We can't even live off the land on a frozen continent that's what, an 8 hour air trip from civilization? Nor does anyone WANT to live there permanently.
I'm sure a few people THINK they want to 'live on Mars', but almost none of them really do if you ask me. Nobody is going to create a colony there, probably ever, certainly not for centuries.
What a classic, the old drive by diss. Why bother? You clearly have no facts to martial, and probably no knowledge of the subject except what, reading the dust jacket of some book? sheesh.
Mars is MORE hostile than the Moon. There are plenty of places on the Moon to get 24/7 solar power. For that matter an SPS could do it and for Lunar purposes wouldn't be an impractical idea at all. In any case near the poles you could put up panels that would swivel and get sun all month long. Mars has chemistry, which is not good, who knows what all the nice perchlorates and other fun stuff will do? Not to mention the nasty super fine airborne dust.
The fact is that sending mass to the Moon is 100x cheaper and thus you'll have 100x more mass of supplies and equipment and thus orders of magnitude higher chances of success, plus a simple and viable bail-out option with pretty reasonable restart and correction options when things don't quite go right. Its really a no-brainer.
Nobody has brought any of this to a level of engineering reality. This is where the general public, and even surprisingly a lot of engineering folks, seem to fall far short in understanding. Just because you did 'some research', doesn't mean you can operate a completely isolated spacecraft in deep space successfully for the duration of a manned Mars mission. ISS and other craft which have had long-duration crews have had constant resupply, spare parts, large amounts of real-time ground control operating significant aspects of their spacecraft, etc.
We are certainly at a point where we can START to achieve long-duration isolated deep-space operation, but we're only at the very start and nobody has ever actually built any spacecraft capable of this. Consider this the equivalent of the Apollo program, in which in 1961 nobody had even been to orbit. By 1968 we were just barely reaching the capability to go 3 days to the Moon, land, and return. Mars is a MUCH harder problem, and we're at a similar point, we know what the technical challenges are, and have several viable options for solving each one, but we have to DO the work.
Apollo required a series of I believe something like 17 manned spaceflights before landing on the Moon, in which all the required systems were iteratively tested, adapted, and retested. Because the time frame for test and iteration was short, it was a few days duration mission, it was possible to achieve in 7 years. Lets assume that means it takes 7 years of actual engineering to do that part of it. Now how long will the 17 iterations take this time, when equipment has to be tested for 9 months or longer at a time, and some of it has to actually go to Mars to be tested. Its not likely to take 7 years, its more likely to take 37 years if you ask me.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell of a long-endurance spacecraft using the existing state-of-the-art in life-support and logistical technology to endure for 9 months in space. To build such a thing is still decades off, and this is just one of the more trivial details of things that people fail to understand. No doubt its FEASIBLE, but that degree of engineering doesn't happen without a LOT of buildup. Look at the plan diagrams that have been published, they include several generations of technology in this area before we're really ready.
Beyond that no existing technology will land men on Mars with the ability to take off again. A lunar-lander style 'direct descent' would require a huge amount of fuel because the ascent engine would be pretty large, on top of the lander itself, and thus the descent engine would be prohibitively large. This means we have to design some sort of aerobreaking/parachute/glider/rocket hybrid approach. Those which have been used in the past are only good for a up to a couple 1000 kg, not enough for a manned landing by a long shot. Again, its FEASIBLE to do this, but we are at least a decade away from such a thing, maybe more.
So, maybe we mostly agree at some level, but I think your 10 years, even for an insanely useless project, is highly optimistic.
As for your ideas on reasons to go or not go, I heartily concur. Mars is a useless waste of a place to go except perhaps as a science destination, and in that case you can send 100 unmanned rovers per human. While a rover is far less than a human 100 sophisticated rovers with advanced manipulators, semi-autonomy, and sample return capability are unlikely to be outperformed by one miserable man who can only move a few km from his landing point and can't stay more than a couple weeks.
If you want to 'colonize Mars' it would make FAR more sense to colonize Antarctica, or the deep ocean, both of which are infinitely more hospitable and closer.
The answer is PMP is a useful certification, but like every cert there's always a bunch of clowns that can pass the course but can't manage a wet paper bag. Experience and a good track record is always a much better indicator than a cert.
A dog is right there and is HARD to fool. Security systems have, as you discovered, myriad flaws. Beyond that the cops basically figure 99% of all alarms are false, so they're dead last dispatch priority. If you're VERY lucky they get there 30 minutes later, if they bother to show up at all. The average crack head is in and out in 5 minutes or less, so all that fancy alarm hardware and expensive multi-year monthly contract monitoring, worthless.
