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Scramjet Test Flight Less Than Successful
Sunthorn writes: "After much hype NASA was forced to destroy the X-43 prototype seconds into the flight after the launch rocket went out of control." The BBC has another story with some pre-flight pictures. Anybody have actual flight photos? Update: 06/02 8:28 PM by michael : Emperor writes "The official NASA take on the X-43
destruction." Update: 06/03 10:18 AM by michael : And someone else sent in this photo gallery, with some really nice close-ups.
After the engine design is refined to the point of being operationally implementable - i.e. we can build them, and they work - I would imagine the next phase of the program would be better fuselage design to accomodate room for passengers, a pilot, missiles, satellites, etc.
...
I think this stage of the testing is geared to study the engine dynamics more than anything else - i.e. how does the scramjet perform under specific controlled conditions. Looking at the current fuselage design, I believe it's current purpose is simply to give the engine what it needs to get started at hypersonic speeds, and run long enough for us to be doing telemetry on the *engine*, not the rest of the plane itself.
So, we're only seeing a small part of the eventual (hopefully) implemented design of scramjet-based transportation systems.
I'm sure we'll get to the rest of the plan once the engines have been proven and tested. It's all about the scramjet right now, in other words
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Be fair... my bugs don't explode in a giant supersonic fireball and rain shrapnel on the test site. So it takes me a few minutes to notice 'em sometimes. ;)
Well, a little searching indicates it is, indeed, in excess of Mach 3 that a scramjet becomes functional. It is, in fact, Mach 4.7.
Anyone know the benefits of a scramjet over a ramjet? I'm guessing a scramjet must be able to function in a much lighter atmosphere (read: "space", i.e. low-Earth orbit) or something.
--Be human.
Please recall that there *is* atmosphere as high as low-earth orbit. It's not very dense, but it is atmosphere. If NASA plans to use this for space launches, one might assume that there would be enough atmosphere low-earth orbit altitudes to sustain combustion for scramjets. Or, alternatively, they vehicle could build enough momentum to carry it into orbit after the atmosphere is too weak to support combustion.
--Be human.
Hmm. The SR-71 uses ramjets. The SR-71 was delivered (i.e. operational) in 1966. So, in fact, we've had operational ramjet engines for about 35 years now. Actually, it's a turbojet/ramjet--it operates as a turbojet at subsonic speeds, and as a ramjet at supersonic speeds.
Scramjets are another issue altogether. They are closely related to ramjets, but the only alleged operational scramjet is on the Aurora, the successor to the SR-71. Of course, that is *pure* speculation, as the Aurora has not been officially confirmed.
--Be human.
From everyone's posts so far, it seems like there are some misconceptions about scramjets.
;-) tells me it's something in excess of Mach 3.
People keep asking why they didn't separate the booster from the scramjet so they can gather as much information from the scramjet as possible. Others are asking why they didn't separate, then let the scramjet operate to gather information.
Well, folks, a scramjet has to get to sufficient speed before it will even work. I am no supersonic aeronautical engineer, but my failing memory (too much LDS in college
Well, in that case, if there's a failure with the booster rocket, there's absolutely nothing you can gather from the experiment. You can't fire the bloody scramjet engine. Separating the booster from the scramjet wouldn't do any good.
Furthermore, we've all seen the damage caused when a 747 hits the water at ~250mph. It breaks apart in a spectacular fashion. It takes years for experts to piece together the reckage to determine what happens. Now, imagine what happens when an object hits the water at 700+mph. It would be pretty damn difficult to get any valuable information from it. Furthermore, the risks to public safety would be incredibly high if NASA let this thing go.
In the end, that's the reason they blew it up. No information can be gathered about the scramjet, and it poses a risk to public safety.
--Be human.
The V1 was a pulsejet, not a ramjet. The two are very different. A pulsejet typically uses flapper valves to admit air into the combustion chamber and to force the combustion products out the back of the engine. They are very loud.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Says it all, doesn't it?
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
While agreeing completely that private industry is frequently extremely shortsighted in their research, well...
... nearly all of the geostationary orbits are already in use, so the competition would have to create substitutes. This tends to imply that eventually governmental control would become necessary. But I still have my doubts that the space industry should be regulated very much at the moment.
