Disclaimer: I am a rocket scientist. I worked for Boeing for 25 years doing space transportation and space station work. Real name is "Dani Eder", look me up.
The problem with the big rocket approach is that it is exactly as hard to make the next trip as the last trip. What we should be doing is building infrastructure to make future trips easier. My current favored approach, which is subject to change as new ideas come along is to:
* Use a hypervelocity gun on a mountain in Equador to launch small cargoes of supplies on a regular basis in tens to hundreds of kg per shot. Build up a manned base station there using robots to do the initial assembly work. People come later via ordinary rocket. * At your low orbit station, assemble VASIMR type plasma rockets which can chug to nearby asteroids and return ~20x their weight in asteroid mass per trip. Choose a carbonaceous type asteroid, and use the carbon to start making space elevator cable. Use the metallic component to expand the orbital base. Use the oxygen component as more fuel for future trips. You will need some chemical and metal processing equipment to do that, send it up in parts via your gun. * As your space elevator cable grows, use the plasma rocket to raise the orbit gradually until it reaches about 30% of a full space elevator. That is the practical limit with carbon fiber we can make now (if we learn how to make better carbon fiber later, great, update the plans and upgrade the fiber). 30% is very useful. Take 30% off the velocity to reach earth orbit,and reuseable single stage to orbit vehicles become fairly easy to make. 70% of orbital velocity means 50% of kinetic energy relative to standard rockets. * 30% above orbital speed on the upper end of the elevator cable is nearly escape velocity (which is 41% above orbital). So you are nearly able to get anywhere outside earth orbit. To start with that is grabbing more asteroid stuff to expand your system. * Lunar orbit velocity is 21% of Earth orbit velocity. So if we can build a 30% Earth space elevator, we can build a full space elevator on the Moon. Now we can take off and land on the Moon with negligible fuel use. * Since we already know how to make habitats and oxygen out of local materials, and use the O2 for fuel, we can pretty much spread out through all the nearby asteroids and the Moon. When we get to Phobos and Deimos, we can build a space elevator going down to Mars. Oh hey, Mars orbit velocity is 45% of Earth's, so our space elevator technology can take care of 2/3 of the velocity to land, the rest is by some aerobraking and landing jets. Going up we can get our oxygen from the Martian atmosphere (its CO2), and only need to get to 1/3 of orbital speed to reach the elevator, so getting to and from Mars is relatively easy all around.
For a conventional rocket, to some extent you are correct. The aerospace industry has lots of experience with a "learning curve", the more of the same kind of item you make on a production line, the more you learn how to do it faster and cheaper. But there is a "forgetting curve", so if you do it less than two per month, in the couple of weeks between instances of the same task, your production workers *forget*, and you don't gain from experience. So yeah, do it often enough, and costs should come down.
Conventional rockets have to fight physics, part of which is the Earth's atmosphere and fuel tank shapes. To minimize drag, you want a skinny rocket, to minimize tank weight, you want a spherical fuel tank. Below a certain size, aerodynamics wins, and the rockts are skinny, but weight-inefficient. Once the get to around 200 ft tall, mass per unit area of the rocket is much larger than mass per unit area of the atmosphere (14.7 psi or 101kPa), so rockets get fatter rather than taller after that.
If you have jet boosters on your rocket rather than solid rockets, that forumula gets reversed. Air breathing engines want area, more air means more thrust.
I worked on a "Shuttle-Derived Cargo Launch Vehicle" in the Mid 1980's. It was an obvious answer to the low payload capacity of the orbiter. I see NASA has finally caught on to this idea after we proposed it to them about 5 times over the years in various studies.
