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I wonder what protocol they're using to upgrade their software. It's gotta be some kind of stateless connection (imagine it: SYN ACK ...). Maybe just a radio broadcast, with something like a FIN containing the checksum of the received data. Anyone have any clues?

Well according to their website here it is indeed radio based and you should be thinking in terms of giving commands to your TV with a remote control rather than expecting a SYN ACK-type scenario. It also seems that to press the buttons on your remote control, requires 6 or more teams. Madness.

I have some news for you buddy. Most mentally disturbed people don't need to be in hospitals and there's no room for them even if there they did.

First I'll quote a few statistics:

• One third of the people that are in hospitals in america today are in psychiatric hospitals (including the psych wards of regular hospitals).
• About one percent of the population is manic depressive
• About one percent is schizophrenic
• About thirty percent of the population will experience clinical depression at some point during their lives, and at any given time about five percent of the population is experiencing clinical depression.

But you can't have a real life in a hospital. You can't go to college in a hospital, hold down a job, cook for yourself, do your laundry, drive a car or provide for your family while you're in the hospital.

What most mentally ill people need is to put their lives back together in the real world, and to do that, they need to be in the real world - living in regular housing, driving cars, going to school, holding down jobs.

You'd probably be pretty amazed if all the mentally ill people that you encountered in your daily existence came up to you and told you what their illness was. I'm very unusual for people who suffer from this in that I make it public - because I want to educate people like you to make it easier for others who have to go through what I went through.

If one percent of the population is manic depressive, chances are pretty good you know at least one, and maybe you know several - they're just not telling you, or they haven't been diagnosed yet.

It happens to me all the time in workplaces when I've confided to my coworkers, as, for example, at a small fruit company in cupertino california where I told a woman I was bipolar and she told me she was too.

I met a technician from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when I was in the psych hospital near there, and he told me that he told a staff counselor at the lab that he felt bad that he took Thorazine at work. The counselor said, "Don't worry, lot's of people at JPL take thorazine."

What the mentally ill people need from people like you is not to be locked up, but to be treated with basic decent human respect.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

You're entirely correct.

The problem is that the technology simply isn't cheap enough yet, and doesn't show any sign of being so in the near future. When our parents / grandparents / great-grandparents / etc. left their home countries to emigrate to America, they came in sailing ships / steamships / airplanes, all of which have operating costs that are a FRACTION of what it costs to operate a spacecraft. That is not likely to change in the near future, barring some breakthrough development in technology.

Upon further thought, it seems to me that getting into orbit is where we suck really hard. Getting from orbit into interplanetary space is not all that tough. Anyone have any interesting links to projects that might be able to get us into orbit VERY cheaply?

IMO there is one technology that will completely and totally enable widespread colonization and exploration of space: electrogravitics. Who knows if we'll ever be able to develop it, though.

Thank you.

4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Email me.

Now I think this story is really interesting. Here's a list of Internet coverage about the story:

The research is being done by the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Here's their press release on the subject.

To shoot the bugs into space, they used a NASA sounding rocket. Information on the rocket launch facility is located here.

Here are some links to the Discovery.com article, as well as a few others:

• BBC News
  
• CNN Space
  
• Discovery.com
  

And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today:

• Tough Bugs Ready for Spaceflight - July 26th

Fraser Cain

The relevant bit is as follows:

In November, 1969, the Surveyor 3 spacecraft's microorganisms were recovered from inside its camera that was brought back to Earth under sterile conditions by the Apollo 12 crew. The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source

First link, now a quick summary: The early unmanned space probes contained cameras. This was the mid 1960's, the only way to retrieve the images was to pick up the cameras, which our intrepid astronauts did. They returned to earth with a colony of the bacteria, these bacteria survived launch, radiation, 3 years on the moon, launch from the moon, more radiation and re-entry.

hey when you get a chance check these links out about plasma and the travel times: ASPL
NASA press release
design refrence mission
a page full of links for more info

I have seen the mission schemes regarding the method you mentioned but i was talking about a slightly different approach: a simultaneous launch of 2 manned vehicles which i have not seen proposed anywhere yet.

hey when you get a chance check these links out about plasma and the travel times: ASPL
NASA press release
design refrence mission
a page full of links for more info

I have seen the mission schemes regarding the method you mentioned but i was talking about a slightly different approach: a simultaneous launch of 2 manned vehicles which i have not seen proposed anywhere yet.

hey when you get a chance check these links out about plasma and the travel times: ASPL
NASA press release
design refrence mission
a page full of links for more info

I have seen the mission schemes regarding the method you mentioned but i was talking about a slightly different approach: a simultaneous launch of 2 manned vehicles which i have not seen proposed anywhere yet.

