Slashdot Mirror
Russia To Save Its ISS Modules
jamax writes "According to the BBC, 'Russia is making plans to detach and fly away its parts of the International Space Station when the time comes to de-orbit the rest of the outpost. ... To facilitate the plan, RKK Energia, the country's main ISS contractor, has already started developing a special node module for the Russian segment, which will double as the cornerstone of the future station. ... Unlike many Nasa and European space officials, Russian engineers are confident that even after two decades in orbit, their modules would be in good enough shape to form the basis of a new space station. "We flew on Mir for 15 years and accumulated colossal experience in extending the service life (of such a vehicle)," said a senior Russian official at RKK Energia...' Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever — old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
Construction of the International Space Station began in 1998. The soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Thus, ISS Modules did not exist in Soviet Russia and did not "save you".
Instead of just plunging them in the ocean, wouldn't it be much cooler to put them in an orbit halfway between the Earth and the moon, as a sort of testament for future generations?
It could be something like the pyramids or the the Eiffel tower or the Chinese wall.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Mars rovers? Voyager? NASA seems to be doing okay with that.
.sig withheld by request
In college, I wrote a web browser. It was fully functional and supported everything that IE supported at that time. My professor was amazed. Not only because I was able to implement such a complicated thing in VB, but also in that I was able to do it over the weekend.
I got an A, but I never told anyone the secret. Now, years after I graduated, I can divulge my methods. Or, should I say *heh heh heh* Microsoft's methods. I simply reused Microsoft's IE COM component and wrapped it in a slick VB shell. Code reuse, not only at the code level, but at the binary level!
So in the real world, it also makes sense to reuse technology and existing parts rather than rebuild them from scratch. Especially so for space-based things that require huge investment per kilogram just to get them up there. And by reusing older parts, we can standardize on the interfaces and create Lego-like systems that can easily work together instead of needing custom parts every time.
The only thing I really worry about is all that Russian fungus.
http://www.space.com/news/spacestation/space_fungus_000727.html
Of course my Checkoff is from another reality and the engineers who are spokesperons for the New Russia is from another reality...
I so miss things which are made to last. Perhaps this is not a product of rocket science, but the chair I'm sitting on right now is a pre-WW2 german-made one. A regular chair, not one of Aeron types or whatever. Why? Because no desk chair I ever bought lasted more than a year; the one I inherited from my grandparents which they in turn inherited from their ancestors is still working fine.
I fully agree with the article poster's sentiment for old German products. Bring such chairs to the orbit and the ISS will be able to continue forever.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
When they announced that this will be the last service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, I was wondering why a large optical lens that was already in orbit had no value. Perhaps we should sell it to Russia for scrap.
More likely than not, America is going to allow Bigelow to attach a few units on there and they will ultimately replace the cans. They will be cheap and 100% appreciated by the occupants since they are MUCH BIGGER and QUIETER. In fact, if Obama and Bolden (our very likely next NASA head) were smart, they would continue COTS-D AND buy a Sundancer to attach to the ISS. Since NASA will not likely want to trust the Sundancer, it can be used for storage and the door kept closed in normal use. It will cost us 200M (assuming a falcon 9 launcher), which is chump change. By getting Bigelow started, it will lead to cheap new space stations for NASA, private space station, and perhaps military (important in light of China's new announcement of their multiple military). Finally, the Sundancer and the metal noodes can be replaced by BA-330's increasing the size of the ISS appreciably.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When the ISS is decommissioned, I doubt it'll be for technical reasons. It's obviously not a consumer product and NASA and their contractors have shown they can build stuff that lasts (like the Mars Rovers, Voyager, the Space Shuttle or any of the hundreds of satellites). At some point the ISS will simply stop being useful. Some say that day had come the day it was launched, but I'm sure there's a little bit of science and a lot of engineering research and PR that the ISS has and still is useful for.
Fleur de Sel
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
No, but the space industry is one of the few where things are built to last. Portable consumer electronics are among the worst for quality except for a few notable examples like the iPod Mini and the Nokia 6310(i). Soldered-in lithium batteries, surface-mount MLC flash memory and electrolytic capacitors don't last all that long. Satellites are over-engineered, if anything goes wrong with them you can't put it in a cardboard box with styrofoam and send it back to the manufacturer.
