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Suborbital Rocketeers Ask FAA For Fair Rocketry Rules
HobbySpacer writes "John Carmack, Dennis Tito, Eric Anderson of Space Adventures, Brian Chase
of the National Space Society and other notables in the world of rocketry and space activism issued a call today for the FAA to cut the regulatory tangle that threatens to hold a nascent fleet of suborbital space vehicles firmly on the ground. The FAA needs to make it clear that these rocket vehicles fall under the jurisdiction of its own Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) and not let intra-agency bureaucratic squabbles over control and power stall the development of this promising new industry."
The space industry is stuck at a standstill. Too many regulations are cutting into innovation anymore... Not that I want to see one of these suborbital crafts get plastered on the windshield of a 747, but geez.
KappaStone
I think this was meant to be a post under "Engineering From Science Fiction", not a story in its own right.
"We're not happy until you're NOT happy."
They want CONGRESS to help cut through the bureaucracy?
Once they get done forming the committe to form the committe to investiage the possiblity of feasiblity the Chinese will all ready have colinized Mars.
Sanity is overrated...Being CRAZY is much more fun!!!
So would this be the next private-sector version of Guantanamo Bay?
I think the author meant interagency, in other words squabbles between different agencies, rather than intra-agency, which would refer to arguments where all participants were part of the Federal Aviation Administration.
SCO satnds for Space Control Organisation??
actually, it's Screwed-up Confused Organization, but you're right anyway.
Different parts of the Federal Aviation Administration regulate the 100-year old aviation industry and the emerging commercial space transportation industry. Unfortunately, the aviation guys want to regulate these new space entrepreneurs the same way they regulate huge corporations like United Airlines or Boeing. If the Wright Brothers had faced such a burden, they would never have gotten off the ground.
Wouldn't it make sense to spin off a portion of the FAA and make it (just an example) the Federal Space Administration? At least then you'd have a separate and wholly defined department to handle both public and government-level space flight regulation.
In it's current form, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) is stuck under the umbrella of the FAA. With the increasing popularity and usage of private/commerical space flight, the AST is continually limited in its scope from the head guys at the FAA. Spinning that department off into it's own regulatory agency frees it from the burden of having to look over their shoulders.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
if one of these rockets does fuck up, a LOT of people could wind up dead or injured. Not just the people in the rocket.
There's a pretty good list of names there, but funnily enough, no mention of Lockheed, Boeing, NASA or the other Government funded big boys of the space industry. Surely they're not afraid that deregulation might allow a little competition?
And another thing, who on earth are the Objectivist Center and Reason Foundation??
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
In other news, they're also searching for a suitable 'A' word so that the acronym doesn't look so stupid.
is it possible the stalling is a result of liability concerns?
consider: spaceflight is the transportation method w/ which humanity collectively has the least experience. if the US government licenses [x] business to ferry humans into space and some horrible mishap occurs, who's thinking that the families of the deceased* won't slap the mother of all class-action suits against, among others, the licensing body?
i mean, that kind of liability would have any bureaucrat shaking in his/her proverbial space boots, but added to that the incredibly high-profile nature of this type of work and the risk...
ed
*and survivors of course, although the likelihood of there being any is mighty small)
Move the tests to southern Mexico, or even further south. I'm sure they have lighter or even no regs covering this.
IIRC, it's easier to get into orbit from close to the equator. Does that apply to suborbital flight too?
I am having trouble with all this red tape and would like your help with my rocket programme. I think that you should slacken the rules for us hard done by amateur rocket makers...
I also wonder if you could help fund my rocket programme like you have helped with my other projects in the past?
Regards
Osama b. Laden
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Range safety is an integral part of government and commercial launch vehicle operations in the United States. Range safety ensures that the launch vehicle, or its components, impact in a safe area if there is a problem with the launch vehicle. This involves redundant systems to monitor the velocity, position and health of the launch vehicle, impact prediction systems (where do the pieces land if it blows up), and thrust termination systems (the big red button). The operator of the launch vehicle has to provide a high degree of assurance that no failure mode will result in injury, death or property damage in areas outside the range. This is not a trivial task, and not something to be built from bubble gum and bailing wire.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
it's best to keep pressure on them. When I wrote software for the Air Force a couple years ago, we had to test out new system with the FAA. As lead programmer, I was put in charge of test coordination. The problem with the FAA is that no one will actually make a decision. If you get stuck in a loop where person X says "Sorry, person Y will have to make that decision," and person Y tells you it's person X's call, you're in trouble. And this happens frequently. I was able to call NOT EMAIL them repeatedly until they got so sick of dealing with me that they made it happen. I was working with people at the GS-14 level. I don't know if this helps at all, but don't worry, others have been there and made it work!
