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It isn't Easy Being Green and Getting to LEO
MWTJ writes "The BBC has a story about the environmental impact of the space shuttle. One of the things that started the modern environmentalist movement were pictures of the Earth from space, so we could see the beauty of the planet as never before. We could also see environmental destruction from space. But what is the impact of the space program on our planet? The story talks about the switch to Freon-free insulation, the use of clean-burning hydrogen/LOX fuel, and other factors. What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?"
I mean really, how much impact could any event have that only happens once every three or four years....
Three Squirrels
Though, that won't work for manned craft, and you need to keep in mind how much power one would use operating one.
Develop nanotech and use it to build a space elevator. Cheap, clean, safe, easy access to space!
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Maybe if they used CFC-based insulation that was stronger, like they used to, they'd have fewer explosions therefore less polutants entering the atmosphere and fewer dead astronauts? Just my vote.
What can be more green than trees in space? Just make sure they are crewed by Ents.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It's totally environmentally friendly and it can get you really high, really fast!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
While the effort is admirable, getting too bent out of shape over the space shuttle's emissions is a little myopic. Weighed against all of the benefits and advancements we've gleaned from the space program, I'd say the environmental impact is pretty negligible. The article itself suggests that the damage to wildlife from hydrochloric acid deposits is "minimal and manageable".
I can't imagine that the costs of upgrading a $1.7 billion shuttle to make NASA's once-in-a-blue-moon launches more earth-friendly will be reasonable for taxpayers. Environmentalists looking for something to complain about should have no trouble finding a better outlet for their ire in corporate America than at NASA.
domain combinatorics
Put this in perspective, people. There are TWO space shuttles still in service, and even though they have a CFC exemption, and it was the breaking off of a piece of that insulation that caused the Colombia disaster, they STILL use non-fluorocarbon (non-freon based) foam for insulation on the shuttles.
As stated in the comments to the article on the bottom of the page, underground fires and about a bazillion other natural sources have more of an environmental impact than the shuttle. If anything, industries and the world's large polluters ought to learn from the efficiency of NASA wiht regard to abusing/respecting the environment.
"clean-burning hydrogen/LOX fuel" reminds me of the energy industry salivating over the New Hydrogen Economy. Because the easiest, cheapest way to mass-produce hydrogen is through, yep, fossil fuels...
So is the hydrogen/LOX fuel commercially produced in an environmentally friendly manner? How about the new insulation?
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Astral Projection.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
This is interesting, will they ever figure it out soon enough?
We do a shuttle launch once every, what, four months even under the optimal conditions that never happen? And the city of Houston, Texas alone is pumping out how much greenhouse gas every day just from the cars alone?
Why is it we never actually care about the environment except at times that it's stupid to do so? Oh noes, think what nuclear power could do to the environment under extreme and unlikely circumstances that can be totally avoided with a modicum of competent regulation! We'd better avoid that and stick with the huge belching coal plants built in the 1970s and grandfathered in from the time before emission controls, that's sooo much more ecologically friendly.
Hard to believe this is merely a coincidence, but last month's Aerospace America cover story was on a very similar topic.
s /pdf/AA_July05_SIE.pdf
PDF of the article: http://www.aiaa.org/aerospace/images/articleimage
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1) Get to space.
As long as you're stuck on this step, you're going to have to have an entire planet's worth of heavy industries, energy generation, and resource extraction being performed on the surface of said planet.
Arguing about the "greenness" of space exploration is like someone having a heart attack deciding not to call an ambulance because being a passenger in a vehicle that's going faster than the posted speed limits in city streets is a health hazard.
A space elevator (always popular on /.) would be about the cheapest way up in theory provided you write of the energy cost of building the damn thing over a long lifetime.
Still, I think the posts and articles about the environmental impact of the Shuttle are mostly crap. Cars that do 40mpg instead of 20mpg on an urban-cycle would have much more positive impact on the environment. Using the heat from power station cooling systems to heat offices/factories in local areas would do more. Recycling your plastic, glass bottles, cans, and paper would do more.
Nasty as the perchlorate SRBs are, they're worth the inconvenience if NASA can use them to build (say) a 100 ton heavy launcher to replace the Shuttle.
This is not a sig
and then as has happened in other fields - Western bleeding hearts set out to save the world via job-killing regulations at home, and then other countries (who could give a rat's ass about the environment) eat our lunch with cheaper products/services, ala China.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions..
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
I don't think we need worry about the environmental impact of a few shuttles once in a while.
But we'd better sort out something a bit 'greener' before we are all blasting off for 2 weeks holiday on the sea of tranquility
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Sure it makes sense to worry about such things if you are making 100K+ cars, but a few space vehicles that already have to deal with some serious mechaqnical stresses? Dumb.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"beauty of the planet"
"environmental destruction from space"
BBC should be able to take the hit..
This omits the solid boosters (SRB). They are not clean like the hydrogen/oxygen SSME. This also omits how they produce the liquid hydrogen and oxygen. And apparently the manuvering thruster fuel is very toxic. Anyone else remember that when the first design for the shuttle was proposed it did not have the SRBs or external tank? Those two items were responsible for the two crashes! Too bad we can't pull out that original design they decided was too expensive and build it.
I'm sorry, but this is the same argument used with why we need to be driving hydrogen cars, and it irritates the shit out of me.
Skipping over the solid rocket boosters as cheerfully as the article summary did- perhaps Professor Fraser would care to explain to us where all the hydrogen and oxygen came from?
If you do the math in terms of the energy produced, and realize that both distillation-by-refridgeration and electrolysis are hugely inefficient, you start to realize the amount of energy required to make all that hydrogen and oxygen is incredible. Chemical methods involve pretty toxic chemicals, so you're not getting out of it that way. Guess how most of our (United States) electricity is supplied? That's right- coal. Which generates huge amounts of carbon soot, carbon dioxide, and radioactive particulate.
I noticed that they also skipped quite nicely over hydrazine, used in the thrusters...
Please help metamoderate.
A hot air ballon.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Space technology is advanced engineering with applications in sustainable technology. Never mind the fact that a lot of our knowledge about environmental impact comes from satellite observations.
However it is generally acknowledged that the organisational imperatives of NASA are too conservative to disseminate or even use the new technology to reduce its environmental impact.
However there is plenty of hope that the competitions that are open to speculative developers will both find disruptive technologies faster but also that commercial exploitation will supply systems that have lower environmental impact to users in non space technology sectors. Fuel cells have been part of space technology for a long time - its only the need to power cell phones that has created a wider market for them though.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Electromagnetic launchers are practical NOW. "Just accelerate the space cargo in a vacuum tube until escape velocity is achieved, while climbing a high mountain." Only one key technology has been needed, and it got invented just a couple years ago. At the END of that vacuum tube, a means is needed to keep the atmosphere from rushing in while still letting the cargo exit. The plasma valve is the answer to that problem.
