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Pine
storyteller
Username: Pine
Post Number: 549
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Friday, August 06, 2004 - 3:30 pm: |     |
Of course the next step would be getting anywhere in space, and that takes too much time. Thus the ESA is starting research into hibernation.
quote:Practical hibernation mechanisms are at least a decade away, says Mark Ayre of ESA's Advanced Concepts Scheme. But he and colleagues are already considering what research needs to done to bring such systems to reality.
One route of inquiry centres on DADLE (D-Ala,D-Leu-enkephalin), a substance with opium-like properties. An injection of DADLE is known to trigger hibernation in ground squirrels during the summer season, when the animals would normally be awake. It also seems to send cultures of human cells to sleep: the cells divide more slowly and their gene activity drops when the molecule is applied, say Biggiogera and his colleagues in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation1
Researchers want to test DADLE in non-hibernating animals, starting with rats. Carlo Zancanaro and colleagues at the University of Verona, Italy, ran such an experiment last month and are currently analysing data from sensors that tracked the animals' heartbeats and brain activity after DADLE was applied.
There is also investigation into a drug to prevent muscle wasting, and the physiology of the Madagascan fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius), revealed this year in Nature as the first primate known to hibernate.
"Mommy, you are not always wrong!" - my daughter, almost 6. |
Da_bear
storyteller
Username: Da_bear
Post Number: 441
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - 3:23 pm: | |
OK, a year and a couple of months???????
CBS NEWS
(CBS/AP) SpaceShipOne headed back to space Wednesday, in nearly a carbon copy of its historic flight in June, when it became the first privately-funded manned vehicle to go into space.
A specially designed jet with SpaceShipOne under its belly took off at 7:12 a.m. PDT from Mojave Airport and began an hour's climb.
That flight was for the record books. Now it's about the money — a $10 million payoff for years of secret work.
To get the Ansari X Prize, reports CBS News Correspondent Steve Futterman, it must make two flights within two weeks at least 62 miles high — an altitude generally accepted as being in space.
"The race begins. After eight years of waiting, race day is here," said X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis.
The prize rules require that the two flights occur within 14 days. SpaceShipOne's creators ambitiously set the second flight for Monday, in less than half the time allowed.
SpaceShipOne is flying with a pilot and the equivalent weight of two passengers aboard in accordance with rules requiring X Prize contenders to be capable of carrying three people on a suborbital hop into space.
SpaceShipOne was expected to spend an hour climbing to about 47,000 feet, fall free from the mothership and ignite its rocket for a fast joyride into space, then fall back into the atmosphere minutes later and glide home.
Official confirmation of the altitude reached was expected about two hours later.
The Ansari X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won in his Spirit of St. Louis for the first New York-to-Paris flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
The St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation, noting the rapid development of air travel after Lindbergh's feat, hopes to inspire an era of space tourism in which spaceflight is not just the domain of government agencies such as NASA.
The idea appeared to be working far faster than might have been expected.
Maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan, with more than $20 million in funds from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, secretly developed SpaceShipOne and is well ahead of two dozen teams building X Prize contenders around the world.
And already the ultimate goal of the X Prize appears in sight.
Richard Branson, the airline mogul and adventurer, announced in London on Monday that his Virgin Group plans to offer passenger flight into space aboard rockets based on SpaceShipOne by 2007.
Branson believes he will fly some 3,000 people into space in the first five years that Virgin Galactic spaceline is operating.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. |
Rhi
storyteller
Username: Rhi
Post Number: 203
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 2:09 am: | |
From Telegraph News:
Manned space flight No 2 clinches £5m prize
By Catherine Elsworth in Mojave, California
(Filed: 05/10/2004)
The American private rocket SpaceShipOne completed another successful space flight to clinch a £5.6 million prize for the first commercial, manned craft to reach sub-orbital space twice in two weeks.
SpaceShipOne blasted off from its carrier craft White Knight at 48,000 feet just before 8am yesterday. Its rockets fired for 84 seconds, sending the plane - fuelled by a mixture of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, and rubber - to the fringes of space, before returning at Mach 3.
Brian Binnie celebrates another successful flight of SpaceShipOne
It was the second of two trips needed to secure the Ansari X prize, set up in 1996 to encourage the commercial space programme. To win, a manned, three-seater craft had to be flown at least 62 miles above the Earth twice in a fortnight.
