Wrong! No one will get lower rates; this is assured. What will happen though is that exuberant drivers will get higher rates. Lower rates? HA; will never happen.
There seems to be a Mars curse for Russian probes. They have sent 4-5 probes, and they have all failed (two are at the bottom of the Pacific right now). However the Ruskies have done very well with other probes; it is just Mars. It is like the Patriots versus the Giants...
NASA (actually JPL) has done better. Off the top of my head I would say that only two out of the last 5-6 have failed. [The failures spelled the doom of NASA new mantra "Better, Cheaper, Faster", although one lander did make it using better-cheaper-faster (using off the shelf electronics).] The last 3 JPL Mars probes have been spectacular successes ( MRO and the two MER rovers).
660 million is peanuts to NASA; about the same as a single shuttle mission. "The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle as of 2011 is about $450 million per mission." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_program#Budget) and the total cost for the shuttle program was about 196 billion. (And the ISS was additional pointless pork costing billions). And since when did the shuttle do any real science? Where were the ground-breaking missions liek Voyage and Cassini and MER? The best the program can claim are servicing missions to Hubble, but Hubble is a robotic mission.
I don't begrudge the cost of MSL. The Webb telescope however....still it pales in comparison to the throwaway money for the ISS and Shuttle.
JPL is responsible for many successful planetary robotic mission including collaborationsas happened with Cassini and MSL. JPL has executed a many highly successful missions such as Voyager and MER2 (Opportunity) while never killing anyone or blowing huge budgets. Do not confuse JPL with the manned scapeflight porkbarrel in Houston. JPL does science; Houston does hugely expensive stunts and kills people. Unfortunately NASA is run by ex-pilots and astronauts; when robotic missions are cut, which happens all the time, Houston is usually behind it. The amount of money spent (wasted) on the spacestation and the shuttle dwarf the amount of money spent on Mars missions.
The cameras on GRAIL were an afterthought; they are dinky, cell-phone-grade cameras so we should not be too picky. Photography was not its primary mission...
NASA deserves little credit for the MER rovers (i.e. Spirt and Opportunity), in fact I suspect that the human-spaceflight ex-pilots at NASA/Houston would prefer to nuke all unmanned mission and dump (waste) all the funding on more manned pork.
The MERs are JPL all the way. Do not confuse the money-pit, scientifically-impoverished manned missions of NASA with the low-code (comparatively), successful missions of JPL.
Opportunity is one of the most successful missions ever flow, right up there with Voyager and Cassini. Compare that with the Shuttle...
Actually I have to apologize for this post. I was off-base....
It is just fustrating that there is not solution to the nuclear waste dispoal problem....killing Yucca Mountain did not seem like the solution
But what do we do with existing nuclear waste?
We cannot just stick our heads in the sand and pretend that this stuff is not piling up at power plants all around the country. Because that is what it seems like a lot of the anti-Yucca people are doing....All the complaints about the long-term viability of Yucca Mountain are ludicrous compared to the long (or even short) term viability of storing used fuel rods on site at plants. Fukushima was storing spent rods on site....
I hardly blame them for not releasing information on Yucca Mountain to a potential muck-raking reporter. I know everyone hates the idea of Yucca Mountain, but do they realize the alternative? Nuclear waste is currently being stored on-site all over the country and piling up. The potential for disaster is growing unless that waste can be disposed of, and I am not aware of any better alternative than Yucca Mountain.
and soon we will all be REQUIRED to carry a cell phone or equivilent transponder....for our own safety of course.
As Stallman said, "The cell phone is Stalin's dream". I do not carry one; I plan to enjoy these last few years of freedom before I am required to carry one.
I would think that a boycott of new movies and music would work. I am sick of entertainment industry running Washington; my protest will take the form or no more movies for me. I won't miss them...
It is a joke program as far as Mars. They have launched a lot of probes to Mars and they have all failed. I think one lasted for a few minute at Mars but the one previous to Fobos-Grunt was Mars-96 which fired its rockets downward causing it to crash into Chile/Boliva dumping 100 grams of plutonium in the debris field.
It was not able to run its heaters so critical components (batteries?) were destroyed by the cold. So even if the wheels were uncovered and the remaining dust was removed its solar panels, it would not be functional.