(Given the rate of management turnover, they would forget someone already did the study, and pay for it again and again)
I look forward to when they catch up to studies we did in the 1990's (giant space guns, and ultra-tall towers)
I have had it running for two years (Since Oct 2009), and it has not crashed or required reinstallation in all that time. It does what I need it to do and doesn't get in the way. Note that I have an Intel i7 based workstation running Win7 x64 Ultimate on 6 GB of memory and a decent graphics card. Your Archos tablet was running a brain damaged version of Win7 (starter edition) on inadequate hardware, so it's no wonder you had a bad experience with it. XP is more appropriate since it can be set up for much lower minimum resources. There is also the matter of how much crapware the vendor installed on your tablet. I had mine built at the local PC shop and told them to put in the OS and anti-malware and nothing else.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
The way to think of Second Life is a distributed game company. Most games, the code, the game servers, and the game content are all done by one company. In Second Life the servers are run by the host company (Linden Research Inc.) The code is open source for the "Viewer" (the program you download and run to play Second Life). A majority of users actually run alternate versions of the Viewer made third parties, that have better features than the official one. And lastly, 99% of the content is made by a subset of the users themselves. As a form of entertainment, it has staying power among the creative "do it yourself" crowd. If you want your game handed to you all pre-made and not have to do anything but play, it's not for you.
The subject of the story, Ailin Graef, made her major start by providing nicer virtual land than was being offered by the owners of Second Life. People liked it, and were willing to pay for it. Like any other entertainment, such as Netflix, or reading Science Fiction novels, it needs no justification. If you find it entertaining, great, if not, find something else to do. I have not made as much as Ailin, but I have made a good amount providing 3D entertainment - enough to buy two new computers...ten times over, and that's doing it as a hobby from home, mostly in Second Life. I'm grateful people found what I did enjoyable, and I had fun creating it. Making stuff is another form of entertainment, for some people.
There is no scam or ripoff here. You can play Second Life entirely free, forever. But about half the users spend some real money each month to get something made by someone else. Just like buying the latest first person shooter game, or a movie ticket, it's an entertainment expense.
The United States Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Alabama that the freedom of association is an essential part of the Freedom of Speech because, in many cases, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others:
"We hold that the immunity from state scrutiny of membership lists which the Association claims on behalf of its members is here so related to the right of the members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in so doing as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment" ( NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 US 449 - Supreme Court 1958 )
The previous post has it right. Some areas of research, like, say, microprocessor design, are getting plenty of money. For interstellar travel, the question is what areas are *not* getting enough, or even any, funding? Figuring out where the holes are you can do for 500K. Filling the holes, obviously, will take more, but you can at least get started on them at a low level.
Some basic questions include:
(1) In 100 years, would we be sending humans? or an AI? (2) Since technology keeps improving (we hope), how short does the trip need to be so that ship A built in 2100 is not passed by ship B built in 2120 which can travel faster? (3) Do you plan for "a mission" (one of a kind thing), or general diffusion of society to the planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, then other stars (many shorter trips in all directions) (4) Where are we going? a Centauri, because it's closest? The nearest star with a bunch of planets? Do we even need planets? If we have learned to live all over the Solar System, including the Asteroid Belt, maybe we just need a star and some rocks to use.
Haas Automation, the largest automated machine tool maker in the US uses automated machine tools to make more automated machine tools. They use several hundred of their own products on their factory floor. This also lets them test out their product in a real working environment.
Actually they are about to release 3d model import as a new feature, along with improved lighting and shadows, so yes, they are upgrading the graphics.
"I mean, seriously. Until I can purchase groceries, or pay my mortgage or utility bill, with this stuff, it's about as useful to me as WoW gold."
Considering I paid for this computer, and the one before that, with money I made in Second Life using their virtual currency, I find game money quite useful. What made that possible is Linden Lab (the owners of Second Life) cashes out game money to PayPal. As long as there is a path to getting your local currency, someone will take bitcoins for goods and services.
There was not much to spend L$ on when Second Life was two months old. Because the mining pool for bitcoins has been growing exponentially, the *average* miner has only been at it for two months. In it's early days, Second Life paid people in game money simply for having an account, or literally for hanging around a location in the game (that was called "dwell"). Those initial efforts seeded the economy by giving people non-zero game money balances. Once there was a way to cash out the game money, which came a little later, now people had an incentive to offer products and services.
I see bitcoin as in that early seeding of the economy, getting balances in people's hands. The exchanges are already in place to enable cashing out (there is even one offering to exchange bitcoins for L$). The offering of products and services is only just starting, and takes a while to set up. I do graphics design and 3D modeling, and currently take payment via Paypal, Linden Dollars, and Blue Mars Dollars. I'll be happy to take bitcons too, once I have verified the path to cashing out works. To do that, I am mining a little each day at the moment, and when it's accumulated to enough to bother, I will test one of the exchanges. If it works, it will be the fourth electronic currency I deal in.