Answer: A tree hugging, Linux hippy.
http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship.htm It is simple, no nuclear materials comes out of the exausts. All you do is super heat some material to rediculous levels and your done. Any activity has a negative impact, but then the biggest human contibutor to radioactivity in the atmosphear is burning coal. As for accidents, you need about 1000 accidents to release as much nuclear materails as those above ground attomic tests. Oh, and make them BIG ...
Logic be DAMNED! It's all about the *cause* that matters with envirowacos. No go back to rubbing two sticks togeather. Better yet, dont breed! Humans are viri to the planet.
God damn that felt good. And yes, I was making fun of those tree huggers.
Life is not for the lazy.
Like this poor bird.
Parent is actually correct. Damage to the shuttle due to foam coming off increased by a factor of 11 (!) after changing to the new enviro-wacko friendly formulation. See for example this.
Some of the work on high-tensile fiber is headed there now.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Aren't you underestimating the engineers at NASA if you think they cannot make a safe shuttle without CFC?
There is a sound suppression system built into the launch pad which is designed to prevent the infrastructure from being damaged from the sound waves generated beginning six seconds before liftoff when the orbiter's main engines ignite and run up to full thrust.
Watch launch footage carefully and you will be able to see that the clouds mentioned begin to appear at that point. While some of them are deflected exhaust from the aluminum perchlorate fuel used for the solid rocket boosters, most of the big clouds are actually water steam.
This can be confirmed by looking at footage of liquid-fuelled rocket launches. Liquid fuel doesn't produce those big visible trails the way solid fuel does -- the clouds are visible only at first and the rocket itself has no trail as long as it has no solid boosters. (The shuttle does indeed lose its trail after SRB separation, as do Deltas and Titans and others).
i am a soviet space shuttle
Anybody who uses a car cannot whine about environmental impact of the space shuttle: there are at least hundreds of millions of cars used every day in the world and only three space shuttles that fly a few times a year!
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
The latest issue of IEEE spectrum featurs the space elevator.
Being more environmentally friendly than conventional rockets wasn't even mentioned as a space elevator advantage. And yes - we do now have the technology in place to build it, for less than the cost of a shuttle replacement.
All we need is somebody in power to sign off on the program and put this into high gear.
My rights don't need management.
The BBC itself probably impacts the environment to a greater degree than the Shuttle. Think of all the fossil energy used to generate the power needed to watch TV and radio while they are on, to generate those signals, the environmental impact of the staff, the transport requirements for the staff, etc.
Ask the guys on the last shuttle....
Well, obviously, since we're throwing stuff into outer space, we need to be putting back the same amount of matter that we're throwing away. I suggest we start harvesting minerals from the Moon and Mars to replace the materials we've permanently removed from Earth.
It's just like logging, so I'm sure all the environmentalists will agree with me on this one.
Wasn't the space program all about spinning off technology into everyday, terrestrial realms? If so, if there's been any spinoff more beneficial than the technology to mass-produce lightweight, carbon-fiber parts for our land vehicles - oh - wait - I guess out huge enormous land vehicles weight more now than they ever did.
Well, at least I've got my Tang and my pen that can write upside-down.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
" Aren't you underestimating the engineers at NASA if you think they cannot make a safe shuttle without CFC?"
Well if they had unlimited time and money I am sure they could. The problem is they pretty much have to use "off the shelf" foam for the shuttle insulation. I have heard that the CFC foam is part of the problem with the shedding foam.
What it comes down it is this. Are the CFCs in the shuttles foam harmful? The truth is probably not. The heat of reentry probably destorys them long before they can get to the ozone layer. Think about all the car ACs that still us CFCs and the Shuttle foam is pretty much a drop in the bucket. I would really like to see some hard science on this and not just guesses. Any yes even I am tossing out guesses.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Now, let's not propagate urban legends farther than they need to go. Yes, they had problems with the insulation when they first started using the non-freon stuff. It had nothing to do with the Columbia disaster, however -- all the problems were solved back around 1997 or so. It also had nothing to do with freon or lack thereof, it was just a different enough material that they needed to make some changes.
So you're proposing that space launches be made from near Andrews AFB from now on?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
seems to keep cropping up as the most logical and harmless and cost efficient next step ...
Question Authority before IT questions You
These are not nuclear powered rockets of the Tintin variety, and the environmental impact is, in total, quite low.
We should worry more about vinyl siding production for houses, cars, etc. Seriously, this is like optimizing the property page rendering code for blurring an image and not optimizing the blur. It'll be faster, but not by much. Hit the big-ticket pollution items before you belabor the horrors of the rarely occurring ones.
Being "a lot of launches" doesn't mean that it contributes to the measurable pollution of the planet in a percentage that would show within four significant digits.
Why oh why does this remind me of Wandaba style?
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
... that was directly resposible for killing the Columbia Astronauts and nearly killed the present set? Yep, gotta love putting the astronauts in sever risk to get rid of a couple pounds of freon. Stupidity reigns supreme when you deal with environmentalist.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Yeah, as long as we can convince ourselves that they are crazy, we can pretend we aren't in the process of destroying the very environment that keeps us alive. Then we don't have to deal with the problems we caused! Yay!
Seriously, let's hope that you (and other people like you) can get their heads out of their asses before it's too late.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I am sure I am going to be one of a chorus of people saying this, but why bother?
Space flight is so rare compared to airplane, automobiles, steel plants, etc. as to be almost insignificant.
Wouldn't it be better to worry about things that actually effect the enviornment?
FTFA The fuel used by these engines is super-cold liquid hydrogen, kept at a temperature of -253 degrees Celsius, which Nasa reports is "the second coldest liquid on Earth".
The NASA engineer went on to say:
"The coldest being, of course, the blood pumping through my ex-girlfriend's heart."
(Although I think he's wrong and it's actually liquid Helium.)
I quit!
Even if this was done every week, it would not add up to the pollution that we spew out in other sources. Coal and Oil energy generation is probably far worse.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I happen to be "near this industry"... I've met with SRB, Tank, and Orbiter people at KSC and I can tell you they really do care about the environment. I've watched the foam being applied and I can tell you the foam and it's application process was designed to be low enviro-impact. The SRB's are even low enviro-impact. They splash down and are towed back to shore. Leaving a trail of dead dolphin's as you tow one back would be bad press. Remember - they are in the middle of wildlife refuge.
would be a space elevator.
However, it presumes we can handle the security and technological issues and cooperate.
I'm not so sure we can. Sadly.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
WTG on nuclear fears. Right on the money. Nuclear energy, be it fission or fusion, seriously needs to be considered as a form of power generation and spacecraft propulsion. Instead, thanks largely to two high-profile incidents, nuclear anything isn't even an option except in distant unmanned probe missions like Cassini, Galileo, and the Grand Tour.
