Slashdot Mirror

I thought they've been using liquid optics for years with lasers. Is this an application of that? Liquid for telescope mirrors is also well known for creating a cheap mirror.

It's a bit big for a robot, but it is automatic.

Delta IV Large

Which Doesn't Exist (which doesn't have even a fraction of the shuttle's capabilities in the design, either). Perhaps you missed the "Status: Development" line? Want me to cite the predicted numbers for how much the shuttle was going to cost per kg during its development phase?

The Delta IV Heavy does exist, but will be making its maiden flight Dec 10.

Here is a link.

I remember someone came up with the idea of a satellite that reflected and focused the suns light down to the earth, and used the thermal energy that way to prodcue hydrogen, I see no mention of that here.

Here is a link.

The parent article is noteworthy in that it may be a new technique for seperating the hydrogen, but honestly, I think it is exciting the hydrogen molecules with heat, instead of electricity, but this is the same method.
-PHiZ

Whoa there Bubba!

I said, "Of course it would literally have to hop as wings are useless on the moon. Low gravity may make the concept practical and gas could be 'waste' from the He3 extraction."

You might also run a fusion reactor on the moon using some of the He3 you've mined and use the heat to vaporize and accelerate other byproducts of mining such as metals.

Links. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html, http://exosci.com/news/129.html (He3 found with concentrations of TiO2), I like the Populrar Science RAIL GUN approach to getting the stuff back to Earth. Another nice thing about proximity of TiO2 and He3 is O2 is handy for miners of the made of meat variety. Perhaps some OPossums or Coons with human like brains (search /. or google for the articles on chimera).

Gotta think outside the bathtub

The World Trade Center towers took 7 years to finish. The Apollo Project took roughly 8 years (from 1961 to 1969) to get someone on the moon. The Hoover Dam took 6 years to finish construction. Each of these (for all their majesty) were either constrained to a relative small geographic space, and a small amount of material.

Broadband has been available to the public since about 1997, and to be complete, requires running cable to every household in the USA. The only hard number I could find comparable for that was Miles of High Voltage Transmission Wire in USA, approx 160,000 miles for bulk transmission. On google, some renewable energy sites indicate that the US has over a million miles of wire for distribution networks (last mile connects). That's a lot of material to run.

The US Interstate system, designed in 1956, will be complete to the original spec in 2006, and that's only 46,000 miles.

I agree with your argument that we should never rest on our laurels, and strive to be the world leader, but let me just throw in that we can be the world leader in this field too, just give the industry a little time to get us there...

Perhaps if we convinced there was oil on the moon there would be more intrest
While there is no oil on the Moon there is some Helium-3 in the Moon regolith, which can make Moon a stepping stone for other, more helium-3 reach sources (gas giants)

An effect of O'Neill's proposal is the creation of space settlements which could house thousands of times the land area of the Earth from asteroidal materials alone. The creator of the space-settlement FAQ, Mike Combs, says in that FAQ to the question "Is space settlement a solution to the overpopulation problem?":

Probably not. No space transportation system we can imagine (although that might be a significant qualifier) could keep up with the number of babies being born.

I couldn't help thinking that we've had an awfull lot of sun spots lately. Sunspot Activity at 8,000-Year High

The simple fact is that there is a muhch stronger coorelation to sun spots and weather patterns than there is to human behavior and cliamte.

Maybe American "greed" is causing the sun to flair up too!

then it would be a good thing that we did not sign on to this restrictive treaty. Some data is suggesting that the other planets in our solar system are experiencing global warming. Could this be due to a cyclical increase in the output of the Sun? I know, that many scientists are not convinced that the sun's warming cycle could cause all of the warming that we have seen, but this new information needs to be taken into account.

As mentioned in http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /space_elevator_020327-1.html (on page 2) is the probable energy source solar-cells with lasers directed from earth giving it power.

"the length of geosynchronous orbit (30,000 miles or so)"

Geosynchronous orbit is around 22,000 miles. This link gives that plus 62,000 miles for the cable.

Yeah...this is slashdot so ignorance is acceptable. Let me quickly explain how a space elevator is supposed to work.

An EXTREMELY strong tether is fixed to a large mass far out in orbit, this mass along with the earth's rotation hold the tether very taut and allows for smaller masses to scale up it. Much like if you tied a small weight to a string and whirled it around your head, imagine a small robot climbing the string...thats the idea of a space elevator.

The issue with the idea of a space elevator currently is the technology that would go into the tether. It is believed that many strands of carbon nano tubes, those tiny super strong tubes grown/created long and attached together, would be able to withstand the stress.

Next the tether would not be round like a rope, but flat like a belt. Being flat, it would be much harder to get twisted if sufficient force is applied to each end, pulling the ends apart.

So that is the general idea the theory behind space elevators...I am sure I left some details out and all, but here is a decent link if you want to learn more. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /space_elevator_020327-1.html

Space.com reported several weeks ago that the White Knight (of Space Ship One fame) might be hired to do some drops for NASA after the retirement of its B-52B. In particular, a NASA spokesman stated that "cost analysis favored Scaled Composites," when talking about the X-37 program.

Perhaps you could site a source for the claim of such high amounnts of radiation? The sources I have seen all say otherwise, including this one on Space.com.

Well, my comment was based on what NASA officials said in this article. Maybe it's something specific to this engine that makes it impossible to test there.

not really. new theory sees it ripping itself apart. maybe. :)

Basically it is a museum of Science Fiction?

You know... all those things that will never happen like say... Flying Cars, Teleportation and Orbital Laser Beams?

I want the museum of things that DID happen and just sucked... Other than Microsoft Bob...

All discussion of physics aside, your description of how the craft works is incorrect. The scramjet is only turned on once, and it is most certainly within the atmosphere when that happens, otherwise the scramjet wouldn't work.

The "skip-glide" mode of flight you describe has been proposed but never demonstrated.

The Vomit Comit was retired recently. Quite a few sites mentioned that about a week ago.

Holding something in space is dangerous and inefficient. Most probably dangerous asteroid will be spotted while it is far enough to launch rockets from earth and change it's path. ESA http://www.esa.int/ is planning Don Quijote http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060 188707?v=glance mission http://www.space.com/spacenews/donquixote_040714.h tml http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/SEMZO8M26WD_Expand ing_0.html. I saw a 15 seconds movie illustrating the impact but can't find a link at the moment. I guess, if we spot something that close to earth that launching from space would be quicker than from the Earth, that would already be too late.

The biggest problem with the US electoral system, is that there are too many voters. This leads to all kinds of statistical problems that otherwise wouldn't be significant. Combine that with a very close result, and you get uncertain results blurred by statistical noise.

I recommend going to a system described in Starship Troopers: only citizens can vote. Citizens being, of course, only those people who had served in the armed forces for a minimum of 2 years.

This solves everything, as the number of voters would drastically be reduced, but that wouldn't matter anyway as all elections would be landslide Republican wins.

I seem to recall something from the 80's during President Reagan's administration, the 'Star Wars' missile defense system or SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) as it came to be known. Various presidents and congresses have kept it alive, moving it forward for over 20 years now and it has yet to happen. I don't see how we can pin the blame on G. W. Bush for something that has been in planning for so long.

There is an article today at space.com where an expert says that weapon platforms in space could be easily defeated by cheaper, mine-like microsatellites which could be easily launched by any country with a space program. Just get the satellites within 10-100 meters of the platform and BOOM!, no more fancy-pants space missiles.

First off, there's no real proof that our CO2 is heating up the climate.

Oh yea? Why? Because you, "the Shadow" knows? And what is the basis of your conclusion on this? Let me guess, "Cause you said so."

Nevermind the Carbon Dioxide Increasing in Atmosphere, Methane Also Increasing, More Frequent Extreme Weather, Disappearing Glaciers, Melting Arctic Sea Ice, Melting Antarctic Sea Ice, Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting, and Tropical Diseases Spreading. Let's just ignore all that, or better yet, let's bury our head in the sand and blindly support an administration hell-bent on burying scientific evidence.

There are some craters on the south pole of the moon which never get sunlight inside, which makes them a potentially good spot to collect volatile minerals. See more at Space.com's article on the south pole.

...this time, it's from NASA. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/nasa_super computer_040809.html

There's been a lot of turnover recently. For those of you keeping track at home, it's now:

IBM BlueGene/L (70.7 teraflops, up from36 in your article)

(?) NEC SX-8 (Not yet installed anywhere; estimated 58.5)

NASA/SGI Columbia (42.7)

NEC Earth Simulator (35.9)

I agree that the voice of a crowd tends to the most common opinion, no matter how wacky the one side is or how reasonable the other side is. The "easy to understand" way, whether right or wrong, tends to become the norm.

Power plants in general have dangers. Nuclear power is arguably more or less safe, depending on where you stand in the crowd. The bad that can happen is terribly bad, but the safety put in place is much more robust to help avoid the bad.

