Development costs were one of the big things that killed HOTOL. They could have been covered by ESA - however, the Thatcher government was at best luke-warm and at worst antipathetic to space. They chose to opt out of a number of key ESA programmes which meant that ESA would not have backed a British-based effort.
But the computers are a tiny proportion of the Shuttle's weight.
The advantage of the Shuttle's computers are that they've been round since the late 1960s, their design has been thoroughly debugged as have the programming tools used to write their code AND the code itself.
The Shuttle code is widely regarded as some of the best programming ever completed.
Throw the Shuttle computers away and you lose all those hard-won achievements.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Other uses for the powerful technology?
on
Mars Flier Prototype
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Any balloon relies on being bouyant to generate lift. With a very thin Martian atmosphere there simply isn't very much bouyancy available. A balloon would have to be HUGE to carry a usable payload.
Having said that, in 1989 the French and the USSR started work on Mars 96, a spaceprobe that would have sent a balloon to Mars.
Mars 96 would have sent a 65kg probe to the surface which would have been slung below a helium balloon. During the day, the Sun would warm the gas and increase bouyancy. The balloon would drift in the Martian winds taking panoramic photographs and making meteorological measurements.
As the Sun set, the gas would cool, the balloon would sink and come to rest on a long semi-rigid tail that would have kept the balloon clear of the surface so that it would not have become damaged. The tail would have contained sensors that would have performed geological tests on the Martian surface.
Sadly the mission was cancelled in the budget crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you had the choice between being in jail and undergoing an operation that would let you get out, which would you choose?
Perhaps in a \. first I will admit that I really don't know.
There are so many implications raised by the introduction of this sort of pervasive technology. I can easily see any use by governments as a slippery slope. We have overcrowded prisons so implant people with trackers (after all its only a small step from current tags), convicted of shop-lifting? have a tag put in your body which will alert shop security when you enter a mall, a refugee awaiting naturalisation - better have you tagged so you don't go wandering...
I have a great dislike of this sort of technology. but an even greater dislike of the sort of politician and business shysters who will see it as a quick route to earning lots of money or plaudits for being 'tough on crime'.
We (in the UK), already have a government that appears to consider almost any intrusion into people's lives to be legitimate, I can imagine David Blunkett will be salivating when this is read to him.
I don't have a problem with convicted criminals being implanted, and their movements tracked for a certain amount of time
There would be major ethical problems for most surgeons. It would go against their creed to operate on a person without their consent when the operation was not needed for a medical condition.
I think we should take some time to consider the implications of asking doctors and surgeons to perform such operations.
Besides, the first people to receive these implants should be politicians, oh and the entire staff at Digital Angel.
I think you meant to say the unmanned programme gave us most of those. The only one the manned programme could conceivably have benefited is the health issue - but I'm struggling to think of a single medical advance that has been brought about by the space programme.
Apart from how to keep people alive in space which is something of a chicken and an egg problem.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Very different to Challenger
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, they did. Marshall space centre ordered Morton Thiokol to determine the causes of O-ring erosion as far back as 1984. Thiokol knew the problem of joint rotation was going to get worse with a proposed light-weight SRB and they wanted to eliminate the problem.
However, Marshall continued to tell NASA that the problem was not severe and no reason to delay the launch schedule.
The lack of urgency was because Marshall considered the second O-ring to be redundant, and would ensure that the joint would never lose integrity.
They were wrong.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Very different to Challenger
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Good points - thanks for correcting me.
But please remember that NASA also had an 'active programme' to fix the SRB seals before Challenger exploded. They knew there was a problem, but they didn't ground the vehicle.
It will be interesting to see if NASA had done any worst-case scenarios to see what was the maximum damage that could be expected from foam impacts.
If they hadn't and yet they knew the ET had a problem then sine serious questions will have to be asked.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Sorry no. PTFE's first industrial use was in the Manhattan Project to protect piping from uranium hexafluoride.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:The price of exploration
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So you're comparing one obscene budget with another? I have no problem with NASA's budget (especially since I'm not an American), its just being wasted on pointless exercises such as the Shuttle and the ISS.
According to the General Accounting Office (PDF document) a single Shuttle launch costs $759 million. I live in the real world, so to me, that still seems like an awful lot of money.
So far NASA hasn't come up with a good explanation why these are sound investments in the future. I'm sure that it could attract more support if it were to be open and say that the Shuttle is a statement of national virility and an essential part of the flag waving exercise.
