Birddog! You are so funnie!!! Twinkie Power Now you are talking some kind of power!! :-)
Hey! They (Marshall) just opened a 30 million dollar lab and will be studying energy possibilites........Check it out:
New Marshall lab to make sci-fi real
$30M addition will look into anti-matter, ion drives, solar sails
07/08/02
By SHELBY G. SPIRES
Times Aerospace Writer shelbys@htimes.com
Nuclear-fusion drives, anti-matter protons and solar sails may sound like something straight out of Hollywood, but NASA hopes the construction of a $30 million Marshall Space Flight Center propulsion lab here will turn fantasy into reality.
Marshall managers and elected officials broke ground on a new administration and lab building for the Propulsion Research Center today at 10 a.m. on Redstone Arsenal. Construction is slated to begin later this summer, and Marshall plans to begin using the new building early next year.
The new lab will pull work together that is now done in three older buildings. The lab is planned as a small research facility, occupying about 66,000 square feet in a 107,000-square-foot building. The balance of the space will be used for administrative offices and meeting rooms.
"This world-class facility sets the stage for propulsion research that will utterly revolutionize space travel as we know it," said Marshall Director Art Stephenson.
U.S. Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Huntsville, said he worked to get money to build the new propulsion lab after touring the old ones a couple of years ago. The former propulsion labs were housed in buildings that ranged in vintage from 1940s-era Army to 1960s-era NASA.
"The labs reminded of a garage I had 20 years ago that I tore down," Cramer said. "The floor was concrete, the roof was tin, and it leaked. That's not an atmosphere we want our propulsion scientists to work in."
The new lab will be used for research, not for large-scale manufacturing or testing of spacecraft or rocket engines.
"The purpose really is to do work on new ideas, new concepts, as well as to understand the fundamentals of propulsion," said Dr. Stephen L. Rodgers, director of the 50-employee center. "It's often difficult to develop technology unless you understand it. It's our job to provide that understanding."
Today's rockets have been pushed about as far as technology will allow, Rodgers said. Further research into improving them would be relatively fruitless. "You're not going to get much more out of them."
Rodgers said Marshall scientists are looking at different types of energy at fundamental levels to provide propulsion sources. Among those being researched are nuclear fission and fusion - or getting energy out of nuclear reactions - combining matter and anti-matter, and directing light from Earth to "push" the ship.
"Anti-matter is several years out," Rodgers said, "but it would give the most energy. You turn essentially all that matter into energy."
The work on anti-matter will be at the level of the atom, so there will be little safety threat in case of an accident, said Harry Gerrish, a chief research engineer at the lab.
Gerrish said at that small level the anti-matter energy could produce only enough energy to light a 60-watt light bulb for a fraction of a second. "There's not enough energy that could heat another gas or material that could cause an explosion," he said. NASA researchers will also delve into nuclear propulsion, and the lab will use computer simulations to study the properties of nuclear materials.
"We are working a simulated fission experiment here now where we simulate the heat from a reactor," Rodgers said. "You take that heat and look at a sort of fission electric system."
The goal is to use the heat from a nuclear reactor and convert the energy producing ions. Those ions can be used to propel a spacecraft. NASA used a different type of ion drive to propel its Deep Space-1 probe, launched in 1998. Marshall engineers hope to improve that technology.
"We've not advanced much beyond chemical rockets in the past 100 years," Rodgers said, "and I think we're going to be doing some interesting work here at Marshall to move space travel into the 21st century." |