Talk to any security expert, a dog is absolutely 100% your best option, if you don't have that, get one FIRST, then worry about the rest. One you have the dog you can worry about impeding ingress with fences, barriers, lights, and if necessary, bars. THEN maybe you start to consider a security system.
And if your dog failed? Get yourself a rottie or a big shepherd. If you think your golden retriever is going to guard your house, well, you got what you asked for, wrong tool for the job.
Simple, reliable, easy to build, but not really optimum at all for a first stage. Much better for high impulse orbital transfer. Yes, nuclear electric might be more efficient, but its unlikely you're going to build a really high thrust nuclear electric design, and for lower impulse designs why not make it solar? The real advantage here though is the ease of development and deployment, you get quite a lot of bang for few bucks. The basic design of a Nerva-class system is already in the bag, it could be flying in 3-5 years if there was some impetus, and its well within the level of budget that could be realistically associated with a commercial venture.
As for not giving the exhaust velocity desired for missions to the outer solar system, there are a whole class of missions, to the inner solar system and asteroids, that would be quite feasible even using fairly primitive nuclear thermal systems. More advanced systems could be pretty interesting as well, though something of the nature of an Orion/Longshot type nuclear impulse rocket would probably make the most sense for really large manned deep space missions. We're likely at least a century away from mounting those however, so its not exactly something that relates to SPS.
Well... That's not ENTIRELY true, you'd need a Rectenna of about 1000m in diameter, for reasonably high efficiency, but it could be considerably smaller in many cases and still be valuable, nor is that size necessarily prohibitive. This is all assuming only GEO, the divergence for lower orbits is MUCH less, so it becomes a balancing act between costs and limitations on the ground vs potentially needing more satellites and/or taking some time to reorient the ones you have.
Its not a perfect system by any means, but it could be hugely valuable in many situations. How many billions would it have saved the US in Afghanistan? What is the additional operational flexibility worth? Its hard to even put exact numbers on it.
Trump is amusing, at least for some values of amusing.
The question is, then, even if you had this microwave powered electric tug, will it really be affordable? I mean its going to cost what, $10 billion to get that going? At least that much, and that'll get you what, one? So, maybe you gotta go slower and accept the hits. Don't deploy your SPS until it gets to GEO. There are creative answers.
Lets assume Skylon works, that doesn't solve your problems. At current sorts of launch scales a hypothetical SSTO launch vehicle might be cheaper to operate than say SpaceX's launchers, but that doesn't mean launch services will be that much cheaper. Their costs are related to supply and demand, and with the initial system probably limited to a fairly small throw weight and requiring a conventional upper stage for GEO chances are slim that an SPS will make economic sense (IE GEO costs will still be far above your $200/kg level). Its unclear there's a continuous set of demands starting at that level which ramp up capacity to the levels where $200/kg GEO actually becomes feasible.
In other words it could be many decades, way out in the later part of the 21st Century before that happens, because you could well be waiting for other space industry applications to take off, but they're all caught in the same chicken-and-egg trap. In the past governments built things like intercontinental railroads, large canals, ports, etc, but building out a cheap space launch capacity is a LOT more expensive. While I'm a 'fan' of the concept, I remain skeptical that this is something that will ever happen.
Why focus on commercial baseload power? The cost to the military or other organizations to provide power in remote hostile locations is orders of magnitude higher than $0.03/Kwh. Isn't your best bet to fill that demand? Competing with coal seems a fool's errand when you can compete with diesel fuel humped over 3000km in tankers, forwarded to advanced basis in Afghanistan on Humvees, and burned in inefficient generators. The costs there are more like on the order of $30/Kwh. Building a reception grid for 10Kw of power out in nowhere is pretty straightforward, the materials are dirt cheap and construction is simple, probably just something you can air drop and set up in a few hours.
This is your initial market. Yes, utilization will be maybe 80% lower than with baseload power, but you can charge 100x more and still undercut the alternative without even breaking a sweat. My guess is, worldwide there's a pretty significant demand for such power. Once you've got say 2-3 medium sized satellites up there filling this demand then you've got a toehold in space and you can incrementally ratchet down prices, filling more and more of these various niches at lower price points. The jump to baseload power will then be vastly easier.
