Nothing about that relates to "going down in flames". It means to having to do capital financing rounds - stakeholders giving up part of their equity in the company for money. There are few analysts who would argue that Tesla or SpaceX could not raise money by selling equity; they're both very valuable companies. Large companies trying to achieve rapid expansion are almost fundamentally required to do this, usually several times. It's a hit for stakeholders, but one that they expect to be worthwhile in the end, as a smaller stake of a much larger company is more valuable (aka, would you rather have a 100% stake in "Jimmy's computer shop" or 10% stake in IBM?).
That said, SolarCity has always been the odd one out, and I do agree that the buyout comes across more as a bailout.
The NASA spaceflight forum is up to about 136 *pages* of people debating theories on the subject. A lof of the more recent comments have focused on a particularity that only applies to SpaceX and not any other rocket in the world: their densified / superchilled LOX. The only other rockets to have ever used any sort of densified LOX have been the NK-33 variants, all of which have very short, very poor test/flight records - and their LOX wasn't as densified as SpaceX's. A unique risk of densified LOX is air liquefaction; it's colder than the boiling point of both oxygen and nitrogen - and nitrogen tends to boiloff first, or not form at all if the surface in contact with air isn't as cold as the densified LOX itself. You can see LOX forming straight from air by pouring liquid nitrogen into an uninsulated, thin-walled metal container (aka, a rocket) and letting it sit; droplets form on the side and slowly drip off.
Like is common with non-densified LOX, SpaceX has no insulation on its stages, apart from any frosts that form. And frosts do not form a rigid layer, nor are they a comparable insulation to foam. There is one type of propellant that has long faced challenges with air liquefaction: liquid hydrogen. And liquid hydrogen tanks are always insulated. In part it's to avoid the air liquefaction from drawing heat out of the hydrogen, but it's also in part for safety and to prevent liquid air from collecting in vents, in the interstage, etc and adding weight.
If there's LOX outside the tanks, that's a serious potential hazard. If there were leaked fuel vapours (for example, hydrazine from the payload, RP-1 from the stage, etc), or if it collected on top of an organic material on the strongback, or even with Falcon's paint itself, that's a major potential hazard for a serious, rapid deflagration.
Some of the other theories are internal. LOX contamination is a common one. Tank contamination is another. Another is failure of the COPV (the helium pressurant container). Another is a common bulkhead failure. I'm sure these things will all be debated endlessly until the actual investigation results come out.
It's neat to see the lengths people go to through to try to get data without access to the official investigation data. For example, they've brought in a seismologist who's been going over results from seismic stations in the area, looking at the S and P waves and what they could correspond to. Lots of people have been working on processing the video in different ways to try to bring out details. I myself am trying to get ahold of the raw video footage; I suspect it may have been interlaced as well as having a rolling shutter, but have been deinterlaced in all of the subsequent processing. If so, it may be possible to bring out a whole extra frame, plus limited details at sub-millisecond accuracy.
All just idle work of course; the real work is going on at SpaceX.
I'm skeptical. That "great deal of work" is mostly with simplistic models: spherical-cow kind of stuff.
You would be wrong.
Name a particular aspect and I'll go into detail about what's been done on it.
If it's new technology it generally ends up costing far more than originally expected when actually implemented.
It's no more new technology than what's going on Mars 2020.
I would suggest starting simple: send two sample-return probes to two diverse locations on Venus
If you can go down to the surface and then back up then it's absurd to not repeat the process.
Another problem with sample return is quarantine
If you're thinking of return to Earth, rather than just to the cooler cloud deck, then that's entirely different (and far more expensive) challenge altogether. Getting off Venus is nearly as hard as getting off Earth. I'm not aware of any mission (well, except HAVOC) currently under proposal that is looking to go that far.
NASA doesn't appear to be developing any special tech or sensors to detect signs of life, and putting it on their rovers
They are. The fact that he doesn't follow what payloads rovers carry does not change this fact.
Tools that Curiosity was sent with for finding life (as well as other purposes) include ChemCam and APXS for determiing spectra, MAHLI (if anything would be fossilized, or be a mineral-forming organism), and SAM (direct organics analysis).
