** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Launch picture of the month:

606890main2011112611024.jpg


MSL on the way to Mars. :)
 
Has there been any breakthroughs or tests on the superconductor magnet heat shield ESA where developing/researching?

All I can find are the initial articles in 2009
 
The European Space Agency has announced that it would cease attempts to contact Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mars probe:

From Twitter:

In consultation and agreement with #PhobosGrunt mission controllers, ESA engineers will end #ESTRACK ground station support today

ESA ground teams remain #available to assist the #PhobosGrunt mission if indicated by any change in situation #estrack

We share full understanding in this v. diff situation with our Russian colleagues #phobosgrunt

@alexcostabh Not under control by ESA; Russian colleagues continue their efforts.
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http://twitter.com/#!/esaoperations
 
Glaucus said:
Has there been any breakthroughs or tests on the superconductor magnet heat shield ESA where developing/researching?

All I can find are the initial articles in 2009
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Apart from the initial reports:

http://www.physorg.com/news178442290.html
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/magnetic-heat-shield-test-could-
use-russian-launcher-335327/

There is nothing more. I suspect it’s buried in a program such as the Advanced Re-entry Vehicle study by EADS Astrium or some other research program. We'll find out one day.
 
PermaBanned said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/01/arthur-c-clarke-russians-moon

Very interesting, and a terrible shame when you consider why some of those predictions never came to light.
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Not really. The reason they didn't come true was because the US and USSR stopped competing with each other over who had the biggest space-peen. If we still had a cold war like it was in the 60s, I'm sure we would have been sending men to the gas giants by now. I'll tell you what will really get the space race restarted though: China declaring that they'll put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

Unrelated, but I've done some reading about planned future missions. This looks pretty fun, and somewhat more interesting than yet another mars rover. The Russians are thinking of putting a Europa lander on there. There's also this. It's a spaceship and a boat, all rolled into one. :p

I really hope these don't get cancelled.
 
With regards to men setting foot on other worlds, if it was me, I wouldn't give a rat's bum about being able to get back. I'd take enough supplies to last a week / month / whatever and a video camera for streaming footage back to Earth. When the last of the grub had gone, take off the suit helmet and breathe deeply and die of asphyxiation.

I know it'd never happen but I'm sure there are plenty of people like me out there but the authorities won't send someone to die.
 
ic1male said:
With regards to men setting foot on other worlds, if it was me, I wouldn't give a rat's bum about being able to get back. I'd take enough supplies to last a week / month / whatever and a video camera for streaming footage back to Earth. When the last of the grub had gone, take off the suit helmet and breathe deeply and die of asphyxiation.

I know it'd never happen but I'm sure there are plenty of people like me out there but the authorities won't send someone to die.
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Well you say that, but a concept called Mars To Stay was a serious proposal. They wouldn't just die though, they'd establish a settlement and live there until they died naturally. The fun thing about Mars is that it has CHON - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. All the stuff you need to sustain life if you have clever enough machinery to process it into food, fuel air, etc. Realistically though, it would require constant supply drops from Earth so it would be rather expensive in the long term.
 
For my own part, I couldn't care less about a manned mission to Mars. I think we've seen too much of Mars and I think it's a shame that most space missions lately have just been pootling around our own neighbourhood like that. I want to see more of the outer planets and their moons. Send orbiters to Uranus and Neptune. Put landers down on Europa and Enceladus. You'd get a lot more science done for your buck than endlessly sending more rovers to Mars. Mars is boring. The moons of gas giants are far more interesting.
 
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