Remember that it went through the summer on Mars and got a good dose of solar energy, but it did not even have enough functionality to send out a ack signal on its low-gain antenna, never mind swivel its high-gain antenna. It is totally kaput, alas, but it went way beyond its expected lifetime (realistically its expected lifetime was about a year) and roved for about 6 years. Not only that but it landed in a bad spot (a "basalt prison" at Gusev crater), and was able to claw its way up a local hill and find the long-sought carbonate deposits in addition to other water-borne deposits such as silica.
When you have a one-party system as Massachusetts does along with a voting public that is only interested national / global issues, you have to expect that the government is loaded with drunken patronage solons.
The last three Speakers of the House have been indicted. Even before that the system was corrupted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Thompson)...
The real story is WHERE Opportunity will be wintering. It has found a nice cozy place with some very interesting rock outcrops. Clay? Sulfates? Who knows but the pictures look very interesting.
Another dust issue is that the Min-TES has been disabled by dust. Opportunity could really, really use Mini-TES now in it current location.
Another dust issue is what MSL will be doing, if anything, about dust on its instruments.
So how are the Ruskies doing these days? Their Mars mission is tumbling out of control in low Earth orbit, soon to rain 10,000 pounds of hydrazine down somewhere inthe world, while JPL's Mars mission is millions of miles away headed to Mars.
The apollo missions were a greater technical accomplishment (in 1969) than the Lunkhod rover (in 1970)....but they was pointless. Manned missions are dangerous stunts and money pits performed by the ex-pilots that run Nasa in Houston. They seem to think that Star Wars / Star Trek was a documentary.
The real science, at a fraction of the cost and no loss of life, has been done out of JPL at Caltech/Pasadena. Two separate branches of Nasa, but you have to love how the bureaucrats in Houston like to claim success when JPL accomplishes one breaktrough mission after another.
The press does not seem to undertand this, alas.
Yes! China's action was irresponsible because it endangers other satellites and manned missions by polluting that orbit with tons of space junk traveling at very very high speed. Space junk is an increasing problem; at least one shuttle was hit, but luckily it was a tiny piece of debris, and many sats have been hit.
China was warned about this but they ignored the warnings. A dumb macho thing I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.sovereignman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Constitution_toilet_paper.jpg
Wrong! No one will get lower rates; this is assured. What will happen though is that exuberant drivers will get higher rates. Lower rates? HA; will never happen.
So simple a child could do it Jim (http://www.startrek.de/_files/images/guide/episode_438.jpg). All you need a plexiglass helmut and some lights.
There seems to be a Mars curse for Russian probes. They have sent 4-5 probes, and they have all failed (two are at the bottom of the Pacific right now). However the Ruskies have done very well with other probes; it is just Mars. It is like the Patriots versus the Giants... NASA (actually JPL) has done better. Off the top of my head I would say that only two out of the last 5-6 have failed. [The failures spelled the doom of NASA new mantra "Better, Cheaper, Faster", although one lander did make it using better-cheaper-faster (using off the shelf electronics).] The last 3 JPL Mars probes have been spectacular successes ( MRO and the two MER rovers).
Maybe the chips were from this source: http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/counterfeit-military-components-and-chips/
660 million is peanuts to NASA; about the same as a single shuttle mission. "The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle as of 2011 is about $450 million per mission." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_program#Budget) and the total cost for the shuttle program was about 196 billion. (And the ISS was additional pointless pork costing billions). And since when did the shuttle do any real science? Where were the ground-breaking missions liek Voyage and Cassini and MER? The best the program can claim are servicing missions to Hubble, but Hubble is a robotic mission. I don't begrudge the cost of MSL. The Webb telescope however....still it pales in comparison to the throwaway money for the ISS and Shuttle.
JPL is responsible for many successful planetary robotic mission including collaborationsas happened with Cassini and MSL. JPL has executed a many highly successful missions such as Voyager and MER2 (Opportunity) while never killing anyone or blowing huge budgets. Do not confuse JPL with the manned scapeflight porkbarrel in Houston. JPL does science; Houston does hugely expensive stunts and kills people. Unfortunately NASA is run by ex-pilots and astronauts; when robotic missions are cut, which happens all the time, Houston is usually behind it. The amount of money spent (wasted) on the spacestation and the shuttle dwarf the amount of money spent on Mars missions.
The cameras on GRAIL were an afterthought; they are dinky, cell-phone-grade cameras so we should not be too picky. Photography was not its primary mission...
Now that the Ambulance Chasers are involved, it is hard to tell what is fact and what is fiction
The simple solution is to slap these companies with import tariffs for outsourced work...
Will this effect robotic missions currently flying such as Dawn and MSL and other missions?
