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Um, they do and do so regularly. http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/ http://astrophysics.gsfc.nasa.gov/balloon/ Balloons hoisting 2000kg+ payloads, up for weeks at a time, at elevations over 30-35km. When working in the 90's at JPL in Southern California, I would occasionally have lunch with a guy responsible for launching huge skids of scientific equipment at Palastine, TX, at the National Balloon Facility. Palastine is convenient due to the large amount of helium produced as a waste product from the wells in the area. Palastine's accomplishments notwithstanding, Southern California is also home to cutting-edge balloon experimenters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters

Um, they do and do so regularly. http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/ http://astrophysics.gsfc.nasa.gov/balloon/ Balloons hoisting 2000kg+ payloads, up for weeks at a time, at elevations over 30-35km. When working in the 90's at JPL in Southern California, I would occasionally have lunch with a guy responsible for launching huge skids of scientific equipment at Palastine, TX, at the National Balloon Facility. Palastine is convenient due to the large amount of helium produced as a waste product from the wells in the area. Palastine's accomplishments notwithstanding, Southern California is also home to cutting-edge balloon experimenters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters

I heard about this a while back and am still puzzled as to how you isolate a space telescope from vibrations while its still somewhat within the atmosphere. Is there very little or no turbulence at its flight altitude?

That's in the cost range ($2 billion to $3 billion) of a NASA Flagship class mission for solar system exploration.

A little further toward the "other end" of the spectrum:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/images/images/pao/AS4/10074807.jpg
For a few seconds, anyways :D

Now that we have Mr. Pedant's "critique" at (Warp:5, Informative), get a load of what NASA says about the X-15 program:

The effect of flight to Mach 1 produces large changes in the air pressures that support, retard, twist, pitch, roll, and yaw an airplane. But man edged past this speed into the realm of supersonic flight, and by the time Mach 1.5 was attained, airplanes had undergone a vast transition in technology. Some men saw in this transition the basis for pushing much farther up the flight corridor. In the early 1950's, a few visionary men looked far up that corridor and became intrigued by a goal much closer than the theoretical limit at the speed of light. They saw that the corridor flared dramatically upward at orbital speed (Mach 24), leading out of the Earth's atmosphere into space, defining the start of a path to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Now, I suppose Mr. Pedant is going to point out that Mach 22 is off by a whole 1539.35 mph.

You hit on my point precisely. Another poster missed the point but nonetheless provided an altitude of 70,000 ft. before doing a bunch of unnecessary math concerning the earth circumference.

Using this applet we can derive a speed of ~3962mph for Mach 6 at 70,000 ft. as opposed to ~4562mph at sea level. A 600mph difference is important enough to make the distinction in my opinion. :)

That's just a sea-level test. If you want an altitude test..... http://facilities.grc.nasa.gov/psl/gallery.html/

    The closest I've ever been to flying one was in simulators a couple times at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. I did a little more looking, and found this diagram, which shows the standard 7 seats and 3 "rescue" seats. 4 on the flight deck, and up to 6 on the mid-deck.

    It does look ... ummm ... cramped. It's a bit tighter than I'd want to spend a weekend with 6 other people, much less a week or two. But hey, they get to go to space and I don't.

That's a different kind of test, and the X-43a beat them to it by a few years.

On top of that, the GGP claims "Not bad without military budgets" when your link states "The launch was a collaborative effort between the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), also representing the research collaborators in the Australian Hypersonics Initiative (AHI)."

Not to belittle their efforts, mind you; it's a spectacular project and I wish them the best. Just correcting bad information.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/



This success is due to Nasa's JPL or Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The successes they have had over the past decade are astounding. I see this as more proof that remote missions are more practical in the short term as opposed to manned missions. Just give JPL some more money and let them do their thing. These are the guys that will discover what we need to know, so as to make manned spaceflight practical.