hey when you get a chance check these links out about plasma and the travel times: ASPL
NASA press release
design refrence mission
a page full of links for more info

I have seen the mission schemes regarding the method you mentioned but i was talking about a slightly different approach: a simultaneous launch of 2 manned vehicles which i have not seen proposed anywhere yet.

follow this link for some interesting stuff from nasa about astrobiology, including the "life evolved on mars and flew here on a comet" theory IIRC

Here are more Internet resources on this topic:

Check out NASA's webpage about the mission:
Pluto-Kuiper Express Homepage

The Planetary Society is organizing a campaign to make sure the mission doesn't get cancelled:
Planeta ry Society News Release

Here are other news sites covering the story:
CNN Space
MSNBC
SpaceViews

And, of course, my own coverage at Universe Today.

Fraser Cain

What about the exploration of Venus? then the moons of Saturn. And so on and so on.

Well, Venus has been explored quite a bit. There were Mariners 2&5 and some landers that melted. I don't think we have any materials (economical ones anyway) that could hold up to the heat on the surface. Most of the surface is mapped I think anyway.

They already launched Cassini (that nuclear thing that got people mad) which is going to drop a probe onto the surface of Titan, and do other stuff in orbit.

I agree with the last part. If you don't know anything about somewhere, you don't know what you'll get out of it. If you have to explain everything about somewhere before you explore it, you aren't going anywhere.

Pluto was given "planet" status only as a reward to the discoverer

Uhhhh... interesting statement, but I have to disagree. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930, he was searching for a ninth planet predicted to exist because of discrepancies between the predicted and actual orbits of Uranus (and Neptune) -- the precise reason that the planet Neptune had been discovered, in fact (here's a detailed story of the whole affair). At the time, no one had any notion that Pluto would be so small: it was predicted to be between two and seven times the mass of Earth, and everyone expected it to be dim -- why else would it be so hard to find?

As it turned out, the most likely cause for Uranus and Neptune's orbital discrepancies is probably observational error, and Pluto just happened to be in the approximate neighborhood being searched. If it were discovered today, we might not call it a "planet" -- it's only the largest (so far) of a number of objects in the Kuiper belt -- but this has been the subject of a lot of controversy, and it's been officially decided to keep calling it a planet.

At the time it was discovered, no one had any notion that things would turn out this way, so it was just considered a planet and named as such. No special considerations or rewards -- just ignorance of the future, as always...

---

Pluto was given "planet" status only as a reward to the discoverer - hell, it's smaller than own moon

The "space game" isn't heating up, just Slashdot's coverage of it is. I'd given up last year on submitting space stories to be ignored by "News for Computer Nerds", but the change of pace this summer is pretty nice. But frankly, with the progress of past years in mind, the current news is pretty depressing.

Rotary Rocket has been gutted of engineers and CEO, and their current progress is destined to be mothballed unless they find a magic money tree somewhere.

Ok, so they were a long shot. But Kistler was playing it relatively safe with their design (after ditching an initial wacky idea), didn't hit any big technical or political snags, but simply is in limbo now trying to raise the last third of their funding.

Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too). The SAS seems to be the group most interested in low cost access to space, rather than in lobbying for a larger NASA budget. And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system, there are only two aerospace companies left who can afford that kind of investment, and they've both got good reason to love the status quo.

Oh, but what about government research? The X-33 is a joke. It was never designed as a simple, cheap launch vehicle, just as a way to be a "technology demonstrator" for as much flashy stuff as necessary to win a NASA contract. Of course, except for the aerospike engine, most of that flashy stuff is looking worse and worse. The lifting body shape may need control fins the size of wings, or ballast (yes, ballast on a spacecraft) to keep the center of gravity ahead of the center of pressure. They've just about given up on a high-tech composite tank after discovering it damaged in tests, and will probably have to use plain old aluminum for their wacky, multilobed design.

And did I mention that they're running years behind schedule, over budget, and despite previous agreements that Lockheed-Martin would pay budget overruns, they may renegotiate or scrap the project anyway?

Sea Launch's success isn't even in the same class as these failures. They're trying to squeeze a few extra pounds onto the usual work-intensive expendable rocket, not to reduce the gross costs of space launch by an order of magnitude.

My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design, but because they've got a sugar daddy financer who can afford all the capital investment before they get up and running. And even if they get started with tried and true booster technologies, they'll be a profitable new space company with no vested interest in squeezing the largest launch prices out of the government as possible. And that might actually heat things up.

I was watching NASA-TV a few weeks ago (yes, I have no life) and there was an interesting little show about aerogel. They demonstrated how it was formed and what kinds of things it can do. One of them was that they took a 2 gram (I'm just guessing here :)) cube of aerogel and sat ontop of it about 8kg of weights. That is pretty amazing. Oh, and here and here are little articles about the aerogel debris collector.

