Slashdot Mirror

So your hair follicle will be frozen solid and blasted into oblivion by cosmic rays over the millenia. Big deal. What everybody really wants is to get to space alive. I've had an idea for quite some time that could be expanded to cover this option ... and adding YOUR VERY OWN DNA (YVOD, registered trademark) might just provide the funding required....Basically, there are some bacteria that love heat and acid, and Venus just happens to have that environment in cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. So let's get space colonization underway and send these little guys on the ride of their life. Before they go, we could add plasmids spliced with YVOD (tm) and instead of inert frozen DNA, it would actually be active in the bacteria, contributing to its evolution and creation of the Venesian ecosphere by expression of your non-bacterial proteins. This isn't a nutty idea, already there is bacterial ecosystems being discovered in Earth's clouds. Any remaining dot-com millionaires out there who want to provide seed (pun) funding, I actually AM a rocket scientist and would love to get a project based on this idea (minus the plasmids, even) off the ground....or even just start a discussion about it.

I'm working with a suite of ancient fortran codes right now (written between 66-78) and have seen some similar problems. For instance, I had an array construct in a common block which was dynamically resized in a subroutine; it went from dimension 199 to dimension 99. Just a typo on the part of some long-dead programmer, and apparently it compiled and ran fine on the Amdahl it was written for. However, surprise surprise, it does not on the Microsoft Fortran compiler which I am forced to use.

From the point of the redimensioning on, the next 100 or so memory locations were permanently assigned the value of the 100 lost array units. Even explicitly writing 'R=7.8d0 ' in the code would not change the value of R... it took me almost a week to find the problem, since the code was close to 50k lines long and the problem was in a common block which the step debugger skipped.

yech.

Anyway although Fortran can be frustrating, there is no way I would consider doing any kind of complex cfd in C. I've seen the source of a NASA code which is written in C- those guys must have spent every moment of every day cursing the idiot who told them "C is the future"... The code is (at least) twice as long as it needs to be, runs at least 50% slower than an equivelant code in Fortran, and is nowhere near as extensible as a code written in Fortran would be. As far as engineering programming goes, FORTRAN is really the best solution.

Wan Hu - medieval chinese rocket scientist (who may not have been exactly a rocket scientist).

Hmm, or maybe that was Larry Walters.
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National Weather Service AWIPS Map Database Catalog
http://isl715.nws.noaa.gov/mapdata/newcat/
All Sorts of U.S. ditigal map data in Shapefile format.

GOES Imagery On-line at NASA-GSFC
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/text/0readme.html
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/
http://www1.etl.noaa.gov/climsat/realtime.html
Your basic weather satellite data - get the latest imagery.

Virtual Terrain Project
http://vterrain.org/index.html
Another interesting open source project ...

DGPS corrections over the Internet
http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html
Of interest to GPS users. Neat!

National Weather Service AWIPS Map Database Catalog
http://isl715.nws.noaa.gov/mapdata/newcat/
All Sorts of U.S. ditigal map data in Shapefile format.

GOES Imagery On-line at NASA-GSFC
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/text/0readme.html
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/
http://www1.etl.noaa.gov/climsat/realtime.html
Your basic weather satellite data - get the latest imagery.

Virtual Terrain Project
http://vterrain.org/index.html
Another interesting open source project ...

DGPS corrections over the Internet
http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html
Of interest to GPS users. Neat!

Check out the original images that went into this composite here here
--

Will they have to take their Pathfinder images down too?

I can't seem to get to that press release. (Slashdotted with 7 posts? What server are they running?)

Here is a text version of the article.

Too bad it doesn't look like anyone's actually trying to communicate here. It's a little like observing that the sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening everyday.

Dancin Santa

Well, he doesn't develop software for them. He develops hardware solutions for certain problems. [All I'm saying. I know he has a clearance.] But he already holds a patent from when he worked for NASA/MSFC. He can license it to whomever he wants if NASA doesn't make it a part of some project on which they need its use.

