Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

Of course, making a black hole isn't the world's most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland's ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. "With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing...we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships." Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. "Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy."

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. "Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards", say Crane and Westmoreland, so it's merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future

The new initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of satellite launch tenfold to somewhere in the region of one million dollars, was announced at the International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, South Korea. Requiring the creation of a low-cost launch system won't be cheap, warns Virgin Galactic president, Will Whitehorn:

This effort will involve designing, building and marketing a launcher rather than the satellites themselves... We hope to get satellite launches underway by 2013 or 2014.

Virgin Galactic adds satellite launches to space tourism [New Scientist]

The central concept is that of Lagrangian Points, or L-points. An L-point is a place in space where the gravitational fields of the surrounding bodies all cancel out to create a point of apparent zero gravity. This concept has been exploited before; the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is stationed at one such point, where the close-by Earth's gravity cancels the distant Sun's gravity. It sort of just sits there, in this gravitational rut.

And that's basically what these gravity corridors are: they are pathways in space where the gravity is lowest and, in most cases, where the gravity is getting lower. If the gravity of the surrounding planets can be seen as big hills, the gravitational corridors are the sloping valleys between these hills. If scientists can find the valleys that slope in the direction they want to go, they won't need much fuel at all to just roll down those valleys.

Scientists in America and Germany are working to develop a map of these corridors for future space flights. They envision a time when very little fuel would be needed to easily drift from one of Saturn's moons to the other using the gravity of these floating rocks.

As a result, fuel use could be cut by a factor of ten on space journeys, allowing for lighter and cheaper spacecrafts. Of course, drifting lazily through the gravity streams between distant space objects, as relaxing as it sounds, would also take a lot longer. Let's get working on those cryogenics!

Interplanetary Superhighway animation (by Cici Koenig)
Gravitational Space Corridors Could Slash Space Travel Costs [PhysOrg]

(Image and Video from Dr. Shane D. Ross)

Segundo's 1908 film, Excursión a la luna, is actually a remake of Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902 and often credited as the first science fiction film. Segundo was one of the great special effects masters of the time, working largely in the fantasy genre, and he decided to try his hand at depicting space travel on screen:

His more magical realist space travel film, Voyage à la planète Jupiter, is also just over a century old, having made its US debut one hundred years ago today:

[via Fanboy]

The absence of oxygen-bearing atmosphere on the moon has been a great challenge to the feasibility of establishing a lunar base. Ferrying stored oxygen to such a base is feasible — but a costly proposition, at up to $100 per ton. Thus, the space agencies have been looking for ways to extract oxygen from the moon's own surface. In 2005, NASA established a $250,000 prize for a feasible, scalable method of oxygen extraction, but even with the prize money raised to a million dollars last year, no one has succeeded. Until now.

A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has built a reactor that strips oxygen from moon rocks, in much the same way metal is extracted from terrestrial rocks. Their machine is able to extract nearly 100 percent of oxygen, yielding one ton of oxygen for every three tons of moon rocks.

The best part of the process is the expense of operation. The reactor could be shipped disassembled, and built on the moon, and it uses roughly the same amount of energy as a home water heater, energy which could be supplied by solar panels or a nuclear reactor placed in the base. The European Space Agency is now working with the team to create a larger, remotely operable prototype, and bring us one step close to a lunar base.

How to breathe on the Moon [Nature via Popular Science]

The British Independent newspaper talked to those who think that space programs make Earth a better place to be. While some, like The Climate Group's chief executive Dr Steve Howard, think that the cost of sending people into orbit may mean that more grounded initiatives could suffer, Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University's planetary sciences department, disagrees:

Every space mission has spin-offs which are unforeseeable. The Wellcome Trust funded Beagle 2 on the understanding that the team of highly talented people would look at ways the technology could be used for medicine. We have developed an instrument that can diagnose TB in a day. Our instrument, which is going to be tested in Malawi, could save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia Theory, puts it more strongly:

It seems to me any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. That gorgeous, inspirational image of the globe that we are now so familiar with came out of space travel. That image has perhaps been of the greatest value to the environmental movement. It gave me a great impetus.

There are the unmanned spacecraft, which are relatively inexpensive, that I certainly think should continue. The more we know about Mars, for example, the better we can understand our own planet. The second sort, the more personally adventurous sort of travel, offers great inspiration to humans. And, were it not for space travel we'd have no mobile phones, no internet, no weather forecasts of the sort we have now and so on. There's a lot of puritanical silliness about it.