--

I was watching NASA-TV a few weeks ago (yes, I have no life) and there was an interesting little show about aerogel. They demonstrated how it was formed and what kinds of things it can do. One of them was that they took a 2 gram (I'm just guessing here :)) cube of aerogel and sat ontop of it about 8kg of weights. That is pretty amazing. Oh, and here and here are little articles about the aerogel debris collector.

--

I was watching NASA-TV a few weeks ago (yes, I have no life) and there was an interesting little show about aerogel. They demonstrated how it was formed and what kinds of things it can do. One of them was that they took a 2 gram (I'm just guessing here :)) cube of aerogel and sat ontop of it about 8kg of weights. That is pretty amazing. Oh, and here and here are little articles about the aerogel debris collector.

--

Assuming you are not a troll and respecting your right to speak...You see this money as being burned up? OK. do the world a favor and throw away your cellphone, vcr, remote controls, and be sure to return that personal computer you posted the message with. These are technological advances that you can't live without today and they all have thier origins in the space program. Read this, this, and all of this and then reflect upon your money burning up. Its great to feel a compassion for your fellow man but don't confuse the issue. If you want socialism and the like then advocate it as you see fit this is a free speaking democracy afterall. You wouldn't get my support and I am sure there are millions of ignorant people with bleeding hearts that seem to 'think' the way you do.In a democracy its not everyones obligation or responsibility to pay the bill for feeding the lazy, the overbreeders or the willfully undereducated of our society. Yet that is were I see my tax dollars burning. I would rather see my tax dollars get spent on the space program than our great war on drugs, welfare, socialized medicine, etc. which ultimately will not reflect our advances but our lack thereof. What you should be getting mad about is the fact that the prison system is the 6th largest growth industry in the US. We spend billions of dollars waging a ludicrous 'war' on drugs (which is largely a health issue not a criminal one) that is incarcerating people at an unprecedented rate and forcing the system to release violent offenders to squeeze in another 'drug' criminal with a mandatory sentence. We encourage overpopulation by increasing welfare benefits for mothers who have more and more children and never give them any incentive to change (read:why would you work if you got free money and free food?). Our country has great potential, for example, I see people wash ashore here in S.Florida all the time, not a penny to thier name and yet they start businesses and forge themselves a niche to survive in. Yet all the time I hear people like you bitch about how we have to feed the hungry, house the homeless etc. and I see people who have spent thier entire lives here saying there is no opportunity here. Don't you think that the folks out there who don't make that niche for thier existence will become part of the natural selection process that governs the nature of all things?Be sure to work extra hard today there are millions out there who are dependant on your tax dollars as thier source of income. A few % of your pennies will go to advancing the science of mankind and the rest of the dollars will feed people who didnot contribute to advancing anything other than thier laziness.

Assuming you are not a troll and respecting your right to speak...You see this money as being burned up? OK. do the world a favor and throw away your cellphone, vcr, remote controls, and be sure to return that personal computer you posted the message with. These are technological advances that you can't live without today and they all have thier origins in the space program. Read this, this, and all of this and then reflect upon your money burning up. Its great to feel a compassion for your fellow man but don't confuse the issue. If you want socialism and the like then advocate it as you see fit this is a free speaking democracy afterall. You wouldn't get my support and I am sure there are millions of ignorant people with bleeding hearts that seem to 'think' the way you do.In a democracy its not everyones obligation or responsibility to pay the bill for feeding the lazy, the overbreeders or the willfully undereducated of our society. Yet that is were I see my tax dollars burning. I would rather see my tax dollars get spent on the space program than our great war on drugs, welfare, socialized medicine, etc. which ultimately will not reflect our advances but our lack thereof. What you should be getting mad about is the fact that the prison system is the 6th largest growth industry in the US. We spend billions of dollars waging a ludicrous 'war' on drugs (which is largely a health issue not a criminal one) that is incarcerating people at an unprecedented rate and forcing the system to release violent offenders to squeeze in another 'drug' criminal with a mandatory sentence. We encourage overpopulation by increasing welfare benefits for mothers who have more and more children and never give them any incentive to change (read:why would you work if you got free money and free food?). Our country has great potential, for example, I see people wash ashore here in S.Florida all the time, not a penny to thier name and yet they start businesses and forge themselves a niche to survive in. Yet all the time I hear people like you bitch about how we have to feed the hungry, house the homeless etc. and I see people who have spent thier entire lives here saying there is no opportunity here. Don't you think that the folks out there who don't make that niche for thier existence will become part of the natural selection process that governs the nature of all things?Be sure to work extra hard today there are millions out there who are dependant on your tax dollars as thier source of income. A few % of your pennies will go to advancing the science of mankind and the rest of the dollars will feed people who didnot contribute to advancing anything other than thier laziness.