But to claim that the Shuttle or the ISS are vital for industry or medical research is fatuous, and preparing for the manned Mars missions - well that would be just another black hole for flag waving.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:I think he missed an important distinction...
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
The wing damage was caused during the ascent to orbit - so the craft was already well on its way.
The collision was only recognised when the Shuttle was in orbit. But even then, the experts concluded that the damage was superficial and the vessel would survive re-entry.
If they had seen something during ascent (and they didn't) I suppose they could have either ordered an abort and returned the orbiter to Kennedy or sent it on a TransAtlantic hop to Dakar. But they have never performed such an abort and that would have risked the crew as well.
What I'm getting worried about is that the implication coming from the investigation team is that the foam shedding problem was not new and that the Shuttle team knew the foam was impacting on the tiles and causing damage.
But they figured that the Shuttle was clearly surviving the damage which meant that foam impacts weren't as serious as first thought and that the Shuttle didn't need to be absolutely perfect to fly.
And if it took a bit more damage that clearly meant it was a little bit more resilient.
Now stop me if this sounds familiar, but this was the same condemnation laid at NASA after Challenger. With Challenger NASA continued to issue launch waivers for the Shuttle even though launch conditions were outside their own constraints. NASA came to the conclusion that if everything went alright that meant the constraints were wrong. IIRC it was Feynmann who said they were playing Russian Roulette with their ships. When a small problem occurred, NASA didn't spend enough energy fixing the problem, they trivialised it.
And now it looks like they've done it with Columbia.
Uhm, this was British made, and funded by Britain (like everything else in Europe) this is a project of the BSA;) Not a non-existant ESA.
Beagle 2 is hitching a lift on the Mars Express probe (funded by ESA) and relies on the Mars Express orbiter to relay data to Earth. To confuse things further the whole lot is being launched on top of a Russian Soyuz-Fregat.
Britain is only the fourth largest contributor to ESA and contributes about 5% of the budget, we've also chosen to opt out of a series of ESA programmes, so we are far from the core nations. France contributes almost 20% of the budget and therefore runs the show.
As for Britain funding everything else in Europe - please! We are (befitting our status as the second largest population and the second largest economy), the second largest contributor to the EU budget.
The Federal Republic of Germany not only contributes more as an absolute amount, but also contributes more per capita. The Netherlands is the largest contributor per capita.
I don't see why we're so interested in Titan. The big deal about Titan is it might have life on it. But the fact is, we live in a vast universe and the possibility that we are the only life is very slim. It's also a particularly arrogant and foolish belief. But if we found life on Titan, it would likely be in the very early stages and it wouldn't be particularly interesting. So I don't see why we're making a huge fuss over it.
I can think of two reasons, the first is purely for the novelty of it - Titan has an atmosphere, no other satellite does.
The second is more important. Titan appears to have a mixture of organic compounds and nitrogen in its atmosphere, which would make it very similar to the primordial atmosphere on Earth. if we can look at the chemistry of the Titan atmosphere and see what is happening to the compounds on Titan under the influence of solar radiation, we can start to work out what happened on Earth all those billions of years ago.
I don't think anyone is seriously expecting to find life on Titan, the surface temperature is so low that most chemistry has effectively ground to a halt.
And even if you aren't excited at the mission, think of the awe-inspiring pictures we're going to get of Saturn and its rings.
Well there is always the Xerox PARC original electronic paper called Gyricon.
It uses a slightly different idea. It has two sheets of plastic forming the faces of the paper, with a sandwich of beads in the middle. The beads have two hemispheres - one white, one black.
When an electric current is passed over the beads they rotate to show one face or another - effectively each bead is a 1-bit pixel. Take away the power and the bead remains in position until another charge is applied.
It seems to be a much lower tech approach than the MIT proposal since all the electronics are in the device creating the images rather than in the paper. So I'm guessing that Gyricon could be much cheaper than E Ink's product.
Xerox spun off Gyricon as the Gyricon Media company who already have two products in the marketplace - SmartPaper and MaestroSigns. They have been used for advertising and smart signs in the US. So you can instantly update thousands of point-of-sale signs or price tags over RF.
I'd never thought of it as a big problem, but this page on the Gyricon site shows the sort of numbers involved and the market opportunity for smart signs.
"And the difficulty of moving around books and papers is greatly exaggerated."
Ever had a book fall out of your hands, land on the floor, and close? Ever have a book that's not very excited about being open? Ever try to pack two books into your bagage for a long trip? I made that mistake once.
