[calvinthedestroyer]

no2pencil, on 25 July 2011 - 07:46 PM, said:

Quote

When deep space exploratio­n ramps up, it'll be the corporatio­ns that will name everything­: The IBM stellar sphere, The Microsoft galaxy, Planet Starbucks.­

-- Chuck Palahniuk

The AT&T Black Hole

[hookiethe1]

We should just send a team of welders up there to weld all that space junk together and voila - instant, low-cost armor plating for our planet to defend against possible assault from aliens!

[Shiggsy]

I've got my name on 'Ryan Airs' first Inter-Galactic Vessel, it's called the 'Doomed to Fail'
- Serious note, I can't wait for proper Star Trek / Star Wars type of Space Age. Would love to captain my own ship and go cruising off trading with smoking hot 3 breasted blue alien women or fighting off a horde of Rampant Rhino Reavers

[raziel_]

i wish i could stay alive till the space travel is common thing. to go watch some nebula pretty close will be great.

[Choscura]

I've got a few designs for deep-space travel. Most are just practical looks at the current problems with what I hope are original ideas for good solutions- eg, no more rockets as a means of escaping any planet's gravity. the space elevator thing has to happen, but once it does, it's relatively simple to make it happen from space to the surface of another planet- and then you're in business, and don't have to bother with things such as recovery missions.

Other possibly less-practical ideas include (or at least have included) building little miniature rogue planets from all the junk floating around: easy shielding from radiation and debris, large enough that gravity can actually be usefully employed, and remember it's space so that a few rockets can push the whole thing- no air resistance.

I don't think space travel will start happening until we get the elevator down. after that, we can start ferrying stuff into space (and even before that, if we really wanted to we could build a rail gun to launch large volumes of raw material into low earth orbit. a quarter mile deep 'barrel' would be nothing to do, and could accelerate 15 cm diameter 1.5 meter long steel bars into orbit, although the question after this point becomes one of the usefulness of this, in terms of it's accuracy (or worse, inaccuracy) and it's safety (supposing it falls? supposing something- or someone- gets in the way?).

[AdamSpeight2008]

Why not manufacture it in space? Then we could float the pieces down the space river, like the logging industry. Mining the Asteroid belt. Siphon the gases of the gas giants.

[hookiethe1]

Well the moon is perfect for that, it's high in titanium and has very little gravity, so we could build shit there and launch it off. And once we mine the moon away to nothing, no more of those pesky werewolves!

[Gavisann]

hookiethe1, on 27 July 2011 - 03:59 PM, said:

Well the moon is perfect for that, it's high in titanium and has very little gravity, so we could build shit there and launch it off. And once we mine the moon away to nothing, no more of those pesky werewolves!

And no more tides and no more stable weather patterns.

[Craig328]

Or tides. (seeing Gavisann's post arrived mere seconds before my own)

This post has been edited by Craig328: 27 July 2011 - 02:15 PM

[AdamSpeight2008]

Junking the ISS