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had an incident that released less radiation into the air than a typical coal power plant does on a good day.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered an incident that became a lasting monument to the failure of communism, an incident plant operators in American plants would never allow to happen, whether before or after the Soviet incident.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I think the payback NASA has made for the environment outweighs any real impact that they may have negatively made with their programs.
If you took the derivatives of all we have learned and developed from the space race I would say overall the planet is much better for it. Space flight requires all sorts of inventiveness and efficiency. These techniques and ideas spin off eventually into the consumer world to benefit everyone.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That's about as realistic as a space elevator, given current tech ;)
Even the strongest *individual* SWNT tubes tested thusfar were around 60GPa, and our best nanotube epoxies and ropes are perhaps 1-2GPa. Most space elevator designs call for >100GPa to be realistic.
There are lines that can be investigated, of course, that may *eventually* yield strong enough materials (for example, pressure-induced interlinking and extremely uniform, single-type CNTs). But don't hold your breath.
I wish people would stop comparing JÃnsi to God. He's good, but he's no JÃnsi.
That comment about environmental destruction was really funny. I almost spit up my lunch from laughing.
The shuttle doesn't have the ability to monitor ground effects the way satellites do and the woman is the pilot. They're orbiting the earth every couple of hours or so.
Her comment wasn't scientific in any way, it was political and based on junk science.
If it were scientific, she would have commented on land reclamation, creation from various dredging operations and erosion control. Did she truly explain the comment in a quantifiable manner? Uh....no. So this pilot...FELT...the world is being damaged. OK, maybe she used a Ouija board and channeled the earth's spirit to tell her about the damage. Maybe she has a "mystic power crystal" from the Franklin Mint which vibrated to tell her the earth was "sick." Pffff...
This thread is also ridiculous. All these comments about how a space launch supposedly screws up the environment. You people remind me of the folks who claimed rockets woudl punch holes int he atmosphere. The overwhelmingly vast majority of major structural "damage" to the earth comes from political issues like African dictators killing off the farmers or stealing their land so irrigation and fertilization stop.
All you folks who are running down this path haven't first asked yourself wether her statemetn is valid and to what degree of validity. It's like the Stephen Covey example of the huge lumbering operation where everyone is so excited about how efficiently they're working yet they don't realize they're in the wrong forest. She sure wagged you guys.
Sorry man, I think most of us are laughing at your own mischaracterizations, stereotyping, and general anger at all who you don't align yourself with.
This may just piss you off more, but there actually are valid points you may find "out there".
In fact, that's how science works. Quacks, the lot of em.
See ya later, I'm off to go hug a tree.
Relative sizes:
/year /year
External tank = 51,000 cubic feet x 12 launches per year (optimistic)
~= 6e5 cubic feet of fuel / year
my car = 10 gallon fillup x 52 fills
~= 70 cubic feet
So a shuttle ~= 9000 cars
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Sorry, but this NASA document says that they switched foam formulations as recently as 2001 to comply with EPA regulations.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One way to greatly reduce the impact of the space program on the environment is to have contractual agreements with the suppliers regarding the amount of waste products they release.
Does anyone have a tally of the waste water, smoke stack emissions, and solid waste produced by Shuttle suppliers?
My wager is that the waste produced by suppliers is in range of thousands of tons per year. And that's with producing no new shuttles.
Hey, as long as I'm not downwind, what do I care?
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Shut it, hippy. ;)
Ok, we can't do it today, but our planning direction needs to be towards making sure everything that goes up does not come back down.
What we really need to find is the minimal long term cost track to establishing independently viable industrial societies off this planet.
The environmental cost to the only environment which actually matters, the earth's biosphere, of keeping returning space travellers alive for the rest of their days on earth will at some point exceed the cost to the earth of keeping them alive in settlements elsewhere. Not soon certainly, but eventually.
Humanity would not be anywhere near where it is today if our pioneering ancestors had insisted on return tickets.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Hey, you missed my laughing along, and hinting to the rest who aren't keeping up as quick. You missed the joke about the joke!
--
make install -not war
Yup. and we should be making toys out of plutonium. It's such fun stuff! It's harmless, really.
Ya, my post was flamebait. But you did hit the nail on the head with the poor judgement issue. Personally, I want to protect the enviroment. In fact, I for one do. I recycle plastic for example. I keep a single plastic bag under my kitchen sink at my appartment and collect bits and pieces of plastic there. When it comes time at the end of each month, I take that huge bag down the the trash area and dump it into the plastic recycle bin.
But seriously folks. Resonable people don't want to live with extreme rules and regulations. Fact is, most of the member of Greenpeace ARE extreme. If you haven't been to one of their meetings before, I suggest you do so. It's enough to make you vomit.
Life is not for the lazy.
Next they'll be asking us to stop driving our SUVs!!
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
For the benefit of everyone suggesting that we use a space elevator, unfortunately, we don't have the technology yet to make Bucky cables (Buckminsterfullerene, I believe) 100 miles long. I don't even think we've managed to make one a foot long yet.
Can you imagine the lawsuits, though, when someone gets hit in the head by one of these cables being dragged from orbit by an off-course space shuttle? Of course, if you could catch it as it goes by, you can anchor it in front of your house and make a fortune. I can see it now: "Joe Billy-Bob's Used Car Lot and Space Transportation Company". Has a nice ring to it, I think.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I don't call greens envirowackos. I call them deluded. They cling to a belief of an 'ideal' cozy green gaia where none really exists: life on earth exists on the whims of forces so powerful we glimpse them but rarely: the recent earthquake activity in the Indian ocean that caused the tsunami (which some nuts blamed on global warming), once-in-a-century micrometeor strikes, etc. They look for micro-effects caused by man and miss out totally on the macro effects of solar cycles and aperiodic weather patterns.
Worse, they bully governments and industry into stasis, as increasing amounts of money have to be spent to come up to the green earth ideal, even as entire national industries become noncompetitive, causing flight of capital to the third world.
Also, people who call greens 'envirowackos' are not above name-calling themselves: they like words like 'republinazi' and so forth. Well, this one likes clean surroundings as much as the next man, but also believes that you can take cleanliness and lack of toxins too far. I have travelled in India (I have family there) and you know what? lots of Indians in urban centres survive with water levels so contaminated that according to every FDA rule I know of they should all be dying off (I drank bottled water, would've fallen sick in an instant given my immune system). And oddly enough , India (esp Indian cities) have much greater population growth than the US/EU -- even taking rural migration into account. The population also seems remarkably free of the dust/pollen allergies we see so much here. Perhaps species' adaptive capabilities deserve more credit than you give?