Government frequently shows no vision at all. Shortsighted can be an imporvement. NASA got into space because Kennedy was a visionary, and appointed visionaries. And because Johnson saw the opportunity for a tremendous political bonanza and the Houston Space Center. As soon as it was built, NASA support dropped like a plummet. Now it's back to being what the military needs (with a bit of support to telecommunications and the weather... but those are left to age, and only sporadically replaced). NASA engineers have to build things out of spit and bailing wire, and hope that they will hold together, while the bureaucrats fight turf battles. And NASA has claimed the status of a monopoly. The bureaucrats get to choose who is allowed to try a launch. (Guess what, only NASA launches have much of a chance.)
So, yes. Rather than THIS NASA, I think private companies would do a better job. Or at least they'd have a chance. IF they weren't totally hamstrung. (This is assuming that the govt. would contract out the work that is currently being done in-house.)
The real problem is that, at least for now, I don't see how the space program can get along without government support. And such support is always extremely dangerous. The one reason that it might be reasonable is, well...
The California "power crisis" (as it is called) demonstrates the ability of a small group to manipulate an economic good through cohesive action. Cartel, I believe the term is. The space program also has those characteristics that would make it vulnerable to a cartel as soon as it became economically worth it. I.e., high barriers to entry for those outside. A small enough collection of entities that an agreement among them is feasible. A time lag before additional competition can enter, even after it becomes worthwhile to do so. They've even got a monopoly
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Look...building hardware is just not all THAT hella expensive. If you don't design it such that it requires recovery, the physical hardware that goes slamming into the ocean need not be 'spensive. That's not to say that the PROGRAM is cheap...but the incremental cost of one more spaceplane prototype just isn't that crazy high.
Nevertheless, I feel that air-breathing high-speed propulsion (that's to say hypersonic atmospheric travel) is a dead end. We'd be much better off developing air-augmented rockets and pure rockets for ferrying humans around Earth. The engineering requirements of hypersonic atmospeheric craft (specifically, the aerodynamic heating of the craft) are pretty staggering. Someday it'll be practical. For now, we'd be much better off figuring out that aerospike engine concept.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'd go so far as to speculate that no unmanned space mission can EVER be classed as a "disaster", no matter what happens. A debacle, certainly. Very embarassing, sure. Space engineering gets an order of magnitude or three more rigorous when people are involved. The only tricky bit is that it also gets an order of magnitude or three more tricky, too.
Reducing costs and increasing mission reliability and efficacy all at the same time is not possible. Effective, reliable and cheap...you get to pick two. NASA does as good (or better) a job of this than anybody else on Earth. Their track record is, by and large, pretty damn impressive.
That said, I think a) NASA is way too stodgy and b) they're FAR too interested in the (dead end) International Space Station. Exploration of space is worth the risk of life. Sign me up for the first seat out of Earth's gravity well.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
OK, I'm not a particularly environmentally minded person, but I believe that large numbers of supersonic shock waves in the ocean is a catastrophically Bad Idea. These waves will be WAY more powerful (and destructive) than sonic booms are in air. I think far more study is required before we decide that high-speed underwater travel is a Good Idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I assume you're being sarcastic. Yes, in principle, the mechanism is very simple.
Try designing one.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
IIRC, the Shkval (sp?) isn't supersonic. It's much faster than any conventional torpedo (somewhere on the order of 150-200 knots), but considering that Mach 1 underwater is considerably higher than Mach 1 in the air, it's not there just yet.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I couldn't agree with you more. These things are not called prototypes because the word sounds cool. They fail. A lot. And the engineers learn something from every failure.
(Remember that whole "scientific method" thing, all you Computer Science majors here? The bit about designing an experiment, and when it fails, feeding the results back into the next attempt? When was the last time any of you wrote a non-trivial program that didn't have a serious flaw? How long did it take you to find the flaw? Probably longer than the few seconds it took NASA...)
Why do you think we refer to difficult tasks as rocket science? :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
my bugs don't explode in a giant supersonic fireball and rain shrapnel on the test site.
