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Yes, they are edible, and have been on the menu for a long time. http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/antarctica2/ask/new/Peng uins_as_food_for_humans.txt The flavour is ok - sort of halfway between dolphin and bald eagle.

First of all, they are hardly simplistic little devices. NASA spent a fair bit of money and several years researching and development of the concept. No doubt Heinlein, Clark, or Asimov also discussed the idea of inflatable modules long before Bigelow heard about them.

NASA's Transhab project was originally intended to utilize inflatable modules for the ISS. Like most aerospace projects, it ran over budget and the program was cancelled before all of the technical challenges like reliable inflation (these are much more complex than a balloon) were solved. Bigelow bought rights on the NASA patents when he started his aerospace company, and has been working on ironing out the remaining design details and figuring how to reliably manufacture them for several years now.

Second, these are not quite as revolutionary as they sound. They do offer significantly more internal volume for the weight, but not a huge amount. I think it's about double for Bigelow's layouts. There is a lot of core framework, life support, etc equipment associated with each module. They also only address the issue of creating interior volume, not fueling, power, temperature control, docking, and all the other major parts of a space station. They also don't offer much benefit for certain ISS modules like Columbus, which has built in experimental stations that can't realistically be inflated and would be difficult at best to install in a SpaceHab module after inflation. However, the technology may later be applied in areas other than habitation. One proposal is replacing the aluminum trusses that support solar panels with inflatable tubes that become sufficiently rigid when pressurized. Third, they may actually be safer than current aluminum modules. The synthetic materials they are made from are even stronger than Kevlar, and layered just like the aluminum/mylar/whatever else currently used. The difference is that these are elastic, so they can be folded up conveniently for launch, and they maintain their outer shape via pressure rather than framing. The same radiation protection would be offered. When a micrometeorites do hit they will probably not be massive enough to penetrate the skin. If one does, you would have a slow leak that could be located and repaired. They aren't inflated to near their ultimate yield strength like balloons are, so a small breach would not immediately grow into a tear that would cause them to "pop."

Check out some of NASA's conceptual drawings for a better idea what these modules are really like.

During Bill MacArthur's flight (Increment 12), he lost his PDA for about 4 weeks. He was later doing some maintenance on some of the vents in the airlock, and it came shooting out of an out-flow vent, along with some other missing items. Apparently, it had gotten sucked into a vent somewhere, and had been sitting in a duct.
Things easily get away from you in the station if they're not tethered down or put back exactly where they came from.

They use an Inventory Management System to track inventory, but when you consider that there are over 30,000 individual items and locations onboard, it gets a little hard to manage.
It works well most of the time, but any inventory system is only as good as its data. If they forget to mark down where they put something, it could take ages to find.

When you have everything you could possibly need for living in, working on, experimenting, and maintaining a space station for six months, in an enclosed space the size of a few school buses, things can get kinda cluttered.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e12909.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e18578.html

Whole gallery here:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/ndxpage1.html

During Bill MacArthur's flight (Increment 12), he lost his PDA for about 4 weeks. He was later doing some maintenance on some of the vents in the airlock, and it came shooting out of an out-flow vent, along with some other missing items. Apparently, it had gotten sucked into a vent somewhere, and had been sitting in a duct.
Things easily get away from you in the station if they're not tethered down or put back exactly where they came from.

They use an Inventory Management System to track inventory, but when you consider that there are over 30,000 individual items and locations onboard, it gets a little hard to manage.
It works well most of the time, but any inventory system is only as good as its data. If they forget to mark down where they put something, it could take ages to find.

When you have everything you could possibly need for living in, working on, experimenting, and maintaining a space station for six months, in an enclosed space the size of a few school buses, things can get kinda cluttered.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e12909.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e18578.html

Whole gallery here:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/ndxpage1.html

During Bill MacArthur's flight (Increment 12), he lost his PDA for about 4 weeks. He was later doing some maintenance on some of the vents in the airlock, and it came shooting out of an out-flow vent, along with some other missing items. Apparently, it had gotten sucked into a vent somewhere, and had been sitting in a duct.
Things easily get away from you in the station if they're not tethered down or put back exactly where they came from.