As a side note, I saw a documentary on spirit and opportunity recently. It was one of the most entertaining and surprisingly dramatic documentaries I have seen.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/welcome-mars/

Great, so where can I get a cheap compatible robot and what kind of stuff can I program it to do?

Also, http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/nasa-vision-workbench/ looks pretty damn cool.

Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.

As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:

The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.

... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.

What article?

The same one I've been linking for a while now.

For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.

I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"

In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.

Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.

It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.

All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.

But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the r

>>I know weather stations have become more automated but they still get visited on a regular basis.

And reported to whom? As far as I can tell, they just use statistical methods to guess which stations are bad, as well as some high level attempts to sort stations into urban and rural.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200711_temptracker/page2.html
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

As I said, satellite data ought to make the debate moot.

>>I know weather stations have become more automated but they still get visited on a regular basis.

And reported to whom? As far as I can tell, they just use statistical methods to guess which stations are bad, as well as some high level attempts to sort stations into urban and rural.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200711_temptracker/page2.html
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

As I said, satellite data ought to make the debate moot.

Voyager runs or 3 different type of computers, each controls the Computer Command System, the Flight Data System, and the Attitude and Articulation Control System.

The chips are non clock-based, and runs off an oscillator. Each computer is doubled-up for redundency, making a total of 6. They total about 540KB volatile and non-volatile memory.

The programing language is a form of assembly language.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

If I read this chapter on the design of the voyagers' onboard computers correctly, they do use CMOS DRAM.

One of the upgrades the Voyagers had over the Viking computers was CMOS memory (instead of plated wires). Read all about it at http://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html Apparently, there was some debate at the time over whether these new-fangled memories would be reliable.

In any case, I don't know what memory technology voyager uses. The (slightly) more modern space shuttles used magnetic core memory for essential systems. These are not affected by cosmic rays. If it isn't magnetic core, then it is likely to be static RAM. This too is not easily modified by a cosmic ray.

I got curious and looked it up: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

...apparently it uses Plated Wire memory which I had not heard of before, but seems to be a relative of core store.

I would imagine that it was relatively easy. Voyager has not only a small amount of memory (about 541kb) about 10% of the command system's memory is dedicated to fault protection. Read here: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

To be more precise, all those texts make it clear that these fire breathing dragons were ridden, sometimes by many people, and that they made thunderous noise and very bright light, while spewing smoke.

Which is more likely, fire breathing dragons, which man rode for vast distances, whereby for absolutely no reason and no explanation suddenly died out over night, without evidence, in historic times, or that as almost every civilization describes, depicts, and documents (including the Bible) in innumerable ways, we were previously visited from space? Even the Book of Enoch clearly describes rockets, space travel, and relativistic travel for Enoch.

Here you go, a couple dozen out of over 1600 technologies that the Space program has given us over the last 50 years.
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2008/pdf/timeline_08.pdf

Mod parent up (and this down if you must, since I wrote the parent and I'm asking for an upmod there). I forgot to click the selfmods, and I think the parent post is worthy of them and I don't want it to be missed in the /. dross so I'm following up with this feeble plea.

Of course if you think the parent sucks, mod it down and this post too, but first please read this.

Another good example is here. The system actually learned gates for the Aibo dogs that were better than human designed gates.

And, at its current demonstrated safety level of around 98%, that amounts to a 50% chance of Shuttle loss over the next 30 launches.

It's worth noting that the Shuttle's demonstrated safety level is equal to any other manned vehicle.
 

Also, on a somewhat bureaucratic side, but with real implications, the Shuttle's Certificate of Airworthiness needed recertification this year.

The closest thing to a certification is the FAA's certificate of airworthiness and that is a completely different creature.

The Shuttle, like all goverment aircraft, doesn't have a Certificate of Airworthiness. You're thinking of the CAIB's requirement that the Shuttle be recertified to fly beyond 2010. (Though they didn't actually spell out what recertification would be entail, only that it was required.)
 