I am more than aware of their successes sonny. In fact right now I am going through the fabulous Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, a great record of a time when NASA managed to do a bunch of stuff I'm sure it couldn't do today with all the funding in the world.

Most of what NASA has done since Apollo has been crap.

We only lost one Shuttle -- of four we could afford to build. It was the wrong vehicle for no particular job at all, tries to be everything and isn't very good at anything. With the same money spent on proven Big Dumb Boosters like the SV we'd have had a space station by 1985 and still be making trips to Luna.

The early planetary probes were incredible, holding together far beyond their life expectancies (even if they did leave the parking brakes on in the Pioneers, that was a joke). But we almost lost Pathfinder because of a computer glitch, and then had the string of failures I mentioned in my first post. Again, space travel is about the QC, but the QC has been supplemented by overachieving goals, tight budgets, and an unwillingness to let schedules slip so things can be done right. "Faster, Better, Cheaper" should have been named "Faster, Better, Cheaper -- Pick Two." Haste and thrift are a poor combination.

This is not a troll. I really believe in space exploration; I am sick to this day that Apollo was killed as ignominiously as it was, and that we are stuck with an albatross like the Shuttle and planetary probes whose computers crash, bearings seize, transmitters fail, and can't even manage to navigate past the planet without hitting it. We've had some successes since Apollo, like the Voyagers, Pathfinder, and NEAR. But even Galileo is crippled. I'm still waiting to hear what will fall off of Cassini before it reaches Saturn.

In 1969 we mobilized a force of about 1/2 million people to put two men on the Moon. We could probably do that (right) with today's technology with 50,000 or 100,000 people, a relatively small proportion of our economy -- and support more and more frequent missions. But we are trying to do it with more like 50 or 100 people. All the people who worked on NEAR could fit in a modest banquet hall. The plain fact is that we don't have the commitment any more; NASA knows this and is running scared. And when you run scared, you're looking over your shoulder instead of at your feet. That's why you trip.

there are images of this flight somewhere. you don't spend tens of millions on an X project without doing something as basic as taking video of it's launch. whether or not you will ever get to see them is another story, of course. here is an example of still images and an mpeg video from another pegasus launch.

Goldin isn't neccesarily averse to selling rides-- it's just that his price would probably be about 60 million dollars-- whether this is more economically justifiable is beyond me. Of course, his largish price tag would be undercut by the Russians, who operate under different economic constraints.

Goldin has also been, strangely supportive of James Cameron, obstensibly because the director is not particularly pushy about a launch date. Of course, it is likely that Cameron will direct/produce a film stemming from his experience, both enhancing the reputation of NASA, and encouraging the profitable commercialization of space.

Pasting "billboards" on the space station isn't neccesarily crass-- after all, ceratin functional components already bear the logos of their manufacturer, but it is rather unimaginative. It promotes the idea of space as an exotic tourist destination, rather than as a a research and development center. Nasa has a website dedicated to commercialization.

2. The recent cancellation (oh, they say it's just on hold, but it's cancelled) of the X-38 derived CRV. Without this, there can never be more then 3 permanent crew on the station. WITH it, the crew increases to 7. 3 crew is just about what it takes to maintain the station. If there were 7, you could maintain the station AND do science.

As others have said, they didn't cancel the crew escape vehicle, but the 7-member habitation module. However, as they state here, the habitation module will probably get built by the Italian Space Agency. So, everything is not lost..

I'm confused about how this is a science experiment. Apart from the confusing statement in the press release about gauging its mass in space (I assume they mean that they measured the resonant frequencies of the toy), from what I can see from a picture of the toy it is not an object that one would expect to behave much differently in zero-G because it appears to only be capable of rotational motion. I'm sure there are far more interesting Lego stuff they could have used (building a scale model of a space structure such as a boom used on the ISS would have been far more useful and could have been passed off as a legit experiment). They might as well have put a Pokemon card on the "mass measurement device." At least the Shuttle Crew (STS-54) brought along much more interesting toys with them (Picture 1 and Picture 2) and probably had more fun playing with them.

