‘Golden Spike’ Space Tourism Start-Up Company: ‘To the Moon!’

By Joel Achenbach
Dec 7, 2012

It had to happen: A start-up company is offering rides to the moon. Book your seat now — though it’s going to set you back $750 million (it’s unclear if that includes baggage fees).

Led by heavy-hitter former NASA executives, the Golden Spike Co. would boldly go where humankind went 40 years ago, this time commercially, hawking tickets to foreign governments or space tourists.

“Two seats, 750 each,” former NASA associate administrator Alan Stern said on Thursday, shortly before he appeared at the National Press Club in Washington to announce the formation of the company. “The trick is 40 years old. We know how to do this.”

You won’t have to joystick the lunar lander yourself, so don’t worry about dodging killer craters and boulders on the way down. Everything will be automated and controlled from Earth. It’ll be like taking a train, the company said.

“We realize this is the stuff of science fiction. We intend to make it science fact,” Stern said at the news conference. He added: “We believe in the price points that we’re talking about.”

The company has assembled some credible advisers, with a board chaired by former NASA Johnson Space Center director Gerry Griffin. The business model requires economies of scale — lots of customers and lots of missions to the moon to offset the very high start-up cost. The company sees 2020 as a plausible date for that initial trip.

Golden Spike would need to commission a lunar lander and moonwalking suits, but most of its mission architecture would rely on commercial rockets and capsules already flying or under development. For example, the company could use a rocket and capsule developed by Elon Musk’s commercial start-up SpaceX, which has successfully flown cargo to the international space station under a NASA contract.

The primary targets for Golden Spike are foreign countries that want to do lunar science or attain the prestige of putting their own astronauts on the moon. Because of political sensitivities, the company would not sell a moon trip to China, which has been expanding its space program, Stern said. Nor would the company sell rides to any country restricted by law  from access to U.S. technology that could be used for military purposes.

Stern said the company has no billionaire backers but has had a serious discussion with one potential lunar tourist. He wouldn’t give the name.

“If you come to me and you’re not an unsavory character, we’re going to fly you,” he said before the news conference…

Read more at Washington Post

NASA plans asteroid mission

DPA
May 30, 2011

The U.S. space agency will send an unmanned spacecraft to a nearby asteroid in 2016 and bring back a sample to provide clues about the formation of the solar system, NASA said on Wednesday.

The mission known as Osiris-Rex will be the first U.S. effort to bring back a sample from an asteroid.

This undated picture made available by Lockheed Martin via NASA shows the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which will take astronauts to a distant asteroid before travelling to Mars (PHOTO: AP/NASA)

Since asteroids formed from the gas and dust that made up the sun and planets, they are considered good indicators of conditions in the early universe and can provide clues about the formation of the solar system.

“This asteroid is a time capsule from the birth of our solar system and ushers in a new era of planetary exploration,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division.

Osiris-Rex will travel for four years to reach the asteroid 1999 RQ36 in the year 2020. It will then spend six months mapping the surface of the asteroid, allowing scientists to determine the best spot for the craft’s robotic arm to dig a 57-gram sample.

The sample will be returned to Earth in 2023, NASA said. The mission is expected to cost some 800 million dollars. A Japanese mission brought back a sample from an asteroid last year.

The space agency also hopes to send astronauts to an asteroid and on Tuesday unveiled plans for a new deep space vehicle. That spacecraft now known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is planned to first take astronauts to a distant asteroid before travelling to Mars.

This story originally appeared on The Hindu news site.

Large Hadron Collider: World’s First Time Machine Through 5th Dimension?

Before Its News
March 16, 2011

If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”

One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.

According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

An illustration of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, located in Switzerland. CREDIT: CERN

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.” The test of the researchers’ theory will be whether the physicists monitoring the collider begin seeing Higgs singlet particles and their decay products spontaneously appearing. If they do, Weiler and Ho believe that they will have been produced by particles that travel back in time to appear before the collisions that produced them.

Weiler and Ho’s theory is based on M-theory, a “theory of everything.” A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity, but it requires 10 or 11 dimensions instead of our familiar four. This has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a four-dimensional membrane or “brane” floating in a multi-dimensional space-time called the “bulk.”

According to this view, the basic building blocks of our universe are permanently stuck to the brane and so cannot travel in other dimensions. There are some exceptions, however. Some argue that gravity, for example, is weaker than other fundamental forces because it diffuses into other dimensions. Another possible exception is the proposed Higgs singlet, which responds to gravity but not to any of the other basic forces.

Illustration of singlet time travel theory. CREDIT: Jenni Ohnstad / Vanderbilt

When a pair of protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, the resultant explosion may create a special type of particle, called a Higgs singlet, that is capable of traveling forward and back in time. It would do so by leaving familiar three-dimensional space to travel in an extra dimension.