The quality of cars hasn't actually gone down - when The Wall was knocked down lots of old Soviet cars like the 2-stroke Trabant were abandoned for second-hand German cars. Of course manufacturers are filling up modern cars with cheap consumer electronics and cheap Chinese DC motors to move every little thing because apparently buyers are too lazy to use their hands for anything. So while all the in-car entertainment and motorised windows,cup holders, sun roofs and central locks might break the car itself (engine & chassis) will probably be in a better state after 20 years than a '70s car would have been after 20 years since engine technology has improved and the underside of the car is better protected from rust.
In the summary they mention Germany equipment that lasts forever. In the shed of my parent's house there is an electric switch made by Siemens, from before WW2 - and it works perfectly to this day! Sure, it's a simple device, but it had to survive countless switchings, and in a rather polluted environment (industrial zone nearby, with oil refinery, iron foundry etc.). The switch is still impeccable both electrically as well as mechanically.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What's so difficult to understand about the fact that new products don't last as much as they used to? Back in the days the production and design processes were not as advanced as today, so a lot of margin of error was needed to produce equipment that worked the way it needed.
Today, there are a lot of different price categories for a lot of goods. So to give the people what they really want (cheap stuff), the components that are used in today's products are mostly the cheap ones that are produced without big margins of error for reliability purposes. This obviously means that they won't last forever, but boy are they cheap! Why should someone buy a very expensive TV that's garanteed to work for 50 years when in 15 years time there would be new models with a lot of new functionality anyway?
Sometimes I don't understand why some people are saying that that old equipment was so much better because it lasted forever, but I think the explanation to that is so simple.
Dependency hell? =>
Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems
As the owner of a rare, older Audi, I find this concept hilarious. A number of components last just about the warranty period- a number of solenoid valves, for example. Numerous hoses break (turbocharged engine- the hoses split and leak.) The radiator end-caps (and thus all the fittings) were of a plastic that broke after a couple of years. Alternators last a few years tops because of their location and cooling design (they are fed air straight through the bumper, so lots of water and crap.) BMW and Mercedes largely had the same issues as they were all being fed the same shit by Bosch and others. Don't be fooled: automotive companies contract out or shop off the shelf at major supplies like Bosch. The climate control and seat controls in my car are straight out of the AC/Delco parts bin, amusingly enough...despite it being an Audi.
Manual transmissions and differentials? Absolutely. The engine block/valvetrain/internals/exhaust, you got it. The (hot-dipped-galvanized) body? Yes. Most of the interior electrics? Yup. All relatively bulletproof and will last longer than you want to keep the car.
Ask B5 A4/S4 owners about their driver information display or ABS modules. Or front suspension links on the original A4...
Please help metamoderate.
instead of burning them up/dumping them, why doesnt Russia also make use of the other components for its own project??
if US is willing to dump them then its junk for the US and Russia could use them i guess.
It is called survivorship bias. Almost all of the things produced in the past have long since broken down. We only see what stood the test of time and therefore tend to assume that things were built to last back in the day.
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires?
Well, no. As another poster has already pointed out, NASA's still got some stuff that's working well-past design goals. I'm sure that 'western' bits of the ISS could be have their working lives extended in the same way, if the political will was there.
Russia has excellent engineers that often found ingenious solutions in the 'make do and mend' Soviet era. Nothing's changed in the Putin-directed puff, propaganda and hubris era. The execution of the ideas often compromised by poor materials and processes - so not always up to Western standards of robustness and reliability.
If you don't agree, just compare an old Volga to an old Mercedes-Benz...
I am an on and off motorcycle rider. One day at the shop, I saw an OLD BMW motorcycle that looked well, vintage. It had no shine, it was matte, it looked like it had been riding forever. An old man tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that my inspection needed to be renewed, so I took care of that.
Later I saw the same bike at the motorcycle gear/coffee shop thats a bit out of town. I had stopped for a coffee before my ride for the day and I heard a couple of older men talking....
