Area 51

Why speculate over what we can't confirm, when there is plenty of interesting apparatus at official labs such as Sandia, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore or NASA's Jet Propulsion site in Pasadena?

z6db.jpg


The 'Z Machine'

NIF_target_chamber.jpg


National Ignition Facility

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/future_propulsion.html

Check out 'VASMIR', a promising future method of propulsion for spacecraft.

Blue Gene/L is housed at Lawrence Livermore, currently the world's most powerful computer with a theoretical peak performance of 360 TFLOPS.

The main purpose of this cool stuff (besides NASA projects) is to simulate the behaviour of nuclear weapons, as they can't be tested atmospherically any more.

To answer the question why we aren't all currently blasting towards Mars and further propelled by some sophisticated mechanism, it's not the responsibility of the military to develop such technologies. NASA survive on what is quite a paltry budget considering the potential of space, though they have squandered cash on the ISS, in my view.
 
O/T
I also remember reading the amount of money that NASA gets each year and never once does it return a profit. Like that fantastic NASA made pen they made costing milliions in R/D so they could use it in space. Where as the Russians just took a pencil.
 
Magic_x_uk said:
Where as the Russians just took a pencil.
Click to expand...

Where pieces of sharp lead/graphite can break off, and find themselves floating around in the capsule, potentially flying into someones eye. Brilliant idea.
 
Magic_x_uk said:
O/T
I also remember reading the amount of money that NASA gets each year and never once does it return a profit. Like that fantastic NASA made pen they made costing milliions in R/D so they could use it in space. Where as the Russians just took a pencil.
Click to expand...
Wrong!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom