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I noticed on one of the diagrams that the orbit of the slingshot itself degrades after each launch pick-up. Maybe the decrease in orbit isn't very significant, but would this system require self-adjustment? How would the system stay in service over the long term?

The Russians have done a lot of thought about this subject, and the general conclusion is that it's not practical or ethical. Besides which, it'd be damn hard to do. It takes about 30 minutes just to use the toilet up there, because of the lack of gravity-induced friction (traction) forces. Sex is all about friction. You'd need to strap one party down, and the other one would need hand- and foot-holds just to maintain contact. It would take 10 minutes just to get into position, not to mention the fact that if I were another crew member and I saw ejaculate floating around or stuck in the air filters (or heaven forbid, any of the flight controls) I'd probably kick your ass... it just doesn't seem worth it.

NASA knows that the Russians need money for their space program and will probably tolerate this guy as well.

If GCT actually does it, will the X-Prize folks accept their application after the fact?

From TFA:
"We will be happy to reconsider your application when provided with evidence of the feasibility of your proposed technology. We strongly encourage GCT to continue with its research and keep us posted as developments warrant our attention," the letter states.

Solar has a large energy investment and the panels, batteries etc are hard to recycle. Oil and coal are environmentally devastating in production as well as use (our largest local (Muja) coal station burns 12 tonnes a year of uranium, to say nothing of releasing radon etc); gas is better but shipping all of those big bombs around the country's just gotta have a sudden, loud environmental impact one day, hopefully not near any serious population. Wave and tidal generators muck around with the local ecosystem something chronic (as does Ocean Geothermal, but if you integrate fish-farms you at least get roughly twice the industry for the same amount of intervention). Nukes are quiet, clean, low-profile and produce small amounts of straightforward-to-manage waste.

If we were allowed to build proper nuclear rockets as well (get Burt Rutan to design them, not NASA), we could fling hundred-tonne loads of waste into the sun (or better still store it in a safe place (orbit/moon etc) for later re-processing) for an extremely low environmental cost. This is a question which has been studied to death, the answers are all to hand.

Stand by for a flock of "-1, Outrageous" mods from people who call themselves "green" but never actually think about the issues. They drive old, cheap, smoky, polluting cars and track dieback through the native forests they claim to protect. Here's a better way of approaching these things.

Hmm... You know, I never thought to ask, but is there any radioactive mineral deposits on mars? I couldn't find any on google. (search terms "mars radiation" and got a map on how much radiation a human would take rather than how much Uranium has been found by rovers in the ground.) If not, and we decide to go the fast way to avoid space-sickness (and all its bone weakening effects), earth would be the sole supplier of fuel to mars for return voyages.

That makes it pretty tough if you want to start a colony.

They just sent up a Beagle! You started it.

Not to mention the fact that he is the worst overactor since Shatner.

Why they don't just use Energia itself I don't know... probably politics.

One of the recent Mars probes was lost due to a simple math error in metric/Anglosaxon unit conversion. That was NASA's blunder. I wonder what sort of blunders will result from this British/ESA/Russian/Japanese/American/Whatever cooperation...

To be fair, there are some new positive findings that emerged after Carl Sagan's death. In 2000 it was discovered that the data from the Labeled Release experiment exhibited circadian rhythms that could only be explained by the presence of living organisms.

If Sagan had lived to see this work, I think he'd look more kindly on the Labeled Release results.

That's He-3, or helium-3. It gets dropped on the Mooon by solar wind, and is trapped in the lunar regolith. H-3 is hydrogen-3 (tritium), which is radioactive with a fairly short half-life (~12 years) which makes it very rare except in environments where it is continuously being replenished. (To add further confusion, both isotopes make excellent fuels for fusion reactions...)

For those who are interested, here and here are a couple of articles on the science and economics of helium-3 fusion. He-3 is a desirable fusion fuel because its reaction with deuterium produces very few neutrons. Consequently, very little in the way of radioactive waste is generated. It's very clean, and very safe. I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, but I suspect is may be an easier reaction to ignite, as well.

This was covered two days ago by space.com. They have pictures and good for people who didn't register on NYT.

Agreed. Correctness is not something programmers are interested in, it seems. Why else are people still using languages that cannot assure that you do not compare metres and feet? Why are people still using languages that cannot assure you don't have buffer overflows?