Undeniably, nuclear power is not oil. If the people could understand the risks and benefits without falling into mob mentality, unless the mob gets with the program, then we can begin moving forward.

Put the power plants far enough away from the people to make them comfortable. Heck, surround them with military bases to make them safer. Put 'em in the deserts or far out in the fields, away from the cities, if that's what it takes.

Chuck the waste into space. Launch it toward the sun 'cause I'm sure it wouldn't mind, or into deep space if there's fear of something bad inside the solar system. Use the space elevator if there's fear of a rocket explosion...

An aside, since I realize the article is about nuclear power, is what about other renewable sources? How about putting wind generation in every cloverleaf on the freeway to power the nearby street lights? How about putting more than one dam on a river for hydro-electric, or just more dams in general? Why not replace those massive refineries with huge farms of wind and solar power generators?

Why not make hybrid cars the norm? Subsidise consumers for buying them, or companies to help make them inexpensive. And why not make them so they can use ethanol? Less than 1/3 the oil consumed per gallon, and lots more miles-per-gallon on top. Even if they have to be the size of SUVs to make Americans happy, the bulk of commuters don't use the power in the gasoline engines anyway; as long as they can be modified to still provide exciting car chases...

I think once we start moving in that direction, dependency will drop, and the rising market will, like elsewhere, reduce prices and increase productivity.

Currently, the International Space Station consists of pretty much every spacefaring nation on Earth, with the exception of China... due to US uncertainty over its motives. So China is planning to go its own way, build its own station, etc.

I don't know about you, but as a Chinese living in the USA, I would really like for China to join the ISS -- we don't need another Cold War style space race, and cooperation with the world will, I believe, lead to greater transparency and scrutiny of China's space program anyhow.

Indeed, it's absurd that China is currently one of only two nations with a operational manned spaceflight capability, but isn't allowed to join the ISS -- when the ISS is suffering from major logistical resupply problems due to the grounding of the shuttle.

China has, for years, been on a path from isolation back in the 1950s and 1960s, to being a part of the world community in many ways. The US needs to ditch its outdated paranoia, or else the other nations (Russia, EU, etc) need to grow some balls and admit China into the consortium for the benefit of all sides concerned.

And the Hulkster's personal favorite is when he takes a "bite outa the moon" in these lunar eclipse pictures

Anandtech
Ars Technica
BBC Science/Nature
BBC Technology
CNET News
Nature Science Update
Slashdot
Space.com
SpaceWire
Wired News

Let's see: the Sun is at an 8000-year high for solar activity, Mars is emerging from its own Ice Age and its polar caps are disappearing, and the Earth's magnetic field strength is approaching nil before it reconstitutes with an opposite polarity. And we are to believe that human activity is somehow solely resposible for global warming?

Let's see: the Sun is at an 8000-year high for solar activity, Mars is emerging from its own Ice Age and its polar caps are disappearing, and the Earth's magnetic field strength is approaching nil before it reconstitutes with an opposite polarity. And we are to believe that human activity is somehow solely resposible for global warming?

They already had one named Enterprise - the first shuttle, in fact.

It lives on in reruns at the Smithsonian which is cool, but doesn't really help with getting things into orbit. :)

Take a look at this article about Kerry's official position on space. Or better yet, see what Kerry's web site says about NASA.

General outlines:
- More NASA funding for research
- More balanced priorities (read: less spending for operations, less human spaceflight, more research)
- Probably no Human Moon/Mars program -- he claims Bush can't pay for it either, which I agree with.
- More aeronautics R&D
- Continued international cooperation
- NASA management reforms

So in short, it seems Kerry endorses more science, more R&D, and less Buck Rogers. While I like the Buck Rogers stuff, I have to agree that unless we're going to do it in a radically different manner, we've reached a dead end with Shuttle and ISS. I would rather park Shuttle and halt development of ISS, instead of spending another $50B to complete construction. I've posted comments to this effect on many occasions... so I won't bore you with it again.

This looks a whole lot like what Steve Mann has been doing for several decades. He was doing research on wearable displays at MIT for a long time, now he's at the University of Toronto.

Not to say that his way of doing things isn't freakishly strange, but he's definitely a leader in the area:

• His research:
  http://wearcam.org/
• His company?:
  http://eyetap.org/mann/
• Brief summary of him:
  http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_f air_projects_encyclopedia/Steve_Mann
• CNN article:
  http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/in ternet.cyborb.ap/
• Same article at space.com:
  http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_man n_041012.html

I met him at a lecture he gave at McGill last year. I think he's a little out in left field, but he's also very bright, and deserves credit. He's been wearing this kind of laser device for some time now, and doesn't seem to have any retinal burn-in.