During the first prize flight last Wednesday in which it reached 64 miles, SpaceShipOne went into a violent roll that almost aborted the mission as the pilot, Mike Melvill, fought to regain control.
SpaceShipOne parts from its mother ship White Knight
But yesterday's trip had no such "unscripted manoeuvres". The tubby, bulbous-nosed craft completed a flawless mission over the desert.
"Right now I'd like to say to Brian 'Nice drive'," said Burt Rutan, the aeronautical pioneer behind SpaceShipOne, after Brian Binnie, 51, the pilot at the controls, navigated the rocket back to Earth.
Sir Richard Branson has struck a deal with Mr Rutan to supply him with five-seater rocket planes to take paying customers into space within three years for around £112,000 a flight.
So SpaceShipOne has won the X prize.
Mostly Harmless |
Cavebear
flint knapper
Username: Cavebear
Post Number: 1348
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 3:02 am: | |
Destination: Moon
The equivalent of North America to the Europeans 400 years ago.
I thought I was wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken about that. |
Scott
storyteller
Username: Scott
Post Number: 487
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 3:23 am: | |
Congrats to the American team for a job well done! I understand that the Canadians aren't giving up and will test flight soon. I hope other teams will too.
I agree with cavebear - next stop the moon, with perhaps a short sojourn in orbit of the earth - by private companies.
While 100 miles is impressive, it really isn't space in my view. Going to the moon would be though. But you have to start somewhere. The ancient polynesioans just didn't get into a canoe and paddle to Hawaii. It took time and trial and error to build the skill to do that.
Scott
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ces gens, Jondalar, ils sourient. Ils me sourient. - Ayla |
Thalion
storyteller
Username: Thalion
Post Number: 1218
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 7:33 am: | |
YAY! Congrats to the team! I always wished that it would be possible to go into space for normal people, just one turn in orbit and then back again would be all that I'd ever have wanted. I very much doubted that that would happen during my lifetime. Now it looks as if it could... so all I need to do now is finding a sponsor, start to work out and sign up for the first routine flights, eh? 
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they pass by - Douglas Adams |
Rhi
storyteller
Username: Rhi
Post Number: 204
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 06, 2004 - 2:40 am: | |
Sounds like they want to make the X prize an annual event. Excellent.
Mostly Harmless |
Cavebear
flint knapper
Username: Cavebear
Post Number: 1356
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 - 1:15 am: | |
I think it is important to keep the prizes going until practical business economics catches up.
I thought I was wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken about that. |
Da_bear
storyteller
Username: Da_bear
Post Number: 456
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - 4:25 pm: | |
Looks like it could happen that wy CB:
CBSnews full article
Diamandis chuckles at how suddenly his dream has become reality. And he insists it is just the beginning. Already, he has launched an annual competition known as the X Prize Cup, a kind of grand prix of space, where teams will compete for fastest launches, fastest turnaround times, most number of passengers and other events.
Other grand schemes have been announced, too.
Richard Branson, the British airline mogul and adventurer, has launched a new company, Virgin Galactic, to bring paying customers into space aboard rockets like SpaceShipOne. Flights are scheduled to start in 2007.
Meanwhile the historic rocket is heading to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. And Diamandis is heading for Florida, where he will relax for a few days — his first vacation in years.
After that, he will hurl himself back into his quest. "I'm going to the stars," he says.
These days, people believe him.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. |
Cavebear
flint knapper
Username: Cavebear
Post Number: 1386
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - 7:48 pm: | |
The current situation of private space flight seems a lot like the situation of private air flight after the Wright Brothers. Granted, the Government back then hadn't built a series of planes and than private builders tried to copy them in different ways, but the potential for private development of space flight seems similar.
Diamandis isn’t “going to the stars”, that is much too great a leap. But he is following the idea of government research first and commercial application afterwards, which is our more modern style. If things had occurred in the Wright Brothers times as they do today, the government would have eventually developed a Boeing 737 and then challenged the private industry to build a Lear Jet.
The challenge today is to take a massive and expensive technological Government triumph like the Space Shuttle and turn it into a cost-effective and safe commercial Airbus.
