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US Should Use Trampolines To Get Astronauts To the ISS Suggests Russian Official
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "The Washington Post reports that Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has lashed out again, this time at newly announced US ban on high-tech exports to Russia suggesting that 'after analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I propose the US delivers its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.' Rogozin does actually have a point, although his threats carry much less weight than he may hope. Russia is due to get a $457.9 million payment for its services soon and few believe that Russia would actually give it up. Plus, as Jeffrey Kluger noted at Time Magazine, Russia may not want to push the United States into the hands of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, two private American companies that hope to be able to send passengers to the station soon. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences have already made successful unmanned resupply runs to the ISS and both are also working on upgrading their cargo vehicles to carry people. SpaceX is currently in the lead and expects to launch US astronauts, employed by SpaceX itself, into orbit by 2016. NASA is building its own heavy-lift rocket for carrying astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, but it won't be ready for anything but test flights until after 2020. 'That schedule, of course, could be accelerated considerably if Washington gave NASA the green light and the cash,' says Kluger. 'America's manned space program went from a standing start in 1961 to the surface of the moon in 1969—eight years from Al Shepard to Tranquility Base. The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now.'"
Is the Ariane project not suitable to conversion?
"The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."
Back then those in power and the people in general cared that the Russians could do something we could not. That is no longer the case when it comes to space. Most people don't understand why space is important at all outside of things like satellites that provides communications around the planet.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Hey US, IN SOVIET RUSSIA ROCKET LAUNCH YOU. Sincerely, US citizens for restoring manned American space exploration.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
That's one helluva double-bounce. Start jumping Russia, well keep up!
Life is not for the lazy.
Nedd Ludd, is that you?
If years of Saturday morning cartooning have taught us nothing else, it's clear you would need, like, several dozen hundred trampolines to pull it off.
Yep, trampolines all the way down.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
a trampoline gap!
Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And we're arguing over a comment about a failing space station.
... why the private sector needs to be more involved in space exploration instead of the toddlers currently in charge of the governments of the world.
Lol it is actually funny how deluded you are. Cutting us off from space is the worst thing we can do, and will certainly result in the end of man kind.
I know that's an unpopular viewpoint on Slashdot (where Elon Musk is a god who can do no wrong). But SpaceX isn't ready to just "take over." Soyuz has a rock solid safety record and is much more versatile. SpaceX's design is still largely untested, particularly with human cargo.
If they try to push too hard too soon, people are going to get killed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
ISS isn't space. It's a LEO publicity stunt. The moon is space. Mars is space. ISS is just a jobs program, and a way to justify funding.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yes, all 7 billion of us will die if a test pilot doesn't drink Tang in the upper atmosphere. You're right! I was delusional! There are 200000 new people on the planet every day, but the answer is surely in the upper atmosphere! Hallelujah! Oh yes, pack the Tang and the rubber underwear FOR MANKIND!!!!!
Yes, and both are equally hostile dead rocks. Not much value there besides pictures and maybe some rock samples. Send machines. Get more pictures. Get some rocks. So what?
Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
The first to make a move always win? tic-tac-toe is not really a strategy game.
http://imgur.com/P7x32KY
The glory days of Russian trampoline champions are gone forever. Time for a US resurgence. Move over China, you're about to get bounced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Opposing space exploration does not necessarily mean opposing development of new technologies. Vernor Vinge, that science-fiction writer who has spent so much time thinking about technological singularities, has speculated that an advanced race might simply burrow deep under its planet's surface and move into a virtuality reality instead of expanding outward into space. Such a future would still involve enormous progress in technology, and lead to new discoveries in mathematics etc. There are multiple technological paths open to us.
First thing: whoosh.
Second thing: tic-tac-toe is not winnable. Capable players will always tie.
"Cutting us off from space is the worst thing we can do, and will certainly result in the end of man kind".
Eh? What on earth are you talking about? Please explain how not sending a tiny handful of astronauts into space, at immense cost and considerable risk, will affect the survival of the race. As far as I know no one, not even the most wildly enthusiastic advocate of space exploration, has ever said anything of the kind.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Simply because the Americans have temporarily abandoned a focus on manned missions in favor of autonomous exploration, you couldn't be more wrong.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
lemme give you a hint
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME???
LETS PLAY ....
does that ring a bell??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Why do people mod "Troll" or "Flamebait" when I ask them to explain what they are talking about? I'm disinclined to bandy insults in a forum that I thought was aimed at constructive discussion and debate. Maybe I should taper off reading Slashdot, and stop contributing.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits United Launch Alliance from buying NPO Energomash RD-180 engines from Russia.
http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
To some extent, I suppose I am a Space Nutter myself. It must have been about 1957 that I first opened some Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and other SF books and thrilled to the stories of galactic exploration and gigantic interstellar empires. I'm all for manned space exploration, even though I must admit that nowadays I can't entirely justify it in practical terms.
But what's this stuff about "the end of man kind"?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
According to an article in last weeks Aviation Week and Space Technology - you are ignorant.
The value of commercial experimentation on the ISS has taken an unforseen upswing. Real companies are paying Real money to put experiments of different varieties on the ISS.There is a back-log of customers.
