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Space Shuttle To Be Replaced By SpaceX For ISS Resupply
destinyland writes "Next year SpaceX will perform resupply missions for the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle is grounded, as part of a $3.5 billion NASA resupply contract. 'The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set. We're likely to see a similar industry shakeout in the private space vehicle market segment in the coming decades.'"
LMFAO!!!
I love how journalists rewrite history. So now the personal computer industry was founded upon stealing DOS from Microsoft and building PCs from 8080 chips?
Wow. Just wow.
Let's hope their wrong. Doesn't anybody remember how crappy the first PC clones were? And compatibility, compaq gear didn't work with tandy, whcich didn't work with... etc. etc.Not what you'd want to experience when you're trying to dock to a space station made by another manufacturer.
Yes it was JUST like the early computer days.
SpaceX bought a shuttle, worked on it in their parents garage, brought it to Berkley and got friends to help out.
I suggest an equally stupid title:
The fledgling Independant Space Industry is just like the Alaska Gold Rush; Folks are excited about getting up their and getting rich!
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
...Blackwater's security contracts in the Middle East.
I think Blackwater's rise to prevalence (or infamy) might be a little more analogous to this situation than DOS and the Intel 8080 chip set.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
This is a great idea. Since NASA has lost the last 40 years on good scientific research but no exploration
Seriously, what it is with the insane, ingorant NASA hate around here these days. No exploration? What about spirit and opprtunity?
Don't they count?
And when it comes to rocketry, sure, the shuttle is getting a little long in the tooth, but is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Most of the article is about Tesla anyway. Interesting, but I'd prefer to read about SpaceX in a NASA related /. story.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
that doesn't understand computers, and why that revolution doesn't apply to every other technology.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For anyone who would like to read a good article about SpaceX check out that link. And it's not just SpaceX that will be delivering cargo to the station under COTS, there's also Orbital Sciences.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
What, exactly, is it about the space industry today that is supposed to be reminiscent of those false memories of the early days of the personal computer? All the startups reverse engineering Space-Shuttle-compatible launch vehicles in their garages and undercutting the United Space Alliance on price?
Its hard to figure out which is worse, the analogy proposed or the recollection of history that it is in part based on.
There is no money to be made directly from space exploration.
If mars had large wooded forests and a magic crystal that was trivial to turn into some paradigm shift technology, then yeah.
NASA's exploration allows us to better understand the universe, and gives focus to companies to develop RnD to accomplish goals. That RnD and it's results is the market payoff, and why the space program actually more then pays for itself.
Satellite launches? sure, that can go private.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Theres a can-do attitude that NASA lost long ago.
Elon Musk is an amazing dude. At a time where rich people are not popular, here is a reason that people
should become rich , he uses his paypal money to do the stuff he wants to do like electric cars and spaceships
and in doing the stuff that makes him happy benefits us all.
After years of people confusing relatively simple computer concepts with unnecessary and imprecise analogies to "real-world" things, people are now confusing relatively simple space transport concepts with unnecessary and imprecise analogies to computers.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Why is there a need for a SpaceX resupply? Where is the evidence that it will be cheaper per kg of cargo than these existing solutions?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Problem is that all that stuff in space is much harder to get to than Paris, although probably less hostile to foreigners.
I meant no NASA hate--I have followed everything they have done. My hate is for our leaders since JFK who did not have the foresight to move maintenance off to dedicated resources. The rocket scientists at NASA should be spending their time dreaming up cooler stuff. Think of the innovations that came out of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo missions. And in the intervening 40 years we have had no more of that innovation. The shuttle was designed in the 1970s. I think if our rocket scientists were put up to the challenge by giving them nothing else to do but invent new stuff--that innovations would come that would spur new technologies.
Only recently, I've gotten the idea that the space program, somehow, went on out of the public eye. I never used to think that but now I'm thinking the reason the public was not treated to the continuing space program was because they were all already preoccupied with the secret space program. Think about it. We designed the shuttle and all that in the 1970s. And in 40 years nobody has thought up a better way? So, innovation in space just stopped in 1970? I don't think so. I think they just classified it.
I'm happy to read that SpaceX will be taking over resupply. We should encourage private launch companies.
Having NASA handle all launch needs was putting all our eggs in a single basket, and killed any chance for private launch. It's already expensive and hard to develop a new space launch system; to do it when NASA is offering launches at cut-rate prices was impossible. (NASA has always been embarrassed by how expensive the Shuttle actually was, and never charged anywhere near a profitable amount for flying things on the Shuttle.)
