It's one thing to have an image; it's another to interpret the results. Two scientific teams working from different points of view could come up with incompletely consistent conclusions from the same data.
We do know that Mars had water, and probably still has some; we just don't know how much, we don't know how recently, and we don't know how important it was in shaping the Martian surface. If it's not on the surface, or in the atmosphere, has it bled away to space, or is a large amount still encased in the ground? The results from the Global Surveyor cameras have only just begun to be analyzed in a rigorous fashion, and the scientific results you look for will be forthcoming over the next several years. Just don't expect pat answers.
Anyway, uh, canals? There ARE no canals on Mars, kiddo. Maybe you should get your astronomy books more recent than 100 years old. ----
Wansu wrote:
> 36 years old and only making 110k a year?
You'd be surprised at how many good system programmers over 40 make less than $100k a year. It depends on what part of the country too. $100k isn't that high a figure in California but it is in North Carolina.
Indeed, since cost of living differs a lot. The Salary Calculator shows that a $110K salary in San Jose is the equivalent of a mere $67K in Durham, whereas a $110K job in Durham would have to become a whopping $170K job in San Jose to meet the same quality of life.
And a lot of people living in North Carolina would probably argue that you couldn't pay them twice that because the quality of life measured in non-dollar terms is much higher there. Never underestimate the nontangibles, like a nice home, more time with family, and so forth.
Another factor to consider is that with a slightly lower salary, often, comes a considerably greater sense of job security. If you're just earning for yourself, hey, go for the gold. But if you have a family, you prefer the steady work, the health insurance, the 401(k) that come with a settled job. Those, too, can be worth a lot more than their simple dollar value.
Anyway, I'm opposed to any snot snidely and snarkily commenting on 36-year-olds who "don't have their shit together", whatever that means. Not everybody follows the same path, and what should matter is how applicable your particular technical skills are. I couldn't stand helping end-users once I got past 30, so I boosted my skills. But this industry is full of round pegs and square holes [cubicles]. If he hasn't learned that by now.... ----
There is an American effort underway, briefly mentioned in both articles, that seems more likely to succeed. Cheryl Stearns, a world-record parachutist, will descend from 130,000 feet (or possibly higher) in Project Stratoquest. They've been working for about two years now, and have performed several practice jumps to test equipment configurations. In fact, the Stratoquest attempt has been covered on Slashdot twicebefore.
Millner will have an opportunity, of course, to surpass her record by going second (assuming either survives). He will also definitely be the new Australian record holder. What his presence in this competition shows is a new interest in stretching the limits of our capabilities in this area, and that's good.
Is either Millner or Stearns disrespectful of the 1960 record of Col. Kittinger? No. Stearns shows an excellent series of photos of the Kittinger jump as part of her team's website. The Millner story has been circulating but only through secondary journalistic sources, so we have no way of knowing whether he has said anything about Kittinger. No matter what, both efforts seek to slam Kittinger's record into history by surpassing it. By five or six miles, maybe as many as ten miles.
By any measure, that isn't something that's "already been done", and the posts to that effect were all unnecessarily snarky. (I notice there were snarky posts in the earlier threads as well.) Millner and Stearns know the history of their sport just as much as, well, Linus Torvalds knows the history of operating systems. They're building on what was done before. ----
dimator writes:
>Space station program management would also shift from Johnson Space Center, Houston
>to NASA Headquarters in Washington under Bush's plan.
This is a travesty. "Washington, we have a problem." How stupid is that!?
Of course the Mission Control rooms at Houston's Johnson Space Center will remain right where they are. What is changing is that the JSC manager will no longer be virtually independent. One of the crippling problems with NASA over he years has been the feudal independence of the various centers (Houston, Marshall, Kennedy, Dryden, JPL... ), which has meant fierce competition instead of cooperation. Johnson, in particular, was run by the notoriously prickly George Abbey, who has just been bumped up to a non-job in NASA headquarters, after some 20 years (interrupted) of stubborn power.
All this means is that Goldin is making sure nobody gets that powerful again anytime soon. ----
Windows file sharing is so fucking stupid -- why on earth would they set it up so the default share is "all users: full access"???
This is not true. The default share setting is read only.
Any reasonable person must infer that Microsoft WANTS people to give their hard drives to the internet at large.
