During the development of the Space Shuttle, the orbiter was designed with wings which were anticipated for use only during reentry. When developing the launch trajectory they used a tool called Rocket Ascent G-limited Moment-balanced Optimization Program (RAGMOP). The side effect of the launch profile was that payload was increased by about 20%. It surprised everyone and was just a benefit of the trajectory. The upside down flight proved a more efficient use of the orbiter wings and that allowed the payload increase. This is not something that is widely known, and no I do not have any web references, only hard-copy reports from the people who did the launch trajectory optimization.
Shuttle never got much more than about 80% of its originally advertised payload capacity.
You are wrong here in a way. I do not know the original advertised payload capacity, however, when they were during launch trajectory analysis they found out that when they used the upside down trajectory, it increased payload by almost 20%, so I can guarantee that the payload they carried up was more than what they originally thought it would be, if not the full extra 20%. I hope that made sense.
Can't we just stick up payloads on two Delta IVs and stick them together? Seems to me we've been rendezvousing in space for a while.
Orion is really heavy. It is much heavier than the Apollo capsule. You ask why not split the payloads between two delta IVs? The splitting of payloads is actually the reason why there is an Ares I and an Ares V. Ares I takes up the crew and anything else that is possible, and Ares V brings up everything else, which is a lot.
If you live in the US and have a listed phone number, google will find it. I have shown this to over 24 people and it worked for all of them. I don't know why it doesn't for you. Are you unlisted? Google and whitepages.com has been 100% successful for any number I type in (and these numbers are listed in the phone book).
Of course, the smart idea is to make your number unlisted.
Not to reply to my own post, but even if my exact numbers here are wrong, the idea is the same. None of the other rockets that exist now can handle the payload needed and be safe for humans to sit on it. That's your basic 4th grade answer to your question.
Did you look at how much payload each rocket can take to orbit before you made this post? Look at the payload capacity to GTO (not LEO)
Let me list the estimated maximum payloads since you did not: Delta IV: 20,000 pounds or so Atlas V: 18,000 pounds or so SpaceX Falcon 9: 27,000 pounds or so Ares I: 50,000 pounds or so
See the difference? Ares I is also rated for man-flight, which just makes everything much more complicated.
The article is from a florida newspaper. Of course florida newspapers are going to print doom stories because they don't want to lose Shuttle business. Losing business happens.
Who cares if it's hard to do a reverse phone number look-up in a physical book? That doesn't matter because there are dozens of websites that do this for you in seconds! Everybody can access the internet now. Physical phone books are meaningless now.
Go to www.google.com and type your home phone number into the search box. Google will list your name, your address, and show a map on google maps satellite view of your house.
Huh? Did I ever mention one candidate or the other when I was talking about flip-flopping on public financing? Flip flopping happens with everybody, I just listed a few examples without names. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that I was talking about only Obama for the public financing? I wasn't. If in your mind you reached the conclusion I was talking about only Obama for the public financing one, then I think you need to examine why you came to that conclusion.
Candidates everywhere flip-flop, which is why I say at the end to ignore everything they BOTH say and to look at their voting records.
I was, however, talking about Obama about flip-flopping about his view on the D.C. gun ban and about his view of Iran. Those flips happened only days apart.
You didn't need to show me links for McCain flipflops. I know they are there too.
I don't know why you got so worked up? Don't you think flip-flopping is bad, no matter who does it?
I don't know who I am going to vote for yet. The problem I have with Obama is that I have absolutely no clue what his stance on issues are because he is constantly saying different things. I have other problems with McCain.
Changing what you think based on new information is not bad. This type of change in thought occurs after receiving new factual information and taking a good amount of time to reach a new decision. This is good.
Flip-Flopping is changing what you say in a very short period of time for no reason (Except to get votes)
Flip-Flopping is saying that you strongly support public campaign financing during the primaries to get votes and then changing to say you want private financing after you receive those votes.
Flip-Flopping is saying multiple times that you think the ban on guns in D.C. is a good idea and then saying that guns should be allowed immediately after the supreme court says so.
Flip-Flopping is saying that Iran is tiny and pose no threat at all, and then 2 days later coming out and saying that Iran poses a great threat and needs to be taken seriously.