"One day I'll wake up and realize that everything is real" -Andy Palmer
I don't care who's juristiction they fall under, it's who they fall on that worries me (-;
Didnt you know, talking about SCO is not allowed on slashdot anymore
ah why do they think that Nasa wil allow them to comepte eventually with the shuttle?
NASA wil kill this movement if we let it..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Federal Aviation and Space Administration?
Wouldn't it make sense to spin off a portion of the FAA and make it (just an example) the Federal Space Administration?
I think that this is a great idea, but good luck getting anyone to fund it. What, exactly, would this agency do right now? We have no shuttle flights (nor do we have any planned for the near future), Mars continues to be a pipe dream, and the ISS is serviced by Russian craft. There's not much to regulate right now. I agree that we'll need one in the future, it's just that the future seems an awfully long way away right now.
I think that the only real chance we have for space exploration, at least until China starts kicking our asses in the race to Mars, is commercial. How about a lottery where a couple of people get a ticket to Mars? Zubrin proposes a $30 billion long term Mars program. At $1000 a ticket, that means we have to sell 30 million tickets (assuming absolutely 0 investment, 0 government aid, and 0 commercial sponsorship (The Pepsi Landing Module, anyone?)). I'm just a poor college student, but you can be damn sure I'd scrape up the cash. Many of the rich and famous would by several tickets, I'd bet. Maybe we couldn't sell 30 million tickets here. Our population is about 280 million, so that's about one person in 9 buying tickets. Pretty unlikely. Our chances get better, however, when we open the lottery up world-wide.
So, before I get modded off-topic, I guess what I'm trying to say is that the space exploration of the future needs to be a cooperative effort.
The government needs to deregulate. Anyone who tries to make space something other than the Wild West is a bit delusional. By stepping back and letting explorers take over their doing nothing that we didn't already do in Tennessee, or Montana, or California.
Commercial ventures need to come up with the money. With all of the MBAs pouring out of Harvard alone you figure that someone could come up with a viable business model. Keep the lottery idea in mind, it's a quick way to make the cash roll in.
Citizens need, at the very least, to vote for Pro-Space Exploration congressmen. How are you going to get Joe Sixpack to vote at all, let alone for such a seemingly trivial issue? Make it exciting again. We need imminent, impressive goals. Mars doesn't count. Even now a landing is 15 years away.
What can we do to:
A) Help the plight of commercial space programs bogged down in bureaucracy?
B) Increase funding to government space programs?
C) Let congress know that there are people interested in space exploration?
Why, I'm glad you asked. Write your congressman. The Mars Society has a well developed lobbying system, including mailing lists and meeting reports. Don't know whether your congressman stands on this issue? Get their report card.
while (!sleep){
sheep++;
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without letting out information that could jeopardize security. Surely, rocketeers would be overjoyed to have a javascript applet of where every plane is at any time, but clearly that would cause problems, even if it could be implemented. For my money, it should be really, really hard to get a permit to shoot things into space. NORAD has enough to worry about without having to nuke JoeBob's CO2-propelled trashcan with fins.
stuff |
Interesting though it may be, commercial space flight is a nuclear proliferation nightmare: what if anyone with (say) $50M to spend could put any payload he wanted, anywhere on the planet, reliably?
As Gen. Pete Worden (former head of U.S Command) used to say, "We're more concerned about people sending surprise packages...".
For a moment I thought this article was about how new regulations threaten to ban the sport of model rocketry. It would be good for that issue to get a little more airplay...
2. they are Freedom, and therefore care very little what the US thinks.
Seems to me that a private company incorporated in an equatorial third-world country would be better situated than any company in the U.S. I don't see why U.S. citizens cannot own a stake in a foreign enterprise of this type.
Because the US doesn't want it's citizens to fund, indirectly, some third world nation's ICBM program?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
They can always move to North Korea.