I'm confused about how this is a science experiment. Apart from the confusing statement in the press release about gauging its mass in space (I assume they mean that they measured the resonant frequencies of the toy), from what I can see from a picture of the toy it is not an object that one would expect to behave much differently in zero-G because it appears to only be capable of rotational motion. I'm sure there are far more interesting Lego stuff they could have used (building a scale model of a space structure such as a boom used on the ISS would have been far more useful and could have been passed off as a legit experiment). They might as well have put a Pokemon card on the "mass measurement device." At least the Shuttle Crew (STS-54) brought along much more interesting toys with them (Picture 1 and Picture 2) and probably had more fun playing with them.

I'm confused about how this is a science experiment. Apart from the confusing statement in the press release about gauging its mass in space (I assume they mean that they measured the resonant frequencies of the toy), from what I can see from a picture of the toy it is not an object that one would expect to behave much differently in zero-G because it appears to only be capable of rotational motion. I'm sure there are far more interesting Lego stuff they could have used (building a scale model of a space structure such as a boom used on the ISS would have been far more useful and could have been passed off as a legit experiment). They might as well have put a Pokemon card on the "mass measurement device." At least the Shuttle Crew (STS-54) brought along much more interesting toys with them (Picture 1 and Picture 2) and probably had more fun playing with them.

NAME: Anna L. Fisher, (M.D.)

NASA Astronaut

PERSONAL DATA:
Born August 24, 1949, in New York City, New York, but considers San Pedro, California, to be her hometown. Married to Dr. William F. Fisher of Dallas, Texas. They have two children. She enjoys snow and water skiing, jogging, flying, scuba diving, reading, photography, and spending time with her daughters.

Not that that proves that no one's ever "done it" in space. Cecil Adams of Straight Dope fame, however, throws water on the idea that anyone ever has "done it".

who will be the first to join the "100 miles high" club?

So, how 'bout this:
NASA Mission STS 51-A - if I remember correctly, Anna Fisher and Frederick Hauck were on the mission, and were (still are I believe) husband and wife.

Odds are good they're the first.

Metorites from Mars are well documented. (Consider doing a little research first next time.) Check out for example this JPL site or this NASA site; the latter says the following:

"Why are they from Mars? ...Most martian meteorites are 1.3 billion years old or less, much younger than typical igneous meteorites from asteroids which are 4.5 billion years old. They also have higher contents of volatiles than igneous meteorites. The conclusive evidence that the SNC meteorites originated on Mars comes from the measurement of gases trapped in one meteorite's interior. The trapped gases match those that Viking measured in the martian atmosphere....
How did they get here?Meteoroid impact is the only natural process capable of launching martian rocks to Earth. To be ejected from Mars a rock must reach the escape velocity of 5.4 km/sec, which is more than five times the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle. An impact capable of ejecting the martian meteorites into space would have left a crater of 10-100 km. The meteorites spent several million years in space before landing at various sites on Earth."

Metorites from Mars are well documented. (Consider doing a little research first next time.) Check out for example this JPL site or this NASA site; the latter says the following:

"Why are they from Mars? ...Most martian meteorites are 1.3 billion years old or less, much younger than typical igneous meteorites from asteroids which are 4.5 billion years old. They also have higher contents of volatiles than igneous meteorites. The conclusive evidence that the SNC meteorites originated on Mars comes from the measurement of gases trapped in one meteorite's interior. The trapped gases match those that Viking measured in the martian atmosphere....
How did they get here?Meteoroid impact is the only natural process capable of launching martian rocks to Earth. To be ejected from Mars a rock must reach the escape velocity of 5.4 km/sec, which is more than five times the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle. An impact capable of ejecting the martian meteorites into space would have left a crater of 10-100 km. The meteorites spent several million years in space before landing at various sites on Earth."

There's a pretty neat "view from the inside" set of reports on the DS-1 project at this JPL site. One of the more amazing parts is where the DS-1's star tracker quit working, so they've written software to take the picture from their main imaging camera, and search for guide stars in it.

