Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Mars on September 26, 2008, 03:29:12 pm
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were to focus on space exploration/exploitation, how long would it be before there was a significant breakthrough (i.e. Moon colonized, Mars colonies, solar economy, etc.)
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Entire world? Not much I'd guess.
That's a LOT of money and will focused towards a single goal.
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I'm thinking pre-apocalyptic scenario,
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There would still be massive time resources involved and major projects reach a critical mass where you can no longer throw people at a problem as its just too many to manage effectively, too much information spread out, and too much time needed to keep relevant people up to speed.
If you wanted to achieve something...it'd have to be several projects with equal funding or something like that. Even then...I doubt we have the technology, in a scenario where we had to abandon the planet, to build what we'd need to sustain ourselves. Necessity is the mother of all invention but I still think we have decades of scientific progress before we'll be approaching the sorts of materials, electronics, and scientific knowhow, to produce some sort of world ship to escape in.
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World econmy would collapse long before anything substantial got done with those terms :P
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It shouldn't be too hard to convert the sun's mass/energy into usable mass if we get that kind of technology...
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IF we had political differences settled, I think it'd be doable in 20-30 years. With the vast amounts of knowledge we have, focusing more at making sure different approaches do it first would be best. Having a half a dozen different ways to get where you want to go is important, and making sure all possible research is done is also important. Focus on refining theories and then figuring out ways to bypass our current shortcomings.
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Truthfully, if we could find the political will and the funding, we could probably establish a workable colony on Luna or Mars within five years, ten at the outside. The problem has been examined for decades by official agencies and gifted amateurs alike, and we have a fairly good understanding of what it would take. It would take at least a few years to become self-sufficent after being founded, but that is well within the realm of possiblity too.
However, this would also be a blantant case of No Plans No Prototype No Backup. There would inevitably be problems in the execution, and if it outright failed, it would probably do so in a spectacular fashion.
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Truthfully, if we could find the political will and the funding, we could probably establish a workable colony on Luna or Mars within five years, ten at the outside. The problem has been examined for decades by official agencies and gifted amateurs alike, and we have a fairly good understanding of what it would take. It would take at least a few years to become self-sufficent after being founded, but that is well within the realm of possiblity too.
However, this would also be a blantant case of No Plans No Prototype No Backup. There would inevitably be problems in the execution, and if it outright failed, it would probably do so in a spectacular fashion.
Agreed. I think if we could have a collective space race, we could put a colony on the moon in 5 years, a colony on Mars in 10, and do better surveys of each planet and microplanet in our solar system. Futhermore: in 20 years, I think we'd have sleeper-ship tech and be ready to launch a few hundred people that way. In 30? We'd be able to send hundreds into space regularly.
What I'd like to see, though, is drug development for space. The microgravity has caused some odd mutations and the general destruction of quite a bit of those fragile samples we've sent up.
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*snip*
Agreed. I think if we could have a collective space race, we could put a colony on the moon in 5 years, a colony on Mars in 10, and do better surveys of each planet and microplanet in our solar system. Futhermore: in 20 years, I think we'd have sleeper-ship tech and be ready to launch a few hundred people that way. In 30? We'd be able to send hundreds into space regularly.
What I'd like to see, though, is drug development for space. The microgravity has caused some odd mutations and the general destruction of quite a bit of those fragile samples we've sent up.
How long does it take to travel to Mars, again?
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Months
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Months for a small rocket carrying a small unmanned probe, or months for a large ship carrying all of the personnel and equipment necessary for the production of a colony?
I can't wait for working ion-drives. :nod:
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Aren't ion drives slower than conventional rockets?
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Aren't ion drives slower than conventional rockets?
Yes---and useless to escape in any less than orbit. They start out slow, but will get much faster with time. If you had a decent ion-drive and reactor, you could send it for millions of lightyears, accelerating as time passes. By the end, it could be like .99999999999999999999c.
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What's the difference between ion and fusion? :confused:
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Ion engines accelerate a small amount of gas ions (usually a noble gas of some sort) to a very high speed. Over time, these will accelerate the vessel to extremely high speeds, but the rate of acceleration is extremely slow. Humans have already successfully used ion engines to power unmanned spacecraft, it is much cheaper and significantly faster (over time) than chemical rockets in many cases.
Fusion engines would fuse Hydrogen atoms (either Deuterium and Tritium, or four plain Hydrogen atoms) together to form some isotope of Helium, releasing a large amount of energy. I'm not entirely clear how this would be harnessed as an engine, but it would likely result in an extremely high rate of acceleration. All fusion engine designs are hypothetical at this point.
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Hmm...in that case, is it possible to channel all the energy released by a helium isotope into some kind of thruster such that it comes out like a jet engine?
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So
Who's going to reach mars first? The US or China?