Er, on second thoughts, perhaps we should let them do their rocketeering right here.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I just finished reading Grisham's "King of Torts" last night, so now I'm an expert!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Not while John Ashcroft has any sort of power. The man's paranoia (right or wrong, sometimes both) knows no bounds.
Can you honestly imagine rules being loosened right now to allow for rockets/missiles being launched in the US under any circumstances while they are *not* under strict government control?
I heard something about them even trying to put a stop to the small-time (Estes) rocketry.
Sort of like public school teachers unions killing vouchers... why give up your government sponsored monopoly?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It's sad that model rocketry is being killed off by new regulations. Yet fireworks were plentiful just 12 days ago. Guess which one caused the most injuries and started the most forest fires.
GIGOwiz
Yes, son, that's a picture of a rocket. We used to be able to launch them.
"AST" is not an acronym. Departments in the FAA have alphanumeric identifiers (e.g. "AUA-100", "AST-200", etc.) and the first three letters designate what in industry would be referred to as a "Line Of Business".
You really have no idea how this whole getting-to-space thing works do you?
First: Escape velocity only applies to an unpowerd projectile. If you have the power source you could putter into space at any speed greater than zero, although it would take a LOT of energy at slow speeds.
Second: You can have a satellite in geostationary orbit without it being around the equator. A good example would be the GPS satellites (not going to double check that, flame me if I'm wrong...).
Third: These launches for the X-Prize are not going anywhere near geostationary orbit. It is quite a distance to get to geostationary orbit, and most satellites are not nearly so high up.
Anyone else having a "Kings of the High Frontier" moment lately? It's quite a time to be alive.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
from Area 51? After all, there's nothing really there according to the government.
One thing I did notice about the letter to the US government is the distinct absence of support by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites.
I think I know why: the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination will be flying in the same airspace around Edwards AFB that was used during the X-Plane research projects, an airspace that is closed off to the general public and has huge factor of safety margins in case something does go wrong. Why do you think NASA and the USAF were able to test the X-15 safely in the range, given that the X-15 could fly faster than Mach 5 and higher than the minimum altitude for X-Prize flights?
I think if you want to safely fly the X-Prize contenders without being a threat to people on the ground and NOT need fly it out over the ocean, there are two places to do this.
The first is the flight test range operated by Edwards Air Force Base east of Mojave, CA. If NASA and the USAF can fly the X-15 inside this range even though the X-15 can fly at over Mach 5 top speed and 350,000-plus feet altitude, it sure can accommodate the X-Prize contenders. Why do you think the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination will fly inside this range?
The second is the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Indeed, given the size of this missile range it may actually be a better choice, given the huge safety margins available there.
Now, if only the X-Prize contenders can get Warren Buffett or Bill Gates to pay for the use of this range for the flight attempts....
Competition leads to a lot of these benefits being passed on to customers. Also, even monopolies often have to pass on a lot of savings to their customers, depending on the shape of the demand curve and a monopolieis inability to charge different prices based on each customer's willingness to pay.
The public has benefitted from better hurricane warnings, more accurate weather prediction, video of news happening around the world in real time, earlier affordable phone and internet service to obscure locations (these get replaced by cables, but satelite links often are far more economical for the first decade and build the volume that makes it profitable to lay the cable). Even things like better prospecting for oil and other natural resources provides environmental benefits from not having to do as much drilling or mining. One could go on for pages about these benefits, just look at the recent Slashdot article on the Global Positioning System for one minor example.
Cheaper access to space could improve all of these services and probably make feasible many new ones. Just having faster deployments of GPS upgrades would go a long way toward facilitating highway autopilot for cars or affordable internet access from airplanes.
It seems to me that, historically, space has benefitted more than just "the people involved, and companies who might someday benefit from that technology." You have presented no evidence about why that trend is likely to be different in the future.
Besides, even if you show that more than 50% of the surplus value would be retained by sellers ("the benefit is mostly to the people involved [...]"), is not relevant to arguing acceptable risks. Instead, the relative information is how much benefit the public might get in absolute terms, regardless of what proportion of the total surplus value that constitutes.
A stray rocket landing on an elementary school wouldn't be "worth it" under any circumstances.
