Can't listen on dial up, and the article ( / book advertisement) makes no mention of a 50's Mars mission. I shall take a look at the interview
transcript, but overall, this looks like a big free advertisement for a bad book by a kept woman. The photo of the author tells me all I need to know.
Reading the transcript, I see the discussion of the "Mars mission" (there was none), and she seems to be discussing the well known
Project Orion in an uninformed and pedestrian way.
The theory about Roswell being a Russian hoax, is interesting, but pretty far fetched. The rationale for it makes no sense whatsoever. I don't buy it.
A lot of what the author says in the interview completely lacks logical coherence:
Ms. JACOBSEN: Absolutely. And there is lots of documentation in the CIA archives that support this idea, going back to its second director, General Walter Bedell Smith, who himself was obsessed with UFO - what he called UFO hysteria in the nation and he felt that it was a threat to national security because people's susceptibility to hysteria could make the nation's early air defense warning system vulnerable to what he felt was a real Soviet attack. And he actually believed that that was a strategy that the Soviet Union had in play in the mid-1950s.
They must have some damn good smoke in LA.
Though I can tell from the photo that prescription happy pills are her thing.
I note that many of the comments on the story at the npr site echo my assesment:
cHristine dahlin (chrisd2) wrote:
I am so disappointed in NPR for even reviewing this book.The writer shows no knowledge of science or engineering, and if you want a "deep throat" approach, that person should be credible.
Nick van der Kolk (nickvdk) wrote:
As great a story as the whole stalin-mendele mutant idea thing is, it's really hard for me to take anything Jacobsen says without a HUGE grain of salt after she was convinced 13 Syrian musicians must have been terrorists.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/skyterror.asp
There is no money in being right. (Trust me on this
)
Sorry to rain on your parade, but dems be me thoughts.
edit: aside - doing some reading... can anyone explain to me how this idea is supposed to work?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop 80Km? You're 1/3 of the way there at that altitude... This launch loop concept is horrifically flawed.
5cm diameter? How the hell is that supposed to support multi-ton launch vehicles at escape velocities?
2000 Km long?
Seriously? Did this Lofstrom fellow really think it possible to produce a 2000Km x 5cm iron tube? (Iron! a little brittle for the proposed application...)
Rotor? Is it rotating radially or axially? Neither seems at all possible to me, given the item is 2000Km long 5cm in diameter and made of iron. How the hell are you supposed to spin that up?
This is the weirdest launch mechanism I have ever heard of. I am quite sure it will never work. Space elevator is much more likely, just need synthetic spider silk and a preservative (carbon nanotubes are not the way to go - that just makes no sense).
edit2: further reading on the launch loop concept:
http://launchloop.com/slides/launchloop.pdfSo I see the idea now... interesting concept, but I'm sorry, an iron tube 2000Km long, 5cm in diameter and moving at 14Km/s along its length is absolutely ridiculous. So far I see no description of how it might be possible to spin such a system up to 14Km/s. Possible with current technology? I think not.
ah, here is a startup description:
The rotor is started, slowly at first, by pulling on it with motors at the ends of the Loop. Given the
enormous inertia of the rotor, and the weak joints that separate the rotor segments, the initial acceleration
is about 1 cm/sec2. At this acceleration, it takes 9 hours just to make one pass of the rotor through the
motors, and 3 days before the motors can work at full power.
The rotor weighs 15,600 metric tons; accelerating it to 14 km/sec requires 1.5E15 Joules of kinetic energy.
If this energy is put in at a 300 MW rate, the system requires 60 days to reach full speed, while the Loop is
flat on the surface. For a Loop operation at this power level, it may be practical to temporarily attach 1 GW
of gas turbines on floating barges to accelerate the rotor to full speed more quickly.
Riggghhhttt.
(in the tone of Bill Cosby doing God and Noah)
I mean seriously, the system is supposed to be under high vaccum as well. So how do you couple your drive motors to the rotor providing drive up to 14Km/s while maintaining high vacuum? Sorry, Viton seals won't do it. You'd need an ocean of Apezion - which itself is an absurd idea. Imagine the friction at 14Km/s. PCBs maybe? Teflon? I can't believe I have even spent this much time deconstructing this concept. Not worth it.
However, this leads me to an interesting thought exercise.... long tube under vacuum - one end at sea level and the other ~33000Km up - then open the bottom to atmospheric, what would happen? Would you get a capilliary type effect? Could you suck the atmosphere off a planet? Would the mass of the air once it filled the tube to a certain height keep it down just as if there were no tube at all? What effect would the diameter of the tube have? Could I suck just selected gases off a planet? (i.e. tube diameters in the range of 0.4nm) Could a space elevator result in atmospheric "leakage" by similar mechanisms?
Topic: =/\= my tech homies, listen to this immediately!!! area-51 and 50's mars mission (Read 3411 times)