They use an Inventory Management System to track inventory, but when you consider that there are over 30,000 individual items and locations onboard, it gets a little hard to manage.
It works well most of the time, but any inventory system is only as good as its data. If they forget to mark down where they put something, it could take ages to find.

When you have everything you could possibly need for living in, working on, experimenting, and maintaining a space station for six months, in an enclosed space the size of a few school buses, things can get kinda cluttered.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e12909.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e18578.html

Whole gallery here:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/ndxpage1.html

The "standard/metric" foulup you refer to is specifically a reference to the Mars Climate Orbiter that was lost in 1999 due to Lockheed Martin sending data to NASA in standard units where the NASA team receiving the data was expecting metric units.

I was working for LM at the time this occured. Even though we were an entirely different division of LM that had nothing to do with space exploration, we all felt collectively embarassed over this error. In the final postmortem of the event, I don't know how much blame falls on NASA's side of the fence, and how much falls to Lockheed Martin, but it is clear that the private sector is at least partially responsible for this mishap, if not more.

Furthermore, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission was part of a long series of missions that NASA designed under their revised "fast and cheap" philosophy they embraced in the 90s. The whole reason for that strategic shift in project design was to get more science done with less money, as well as distributing the financial risks of failure more widely. If you look at the Mars exploration projects of the last decade as a whole, then this strategy has been wildly successful with MCO only representing a single failure in an otherwise exemplary record. This is especially true with the Spirit and Opporunity projects, which have dramatically outlasted their original operating goals and have produced a fantastic ROI in space exploration terms.

So yes, lets have more X prizes, and private investments, and so forth. But simply regurgitating the idea that public sector projects are inherently inefficient and wasteful is a canard, and nothing more.

Heres a clicky for other challenges in NASA's Centennial Challenges programme.

Notice the very doable (slashdotters?) robotics one. 250k.

Actually, the article summary is a little misleading.

NASA's role has always been vision, specification, oversight, and operations. Design and construction have always been contracted out to the public sector, and to the universities.

Classic examples of this method are the Gemini and Apollo projects. NASA's document, Chariots for Apollo gives a fascinating account of how this process works.

Heck, most human beings wont recognize what you are talking about if you just said "\circle \circle*"

I might not know what he was talking about, but I could match it literally with other instances.

The real problem though, in this particular instance, is that he did not properly identify to himself what he wanted to search for on the web

Your search, by the way, is obtuse and relies on specific knowledge that only results in false hits.

Try something as simple as "latex+circle command". This one'll give you the answer in the first hit:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/latex/ltx-210.html

KFG

A quick check shows they'll all reenter within (at most) 5 to 15 years, which is within the usual safety standards. See some related NASA materials.

"NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/ "

NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?

If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.

"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."

Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.

But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.

http://linux.org.mt/article/space and http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/Linux InSpace.html

And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)

NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.

"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"

I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.

It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.

BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.

But Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...

Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.

But Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...

Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.

But Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...

Energy is indeed the only consumed resource besides rock. The process requires temperatures of around 1000C; these temperatures can readily be achieved using reflectors.
More oxygen is produced by the titanium-rich mare soil than by the prolific silica; it's like the difference between regular and premium gasoline. Rates of about 3.3% (by weight) are achieved using ilmenite at around 1000C in hydrogen, and rates of up to 5.5% using iron-rich glass. (Ilmenite, btw, is composed of oxides of iron and titanium, and makes up anywhere from 3% to 10% of lunar material.) In addition, the result is water vapor, iron metal, and titanium oxides. I'll take iron and titanium as building materials over silicon any day.
The question of dust on reflectors seems fairly simple, actually. Assuming one is using polished metal, rather than glass, the dust can be forcibly removed by positively charging the reflectors. Kind of like those ion air purifiers, only in reverse.
Composition maps: http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec04/LunarCrust.html
Table: http://www.neiu.edu/~jmhemzac/mooncomp.htm
NASA's earlier work on oxygen extraction: http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/ EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC048.HTML
Artemis project: http://www.asi.org/adb/04/03/10/04/oxygen-extracti on.html
Lunar simulant with composition tables: http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/ EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC050.HTML