Sorry that there's no magical "Tool That Finds 100% Whether Mars Has/Had Life Or Not" that you can just set on a rover.
I think you totally misunderstood Franklin's response. He was talking with people who didn't see a use in flight. He responded by asking what's the use of a newborn. A newborn is pretty "useless" as well. But with time, they grow into an adult.
To give a sense of how much "$2,1 + whatever cost overruns we happen to see" can do on Venus, one of the current missions under proposal is for both a balloon and lander for a New Frontiers mission (these generally run around $800m, give or take). Now, that's much more limited - the balloon is only a short-term one (not much longer than Vega, about 3 days) and a one-way lander. But with three times the budget? Totally feasable. We could be answering pretty much all of the *massive* unsolved questions about Venus (what's the mystery UV absorber? Why is the mercury in the atmosphere literally at least three times of magnitude less than our models exist? What are the metallic / crystalline snows / frosts in the highlands? Are the highlands actually old continents? What on earth carved Venus's canals, the longest rivers in the solar system on a body devoid of liquid? What is the nature of the lightning that we're pretty sure is there (and possibly very weird), and where is it? What is the nature of volcanism on this, the second most volcanically active body in the solar system yet a place where we've never had a mission to actually observe it? Carbonatites? Kimberlites? I could go on and on. We could be solving almost all of this on a Mars 2020 budget. It's a LOT of money.
And instead they're doing things like flying around RC helicopters (on one of the worst possible bodies in the solar system for a helicopter that still has an atmosphere). Don't get me wrong, there's a couple nice things on the instrument list, like ground penetrating radar. But most of the hardware comes across as either wild-stab-in-the-dark or "space toys in the guise of science". I expect more from a mission that expensive, Cassini-scale returns.
The surface of Venus is 800 degrees Fahrenheit. A balloon would have its electronics fried
There seems to be some confusion here. Note that there were two things mentioned: balloon *and* lander. Venus's atmosphere has a strong temperature gradient, like ours - it just continues downward to the extremes. Long-term flight in Venus's atmosphere is quite reasonable (and there are a number of missions that have proposed this) at the more temperate altitudes. There are even locations on Venus that are temperate by human standards (let alone Machine standards), and are a proposed location for a human colony (which actually has quite a bit going for it vs. a Mars colony). I take it you're not familiar with Landis's work?
Back to the near term: there have been some proposals for long-term surface missions to Venus, but it's exceedingly challenging. Most surface missions are focused on the short-term (and indeed, all surface missions thusfar have been short-term). However, missions so far have only been on a one-way trip: land and then simply rely on thermal inertia to stay cool as long as you can (the maximum achievable for a reasonable mass probe is a few hours, as a general rule). However, a craft that can return to higher altitudes (samples in tow) can cool, recharge its batteries, and make any number of subsequent descents. There are three main approaches for this.
One is a phase-change balloon, wherein you have a material that can change between solid and gas filling up all or part of the envelope. As the balloon rises, the temperature drops and condenses out the material, reducing lift, and vice versa (pressure works somewhat counter to this, but not to the degree that temperature drives it). This has been tested on Earth with the ALICE project. If you want to stay down, you can collect the liquid in a pressure vessel, and release it back into the envelope when you want to descend. It's effective, but challenging on Venus, because you need an envelope that remains flexible yet intact at surface temperatures. PBO is one investigated substance; there's also various metal and carbon composite envelopes under investigation.
The second possibility is a bellows balloon. This is a metal "balloon" shaped like an accordion, that has an electric winch on the inside. When they want to descend, they reel in the winch to reduce the volume. When they want to ascend, they unreel the winch to increase the volume. A prototype has been built and validated at Venus surface conditions.
A third possibility is just to borrow a page from submarines - a rigid spherical envelope. This may sound absurdly massive, but because Venus's surface pressure is so high, you actually don't need a very large envelope. Changing lift is thus a matter of pumping air in or out of the envelope. This approach however is more limited in the maximum altitude achievable versus the others.
It's important to stress that all of these things have already had a great deal of work on them, and there are literally about two dozen mission designs out there in various stages, half a dozen or so actively in the process of trying to get their missions funded at present.