Assuming you are not a troll and respecting your right to speak...You see this money as being burned up? OK. do the world a favor and throw away your cellphone, vcr, remote controls, and be sure to return that personal computer you posted the message with. These are technological advances that you can't live without today and they all have thier origins in the space program. Read this, this, and all of this and then reflect upon your money burning up. Its great to feel a compassion for your fellow man but don't confuse the issue. If you want socialism and the like then advocate it as you see fit this is a free speaking democracy afterall. You wouldn't get my support and I am sure there are millions of ignorant people with bleeding hearts that seem to 'think' the way you do.In a democracy its not everyones obligation or responsibility to pay the bill for feeding the lazy, the overbreeders or the willfully undereducated of our society. Yet that is were I see my tax dollars burning. I would rather see my tax dollars get spent on the space program than our great war on drugs, welfare, socialized medicine, etc. which ultimately will not reflect our advances but our lack thereof. What you should be getting mad about is the fact that the prison system is the 6th largest growth industry in the US. We spend billions of dollars waging a ludicrous 'war' on drugs (which is largely a health issue not a criminal one) that is incarcerating people at an unprecedented rate and forcing the system to release violent offenders to squeeze in another 'drug' criminal with a mandatory sentence. We encourage overpopulation by increasing welfare benefits for mothers who have more and more children and never give them any incentive to change (read:why would you work if you got free money and free food?). Our country has great potential, for example, I see people wash ashore here in S.Florida all the time, not a penny to thier name and yet they start businesses and forge themselves a niche to survive in. Yet all the time I hear people like you bitch about how we have to feed the hungry, house the homeless etc. and I see people who have spent thier entire lives here saying there is no opportunity here. Don't you think that the folks out there who don't make that niche for thier existence will become part of the natural selection process that governs the nature of all things?Be sure to work extra hard today there are millions out there who are dependant on your tax dollars as thier source of income. A few % of your pennies will go to advancing the science of mankind and the rest of the dollars will feed people who didnot contribute to advancing anything other than thier laziness.

Here are links to this story around the Internet:

Hubble and Chandra imaged the comet in early July and saw a house sized chunk come off the comet:
NASA Press Release

A British telescope imaged the comet in late July as it completely vapourized:
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes Press Release

Finally, here are links to the CNN article, and everywhere else on the Internet I could find:
Astronomy Now
CNN Space
Space Online

And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today.

Fraser Cain

You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it.

Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision.
----

You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it.

Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision.
----

You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it.

Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision.
----

I just finished writing a proposal to NASA for some instruments on the Solar Probe spacecraft. That's a pretty telemetry-constrained mission. We tested a proprietary wavelet-compression algorithm at 50:1 on 14-bit images (yes, that's about a quarter-bit per pixel) and even at that level it's very hard to tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed images with the naked eye. (The algorithm seems to work by quantizing the sizes of features in the image).

At that level of compression, a 30Hz stream of 6bit-per-channel 640x480 images would only require just over 3Mbps of bandwidth -- and that's without taking any advantage of the relationship between frames. It's easy to believe that another factor of 50 could come out of a combination of more aggressive compression and either diferential encoding or 3-D wavelets. We could end up with full-motion, full-rate video being squirted through 60kbps connections.

the Shuttle has an escape system - ejection seats The shuttle has very limited escape mechanisms. Escape is only really possible under 'ideal' ditch conditions (overshot runways, etc.) A sad fact of the Challenger trajedy is that the crew module was found partially intact on the bottom of the Atlantic. Read this for an excellent report.

A probe to Venus would be very difficult to lift out of Earths gravity well. We'd almost have to build something that heavy in space - where could that take place? Why a space station, of course?

Not to nitpick, but the Soviet Union managed to send several Venera missions just fine without a space station. These probes had very limited lifetimes but I'm sure with todays technolgy we could probably do a lot better (the first one landed in 1970).

Yes! This is a worthwhile book. I got to hear Dr. Tomayko speak in the early 1990's when he was an ACM traveling speaker. He clearly demonstrated why they use "old" and "outdated" systems for spaceflight - because they are "known" quantities.
It appears that the book is indeed out of print. But some form of it appears to be on the web at NASA.

-karl.

Until we take care of our problems on the ground, I don't understand why we're spending $60 billion on a space station.

Just my $0.02

You can tell how desparate they are by the number of time they use the word "innovate" in their press releases.

