(Part 3) Top products from r/space

I'd say something hands-on and very pracitcal like a telescope or if you're willing to shell out a lot of cash (or share with your sibling) an astrophotography camera lens (dunno what the cheapest one is) or this https://www.amazon.com/d/Garden-Suncatchers/Amlong-Crystal-Solar-System-Stand/B00THHMU4Q/?pldnSite=1 if he appreciates art and likes to look at things. But a telescope would be best since you said he isn't into sports. That way he can have a physical activity without dealing with sports. I say hands-on is best because this age the kids are all over the internet and a refreshing physical activity is always very welcome and he'll appreciate it a lot if he can do cool stuff about space. I'm glad you're taking note of his interests and you're making sure he keeps it :)

>Model rockets helped push me to become the literal rocket scientist I am now

I'll support him in whatever he decides to do, but I'd love to give him a push towards something as interesting and rewarding as this.

>head to the National Association of Rocketry website and see about getting him on his level 1 certificate. Then he can push fiberglass tubes to mach 2 with even more fire.

I know nothing about this but hopefully I'll be able to learn with him in the near future. I bought him this DVD set for his birthday, which I'll give to him Tuesday, and hopefully build some interest for when I give him his own rockets on Christmas.

Thanks again for the suggestion. There were a ton of good ideas in this thread, but this one was my favorite.

You're thinking far too small. We don't need to leave the solar system to find other environments to live - we can easily (relatively speaking) create such places here in the solar system, almost anywhere we choose. If your conception is that we have to live on a planetary body, jettison it, and you'll find a lot more options open up. Within current engineering ability, we can build large, earthlike habitats that offer 1G.

It's not about saving a few thousand people, or about the very richest of humanity escaping. It's about using the resources of space in a big way to both enrich those on Earth, by providing lots of clean energy from space, and seeing millions of people living and working offworld. We have the ability to do it, and if we use it wisely, it will help us clean up Earth faster than expecting all our solutions to come from what we have on Earth itself.

For a more hopeful view of the future than what you see, I seriously recommend reading both of these books: The High Frontier and 2081. I think you'll find that there's a lot more to recommend to space travel and use than what the public has been exposed to through decades of government dominance.

For actual documentary, When We Left Earth: The NASA Misssions is just about the best, although it is completely one-sided.

In The Shadow Of The Moon and The Wonder Of It All are great sets of interviews with the Apollo astronauts.

For All Mankind is a great collection of footage from the Apollo missions.

For a very well done dramatization that is surprisingly technically accurate (insofar as it goes) and pretty close to historically truthful, From The Earth To The Moon is a good set.

I don't know of any good ones that focus on the Russian program, either on its own or in relation to the US one. Considering they achieved most of the milestones of space travel before the US (sometimes decades ahead), this is a glaring gap.

EDIT: whyfor somebody downvote me? Do ah offend?

If you want a rigorous basic understanding of astrophysics, you need a couple of years of college-level math and physics. If you are the sort who can learn difficult material on your own, they have textbooks at libraries. These topics go into it:

Math: Presumably you had the full track of algebra and trigonometry, so then you need single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra.

Physics: Newtonian mechanics, heat and electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics.

You also need statistics, which I would advise learning the basics of before trying to learn quantum mechanics. Chemistry is nice to have too, but isn't essential except for certain topics.

Once you have this background, there are introductory astrophysics textbooks you can read. In fact, you might just want to browse through one at a library just to see what it's like. The one I learned from in college was pretty great:

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Astrophysics-2nd/dp/0805304029

Even without completing the entire background knowledge, you can pick up some fascinating things reading a book like that.

I wouldn’t say microscopic, but significantly smaller than a small black hole. Surprisingly, and please Reddit, don’t hang me for citing a Hollywood movie in a discussion about astrophysics, the movie Interstellar is a fantastic example of what happens when you’re close to a SMBH. Kip Thorne was the science/physics advisor for the film and does a great job keeping the physics true to science. If you’re able, read The Science of Interstellar. It’s amazingly written and Thorne is so so so good at explaining complex ideas in simple language. Also pictures.

Great question! The most direct method is by spectroscopy. This exploits the fact that atoms absorb and emit light at specific wavelengths. So, we can look at what wavelengths of light distant stars are emitting and absorbing, and infer what kinds of atoms are in its atmosphere. This is what lets us know what white dwarfs are made of, for instance.

