Even if it were possible, it would never happen. You've neglected the emerging field of "Meat-oid IP". Big Companies and their lawyers will patent or copyright or whatever the best cuts of meat, and charge all the market will bear for them. In order to avoid the IP of the big companies, small companies will add extra elements like pseudo-gristle, imitation blood vessels, and ersatz stringy fat, all so they can make "cheap" meat that's more complex and more expensive to make than the "expensive" meat.
Take a look at the nano-forge in Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace" for what happens to such promises.
I actually HAVE mod points, at the moment. But there's nothing on the pulldown for amusingly, pathetically, distressingly nerdy. Sometimes I wonder how many people get some of Jason's jokes in Foxtrot, and how he manages to get them into a mainstream newspaper comic.
I've recently been hearing more about bad radiation levels in space, to the point that some question feasability of interplanetary travel, at all. IMHO, a cycler offers a solution to these problems. Imagine if space stations were THE way to travel, and space ships only did limited things near planets.
Thanks, I can never keep those two straight. It just seems to me that neither one can spell, "Paul." I realize that Pohl is a last name, but it still sticks in my head as a misspelled Paul, and gets confused with Poul.
Is there such a thing as a stable elliptical solar orbit that swings between Earth and Mars, repeatedly? Obviously meeting the two orbits repeatedly is easy, but approaching the two planets repeatedly may not be.
My pet concept for some years has been to have a space station, with sufficient radiation shielding, in that orbit. In honor of the "porkchop plot" as well as the Kurt Russell movie, "Big Trouble in Little China" I've tentatively named this orbital transfer station, "The Porkchop Express." To get to Mars, you launch from Earth at the right time, rendezvous with the station, and ride it to Mars. At Mars you leave, and inject into a planetary orbit. Return would be the same way, again at an appropriate time.
The key is that they station remains in its orbit, and is not accelerated. Therefore it can afford to have plenty of radiation shielding, probably in the form of bags of water and multiple layers of polyethylene. Obviously construction would require accelerating materials, but not operation.
But it requires the existence of an appropriate orbit. Slower than Hohmann is probably acceptable, but likely not too much slower.
Is it really "classic" photo processing, or is it the simplified "stabilized" processing? (Which, from what I understand, is nowhere near as stable as classic is.)
Deflect comets and crash them into Mars. He even goes into a fair amount of detail about the orbital herding needed, and how to make the crashes as "non-catastrophic" as possible. In the book there were already settlements on Mars that had to be avoided, as well as keeping the crashes from ejecting much of the freshly delivered comet.
In another similar book, they allowed the comet crashes to create a fairly large, deep valley. Easier to get a usably dense atmosphere much sooner in a limited space than on an entire planet.
It's this pesky little problem called national borders. Many, if not most of them haven't been in place for hundreds of years, some only tens.
Everything I've heard about global warming suggests changes in sea level, which hits hardest on low-lying areas, with Bangladesh being frequently mentioned. So what happens when part of Bangladesh becomes the Indian Ocean, and a significant part of the rest has flooding problems? What happens when portions of northern European countries decide they'd rather be in the North Sea? How about when Florida seacoast becomes Atlantic and Gulf shallows?
Past tipping points were accompanied by extinctions of various sizes. I suspect humans WILL adapt just fine. But I doubt our societies will. I expect there would be a lot of social strife, and more deaths would be caused by other humans than by climatic problems.
Your view of the world is (obviously) a function of your information feeds. In the old days, that meant what you saw, heard, and felt. Slightly more recently it began to include newspapers, radio, and TV. In both "past eras" you couldn't do too much to select your feeds, and you got a pretty mixed view.
Today we have infoglut, and it has become necessary to manage our feeds. Unfortunately many will not have discipline to diversify their information input, and will only take in that which is slanted their way. IMHO this is part of the problem behind today's vaunted polarization - the various left and right wings no longer share information input. It used to be that they had common input, and came to different conclusions based on their culture and beliefs. Now their input has been preselected, then their culture and beliefs operate on that, so the conclusions differentiate even further.
These are security-conscious bacteria, they'd never use bluetooth, and recognize that they don't have the necessary computing cycles to use decent wireless security.
I suppose you think they were just using wires without thinking it through?
