Bucket list

[cjsmith]

Someone I value asked about my bucket list. I haven’t really ever written one up, but I know the green flash was on it.

I don’t have very much on there. Not any more, anyway. Id like to see Victoria Falls some day. Bucket list item? Perhaps. Maybe Machu Picchu, too. Maybe the northern lights (I’ve tried). The rest is stuff I can’t control.

What are some things on your bucket list?

Comments

[cjsmith]

Oh wow! I’d give up everything else on my bucket list if I could do even one of those last few.

[siliconshaman]

I have a very short bucket list...

[cjsmith]

I hear ya!

If I thought I had even a prayer of success, I'd say my bucket list had one item: get to space. But I'm sort of automatically deleting things I know won't happen, like be pain free for 24 hours, be perceived as a full and worthwhile individual human being, and be able to levitate. And get to space. :)

[siliconshaman]

Well.. I've kinda got the "get to space" thing already figured out. Not easy, but do-able, just.

However, the "getting back down again alive" part..not so much.. I mean, the 'getting down' part yes..but that last bit's proving to be a tad tricky to work out.

There's also the 'surviving long enough to appreciate the view' part as well..

[cjsmith]

Surviving long enough to appreciate the view is definitely a key part. (Being willing to ditch everything else on my bucket list in order to get to space means that maybe the getting back down alive again part isn't an absolute requirement. I don't value my life as highly as most people seem to value theirs, and while I get a lot of flak for that, it also makes certain possibilities comprehensible...)

[siliconshaman]

Yeah... not much point doing it if you can't enjoy the view, even for only short time. I think I'd consider it if I didn't have much time left anyway, for whatever reason. It's not the life I value, it's the time and the potential to do and see other stuff in it.

I mean, I want to live forever. The future sounds like it could be fun! Come to think of it, that's one to add to the bucket list, watch the sun go nova in about 14 billion years time [from a safe distance!]

But... if you're gonna die anyway, might as well go out in blaze of glory! Either on reentry, or in 14 billion years time..

[cjsmith]

The future could indeed be fun! I might be a person some day. That would be even better than space.

And yeah, blaze of glory sounds just right. In either of those cases.

[siliconshaman]

*raised eyebrow* You mean you're not a person now?

And yeah, if we're talking going out gloriously.. then a mil-surplus high altitude flight suit, a chair bolted to the nose of a home-made atlas missile [basically, a metal cylinder thirty foot long and 7 foot wide, stuffed with a mix of sugar and perchlorate oxidizer], and a joystick to fly it with.

You'd get about 20 minutes of freefall, and then burn up on reentry. But it would be worth it I think.

[cjsmith]

No, I'm seen as female now. If I could live long enough, perceptions might shift such that we are human beings.

Wow, that is quite the setup. Physiologic limitations might make that flight tough to control, but... maybe control isn't the biggest goal. I might want something to make sure the burnup was at least *quick*. And yeah, might be worth it.

[siliconshaman]

calculated G-force on take off would be about 6 to 7 gees, for around 140 seconds, tapering off to under 3 gees for 3 minutes after q-max.

But yeah, control would be a bitch... but all you'd have to do is keep the nose pointed up at about 60 degrees, and aim roughly east, to take advantage of the earth's rotation.

It's based off one of the early ICBM designs, just a big old solid fuel bucket of boom! Most of the guidance is ballistic. You'd get 45 minutes of flight, with 20 minutes of freefall before you hit atmo again... although, add a wooden ablative heat shield [yeah, really! that's what they used to use] and if you can get a 15 degree pitch, you could skip off the troposphere and double the flight time or better.

There's even a slight chance of survival then... at least until you hit the ground. parachutes are good idea, but they add weight. I figured, if you could somehow bail out after reentry, then you only need a chute large enough for a person... but you'd still need to slow down below Mach 1 first.

It gets complicated the more you try to do, and complicated decreases the probability of everything working right and being built on a budget.

[cjsmith]

Mmm, I've never experienced over 6G. Five and a fraction, yes. Six no. Don't know how I'd do at seven!

Agree that complexity adds to the failure rate. Still... intriguing. Very intriguing.

[siliconshaman]

There's a chap in Barnsley building something similar, he's got sponsorship from Tate&Lyle because he's using sugar as a fuel. It's smaller, and rather more complicated, but the unmanned test flight hit 89 miles altitude. [he was hoping for a 100, but there was a glitch.]

A staged rocket, would cut the gee force down to a manageable 4g, spreading the acceleration over a longer boost phase. But that significantly increases the complexity again.

The other solution would be to use a hybrid motor, solid fuel and nitrous oxide gas, this would mean you could pack more fuel into the rocket and have a more controllable burn, allowing you to have smoother acceleration. It would also allow you the option of turning the motor off in event of something going wrong. It's more complicated as motor, but it reduces the complexity of the rocket, because you can build it with enough fuel, and basically do something like space X do with their rockets and slow down.