Once we have several private companies flying things to orbit, we can expect the cost to orbit to come down drastically. And once you are in orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.
NASA is talking about a return to Mars 30 years from now. That's crazy; once we have cheap launch, we can assemble a Mars mission in pieces, rather than launching the whole mission on one giant rocket (as we did the Apollo missions). If you can cheaply and reliably launch dozens of launch vehicles, each ferrying up a tonne of fuel, you could make a Mars mission with lots of gear, lots of fuel, lots of safety margin.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The best thing NASA has done in the past 40 years is Hubble. That is a real treat for anybody with a pair of eyes and an imagination.
Did you really write that there was no money to be made in space exploration? There are an infinite number of ways to make money there. Sure, it takes huge investments but even as tourism and mining there's a lot out there. Wasn't Lebensraum ("living space") one of the main justifications for World War II? People just want to explore.
Doesn't anybody remember how crappy the first PC clones were?
Doesn't anybody remember how crappy the PC was? Crippled CPU (in too many ways to list), edge-triggered interrupts, no software (one of the most popular upgrades was a chip that let you run CP/M-80 on it), bizarre wasteful memory map, premium price for an entry-level product? Of course the clones were going to suck. Sheesh.
The initial IBM PC used an intel 8088, which was an 8086 with an 8-bit (rather than 16-bit) data bus, and trailed the 8080 by several years. IBM wasn't sure that such a wide bus as the 8086 had would catch on...
Conspiracy theories are fun and all, but I think the more obvious explanation will suffice here-- We simply haven't had motivation to push our space programs as we have in the past. Certainly there have been innovations and rocket scientists dreaming up new and better propulsion systems, but there has been no grand scale programs to put them to the test. With any luck, China and India will be pushing their own space exploration programs to spur on a new space race, but short of that a lot of Americans simply don't care.
+1 Disagree
It was the Intel 8088 chip not the 8080 chip used in the IBM PC and PC Clones.
MS-DOS was not reverse engineered, it was originally IBM PC-DOS and Microsoft released the MS-DOS to work with IBM PC clones that had reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS. MS-DOS used GWBASIC.COM to replace the IBM BASICA.COM that used the IBM PC BIOS and wouldn't work on PC Clones.
Some say MS-DOS and IBM PC-DOS which was based on 86-DOS/Q-DOS was really a reverse engineered DRI CP/M-86 with some commands renamed to be more user friendly and moved into RAM instead of the floppy disk. DRI later on released DR-DOS to compete with MS-DOS. Anyway DRI lost the DOS wars and when they tried to make a competitor to Windows named GEM, they got sued by Apple and had to change the way it looked.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
There is no money to be made directly from space exploration.
Remember the old real estate salesman's pitch?:
Land! It's the ultimate investment. It's not like they'll be making more of it.
There are whole worlds to be had.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Don't forget the #1 rule of manned space flight: *you* don't get to go. And if you're stuck on earth, does it really matter if the pictures you're looking at were taken by man or machine?
No they don't. Most people just want to eat, get laid, and have fun. Very few want anything more then that, and the majority of this minority don't care about exploration but rather serving their own phantoms.
is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
There are plenty of vehicles that can bring themselves down; most of them do, somewhere around South Pacific. If you mean "safely" then the list narrows, but a used satellite, well past its "use by" date, is just not worth of bringing down in one piece. The value is in data bits, not in bits of metal and silicon - and data can be easily sent over the radio.
Hubble is yet another issue. The original cost of Hubble was estimated at $400 million, but it grew out of proportion because of endless delays with launch and because of the defective mirror. It would be probably cheaper and better today to build a copy of Hubble telescope, with all new cameras installed and all the improvements made, instead of replacing failed components one by one in a risky and limited servicing mission. Many components of Hubble telescope are not serviceable anyway. So while STS is a system capable of servicing Hubble, the overall value of such a service is debatable. Of course, if you have STS you use it, but I wouldn't say that without Shuttle the Hubble telescope project can't happen - there would be some other vehicle to launch it on, likely a cheaper one.
640 tonnes of lift capacity ought to be enough for anyone. ;)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
Actually you were checking out Paris on a completely different site, but the same principle applies.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Are you sure about this? Trusting our fate to a rocket we hardly know? The Hill will not approve.