Testing doesn't help, because your tests can have bugs too and are probably incomplete. It's gives a lot of peace to the mind if you hit the compile button in Eiffel and it compiles successfully.

That does not imply Eiffel is the end of the road. I would like to see something like Spark being available for Eiffel.

are launching a satellite system as well

This I can understand considering that the US and China represent so different systems.

But for Europe to launch a comprehensive, expensive system... I don't get it. I mean of course there are sometimes disagreements between the US and Europe but I wish that we could realize that we stand on the same side: that of democratic capitalism. Most of the rest of the world does not.

Why not spend the money on real space science? Even if you think that stronger European military independence is a good thing (I do) there are plenty of military investments that make more sense (e.g., strategic trasport aircraft for power projection). This Gallileo system is very expensive and is useful in the very unlikely scenario where the US blocks GPS for Europe (btw, can anyone describe a single plausible scenario where this happens?).

Tor

...does anyone know just how close it's going to be compared to usual?

Loads of info (sky maps, viewing charts, other graphics) in Where is Mars Now? at space.com.

A couple of choice quotes:

"As of May 15, the Red Planet is about 82 million miles (133 million kilometers) from Earth."

"On Aug. 27, 2003, Mars will be less than 34.65 million miles (55.76 million kilometers) away -- closer to our planet than it's been in nearly 60,000 years."

The idea that the Sun has a companion star has been around for a number of years in the scientific community. The name "Nemesis" was proposed in 1984.

Of course, it's a complete coincidence that Asimov's 1989 story used the same name :-)

Pics are here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/05 22_030522_earthmars.html

Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=62 4&ncid=753&e=10&u=/ap/20030522/ap_on_sc/earth_from _mars

Here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=11583

Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030 522/168/45jfk.html

Here:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/05/22/earth.mar s.ap/

And Here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/World/viewo fearth030522.html

Here is a pic of earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1991 from more than 4 billion miles away (showing only a dot):
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/to p10_images_010925-11.html

Posting as AC, I don't seek any karma. Mod up if you want to

Pics are here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/05 22_030522_earthmars.html

Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=62 4&ncid=753&e=10&u=/ap/20030522/ap_on_sc/earth_from _mars

Here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=11583

Here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030 522/168/45jfk.html

Here:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/05/22/earth.mar s.ap/

And Here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/World/viewo fearth030522.html

Here is a pic of earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1991 from more than 4 billion miles away (showing only a dot):
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/to p10_images_010925-11.html

Posting as AC, I don't seek any karma. Mod up if you want to

If you go to the space.com website, they show you that in that shot, Jupiter is about 7 times farther away from the viewpoint, but it still appears dramatically larger than earth in the full image.

We all know Jupiter is big but this rare chance to phyicially see it compared to our own planet is kinda profound...

or maybe I just need to get out more.

Space.com has the pictures, and is not (yet) slashdotted.

Silica is the primary component of the Moon's surface (and Earth's too) - this technique could greatly reduce the cost to produce useful things (like oxygen as a fuel component and for life in space, and silicon for solar cells) out of bulk lunar material.

Large-scale space construction is coming, and will provide one of the major markets for lunar materials. Martin Rees has a new book out that is pretty clear on why we need to develop space resources. Here's another enabling technology - now let's go do it!

By the way, anybody in the SF bay area this coming weekend should check out the International Space Development Conference in San Jose, where we'll be discussing a lot of these ideas, and more!

Note that one major thing that caused failures in the Mir space station leading to its abandonment (a historic shame!) was skin oils etc. from human inhabitants getting onto metal, glass, and plastic components and then providing food for [mutated] mold to grow which then could cause electrical failures and mechanical damage (as mold and other fungi put holes into metal, glass, etc.). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/media_ reports/1209034.stm http://www.space.com/news/spacestation/space_fungu s_000727.html

So -- in space, perhaps it's either roaches or mold -- take your choice. :-)

Are you talking about this? "Peace Be With You: The All-Around Ergonomic Chair Has Arrived">

Try some of these links, not mirrors but they have info and pictures, and may just stand up to the power of a slashdotting a bit better.

