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Monday, June 25, 2007 - 02:53 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

More Filler

The hours seem to slip by so readily :/

So here's some more random stuff - while at the NUS basketball courts, I noticed some workers maintaining the floodlights using some sort of portable winch box, thus lowering the top half of the pole down to ground level for them to inspect at their leisure.


Fun with MS Paint

I vaguely remembered then that the (older) floodlights at some other place instead had horizontal handholds jutting out of their top half for the worker to climb up and do his job. Now, if you ask me, bringing work to meet one is far better than going out of one's way to find work, not to mention safer too.

There are of course disadvantages too - constructing the pole to be able to fold in half probably is more challenging to engineer, or at least more costly; It might not be possible to reach the lamp without the right gear, while all one needed was a ladder and a good grip in the past.

Then again, in a world where a horde of Secondary Four students can climb their way up a eight-storey high fire lookout tree without any precautions whatsoever, heights shouldn't be that much of a concern...

After basketball, I was struck with a funny idea - what would it take for a private citizen to send a token to say, the Moon? The USA's Apollo program cost over a hundred billion dollars (adjusted for inflation), but that included the complication of getting fragile lifeforms there, and back. However, unmanned landings haven't been that hot either, with only the usual suspects like the USA, Russia, Japan, China, India and Germany involved.

Why? Money, most probably. Getting some rocket to the Moon is surely possible, but it wouldn't be profitable. The Americans bankrolled Apollo mainly to one-up the USSR at the peak of the Cold War, and after that first giant step for Mankind (and general snootiness versus the Commie Ruskies), the administration probably realised that there were more urgent uses for those billions.

Could a tiny payload, say a kilogram or so, be sent to the Moon on the cheap then, say in the range of a few tens of thousands of dollars? Considering how a huge bleeping (non-reusable) launch vehicle is required to boost the comparatively tiny spacecraft to the edge of the atmosphere, one must wonder if there is an easy way to lift the payload to the edge of the atmosphere. A hydrogen or helium balloon, maybe?

The nice thing is that there is no air resistance in space, so all the hypothetical rocket needs to do is to work against gravity, a force that diminishes quickly as the rocket gets further away. Also, since there's no provision for the rocket to return, no additional fuel needs to be catered for. One could imagine a teeny flag popping out of the spent rocket just for bragging rights.

Silly, maybe. But then I Googled "launch rocket with balloon", and found that some guys at Cambridge are doing it, at least the "into space" part. Best of luck to them.



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