Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You! 146
theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
I'm sure it was awe inspiring, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
you wouldnt find me close to a rocket launch
Here's a compilation of videos from a failed Soyuz launch - it got up off the launch pad and then came right back down, very close to the spectators. One person died.
Foton M-1 launch failure [youtube.com]
If you hadnt guessed, the video contains lots of expletives.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Interesting)
not if it leads to those with a lot of money to invest more in lift systems, and get us off this planet, so we have no need to rape it anymore. or to discover a new propulsion system as a side effect of the research that can change transportation, something that doesn't pollute the atmosphere or politically destabilize portions of the world
it's ok to have a conscience. it's not ok to have no imagination
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
The cleanest rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen as the 'oxydizer'.
And where does that hydrogen comes from? Magic elves?
No, as the post you utterly failed to understand already said, it comes from turning Methane into H2 and CO2. Or turning Coal into electricity and then using that to split water. Not very environmentally friendly at all.
Simply moving the pollution from one place to another is not being more environmentally friendly, it's called being short sighted.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast.
That's only because nobody cares about making them faster. They already run them slower [bloomberg.com] than their maximum speed intentionally because the primary design consideration for container ships is efficiency, not speed. And if you look at the amount of freight transported per ship and per crew member compared to a clipper ship, I suspect it is in the range of ten to a hundred times more.
But let's assume you're right:
rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft.
OK, so don't use rockets. I keep hearing about this magic carbon nanotube space elevator that we'll have Real Soon Now.
Even if you want to assume that never happens, let's consider another alternative: You pick a proverbial "asteroid the size of Texas" out of the many floating around out there. Find one in the habitable zone. Then you send a team there with some industrial equipment, not to mine the asteroid and bring it home, but to mine it and use the raw materials to construct a large compartmentalized living environment. Start off by building a few dozen acres of greenhouse, and fill it with plants so that you have food and oxygen recycling. Then proceed to build yourself a little home away from home -- but in a place that has lower gravity, so that you can build yourself a space elevator. Create yourself a city in space with a population of a few thousand people.
That gives you a foothold. You create an industrial city that can export its products to the universe without burning ten thousand gallons of fuel fighting gravity. Then you can branch out. Colonize and mine more asteroids and small planets. Once you have a large enough industrial capacity in low gravity areas, you can build yourself a city-to-go and just land the entire thing piecemeal on a suitable planet. Next thing you know you've got a million people living on Mars and several expeditions on their way to colonizing habitable planets in other planetary systems.
I'm not saying what I've just laid out would definitely work. Maybe, maybe not. What I'm saying is that we haven't yet exhausted all the possible alternatives, so giving up now is nothing but defeatism.