Shanghai’s underground hotel
In an abandoned quarry at the base of China’s Tianmenshan Mountain, 30 miles outside Shanghai, an extraordinary hotel is taking shape. At a cost of £345 million, the InterContinental Hotels Group is building a five-star resort that will boast two floors above the top of the 330ft rock face and another 17 storeys below ground level, two of which will be underwater. If construction goes to plan, the first guests at “the world’s lowest hotel” will check-in by the end of 2017.
Trip to Mars
As it stands, if you felt the urge to make the 54-million-mile trip to Mars, it would take you nine months. That’s around 39 weeks dealing with cosmic radiation, asteroids and wastage to your bones and muscles.
But VASIMR could change all that. Set to be tested aboard the International Space Station in late 2017 to early 2017, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket is an experimental engine that, if it works, could get us there in three months.
To simplify enormously: existing chemical rockets only produce short bursts of speed as they burn a vast amount of fuel in one go, but at a relatively low velocity. By contrast, VASIMR takes a tiny bit of propellant (plasma), heats it to very high temperatures (two million degrees centrigrade) using radio waves, then uses magnetic fields to push it out at extremely high velocities. The result is a steady, continuous acceleration to higher speeds, using far less fuel.
【新年新科技】相关文章:
最新
2020-09-15
2020-09-15
2020-09-15
2020-09-15
2020-09-15
2020-09-15