"You need a new transmission"
"I do not. That transmission is fine, why would I want a new one that might not be good. This one has 650,000 miles on it. Every 200,000 there is a bearing that dissintigrates and I have to replace. That is a good transmission."
650,000 miles on one bike and still riding. Not THAT is a quality vehicle. I mean, I am sure he must take care of it, but damn.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Old stuff seems to last forever because the old stuff we have left is the stuff that survived. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's plenty of old junk-- but that went out with the trash years ago. Every era manufactures a bunch of unreliable crap, too.
To make matters worse: through sheer chance, some unreliable junk survives for a century now and then, too. While this stuff is all at the statistically unlikely end of the bell curve, and 99.9% of its cohorts have vanished, what remains by dumb luck reinforces the idea that "stuff was made better in the old days."
In Soviet Russia, things outlast you!
Many Russian/Soviet era military radios were tube type with regenerative receivers. They were supposedly designed so they would continue to work after an EMP. The reality was that they didn't have access to transistor patents, and tube factories provided jobs. The radios worked very well until the tubes went bad. As long as you looked at tubes as a disposable item, like a battery, you could say that they were made much better than the US equivalent. However, in reality, the silicon based radios were far superior in both function and reliability, and EMP hardened systems were developed, nullifying the tube's main advantage. My dad, a radio collector, has a Zenith Royal 500-D that has never had anything done other than replace batteries that still works as it did in 1955. There are almost no tube radios of that era that have maintained the stability of even those early transistor sets.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
A4 is introduced in 1995, that's not "old". Old is like my Volvo 245 1977 (Swedish not German...) which still runs great.
Audi is Bavarian, not German (and imo, Bavaria isn't even Europe :))
The last time they had a MIR toilet seat land in the middle of Seattle (then tried to blame the targeting mistake on "gremlins," no less). They just don't want another fiasco like that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires?
I can't argue with him to a point. Back in the day things were built to last well beyond the warranty. I like his attitude.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
They tend to design things to outlast the competition.
Look at the Kalashnikov: crude, but timeless. Our tax dollars have bought hundreds of thousands of AK-knockoffs in the last few years alone, for our puppets... I mean allies.
the problem is lazy consumers confusing something that is maintenance free for a period and then completely fails, with something that is designed to last indefinitely with maintenance. in cars there used to be lots of seals and gaskets that needed to be changed regularly, however the higher quality steel generally meant the car could last forever. asian companies pushed close tolerance and cheap aluminum, eliminating many seals and gaskets. my dumbass generation gets 200,000 miles out of one of these things while barely remembering to change the oil and considers that to be "reliability". around that 200k marker; however, the motor completely fails and the chassis falls apart from rust. meanwhile, my grandfathers generation still changes their gaskets and seals; their cars last forever and appreciate in value. this should certainly not be confused with survivor bias... this is a shift in engineering for an educated user vs. an uneducated one.
This reminds me of the VW Beetle owned by the great Bob Pease (still going strong by the way) who used to replace the engine on his Beetle "every 150000 miles whether or not it needed it." - though being driven in California at moderate speeds by a careful driver had a lot to do with that.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That is not a simple fact, but a grandiose fact claim on your part.
Some products may have been more durable in the past, some not so much. You would have to look at a case by case analysis, do some testing, empirical work to figure out what is true.
Metal and steel rusts and bends. Lots of mechanical and moving parts can cause all sorts of problems, line shafts wear out, cloth cables, springs, reed relais, etc.
Wooden joints that where glued or screwed together tend to get loose, etc.
No material is perfect. And cost saving can leed to simplicity, which can benefit durability greatly.
I believe that especially eletronics and computing is getting much better. Complicated VHS tape drives broke down all of the time. Reel to Reel tape drives had lots of problems. Optical is better and solid state even moreso.
It's possible to design much electronics to last a long time. I'd say that 95% of the reliability comes from not using wet electrolytic capacitors, which dry out with heat x time. The reliable test equipment I have from the 60s and 70s uses solid tantalum caps with a very long service life. And my mil-supplied, 50's built, tubes only, up to 500V variable voltage bench supplies use oil/paper caps and work perfectly after 50 years.