Flip-Flopping is saying one thing and changing your mind because you can't take the heat of your decision.
Someone else in this thread already mentioned Obama's change on the telecom vote.
Obama trumps himself as the candidate of change. The only change I have seen is him changing his mind in rapid succession. McCain is not the best either, but Obama clearly flip-flops all the time and it is getting ridiculous.
I'm not going to continue because I trust in your ability to decipher several other flip-flops.
I urge everybody to ignore every single thing that a candidate says for up to 1 year prior to the actual election. Go to www.vote-smart.org and look at the candidates voting records. Voting records don't lie. Go with the candidate who votes the way you like.
No commonality to the actual Ares I? Are you testing different wind tunnel models than I am? If so, I would like to see them. The flight test will provide very useful actual flight test data. There is only so much you can do in the wind tunnel and extract to full scale. All kinds of measurements will be taken and used to further refine the design. What I am mainly interested in personally is the sound pressure levels on the upper stage.
You are aware of the concept of iterative design? You don't think taking actual flight test measurements will be helpful?
You do know that the first full scale flight test for the Ares I-X is in April of 2009, right? They Ares I-X is down to the nuts and bolts, it is not a paper design. You knew this before making that comment about Ares being only in autocad, right?
Review does not mean Summary. The movie critic profession lives on providing advice as to whether or not a movie is worth seeing, not to provide summaries of the movie. A good reviewer can tell you if a movie is good without resorting to listing a summary.
Everytime this issue gets brought up, the same hatred comes out. Why do Atheists feel the need to continually make fun and blast the views of the religious? Conversely, why do the religious blast the views of the atheist?
Why do you who believe that all of a sudden a big bang occurred and all the atoms that we know of suddenly appeared and formed the planets and the stars think that that theory is any more credible than a God all of a sudden creating everything?
What was there before the big bang? If you have read the theory of everything by stephen hawking, he even proposes that 'something' else had to be present in order for the universe to be created. How did the big bang occur and how did everything react so perfectly at just the right temperature in order to expand the universe?
For the evolutionists, how come only one species evolved, out of the billions on earth, that have the mental capacity as humans? No other species have the abilities we do. How did humans luck out? Why isn't there another type of creature similar to the homosapien? You would think that other combination of molecules would evolve to the same point. For the creationists, why isn't there a companion species to the humans?
Nobody knows how the universe was created, nobody knows what was there BEFORE the universe was created, nobody knows where the atom came from, nobody knows where humans came from.
Everybody needs to stop blasting each other when neither side knows what is going on. Big bang (and hence evolution) is just as mythic as creationism.
I know... and that's why I was trying to relay to the parent I replied to that on his 1996 laptop if he only has 256 MB ram or less he might want to go with something other than Ubuntu.
Just to relay my Ubuntu experience.. I recently put Ubuntu on a 5 year old laptop that had 256 MB ram on it, and it was not a good experience. The normal install CD would not work, so I had to download and burn the alternate install cd. After installing, Ubuntu runs a lot slower than windows XP on this particular laptop. It also took a little bit of work to get the wireless card working. If your laptop is from 1996 and doesn't have more than 256 MB ram I would not put Ubuntu on it.
If you read the Ubuntu forums you will see that you really need more than 256 MB ram for it to work well, and lots of computers will not use the normal cd to install Ubuntu.
Does the Best Buy purchase come with the normal install cd AND the alternate cd? If it doesn't have the alternate cd there are going to be a lot of angry customers.
I can't tell if your comments are a joke or not...
We are talking about a passenger jet, not a fighter jet, right? You want to take a 747 and turn it upside down? You want to cause enough acceleration that the passengers will be incapacitated? Just how much accel. do you think a 747 can do??? Going from Mach 0.2 to 0.4 is no big deal. Again with the vertical climb, the passenger jet will stall if you were at an angle to make everybody fall to the rear...
In addition, it seems to me that AOL is tricking people into accepting this $2 increase. Let me explain:
My wife's grandma uses AOL and she told me that she got an e-mail that said that her bill will go up by $2 every month unless you click this link and answer some account security questions. I immediately thought this was a fake e-mail to get grandmas account information. I looked at the e-mail and it looks just like the false bank emails that I receive all the time. However, I called AOL and it ended being a true e-mail.