I thought I was wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken about that. |
Da_bear
flint knapper
Username: Da_bear
Post Number: 633
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Monday, March 28, 2005 - 1:39 pm: | |
NASA is now into it with space elevators:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7201
New space prizes target space elevators
18:09 24 March 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Space elevators - a futuristic idea in which space is accessed via long tethers with the power needed being transmitted on beams of light - are the target of two new cash prizes, sponsored by NASA.
The prizes, announced on Wednesday evening, are the first in a series called "Centennial Challenges", modelled on the $10 million X Prize recently awarded to the first privately developed spacecraft. Winning teams will receive $50,000 in 2005 for either building the strongest strand of material or for using light to power a wireless robot up a cable.
The Spaceward Foundation, a space advocacy organisation based in Mountain View, California, will administer the prizes, which NASA will fund. The new prizes will focus on the technologies necessary to develop a space elevator. But NASA is keen to stress that the work could benefit many space-based projects required to achieve President George W Bush's plans to return people to the Moon and on to Mars.
"The innovations from these competitions will help support advances in aerospace materials and structures, new approaches to robotic and human planetary surface operations, and even futuristic concepts like space elevators and solar power satellites," says Brant Sponberg, NASA's program manager for Centennial Challenges.
Breaking point
The $50,000 "Tether Challenge" will be awarded to a privately funded team that has the strongest tether of a particular diameter. The tether that takes the most tension before breaking will then have to support at least 50% more tension than a NASA-built "house tether" to win the prize.
Then, in 2006, NASA will increase the booty for first prize to $100,000, and offer a $40,000 second prize and a $10,000 third prize.
The "Beam Power Challenge" will focus on how to transmit power wirelessly by beaming radiation from a source to a receiver. In 2005, the teams will have to build a power receiver that can convert this radiation to electricity with photoelectric cells and lift a climbing robot carrying at least 25 kilograms up a 50-metre cable. Each team will get three attempts and the $50,000 will go to the team that can lift the most weight in three minutes.
In 2006, the challenge will include building the source of power, as well, and the top three teams will again receive $100,000, $40,000 and $10,000, respectively.
NASA is set to announce more centennial challenges in the coming weeks.
I like it. Independent spend their own money, and use their own creativity without a cloying bureaucracy holding them back.
Excellent idea.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. |
Da_bear
flint knapper
Username: Da_bear
Post Number: 767
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, December 15, 2005 - 5:02 pm: | |
CBS NEWS:
Virgin Galactic, the British company created by entrepreneur Richard Branson to send tourists into space, and New Mexico announced an agreement Tuesday for the state to build a $225 million spaceport.
Virgin Galactic also revealed that up to 38,000 people from 126 countries have paid a deposit for a seat on one of its manned commercial flights, including a core group of 100 "founders" who have paid the initial $200,000 cost of a flight upfront. Virgin Galactic is planning to begin flights in late 2008 or early 2009.
New Mexico Economic Development Secretary Rick Homans said construction of the spaceport, to be built largely underground in the south of the state near the White Sands Missile Range, could begin in early 2007, depending on approval from environmental and aviation authorities.
Virgin will have a 20-year lease on the facility, with annual payments of $1 million for the first five years and rising to cover the cost of the project by the end of the lease.
"Experts predict that thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of private investment will be created in the next 20 years as the private sector develops new commercial markets in the space industry in New Mexico," Homans said in London. "Virgin is the beginning and many other space companies will follow."
Virgin Galactic said it had chosen New Mexico as the site for its headquarters because of its steady climate, free airspace, low population density and high altitude. All those factors can significantly reduce the cost of the space flight program.
The spaceport, to be located some 25 miles south of the town of Truth or Consequences, will be constructed 90 percent underground, with just the runway and supporting structures above ground.
Stephen Attenborough, the Virgin Galactic executive in charge of marketing the space flights, said the 100 founder members were committed to "stepping up to the plate" and boarding a flight early in the operations.
"Many of the others will need to wait until the price comes down and will want to wait for proven reliability and safety," he said.
Trevor Beattie, a London-based advertising director who paid for his ticket within days of Branson's announcement of the company's launch, said he is not concerned about safety.
"My only concern is that the longer they leave the launch, the more likely we all are to be hit by a bus," said Beattie, who has dreamed of going to space since watching the 1969 moonwalk.
Branson formed Virgin Galactic after watching SpaceShipOne, a craft designed by Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, become the first privately manned rocket to reach space last year. SpaceShipOne went on to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize with two suborbital flights in five days from Mojave, Calif.