Lebensraum wasn't about exploration... it was about spreading the German people over the Asian continent, and making everybody else slaves or dead.
It's like how easy it is to cull the idiots from a political story by the posts that start off with "I'm a Libertarian..."
With space stories it is equally easy, just look for the posts babbling about Mars...
What do you mean, an african or european man?
As far as I can see the only thing in TFA that wasn't covered months ago in http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/24/0151211 is the entirely useless analogy to the computer industry. I wonder if that section is replaced with say, an equally bogus analogy to automobiles so it can be sent to Car And Driver.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...so I can get up there and have the first Caldari control tower anchored off the Moon. Manufacturing, research, storage. I'll have it all.Now all I need to do is to make sure that the damn Minnies don't start throwing VWs at my station. Who wants to help build cruise missile batteries? Capital construction hangars?
One of the 187.
very timely comment given that it is the 70th anniversary of the start of ETO (european theatre of operations) for WWII (which had many starts depending on where in the world you live)
They explore what's in the TV Guide. (Not me! Stopped watching TV in 8th grade.)
A major impetus (maybe the primary) of the 1950's - 1970's space program was the Soviet Union's space program. We couldn't let them out flank us in space. That isn't true now-a-days.
Please note that the original article headline is a question, not a statement.
SpaceX might get a contract to resupply space station. And they might not.
Yup. There are places on the earth that aren't worth developing. And they have an atmosphere. And they are close to resupply points. And definitely much less expensive than even getting to orbit, much less getting to another planet.
Why would I want to develop Mars? Venus? It would be far more expensive to get there and maintain than you wold ever get out of it.
Sure I am for exploration. But this fantasy that somehow we can make a self-supporting base on Mars or another planet is ridiculous. Fantasy. If we thought about some long-term terraforming project, then maybe some places might be habitable. But with today's technology this is laughable.
Some day we might do it, but not in this century.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Timothy, will you please, for once, actually R T F A before you POST it!
No. NASA spent 50-100x what Spirit and Opportunity cost. Where did the rest of the money go? After the first two were so successful, why didn't they make more of them and explore further? They had the budget.
I can see the moon from my front porch. I can't see Paris. So, which is closer?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Are these unladen men?
Just because there's nothing like it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Here come the parasites.
Could turn into a buy-off of a threat to big aerospace.
If NASA were serious they'd cut out all their launch technology development and just put up a $2000/kg bounty for reaction mass delivered to orbit, by any domestic system, at the desired inclination and altitude, starting immediately. Grab it with a tug later.
You can always use reaction mass.
Let the industrial learning curve do the rest.
Of course, if they did that, launch services would become so affordable, there would be private space stations and they'd lose their mandate for big bucks operational budgets and have to go back to science.
Seastead this.
This is news?
It was announced late last year, and has appeared on /. at least once already.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Great idea! They are putting a lot of faith in an organisation that has exactly one successful orbital launch of a dummy spacecraft to their credit. SpaceX is an admirable organisation, but it is a decade away from being able to launch large payloads. The Falcon 9 has never flown. Given the track record of the Falcon 1 we can expect failures. And when they lose a mission to ISS, what then? Will failure be tolerated?
an ill wind that blows no good
Not really. The really important thing about the Hubble servicing mission - and the various service and resupply missions to the ISS - is learning how to WORK in space. If we're planning on anything long term, we must have the capability to routinely get up out of bed, out the door and fix whatever broke (remember Murphy?).
Obviously, we aren't there yet. It took years of training and planning to fix the Hubble. It took years of training and planning to fix the solar cells on the ISS. We've got to get to the point where we can go 'oops, the widget broke, need to go out and replace it' without spending months choreographing every move. It's routine and boring but it's exactly what we need to do to STAY in space. That's why ISS is important and that's why the Hubble resupply missions were critically important.
Even if you're correct and it's cheaper to just chuck the old one and launch Hubble II.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The first three settlements in what is now Southern California were never heard from again. But look at the place now...
Help stamp out iliturcy.
instead of continuing to build chemical rockets, nasa should research advanced propulsion. The Large Hadron Collider will be the rosetta stone explaining the energy matter interface, allowing creation of psuedo matter, having the mass and "solidness" of matter that can be turned on and off like a switch, which in turn will lead to force fields which in turn will lead to antigravity.
