Slashdot Mirror

Go to UND. I'm not even joking.

Where do air rights stop? Gee don't you remember the big deal about Spaceship One last year, and 50 miles being "space"? The legal definition is 50 miles, and everything above that is OPEN and non territorial, by treaty.

The rules on spy sats were set in the 1950s - Effectivly, if not legally in 1957 with the launch of Sputnick, when NO country objected

to quote the FAS

"The United States operates on the
premise that any activity pursued in the national
interest is permitted save for those
specifically prohibited by the U.N. Charter
or the treaties to which it is a signatory such
as the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972."

for more details see

http://www.space.edu/projects/book/chapter30.html

For more horrific results, recall the story of Marshal Nedelin's end, here and here.

One version I've read...
After the rocket failed to fire, Nedelin ordered technicians to go service the rocket and try again. As he stood by the pad watching, someone re-cycled the launch sequence. The launch clock had meanwhile counted from T-Minus to T-Plus, so the rocket's (perfectly functioning) second stage ignited, ending Marshal Nedelin and many others.

I remember hearing stories from a professor in college about the Russian space program. Supposedly at one point they had their electricity shut off (forgot to pay the bill...?) and were tinkering on their rockets by the light of propane lanterns. At another point, a serious rat infestation was discovered in the wiring in their version of mission control.

And let's not forget poor Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the pilot of the first Soyuz-1. His capsule's parachute malfunctioned and he hit the ground at ~500 mph. http://www.space.edu/projects/book/chapter20.html

Yeah, I'll wait for the movie...

There really isn't all that much control over where a payload parachuting from 100K feet goes: it's at the mercy of the winds. Need proof? Check out where all these guys' payloads landed:

http://balloons.space.edu/habp/

Sex in space

The payload bay doors serve two purposes: first, they expose the entire bay and all of its contents to the vacuum of space; second, the inner lining of the payload doors serves as heat radiators and cool the orbiter by removing the excess heat caused by electrical equipment and life sup port systems operations. If the doors cannot be opened the mission must abort within eight hours of entering space because the heat saturation of the orbiter starts to cause equipment breakdown.

http://balloons.space.edu/habp/project_4/airphotos .html

The balloon gets so high that you can see stars at mid-day.

The Soviets did it on Zond 6 (part of the Lunar L1 program), and it was heavily studied for Apollo and subsequent vehicles. Peak heating is lower than other entry methods, but only slightly, and the degree of precision required for the same ultimate landing position accuracy is much higher.

From http://www.space.edu/projects/book/chapter20.html

On November 6, 1968 a Proton rocket launched Zond 6 to within 2420 km of the Moon's surface. Cameras aboard photographed the Earth rising over the bleak lunar terrain; however, on the way back a gasket failed which would have killed any cosmonauts on board. Zond 6 performed a complex skip maneuver, decelerating to 7.6 km/sec over India then skipping back into space and landing in the Soviet Union. The parachute failed during landing and, once again, any human occupants would have perished. After this disaster, any thoughts of sending a cosmonaut to the Moon before January 1969 faded as Apollo 8 accomplished its historic lunar mission. There were three more Zond flights after Zond 6; a potential Zond failed on the 20th of January 1969 when its Proton booster failed. On August 8, 1969 after the successful Apollo 11, Zond 7 successfully orbited the Moon and returned. The last flight, Zond 8, was flown a little more than a year later successfully around the Moon, but landed in the Indian Ocean rather than back in Russia.

here is my own .edu sacrifice to this great subject!

FuturaMath

Here is my local mirror on a server that won't be ./'ed...

mpg format
wmv format

Here is my local mirror on a server that won't be ./'ed...

mpg format
wmv format

Here is a direct link to a cached .pdf, looks like their server (and mirrors) are already going down.

I point you to Legal Issues for Commercial Reusable Launch Vehicles

If I recall correctly, I saw a NASA image of one of the shuttles with a small "Experimental" designation on it.

I can imagine NASA talking to the FAA going "oh yah, we're working on a new er, aircraft, yeah, aircraft... we need a experimental type certificate for it... no,no, nothing fancy really, just a pretty standard glider design... in the post by tuesday afternoon? Ok, thanks!"

On October 24, 1960 the Soviet Premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev was boiling mad. Two launches to Mars on the 13th and 15th of October had failed while he was preparing to make a big propaganda speech at the United Nations bragging once again about the superiority of the Communist system. His appointed lackey, Field Marshal Nedelin, was told to launch a vehicle to Mars, or else. When the countdown reached zero, the huge SS-6 rocket did not ignite. Feeling the pressure from Khrushchev, Nedelin disobeyed all safety regulations concerning rocket misfires and sent the technicians out to work on the rocket. Korolev was extremely safety conscious and he argued with Nedelin about sending the engineers out to accomplish maintenance on the unstable space vehicle. In an action of bravado, Nedelin took his entire staff and some chairs to sit by the rocket as it was being inspected by the technicians. Korolev and a deputy Yangel went into a blast shelter to have a cigarette when the rocket exploded. Instantly, Nedelin, his staff, their chairs, and over 100 technicians on the rocket were incinerated in the worst accident in the history of the Soviet space program. Rather than admitting that such an event occurred, the Soviet Press claimed that Nedelin was killed in an aircraft accident. About once every month after the accident, three or four space technicians would have their obituaries in the press; it took thirty months for all the Nedelin disaster technicians to be officially recognized as dead. Such was the secrecy of the Soviet space program in the early years. At the Tyuratam Rocket Launch Facility there is now an obelisk with the names of the scientists and technicians who perished in "The Nedelin Disaster".