You might have minimized mistakes and/or costs, but you've certainly maximized your balls with that move. If someone did that at my university and the professor noticed it, they would've been kicked out immediately and gotten a permanent mark of plagiarism or deception on their transcript. In fact, even if the prof missed it originally and the university somehow found out afterwards, even years afterwards, they could revoke your degree for such ballsy academic dishonesty.
Kudos to you. For your gigantic cojones.
Even though your testicular mass is something to marvel at, it was still a stupid and unethical thing to do. I'm not sure you should be so proud of it, openly or secretly.
BMW and Mercedes largely had the same issues as they were all being fed the same shit by Bosch and others.
As the owner of a 1982 MBZ 300SD, I break wind in your general direction. I do have a problem with my EGR, but since it's a diesel it's only a stink problem. I need to fix it, though. 350,000+ miles, wewp.
Regrettably, the W126 body is [often] considered to be the last great Mercedes. But it does point to the end of an era.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unfortunately, much of NASA is focused on building things, not doing things. Look at the argument over the repair capabilities that made the Hubble a success : Nasa is letting go of those capabilities. The new Manned Space Flight System - Orion - will not have the capability to repair future Hubbles. In my opinion Hubble is the biggest success NASA has had since Apollo, and as before we are going to let the capability die.
The builder types of would respond "its cheaper to build new ones," except, of course, we more or less won't. The current paradigm means that we will launch a telescope, have it fail, and then wait 20-30 years until another of the same type can be orbited. And, there seems to be no real effort expended on new types of propulsion and certainly no effort on new types of manned propulsion.
The Russians, meanwhile, view everything they have ever launched as an asset. You bet that they are going to use their ISS modules as long as they can, and maybe just a little more.
"There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever..."
I understand the principle you are referring to, but I'm not really sure if it's a case of people remembering, or even imagining things more fondly than they really were. And I mean that literally; I'm not sure.
My grandfather, who passed away 16 years ago, left behind in his garage a lawnmower with a Briggs & Stratton engine. He originally purchased this lawnmower sometime in the late 50's. That lawnmower is *still* in my mother's garage, and still fully operational, some 50 years later. The only maintenance required is a bit of gasoline and a new spark plug every 10 years or so.
*50* years and still running strong
Fast forward to a car I owned in college. It was a 1985 Volkswagen Golf. The car was 5 years old when I got it; my mother owned it before me. It had about 60,000 miles on it when I got it, but it already had a cracked head (faulty radiator), CV joints were replaced 3 times (it was an engineering defect - anyone who owned a Golf or Jetta from about that time can attest to this), faulty fuel injector (it would stick at WOT sometimes when you floored it), headliner collapsed, sunroof broke twice (couldn't open it), and several other minor problems, and this was BEFORE I got it. I owned it for under two years and by then it was such a heap of garbage we decided to simply trade it in on something new, as it was too expensive to keep repairing. Mt grandfather bought me a 1992 Nissan pick-up, the no-frills base model, and it was mechanically the best vehicle I've owned to date, and I'm currently on my 8th automobile. I put over 200,000 (really rough) miles on it, and the only thing that ever failed was a bearing in the transmission, which was most likely my fault for driving it like a dragster. Was only $600 to repair, including parts and labor. Everything else worked great.
Going back in time again, I also have some of my grandfather's toys. They are stored away, and never touched, but the craftsmanship was so delicate, they never would have made it this long if continually played with. Even simple mechanisms like the Jack-in-the-Box readily break.
So taking into consideration the materials used in the past (heavy duty plastic, metal, solid wood) versus those in use today (thin plastic, cheap alloys, synthetic/pressed wood), as well as the business ethics of planned obsolescence (i.e. build something that breaks right after warranty) I would say that overall, if all manufactured products were compared to their equivalent from many decades past, it does seem that a higher percentage of products are now built more cheaply than they once were.
However, considering engineering advances, I'd put my Nissan up against any 1950's Ford or Chevy for reliability. And as has been mentioned by other posters, it's often what you pay and who you buy from. If you buy cheap, you shouldn't expect longevity. Of course there are exceptions to that, as well. My Nissan pick-up in 1992 was $9,000 out the door. The next most reliable car I've owned is my Viper, but it cost 10x as much as my old Nissan.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
It's a feature of inflation.