While researching this topic for a paper, I ran across another (very hopefully) theoretical drive for probes involving an extremely thick lead shield and a large quantity of nuclear devices. In the words of Dave Barry, "No, I am not making this up". This was actually a proposed type of propulsion, the idea being that once the ship was far enough away from earth, one would just detonate nuclear devices behind the ship and use the resulting shockwave to propel the craft.

Now I'm quite sure of the immediate reaction to this idea from the people at any space agency in the world, but when you look at that, doesn't Antimatter seem more plausible? I mean, we have the capability (rediculously limited, mind you) to create antimatter, plus the apparent Antimatter Fountains in the universe (I'm not saying we'll be able to use them, just that they are out there).

It's a far stretch, but I have a feeling that if the technlolgy advances as far as it has (think the first production of antimatter about 6 years ago) we could feasibly see antimatter drives within our lifetimes.

On the other hand, the nuclear drive does solve the problem of what to do with the combined nuclear arsenal of the world

Hmmm, a quick search on Google turns up plenty of hits for this stuff - it's not THAT new.

http://www.afstrinity.com/
http://www.activepower.com
http://www.acumentrics.com
http://space-power.grc.nasa.gov/ppo/projects/flywh eel/papers/powertrades-oct98/ - a NASA study from 1998

All with URLs displayed, for you who fear goatse.cx. Somehow, this doesn't look like that new of a technology. (And besides, I thought a REGULAR UPS was heavy!)

Other stuff we'd mine from the Moon because for use in space because it's much easier to get things to space from the Moon than from Earth. There's plenty of aluminum and titanium, both of which we already use in space. And there are a lot of oxides.

Clementine data shows where there are iron deposits, of up to 20% iron oxide. That's a low-grade taconite, although the processing techniques used on Earth would probably have to be modified for lunar gravity. Northern Minnesota has been mining taconite for a while. I don't know how hard it will be to find all the ingredients for steel on the Moon.

New Lunar Prospector studies suggest that the Clementine data is correct in location, but might be overestimating the abundance. Well, if we want to mine we'll be doing more prospecting -- at least we have LP maps and Clementine maps.

I'm a huge proponent of the US space program, but let's face it. The enormous cost of sending a man to the moon should be enough to show us that the US would not have bothered if there had not been the intense competition for propaganda rights with the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union had not existed in the '50s and '60s, there would not have been a US lunar program then.

Why am I saying this? Because it's true. Today, the cost to put anything into low Earth orbit is about $10,000 per pound. Until that cost falls by a factor of 10 or more, NASA will continue to scratch for the money to conduct any sort of space exploration and the moon and Mars will be out of reach for manned missions.

Kubrick and Clarke looked at the rate of progress of space exploration in the '50s and '60s and extrapolated that by now, we'd have giant orbiting space stations that rotated to produce artificial gravity. They imagined we'd have the wherewithal to send an enormous manned spacecraft to Jupiter (Saturn in the book).

So, why don't we have any of those things? Ironically, it has less to do with current launch costs than with the economics of demand for commercial space launch and what's known as a "demand plateau." A recent study showed that demand for space launch capability is in a plateau region where reducing costs will not significantly increase demand until costs fall by a factor of 20 or more. In other words, there's a disincentive for commercial launch companies to reduce launch costs unless they can radically slash launch costs.

And don't even get me started on the dangers of orbital debris....

No history of the USA space program is complete without acknowledging the brave and selfless contribution of our porcine fellow travellers.

--Blair

Wonderful stuff to pick through.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Hubble would be blinded if it pointed at the Moon or Earth

Not True. Look here.

As far as I know, Mercury and the Earth are the only planets Hubble has never looked at.

I work with scientific spacecraft, and I'm still always surprised at the precision with which we can determine distances and positions of distant objects. SOHO is a million miles from Earth, and its radial position is known to within a few centimeters.

Barring egregious mismanagement, it's not that hard to hit celestial bodies -- we have the right tools for the job!