Well, not all of their findings. Their research on ocean navigation was superb, but I'll admit that their research on which northern European peoples made the best slaves was indeed controversial at best.
So let me get this straight. Your argument thusfar has been:
1) Stupid NASA has been doing it all wrong. 2) I don't know how they should be doing it instead. 3) They're supposed to be figuring out a better way than either they or I have figured out
Frost weathering != thermal cycling. Different materials have different coefficients of expansion, not just "water" and "everything else". Try epoxying a piece of glass to a piece of steel and watch what happens when you set it outside in a place where the temperature varies, even if the temperature never drops below freezing
Clearly however it's not at a problematic level in this case:)
Also I'm not sure why you're of the view that only liquids can enter rocks and freeze...
What we all want to know if did Mars support life? All the missions to Mars were not equipped to answer that fundamental question. NASA needs to finally design fund a mission to answer that question.
And how exactly do you propose to answer that in a single mission? Do you plan to sample the entire planet at all depths and return that all back to Earth so every test possible can be done?
(The answer to your initial question is "No", but I know hope springs eternal to a lot of people...;) )
And nobody less prestigious than Lord Kelvin insisted that heavier than air flying machines are impossible and anyone society who wasted their time funding research into them, he would never be part of. Also said that radio had no practical use. And that X-rays were a hoax. And that all useful discoveries had been made in physics.
And he's hardly the only "respectable" person to go off proclaiming things like that.
Look, I'm not onboard with NASA's obsession with Mars in particular. But I do believe that all open fields of investigation that can teach us new, unexpected things and help answer the big questions questions like "How does the universe work?" and "How did we get here?" and "What is our fate?" are worthy of investigation - even if the payoff may not be for generations. I don't believe that the purpose of society is to stagnate into "Are we maximizing our subsidize to the poor?" or "Are we minimizing our taxes on the rich?" and insisting that all funding for basic scientific inquiry get put off until such never-achievable goals are met.
BTW, Curiosity has only been out there for four years. I think you're confusing it with Opportunity (which yes, indeed, is still actively roving Mars, 12 years going!). Spirit and Opportunity combined cost $820M (although the program has gone so long that their science extension costs have been adding up, another ~$120M or so).
The cost difference between the MER and MSL projects is one reason why I have trouble getting fully onboard with MSL, and why I'm rather disappointed that Mars 2020 got chosen (there goes another $2,1B - tack on another half billion after the inevitable price hikes). We could have sent a sub to Titan and/or a sample return mission to Enceladus for that price. We could have sent a blimp to spend months in the skies of Venus with a multiuse phase-change/bellow balloon lander to sample all across the surface for that price. We could have sent a mission to the core of a protoplanet (16 Psyche) *and* to a Jupiter trojan *and* to another large KBO (say, Eris) for that kind of money. We could have done a mini-Cassini for Uranus or Neptune for that kind of money. I just cannot get myself to believe that the science return on Mars 2020 is going to approach any of those things. Some of the "instruments", like MHS, sound more like NASA they put a "Request For Lame Excuses To Have Such A Large Payload Capacity" rather than a RFP.:P I just don't get this Mars obsession.
I love how thin and fragile looking those layers are, you rarely see such delicate shapes on Earth. Mars has the advantages of low gravity and winds that exert only tiny forces. No rain, snow or floods either. There's stronger thermal cycling, but that's apparently not a problem for them.
I also love the white hydrothermal deposits that fill in the cracks; it reminds me of my land here (Iceland) - though my land is basaltic, not sedimentary. Too bad it all looks so amorphous and bland; would be neat to find deposits of large single-crystal calcite, pretty chalcedony (maybe with botryoidal surface patterns), opal, zeolites, etc. Hydrothermal systems can make neat minerals, but I see no evidence unfortunately that it's done so there.