Energy is indeed the only consumed resource besides rock. The process requires temperatures of around 1000C; these temperatures can readily be achieved using reflectors.
More oxygen is produced by the titanium-rich mare soil than by the prolific silica; it's like the difference between regular and premium gasoline. Rates of about 3.3% (by weight) are achieved using ilmenite at around 1000C in hydrogen, and rates of up to 5.5% using iron-rich glass. (Ilmenite, btw, is composed of oxides of iron and titanium, and makes up anywhere from 3% to 10% of lunar material.) In addition, the result is water vapor, iron metal, and titanium oxides. I'll take iron and titanium as building materials over silicon any day.
The question of dust on reflectors seems fairly simple, actually. Assuming one is using polished metal, rather than glass, the dust can be forcibly removed by positively charging the reflectors. Kind of like those ion air purifiers, only in reverse.
Composition maps: http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec04/LunarCrust.html
Table: http://www.neiu.edu/~jmhemzac/mooncomp.htm
NASA's earlier work on oxygen extraction: http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/ EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC048.HTML
Artemis project: http://www.asi.org/adb/04/03/10/04/oxygen-extracti on.html
Lunar simulant with composition tables: http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/ EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC050.HTML

I predict that if hydrogen can be extracted from regolith close to the surface, then a lot of that oxygen will be burnt down to make water. During the apollo missions oxygen had to be carried but more often than not water for cooling was the limiting factor for stays on the surface.

Its nice to see that people are working directly on this, even if it will be at least 15 years before anybody walks on the moon again.

I think you may be conflating two things. Java was used to write the command and control system (Maestro), which does a combination of data visualization, collaboration, command and control. Java 3D and Java Advanced Imaging technology are used in the software that renders and interprets the realtime images captured by the Rover. NASA has even made a stripped down version of the software that you can download so you can view a simulated 3D landscape and drive the Rover around in it (see here http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/relatedsites/). However as far as I know the computer onboard the rover itself does not currently run Java and I don't know of any upgrade plans.

The upgrade is a software upgrade. But it's not an easy task to do this at such a distance. Two way communication is a painbecause of the lag time. I can't remember the exact time, bu I believe the lag is about 20 minutes. They use a specialised protocal that was designed to handle such extreme lag. The protocol is PROXIMITY-1 SPACE LINK PROTOCOL (specs). They are verry carefull to make sure they dont have to reset the rover the hard way (A.K.A. reset-button) after updates and even during normal operation. I believe they build in all kinds of auto-reset features so the rover could reset itself.

I don't find it amazing, but part of a steady evolution.

Spacecraft autonomy software was a high-risk technology evaluated with Deep Space One, back in 1998-2001.
http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/

The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which flew aboard the EO-1 satellite mentioned in TFA
http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/
even used autonomy software related specifically to clouds. The AES delivered results in 2003-04, from looking at that link, though TFA would seem to imply that the effort is ongoing.

And of course autonomous operation software is a research focus in countless terrestrial projects.

I do see ongoing references to the seemingly never-ending Geek problem of bandwidth. I expected better from NASA, although I can't think why. They've had bandwidth problems for years.

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/advmiss/#bandwidth
would seem to be a good information source. There's a lot to go through on that site, and none of it might answer my real questions:

- What will it take to create a scalable bandwidth solution?
- Who's working on it, and what progress has been made?
- Is it an international effort?