But I can't write on it. With paper I don't just read the document, I interact with it, change it, comment it and so on.
With e-paper I can't jot a note in the margin, scribble a diagram, work out a calculation, mark up a typescript or even do the crossword.
As soon as you add those features, not only does e-paper become more expensive but also energy hungry.
E-paper looks okay as a display-only medium; anything you want to interact with - well I'll choose paper. If nothing else I'll be able to light a fire with it.
Are you forgetting the melting faces at the end? Was that really necessary? No, but it looked cool and gross.
Psychologically, yes it was. The baddies in this movie are so bad that it was absolutely necessary for the story to show them getting their comeuppance in an extraordinarily gratuitous manner.
The chilled monkey brains bit in the second movie? No, I never worked out why that was included - it would upset plenty of people, and could offend people with Indian backgrounds.
I guess it shows that even Spielberg makes mistakes.
Strangely, what you'll find is that 150 000 American soldiers died so that the people of France could live in freedom. That they could make up their own minds, elect their own leaders, make political choices free from foreign threats and domination.
Judging by the respect accorded to American war memorials in France, it seems that the French remember the cause of their sacrifice rather better than you do.
What should piss you off is that you've reached your age without realising the difference between freedom and slavery.
There is nothing unsafe about a defensive nuclear missle.
That's the thing about America, it not only spells 'defence' differently, it does it differently as well.
An anti-missile system allows the country which deploys a system a slight advantage over its opponents. It permits them to contemplate a nuclear first strike on an opponent, in the hope that any retaliation can be defeated.
It's the same old reasoning we had during the Cold War for successive inventions like the ICBM, solid fuel rockets, Strategic Air Command on permanent heightened awareness, MIRV, ballistic missile submarines...
There are plenty of people who still consider there to be such a thing as a 'limited' nuclear war or a winnable nuclear war. These people were in the ascendant during the early years of the Reagan presidency and now they're back for Bush 2.
No country is contemplating a nuclear attack on the US, everyone is aware of the enormous retaliation that would be in store for them if they were to attack the Americans.
No terrorist group has access to the technologies necessary for a ballistic missile, let alone one tipped with a nuclear warhead.
So why do it? Well it certainly would do wonders for the sagging share price of Boeing and other aerospace companies who need something to make up for the collapse of the airline industry. And then there are the ideological reasons - runaway defence spending helped destroy the great 20th Century rival to American power, perhaps it can do the same to its 21st Century rivals?
SDI and NMD are the battleship race of the 21st Century. That ended in tears and the destruction of the World's two greatest imperial powers. Somehow I think that history is repeating itself. At 'best' exploding deficit spending might hobble the American economy and force a more sane outlook on the rest of the World, at 'worst' - well how bad do you want it?
Upon re-entry the projectile once again has a huge spike in infrared visibility, and the path is entirely ballistic at this point.
Actually no, both the Americans and the Russians have designed warheads that can be steered off ballistic trajectories during final approach. The Americans fitted them to their Pershing missiles (which have now been withdrawn), the Russians have them on their Topol-M ICBMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Best wishes,
Mike.
The advantage of the Shuttle's computers are that they've been round since the late 1960s, their design has been thoroughly debugged as have the programming tools used to write their code AND the code itself.
The Shuttle code is widely regarded as some of the best programming ever completed.
Throw the Shuttle computers away and you lose all those hard-won achievements.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Having said that, in 1989 the French and the USSR started work on Mars 96, a spaceprobe that would have sent a balloon to Mars.
Mars 96 would have sent a 65kg probe to the surface which would have been slung below a helium balloon. During the day, the Sun would warm the gas and increase bouyancy. The balloon would drift in the Martian winds taking panoramic photographs and making meteorological measurements.
As the Sun set, the gas would cool, the balloon would sink and come to rest on a long semi-rigid tail that would have kept the balloon clear of the surface so that it would not have become damaged. The tail would have contained sensors that would have performed geological tests on the Martian surface.
Sadly the mission was cancelled in the budget crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Perhaps in a \. first I will admit that I really don't know.
There are so many implications raised by the introduction of this sort of pervasive technology. I can easily see any use by governments as a slippery slope. We have overcrowded prisons so implant people with trackers (after all its only a small step from current tags), convicted of shop-lifting? have a tag put in your body which will alert shop security when you enter a mall, a refugee awaiting naturalisation - better have you tagged so you don't go wandering...