The shuttles have taught us a great deal about what you need to be designing into a SHUTTLE rather than a single use rocket. The costs, maintenance, and safety issues that crop up over the 20-30 year life span of a launch platform designed to be re-used. There are things you learn over the long term. Who would have thought that foam insulation around the liquid fuel tanks would be more dangerous because it is light weight than it would be if it were heavier? It took many many launches before we learned it (in a worst case scenario, sadly). Point is, that's just the one big glaring example. There are countless other reliability and availability lessons learned.
We already knew we could make a rocket get into space. We needed to make it almost commercially reliable and cheap. We're not there yet, but a long way closer, yes?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
omfg.
to = let's go to the movies.
too = there are too many of them.
two = there are only two of them, not three.
there = let's go there.
their = it is their house.
they're = they are going to the house.
seriously people. 3rd grade stuff here. learn these 6 simple things or be doomed to look like an idiot when you write.
Yup. That is the perfect, superficial logic analogy.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Hey. It's okay to joke around about it a little bit. But don't be picking on people's obsessions with plaster of paris and deathmasks. It's just a hobby.
Private spaceflight is a long standing theme of MANY sci fi favorites.
Its the next great frontier, the next new world.
We have been reading about the "early days" of space exploration from the position of the future.
Stories about clipper ships taking off in the distance.
I think once things happen, they are going to start happening very quickly.
If not in our lifetimes in our childrens lifetime, commercial space enterprises and orbital manufacturing will be a reality.
exciting times indeed!
What we really need, and will soon get, is a space race with the Chinese.
They'll of course, use the interest payments from the Obamabonanza Loans to pay for their program. The US will be funding both sides of the 'race.'
Wow. Yes, it matters. Because even if I don't get the excitement etc. of being on Mars, someone does, and I bet that person is just as excited as I would be. And I get a small piece of his excitement by listening to his radio transmissions, or watching himself walk around on the surface, or reading about it in the newspaper... whatever. Is it as good as the real thing? I doubt it's even in the same league. But it's also better than nothing, and nothing is what you seem to think we should have.
I'm really picking up a huge vibe of jealousy here. "If I don't get to go to Mars, nobody else should either." Or perhaps it's just that you think others should feel that way. I don't really get it. But perhaps you're also one of those people who don't think I should aspire to be wealthy because the so-called American dream is really a myth designed to keep me in de facto indentured servitude for my entire life, only my deluded hope of bettering my situation or my children's preventing me from overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
(Is there a law like Godwin's for calling someone a communist? I think there should be. By the way, I'm not trolling or... flamebaiting... a lot of people actually believe what I wrote above. I don't get that either, but it does explain the parent's sentiment, if I'm reading him correctly, and also why he's +4 insightful when he should be, at most, +4 buzzkill masquerading as "realism.")
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Don't forget the #1 rule of manned space flight: *you* don't get to go. And if you're stuck on earth, does it really matter if the pictures you're looking at were taken by man or machine?
So, imagine living in the 1400s. They want to sent a ship full of people over the edge of the world. Since *you* don't get to go.. you decide to just sent a boat, and watch it fall off the edge of the earth. But since they did.. and found a whole new continent, i'd say it was worth sending a few people on those boats, even though *you* wouldn't have gotten to go. What about the Hubble? Who would fix it? To build a machine as flexible, intelligent, and strong as a human would be insanely expensive and gigantic.. and why? Because you don't get to go? How was that comment ranked insightful?
And are they carrying coconuts?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yet.
Bound to be plenty of stuff we can make that are just better when made in microgravity, like ultrapure crystals & medications, foamed metals, stuff like that...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
What about spirit and opprtunity?
Don't they count?
When people say 'NASA', they mostly mean the part that's spending billions delivering pizza to a few astronauts in a tin can who are too busy fixing it to do anything much useful. Not the unmanned part or the aeronautical part, both of which provide decent value for money.
And when it comes to rocketry, sure, the shuttle is getting a little long in the tooth, but is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
At over a billion dollars per servicing mission, building multiple Hubbles on a production line and launching a new one every few years would have been cheaper. And there's essentially no market for bringing large payloads _down_ from space.
And I watched video of her on the internet.... wasn't the same either...
