New Earths.

Gleese 581b is an Earth size planet about 20 light years away.
Another is Kepler 22b about 600 light years away. Mean temp is 72 degrees, which translates to liquid water, the basis of life. It may be a world covered in water. Interesting.

Gee whiz. I wanna go~~~!    Only take a few million years at present speeds. Ad Astra! (to the stars!)

Moon first.  Build a "space station" torus on the ground and launch entire.
Serves as "space ship", "space station", "lunar habitat", "Martian habitat and artificial gravity transport to Mars".  Build more on the Moon. Use them to go to asteroids, Mars, all the other planets for exploration~!

Forget government involvement. This is or should be a do it yourself effort. Support from the government evaporates with every new election cycle because the populace forgets and 10 to 20 years is "too long" to remember a goal.  How do we do it?

Give "cash flow" to unemployed engineers to "live the dream" and create a "skunk works" to make that torus "gas tank" blast off into orbit. Structure IS the payload. I propose commercial real estate in the form of residential apartments is the way to get that cash flow going. I have several "on line" guru's in this area and at least ONE that I am impressed with.  Several good books in print (see Amazon). I really need several folks signed on to this idea to make it work. (rmoore@swoi.net) Let me know if your interested.

Particles go faster than light ~~!!!!

"Known as neutrinos..... These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years. The neutrino has almost no mass, comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from our sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland." They go 60 nanoseconds faster plus or minus 10 nanoseconds  margin of error.


How is this important? Check out my previous post. Clocks are physical things that measure motion. So at the speed of light the clock still looks normal while back at the ranch your moving ultra slow. OK. If the variable is time rather than space if you increase the "time" factor looking the same from either frame of reference then the speed of light is "MUCH" further up the line, i.e. you will be FTL..... but not in violation of any "real world" physics "law". That is to say, Albert may have been wrong, but not overtly, just in the description of what is happening (thought experiments ) vs his math. Things may have "fields" that relate to each other and change with distance the time variable. That is they look like they are going slower as they get further from us, BUT not the huge distances between the stars, just out as far as some local planets. NEW questions. The devil is in the details, as always.


These "fields" are what make things, "Things"; matter and energy are yet still the same just needing new explanations as to how they really work. I am reminded that Maxwell's equations were done in "quarternons", or solutions in 4 dimensions. Professor Heavyside did not like "this spooky 4th dimension" and re-wrote Maxwells equations in "vector analysis". Which one did you learn in school? So now we have 11 dimensions?  


So much more to learn.

"Through the Wormhole" TV series on science channel showed that "bar code" spectrum lines rather than be the same differ depending on which hemisphere you take the readings as to what is "done" to the speed of light. That is to say, things don't add up. 

As tonight space junk falls from the sky, let's not build more smaller vehicles, let's build bigger ones'. Let's build a a space station torus style and launch it entire. Donuts can make just as good fuel tanks as cylinders can. And what makes better stability than gyroscopes? Easy in a big circular pre-built on the ground launch-able space station torus as heavy launch vehicle. Stack 'um, rack 'um, recover the first stage with a big huge "fan blade" donut hole for the next two stage launch. But maybe just one will do. Any rocket scientists looking on. Do the math and let me know.


~Heinlein's Ghost

Updates

My sister is in California dealing with her ex husband's end of life stroke and dementia. My daughter is in the hospital with burst appendix. As we continue to have problems meeting end of month needs with limited incomes. Not to say that life doesn't go smooth, but that we should expect the unexpected because "that's life".

Not that my "Space interest efforts" have taken a back seat, but have retreated to background noise in my living journey.

Here is another kicker:
 http://www.thunderbolts.info/
forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=26980&sid=f194f730dce97e3b1075a5534805c784
Here is a discussion of the ideas of David Barclay in that TIME field creates matter and space such that all points in the universe are UNIQUE. As we leave our local time field influence matter "slows down" hence "One example of what caught my interest is the fact that he actually predicted the anomalous 
slowdown of the Voyager 10 and 11 , an observed fact giving NASA and many other a headache." ...regarding time, according to David we have it all back to front, time is not an effect of space and motion, on the contrary, space and motion are the relative effect of time....The quality and proagation of time is different for every field system, and as a consequence Earth has a different time field than for example the Moon...When leaving our planet with a survey vessel like the Voyager 10 headed for outer space, this vessel which belongs to the time field of Earth is doomed to slow down gradually due to the fact that Earths time field is getting weaker by distance, therefore time is slowing down for the Voyager vessel, resulting in an observable slowdown....Even going to the Moon and trying to live there by using water and Moon soil for food production is hazardous due to the different time field existing on the Moon.... NASA reported of anomalous cancerous growth in all their plants grown in Moon soil in the sixties. This information is hidden away and denied to ever have existed. Still there is (sic 'are') many people remembering these reports and having the articles in their possession as proof."  READ the whole article/thread for the info.  Sad if true, we must KNOW how time and the universe works before becoming a SPACE FARING CIVILIZATION. 

Therefore I offer this "Other Strange" link to chase down: Google Mike Marcum's Time Machine Experiments. Time machines may be easy to build and if so use the universe's pre-existing "wormholes" to bridge distance. Instead of "Alcubierre's" space warp FTL we need to warp TIME instead, control time differentials instead. Let me know if you get some good leads.