I'd like to see a lot more data coming down and being archived. There's a long history of discoveries have been made or confirmed through a review of old data. Another good use for recent data mining advances, as opposed to undermining our privacy, selling us more useless widgets, etc.

Autonomy at the tip of the spear must surely be regarded as a Good Thing (tm). I just hope it's not masking another, more fundamental, weakness in the system. It wouldn't surprise me to find that this is the case. Building infrastructure isn't sexy, and in these days of falling science budgets...

I don't find it amazing, but part of a steady evolution.

Spacecraft autonomy software was a high-risk technology evaluated with Deep Space One, back in 1998-2001.
http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/

The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which flew aboard the EO-1 satellite mentioned in TFA
http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/
even used autonomy software related specifically to clouds. The AES delivered results in 2003-04, from looking at that link, though TFA would seem to imply that the effort is ongoing.

And of course autonomous operation software is a research focus in countless terrestrial projects.

I do see ongoing references to the seemingly never-ending Geek problem of bandwidth. I expected better from NASA, although I can't think why. They've had bandwidth problems for years.

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/advmiss/#bandwidth
would seem to be a good information source. There's a lot to go through on that site, and none of it might answer my real questions:

- What will it take to create a scalable bandwidth solution?
- Who's working on it, and what progress has been made?
- Is it an international effort?

I'd like to see a lot more data coming down and being archived. There's a long history of discoveries have been made or confirmed through a review of old data. Another good use for recent data mining advances, as opposed to undermining our privacy, selling us more useless widgets, etc.

Autonomy at the tip of the spear must surely be regarded as a Good Thing (tm). I just hope it's not masking another, more fundamental, weakness in the system. It wouldn't surprise me to find that this is the case. Building infrastructure isn't sexy, and in these days of falling science budgets...

I don't find it amazing, but part of a steady evolution.

Spacecraft autonomy software was a high-risk technology evaluated with Deep Space One, back in 1998-2001.
http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/

The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which flew aboard the EO-1 satellite mentioned in TFA
http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/
even used autonomy software related specifically to clouds. The AES delivered results in 2003-04, from looking at that link, though TFA would seem to imply that the effort is ongoing.

And of course autonomous operation software is a research focus in countless terrestrial projects.

I do see ongoing references to the seemingly never-ending Geek problem of bandwidth. I expected better from NASA, although I can't think why. They've had bandwidth problems for years.

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/advmiss/#bandwidth
would seem to be a good information source. There's a lot to go through on that site, and none of it might answer my real questions:

- What will it take to create a scalable bandwidth solution?
- Who's working on it, and what progress has been made?
- Is it an international effort?

I'd like to see a lot more data coming down and being archived. There's a long history of discoveries have been made or confirmed through a review of old data. Another good use for recent data mining advances, as opposed to undermining our privacy, selling us more useless widgets, etc.

Autonomy at the tip of the spear must surely be regarded as a Good Thing (tm). I just hope it's not masking another, more fundamental, weakness in the system. It wouldn't surprise me to find that this is the case. Building infrastructure isn't sexy, and in these days of falling science budgets...

If you want, read Steve Squyers book "Rovign Mars". It'll give you a better understanding of why the rovers lasted as long as they did. They're built like tanks with proven technology. There was nothing flashy about what went into those robots, it was all tried and true.

They were originally supposed to last for 90 sols, or Martian days. They've now gone far past the origianl design goals and the benefit has been lots more data about Mars. Spirit is currently on it's 853rd sol. http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/

But NASA has decided instead to throw away all of that and spend money to develop a new, bigger probe, the Mars Science Labratory. It's a shame that the limited science money NASA gets isn't being spent in the most efficient way possible on stuff that we know to will give excellent scientific data, but instead is used for these kinds of big budget employment makers.

The parent post to this one is somewhat on target. There are numerous reasons for the ozone hole.