NASA deserves little credit for the MER rovers (i.e. Spirt and Opportunity), in fact I suspect that the human-spaceflight ex-pilots at NASA/Houston would prefer to nuke all unmanned mission and dump (waste) all the funding on more manned pork. The MERs are JPL all the way. Do not confuse the money-pit, scientifically-impoverished manned missions of NASA with the low-code (comparatively), successful missions of JPL. Opportunity is one of the most successful missions ever flow, right up there with Voyager and Cassini. Compare that with the Shuttle...
Actually I have to apologize for this post. I was off-base.... It is just fustrating that there is not solution to the nuclear waste dispoal problem....killing Yucca Mountain did not seem like the solution
But what do we do with existing nuclear waste? We cannot just stick our heads in the sand and pretend that this stuff is not piling up at power plants all around the country. Because that is what it seems like a lot of the anti-Yucca people are doing....All the complaints about the long-term viability of Yucca Mountain are ludicrous compared to the long (or even short) term viability of storing used fuel rods on site at plants. Fukushima was storing spent rods on site....
I hardly blame them for not releasing information on Yucca Mountain to a potential muck-raking reporter. I know everyone hates the idea of Yucca Mountain, but do they realize the alternative? Nuclear waste is currently being stored on-site all over the country and piling up. The potential for disaster is growing unless that waste can be disposed of, and I am not aware of any better alternative than Yucca Mountain.
and soon we will all be REQUIRED to carry a cell phone or equivilent transponder....for our own safety of course. As Stallman said, "The cell phone is Stalin's dream". I do not carry one; I plan to enjoy these last few years of freedom before I am required to carry one.
Boycott the entertainment industry. Enough is enough...
I would think that a boycott of new movies and music would work. I am sick of entertainment industry running Washington; my protest will take the form or no more movies for me. I won't miss them...
It is a joke program as far as Mars. They have launched a lot of probes to Mars and they have all failed. I think one lasted for a few minute at Mars but the one previous to Fobos-Grunt was Mars-96 which fired its rockets downward causing it to crash into Chile/Boliva dumping 100 grams of plutonium in the debris field.
It was not able to run its heaters so critical components (batteries?) were destroyed by the cold. So even if the wheels were uncovered and the remaining dust was removed its solar panels, it would not be functional. Remember that it went through the summer on Mars and got a good dose of solar energy, but it did not even have enough functionality to send out a ack signal on its low-gain antenna, never mind swivel its high-gain antenna. It is totally kaput, alas, but it went way beyond its expected lifetime (realistically its expected lifetime was about a year) and roved for about 6 years. Not only that but it landed in a bad spot (a "basalt prison" at Gusev crater), and was able to claw its way up a local hill and find the long-sought carbonate deposits in addition to other water-borne deposits such as silica.
When you have a one-party system as Massachusetts does along with a voting public that is only interested national / global issues, you have to expect that the government is loaded with drunken patronage solons. The last three Speakers of the House have been indicted. Even before that the system was corrupted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Thompson)...
The real story is WHERE Opportunity will be wintering. It has found a nice cozy place with some very interesting rock outcrops. Clay? Sulfates? Who knows but the pictures look very interesting. Another dust issue is that the Min-TES has been disabled by dust. Opportunity could really, really use Mini-TES now in it current location. Another dust issue is what MSL will be doing, if anything, about dust on its instruments.
with a pinhole camera
So how are the Ruskies doing these days? Their Mars mission is tumbling out of control in low Earth orbit, soon to rain 10,000 pounds of hydrazine down somewhere inthe world, while JPL's Mars mission is millions of miles away headed to Mars. The apollo missions were a greater technical accomplishment (in 1969) than the Lunkhod rover (in 1970)....but they was pointless. Manned missions are dangerous stunts and money pits performed by the ex-pilots that run Nasa in Houston. They seem to think that Star Wars / Star Trek was a documentary. The real science, at a fraction of the cost and no loss of life, has been done out of JPL at Caltech/Pasadena. Two separate branches of Nasa, but you have to love how the bureaucrats in Houston like to claim success when JPL accomplishes one breaktrough mission after another. The press does not seem to undertand this, alas.
Yes! China's action was irresponsible because it endangers other satellites and manned missions by polluting that orbit with tons of space junk traveling at very very high speed. Space junk is an increasing problem; at least one shuttle was hit, but luckily it was a tiny piece of debris, and many sats have been hit. China was warned about this but they ignored the warnings. A dumb macho thing I guess.