I'm thinking the Dragon from Space-X is a nice answer to the Russian suggestion. I also think their minister needs some remedial science classes to learn about the law of gravitiy.... you can't possibly reach escape velocity with a trampoline ;-)
Have you compiled your kernel today??
... as the US are lacking the proper Nazis for the job: https://xkcd.com/984/
I think you're missing the bigger picture here. Space is vital for the survival of humanity because, eventually, we're going to totally fuck up this planet. And when that happens, we need to be able to move somewhere else.
Also we need to be able to relieve population pressure eventually. Emigration and massive war have always been the traditional methods for doing that. Nowadays we don't like the idea of war, so that leaves emigration. Where the fuck are we going to emigrate to?
The ISS isn't even space exploration. It's the Mile High Corporate Welfare Club. We've explored space from right here with the naked eye, telescopes and computers just fine, we don't even need LEO for that.
Oh, you meant putting test pilots in rubber suits to bounce around on the Moon for a day is "exploration"? Well, maybe, but the Russians managed a robotic sample-return mission to the Moon... 40 years ago.
...and this gets modded "Insightful".
I know Slashdot is popular with a lot of folks with "a zany sense of humour". But suggesting the nuclear bombing of Moscow - or anywhere else - is not clever and it's not funny. It's wicked, and I say that with no religious agenda. If the word "wicked" has any meaning, this is a perfect example of it.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
lighten up! Nobody is bombing anybody.
It's May 1, not April 1.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The trick to winning is to choose your opponents wisely. Drunks and small children are easy prey from my mastery of X's and O's.
When it comes to space travel, technology that isn't decades-dead has a good chance of turning itself into a cloud of dust on the launch pad.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yes, all 7 billion of us will die if a test pilot doesn't drink Tang in the upper atmosphere. You're right! I was delusional! There are 200000 new people on the planet every day, but the answer is surely in the upper atmosphere! Hallelujah! Oh yes, pack the Tang and the rubber underwear FOR MANKIND!!!!!
What a strange way to be jealous.
Being in 0-g is cool enough. Many people like myself want to have the opportunity to go on such a trip. I for one would love to leave this rock and colonize another. An age of exploration is a man's romance.
"Please explain how not sending a tiny handful of astronauts into space, at immense cost and considerable risk, will affect the survival of the race"
If dinosaurs had advanced enough to have a space program, maybe they could of stopped the rock that hit Mexico 65 million years ago, and they would still be alive today.
Sooner or later another rock is going to be on a collision course with the earth, and if we don't stop it, it will wipe us out.
And there are othere problems in the long term, like the sun running out of hydrogen in a billion years...
If we don't get off this planet, then it will be the end of mankind.
Threatening apocalyptic violence because a service provider is unwilling to do business? You must be beloved by the staff at McDonald's.
Actually, with Moscow in particular, it falls even more into the "retarded" category than "evil".
We must not allow a trampoline gap!
Because you're a moron.
the Trampoline!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
“Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!” Larry Niven
As to your follow up post, perhaps if you stopped asking questions with obvious and well-discussed answers, you wouldn't get modded down.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You forgot to add "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but..." at the start.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
No, the thing to do is establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, perform fission experimentation in space vice the Earth's atmosphere, and mine some asteroids.
How about a nice game of chess?
Apparently reading comprehension is not your forté.
In any combination of Boeing, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin vehicles, we'll get up there with people fairly soon and in modern spacecraft that will be able to do useful things for the next few decades. What we do with them then and how much it will cost is the key question. The NASA program is stuck in pork that traps its potential so we may well lose the Space Station. Not many really care about it anyway, other than those who work on it. Those companies that are innovating for cost, certainly SpaceX, perhaps Sierra Nevada and Boeing, could make the NASA program moot. The Russian problem of access to the ISS might accelerate the non-NASA New Space regime slightly, but it will happen. If our national space program can take advantage of this new capability, if the politics of supporting old players dies, we could be in for an exciting future of human space exploration. That might still happen if human spaceflight becomes a mostly private affair. We'll know in a few years.
I think you need to re-watch that movie. You missed the entire point.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What a strange way to be jealous
What a strange interpretation.
Being in 0-g is cool enough
So is flying at Mach 2.5 or going to the bottom of the ocean. So?
Many people like myself want to have the opportunity to go on such a trip.
Good for you. I want a leisure society with a 10 hour work week and a sustainable social economy.
I for one would love to leave this rock and colonize another
You realize that using "this rock" is a diagnosis in the DSM-V for Space Nuttery? How is this planet a "rock"?
An age of exploration is a man's romance.
That's all it is. We *KNOW* Mars is a dead rock. They thought we'd colonize Venus before we found out it it's a roasted Hell.
Grow up. Look at reality. No one's going anywhere, the Earth is *IT*. Escapism is fine, but it's no basis for adults to build their life around.
yeah, what sort of a jackass would make a joke like that?
kids these days. they're gonna re-learn a lot of the lessons our great grandparents learned the hard way. because their parents are greedy and stupid. whooping cough, polio, financial regulation, union-busting, pollution, plutocracy...