Virgin Galactic has a deal with Rutan to build five spacecraft, licensing technology from Allen's company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures.
Virgin Galactic plans to operate its initial flights from the Mojave base ahead of the projected opening of the New Mexico spaceport in late 2009 or early 2010.
Virgin Galactic also unveiled its logo — the pupil of an eye incorporating an eclipse. Branson's iris will be used for the final design.
Coming soon, private commercial space travel.
WHere can I get the money, I know where to get the ticket?
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. |
Scott
flint knapper
Username: Scott
Post Number: 1144
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 17, 2005 - 12:22 am: | |
OK, goingt o try this again. The NSA just zapped my post.
To recap:
bear, you could start your own PAC and siphon off the funds - just ask any local Republican how to do it.
Or, we could dress you up in drag and parade you around the kinky circuit - former Republican wanna be senator Jack Ryan might even take you up - he was an investment banker - lots of dough there.
Or, you could claim dike dollars from the billions that Bush promised. You place is in danger of imminent sinking, isn't it?
But the best chance might be to hunt down that scamp of a FICAS Treasurer and see where he has stashed all the donations for the multitudes. He couldn't spend it ALL on Rosa Maria, Juanita and Marisol, could he?
Scott
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ces gens, Jondalar, ils sourient. Ils me sourient. - Ayla |
Da_bear
flint knapper
Username: Da_bear
Post Number: 769
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 17, 2005 - 1:05 am: | |
Or, you could claim dike dollars from the billions that Bush promised. You place is in danger of imminent sinking, isn't it?
Isn't the dyke dollars from being in drag???
I get confused.
But the best chance might be to hunt down that scamp of a FICAS Treasurer and see where he has stashed all the donations for the multitudes. He couldn't spend it ALL on Rosa Maria, Juanita and Marisol, could he?
I would.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. |
Ted
hunter
Username: Ted
Post Number: 366
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, December 18, 2005 - 9:57 pm: | |
Scott:
......FICAS Treasurer and see where he has stashed all the donations for the multitudes. He couldn't spend it ALL on Rosa Maria, Juanita and Marisol, could he?
Wanna bet?
Hrrrummpphhh, nobody seems to realise how expensive it is drumming up converts for FICAS, and the high cost of keeping up appearances, vital in today's cut-throat competition for the world's souls.
Why, just yesterday I priced some new feathers for new costumes for Juanita, Nina and Vianca, and they were astronomical!
Not to mention the high cost of thongs, honestly, the less there is the more you pay!
Then there's holy brew for the ceremonies, five star accomodation, and holidays from the hectic business of proselytizing!
I think it's time we had another donations drive, anybody got any money lying around doing nothing? FICAS needs you to give, and give generously and often!!!!!!!!
And just so you know what sort of services you are getting, here are a few pics of the acolytes:
Nina in one of her costumes:
Vianca hamming it up for the camera:
Do not go gentle into that good night...Rage, rage against the dying of the light
Benjamin Disraeli: "The Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll." |
Da_bear
flint knapper
Username: Da_bear
Post Number: 918
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 - 4:42 pm: | |
The x prize has another crash:
Crash destroys rocket ahead of X Prize contest
12:54 22 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
David Shiga
Enlarge image
Armadillo Aerospace's Pixel vehicle performs a hover test. An identical vehicle called Texel was wrecked in a crash landing on Saturday (Image: Armadillo Aerospace)Tools Related ArticlesNine teams to compete in lunar lander contest
21 June 2007
Mock lunar lander hovers for record time
14 May 2007
Lunar lander challenge ends with a crash
21 October 2006
Search New Scientist
Contact us
Web LinksArmadillo Aerospace
X Prize Foundation
Masten Space Systems
The front-runner for a $2 million NASA competition to build mock lunar landers has lost one of its two main vehicles in a fiery crash. The company, Armadillo Aerospace, says it will enter a smaller vehicle instead, but outsiders say the upset will level the playing field and add suspense to the upcoming contest.
The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is designed to spur innovation in future vehicles that could take off and land vertically on the Moon. The event will be held on 27 and 28 October at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico, US.
Nine teams have signed up for the competition, but Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, US, is by far the leading contender for the prize. The company, led by Doom video game creator John Carmack, nearly won the 2006 contest, in which it was the only entrant.
