Slashdot Mirror
Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You!
theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
in soviet slashdot , first post gets you
I'm going to go with yes, Mr. Emissions Police.
In 1983, a Soyuz rocket exploded on the launch pad. The crew was lifted to safety by the launch escape system, and there don't seem to be reports about any casualties on the ground due to this this incident.
Yes, you are.
you wouldnt find me close to a rocket launch
Here's a compilation of videos from a failed Soyuz launch - it got up off the launch pad and then came right back down, very close to the spectators. One person died.
Foton M-1 launch failure
If you hadnt guessed, the video contains lots of expletives.
I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
A fellow guard responded, "Yeah, if it doesn't fall down on us, Putin will. Reality that doesn't agree with his propaganda of sending rockets to Proxima Centauri and winning 99% of the vote for it? Gulagistan for the both of us!" The guard recounted his story on condition of anonymity to avoid the ex-KGBer's customary punishment of death by judo.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Yes. My immediate thought was on the "...the Russians are not as concerned with safety." comment. After 80 years of Stalinism I think I get that.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
not if it leads to those with a lot of money to invest more in lift systems, and get us off this planet, so we have no need to rape it anymore. or to discover a new propulsion system as a side effect of the research that can change transportation, something that doesn't pollute the atmosphere or politically destabilize portions of the world
it's ok to have a conscience. it's not ok to have no imagination
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What the Soviet ruskies desperately need is more lawyers. Let's ship them at least half of ours, pronto!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Ok, fine. Just use hydrazine - not turning into any greenhouse gases and merely being poisonous for everyone handling the stuff. Combined with the joys of red fuming nitric acid, you can be sure to save the planet that way. Or how about using solid propellants, spraying the environment with Chlorine and hydrochloric acid?
Seriously, the annual oil production of Germany (about 3mio tons and perfectly insignificant in the grant scheme of things) would be enough to put as much stuff into orbit as people put there since 1957 several times over. Kerosine is among the most environmentally friendly rocket fuels out there - especially since hydrogen is usually (~95%) made by simply turning the carbon in methane molecules into CO2, closing your eyes and pretending that the hydrogen that's left is a clean fuel.
Well, speaking only for myself, my first thought was "Wow, I wish I could drop $100K on a whim."
Regards,
dj
5 miles away behind a mountain? Maybe from the causeway. I guess the Google guys aren't important like me(haha!). I've been to one on the VIP platform. It's about 3 miles away, and has a great view of the launch unobscured by smoke(unlike the causeway). Seriously, though, I don't see how 2 of the most successful men in the US couldn't see a launch from the VIP platform unless they didn't even try to see a launch in the first place.
Get your facts straight. USSR has existed for 73 years and despite many people think otherwise, Stalin died in 1953 and Stalinism died with him, thanks to Khrushchev.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And this is unlikely to change, because rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft. Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast. Similarly, a modern commercial airliner isn't radically faster than the first jetliners that flew in the late 1940s, maximum cruise speed of a 777 is about 600 mph, versus around 500 for the first jetliners. And rockets are the same way: the economics of rockets haven't changed radically since WWII when von Braun was lobbing V2s at London. Back then you were throwing away a lot of fuel and metal to launch a small payload, almost 70 years later we're still doing the same, just with bigger rockets. In short, a mature technology. It was extraordinarily expensive to launch stuff on a rocket 70 years ago, and it's still extraordinarily expensive, which suggests it will be extraordinarily expensive 70 years from now. To make space colonization or resource extraction practical, you'd need to increase the efficiency of space travel by multiple orders of magnitude. That's probably impossible with anything that remotely resembles existing rockets; instead if humans ever leave the planet it will require some completely new kind of technology.
Well, speaking only for myself, my first thought was "Wow, I wish I could drop $100K on a whim."
Well, start the next Google and you, too, can do that.
Personally, I'm not exactly concerned about the environmental impact caused by the number of people who can afford to burn $100,000 worth of fuel per day. Notice that the grandparent poster doesn't mention the much worse effects of a billion not-so-Red Chinese who will soon be driving their own cars and SUVs. That's because it wouldn't give him the same eco-hipster "Occupy Earth" street cred as he could get by directing an equivalent amount of criticism at a couple of rich dudes riding around in a Gulfstream.
What's RP-1?
Now shut your pie-hole
--
BMO
what story? the whole thing is pointless.
The aircraft analogy doesn't work. 100 years ago, the idea that high volume air travel was possible wouldn't be that fantastic given what was happening in 1912. The airplane had gone from a short flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the French flying across the English Channel in 1909, a span of only 7 years. And look at what was happening in 1912 according to Wikipedia: you had the founding of major aircraft corporations like Sopwith and Fokker, seaplanes, carrier tests conducted by the U.S. Navy, the first use of aircraft as bombers. On the engineering end of things, they had gone from the Wright Brother's first use of the wind tunnel to the development of Prandtl's lifting-line theory and theories of supersonic flow. In short, in 1912, aircraft were nowhere near a mature technology. Over the past 50 years, however, the pace of change has slowed dramatically. Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.
Dude, it isn't cheap easy pessimism. Travelling around the planet, like we've done for thousands of years, but faster isn't nearly as big a deal as going into space, where everything is hostile to human life and there is no deserted jungle island out there that you can survive on if your plane crashes. The problems of space travel are considerably larger than anything we've faced before and will take considerably more resources and a concerted, well-thought out planning step. We can't just throw some men on a boat and have them survive when they arrive and along the way. We have to plan every detail, plan for every conceivable error and failure step and build very precise machinery using the best technology of the day. Sure, we can do it, but it'll be extremely expensive, very dangerous and unlikely to yield anything more useful than bragging rights.