There are also indirect lines of evidence. We can take well-tested theories describing nuclear reactions, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and others, and apply them to the interiors of stars. The most sophisticated models are supercomputer simulations that couple fluid dynamics models with statistical descriptions of nuclear reactions and electromagnetic interactions. They're tested both by ensuring that they're correctly applying theories tested elsewhere, and against actual astrophysical observations of stellar luminosity and spectra. (Side note --- as you might expect, these numerical capabilities have a decidedly terrestrial origin.)

Scientific advances along these lines often look like rasterizing, where the scientific community takes a very simple model and makes successive passes elaborating and refining it. For instance, you can look at the sun, measure its temperature, mass, and radius, and notice that it's mostly made of hydrogen gas. Then you can show that the kind of conditions that exist at its core necessitate hydrogen fusion. Once you've done that, you see that a hydrostatic equilibrium balancing energy produced by fusion with gravitational collapse accurately predicts the sun's radius and temperature. Then it's on to building more complex models to try to understand its inner temperature gradients, convection, solar storms, etc ...

(Source: Mixed graduate/undergraduate astrophysics was one of my favorite classes in college and I still keep BOB in a special place on my shelf.)

That's a great scope you got yourself there, it'll treat you well. Check out the books NightWatch and Turn Left at Orion for great information on how to get started in Astronomy. "NightWatch" answers a lot of questions you might have where "Turn Left.." serves more as a guide and map to the night sky, and both serve as excellent resources.

A Man on the Moon by Andy Chaiken is considered THE text on the Apollo program. If formed the basis of the mini series From the Earth to the Moon

Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz is a wonderful first hand account of life in the trenches from Mercury thru Apollo.

And my personal favorite space book - Roving Mars which was turned into a great IMAX movie as well.

If I might recommend a book, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything sounds like something you'd be interested in.

It's mostly about the origins and stories behind major scientific discoveries and theories that have shaped our view of the world and universe today. He starts at the Big Bang and goes from there. The book is quite accessible to those without formal scientific education (like myself). Bryson dumbs things down just enough so you can understand it while feeling enriched afterwards at the same time. I can definitely say that the book changed me for the better when I read it for the first time back as a teenager. It also has an awesome illustrated edition.

Exactly.

The way I describe SLS is that for a long time, contractors worked to see how much money they could extract out of NASA while building the hardware that NASA would use to do interesting things (Apollo), slightly less interesting things (shuttle), and then mostly mundane (ISS).

Then the contractors realized that the only thing better than getting paid a ton of money to fly was getting paid a ton of money to not fly. Why should Boeing work hard to get SLS functional? It actually makes their work harder than continuing the delays, and it's not like being slow or making big mistake has cost them when it comes to incentives.

Have you read Simberg's "Safe is not an option"? It's a great discussion about taking risks when it's useful to do so, and not taking risks when you aren't doing anything interesting...

https://www.amazon.com/Safe-Not-Option-Rand-Simberg/dp/0989135519

This question gets asked all the time on this sub. I did a search for the term books and compiled this list from the dozens of previous answers:

How to Read the Solar System: A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Christ North and Paul Abel.


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.


A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.


Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan.


Foundations of Astrophysics by Barbara Ryden and Bradley Peterson.


Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by Pat Duggins.


An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything by Chris Hadfield.


You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station by Chris Hadfield.


Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the Space Transportation System by Dennis Jenkins.


Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010 by Chapline, Hale, Lane, and Lula.


No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time by Claus Jensen.


Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences by Andrew Chaikin.


A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin.


Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA by Amy Teitel.


Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas Kelly.


The Scientific Exploration of Venus by Fredric Taylor.


The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.


Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White and Richard Truly.


An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie.


Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley.


Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Clark.


A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.


Russia in Space by Anatoly Zak.


Rain Of Iron And Ice: The Very Real Threat Of Comet And Asteroid Bombardment by John Lewis.


Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John Lewis.


Asteroid Mining: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis.


Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris.


The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report by Timothy Ferris.


Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries by Neil deGrasse Tyson.


Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson.


Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson.


The Martian by Andy Weir.


Packing for Mars:The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.


The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution by Frank White.


Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.


The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne.


Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Oddyssey by Joseph Allen.


International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems by Hopkins, Hopkins, and Isakowitz.


The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene.


How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin.


This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows.


The Last Man on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.


Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Eugene Cernan.


Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.


The end

The usual advice is to learn your way around the sky with just your eyes and some binoculars before getting a telescope; you don't need anything more than that to learn constellations. I've also found these links helpful:

• Here's a beginner's guide with star charts for each month to learn the constellations. If you want to use the telescope you can also just point it at the moon and use the moon map to look at interesting stuff.
  