It absolutely was not "quite forseeable", any more than quantum computers and fusion power have been "quite foreseeable"; it was fraught with major technical challenges that had to be overcome, and there was no guarantee that they would be. High temperature superconductors are brittle and cannot be used as wires or tapes in any simple manner. More importantly, their grain boundaries act like "weak links" in their behavior; the more frequent the grain boundaries (aka, the smaller you make the grains, aka, the more you make it thinner to improve flexibility), and the more poorly aligned the grains are (aka, what happens when you try to use most non-lab-scale manufacturing techniques), the more sensitive they become to external magnetic fields, to the point of being worthless.
The first generation to work involved filament-filled tubes, but manufacture them required a long thermal cycling / stressing process to get the grains aligned, and more problematically, lots of silver. Even on this "simple" process there were lots of constraints, such as the silver having to let oxygen permeate through it, the grains partially melting on their exteriors but not all the way through (evenly throughout the entire wire) on each cycle, etc; there was little tolerance for error for the wires to function. Purity tolerances are very tight - even small carbon contamination for example ruins the wires. They were very expensive and offered poor performance, particularly in magnets. And that was the easier stage to get to.
It's taken a lot of work to turn flexible, durable, long HTS wires suitable for magnets into a reality. And that doesn't come cheap.
Because high temperature superconductors have been around longer than that. It's a fairly obvious bad design decision even for the 90s.
High temperature superconducting wires and tapes suitable for large superconducting magnets have most definitely not been around since the 90s. They went from 90 A-m to 300k A-m between 2002 and 2009, overwhelmingly due to research by and demand from high-energy plasma physics research projects, particularly tokamaks. But hey, I think it's wonderful how you feel qualified to lecture physicists on how dumb they are in their magnet designs!
So if ITER doesn't have to use helium-cooled superconductors any more and those arent' the future of fusion reactor design, then why do they [finances.gouv.fr]?
Why are you pointing out something I pointed out in my first post on the subject?
If ITER went and redesigned their magnets now after all of the other engineering work has been done the budget would go up and people like you would be raising hell about that. But you better bet that DEMO will use more advanced magnets.
Which is a ludicrous comparison since higher magnetic fields at higher temperatures, using helium-cooled superconductors
Someone doesn't know what a high temperature superconductor is.
The whole point is that you don't have to use helium cooling anymore. Do you understand why that's important now? The new tapes operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. You can get very high field strengths with a very compact magnet with very little cooling cost, with capital costs also expected to be low in mass production (since the raw materials aren't that expensive). It is a big deal. Imaging. Proton beam therapy. Maglev. Motors. Generators. Transformers. NMR. Magnetic separation. Spacecraft propulsion. Power transmission. Magnetic energy storage (97+% efficiency, super-rapid discharge, indefinite lifespan). High energy physics. Everything becomes a lot more reasonable when you can make affordable superconducting wires/tapes at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Thanks to the research by and demand from the plasma physics community, prices are now down to the point that it's only about 6 times more expensive than copper per amp/meter. And that number has been falling at a good pace. There's already a number of places that use it in the power grid, where they need higher capacity within limited space constraints. And you could nearly double the strength of the LHC's central field with HTS magnets.
wasting time of fusion researchers
The majority of the fusion research community supports ITER. Which is why it came about and continues to receive heavy advocacy from the scientific community.
and risk of obsolescence from rival fusion technologies
Like?
... rival fusion research, some of which (Polywell)
Yes, and what percent of mainstream fusion researchers do you see lining up to back cutting ITER funding to support some massive Polywell project?
Polywell (and a few others, like Focus Fusion) are popular among armchair plasma physicists. Not so popular among actual plasma physicists. It does have some respectable backers, but not that many.
You can't just take Bussard's scaling claims at face value. Real-world phenomenon aren't limited to just linear and quadratic scaling curves. And the fact that the concept is 20 years old and has little peer-reviewed results doesn't exactly give it much credence vs. cutting something that's pretty well understood and which there's relatively little doubt about its ability to scale (ability to prove economic, that's a more up-in-the-air question).
Praying for magic beans is not a reasonable way to approach science. You get funding by convincing your peers that your concept has merit. Polywell has not succeeded in this regard.
Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".
Higher magnetic field strengths, at higher temperatures, out of materials that should be well cheaper in mass production, is not some little "maybe, maybe not" sort of thing. For anything that uses powerful magnets (and that's a lot of things), that's a huge result.
