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James Cameron Commissions Submarine To Visit Challenger Deep
frank249 writes "In January, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Trieste descent, the X Prize Foundation announced a $10 million prize for the first privately funded craft to make two manned descents to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest surveyed point in the oceans. Now, James Cameron has announced he has commissioned a submarine capable of surviving the tremendous pressures at a depth of seven miles, from which he will not only try for the X prize but also shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar's sequel."
Interesting point. Though he did use footage of the Titanic in the movie Titanic where he did much the same thing.
NASA is a train wreck at the moment. The shuttle retires this year and there is nothing to replace it. NASA has no clear plans, no guidance, and no funding. It'll be at least seven years before NASA will have a craft capable of even getting a person off this rock, let alone going to the Moon.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone.
GOD DAMN IT. I really, really wish people would quit perpetuating this wildly incorrect urban legend. The original design details, down to the very last nut and bolt, are on file at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Absolutely nothing at all is "gone". Source.
The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.
Also ridiculously incorrect. You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right? That they're rebuilt between missions, and that the design has improved and evolved over the life of the program? That as of right now there are in fact nine fully-built spare ones in storage at KSC? The engineers didn't just build a bunch of them in 1980 and then zap themselves with the Men In Black flashy-thing--SSMEs have been constantly built for the past almost thirty years. If my tone is coming across as a little coarse, it's because I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a highly-moderated post to Slashdot when thirty seconds of research would refute almost everything you just said.
The reason why building a Saturn V today from the old plans is impossible has nothing to do with "cheaper labor" or "people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty" or whatever stupidness you wrote. Rather, you can't build a Saturn V today because a Saturn V isn't just a bunch of tanks with engines strapped to it--it's half of a complex launch system, with the other half being the Apollo CSM that sits on top of it. A Saturn V is an end-to-end system designed around the IBM-produced instrumentation unit, two tons of analog and basic digital computers and instrumentation. It's not that you can't build it--it's that building it wouldn't make any sense. You'd need to completely de-Apollo the rocket for it to work right, and guess what? That's exactly what NASA has been doing, although the political will to make it happen is sorely lacking.
Please educate yourself before you spout off such a mixture of urban legend and outright incorrect craziness.