We do? We know that everybody who can survive astronaut-type training can handle a few months of it. We know now that more than a few months of it is bad for you; bones deteriorate. The people who flew on Skylab and Mir established that long ago. More data is nice, but not worth billions of dollars.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that the pretty color pictures of the space station with the earth in the background are fake, although they're presented as real. There's nothing up there in position to take those pictures. Those are rendered 3D models. The real pictures from the spacecraft camera used during docking don't show much, and they're black and white, so for PR purposes, fake images are used. Does this bother anybody?

Great! Where do I sign up!

IIRC, applications for the astronaut training program are reviewed every two years in July; the next screening takes place approximately a year from now. You can find out more information and download application forms at NASA's astronaut selection website. Generally speaking, for admittance as a mission specialist you need to possess an advanced scientific, technical, or medical degree (PhDs and MDs are preferred) as well as demonstrate leadership in your particular field. (Most if not all of the pilots have prior military training, so a civilian's best shot into the program is as a mission specialist). Becoming a NASA astronaut is highly competitive and grueling, as I'm sure you can imagine, but since it is hands down the coolest job imaginable, it won't stop me from sending my application in.

• Officia l NASA press release
• Boeing's ISS page
• ISS teleconference
• NASA Spacelink
• CNN special feature
• Congress' ISS Authorization Act
• Zvezda statistics
• Discovery Channel coverage
• Unofficial ISS Users' Guide
• NASA press kit
• Yaho o! ISS directory

- vl

• Officia l NASA press release
• Boeing's ISS page
• ISS teleconference
• NASA Spacelink
• CNN special feature
• Congress' ISS Authorization Act
• Zvezda statistics
• Discovery Channel coverage
• Unofficial ISS Users' Guide
• NASA press kit
• Yaho o! ISS directory

- vl

Here is the clickable link. That ain't no 10 minutes! This is proof (if true, of course) that bacteria can survive harsh space conditions for extended periods of time.

Sure it doesn't prove that "we are the aliens", but it's the best evidence yet (besides similar lab results of vacuum and radiation) that bacteria can survive things like mars meterorites. (Who knows, maybe even comets?) So life may be more pervasive than we thought. (Or maybe only able to be more pervasive)

-Ben

You are probably referring to D. radiodurans, which is one of several organisms that will be carried aloft in this mission.

This NASA article talks about D. radiodurans with an eye on possible uses of the bacterium in space exploration.

AIAA-2000-3615 Design and Simulation of Tether Facilities for the HASTOL Architecture (Hoyt)

AIAA-2000-3866 Design and Sim of a Tether Boost Facility for GEO, Lunar, and Mars Transport (Hoyt, Grant, and Bangham)

AIAA-2000-3865 Computation of Current to a Moving Bare Tether, (Onishi & Martinez, MIT, and Cooke, AFRL)

AIAA-2000-3870 Future Application of Electrodynamic Space Tethers For Propulsion (Santangelo, Michigan Technic and Johnson, Nasa Marshall )

I apologize for not being able to link to the specific papers or give much additional information, since this panel ran at the same time as one I was more interested in and the papers are copyrighted by AIAA. The fact that technical publications are generally not available upon demand except in bulk or by federal express is increasingly irritating to me, since 1) they are available in .pdf format on CD-ROM at the conference anyway, and 2) many distribution systems exist which would allow the organizations to distribute them electronically and still get paid. Please complain (nicely) to Webmaster@aiaa.org about this, since my lonely voice is probably not loud enough to cause action.

Rev. Neh
propulsion geek

AIAA-2000-3615 Design and Simulation of Tether Facilities for the HASTOL Architecture (Hoyt)

AIAA-2000-3866 Design and Sim of a Tether Boost Facility for GEO, Lunar, and Mars Transport (Hoyt, Grant, and Bangham)

AIAA-2000-3865 Computation of Current to a Moving Bare Tether, (Onishi & Martinez, MIT, and Cooke, AFRL)

AIAA-2000-3870 Future Application of Electrodynamic Space Tethers For Propulsion (Santangelo, Michigan Technic and Johnson, Nasa Marshall )

I apologize for not being able to link to the specific papers or give much additional information, since this panel ran at the same time as one I was more interested in and the papers are copyrighted by AIAA. The fact that technical publications are generally not available upon demand except in bulk or by federal express is increasingly irritating to me, since 1) they are available in .pdf format on CD-ROM at the conference anyway, and 2) many distribution systems exist which would allow the organizations to distribute them electronically and still get paid. Please complain (nicely) to Webmaster@aiaa.org about this, since my lonely voice is probably not loud enough to cause action.

Rev. Neh
propulsion geek

Russia may in fact be diverting ISS resources to Mir (as the IEEE article suggests to the point of virtually stating it as fact) but putting a tether on Mir before putting one on ISS makes lots of sense. Russia was ready to let Mir turn into a crispy critter in the atmosphere, so if the tether doesn't work so well, c'est la vie.