And who else exactly do you think has the budgets and need to pump into high-power magnet research except for high-energy particle physics projects?
And couldn't we have done the work you think is immensely valuable for a lot less than $14+ billion (ITER's cost in current US dollars)?
Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.
If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing about that relates to "going down in flames". It means to having to do capital financing rounds - stakeholders giving up part of their equity in the company for money. There are few analysts who would argue that Tesla or SpaceX could not raise money by selling equity; they're both very valuable companies. Large companies trying to achieve rapid expansion are almost fundamentally required to do this, usually several times. It's a hit for stakeholders, but one that they expect to be worthwhile in the end, as a smaller stake of a much larger company is more valuable (aka, would you rather have a 100% stake in "Jimmy's computer shop" or 10% stake in IBM?).
That said, SolarCity has always been the odd one out, and I do agree that the buyout comes across more as a bailout.
LOX makes everything shock sensitive. Including aluminum itself.
That said, no, I think it's a silly theory.
The NASA spaceflight forum is up to about 136 *pages* of people debating theories on the subject. A lof of the more recent comments have focused on a particularity that only applies to SpaceX and not any other rocket in the world: their densified / superchilled LOX. The only other rockets to have ever used any sort of densified LOX have been the NK-33 variants, all of which have very short, very poor test/flight records - and their LOX wasn't as densified as SpaceX's. A unique risk of densified LOX is air liquefaction; it's colder than the boiling point of both oxygen and nitrogen - and nitrogen tends to boiloff first, or not form at all if the surface in contact with air isn't as cold as the densified LOX itself. You can see LOX forming straight from air by pouring liquid nitrogen into an uninsulated, thin-walled metal container (aka, a rocket) and letting it sit; droplets form on the side and slowly drip off.
Like is common with non-densified LOX, SpaceX has no insulation on its stages, apart from any frosts that form. And frosts do not form a rigid layer, nor are they a comparable insulation to foam. There is one type of propellant that has long faced challenges with air liquefaction: liquid hydrogen. And liquid hydrogen tanks are always insulated. In part it's to avoid the air liquefaction from drawing heat out of the hydrogen, but it's also in part for safety and to prevent liquid air from collecting in vents, in the interstage, etc and adding weight.
If there's LOX outside the tanks, that's a serious potential hazard. If there were leaked fuel vapours (for example, hydrazine from the payload, RP-1 from the stage, etc), or if it collected on top of an organic material on the strongback, or even with Falcon's paint itself, that's a major potential hazard for a serious, rapid deflagration.
Some of the other theories are internal. LOX contamination is a common one. Tank contamination is another. Another is failure of the COPV (the helium pressurant container). Another is a common bulkhead failure. I'm sure these things will all be debated endlessly until the actual investigation results come out.
It's neat to see the lengths people go to through to try to get data without access to the official investigation data. For example, they've brought in a seismologist who's been going over results from seismic stations in the area, looking at the S and P waves and what they could correspond to. Lots of people have been working on processing the video in different ways to try to bring out details. I myself am trying to get ahold of the raw video footage; I suspect it may have been interlaced as well as having a rolling shutter, but have been deinterlaced in all of the subsequent processing. If so, it may be possible to bring out a whole extra frame, plus limited details at sub-millisecond accuracy.
All just idle work of course; the real work is going on at SpaceX.
If it's apocryphal, it's at least old. Here's a report mentioning him saying it from 1823.
That of course doesn't mean it's legit :)
You would be wrong.
Name a particular aspect and I'll go into detail about what's been done on it.
It's no more new technology than what's going on Mars 2020.
If you can go down to the surface and then back up then it's absurd to not repeat the process.
If you're thinking of return to Earth, rather than just to the cooler cloud deck, then that's entirely different (and far more expensive) challenge altogether. Getting off Venus is nearly as hard as getting off Earth. I'm not aware of any mission (well, except HAVOC) currently under proposal that is looking to go that far.
They are. The fact that he doesn't follow what payloads rovers carry does not change this fact.
Tools that Curiosity was sent with for finding life (as well as other purposes) include ChemCam and APXS for determiing spectra, MAHLI (if anything would be fossilized, or be a mineral-forming organism), and SAM (direct organics analysis).
