[Nuke]

so how do they manage to protect the astronaughts, cosmic rays are capable of devistating human cells as well as microelectronics. this tells me that the shuttle already has substatial shielding.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Nuke
so how do they manage to protect the astronaughts, cosmic rays are capable of devistating human cells as well as microelectronics. this tells me that the shuttle already has substatial shielding.

It's good but it's not enough. Remember that humans can repair damaged cells. Electronic equiupment can't. While 1 cosmic ray hitting a person is unlikely to cause much damage (some risk of developing cancer if you're hit by enough of them but a single one should be okay), a single cosmic ray can easily fry electronic components.

As for the shutttle. The idea was obsolete from the day it was built. The result of the military pushing for a bigger craft than NASA originally planned. Instead of improving the shutttle lets build something new for space exploration and leave the spy satallites to something else.

[aldo_14]

NB: apparently NASA has had problems for some time in tracking down replacement electronics for the shuttle, due to the age of the components.

[Nuke]

about 2 months ago our federal building got struck by lightning, it fried some components and took out all the phones in the building. the phone system in the building was so old that it was impossible to find replacement parts. so they spend  thousands of taxpayers dollars to implement a workaround when a newer system yould cost nearly half that. if you knew how many social security buildings ran 10base2/10base5 networks, youd wish the governent would grow a brain and upgrade everything. and stop wasting out money hunting down old parts. the cosmic ray thing is a big issue but its not really a problem that cant be resolved. the hubble space telescope runs a 486 processor, which is old but still uses some pretty dence microelectronics. if they can make that work why not a xeon?

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by ionia23
Let's hear it for awesome ship construction (and a little dumb luck)

Also, regarding the space elevator thing, Ihave a general question.

Remember taking two magnets in school?  Setting them pole-to-pole one way made them attract, the other way made them repel?

With an electromagnet you can control field strength.

Couldn't something like this be used for the 'elevator?  Pushing against Earth's own natural magnetism?

Or is it a retarded concept.  I'm picturing a huge platform with giant electromagnets on it where field strength can be controlled.

You're talking about anit-gravity drives. There have been some experiments with it, and supposedly some sucess was reported 1996, but after that I heard nothing.

Vaelinx - You know years ago I mentioned that Railgun idea to my physics profesor. In theors it sounds good, alltough the cost and power requirements should be claced to so how feasable it actually would be...

[Vaelinx]

Well...  I've checked out of different "anti-gravity" devices, and even built a few.  So far, most of them are wrong in their presumption, and usually use something along the lines of ion wind to work.  However, there is one example from the mid 1900's that I've never looked into.  If I ever get a mind/time to go back into expermenting on such things I'll have to check that one out.

Oh, and not anti-gravity, but a cool EM science experiment to look into: You can try and make your own conclusions, but be scientific and objective.
The guys in this link are looking for something, and they seem to see it everywhere they look, regardless of the validity/invalidity of the experiment... which is why I don't really trust their findings.

And the railgun... we have them, we make them, we're starting to mount them on ships as weapons.  What we require is higher efficiency in order to get it to work for delivering payloads into orbit.  That, and it would need to be built at the highest altitude possible, probably Asia...  I'm not holding my breath, unless it can get you rich, or potentially kill people, then humans don't seem to care.  Where's real Patriotism when you need it?

[Nuke]

ah, youve seen eraser one too many times.

*takes away your dvd player*