We have been trained to ignore e-mails with wording like this, how many old people do you think will just delete this e-mail and end up getting charged an extra $2?
Does the book mention Gemstone III or Dragonrealms at all? Those MUDs were very influential in my addiction to role-playing games. Also, when I used to play Asheron's Call or World of Warcraft I would constantly think that this or that feature was not as good as Dragonrealms. MUDs are just way more interactive than a graphical MMO.
The last time I was in NYC and the only time I was in Tokyo, I saw lots of imitation goods for sale on the street. If the companies can sue eBay for somebody selling these goods, what is different about suing a major city if somebody is selling the goods on the street? Is this the next step?
I was talking about losing a solid rocket booster due to a failure of the reentry and recovery system. Of course it was lost during Challenger. A lot of things went wrong with Challenger. Let me rephrase: For every other STS launch that reaches the separation point for the SRBs, every solid rocket booster that has been separated has been recovered, and most have been reused. That's over 20 launches and recoveries. Pretty good I would say considering the thing tumbles like crazy and is surrounded by fire for most of the reentry.
I work at Marshall Space Flight Center, and I can't get into too much detail about the specifics due to security reasons, but the ARES will fly and the design is coming along nicely. It's beyond naive to suggest that NASA does not want to use the best possible rocket.
You mention an internal study found DIRECT superior in every way? Can I ask, have you read this study? I have, and it does not say what you suggest that it says. Are you just spouting what you read from a newspaper, or do you have higher access than I do? Newspapers live on sensationalist reporting. Keep in mind that it takes a lot more effort to send a rocket to the moon that it does to send a rocket to orbit. Also, (and I am making up these percentages here but the trend is real) it takes a lot more effort to raise the safety rating from 85% to 95%. I would not sit on top of a DIRECT rocket.
Additionally, the quality of your opinion goes down further when you mention that almost no shuttle or previous equipment is being reused. That is simply not true. The J-2X engines are a direct evolution from the J-2. The RS-68 is a direct evolution from the Delta IV. The solid rocket boosters and recovery system are also improvements. Not a single solid rocket booster was ever lost on the space shuttle (they are all re-used) and the design for the ARES is almost identical.
The local newspaper here, The Huntsville Times, ran an article from the Orlando Sentinel that basically says exactly what you posted. The next day they printed a response from a higher up NASA executive. Keep in mind the importance of safety and reliability when humans are on board.
"NASA has an excellent plan in place for its future space fleet
The Huntsville Times reprinted an Orlando Sentinel story on June 23 that suggested NASA, now hard at work on the Ares I rocket that will return human explorers to the moon in the next decade, passed too hastily on "Direct 2.0," an alternative next-generation rocket concept some say is worthy of further consideration.
That decision was not hasty. Nor was it the only alternate concept considered - literally thousands of options were set aside for one compelling reason or another in the run-up to Ares development. Why?
Because the Ares family is the right set of rockets for the mission.
It's the best possible solution to our 21st century spacefaring challenges: flying humans routinely to space, supporting groundbreaking research on the International Space Station and sending explorers to the moon and worlds beyond.
To reach this solution, NASA has embraced a multitude of opinions, as it always has done. We value open debate and rational dissent, and rely daily on the innovative minds and voices of gifted engineers and developers who think around corners and buck conventional wisdom. They have been heard, and their insight has helped set us on our chosen path - which began in earnest in 2005 when NASA announced its formal plan to develop the Constellation Program vehicles: the Ares I and Ares V rockets and the Orion crew capsule, and which have continued to mature ever since.
Designing any rocket - particularly a rocket intended to accomplish such bold, far-reaching exploration initiatives - is a tough proposition. It takes years of training and rigorous analysis. In getting to where we are today, the agency has been thorough and conscientious in its evaluation of thousands of possible options. On the Ares family alone, we have evaluated more than 1,700 concepts since 2005, using proven, validated launch vehicle design models and techniques.
Was each rejected option a drawing-board failure, flawed from the start? Not by any means. The prodigious talents of our engineers and developers across NASA and among its partner organizations is second to none.
