper the sadness so many are feeling with one mission remaining, officials said. Thousands of more layoffs loom once the shuttle program ends.

"It's been a heck of a month in the last four hours," observed launch manager Mike Moses, "and I think we've used up our overtime budget for the entire month."

NASA is leaving the Earth-to-orbit business behind to focus on expeditions to asteroids and Mars. Private companies hope to pick up the slack for cargo and crew hauls to the space station. But it will be a while following Atlantis' upcoming flight — at least three years by one business' estimate, five to seven years by Kelly's — before astronauts ride on American rockets again.

Until then, Americans will continue hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz capsules at the cost of tens of millions of dollars a seat.

"We're in the process of transition now, and it's going to be awkward," Atlantis astronaut Rex Walheim said. "But we'll get to the other side and we'll have new vehicles.

"I really do have to say, though, it's going to be really hard to beat a vehicle that is so beautiful and majestic as that one is," he said as Atlantis rolled to the pad behind him. "I mean, how can you beat that? An airplane sitting on the side of a rocket. It's absolutely stunning."

I read elsewhere, that Endeavor was designed to fly a total of 100 missions. Retiring it at 25 seems premature, and in many ways, a waste of money. So why are they retiring it?

1. Safety issues. Since the Challenger and Columbia deaths, there have been a lot of safety concerns about continuing to use the shuttles. Dangers inherent in the design, that are not easily managed.

2. The cost of launching, and maintenance. The vehicle's themselves may be paid for, but their continued maintenance, and the cost of launching them safely, is quite expensive.

NASA was working on a new transport vehicle, the Orion Spacecraft, but that got scrapped by Obama when he scrubbed the Constellation Program.

Recently there has been talk of restoring the part of the Constellation Program that would finish building the Orion, so the US would at least have a spacecraft. There is some sense in that, since billions have already been spent on it. But it will be years before it's ready.

Obama has suggested that the private sector should step in to fill the transport gap. I suspect he says that because he's not that interested in the space program, and wants their budget money for entitlement spending.

Money spend on NASA's budget was only a fraction of what's spent on entitlements; see this graph. Entitlement spending, and even the interest on our debt, is way, WAY more than NASA's budget. And at least the NASA spending created jobs, and spin-off technologies that could be used in the private sector. We at least got something back for our money.

Still, I agree with the President that the private sector should be more involved in space transportation, and some good may come out of Obama's decision. Some private companies are already striving to fill the gap, and my favorite, Spacex, has already come quite far in doing so. Competition in the free market often creates better, and more cost-effective, alternatives. So perhaps it will ultimately benefit The Future of American Manned Space Flight.

We shall see.


The "Dragon" spacecraft, by Spacex
     

The Future of American Manned Space Flight

What will it look like, especially with all the budget cutting going on? Space.com asked the question of some people who might know:

What Obama and Congress Should Do for Spaceflight & Space Exploration

Amid much wrangling over how to allocate funds out of an increasingly out-of-control federal budget, the editors and writers at eight of the TechMediaNetwork's sites sought the advice of dozens of researchers, technologists, futurists, analysts and business owners in fields ranging from space and Earth science to health and technological innovation.

We asked one simple question:

If you could ask President Obama and Congress to do one thing related to your field that would be for the good of the economy and the country, what would it be and why?

[...]

At SPACE.com, we asked respondents to focus their answers on space exploration and astronomy. Here are their replies:

"If America is to fulfill its highest ambitions in space, the country must focus its attention on lowering the cost of getting there. Less expensive space access — whether through novel technologies, better manufacturing or increased reusability — will make it much more likely that we'll be able to execute thriving exploration missions to Mars, the asteroids and the moon. Some experts believe that getting to space today costs essentially the same as it did in the 1960s. Breaking free of that plateau will save the taxpayers money, grow American jobs and allow us to achieve our dreams.
— George Whitesides
President and CEO, Virgin Galactic

[...]

The other responses were interesting, too. But Whitesides really made the best point, IMO. The costs have to be lowered, and free enterprise and competition will do that.

And speaking of competition, I didn't see Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, among the folks asked the question. His company has already created a working launch vehicle and reusable spacecraft, the Dragon capsule, that flew an unmanned test mission in December, and returned safely to Earth.