2010: A new space odyssey beckons [Independent.co.uk]

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy laid down what seemed like an impossible goal for the nation: to reach the moon and land successfully before the end of the 1960s . . . NASA had been formed only a couple of years prior, in 1958, and instituted Project Mercury a year later, designed to bring a human into space and back again safely. This project was the first of three projects, with the overall intent on bringing people to space, and later, to the moon . . . Mercury was only the first step.

What's exciting about reading over Andrew's account is imagining what it must have been like to live through the 1950s and 60s, before all our disappointments over space travel and colonization.

Back then, it seemed as if a Mars colony was right around the corner. And now just getting back to the Moon seems like a major undertaking. I think we could use a little bit more of that long-lost optimism today, tempered of course with wisdom from what we've learned. But we can't throw away the dream of going to space now, especially with the planet feeling more crowded every day - and with so many recent discoveries of potential Earth-like planets elsewhere.

Check out Andrew's full article on his blog. And watch for further installments!

Here's the gallery, which also includes a photo of the ship's captain, Frank Pike, acting out a Civil War scenario on horseback via the ship's virtual reality modules. And a picture of visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel in action. After this post had already gone up, producer Michael Taylor sent me a bonus image showing the Phaeton's workings, which is now in the gallery.

And because the gallery software doesn't seem to be able to give you a high enough resolution of it, here's that explanation of the Phaeton's physics:

Having read the script to this TV movie (which still could become the pilot for a new series if the stars align just right) I'm incredibly excited to see it play out on screen. Here's the official description:

The crew of the Phaeton is approaching the go/no-go point of their epic 10-year journey through outer space. With the fate of Earth in their hands, the pressure is intense. The best bet for helping the crew members maintain their sanity is the cutting-edge virtual reality technology installed on the ship. It's the perfect stress-reliever until they realize a glitch in the system has unleashed a virus on to the ship. Tensions mount as the crew decides how to contain the virus and complete their mission. Meanwhile, their lives are being taped for a reality show back on Earth in the World Broadcast Premiere of VIRTUALITY airing Friday, June 26 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

Thanks to the recent grant from the ESA, British company Reaction Engines is working on the problem of how to make air-breathing engines work on spacecraft, according to New Scientist. Their aim is to create Skylon, a space plane that can take off and land like a conventional plane, yet still achieve orbit, by mixing air-breathing jets for take-off and landing with rockets (fueled by onboard oxygen) past a certain speed:

Skylon's proposed engine would use a heat exchanger to cool incoming air from 1000 °C at Mach 5 to less than -100 °C. Once cooled, the air is mixed with liquid hydrogen and burned... Skylon is designed to run in air-breathing mode directly from launch up to a speed of Mach 5.5. At an altitude of 26 kilometres, the engine would switch to conventional rocket power and use onboard oxygen to propel the plane into space.

"It's a pretty unique concept," says Mark Hempsell, director of future programmes at Reaction Engines. "I think at the moment it's the only realistic way to make aircraft vehicles that go into space."

Mark Lewis, a aerospace engineer from the University of Maryland, disagrees:

I think all approaches are on the table. [Reaction Engines is] looking at one possible combination of engine system, and there's really a much broader range of options we need to explore before we know what to fly up to orbit.

Personally, we're hoping that more affordable space planes come to pass, and sooner rather than later. We're already eight years behind the future Stanley Kubrick promised us in 1968.

Air-breathing planes: the spaceships of the future? [New Scientist]

On the 1st of February, 2003, America's first operational space shuttle, the Columbia, broke up over the skies of Texas, leading to the deaths of the seven crew members on board. An analysis of the crash in the weeks afterward revealed that damage caused by a foam strike on the orbiter's wing allowed plasma into the internal structure of the shuttle, reducing its integrity and leading to disaster.

This disaster, much like the 1986 one that destroyed Space Shuttle Challenger during lift-off, has fueled debate as to the viability of crewed spaceflight, a debate that is sure to continue. It also revealed a number of problems within the space program, namely that the shuttle fleet is overworked and outdated. Using shuttles continuously as one of the only ways into orbit in the US can be detrimental - and that's why we're seeing so many people seeking out spaceflight alternatives in the private sector.

Currently, almost all of the United State's space flight activities are projects headed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and in their relatively short history, they have undertaken a number of incredible feats - sending people to space, landing on the moon six times, maintaining two space stations and launching satellites that have increased our knowledge of our surroundings in the galaxy. However, NASA is largely unequipped to handle the growing demand for commercial space endeavors such as satellite launches and tourism because they've focused mainly on scientific and exploration missions.