But NASA works within its budget to accomplish three goals above all else: maximizing the safety of our crews during launch and spaceflight; ensuring the highest-value, most cost-effective mission operations possible; and increasing the boun
IMHO it's real, it's being tested at NASA, and it's probably going to burn through $1 billion before the end of 2009... unfortunately...
Unfortunately? There has to be research for research sake for progress to be made. If NASA did not experiment with things, a lot of the technology that we use everyday (directly but mostly indirectly) would not be here.
Anything that takes more than the average 'smarts' to accomplish is considered nerdy in our culture (America).
This is because the people with average or less smarts have to make fun of the smart people to feel better about themselves, and since the percentage of smart people is so small, the dominant ideology takes hold.
Basically:
Are you a smart kid in grades K-12 who likes science? Nerd. Percentage of kids: 15%
Are you an idiot who plays second string on the football team and who's brain can't grasp anything beyond business classes? Cool. Percentage of kids: 85%
I'd rather be a nerd. Of course most of the population would think IT or science is boring, because they can't mentally do it so they demote it to boring or nerdy. Additionally, 74% of statistics are made up on the spot.
What I find amusing is that almost everybody watches cable tv or uses a cell phone, and they do not realize that is all thanks to the computer/aerospace/electrical nerds for putting together the rockets/satellites/programs/etc that makes it possible.
In Engineering you have to use the absolute temperature for calculations. 0 degrees Celsius is not the lowest temperature you can achieve, but 0 degrees Kelvin is. 0 degrees Kelvin or 0 degrees Rankine is absolute zero. It makes all temperature values a positive quantity and that is one of the reasons it is needed for calculations.
For example, a simplified combustion equation is Q = m*cp*dt where dt is the change in temperature or (Tfinal - Tinitial). You get a different quantity here if one of the numbers is a negative quantity. Using the absolute temperature scale avoids that.
Kelvin (or Rankine) values are almost always the values referenced for engineering or scientific use.
Slashdot Mirror
During the development of the Space Shuttle, the orbiter was designed with wings which were anticipated for use only during reentry. When developing the launch trajectory they used a tool called Rocket Ascent G-limited Moment-balanced Optimization Program (RAGMOP). The side effect of the launch profile was that payload was increased by about 20%. It surprised everyone and was just a benefit of the trajectory. The upside down flight proved a more efficient use of the orbiter wings and that allowed the payload increase. This is not something that is widely known, and no I do not have any web references, only hard-copy reports from the people who did the launch trajectory optimization.
Shuttle never got much more than about 80% of its originally advertised payload capacity.
You are wrong here in a way. I do not know the original advertised payload capacity, however, when they were during launch trajectory analysis they found out that when they used the upside down trajectory, it increased payload by almost 20%, so I can guarantee that the payload they carried up was more than what they originally thought it would be, if not the full extra 20%. I hope that made sense.
Can't we just stick up payloads on two Delta IVs and stick them together? Seems to me we've been rendezvousing in space for a while.
Orion is really heavy. It is much heavier than the Apollo capsule. You ask why not split the payloads between two delta IVs? The splitting of payloads is actually the reason why there is an Ares I and an Ares V. Ares I takes up the crew and anything else that is possible, and Ares V brings up everything else, which is a lot.
Let me clarify:
If you live in the US and have a listed phone number, google will find it.
I have shown this to over 24 people and it worked for all of them. I don't know why it doesn't for you. Are you unlisted?
Google and whitepages.com has been 100% successful for any number I type in (and these numbers are listed in the phone book).
Of course, the smart idea is to make your number unlisted.
Not to reply to my own post, but even if my exact numbers here are wrong, the idea is the same. None of the other rockets that exist now can handle the payload needed and be safe for humans to sit on it. That's your basic 4th grade answer to your question.
Did you look at how much payload each rocket can take to orbit before you made this post? Look at the payload capacity to GTO (not LEO)
Let me list the estimated maximum payloads since you did not:
Delta IV: 20,000 pounds or so
Atlas V: 18,000 pounds or so
SpaceX Falcon 9: 27,000 pounds or so
Ares I: 50,000 pounds or so
See the difference? Ares I is also rated for man-flight, which just makes everything much more complicated.