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Space travel is currently limited by funding. A lot of ideas are discarded simply because they are too expensive. With the whole world budget behind space exploration, a lot of hurdles would be lifted.
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What's the difference between ion and fusion? :confused:
That they're completely unrelated?
Also, ion drives are for propulsion, and ... fusion 'drives' don't make sense. And nuclear fusion as a power source for a ship is not practical with today's tech.
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I think it's still a toss-up for China and the USA. I think we need to stay a step ahead of them to have the drive to reach Mars and beyond. Frankly: we should already have drawn up full plans for Lunar and Martian permanent bases, and have experimented enough with the technology to actually stay there. Other then that, I think we need a few larger shuttles to ferry a modular vehicle to go to Mars. Either from the ISS or from the Moon, we have the technology to go there but the Government is basically saying "no".
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I think it's still a toss-up for China and the USA. I think we need to stay a step ahead of them to have the drive to reach Mars and beyond. Frankly: we should already have drawn up full plans for Lunar and Martian permanent bases, and have experimented enough with the technology to actually stay there. Other then that, I think we need a few larger shuttles to ferry a modular vehicle to go to Mars. Either from the ISS or from the Moon, we have the technology to go there but the Government is basically saying "no".
I'm sure the plans are already drawn up. It's not like it's that complex, the problem is we won't actually DO it.
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Contact. Carl Sagan. Look it up.
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I think it's still a toss-up for China and the USA. I think we need to stay a step ahead of them to have the drive to reach Mars and beyond. Frankly: we should already have drawn up full plans for Lunar and Martian permanent bases, and have experimented enough with the technology to actually stay there. Other then that, I think we need a few larger shuttles to ferry a modular vehicle to go to Mars. Either from the ISS or from the Moon, we have the technology to go there but the Government is basically saying "no".
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion))
^ it would have been great except for that small problem of radioactive fallout.
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You need to include the end parentheses in the link
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A mission to Mars would not be like the first mission to the Moon. They want to be able to establish long term outposts on mars, not 1 week or less stays. It takes 8 or 9 months 1 way to get there, so im sure they want the astronauts to be able to sit around for at least 6 before a replacement crew is sent up. But thats real dedication. You are talking close to 2 years a trip. I mean, i wouldnt be surprised if alot of the astronauts were partners or mates.
I would say even if most of the world's economy was put towards space exploration, there is still the necessary time to develop technologies that take time to develop regardless of how much money is thrown at them.
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You need to include the end parentheses in the link
Oops, fixed. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion))
It's also probably the best technology we have at the moment to avert any kind of asteroid that would collide with the Earth.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob - this article is also interesting...
900 kg of armor steel was launched, at an unknown speed (calculated to be 6x bigger than needed to escape the Earth's gravity), due to a nuclear boom underneath it. It was never found, so it's possible it did go on an interplanetary voyage.
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It'll be nice if nukes could be converted into this kind of propulsion... :nod:
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We would have had nuclear powered rockets a while ago. But, during the cold war, nuclear was a dirty word, but the nuclear rocket tests were successful. All it really was just a nuclear reactor heating up hydrogen. It did consume less fuel, and only require one type of fuel as compared with slower chemical rockets. At least this is a nice little thing for space travel. Still hardly anything you'd want to go to mars and back again with, but to the moon would be great.
Had nuclear not been a dirty word back in the cold war, maybe nuclear rockets would have been prime time for at least a decade and still current instead of a suggested and successfully tested idea like it is today. I'm still waiting for cooler things like a rapid accelerating ion drive system, fusion drive system, and an ftl drive that works on the principles of creating artificial wormholes. While all of this is still ideas is ludicrous speed and the improbability drive on the drawing boards?
It'll be nice if nukes could be converted into this kind of propulsion... :nod:
It gives an idea if there's liquid plutonium :yes:
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Ludicrous speed? Yeah, maybe.
I'm not too sure about the improbability drive, though. As far as I know, it's still a plot device of Douglas Adams'. ;)
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ludicrous speed
All that Tartan flying around would make me sick at night, Jet Liners vapour trails are fairly un-noticable, but imagine a night sky filled with tartan streaks :ick:
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You mean streaks of plaid?
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It's tartan :p
I never understood why it got changed to plaid state-side, but who am i to judge....
In all seriousness though, when's the ISS gonna be finished? It started before the LHC right?
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The ISS was never much more than a publicity stunt. It's actual value in terms of R&D or having an orbital platform from which to launch expeditions further out is little-to-none. It's orbit is so fricking low that it requires constant fuel resupplies just to keep it from falling out of the sky. I wish they had never built the thing so that the time, effort, and oh yeah, money could have been diverted to projects that actually accomplish something. Like upgrading the Hubble (cancelled, it's due to be decommissioned in 2010 with no replacement in sight). Or the JIMO project to the moons of Jupiter (cancelled). Or a serious attempt at completely rethinking how we get from ground-to-orbit (the current Ares system proposed has more to do with keeping the old Space Shuttle supply chain contractors employed than really coming up with a new solution that works). Or... need I go on?