So jaunt on over there and visit, silly.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Oh man, in that case get your friend some lessons on using their cameras *groan*
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Leaving aside the gross inaccuracies about the history of the personal computer in TFA, there's one giant shrieking difference between the "Fire in the Valley" days and the current commercial space rush: startup costs. Any number of early personal computer companies really were started by a couple of guys in a garage with a few thousand dollars. There may very well be some space industry parts vendors who still start this way. But no one starts a private launch company without a ton of money up front.
It's still exciting, but not in the way the early personal computer days were. Back then, you could look at, let's say, Wozniak and Jobs and think, "That could be me!" No one at my pay grade is having that thought about SpaceX.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
They'll of course, use the interest payments from the Obamabonanza Loans to pay for their program
Yeah, because they didn't have any of our money before Obama. It's disturbing how many people think our debt just happened in the last 9 months.
on slashdot, yes.
Wasn't Lebensraum ("living space") one of the main justifications for World War II? People just want to explore.
And is a bizarre sort of way, Großdeutschland actually happened, only we now call it the European Union and it's (arguably) a good thing.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set.
I had to double check that it wasn't kdawson that edited this article. Wow. You usually do a pretty good job, timothy. But this?
No one "reversed engineered Microsoft's DOS" and it did not come out until the industry was pretty well established. The original IBM PC's BIOS was reverse engineered. The only thing Microsoft ever did that ran on an 8080 was Microsoft BASIC (which was indeed a true standard of its time - even Apple adopted it as Applesoft BASIC).
In the earliest years, the world was 6502 dominated - Apple, Commodore, etc. There wasn't any need to reverse engineer Apple Software, because they published it all in the Apple ][ red manual.
Once the 8080 came out (and its competitor the Z80) there still wasn't any need to reverse engineer software as CP/M was effectively open source.
PC DOS was very much a late comer to the game and as the industry was moving from 8 to 16 bit. Just because a bunch of whacked out journalist bozos said that the IBM PC (on the traffic light controller 8088, or so sayeth the official Intel documentation on that chip) "legitimized" personal computers doesn't make it correct.
Sheesh.
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Copyvio if it includes the Eiffel Tower at night. Hopefully that's not a problem on space flights.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The 8080 chip was what grown up hardware enthusiasts were using in their S-100 computers. The kiddies had the weaker, cheaper 6502 parts.
Don't diss the 6502. It was a wonderful chip for its time and although it ran at slower clock speeds than later 8080s and Z80s, it still ran code faster because very few clock cycles were wasted. The instruction set was remarkably well done.
If you've never read through Woz's Sweet 16 interpreter, which fit in just a bit over a page of memory (about 270 bytes) and emulated a 16 bit architecture CPU, you have not experienced True Programming.
The 6502 was a remarkable work of engineering. It's a great pity that they never followed up on it.
There's a difference between looking at someone's holiday photos online (perhaps with information on latitude/longitude, temperature, and weather conditions at the time of the photo) and looking at someone's photos while listening to them talk about what they saw, felt, and experienced. Even if you didn't get to go personally, the latter is undoubtedly more viscerally satisfying, I think.
http://www.tenjou.net/
"...manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set."
Wasn't the 8088 used in IBM's first PC, the one that ran PC-DOS?
Seriously, what it is with the insane, ingorant NASA hate around here these days. No exploration? What about spirit and opprtunity?
Children ...
NASA should never have been a government agency. That was President Eisenhower's doing and aren't all Republicans evil?
The moon missions were done as stupidly as they possibly could be. The mathematics of space, delta-V is everything and once you're in Earth orbit you're half way to anywhere, dictated the establishment of a space station that could be used to launch further flights outward. This was debated before they chose the throw-everything-away-along-the-way design they ended up using.
So after all the money spent on R & D we ended up with less than two dozen men walking on the moon and nothing to show for it afterwards except that a follow on space shuttle that occasionally blows up and kills everyone on board.
Or, let me put it another way, we could have had colonies established on the moon and probably Mars by now if we had pursued space exploration sanely. A space station with a hostile environment outside isn't any more difficult than the world outside Mom's basement.
Ah, it's Slashdot let me try a car analogy. What good is it to drive a car if it could only remain within 1 mile of your house?
Now, get off my lawn.
Can we debunk this one once and for all? Parisians as a whole don't seem to be any more or less hostile to foreigners than the inhabitants of any other large city.