It's more a Very Bad side-effect of oversimplifying security and making it friendly. What happens is that file-sharing is set when you install a network card. For most people this is already installed and ready to go. During Windows installation, the user is asked, "Do you want to give others access to your files?" which is straightforward enough. The problem is that this is a separate activity from setting up internet access, and there is no step during internet access that warns you, "You have given others access to your files, do you really mean that?"
Also, it would be better if the NETBEUI protocol used to access these shares were not bound to the dial-up adapter (i.e. modem). Unfortunately, all protocols are bound to all devices by default. ----
Correct, Windows 2000 (like NT) has default hidden shares named for the drive, e.g. C$ (where the $ indicates hidden: it won't show up in Explorer as shared). Admin$ is equivalent to the C:\WINNT folder (which may be different, for example, it may be on the D drive, or a reinstallation could have named it C:\WINNT2).
First, these MAY be removed. If you have no need of file sharing (e.g. a standalone PC) this would be recommended above any other security measure. Log in as administrator, right click on the drive, and change the sharing.
Second, the administrative shares are by default set to Full Control for administrators on the domain that was used to authenticate your machine to the network. This is their purpose: to allow human administrators and administrative processes to run unimpeded. You may retain the administrtive share but reduce the access to read-only, again by logging as administrator of the local machine.
If you are not authenticated on the domain, but are simply connected, someone trying to access this share will need to know the administrator password on the local machine (and they themselves will usually need to be logged out of the domain, to avoid a rights conflict, though there are tricks to get around that).
It is possible to lock out Domain Administrators yet still permit local machine administrators, by removing the one group from the other, but in most cases this will one day cause your administrator to pull his hair out.
To reiterate: yes, Win2K has shares by default, but they are only open to authenticated administrators. ----
Heidi Wall wrote:
This is the kind of spasce mission that NASA should do more of. This mission was essentially all about prospecting - going out to check out the asteroids and see what resources they have for us to rape and use for our own ends. [...] it is clear that the only possible reason anyone other than a scientist could be interested in an asteroid is for the resources that it contains.
Well, I agree there should be more exploration of the asteroids. Prospecting, however, is just a very-long-term (very very long term) upside from a mission such as NEAR. The mission objective has much more to do with planetology and cosmology -- the origins of the solar system -- than it does with asteroid mining. (For one thing, we don't really need to send a vehicle to a body to find out whether it has metal or not.)
Already Japanese companies are interested, and many have asteroid mining as part of their 100 plans (Japanese companies plan far into the future, unlike western capaitalist companies). Here in the west our companies do not plan beyond the next shareholder AGM, generally speaking, and so our government has to take the lead in making long term plans for our society.
Not even the government, really. Although this mission is not, as I noted above, an example with much relevance to commercial exploitation, the planning that you speak of does take place in academia and in many R&D think tanks that are collaborations between industry and academia. NASA has been singularly unsuccessful in helping "commercialize" space, and most experts today would prefer that they stick to science and long-term R&D.
I congratulate NASA and the government for the foresight they are showing here. It is vital that the USA get a good place in the biggest resource bonanza of the 21st century. Vital for our future.
Again, you don't seem to have a grasp of the relevance of this mission. We don't need a probe to tell us there are resources out there. What we do need is cheap access to space, and the right economic conditions. For instance, resource substitution remains a much more economical approach than asteroid mining for the forseeable future.
My only quibble is with them making the results of this mission public, and the data available to all. Would the Chinese do it? No. The Japanese? No. Only the idealistic Americans. We need to close the lid on this, for it is needed for our future in the face of our competitors.
Ridiculous. YOu don't have the slightest understanding of how the scientific community works, which casts into doubt everythign else you've said. Japanese research by their space agency is made public. A lot of Chinese research is made public as well. We have an excellent history of scientific cooperation with the Japanese; your xenophobia seems to have bounced through a time warp from 1979 or something, and is very prejudiced as well. Do Americans have a monopoly on idealism? Do the Chinese have a monopoly on secrecy? Good grief. ----
Chairboy wrote:
3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.
4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.
I wrote:
Hydrazine replacement is being considered for Phase III of the ongoing Shuttle Upgrades program. It should be noted that the decision tree NASA uses for Shuttle upgrades places safety first, supportability second, reliability and maintainability third, and cost-reduction last.
That last remains true, but I was wrong about the upgrade status. The $1.6 billion upgrades program that Congress approved last fall includes $224M to eliminate hyrdrazine in the Shuttle APU and $208M for the SRB, though the OMS will apparently continue to use it.