I wasn't advocating ignoring the issue of space-based weapons. I was merely saying that we don't have to lead the way, prodding others into taking the same action. Based on our surveillance, we can determine if others are building the capacity, and at that point we have 3 options: 1: Take diplomatic steps to stop them. 2: Match or beat them, which should be easy, given our head start. 3: Reduce their capability.
First-mover tends to have advantages in the marketplace. But in this case, that may not be true, and in fact may turn the game into dog-pile-on-the-rabbit. (or on the first-mover)
1: They require infrastructure to develop. Even if you want to think mobile launcher instead of launch pad, orbit-altitude capable solids (or liquids) are not garage-built. They take some fairly sophisticated manufacturing facilities to produce.
2: Several of us are already in space and have big eyes pointed back at Earth looking for (1).
You only remember crossbows? Well in the good old days, I remember the flap over the thighbone club!
The Clinton administration was focused on the Middle East - some might say preoccupied. The day the Bush admistration took office, attention shifted to the ABM treaty. The change of focus was palpable - the best example I can think of at the moment was the way the Eye of Sauron moved during the distraction battle at the end of Return of the King.
Maybe nothing could have been done about 9/11. Maybe it was beyond anyone's ability to foresee. Maybe there was too much isolation between our intelligence services. But maybe we just weren't looking, maybe even saying, "Quit distracting me with that Middle East stuff!"
Can you comment on WPA/TKIP vs WPA/AES in terms of the dictionary attack weakness? Of course neither really matters to me, because though I'm using WPA/AES, I'm also using a random-generated 60+ character "passphrase". (Not a phrase at all, just random stuff generated by pwsafe.)
One of these days, if I ever get my LDAP server set up right, I'll add FreeRadius to the mix and leave pre-shared keys behind.
Named for the plot of minimum-time/energy orbits between Earth and Mars... And Kurt Russel's truck in "Big Trouble in Little China." It's also squarely against Zubrin's Mars Express, and a shift in thinking about space transportation roles.
We think of space stations as staying in one relatively local orbit, and space craft as moving between orbits, or between the surface of a planet and an orbit. How about a space station that lives in a transfer orbit? In this case, a space station that is in an elliptical solar orbit that transits between Earth and Mars. More study is needed to make sure an orbit can be constructed to stay synchronous to the two planets, and not just cross their orbits, obviously. It doesn't pay to get to either orbit, when the planet is elsewhere. For a simpler situation, think of a transfer station that orbits the Earth and Moon. For the moment, let's assume a suitable orbit could be calculated for Earth and Mars...
The key is that it's a long-term structure, and you don't accelerate it after construction. That way, it can be as big as you want it to be. That includes those big bags of water clustered around the crew module. That also includes the several layers of polyethelene bags inside that. As others may have mentioned, in interplanetary space, lead shields are one of the last things you want. But the real essence is, for a non-accelerating platform, you can afford to spend some weight on appropriate shielding.
In this case, some sort of transfer vehicle accelerates you from LEO to the Pork Chop Express. At Mars, either the same, or a similar vehicle transports you to LMO. But the bulk of the journey is made in a free-falling structure that is as big as it needs to be in order to get appropriate shielding for the transit time. Passengers bring their consumables, and the transit station is left automated and unoccupied when nobody needs to travel. There would probably need to be a wheel tucked away in there somewhere, if only for a gym.
Beyond the finding an acceptable, synchronized orbit, the biggest issue is getting enough water up there. Right behind that is construction technique, because major assembly should probably be done in LEO, accelerating the mostly-assembled station into the transfer orbit. Remaining assembly would either be done inside shields or by robots.
You can bring a shuttle down under computer control. You can go into final approach under computer contro.
But you can't land. No landing gear.
The only way to open the landing gear is with a manual control. AFAIK it's the *one* part of the shuttle with no connection to the computers. ISTR that they were afraid of a computer glitch deploying the landing gear prematurely - say on orbit. The landing gear can only be stowed by the ground crew. There is no "raise landing gear" switch on the shuttle. Actually, the landing gear mostly "fall" open by gravity - it's the act of unsealing the doors premature that would cause a Bad Day.
Since they're talking capsules again, I'd like to understand more of what they're really proposing, and what these new capsules are capable of.
In the old days, I remember TV coverage from the Navy task force, complete with aircraft carrier, helicopters, and frogmen for each splashdown. I also know that the Soviets (and now Russians) brought their capsules down on land, and at least that happened too hard. In neither case did they seem to have any sort of precise targeting.