I think that you'd have to consider the intensity levels involved, it's a matter of wavelength, intensity and duration of exposure. It's quite possible that the 3 combined make this extremely safe. My approximation is that you probably risk more eye-damage from looking directly at a halogen desk lamp bulb.

His system is more interesting, because he includes a camera, and does image processing to include relevant information about the outside world onto the retinal image that is being displayed: ie. names of people (yes, little laser overlayed name tags), recalling facts and so on. I'm not sure how successful his systems are, but the way he speaks about them, they work fairly sucessfully.

Here's another article that talks a little more about the findings, including a very short discussion on possible implications regarding climate change and global warming. Although a correlation makes sense and there appears to be a link between global climate change and sunspots in several instances, there is not enough data to be conclusive and the current warming trends do coincide with increasing levels of methane and CO2. It could be either or both.

In addition to the obvious question of whether this affects our climate, the findings are interesting simply because they provide more information about our sun. I think it's amazing we can look at carbon-14 content here on earth an make inferences about the solar weather 10000 years ago. They're using this to show indirectly that the sun exhibits it's own long term "climate changes" as expected. Of course, other bodies do this as well. For example, that hurricane on Jupiter (the red spot) that's been hanging around for just a little bit longer than Frances.

You guys might like what I ended up - definately something "different" - (see link above) and the space.com guys put it in their eclipse photo wrapup which includes more of the "standard" eclipse pictures.

At least get your conspiracy theory straight. It should be that the radiation trapped inside the Van Allen belts is too high.

Of course, it's all been discounted here, among other places.

Summary: they were only in the belts for about 4 hours, and got about the same radiation level as a chest X-ray.

Here is a link to a better article on Space.com with a viewer's guide and timing for each stage of the eclipse (with local timezone info). Good for those of you who care about the eclipse but could give a rat's ass about baseball.

What's more, they will be recorded by a microphone on the probe and relayed back so that everyone on Earth can hear the sounds of Titan. Although the Russians took a microphone to Venus in the 1970s, few scientific results came out of that endeavour. A similar microphone for Mars was destroyed when NASA's Mars Polar Lander crashed a few years ago.

How convienient that so many NASA probes to Mars worked out, when the only one with a microphone failed, eh?

And although I cannot find the final answer on if it had it or not the Beagle 2 was possibly going to have a microscope as well.

Hopefully the Titanites don't mind people listening in.

Just trying to ferment ideas. :-)

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/dart_prelaunc h_041025.html/

Was it also NPR that ran a story that most some SETI scientist are starting to think that radio waves is the wrong place to look. Some now believe that lasers would be used by more advanced civilizations as radio waves would be used but a brief history of the civilization.

Brazil launched its first successful rocket Saturday from their Alcantarao base in Maranhao. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3948531.stm The two stage rocket, VSB-30, reached a maximum height of 250 km Good to see their program getting back on its feet after last years disaster http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/brazil_failur e_030822.htm which killed 21 of their top people

No, this is different, Gravity Probe B is a separate project, this was an Italian research group who used freely avaliable data from the past 11 years of the two LAGEOS satelites, who's orbital paths have been monitored for that time. Space.com has a good summary, and so does New Scientist

We're a creative species. I'm absolutely certain we could come up with something that would work.

You might have been joking, but consider this - if you built one in each hemisphere and linked them together, you'd have a HUGE baseline - giving much better results for stellar interferometry than this http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/ch ara_array_010717-1.html.

The link works, slashcode just puts a space in long strings with out spaces(like URLS). More Moons Around Earth? It's Not So Loony

There are newer/better articals, but I'm to lazy to keep looking, heck even /. has covered them multiple times in the last 5 years.1, 2,.

Also about the size thing, while I was wrong in the portion, the moon does effect us a lot. This link will help put things in perspective. Best I could find.(I am working after all, and don't have much time to put into my postings or reading of websites) Big Planets, Little Planets, Big Moons, Little Moons!

And for the lazy, posting anon to avoid karma whoring too...
NOAA satellite
Climate Orbiter

XM is likely to be over in a few years anyway, right?

i went, and checked...

first, that link don't work.

second, digging, a bit further, i found this link -- look at #62, specifically:

62. Which planet has more moons, Earth or Mars?

Mars has two satellites, Phobos and Deimos. The Earth has only one natural satellite, but it's the Moon. The outer planets have lots of Moon, most of them found fairly recently and leading to the possibility that scientists might one day need to redefine what it means to be a moon.