I have a great dislike of this sort of technology. but an even greater dislike of the sort of politician and business shysters who will see it as a quick route to earning lots of money or plaudits for being 'tough on crime'.
We (in the UK), already have a government that appears to consider almost any intrusion into people's lives to be legitimate, I can imagine David Blunkett will be salivating when this is read to him.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There would be major ethical problems for most surgeons. It would go against their creed to operate on a person without their consent when the operation was not needed for a medical condition.
I think we should take some time to consider the implications of asking doctors and surgeons to perform such operations.
Besides, the first people to receive these implants should be politicians, oh and the entire staff at Digital Angel.
Best wishes,
Mike.
:) Ah but surely circumventing a person's security system will violate the DMCA? The kidnappers will quake at the thought! Best wishes, Mike.
Apart from how to keep people alive in space which is something of a chicken and an egg problem.
Best wishes,
Mike.
However, Marshall continued to tell NASA that the problem was not severe and no reason to delay the launch schedule. The lack of urgency was because Marshall considered the second O-ring to be redundant, and would ensure that the joint would never lose integrity.
They were wrong.
Best wishes,
Mike.
But please remember that NASA also had an 'active programme' to fix the SRB seals before Challenger exploded. They knew there was a problem, but they didn't ground the vehicle.
It will be interesting to see if NASA had done any worst-case scenarios to see what was the maximum damage that could be expected from foam impacts.
If they hadn't and yet they knew the ET had a problem then sine serious questions will have to be asked.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
According to the General Accounting Office (PDF document) a single Shuttle launch costs $759 million. I live in the real world, so to me, that still seems like an awful lot of money.
It then does around about 5.3 million miles.
So that's $143 per mile. To do what?
So far NASA hasn't come up with a good explanation why these are sound investments in the future. I'm sure that it could attract more support if it were to be open and say that the Shuttle is a statement of national virility and an essential part of the flag waving exercise.
But to claim that the Shuttle or the ISS are vital for industry or medical research is fatuous, and preparing for the manned Mars missions - well that would be just another black hole for flag waving.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The collision was only recognised when the Shuttle was in orbit. But even then, the experts concluded that the damage was superficial and the vessel would survive re-entry.
If they had seen something during ascent (and they didn't) I suppose they could have either ordered an abort and returned the orbiter to Kennedy or sent it on a TransAtlantic hop to Dakar. But they have never performed such an abort and that would have risked the crew as well.
What I'm getting worried about is that the implication coming from the investigation team is that the foam shedding problem was not new and that the Shuttle team knew the foam was impacting on the tiles and causing damage.
But they figured that the Shuttle was clearly surviving the damage which meant that foam impacts weren't as serious as first thought and that the Shuttle didn't need to be absolutely perfect to fly.
And if it took a bit more damage that clearly meant it was a little bit more resilient.
Now stop me if this sounds familiar, but this was the same condemnation laid at NASA after Challenger. With Challenger NASA continued to issue launch waivers for the Shuttle even though launch conditions were outside their own constraints. NASA came to the conclusion that if everything went alright that meant the constraints were wrong. IIRC it was Feynmann who said they were playing Russian Roulette with their ships. When a small problem occurred, NASA didn't spend enough energy fixing the problem, they trivialised it.
And now it looks like they've done it with Columbia.
A bloody tragedy.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Or perhaps on a sane Federal budget that didn't rely on deficit funding to cover every pork barrel?
Although I'd have to agree with you if it meant America spending enough on space to stop Rumsfeld pissing it away on his latest toys.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Actually, broken down on passenger miles, it's the safest way to travel, on or off this planet...
Per dollar, per mile it bloody well should be.
If nothing else, economics should ground the manned space programme once and for all.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Britain is only the fourth largest contributor to ESA and contributes about 5% of the budget, we've also chosen to opt out of a series of ESA programmes, so we are far from the core nations. France contributes almost 20% of the budget and therefore runs the show.
As for Britain funding everything else in Europe - please! We are (befitting our status as the second largest population and the second largest economy), the second largest contributor to the EU budget.
The Federal Republic of Germany not only contributes more as an absolute amount, but also contributes more per capita. The Netherlands is the largest contributor per capita.
Best wishes,
Mike.
This is a British space probe; the fuel will be tea with two sugars and a chocolate Hob Nob.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I can think of two reasons, the first is purely for the novelty of it - Titan has an atmosphere, no other satellite does.