As a buyer you would pay for an item with bitcoins if the seller had something you wanted enough. I have made money the last 5 years in two virtual worlds with electronic currencies, mostly Second Life on that basis. That the currencies are not backed by anything is irrelevant. Convertibility is what matters. As long as the currency does not fail between the time the buyer exchanges "real money" for the electronic currency, and the time I exchange it back to real money, we are happy.
Bitcoin having a distributed P2P verification system and multiple exchanges means it is more resistant to failing than those virtual worlds, which depend on a single company to operate the currency. Note that national currencies have failed too.
""as little as an hour" in monitory transfer terms IS instantaneous. In case it wasn't completely clear the transfer is instantaneous, it takes as little as an hour to be 100% sure that it is completely irreversible."
In paper check terms, the transit time to the payee is seconds, the time for the transaction to clear is an hour. Bitcoin beats the heck out of PayPal, which has much higher fees, and still takes several days to get a withdrawal into my checking account (from a supposedly electronic system).
I think what is needed is the other half of a transaction system. Bitcoin handles the secure transfer of account balance from one person to another, but we need a secure way to ensure the delivery of whatever it is you are buying with the coin. Something like a cryptographically signed delivery contract which replaces old style paper contracts as proof of what was agreed to. The signed contract gets delivered first, then the coins and whatever goods are being traded get delivered.
Obviously Saturn has reached it's industrial age, and we are seeing the plume from their smokestacks. Beware our future giant planet steampunk overlords.
Rather than a virtual currency backed by computational complexity, I suggest one backed by labor. The standard unit is 1 hour of unskilled labor. Other labor is negotiated at some multiple of that unit. So programmer time might be valued at 10 or 20 units per hour. Whoever you do work for pays you with a promise to supply the negotiated units in return. The promise goes into an electronic system with cryptographic security, etc. Now you can trade your positive promise balance to other people for whatever it is they supply. The person who made the original promise extinguishes it when they do something for someone else. They can use the units they get to extinguish the units they owe.
Number of bullets (rogue planets): roughly 1 per 8 square light years Size of target (the Earth): 0.02 light seconds x 0.02 light seconds Number of seconds in a year: 31,556,925 Impact probablility: 19,916,790,309,112,500,000 to 1
Assume rogue planets have random velocities of 100 km/s (probably too high a number) Then bullet frequency will be around one per 10,000 years. So impact probability per year is that very large number above times 10,000. Stop worrying.
Create one or more "currency warehouses" to store the 20's. This is not a bank which lends, merely a storehouse. Two parties can transfer ownership by both sending encrypted messages to the warehouse. Withdrawal can be in person or request a shipment of cash hidden inside something innocuous, like an external hard drive case.
@AC1 - are you conscious when asleep or under medical procedure? The assumption is that an atomic detail copy contains all the detail to recreate the person, including their consciousness. If you don't agree, then where is the extra data stored in the body? I assume the traveler lays down in and operating type room, put to sleep so they don't move around, then is scanned. The copy wakes up in reverse order, first body set in operation (heart started, etc), then woken up.
@mdsolar - even if you have access to lots of energy, and it's expected in the future we will, why spend a million times more than you need to? We don't know how to scan humans in sufficient detail right now, but then we don't know how to build an interstellar propulsion system either. Given the equal lack of knowledge, it makes sense to research the one that gives the lower energy solution first. If that doesn't work, then follow the other path.
@AC2 - I would assume copy retains the thoughts of the original, including the intent to go. If the scan is non-destructive, you end up with the original, and a copy. From the point of view of the original, they have a 50/50 chance of waking up at the destination, and an equal chance of waking up still on Earth as the original. You also have the moral issues of making local copies within the Solar System, where they *can* meet.
If the scan is destructive, it is now a long range version of the Star Trek transporter, with only one copy at a time. The original is destroyed at the origin, and re-constructed at the receiver. However you can get around this by transmitting the data several times to different destinations, including right back to a receiver near the transmitter.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I am a rocket scientist. I worked for Boeing for 25 years doing space transportation and space station work. Real name is "Dani Eder", look me up.