To me, whether such a scenario is "worth it" definitely depends on the circumstances, and I will vote accordingly. I suspect lots of model rockets have landed on schools, although the circumstances were probably that school was usually not when they were in session at the time, just because school athletic fields often make good launching areas for students, perhaps some from school activities. Even in the case of a high powered rocket landing on a school that is in session, I could be convinced that that was "worth it" to the same extent that a truck plowing into a school in session would be "worth it", depending on statistical likelihood and benefits of the technology.
Carmack:
"Hey gov, I'm the developer of BFG, BFG 10, and the rail gun, please now let me have my private rocket launcher."
Back when I used D rockets to launch lizardnauts into sub-orbit, the FAA never gave me any hassle. Though lizards parachuting into residential areas was a hazard...
I don't particularly like flying. I suppose if I have to get across the country, it's preferable to driving; however, despite the low chance of dying, if you go anywhere from a small airport, you are likely to be bounced around like a [insert lame simile here]. That doesn't happen in a car. At least not on the interstate.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
In addition to publishing Reason magazine, the Reason Foundation supports a lot of public policy studies through the Reason Public Policy Institute, which is basically a libertarian-leaning think-tank. It's not surprising they'd have a postltion on this issue; they have a position on every transportation-related issue one could imagine, and Poole is probably more politically savvy than most of the other signatories.
Here's the RPPI's take on general transportation, and surface transportation.
I play Nerd-Folk!
> ...The FAA needs to make it clear that these rocket vehicles fall under the jurisdiction of its own Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST)...
Wow, now that's a counterintuitive acronym.
Must-not-watch TV!
Did you read the article you're linking to?
There's no regulation threatening to ban model rocketry, there's a requirement for shipping companies who deliver the larger motors to have their employees undergo background checks and the like, because the larger motors are classed as dangerous/explosive objects.
If you can get the motors, there's nothing new stopping you from firing them off. It's the delivery of the big motors that's the issue.
Look at some of the X prize projects, like Canadian Arrow.
The thing is souped-up German V2. If it can lift 3 people 100km up, it would be able to deliver 300-500 lb warhead 100-200 miles easily. AND it will be technology developed easily by a bunch of people in the garage at a cost of 3-5 mln dollars.
OF COURSE, government will do anything possible to prevent this technology from becoming easy.
If there's one thing tech people do not understand, it is tort law.
You've actually made a severe understatement, but possibly not in the direction you intended. The lack of understanding by techs is far less a product of tech ignorance than a product of their very full and well developed understanding of the fundamental irrelevance of law, lawyers, and the whole paraphenalia of humanity's self-sustaining legal institutions.
That doesn't mean that they ignore them of course, as otherwise the system will put them behind bars. But they do ignore them at a deeper level, where it really matters.
Whether intended or not this is going to destroy model rocketry.
Make the civil defense of the United States more robust via computer networking, rural power systems and family-owned agriculture disintermediating the Chicago commodities pits. A lot of people think the reason Wall Street analysts grabbed CDC by the throat was the nearly $1 billion investment in the PLATO project supported by Norris -- but the PLATO project was just the networking dimension of his vision for a robust decentralized society. The real reason Wall Street went after Norris is that his vision was viable -- far more viable than centralizing all key assets in a small number of target zones for small nuclear powers to destroy with a few nukes. If he had been allowed even to deploy PLATO to the mass market, it could have spelled the end of the hyper-centralization that lends so much power to the bottlenecks of power and influence that typifies Wall Street.
There is good reason to believe that those who control central power points are threatened more by decentralization via space settlement than they are by the throw-weight of suborbital rockets.
As a reductio ad absurdum of the position that they are afraid of rocket delivery of weapons of mass destruction: What is the throw-weight of the billions of dollars of heroin and other contraband into the US every year, not to mention the huge influx of illegal labor over the boarders?
Norris was right -- but he was more right than he imagined. There are really good reasons to depopulate cities -- not the least of which is the fact that cities are producing more disinformation than information -- more theocracy than enlightenment -- more control than degrees of freedom.
Technically it appears populations structured around demes of 5,000 people, what Plato specified as the size of a deme in ancient Greece, is feasible as an alternative to hypercivilization now infesting most of the planet. This is an achievable goal compared to the vast majority of the nonsense being promoted by environmentalists, nationalists and globalists alike.
Seastead this.
if they are suborbital, ;-)
don't they fall under the law of gravity?
(the ultimate authority in such matters...