Mankind extending its reach out to space is like moving out of your parent's house when you're an adult. It might not make the most sense financially but it's important for you to learn how to make it out there on your own. It's for your own good.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Ah yes, "nuclear weapons" is the answer since it worked out so well in the past (and cost effectively as well).
Perhaps looking for an alternative solution then "nuclear posturing" is a more appropriate path now that it is no longer the 1950's?
Opposing space exploration does not necessarily mean opposing development of new technologies.
Not necessarily, but there's only so much we can do deep in a gravity well. Some technologies will probably require orbital manufacturing.
Vernor Vinge, that science-fiction writer who has spent so much time thinking about technological singularities, has speculated that an advanced race might simply burrow deep under its planet's surface and move into a virtuality reality instead of expanding outward into space.
That's not impossible, but such a culture is probably guaranteed to be wiped out eventually by an impactor if they don't develop their space technology. And if they want to support a large civilization they'll need lots of energy. Unless they strip-mine their atmosphere, putting the generation equipment in space will still be a good way to improve efficiency and safety.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And if you keep sailing west from Europe you will fall off the edge of the world.
I'll tell you what wicked is -- wicked is the former Soviet Union with the Iron Curtain and it's secret police and gulags, and people disappearing during the middle of the night. Putin was part of the secret police (KGB) in former East Germany and Russia and I believe he would like nothing better than to bring back the former Soviet Union. If we could be selective with a good old American Crowd Pleaser and take out the folks that would like nothing better than to recreate the 'Glory Days' of the former Soviet Union then I am all for it. I have nothing against the citizens of Russia and would never want to see them hurt, their government did things to them that we Westerners can't even fathom, so anyone remotely attracted to the old Soviet ways is more wicked than you can probably even imagine. Whose government is directing the flyovers of Russian bombers into UK and other countries air space once again. The quicker the world is through with individuals like Putin and Rogozin the better we will all be.
No, the thing to do is establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, perform fission experimentation in space vice the Earth's atmosphere, and mine some asteroids.
It would make a lot more sense to kick off a few more Mars missions and learn more about the place before we actually sent humans. Maybe build a better communications infrastructure between the two, first, so that there's always contact. Can't do anything about transmission time, can do something about bandwidth and coverage. A colony on the moon is a really good idea, though. It's nearby, so we could feasibly make a withdrawal plan. Mars is a one-way trip in case of failure. You maybe could bring people back, but not in a hurry, or probably in a timely fashion.
Also, I'd like to see some missions to asteroids which are on the level of this Mars mission, with some kind of rover. Let's get a clearer idea of what asteroid mining is going to look like. If we're really going to get development and exploration of space kicked off, we're going to need to do our heavy manufacturing in space anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is to use a teeter board, and have an average American jump onto the other end.
Makes you wonder why Columbus ever bothered...
We have been thoroughly chastised by the self designated hall monitor. We all feel sooooo bad now.
It was a huge boondoggle to keep the skills in place for Russia and the USA.
The US needed to keep its best workers productive as the Shuttle spy satellite boondoggle was slowly ending.
Russia got to keep its best workers productive as the massive science cities/space funding was ending.
A lot of workers got to work with complex metals, fuel, life support systems, complex computer systems... for another few years.
Both countries also invited other wealthy nations in to 'share' in a huge sheltered workshop for years of fancy space funding.
Contractors, gov workers, federal and state political leaders all got the tax payer winnings out of that one last project.
The "diplomatic" charm that went with a modual, flag painted on the side and other national bragging rights seems to be lost on other nations too.
That cash could have gone to their own evolving space projects rather than renting a very expensive Skylab 2.0 experience.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
From your first line. "wicked is the former Soviet Union with the Iron Curtain and it's secret police and gulags, and people disappearing during the middle of the night."
Wicked is also the NSA, with its constant surveillance of citizens, its Blackwaters and other PMCs, its Guantanamo Bays, and people going on extraordinary rendition flights during the night.
I'm a Westerner, and while our think OUR system is more humane than theirs, I must say that we haven't covered ourselves in glory during the past couple of decades.
... a rail gun up the side of a tall mountain as a sort of first-stage booster stands a better chance of, ahem, taking off. (All puns intended.)
If it weren't wicked, it wouldn't be funny. Humor is always based on another persons pain.
-1. Congress micro-managing NASA instead of just budgeting money that goes into a pool that NASA decides priorities on.
0. NASA being primarily a conduit for the distribution of pork, rather than a research organization.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The glaring error is the claim that Orbital Sciences is upgrading their Cygnus cargo vehicle to carry crew; they are NOT.
1. Orbital DOES NOT MAKE THE CYGNUS nor do they make the rocket that launches it. They mostly just integrate stuff they buy. The Antares has a first stage liquid-fueled rocket body built in Ukraine and using engines built in Russia. The upper stages of Anares are solid-fueled units purchased from ATK (which made the shuttle SRBs and with whom Orbital has just announced a merger). The Pressurised cargo portion of the Cygnus spacecraft is made by Thales in Italy.
2. The Cygnus has no heat shield, no parachutes or wings, etc. It burns up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere (plunging into the atmosphere at Mach 20+ without thermal protection tends to have that effect). Making Cygnus survive re-entry and landing would require a complete re-design and would produce a "new" spacecraft.