The most specific reason for the ozone hole was cold. It takes a temperature of -205 Deg C to create the atmosphere conditions where ozone does not form in presence of sunlight. As a result the "Hole" was a cold spot. The conditions being suppressed in the cold spot, they reverted back with a vengance when the air hit warmer locations. Typically the southern habitable regions saw their Ozone levels rise by nearly double as the "Hole" formed. ( See the Total Ozone Measurment System TOMS site) To add to the nutty stuff over ozone holes, this never formed when any appreciable sunlight could fall in the affected area anyway and the hole always closed by the time appreciable sunlight appeared in the area.

The correspondence to the ozone hole and Mt Erebus volcanic activity was always 1:1. The existence of chlorine in the upper atmosphere was in that area about 99.9% natural in origin. The mountain pumped massive amounts of material into the atmosphere swamping anything man did.

The price paid for this nutty behavior by some "scientists" was very high. In the world as a whole it represented the replacement of very long lived very safe and very efficient CFC based refrigeration systems with ones which use toxic gasses and which are much shorter lived and less in energy efficiency. The resulting energy demand is in no small part the cause of the current pinch in energy supplies the world is experiencing at this time and was completely unnecessary. The whole process was generated by Dupont and the fact that their CFC patents were running out.

Basic Physics of the CFC's indicated why they were used and why they never caused this problem. The first most important reason for their selection was that they were inert and did not mix with air for any extended period. They separate from air like oil and water. CFC's by this means were safe to work with, and did not ruin machinery. They were heavier than air so they fell to the ground and penetrated into the ground rapidly. CFC-12 has the same mass ratio to air as a cannonball of solid steel has to a lake it is being shot into. Since lakes are unlikely to have cannon balls floating around on the top of them, it is just as likely for CFC's to migrate to the upper atmosphere and subsequently float around up there.

Just for the Moderators: This isn't troll. It's fact. If you don't like it post what you don't like or go get a life. You still will not change the facts.

I am aware that some people have attached themselves to this like "Ozone Hole" stuff like it was a religion. I am sorry if your feelings get hurt by the facts. We have damaged our world greatly as we bought off on this nutty theory of "Ozone and CFC's." The damage is quite severe. Our atmosphere is highly polluted by wasted energy generation that this caused. People see economic troubles and the earth is damaged by the energy shortage that results. I appreciate the desire to help and make things better. This time you had good intentions but bad delivery. Try improving your aim! Shoot at real targets and bring real solutions please. We need them.

So yeah, the planet is ridiculously big, and it's unimaginably old. But there are a lot of us, and we are going to town on that atmosphere.

It was impossible for comets to glow by themselves, let alone in ultraviolet, but they do.

It was impossible for a 25cm remnant to remain from the object forming a 43km wide impact crater on Earth, but it did.

It was impossible for a flat channel 3000km long to form, but Valles Marineris exists on Mars, 10km deep and 90km wide and more. Carved by what? Hardly water, since roughly half of the carving was done uphill.

These are a few of the many impossible things which exist apparently for our collective puzzlement. Many.

Yeah, it's probably directly in proportion to the solar wind velocity in all directions. Which varies. We're currently at solar minimum right now in the 11 year cycle which means the field does not go out as far. See also Space Weather.

Taking into account that the technology in these machines is from the 70's, perhaps even from the 60's.. and they're still going strong. After almost 30 years in space, high speeds (vs. dust/debris), radiation, the cold, and such a weak signal when it reaches Earth:

"... located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level."

I really recommend checking out the Voyager's 'Did you know?' website, for more amazing facts. You'll be amazed!

Finally I'd like to take my hat off to all the people who have helped to realize this project from the beginning to this very day. I often wish I'd have been born 2 decades earlier with a chance to be part of such an amazing (engineering) team!

Taking into account that the technology in these machines is from the 70's, perhaps even from the 60's.. and they're still going strong. After almost 30 years in space, high speeds (vs. dust/debris), radiation, the cold, and such a weak signal when it reaches Earth:

"... located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level."