I work with scientific spacecraft, and I'm still always surprised at the precision with which we can determine distances and positions of distant objects. SOHO is a million miles from Earth, and its radial position is known to within a few centimeters.

Barring egregious mismanagement, it's not that hard to hit celestial bodies -- we have the right tools for the job!

NASA is in a sorry state right now. The space station is a lousy way to get out of the stagnation that we've been locked in ever since the shuttle program got underway. More competition from a Russian/Australian alliance (as well as from China et al) could be a very good thing, both for NASA and for global space exploration in general.

I'm for anything that would get us off our asses and have us out doing something interesting, like exploring Mars, rather than putting Yet Another Damn Tin-can in orbit. Someone at NASA has a huge David Bowie fixation, methinks....

Alright, first off... let's point the masses at some good reading

Some Basics Of Radio Astronomy

... and some really specific reading.

Chapter 2. The Properties of Electromagnetic Radiation (PDF)

Now that that's done, let's revisit your comment again. Please see the section regarding the inverse square law and EM propagation.

Thank you,
-Goodnight


Nietzsche on Diku:
sn; at god ba g
:Backstab >KILLS< god.

Alright, first off... let's point the masses at some good reading

Some Basics Of Radio Astronomy

... and some really specific reading.

Chapter 2. The Properties of Electromagnetic Radiation (PDF)

Now that that's done, let's revisit your comment again. Please see the section regarding the inverse square law and EM propagation.

Thank you,
-Goodnight


Nietzsche on Diku:
sn; at god ba g
:Backstab >KILLS< god.

Mars Network

If you look at the author list, they're all from MITRE or JPL. (read Defense Department sponsored.)

This is likely as important and visionary as (Rand Corporation) Paul Baran's 1964 "On Distributed Communications" series, and I would take it as a look at the near future.

So far as I can see, O'Neill's approach -- that of using nonterrestrial materials -- is the only way solar power satellites will ever prove economical -- with the possible exception of some proposals for urban illumination from earth-oribing mirrors. Sadly, I've seen very little in the way of studies of how to make non-terrestrial resource utilization work coming from mainstream corporate (or governmental) sources.

Since the early 1980s, when it became apparent that NASA's predictions for Shuttle economy were enormously optimistic, there has been a lot of thought put into how to create human-guided self-replicating raw-material processing facilities on the lunar surface and in space as a way of bootstrapping a huge industrial manufacturing infrastructure in those locations. This at the same time as technology has advanced in the relevant areas, thus bringing the cost of such a self-replicating "seed" facility, put in place in space or on the lunar surface, much closer to the level that might make private investors interested.

Ergo, what is needed is a "technology development initiative" by the government, but a release from taxation, those businesses that are pursuing relevant milestones toward the establishment of these capabilities.

This has been one of those Real Soon Now (tm) projects for years, for a simple reason - assuming your solar cells are made of silicon or something of similar density, the mass of an SPS (solar power satellite) big enough to generate useful amounts of power is prohibitive.

Here's my calculations:
Assuming a solar cell 1m to a side and 1mm thick, we get: 0.001m^3/cell * 2330 kg/m^3 (the density of silicon from Webelements ) = 2.33 kg per cell.

The solar irradiance at Earth's orbit is 1367.6 W/m^2 (from NASA National Space Science Data Center ). We currently have solar cells that can convert solar energy to electrical energy at about 30% efficiency in the labs. So, we'll assume that these can be made in bulk sometime in the near future. That yields 1367.6 * 0.3 = 410.28 W/m^2.

That seems like a lot, but consider - it four 100 watt light bulbs, or your computer (no monitor), if you have a system like mine. Lets say we aim for a generating capacity nearer to your average nuclear plant - 2 megawatts. Then we need 2,000,000 / 410.28 = 4,875 panels. At 2.33 kg each that's 11.4 metric tonnes. Not a huge amount, but then you have to add about that much in support structures, repair equipment, and the microwave emmitter, of course.