Look for these upgrades to be incorporated into flying orbiters late in the coming decade. ----
Chairboy wrote:
The problem with these technologies is the amount of money it takes to develop them to working examples. The solution? Make it _worth_ investing the large sums of money.
You can't "make" it worth it. It either is, or it isn't. At this point, it isn't. It almost was, but it really wasn't. So it isn't again.
The current launching market is too small to support large R&D efforts. The rate of commercial launches is dropping steadilly with the dissolution of market drivers like Iridium. To make it worth the while of companies like Lockmart to spend big bucks on space you need to make space appealing to the industries that would purchase cheap access to space.
I'm baffled by what you could mean here. Either industries have investments in space they want to make, or they don't. We can't change that. What we can change is the expense.
The first step is not to spend $10 billion for a Venturestar (which will never get congressional approval). The real step is to make the Space Shuttle as cheap as possible in the short term so that business in space can get started. Here's how:
I'm with you in principle. VentureStar is LockMart's bid for a gravy-train-to-the-future. They have a vested interest in promoting big, bloated government space programs.
1. Remove government restrictions on using the shuttle fleet for commercial operations. This reactionary restriction that came in the wake of the Challenger incident hurts our future in space and forces companies to use expensive ELVs.
Expensive? Expensive?! Most ELVs are a mere fraction of the cost of a shuttle flight, by a factor of at least three and probably closer to five-to-twenty, depending on how costs are amortized. The ban on commercial launches was not reactionary. What was reactionary was the original policy to concentrate all US launch capability in Shuttle, simply in order to protect the Shuttle program's political viability. As Challenger demonstrated, that had enormous risks, both for the commercial and military applications.
The ban on commercial launches aboard Shuttle allowed the revival of a true private launch business, with Delta, Pegasus, and Titan all available now. Pegasus costs as little as $15M, compared with the out-of-the-gate Shuttle costs of $300M. How would Shuttle compete for that business?
2. Give NASA the chance to profit. Any commercial money NASA ever makes is funneled straight back into a general slush fund. If they had a direct incentive to operate more like a business, they would start innovating.
First of all, NASA is a government agency. It is not a quasi-private business like Amtrak or the Post Office. The lesson of Challenger was that human spaceflight is still too risky to be subject to a business-style imperative on schedule.
Second, Shuttle operations are being privatized in the form of the United Space Alliance. USA at this point is only acting as a contractor for NASA launch requirements, though they do occasionally entertain the fantasy of bringing Shuttle costs low enough to be competitive, as you've suggested. USA would like to be a profitable entity.
Third, government agencies do not need the profit motive to incentivize them. They have all the motivation they need. Ask anybody at NASA, off-campus, whether they want to go to Mars, and they'll say Hell yeah.
Fourth, a profit-based incentive can skew and damage the overall purpose of what should be a pure R&D oriented program. Goodbye planetary missions! No ROI, you see. I don't want to see NASA playing the carnival hawker and dropping important activities that just can't produce income.
3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.
4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.
Hydrazine replacement is being considered for Phase III of the ongoing Shuttle Upgrades program. It should be noted that the decision tree NASA uses for Shuttle upgrades places safety first, supportability second, reliability and maintainability third, and cost-reduction last.
5. Convert the Enterprise into an unmanned cargo launcher. Removing the life support, crew cabin insides and so on and automating it would drop the between flight costs and increase payload significantly. Use this to deliver things that don't need human interaction to orbit.
Anything the Enterprise (equipped with Buran-like automated systems) can do, the Titan can do just as well. There are few applications for large payloads in LEO outside of Station. The orbiter cannot deliver beyond LEO without modifications.
6. Re-activate the Centaur upper stage project and install the plumbing in at least two of the OV fleet. Cryogenic upper stages increase your payload to geosynchronous orbit and let you build things like transfer vehicles to the moon. The shuttle uses IUS solid upper stages that have a fraction of the performance.
Centaur, of course, was cancelled for crew safety reasons.
7. Last and more importantly, commission the development and construction of LFBB (Liquid FlyBack Boosters) to replace the dangerous and low performance SRBs. Liquid fueled boosters would increase the payload to orbit, offer abort modes during the first 2.5 minutes that the SRBs don't (see the Challenger disaster for an example of where this would have helped) and could be a lot cheaper then dragging the solid steel SRBs out of the ocean and rebuilding them. Boeing wants to make LFBBs. They would land themselves on a runway and be ready for launch shortly afterwards. LFBBs could lower costs for other boosters like the Titan V, the EELV, Ariane 5 and more.