NASA's original charter, The National Aeronautics and Space Act, established NASA in 1958, just as space flight was beginning with the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1. In a move to catch up with the Russians and close the perceived gap in technology and security, NASA's mission was laid out in the first sections of the bill:

DECLARATION OF POLICY AND PURPOSE
Sec. 102. (d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space;
(4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;
(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
(6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency;
(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof;
(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment; and
(9) The preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes.

While NASA's charter does indicate that it should encourage commercial enterprises, the focus of the agency has largely been one of exploration. Crewed missions to space brought back a wealth of knowledge flight after flight, while missions to the moon helped to piece together some of the secrets of the solar system's origins, while even today, robotic missions to the outer planets have reported back the existence of water on Mars, and the mineral compositions of our nearest neighbors.

In the 1970s was a shift in focus from the lunar landings that heralded the birth of NASA. David Hitt, in his book Homesteading Space, notes:

Developed in the shadow of the Apollo moon missions and using hardware originally created for Apollo, the Skylab space station took the nation's astronauts from being space explorers to being space residents.

Where the Lunar landings were somewhere between politics and genuine scientific exploration, Skylab was the turning point, when it was launched in 1973. The idea of living in space would continue through the six-year lifespan of the Skylab space station to the birth of the Space Shuttle to today's International Space Station.

Trying to maintain the pace of its missions, NASA had to strain its resources to undertake commercial endeavors. From early on, private companies such as AT&T have used NASA to launch their own commercial satellites, and that is a policy that has continued through to today. While the US Military also launches a bulk of commercial satellites, there are other problems with the agency as well. As NASA's budget gets further cut down as the economy worsens, job cuts have begun to force people away from the agency, including some higher level members, such as Martin Kress, who left his position at NASA as Deputy Director of the Glenn Research Center for National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In his statement that was released by NASA, he noted that "The world is changing rapidly, and I see an opportunity for doing some very innovative things at the National Space Science and Technology Center" (Source)Innovation here is a key element, and is something that is difficult within such a large bureaucratic structure such as NASA. Private companies have already proven that they can accomplish much the same tasks as NASA, but at a much lower cost.

Even as the military also launches satellites, the demand has placed a burden on the launch capabilities of NASA. According to Science Fiction author Allen M. Steele, in his testimony to the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics in 2001, commercial enterprise had led to the Challenger disaster:

As stated before, NASA is ill-suited for dealing with commercial space enterprise. This was demonstrated during the early 1980s, when the demands of the satellite launch industry contributed in part ot the circumstances which led to the Challenger disaster; the Reagan administration responded by barring Commercial payloads from the space shuttle fleet. More recently, we've also seen the indecision over the purpose of the International Space Station; no one could decide whether the ISS should be a government R&D lab, a commercial space outpost, or neither or both. As a result, the ISS has been redesigned several times, causing enormous construction overruns.

In his testimony, Steele argues that the creation of a federal agency devoted to private space enterprise is needed. While NASA maintains a busy schedule of scientific missions and its own launch capabilities, this agency would encourage private space flight interests. This has yet to happen, but there has been considerable development in private space flight, most obviously with SpaceShipOne's dramatic capture of the Ansari X-Price in October of 2004.

There are many commercial alternatives to NASA which are in their early stages. These companies, and the ones that are likely to follow, will be essential in easing the burden that has been placed upon NASA's aging space fleet. They will likely do this by taking control of the more routine tasks in space: Delivering crews to their destinations, bringing up consumables and equipment to those crews, and servicing satellites in orbit. In this scenario, we would likely see NASA's duties shift to what they have traditionally been: science and exploration, rather than an all-encompassing service for ferrying everything into space.

We can see the shift towards commercialization already with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which is considered the first spaceliner. In the four years since Virgin Galactic tickets went on sale to the general public, over two hundred have been sold, at over $100,000 each. The price is likely to drop after that, but this highlights the demand for a space tourism industry. Branson's company has the right idea, and has signed contracts with Spaceport America, the first commercial spacesport, which is currently under construction. It was recently announced that a sister spaceport, Spaceport Sweden, would also sign contracts with Branson's Virgin Galactic.