No, the first thing he said *IS* wrong. Escape velocity is escape velocity. The amount of acceleration you use to achieve escape velocity is irrelevant.
You can ease the throttle up one mile an hour at a time, but if your velocity is not 25,000mph, you will not enter orbit and will eventually fall to earth.
As to calming down, I don't handle phrases like:
You really have no idea how this whole getting-to-space thing works do you?
very well. Not when the nimrod stating it doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about.
If he had a single valid point I wouldn't have rubbed his nose in it.
> What happens when one of their toys take a nose-dive into the heart of a heavly-populated city?
Unlikely. These "toys" go awry on occasion, for sure, but the existing regulations prevent launch arcs that fall over heavily populated areas already. Also, modern rockets are required (again, by existing regulations) to have a self-destruct mechanism on board, and there's only one documented case of said system failing in use.
> NASA got damn lucky where and when the shuttle came apart. What would've happened if a large chunk of it survied intact and had plowed into downtown Dallas?
Having a bit of trouble wrapping our hands around the term "suborbital", are we? Suborbital rockets do not burn up and fragment on reentry, because they don't undergo reentry. And as to what would have happened, it's vanishingly unlikely that any significant damage would be done by stuttle fragments that fell on a populated area. First, it would have to be very big (the entirety of the shuttle would not be very big in terms of collateral damage). Second, it would have to hit something full of people. If you think that's a definite, you should be aware that more than 50 percent of the ground space in any given city isn't occupied buildings, it's roads, parks, factories (which are very sparsely populated on a per-square-foot basis), waterways and other stuff no more densely populated than anywhere else. Third, it would have to hit those people in a soft target, and, 9/11 not withstanding, buildings are not soft targets. Remember that it was fire and the subsequent collapse from fire that destroyed the Twin Towers, both of which withstood the initial collisions. Since falling debris from orbit isn't generally full of high-test aviation fuel, that fire damage simply wouldn't occur.
You sound like someone who takes information from watching reruns of "Armageddon". That's a movie, not reality.
Virg
Check out:
http://www.asa-houston.org they are building a suborbital vehicle for amateur payloads
> Not to mention the problems of orbital debris once these guys get themselves into orbit... what happens if the ship blows up 500 miles up? PAVE PAWS et. al is already tracking too much junk as it is...
Please, people! SUBorbital craft, eh? Any debris from explosions will fall to the ground, or water.
Carry on.
Virg
You forgot the strangely appropriate "Mac user: Muser".
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
What is your fucking malfunction? Are you saying that it doesn't make a given, pre-fucking-existing ALREADY-PAID-FOR rocket cost less? That's both obvious and obviously has nothing to do with the post you're replying to.
Are you too fucking retarded to grasp that if a given rocket can carry more payload that you can build a smaller rocket - which costs less! - to do the same job?
God damn it, I just wish you were within reach so I could personally carve MORON into your forehead with my car keys.
First: Did you even *TAKE* pre-calc? You do know the difference between velocity and acceleration, don't you? Your *ACCELERATION* may be "puttering along" (ala "Salvage One") but if you don't have escape velocity, down you go!
Fun Facts About Escape Velocity
-escape velocity is not constant
-escape velocity is only relevant for unpowered object (i.e. anything with the engines turned off)
-in a powered craft you can gain altitude at an arbitrarily low speed as long as your thrust exceeds gravitational pull
Here's a hint, moron: don't post angry "corrections" when you aren't bright enough to recognize what you don't know.
Also: "GPS satellites are LEO (low earth orbit). How do you think a watch or smaller receiver could pick up the signal?" Wow! That so has fucking nothing to do with it! What color is the sky in your little world where it's possible to build a LEO sat that produces a signal that a watch can pick up, but impossible to build one for geosynchronous orbit?
Jesus, even when you've got a correct fact to quote, you have to throw in your retarded, WRONG reasoning to support it.
As to calming down, I don't handle phrases like: "You really have no idea how this whole getting-to-space thing works do you?" very well.
You should learn to, since you really have no fucking idea.
Jesus, you started this idiocy off by claiming that an equator launch has no advantage for reaching orbits other than geosynchronous.
That's so wrong I can't even imagine how your mental model of spaceflight works.
Not to mention your claim that you need to reach escape velocity to orbit, as opposed to say, orbital velocity. We all love big fancy science-fictiony phrases like "escape velocity" but some of us also learn what they mean, and use them correctly, instead of just throwing them in at random to decorate our paragraphs.