All is not lost, however. There ARE several US firms working on manned access to space:
1. SpaceX has their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule which currently carry cargo to AND from the ISS. The Dragon was designed from the outset for crew but does not yet have a tested launch abort system or life support system (this should be resolved within the next 3 years).
2. Sierra Nevada Corp has built and drop-tested the early (non-space) version of their Dreamchaser (HL-20 derived) lifting body. They've scheduled more flight tests for this vehicle (the equivalent of the Shuttle programs's "Enterprise") for later this year and have purchased an Atlas to fly a space-worthy airframe into orbit in 2016
3. Boeing is working on their CST-100 capsule which is designed to fly on an Atlas rocket.
4. Lockheed is working on the Orion (a crippled-form of the capsule that would have flown as part of the cancelled Constellation program) for NASA. Orion is NOT part of the "commercial crew" program, which is intended to get people to and from Low Earth Orbit (LEO); Orion is designed for deep-space missions with a heat shield and structure designed for re-entry into Earth's atmosphere at MUCH-higher lunar- and martian-return speeds. The first Orion will fly an unmanned test flight into space in December 2014 atop a Delta IV Heavy (which lacks the horsepower to loft Orion with a crew aboard). Orion will ultimately fly atop the giant SLS rocket which will make its maiden flight in Decemer 2017.
5. Blue Origin (run by Jeff Bazos of Amazon.com fame) is working on both a capsule and a re-usable launch vehicle of their own (with very little publicity).
Notes:
It's interesting that only the two companies run by internet guys are working on re-usable launch vehicles - the traditional aerospace firms are apparently so used to the wasteful government "cost-plus" way of business that they are using throw-away launch vehicles and will never be able to lower their mission costs.
Both Boeing and Sierra Nevada plan to use the Atlas launch vehicle which uses Russian engines and therefore is no more "assured" for US access to space than rented seats aboard Soyuz.
Virgin Galactic's "Space Ship Two" is NOT a competitor; it will never be an orbital vehicle. While SS2 will certainly go into space, this will be highly-ballistic like a WWII V-2 rocket going nearly stright up at a couple times the speed of sound and falling back at similar speeds (therefore not needing a proper heat shield). SS2 lacks the ability to carry enough fuel to get enough horizontal velocity to go into orbit (nearly 15K mph required) and would be incapable of re-entry if it DID attain orbital speed. SS2 will be a fantastic roller-coaster ride out of the atmosphere and back for super-rich tourists but is a dead-end as far as manned spaceflight.
The shuttle program could have kept going until the US has developed a replacement, now figured to be around 2020. (I double the time estimates of big engineering programs.) Most of the shuttles were only into 1/3 of their 100-flight rated lifetimes.
They're not reusable. So what's the cost of the rockets? How much of that $457m is profit. Probably $100m or so.
I bet Putin would give the US the middle finger at a cost of $100m
100% loss in case of problem with shuttle, whereas survival was 10 out 12 with souyuz.
It's not funny when a President makes the joke, but I'm guessing that Obama and Putin do not post as an AC on Slashdot.
Life is Beautiful was a fantastic comedy about the Holocaust. There's humor everywhere, and it makes a damn fine coping mechanism for many of us.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not funny when a President makes the joke, but I'm guessing that Obama and Putin do not post as an AC on Slashdot.
It's likely pro-Putin propagandists post provocative comments advocating nuking Moscow, genocide by the CIA in Ukraine, usw. Then they quote those comments in the Russian media as somehow representative of western opinion. Haven't seen it here on /., but it seems to come up on some european online news sites.
So that falls under number #3.
Guess the mod trolls can't handing the truth about #1 and #2.
The Soviet Union had ICBMs targeted at American cities
You seriously think China doesn't? China has the capability and I'm sure both China and the USA have some nukes with the other's name on them. It's not as tense as the cold war was (I'm old enough to have lived through a good bit of the cold war) but any time you have two large nation states there is always the possibility of military conflict.
I'm not hugely worried about getting into a shooting war with China but it's hardly inconceivable. Most likely source would be Taiwan. Also could be issues with Japan or on the Korean peninsula.
Europe never got its act together to build a manned vehicle to launch on it, AND they've grown weary of using it in a sub-optimal way as a commercial satellite launcher, to the current plan is to cancel it and replace it with a cheaper, smaller, and NOT man-rated "Ariane 6"
I think this is just another example of how badly the US has slipped in the world standings in just the last decade.
The US now can't even get people up to the space station that just 15 years ago they were taking a lead position in creating.
I'll tell you what wicked is -- wicked is the former Soviet Union with the Iron Curtain and it's secret police and gulags, and people disappearing during the middle of the night.
Perhaps they were ahead of time with their own "Patriot Act"? But then even at the height of the gulag system, Russia had *less* prisoners than the "Free" Amerika. Secret FISA courts? Constitutionally Free Zones covering most of the population? Designated "Free Speech Zones"? Tens of millions virtual slaves called "undocumented workers"?