Deleted
"Russian components...American components...ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!" -Lev Andropov, from Armageddon
[End Of Line]
Why not spend some of that brain power and money building something to go AROUND the current station.
Then take the old station apart INSIDE the new one, and melt down / decompose the old materials to be re-used as new ones?
I remember someone on UniverseToday suggested against my idea because it wasn't feasible to put a "recycling plant" inside a space shuttle.
It will have to happen at some point, why the HELL not now in the middle of a depression?
Why waste so many years of effort, then just throw it into the atmosphere?
This is exactly what is wrong with all these space agencies just now, filled by wasteful idiots.
Spray on some new paint and they still look new, 40 years later. In fact, it's so durable that disposal is a problem.
They're still used to tour Berlin btw. You can go on a "Trabi Safari".
Deleted
As our 25 year old stoves and 15 year old water heaters are breaking, we find that most stoves and hot water heaters break in under a decade and under six years respectively.
As you can imagine, it's irritating because it is so obvious.
It is a real hassle to have to replace these things more often.
I think they may be cheaper adjusted for inflation- but sometimes a single piece comes up a lot as the source of failure so you have to think that upgrading that one piece from plastic to steel would prevent a lot of failures and raise the cost very mildly.
As you look at hot water heaters- many fail in the first year - and then the companies screw people who bought warranties over for several weeks before replacing them.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is how we fix problem in the Russian space station!
[hits panel with tool]
350000 miles? Why she'll be broke in soon!
Absolutely, the W124, W126 and W201 were the last really great Mercedes'. Easy to work on, reliable engines, cheap spare parts and built before the really complicated automotive computers were introduced.
My parents have had two W201's (1985 2.0 NA diesel and 1988 2.5 turbodiesel) and both were utter tanks and a pleasure to drive. After that they got a 1996 C250 diesel and it was a real heap, despite lower miles. Everything that could go wrong on that car did. In the end, the automatic transmission gave up the ghost and they decided to cut their losses and get a Citroën instead!
The 1985 W201 is still running fine with more than 1 million kms on it. The place they sold it uses it as a courtesy car.
Eat the rich.
Longevity is not a word I would attach to Russian made products.
You need to recalibrate your understanding of the word "old".
The point is, the need for desks will always be there. He has a desk that was built stout enough so it can last through generations of humans using it. One good desk can be built instead of ten chintzy ones that fall apart after a few years, like those pressed sawdust hunks of crap they push at the office supply stores now. In that sense, it is probably a pretty efficient use of the materials and multiple humans will get the benefit from it. And being steel, even when it is finally so worn out that it isn't worth fixing, the steel itself is easily recyclable, whereas pressboard is just landfill mulch.
And as for not needing to support weight, I know I can't be the only one here who has climbed on a desk to change the lightbulb overhead or to run cables through drop ceilings. Try doing that with your pressboard and little peg lock together marvel.
My personal desk I am sitting at right now is a very adeqaute and simple cobjob made from an old birch plywood and fir edging (strong) platform single bed I built years ago and now just laid across two of those similar type antique made from heavy steel filing cabinets. Yep, used it to paint the ceiling, climbed right up on the sucker, didn't need to move it, just throw a dropcloth over it. Probably could stick 1,000 lbs on the thing if I really wanted to. Would I replace it with an officemax special? Not only no but hell no!
Really, there's something to be said for building things to last in the first place, this use stuff for a short time and then throw it away is highly energy intensive and wasteful. Build/buy strong, then recycle or repurpose like I did with the bed, that's the way to save time, energy and cash.
It's of course a myth that products today are specifically engineered to fail right after the warranty expires. In this particular case, the more likely explanation is that the Russians simply accept a larger risk-factor than the other partners. Due to the politics involved, organizations like NASA and ESA are simply not allowed to fail, and so they will rather scuttle a module than squeeze the longest life possible out of it.
That, and the fact that NASA and ESA simply don't have the funds available to continue operating the ISS after 2015 or so.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
Seriously everything made for consumers is made for a quick and dirty buck and made to be EOL at some 3 year point.