So once the new and improved capsule re-enters the atmosphere, what happens next? Are capsules coming back because the US Navy felt left out in the cold by the Shuttle?
You clearly don't like SRBs. I tend to have a bias against them as well, but based on some stuff I've read lately, I must admit that it may be... bias.
After Redstone, Atlas, Titan, et al, ICBMs, we've finally settled on the solid fuel varieties - I suspect primarily for their simplicity of maintenance and use.
When these proposals started up again recently, I read some pages sponsored by a subsidiary of Morton Thiokol. (The SRB maker, obviously with a stake in the outcome.) But I really liked one of the things they said. They liked recovering SRBs, not for the reuse or cost reduction, though those were in there. They liked the ability to tear the thing down for quality improvement. In all of the Shuttle launches, there has been 1 SRB failure, though there were several non-catastrophic pre-Challenger burnthroughs. (Wonder how many since?)
The big thing about an SRB is that you can't shut it off. Then I start hearing about how nervous the rocket science folks get when you talk about premature shutdown of a liquid engine.
I'm willing to have an open mind about the SRB-based CEV.
I didn't just see footage, years back on a tour of KSC, I saw a guy actually do it.
He put a tile on a frame, and turned a torch on it, then turned off the room lights. We saw the spot on the tile start to glow, then the tile started waving around in the air, still glowing, for a few moments while he talked about how thermally non-conducting tiles were, and how fast they could shed heat. Then the room lights came on, and we could see that he had been holding the tile in his fingers, while the center was still glowing. Next he put the part that had been glowing flat on his palm - less than a minute after coming away from the torch.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it were possible, it would never happen. You've neglected the emerging field of "Meat-oid IP". Big Companies and their lawyers will patent or copyright or whatever the best cuts of meat, and charge all the market will bear for them. In order to avoid the IP of the big companies, small companies will add extra elements like pseudo-gristle, imitation blood vessels, and ersatz stringy fat, all so they can make "cheap" meat that's more complex and more expensive to make than the "expensive" meat.
Take a look at the nano-forge in Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace" for what happens to such promises.
I actually HAVE mod points, at the moment. But there's nothing on the pulldown for amusingly, pathetically, distressingly nerdy. Sometimes I wonder how many people get some of Jason's jokes in Foxtrot, and how he manages to get them into a mainstream newspaper comic.
I've recently been hearing more about bad radiation levels in space, to the point that some question feasability of interplanetary travel, at all. IMHO, a cycler offers a solution to these problems. Imagine if space stations were THE way to travel, and space ships only did limited things near planets.
Thanks, I can never keep those two straight. It just seems to me that neither one can spell, "Paul." I realize that Pohl is a last name, but it still sticks in my head as a misspelled Paul, and gets confused with Poul.
Is there such a thing as a stable elliptical solar orbit that swings between Earth and Mars, repeatedly? Obviously meeting the two orbits repeatedly is easy, but approaching the two planets repeatedly may not be.
My pet concept for some years has been to have a space station, with sufficient radiation shielding, in that orbit. In honor of the "porkchop plot" as well as the Kurt Russell movie, "Big Trouble in Little China" I've tentatively named this orbital transfer station, "The Porkchop Express." To get to Mars, you launch from Earth at the right time, rendezvous with the station, and ride it to Mars. At Mars you leave, and inject into a planetary orbit. Return would be the same way, again at an appropriate time.
The key is that they station remains in its orbit, and is not accelerated. Therefore it can afford to have plenty of radiation shielding, probably in the form of bags of water and multiple layers of polyethylene. Obviously construction would require accelerating materials, but not operation.
But it requires the existence of an appropriate orbit. Slower than Hohmann is probably acceptable, but likely not too much slower.
Is it really "classic" photo processing, or is it the simplified "stabilized" processing? (Which, from what I understand, is nowhere near as stable as classic is.)
"Mining the Oort" by Poul Anderson
Deflect comets and crash them into Mars. He even goes into a fair amount of detail about the orbital herding needed, and how to make the crashes as "non-catastrophic" as possible. In the book there were already settlements on Mars that had to be avoided, as well as keeping the crashes from ejecting much of the freshly delivered comet.