Sorry that there's no magical "Tool That Finds 100% Whether Mars Has/Had Life Or Not" that you can just set on a rover.
I think you totally misunderstood Franklin's response. He was talking with people who didn't see a use in flight. He responded by asking what's the use of a newborn. A newborn is pretty "useless" as well. But with time, they grow into an adult.
To give a sense of how much "$2,1 + whatever cost overruns we happen to see" can do on Venus, one of the current missions under proposal is for both a balloon and lander for a New Frontiers mission (these generally run around $800m, give or take). Now, that's much more limited - the balloon is only a short-term one (not much longer than Vega, about 3 days) and a one-way lander. But with three times the budget? Totally feasable. We could be answering pretty much all of the *massive* unsolved questions about Venus (what's the mystery UV absorber? Why is the mercury in the atmosphere literally at least three times of magnitude less than our models exist? What are the metallic / crystalline snows / frosts in the highlands? Are the highlands actually old continents? What on earth carved Venus's canals, the longest rivers in the solar system on a body devoid of liquid? What is the nature of the lightning that we're pretty sure is there (and possibly very weird), and where is it? What is the nature of volcanism on this, the second most volcanically active body in the solar system yet a place where we've never had a mission to actually observe it? Carbonatites? Kimberlites? I could go on and on. We could be solving almost all of this on a Mars 2020 budget. It's a LOT of money.
And instead they're doing things like flying around RC helicopters (on one of the worst possible bodies in the solar system for a helicopter that still has an atmosphere). Don't get me wrong, there's a couple nice things on the instrument list, like ground penetrating radar. But most of the hardware comes across as either wild-stab-in-the-dark or "space toys in the guise of science". I expect more from a mission that expensive, Cassini-scale returns.
There seems to be some confusion here. Note that there were two things mentioned: balloon *and* lander. Venus's atmosphere has a strong temperature gradient, like ours - it just continues downward to the extremes. Long-term flight in Venus's atmosphere is quite reasonable (and there are a number of missions that have proposed this) at the more temperate altitudes. There are even locations on Venus that are temperate by human standards (let alone Machine standards), and are a proposed location for a human colony (which actually has quite a bit going for it vs. a Mars colony). I take it you're not familiar with Landis's work?
Back to the near term: there have been some proposals for long-term surface missions to Venus, but it's exceedingly challenging. Most surface missions are focused on the short-term (and indeed, all surface missions thusfar have been short-term). However, missions so far have only been on a one-way trip: land and then simply rely on thermal inertia to stay cool as long as you can (the maximum achievable for a reasonable mass probe is a few hours, as a general rule). However, a craft that can return to higher altitudes (samples in tow) can cool, recharge its batteries, and make any number of subsequent descents. There are three main approaches for this.
One is a phase-change balloon, wherein you have a material that can change between solid and gas filling up all or part of the envelope. As the balloon rises, the temperature drops and condenses out the material, reducing lift, and vice versa (pressure works somewhat counter to this, but not to the degree that temperature drives it). This has been tested on Earth with the ALICE project. If you want to stay down, you can collect the liquid in a pressure vessel, and release it back into the envelope when you want to descend. It's effective, but challenging on Venus, because you need an envelope that remains flexible yet intact at surface temperatures. PBO is one investigated substance; there's also various metal and carbon composite envelopes under investigation.
The second possibility is a bellows balloon. This is a metal "balloon" shaped like an accordion, that has an electric winch on the inside. When they want to descend, they reel in the winch to reduce the volume. When they want to ascend, they unreel the winch to increase the volume. A prototype has been built and validated at Venus surface conditions.
A third possibility is just to borrow a page from submarines - a rigid spherical envelope. This may sound absurdly massive, but because Venus's surface pressure is so high, you actually don't need a very large envelope. Changing lift is thus a matter of pumping air in or out of the envelope. This approach however is more limited in the maximum altitude achievable versus the others.
It's important to stress that all of these things have already had a great deal of work on them, and there are literally about two dozen mission designs out there in various stages, half a dozen or so actively in the process of trying to get their missions funded at present.