I really recommend checking out the Voyager's 'Did you know?' website, for more amazing facts. You'll be amazed!

Finally I'd like to take my hat off to all the people who have helped to realize this project from the beginning to this very day. I often wish I'd have been born 2 decades earlier with a chance to be part of such an amazing (engineering) team!

There's a great article with pictures of the Earth's magnetic field at: this UK physics site...scroll down to see the "bow shock," but there's no picture of the tail, they cut the picture off early. A great animation of the Sun's impact on the rotating magnetic field of the Earth can be seen at this NASA site.

Earth's shape changes due to climate

*You should be ashamed* by your lack of professionalism.

Well said.

I was originally going to bash Java and make a few snide remarks about Ruby on Rails. But yes. Slashdot is terrible. Calling it yellow/tabloid journalism is too good. I don't know why I keep reading the site.

That being said I'm still going to bash Java (and Ruby). I've found a really wonderful video demonstration on why Java sucks ass for developing web apps. So I really don't care if Java becomes truly open source or not.

If you read the NAIS business opportunity (link), then you will see that they are not asking for public ideas, but for corporate sponsors.

"... seeks one or more unfunded collaborations ..."

"... NASA will consider negotiating brand placement, limited exclusivity (defined above) and other opportunities ..."

They want Nike to do their work for them in exchange for the swoosh being used in the educational materials generated or something. You would have to be interested in marketing to school kids to make this work for you. But that smacks of bringing ads into the classroom, which is a bad thing IMHO.

I'd rather see them sell ads like NASCAR, get corporate sponsors for painting logos on rockets or the shuttle. That would at least be honest advertising. Marketing to kids through education sounds like a deceptive practice.

For a long time, the Aviation Safety Reporting System has made it possible for people to report a dangerous situation without risking getting stomped. There's no way to tell how many lives it has saved but everyone uses it as a prime example of first-rate systems safety engineering.

"Scientifically irrelevant"...I'm sorry, what other platform allows direct monitoring and control over long-term microgravity and exo-atmospheric experiments? Perhaps the benefit/cost ratio of the experiments is questionable, but there is not currently anything equivalent to the laboratory capabilities it offers.

The ISS has supported several hundred past and present science experiments and the numbers will pick up fast once the remaining modules are added and the crew is increased to a standard full complement of 6.

"no astronomer uses forth these days"?? http://forth.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Actually, the $1:DVD cost is probably right, if they mailed it in a paper wrapper with instructions. And though they'd probably have to mail only one to each household, which is about 113M. NASA's 2005 budget was over $16.2B. A $113M expense would be under 0.7% (<<0.005% of the Federal budget), which would deliver promotion of the rest of the budget's product to every citizen it's working for. Which would likely increase support for bigger NASA budgets and better national programs, reflecting Americans' actual prioritization of NASA work among all government work. And a Netflix type of distribution contract at competitive bid (including the USPS) would invest in American info distribution infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost at least $300B, and will likely cost at least $1T, not to mention diverting lots of other government productivity from other services. But Americans get to see the "best" parts of the Iraq War on TV, so it gets lots of promotion, while most of NASA's valuable and popular work happens in the dark.

So thanks for recognizing the thrifty economics of a program to educate every American about NASA's work. Your support for my NASA career is thoughtful, but certainly overkill. NASA needs more educated and communicative citizens like me, rather than extra on-budget staff. If they can perform promotion like the one I suggested, with such great ROI, in keeping with NASA tradition.

We go through this every time with you shuttle fan-boys:

What is this hey-dey you speak of where we were launching shuttles to ths ISS every month:

2002: 5 missions, 4 to ISS
2001: 6 missions, all to ISS
2000: 5 missions, 4 to ISS

NEVER have we sent a mission a month (for more than thre months) to the ISS.