Don't get me wrong, clean air and water is important, but choking industry for a treaty based on starry eyed green politics and bad economics is not the way to do it.
Go somewhere random
Oh, and what about this "great" quote from this "commander""
Huh? What is this freak talking about? Where are all the scientific data showing the concentration of O2 that would substantiate "we don't have much air"? I am breathing just fine. Should I start taking smaller breaths?Call me old-fashion, but I miss the days of _real_ Astronauts! Those guys were kick-ass pilots that risked their lives in planes. They "pushed-the-envelope" and were what I considered Astronauts. Not all these Politically Correct scientists that get to go for a ride. Look at some of the pictures of the shuttle missions over the last 5 years or so. They look like your typical PC photo. A couple of men, a couple of women, a few white guys, a few Asians, a black or two and throw in some other nationality and your have the "perfect" shuttle crew!
I am not prejudice. I DO NOT care what your race, sex, religion, etc is when it comes to picking a shuttle crew (or president or king or whatever). However, I think we need to get back to the basics of only the "best of the best" make the grade. At more than a BILLION per mission, we cannot afford to be PC. If the "best of the best" happens to be a black dude from Africa, or an Asian chick from Mongolia, so be it. I just am sick of seeing crews picked to fit your typical "tree hugger" profile.
Oh, and to make sure I am "on-topic", does anyone _really_ think the few shuttle missions that we have had so far will cause any "harm" to the environment? The funny thing to me is that _all_ of the people screaming about the environment DRIVE CARS, and LIVE IN HOMES, and USE ELECTRICITY and USE WATER, and ETC. _What_ in the world makes these tree-huggers tick? How can someone be sooooo anal to complain about others usage of natural resources when the people complaining are using just as much.
Give me a call when _one_ of these vocal tree-huggers actually walk-the-talk and live in an adobe home with _no_ electricity (unless 100% of it is generated by wind/solar/etc) and does not drive _any_ vehicle unless they know it is 100% natural/etc. Tree-huggers hold no salt with me because they complain about things they are doing! When I find _one_ vocal tree-hugger that is living off the land and using 0% of the resources they are complaining about, then I will give them some of my time to hear their side. Until then, all I have to say is STOP BEING A HYPOCRITE!
And to answer your last question:
Why don't we first worry about getting _some_ type of peace-on-earth going and getting our natural resource usage under control (on a global scale) _before_ we try to get NASA/ESA to be even more PC and tie thier hands further. The original goal of NASA was SCIENCE and now it seems like NASA does very little science for the money spent.If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I like this idea since it uses fairly simple technology. Although it would take a relatively long time to get to orbit using an ion engine(about a week), you could put cargo on airships, and people on rockets.
Another nice thing about going slowly is that you don't have to manage all the risks of volatile fuels on the way up, and a rapid reentry on the way down.
And when the cable is ready, do the space elevator.
"What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?"
STEP #1: LEAVE PLANET.
Seriously, why do most of these discussions center around how much energy it takes to get into orbit? Build the freakin' space platform and fuhgettaboutit!
. . it was a bad attempt at satire. Whining about acid rain caused by space shuttles, well, it's like a recent article I read that complained about how NASCAR racers get poor gas mileage. Sheesh.
Of course you are right, and thanks for the links. I am even sure that in balance more environmental benefit has been accrued than any damage caused by the space program overall. And no doubt there will be more environment-friendly means of propulsion than SRBS, which we all know can be Trouble.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I am saying this again, because sometimes repitition is good for learning.
People need to UNDERSTAND PRIORITIES WHEN PICKING BATTLES TO FIGHT. This is a topic so far under the radar today IT SHOULD NOT BE DISCUSSED until space vehicles are AT LEAST AS POPULAR AS PRIVATE AIRCRAFT.
Gaah... Let's try to keep the shuttles from blowing up before replacing their environmental control systems and insulative materials.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
There are people doing just this, except not with a hot air balloon, but rather a lighter than air craft:
http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf/
And, of course, I'm sure your car burns pure hydrogen in pure oxygen, producing only water, as with the Space Shuttle Main Engine.
From the /. post:
"We could also see environmental destruction from space."
If you mean something that is 1,000km wide and made mostly of iron and nickel and is on an earth bound trajectory, then yes, I can plainly see how you could have environmental destruction from space.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
But seriously, what we need to do is move everything over to a hydrogen-based economy. Since it can be produced in a number of ways, there's no practical way for a small number of suppliers to end up in an oligopoly situation as we currently have with gasoline. The solution for rockets can wait, but it's still pretty much the same solution, for the same reason.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They could all bus to work.
The chlorine would tend to "burn" combine with other elements. But like you it is also a wild ass guess. Not to mention that the question of where the chlorine tend to stay? Would it be above the ozone layer? And an even better question is it enough to make a difference in the global sense?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No nasty emissions. Goes slowly so less energy wasted on aerodynamic drag.
Though, maybe someone will complain about birds crashing into it. Oh well.
Start Running Better Polls
This may just piss you off more, but there actually are valid points you may find "out there".
Valid points?! What valid points??? It does not piss me off, it makes me weep out of the pure insanity that you would even ponder such things. Humans are a product of nature. Even if we lay scorched earth and caused the extinction, it's still a process of nature. Because...we ARE a part of nature. Life and death are part of a cycle. As such, just live yours with respect for everyone elses quality of life. But don't force others HOW to live their own life as well.
Life is not for the lazy.
I know smoked salmon is good, but I didn't know it could launch a space craft.
Or were those only so we wouldn't ever have to land on the moon again, allowing us to cut the trip distance in half?
But that pales into insignificance compared to those evil environmentalists banning DDT, right? Wrong. As blogger Tim Lambert records in excruciating detail, DDT has never been banned for malaria control, and is indeed in use in a number of countries for just this purpose. It has, however, been banned for agricultural use; this actually *helps* its use for malaria control because insects are exposed to less of it, thus reducing resistance levels.
There are a number of ways in which you could argue that the nuttier green groups have hurt both the environment and humanity (for instance, their opposition to nuclear power), but the malaria-DDT story is a crock propagated by right-wing propagandists who never let the facts get in the way to smear everybody to the left of Genghis Khan.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Your 'everything is nature' idea is quite indicative of your thought process. Let me give you a hand here.
In the English language, we differentiate between ideas using words, many of which have multiple meanings. The intended meaning can be determined by usage and context. For instance, your statement "Even if we lay scorched earth and caused the extinction, it's still a process of nature. Because...we ARE a part of nature." is demonstrably untrue due to it's logical failure on the basis of context.
The meaning of nature in the original context is number 4 listed below. You attempted to disprove a statement (that you in fact authored) by criticizing its veracity on the basis that it does not conform to another definition of the word.
For your perusal:
nature (n'chr) pronunciation
n.
