Everything is made from tiny vibrating strings (closed loops). The propertys of the strings dictate what sort of mater they are. In some theorys open ended strings represent gravity.

Is it just me, or there's something really wrong about the new Constellation program...?

First of all it's a complete copy of the Apollo program, only on a slightly bigger scale...
They are even going back to the times before the eva suit, and the new "outer vehicle suit" will be connected to the vehicle with a cord supporting water, air and electricity(Mercury, anyone?)...

Even the new moon lander is similar...
OF COURSE they will be packed with new technology and all, but COME ON! We could have orbital planes right now ffs... and nuclear powered ion drives for space flight... but instead there will be a "bigger and more advanced" Apollo...

If it goes well the private industry will soon be way ahead of NASA and all other space agencies...

Indeed.
Nasa is regressing.
But then, so has their budget.

Its wrong at both ends, they are aiming for the wrong things, and they are given the wrong things to do it with.

Frankly, we should have teams of robots/rovers on the moon right now building vaste solar arrays from the surface material. We should have equipment that can just be ready and waiting for people to plug into it.

We should be expanding our abilitys to explore other planets, not just doing more dangerious "one shots".

Anyway, talking of Private, one of the WhiteKnight2 craft has been finnished;

http://gear.ign.com/articles/894/894536p1.html

http://gearmedia.ign.com/gear/image/...8050242264.jpg

Looks pretty simerla to the first, but its a bit bigger, can lauch stuff from higher up, and (of course) is designed for SpaceShipTwo(s) still being built.

This is such a beautiful piece :D.
I love their new logos and stylistics. I wonder how is this thing piloted, are there two pilots in the two cockpits?

No it is not just you.
It's all one big conspiracy the proof is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSI5jIY0Zk4

On another note I don't think private industry can take over such a position easily. They need to make it all profitable, right? Don't think it will be profitable to have tourism even on the next planet, it is just a hostile rusty desert. Maybe they can get some robots on the moon to carve a General Motors sign on the side facing us. Or make ego boosting team building trips where every coked up group gets to orbit their piss and poo around the earth just so they can make pictures of it.
Then agian maybe they will find new things and claim it as their own but I kinda get lost in how that benefits humankind.

Short term is tourism and earth point-to-point travel.
Spaceplanes and (from there) low earth orbits are suitable for those two.
Slowly, commercial R&D will be spent developing these industarys. But, unlike Nasa, they will be working to get their cost per launch as low as possible.

Once you have the cost of putting payload in orbit down, everything else becomes easier.
The next commercial step would be mining, and scientific lisenceing. (just because your commercial dosnt mean you cant rent space to the highest paying research teams :p).

As far as mining goes, its more a long term thing, but theres absolutely shitloads of stuff up there thats quite rare on earth.

I think what will happening is probably commercial industarys will be the driving force developing the technology over the next few decades, but it will still be govements using the technology for science.

Mars Panorama from Phoenix.

The Landing site combined pics, 30mb

And I still wonder what the hell is that white stuff? Ice previously was just just mud, you couldn't see reflective ice.

Prety sure it was ice, because bits of it were confirmed to have melted.

Well it's there on every pic, and it's not vaporising or melting... it's the same way it is in every pic and it's really reflective...

Well, if its a large smooth block of ice I dont think it would melt anyway. Temp isnt high enough.
It was the smaller blobby bits that did. (larger surface area to sublimate I think.)

Well as they say all the water would be contained in the soil and frozen in a single mass I really doubt there's a single block... even more so no one mentions (or mentioned) the white stuff, only the bits that melted. It's like it isn't there...

bit of info;
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ph...-20080729.html

The water on mars is a cool discovery, but I prefer to solve Earth problems before starting to think about new planets. Don't you see Wall-E?? Want you that to happen? No!

:P

If you wait to complete one thing before doing another, you will never get either done.

I mean, sure you can say earths problems are more important then mars research.
But then, surely earths problems are FAR more important then say, the multi-billions spent each year on the film and tv industarys?
Does that mean we shouldnt watch any film or tv shows till earths problems are done?

And what order should we do the problems in? :p
Is the enviroment more important then wars? Wars only kill humans in batchs. Enviromental problems could whipe out large populations in single swoops
But then, by that logic we should work on space problems...after all, in a few million years we are certainly going to leave the planet due to perfectly natural reasons. (if not a lot sooner). But then we have longer to deal with that, so maybe we deal with problems according to soonness? Or inverse difficulty? (easiest first)

Getting into the ethics of "what should be done first" is actualy quite tricky.
Do you value current life more then future life? What assumptions do we make about enviromental problems? How the hell do we solve pretty huge social problems anyway.

The way I see it is we try to solve what we can when we can, and dont assign an order unless there is a major need for funding to go into something else.
And while theres many things more important (at the moment) then space travel....
...theres also a lot of things less important too ;)

As a Asimov reader I can't argue with you on that.

Too bad we won't can travel throughout the space.

Good luck future generations!

You can't tell how far we're going to progress in our lifetime... nowadays, everything is possible.

The Collider is Nearly ready! ^^

http://cache.boston.com/universal/si...8_01/lhc11.jpg

Personaly, I love this picture;
http://cache.io9.com/assets/images/i...iantmagnet.jpg

The only thing that would make that picture better would be if it actualy was a cog :p

Can someone briefly explain what a collider is to the ignorant (aka me)? That thing look like a Black Mesa wormhole generator or something.

Its a LARGE structure made for the purpose to collide two atoms to see if there really is a *insert name here*-constant (couldn't remember the name of that guy) if theres not, then we can throw everything we know in physics to the thrashcan.

Thanks, but I still don't get it :p

It's a giant series of tubes...
That contain superconductiong nitrogen cooled magnets, wich accelaret particles in opposing directions, and then blast them at each other in a detector, so that their building blocks might be observed by the detector (like smashing brick walls at eachother, to see the individual bricks flying apart).

The purpose of the LHC is to discover the Higgs bosone, the particle that would be responsible for the existence of mass in the universe. We know stuff about mass, yet we still don't know where does it come from.

See this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJFllPVIcpg

and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SARgkwczvAE&feature=user

Thanks, much clearer now. Very interesting videos. I'm so jealous at the people working there... they have the most fulfilling jobs. In a perfect world, 90% of the population would have those jobs.

Now imagine that CERN discovers something, and that it runs to Barosso, like Nasa runs to Bush... not really going to happen - and I love that, total separation of science and normality from political bullshit...

Also, I didn't say anything, but recreating conditions that didn't exist since the big bang? Isn't it, like, dangerous?!