You will note that I have ignored losses in transmission, etc after the power is converted from solar to electrical. That is because these conversions are all very efficient, compared to the solar/electrical conversion, so they don't change any mass calculations by that much.

So how many SPS units would we need to power the world? From the CIA World FactBook , the US in 1998 used 3.365 trillion kWh, equivalent to a continous 384 million kW. We would therefore need about 200 thousand of the 2 megawatt stations considered above, for the US alone. If we wanted to be generous and extend this technology to the rest of the globe, we need over 2 million stations of this size.

Now, this is clearly not economical, not with launch costs in the neighborhood of $500/kg for the Shuttle (some dumb boosters can haul more for only $100/kg), but there is still hope. John S. Lewis, in his book Mining The Sky shows that building SPS units is economical, if you don't have to launch the mass of the solar cells. Instead, you bootstrap - launch a processing facility to a target Near Earth Object, set down and start making solar cells. The facility would have to be unmanned, but it would in a few years time produce enough cells to build a SPS.

One thing's for sure: You sure won't see any of this from NASA. They'd like it if you gave them the trillions of dollars it would take to build one of these, so they could fail miserably and call the whole idea impossible.

---------------

Secondly, the X-15 (for which eight Air Force Pilots were awarded Astronauts wings as they entered the official minimum altitude for "space") was launched from under the wing of a B-52. And this was a program that started in he late fifties! Also, when the Shutle lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, it's transported piggyback style back to Kennedy Space center in Florida by a specially modified NASA Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. They have "launched" orbiters this way before for the purposes of approach and landing testing, so there must not be any unreasonable risks in seperation at those speeds / altitudes or with massive craft like those.

For your third point... um... either way, verticle or not, you're going to reach *vast* speeds and move huge amounts of air. One way or another, you want as aerodynamic a design as you can reasonably build.

Your fourth point... We definatly would not have been able to, if we had to strap a saturn V to a jet. But with a starting point of 60,000+ Ft, and 600+ MPH before you even light the engines, you don't need that large a rocket to push you the rest of the way, especially with more modern techlology tht we have today.

Secondly, the X-15 (for which eight Air Force Pilots were awarded Astronauts wings as they entered the official minimum altitude for "space") was launched from under the wing of a B-52. And this was a program that started in he late fifties! Also, when the Shutle lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, it's transported piggyback style back to Kennedy Space center in Florida by a specially modified NASA Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. They have "launched" orbiters this way before for the purposes of approach and landing testing, so there must not be any unreasonable risks in seperation at those speeds / altitudes or with massive craft like those.

For your third point... um... either way, verticle or not, you're going to reach *vast* speeds and move huge amounts of air. One way or another, you want as aerodynamic a design as you can reasonably build.

Your fourth point... We definatly would not have been able to, if we had to strap a saturn V to a jet. But with a starting point of 60,000+ Ft, and 600+ MPH before you even light the engines, you don't need that large a rocket to push you the rest of the way, especially with more modern techlology tht we have today.

The interesting part of all this stuff is the material the controller is made of.

Some cut-off spandex from a jumpsuit, and coat button snaps sewn on backwards for the electrodes to connect to.

NASA Engineers with duct tape and a toolshed can do pretty much anything. :>

BTW, For info on the Neural Engineering project at NASA Ames who is working on this project, see The Neural Engineering group
------------------------------------------------ --

The RTG can't shield the neutrons... the sheilding would weigh more than the rest of the spacecraft.. Beyond Jupiter RTG radiation is that largest non-gravitational effect, larger than solar pressure even

Sorry, but effectively there aren't any neutrons. The P238 isotope used is used because it decays to U234 with the emission of an alpha particle and releases this energy fairly quickly, but not too fast - a half-life of 87.7 years. The alternative spontaneous fission only occurs .00000019% of the time. Effectively zilch.

Well, some of the Pioneer 10 sounds are already on the Internet, as WAV files. Did check Napster to see if they're already in there? (Technical details of the record are here)

As someone considering NASA after their Ph.D., I find your comment offensive and ill-informed. Government wages for scientists at NASA are decent, easily enough for comfortable living. But there is also job security, an above-average vacation policy (for the USA), and exposure to a wonderful variety of people and technologies.