1. The material world and its phenomena.
2. The forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena of the material world: the laws of nature.
3. The world of living things and the outdoors: the beauties of nature.
4. A primitive state of existence, untouched and uninfluenced by civilization or artificiality: couldn't tolerate city life anymore and went back to nature.
5. Theology. Humankind's natural state as distinguished from the state of grace.
6. A kind or sort: confidences of a personal nature.
7. The essential characteristics and qualities of a person or thing: "She was only strong and sweet and in her nature when she was really deep in trouble" (Gertrude Stein).
8. The fundamental character or disposition of a person; temperament: "Strange natures made a brotherhood of ill" (Percy Bysshe Shelley).
9. The natural or real aspect of a person, place, or thing. See synonyms at disposition.
10. The processes and functions of the body.
[Middle English, essential properties of a thing, from Old French, from Latin ntra, from ntus, past participle of nsc, to be born.]
I challenge you to back that number up with a reputable source.
The original design was a cynical attempt to maintain funding in the absence of any current sexy NASA projects: Skylab was a joke, robotic Mars ideas were pie in the sky, etc.
:(
Building a plane-like thing could be sold: we're only one step away from making space flight as easy as a 747 ride. Only problem was that it was complete fiction: at $10,000/lb, hauling two big wings, landing gear, reusable everything, and the associated supporting infrastructure made this dog unable to actually carry a payload. But what the heck: sell it as a reusable, then tack on enough external boosters to actually allow it to at least lift a few tons into LEO.
Also, play the Russian card: they'll have to compete with our cool tech and that will bankrupt them sooner. Russian did try at first, but then gave up and switched to sensible tech: big dumb boosters. Now Russia has more, cheaper lift capacity than we do.
Sadly, the space shuttle set American space exploration back twenty years.
Yeah, let's kill millions of people every year, mostly children, by banning mostly harmless DDT!
What utter stupidity! The EPA's ban on DDT has caused ZERO deaths. By 1972 malaria had been eradicated from the US, so there was no need to spray with DDT (or any insecticide) for malaria control. When there have been some small outbreaks since 1972, they have been eradicated by other, more effective, insecticides. The radical right seems to think that DDT is the only insecticide in existence -- and that the EPA regulations are binding on every country in the world.
There is no ban on using DDT to fight malaria and there never has been. DDT is banned for agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. The radical right pretends that there is a ban so they can blame malaria deaths on environmentalists.
According to the EPA's December 31, 1972 press release on the DDT ban:
"An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products. Public health, quarantine, and a few minor crop uses were excepted, as well as export of the material."
So it was still legal to use it for public health, quarantine, and to export it.
"The effective date of the EPA June cancellation action was delayed until the end of this year to permit an orderly transition to substitute pesticides"
See that? "Substitute pesticides." Didn't know they had those, did you?
"During the past 30 years, approximately 675,000 tons have been applied domestically. The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.
The decline was attributed to a number of factors including increased insect resistance, development of more effective alternative pesticides, growing public and user concern over adverse environmental side effects..."
Again, insects had become increasingly resistand and more effective alternatives already existed.
The World Health Organization's plan for malaria prevention in Sri Lanka after the tsunami stated:
"Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids."
The mosquitoes in Sri Lanka, as in many other parts of the world, have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn't work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn't because of any ban. It was because it became ineffective. If the radical right wasn't so busy trying to ban the teaching of evolution, they might have less trouble grasping the concept that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT. Fortunately, the World Health Organization does not consist of flat-Earth conservatives, so they sent malathion to Sri Lanka -- which can actually kill the mosquitoes there.
Before you waste all of our time with the much-repeated claim by the right that aid organizations won't fund DDT spraying to control malaria, I'll shoot that claim down, too:
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances some DDT spraying in Somalia. USAID pays for some spraying of DDT to prevent malaria in developing countries.
According to a news story from the July 18, 2005 issue of The Monitor (Uganda), Dr Herbert Wilson Lwanga, the Executive Director of the Community Welfare Services, said his agency had received funding for DDT spraying programs from the Global Fund.
Until you can show me an example of where a non-government entity kills millions every year by polluting, I'd say the radical enviromentalists have quite the
What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?
Orion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion
"What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?"
Nanotech.
Stop spending scores of billions on crappy primitive hardware from fraudulent government contractors and leapfrog the issue with nanotech (presumably from the same fraudulent government contractors, but hey, it might trickle down...as long as it doesn't "trickle down" as "grey goo.")
You also get the benefit that the same nanotech developments could be used to clean up and re-use the crap we've already dumped on the planet.
Not that it concerns me - get rid of the monkeys and the environment will rebound in a few hundred or a few thousand years - an eyeblink in geological - and Transhuman - time.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A: Russian rocket burn in the atmosphere, Shuttle is reusable.
Q: What is the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?
A: Astronauts burn in the atmosphere, cosmonauts are reusable.
Don't forget about the orginal O-Rings on the SRB stacks were changed when the manufacturer was in fear of asbestos law suits; stop making it. The replacement O-Ring material brought us the Challenger disaster.
The development of materials is always a stepwise process and involves not only the identification of the cool properties that you are seeking but also a clear understanding of the shortcomings of the material. And believe me a material as anisotropic as this material is bound to have some interesting ones. Recognize that only now has graphite composite technology reached the mainstream - 787 will be the first commercial aircraft with widespread composite primary structures. Many aircraft including advanced combat aircraft still use aluminum for primary structures.
Your simplification of the erection process suggests some rather sloppy thinking too. There is a significant energy difference between LEO (shuttle territory) and GEO. The largest rockets can place about 8 metric tons in GEO. That is in GEO- not in a transfer orbit. Shuttle has no lift capabilty to GEO at all. You must move the machines for hoisting materials and to integrate these structures into a load-bearing whole. That requires power and that means a lot of mass- that must be emplaced before you can begin hoisting. Before first fiber down you must stationkeep this system and implement a comm and control system. In any event this means you will have to place the largest geosync satellite ever launched and assemble it remotely from multiple pieces autonomously. This has never been done and represents a non-trivial task. I would estimate that you will have to place at least 50 metric tons at geosync. This will require at least a billion dollars in launch and integration costs as well as the development and testing of rendezvous and dock system as well as probably another half billion for the spacecraft themselves- and that is a very lowball estimate. It is much more likely to be three times that. This assumes that you can make fiber in megaton lots. Assuming it is on the order of high performance graphite/epoxy tows it will be $20-80 /lbm. Very likely it will be far more.
And just what does this get you? Well you are not really in a great location. You still have to use in-space propulsion stages to get anywhere of interest like the moon. Departing from the elevator is of course straightforward but you must consider the mechanics and threat from an arriving vehicle. They must circularize and match plane from an arbitrary lunar orbit for example. This does cost energy- especially plane changes which are highly energy intensive. This means that the stage is heavier and more complex. A stage coming from Mars may well find it better to just directly aerobrake instead of using the elevator.