The funny thing is that there is actually no official "manned certification" in NASA. No set criteria. No testing procedure. Nothing.

On the contrary - NASA's NPR 8705.2B is the governing document for human rating spacecraft.

Uh, actually two more

I wonder if they let players interface with those mining drones via the that NASA MMO

One of the best studies done on extraterrestrial cave habitation. Reports like this are one of the reasons why it was such a travesty that Griffin shut down NIAC, just to raid their budget for Constellation.

Not sure if you already knew this, but NASA is actually planning on restarting the NIAC under its new plans:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428439main_Space_technology.pdf

Responsive the NRC report, Fostering Visions for the Future: A Review of the NASA Institute for
Advanced Concepts (2009), the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) will be re-established
as a project within the Early Stage Innovation Program. The project is formulated as a two-phase,
low TRL activity, focused upon conceptual studies of visionary approaches addressing long-term
NASA strategic goals. The first phase of NIAC will fund a competed set of conceptual studies and
systems analyses that investigate how technology innovations will enable NASA's future missions
and extend its goals. Second Phase NIAC proposals will further develop successful Phase I
proposals and work to transition the key technical advances into projects within the Game Changing
Technology Program.

NIAC will serve as an incubator for bringing new technologies into future aerospace endeavors. By
supporting innovative and visionary concepts aimed a decade or more into the future, NIAC-funded
research significantly impacts the Agency's future missions as well as its roadmaps for future
science, discovery and exploration. As a low-TRL early phase activity, NIAC will serve as a visible
and recognized entry point for innovators and researchers who will enable future NASA missions and
goals. ...

The best way to expand and increase the cost effectiveness of NASA is convert it to a goal driven agency. Don't pay to research or study something. Instead setup prizes like the X-Prize or Google's Android challenges to motivate everyday Americans, small business startups, Universities, etc. to solve challenges. Send a rocket to the moon get X million. Put a Satellite in orbit of the moon get Y million, send a crew to circle the moon get Z million, etc. Then we the tax payers only pay for success and we only pay the winning scientists (or garage engineers).

You may want to read through NASA's new plans. From the Space Technology section of the new budget:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428439main_Space_technology.pdf

The Centennial Challenges program seeks innovative solutions to technical problems that can drive progress in aerospace technology of value to NASA's missions in space operations, science, exploration and aeronautics. Beginning in FY 2011, Centennial Challenge activities associated with the Innovative Partnerships Program are transferred to the Space Technology Program. Centennial Challenges encourage the participation of independent teams, individual inventors, student groups and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development, and seek to find the most innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation. NASA's original seven prize challenges have been successful in encouraging broad participation by innovators across our nation and across generations. Many of these technical challenges also have direct relevance to national and global needs such as energy and transportation.

Prize programs encourage diverse participation and multiple solution paths. A measure of diversity is seen in the geographic distribution of participants (from Hawaii to Maine) that reaches far beyond the locales of the NASA Centers and major aerospace industries. The participating teams have included individual inventors, small startup companies, and university students and professors. An example of multiple solution paths was seen in the 2009 Regolith Excavation Challenge. NASA can typically afford one or two working prototypes in a development program but at this Challenge event, over twenty different working prototypes were demonstrated for the NASA technologists. All of these prototypes were developed at no cost to the government. For three years of competitions with dozens of teams investing tens of thousands of hours, NASA spent only $750,000 in prize money.

The return on investment with prizes is exceptionally high as NASA expends no funds unless the accomplishment is demonstrated. NASA provides only the prize money and the administration of the competitions is done at no cost to NASA by non-profit allied organizations. For the Lunar Lander Challenge, twelve private teams spent nearly 70,000 hours and the equivalent of $12 million trying to win $2 million in prize money. Prizes also focus public attention on NASA programs and generate interest in science and engineering. Live webcasts of Centennial Challenge competitions attract thousands of viewers across the nation and around the world. The 2009 Power Beaming completion resulted in over 100 news articles and web features. Prizes also create new businesses and new partners for NASA. The winner of the 2007 Astronaut Glove Challenge started a new business to manufacture pressure suit gloves. Armadillo Aerospace began a partnership with NASA related to the reusable rocket engine that they developed for the Lunar Lander Challenge, and they also sell the engine commercially.