LEO sats are about 300 miles up. Geo sats are ~25000 miles away. One (very important) variable relating to signal strenght is distance. Why the fuck do you think they put them so low?
As to Escape Velocity, here is some crap I found in about 10 seconds:
If the kinetic energy of an object launched from the Earth were equal in magnitude to the potential energy, then in the absence of friction resistance it could escape from the Earth.
Escape velocity is defined to be the minimum velocity an object must have in order to escape the gravitational field of the earth, that is, escape the earth without ever falling back.
The object must have greater energy than its gravitational binding energy to escape the earth's gravitational field. So:
1/2 mv2 = GMm/R
Where m is the mass of the object, M mass of the earth, G is the gravitational constant, R is the radius of the earth, and v is the escape velocity. It simplifies to:
v = sqrt(2GM/R)
or
v = sqrt(2gR)
Where g is acceleration of gravity on the earth's surface.
The value evaluates to be approximately:
11100 m/s
40200 km/h
25000 mi/h
So, an object which has this velocity at the surface of the earth, will totally escape the earth's gravitational field (ignoring the losses due to the atmosphere.) It is all there is to it.
scape velocity is defined as the smallest speed that we need to give an object in order to allow it to completely escape from the gravitational pull of the planet on which it is sitting. To calculate it we need only realize that as an object moves away from the center of a planet, its kinetic energy gets converted into gravitational potential energy. Thus we need only figure out how much gravitational potential energy an object gains as it moves from the surface of the planet off to infinity. According to the above discussion for a planet with mass M and radius R, this gain in gravitational potential energy is GmM/R. For an object to just barely escape to infinity (without any residual speed), all its initial kinetic energy must go into this increase in gravitational potential energy. Thus, the initial kinetic energy must be equal to GmM/R. Since kinetic energy is mv2/2, equating these two expressions tells us that the square of the initial velocity must be equal to twice the gravitational potential energy divided the inertial mass of the object. However, since gravitational potential energy is proportional to inertial mass, we find finally that the square of the escape velocity depends only on the mass and radius of the planet (and of course Newton's gravitational constant) Note that the inertial mass of the object has cancelled, so that the escape velocity of any object is independent of its mass. This means that if you want to throw a grain of rice or an elephant into outer space, you need to give them both the same initial velocity which for the Earch works out to be about 10,000 meters per second.
LEO sats are about 300 miles up. Geo sats are ~25000 miles away. One (very important) variable relating to signal strenght is distance. Why the fuck do you think they put them so low?
Gee, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that it's the easiest, cheapest orbit to attain, do you?
Do you know anything about radios or transmission antennas?
-empty space doesn't absorb radio energy
-a focused beam doesn't disperse over distance like an omnidirectional transmission
-you can use a more powerful transmitter to make a stronger signal (SHOCK!)
I'm going to take wild leap here and assume you haven't read about the Thuraya satellite phones: handheld telephones that work anywhere in the world by accessing geosynchronous satellites.
No, no, you're right. It's inconceivable that small devices would receive signals from GEO sats, let alone send signals to them.
As to Escape Velocity, here is some crap I found in about 10 seconds:
Good boy. You can use Google!
Now try understanding it, how you used it wrong, and where it's not relevant, rather than just cutting and pasting a random collection of facts.
I'm very pleased that the various organizations have taken the initiative to petition for change, but I don't think that the FAA or Congress will respond anytime soon. The only way to force change is to demonstrate the need for it. So when Rutan flies his spacecraft later this year from Mojave, or when the Canadian X-Prize teams fly from the Great Lakes and Saskatchewan, then people will start paying attention and take action. The trick is to make sure that those actions are favorable to the industry.
You're a funny guy. Here's another joke. Be sure to move to someplace like Manhattan or west LA. If you find yourself looking for iodine pills, check yourself into the nearest county mental health facility quick before you find yourself moving to a rural area or exhibiting other signs of paranoid dementia.
Seastead this.
Another good Zubrin idea for getting a Mars mission funded is to have more X Prize style competitions. The next step from manned suborbital flight (X Prize) might be something like an unmanned booster on par with Saturn V / Energia in tonnage, or it could be something like an orbital spacewalk, or a craft capable or reaching the ISS or whatever. Greater and greater prizes are offered, building up to the goal of a manned Mars mission.