In the end the elevator is useful but is not a panacea- you must have good rockets and aerobraking technology. SInce you must have those anyway the incremental benefit of the elevator is reduced. The cost of maintenance is also not yet defined- and could be very high. The consequences of objects passing slowly through the VanAllen belts could also be significant- rockets generally pass through them in minutes- even a fast elevator will place the cargo in the belts for hours at a time.
So give this some thought- there is more to a car than just the tires or engine- it all has to work together. Without an internally consistent architecture the design will be a disaster. I suspect that the elevator will not be economically viable unless there is a very high demand- well above what is envisioned until very late in the century. Consider the marginal cost effectiveness of the Chunnel.
4. A primitive state of existence, untouched and uninfluenced by civilization or artificiality: couldn't tolerate city life anymore and went back to nature.
I totally disagree this this definition. I'm not sure who or what consortium designated this to be, but it doesn't belong philosophically. That, and add to the fact your link also includes....
"The totality of all existing things: cosmos, creation, macrocosm, universe, world. See matter, part/whole."
Although skewing off topic here, did you know that oxygen never existed in Earth atmosphere until a billon years after it's formation? Well it's true. Oxygen started off as polution, and now all modern life depends on it. Ironic that you find what Humans doing to be unnatural, but the first microbes on earth wasn't? There just isn't any formal logic as to what "natural" is in regards to life and evolution.
While yet to be proven, who's to say mankind isn't natures "evolution revolution". Who's to say nano-technology won't take over biology. Perhaps even fuse mechanical with biological processes to form new life? An even grander thought is to think we can actually stop an astroid impact from wiping out all life on Earth (again) while at the same time seeding sterile planets with life from Earth.
Life is not for the lazy.
Compare with the average US 500 megawatt coal fired electric plant, issuing 15,000 metric tons of non-CO2 crap, and 1,000,000 metric tons of CO2. Multiply by at least 500 for all US coal-fired electricity. Add the rest of the world.
Missing from the equation is the number of megawatts it takes to produce the 27,000 metric tons of missiles and their fuel... an exercise for the reader.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Sort of like the DDT ban. How many people have to die from West Nile before we resume spraying with the most effective anti-mosquito agent known? Yes, it's a bioaccumulator. So we'll keep our level of use only to the point where it is directly saving lives, as opposed to spraying it all over crops. Note that any "evidence" that DDT causes harm to humans at reasonable levels has been fabricated over the years by people with an agenda. Kind of like marijuana.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
In order to achieve escape velocity, how fast will the spacecraft need to be going to counteract the air friction it will encounter once it leaves the launch tube? I imagine it will have to be moving at a much higher rate of speed then escape velocity in order to push through all that air.
Then your greatest speeds will be through the densest part of the atmosphere. I imagine this will put a lot of heating onto the vehicle. Probably more than the shuttle at landing. Has this problem been overcome?
The environmental impact of the launch itself is utterly insignificant compared to the total environmental footprint of the industry directly and indirectly supporting it.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
As I see it, the part that has the most impact on the environment and as well is the most critical part today are the solid fuel boosters.
One feature that could be used for the light shuttle is to have a launch vehicle that carries and accelerates the shuttle to a speed and altitude where the rockets can work best. By using ordinary jet engines for the first step you wouldn't need to carry the oxygen for the first stage, which is a major weight contribution.
This will of course require several different design issues to be solved, but since Burt Rutan has done this (on a sub-orbital scale) it isn't impossible.
If the carrier would be able to go supersonic before the release of the shuttle it would be even better, but then there are a lot of issues to take into account like interfering shock waves occuring at separation. A lot of fun for those guys that like extreme calculations! :->
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
...it's a little known fact but 10% of the world's deforestation is caused by the amount of paperwork associated with launching satellites to study...deforestation!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I can't believe people are actually complaining about the space shuttle polluting. If it spewed nerve-gas laced radioactive material, I still wouldn't care, though I suppose they would have to launch farther away from civilization. That's like saying we shouldn't X-ray a broken leg to see how to fix it because it might raise the risk of cancer by .0045% So many people, like that one person who asks questions in class just to hear his/her head rattle/use big words/get brownie points, are better off dead because they totally muck up the machinery and piss me off.
FYI: ESA (the European Space Agency) is planning to use a hybrid approach in its next-generation launcher, the Hopper with a 4 km magnetic track (a prototype, the Phoenix, has already flown).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
This has got to be the most 'uninformed' vote I've ever seen, even for /.
Just so you understand a few things, there have been 2 loss of vehicle accidents involving the shuttle, one of them was an explosion. The vehicle that exploded was BEFORE the change in insulations. Since the change, there have been no explosions. There was one breakup during re-entry. it's assumed that breakup had a foam strike as it's root cause. There is no evidence to suggest this could not have happened with the older foam systems.
Regarding the issue of pollutants, the majority of pollutants created by the shuttle come from the solid rocket boosters. In the lower portions of the troposphere, these pollutants have little effect, but they tend to last a lot longer, and have a much more dramatic effect when thier exhausts are dumped into the stratosphere. The vehicle that exploded did so before the srb's reached the stratosphere, so, it effectively had LESS pollution impact than those which launched successfully.
Based on empirical measurements, there have been 7 astronauts killed by shuttles using the old foam system, and 7 killed by the new foam system. If there's any correlation to be drawn from these numbers, it's that the change in foam had no effect on astronaut death rates.
I wonder if it's possible for you to get more things wrong in such a short post? I'm glad you cant vote in my part of the world. I'm amazed this got insightful mods.
Look at the way you phrase it: 7 kill while using the old system, 7 killed by the new foam. Even in your defense you suggest the new foam is at fault.
Also, claiming the "death rate" is unchanged assumes the old and new foam were used on an equal number of missions.
There was an interesting article long ago in Scientific American which discussed how removing asbestos from the O-rings on Challenger's boosters led to the O-rings failing. Well, at least no one at Nasa got lung cancer.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
As has been pointed out already, your source supplies no additional evidence, no additional links to studies, no additional quotes from engineers.
More importantly, it's wrong.
The foam that ultimately contributed to Columbia's loss was BX-250, which used CFC-11 as a blowing agent. In later tank designs, this foam was changed to BX-265, which used HCFC-141b as a blowing agent.
The last time we piddled with the space shuttle to make items more human friendly (asbestos gaskets on the fuel tank), it blew up!
> Hello, I have modded you down for the spam in your sig
You should have added your username in your message somewhere, so that we can all be notified who it was that just publicly announced "I'm a fucking idiot."
According to the article, there are some unintended effects to the West's ban on DDT. By banning DDT (notably after malaria was eradicated in their own territories), the West has forced other countries from using DDT.
