The russians already have a HUGE ABM setup. How well it works who knows. They use nukes for the warheads so lets not test it any time soon okay. So it is not like the US is building the first ABM system.
Actually you did, it was called Nike-Zeus and introduced in 1958.
The Russian system is a hangover from the days of the SALT talks. Each of the two signatories (the US and the USSR) were able to retain one ABM system that had been deployed or was in the process of deployment, on three conditions: 1. That there were no future developments; 2. That the technology was deployed at no more than two sites; and 3. That no site possessed more than 100 interceptors.
A further appendix to the treaty then reduced the number of sites to one.
The US was in the process of deploying its own AMB system known as Safeguard, originally authorised in 1970. It was deployed at Malmstrom USAFB in Montana and Grand Forks USAFB in North Dakota. It would have then been rolled out to Whiteman USAFB in Missouri, and Warren USAFB Wyoming.
When the SALT negotiations proved to be a success, the US abandoned the second two sites. Malmstrom was abandoned when the final section of the talks were concluded.
The Grand Forks base was completed and brought into operation in April 1975, and was fully fitted out with all 100 missiles by October 1975. A day later, Congress cancelled all funding for Safeguard and the system was withdrawn.
The Soviet system was called Galosh and as you said operated around Moscow. It is doubtful whether it is operational any longer.
And as for your, NMD is a good idea - well even if you overlook the horrendous spending projections needed to build the system, the dubious statistics used by the Pentagon, the faked test results you're left with the obvious pork-barrelling in a time when the US economy and budget aren't looking too healthy.
If you choose to ignore the message this sends to China - build up your missile fleet before its made obsolete. If you want to forget that the Chinese already see the US as a long-term strategic threat - and the Indians see the Chinese as a threat and the Pakistanis see the Indians as a threat...
You still have severe questions about the political implications of such a system. The US and its political catamite the UK have shown themselves willing to trample over international law to get their own way with Iraq. We broke international law and the UN Charter to take on a country we knew we could beat without retaliation.
Imagine the temptation to get involved in a conflict with ANY country if you thought your country was immune from any retaliation.
Bush and co. are scary enough without NMD, with it - well I won't be sleeping much.
Smaller. There was a lot of interest from the 1960s onwards with launching satellites from high velocity artillery. The work was pioneered by Gerald Bull, who later went on to develop long range artillery for the South Africans, develop the Iraqi supergun and ended his days being assassinated - presumably by the Israelis.
Bull was in charge of a 1960s project called HARP which built an enormous cannon to fire projectiles into the upper atmosphere (and we're talking about 180 km here) over Barbados (well if you're going to do science, you should do it somewhere nice).
The projectiles were instrumented devices known as martlets, Bull planned to develop martlets with small motors that would give them enough kick to enter low orbit.
The cannon would have been much cheaper than rockets, but the technology of building advanced satellites capable of withstanding the shock of launching would have been formidable.
The supergun built for the Iraqis by the British company Matrix Churchill would have not been able to fire satellites, but a bigger one designed by Bull would have. He got round the problem of a short, sharp shock by having a series of explosions accelerate the projectile as it travelled along the gun barrel. Since there would be less pressure on the barrel, it needn't be so strong or made of advanced materials. Bull got the idea from the German V3 gun built to bombard London during WW2. The photo is dreadful but it shows the central barrel and the side barrels coming off it. Each of those would have fired in turn behind the shell and accelerated it up the gun and towards Britain.
More on HARP here and other space guns (with an awesome picture of the HARP gun firing here.
God, did you just get off the Gamepro forums or what? To say that Halo is the only killer app for the Xbox is an insult to anybody who remotely considers themselves a hardcore gamer.
I've got an XBox and I have to admit the games line up really does suck. Almost all the big hyped titles have been busts on the machine and other 'must-have' titles are just being pushed ever forward into the future.
I'm hoping 'Brute Force' will show some signs of life in the XBox market. But that isn't until the end of June - assuming it actually ships on time.
But thank god I bought a Cube!
As a matter of interest which games do you consider outstanding on the XBox?