I see the litter pile up every time I open my eyes and look around...
Nobody seems to figure that is the problem with our environment, with our system of capitalism. We just waste everything for a quick profit. This will be the downfall of our so-called civilization.
Nobody talks about this in the proper context because you are all afraid of losing your profits.
When I say nobody, I mean people like you, not people like me - as I am nobody too.
Its OK, just smoke a cigarette for 5 minutes and forget about this.....
Dj fuQ [url="http://djfuq.org"]djfuq urges you to listen to the beats[/url] [url="http://djfuq.org"]http://djfuq.org[
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
What a load of malarkey. Things last just fine these days. There are any number of reasons that you could have the impression that that's not the case.
1) We just have so much *more* of it that there are more things to break.
2) Systems are more complex, and a little thing breaking tends to take out the whole system. I.e. piece of ice on the booster tank, taking out the whole shuttle.
3) Older things that are still around are a self-fulfilling prophesy. They seem to be better built because we have no idea how many of them were produced in the first place. Ask yourself this, though. How many old toasters are still out there? Surely if they were universally built, no one would ever buy a new one. Likewise for so many tools and kitchen appliances.
My personal history with cars since the mid-90's: none of them breaking, ever. My friends rarely have problems. I worked in an auto shop, and most of our repairs were either routine maintenance or "luxury stuff", such as power windows or cruise control. Very, very rarely the car itself. Now, my parents cars had breakdown after breakdown when I was a kid. They wound up junking them because, clearly, these 1970s cars didn't last. And don't get me started on my dad's E-type. What parts of it aren't rusted through and through are simply broken and irreplaceable.
I think the makers of these kinds of comments are confusing maintenance with quality. The simple fact was that things were expensive enough that it was worth repairing them. When something breaks these days, it's usually just a bad cap, transistor, or something simple like that. Very easy to fix and repair, but no one has the schematics and things move so quickly these days you'd have to be a highly-paid professional. Which no one is willing to pay for.
Except for one thing: airplanes. Airplanes built in the 1910s are still flying today. They're maintenance nightmares, but compared to the new purchase price they're worth it so people do it.
So today's TV isn't worse. It's just that we're too cheap to repair it when a $0.02 component breaks.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Ppl are wanting good wood, but the rainforest holds INEXPENSIVE wood, some good, and some bad. But at this time, that is mostly China that is doing that. In 2000, America was starting to switch to our PRIVATE forests which are loaded with lots of good hardwood. Obviously, these will go for a top price. Sadly, neo-cons opened up many of our forests to clear cutting to allow companies to grab other hardwoods much cheaper. What is needed is for us to stop that slowly and for the west to quit buying any furniture made from none-farmed rainforest woods. In this economy, I give that little chance of occuring. BUT once the economy returns, the west CAN and SHOULD take actions on that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ditto. Years ago an automobile was all but dead once (if) it reached 100,000 miles. Today's versions regularly hit 100,000, 150,000, or even 200,000 and keep on rolling.
People don't give the darn things enough credit. You design a device that will run for a decade or more with minimal maintenance and that will start up after a week of sub-zero winter nights in Wisconsin or after spending days on end broiling in the Phoenix heat.
Consumer electronics are on a much faster track, but even there they DO more. Try rendering some HD video on a Pentium... if you can get fit it onto the hard drive. Hell, the average FILE on my iPod is larger than my first hard drive.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You might want to cut him some slack. 15 years is a long time for a modern German car, most are rotting away in scrap yards by that point. Even American cars manufactured in Mexico seem to last longer than Audis and VWs nowadays.
No, it's just the last country willing to have it's astronauts die in rickety death traps held together by duct tape if it can save money in the process.
I fully agree with the article poster's sentiment for old German products.
There are still some things made properly (i.e. without the designed-in short lifetime), but their number is declining, alas. Cheap shit forces good shit out of the mass market, and into expensive niches. This trend has been very clear for at least 15 years (I speak as a PhD engineer with 30 years experience).
The design objective nowadays is not really 2 days past warranty, but one day. Unfortunately, some fool puts an extra day into leap years, which necessitates one or more additional days of overengineered lifetime, as warranties are calendar-based.