I really don't know, but this was WAY back, I don't even think in those days WineLib was a viable option. We were one of the first web development shops in existence, back in '94. We got access to everything, all sorts of weird "this does not exist" software. Amigas, DEC Alpha based NT4 workstations, tons and tons of stuff that nobody in the current generation knows squat about.
It was actually a SCO binary and you had to have the SCO binary compatibility patch, which hasn't worked in years (since like kernel 1.2.x or something). I still know a guy that works in a shop that has a linux box (I think its a VM now) running some ancient RedHat just so they can support a specific workflow and print WP documents. That whole tech stack got deeply embedded in the legal field way back and they're STILL not entirely free of it.
Adobe WROTE photoshop for Linux YEARS ago, we actually used to run it, but it was a limited release application that was only provided to specific customers and beta test sites. There's just never quite been a critical mass to make it profitable to release stuff like that. Porting, if your a sophisticated shop that already supports several platforms is really pretty trivial.
Hahaha, that wasn't IDX (AKA GE Healthcare) was it? I interviewed with them back in the early 90's. They were the most arrogant dorks you can possibly imagine, and their product frankly stank. They had a very good grasp of the business side of things, but their actual software engineering practice was execrable and MUMPS couldn't have helped.
Well, maybe we shouldn't allow fire trucks to race down our streets with their sirens blaring! Clearly there are pros and cons to different things, but how often do you actually get bothered by a fire truck? What is any more creepy about a drone flying by than a police cruiser sailing down your street? I think its pretty clear the intent here isn't to carry out constant areal surveillance.
I mean its kinda hard to say if the economics really do make sense or not, but its at least plausible. And frankly, if the location and purpose of use for each drone is available in near-real-time, then its hardly a spying tool, though it could still be used for surveillance in some sense. That would seem to address the bulk of the privacy issues, and its difficult to be too sympathetic with most of the other ones.
Yup, agreed. Qt will provide you good libs for a LOT of things, not just UI stuff, though all of it is certainly written with client applications in mind.
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We can't even live off the land on a frozen continent that's what, an 8 hour air trip from civilization? Nor does anyone WANT to live there permanently.
I'm sure a few people THINK they want to 'live on Mars', but almost none of them really do if you ask me. Nobody is going to create a colony there, probably ever, certainly not for centuries.
What a classic, the old drive by diss. Why bother? You clearly have no facts to martial, and probably no knowledge of the subject except what, reading the dust jacket of some book? sheesh.
Mars is MORE hostile than the Moon. There are plenty of places on the Moon to get 24/7 solar power. For that matter an SPS could do it and for Lunar purposes wouldn't be an impractical idea at all. In any case near the poles you could put up panels that would swivel and get sun all month long. Mars has chemistry, which is not good, who knows what all the nice perchlorates and other fun stuff will do? Not to mention the nasty super fine airborne dust.
The fact is that sending mass to the Moon is 100x cheaper and thus you'll have 100x more mass of supplies and equipment and thus orders of magnitude higher chances of success, plus a simple and viable bail-out option with pretty reasonable restart and correction options when things don't quite go right. Its really a no-brainer.
Nobody has brought any of this to a level of engineering reality. This is where the general public, and even surprisingly a lot of engineering folks, seem to fall far short in understanding. Just because you did 'some research', doesn't mean you can operate a completely isolated spacecraft in deep space successfully for the duration of a manned Mars mission. ISS and other craft which have had long-duration crews have had constant resupply, spare parts, large amounts of real-time ground control operating significant aspects of their spacecraft, etc.
We are certainly at a point where we can START to achieve long-duration isolated deep-space operation, but we're only at the very start and nobody has ever actually built any spacecraft capable of this. Consider this the equivalent of the Apollo program, in which in 1961 nobody had even been to orbit. By 1968 we were just barely reaching the capability to go 3 days to the Moon, land, and return. Mars is a MUCH harder problem, and we're at a similar point, we know what the technical challenges are, and have several viable options for solving each one, but we have to DO the work.
Apollo required a series of I believe something like 17 manned spaceflights before landing on the Moon, in which all the required systems were iteratively tested, adapted, and retested. Because the time frame for test and iteration was short, it was a few days duration mission, it was possible to achieve in 7 years. Lets assume that means it takes 7 years of actual engineering to do that part of it. Now how long will the 17 iterations take this time, when equipment has to be tested for 9 months or longer at a time, and some of it has to actually go to Mars to be tested. Its not likely to take 7 years, its more likely to take 37 years if you ask me.