Yes you could have returned it under the terms of the Sale of Goods Act.
And you damn well ought to have!
SoGA requires all goods to match the description on the box or in any advertising, to be of satisfactory quality - (ie. they must work and last a reasonable length of time), and they must be fit for the purpose they were sold under.
The company cannot claim that breaching the wrapping violates your rights as the goods were clearly not of satisfactory quality.
And it is the store not the manufacturer who must sort out the problem - your contract is with the store. Nor does claiming a problem under SoGA violate your warranty terms since the manufacturer's warranty is in addition to any rights in the SoGA.
It's an incredibly powerful piece of law (and far stronger than US legislation in the same area), just mentioning the words 'Sale of Goods Act' is usually a good way of getting a company seriously worried. They usually back down there and then, but if you then mention the local trading standards office (in the phone book), they will get VERY worried. Trading standards are the last people you want to cross...
...hmmm okay maybe not the *last* people. But close.
Anyway UKers, read up on the Sale of Goods Act 1979, know your rights and use them. Don't take all the crap stores try to fob you off with about shrink wrap, misuse and 90 day warranties.
IIRC the only physical purchases not covered by SoGA are houses, which live in a legal minefield all of their own.
Hehehe, the people that buy this "highspeed" modem cable would be horrified to see the phone cable inside the wall. Then trace the phone wiring in the basement and see how close it is to the power wiring. They must be selling the placebo effect modem cable.
:)
I'm told homeopathic modem drivers cure that problem.
"Who would have thought that France and Germany could work together in 1945?"
Look up words like "Vichy" and "Petain" in a history book. You'll find that the French and Germans had no difficulty working together almost from the moment that German tanks rolled across the border. A leopard never changes its spots.
250 000 French soldiers died in World War II - only slightly fewer than the 295 000 Americans who were killed. French civilian casualties were 360 000, six times that of Great Britain - we won't even try to calculate how few American civilians died.
And that is just one generation after 1.37 MILLION French were killed in World War I.
When you actually read the history books the facts sometimes get in the way of prejudices.
If the satellites are in retrograde orbits they're certainly captures from somewhere.
Retrograde orbits are not stable in the long term. The tidal effects of Jupiter will cause the satellite's orbit to decay; the satellite will drift ever-closer to the planet with an accelerating rate of decay.
Jupiter has got 'em good and hard and will eventually pull them apart.
Much of the risk from comets comes from short period comets that whip around the Sun in a few tens of years. And guess which planet produces short term comets?
Yup, Jupiter.
A comet comes in from the Oort cloud and makes a close approach to Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity turns that highly elliptical orbit into a much less elliptical orbit with its aphelion somewhere around the orbit of Jupiter. That comet then spends its time whizzing around the inner Solar System - which includes us.
Having a look at Jupiter space could be interesting, we might see something that wasn't there before and we can take a look to see what Jupiter is catching. If we can calculate how often Jupiter picks up satellites, we can help calculate the risk to Earth.
Buran could carry larger, heavier cargos into orbit (30 tonnes versus 25 for the Shuttle), bring more back (20 tonnes versus 15), fly the whole mission automatically, was made of stronger materials and didn't have to lug three heavy engines around with her.
She was the better craft of the two - the product of the genius of two design teams, the Americans who put the Shuttle together, and the Soviet team who took their product and improved it.
Buran was never entirely finished, even when it flew many of its avionics and life-support systems had not been installed.
The Energia booster team has been split up with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The strap on boosters were built in the Ukraine and have now become the Zenit rocket which is used for the Sealaunch programme. The Russian workers have been deployed to other tasks such as the new Angara rocket which should fly this year.
Sadly it looks like Buran will never fly again. The Russians have continued work with a series of ongoing spaceplane projects.
There is the Multi-purpose Aerospace System (MAKS) a 30 tonne, 2 man orbiter with an 8 tonne payload which would be launched off the back of an aircraft, and a programme known as Orel which is developing a single-stage to orbit spaceplane by the name of the Tu2000.
