Last Week the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program published the latest set of awards, funding technology investigations which may one day lead to new technologies, new missions or solve problems which might be required in future plans.
Most of these are just funding for the investigators to study the problem, do the math and make a presentation of the findings.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/niac-2024-selections/
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If Starship was designed like Stoke Space's second stage. Would it be able to carry more Cargo??? I wish Scott would do a video that answers that question. I think/guess that Elon should upgrade Starship to the Stoke design. Pros. No flip. No fragile tiles. More stable design. Cons hydrogen not methane on Mars. If stokes design is more mass efficient it would reduce the number of refuel flights, Starships most important function.
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How many of these have actually made it trough in the last few years?
Scott: Red shift indicates that distance objects WERE moving faster IN THE PAST, not right now. So how can you say that the universe is expanding right now? The distant objects could have slowed down by now or even started coming back towards us by now due to gravity.
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The universe isn't expanding. Redshift is likely not cosmological at shown by Halton Arp.
Cute that the alien life detector abbreviated to ALF
jfc, your outro was really loud compared to your voice.
Just take a minute and imagine the absolute whackiness of submitted ideas that must have been rejected if these were the selectees.
Great explanations! I hope you can do more videos in this style, covering different papers across multiple subjects. Anyway…
Tangent! Any thoughts on you including starter prompts/questions we could use with ChatGPT or similar AIs to dive deeper into different subjects? Maybe mentioned in the video or just posted in the comments? I can sort of come up with my own, but getting them from a much more knowledgeable and experienced scientist would be a huge help.
Water does not conduct electricity it's the (minerals) in the water that does.
Listening while playing Star Citizen.
I look forward to all of the articles on how NASA is developing a warp drive and/or a weather control satellite.
The nuclear rocket TFINER mentions the delta-v but not the thrust… I suspect it's miniscule. Nonetheless a cool idea.
Using the term “freedom units” is a real low point in the quality of your otherwise brilliant videos and makes you sound like you’re pandering to Americans waaaay too much. Stop using it. Just stop. It’s embarrassing.
We need a spin launch system in orbit. Spinlaunch has the chemical/mechanical equation backwards.
That was a fun walkthrough of the projects … do more of that please. Seems like this is NASA's version of DARPA projects?!
Ah, my colleague and I made it to the semi-final stage of the NIAC this year. We got informed of the rejection on the 7th of January.
A little bittersweet to see the successful cases here, as interesting as they are!
We'll resubmit again and I'll keep rolling the D20 for luck.
Wow, most of these concepts aren't even as sci-fi as I expected. The sad thing is, that a lot of these ideas could be realized or at least tested with today's technology. It's already possible to send probes to a distance of 10 AU (that's Saturn) or test something in zero gravity. The issue is money. If we'd spent less on wars we could be living on the moon right now (yes I know, war can also boost technology, like the V2 – but mostly it's about destoying stuff).
I'm going to start wearing a foil hat because I was thinking about the possibility of something like a Lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer and they must have stole my idea! It is affirming to see that it's possible!
You know what we should do? We shouldn't make a new version of the voyager with a SpaceX requirements of a being big enough to record everything. I'm actually have something better than a record on it.
Thank you Scott for speaking to us like we are already familiar with many of the concepts and terminology in your videos. That is the kind of respect that many creators lack and it sets you apart from the masses while simultaneously making it clear that you know what you're talking about.
"… from the Venus [sic] atmosphere …" — "Venusian"!
An interstellar spacecraft swarm seems farfetched — I'm quite taken by the idea of the Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket, (TFINER) but I wonder whether the Thorium-228 (and other fuels) can be economically produced in the amounts necessary for space exploration. Oak Ridge National Laboratory makes what it describes as "large quantities" in the course of producing Actinium-227 (which might also be used in TFINER) for medical research, but the context is medical research.
Perchlorates in the Martian soil…. So you mean the potatoes from The Martian were …. Sci fi??