Being floated as a possibility for Phase III or beyond. NASA, of course, would have preferred flyback boosters 30 years ago, but 1970s budgets forced them to the SRBs.
Once companies can afford to get stuff to orbit,
They already can.
the market will exist to develop the new space craft that will drop costs to where we want.
That's a very disingenuous statement. Not only is it a completely unwarranted assumption, it ignores the likelihood that having Shuttle in place as the default launch capability will eliminate any market incentive for cheaper, nimbler vehicles to be developed. That is a Bad Thing.
Until then, it will be entirely dependent on how much pork a congressman will get.
No, it really hasn't depended on that for some time. The rise and fall of the commercial launch business the last ten years was entirely due to factors outside government funding, as you noted earlier. Without Iridium, Globalstar, etc. requiring 60-odd satellites launched every five years, there is no need for cheaper launch vehicles. The existing commercial satellite business is stable and relatively healthy.
You sound like you get it -- you want a sustainable business model for space. But you can't create business where there isn't demand. This is exactly the lesson that the dot-com venture capitalists had to learn. We're watching lots of companies who've spent a lot of money giving away services the last couple of years. Sure, as long as it's free, they get customers. The moment they have to make it pay, though -- see Yahoo auctions, who implemented a modest fee, pennies really, and saw their business drop 90% in January -- everything collapses.
You want NASA to be in the business of creating these markets. It really can't, and when it's in anything like that position, its priorities get screwed up. NASA is better off NOT being in this loop at all. They are putting money into pure R&D for things like X-33 and hypersonic transport and scramjets. But only in the most arcane laboratory conditions, with payoff expectations measured in decades.
What I wanted to see happen was one of the startups -- Rotary being my favorite -- succeed in getting just enough funding to reach the next step, a second prototype, a third prototype, a test launch. Whoever was there first was destined to be in the best position to win this market. But the market fizzled away, and there's nobody to pay for that. That still could happen, e.g. the new Kelly-Boeing alliance, but on a much more extended timeline.
The last thing we want is to go back to the 80s when Shuttle's very existence meant that our launch needs were theoretically covered. Getting NASA out of that market was the smartest thing Congress has ever done with Shuttle. ----
After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...
[Spider Robinson story about space pen replacing switch snipped; read it at the Official Space Pen website. For the record, there's no mention of this incident in the exemplary resource Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.]
In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.
But the Space Pen was developed entirely by private enterprise. Fisher does claim that they spent $2 million (in 1960s dollars? doesn't say) to develop the pen, but we can assume those development costs have been repaid many times over.
Also, many Russian cosmonauts now use the Space Pen; and American astronauts have used a variety of writing implements, generally chosen by the astronauts themselves. The ALSJ does relate one mention of the Space Pen: Aldrin says he had a felt-tip pen that put out more ink than the Fisher pen.
The space pen is neither an example of government procurement gone mad, nor an example of return on investment, except for the Fisher company.
The original Spider Robinson article. Despite the attribution to Aldrin, I believe we have to take this one with a grain of salt. The Apollo 11 mission has been very closely studied for a generation. ----
Somewhere, there must be a geek with some source code secreted on some media or another--I find it hard to believe that no one swiped a copy, or conveniently forgot to erase a copy he installed at home for debugging. Somewhere, somehow, it'll show up.
Of course, how could I have been so blind. The FBI used 19-year-old wAr3z d00dz to write Carnivore!
The boss came by one day. "Oh, boys. By the way. This is important, secret stuff, so don't take a copy or anything. Oh, is that a cupholder?" ----
Dual spacecraft imaging solar eruptions in 3D with STEREO.
... and many more, some missions still active 27 years after launch.
A number of these are excellent examples of the great, focussed science experiments that can be done under the faster-better-cheaper paradigm, and they're even competing for slots in the slightly more expensive Mid-Explorer program.
*It should be noted in fairness that NEAR itself had a glitch; in December 1998 they failed to make their planned orbit insertion, and had to circle the sun 14 months before another approach could be made. (At that time I'm sure many/. posters were blaming NASA for yet another failure! Indeed the faster-better-cheaper policy was being severely criticized.) ----
It's an hour later, and I got into the site just fine. So there was a spike.