In another similar book, they allowed the comet crashes to create a fairly large, deep valley. Easier to get a usably dense atmosphere much sooner in a limited space than on an entire planet.
Pardon me, but you mistake me for my sarcasm.
Yeehaaa!!
615 is back!
It's this pesky little problem called national borders. Many, if not most of them haven't been in place for hundreds of years, some only tens.
Everything I've heard about global warming suggests changes in sea level, which hits hardest on low-lying areas, with Bangladesh being frequently mentioned. So what happens when part of Bangladesh becomes the Indian Ocean, and a significant part of the rest has flooding problems? What happens when portions of northern European countries decide they'd rather be in the North Sea? How about when Florida seacoast becomes Atlantic and Gulf shallows?
Past tipping points were accompanied by extinctions of various sizes. I suspect humans WILL adapt just fine.
But I doubt our societies will. I expect there would be a lot of social strife, and more deaths would be caused by other humans than by climatic problems.
It's obvious...
You dispute the diagnosis,
claim that the proposed treatment is too expensive, and not proven effective,
and party-on until you die.
Herein lies the danger...
Your view of the world is (obviously) a function of your information feeds. In the old days, that meant what you saw, heard, and felt. Slightly more recently it began to include newspapers, radio, and TV. In both "past eras" you couldn't do too much to select your feeds, and you got a pretty mixed view.
Today we have infoglut, and it has become necessary to manage our feeds. Unfortunately many will not have discipline to diversify their information input, and will only take in that which is slanted their way. IMHO this is part of the problem behind today's vaunted polarization - the various left and right wings no longer share information input. It used to be that they had common input, and came to different conclusions based on their culture and beliefs. Now their input has been preselected, then their culture and beliefs operate on that, so the conclusions differentiate even further.
Next thing they'll have Doom books and a Doom movie. Heaven forfend that such a movie might even star Dwayne "The Rock" Whatsisname!
(Billing now as "Dwane" I suspect he's trying to distance himself from "The Rock" as he moves further into movies.)
These are security-conscious bacteria, they'd never use bluetooth, and recognize that they don't have the necessary computing cycles to use decent wireless security.
I suppose you think they were just using wires without thinking it through?
I wasn't advocating ignoring the issue of space-based weapons. I was merely saying that we don't have to lead the way, prodding others into taking the same action. Based on our surveillance, we can determine if others are building the capacity, and at that point we have 3 options:
1: Take diplomatic steps to stop them.
2: Match or beat them, which should be easy, given our head start.
3: Reduce their capability.
First-mover tends to have advantages in the marketplace. But in this case, that may not be true, and in fact may turn the game into dog-pile-on-the-rabbit. (or on the first-mover)
There are two key differences with space weapons:
1: They require infrastructure to develop. Even if you want to think mobile launcher instead of launch pad, orbit-altitude capable solids (or liquids) are not garage-built. They take some fairly sophisticated manufacturing facilities to produce.
2: Several of us are already in space and have big eyes pointed back at Earth looking for (1).
You only remember crossbows? Well in the good old days, I remember the flap over the thighbone club!
Well now that you've brought up the ABM treaty...
The Clinton administration was focused on the Middle East - some might say preoccupied. The day the Bush admistration took office, attention shifted to the ABM treaty. The change of focus was palpable - the best example I can think of at the moment was the way the Eye of Sauron moved during the distraction battle at the end of Return of the King.
Maybe nothing could have been done about 9/11.
Maybe it was beyond anyone's ability to foresee.
Maybe there was too much isolation between our intelligence services.
But maybe we just weren't looking, maybe even saying, "Quit distracting me with that Middle East stuff!"
Can you comment on WPA/TKIP vs WPA/AES in terms of the dictionary attack weakness? Of course neither really matters to me, because though I'm using WPA/AES, I'm also using a random-generated 60+ character "passphrase". (Not a phrase at all, just random stuff generated by pwsafe.)
One of these days, if I ever get my LDAP server set up right, I'll add FreeRadius to the mix and leave pre-shared keys behind.
Overkill on a home lan? We LOVE overkill.
My proposal, the Pork Chop Express.
Named for the plot of minimum-time/energy orbits between Earth and Mars... And Kurt Russel's truck in "Big Trouble in Little China." It's also squarely against Zubrin's Mars Express, and a shift in thinking about space transportation roles.