The article is from a florida newspaper. Of course florida newspapers are going to print doom stories because they don't want to lose Shuttle business. Losing business happens.
Who cares if it's hard to do a reverse phone number look-up in a physical book? That doesn't matter because there are dozens of websites that do this for you in seconds! Everybody can access the internet now. Physical phone books are meaningless now.
Go to www.google.com and type your home phone number into the search box. Google will list your name, your address, and show a map on google maps satellite view of your house.
Huh? Did I ever mention one candidate or the other when I was talking about flip-flopping on public financing? Flip flopping happens with everybody, I just listed a few examples without names. Why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that I was talking about only Obama for the public financing? I wasn't. If in your mind you reached the conclusion I was talking about only Obama for the public financing one, then I think you need to examine why you came to that conclusion.
Candidates everywhere flip-flop, which is why I say at the end to ignore everything they BOTH say and to look at their voting records.
I was, however, talking about Obama about flip-flopping about his view on the D.C. gun ban and about his view of Iran. Those flips happened only days apart.
You didn't need to show me links for McCain flipflops. I know they are there too.
I don't know why you got so worked up? Don't you think flip-flopping is bad, no matter who does it?
I don't know who I am going to vote for yet. The problem I have with Obama is that I have absolutely no clue what his stance on issues are because he is constantly saying different things. I have other problems with McCain.
Changing what you think based on new information is not bad. This type of change in thought occurs after receiving new factual information and taking a good amount of time to reach a new decision. This is good.
Flip-Flopping is changing what you say in a very short period of time for no reason (Except to get votes)
Flip-Flopping is saying that you strongly support public campaign financing during the primaries to get votes and then changing to say you want private financing after you receive those votes.
Flip-Flopping is saying multiple times that you think the ban on guns in D.C. is a good idea and then saying that guns should be allowed immediately after the supreme court says so.
Flip-Flopping is saying that Iran is tiny and pose no threat at all, and then 2 days later coming out and saying that Iran poses a great threat and needs to be taken seriously.
Flip-Flopping is saying one thing and changing your mind because you can't take the heat of your decision.
Someone else in this thread already mentioned Obama's change on the telecom vote.
Obama trumps himself as the candidate of change. The only change I have seen is him changing his mind in rapid succession. McCain is not the best either, but Obama clearly flip-flops all the time and it is getting ridiculous.
I'm not going to continue because I trust in your ability to decipher several other flip-flops.
I urge everybody to ignore every single thing that a candidate says for up to 1 year prior to the actual election. Go to www.vote-smart.org and look at the candidates voting records. Voting records don't lie. Go with the candidate who votes the way you like.
No commonality to the actual Ares I? Are you testing different wind tunnel models than I am? If so, I would like to see them. The flight test will provide very useful actual flight test data. There is only so much you can do in the wind tunnel and extract to full scale. All kinds of measurements will be taken and used to further refine the design. What I am mainly interested in personally is the sound pressure levels on the upper stage.
You are aware of the concept of iterative design?
You don't think taking actual flight test measurements will be helpful?
You do know that the first full scale flight test for the Ares I-X is in April of 2009, right? They Ares I-X is down to the nuts and bolts, it is not a paper design. You knew this before making that comment about Ares being only in autocad, right?
Review does not mean Summary. The movie critic profession lives on providing advice as to whether or not a movie is worth seeing, not to provide summaries of the movie. A good reviewer can tell you if a movie is good without resorting to listing a summary.
Everytime this issue gets brought up, the same hatred comes out. Why do Atheists feel the need to continually make fun and blast the views of the religious? Conversely, why do the religious blast the views of the atheist?
Why do you who believe that all of a sudden a big bang occurred and all the atoms that we know of suddenly appeared and formed the planets and the stars think that that theory is any more credible than a God all of a sudden creating everything?
What was there before the big bang? If you have read the theory of everything by stephen hawking, he even proposes that 'something' else had to be present in order for the universe to be created. How did the big bang occur and how did everything react so perfectly at just the right temperature in order to expand the universe?