The problem with the big rocket approach is that it is exactly as hard to make the next trip as the last trip. What we should be doing is building infrastructure to make future trips easier. My current favored approach, which is subject to change as new ideas come along is to:
* Use a hypervelocity gun on a mountain in Equador to launch small cargoes of supplies on a regular basis in tens to hundreds of kg per shot. Build up a manned base station there using robots to do the initial assembly work. People come later via ordinary rocket.
* At your low orbit station, assemble VASIMR type plasma rockets which can chug to nearby asteroids and return ~20x their weight in asteroid mass per trip. Choose a carbonaceous type asteroid, and use the carbon to start making space elevator cable. Use the metallic component to expand the orbital base. Use the oxygen component as more fuel for future trips. You will need some chemical and metal processing equipment to do that, send it up in parts via your gun.
* As your space elevator cable grows, use the plasma rocket to raise the orbit gradually until it reaches about 30% of a full space elevator. That is the practical limit with carbon fiber we can make now (if we learn how to make better carbon fiber later, great, update the plans and upgrade the fiber). 30% is very useful. Take 30% off the velocity to reach earth orbit,and reuseable single stage to orbit vehicles become fairly easy to make. 70% of orbital velocity means 50% of kinetic energy relative to standard rockets.
* 30% above orbital speed on the upper end of the elevator cable is nearly escape velocity (which is 41% above orbital). So you are nearly able to get anywhere outside earth orbit. To start with that is grabbing more asteroid stuff to expand your system.
* Lunar orbit velocity is 21% of Earth orbit velocity. So if we can build a 30% Earth space elevator, we can build a full space elevator on the Moon. Now we can take off and land on the Moon with negligible fuel use.
* Since we already know how to make habitats and oxygen out of local materials, and use the O2 for fuel, we can pretty much spread out through all the nearby asteroids and the Moon. When we get to Phobos and Deimos, we can build a space elevator going down to Mars. Oh hey, Mars orbit velocity is 45% of Earth's, so our space elevator technology can take care of 2/3 of the velocity to land, the rest is by some aerobraking and landing jets. Going up we can get our oxygen from the Martian atmosphere (its CO2), and only need to get to 1/3 of orbital speed to reach the elevator, so getting to and from Mars is relatively easy all around.
For a conventional rocket, to some extent you are correct. The aerospace industry has lots of experience with a "learning curve", the more of the same kind of item you make on a production line, the more you learn how to do it faster and cheaper. But there is a "forgetting curve", so if you do it less than two per month, in the couple of weeks between instances of the same task, your production workers *forget*, and you don't gain from experience. So yeah, do it often enough, and costs should come down.
Conventional rockets have to fight physics, part of which is the Earth's atmosphere and fuel tank shapes. To minimize drag, you want a skinny rocket, to minimize tank weight, you want a spherical fuel tank. Below a certain size, aerodynamics wins, and the rockts are skinny, but weight-inefficient. Once the get to around 200 ft tall, mass per unit area of the rocket is much larger than mass per unit area of the atmosphere (14.7 psi or 101kPa), so rockets get fatter rather than taller after that.
If you have jet boosters on your rocket rather than solid rockets, that forumula gets reversed. Air breathing engines want area, more air means more thrust.
I worked on a "Shuttle-Derived Cargo Launch Vehicle" in the Mid 1980's. It was an obvious answer to the low payload capacity of the orbiter. I see NASA has finally caught on to this idea after we proposed it to them about 5 times over the years in various studies.
(Given the rate of management turnover, they would forget someone already did the study, and pay for it again and again)
I look forward to when they catch up to studies we did in the 1990's (giant space guns, and ultra-tall towers)
I have had it running for two years (Since Oct 2009), and it has not crashed or required reinstallation in all that time. It does what I need it to do and doesn't get in the way. Note that I have an Intel i7 based workstation running Win7 x64 Ultimate on 6 GB of memory and a decent graphics card. Your Archos tablet was running a brain damaged version of Win7 (starter edition) on inadequate hardware, so it's no wonder you had a bad experience with it. XP is more appropriate since it can be set up for much lower minimum resources. There is also the matter of how much crapware the vendor installed on your tablet. I had mine built at the local PC shop and told them to put in the OS and anti-malware and nothing else.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
They have a cloaking device which surrounds the entire planet, and are playing with a huge tractor beam.
