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Category: space travel

Permanent magnetic motors circa 2014.

The AZ-PM thruster is the latest in a range of Rolls-Royce propulsion products using its permanent magnet technology. This technology is based on electric drive where the motor is in the form of a ring round the propeller. The moving part of the ring is a rim around the propeller blades which carries a series of strong permanent magnets. The rotor, fitted within a series of magnets, turns within an outer ring which form the stator.

When current is supplied to the motor from the variable frequency power supply the electromagnets are excited in a particular sequence and the resulting magnetic fields interact with the field from the rotor magnets creating a torque that turns the rotor and its propeller blades.

At the centre of the thruster the propeller blades are joined to a hub, which has two functions; to carry the bearings taking propeller thrust and provide radial location of the rotor, and to improve the hydro-dynamic efficiency of the thruster. Loads are transferred to the stator through struts. Both rotor and stator are sealed against water ingress and operate fully submerged.

Rolls-Royce PM technology is flexible, and is currently applied in this integrated propeller drive form to tunnel thrusters (TT-PM) and azimuth thrusters (AZ-PM). Other versions in which the PM rotor is arranged to turn an output shaft provide a high torque, low speed, drive for winches.

Among the advantages of this PM thruster technology are high efficiency (at nominal speed) over the entire speed range, leading to low thermal losses and eliminating the need for separate cooling systems of the submerged motor. Thrusters are compact and robust, and require less space within the hull. They are simple, with far fewer components than geared thrusters and are also quieter, with reduced structure and airborne noise. Learn more about Permanent Magnet Thrusters http://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/marine/product-finder/propulsors/azimuthing-thrusters.aspx#section-product-search

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Several hundred people have already booked their tickets and begun training for a spectacular voyage: a few minutes, or perhaps days, in the weightlessness of space.

The mainly wealthy first-time space travellers are getting ready to take part in one of several private missions which are preparing to launch.

The era of space tourism is on the horizon 60 years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.

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Writer-director Neil Burger is well known for his provocative cinematic projects, most notably 2006’s period-set magician movie “The Illusionist,” 2011’s psychological thriller “Limitless,” and a trio of “Divergent” films adapted from author Veronica Roth’s young adult sci-fi novels.

Now Burger has his eyes fixed on the stars with his new science fiction adventure flick, “Voyagers,” which revolves around the perils inside a generation spaceship carrying 30 home-grown candidates on a one-way mission to settle an exoplanet 86 years from Earth.

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I found your rocket … Kyle Foreman, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, told GeekWire that the property owner left a message reporting the debris. “The sheriff’s office checked it out on Monday, and SpaceX staff came over on Tuesday and retrieved it,” Foreman said. SpaceX has yet to detail precisely what went wrong with the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage, such that it failed to de-orbit in a controlled manner over the ocean. Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Brazilian launch site stirs controversy. The Brazilian government is committed to further developing the Alc ntara Launch Center on the country’s north Atlantic coast, near the equator. However, the region is also home to Afro-Brazilian residents of settlements first established by escaped slaves. These settlements are known as Quilombola communities. The Washington Post recently did a deep dive into the controversy, examining how eviction of these communities would affect local residents. The newspaper found that the spaceport expansion could displace nearly 2100 people from Quilombola communities.

Brazil’s polarizing dilemma … Marcos Pontes, head of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, said there are no plans to relocate families “right now.” And if the time comes to remove people, he predicted, they will go willingly. “They are going to see development coming in, real development,” he said. “All of the resistance, that is going to be gradually disappearing.” This seems unlikely. The clash is the distillation of one of Brazil’s most urgent and polarizing dramas, the publication says. What is more important: developing a vast country with unrealized potential and a lagging economy? Or protecting some of its most vulnerable communities?

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Circa 2009

(PhysOrg.com) — Scientists have managed to levitate young mice in research carried out for NASA. Levitated mice may help research on bone density loss during long exposures to low gravity, such as in space travel and missions to other planets.

The researchers worked from a number of laboratories around the U.S., including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and the University of Missouri. The research was done on behalf of NASA, and was published in the online journal Advances in Space Research on 6 September 2009.

The scientists built a variable gravity simulator consisting of a superconducting magnet that could generate a magnetic field strong enough to levitate the inside every cell in the mouse’s body. Water is weakly diamagnetic, which means that in the presence of a strong magnetic field the electrons in water rearrange orbit slightly, creating tiny currents in opposition to the external magnetic field. If the external magnet is strong enough, the diamagnetic repulsion of the water in the mouse tissue is enough to exactly balance the force of gravity on the body.

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Plus, we can bring along 1.5 tons.

Scientists have outlined the wild way humans could travel past Neptune in under 10 years—with over 1.5 tons of cargo on board.

The secret is an in-the-works direct fusion drive (DFD), which will kick in once the spacecraft reaches orbit and propel it at up to 44 kilometers per second. From there, the spacecraft could conduct experiments on Neptune as well as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), or outer dwarf planets like Makemake, Eris, and Haumea.

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I just finished the most recent season of The Expanse – my current favourite Sci-Fi series. Unlike most of my other go-to Sci-Fi, The Expanse’s narrative is (thus far) mainly contained to our own Solar System. In Star Trek, ships fly about the galaxy at Faster-Than-Light speeds giving mention to the many light years (or parsecs *cough* Star Wars) travelled to say nothing of sublight journeys within solar systems themselves. The distances between stars is huge. But, for current-day Earthling technology, our Solar System itself is still overwhelmingly enormous. It takes years to get anywhere.

In The Expanse, ships use a fictional sublight propulsion called The Epstein Drive to travel quickly through the Solar System at significant fractions of light speed. We’re not nearly there yet, but we are getting closer with the announcement of a new theoretical sublight propulsion. It won’t be an Epstein drive, but it may come to be known as the Ebrahimi Drive – an engine inspired by fusion reactors and the incredible power of solar Coronal Mass Ejections.

Rocket engines have been the backbone of space exploration lifting humans to the Moon, rovers to Mars, and sending probes outside the Solar System. However, for all their blast-offy awesomeness, they are inherently inefficient and bulky. You can only get so much energy out of rocket fuel. As a result, most of your entire spacecraft is a giant fuel tank. The mass of a rocket destined for Mars could be as much as 78% fuel. To reduce weight, we need more efficient engines.

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Elon Musk has given us his findings to why the SpaceX Starship SN 11 exploded above the landing pad.
I explore fixes from a system safety standpoint. See what I recommend.

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Humanity has come a long way in understanding the universe. We’ve got a physical framework that mostly matches our observations, and new technologies have allowed us to analyze the Big Bang and take photos of black holes. But the hypothetical EmDrive rocket engine threatened to upend what we knew about physics… if it worked. After the latest round of testing, we can say with a high degree of certainty that it doesn’t.

If you have memories from the 90s, you probably remember the interest in cold fusion, a supposed chemical process that could produce energy from fusion at room temperature instead of millions of degrees (pick your favorite scale, the numbers are all huge). The EmDrive is basically cold fusion for the 21st century. First proposed in 2001, the EmDrive uses an asymmetrical resonator cavity inside which electromagnetic energy can bounce around. There’s no exhaust, but proponents claim the EmDrive generates thrust.

The idea behind the EmDrive is that the tapered shape of the cavity would reflect radiation in such a way that there was a larger net force exerted on the resonator at one end. Thus, an object could use this “engine” for hyper-efficient propulsion. That would be a direct violation of the conservation of momentum. Interest in the EmDrive was scattered until 2016 when NASA’s Eagelworks lab built a prototype and tested it. According to the team, they detected a small but measurable net force, and that got people interested.

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