For the evolutionists, how come only one species evolved, out of the billions on earth, that have the mental capacity as humans? No other species have the abilities we do. How did humans luck out? Why isn't there another type of creature similar to the homosapien? You would think that other combination of molecules would evolve to the same point. For the creationists, why isn't there a companion species to the humans?
Nobody knows how the universe was created, nobody knows what was there BEFORE the universe was created, nobody knows where the atom came from, nobody knows where humans came from.
Everybody needs to stop blasting each other when neither side knows what is going on. Big bang (and hence evolution) is just as mythic as creationism.
I know... and that's why I was trying to relay to the parent I replied to that on his 1996 laptop if he only has 256 MB ram or less he might want to go with something other than Ubuntu.
Just to relay my Ubuntu experience.. I recently put Ubuntu on a 5 year old laptop that had 256 MB ram on it, and it was not a good experience. The normal install CD would not work, so I had to download and burn the alternate install cd. After installing, Ubuntu runs a lot slower than windows XP on this particular laptop. It also took a little bit of work to get the wireless card working.
If your laptop is from 1996 and doesn't have more than 256 MB ram I would not put Ubuntu on it.
If you read the Ubuntu forums you will see that you really need more than 256 MB ram for it to work well, and lots of computers will not use the normal cd to install Ubuntu.
Does the Best Buy purchase come with the normal install cd AND the alternate cd? If it doesn't have the alternate cd there are going to be a lot of angry customers.
I can't tell if your comments are a joke or not...
We are talking about a passenger jet, not a fighter jet, right? You want to take a 747 and turn it upside down? You want to cause enough acceleration that the passengers will be incapacitated? Just how much accel. do you think a 747 can do??? Going from Mach 0.2 to 0.4 is no big deal. Again with the vertical climb, the passenger jet will stall if you were at an angle to make everybody fall to the rear...
You aren't kidding about grandmas.
In addition, it seems to me that AOL is tricking people into accepting this $2 increase. Let me explain:
My wife's grandma uses AOL and she told me that she got an e-mail that said that her bill will go up by $2 every month unless you click this link and answer some account security questions. I immediately thought this was a fake e-mail to get grandmas account information. I looked at the e-mail and it looks just like the false bank emails that I receive all the time. However, I called AOL and it ended being a true e-mail.
We have been trained to ignore e-mails with wording like this, how many old people do you think will just delete this e-mail and end up getting charged an extra $2?
Does the book mention Gemstone III or Dragonrealms at all? Those MUDs were very influential in my addiction to role-playing games. Also, when I used to play Asheron's Call or World of Warcraft I would constantly think that this or that feature was not as good as Dragonrealms. MUDs are just way more interactive than a graphical MMO.
In India the cost of texting is as little as 80paisa. i.e 0.80 INR.
I have a friend who told me that in Soviet Russia the phone companies pay YOU when you make text messages!
The last time I was in NYC and the only time I was in Tokyo, I saw lots of imitation goods for sale on the street. If the companies can sue eBay for somebody selling these goods, what is different about suing a major city if somebody is selling the goods on the street? Is this the next step?
I was talking about losing a solid rocket booster due to a failure of the reentry and recovery system. Of course it was lost during Challenger. A lot of things went wrong with Challenger.
Let me rephrase:
For every other STS launch that reaches the separation point for the SRBs, every solid rocket booster that has been separated has been recovered, and most have been reused. That's over 20 launches and recoveries. Pretty good I would say considering the thing tumbles like crazy and is surrounded by fire for most of the reentry.
I work at Marshall Space Flight Center, and I can't get into too much detail about the specifics due to security reasons, but the ARES will fly and the design is coming along nicely. It's beyond naive to suggest that NASA does not want to use the best possible rocket.
You mention an internal study found DIRECT superior in every way? Can I ask, have you read this study? I have, and it does not say what you suggest that it says. Are you just spouting what you read from a newspaper, or do you have higher access than I do? Newspapers live on sensationalist reporting. Keep in mind that it takes a lot more effort to send a rocket to the moon that it does to send a rocket to orbit. Also, (and I am making up these percentages here but the trend is real) it takes a lot more effort to raise the safety rating from 85% to 95%. I would not sit on top of a DIRECT rocket.