If Google wants a scan of an identity card to prove your identity, I guess there will be a nice business for someone to Photoshop ID cards.
The way to think of Second Life is a distributed game company. Most games, the code, the game servers, and the game content are all done by one company. In Second Life the servers are run by the host company (Linden Research Inc.) The code is open source for the "Viewer" (the program you download and run to play Second Life). A majority of users actually run alternate versions of the Viewer made third parties, that have better features than the official one. And lastly, 99% of the content is made by a subset of the users themselves. As a form of entertainment, it has staying power among the creative "do it yourself" crowd. If you want your game handed to you all pre-made and not have to do anything but play, it's not for you.
The subject of the story, Ailin Graef, made her major start by providing nicer virtual land than was being offered by the owners of Second Life. People liked it, and were willing to pay for it. Like any other entertainment, such as Netflix, or reading Science Fiction novels, it needs no justification. If you find it entertaining, great, if not, find something else to do. I have not made as much as Ailin, but I have made a good amount providing 3D entertainment - enough to buy two new computers...ten times over, and that's doing it as a hobby from home, mostly in Second Life. I'm grateful people found what I did enjoyable, and I had fun creating it. Making stuff is another form of entertainment, for some people.
There is no scam or ripoff here. You can play Second Life entirely free, forever. But about half the users spend some real money each month to get something made by someone else. Just like buying the latest first person shooter game, or a movie ticket, it's an entertainment expense.
The United States Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Alabama that the freedom of association is an essential part of the Freedom of Speech because, in many cases, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others:
"We hold that the immunity from state scrutiny of membership lists which the Association claims on behalf of its members is here so related to the right of the members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in so doing as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment" ( NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 US 449 - Supreme Court 1958 )
The previous post has it right. Some areas of research, like, say, microprocessor design, are getting plenty of money. For interstellar travel, the question is what areas are *not* getting enough, or even any, funding? Figuring out where the holes are you can do for 500K. Filling the holes, obviously, will take more, but you can at least get started on them at a low level.
Some basic questions include:
(1) In 100 years, would we be sending humans? or an AI?
(2) Since technology keeps improving (we hope), how short does the trip need to be so that ship A built in 2100 is not passed by ship B built in 2120 which can travel faster?
(3) Do you plan for "a mission" (one of a kind thing), or general diffusion of society to the planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, then other stars (many shorter trips in all directions)
(4) Where are we going? a Centauri, because it's closest? The nearest star with a bunch of planets? Do we even need planets? If we have learned to live all over the Solar System, including the Asteroid Belt, maybe we just need a star and some rocks to use.
Haas Automation, the largest automated machine tool maker in the US uses automated machine tools to make more automated machine tools. They use several hundred of their own products on their factory floor. This also lets them test out their product in a real working environment.
Actually they are about to release 3d model import as a new feature, along with improved lighting and shadows, so yes, they are upgrading the graphics.
In case of the zombie apocalypse, this is what you can distract them with. Add poison or high explosives, and much hilarity ensues.
"I mean, seriously. Until I can purchase groceries, or pay my mortgage or utility bill, with this stuff, it's about as useful to me as WoW gold."
Considering I paid for this computer, and the one before that, with money I made in Second Life using their virtual currency, I find game money quite useful. What made that possible is Linden Lab (the owners of Second Life) cashes out game money to PayPal. As long as there is a path to getting your local currency, someone will take bitcoins for goods and services.
There was not much to spend L$ on when Second Life was two months old. Because the mining pool for bitcoins has been growing exponentially, the *average* miner has only been at it for two months. In it's early days, Second Life paid people in game money simply for having an account, or literally for hanging around a location in the game (that was called "dwell"). Those initial efforts seeded the economy by giving people non-zero game money balances. Once there was a way to cash out the game money, which came a little later, now people had an incentive to offer products and services.
I see bitcoin as in that early seeding of the economy, getting balances in people's hands. The exchanges are already in place to enable cashing out (there is even one offering to exchange bitcoins for L$). The offering of products and services is only just starting, and takes a while to set up. I do graphics design and 3D modeling, and currently take payment via Paypal, Linden Dollars, and Blue Mars Dollars. I'll be happy to take bitcons too, once I have verified the path to cashing out works. To do that, I am mining a little each day at the moment, and when it's accumulated to enough to bother, I will test one of the exchanges. If it works, it will be the fourth electronic currency I deal in.
