Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
This is really quite a big deal. A tremendous amount of modern research ends up being sold to journals which require unreasonable payments to access it and only pay the original authors a pittance. It’s nice to see an agency like NASA deliberately widebanding its findings.
Not sure if people fully realize just how big of a deal this is.
THIS is how science is advanced. Not through biased corporate research, business secrets, marketing, paywalls and patent wars. But through open, uncensored and unrestricted public access to knowledge.
Just a reminder that the first NASA astronauts were supposed to be women because generally they are smaller, lighter (less weight in the cockpit means less fuel required) and eat less than men and so would be easier to accommodate in space.
Both men and women trained (and many of the female finalists had higher scores than the men), but they were completely excluded from the final selection because of their gender.
13 women underwent final training, all were accomplished pilots with at least 1000 hours flying experience, all passed the necessary tests, all could have been astronauts if only they were afforded the opportunity.
[below, Jerrie Cobb photographed during testing]
They are collectively known as the Mercury 13, there’s a great blog entry about them here and a brilliant PBS documentary too.
Their names are Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane “Janey” Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Gene Nora Stumbough, Irene Leverton, Jerri Sloan and Bernice Steadman. They should be remembered and celebrated for their role in the history of space exploration.
It wasn’t until 2 decades later that Sally Ride became the first woman in space in 1983.
7 of the surviving members of the Mercury 13 are pictured below, 33 years later in 1995.
The film “Hidden Figures,” based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, focuses on the stories of Katherine Johnson (left, after receiving the Medal of Freedom in 2015), Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, African-American women who were essential to the success of early spaceflight. Today, NASA embraces their legacy and strives to include everyone who wants to participate in its ongoing exploration. “Progress is driven by questioning our assumptions and cultural assumptions,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says in a new video. “Embracing diversity and inclusion is how we as a nation will take the next giant leap in exploration.“
After months of speculation and leaked documents , NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published . And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.
Okay so this is one of the WEIRDEST FUCKING THINGS humanity has stumbled upon in science and it gives me a nerd boner that can be seen from Alpha Centauri.
As far as we can tell, this fucking thing generates reactionless thrust. Let that shit sink in: The EM Drive does not require fuel. Only electrical power.
Okay I know I said it already but AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL THIS IS A !!REACTIONLESS!! !!THRUST!! !!DEVICE!! you have no idea just how goddamn amazing that is
mark my words this fucking thing is going to REVOLUTIONIZEthe design of satellites and scientific probes
and just think of the potential it might have if its thrust increases proportionately to the power fed into it
THIS IS FUKCIN HUGE MY DUDES
Reblogging this just to restate how fucking huge this is.
Imagine you blow air into a balloon and tie it off. Then when you untie it, you let the balloon go and it flies all over the place. This is how propulsion works. This is what Newton’s Third Law is based on. That the air is coming out and pushing the balloon forward.
The EM drive is moving forward when the balloon is still tied off at the end.
I heard about this theorized not some time ago and thought it was amazing!
The fact that it’s been thoroughly peer-reviewed and still stands up is nothing short of absolutely astounding.
This device works, and no one is quite sure how or WHY it does. It defies our current understanding of why physics work the way the way they do. Which mean basically means that we need to re-evaluate and refine our laws of physics because we have discovered empirical evidence that we’ve got something wrong. And trying to fix our math to accurately describe the universe is going lead to new discoveries about the fundamental nature of reality. IT’S MIND BLOWING.
Not to mention this device itself, if we can elaborate and expand on it, will change how we do propulsion. This might the next stage of propulsion technology. To the people a few decades in the future, combustion engine propulsion technology will seem as silly, outdated, and quaint as steam propulsion or horse-drawn carriages seem to us.
THE FUTURE APPROACHES.
god I’m such a nerd
This is hugely important stuff.
A lot of reports on this thing talk about how it “breaks the laws of physics,” but this is an inaccurate oversimplification. The reality of it is much more profound. If this thing indeed works, and the results we’ve gotten thus far can’t be explained by some sort of experimental error, it will redefine our understanding of physics. In other words, the laws of physics aren’t being “broken,” we’ve just been wrong about physics the entire time.
so what you’re saying is maybe we get long distance space travel before we go extinct of our own stupidity
*insert excited nerdy babbling here*
There’s still a lot of work to be done to eliminate the possibility of any outside interference or mundane errors, but this is a huge step towards either proving or disproving whether or not it actually works. I’m seeing articles from September suggesting that there are plans to test it in space.
KIRK IS HOLDING A ZINNIA. THE SAME FUCKING FLOWER.
FUCKING NASA MAN
No. Nononono. You don’t understand.
I am so mad about this. Like, not like I wanna kill someone, but mad, as in, hysterical?
They wanted to answer questions about plants in space, right? How biology and botany would work in space. Because then who knows? We could grow crops in space, or fix the atmosphere. Or create the perfect biome for plants that are now extinct. Who fucking knows, right?
They could have taken a food crop. Wheat, maybe. Or rice. Something they could observe to see if it would be possible to solve a food shortage or whatever. Maybe a small apple tree to see if it would bloom, and then see if there could be a way to make it fruit.
Or, you know, go the genetics route and take a sweet pea. See if zero gravity does anything to how genes are passed on. Mendel did it in a shed, why not a tin shed in outer space, right? Oh the possibilities.
Was it so wrong to take the zinnia? No, of course not. In my little horticultural brain, I thought, oh how lovely! A splash of colour in the emptiness of space. Something bright and cheerful, something that gives hope. That must have been it, right?
But no.
SOMEONE went, “Nah, mate, here’s an episode of Star Trek where Kirk is holding a ZINNIA in a SPACE DESERT.”
I could scream. I don’t know if I love or hate these fucking nerds. Oh my gods.
Kalpana Chawla was born on March 17, 1962 in Karnal. Her official date of birth was altered to 1 July 1961 to allow her to join school underage.While other children of her age dressed their Barbie dolls, Kalpana liked to draw the pictures of airplanes.
She moved to the United States in 1982 where she obtained a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1984. Determined to become an astronaut even in the face of the Challenger disaster, Chawla went on to earn a second Masters in 1986 and a PhD in aerospace engineering in 1988 from the University of Colorado at Boulder…
Her first space mission began on November 19, 1997, as part of the six-astronaut crew that flew the Space Shuttle Columbia flight STS-87. Chawla was the first Indian-born woman and the second Indian person to fly in space, following cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma who flew in 1984 on the Soyuz T-11.
Chawla died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster which occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Columbia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, with the death of all seven crew members, shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission, STS-107. Just 16 minutes before landing, the space shuttle disintegrated, killing all on board.