Seriously, look how fucked your country has become in the name of "freedom". And this is not limited to US, look at UK and the rest of the nations are not too far behind, including Canada (secret detention warrants, 1m+ privacy intrusions per year in a nation of 35m, gov't dictating science results not reality etc..)
So please, a little respect for Putin. He's late to the game of fucking up his country.
Whose government is directing the flyovers of Russian bombers into UK and other countries air space once again.
CITATION NEEDED! Russian planes never entered UK or any other nation's airspace.
PS. I lived in the Soviet Union. And drugging up century old Stalin-era-stuff to show how evil something is, you might as well start saying how evil US is because of the *centuries* of literal slavery. How wicked and fucked up is that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
old "our NAZIs were better than their NAZIs" line as an explanation of the space race. Yes, both the Americans and the Russians benefitted from the Germans they grabbed at the end of WWII (those guys had a lot of hands-on experience designing, building, and flying rockets). The claim that those guys were the brains of both programs, however, is supremely unfair to thousands of hard-working and dedicated engineers in both the US and Russia who designed and built the systems those two nations operated (neither country put men into space aboard V-2 rockets). When the Americans got Von Braun and asked him where he and his fellow Germans got some of their ideas, he responded by saying they'd gotten them from the American rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard and inspiration from Russian genius Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Von Braun and his team brought OPERATIONAL EXPERIENCE to the Americans which was otherwise lacking beacause the US government had not taked rockets seriously pre-WWII (an idiotic move that I see repeated by another AC who is tainting this thread with lots of snarky comments) and Von Braun himself provided a certain PR and engineering-management talent, combined with a drive to put men on the moon that served the US well at the time, but which could well have developed domestically over time (just not in time for a 1969 moon landing)
I personally dislike the "NAZIs took America to the moon" line just like I dislike the "we got our tech by reverse-engineering a crashed UFO" line and for the same reason: It's a flip, vacant, obnoxious comment (usually by some non-technical moron who's career is in marketing, or burger-flipping) that trashes and dismisses all the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of thousands of tech workers over decades of time who built layers of tachnology step-by-step on top of the work of their predecessors to get us to the hard-won spot we currently occupy. Anybody who works in science or technology should take these memes as an insult and should slap them down with great zeal at every opportunity.
Troll fail:
(1) Entitlement spending doesn't make one bit of difference. These days, NASA gets less than 0.5% of the federal budget. The Pentagon wastes more money in a month than NASA spends in a year. The only reason Congress doesn't double or triple NASA's budget is that they see no political gain in it for themselves without earmarking the money for projects that will never be finished.
(2) Don't know how this is relevant. We knew all along that making ourselves beholden to Russia for manned spaceflight was a bad idea, but Bush and the last Congress did it anyways. If Ukraine hadn't happened, something else probably would have sooner or later.
(3) is flat-out wrong. If you hadn't noticed, the NASA Chief Administrator is a former astronaut himself--not some lawyer who was handed the job on a silver platter for ass-kissing. NASA managers are probably the most competent team in the whole federal government (not least because so many of them are actual rocket scientists), which is why we are able to do so many amazing projects in spite of the idiotic budget cuts that get thrown at us.
Thud's response was far more accurate:
(0) is an accurate characterization of the SLS-Orion project, the official successor to the shuttle and informally known as the "Senate Launch System". This is why we had to contract SpaceX to actually build a rocket, as opposed to pretend to build while distributing pork.
(-1) is really the same thing as (0).
You're also forgetting the stupid decision to start the Shuttle program (instead of using Apollo-like rockets and capsules to launch people into orbit, for far less money), and also the complete mismanagement of our foreign policy by the morons in the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan Administrations.
Russia isn't what it used to be...it's anarchy now...basically a gas station that also acts as a front for criminal activities
On a map the country looks big...that's about all they have going for them...that and their oil and illegal activities
The thing is, I agree that most people don't care about Russia being able to do something we cannot...because its temporary and Russia is just a noisy lapdog for international criminals and illuminati
Thank you Dave Raggett
Remember that any object fired from a gun has maximum velocity as it leaves the barrel/rail (it immediately begins to slow due to air friction. Your spacecraft, fired from a gun will, therefore be at its highest Mach number in the low atmosphere and the plasma that forms around it (both from friction and from aerodynamic compression) will be far higher than ANYTHING the space shuttle faced on re-entry (higher even than an Apollo on lunar return).
Current re-usable thermal tile tech would not be good enough (shuttle tiles would melt) so you'd need VERY HEAVY ablative protection (like Soyuz, Apollo, Mercury, Gemin, Orion, etc) which would be consumed during launch and then another thermal protection system for re-entry at the end of the mission. Also, most of the mountains on Earth are not tall enough to give you enough of an advantage to buy what you think. 15K feet sounds high when we talk about mountains, but any reasonable orbit as at a minimum altitude of something like 500K feet; That mountain you dream of buys you only a tiny fraction of the needed altitude, and while it DOES get you up out of the deepest, thickest air it is NOT enough to help a lot. When you travel at high Mach numbers, thin air still seems thick and still gets REALLY hot. Remember that the SR-71, WAY up high at 80K feet (5 to 8 times higher than the mountain) at only Mach3 still experienced skin temps in excess of 500 degrees F.