Granted, I grew up just outside of New York City, and accordingly have absolutely no expectation for total strangers to give me much more than the time of the day (especially in another language), but such is city life -- Paris gets an unfair rap, and really is a wonderful city. Every locale has its little quirks...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So, imagine living in the 1400s. They want to sent a ship full of people
Exploration ships in those days were mostly filled with convicted criminals.
I can see the moon from my front porch. I can't see Paris. So, which is closer?
It's a trick question: they're the same.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So, innovation in space just stopped in 1970? I don't think so. I think they just classified it.
I think you have a mistaken view of what "classified" means. It's info that spies get to see first before citizens do.
Innovation in space has stopped. It's about time it started up again.
And if they're carrying coconuts, are they making clop-clop sounds with them?
Well, the instant they decide to start launching criminals into space I'm going on a carjacking spree...
I still have in a basement or the garage the original manuals that shipped with the original IBM PC aaaaand, guess what. In the back of the programmers reference manual is the full, commented source to the system BIOS.
There was no reverse engineering of the BIOS involved, instead, it was simply reimplementing it using the original code that was published with the PC.
I don't know if it was common practice to do so back then with other systems, but by releasing full source to the BIOS, it probably saved IBM thousands of hours properly documenting the API of the BIOS.
Keep in mind that for the most part, until Ralf Brown took it upon himself to document as much of the PC interrupts as possible, the BIOS source was probably the only decent documentation available for programmers.
I find it a little incongruous of the article to say that SpaceX could 'take over' the resupply of the ISS. The Russians have been doing, and, AFAIK, will continue doing, sterling work with they very reliable Soyuz based Progress missions.
Beyond stuff that you can do in free fall that'd be difficult/impossible in 1G, there's truckload of money to be grabbed. As soon as you can extract useful resources from moon and later, asteroid belt, sky's the proverbial limit.
One obvious moneymaker would be of course manufacturing more spaceships. It's the whole pyramid cost structure - Setting up that 1st space ship factory is astronomically (ha) expensive but each step after that costs less and less while the profits grow inversely.
Rocket equation for moon is just way different for rocket equation for earth. And once you can drag heavy metals from asteroid belt you have unlimited resources for practical foreseeable future.
But, yes, in quaterly fiscal thinking, there's no money to be made.
That gives me an idea: let's get together a ton of money and pay for one jerk to have a millionsome with hot women. We'll get whatever pics he can take with his cellphone camera. Totally worth it, right?
and without NASA there wouldn't be any Google Maps at all.
I agree. I've been to Paris, and the people there were perfectly nice to me.
I think this is an example of selection bias. A few loudmouths went to Paris, acted like jerks, and then came back and told everyone around them how horrible the Parisians were. Meanwhile, normal people went and were treated normally, and didn't say "gee, the people in Paris seemed nice".
I witnessed an American tourist giving a really abusive attitude toward a hotel manager. She had come a day early; her reservation was for the following night. "Madame, I am sorry, we simply don't have any rooms available tonight." "But I have a reservation!" "Your reservation is for tomorrow night." "THAT'S NOT MY PROBLEM!" He wound up calling her a cab to take her to some other hotel. I'll bet she told her friends she was horribly treated.
The worst treatment I received in Paris was when we weren't sure how to eat some prawns. We had never before received prawns with the head, legs, etc. still attached and we weren't sure what to do. I asked the waiter as politely as I knew how, "how does one eat this?" He showed me how simple it is: you just grab the head, pull, and *pop* it comes off. I thanked him. He showed me again. I thanked him again, with a little less enthusiasm. And then he just stood there, with this smug little smile on his face, pulling the heads off of all the prawns, as if we were too stupid to do it for ourselves, even when shown. Well, somehow we survived this incredibly abusive mistreatment, and I can't say I lie awake at nights worrying about it.
If you take the trouble to learn even a few words of French -- such as "merci", for "Thank You" -- the French people really appreciate it. They don't expect you to speak perfect French. (Although, a lot of the people I did meet didn't speak any English; if you can't speak any French, you will be limited to pointing at things. But you can actually get around pretty well that way if you have to. Just please learn a few polite phrases.)
A 670kg payload ought to be enough for anybody.
You obviously don't have an Aunt Sally...
An important change for education.
I can't speak for the parent, who may actually be talking about a conspiracy theory, but it is true that a substantial portion of the tonnage lifted has been military.