Clearly you're using the wrong programming language. I understand that this is perfectly normal in, say, Perl. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'd be cautious of having an opinion about something like that without hedging a bit. While I can see the point that private industry would be more efficient in implementing space programs, but I'd argue that it would lead to short-sightedness in research. Corporations are notoriously short-sighted (ex. AT&T not recognizing until 1998 that the internet would put long-distance carriers out of business) and space research could go from focusing on projects that have little immediate returns (but long term potential gains) to focusing on projects that can make a quick buck. I'd argue that a blend of both public and private research would be ideal, with a public agency like NASA focusing on long-term research (like studying comets, deep space, etc), and private companies focusing on short-term projects (like a moon base).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That website is the best website I have read in a LONG TIME! I'll certainly think twice next time I come near one of so many DHMO infected foods and beverages.
Ian Zink
Would *you* fly a Scramjet-like test-plane designed by a company? I think I'd rather fly in a plane designed by Nasa then one designed by a company. Sure, this one blew-off, but it was unmanned.
Had it been a company in a bad financial situation, they could have been tempted to put a man there. "Hey, if we don't do it, we'll go bankrupt, so we should at least try a manned mission. If it works, we're rich and if it doesn't, we're bankrupt anyway". Of course, this is a bit exagerated, but you get the idea.
Of course, NASA ain't perfect, but it's still more to be trusted than companies that need to reduce costs (read ValueJet).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
...that when one of their unmanned testbeds blows up for some stupid reason, it's an eternity before they can try again.
When one of their hydrogen tanks decided to leak and destroy one of the (now canceled) research craft not so long ago, NASA said they would try again, once a new hydrogen tank arrived.
In 10+ months!
It takes them so freakin' long to do *anything*. 6 hours just to prepare the meals on the ISS.
How can you possibly spend 6 hours reheating food!?!
What is the hold-up here?
I know they didn't even wanted to retrieve the test planes, but if they added something like a parachute attachment, they may even actually be able to retrieve them as well. These things are pretty expensive, after all.
But hey, IANANAE (I Am Not A NASA Aerospace Engineer), so what do I know, right?
I remember reading that this is suppose to revolutionize travel, meaning this is not just a military technology they are working on, but something geared towards civilian travel.
I hope they are not going to continue to require rocket boosting to get fast enough for the scramjet engine to be operable. But then, how could they get up to that speed?
That's not something to be proud of - one too many shuttle destroyed and a bunch of people killed. Compare that to traditional rockets - they are the safest vehicle to space today, once people learned how to make them right (in both Russia and USA). The shuttle still doesn't have an emergency ejection system in case of disaster on launch. The design of shuttle's cabin can't accomodate that, and so astronauts just have to pray that everything works.
True, if you count just few Shuttles that were made. Untrue, if you count number of launches or number of people launched.
As I recall, nobody ever died using rockets - flying upward. Hundreds of people successfully went to space. Four died on the way back (1967 and 1971), but that was not the problem of the rocket - the rocket was long gone by then. We do have enough statistics on launches and on deaths, and so far the launch on a rocket is safer (0% of observed fatalities) than driving on a highway.
One also can't directly compare number of catastrophic fires/explosions on rockets and on Shuttle. Fire of a rocket is not fatal or even dangerous, it happened once or twice, but the crew was saved by an independent hardware that was intentionally designed in, knowing that sooner or later a rocket will explode on launch. A single failure of a Shuttle killed everyone because the Shuttle was built with zero tolerance to a failure. Flexible systems bend, rigid systems break.
A Shuttle service history is another data point. Many failures are caught after the flight, many failures are caught on pre-launch countdown, and lately every Shuttle flight gets its own, unique malfunction to entertain the crew. That's because the fleet gets older and older, and no upgrade can help. Rockets, on the other hand, are made practically on a conveyor, and every cosmonaut gets a shining, brand new vehicle to ride on.