Of course the ongoing crisis of the Russian economy means that these programmes are running almost on empty. The Orel programme has done work on scramjets in conjunction with the French, so it is possible that ESA might get involved at some stage in the future.
One of the original design goals of the STS was that it would be able to repair satellites in space-- but very few satellite programs have taken advantage of this design feature.
NASA were forbidden from working on commercial satellites in the wake of Challenger.
The other reason why this is a poor reason for a vehicle as expensive as the Shuttle is that very few satellites sit in Shuttle-suitable orbits. The only ones NASA did work on were comm satellites that had failed to fire their booster into geosynchronous orbit.
Should they happen to devise a method of checking the shuttle while in orbit for defect, what would happen should they find a defect on a shuttle in space? Do they have the ability to fix defects while in space?
There is little they can do. NASA originally planned to produce a tile repair kit for the Shuttle. Contracts were given to Martin Marietta around 1980, but I don't think it ever flew. The plan was to use a paste to fill in small cracks and dents in tiles and carry blocks to fill larger gaps in the thermal protection.
I think NASA ditched the plan for a number of reasons, amongst them were that the tile system seemed to be more resilient than people thought. The Shuttle routinely lost tiles, but none of them were ever in critical areas. Then, NASA introduced thermal blankets over most of the Shuttle's surface which got rid of the troublesome tiles once and for all - apart from in the most critical areas.
There are serious worries that an astronaut moving close to the tiles would cause more damage than he could repair. The tiles can be damaged by a fingernail - so they are horribly vulnerable.
The real problem is that the outside of the Shuttle has few handhold that would be needed to replace tiles. The underside is particularly smooth and would be almost impossible to work on.
I've got a nasty feeling that the committee that is formed to investigate the disaster is going to find a repetition of the workings that contributed to the loss of Challenger, the Shuttle was being hit by debris - it survived, so obviously it was more robust than people thought. Instead of fixing the problem, they congratulated themselves on a resilient spacecraft.
And lastly, how many people can the Soyuz capsules handle? If the shuttle could not handle a landing they might have to orphan it in space and send up multiple Soyuz capsules, or a second shuttle?
Soyuz can carry three people. The main problem is that the Russians are so strapped for cash that there are probably only three or four Soyuz capsules available.
Heck, even if the PS2 comes out relatively soon, it may not be enough; MS are already thinking about XBox-2 which could leapfrog the PS3 (NB: wild speculation here!). If the timeframe between PS3 & Xbox2 isn't enough, Sony are going to have some trouble making sales.
I wonder if Sony is going to play the same game that worked so well against Sega? Dreamcast, which launched first, was fatally wounded by on-going speculation of the power of PS2. When Dreamcast launched, it had a fantastic line-up of games - but the suspicion of punters was that PS2 would offer a quantum leap over Dreamcast. Sales tanked.
When PS2 came out, I think a good number of people were surprised at how poor the games looked by contrast to Dreamcast, but by then Sega was already talking about pulling the plug.
My guess is that Sony will stay relatively quiet for a while yet, at least until XBox2 is better defined and then announce a product far in advance of the competition.
Month upon month of strategic 'leaks', some 'in-game' shots, a few 'exclusives' to game-illiterate journalists all intended to drain hype from the other consoles. Then a release either shortly after XBox2, or in time for the big Christmas sales.
I do agree that Sony is better placed than the competition to hold off a release for as long as possible. Not only is it making money on each console sale and each game, it is selling more games the the competition combined.
Naturally my biggest hope for PS3 is that they apply a little of Sony's famed styling to the machine and produce something less pig-ugly than the nasty lop-sided, cheapo PS2. PS1 was a design classic - the PS2 - well, what happened?
First comes chemical, then comes nuclear. The energy to be had from nuclear reaction is 1,000,000 times what you can get from chemical reactions. Even using fision with 90% of your energy going into fision fragment heat, you can get 100.000 time the energy of chemical. Get yourself a nice little highly enriched core, pulse it and somehow turn the photons into laseable light/xrays. Or perhapse you could use the heat itself to excite CO2. Hot stuff tonight!