You're suggesting that Slashdot post this story when people don't want to talk about it? Like the guy looking for a quarter he dropped, only under the streetlight, "where the light's better"? ----
smitty asks:
NEAR successfully landed, which is really cool, but since NASA's budget is spent on this thing, what will it be doing now that it's sitting on Eros? I'm assumming it is able to charge its batteries using its solar panels, which should allow it to keep transmitting, correct? Is there anyway that amatures could set up some device so that we can listen to what it has to say?
Well, you've hit on the problem.
First, NASA's budget was well-spent. The NEAR mission completed all of its objectives (despite a "near-miss" on the first approach to the asteroid -- so even this mission wasn't perfect!). The funding runs out on Feb. 14, so this is the last opportunity to do anything. The impact objective seemed the best way to make use of that time.
Second, the real constraint on the various probes we have traversing the solar system is money -- both for control teams, and for the Deep Space Network. The control team for NEAR will disband and go on to other projects, some together, some separately. (I can't wait to see what Johns Hopkins does next.) For quick check-ins with "defunct" probes like Pioneer, the teams are long dispersed and are assembled ad-hoc from veterans and current controllers. Somebody has to pay these people, though some of them would clearly work for free, and support the control center and connectivity.
Third, the Deep Space Network is pretty much always maxed out. It's a limited resource, and projects get time on it in a sort of auction. Time spent collecting data from a dormant, completed project like NEAR is time taken away from active, valuable projects like Cassini and Mars Global Surveyor.
Could amateurs build their own alt-DSN? Technically I imagine it would be possible -- buy up a couple of sold-off Cold War dish stations on the cheap -- but the problem is that the NEAR spacecraft is designed to broadcast at certain frequencies, and those would still interfere with existing DSN communications. Thus the spacecraft, if it continues to survive, will be commanded to suspend communications. I don't know if NEAR has any capability to change its communications parameters enough for an alternate station network to talk to it. ----
viadd wrote:
NEAR is a 'faster better cheaper' mission. The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade. NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid.
I fully agree with this. faster-better-cheaper means more missions for the bucks. (Now, if they'd only have a little more flexibility on the budget, we could keep Pluto-Kuiper Express.)
And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
This, however, isn't true. Indeed, they'd rather do an "orderly disposal" of a probe like Galileo than just shut it off, because at least a controlled disposal allows the opportunity for some science to be done. (The solar-system-exiting vehicles like Pioneer... which may have at last gone quiet... were kept alive because they could still do science just by reporting their position.) Last year a team studied Galileo's options, based on a collision with Jupiter or one of her four major satellites, with consideration of UN Outer Space Treaty prohibitions against accidental transfer of Earth organisms to those bodies. So far, though, they apparently haven't decided what to do. ----
Legally, under Article VIII of the 1967 UN Space Treaty, the laws of the owner of the vehicle. Outer space itself is subject to international law and may not be claimed. On the Space Shuttle, US law applies. On Soyuz, Russian law. On the ISS, sovereignty still rests with the owner of a particular vehicle: Zarya and Zvezda are Russian, Node 1 and Destiny are American. In theory, Russia could remove its equipment and give us the hand-in-elbow gesture, or we could remove ours and give them the finger. In practice, most of this stuff is decided on the ground beforehand (as with the recent ESA announcement against permitting the Russians to bring Dennis Tito to ISS). In practice, there's a complicated usage formula based on assumptions about how much various groups (NASA, NASDA, ESA, CSA, RSA) contributed to the station.
If one astronaut were to murder another there might be some trouble deciding who had criminal jurisdiction. This has been studied for some time but won't be completely sorted out until we have more experience. ----
evilone wrote:
I am aware that CDs and DVDs have very little mass compared with the rest of the station, but what effect would these discs have on the station when they start and stop spinning? Could the usage of discs onboard the station require thrusters to compensate for them?
Good novice question. Anything spinning acts as a kind of gyroscope, but you should realize that for the most part that gyroscope works to conserve angular momentum. Pick up a spinning box fan and turn it, you'll see what I mean. There are actually many small fans aboard the ISS, not to mention computer disc drives, so that gives you an idea of how serious an issue this is.
