Engineer Darrin Taylor Inspiration

Engineer Darrin Taylor is an engineer who has always liked space and looking at the stars but is not an astronaut or astronomer. He is also the founder of Outer Space Colonization which is dedicated to the goal of the colonizing outer space for human civilization.

You can view his website on this link http://www.outerspacecolonization.com/

Find out more about his inspiration on his work by reading along.

My inspiration to help enable astronauts get to Mars came from a maker who built a computer from simple logic chips and the art of building what is fun to build.  As an engineer I was thinking about how to build a primative computer that could be manufactured on Mars.  This computer would trade speed for simplicity and would only be fast enough to be attractive on Mars or a planet in a different solar system.  Because of this the act of designing it was more an expression of art than engineering which usually deals with doing the things others will pay you for.

My design relies on the speed of light that is 300000000 m/s (300000 km/s).  If two computers are 30000 meters (30km) apart then a radio message from one to the other takes 1/10000 of a second (0.1 milli-seconds).  This delay can be used as computer memory,  the computer can remember for 0.1 milli-seconds each way.

Now if the computer could operate at 1000000000 (1 ghz ) operations per second there would be enough time in that 0.1 milliseconds to store 10000 bits of information.  On new planets there is no one else using the radio waves so I could use all of the radio waves for this computer.  This allows multiple signals and multiple delays each able to hold 10000 bits of information each way.  Radio transmitters can be built to operate over many ghz of bandwidth allowing 32 copies of this delay to be possible 16 to go and 16 to return.

Now that the computer has 20000 sixteen bit words of memory how can the computer be simplified?  The answer is that all the normal functions of the computer get folded into the memory.  The computer only needs to move data from one location in memory to another, do very simple 1 bit logic and 1 bit math and jump to new addresses when needed.  Because the data is stored least significant bit first and fed in one bit at a time it's possible to use a simple 1 bit adder with carry to do addition or subtraction on large numbers using only 5 logic gates.  This is possible because the carry needs to be added to the next bit which is shifted in the next cycle.  Addition takes 16 cycles but only 6 gates.  Logic operations work the same way and take 16 cycles.  Normally computers take 1 cycle but have millions of gates compared to hundreds for this computer.

Because the computer can be designed to take such a very small number of gates it doesn't need to be build using silicon.  Silicon is better than vacuum tubes on earth but in space it's much easier to build a vacuum tube factory than a silicon computer factory.

Thinking about that computer led me to want to learn about how thrust works in space so I could build the computer on Mars.  There is a law in physics that says if you push something it always pushes you back based on its mass and velocity.  If you throw a rock you are heavy (mass) and it is light so it's hard to feel it push back.  But if you try and push the earth it is massive and you are light so you move and the earth moves very little in comparison.

This law is called conservation of momentum and it says that velocity times mass of you equals the velocity times mass of the stone or earth.  

In space,  NASA uses rocket fuel that throws itself using chemical energy as it burns.  The opposite push from the fuel pushes the spaceship.  NASA has to carry all the fuel and they always thought they wanted to throw the fuel as fast as possible so that less fuel is needed.  A spacecraft that is 1 ton needs 29.67 tons of fuel to make a round trip to Mars if it is going fast enough for human passengers to survive the space radiation (310 seconds specific impulse was used to calculate the fuel needed).  So NASA wanting to reduce fuel is understandable.

But there is another law called the conservation of energy.  This law says when you throw a rock the energy needed is mass times velocity times velocity divided by two.  This means if NASA tries to throw the fuel faster it will take more energy.  If they throw 2 times faster it takes 2*2=4 times the energy, 10 times faster 100 times the energy etc.  This is why ion propulsion takes so long to speed up, it's lack of enough energy that is limiting it.

I thought about magnetism as a kind of thrust.  The sun, Jupiter and earth are magnets and turning an electro magnet on and off in outer space allows you to pull the earth or sun.  Like pulling someone on a swing only when they are comming towards you this can be used as thrust.  Because the earth is heavy compared to your spaceship it hardly changes speed at all from your pull and the energy used is very small.

Now imagine this magnetic powered spaceship is called a brick.  We could build lots of bricks and put them in space.  Now imagine a different spaceship that is large compared to the brick.  This spaceship uses the bricks as its fuel.  This spaceship throws the bricks at a slower speed than NASA has been throwing their rocket fuel.  

So lots of bricks are needed but the bricks don't need to be carried because they can navigate to where they are needed.  So the spaceship is lighter and needs less thrust.  Imagine if you needed to carry all the water you need for a month versus using a drinking fountain when you are thirsty.  If you had to do that you would get hot and sweaty and need more water for a month and it would limit how far you can walk.  NASA has the same problem because they need to carry all their fuel from earth.

But "bricks" carry themselves so there is a large efficiency gain.  But the best part is after being thrown "bricks" can collect themselves and the large spaceship can reload each time it passes by a brick reloading station.  Previously NASA only got to use fuel one time but using bricks as fuel can be used over and over.

The computer idea was fun but probably will never be built.  A lot of engineering is art just for fun.  It's making the world the way you want it made in your mind.  But the idea of re-using fuel will one day send astronauts to Mars and back over and over again without needing new fuel.  Instead of magnetism it will use a solar sail but when I first thought it I was thinking about pushing the earth and two laws of physics.

If you enjoy art you may enjoy the art of building beautiful machines some will never be built but some may change the world.

Best wishes,

DARRIN Taylor