I think you should read the entire thread here:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
It's an AMAZING thing to read, when a physicist explains the basics. He comments:
"This set of responses has been a real eye-opener for me. I never appreciated the almost cult-like religious fervor behind the assumption of a future in space."
You can't really reason with the religiously deluded, you can see that here already. But it's simply baffling and mind-boggling the deep faith geeks have about space, even though it's trivial to show how completely unfeasible any of the fantasies are.
And the doomsday scenarios! The same people who'd laugh at the Jehovah's Witnesses doomsday have their very own doomsday scenarios!
I'm kind of surprised no one has pointed out that Orbital Sciences is not working on any sort of man-rated spacecraft. The Cygnus, which is used for ISS cargo deliveries, is designed to burn up in the atmosphere and has never been desinged in any way to be man-rated. Other than SpaceX, the other companies working on man-rated spacecraft are Boeing with the CST-100, Sierra Nevada Corp with the Dream Chaser, and Blue Origin which keeps information close to the chest.
Well trampoline is good , it works, but I recommend using a good quality catapult.
Yes, the Bush admin was stupid to plan to end the Shuttle program before having their replacement "Constellation" program up-and-running (so the money used to operate the shuttles could be shifted to development of the new system - which was scheduled to be operational for ISS missions by 2013). The shuttle program was not, however, irreversibly gone when Obama came into office. President Obama not only put the final nail in the coffin of the shuttle program, but his administration:
1. Ordered the shuttle infrastruture to be either demolished or sold-off so that the decision could never be undone.
2. Cancelled the follow-on Constellation program
3. Cancelled ALL American manned spaceflight programs in his 2010 budget proposal (which congress UNANIMOUSLY threw into the trash bin). Yes, he has subsequently seen how unpopular this was and has extended the life of the ISS (an easy bone to throw to activists) but he has done nothing to make sure a new system is in place while he is still in office (which he COULD have easily done with some of the hundreds of billions of dollars in his "stimulus bill")
4. After the Contellation program ended, and congress DEMANDED in their 2010 NASA budget law that Obama have NASA build a big new rocket to enable future Moon and Mars missions, Obama's team decided to rip all the re-usable engines out of the shuttles and prepare them for one-time use on the giant new rocket (each flight will use four shuttle engines for less than 8 minutes and then crash them into the ocean). EVERY shuttle in a museum display now has dummy engines, and none will be left for future engineers to study (the way young engineers today are able to go study real Apollo engines - one of which was recently removed from storage and had its powerpack test-fired on a test stand with modern instruments)
5. Obama has added $40 BILLION PER YEAR to the food stamp program, doubling its cost (which whould have been unneeded had his economic plans succeeded in reviving the economy and is not matched to poverty rates which have NOT doubled since Bush left office), and in 2009 spent about $850 BILLION on "stimulus" but he currently is proposing to cut the NASA budget (which is approx $17 Billion per year) ...... but at this very same time, Obama is picking a fight with congress over funding for "commercial crew" of only several hundred million dollars.
The real point I'm making is that the policy wonks in the permanent political establishment of Washington D.C. (both Republican AND Democrat) has always hated spending money on manned spaceflight; the OMB has tried to get presidents to kill the shuttle program for decades. With the loss of Columbia in 2003, the anti-spaceflight Republican-leaning budget wonks helped convince the Bush team to kill the shuttle, but failed to get him to abandon manned spaceflight. When Obama got into office (after campaigning on a promise to teachers unions that he would shift money from NASA to education for 5 years) he went on the anti-manned-spaceflight war path to the delight of the anti-spaceflight Democrats (who'd been trying to gut NASA since Walter Mondale tried to use the Apollo 1 fire to do it). The current sad state of NASA is a bi-partisan mess that the establishment in Washington D.C. WANTED.... these things are NOT conspiracies but they are also NOT accidents. In 1959 we could put monkeys into space and we currently cannot.
NASA under Obama has a "commercial crew program" (a manned follow-up to the currently successful Bush administration "commercial cargo program") which pretends to provide a bright future BUT the commercial vendors are making systems for access to the ISS which will go away in the 2024-2028 timeframe leaving them with no destination and no NASA funding. If you want those commercial guys to succeed over the long-term, NASA needs to need them for access to LEO (for a space station and/or to meet-up with trans-lunar vehicles) at a high-enough flight rate (supporting rare mars bootprints-and-flags missions won't be enough) to justify all the overhead and infrastructure.
While I'm not defending Russia, I think there is one reason for this hard-line rhetoric:
Russia has a lot of borders, from Finland in the west to the US in the east. Historically, Russia has learned that the slightest sign of weakness, they get invaded. Hell, even the US went into Russia after WWI (although we did stop Japan from making a major incursion a year or two later.) So, they have a right to be paranoid.
There is a mindset with some of Russia's neighbors, especially near the Middle East: Some of them view strength above anything else. Their world view is that if they are not running from an enemy, they are running at an enemy.
Because of this, and the sagging economy Russia has had, they have to maintain a strong posture, even if it costs them economically. If they don't, Russian land can turn Chinese as easily as Tibet did.
