MarsFollow

I'm not sure what technology you are refering to here. EMF usually stands for ElectroMagnetic Frequincy, which wouldn't really be applicable to engine technology.

There are several nuclear derived propulsion technologies that have been researched to the point where they could be built, today, with very little trouble. There's your standard nuclear pulse jet, where you basically build a super thick steel pie plate, put your craft on top, and detonate nuclear bombs out the back. messy, but effective. Or there is the nuclear mass ejection engine. here, you have a reactor that heats up Mercury (because of it's thermal and vaporization properties) and ejects it at high speed as reaction mass. Also quite messy.
The nuclear powered Ion drive is another possibility. Your accelleration is extremely slow, and your craft builds up such a strong static charge eventually that you would fry anything you crash it into. Still though, very efficient over time.

Electromagnetic propulsion schemes do also exist. They are usually concieved of as initial launch assist vehicles. Kind of along the lines of a maglev train. The space concepts I have seen involve taking a huge container of iron ingots, then expelling them out the back via a high speed electromagnet (prefferably to a known location so they can be reused). Very mass intensive, and not very efficient so probably not likely to be what you are talking about.

Shielding systems we can make today. The easiest way to do it is just put a fariday cage around your component (or the entire enclosure). A fariday cage consists of a mesh of any conductive metal (copper or gold work quite well) that surrounds the entire container. any electromagnetic field will simply entere the cage and flow around the component. You would of course want to use fiber optic relays for the control runs to minimize mass. A decent coating of led would help with the magnetics and radiation degredation as well.

Putting a base on the moon would actually be fairly easy in my oppinion. We have existing habitat designs, Perhaps the initial habitat would be expensive, but moon dust has many of the required elements to make concrete. Just need to get the area enclosed, heat it up, introduce water, lime and oxygen, pour, let cure, then coat the inside with urithane foam. I think the hardest partwill be gettign the infrastructure there in the first place to make it work. If we can get a machine shop, some sort of refinerry to produce structural members, and the equivelent of a tunnel boring machine to the surface along with all the support infrastructure, I think we really could have a go at a permenant installation. It's all a question of funding, and weather they are willing to create a heavy lift launch vehicle that can replace the shuttle in a short timeframe.

Space is fun.

I was thinking the same thing, that British boy-band Explicit MotherF-ers.

So Bush wants to be back into space and on the Moon by 2020...Bradbury claimed that humans will be on Mars within 50 years. We have a new Space Race on our hands, what with Europe poking around and China, North Korea flinging objects into space. I think that, with the premium on human lives and disasters such as Columbia and Challenger, the US won't send people any further than the Moon for some time - maybe through this century. China's got plenty of folk, let them test interplanetary travel modes. A permanent base on the Moon, though, that may well be obtainable soon. When it's done, we can send Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin to test it out for a year.

Hold on...

You guys actually treated Katie in a dignified manner and aknowledged her questions?

WTF is going on?? Everyone's gone mad!!

No problem. Just wasn't used to it is all. Took me completely by surprise.

that was pretty interesting, thanks Katie :)

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/302l/lectures/node76.html


sorta like this, but there is a theory. Starts with k. Named after the guy who invented it, but I will be damned if I can remember it..

anyways the guys I know using this are using magnets 5x9x3 it seems like. I will have to check again

TA DA!! LIKE THIS!!
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~noelh/Antigravity.htm