Look it up for yourself.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlem issions/list_main.html

The robot used for this mission was developed by SRI International, a non-profit research firm; one of whose spinoffs is Intuitive Surgical. This two-armed robot was developed initially for open trauma surgery for the military, and was upgraded before the NEEMO 9 mission as a deployable system. Here's a link with some information (note that the pictures are rather old; the surgeon side of the system looks different now):
http://www.sri.com/esd/med_devel/telepresence.html

You can read more about the mission here and see a very cool picture of the robot suturing with fish in the background:
http://www.sri.com/news/releases/04-20-06.html

Not long after suturing was demonstrated at lunar latency; rock samples were picked up with the same manipulators, demonstrating the application flexibility of the robotic arms.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/behindt hescenes/training/html/jsc2006e13997.html

Dude, you could at least give some attribution to http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/ques tions/question19.html

I reckon aliens would have a hard time picking up TV stations from mars, never mind light years away.

Assume that the aliens have a radio telescope that is comparable to the one at Arecibo. I don't have numbers on its sensitivity after recent upgrades, but a ball-park figure I have heard is that it can pick up a cell phone transmission within a sizable part of the solar system near earth.

A rough calculation reveals that perhaps a 10^14 W source at the centre of our galaxy (2.2 x 10^4 light-years away) could be detected by Arecibo. Compare this to terrestrial television (~10^6 W) and radio (~10^5) stations, and you'll find that it could be on the edge of possiblility for Arecibo to pick up TV transmissions from a planet 41 light-years away.

Assuming that Bode's Law applies there, it's a reasonable assumption that a planet resides within the habitable zone around that star.

However, unless it has through some miracle of coincidence a large moon to provide the environment of constant change via tides and crustal flexing, I doubt that Darwinian processes would have had the time to produce an ecosphere like ours. Maybe something along the lines of the Paleozoic era might be possible.

But then, with an asteroid belt comes catastrophic encounters, and maybe that would be the larger driving influence for Darwinian change.

But in any case, I doubt that the coincidence would be strong enough to extend to a similarity of geography that would support an ecological mechanism similar to ours, that regulates climate change between two quasi-stable regimes.

Quite possibly, once life developed on such a world it might quickly drive it into a greenhouse state like Venus, without the mechanisms that switch us between greenhouse and icehouse that we have.

How is DART different from Progress (the Soyus based supply ship)? I thought Progress carried out automated docking to the ISS?

DART is NASA's shining example of technology that will move the Agency towards safer, more reliable and affordable access to space.

It was called DART. The NASA page has headlines like "DARTing Into Space" and "DART Seeks its Target: NASA launches a DART to target an orbiting bull's-eye". The DART has hit its target now, what's the problem? ;-)
Also, DART stands for "Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology"; I'd say it hasn't been a particularly good demonstration now, has it? (Reminds me of the Windows 98 launch (or oh, the recent CES as well).)
And notice from the article that this incident actually happened last year!

Offical NASA writeup available here: http://patriot.net/~cary/slashdot/dart_mishap.html

Made from original PDF available here: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/148072main_DART_mishap_ove rview.pdf

(I hate PDF's for simple text things like this)

--
NoFluffNews.com - Currently in development but seeking journalists and editors

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/30jan_smel lofmoondust.htm/

And perhaps this site will explain why Bart Sibrel is a lying, attention seeking con artist without a clue. When the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter takes pictures of the Apollo hardware on the surface I would dearly love to see some documentary crew follow him around and hound him relentlessly like he does to the astronauts. Not that he won't just claim that the new evidence is faked as well.

Last I heard they'd only use 486s. But this was in 2000.

No, not 486s. The CPUs in the 5 shuttle computers are AP-101S, which are upgrades from the AP-101B. iirc, the upgrades were circa 1991.

This CPU has its lineage in IBM 360 mainframes. See http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/computer s/Ch4-3.html or http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shut ref/orbiter/avionics/dps/gpc.html or even