Slashdot Mirror
NASA Plans Lunar Mobile Phone Network
If NASA and the British National Space Centre succeed in their 'MoonLite mission' you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone." They plan on building a satellite system/phone network that would provide full four-bar signal coverage for colonists living in the base NASA wants to build at the south pole of the moon after 2020.
$20+ a meg and $5 a text and $100 for 60 min of talk time
I think you'd just have to take more time and be more thoughtful about cutting someone off, getting exciting and interjecting a comment randomly, etc... all the stuff people normally do in conversations. Hey, if I were a colonist I'd take a 1+ second voice delay over only being able to use email to communicate with friends/family back on Earth.
The problem isn't NCLB, its with the Teacher's Unions and Federal Involvement in Education.
The fact is, no matter what we (as people) do, there are going to be problems with whatever. I know some people cannot accept "problems". The fact is, Problems exist, because we don't live in a perfect world. Trying to create a Problem Free Society is HUGELY expensive and impossible to boot. There will always be "problems" and pouring money into "solutions" will NEVER fix them all.
There will always be people who fail the system, or the system fails some of the people. NCLB is flawed because it creates an impossible standard of perfection, where none can exist. Even the title betrays the goal. "No child left behind" is a great goal, but impossible to accomplish, which is why it is doomed to failure.
I'd much rather give people OPPORTUNITY to succeed, and the opportunity to fail. Because sometimes failure is the greatest teacher of all, and leads to success.
"I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb." Thomas A Edison (not withstanding the debate over TAE and invention of light bulbs)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I sincerely hope that the "mobile phone network" concept is the result of bad journalism rather than bad thinking. There are historical reasons for the development of telcom concepts in their current form; but the idea of transplanting them to an area not bound by legacy infrastructure is just pathetic. Are we still going to be separating "voice" and "data" in space? Will "SMS" still be a special kind of data thousands of times more expensive than the normal stuff? What times qualify as "nights and weekends" on Mercury?(I'm guessing that free nights and weekends will not be offered on the dark side of the moon) So much of our existing mobile phone infrastructure is just a mass of stupid legacy crap, good-for-business-bad-for-everybody pricing structures, and arbitrary limitations. Worse, much of it is hacked on top of a much more sensible wireless packet switched infrastructure.
Wireless data links are good, obviously, particularly in places that have no wires. The incarnation we are stuck with on earth, though, is nothing short of pathetic. Surely we can do better than that in a place without legacy issues?
Project Constellation overall is a great idea, but building a moonbase is probably a bad idea.
He also argues that a Moon base is a poor use of resources, since "science can be done for far less money by robotic missions--which also don't put human lives at risk."[5] The Los Angeles Times seconded that in an editorial, saying "Manned moon flight may appeal to baby boomers, but it makes little scientific sense for most space missions these days. Robots can now perform, or be developed to perform, most of the tasks people would do at a moon station." [6]
Columnist Gregg Easterbrook has criticized the plans as a poor use of resources. He writes that
Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant. [7]
According to Easterbrook, the billions of dollars that a lunar colony might cost should instead be devoted to exploring the solar system with space probes; space observatories; and protecting the Earth from Near-Earth asteroids.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_(NASA)
I don't mean to troll, I really don't, but this just seems to be an incredibly stupid waste of resources.
I don't see it working that well due to the lag, and the costs are incredible.
Are we really trying to put bandwidth (that is what is essentially being done) on the Moon?
Isn't the whole reason why we are having problems with bandwidth/transfer caps in the US due to a lack of bandwidth? Maybe we should be investing in our infrastructures at home and solving the problems we have here with our current bandwidth before trying to place some incredibly expensive bandwidth on the moon for possible colonists.
Now I understand this might be done for national pride, just like the space race in the 60's. Are we really going to have that much pride that we were the first to offer cellphone service on the Moon?
Unless/until private groups start getting interested in moon missions, the design will be bleeding edge no matter how long you wait. The difference in waiting five years includes that (a) it will need to be updated to work with any developed advancements in materials science in the interim, and (b) you'll likely have to get a bunch of new people familiarized with the old designs once you pick things back up.
Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing eye-candy.
(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)
An excellent question.
One only has to refer to the impact of the right-wing noise machine to see the answer. After all, it was the conservatives that created this monster, and they control the loudest of the media outlets. If one were to kill off "no child left behind", the right-wing media would jump all over it and label the people behind its killing as being "anti-child", "anti-education", "anti-progress", "anti-jesus", and of course "anti-america" and hence "anti-patriotic".
Hell, just look at what those same media outlets did to Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, or what they've done to Kucinich every time he's tried to run.
So in short, you would never be successfully hailed for saving children (due to the true controls over the US media), though you can certainly try. The neocons have set up almost a perfect storm by establishing this woefully underfunded beast of a bill.
Add to that the spineless fowl in congress that aren't willing to call out Bushco on their offenses, and you see that we're stuck with it for a long time to come.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.