Yes, Russia is scary (especially talking with people who lived life behind the Iron Curtain before the USSR fell), their leadership can be extremely brutal, and it isn't good that we are on the verge of another Cold War, but not many people (especially people in the US) understand the history of Russia and thus their siege mentality mindset.
Emigration to space never makes sense once you do the maths. The escape velocity of Earth is 11.2 kilometers per second. Assume that a human is around 100kg, the energy required to accelerate the human to escape velocity (assuming 100% efficient propulsion and no support equipment required) is around 6.2GJ, or 1.7MWh to put it into a more consumer-friendly terms. The average American (to pick the country with the highest per-capita energy consumption) uses around 87kWh per year, so the cost of getting a human away from Earth, assuming perfect conditions, is around 20 times their energy consumption living on Earth for a year. Even assuming a space elevator and the most optimistic efficiency numbers, getting into space for less than your lifetime total energy consumption on the ground is difficult.
And that's just the economic argument. The population growth rate is currently sitting at about 1% per annum. That means about 70 million more people are born every year than die. For exporting people into space to be feasible for reducing the population, you need to ship 70 million people into space per year, or around 200,000 per day. That's in the same ballpark as the total number of air passengers today, including short-haul flights.
Combining these two, the total energy cost is 340GWh (1.24PJ) per day, or 126TWh (450PJ) per year. To put that in perspective, the total energy consumption of the world in 2008 was around 140,000TWh, so you're only talking about 1% of the total energy consumption of the world for your colonisation project - assuming theoretically impossible technology and that everyone goes naked. It typically takes a minimum of ten times as much mass for life support equipment as for passengers, so now you're up to 10%. Even optimistic efficiency numbers bump this closer to 50%. If you actually want them to go somewhere with enough equipment to do something vaguely like colonisation, then you're up to over 100% the total energy production of the world today and a throughput of 2-3 people boarding every second constantly, all day, all year round.
A more compelling argument is that having some self-sustaining colonies in space means that a global catastrophe won't kill all humans. We're still a long way away from being able to build one though, and it's not clear that investing in things like the ISS are actually taking us in that direction. Just as NASA likes to tout how spin-offs from space research have helped other industries, significant improvements in technology used in space have come from elsewhere.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
George Soros (the planet's ONLY proud and unrepentant actual NAZI collaborator billionaire) who makes money manipulating currencies (rather than from productive industry) is FINE in Left-wing circles because he funds most of their groups (usually laundered through his "Open Society Foundation" and its vast array of spin-offs with similarly deceptive "nice" sounding names).
Warren Buffet is a "good guy" for them too, even though his Berkshire Hathaway was once a productive manufacturer with a bunch of middle-class employees (before he layed them all off and converted it into a shell for his financial business) and even though he now has lots of money in oil-tanker rail road cars (ever wonder WHY Obama cannot OK the Keystone XL Pipeline? It would only be one more in a large number of pipes, and the oil will be pumped and used anyway, but that pipe which union construction guys really want jobs building would eliminate the need for a lot of rail cars... leaving Obama with a multi-pronged dilemma)
Bill Gates is a "good guy" on the left (in non-Steve-Jobs-fanboy circles) as long as he funds lots of "good" liberal causes.
Elon Musk is FINE on the left ... the guy burns TONS of kerosene with ZERO emissions controls with every rocket launch, but they love his elctric cars and they love that he is competing against big defense contractors (who they ignorantly percieve to be aligned with "the right", ignorantly because big defense firms fund ANY politivian they think will mean big contracts)
The left was ok with billionaire Bloomberg (who EVERYBODY knew was a phony Republican before he finally admitted it and went "independent" and then attacked table salt, sugar, and "big gulps")
The left is perfectly OK with rich people (Hillary Clinton is ROLLING in money, as are Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, etc). They're even ok with THEIR people making profits (like all the people who invest in "green" companies that then get huge government grants and loans and then go bankrupt leaving all that cash in the investor hands and the taxpayer holding the debts)
They DO NOT percieve profit to be bad.... they talk like that to rev-up the young-and-dumb part of their base that thinks it's cool to wear Che' shirts, and they talk like that when they want to "tax the rich" (by which they mean the middle class, since they NEVER actually boost taxes on guys like Gates and Buffet) to provide more services that buy the votes of lots of the poor. Everybody in the US can pay as much as they want in taxes every year as long as they pay at least what they owe.... did you ever notice how many super-rich lefties have said "I should pay higher taxes" and/or "I'm perfectly willing to pay higher taxes" as part of an effort to get the middle-class to accept higher taxes???? Those rich guys only SAY this; they do not just sit down and write a big check to the treasury which they certainly would if they were sincere. They've got armies of accountants and lawyers making sure they use every loophole available to them (something the average middle-class person cannot do)
SpaceX should name their first manned vehicle "Trampoline" and watch Dmitry Rogozin's head explode when it delivers astronauts to IIS.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to burn your house down now. You might as well go into a church and yell "there is no God!".
I think most nerds that have irrational beliefs about space are programmers, they just simply have no idea about practical physical reality.
Which is funny because it's far more likely we'll be able to build a Matrix-style VR than getting just 15 people to live on the Moon for a year.