As a buyer you would pay for an item with bitcoins if the seller had something you wanted enough. I have made money the last 5 years in two virtual worlds with electronic currencies, mostly Second Life on that basis. That the currencies are not backed by anything is irrelevant. Convertibility is what matters. As long as the currency does not fail between the time the buyer exchanges "real money" for the electronic currency, and the time I exchange it back to real money, we are happy.
Bitcoin having a distributed P2P verification system and multiple exchanges means it is more resistant to failing than those virtual worlds, which depend on a single company to operate the currency. Note that national currencies have failed too.
""as little as an hour" in monitory transfer terms IS instantaneous. In case it wasn't completely clear the transfer is instantaneous, it takes as little as an hour to be 100% sure that it is completely irreversible."
In paper check terms, the transit time to the payee is seconds, the time for the transaction to clear is an hour. Bitcoin beats the heck out of PayPal, which has much higher fees, and still takes several days to get a withdrawal into my checking account (from a supposedly electronic system).
I think what is needed is the other half of a transaction system. Bitcoin handles the secure transfer of account balance from one person to another, but we need a secure way to ensure the delivery of whatever it is you are buying with the coin. Something like a cryptographically signed delivery contract which replaces old style paper contracts as proof of what was agreed to. The signed contract gets delivered first, then the coins and whatever goods are being traded get delivered.
Photo apparently stolen from here:
http://journal.crossfit.com/2005/10/getting-off-the-crack-by-nicol.tpl
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1179953216&sk=friends
Obviously Saturn has reached it's industrial age, and we are seeing the plume from their smokestacks. Beware our future giant planet steampunk overlords.
Rather than a virtual currency backed by computational complexity, I suggest one backed by labor. The standard unit is 1 hour of unskilled labor. Other labor is negotiated at some multiple of that unit. So programmer time might be valued at 10 or 20 units per hour. Whoever you do work for pays you with a promise to supply the negotiated units in return. The promise goes into an electronic system with cryptographic security, etc. Now you can trade your positive promise balance to other people for whatever it is they supply. The person who made the original promise extinguishes it when they do something for someone else. They can use the units they get to extinguish the units they owe.
Number of bullets (rogue planets): roughly 1 per 8 square light years
Size of target (the Earth): 0.02 light seconds x 0.02 light seconds
Number of seconds in a year: 31,556,925
Impact probablility: 19,916,790,309,112,500,000 to 1
Assume rogue planets have random velocities of 100 km/s (probably too high a number)
Then bullet frequency will be around one per 10,000 years.
So impact probability per year is that very large number above times 10,000.
Stop worrying.
Create one or more "currency warehouses" to store the 20's. This is not a bank which lends, merely a storehouse. Two parties can transfer ownership by both sending encrypted messages to the warehouse. Withdrawal can be in person or request a shipment of cash hidden inside something innocuous, like an external hard drive case.
@AC1 - are you conscious when asleep or under medical procedure? The assumption is that an atomic detail copy contains all the detail to recreate the person, including their consciousness. If you don't agree, then where is the extra data stored in the body? I assume the traveler lays down in and operating type room, put to sleep so they don't move around, then is scanned. The copy wakes up in reverse order, first body set in operation (heart started, etc), then woken up.
@mdsolar - even if you have access to lots of energy, and it's expected in the future we will, why spend a million times more than you need to? We don't know how to scan humans in sufficient detail right now, but then we don't know how to build an interstellar propulsion system either. Given the equal lack of knowledge, it makes sense to research the one that gives the lower energy solution first. If that doesn't work, then follow the other path.
@AC2 - I would assume copy retains the thoughts of the original, including the intent to go. If the scan is non-destructive, you end up with the original, and a copy. From the point of view of the original, they have a 50/50 chance of waking up at the destination, and an equal chance of waking up still on Earth as the original. You also have the moral issues of making local copies within the Solar System, where they *can* meet.
If the scan is destructive, it is now a long range version of the Star Trek transporter, with only one copy at a time. The original is destroyed at the origin, and re-constructed at the receiver. However you can get around this by transmitting the data several times to different destinations, including right back to a receiver near the transmitter.
And what did it look like?