  
• This Week's Sky at a Glance gives you something interesting to look at every night that usually doesn't require a telescope. It also lets you know which planets are visible that week, when, and where to find them.
  
  
• Turn Left at Orion is a very popular beginner's telescope book with lots of things to find and how to find them. Worth getting.

yes.

It was shortly after he left Paypal if I remember right. He went overseas there with some people, met with them to try to buy rockets, they said he was crazy. The thing to keep in mind is, for that moment it was crazy. Spaceflights like this were always pioneered by governments because of cost, not companies, let alone individuals looking to make a company.

He pulled something off that is absolutely tremendous. He has his flaws... But I think we needed Musk; I bet he has inspired a whole new generation of scientists and engineers.

If you want to read more about this, check out the biography written on him, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. It was very good, and it puts into perspective some of his bigger goals.

From Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach (chapter 11)


> The zero-gravity fart has been a popular orbital pursuit, particularly on all-male flights. One hears tell of astronauts using intestinal gas like rocket propellant to "launch themselves across the middeck," as astronaut Roger Crouch put it. He had heard the claims and was dubious. "The mass and velocity of the expelled gas," he told me in an email that has forevermore endeared him to me, "is very small compared to the mass of the human body." Thus it was unlikely that it could accelerate a 180-pound astronaut. Crouch pointed out that an exhaled breath doesn’t propel an astronaut in any direction, and the lungs hold about six liters of air—versus the fart, which, as we learned from Dr. Murphy, holds at most three soda cans’ worth.

> Or the average person’s, anyway. "My genes have blessed me with an extraordinary ability to expel some of the byproducts of digestion," wrote Crouch. "So given that, I thought that it should be tested. In what I thought was a real voluminous and rapidly expelled purge, I failed to move noticeably." Crouch surmised that his experiment may have been compromised by the "action/reaction of the gas passing through "through the pants." Disappointingly, both his flights were mixed-gender, so Crouch was disinclined to "strip down naked" and try it again. He was heading to Cape Canaveral and promised to ask around for some other astronauts’ input, but so far no one is, as they say, spilling the beans.

Great book. If you get a chance to read it, it's chocked full of hilarious/disgusting/interesting stuff like this.

most of the costs come from developing the spacecraft and its life support systems, and then qualifying it to a level the operator feels safe with. 20 billion seems like a good number to wildy guess at.

if you want equations, they are in here https://www.amazon.com/Space-Mission-Engineering-Technology-Library/dp/1881883159

Yes, that is a good point. That was also detailed in the book I read.

If anyone cares, I think it's this book (I read at least two so I'm not 100% sure): https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/006230125X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1475082388&sr=8-5

Old but good: The High Frontier, with the studies for orbital colonies from the 70s.

There's also the recent "update" The High Frontier: An Easier Way.

You might really enjoy The Three Body Problem, a Chinese sci-fi book that explores the hungry eyes situation brilliantly.

Space Mission Engineering/SMAD is a pretty good general overview of space mission engineering and spacecraft design, if that's what you're looking for. That's the senior design textbook for my program, but it's written by a number of engineers at NASA and in the industry. Braeunig also has some good information on some basics of the science (and it's free), but it's mostly undergrad-level orbital mechanics and rocket propulsion.

Is there anything more specific (other than heat transfer) that you're looking for?

No thanks, I don't have a problem with r/space. People forget the "hide" button exists for posts they don't even want to see. I use it liberally.

I'd recommend this book though: http://amzn.com/0143117165

It's apparently on sale for less than $3 now. It's a great read.

When We Left Earth is a pretty good overview by Discovery.

Have you read Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything? Bill's a writer who pondered the same questions you've been pondering, and set out to learn exactly how he, and all people, came to be, beginning with the start of the universe and running through to the scientific discoveries and pioneers which enabled the modern age. It's a book I'd recommend to anyone, and one I especially think you would relate to, learn from, and enjoy.

BBC made an hour long documentary about this project and it's well worth the watch. It's available on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYoLcJuBtOw

There's also a book written by Dyson's son, although I have not yet read it so I can't attest to how good it is. This is it here: http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805059857

There is also a very good book about it by George Dyson who is Freeman Dyson's son.

https://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805059857

It is actually a plausible way to travel to another Star quickly.

Mary Roach touched on it in her book packing for mars. If you haven't read it I'd recommend it. Very entertaining and well researched.

In short, the answer is no. It came close to happening though.

http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/1469235919

Yep, kids on the way; had to sell his home and move in on the couch of another silicone valley investor to finish the first rocket launch that landed his first contracts. Said he was days away from being negative. This is an amazing read <EDIT harmless joke out> https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/006230125X

Here are some more cool stuff on Rotating Habitats if your interested.