PC World

Space.Com (Nice big pic of the two chairs if you click on the smaller image)

Space has an article with pictures on a server that isn't slash dotted... yet.

Space has an article with pictures on a server that isn't slash dotted... yet.

The parts of working on this that have amazed me most are when the evolution doesn't go as I've planned. In particular, when writing Avida, the best debugging technique I have is to just run it, and then see how some of the evolved organisms work. If I made any mistakes, they will find a way to exploit my errors.

One key thing about Avida is that its not exactly a genetic algorithm. The digital organisms must self-replicate. No matter how skilled they are at performing any of the rewarded computations, if they can't also copy themselves their genetic material will not make it into the next generation. Some people may consider this a minor difference, but it causes certain side effects, such as an evolution toward being more robust to mutations (See this previous space.com article), and in general helps prevent the population from running into a complexity barrier.

Now, back to the organisms exploiting any mistakes I've made. The story that convices most biologists that these organisms can, in some sense be considered alive is this. I was working on a project where I didn't want any more beneficial mutations to be able to occur, so that I might be able to study more ecological effects. Since I'm using a computer system, I actually have the ability to fully analyze every mutation as it happens -- I can take the resulting organism, start up a new population, and run it for a while to see how it does. Now obviously this will slow down an experiment tremendously, but if I'm willing to take such a time hit, it will work. I can then take any mutation that would be beneficial, kill off those organisms (or even just revert that mutation). I implemented it and set it up to do.

What happened? Well, I watched the run as it was going (looking particularly at these test environments), and was surprized to see the fitness of the organisms appeared to be dropping. I couldn't understand it; just because there would be no mutations to improve their ability to survive, it still shouldn't drop. So I looked more carefull in the population itself, and there the fitness appeared to continue to rise. In enither case did I see the stasis that I expected.

Upon further investigation, it turned out that the organisms had evolved a way to distinguish between the test environments and the real one. I had made a slight difference on how I gave them the input numbers to the computations they needed to be able to perform, thinking it would really matter in the end. But from the organisms persepective they were able to use this -- if the inputs looked like those from a test environment, the organisms would purposfully not perform any tasks, while if they were from a real population they would do all of the rewarded tasks they could and continue to adapt to perform more.

It shocked me that they were able to figure this out so easily. A biologist friend of mine equated it to predator avoidance -- if they showed a particular behavior they would be killed for it, so they were careful how they did it. Kind of like if a squirral wasn't careful collecting nuts, a bird might swoop down and get it. Even being careful there is an occasional problem, but they can do quite well for themselves.

I went in and fixed it: I made both the real population and the test environment as random as possible, and started my runs up again.

Did this work? Of course not. What they started to do now was just play a probability game. They would ususally do all of their tasks, but sometimes they would do none of them. If an otherwise beneficial mutation happened to occur when they weren't doing tasks, it would slip through and get into the population, never to be checked again. This really slowed down the rate of evolution (most beneficial mutations were purged), but enough still slipped though.

I am actually at a loss on how to get rid of them all! Here I have this system that should make experimental evolution all the easier because I have "complete control" over it, when in truth life does always seem to find a way.

Charles Ofria

click here

Shortwave Radio Hobbiests do this all the time. In fact, I believe there is a satellite that is open for use by the shortwave enthusiasts, put into orbit via donations and some private capital.

Samus is correct, most commercial and military communications will be encrypted. I would also add that there are enough stories to show that trying to decrypt this stuff without showing some discretion has gotten some people into hot water with the government.

A decent program for monitoring satellites is Starry Night Pro. It can be purchased via Space.com. Even without the satellite stuff, it's a fun program. It's nice when you look up into the sky and wonder, "What the hell is that?," you have a resource to use and find out.

Except NASA is forbidden, by law, from doing this.

I'd heard this several times, but this is the only current reference to the law I can find (see the fourth and fifth paragraphs). Here is an older article about the restriction before it was passed.

Guess who it's going to be?

Yep.

Excerpt:

In the October 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia's University of Tasmania, report on new observations (partially supported by the SETI Institute) designed to test this idea. Their new try was made at the 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania. This southern hemisphere instrument could continuously follow for most of a day the patch of sky (in the constellation of Sagittarius) where the "Big Ear" was pointing when it found the 'Wow' signal. They made six 14-hour observations, and even though their telescope was rather smaller than the venerable Ohio State antenna, they still had sufficient sensitivity to find signals only 5% as strong as Wow's 1977 intensity. They also covered five times as much of the radio dial as the original "Big Ear" telescope.