Well, not all of their findings. Their research on ocean navigation was superb, but I'll admit that their research on which northern European peoples made the best slaves was indeed controversial at best.
So let me get this straight. Your argument thusfar has been:
1) Stupid NASA has been doing it all wrong.
2) I don't know how they should be doing it instead.
3) They're supposed to be figuring out a better way than either they or I have figured out
Am I understanding you right here?
Frost weathering != thermal cycling. Different materials have different coefficients of expansion, not just "water" and "everything else". Try epoxying a piece of glass to a piece of steel and watch what happens when you set it outside in a place where the temperature varies, even if the temperature never drops below freezing
Clearly however it's not at a problematic level in this case :)
Also I'm not sure why you're of the view that only liquids can enter rocks and freeze...
Perhaps more appropriate:
"What is the use of a new-born infant?" - - Benjamin Franklin, responding to the question what the use of a balloon was.
No, that would be "pictures abort ISS", a structure which cost sixty times as much as MSL/Curiosity.
And how exactly do you propose to answer that in a single mission? Do you plan to sample the entire planet at all depths and return that all back to Earth so every test possible can be done?
(The answer to your initial question is "No", but I know hope springs eternal to a lot of people... ;) )
And nobody less prestigious than Lord Kelvin insisted that heavier than air flying machines are impossible and anyone society who wasted their time funding research into them, he would never be part of. Also said that radio had no practical use. And that X-rays were a hoax. And that all useful discoveries had been made in physics.
And he's hardly the only "respectable" person to go off proclaiming things like that.
Look, I'm not onboard with NASA's obsession with Mars in particular. But I do believe that all open fields of investigation that can teach us new, unexpected things and help answer the big questions questions like "How does the universe work?" and "How did we get here?" and "What is our fate?" are worthy of investigation - even if the payoff may not be for generations. I don't believe that the purpose of society is to stagnate into "Are we maximizing our subsidize to the poor?" or "Are we minimizing our taxes on the rich?" and insisting that all funding for basic scientific inquiry get put off until such never-achievable goals are met.
BTW, Curiosity has only been out there for four years. I think you're confusing it with Opportunity (which yes, indeed, is still actively roving Mars, 12 years going!). Spirit and Opportunity combined cost $820M (although the program has gone so long that their science extension costs have been adding up, another ~$120M or so).
The cost difference between the MER and MSL projects is one reason why I have trouble getting fully onboard with MSL, and why I'm rather disappointed that Mars 2020 got chosen (there goes another $2,1B - tack on another half billion after the inevitable price hikes). We could have sent a sub to Titan and/or a sample return mission to Enceladus for that price. We could have sent a blimp to spend months in the skies of Venus with a multiuse phase-change/bellow balloon lander to sample all across the surface for that price. We could have sent a mission to the core of a protoplanet (16 Psyche) *and* to a Jupiter trojan *and* to another large KBO (say, Eris) for that kind of money. We could have done a mini-Cassini for Uranus or Neptune for that kind of money. I just cannot get myself to believe that the science return on Mars 2020 is going to approach any of those things. Some of the "instruments", like MHS, sound more like NASA they put a "Request For Lame Excuses To Have Such A Large Payload Capacity" rather than a RFP. :P I just don't get this Mars obsession.
You want your next iPod to cost $2,47 billion dollars and powered by plutonium?
Sort of like how people say "The Ukraine" ;)
I love how thin and fragile looking those layers are, you rarely see such delicate shapes on Earth. Mars has the advantages of low gravity and winds that exert only tiny forces. No rain, snow or floods either. There's stronger thermal cycling, but that's apparently not a problem for them.
I also love the white hydrothermal deposits that fill in the cracks; it reminds me of my land here (Iceland) - though my land is basaltic, not sedimentary. Too bad it all looks so amorphous and bland; would be neat to find deposits of large single-crystal calcite, pretty chalcedony (maybe with botryoidal surface patterns), opal, zeolites, etc. Hydrothermal systems can make neat minerals, but I see no evidence unfortunately that it's done so there.