Yet another consideration is numbers of launches of rockets vs. Shuttles. Rockets are launched very frequently, but when they only carry a satellite it is not news any more. Every launch is an addition to the database of known successes and failures. Many manned flights were successful because similarly designed rockets carried a satellite earlier - and failed. The failure was analyzed and prevented in next rockets. Evolution in rockets progresses very fast, as in fruit flies, because they live fast lives. If some component can be improved it will be introduced in new rockets, very fast. Shuttle riders have to test all flaws on themselves because there are no unmanned launches, and there is no redesign of parts of the Shuttle. When such redesign is needed (after the explosion) the fleet was grounded for many, many years.
Short sighted govenments on the other hand, cause billions in taxpayer dollars to be flushed down the toilet. Take the Soviet Union. Aside from the various unworkabilities of their economic system, they had too strong of a focus on heavy industry. Whereas the collapse of steel caused places like Detroit in the US to experience heavy recessions, in the Soviet Union it caused the whole damn country to collapse.
Also, why in God's name would you consider a moon base to be short sighted? I'd consider single shot probes to be far more short sighted. With a moon base, you can carry on moon-based research for decades, even centuries if you build it strong enough. A probe on the other hand, maybe will last 5-10 years, of which 1 or 2 years will actually produce worthwhile data, and then it will be lost.
Finally, in case you're worried about a lack of "pure science" research, don't forget academic institutions. It's fairly well known, I think, that government projects are always more expensive than private industry. Sometimes they do a better job (I've heard that Air France has a pretty top notch safety record), sometimes not (the Post Office: 6 seconds without a lost parcel and counting). So, given that, why send the government out first? Why not get corporations to bring down the cost, then have academic institutions (which always recieve govenment subsidies anyway) then provide the research for a tiny fraction of the cost? I mean, it's not like Mars is GOING anywhere!
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I got word first hand from a friend who worked on this project that the X-43 got deployed from the B-52 safely but when the rocket ignited a piece of the X-43 tore off causing the whole thing to go into cart wheels. It's really too bad the program will likely now get killed since it would really be cool to fly from say London to Tokyo at Mach 10.
there are images of this flight somewhere. you don't spend tens of millions on an X project without doing something as basic as taking video of it's launch. whether or not you will ever get to see them is another story, of course. here is an example of still images and an mpeg video from another pegasus launch.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
If you believe the schedule at Nasa Television, there will be a press conference at 6:30 on Saturday, to be repeated at 1pm, 4pm, 7pm, and 10pm on Sunday (all times are EDT).
Don't forget space.com
"I hope they are not going to continue to require rocket boosting to get fast enough for the scramjet engine to be operable. But then, how could they get up to that speed?"
So what if they do use rockets? Rockets are very efficient (more efficient than jet engines, and can be much less polluting); and can be made reliable.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I'm still waiting to hear what will fall off of Cassini before it reaches Saturn.
I read somewhere that there is a known problem with the Huygens (sp) probe... not something fatal, but there's definitely something amiss with it.
I still have a fair amount of confidence in Cassini. It was one of the very last Slower, More Expensive missions. It's a billion-dollar probe, the last of the NASA monsters... it will certainly have some problems, but I bet it will come through in the end.
Incidentally, it's freaking HUGE... I saw it a few times from the assembly bay observation deck at JPL. Weird to think that something I saw is now so freaking far away.
...and could eliminate fossil fuel needs by 2010...
If we wanted to land a rock on the moon at 4000 MPH we couldn't get the PAPERWORK done by 2010.
So why do we need to be able to fly from New York city to Tokyo in 2 hours anyway? Why can't people just learn to be hapy where they are?
Well it's less expensive because you don't need to bring liquid oxygen up with you. Normal jets burn fuel together with oxygen which needs to be compressed in order to be injected in the burning chamber. Because speeds are so high, the scramjet can simply take oxygen from outside because the pressure is allready high enough. The engine also doesn't need any rotors or moving parts because the need for a compressor is gone. On top of that, it's also faster. Wasn't technology supposed to increase comfort value?
See this scramjet tech explanation for more info.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
All (or at least most) tax-payer funded space research and missions should be privatized. A company can do things better, cheaper, and faster than a government can. NASA has been proving that for years...