For comparison, check out the Control Moment Gyroscopes that are installed on the ISS and used for stabilization and attitude control. They're huge and will dwarf any effects of something like a DVD player. They'll be activated after the Destiny lab goes online. In the meantime, the Zvezda and Zarya modules each have their own smaller gyroscopes.
Incidentally, the gyroscopes are more important for attitude control than thrusters. Rather than constantly firing in different directions, where you're fighting your own efforts, the gyroscope stabilizes the station and makes it harder for it to get out of control where thrusters would be required. ----
"Obviously, a major malfunction."
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 3
The quote is from Steve Nesbitt, a NASA spokesman responsible for updates to the television link. Nesbitt was neither a Flight Controller, nor a CapCom -- almost always another astronaut. Call him the NASA TV anchor.
Nesbitt was based in Houston and did not have a monitor in front of him showing the plumes, just data monitors showing telemetry.
At that point they only knew something was awry with the launch and vehicle communications. There are limited abort capabilities at 73 seconds -- realistically, probably none. But until the Range Safety Officer reported they had destroyed the SRBs ahead of schedule, even after that, it was still possible that the orbiter vehicle was in some kind of abort mode.
Nesbitt's words were for the public, interpreting things that are said and seen, and as far as I know were not heard by the people at Mission Control.
I agree, it was a tremendously professional moment among many others that day. Hundreds of people, all of them unable to sit and stare, all of them required to be working their post and determining what happened and what options may be left, if any.
Technically, you're correct. The vehicle did not explode. The SRB plume burned through the strut connecting it to the External Tank, the SRB swung on the remaining strut, and the vehicle was then being pushed in different directions at once at supersonic speeds. The tank was ripped open, and the fuel inside ejected in yet a third direction, causing thrust against the orbiter that it was never designed to withstand. The vehicle broke up at that point.
I don't think Peter Jennings has been lying to us, either. Explosion is a simple way to put what happened, and those with a desire for more knowledge can easily find it. There is no conspiracy to conceal this fact. ----
US Space Program was not destroyed.
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 5
I agree with those calling that an irresponsible statement. The Challenger accident was a horrible tragedy, but in challenge, intelligent people see opportunity.
The standdown allowed for a redesign to not only the solid-rocket boosters, but a reassessment of NASA's entire approach. Congress was right to correct their earlier error of putting all our space launch needs on one vehicle, so the Air Force revived the Titan, Atlas, and Pegasus booster programs. The removal of the shuttle as a requirement for commercial launches reduced costs for the satellite industry, and allowed NASA to concentrate its resources on a successful manned science program in low Earth orbit. The tragic realization that the safety process had become tainted by what NASA calls "Go Fever" led to a reorganization of the people running the program and a safety-at-any-cost mentality.
Since Challenger, the realization set in that the limitations of the Shuttle as a launch platform, which had been a source of debate since the early 1970s, required a blunt approach with self-honesty.
If anyone believes that if it had not been for Challenger, we would today have wheel space stations and moon shuttles as in Kubrick's 2001, you're fooling yourselves in the same way that NASA was fooling itself right up to 51-L. That future was never going to happen. The only justification for massive spending as on Apollo was the Cold War. (It's little known that the infrastructure shown in the film was chiefly to support space-based nuclear weapons platforms. Science and exploration were incidental benefits.)The debacle of Viet Nam taught us that the Cold War could not continue, and led to the scaling back of space ambitions just as surely as it led to Nixon's opening to China.
The failure of the shuttle program itself to live up to program promises of early days (100 launches a year, cost to orbit approaching an expensive plane ride) taught us many lessons about our own capabilities, though it took Challenger to drive those lessons home.
The reason we don't have moon bases or Mars missions today is not that we lost our nerve in 1986. It's because those things cost a hell of a lot of money. Until recently, we were saddled by massive budget deficits and even more massive national debt. Today, we're paying those down; in a decade we'll be able to afford a budget 20% larger than today's with the same tax receipts, because we won't be paying all that interest. In a decade, maybe we can see our way to modest spending increases on space exploration.
We honor the Challenger Seven today by continuing our space program but with mature knowledge of what we can and cannot do. ----
Re:Pardon me, but WTF is this
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
ASM wrote:
It was 7 years before the next manned launch.
Seven years? Hardly.
The Challenger accident occurred on Jan. 28, 1986. The Return to Flight, STS-26B, launched Sep. 29, 1988 -- two years and eight months later. ----
Unfortunately, that DemoNews page is out of synch with the "Storerunner" download site (or wherever); when you follow the DemoNews link it gives you a page for some kind of calculator software. ----
>>We thought we understood the mass ranges of planets of other stars.