Bottom line? No dice. To quote from their article, "no signals resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected..." Of course, if the signal's repetition cycle were much longer than 14 hours, then even this careful experiment could have easily missed it. But as Gray and Ellingsen point out, if the signal were really this infrequent, then the chance to have found it in the first place was very slim.

So was the Wow signal our first detection of extraterrestrials? It might have been, but no scientist would make such a claim. Scientific experiment is inherently, and rightly, skeptical. This isn't just a sour attitude; it's the only way to avoid routinely fooling yourself. So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the Wow signal will remain a What signal.

Well, sounds like someone might actually build a spacecraft. Scaled Composites has designed a sub-orbital spacecraft launched from the belly of the plane. It is in testing now. They're trying to win the $10 million X-prize, by builing a re-usable spacecraft that can send three people to space (100km) and return them safely. Looks like a neat design, and these guys are for real. Passengers would have a 5-minute micro-gravity environment during the flight. Sounds really cool. Space.com has an excellent write-up.

In other news, the Columbia investigation continues, and Space Daily has a real good (but long) write-up.

But NASA soldiers on. They have 2 Mars missions scheduled for this summer, plus the launch of SIRTF (infra-red telescope), which was recently delayed. Check out Spaceflight Now for details, and the best space coverage, in general.

Oh hell, almost missed this one. Apparently, the founder of PayPal is trying to get into the "microsatellite" launch business, although 1000 pounds is a bit bigger than micro. The company, SpaceX, is based in El Segundo. But, I think these guys are biting off more than they can chew, essentially trying to compete with Boeing, Lockheed, and everyone else. I think Scaled Composites is for real, though; they might pull it off.

Well, sounds like someone might actually build a spacecraft. Scaled Composites has designed a sub-orbital spacecraft launched from the belly of the plane. It is in testing now. They're trying to win the $10 million X-prize, by builing a re-usable spacecraft that can send three people to space (100km) and return them safely. Looks like a neat design, and these guys are for real. Passengers would have a 5-minute micro-gravity environment during the flight. Sounds really cool. Space.com has an excellent write-up.

In other news, the Columbia investigation continues, and Space Daily has a real good (but long) write-up.

But NASA soldiers on. They have 2 Mars missions scheduled for this summer, plus the launch of SIRTF (infra-red telescope), which was recently delayed. Check out Spaceflight Now for details, and the best space coverage, in general.

Oh hell, almost missed this one. Apparently, the founder of PayPal is trying to get into the "microsatellite" launch business, although 1000 pounds is a bit bigger than micro. The company, SpaceX, is based in El Segundo. But, I think these guys are biting off more than they can chew, essentially trying to compete with Boeing, Lockheed, and everyone else. I think Scaled Composites is for real, though; they might pull it off.

The EZ-Rocket, a modified Long EZ plane piloted by retired Lt. Col. Dick Rutan, flew two flights in one day earlier this month. Rutan's brother Burt Rutan, of Scaled Composites, designed the Long EZ plane and is also developing a separate reusable vehicle as part of the $10 million X-Prize competition to put three people in space and return them safely.

Really sweet too for getting at t3h c0mput4r l33t.

Example:

Check out this really cool image.

While I realize that a paint job can cover many ills, it does appear that Rutan is significantly farther along in constructing his X-Prize vehicle than Carmack.

Comparing pictures, you see:
Armadillo Aerospace Launch Vehicle
vs.
Scaled Composites aircraft and drop ship

Perhaps one of the issues is that Armadillo publishes their status (and myriad problems) openly (see the latest update for example). No one knows what issues Scaled Composites has had as they worked in secret, but it's easy to feel like Rutan's running a professional company while Carmack is leading a group of (brilliant, talented) hobbyists.

I'd be interested in hearing Armadillo/Carmack's perspective on the competitive landscape, now that this new player has made an announcement.

I haven't got clue one about aerospace engineering so I'm hoping someone else could toss out a quick summary of what the limitations are that keep conventional air craft from reaching the kinds of altitudes that the White Knight craft is capable of (>65,000 ft)?

