spaceflight
esiegel | September 18, 2017"We are what we are, and we're doing the best we can. It is not for you to set the standards by which we should be judged!" -Capt. Picard, to Q
When you think about Star Trek, a whole variety of things might come to mind. It might conjure images of space exploration, feelings of optimism about the future of humanity, the inextricable link between prosperity and technology, or the fear of the unknown. But what has always set Star Trek apart from any other sci-fi or fantasy show has been its ability to hold a mirror up to humanity, and force us to confront our greatest moral and ethical…
esiegel | August 26, 2017"Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system." -Alexandra Adornetto
The dream of futuristic technologies and what they might enable us to do -- travel back in time, create artificial gravity, traverse the stars, create unlimited energy -- are some of the best goals science can aspire to. While a great many of the technologies we’ve envisioned…
esiegel | August 24, 2017“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.” -Stanisław Lem
One of the questions that’s fascinated humanity since we first began looking up at the night sky is whether or not we’re alone in the Universe. Although we now know of other stars, other planets, and potentially inhabited worlds, we have yet to make contact with another intelligent species. Despite our curiosity, a great many people live in fear that if we did…
esiegel | August 17, 2017“We [are] a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.” -Carl Sagan
When the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft were launched, they contained a message emblazoned on them: a map of 14 pulsars, showing the location of Earth relative to them. This was a brilliant idea: showcase bright, unique identifiers, complete with their observed periods and distances from our world, and people would be able to find Earth. If we wanted to be found, it was the best idea 1977 had to offer.
A colorized…
esiegel | May 18, 2017“We had this whole big beautiful place for discovery, and all we could think to do with it was wipe out everything that made it worth discovering.” -Buzz Aldrin
It’s been more than 40 years since humans last set foot on the Moon. The final space shuttle flight occurred six years ago already, and the International Space Station is set to reach the end of its life a few years from now. At the 33rd Space Symposium last month, NASA announced their new, bold plan for crewed spaceflight: a crewed space station that orbits the Moon.
The Orion capsule would be one of many components on a proposed…
esiegel | March 6, 2017"A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women." -Valentina Tereshkova
Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 amidst controversy. At 32, she was the youngest astronaut in history, surrounded by questions such as “will it ruin her reproductive organs,” “what if she’s menstruating” and “will she weep if something goes wrong on the job?” But 20 years prior, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova proved that women had every bit as much mettle and ability as the…
esiegel | January 21, 2017"It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away." -Lisa Unger
If you want to experience zero gravity, all you need to do is go to space, turn your rocket off and feel that weightless sensation, right? Except, from up there in Earth’s orbit, the gravitational force on you is still almost as great as it is on Earth’s surface! You still accelerate down towards the center of the Earth, not quite at 9.8 m/s^2, but not by much less.
Astronauts, and fruit, aboard the International Space Station.…
esiegel | January 18, 2017"One way or another the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium. So if we really want to know where our atoms came from, and how the little planet Earth came to be capable of supporting life, we need to measure what happened at the beginning." -John Mather
Launching in October of 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will revolutionize our conception of the Universe. The biggest scientific find that we know it can uncover is how the Universe came to be the way it is today. How…
esiegel | December 24, 2016“The very closest stars would require many years to visit, even traveling at the speed of light, which is impossible according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Today’s fastest spaceships would require 200,000 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, our closest bright star. The energy required to send a hundred colonists to another star, as Frank Drake has pointed out, would be enough to meet the energy needs of the entire United States over a human lifetime. And these estimates are regarding nearby stars. When we consider the distances across the entire galaxy, and between galaxies,…
esiegel | December 10, 2016“I’m coming back in… and it’s the saddest moment of my life.” -Ed White, at the end of his first spacewalk
A great many of us had dreams of becoming an astronaut when we were younger, and many of us still have that dream today. But turning that dream into reality involves a lot of choices, a lot of hard work, a lot of trade-offs and a lot of luck. Having “the right stuff” is no guarantee that you’ll get there, but if you’re willing to put in the work, there’s plenty you can do to maximize your chances.