>>We thought we understood
the full diversity of planets.
>What's frightening to me is if they really thought they understood these things.
I think you're overinterpreting. Do you see the statements you quoted as arrogant? Hardly. They are acknowledging that pre-existing theory was wrong. Instead they are doing the most exciting thing a scientist can do, which is Find New Stuff that doesn't fit known theories. When I read those words, instead, I hear a scientist speaking expansively using his hands and almost giddy with the new possibilities this opens up. Imagine him being interviewed for Nova.
Arrogant is not unheard of in science. But arrogance does not take the form of giddy excitement at finding something that doesn't fit the theory: it takes the form of outright dismissal of the results, the methods, the people doing the finding. For example, it took half a century for Wegener's theory of continental drift to become widely accepted; and a widely-heard saying among scientists is that the way to get your radical new theory accepted is to wait for your opponents to die! ----
You're focussing on today's high crime situation. The whole point of a project like this is to develop the economy of Russia's far east so that there's less unemployment and crime, and so that the government has tax revenues to pay its soldiers. Will the same situation be true in 20 years? I don't think you can say so with true confidence.
The real problem is financing. Whether or not there are security fears, there just isn't enough existing trade to justify a project of this magnitude. Most major bridge or tunnel projects are privately financed based on paying off bonds through revenues like tolls. As someone pointed out, this project would face interest rates of $250M a *month*.
I think the Russians are to be credited for thinking big and thinking ahead. But they should concentrate on realistic projects first, like linking to Japan via Sakhalin Island. ----
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing to have an image; it's another to interpret the results. Two scientific teams working from different points of view could come up with incompletely consistent conclusions from the same data.
We do know that Mars had water, and probably still has some; we just don't know how much, we don't know how recently, and we don't know how important it was in shaping the Martian surface. If it's not on the surface, or in the atmosphere, has it bled away to space, or is a large amount still encased in the ground? The results from the Global Surveyor cameras have only just begun to be analyzed in a rigorous fashion, and the scientific results you look for will be forthcoming over the next several years. Just don't expect pat answers.
Anyway, uh, canals? There ARE no canals on Mars, kiddo. Maybe you should get your astronomy books more recent than 100 years old.
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Wansu wrote:
....
> 36 years old and only making 110k a year?
You'd be surprised at how many good system programmers over 40 make less than $100k a year. It depends on what part of the country too. $100k isn't that high a figure in California but it is in North Carolina.
Indeed, since cost of living differs a lot. The Salary Calculator shows that a $110K salary in San Jose is the equivalent of a mere $67K in Durham, whereas a $110K job in Durham would have to become a whopping $170K job in San Jose to meet the same quality of life.
And a lot of people living in North Carolina would probably argue that you couldn't pay them twice that because the quality of life measured in non-dollar terms is much higher there. Never underestimate the nontangibles, like a nice home, more time with family, and so forth.
Another factor to consider is that with a slightly lower salary, often, comes a considerably greater sense of job security. If you're just earning for yourself, hey, go for the gold. But if you have a family, you prefer the steady work, the health insurance, the 401(k) that come with a settled job. Those, too, can be worth a lot more than their simple dollar value.
Anyway, I'm opposed to any snot snidely and snarkily commenting on 36-year-olds who "don't have their shit together", whatever that means. Not everybody follows the same path, and what should matter is how applicable your particular technical skills are. I couldn't stand helping end-users once I got past 30, so I boosted my skills. But this industry is full of round pegs and square holes [cubicles]. If he hasn't learned that by now
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There is an American effort underway, briefly mentioned in both articles, that seems more likely to succeed. Cheryl Stearns, a world-record parachutist, will descend from 130,000 feet (or possibly higher) in Project Stratoquest. They've been working for about two years now, and have performed several practice jumps to test equipment configurations. In fact, the Stratoquest attempt has been covered on Slashdot twice before.
Millner will have an opportunity, of course, to surpass her record by going second (assuming either survives). He will also definitely be the new Australian record holder. What his presence in this competition shows is a new interest in stretching the limits of our capabilities in this area, and that's good.