But if the tether does work, then NASA for once gets something back from industry - a cheap way to keep the muy expensive ISS from becoming muy caliente. The theory behind government-funded research (like NASA) is that eventually, the research becomes disseminated to industry. The taxes that payed for the research in the first place end up benefitting the entire economy (TCP/IP and the Internet would be a sterling example of that). It's much more unusual for industry to provide something new and useful to government without a big fat government contract (i.e., not just overpriced versions of widely available products).

Joke? Baaah. I find your lack of faith...

See the NASA page that explores other avenues for space commercialization.

• 3.10.3.3.3 Market Assessment
  Although it is extremely unlikely that advertisements could fund an entire mission, they may provide significant supplementary revenue. Advertisements may be purchased on their own, but they are generally integrated into overall promotional campaigns. As such, they have the potential to generate additional revenues on the order of $3 million to $5 million or more per mission. For example, Columbia Pictures was willing to pay $500,000 for space on the side of the first Comet launch to promote the release of "The Last Action Hero." This was split between Westinghouse (Conestoga) and Space Marketing, Inc.

You gotta keep your action-oriented-box-office-bombs-starring-bulky-br utes straight. :)

Obviously, Pizza Hut wants to be ready to deliver pizzas to the International Space Station They'll basically have a monopoly, at least until Domino's and Papa John's get their stuff into orbit... Of course, making a pizza oven mounted on a 1G centrifuge in orbit may be tougher than they think. 0.5*:-)

For the record, I believe Coke was the one thinking of this, but I can't be sure.

Two methods of space-based advertising were being considered:

1) Send up huge coloured sheets, akin to the light sails that we've heard about, except this would simply be a huge, orbiting billboard. Just think about it - looking up one night and noticing a rectangular shape crossing the sky that catches the sun, lighting up "Enjoy Coke!" clear as day against the night sky. Shudder.

2) This idea was even worse; Instead of making a floating, orbiting billboard, they were simply going to paint a billboard on the moon for all to see.

As much as I like it and rely on it on a daily basis, THIS is why a market economy sucks.

Although the prospect of such a exciting new approach to gravity and the dark (or rather 'transparent' since it does not absorp light) matter problem, it needs to be stressed that lack of theories and ideas is not the problem.

The actual limit on progress in this field is lack of relevant data, obtained either from super colliders or from deep cosmological observations. Currently it is possible to make many models consistent with the observational constraints because it is these constraints themself which are so loose.

Everybody knows the US killed the giant supercollider program, and the state of affairs in observational cosmology learns that it is very difficult to calibrate measurements of (dark) matter.

To so something more about the last point, since I've researched this last year, it is far from trivial to yield reliably answers on galactic cluster potentials via dynamic or gravitational lens measurements, especially because you need to go into the Infrared to observe (optical) light emitted by stars in the deep universe. Only recently with instruments like ISAAC on one of the VLT telescopes we are able to obtain high quality near-infrared data. For the far infrared imaging space based missions like the NGST are required, because of the polluting thermal radiation from the earths atmosphere. The NGST is still under study and not expected to be launched until 2010!

Until then we can only speculate aboute the nature of dark matter.

Ivo

The roton *got* off the ground, but not very far - they were only testing the last stage of the landing system.

They don't need $10 million, they need $200 million.

I'd love to see them succeed more than anyone - their design is one of the most radically innovative anywhere and could really have been something. But the investment capital for launch startups has simply gone dry the last year or so. If your seti@home idea happens to fly they'll get my 20 bucks, but I wouldn't count on that really accomplishing much...

Disclaimer: I work at JPL so the last year or so I've gained experience being bitter and jaded about the space program...

I like SML a LOT, but there's a langauge which a lot of people aren't talking about. It's LISP. LISP has a public-domain compiler, an orphan of the Carnegie Mellon University lisp project from about 8 years ago. (CMUCL)

The compiler (Python) is fast; it compiles down to raw machine code, and it's performance is comparable to C, and has been for the last 5 years. (~30% slower at things like matrix multiplication, bench it yourself) , which isn't bad for a compiler that's had a fraction of the effort of EGCS. It can use non-descriptor arguments and structures. It will also use type inference where it can (Roughly, the monomorphic subset of the type system of SML.)

Now, the language Common Lisp is exremely nice. It has a variety of built-in things like lists, hash tables, structures, vectors, multidimensional arrays... It's got a lot of declarative things too. Loops, 'foreach', 'set'... Lisp programs can't crash because it does typechecks too. (Though if Python infers that they're unnecessary, it'll omit them.)