... All I can say is I pray the private space industry grows to the point where it can be self-sustaining, because the US government-operated space agency is so mired in corruption and corporate greed that it can hardly do anything. That's despite having some of the most clever-minded scientists and engineers on the planet in its employ.
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Space-ship one, Virgin airlines etc,.... i can see them tasking off, srsly :yes:
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ludicrous speed
All that Tartan flying around would make me sick at night, Jet Liners vapour trails are fairly un-noticable, but imagine a night sky filled with tartan streaks :ick:
Ahh buckle this! Ludicrous speed! GO!
:D
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Another thing that matters is the computer systems that go make up space flight. You could have a trip to mars with a space shuttle, but what about avoiding stuff like asteroids effectively?
The crew wont be hibernating, we don't have that technology yet. All of a sudden...BOOM! wtf just happened roger wilco? Our ship just got ripped in half jim! ****!
I guess you'd need an active radar system to watch out for asteroids in a given radius. The other thing is that when something disastrous does happen. The crew really is ****ed. It makes it that much harder to get home, if going home at all is still a possibility.
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We don't have to worry about asteroids until we go beyond Mars, but you might have a point there.
If we want to create a space exploration vessel that can support human life for years on end, that ship should also have some defence systems to blow up any obstacles. They must also be able to function at high temperatures.
Speaking of which, there are some space probes that NASA sent out decades ago, right? Where are they now? Voyager 1 is already far beyond Pluto, and it's still moving further and further away from Sol. How can it have the propulsion needed to move for 31 years?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
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By the nature of its flight path. As the article mentions, the two Voyager probes were designed to take advantage of gravity assist, the "slingshot effect" that occurs when a smaller body interacts with a much larger body and gains momentum. Because of the unique alignment of the outer planets at the time of the launches, both Voyager probes had the option of slingshotting by all four of them (though only Voyager 2 exercised that option; Voyager 1 was diverted to pass by Titan, which altered its trajectory). Both Voyagers achieved escape velocity from the Sun, meaning that they're no longer gravitationally bound to orbit it. Neither craft has any boost thrusters of any sort; all of their velocity was gained from their initial launches and subsequent gravity assists.
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Yeah, it'd only need fuel to "stop" the "movement".
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A midway station to be in between the journey to mars would be a great idea. It'd just be an area strictly for resupply that's regularly strocked.
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By the nature of its flight path. As the article mentions, the two Voyager probes were designed to take advantage of gravity assist, the "slingshot effect" that occurs when a smaller body interacts with a much larger body and gains momentum. Because of the unique alignment of the outer planets at the time of the launches, both Voyager probes had the option of slingshotting by all four of them (though only Voyager 2 exercised that option; Voyager 1 was diverted to pass by Titan, which altered its trajectory). Both Voyagers achieved escape velocity from the Sun, meaning that they're no longer gravitationally bound to orbit it. Neither craft has any boost thrusters of any sort; all of their velocity was gained from their initial launches and subsequent gravity assists.
Ah yes, of course. What's it called on Wikipedia, "drafting". It's something that applies to Daytona USA. :D
I also forgot that there's not much friction in a vacuum, if not none.
A midway station to be in between the journey to mars would be a great idea. It'd just be an area strictly for resupply that's regularly stocked.
I think so too. It is good to note, though, that space stations need to be sent up in stages. Both Mir and the ISS were and are space stations made up from much smaller modules.
Has any human even reached the midpoint between Earth and Mars in the first place?
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Has any human even reached the midpoint between Earth and Mars in the first place?
No human's ever been further from the Earth than in orbit around the Moon, which was obviously accomplished during one of the Apollo missions.
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Perhaps the ISS should have been at one of the Lagrange points instead of a mere 300km up. What I find REALLY silly is they are still building the thing when its slated to come crashing down in 5 years or so.
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Well as long as the ISS has the means to change altitude via it's own thrusters or those of a docked vehicle, I don't think it'll be coming down anytime soon.
http://www.heavens-above.com/issheight.aspx
As for bases at Lagrange points, still need a cost effective way to get stuff there and return before we can think of building anything.
So either we need a breakthrough in the field of electric propulsion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_propulsion), or someone builds a space elevator.
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Perhaps the ISS should have been at one of the Lagrange points instead of a mere 300km up. What I find REALLY silly is they are still building the thing when its slated to come crashing down in 5 years or so.
Um, no it's not.
However, it might very well fall apart and be abandoned. (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04u.html) Of course, that article's from 2004, and we've managed to keep it going since then, but I doubt it's much improved.
