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Astronaut Wants Space Program With No Frills
colonist writes "A veteran astronaut wants less comfort and more exploration for future missions. British-born astrophysicist Michael Foale has clocked up 374 days in space, more than any other American astronaut. Foale said, 'We need lean and mean spaceships with no frills', such as toilets or kitchen. However, he would like better oxygen-producing systems for the space station. Foale also talked about the Russians: they played 'some sort of Russian folk song. I'm not so sure it calmed me a lot.' As Foale boarded the Soyuz, an official kicked him in the back: a Russian launch tradition. From space, Foale saw a large black cloud over the Middle East: smoke from a bombed oil pipeline in Iraq."
Michael Foale is actually British and not American.
e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3298031.stm
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I'm not one for reading articles usually, there are to many things going on in the world to read all about the changelog for SpamAssasin 3.0 or yet another diatribe on free vs. not-so-free vs. user rights vs. privacy... anyways, most of the time it all gets a bit repetitive, but if you are tired of that, read this one, its good, the poster sort of mangled it into a very curt summary but take a look, its worth the time
The US has involved itself in a huge pork project (ISS) that will syphon off most of the money for space in the near future. Talk of Mars is just that, talk. The US is floating a $7 trillion dollar real debt, huge deficits, and (according to the Fed study) a social security future deficit of $50 TRILLION. If you think the govt is going to fund a Mars program or any other new manned program you are deluded.
A "kick of luck" is a figure of speech in both Finland and Sweden, when you get really lucky you've had a kick of luck ('onnenpotku' or 'lyckospark', respectively). And I think wishing for luck by giving a kick in the ass is a semi-humorous thradition which one sometimes sees here. I don't know which came first, the act or the linguistic concept, though.
I read Deke Slaton's book about the Apollo missions, and the way they described the bathroom situation on the early missions was downright scary. Basically, you have a tube that you clamp on your dong, and a plastic baggie that you flypaper to your ass. And you don't even want to know what they had to do to disinfect the bags. For a good six weeks after reading Moon Shot, I couldn't put my sandwitches in plastic bags.
For a change, a"Back in my day..."comment is actually accurate. Alan Shepard had to do it in his suit!
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Alan Shepard didn't... Here is an interesting page about "creature comforts" in space.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"I think we are already good enough on ISS, even for a crew of six," Foale said
"The line for the toilet is never that bad," he laughed.
I assume he isn't against toilets in general!
I don't care how many authors and futurists claim that it's only going to cost 79 cents to pull off the mission.
How about NASA and the ESA saying that it will cost tens of billions? Do the analyses of rocket scientists and nuclear physicists carry any sway with you?
Of course, I could always trust estimates that work like this: "It costs $X to do something easy. Therefore, it will cost 1000 times that to do something harder".
Blaze a trail to the New World
Rocket scientists also made wildly estimates for the costs of the space shuttle and the ISS that were off by factors of 10 to 100.
We'll never know if their estimates were right or not, since congress made them build a different system than the one they estimated for. The main reason the estimates were off is that what they were calling "The Space Shuttle" and what we today call "The Space Shuttle" are completely different things with nothing similar between them other than the name. They advocated a model that was more expensive up-front, but much cheaper to maintain. What they were made to build was something that cut the up-front cost in half in exchange for making the maintenence between missions go up orders of magnitude.
The system they designed would not have required the tedious rebuild the shuttle now has to go through with every launch.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Carbon nanotubes, or a derivitve technology thereof.