The demand for commercial spaceflight exists beyond tourism of course. Another privately owned company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (Space X), made history last year when it launched the first commercial rocket into orbit, the Falcon 1. Founded by Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal, the company has been working to create a low-cost alternative to deliver payloads to space.

According to Musk:

Satellites and spacecraft urgently need a more reliable and cost effective launch vehicle than the options available today. SpaceX is confident that our Falcon rocket will achieve that end in the near future. In only nine months we've designed, built and initiated testing of our rocket's main engine, which is a testament to the capability and determination of the SpaceX team to deliver on promised goals in record time.

After several failed launches, the first successful Space X flight was in September of 2008, with another launch scheduled for 2009. In addition to these unmanned rockets, the company has announced the plans for the Dragon, a crewed module. Additionally, NASA announced in 2006 that it was awarding a contract with the company to provide resupply missions for the International Space Station. According to the company's website, there are already twenty-five planned missions on both the Falcon and Dragon vehicles, performing duties for both public and private interests.

With the grounding of the space shuttle fleet projected for 2010, the United States will need to rely on foreign powers such as Russia or the European Space Agency to resupply the International Space Station, a costly affair that will likely draw criticism from taxpayers. Companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space X both fill a growing need for alternative launch capabilities, and will likely be at the forefront of future space exploration. After all, there are entire worlds to be explored, and numerous commercial possibilities.

In the meantime, there is certainly evidence of what haste does to a program such as NASA, when safety is inadvertently compromised in order to meet a packed schedule. NASA is essentially the sole means to get cargo into orbit, but it cannot remain so. Explorers and entrepreneurs will seek out alternative means of sending equipment and humans into space, and shifting this burden to the commercial sector makes sense. This is especially true because private companies can fund their own hardware - this takes the burden off the taxpayers, who only really see the failures of the space program, and not its enormous benefits. Eventually, the private sector will reveal the true benefits of space travel, which isn't just economic, as satellites such as Hubble continually show us.

If you'd like to enjoy a cool pint of fresh water in space, the "shipped-from-Earth" variety will cost you $15,000. That's why the International Space Station captures every bit of evaporated water possible, collects it and purifies it for use as drinking water. While astronauts were apparently fine with drinking each other's sweat, exhaled water vapor and shower water, NASA hadn't crossed the urine barrier yet. But that's about to change.

Last week, Space Shuttle Endeavor carried aloft a Michigan Technological University designed Water Recovery System. Here's how it turns pee into a refreshing drink:

1). Urine is distilled, removing a bunch of the "bad stuff" you wouldn't want to drink.
2). It's combined with the other waste water (the sweat and shower water).
3). Solids are filtered out. You don't want someone's hair in your morning drink.
4). The water passes through a bunch of multi-filtration beds made of materials that remove contaminants either by absorbing them or negating them via ion exchange.
5). At this point, the water holds some non-organics and solvents. A reactor breaks those impurities down into carbon dioxide, water and ions.
6). Leaving behind the CO2 and the ions gives you water that's as pure as a mountain stream. Probably purer. Image by: NASA.

Turning Urine Into Water For Space Station Recycling. [Science Daily]

PILOTED SATELLITE will mark man's first venture into outer space . . . It will come only after long experience with unmanned satellites. Best-informed opinion places the date with the decade 1970 to 1980. Later, manned satellites may be used as "space platforms." Moon rockets could be assembled and launched from such space laboratories. A TRIP AROUND THE MOON in a rocket ship launched either from a space platform or from the earth's surface (depending on technological developments) will be the next step. . . Experts believe that will come in the decade 1980-1990. A LANDING ON THE MOON . . . man's goal for as long as he has had the imagination to think about it, will be made in the last decade of this century. Travel to all these planets will come, but probably not within the lifetime of anyone now alive.

The Polar Lander, launched in 1999, was zooming along just fine until communication was lost on entry into the atmosphere. Most speculate that it simply malfunctioned and crashed, though none of the satellites currently in orbit have imaged the remains. Perhaps for this reason, there has been a lot of lively speculation that it may have been destroyed by an alien outpost. So far, no aliens have harmed any of the other robots on Mars — including the Phoenix Lander, which is also in a polar region (the north pole).

Check out ten more ill-fated robots and satellites who never made it to their Martian destination.

12 Mars Mission Failures [Oobject]

Phoenix, an even more badass version of the current Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, will hit the Martian north pole. (Sadly, it can't look for the dead Polar Lander, because that rover was headed for the South Pole.) If all goes as planned, it will immediately dig into the icy tundra and take samples to see what the deal is with all that ice. Could it be turned into potable water for future colonists?