HAHAHAH!!! The Soviet Union cared more about life than the US? The Soviet Union?? HAHAHAHAAH!!!

Even accounting for recent US losses with the space shuttle, the Soviets/Russians have a very healthy lead.

So strongly I suggest you check your facts before posting your "omfg amerikans are so teh evil, i hate them" trash, or otherwise just shut the fuck up.

114,000 feet... ;-)

Photos

or

High Altitude Balloon Project

Photos

or

High Altitude Balloon Project

Yes, that would be the accident on October 24, 1960, where a R-16 (aka. SS-6) rocket exploded on the launch pad, killing over 100 persons. Undoubtedly the worst accident during the space race.
Read about it here or here.

See the link, this has been done, many, many times, and to much greater effect also. Balloons.space.edu

High Alt Balloon Group

Google found me this story debunking an urban legend surounding a "paper" leaked to the usenet, read it and you realise that whoever bought into this must trust every document posted to the usenet, and that whoever wrote it has some insight in how space experiments are conducted and a large imagination. my personal favourite part "We made extensive use of a number of published sources in our efforts to find satisfactory solutions see Appendix I), arriving at an initial list of 20 reasonable solutions. Of these, we used computer simulation (using the mechanical dynamics simulation package from the CADSI company) to determine the 10 most promising solutions. ".

Can you imagine the work involved in getting accurate computer simulations of twenty posible positions for intercourse in zero-g, motioncapturing wont work ofcourse (unless in micro-g) and getting the right model for the amount of force astronouts can use to keep in position is even harder. And all of this would ignore the mental factor (subjects being to occupied to keep attention to their position), but this one is discused in the results of the experiments, wich sugests those with exceptional selfcontrol might be able to use some positions without elastic bands.

Anyway not to kill the discision, the same google searches also returned rumours about rusian space missions (we all know they hold most longest-time-in-space records, rusians get bored to apperantly (again acording to some usetnet posts ;-))

But on a more serious story, I recal a discovery documentory including interviews with questions on this very subject with older female nasa biologist explaining nasa was looking into experiments with rubber bands and hamsters, and astronauts (the astronauts could be included in the experiment later on, not together with the hamsters ofcourse....uhm yeah...couse..uhm...you know) This interview was folowed by a astronaut couple which explained that if nasa would be willing to do this experiment, then they would be happy to be test-subjects!

Google also mentions iss has pregnancy test onboard But for now it seems all just Theory

Might I mention that the Nazi's V1 and V2 were largely developed by rocket enthusists (including Von Braun) who, before WWII, were mostly considered crackpots...

http://www.space.edu/projects/book/chapter8.html

But as a side note, the current method of Russian transportation is still probably better than ours, at least much more cost effective. (Just finished my History of the Russian Space Program class not long ago...)

Could be why they didn't put up the first satelite into orbit or put the first man into space or have the longest continually manned space station.

When the USSR's manned spaceflight program began, several people died because the rockets they were on were too shakey, pulled too many G's, or some other factors.

If that's not 'rockey and dangerous', then I don't know what is.

has tried to be the first organization to "integrate" both standard and metric.

Mars Climat Orbitor Lost

Kind of costly to show that it does not work well.

Ya, I got it wrong.

Radiation is actually more focussed in its magnetic field. Thanks for the heads up.

On a Side note,
Check this out

Scroll down to the part about Radiation. There's a reason Astronauts only have a career life of 3-5 years. Cosmic Radiation. But we've got Navy Nukes riding subs for much longer periods of time.

Now, who's still worried about the reactor?

One note about this hard drive, or any other hard drive for that matter. They might be tough and made for a laptop, but they will not work about 20,000-30,000 feet, confirmed by IBM engineers. We never got a chance to actually flight test one for fear of distruction, but the consensus was it wouldn't make it back anyway.

For an excellent on-line collection of relevant international documents and statutes relating to space law, check out the Archimedes web site. A survey of applicable treaties can be found at the Space web site.

An article on the point raised in the note is: "Emerging law of outer space - the analogy of maritime salvage" / Almond, Harry H., Jr. / 19 J. OF SPACELAW #1, 1991, P67. You should be able to find this in most law school libraries.

The problem with the salvage analogy is that there is at present no legal mechanism for a nation to absolve its responsibility for objects placed into outer space. There doesn't really seem to be legal recognition of abandoned property in space. I understand that the prohibitions against military operations in the Outer Space Treaty have been argued to preclude private salvage as well. This is not to say that salvage is prohibited, only that interest in any property rights to the salvage estate are unclear.

Though I practice intellectual property law, these remarks should be considered coming from a lay person -- I have absolutely no real clue what is going on in these space law/admiralty issues beyond a rudimentary understanding of the Space Patent Act.