An upcoming insidious trend is to make the warranty for complex items conditional on regular service, which can only be purchased from the manufacturer, due to "trade secrets" or protected "intellectual property".
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
BMW is not a fair example. They always build long lasting machines. I would bet you anything a BMW made in Germany yesterday will run for 650k miles (with maintenance of course).
Same as it has ever been. You get (and got) what you paid for.
A lovely fiction book to read which talks about the condition of working class tradesmen in England in the early 20th century is "The ragged trousered philanthropists" by Robert Tressell. The novel is about one man's attempt to survive the situations many people found themselves in, and on the way you get great descriptions of what life was like for working class folk. Cheap furniture which fell apart for sure, and the book describes how the supervisor for the workers in the book encourages them to do jobs on the cheap when they are decorating a new house because the rich owners won't notice till a few years later that a bodge job has been done, and this will make a little more profit for the owners of the painting and decorating companies.
Always has been good and rubbish furniture and construction, and there's always been people on the make squeezing a bit of profit by doing things cheaply.
Code reuse, not only at the code level, but at the binary level!
Yeah... that's not reuse, that's plagiarism.
*thumbs down*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zvezda_(ISS)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Don't get me started on my '99 Passat Wagon... It had a great little fault where occasionally it wouldn't start. No cranking. No nothing. Turns out that there was an intermittent short in a wire.
Oh, man... Were the guys at the local VW proud of themselves that -- after 500 bucks of labor -- they managed to figure out how to read a fucking wiring diagram and ran a new wire...
Oh, and my ABS module is shot, too...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Why would we ever de-orbit the ISS ? Why not either boost it to a Lagrange point? Alternatively give it an Ion engine and use a long term Hohmann transfer to Mars orbit, then use it as a handy orbital waypost when we first get there ? We could even use it to transfer supplies for initial use when we first send people to explore Mars. NASA just successfully repaired the Hubble. Many objects in space far exceed the short term media objectives and limited marketing imaginations that caused them to be launched in the first place... Turns out rocket scientists really are smarter than the political idiots they are obliged to work for. I can't guess how useful the ISS may eventually be if preserved in space, but I am sure that a debris field of carbonized lumps at the bottom of the Pacific represents an inexcusable waste of resources.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
By contrast, my cousin in Italy bought a new Turbodiesel VW Golf when he started working in the early 1980's. He drove it all around Europe, kept it for for about 15 years and the only thing he had to replace was the radiator and battery. It was well-known that the VW Golfs built in the USA were of much lower reliability than the German-built ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_W124
Many of them (Diesel versions) are still being used today (2009) as Taxis. 500k-1m miles isn't something exceptional.
At 130k mine is one of the youngest, and I fear with my low usage it'll last longer than oil supply. But as it runs fine on veggie-oil...
The important thing to remember here is that until the pieces of the ISS end up in an innocuous state (eg, in the Pacific Ocean), NASA is responsible for whatever happens to the ISS and the things it runs into, whether it be now or a thousand years from now. Breaking up the ISS introduces a number of risks. Things can break generating debris, or they can become uncontrolled possibly landing on a populated area some years from the point of loss of control.
In addition the US has to be able to handoff responsibility for what happens to the Russian pieces. It's possible, but I'm not sure what laws would need to be passed and treaties made to absolve the US of responsibility for what a loose Russian module does in the future.
My guess is that liability issues will prevent Russia from implementing this plan.
Until various parties get their acts together, why not hook up the tether that was made for Mir, and probably still sitting in the same warehouse? It's a basically a propellantless booster, just needs electricity, which ISS overall, and the russian segment in particular, has lots of if there are few to no humans on board. The only thing bad about it is the power consumption and the habit of straightening out the orbital inclination over a (admittedly very long) period of time.
At least it cuts the costs of waiting to figure out what to do and getting new hardware up there, because progress cargo ship flights just to deliver reboost fuel isn't cheap. A tether is the simplest and probably safest solution in the interim if people can't commit to anything.
Hopefully, this time around they've freed themselves of the space gunk/funk that was stinking up Mir.