You can't pulse a reactor in such a manner as it uses slow fission. High-powered X-ray lasers use a nuclear weapon to generate the X-rays which are focused along metal rods.
As well as being nasty things in their own right, they suffer a serious drawback - the atmosphere is opaque at those wavelengths.
The only way to use them would be to detonate the bomb in space. Which would either mean launching the X-ray laser as soon as a threat was noticed, or placing nuclear weapons into orbit. Neither of which is very palatable.
Fortunately tests on the concept in the Nevada desert showed that the X-ray laser was not as promising a technology as old Doctor Strangelove himself - Edward Teller had promised.
While one could argue that lasers do not qualify
as being restricted to defensive use, ABM proliferation
seems to me to be VERY desirable. I'd like to
see every country in the world deploy effective
ABM technology. It would make launching ICBMs
redundant.
Not at all. I just build more ICBMs to overwhelm your system. If I'm a little strapped for cash I top them with decoys. They don't have to be smart, just as long as they get to the target area to confuse your ABM system. Since either option is going to be cheaper than a sophisticated ABM system I take the advantage.
Or if I have enough resources, I put my ICBMs on to submarines and park them just off of your shore. Fire the missiles with very short travel times and you have no time to react.
And if ICBMs are passe, cruise missiles certainly aren't. We're back to the old race between the armour maker and the archer. The offensive weapon always wins.
Do you think the US would be sitting by if another country had decided to deploy their own version of NMD?
I have always wondered why the Neutron Bomb (which kills people and leaves buildings intact) was against the Geneva Convention. I suppose they prefer plain old nuclear bombs that both kill people *and* destroy buildings.
It's not banned. The United States, Soviet Union and France all developed and tested neutron weapons. They just went out of fashion during the 1980s.
As tensions in Europe stabilised during Gorbachev's premiership, the US and USSR agreed to remove the SS20 and Pershing missiles that would have carried the warheads. The French programme was cancelled because of domestic and European pressure. I don't know if the American warheads were ever destroyed.
There was also a general feeling that the supposed 'benefits' of neutron weapons lowered the threshold at which point the use of nuclear weapons would become 'acceptable' - they would destabilise the situation rather than add to security.
Finally, to correct a mistaken belief. Neutron weapons are still incredibly destructive weapons. They produce the same heat flash and blast wave as a conventional nuclear weapon of the same yield. Detonated at ground level they will still spill fall-out over a wide area.
The difference between the neutron bomb and a conventional thermonuclear warhead lies in the outer casing. In a traditional bomb this has been made of materials such as iron or steel - which absorb neutrons, or U238 - which undergoes fast fission. In the neutron bomb, the casing does not absorb high velocity neutrons which then irradiate the surrounding area.
There is no such thing as a clean bomb that just kills people.
Nukes don't go off from normal explosions -- it takes a lot more energy that a simple explosion to start a fusion reaction.
There is one type of nuclear weapon that can be detonated by accident. The uranium cannon design is vulnerable to accidents.
Essentially, it consists of two sub-critical masses of uranium. One piece forms a 'bullet', the other, a 'target'. When the cannon is fired the two pieces impact producing more than one critical mass.
The ignition charge could explode under high temperatures, firing the bullet into the target and starting the explosion.
The uranium cannon has largely been retired since the late 1950s - it is wasteful of fuel, the same amount of U235 can be used to build two implosion bombs.
However, it was used by South Africa in their nuclear weapons (now dismantled). They had lots of uranium, electrical power and plenty of experience with enrichment technologies. The cannon is relatively technically undemanding and can be built without a test programme.
A country wanting a quick and dirty nuclear deterrent is quite likely to try building uranium cannons.
Fortunately, such a country is unlikely to be able to build a device that can be put on top of a missile. That is another quantum leap in weapon design.
Good point, but it also assumes that you are being led by a sane person. Fortunately the West has been lucky in that regard - to date; but that isn't guaranteed in the future.
Agreed, that it looks impossible right now. We need an enormous velocity to get to Jupiter and then need to lose almost all of that to enter orbit around Europa. Any space-craft would be something like 90% fuel unless we use some radical technologies - which will need a lot of testing.