The US put up several generations of total-coverage constellations, for communication, navigation, surveillance and GIS. Some of these programs have been declassified (and in the case of GPS, allowed for civilian use), some haven't (though all are plain to see from your backyard).
And on that note, it seems like you could count GIS as "innovation in space". How many awesome stories about augmented reality have you seen lately?
As many other comments point out, space hardware is already (and always has been) built by the "private sector", whatever that means. It's just that governments are the only entities with the resources and drive to push anything past LEO. Getting a manned mission to another planet, with no short-term payoff, is something that a corporation (or rather, a privately administered program) will never do. It's just too expensive. There's only a couple of countries on Earth with the resources to even attempt it. Space is hard.
In fact, private programs would suck for all of the coolest projects. What would the incentive be for a corporation to put up something like Hubble?
I know this screed is getting too long, but I have to bring up one more thing: The science being done on ISS is very important. The material science experiments, as an example, are changing your world in ways you may never notice.
Innovation in space has stopped.
Not really.
If you want more space exploration, support a larger budget for NASA and/or a reduction in military launches. This dichotomy between the "private" and "public" has no basis in reality. If SpaceX gets a contract, awesome. But that just means that we have a SpaceX vehicle instead of a Lockheed one.
Try punching Pierre in the face and pissing on his dog... hospitality goes right out the window.
It was my first drink! I swear!
In fact, private programs would suck for all of the coolest projects. What would the incentive be for a corporation to put up something like Hubble?
Getting paid for it?
I used to work for NASA/JPL. Whatever.
Maybe we have some crossed wires here, but in case we don't, here's my response.
Getting paid for it?
Yes, getting paid by a government contract or grant, the only entity than can spend billions on a science mission with no short-term payoff. Which is the way it's been for decades, as I said.
I used to work for NASA/JPL. Whatever.
Good on you. Maybe you'd like to talk to the other people in this discussion who also work for NASA/JPL, who seem to have a different opinion.
This "private sector" thing is magical thinking. Public/private is a false dichotomy. As I said, and to which you seem to have no logical answer.
I get the feeling that this might be a religious issue for you. If so, no response requested. Not interested in digressions into debates about free market orthodoxy, though I respect your religious beliefs.
Btw, I liked the rest of your comments in this discussion, but I don't understand why you were so dismissive. Lame. You were wrong in your response to curmudgeon99 (though I disagreed with most of his comments). He has a point. The Air Force has a huge budget, for projects that don't officially exist. And companies like Lockmart handle them. And your statement about innovation in space would seem to be an insult to your former co-workers (besides being 100% wrong). I'm sorry we didn't get you pony; you'll get over it.
I visited Hawaii on business and they put me up at the "Hawaiian Village" at Waikiki. I can tell you that a sufficiently contrived local experience is less informative than a remote exploration. Fortunately, I was there to work so I got to meet Hawaiians without flaming batons being involved.
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I get the feeling that this might be a religious issue for you. If so, no response requested. Not interested in digressions into debates about free market orthodoxy, though I respect your religious beliefs.
It's religious only in the sense that I had contact with would-be free market to earth orbit folks in the 1980s. They were squashed and I thought it was very unfair.
I got infected by a coworker who was very much into private enterprise launches and the people behind them. He convinced me that that was The Right Way To Go. Sorry.
While I generally agree with your sentiment, trying to speak French in Paris is just asking for being treated poorly. It's the only place I've ever been where trying to speak the native language (or even speaking it relatively well but not natively) didn't garner better help and hospitality. In fact, it was quite the opposite. They automatically assumed something negative (I can't actually say what the people were thinking) and immediately started speaking to us as loudly as possible in English. I'm not sure why the change in volume, but the change in attitude was quite obvious.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Well, you put your finger on an important point.
When it comes to space exploration -- particularly planetary exploration -- mass is king. Let's say there were great deposits of gold on Mars. It wouldn't be worth going there to get it until we'd completely exhausted mines on Earth, because of the cost of moving the mass from Mars to Earth. The same goes for that mainstay of science fiction: asteroid mining. It may be that as the Earth's population reaches the fifty billion mark, iron will be come dear enough to get it from space, but not any time soon.
So the things most worth going to space for are the lightest things. Knowledge. Information.
In fact, if you look at the commercial importance of space, arguably space technology is information technology. What are the things that are worth putting a commercial satellite in orbit for? Relaying communication. Taking pictures of the Earth. Even space tourism is ultimately about sensory information.