If Mars is a stepping stone, then start with the nearest one, the Lunar surface is a good proxy for most of the rest of the Universe.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell of a long-endurance spacecraft using the existing state-of-the-art in life-support and logistical technology to endure for 9 months in space. To build such a thing is still decades off, and this is just one of the more trivial details of things that people fail to understand. No doubt its FEASIBLE, but that degree of engineering doesn't happen without a LOT of buildup. Look at the plan diagrams that have been published, they include several generations of technology in this area before we're really ready.
Beyond that no existing technology will land men on Mars with the ability to take off again. A lunar-lander style 'direct descent' would require a huge amount of fuel because the ascent engine would be pretty large, on top of the lander itself, and thus the descent engine would be prohibitively large. This means we have to design some sort of aerobreaking/parachute/glider/rocket hybrid approach. Those which have been used in the past are only good for a up to a couple 1000 kg, not enough for a manned landing by a long shot. Again, its FEASIBLE to do this, but we are at least a decade away from such a thing, maybe more.
So, maybe we mostly agree at some level, but I think your 10 years, even for an insanely useless project, is highly optimistic.
As for your ideas on reasons to go or not go, I heartily concur. Mars is a useless waste of a place to go except perhaps as a science destination, and in that case you can send 100 unmanned rovers per human. While a rover is far less than a human 100 sophisticated rovers with advanced manipulators, semi-autonomy, and sample return capability are unlikely to be outperformed by one miserable man who can only move a few km from his landing point and can't stay more than a couple weeks.
If you want to 'colonize Mars' it would make FAR more sense to colonize Antarctica, or the deep ocean, both of which are infinitely more hospitable and closer.
Ahhhh, yes.
The answer is PMP is a useful certification, but like every cert there's always a bunch of clowns that can pass the course but can't manage a wet paper bag. Experience and a good track record is always a much better indicator than a cert.
A dog is right there and is HARD to fool. Security systems have, as you discovered, myriad flaws. Beyond that the cops basically figure 99% of all alarms are false, so they're dead last dispatch priority. If you're VERY lucky they get there 30 minutes later, if they bother to show up at all. The average crack head is in and out in 5 minutes or less, so all that fancy alarm hardware and expensive multi-year monthly contract monitoring, worthless.
Talk to any security expert, a dog is absolutely 100% your best option, if you don't have that, get one FIRST, then worry about the rest. One you have the dog you can worry about impeding ingress with fences, barriers, lights, and if necessary, bars. THEN maybe you start to consider a security system.
And if your dog failed? Get yourself a rottie or a big shepherd. If you think your golden retriever is going to guard your house, well, you got what you asked for, wrong tool for the job.
This is 1000x more effective (literally) than ANY electronics you can buy or build.
Simple, reliable, easy to build, but not really optimum at all for a first stage. Much better for high impulse orbital transfer. Yes, nuclear electric might be more efficient, but its unlikely you're going to build a really high thrust nuclear electric design, and for lower impulse designs why not make it solar? The real advantage here though is the ease of development and deployment, you get quite a lot of bang for few bucks. The basic design of a Nerva-class system is already in the bag, it could be flying in 3-5 years if there was some impetus, and its well within the level of budget that could be realistically associated with a commercial venture.
As for not giving the exhaust velocity desired for missions to the outer solar system, there are a whole class of missions, to the inner solar system and asteroids, that would be quite feasible even using fairly primitive nuclear thermal systems. More advanced systems could be pretty interesting as well, though something of the nature of an Orion/Longshot type nuclear impulse rocket would probably make the most sense for really large manned deep space missions. We're likely at least a century away from mounting those however, so its not exactly something that relates to SPS.
Well... That's not ENTIRELY true, you'd need a Rectenna of about 1000m in diameter, for reasonably high efficiency, but it could be considerably smaller in many cases and still be valuable, nor is that size necessarily prohibitive. This is all assuming only GEO, the divergence for lower orbits is MUCH less, so it becomes a balancing act between costs and limitations on the ground vs potentially needing more satellites and/or taking some time to reorient the ones you have.
Its not a perfect system by any means, but it could be hugely valuable in many situations. How many billions would it have saved the US in Afghanistan? What is the additional operational flexibility worth? Its hard to even put exact numbers on it.
I only have one thing to say, Nuclear Thermal Rocket.