Additionally, the quality of your opinion goes down further when you mention that almost no shuttle or previous equipment is being reused. That is simply not true. The J-2X engines are a direct evolution from the J-2. The RS-68 is a direct evolution from the Delta IV. The solid rocket boosters and recovery system are also improvements. Not a single solid rocket booster was ever lost on the space shuttle (they are all re-used) and the design for the ARES is almost identical.
The local newspaper here, The Huntsville Times, ran an article from the Orlando Sentinel that basically says exactly what you posted. The next day they printed a response from a higher up NASA executive. Keep in mind the importance of safety and reliability when humans are on board.
"NASA has an excellent plan in place for its future space fleet
The Huntsville Times reprinted an Orlando Sentinel story on June 23 that suggested NASA, now hard at work on the Ares I rocket that will return human explorers to the moon in the next decade, passed too hastily on "Direct 2.0," an alternative next-generation rocket concept some say is worthy of further consideration.
That decision was not hasty. Nor was it the only alternate concept considered - literally thousands of options were set aside for one compelling reason or another in the run-up to Ares development. Why?
Because the Ares family is the right set of rockets for the mission.
It's the best possible solution to our 21st century spacefaring challenges: flying humans routinely to space, supporting groundbreaking research on the International Space Station and sending explorers to the moon and worlds beyond.
To reach this solution, NASA has embraced a multitude of opinions, as it always has done. We value open debate and rational dissent, and rely daily on the innovative minds and voices of gifted engineers and developers who think around corners and buck conventional wisdom. They have been heard, and their insight has helped set us on our chosen path - which began in earnest in 2005 when NASA announced its formal plan to develop the Constellation Program vehicles: the Ares I and Ares V rockets and the Orion crew capsule, and which have continued to mature ever since.
Designing any rocket - particularly a rocket intended to accomplish such bold, far-reaching exploration initiatives - is a tough proposition. It takes years of training and rigorous analysis. In getting to where we are today, the agency has been thorough and conscientious in its evaluation of thousands of possible options. On the Ares family alone, we have evaluated more than 1,700 concepts since 2005, using proven, validated launch vehicle design models and techniques.
Was each rejected option a drawing-board failure, flawed from the start? Not by any means. The prodigious talents of our engineers and developers across NASA and among its partner organizations is second to none.
But NASA works within its budget to accomplish three goals above all else: maximizing the safety of our crews during launch and spaceflight; ensuring the highest-value, most cost-effective mission operations possible; and increasing the boun
IMHO it's real, it's being tested at NASA, and it's probably going to burn through $1 billion before the end of 2009... unfortunately...
Unfortunately? There has to be research for research sake for progress to be made. If NASA did not experiment with things, a lot of the technology that we use everyday (directly but mostly indirectly) would not be here.
Anything that takes more than the average 'smarts' to accomplish is considered nerdy in our culture (America).
This is because the people with average or less smarts have to make fun of the smart people to feel better about themselves, and since the percentage of smart people is so small, the dominant ideology takes hold.
Basically:
Are you a smart kid in grades K-12 who likes science? Nerd. Percentage of kids: 15%
Are you an idiot who plays second string on the football team and who's brain can't grasp anything beyond business classes? Cool. Percentage of kids: 85%
I'd rather be a nerd. Of course most of the population would think IT or science is boring, because they can't mentally do it so they demote it to boring or nerdy. Additionally, 74% of statistics are made up on the spot.
What I find amusing is that almost everybody watches cable tv or uses a cell phone, and they do not realize that is all thanks to the computer/aerospace/electrical nerds for putting together the rockets/satellites/programs/etc that makes it possible.
In Engineering you have to use the absolute temperature for calculations. 0 degrees Celsius is not the lowest temperature you can achieve, but 0 degrees Kelvin is. 0 degrees Kelvin or 0 degrees Rankine is absolute zero. It makes all temperature values a positive quantity and that is one of the reasons it is needed for calculations.
For example, a simplified combustion equation is Q = m*cp*dt where dt is the change in temperature or (Tfinal - Tinitial). You get a different quantity here if one of the numbers is a negative quantity. Using the absolute temperature scale avoids that.
Kelvin (or Rankine) values are almost always the values referenced for engineering or scientific use.