~Heinlein's Ghost

a simple statement

"The human mind simply cannot deal with delayed cause and effect. We accept things at face value and do not accept the complexities and complications of time." (the Bob Livingston letter PO Box 1105 Cullman, AL 35056 $65 per 12 issues). Bob follows with an example where he states that we are in an era of vaccinations and inoculations. We all get them and years later we get a "buildup of plaque"in the arteries, heart disease and other diseases. These are diseases that were not common before vaccinations. So like Rome it is only much later that anyone figures out that the lead in the plumbing is what made them go mad and sterile.  As to the FED. QE1, QE2, "quantitative easing" is just printing up more money in the basement. And any farmer knows that if you just keep adding water to the milk the milk loses it's value because soon it is just all water. The dollar lost 20% this year. Such government money inflation is a TAX on every thing you own. Since 1913 when the fed was created we have lost 97% of the value of money. As Churchill once said "Once in awhile people stumble across the truth, then pick themselves up, ignore it and proceed on". That is a variation of the "normalacy syndrome" where we tend to stick our head in the sand and NOT EVEN SEE the problem and just do what we normally do. The Titanic is sinking so let's rearrange the deck furniture. After all, it was on our schedule.

We are going to have a depression, not because of a poor economy but BECAUSE of the effects of GOVERNMENT and it's direct actions.  It will not get out of the way. Don't expect it to. They want to own you.

Prepare.

Let's do it without government

"Mining the Sky" by John S. Lewis is a great read. He points out that "the last three Saturn 5 boosters,  already built and paid for, were laid out as lawn ornaments at Cape Canaveral, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Johnson Space Center, to rust into ruin and serve as a testimony to the futility of that dream. Only governments can afford to spend a quarter of a billion dollars each for the equivalent of plastic flamingos." Then he describes the fate of the tools and dies, sold pennies on the dollar (a 20 billion dollar investment) and melted down for scrap. The plans donated to a Boy Scout paper drive. And the last of plans in the Federal Records Archives in Atlanta are "lost". So much for GOVERNMENT intelligence. The whole space effort was a geopolitical stunt based on lies. Evidently President Eisenhower financed U2 effort to find out if Russia had ICBM's. They found out they had FOUR.  JFK got elected on the fear of a  "missile gap" that did not exist. JFK knew that.  Lack of intelligence, foresight, imagination, or even "hindsight" for that matter. Lack of accountability to the public. Central planning sucks. Government is untrustworthy.

Capitalism can achieve Space development for us. Paradoxically Hong Kong is the only place on Earth right now that has been left untouched by government regulation. China doesn't mess with it because it WORKS and pays them dividends. You can get a business "license" with ONE form filed. It has the number one economy and the most freedom. We are a mixed socialism/capitalism economy and number 9 on the list of economies. Pure socialist countries rank at the bottom of the list in the 170's.  That should be informative to China, USA, and the rest of the world, but somehow escapes notice of supposedly intelligent people. We have a long way to go.

So many problems. We need real solutions. Governments will not do that for us. Abundance of resources and energy await us in space. We will only mature as a species when we are able to open up this frontier. We need to get to work on it NOW without government.

Survival

"Can America Survive" by John Hagee points out in Part one of the book Nuclear Iran's plan of attack on 7 cities in the USA. He tells of British agents already catching a terrorist with a suitcase/backpack nuke. He says the bombs are already here since our borders to the south are non existent. EMP pulse can send us into the dark ages starving millions as electricity shuts off everything from the grid to vehicles that won't run and gas pumps that won't pump. Tractors won't plant crops. And trunks won't stock the grocery stores. Planes will fall out of the sky. When Iran has the rockets and bombs enough to do Israel "off the map" they will only hold off only long enough to do us in at the same time. They can launch medium range missiles from cargo ships off our coast. How much canned food do you have stored by? No, that's not enough. Plan better.

"Survival with Style is the name of a series of articles in the 70's by Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Space development leads to abundance of resources, and expanded frontier, and HOPE that the species can have some of its' eggs in another basket if this one should stop having a history or someone to tell it.


The old boy scout in me says "Be Prepared". Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. READ "Patriots" by James Wesley, Rawles. It is a novel cloaked as a readable survival guide to TEOTWAWKI or " the end of the world as we know it". His blog is survivalblog.com .


The last shuttle has flown. We have to do it on our own. Join me in brainstorming that process.

Another Book

"How To Live On Mars" by Robert Zubrin opens with a page " about the author" which at first sight is confusing; Quote "He is no (proven) relation whatsoever to his twentieth-century namesake, a humorless astronautical engineer who developed the Mars Direct mission plan, authored the classic treatise The Case for Mars, and led the founding of the Mars Society n 1998". Then you check the back of the book. Yes, he IS the writer of The Case for Mars. So as you read it you realize that he "using the voice" of a writer FROM the Martian colony telling the newbies all the tricks that make the colony work. Chapter 2; How to choose a Spacesuit. It's really detailed but fun to read.  Choose a pressure suit over elastic skintight suits. Gain a pound of fat and they don't fit right anymore. Get Liquid Oxygen over gas oxygen supply system. You get 36 hours of air vs 12 plus possible refills from your rover's propulsion system. Power with methanol/oxygen fuel cells vs Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel cells.  Both boil off leakage. Stuck in air lock your boot rubbed on the floor causes a spark and BOOM. Not healthy. Thermal Control and Waste Management: Heated boots because the ground is -90 degrees C. Nice diagram of a spacesuit diaper named "Spacesuit Waste Entrainment Temporary Cachement System (WETeCS). Gosh, did you ever wonder?

He divides the book into two parts "The basics of survival" and "The basics of success" with things like **Technical Note **(WARNING: High Science Content) The Science of Terraforming. Lots of fun and a quick read. Me like. You like? What's not to like. Check it out.

~Heinlein's Ghost.