After the last space shuttle flight this summer, America will be without a manned space craft to take us into orbit. We shall have to rely on the Russians to ferry us back and forth, at great expense to us: $56,000,000.00 per ride. And the Russians plan to raise the price to $63,000,000.00 in 2014. A cost effective commercial alternative would be very timely, and greatly appreciated. Let the competition begin!


Also see:

55 Space Leaders to Congress: Support Private Spaceflight Now
     

Asteroid Sample Brought Back to Earth

At least, that's what they think:

Space probe returns to Earth from trip to asteroid

ADELAIDE, Australia -- A team of eager scientists flew into the Australian Outback on Monday to recover a Japanese space capsule they hope contains the first-ever asteroid samples that could provide clues into the evolution of the solar system.

The Hayabusa explorer returned to Earth overnight after a seven-year, 4-billion mile (6-billion kilometer) journey, burning apart on re-entry in a spectacular fireball just after jettisoning the capsule. It was the first time a spacecraft successfully landed on an asteroid and returned to Earth.

Seiichi Sakamoto of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which launched the explorer in 2003, said they were "delighted" to recover the capsule, particularly after a number of technical problems delayed Hayabusa's arrival for three years.

"It was an extremely difficult technological challenge, and we did everything to overcome the troubles one by one," he said. "This is an achievement we could make simply because we never gave up hope."

On Monday, two helicopters took scientists to the capsule's landing site in the Woomera Prohibited Area, a remote military zone 300 miles (485 kilometers) northwest of the South Australian state capital of Adelaide.

It could take many hours to retrieve the capsule and collect samples, which will be taken to Japan for study after a series of measures to protect the capsule and its cargo. [...]

It was supposed to come back in 2007, but was delayed by technical problems, and missed it's window of opportunity to maneuver into the Earth's orbit until this year. I found all the details interesting. Quite an accomplishment, if the samples made it back.

     

Air Force X-37B Spacecraft to Launch Tonight

Air Force's Mystery X-37B Robot Spaceship to Launch Today

The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket and poised for an evening blastoff from Florida tonight on a mission shrouded in secrecy.

The spacecraft, called the Orbital Test Vehicle, is poised to launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from a seaside pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is slated for sometime during a nine-minute window that opens at 7:52 p.m. EDT.

[...]

"On this flight the main thing we want to emphasize is the vehicle itself, not really, what's going on in the on-orbit phase because the vehicle itself is the piece of news here," Payton said.

Secrets of the X-37B

The on-orbit tests, Payton said, are classified
like many Air Force projects in space to protect the nature of the X-37B's "actual experimental payloads."

But the X-37B is designed to stay in space on missions that last up to 270 days long.

For this first test flight, the Air Force wants to see if the X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, can actually launch into space, open its payload bay and deploy a set of solar panels to keep it powered for months at a time. This demonstration flight is also aimed at testing the X-37B spacecraft's ability to fly itself back to Earth and land on a runway at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The key question for the Air Force: How expensive and how much work will it be to turn the X-37B spaceship around for a second flight? If the answer is "too long and too much" it may affect when the X-37B and its sister ship -- a second Orbital Test Vehicle already contracted by the Air Force -- fly again, if ever.

"If that's the case, it makes this vehicle much less attractive to the future," Payton said.

Currently, the Air Force envisions launching the second X-37B, presumably the Orbital Test Vehicle 2, sometime in 2011. [...]

If these tests work out, could this "mini" shuttle eventually be a less-powerful replacement for our current space shuttle fleet, which will be retired soon?
Unlikely, because of it's size. And it won't ready anytime soon. It could lay the groundwork for developing a new kind of space shuttle for people, but that would be a long way off. That's unfortunate, because if Obama succeeds in canceling NASA's Constellation program, we will be facing an unknown period of time with America having no viable manned spacecraft. We will have to depend on the Russians for transport, indefinitely.

And this spacecraft really is small. Look at the human figure in this diagram. Look at the size comparison with the Space Shuttle:



The X-37B is meant to be a small, reusable "robot" ship. It's not clear if it could even be adapted to transport any amount of people. I think it's only meant for cargo missions, satellite retrieval, and for experimenting with technologies for reusable spacecraft.

IMO, we need to keep the Constellation program and it's Orion Spacecraft in production and on-track. It could be ready in three years, and it can hold up to 6 astronauts. It will be cheaper than our shuttle fleet to build and maintain, release us from relying on the Russians, and keep lots of American jobs. Jobs that actually produce something.

Click here for lots more photos and diagrams of the X-37B spacecraft.