It's not about loosing faith in the progress... I just wonder about motivations of their potential clients - what's the point of paying a lot of money for participating in something which will turn out to be spectacular only if a disaster happens?
The dragonfly wings as discussed during the Bremen KO meeting. There should also be some cool videos and CFD stuff visualizing how this actually works.
Chris Moore is a good guy and one very open minded to new ideas and concepts at NASA; the fact that this was picked up by fox news must be that they could relay this to "gas stations" :-)
Now a NASA engineer has come up with a new way to fling satellites through space on mere grams of fuel, tens of times as efficiently as today’s best space probe thrusters.
Instead of using deuterium and tritium as the fuel stocks, the new motor extracts energy from boron fuel.
"And according to his calculations, improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today's ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. "
while the nuclear reaction seems to be sound at first view, I am not so sure how this would work: "Electromagnetic forces push the target and the alpha particles in the opposite directions, and the particles exit the spacecraft through a nozzle, providing the vehicle's thrust. "
Love the concept acronym, which pretty much says it all... Not sure which astronaut would fancy floating around in an atmosphere where clouds are made of sulphuric acid.
Besides I don't see the point of a manned mission if one can't reach the surface.. tele-operation would be easy and so much cheaper.
Loss of connectivity in the multisensory integration cortical areas after short term microgravity experience, which could explain astronauts decrease of performance in sensorimotor tasks and spatial working memory. However, the effect should wear off after a few days in microgravity and after adaptation to incongruent vestibular information. ISS experiment needed...