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Electric propulsion is of little use until you are already in orbit. Specific impulse for even the more exotic electric drives are still orders of magnitude too low to get anything off the ground. I'd love to see them developed, but the big problem is surface-to-orbit. The ability to move from low orbit to higher orbit is important, but secondary.
A space elevator, as crazy as it may sound, is probably the most practical solution. Manufacturing techniques are still a good ways off from being able to make cable strong and durable enough to do it. Maybe in the next couple decades, though. The other thing you need is a counter-weight. The most sane way of getting enough mass into orbit to act as an effective counterweight is to capture a small asteroid and move it there, but it doesn't take much imagination to see what kind of public panic that idea would cause.
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Perhaps the ISS should have been at one of the Lagrange points instead of a mere 300km up. What I find REALLY silly is they are still building the thing when its slated to come crashing down in 5 years or so.
Um, no it's not.
However, it might very well fall apart and be abandoned. (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04u.html) Of course, that article's from 2004, and we've managed to keep it going since then, but I doubt it's much improved.
The projected completion date is 2010, with the station remaining in operation at least until 2016.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS)
So the point is, it spends most of its life being built, then 6 years after its slated to be finished its going to be intentionally burned up.
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I doubt it'll be finished by 2011, but I also doubt it'll be shut down by 2016. Mir, for example, lasted well beyond its projected expiration date.
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Electric propulsion is of little use until you are already in orbit. Specific impulse for even the more exotic electric drives are still orders of magnitude too low to get anything off the ground. I'd love to see them developed, but the big problem is surface-to-orbit. The ability to move from low orbit to higher orbit is important, but secondary.
A railgun like device has been proposed for launching objects into orbit. Also the main thing limiting electric propulsion is the amount of electrical energy available. A sufficiently large power source would increase both specific impulse and thrust, although the increase becomes exponentially smaller per watt. I don't know if it's possible to have a large and light enough power source to allow a spacecraft using electric propulsion to make it off the ground, let alone into orbit, but it's certainly possible for them to be more powerful than they are now.
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As I understand it, is a railgun considered to be a mass driver?
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Well yes, but instead of a spacecraft projecting the mass backward to attain thrust, the spacecraft IS the mass, the (very large) railgun accelerates the spacecraft on the ground and essentially shoots it into orbit. I forgot what the idea was called.
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Yes, a rail gun is essentially a mass driver. And for certain raw materials or particularly hardy pre-fab equipment, it might even work. What it will never do is get human beings off the ground. Even if the magnetic fields involved weren't strong enough to rip the iron out of your haemoglobin, the acceleration involved would almost certainly kill you.
I do like the idea for shooting heavy equipment into orbit, though.
As for a problem with electric drive being making large enough quantities of electrical power... I'll grant that it is a contributing factor, but mostly it is a question of design intent. Take the ion drive, for example. You are essentially taking a rarefied noble gas, ionizing it, and accelerating the ions using a high voltage electric field. Ok. You can do this with pretty high efficiency. However, you don't really get much push from the drive because you aren't discharging much mass at all. Yes, what mass leaves the ion drive is moving pretty fast, but momentum = mass * velocity. To overcome the fact that mass is low for this type of drive, you'd have to accelerate your ions monstrously hard. That means even higher voltages. There are practical limitations to how high a voltage you can reach before you start having serious problems.
A plasma drive might scale a bit better with a larger power source. But it still wouldn't do any good except once you were already in orbit, or at least well past the ionosphere. With only a few exceptions (most of anchor the launch mechanism to the earth), these electric propulsion systems will only work in a vacuum.
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Perihelion...
In contrast to a space gun, a mass driver can have a length of hundreds of kilometers and therefore achieve acceleration without too high g forces to the passengers. It can be constructed as a very long and mainly horizontally aligned launch track for spacelaunch, targeted upwards at the end, partly by bending of the track upwards and partly by Earth's curvature in the other direction.
It starts at 0 km/h, then accelerates slowly along the track before reaching super high speeds at the other end. The ride should theoretically be as comfortable as when you're in a Bugatti Veyron moving at 407 km/h.
Banking on this idea, perhaps a mass driver could be built on the slope of Mount Everest... :drevil:
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Let's see what ice can do when you're moving at 7 miles a second.
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Let's see what ice can do when you're moving at 7 miles a second.
:lol:
What's on your mind? I was thinking of either:
- The ice block becomes an armour-piercing shell; or
- Nothing. It melts in a millisecond.
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I'm not sure, I was thinking of a massive spacecraft spinning out of control and extremely high speeds and vaporizing in the atmosphere.
In any case I think Everest is out of the picture
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In any case I think Everest is out of the picture
Really? Why?
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Let's see what ice can do when you're moving at 7 miles a second.