It was the first object-oriented langauge to be standardized. CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) is amazing. You can have dispatch based on multiple arguments unlike java/C++ which is only polymorphic based on the first argument. And you've got multiple inheritence. With the MOP, you can even write your OWN OO system on top of it.

Because the syntax is simple, it makes it easy to have programmed transformations of code 'macros'
A simple example is a 3-way if-then. (:less, :greater, :equal).
A slightly more complicated example is adding in c-style for-loops. (done with the 'loop' facility)

For a fairly complicated example, there's a package called 'SERIES' which adds in the equivalent of pipes to the language. You 'pipe' data between routines and it transforms the code into minimum-sized loops and other iteration constructs.

For example, if I have a list of triangles. My code looks like I first transform all of the triangles, then texture them, then transform them. again. This requires creating lots of superflouis triangles. SERIES will automagically turn this into a single loop on each triangle 'tranform -- texture -- transform'. Except that it'll handle multiple argument functions that return multiple results, and it'll handle conditionals in the functions. Not all loops can be merged, but it'll do what it can.

This is much like the one example of aspect-oriented programming, which was a realtime handwriting recognition program. It needed to do edge detects, averaging, convolutions. To do each operation in turn would have been horrific in time and space. The loops could be merged manually, but obfuscated the core algorithms and made it difficult to modify. The overhead of doing this transformation manually was a 50x code increase. From 700 lines to 35000 lines!

They implemented a new mini-langauge (Adding 'primitive' things like pointwise, convolve, etc to the language.) and used macro's do that merging automatically made the core algorithm obvious and trivial to change. The result was the core algorithm required only 700 lines of code, and another 1000 lines of code to do the merging and fusing of loops.. 2000 lines of code to do what took 35000 lines of code to do manually!

If you come from LISP, Aspect oriented programming is stupidly obvious. (If you don't, you think, 'wow' look at the cool stuff that they invented, and think that they created it.)

As a much much more complicated example, CLOS itself was implemented through macro's. Can you imagine a language powerful enough that you could 'transparently' layer a high-performance and very flexible OO system on top, WITHOUT REWRITING the underlying layer? Aspect oriented programming will never get this good. :)

Yet another plus of this is that you can runtime-generate and compile code. Want to compile that encryption inner loop to make a custom version for this key? It's as easy as


(defun twofish-make-fun (key)
(compile nil `#'(lambda (block) (twofish-encrypt block ,key)))


This works because the function 'twofish-encrypt' will be declared maybe-inline. Thus it'll be compiled as normal, but the source code will also be saved. Normally, a function call to it will invoke the unspecialized version. But if we compile a call to it that has known arguments, the compiler will fully specialize and inline it, and create a specialized assembly. (This is how CLOS is implemented.)

There are some nice advantages to having a simple syntax. :)

For hackers, there's the advantage that you can download ``Common Lisp The Language'' or the ``Common Lisp Hyperspec'' for a full specification of the language. No spending a hundred bux on a manual. (I'd give links, but I use my personal version so I don't know where to find them on the net anymore.)

Common LISP still has the features of a functional language. It has first-order and higher-order functions or closures. Python has a strong type system and it makes fast code. Your claim that LISP runs slow is false. :) Like SML, it's interactive and incremental compilation. You can redefine functions without quitting. You can even redefine functions that are running in a different thread.

In fact, LISP was found to be almost 50% faster than C/C++ on average. There was a study done about a year ago where they compared C++ and Java. Unlike other study's between langauges, they had a dozen people implement the same program in C++ and Java and then compared the results. They found what you'd expect, Java was slow and sucked memory.

These guys decided to repeat the study, only comparing LISP and Java. Although the fastest implementation was in C++, they found that Lisp programs, as a group, were over 50% faster than the C++ programs as a group. Also, development time was a fraction that of C++ or Java, and the number of lines of code was half. Not only that, the variability in the number of lines of code and development times was signifigantly reduced.

(Tom, I'll be back at CMU in a month, if you want to talk about this, or let me get my greedy hands on the TILT compiler. Send mail to crosby@qwes.math.cmu.edu if interested.)

I like SML a LOT, but there's a langauge which a lot of people aren't talking about. It's LISP. LISP has a public-domain compiler, an orphan of the Carnegie Mellon University lisp project from about 8 years ago. (CMUCL)

The compiler (Python) is fast; it compiles down to raw machine code, and it's performance is comparable to C, and has been for the last 5 years. (~30% slower at things like matrix multiplication, bench it yourself) , which isn't bad for a compiler that's had a fraction of the effort of EGCS. It can use non-descriptor arguments and structures. It will also use type inference where it can (Roughly, the monomorphic subset of the type system of SML.)