Although a halfway step would be nice - a high resolution Europa orbiter would be very useful. Then we could see exactly what the whole surface looked like, map it with radar and so on. Perhaps we could map the heat flow through the surface from that projected Europan ocean, work out what trace materials form those dark streaks, perhaps it would even be able to remote sense organic compounds that have come to the surface.
Still we can at least rule out a manned mission - the Jovian magnetosphere would cook any Frank Pooles and Dave Bowmans long before they got to Europa.
Anything drifting between the stars is likely to have originated in a solar system somewhere. To have escaped from a star's gravity it would have needed an enormous velocity.
It would need to shed almost all of this velocity before it could then enter an orbit around Jupiter or the Sun. It would have to do this by coming extraordinarily close to Jupiter or the Sun - I have no idea if it could survive such an encounter without being ripped to pieces by tidal forces - anyone?
Needless to say we haven't seen anything entering the Solar System on such a trajectory, although it seems likely that huge numbers of small bodies were flung out of the Solar System in the period directly after planets were formed. So they might well be out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you did, it was called Nike-Zeus and introduced in 1958.
The Russian system is a hangover from the days of the SALT talks. Each of the two signatories (the US and the USSR) were able to retain one ABM system that had been deployed or was in the process of deployment, on three conditions: 1. That there were no future developments; 2. That the technology was deployed at no more than two sites; and 3. That no site possessed more than 100 interceptors.
A further appendix to the treaty then reduced the number of sites to one.
The US was in the process of deploying its own AMB system known as Safeguard, originally authorised in 1970. It was deployed at Malmstrom USAFB in Montana and Grand Forks USAFB in North Dakota. It would have then been rolled out to Whiteman USAFB in Missouri, and Warren USAFB Wyoming.
When the SALT negotiations proved to be a success, the US abandoned the second two sites. Malmstrom was abandoned when the final section of the talks were concluded.
The Grand Forks base was completed and brought into operation in April 1975, and was fully fitted out with all 100 missiles by October 1975. A day later, Congress cancelled all funding for Safeguard and the system was withdrawn.
The Soviet system was called Galosh and as you said operated around Moscow. It is doubtful whether it is operational any longer.
And as for your, NMD is a good idea - well even if you overlook the horrendous spending projections needed to build the system, the dubious statistics used by the Pentagon, the faked test results you're left with the obvious pork-barrelling in a time when the US economy and budget aren't looking too healthy.
If you choose to ignore the message this sends to China - build up your missile fleet before its made obsolete. If you want to forget that the Chinese already see the US as a long-term strategic threat - and the Indians see the Chinese as a threat and the Pakistanis see the Indians as a threat...
You still have severe questions about the political implications of such a system. The US and its political catamite the UK have shown themselves willing to trample over international law to get their own way with Iraq. We broke international law and the UN Charter to take on a country we knew we could beat without retaliation.
Imagine the temptation to get involved in a conflict with ANY country if you thought your country was immune from any retaliation.
Bush and co. are scary enough without NMD, with it - well I won't be sleeping much.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Smaller. There was a lot of interest from the 1960s onwards with launching satellites from high velocity artillery. The work was pioneered by Gerald Bull, who later went on to develop long range artillery for the South Africans, develop the Iraqi supergun and ended his days being assassinated - presumably by the Israelis.
Bull was in charge of a 1960s project called HARP which built an enormous cannon to fire projectiles into the upper atmosphere (and we're talking about 180 km here) over Barbados (well if you're going to do science, you should do it somewhere nice).
The projectiles were instrumented devices known as martlets, Bull planned to develop martlets with small motors that would give them enough kick to enter low orbit.
The cannon would have been much cheaper than rockets, but the technology of building advanced satellites capable of withstanding the shock of launching would have been formidable.
The supergun built for the Iraqis by the British company Matrix Churchill would have not been able to fire satellites, but a bigger one designed by Bull would have. He got round the problem of a short, sharp shock by having a series of explosions accelerate the projectile as it travelled along the gun barrel. Since there would be less pressure on the barrel, it needn't be so strong or made of advanced materials. Bull got the idea from the German V3 gun built to bombard London during WW2. The photo is dreadful but it shows the central barrel and the side barrels coming off it. Each of those would have fired in turn behind the shell and accelerated it up the gun and towards Britain.