Not to mention that some people might actually like helping their country, despite the fact that folks like you diss all public servants as "also-rans". Because US taxpayers have a screwed-up sense of what public servants deserve, there are some fairly draconian policies in place in various government institutions:
* All cups of coffee must be accounted for, and paid for individually
* No Christmas parties, even if financed by
discretionary money
* Spouses not allowed to ride in government
vehicles, even when travelling together
Obviously, I don't like your attitude. That said, it's quite possible you were making a joke -- an inappropriate joke, in my opinion. How would you like it if your company couldn't hold a Christmas party, despite a year of record performance?

Your comment is certainly not "informed". Consider the following data, all found via Google at
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/HR-Education/workfor ce/endofy99.html:
* 74% of NASA's workforce have a Bachelor's
degree or higher.
* 34% have a Master's or higher
* 10% have a Doctorate
For an agency with 17,000 employees, that's not bad. How does your company stack up, Mr. Fancy Pants? Here's some more info:
* Average salary across all NASA's scientific
and engineering employees: $79,000
* Average salary across all NASA's employees,
regardless of job: $69,000
* Average salary of scientist or engineer at
NASA's headquarters: $103,000
* Average for same at Ames Research Center:
$86,000
* At all of NASA's centers, scientists and
engineers have higer average earnings than
professional administrators -- music to my
ears!
Remember that these are averages, not maximum salaries. Also, consider that NASA has 17,000 employees, though I don't know how many are scientists or engineers. Given that 35% percent have an advanced degree, this is likely to be a large number. At any rate, these numbers are just fine, if you're not a mercenary.

It is very interesting to look at the top ten reasons people remain federal employees. You can see this list here.

-Paul Komarek

This troll also goes by Nemesis on the sci.physics.relativity newsgroup. He's a popular killfile item. He really likes to call people "prevaricating little lapdogs." This means he knows how to use a thesaurus and possibly a dictionary as well. He seems only capable of ad hominem attacks.

Ack! He doesn't seem to be able to tell difference between a map and the actual road.

from the Simpsons' Episode: $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling):
Mr. Burns - "Quick, Smithers! We'll take the Spruce Goose. Hop in."
Waylon Smithers - "But that's just a model."
Mr. Burns, cocking a revolver - "I said, 'Hop in.'"

On the actual subject of the article: That is simply fascinating. I would like to see them add an experiment to the proposed Pluto probe to study this phenomenon further. Pluto-Kuiper Express

Voyager is more advanced than anything that NASA has produced lately.

Based on what criteria? The processing power of its computer? The sophistication, compactness and sensitivity of its instruments? The Voyagers were marvels of 1970s technology, but current probes can definitely do more for less.

The difference between Voyager and current proposals is that Voyager cost billions of dollars, while most probes nowadays come in at under $400 million. Voyager had about a dozen instuments, most probes now have at most five or six. Voyager was exploring areas of the solar system that we had never been to before, so everything was new, and major discoveries were dropping into our laps. Mars still has surprises in store, but they are more subtle than volcanos on Io, or braided rings around Saturn.

There is one last superprobe still to go; Cassini is the biggest probe ever launched, with a dozen instruments. It also cost over three billion dollars. We will not see its like again.

"Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of the earth's surface every day."

Aside from the fact that he's confusing power and energy, just how many of the coal-burning steam locomotives of his day would be required to match that power output? Do you really think they'd take up anywhere near an acre?

10 acres of solar panels in Arizona get about 40 Mw/day, if I'm doing the math right; solar panel conversion of 60% = 24Mw over about 10 hours = 2.4Mw available on average. You'd still need a bunch of this to put a dent in the West Coast power shortfall, which is maybe 10,000 Mw capacity right now. The good news is that it is available when needed, during peak cooling needs; the bad news, as he pointed out, is that it takes a lot of space; also that it is not cost effective using historical wholesale electric rates. At the current spot rates, solar should be close to competitive right now. But who is going to build 5000 acres of solar power plant at ~$300/sq meter? That's like 6 billion dollars Wait a second -- that's about what California has had to overpay the producers for power for the last year.