We think of space stations as staying in one relatively local orbit, and space craft as moving between orbits, or between the surface of a planet and an orbit. How about a space station that lives in a transfer orbit? In this case, a space station that is in an elliptical solar orbit that transits between Earth and Mars. More study is needed to make sure an orbit can be constructed to stay synchronous to the two planets, and not just cross their orbits, obviously. It doesn't pay to get to either orbit, when the planet is elsewhere. For a simpler situation, think of a transfer station that orbits the Earth and Moon. For the moment, let's assume a suitable orbit could be calculated for Earth and Mars...
The key is that it's a long-term structure, and you don't accelerate it after construction. That way, it can be as big as you want it to be. That includes those big bags of water clustered around the crew module. That also includes the several layers of polyethelene bags inside that. As others may have mentioned, in interplanetary space, lead shields are one of the last things you want. But the real essence is, for a non-accelerating platform, you can afford to spend some weight on appropriate shielding.
In this case, some sort of transfer vehicle accelerates you from LEO to the Pork Chop Express. At Mars, either the same, or a similar vehicle transports you to LMO. But the bulk of the journey is made in a free-falling structure that is as big as it needs to be in order to get appropriate shielding for the transit time. Passengers bring their consumables, and the transit station is left automated and unoccupied when nobody needs to travel. There would probably need to be a wheel tucked away in there somewhere, if only for a gym.
Beyond the finding an acceptable, synchronized orbit, the biggest issue is getting enough water up there. Right behind that is construction technique, because major assembly should probably be done in LEO, accelerating the mostly-assembled station into the transfer orbit. Remaining assembly would either be done inside shields or by robots.
You've overcounted, to 125% here. Even Indigo Montoya's nemesis couldn't help you, since he can only overcount to 120%. (on the one hand)
You can bring a shuttle down under computer control.
You can go into final approach under computer contro.
But you can't land. No landing gear.
The only way to open the landing gear is with a manual control. AFAIK it's the *one* part of the shuttle with no connection to the computers. ISTR that they were afraid of a computer glitch deploying the landing gear prematurely - say on orbit. The landing gear can only be stowed by the ground crew. There is no "raise landing gear" switch on the shuttle. Actually, the landing gear mostly "fall" open by gravity - it's the act of unsealing the doors premature that would cause a Bad Day.
Since they're talking capsules again, I'd like to understand more of what they're really proposing, and what these new capsules are capable of.
In the old days, I remember TV coverage from the Navy task force, complete with aircraft carrier, helicopters, and frogmen for each splashdown. I also know that the Soviets (and now Russians) brought their capsules down on land, and at least that happened too hard. In neither case did they seem to have any sort of precise targeting.
So once the new and improved capsule re-enters the atmosphere, what happens next? Are capsules coming back because the US Navy felt left out in the cold by the Shuttle?
You clearly don't like SRBs. I tend to have a bias against them as well, but based on some stuff I've read lately, I must admit that it may be... bias.
After Redstone, Atlas, Titan, et al, ICBMs, we've finally settled on the solid fuel varieties - I suspect primarily for their simplicity of maintenance and use.
When these proposals started up again recently, I read some pages sponsored by a subsidiary of Morton Thiokol. (The SRB maker, obviously with a stake in the outcome.) But I really liked one of the things they said. They liked recovering SRBs, not for the reuse or cost reduction, though those were in there. They liked the ability to tear the thing down for quality improvement. In all of the Shuttle launches, there has been 1 SRB failure, though there were several non-catastrophic pre-Challenger burnthroughs. (Wonder how many since?)
The big thing about an SRB is that you can't shut it off. Then I start hearing about how nervous the rocket science folks get when you talk about premature shutdown of a liquid engine.
I'm willing to have an open mind about the SRB-based CEV.
I didn't just see footage, years back on a tour of KSC, I saw a guy actually do it.
He put a tile on a frame, and turned a torch on it, then turned off the room lights. We saw the spot on the tile start to glow, then the tile started waving around in the air, still glowing, for a few moments while he talked about how thermally non-conducting tiles were, and how fast they could shed heat. Then the room lights came on, and we could see that he had been holding the tile in his fingers, while the center was still glowing. Next he put the part that had been glowing flat on his palm - less than a minute after coming away from the torch.
Good demonstration.
Under the tiles is glue, and under that is aluminum. Still nothing magnetic.