More on HARP here and other space guns (with an awesome picture of the HARP gun firing here.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I've got an XBox and I have to admit the games line up really does suck. Almost all the big hyped titles have been busts on the machine and other 'must-have' titles are just being pushed ever forward into the future.
I'm hoping 'Brute Force' will show some signs of life in the XBox market. But that isn't until the end of June - assuming it actually ships on time.
But thank god I bought a Cube!
As a matter of interest which games do you consider outstanding on the XBox?
Best wishes,
Mike.
And you damn well ought to have!
SoGA requires all goods to match the description on the box or in any advertising, to be of satisfactory quality - (ie. they must work and last a reasonable length of time), and they must be fit for the purpose they were sold under.
The company cannot claim that breaching the wrapping violates your rights as the goods were clearly not of satisfactory quality.
And it is the store not the manufacturer who must sort out the problem - your contract is with the store. Nor does claiming a problem under SoGA violate your warranty terms since the manufacturer's warranty is in addition to any rights in the SoGA.
It's an incredibly powerful piece of law (and far stronger than US legislation in the same area), just mentioning the words 'Sale of Goods Act' is usually a good way of getting a company seriously worried. They usually back down there and then, but if you then mention the local trading standards office (in the phone book), they will get VERY worried. Trading standards are the last people you want to cross...
Anyway UKers, read up on the Sale of Goods Act 1979, know your rights and use them. Don't take all the crap stores try to fob you off with about shrink wrap, misuse and 90 day warranties.
IIRC the only physical purchases not covered by SoGA are houses, which live in a legal minefield all of their own.
UK Consumer Rights
Best wishes,
Mike.
Hehehe, the people that buy this "highspeed" modem cable would be horrified to see the phone cable inside the wall. Then trace the phone wiring in the basement and see how close it is to the power wiring. They must be selling the placebo effect modem cable.
I'm told homeopathic modem drivers cure that problem.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Which is a market larger than that of North America. The EU may well lack political clout, but its an economic superpower.
(Not to mention that there are a number of printer companies inside the EU that would love to see HP out of the market.)
Best wishes,
Mike.
Look up words like "Vichy" and "Petain" in a history book. You'll find that the French and Germans had no difficulty working together almost from the moment that German tanks rolled across the border. A leopard never changes its spots.
250 000 French soldiers died in World War II - only slightly fewer than the 295 000 Americans who were killed. French civilian casualties were 360 000, six times that of Great Britain - we won't even try to calculate how few American civilians died.
And that is just one generation after 1.37 MILLION French were killed in World War I.
When you actually read the history books the facts sometimes get in the way of prejudices.
Best wishes,
Mike.
That is an enviable safety record by any standard. It's clear that Soyuz has been debugged, the Shuttle appears not to be so well understood.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Retrograde orbits are not stable in the long term. The tidal effects of Jupiter will cause the satellite's orbit to decay; the satellite will drift ever-closer to the planet with an accelerating rate of decay.
Jupiter has got 'em good and hard and will eventually pull them apart.
But not for a few million years.
Damn, I evolved too early!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yup, Jupiter.
A comet comes in from the Oort cloud and makes a close approach to Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity turns that highly elliptical orbit into a much less elliptical orbit with its aphelion somewhere around the orbit of Jupiter. That comet then spends its time whizzing around the inner Solar System - which includes us.
Having a look at Jupiter space could be interesting, we might see something that wasn't there before and we can take a look to see what Jupiter is catching. If we can calculate how often Jupiter picks up satellites, we can help calculate the risk to Earth.
Best wishes,
Mike.
She was the better craft of the two - the product of the genius of two design teams, the Americans who put the Shuttle together, and the Soviet team who took their product and improved it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Energia booster team has been split up with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The strap on boosters were built in the Ukraine and have now become the Zenit rocket which is used for the Sealaunch programme. The Russian workers have been deployed to other tasks such as the new Angara rocket which should fly this year.