Here is a video about them by this great Youtube channel Issac Arthur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8&list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu5OC3EOwqxQ&index=5

And here is the first book I read on them, written by the designer of this concept, Gerald O'neill himself
https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Space-ebook/dp/B00CB3SIAI

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is also awesome (someone else already responded with Stephen Hawking's book of almost the same name).

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171

Great book on the Shuttle and how it came to be:

"Into the Black" by Rowland White.

https://www.amazon.com/Into-Black-Extraordinary-Columbia-Astronauts/dp/1501123629

The New S.M.A.D

Google it, its the shit

Source : recently graduated aero/astro engineer

Edit: https://www.amazon.com/Space-Mission-Engineering-Technology-Library/dp/1881883159

You heard wrong. Kip Thorne, one of today's leading theoretical physicists, was intimately involved to ensure the science wasn't inaccurate. Here are some great interviews that discuss this:

• Science Friday
  
• Wired
  
• Scientific American
  
  Kip even wrote a book called The Science of Interstellar that goes into a lot more detail.

Into The Black was a good read

According to Steve Squyres, the lead scientist of the mission and author of this book, 90 days was what they expected. They hoped for more.

If you want your mind blown with some very cool cosmological theories, I suggest reading A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence M. Krauss). He's a famous atheist, but even a believer can read this book just for the science, it's very well-written.

George Dyson talks about his Dad, Freeman's work on the Orion also His book on project Orion



Freeman Dyson's 1968 paper detailing the Orion Nuclear Ramjet

"Our plan was to send [manned] ships to Mars and Venus at a fraction of the cost of the Apollo program".

There would have been 150 people in a project Orion ship.

If we had utilised this technology we would have colonised Mars and the Moon by 1980.

Interview with Freeman Dyson about the Orion

Humanity will not become a space-faring species with chemical rockets alone.

This could have been the gateway to a real extra-terrestrial future for humanity

I'd strongly advise against getting a goto dob. They dont work that well and for the most part make it less likely you will use your scope.

Instead teach yourself how to star hop using:

https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundreds-Telescope/dp/0521153972


Then mount a telrad quick finder on your scope:


https://www.amazon.com/Telrad-Finder-Sight/dp/B0000ALKAN/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1502122336&sr=8-2&keywords=rigel+quickfinder


Dobs are all about setting the scope on the ground and getting to viewing quickly and easily, a cheap goto mount will just fight you in doing that.

Winning the lottery 50 times in a row has mathematical odds. Its unlikely, but possible. You dont need the supernatural for it to happen.

The same goes for matter popping into existence. Its entirely possible without a prime mover, intelligent force, space aliens or the flying spagetti monster. (see: https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468)

We dont even know if there was a "beginning". It may have always been. What sign tells you there was a beginning?

You cant go beyond science; its not a "thing"; its a way of observing your environment to learn more through proof. If you need to look for signs, its obvious you are looking for something that isnt there.

Roving Mars for the story of the MER rovers. The Smithsonian Book of Mars is a little outdated but it is cheap.

You might want to just check out the highly rated books at Amazon.

You might want to read The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. This series provides some interesting thoughts on your question.

Quite literally because the whole process the International Astronomical Union goes through to decide these things is political. The choice of words was a compromise. Technically, dwarf planets are not planets or a subset of planets, even though this might defy the common way we use words.

For further reading:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Killed-Pluto-Why-Coming/dp/0385531109

Amlong Crystal Solar System Crystal Ball with Crystal Stand https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00THHMU4Q/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_H4SrzbG8Z0R0X

[Noice] (https://www.amazon.com/Amlong-Crystal-Solar-System-Stand/dp/B00THHMU4Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497828200&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=solar+system+model&psc=1)

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming is a great read for anyone to fully understand why classifying Pluto as a planet just doesn't work.

Is this the creature you're remembering.

Also the book is Our Universe by Roy A. Galllant.

I actually just purchased the book for like 2 dollars because I've been nostalgia-ing on my childhood bad lately.

How I Killed Pluto and Why it had it Coming.

That's the premise of Rand Simberg in his book Safe Is Not An Option.

In a trial and error learning process we will make mistakes and there will be loss of property and possibly life. If we can't accept that, we're done -- some will argue.

I partially agree. I think focusing on improving the robotic state of the art and robotically establishing infrastructure on other bodies can largely mitigate risk to human life. But you will still lose expensive payloads in a trial and error process.