To make sure nothing goes wrong with the landing — or at least to see what the hell happened if it does — three Earth-controlled satellites orbiting Mars will be watching Phoenix's descent into the ice. According to Discovery News:

Mars Odyssey will relay the descent and landing live, or what passes for live when the action takes place 171.5 million miles away. At that distance, radio signals traveling at the speed of light take 15.3 minutes to reach Earth. By the time flight controllers know if Phoenix began the descent through the planet's atmosphere, it should have already landed.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Europe's Mars Express are the backups. They will record signals from Phoenix during the descent and landing which can be relayed to Earth for later analysis.

Mars Probe Entourage Poised to Welcome Phoenix [Discovery News]

At 102,800 feet, he will pass the current world record for highest altitude jump, set by Joseph Kittinger in 1960 (pictured). If exceeding Mach 1 doesn't tear him apart, he doesn't go into an uncontrollable spin and die, and he manages to survive lethally low temperatures, pressures, and oxygen levels, his name will go down in the history books. But why is he doing this? It's not just the record.

When Fournier jumps (it's more a question of 'if'; he's been trying this for years, but been foiled by weather and technical difficulties), the gear he'll have on will basically be a spacesuit. This isn't by accident.

When the Challenger space shuttle exploded during launch in 1987 it was just 11 miles above Earth's surface. If Fournier can survive his jump from more than twice that height, he believes he'll show the world that astronauts can return safely back to Earth from the edge of space. Spaceflight would become a lot safer, saving lots of live and possibly even helping to usher in the commercial spaceflight industry.

Source: LiveScience

• In Verne's story, the cannon that fires the passengers into space is called the Columbiad. More than 100 years after this book was published, the ship that sent the astronauts to the moon in the Apollo 11 mission was the Columbia.
• There are other correlations to the Apollo mission: in both cases there were three travelers, both ships blasted off (literally, in Vernes' case) from Florida, and the dimensions of the "shell" are very close to those of the Apollo Command/Service module.
• The French adventurer Michel Ardan in the novel was inspired by the French photographer, cartoonist, writer, and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. He was the first person to take aerial photographs, and inspired the Verne novel Five Weeks In A Balloon.
• In 1875 the novel was adapted into an opera, "Le voyage dans la lune." Although this was done without Verne's permission, it featured an enormous budget with music by Jacques Offenbach, huge palaces built out of glass, a live camel, and 673 costumes. Verne approached the creators of the show and complained to them that it was similar to his novel, and they apparently settled the matter, because the same team later adapted Verne's short story anthology Doctor Ox into an opera as well.
• Verne did his own rough calculations on what it would take to shoot something into orbit for this novel, and they turned out to be fairly close to the real thing. If Verne had lived in the 1950s and 1960s, who knows what would have happened.
• In the novel, when constructing the cannon, they have to dig a hole 900 feet deep, and 60 feet wide, to house the barrel. That's pretty damn big.
• Although the projectile is actually fired in this novel, the fate of the astronauts aboard is unknown. Verne later wrote a sequel called Around The Moon which details their trip which involves orbiting the moon, and somewhat impractically falling back to the Earth and being rescued.
• This book inspired the first science fiction film ever made: Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, in 1902. Later adaptations included From The Earth To The Moon in 1958 from RKO Pictures, and a comedy with Burl Ives and Terry Thomas in 1967 called Jules Verne's A Rocket To The Moon.
• In 1961 ballistics engineer Gerald Bull began Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) which fired very large projectiles into the sky, with the hopes of them one day attaining orbit. This would be much cheaper than using rockets, although the project was ended before they could get anything beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
• Bull kept trying to work on his idea to launch a satellite into space via a gun through the 1970s and 1980s, and produced an enormous gun based on his work called the GC 45. It fired 155 millimeter shells over vast distances, and was purchased by both South Africa and Iraq. Bull continued to work with the Iraqis on the design of the supergun, but was assassinated in 1990, most likely by Mossad agents, as Israel would have been the target of that gun.
• During the U.S. military's Operation Plumbbob series of nuclear tests in Nevada in 1957, a 900 kilogram steel plate covering a safety shaft was sent shooting skyward at enough speed to attain escape velocity, and it was never found again. Some researchers think that it broke the Earth's gravity and is in space somewhere, but others believe it melted in the upper atmosphere.
• When Disneyland Paris was designed, the Imagineers drew heavily on the French love for their native Jules Verne, and as a result Space Mountain was built as an homage to this book. In fact, there's an enormous cannon mounted on the building, which is meant to "fire" tourists into space. Inside the ride you pass by the Columbiad which fires and recoils as you pass it. Logos for the Baltimore Gun Club and the Columbiad Cannon are visible throughout. Additionally, the ride lies right next to the attraction inspired by Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
• A verneshot is a geologic term where a hypothetical volcanic eruption caused by a buildup of gas deep underneath the Earth's crust could launch parts of the crust and mantle into orbit. It's named in tribute to both Verne, and From The Earth To The Moon.
• Warren Ellis' excellent Planetary comic book features many homages to classic literature, including the discovery of the shell fired by the Baltimore Gun Club (now the American Gun Club). However, in Ellis' story there was a miscalculation in the trajectory, and the shell orbited the Earth for years before crashing back to Earth, and the astronauts aboard died due to lack of food and water.
• In 2005 a video game called Voyage: Inspired By Jules Verne was released, based on this novel and its sequel, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells. It's set in the year 1851, and you play the part of French adventurer Michael Ardan who travels to the Moon aboard the shell. The story then deviates from Verne's work, having Ardan meet an entire civilization that lives under the surface.