Well, I don't really expect you to tutor me in these numbers, but I've heard the case made pretty convincingly. What in the numbers doesn't work?
Trump is amusing, at least for some values of amusing.
The question is, then, even if you had this microwave powered electric tug, will it really be affordable? I mean its going to cost what, $10 billion to get that going? At least that much, and that'll get you what, one? So, maybe you gotta go slower and accept the hits. Don't deploy your SPS until it gets to GEO. There are creative answers.
This is gibberish. lol.
Lets assume Skylon works, that doesn't solve your problems. At current sorts of launch scales a hypothetical SSTO launch vehicle might be cheaper to operate than say SpaceX's launchers, but that doesn't mean launch services will be that much cheaper. Their costs are related to supply and demand, and with the initial system probably limited to a fairly small throw weight and requiring a conventional upper stage for GEO chances are slim that an SPS will make economic sense (IE GEO costs will still be far above your $200/kg level). Its unclear there's a continuous set of demands starting at that level which ramp up capacity to the levels where $200/kg GEO actually becomes feasible.
In other words it could be many decades, way out in the later part of the 21st Century before that happens, because you could well be waiting for other space industry applications to take off, but they're all caught in the same chicken-and-egg trap. In the past governments built things like intercontinental railroads, large canals, ports, etc, but building out a cheap space launch capacity is a LOT more expensive. While I'm a 'fan' of the concept, I remain skeptical that this is something that will ever happen.
Why focus on commercial baseload power? The cost to the military or other organizations to provide power in remote hostile locations is orders of magnitude higher than $0.03/Kwh. Isn't your best bet to fill that demand? Competing with coal seems a fool's errand when you can compete with diesel fuel humped over 3000km in tankers, forwarded to advanced basis in Afghanistan on Humvees, and burned in inefficient generators. The costs there are more like on the order of $30/Kwh. Building a reception grid for 10Kw of power out in nowhere is pretty straightforward, the materials are dirt cheap and construction is simple, probably just something you can air drop and set up in a few hours.
This is your initial market. Yes, utilization will be maybe 80% lower than with baseload power, but you can charge 100x more and still undercut the alternative without even breaking a sweat. My guess is, worldwide there's a pretty significant demand for such power. Once you've got say 2-3 medium sized satellites up there filling this demand then you've got a toehold in space and you can incrementally ratchet down prices, filling more and more of these various niches at lower price points. The jump to baseload power will then be vastly easier.
I really don't know, but this was WAY back, I don't even think in those days WineLib was a viable option. We were one of the first web development shops in existence, back in '94. We got access to everything, all sorts of weird "this does not exist" software. Amigas, DEC Alpha based NT4 workstations, tons and tons of stuff that nobody in the current generation knows squat about.
It was actually a SCO binary and you had to have the SCO binary compatibility patch, which hasn't worked in years (since like kernel 1.2.x or something). I still know a guy that works in a shop that has a linux box (I think its a VM now) running some ancient RedHat just so they can support a specific workflow and print WP documents. That whole tech stack got deeply embedded in the legal field way back and they're STILL not entirely free of it.
Adobe WROTE photoshop for Linux YEARS ago, we actually used to run it, but it was a limited release application that was only provided to specific customers and beta test sites. There's just never quite been a critical mass to make it profitable to release stuff like that. Porting, if your a sophisticated shop that already supports several platforms is really pretty trivial.
Hahaha, that wasn't IDX (AKA GE Healthcare) was it? I interviewed with them back in the early 90's. They were the most arrogant dorks you can possibly imagine, and their product frankly stank. They had a very good grasp of the business side of things, but their actual software engineering practice was execrable and MUMPS couldn't have helped.
It's been called MUMPS for at least the last 20 years...
Well, maybe we shouldn't allow fire trucks to race down our streets with their sirens blaring! Clearly there are pros and cons to different things, but how often do you actually get bothered by a fire truck? What is any more creepy about a drone flying by than a police cruiser sailing down your street? I think its pretty clear the intent here isn't to carry out constant areal surveillance.
I mean its kinda hard to say if the economics really do make sense or not, but its at least plausible. And frankly, if the location and purpose of use for each drone is available in near-real-time, then its hardly a spying tool, though it could still be used for surveillance in some sense. That would seem to address the bulk of the privacy issues, and its difficult to be too sympathetic with most of the other ones.
Yup, agreed. Qt will provide you good libs for a LOT of things, not just UI stuff, though all of it is certainly written with client applications in mind.