Sadly it looks like Buran will never fly again. The Russians have continued work with a series of ongoing spaceplane projects.
There is the Multi-purpose Aerospace System (MAKS) a 30 tonne, 2 man orbiter with an 8 tonne payload which would be launched off the back of an aircraft, and a programme known as Orel which is developing a single-stage to orbit spaceplane by the name of the Tu2000.
Of course the ongoing crisis of the Russian economy means that these programmes are running almost on empty. The Orel programme has done work on scramjets in conjunction with the French, so it is possible that ESA might get involved at some stage in the future.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You can get 22 000 kilos to low orbit on a Proton-M. The ISS has already received the Zarya and Zvezda modules from Proton rockets.
Best wishes,
Mike.
NASA were forbidden from working on commercial satellites in the wake of Challenger.
The other reason why this is a poor reason for a vehicle as expensive as the Shuttle is that very few satellites sit in Shuttle-suitable orbits. The only ones NASA did work on were comm satellites that had failed to fire their booster into geosynchronous orbit.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There is little they can do. NASA originally planned to produce a tile repair kit for the Shuttle. Contracts were given to Martin Marietta around 1980, but I don't think it ever flew. The plan was to use a paste to fill in small cracks and dents in tiles and carry blocks to fill larger gaps in the thermal protection.
I think NASA ditched the plan for a number of reasons, amongst them were that the tile system seemed to be more resilient than people thought. The Shuttle routinely lost tiles, but none of them were ever in critical areas. Then, NASA introduced thermal blankets over most of the Shuttle's surface which got rid of the troublesome tiles once and for all - apart from in the most critical areas.
There are serious worries that an astronaut moving close to the tiles would cause more damage than he could repair. The tiles can be damaged by a fingernail - so they are horribly vulnerable.
The real problem is that the outside of the Shuttle has few handhold that would be needed to replace tiles. The underside is particularly smooth and would be almost impossible to work on.
I've got a nasty feeling that the committee that is formed to investigate the disaster is going to find a repetition of the workings that contributed to the loss of Challenger, the Shuttle was being hit by debris - it survived, so obviously it was more robust than people thought. Instead of fixing the problem, they congratulated themselves on a resilient spacecraft.
And lastly, how many people can the Soyuz capsules handle? If the shuttle could not handle a landing they might have to orphan it in space and send up multiple Soyuz capsules, or a second shuttle?
Soyuz can carry three people. The main problem is that the Russians are so strapped for cash that there are probably only three or four Soyuz capsules available.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I wonder if Sony is going to play the same game that worked so well against Sega? Dreamcast, which launched first, was fatally wounded by on-going speculation of the power of PS2. When Dreamcast launched, it had a fantastic line-up of games - but the suspicion of punters was that PS2 would offer a quantum leap over Dreamcast. Sales tanked.
When PS2 came out, I think a good number of people were surprised at how poor the games looked by contrast to Dreamcast, but by then Sega was already talking about pulling the plug.
My guess is that Sony will stay relatively quiet for a while yet, at least until XBox2 is better defined and then announce a product far in advance of the competition.
Month upon month of strategic 'leaks', some 'in-game' shots, a few 'exclusives' to game-illiterate journalists all intended to drain hype from the other consoles. Then a release either shortly after XBox2, or in time for the big Christmas sales.
I do agree that Sony is better placed than the competition to hold off a release for as long as possible. Not only is it making money on each console sale and each game, it is selling more games the the competition combined.
Naturally my biggest hope for PS3 is that they apply a little of Sony's famed styling to the machine and produce something less pig-ugly than the nasty lop-sided, cheapo PS2. PS1 was a design classic - the PS2 - well, what happened?
Best wishes,
Mike.
You can't pulse a reactor in such a manner as it uses slow fission. High-powered X-ray lasers use a nuclear weapon to generate the X-rays which are focused along metal rods.
As well as being nasty things in their own right, they suffer a serious drawback - the atmosphere is opaque at those wavelengths.