Now, the language Common Lisp is exremely nice. It has a variety of built-in things like lists, hash tables, structures, vectors, multidimensional arrays... It's got a lot of declarative things too. Loops, 'foreach', 'set'... Lisp programs can't crash because it does typechecks too. (Though if Python infers that they're unnecessary, it'll omit them.)

It was the first object-oriented langauge to be standardized. CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) is amazing. You can have dispatch based on multiple arguments unlike java/C++ which is only polymorphic based on the first argument. And you've got multiple inheritence. With the MOP, you can even write your OWN OO system on top of it.

Because the syntax is simple, it makes it easy to have programmed transformations of code 'macros'
A simple example is a 3-way if-then. (:less, :greater, :equal).
A slightly more complicated example is adding in c-style for-loops. (done with the 'loop' facility)

For a fairly complicated example, there's a package called 'SERIES' which adds in the equivalent of pipes to the language. You 'pipe' data between routines and it transforms the code into minimum-sized loops and other iteration constructs.

For example, if I have a list of triangles. My code looks like I first transform all of the triangles, then texture them, then transform them. again. This requires creating lots of superflouis triangles. SERIES will automagically turn this into a single loop on each triangle 'tranform -- texture -- transform'. Except that it'll handle multiple argument functions that return multiple results, and it'll handle conditionals in the functions. Not all loops can be merged, but it'll do what it can.

This is much like the one example of aspect-oriented programming, which was a realtime handwriting recognition program. It needed to do edge detects, averaging, convolutions. To do each operation in turn would have been horrific in time and space. The loops could be merged manually, but obfuscated the core algorithms and made it difficult to modify. The overhead of doing this transformation manually was a 50x code increase. From 700 lines to 35000 lines!

They implemented a new mini-langauge (Adding 'primitive' things like pointwise, convolve, etc to the language.) and used macro's do that merging automatically made the core algorithm obvious and trivial to change. The result was the core algorithm required only 700 lines of code, and another 1000 lines of code to do the merging and fusing of loops.. 2000 lines of code to do what took 35000 lines of code to do manually!

If you come from LISP, Aspect oriented programming is stupidly obvious. (If you don't, you think, 'wow' look at the cool stuff that they invented, and think that they created it.)

As a much much more complicated example, CLOS itself was implemented through macro's. Can you imagine a language powerful enough that you could 'transparently' layer a high-performance and very flexible OO system on top, WITHOUT REWRITING the underlying layer? Aspect oriented programming will never get this good. :)

Yet another plus of this is that you can runtime-generate and compile code. Want to compile that encryption inner loop to make a custom version for this key? It's as easy as


(defun twofish-make-fun (key)
(compile nil `#'(lambda (block) (twofish-encrypt block ,key)))


This works because the function 'twofish-encrypt' will be declared maybe-inline. Thus it'll be compiled as normal, but the source code will also be saved. Normally, a function call to it will invoke the unspecialized version. But if we compile a call to it that has known arguments, the compiler will fully specialize and inline it, and create a specialized assembly. (This is how CLOS is implemented.)

There are some nice advantages to having a simple syntax. :)

For hackers, there's the advantage that you can download ``Common Lisp The Language'' or the ``Common Lisp Hyperspec'' for a full specification of the language. No spending a hundred bux on a manual. (I'd give links, but I use my personal version so I don't know where to find them on the net anymore.)

Common LISP still has the features of a functional language. It has first-order and higher-order functions or closures. Python has a strong type system and it makes fast code. Your claim that LISP runs slow is false. :) Like SML, it's interactive and incremental compilation. You can redefine functions without quitting. You can even redefine functions that are running in a different thread.

In fact, LISP was found to be almost 50% faster than C/C++ on average. There was a study done about a year ago where they compared C++ and Java. Unlike other study's between langauges, they had a dozen people implement the same program in C++ and Java and then compared the results. They found what you'd expect, Java was slow and sucked memory.

These guys decided to repeat the study, only comparing LISP and Java. Although the fastest implementation was in C++, they found that Lisp programs, as a group, were over 50% faster than the C++ programs as a group. Also, development time was a fraction that of C++ or Java, and the number of lines of code was half. Not only that, the variability in the number of lines of code and development times was signifigantly reduced.

(Tom, I'll be back at CMU in a month, if you want to talk about this, or let me get my greedy hands on the TILT compiler. Send mail to crosby@qwes.math.cmu.edu if interested.)

The high-energy particles cause bright points on CCDs. This affects things like star trackers and telescopes. Star trackers have a hard time differentiating between the particle hits and the real stars. The telescope images get "snow" in them.

Also, memory bits and other electronic switches can get flipped by impacts of high-energy particles.

disclaimer: I work for SOHO, but I don't speak for them, etc.

Also check out Nasa's science site about this event. They also have an active email newsletter that keeps you up to date on interesting space stuff like this.