The challenge has two 'levels' that involve a vehicle lifting off at one launch pad and hovering – for either 90 or 180 seconds, depending on the level – at an altitude of 50 metres as it moves to a second launch pad 100 metres away. Then the vehicle must do the same thing in reverse. If more than one vehicle achieves this, then the vehicle that can repeat it the greatest number of times in a given time period of time will win.
Armadillo has two main rockets, twin vehicles called Pixel and Texel. It plans to enter its better-tested Pixel into the more difficult level 2 contest, which carries a top prize of $1 million, and it had planned to enter Texel into the $350,000 level 1 contest.
But on Saturday, Texel burst into flames after it crash landed during a test. Its fuel and liquid oxygen tanks were so damaged in the impact that it would be easier to build a new vehicle from scratch than to repair Texel, says Armadillo test team member Phil Eaton.
Engulfed in flamesRather than trying to build a new vehicle based on Texel's design, however, Armadillo now plans to use an existing vehicle called Module 1 to vie for the prize. With two tanks compared to Texel's four, Module 1 has less fuel capacity and cannot hover as long. But its makers say it is still capable of winning the level 1 prize.
"We ought to have things covered for the X Prize Cup for level 1 and level 2," Eaton says.
When Texel was destroyed, Armadillo was testing an automatic system to shut down its engines. The system was designed to reduce bouncing when the vehicle lands, which had tended to occur when the engine was powered down by a human controller.
During the test, Texel lifted off and hovered without incident, then descended again and touched the ground. But it then rose again unexpectedly and began accelerating upward. "Crap, it's going to fly into the crane, I need to kill it," Carmack recalls thinking.
He hit the manual shutdown switch, turning off the vehicle's engine in mid-flight. Texel was about 6 metres above the ground and fell like a stone. One of its fuel tanks broke open when it hit the ground, spewing fuel that ignited and engulfed the vehicle in flames. "It made a fireball that would make any Hollywood movie proud," Carmack says.
A fire truck at the test site quickly doused the flames with water, and fortunately, no one was injured in the crash.
Faulty readingsPost-crash analysis has revealed what went wrong – the automatic shutdown that should have triggered when Texel first touched down did not occur. That's because the computer was mistakenly told to expect a stronger signal from the touchdown sensor, beyond what it is actually capable of producing.
But the touchdown did have a big enough effect to jostle the onboard GPS unit that Texel relied on to track its motion. The disturbance caused faulty readings from the unit, confusing the vehicle.
"It thought that it was plummeting to earth very quickly, so it fired the engine to reduce the speed," Eaton told New Scientist. "Well, it actually wasn't going down, so this caused it to start going up very quickly." That is when Carmack triggered the manual shutdown.
Although no one was harmed in the crash, Eaton says there are risks involved in rocket tests, underscored by the July explosion that killed three people at a test site for the pioneering commercial spaceflight company Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, US. "We try as hard as we can to eliminate those [risks] so that our team members are safe, but it doesn't eliminate every possibility of something catastrophic," Eaton told New Scientist.
Up the anteBut he says all three shutdown triggers meant to reduce the danger of the vehicle flying out of control worked as expected. In addition to Carmack's manual shutdown command, the vehicle's computer also sensed it was going astray and triggered an automatic shutdown at nearly the same instant, followed shortly by another manual shutdown command from another team member. Any of these three would have shut down the engine on its own.
Henry Spencer, a computer programmer and space enthusiast who wrote the software for an astronomy satellite called Microvariability and Oscillation of Stars (MOST), thinks the lunar lander competition could be more interesting in light of the crash.
He notes that the front-runner for the first non-stop transatlantic flight of an aircraft in 1927 was not Charles Lindbergh but Richard Byrd, "until he crashed on take-off, and just like that, was out of the race." That left Lindbergh to win the $25,000 prize for the flight.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. |
Hitman84
gatherer
Username: Hitman84
Post Number: 213
Registered: 9-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 11:28 am: | |
X prize, where X=0!
Here is the spaceship!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/23/nbranson123.xml
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080124/ap_on_hi_te/space_tourism_9;_ylt=A0WTcU5Dc5hHh0gBSAGUU80F
Umm.. very expensive!
“Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.”
- Richard Dawkins |
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