The only way to use them would be to detonate the bomb in space. Which would either mean launching the X-ray laser as soon as a threat was noticed, or placing nuclear weapons into orbit. Neither of which is very palatable.
Fortunately tests on the concept in the Nevada desert showed that the X-ray laser was not as promising a technology as old Doctor Strangelove himself - Edward Teller had promised.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Not at all. I just build more ICBMs to overwhelm your system. If I'm a little strapped for cash I top them with decoys. They don't have to be smart, just as long as they get to the target area to confuse your ABM system. Since either option is going to be cheaper than a sophisticated ABM system I take the advantage.
Or if I have enough resources, I put my ICBMs on to submarines and park them just off of your shore. Fire the missiles with very short travel times and you have no time to react.
And if ICBMs are passe, cruise missiles certainly aren't. We're back to the old race between the armour maker and the archer. The offensive weapon always wins.
Do you think the US would be sitting by if another country had decided to deploy their own version of NMD?
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's not banned. The United States, Soviet Union and France all developed and tested neutron weapons. They just went out of fashion during the 1980s.
As tensions in Europe stabilised during Gorbachev's premiership, the US and USSR agreed to remove the SS20 and Pershing missiles that would have carried the warheads. The French programme was cancelled because of domestic and European pressure. I don't know if the American warheads were ever destroyed.
There was also a general feeling that the supposed 'benefits' of neutron weapons lowered the threshold at which point the use of nuclear weapons would become 'acceptable' - they would destabilise the situation rather than add to security.
Finally, to correct a mistaken belief. Neutron weapons are still incredibly destructive weapons. They produce the same heat flash and blast wave as a conventional nuclear weapon of the same yield. Detonated at ground level they will still spill fall-out over a wide area.
The difference between the neutron bomb and a conventional thermonuclear warhead lies in the outer casing. In a traditional bomb this has been made of materials such as iron or steel - which absorb neutrons, or U238 - which undergoes fast fission. In the neutron bomb, the casing does not absorb high velocity neutrons which then irradiate the surrounding area.
There is no such thing as a clean bomb that just kills people.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There is one type of nuclear weapon that can be detonated by accident. The uranium cannon design is vulnerable to accidents.
Essentially, it consists of two sub-critical masses of uranium. One piece forms a 'bullet', the other, a 'target'. When the cannon is fired the two pieces impact producing more than one critical mass.
The ignition charge could explode under high temperatures, firing the bullet into the target and starting the explosion.
The uranium cannon has largely been retired since the late 1950s - it is wasteful of fuel, the same amount of U235 can be used to build two implosion bombs.
However, it was used by South Africa in their nuclear weapons (now dismantled). They had lots of uranium, electrical power and plenty of experience with enrichment technologies. The cannon is relatively technically undemanding and can be built without a test programme.
A country wanting a quick and dirty nuclear deterrent is quite likely to try building uranium cannons.
Fortunately, such a country is unlikely to be able to build a device that can be put on top of a missile. That is another quantum leap in weapon design.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Although a halfway step would be nice - a high resolution Europa orbiter would be very useful. Then we could see exactly what the whole surface looked like, map it with radar and so on. Perhaps we could map the heat flow through the surface from that projected Europan ocean, work out what trace materials form those dark streaks, perhaps it would even be able to remote sense organic compounds that have come to the surface.
Still we can at least rule out a manned mission - the Jovian magnetosphere would cook any Frank Pooles and Dave Bowmans long before they got to Europa.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Anything drifting between the stars is likely to have originated in a solar system somewhere. To have escaped from a star's gravity it would have needed an enormous velocity.
It would need to shed almost all of this velocity before it could then enter an orbit around Jupiter or the Sun. It would have to do this by coming extraordinarily close to Jupiter or the Sun - I have no idea if it could survive such an encounter without being ripped to pieces by tidal forces - anyone?
Needless to say we haven't seen anything entering the Solar System on such a trajectory, although it seems likely that huge numbers of small bodies were flung out of the Solar System in the period directly after planets were formed. So they might well be out there.
Is there an astrophysicist in the house?
Best wishes,
Mike.