The cost of paying out the prize winners could be quite small compared to the cost of developing the technology (as it has been with the X Prize, which is fairly small beer in terms of recovering the costs of winning). Governments could pay out prizemoney for much less than the cost of running a NASA style space program, and the taxpayer only foots the bill after the program gets results.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
...about a half-dozen years ago. Yeah, the same one that is now at Space Adventures.
What an asshole.
I tend to think they may be smarter than we give them credit for - and they are going to kick our asses into the ground by getting a manned mission to Mars, and soon. How? By using late 1950's technology - otherwise known as Project Orion.
They have *all* the technology to do this, and it would be a major coup for them to lift 1000 or more tons into orbit and beyond, using nuclear bomb/pusher plate propulsion technology.
It may sound crazy, but we came *this* close to doing it ourselves, but political and eco-activist pressure caused the project to be scrapped.
Much of the project documentation, spearheaded by General Atomics, is still to this day considered "top-secret". Mostly because the Orion Project required very small thermonuclear bombs to run on (small H-Bombs - 1KT to 15KT), plus the documentation on how to mitigate the effects of the pusher plate ablation, and the sheilding substances - are useful information on designing H-Bombs with more destructive effects, while at the same time knowing how to protect yourself from the effects. Also, the design of the bombs basically made them directed energy weapons (so that the energy could mostly go into pushing the craft) - so these small bombs required special radiation channelling systems, which were basically one stage in a staged H-Bomb (ie, fission bomb directs energy to hydrogen/deuterium solid core, to compress and "kick" the fusion process off - a three stage bomb could be made by adding another core/channel system, so that the energy from the smaller H-Bomb could kick start a larger reaction). Plus, there was the design/use of (thorium?) as a means to kick the reaction up higher...
But they surely know about all of this - and if our engineers could work this out in the late 50's using computers (IBM 704?) with less power than a low-end Pentium (heck, even that is overkill compared to the 704) - don't you think they could do the same with today's machines?
I would be willing to bet that they are researching the technology. It is doable. They have the land, they have the bomb technology, and they have the will - I doubt they care about any form of fallout...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You gotta read Atlas Shrugged, or at least The Fountainhead to get into Rand's philosophy known as Objectivism,
Or you could avoid putting yourself through the pain of reading a couple of cheap, poorly written romance novels by a writer with no intellectual depth and instead just look up the entry on Objectvissm in the Wikipedia.
Many people would disagree with the tenets of Objectivism because they have different moral and ethical beliefs and values. But whether one agrees or disagrees with the stated tenets of Objectivism, a more fundamental problem with Objectivism is that it is naive about the fact that many of those goals are in conflict with one another. Most of the work in philosophy (and law, for that matter) over the last few thousand years has been trying to address how to resolve those conflicts, while Rand's philosophy just ignores it. Therefore, Objectivism just fails to be a coherent system of philosophical or moral thought.
Objectivism really suffers from the same problem as Communism: it sounds good to its ardent supporters, it might theoretically work if everybody was behaving properly, but it fails miserably in the real world. And just like Communism, Objectivism can be used to justify many kinds of anti-social behavior and social ills.
If there are so many regulatory tangles and government departments protecting their turf (and covering their asses) just go launch somewhere else.
;-)
It doesn't really help that the Dept of Fatherland Security doesn't want to give anybody an excuse to launch anything
Australia has been wanting to build a solid commercial space launch operation for a few years now. The Russians would love for y'all to go launch there.
I'm sure there a a few other countries who wouldn't mind you launching and landing on their turf.
Yes, centralization of really anything concentrates power at the expense of vulnerability. It is a civil infrastructural liability that should have been planned for all along, but now it's entirely too late.
I would have presumed nerds familiar with the advantages of RAID and decentralized Internetworking technologies might have had an easier time following your thesis, but the earliest responses suggest otherwise.
If you look at the general trends in the unstoppable proliferation of technology, eventually amateurs will get their hands on what once was affordable only by large governments. Pick any technology that is currently only in the hands of governments, and you can assume that sooner or later, amateurs on personal budgets will be experimenting with a similar techology.
In a few decades, the advantage of living hundreds of miles upwind from the latest school kid's gene-splicing science project gone awry will be tragically obvious.