-dB

NASA is costing each and every US citizen around $742 EACH YEAR, and yet the people on the space station cannot even follow orders ?

Ok, you are clearly trolling but i still want to set the record straight.

From http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-00 3-HQ.html:

NASA has the smallest budget of the major agencies in the Federal Government. Its budget has represented less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget each year since 1977.

The above link also mentions a total budget of 14,035 million dollars. This amounts to about 56 dollars per US citizen per year. Not quite your quoted number of $742 per year.

Dang, no broadband!

Of course, you do need to bring 18 months of consumables with you to get to mars in the first place + time to see if you can even get what you need there to survive. We reached the moon by the skin of our teeth. It cost us a large percentage of the GDP for ten years to get there; it was too expensive. There was no reason for it, then.

As you said, there's "nothing interesting to anybody except geologists". Well, that is why we would go back. Minerals.

The most abundant element is oxygen, accounting for about 58% of the atoms present. Most of the oxygen is chemically united with silicon, next most abundant, and accounting for about 20% of the atoms. Also abundant are aluminum, calcium, iron, magnesium, titanium rich compounds and other elements that are abundant in the earth's crust.

Exploration of the Universe, George O. Abell

The moons gravity is only 0.165 that of the earth. Getting things into orbit there would be very cheap. A mass driver would do it pretty well.

Supporting life on the moon is a pain in the ass. No air, no water,

Actually, you're wrong. Water was found on the moon on March 5, 1998. Where the hell were you? Also here and here.

Get yer facts straight, big guy.

This JPL page on Lunar In-Situ resource utilization seems to be the best of the lot.

-tarkas

Actually, they were called canali by Schiaparelli ("canali" is the Italian for "channels," with no implication of manufacture--c.f. "the English channel"). They were generally acceped as natural until canali was (incorrectly) translated to "canal," thus originating the supposition that they were artificial.

-- MarkusQ

The short answer to this is not really. The long answer to this is below :)

First of all, the type of fusion you mentioned is called magnetic confinement fusion. It is as you said, where magnetic fields trap a plasma which is at a temperature high enough to fuse. While it is true that many problems with this stem from the fact that the field strength is limited, room-temperature superconductors would by no means magically fix this problem. If this was the only problem, we'd simply use normal superconductors. This, however, is only one type of fusion.

There are several other types of fusion, the most easily understood being inertial confinement fusion. Instead of using ultra-strong magnetic fields to contain the plasma, it attempts to use the inertia of the reacting particles to keep the material contained. Lasers hit by extreme bursts of laser energy accomplish this as they rapidly implode. Ion beams directed at each other at relativistic velocities are also another way of accomplishing this same effect.

A few more interesting types are muon catalysed fusion, and antiproton catalysed fusion. The latter is being investigated for its uses in propulsion (Here is an excellent link on NASA's page about it, my younger brother researched this as a school project and won first place.). Muon-catalysed fusion is a pretty wacky idea, shooting negatively charged muons (like electrons, only heavier) into a bunch of hydrogen, which causes sponaneous fusion to occur. A muon is a particle like an electron, but much heavier, produced easily by many particle accellerators. The problem with this sort of fusion is that producing muons takes a lot of energy, and you need a lot of muons.

There was a slashdot article earlier on the different types of fusion, which points to an excellent article.

To reiterate my point, these quantum wires are very small, and would not carry much current. This may be extremely useful for semiconductor chips (if you read they are already interfaced through semiconductors) and could allow very small chips that consume such small amount of power that they could be easily powered by the ambient RF radiation (Just think, talk radio would actually be good for something, he he he). There's a lot of uses, but sadly I don't think that small defect free wires will play much of a role in bringing about fusion.

Maybe someday...

Justin