According to a release about the study, which will be published in the April issue of the journal Anaethesiology, the researchers are convinced that they've hit on something that's very close to the scifi idea of suspended animation.

"Hydrogen sulfide is the stinky gas that can kill workers who encounter it in sewers; but when adminstered to mice in small, controlled doses, within minutes it produces what appears to be totally reversible metabolic suppression," says Warren Zapol, MD, chief of Anesthesia and Critical Care at MGH and senior author of the Anesthesiology study. "This is as close to instant suspended animation as you can get, and the preservation of cardiac contraction, blood pressure and organ perfusion is remarkable."

The researchers measured factors such as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, respiration and physical activity in normal mice exposed to low-dose (80 ppm) hydrogen sulfide for several hours. They analyzed cardiac function with electrocardiograms and echocardiography and measured blood gas levels. While some mice were studied at room temperature, others were kept in a warm environment - about 98º F - to prevent their body temperatures from dropping.

In all the mice, metabolic measurements such as consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide dropped in as little as 10 minutes after they began inhaling hydrogen sulfide, remained low as long as the gas was administered, and returned to normal within 30 minutes of the resumption of a normal air supply. The animals' heart rate dropped nearly 50 percent during hydrogen sulfide adminstration, but there was no significant change in blood pressure or the strength of the heart beat. While respiration rate also decreased, there were no changes in blood oxygen levels, suggesting that vital organs were not at risk of oxygen starvation.

The mice kept at room temperature had the same drop in body temperature seen in earlier studies, but those in the warm environment maintained normal body temperatures. The same metabolic and cardiovascular changes were seen in both groups, indicating that they did not depend on the reduced body temperature, and analyzing the timing of those changes showed that metabolic reduction actually began before body temperature dropped.

"Producing a reversible hypometabolic state could allow organ function to be preserved when oxygen supply is limited, such as after a traumatic injury," says Gian Paolo Volpato, MD, MGH Anesthesiology research fellow and lead author of the study. "We don't know yet if these results will be transferable to humans, so our next step will be to study the use of hydrogen sulfide in larger mammals."

Sewer-gas induced suspended animation is rapid and reversible [Eurekalert]

Here is our Martian woman's spec:

First, our woman is tall, a little pear-shaped, with really thick legs. This shape compensates for the reduced gravity.

She has a very lightweight exoskeleton covering her whole body. The exoskeleton has to keep her warm, keep her pressurized, shield her from solar wind, and absorb lots of sunlight. So it can be thin, but laced with heated mesh. It should have a nanofabric outer shell laced with lead to repel x-rays and other cosmic rays. And the upper half should have super bendy, ultra-thin solar cells that are constantly sucking up solar energy.

In her boots and strapped to her thighs, she has water drilling/processing packs. A cannulated drill can extend out of it, go deep under martian crust, suck up water, run it through a filter to get the salt and acid out, and then store it close to her body to keep it liquid so she can sip from it.

She also has a photosynthesis rig on her back. This is a light, thin backpack that converts the C02 from the atmosphere and some of the water from her leg pack into sugars and oxygen for our Martian. So it's a combination breathing apparatus and feeder.

Image by Stephanie Fox. Additional reporting by Nivair Gabriel.