For example, Zimbabwean tobacco has been blocked from export into the U.S. because of DDT traces on the tobacco. This tends to cause the Zimbabwe's tobacco farmers (a powerful group in the country) to become an anti-DDT lobby.
While there's no call to ban DDT outside of the West, the need to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy ("use this pesticide that we consider too dangerous") and the plan to "phase out" DDT use entirely (Stockholm Convention) makes it difficult for anyone to argue or justify funding for anything related to DDT.
Some international research agencies will simply not fund any studies related to DDT and malaria control. Who wants to be on the hot seat for spraying cancer?
While insecticide-treated bed nets and house spraying is effective, its apparently cheaper to use DDT (the article uses a $1.70 per person per year figure).
The article also mentions that Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" pretty much brought about the modern environmental movement so debates about DDT get rather polarized. Liberals consider DDT the poster child of runaway technologists ("we can control nature") while conservatives consider the DDT ban a win by Luddites using emotion over science.
What's missing in the article are any questions to the people actually suffering from malaria. The questions were too focused on the hospital manager or the international aid organizer. I wish the journalist would have asked folks suffering from malaria how they would have chose in this Faustian bargain: higher malaria deaths (which kills mostly children under 5) or increased chances of cancer later in life?
According to the article, there are some unintended effects to the West's ban on DDT.
The west has only banned DDT for agricultural use, not fighting disease.
Some international research agencies will simply not fund any studies related to DDT and malaria control. Who wants to be on the hot seat for spraying cancer?
And yet I gave multiple examples of funding to use DDT -- where it is still effective.
While insecticide-treated bed nets and house spraying is effective, its apparently cheaper to use DDT (the article uses a $1.70 per person per year figure).
And it is less effective. DDT usage has dropped worldwide due to mosquitos developing an immunity to it.
From a 2004 scientific research article entitled "Insecticide susceptibility status of malaria vectors in some hyperendemic tribal districts of Orissa" by S. K. Sharma, A. K. Upadhyay, M. A. Haque, O. P. Singh, T. Adak2, and S. K. Subbarao:
VECTOR control programmes in India rely mostly on indoor residual spraying by DDT. The spectacular success achieved in malaria control between 1958 and 1965 was mainly attributed to DDT. However, this achievement was short-lived and soon after malaria resurgence took place. One of the technical reasons for malaria resurgence was development of DDT resistance in primary malaria vector, Anopheles culicifacies, which is responsible for the transmission of 60-70% of new cases of malaria in India
Again, DDT is ineffective in much of the world as DDT-resistant mosquitos are now the norm.
Liberals consider DDT the poster child of runaway technologists ("we can control nature")
I am a liberal and a technologist -- and that doesn't sum up my beliefs about DDT at all. I believe that it poses significant risks to humans when it enters the food chain and that it is harmful to many forms of wildlife. That it used to be an effective means of killing mosquitos is good, but moquitos in many third-world countries have evolved a resistance to it, making malathion and other pesticides the preferable mosquito control options.
What's missing in the article are any questions to the people actually suffering from malaria. The questions were too focused on the hospital manager or the international aid organizer. I wish the journalist would have asked folks suffering from malaria how they would have chose in this Faustian bargain: higher malaria deaths (which kills mostly children under 5) or increased chances of cancer later in life?
Why do you insist on false dichotomies like that?
1. DDT is ineffective in many malaria-ravaged regions due to mosquito resistance.
2. Other pesticides are much more effective in those areas while not having the cancer risk or causing the environmental damage of DDT.
3. There is funding by aid groups for DDT spraying in areas it is still effective.
4. The EPA ban in the U.S. exempted DDT use for disease control.
5. The EPA ban permitted the export of DDT.
6. The EPA ban only prohibited DDT usage for crop spraying.
P.S. Who cares how old the victims are? I'm tired of the "think of the children" cry that comes from the right on just about every issue. The life of someone's mother, father, brother, or sister is no less precious than the life of an infant.
> How many people have to die from West Nile
Well, ignoring that that number is extremely close to zero and that DDT is no longer "the most effective anti-mosquito agent known," I'd say it probably won't resume any time soon.
You aren't going to convince anyone (with half a brain) that your results are valid, considering your sample size is 2.
Yes, I have a hydrogen mine in my back yard. Where did you think hydrogen came from? You didn't think they use natural gas to generate hydrogen do you? That's just a lie from those damned environmentalists. Good thing I wasn't sucked into ignoring good clean hydrogen as a fuel source.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I highly agree that electromagnetic launchers would be damn useful. I also think that most people are thinking of using them in the wrong way. Let me explain:
Due to high acceleration, electromagnetic launchers are probably not the best choice for launching humans or delicate equipment. Rockets are likely to be cheaper for this for the time being. In order to have a launcher which would be useful for human launches, the launcher would have to be very long, and thus very expensive. However, a launcher which was designed for bulk transport would not need to be very expensive at all. This is because, unlike in a rocket, the majority of capital expense stays on the planet. In order to have a cheap (and thus, likely to be actually built) system, you want to minimize the expense involved in building the launcher. One of the best ways to do this is to reduce the size of the projectile. People tend to think of launchers as firing something about the size of a Gemini capsule or Space Shuttle. However, if the launcher is going to fire a projectile the size of a coke can, a much smaller launcher could be built. Electromagnetic launchers can have very high fire rates - why launch one large projectile when many small ones will contain the same mass and use the same energy?
The atmosphere of course puts limits on the size reduction of the projectile. A large or dense projectile loses a smaller proportion of its energy to drag. However, if we make the launcher small enough to put on an airplane, then we can launch from the stratosphere for a fairly low cost. This would enable the use of small projectiles without too much energy loss to atmospheric drag. I would expect the cost of a launcher to be less than the price of an airplane which could mount one. Lets assume it is a plane similar to a 727. A 727 has a payload of about 50,000 kg including fuel. Let's say that 10,000 kg of that is projectiles, with the rest of the payload being used to carry the crew, the launcher, and the fuel for the plane and the launcher. To get to LEO, the fuel for the launcher would be about 2 times the mass of the projectiles, so that works out about right for a short flight. Assuming a fire rate of about 1/sec for 1 kg projectiles, the payload of the plane would be shot in about 3 hours.
So, presuming we had a bulk launcher which cost $20 million and could launch small projectiles into LEO at not much more than the cost of fuel, the price per kg would likely be on the order of $10/kg. Of course the launcher could only be used for launching bulk materials, but as an example:
A Delta 4 heavy rocket delivers a payload of 23000 kg to LEO at a cost of about $170 million. If we were to take that same $170 million and put $20 million into a plane-based launcher, $50 million into various upkeep costs (personnel, ground site, the inevitable bureaucracy), and $100 million into launch fuel, you could put 10 million kg into LEO. It would take a year of flying 3 flights a day with the launcher plane to put this much mass in orbit.