:) Unless those panels are built by robots (powered by what?) we'll need a place for at least a few people. Sure, they can set up greenhouses, but they need to free that oxygen, mine that metal, set up power plants, make the actual greenhouses... don't you get the feeling that this project might take a while? I mean, it was only 32 years ago that we just barely made it to the moon, and as this article suggests, we're still at the "our equipment goes out of control sometimes" stage. And it's just a little harder to get oxygen from rocks than from water. Speaking of which, you'll need water too.
NASA may seem bad, but since there has not yet been anything comparable to compare them to, your comparison doesn't hold water. Also, think about electrical suppliers in California. PG&E has been "proving" the opposite of your claim for quite a while now...
Besides, all NASA does is contract out to those same companies. It's not like they build the rockets themselves. "Privatization" just means that Congress is paying Boeing directly (instead of funding NASA, who then pay Boeing or whoever). That won't create more accountability - it'll create less! Congress can't be bothered with all the details of every spending bill. At best, they'll make a committee or create an organization to deal with space funding - which basically means they're recreating NASA.
Bids should be VERY open, so that there isn't any pork-belly pay-offs like are so common now, and there should be massive accountability with the funds (hey, thats MY money you just blew up...).
Yeah, we all know how private corporations are historically good at being accoutable for their spending (Savings and Loan bailout, anyone?). Also, I'm sure they can run an honest "VERY open" auction without anyone checking up on them.
The moon is 20 percent metal, 20 percent silicon, and 60 percent oxygen (not in an atmospere). It is the perfect place for solar harvesting. The panels could even be made in factories on the moon. It would be zero polution, as electricity is free on the moon, all you can eat.
And we will be eating electricity, because there's no food on the moon
It should be done, and it should be done immediately. Such an effort on the moon would change life as we know it here on earth, and could eliminate fossil fuel needs by 2010...
How were we going to transmit that power back to Earth? Oh, I get it - this is the start of a new science fiction story!
Seriously, I'm surprised that a post so full of speculation and conjecture got marked up so high. For example, replacing fossil fuels is a worthy goal, but really, why not just put more solar plants on Earth? Isn't putting them on the Moon just a bit of overkill? It's far easier to transmit power from sunny equatorial regions to the far reaches of the Earth than from the Moon to the same.
Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
We must stop the use of DHMO-producing fuels in rocket engines IMMEDIATELY or we risk furthering the Earth's contamination with this DEADLY chemical!
To clue-impaired moderators: this is a joke.
---
NASA spokesperson Leslie Williams said a press conference would be held later today to discuss the failure. No details about the cause of the problem were immediately available, she said.
On the bright side, at least it was unmanned. Hopefully we got a little data before we shot it down and it won't be a total loss.
--brian
- More of it might have been salvageable.
- More information might be gleaned from the rocket itself once it was retrieved.
Does anyone who's close to such launches know whether it would it have been close enough to land that there was a risk it would veer back and "fall on someone", to put it mildly? I know solid-fuel rockets usually can't be turned off once activated, is this the case with this one also? If they could have just deactivated, it wouldn't have been better to just turn it off and let it fall into the ocean?Oh, new thought: environmental damage from all that fuel,, vs. if you blow it up it doesn't fall into the ocean. (These things burn fairly efficiently, no?) Am I way off-base?
Second new thought: If it's just the BOOSTER ROCKET carrying it aloft, couldn't they have forced separation, waited a few moments for the prototype of the aircraft itself to fall a little out of danger, and THEN exploded the "booster rocket"? Eventually there would be separation anyway, so obviously it's within design specs...and if you CAN'T separate prematurely, isn't that stupid design? If they put explosives on it for self-destruction, it means they were thinking of worst-case scenarios already...why not salvage some of that few dozen million dollars while you're at it?
Thoughts, as always, are welcome.
~
I was refering to the fact that air quality is going to get worse and worse. At some point we wont have very much clean air to fly scram jets. Oh and yea it was a joke.
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
scramjet's are very simple mechanically. No moving parts, just hydrogen injectors which combust supersonic oxygen to allow sustained hypersonic speeds.
To get to supersonic speed you need to operate a scramjet, you need a booster rocket of some sort. The booster rocket is what failed in this experiment, careening the entire assembly off course. Rockets are tempermental beasts, unfortunately.