It absolutely was not "quite forseeable", any more than quantum computers and fusion power have been "quite foreseeable"; it was fraught with major technical challenges that had to be overcome, and there was no guarantee that they would be. High temperature superconductors are brittle and cannot be used as wires or tapes in any simple manner. More importantly, their grain boundaries act like "weak links" in their behavior; the more frequent the grain boundaries (aka, the smaller you make the grains, aka, the more you make it thinner to improve flexibility), and the more poorly aligned the grains are (aka, what happens when you try to use most non-lab-scale manufacturing techniques), the more sensitive they become to external magnetic fields, to the point of being worthless.
The first generation to work involved filament-filled tubes, but manufacture them required a long thermal cycling / stressing process to get the grains aligned, and more problematically, lots of silver. Even on this "simple" process there were lots of constraints, such as the silver having to let oxygen permeate through it, the grains partially melting on their exteriors but not all the way through (evenly throughout the entire wire) on each cycle, etc; there was little tolerance for error for the wires to function. Purity tolerances are very tight - even small carbon contamination for example ruins the wires. They were very expensive and offered poor performance, particularly in magnets. And that was the easier stage to get to.
It's taken a lot of work to turn flexible, durable, long HTS wires suitable for magnets into a reality. And that doesn't come cheap.
High temperature superconducting wires and tapes suitable for large superconducting magnets have most definitely not been around since the 90s. They went from 90 A-m to 300k A-m between 2002 and 2009, overwhelmingly due to research by and demand from high-energy plasma physics research projects, particularly tokamaks. But hey, I think it's wonderful how you feel qualified to lecture physicists on how dumb they are in their magnet designs!
Why are you pointing out something I pointed out in my first post on the subject?
If ITER went and redesigned their magnets now after all of the other engineering work has been done the budget would go up and people like you would be raising hell about that. But you better bet that DEMO will use more advanced magnets.
Why not aim that development toward something that's also a major goal (fusion power), and kill two birds with one stone?
Someone doesn't know what a high temperature superconductor is.
The whole point is that you don't have to use helium cooling anymore. Do you understand why that's important now? The new tapes operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. You can get very high field strengths with a very compact magnet with very little cooling cost, with capital costs also expected to be low in mass production (since the raw materials aren't that expensive). It is a big deal. Imaging. Proton beam therapy. Maglev. Motors. Generators. Transformers. NMR. Magnetic separation. Spacecraft propulsion. Power transmission. Magnetic energy storage (97+% efficiency, super-rapid discharge, indefinite lifespan). High energy physics. Everything becomes a lot more reasonable when you can make affordable superconducting wires/tapes at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Thanks to the research by and demand from the plasma physics community, prices are now down to the point that it's only about 6 times more expensive than copper per amp/meter. And that number has been falling at a good pace. There's already a number of places that use it in the power grid, where they need higher capacity within limited space constraints. And you could nearly double the strength of the LHC's central field with HTS magnets.
The majority of the fusion research community supports ITER. Which is why it came about and continues to receive heavy advocacy from the scientific community.
Like?
Yes, and what percent of mainstream fusion researchers do you see lining up to back cutting ITER funding to support some massive Polywell project?
Polywell (and a few others, like Focus Fusion) are popular among armchair plasma physicists. Not so popular among actual plasma physicists. It does have some respectable backers, but not that many.
You can't just take Bussard's scaling claims at face value. Real-world phenomenon aren't limited to just linear and quadratic scaling curves. And the fact that the concept is 20 years old and has little peer-reviewed results doesn't exactly give it much credence vs. cutting something that's pretty well understood and which there's relatively little doubt about its ability to scale (ability to prove economic, that's a more up-in-the-air question).
Praying for magic beans is not a reasonable way to approach science. You get funding by convincing your peers that your concept has merit. Polywell has not succeeded in this regard.
Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".
Higher magnetic field strengths, at higher temperatures, out of materials that should be well cheaper in mass production, is not some little "maybe, maybe not" sort of thing. For anything that uses powerful magnets (and that's a lot of things), that's a huge result.
And who else exactly do you think has the budgets and need to pump into high-power magnet research except for high-energy particle physics projects?
Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.
If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.