In selecting topics for prize competitions, NASA consults widely within and outside of the Federal Government. The $10 million per year FY 2011 request for Centennial Challenges will allow NASA to pursue new and more ambitious prize competitions. Topics for future challenges that are under consideration include revolutionary energy

You mean besides all the technical innovation which has been supported and used by NASA? There is a list of 10 at HowStuffWorks.com but there are more out there. Those billions thrown at human space flight results in science and robots.

Wait which part are we discussing that is Shuttle Derived?

The Heavy lift portion that we need to get out of the Earths Colossal Gravity well or the capsule that sits atop the rocket itself?

Just trying to get it straight how scrapping the work done on the Heavy lift module and related SRBs are bad ideas. Especially if said SRB could easily be adapted due to configuration to plasma based applications in the future.

Also wanting to make sure we are both talking about the same Constellation Program

That would be very odd, since they've been imaged by the LRO.

That's why I use Yahoo.

First link:

Solar System Exploration at NASA

First few paragraphs:

Our solar system is made up of a star - the Sun - eight planets, 146 moons, a bunch of comets, asteroids and space rocks, ice and several dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

The eight planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Mercury is closest to the Sun. Neptune is the farthest. Remember the order of the planets like this: My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Neptune.

There's also a gross-out version: My Very Early Morning Jam Sandwich Usually Nauseates. Why not make up one of your own?

You could use NASA's sterling engine technology with MDI's articulating connecting rod to burn hydrogen efficiently. It doesn't let you convert existing cars, but it does allow you to utilize existing plants and technologies. Theoretically.

Better citation of Allais Effect. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast06aug99_1/

Actually, I think it's highest was 360 miles (594 kilometers) on STS-82.

But again, is it just the Shuttle's inability to get there (ie, it can't carry enough fuel to get up there and get back)? Or is there more (eg radiation shielding, etc.)?

Failure is relative. THIS is a failure. http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/

Maybe he meant it only failed once...

I don't think so. The earth-moon L-points are L4 and L5, which are stable Lagrange points and are 60 degrees ahead of and behind the moon in its orbit, L3 which is 180 degrees (opposite the moon in it's orbit) and L1 and L2 which are in line with L3 and very close to the moon. http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html

Bottom line is that the Earth-Moon L points are an order of magnitude (more or less) more distant than geostationary orbit. A satellite in geosync is NOT going to an earth-moon L point with out a lot of fuel and a working guidance system...

Of course, I could be wrong, I'm most definitely NOT a rocket scientist...

Whether a flow is turbulent or laminar is irrelevant to whether the system is chaotic, the Navier–Stokes equations that model it remains the same. It's unfortunate that the word chaos is so ingrained because it's popular meaning and it's scientific meaning have so little in common, just like how greenhouse gases effect a planets temperature in a manner so different from how a greenhouse really works. The climates models assume regularity where it doesn't exist, for example they assume CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere, where in reality CO2 is not well mixed.

Forgive my ignorance in these highly technical matters, but when exactly did we start sending up Small Or Home Office satellites?

We didn't. Instead we sent up Solar Heliospheric Observatory satellites. IIRC, they're the ones that UFOlogists like to think have shown UFOs.

Despite substantial uncertainties, especially for the period prior to 1600 when data are scarce, the warmest period prior to the 20th century very likely occurred between 950 and 1100, but temperatures were probably between 0.1C and 0.2C below the 1961 to 1990 mean and significantly below the level shown by instrumental data after 1980. The heterogeneous nature of climate during the 'Medieval Warm Period' is illustrated by the wide spread of values exhibited by the individual records.[12]

Here's some reasonable data somewhat supporting your solar intensity hypothesis. The problems are that (1) now that we can observe intensity directly, we haven't observed large enough changes (2) your assertion about the relative warmth of the MWP seems to be not quite correctn and (3) where's the huge pile of sunspots?