Weiler began looking at time travel six years ago to explain anomalies that had been observed in several experiments with neutrinos. Neutrinos are nicknamed ghost particles because they react so rarely with ordinary matter: Trillions of neutrinos hit our bodies every second, yet we don’t notice them because they zip through without affecting us. Weiler and colleagues Heinrich Päs and Sandip Pakvasa at the University of Hawaii came up with an explanation of the anomalies based on the existence of a hypothetical particle called the sterile neutrino. In theory, sterile neutrinos are even less detectable than regular neutrinos because they interact only with gravitational force. As a result, sterile neutrinos are another particle that is not attached to the brane and so should be capable of traveling through extra dimensions.

Weiler, Päs and Pakvasa proposed that sterile neutrinos travel faster than light by taking shortcuts through extra dimensions. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there are certain conditions where traveling faster than the speed of light is equivalent to traveling backward in time. This led the physicists into the speculative realm of time travel.

Ideas impact science fiction

In 2007, the researchers, along with Vanderbilt graduate fellow James Dent, posted a paper titled “Neutrino time travel” that generated a considerable amount of buzz. Their ideas found their way into two science fiction novels. Final Theory by Mark Alpert, which was described in the New York Times as a “physics-based version of The Da Vinci Code,” is based on the researchers’ idea of neutrinos taking shortcuts in extra dimensions. Joe Haldeman‘s novel The Accidental Time Machine is about a time-traveling MIT graduate student and includes an author’s note that describes the novel’s relationship to the type of time travel described by Dent, Päs, Pakvasa and Weiler.

Prof. Thomas Weiler, right, and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho. CREDIT: John Russell / Vanderbilt

Ho is a graduate fellow working with Weiler. Their theory is described in a paper posted March 7 on the research website arXiv.org.Contact and sources:
University of Vanderbilt
David Salisbury, (615) 322-NEWS
david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu

Read more at Nano Patents and Innovations

Magnetic Pole Shift May Close Airports

Before It’s News
Jan 13, 2011

The recent changes at Tampa Bay International Airport regarding magnetic pole re-calibration and runway closure, chart alignment and runway number paint, could become a normal procedure for airports across the land. As an example nearby Peter O’Knight Airport is also scheduling similar changes at their facility.

It’s no surprise to many people that the Earth’s magnetic north pole has always wobbled over geological time, but what may be surprising is the speed at which the magnetic north pole has been recently moving and accelerating.

The current shift in the Earth's crust is causing magnetic headings to move coordinates- prompting closure of some runways.

Although the magnetic north pole was first scientifically located in 1831, during 1904 it was discovered that the pole had begun moving to the northeast at about 9 miles a year (15 kilometers). Scientists in 1989 discovered that the pole shift speed was accelerating and had increased to 35 miles a year (56 kilometers), and was heading directly towards Siberia.

At the current rate, about every 5 years a compass needle will be off by 1 degree. More, as the rate increases.

FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen recently said, “Airport runway charting relies on accurate geomagnetic information. Aviation is charted using latitude and longitude and the magnetic poles. The Earth’s poles are changing constantly, and when they change more than three degrees, that can affect runway numbering.”

While satellite GPS navigation has become a predominantly used method, navigation by way of compass heading is still essential in locations where line-of-sight to orbiting satellites is not possible.

As the Earth’s magnetic field continues to move, at some point the changes will effect all sorts of established systems such as charts, directions, documentation, software, and yes – more airports…

The Earth’s magnetic poles are generated by the effects of a huge spinning ‘outer core’ layer of liquid iron, 8,000 degrees F (4,400 C), and 4,300 miles in diameter (2,600 kilometers) deep within the Earth. This ‘outer core’ rotates around a solid white-hot 11,000 degree F (6,000 C) ‘inner core’, 1,500 miles in diameter (930 kilometers). Even though the ‘inner core’ is much hotter, it remains solid due to the enormous pressure that it is under. It is amazing to realize that the layer of earth and rock beneath our feet, the ‘crust’, is only just 25 miles thick, and is just a tiny slice of the enormous hot layers beneath. The Earth’s continents float and jostle around on top of a layer of hot molten rock, the subsistence of road tar.

After putting the scale of the Earth’s layers in perspective, and realizing that most of the mass under our feet is extremely hot, molten, liquefied, and on the move, it is then easier to understand the changes we sometimes witness and our vulnerability to what is underneath us.

One wonders that if the reason for the increased speed and acceleration of the magnetic north pole could be due to a change in the speed of the liquid ‘outer core’, then could this be leading towards more geophysical events on the surface? After all, we’re just floating and bumping around on top of a red hot molten mix. If the mixer speeds up…I put together the following ‘to scale’ animated image of the Earth and it’s core layers. Again, look at the blue crust sitting on top, so small in comparison:

Reference to Yahoo News story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110107/sc_yblog_thelookout/florida-temporarily-closes-runway-due-to-magnetic-pole-shifting