Of course, the mass would not be a nicely formed satellite or spaceship, but the point is that for the same cost, you get to put 4300 times the mass into orbit. 100 million kg is about twice the mass of a WWII battleship like the Bismarck, and is plenty of mass to build an orbital factory to turn some of that mass into something useful. In addition, metal encapsulated fuel pellets could be sent into orbit - fuel in orbit is worth much more than fuel on the ground.
This sort of project would only take a few million to get off the ground, and if things don't work, then you have the opportunity to retool your system, which is not as easy with exploding rockets. The real challenge lies in making the projectiles go where they are supposed to so they can be gathered in orbit to be used.
It is well-documented that the disaster was brought by inability to read and interpret available data that clearly pointed to possible problems at low temps.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Historical Background of the _harms_
About the various substitutes mentioned and the lack of a "ban": From the American Council on Science and Health (disclaimer, they receive 75% of their funding from private chemical/pharmaceutical companies, although since DDT replacements are more patented and higher cost, you'd think that'd prejudice them the other way):
"Despite the cost in human lives, many groups stubbornly defend the ban. While the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and UNICEF have recommended continued DDT use, influential organizations such as the Norwegian Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Swedish Aid Agency, and USAID -- the sorts of groups from whom some poor nations such as Belize, Mozambique, and Madagascar receive the majority of their public health money -- continue to insist that DDT be left out of malaria-control efforts.
Countries have found themselves faced with malaria upsurges due to pressure from such international aid organizations to avoid DDT use, according to a report in the March 11, 2000 British Medical Journal. The use of DDT in Mozambique, noted the Journal, "was stopped several decades ago, because 80% of the country's health budget came from donor funds, and donors refused to allow the use of DDT."
The WHO estimates that malathion, the cheapest alternative to DDT, costs more than twice as much as DDT and must be sprayed twice as often, while another mosquito-fighting chemical, deltamethrin, is over three times as expensive, and the highly effective propoxur costs twenty-three times as much. For countries with minimal public health budgets, dependent on foreign aid, such substitutes are impractical. More importantly, there is no compelling public health reason to substitute these chemicals for DDT, which as stated is harmless to humans."
Anyway, Wikipedia has a relatively balanced article that covers both sides of the issue.
My conclusion is that DDT was banned in many areas in the early 70's at the behest of environmentalists relying on flawed science. A large number of people who would currently be alive are dead due to bans in various countries that still suffered malaria. Using DDT for regular agriculture instead of just anti-malarial spraying is probably a bad idea due to the possibility of mosquitos developing resistance.
The deaths are real, but probably exaggerated. Likely only hundreds of thousands per year have died uneccesarily since the bans started, not millions. The millions figure is an extrapolation that uses primarily most of the people who die from Malaria each year. Some contries who've substituted more expensive and/or less effective anti-malarial programs for widespread anti-malarial uses of DDT may not have as good of results as those who still use DDT widely have had, so it's better to be conservative on the numbers.
Finally, that hotbed of right-wing extremists, the British Medical journal states that "The Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty aims to completely phase out global use of dicophane (DDT), while many donor agencies will not fund any malaria control programmes that use this insecticide. But dicophane is effective, with a remarkable safety record when used in small quantities for indoor spraying in endemic regions. Malaria cases soared in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa after it stopped using dicophane in 1996. Its reintroduction together with artemisinin based combination therapy for treating malaria brought the disease back under control. Dicophane, a "dirty word" in the malaria world, must surely be reintroduced into the conversation on rolling back malaria."
So it's fine and good to say "oops, the environmentalists screwed up and should stop pressuring people not to save li
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Historical Background of the _harms_ [junkscience.com]
I provide quotes from peer-reviewed scientific studies in reputable journals and you provided a link to a discredited, right-wing advocacy site that has no scientific peer review.
Influential organizations such as the Norwegian Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Swedish Aid Agency, and USAID -- the sorts of groups from whom some poor nations such as Belize, Mozambique, and Madagascar receive the majority of their public health money -- continue to insist that DDT be left out of malaria-control efforts.
That's simply untrue. USAID has recently funded DDT spraying in developing countries. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances DDT spraying in Somalia and Uganda. In many cases where aid organizations won't fund DDT spraying, it's because the mosquitos have become resistant to DDT.
The WHO estimates that malathion, the cheapest alternative to DDT, costs more than twice as much as DDT and must be sprayed twice as often
Yet malathion is what the WHO sent to Sri Lanka after the tsumani because the mosquitos in Sri Lanka were now DDT-resistant. It doesn't matter how cheap DDT is if it doesn't work.
My conclusion is that DDT was banned in many areas in the early 70's at the behest of environmentalists relying on flawed science. A large number of people who would currently be alive are dead due to bans in various countries that still suffered malaria. Using DDT for regular agriculture instead of just anti-malarial spraying is probably a bad idea due to the possibility of mosquitos developing resistance.
The EPA ban on DDT was for agricultural spraying. The EPA did not ban its use for disease control and, in fact, specifically exempted such use from the ban.
Some contries who've substituted more expensive and/or less effective anti-malarial programs for widespread anti-malarial uses of DDT may not have as good of results as those who still use DDT widely have had, so it's better to be conservative on the numbers.
Most modern insecticides are much more effective than DDT. Again, mosquitos have developed a resistance to DDT in most of the world. In the U.S. DDT spraying had been on a decline from 1959 until its ban in 1972. The decline was because insects had evolved a resistance to DDT. Industries would not go to a more expensive insecticide unless it was cost-effective.
Finally, that hotbed of right-wing extremists, the British Medical journal states that "The Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty aims to completely phase out global use of dicophane (DDT), while many donor agencies will not fund any malaria control programmes that use this insecticide.
The DDT provisions of POP include the goal of ultimate elimination, limiting use to disease vector (i.e. malaria) control in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. The treaty calls for research, development and implementation of safe, effective and affordable alternatives to DDT. It does not, in any way, ban the use of DDT for malaria control.
So it's fine and good to say "oops, the environmentalists screwed up and should stop pressuring people not to save lives with DDT", but what about all the people who are now dead because of the false claims that have been made about DDT in the past?
The ban on DDT was for agricultural use -- because it was (and is) felt to be dangerous to humans and animals when it is ingested in the amounts that would be present in foodstuffs sprayed with it. It has continued to be used throughout the world for malaria control, though in declining amounts due to mosquito resistance to DDT.
Is there any real debate left over whether most of the claims made in the late 60's/early 70's about DDT were simply untrue?
No, most of the claims have not proven to be untrue. In fact, many have been borne out in long-term studies. DDT's stability, its persistence (as