I found no problems in anything that you referenced, because you referenced nothing. If you want to make a case, please support it. The "standard sources" (Wikipedia, top hits in Google) don't.

Just for the sake of argument let's say the CRU were totally corrupt and in the pocket of the evil geniuses of the NWO. How then do you explain that the independently derived GISTEMP dataset (nasa) closely matches the HADcrut dataset (CRU)?

Others have pointed to the raw data for HADcrut, a small portion of wich is hard (but not imposible) to obtain due to nationalist obstuctions. GISStemp does not suffer from that restriction, the raw data and source code is all publicly available here and has been indenpendently reconstructed here

As for chaos theory, it was discovered by Lorenze while working on a weather models. Climatoligists are aware that climate is the statistics of weather and that chaos theory does not apply to climate over human time scales.

"I'd love to know what this letter would've looked like before we knew about wave theory, or...We'd be hearing about how matter is made up of particles which have neatly orbiting electrons because this hadn't been refuted yet, as though you have to agree with every long-standing theory that hasn't been refuted to be a good little boy or girl."

You are trying to make all science into an "argument from authority" wich it is not. Popper's "republic of science" demands you accept the best testable explaination until you can falsify it or come up with a better one, this has nothing to do with authority and everything to do with logic and skepticisim. Your statement shows you simply do not comprehend the relativity of wrong and utill you do you will never really appreciate the utility of science that is staring you in the face while you type your refutation of it.

NASA does science. It's the one thing they're really good at. The more we learn about our solar system, the more possibilities we're finding that other life, simple as it may be, could exist within it. Mar's now, possible underwater oceans on Europa and the other icy moons (Callisto, Ganymede, Triton) as well as many unanswered questions on Titan as well. Life outside earth is something so important that a price cant be put on the effort to know, even in the more then likely scenario that it isn't there. . If it isn't in the solar system, nobody here will be alive to see when it does happen. Not unless it finds us.

The next space mission I am most anticipating.

If global temperatures went down significantly over a period of many years, it would certainly be fantastic evidence against anthropogenic global warming. But the fact is that past decade is the warmest on record. Ice in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and Greenland has been melting as a result of this warming.

NASA's record (as opposed to JPL's) is not good.

Uh, dude. JPL is part of NASA: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Reading that operations report I was most impressed by these two lines:

There were 97.9 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 1 of which 61.3 hours were large aperture coverage.

and

There were 62.3 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 2 of which 39.3 hours were large aperture coverage.

Wow -- that's an incredible amount of Deep Space Network time in a week -- and, looking at earlier reports, it seems to be representative of the time used in a typical week. I had no idea that the Voyagers were consuming that much DSN time. I assume "large aperture coverage" means use of the 70m dishes -- also an impressive number.

That much DSN time must be very expensive.

All the news articles report pretty much the same, digested, not particularly informative stuff. The mission page hasn't been updated in a while, the NASA news item isn't any more detailed, and the last operations report was from March 12. But I did learn this from the operations report: they're running the whole mission on less than 275 Watts of power from the RTG units. Wow.

All the news articles report pretty much the same, digested, not particularly informative stuff. The mission page hasn't been updated in a while, the NASA news item isn't any more detailed, and the last operations report was from March 12. But I did learn this from the operations report: they're running the whole mission on less than 275 Watts of power from the RTG units. Wow.

All the news articles report pretty much the same, digested, not particularly informative stuff. The mission page hasn't been updated in a while, the NASA news item isn't any more detailed, and the last operations report was from March 12. But I did learn this from the operations report: they're running the whole mission on less than 275 Watts of power from the RTG units. Wow.