And in 1964, that fave of all Russki TV shows came on, "Leave it to Brezhnev" followed immidiately by "Bowling for Food".
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
There was no cheap pessimism before the internet, right? Nothing but unbridled optimism and credulousness, right? Get off it. You're no better than the people you're complaining about.
That's what 1 billion other people say, too.
A billion other people don't actually have the money to fly a private jet anywhere.
And if you try to do something that would cause those billion other people to reduce their oil consumption, like raising the gas tax, they start a lynch mob and accuse you of not caring about poor people and destroying the economy.
Water vapor has different properties, namely that its cycle is a lot shorter and is affected by day to day weather, allowing it to be modulated by shorter term phenomena as well as CO2 and methane. Creating some water out the back of a spaceship is inconsequential, since it will simply rain back out in short order. CO2 doesn't have that property.
The cleanest rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen as the 'oxydizer'. The reason they use hydrazine is, l-hyd isn't that easy to handle. Fact is, it's a real pain in the ass. You have to store it in a Thermos tank, vented for the boiloff. You can't hope to store it for more than a few hours in a 'fuel tank' on a rocket. Hydrazine can be handled in ambient room temperature, it's already liquid. Saves weight as well on the tankage, you only have to insulate the liquid oxygen. And let's not even go into the problems of cryogenically frozen pump components when dealing with pumping l-hyd. Lox is bad enough, but l-hyd is liquid at -253C thereabouts, almost absolute zero. Materials do strange things at that temperature range...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
And rich men spending their money on junkets and toys is news how Slashdot? What's next, keeping up the Kardashians?
"Leave it to Brezhnev"
I like the 4-episode series where he accidentally gets his eyebrows burned off.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The cleanest rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen as the 'oxydizer'.
And where does that hydrogen comes from? Magic elves?
No, as the post you utterly failed to understand already said, it comes from turning Methane into H2 and CO2. Or turning Coal into electricity and then using that to split water. Not very environmentally friendly at all.
Simply moving the pollution from one place to another is not being more environmentally friendly, it's called being short sighted.
Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast.
That's only because nobody cares about making them faster. They already run them slower than their maximum speed intentionally because the primary design consideration for container ships is efficiency, not speed. And if you look at the amount of freight transported per ship and per crew member compared to a clipper ship, I suspect it is in the range of ten to a hundred times more.
But let's assume you're right:
rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft.
OK, so don't use rockets. I keep hearing about this magic carbon nanotube space elevator that we'll have Real Soon Now.
Even if you want to assume that never happens, let's consider another alternative: You pick a proverbial "asteroid the size of Texas" out of the many floating around out there. Find one in the habitable zone. Then you send a team there with some industrial equipment, not to mine the asteroid and bring it home, but to mine it and use the raw materials to construct a large compartmentalized living environment. Start off by building a few dozen acres of greenhouse, and fill it with plants so that you have food and oxygen recycling. Then proceed to build yourself a little home away from home -- but in a place that has lower gravity, so that you can build yourself a space elevator. Create yourself a city in space with a population of a few thousand people.
That gives you a foothold. You create an industrial city that can export its products to the universe without burning ten thousand gallons of fuel fighting gravity. Then you can branch out. Colonize and mine more asteroids and small planets. Once you have a large enough industrial capacity in low gravity areas, you can build yourself a city-to-go and just land the entire thing piecemeal on a suitable planet. Next thing you know you've got a million people living on Mars and several expeditions on their way to colonizing habitable planets in other planetary systems.
I'm not saying what I've just laid out would definitely work. Maybe, maybe not. What I'm saying is that we haven't yet exhausted all the possible alternatives, so giving up now is nothing but defeatism.
It all depends on how worried you are about anthropogenic CO2 in the environment. If you are very worried, then space tourism is a *bad* thing, because it releases a lot of CO2, and the more people do it, the more it releases.
If you are not worried about anthropogenic CO2, then increasing the gas tax to stop the increase is a really dumb thing, because it would hurt the economy and poor people for no good reason.
Premises determine conclusions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes. My immediate thought was on the "...the Russians are not as concerned with safety."
But by all means, we should entrust manned launches to them.
We really, really need to further accelerate devlopment of the Delta Heavy and Atlas Heavy families of rockets, and get them man rated. Stat.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You obviously have no idea of what the Stalin era was about. The bibliography of Yezhov tells a lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Mundus Vult Decipi
(or will be when they get back into the heavy lifting business.)
Get a press pass to a NASA launch. You're close enough that the temperature in the room almost immediately goes up by 20 degrees. Fortunately you're in a reinforced bunker.
Actually if you read your history, and not just the American propaganda spins on history, then you'd know that for most of his tenure Khrushchev was trying to open things up and be more liberal, with artists and commerce being allowed much more freedom for the majority of his rule, which is why he ended up getting run out on a rail in favor of Brezhnev who was more a classical Soviet style communist which was much more what the old party heads wanted. Of course what followed was a long period of stagnation that was later named the Brezhnev stagnation which lasted for the most part all the way up to the fall of the wall.
As for TFA it just shows that money can't buy common sense or as we say in the south "Give a billion to white trash and all you get is white trash with a lot of money" or if this case give a ton of money to a dufus and you get a dufus with the money to do really dumb ubernerd things.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ha! Thought you had me, did you? Because you think I'm just sitting on my computer, which burns CO2 for electricity, wasting my time on slashdot. Well I'm also exhaling! So take that!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is the Atlas Heavy still going to use russian rocket engines as the Atlas V and Atlas III do?