Thankfully, this probably wouldnt set research back much. The mechanical simplicity of the test plane makes it pretty easy to build another. The 30 years of research went into the design of the airbox (and it really is just a box w/ injectors) to make it aerodynamically stable enough for use.
What amuses me is the news stations assertions of "30 minute trip between los angeles and new york!".. well not really. You'd have to speed up to the hypersonic speed safely and then slow down safely. All in all you'd be in hypersonic mode for a couple of minutes, if that. Hardly worth it for the trip. Better for far away destinations.
http://www.aviation-history.com/engines/ramjet.h tm has a comparison of scramjets vs. ramjets.
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These these are *** experiments ***
For some reason people seem to feel that experiments MUST reach their desired outcome first go or the project is a failure.
If we were able to do this then we wouldn't ever need to do experiments - we would go straight to production every time. (and have no more accidental discoveries either- which fairly much everything started with at some time, even electrical energy)
At the moment I am a bit down on marketing so I blame marketing for over hyping the immediate possiblities rather than presenting a longer term view.
Maybe that casual space tourism thing should wait until we have a better ... but then, he didn't take the shuttle up he got some people who knew what they were doing to do the job.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Except that you will also have to store 14 days worth of power somehow to get through the night. We really don't have any efficient ways of doing that yet.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
That was 1963. In 1969, Richard Nixon was Prez and I don't know anybody who would describe him as "highly charismatic" or even as a believer in space exploration.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The good ole' reliable rocket they built it on failed before they could test the scramjet.
Pretty sad...
--
Sure the thing tanked before it could complete its mission and NASA didn't get nearly as much data from it as they wanted. They did get some data though. If nothing else, they learned to make damn sure their reasonably reliable Pegasus boosters are thoroughly extra checked over before ignition.
Additionally, they intended to slam this thing into the ocean at the end of the run anyways. The test hardware that was destroyed wasn't all that expensive to begin with (compared to most other things at NASA). Most of the X-43 budget was spent on designing the space plane, not actually building the functioning single use model (not prototype; the eventual space plane is going to be MUCH bigger) that was destroyed today. Given my experience with NASA, I suspect the largest lost cost in today's failure was the Pegasus missile and all the red tape involved in scheduling the launch itself.
NASA still has two or three more X-43's to try again with. And they will try again, and next time it will probably work. Despite what some people here might say, they're not complete fools over at NASA.
I have to wonder just how many people out there were even aware this test was going on today before they saw this news article? How many people would have noticed or cared if it hadn't failed?
I am reminded of a report of the words of Robert Goddard when one of his early liquid fuel rockets exploded. Someone asked him how he felt about his latest failure. He said it was not a failure, "we have gathered valuable negative information!"
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Projects/hyperx/developme nts.html
Currently, there is no information on the destruction of the vehicle there yet, but will probably be posted soon.
Shame of Slashdot
A couple of people have mentioned the UQ Scramjet project... I think the interesting thing is that UQ's budget is $1.25 million, as compared to NASA's somewhat more ($400 million?). And the UQ tests are coming along fairly well, see this story.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rlv-01k.html
Makes you wonder just how hard NASA are trying for the "cheaper" bit of their new motto.
All (or at least most) tax-payer funded space research and missions should be privatized. A company can do things better, cheaper, and faster than a government can. NASA has been proving that for years...
Bids should be VERY open, so that there isn't any pork-belly pay-offs like are so common now, and there should be massive accountability with the funds (hey, thats MY money you just blew up...).
With all of the money NASA has spent, there is NO reason we should have a station on the moon, entirely self-contained, solar powered (without an atmosphere the moon is a VERY efficient place for solar power and harvesting).
The moon is 20 percent metal, 20 percent silicon, and 60 percent oxygen (not in an atmospere). It is the perfect place for solar harvesting. The panels could even be made in factories on the moon. It would be zero polution, as electricity is free on the moon, all you can eat.
It should be done, and it should be done immediately. Such an effort on the moon would change life as we know it here on earth, and could eliminate fossil fuel needs by 2010...
Smart enough to be rich?
See Reuters and ABC 7:30 report and slashdot