The second is more important. Titan appears to have a mixture of organic compounds and nitrogen in its atmosphere, which would make it very similar to the primordial atmosphere on Earth. if we can look at the chemistry of the Titan atmosphere and see what is happening to the compounds on Titan under the influence of solar radiation, we can start to work out what happened on Earth all those billions of years ago.
I don't think anyone is seriously expecting to find life on Titan, the surface temperature is so low that most chemistry has effectively ground to a halt.
And even if you aren't excited at the mission, think of the awe-inspiring pictures we're going to get of Saturn and its rings.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It uses a slightly different idea. It has two sheets of plastic forming the faces of the paper, with a sandwich of beads in the middle. The beads have two hemispheres - one white, one black.
When an electric current is passed over the beads they rotate to show one face or another - effectively each bead is a 1-bit pixel. Take away the power and the bead remains in position until another charge is applied.
It seems to be a much lower tech approach than the MIT proposal since all the electronics are in the device creating the images rather than in the paper. So I'm guessing that Gyricon could be much cheaper than E Ink's product.
Xerox spun off Gyricon as the Gyricon Media company who already have two products in the marketplace - SmartPaper and MaestroSigns. They have been used for advertising and smart signs in the US. So you can instantly update thousands of point-of-sale signs or price tags over RF.
I'd never thought of it as a big problem, but this page on the Gyricon site shows the sort of numbers involved and the market opportunity for smart signs.
Very clever.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Ever had a book fall out of your hands, land on the floor, and close? Ever have a book that's not very excited about being open? Ever try to pack two books into your bagage for a long trip? I made that mistake once.
But I can't write on it. With paper I don't just read the document, I interact with it, change it, comment it and so on.
With e-paper I can't jot a note in the margin, scribble a diagram, work out a calculation, mark up a typescript or even do the crossword.
As soon as you add those features, not only does e-paper become more expensive but also energy hungry.
E-paper looks okay as a display-only medium; anything you want to interact with - well I'll choose paper. If nothing else I'll be able to light a fire with it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Psychologically, yes it was. The baddies in this movie are so bad that it was absolutely necessary for the story to show them getting their comeuppance in an extraordinarily gratuitous manner.
The chilled monkey brains bit in the second movie? No, I never worked out why that was included - it would upset plenty of people, and could offend people with Indian backgrounds.
I guess it shows that even Spielberg makes mistakes.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Its fabulous musical opening going straight into a full-speed action sequence is one of the most remarkable first five minutes of a film ever.
The rest of the movie (and that kid) I can take or leave, but the first few minutes? Magical.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Judging by the respect accorded to American war memorials in France, it seems that the French remember the cause of their sacrifice rather better than you do.
What should piss you off is that you've reached your age without realising the difference between freedom and slavery.
Mike.
That's the thing about America, it not only spells 'defence' differently, it does it differently as well.
An anti-missile system allows the country which deploys a system a slight advantage over its opponents. It permits them to contemplate a nuclear first strike on an opponent, in the hope that any retaliation can be defeated.
It's the same old reasoning we had during the Cold War for successive inventions like the ICBM, solid fuel rockets, Strategic Air Command on permanent heightened awareness, MIRV, ballistic missile submarines...
There are plenty of people who still consider there to be such a thing as a 'limited' nuclear war or a winnable nuclear war. These people were in the ascendant during the early years of the Reagan presidency and now they're back for Bush 2.
No country is contemplating a nuclear attack on the US, everyone is aware of the enormous retaliation that would be in store for them if they were to attack the Americans.
No terrorist group has access to the technologies necessary for a ballistic missile, let alone one tipped with a nuclear warhead.
So why do it? Well it certainly would do wonders for the sagging share price of Boeing and other aerospace companies who need something to make up for the collapse of the airline industry. And then there are the ideological reasons - runaway defence spending helped destroy the great 20th Century rival to American power, perhaps it can do the same to its 21st Century rivals?
SDI and NMD are the battleship race of the 21st Century. That ended in tears and the destruction of the World's two greatest imperial powers. Somehow I think that history is repeating itself. At 'best' exploding deficit spending might hobble the American economy and force a more sane outlook on the rest of the World, at 'worst' - well how bad do you want it?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Actually no, both the Americans and the Russians have designed warheads that can be steered off ballistic trajectories during final approach. The Americans fitted them to their Pershing missiles (which have now been withdrawn), the Russians have them on their Topol-M ICBMs.
Best wishes,
Mike.