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I think that would be unlaid not unladen.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
400 years ago it was fantasy for man to fly like a bird. Technology has a way of interchanging fantasy and reality. It takes time, but it happens. We are just taking our first baby steps... or perhaps just learning to roll over in our crib before we crawl.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Fair enough. Sorry for my vitriol.
I was infected with the opposite side of a related controversy: The near bi-annual attempts of the Commercial Weather Services Association to take NOAA/NWS data away from the public (last serious attempt). I'm only passionate about such issues because I fear that the only way to incentivize basic science for the private sector is to lock it up.
Limiting the scope to launches, I would be happy if one of these new private enterprise launch outfits was able to handle everything and send NASA an invoice, and I think NASA should be, too. If what you're saying about outfits in the 80's being squashed is true, then that's awful and shouldn't have happened.
Btw, respect for XEmacs :).
Even if you're correct and it's cheaper to just chuck the old one and launch Hubble II.
I think if NASA adopted this "Dell business model" that you describe, space exploration would take about ten years before if became too dangerous for anybody without a powerful Anti-Debris Scan and Removable Tool. Unfortunately, the requirements of space are higher than the comparable code that McAfee and Microsoft churn out. The option to resign yourself to raising the white flag and start from scratch would have much more devastating results when you realize the Scan and Removable Tool has become overwhelmed.
On the other hand, this would pave the way for a huge Anti-Debris Scan industry which would create tens-of-millions of jobs to kick start the economy. Or is that just another example of the Broken Window Fallacy?
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Don't forget the #1 rule of manned space flight: *you* don't get to go.
I thought the whole point of manned space flight was to eventually get large numbers of people out of Earth and onto other planets. It's the next logical step in human expansion.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I have no problem with one person experiencing the joy of going to Mars while the rest of us stay home, so long as that one person paid for it himself.
Yes, I deliberately overstated my original post, and you're right that people do appreciate exploration more when there's a person involved, even if the scientific benefit is negligible.
I was once a huge manned spaceflight proponent, but I learned a huge lesson from the Pathfinder and MER missions: humans like it when exploration is done by people, but they're very flexible about the definition of "people". If you build a robot with good sensors and mobility, on a human scale, people will anthropomorphize the crap out of it. They will cheer for its successes, worry over its problems, idolize and even come to love it. We love those "plucky" Mars rovers almost as much as we loved Neil Armstrong.
And Neil's a whole lot more expensive.
ISS Resupply is mentioned once and even then it's more like a statement of what it can do and no reference to any contract from NASA. Also if they have been awarded the contract how come it's not all over space.com????
Really it's just a waste of a frontpage
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
"And when it comes to rocketry, sure, the shuttle is getting a little long in the tooth, but is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?"
That's the entire point - NASA knew that the shuttle would not last forever, yet did very little on the next generation of heavy lifters. If they had diverted more resources into LEO lifting from other programs, we may not have as many probes, but we'd be able to go up and repair Hubble, etc.
Lack of foresight IS a sin, especially when the clues are beating you over the head.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Exactly. Plus you are missing a few,
Galileo - Jupiter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(spacecraft)
Cassini & Huigens - Saturn & its moon titan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiniâ"Huygens
Spirit & Opportunity - Mars landers
then we have a whole slew of satellites for observing sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon and Mars. Just go to nasa.gov for overview. There is also that fast flyby by Pluto - the only planet not yet observed closely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
Limiting the scope to launches, I would be happy if one of these new private enterprise launch outfits was able to handle everything and send NASA an invoice, and I think NASA should be, too. If what you're saying about outfits in the 80's being squashed is true, then that's awful and shouldn't have happened.
The aforementioned coworker is this guy http://www.planetpuna.com/siriusa/HysonBio.htm by the way. Make of it what you will, but absolutely one of the brightest people I've ever met and called "friend".
Unmanned deep space probes (ie JPL) is probably OK to leave government funded, but that leaves open the issue of who owns the stuff the probes find. Manned stuff ought to be left to for profit organizations. There's limitless wealth out there, if we can only get to it. And, in my opinion, getting people permanently off earth is way too important to leave to an election or politicians.
I guess you were right. I am religious on the subject. I want manned space travel and I wanted it 4 decades ago when it became feasible.
Btw, respect for XEmacs :).
Thanks. :-)