Is it an engine issue? That the engines on your typical 747 won't get enough oxygen at the higher altitudes? Or is there a problem with pressure (or lack thereof) at that (65,000ft) altitude.

It would seem cheaper to buy an existing plane and retro-fit it with new engines than to have to start from scratch on a new design. Now I'm not suggesting you take a Cesna and strap a Big Ass Engine(tm) to it and hit the switch. But take something along the lines of a U-2, which is already capable of very high altitudes, and strap SpaceShipOne to it.

I haven't got clue one about aerospace engineering so I'm hoping someone else could toss out a quick summary of what the limitations are that keep conventional air craft from reaching the kinds of altitudes that the White Knight craft is capable of (>65,000 ft)?

Is it an engine issue? That the engines on your typical 747 won't get enough oxygen at the higher altitudes? Or is there a problem with pressure (or lack thereof) at that (65,000ft) altitude.

It would seem cheaper to buy an existing plane and retro-fit it with new engines than to have to start from scratch on a new design. Now I'm not suggesting you take a Cesna and strap a Big Ass Engine(tm) to it and hit the switch. But take something along the lines of a U-2, which is already capable of very high altitudes, and strap SpaceShipOne to it.

I have seen this rocket/airplane space orbital type mentioned for a long time. By the way , what is the spaceship made out of ?

Reading the linked article "Cosmic Cannon: How an Exploding Star Could Fry Earth", I'm left thinking... So what? It's not like there's anything we could even dream about doing about it, except maybe get off the planet so all our eggs aren't in one basket, and that isn't going to happen (a viable colony that can surive forever without us) for a long, long time. So, why even worry about it? If it happens, we won't even know it, except maybe briefly.

I agree 100% and make a comparison with Werner Von Braun...

Here is one important difference between Mitnick and von Braun. Mitnick was charged, and convicted for his crimes. And he then served his time, and served his parole. Von Braun was never even charged.

What is the phrase Americans use? Mitnick "paid his debt to society."

As for the deaths von Braun was responsible for? Some of the later correspondents in this thread are allowing him the defense Tom Lehrer suggested in his satirical song,

" Ze go up in the air, but where they come down,
'Zat's not my department!' say Werner von Braun."

Von Braun wasn't just in charge of a big research project. He was also a Nazi party member. I have heard people defend his Nazi party membership. They say something like this, "C'mon, he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to build rockets."

Well, von Braun wasn't just a Nazi. He oversaw the construction of the rockets too. And, as such, he was responsible for the employment of slave labor.

The Nazis held captive members of ethnic groups they didn't like, political prisoners, and homosexuals, and they worked them to death. 15,000 slave labourers worked in von Braun's factories I heard.

"Von Braun's complicity in Nazi atrocities is less clear, Neufeld said. But there is at least one document _ a letter _ in which von Braun discusses a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he apparently spoke to the commandant about obtaining more skilled laborers to use at Mittelwerk."

This site says one of his plants contained a concentration camp that employed 40,000 slave laborers.

Life on Venus?

Um, the AP over exaggerated or misunderstood what the scientists said. Imagine that.
This one makes more sense.

by the way, that's my boss in the picture from the CNN article.

Not to mention that even if they HAD said "it's dead" there would have been NO POSSIBLE WAY to save the crew

Reports on released emails say that NASA engineers would seem to disagree. Maybe you're better at spaceflight than they are...

In theory, one can fuse non-radioactive Helium-3 and get basically non-radioactive end-products, plus truckloads of energy. The problems are:

1. Fusion technology isn't ready (yet)
2. There's not much Helium-3 on Earth

Then again, "the only difference between theory and pactice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice"!

You mean like this one:
Possible Hypernova Could Affect Earth

First off, note that the write up mentions only satellites and says nothing about moons.

But as for your question: historically there hasn't been a need for a hard definition, and hence there isn't one. At this point in time, however, with 118 official moons in the solar system and a whole bunch of candidates, lines need to be drawn.

You may want to read this article for details.

Defending against an extinction level event such as the Yucatan strike described by Alvarez et al would be prudent on a scale of megayears, but is difficult to organise on a scale of election years.

Extinction

deep impact