Teamwork is essential to future astronauts, as astronaut candidates Tyler N. (Nick) Hague…
esiegel | November 30, 2016"...axions are potentially detectable through their weak coupling to electromagnetism..." -Aaron Chou
We know, from hundreds of years of experience with the laws of physics, that momentum is strictly conserved, and therefore a reactionless drive is impossible. What's not impossible is an engine that has a reaction that's simply invisible, or otherwise undetectable to us. This has been seen in experiments involving neutrinos, but NASA's impossible space engine, the EMdrive, offers another possibility: a dark matter reaction.
Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada, of the illustration of the dark matter…
esiegel | November 23, 2016"The law of the conservation of momentum is the basis of the static thrust equation, the law of the conservation of energy is the basis of the dynamic thrust equation. Provided these two fundamental laws of physics are satisfied, there is no reason why the forces inside the resonator should sum to zero." -Roger Shawyer, clearly misunderstanding the theory of forces
So it’s official: the NASA Eagleworks test of the EMdrive, an engine that claims to produce thrust with no reaction to correspond to its action, has passed peer review and is now published. If there’s truly no reaction at all, then…
esiegel | October 1, 2016"There will be peace when the people of the world, want it so badly, that their governments will have no choice but to give it to them. I just wish you could all see the Earth the way that I see it. Because when you really look at it, it's just one world." -Superman
So, you want to shoot Earth’s garbage into the Sun, do you? From a physics point-of-view, this is difficult, but possible. First, you have to overcome the pull of Earth’s gravity, and escape into space. Next, you have to take into account the fact that Earth orbits the Sun at 30 km/s, and to fall into the Sun, you need to take…
esiegel | September 8, 2016"We are what we are, and we're doing the best we can. It is not for you to set the standards by which we should be judged." -Captain Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, the first episode of the original Star Trek premiered. It introduced a vision of humanity’s future that included the ability to travel interstellar distances and investigate new, never-before-seen worlds at speeds far exceeding the speed of light. The technological advance that enabled it all? Warp drive, with the power to bend the fabric of space so severely that light years could be…
esiegel | September 2, 2016"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." -Carl Sagan
For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. While Newton may not be the final word in mechanics anymore since the development of relativity and quantum physics, this law -- better known as the conservation of momentum -- has held up from the 17th century through the 21st in every interaction ever observed. Unless, that is, the EMdrive is everything it claims to be.
The surface magnetic field of an…
esiegel | August 22, 2016“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'” -Edgar Mitchell
Can you believe it’s been 70 years since humanity first began exploring our own planet from space? It’s the best way to view clouds, weather patterns, sea ice, deforestation and all sorts of other…
esiegel | July 31, 2016“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” -Mattie Stepanek
It's been a fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, where we've covered even more ground than normal! First off, for those of you not following me on SoundCloud, we've got a new science podcast out, on the last star in the Universe.
Have a listen and enjoy; that's all possible thanks to the generous donations of our Patreon supporters, as are the re-runs of each article, ad-free, on a 7-day delay over on Medium. Here were the new pieces of this past week:
Will the 'Great Attractor' defeat dark…
esiegel | July 20, 2016“I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.” -Michael Collins
Less than a decade after the first human was launched into space, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins journeyed from the Earth to the Moon. For the first time, human beings descended down to the lunar surface, opened the hatch, and walked outside. Humanity had departed Earth and set foot onto another world.
Buzz Aldrin having just planted the first American flag on the surface of a world other than our own. Image credit: NASA/Apollo 11.
While Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the…
esiegel | June 21, 2016"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." -Enrico Fermi
Given the huge number of stars, planets, and chances at life that the galaxy and the Universe has given us, it seems paradoxical that we haven't yet encountered any form of alien intelligence or even life. The discoveries make in the field of exoplanet studies, particularly by the Kepler mission, make this an even bigger problem than we anticipated: more than 10^22 planets with Earth-like condition…
esiegel | May 12, 2016“Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding – such is the role of a scientist.” -Brian Schmidt
Imagine you had arbitrarily great technology, limitless energy, and the ability to accelerate as close to the speed of light for as long as you wanted. Would you be able to reach the most distant galaxies, the leftover glow from the Big Bang or anything beyond the limit of what we can see today?
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI). The GOODS-North survey,…