I'm not sure exactly why the fantasies and propaganda from the space age are so hard to kill, but there you have it.
I don't believe that Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK as of last week) has any near-term plans for carrying people. Orbital's Antares rocket, which is what they use for the commercial cargo program for ISS, was only ever planned for cargo (And incidentally also uses Russian engines, the NK-33).
The Sierra Nevada Corporation is making their Dream Chaser spacecraft for manned flight, but it relies on the Atlas V as a launch vehicle.
So the only way we are going to get people into space without the Russians, before the SLS is done, is getting the Delta IV heavy human rated, or, SpaceX.
Baffling response.
It would be cool if SpaceX renamed Dragon to Trampoline in response.
"Rogozin does actually have a point, although his threats carry much less weight than he may hope. Russia is due to get a $457.9 million payment for its services soon and few believe that Russia would actually give it up."
Apparently Russian energy exports (which is what this whole thing is about) is worth about 160 BILLION dollars annually.
I am not event sure that 458 Million dollars is an annual figure, but even if it is:
0.458/160*100 = 0.286 or about 0.3% of the money at stake here.
If you don't think the Russians (Putin) would be willing to eat 0.3% for a chance to very publicly and embarrassingly throw it into Obama's face at a global scale, you may be mistaken...
Even if he does eat the 0.3%, it's not like Putin has to worry about being re-elected...
badda boom ting... I'm here all week, try the veal it's excellent! :)
Makes me wonder why you think that's a valid response. The equivalent would be if Columbus just floated in a circle half a mile from the coast of Spain, never brought back anything of any value, but kept yelling about how everyone in Spain will die if they don't build more boats. That's the Nutter "logic".
Great business model though, Columbus getting Queen Isabella to dip into the treasury to fund experiments studying the reproductive habits of various salamanders while underway off the coast. The only thing Columbus would have to worry about is some upstart named "Sea-X" convincing Isabella that unfettered capitalism is much more efficient and patriotic than having Spanish taxpayers shell out (no pun intended) for a socialized sea program, and getting a contract to deliver salamanders to the Sea Station using funds executed off the very same Accounts Payable.
A big difference is that the Ukrainian doesn't have the biggest baddest military on the planet.
6.2 GJ is also the heat content of a whopping 51 US gallons of gasoline. I use that much per month commuting to and from work.
ISS isn't space. It's a LEO publicity stunt. The moon is space. Mars is space. ISS is just a jobs program, and a way to justify funding.
The ISS is a research platform we need because there is a lot of things we need to know how to do before we can go to "space". If we were serious about getting to "space" we'd double our efforts at the ISS and probably have to build an ISS2. Once we've learned enough to actually build a deep space habitat, then we can look at going to "space".
We could have found a better project for our space industry. The ISS was a make work project... in space.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I remember an article (by Carl Sagan?) that argued that, even if a US-Soviet space station or mission to Mars were not justifiable from a scientific point of view, they worked as an example that peaceful collaboration among the superpowers was possible.
If both countries can't coordinate on keeping human presence in orbit, that's sad.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This could be entertaining. While the U.S. is using trampolines to get astronauts to the ISS; Russia can use a catapult to get supplies to it.
Funny how it took a *bit* more than that to get Alan Shepard even just to a sub-orbital speed. Perhaps you should share your amazing insights into technology with NASA?
That may be over-thinking. As we already saw in "Prometheus," in the future arrival at some mystery planet proceeds to immediate landing on visual at some place along the flight trajectory, hopefully flattish.
Way easier.
My fingers get tired in the outer troposphere, though. Need better gloves.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Thank you, Dmitry, for reminding us Americans how untrustworthy you Russians are.
C'mon! You did not figure the AC was joking ( or badly trolling) at the mention of New Zealand?
NZ does not even have a fighter jet, so I'd say Burkina Faso has a better space capability.
boston "wicked" or regular?
No, the second player just has to pick a box that precludes a win. Like first player picks a corner, 2nd should pick one of the center boxes
Not just that - w/ a population of just 150M, Russia is heavily underpopulated, and prone to invasion. It would be trivial for the Chinese to walk in & annex Eastern Siberia. As it is, Russia struggled just to keep Chechnya subdued: it would be tough for them to keep their borders intact w/o nukes.
Assume that a human is around 100kg, the energy required to accelerate the human to escape velocity (assuming 100% efficient propulsion and no support equipment required) is around 6.2GJ, or 1.7MWh to put it into a more consumer-friendly terms. The average American (to pick the country with the highest per-capita energy consumption) uses around 87kWh per year, so the cost of getting a human away from Earth, assuming perfect conditions, is around 20 times their energy consumption living on Earth for a year.
Check your numbers. I pay for close to 1.2MWh per year in electricity alone. Then there's heating, transportation, ... – and I'm not even American.
According to this table, US per capita energy consumption is about 84MWh/year. You're off by a factor of 1000.
I'll tell you what's Wicked! The play, Wicked. It's pretty good.
Exactly what I thought of when I read Archtech's post...
I'll tell you what's Wicked! The play, Wicked. It's wicked good.
FTFY.
So many lies in here, and yet, you neo-cons/tea* will stop at nothing. Not worth even trying to rebute.