Solar System Experiments

With shuttle's end, a new space era begins

Richard Garriott paid a reported $30 million to ride Russian government Soyuz spacecraft, above, to the International Space Station in 2008. Garriott contends that privately funded space travel will be the new frontier for NASA after the space shuttle program ends. Atlantis, flying the 135th and final space shuttle mission, launched from Kennedy Space Center on July 8, inset.

There can be little doubt that humanity is destined to expand well beyond the confines of Earth. This expansion will be far more than a worthy adventure; it will create radical benefits for humanity here on Earth, too.

When the space shuttle arrived in 1981, it was revolutionary. It was the first reusable crewed orbital space vehicle.

The shuttle proved we could not only launch but also service satellites in orbit, as we have done with the Hubble Space Telescope. Over the years, it facilitated construction of the International Space Station, something no other vehicle could have done. For just over 10 years, humanity has lived nonstop beyond the surface of the Earth through the continuous occupation of the space station.

Today, we need vehicles that work beyond low Earth orbit, something the shuttle was never designed to do.

With the retirement of the shuttle program, many Americans are rightly concerned about the future of America's human spaceflight program. I have read innumerable headlines claiming that America is abandoning human exploration of space; nothing is further from the truth.

The new American space race has begun. This new race promises to create safer, cheaper spaceships that will explore farther, sooner. More importantly, in addition to exploration and fundamental research, this new era will return economic value from space resources like energy and minerals and microgravity research in fields such as biology.

For the past few years, NASA has been leading a bold new endeavor, challenging private industry to provide it not one but many vehicles to support its missions to and beyond the space station.

The new fleet is being built by both traditional aerospace companies and entrepreneurial startups. One has already flown in space and is scheduled to begin cargo service to the space station within a year and crew service soon after.

The new space race, driven by NASA objectives and awards, is rapidly changing the outlook for future human exploration of the cosmos for the better. Most Americans are not aware of the detail and importance of this new plan.

Chrome Experiments - "WebGL Solar System" by regis

From the Author:

This experiment is a N-body problem simulation. Using a simplified version of Barnes-Hut algorithm, we can compute the trajectories of thousands of massive bodies spinning around a larger one.
The asteroids merge when they collide.
With Google Chrome on Windows and a recent proccessing unit, you can reach 10 000 bodies.

Technology:

languages : WEBGL/javascript/php technologies : Barnes-Hut algorithm Used good advices of Gregg Tavares = http://www.youtube.com/watch?