Is either Millner or Stearns disrespectful of the 1960 record of Col. Kittinger? No. Stearns shows an excellent series of photos of the Kittinger jump as part of her team's website. The Millner story has been circulating but only through secondary journalistic sources, so we have no way of knowing whether he has said anything about Kittinger. No matter what, both efforts seek to slam Kittinger's record into history by surpassing it. By five or six miles, maybe as many as ten miles.
By any measure, that isn't something that's "already been done", and the posts to that effect were all unnecessarily snarky. (I notice there were snarky posts in the earlier threads as well.) Millner and Stearns know the history of their sport just as much as, well, Linus Torvalds knows the history of operating systems. They're building on what was done before.
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dimator writes:
... ), which has meant fierce competition instead of cooperation. Johnson, in particular, was run by the notoriously prickly George Abbey, who has just been bumped up to a non-job in NASA headquarters, after some 20 years (interrupted) of stubborn power.
>Space station program management would also shift from Johnson Space Center, Houston
>to NASA Headquarters in Washington under Bush's plan.
This is a travesty. "Washington, we have a problem." How stupid is that!?
Of course the Mission Control rooms at Houston's Johnson Space Center will remain right where they are. What is changing is that the JSC manager will no longer be virtually independent. One of the crippling problems with NASA over he years has been the feudal independence of the various centers (Houston, Marshall, Kennedy, Dryden, JPL
All this means is that Goldin is making sure nobody gets that powerful again anytime soon.
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Windows file sharing is so fucking stupid -- why on earth would they set it up so the default share is "all users: full access"???
This is not true. The default share setting is read only.
Any reasonable person must infer that Microsoft WANTS people to give their hard drives to the internet at large.
It's more a Very Bad side-effect of oversimplifying security and making it friendly. What happens is that file-sharing is set when you install a network card. For most people this is already installed and ready to go. During Windows installation, the user is asked, "Do you want to give others access to your files?" which is straightforward enough. The problem is that this is a separate activity from setting up internet access, and there is no step during internet access that warns you, "You have given others access to your files, do you really mean that?"
Also, it would be better if the NETBEUI protocol used to access these shares were not bound to the dial-up adapter (i.e. modem). Unfortunately, all protocols are bound to all devices by default.
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Correct, Windows 2000 (like NT) has default hidden shares named for the drive, e.g. C$ (where the $ indicates hidden: it won't show up in Explorer as shared). Admin$ is equivalent to the C:\WINNT folder (which may be different, for example, it may be on the D drive, or a reinstallation could have named it C:\WINNT2).
First, these MAY be removed. If you have no need of file sharing (e.g. a standalone PC) this would be recommended above any other security measure. Log in as administrator, right click on the drive, and change the sharing.
Second, the administrative shares are by default set to Full Control for administrators on the domain that was used to authenticate your machine to the network. This is their purpose: to allow human administrators and administrative processes to run unimpeded. You may retain the administrtive share but reduce the access to read-only, again by logging as administrator of the local machine.
If you are not authenticated on the domain, but are simply connected, someone trying to access this share will need to know the administrator password on the local machine (and they themselves will usually need to be logged out of the domain, to avoid a rights conflict, though there are tricks to get around that).
It is possible to lock out Domain Administrators yet still permit local machine administrators, by removing the one group from the other, but in most cases this will one day cause your administrator to pull his hair out.
To reiterate: yes, Win2K has shares by default, but they are only open to authenticated administrators.
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Heidi Wall wrote:
This is the kind of spasce mission that NASA should do more of. This mission was essentially all about prospecting - going out to check out the asteroids and see what resources they have for us to rape and use for our own ends. [...] it is clear that the only possible reason anyone other than a scientist could be interested in an asteroid is for the resources that it contains.
Well, I agree there should be more exploration of the asteroids. Prospecting, however, is just a very-long-term (very very long term) upside from a mission such as NEAR. The mission objective has much more to do with planetology and cosmology -- the origins of the solar system -- than it does with asteroid mining. (For one thing, we don't really need to send a vehicle to a body to find out whether it has metal or not.)
Already Japanese companies are interested, and many have asteroid mining as part of their 100 plans (Japanese companies plan far into the future, unlike western capaitalist companies). Here in the west our companies do not plan beyond the next shareholder AGM, generally speaking, and so our government has to take the lead in making long term plans for our society.
Not even the government, really. Although this mission is not, as I noted above, an example with much relevance to commercial exploitation, the planning that you speak of does take place in academia and in many R&D think tanks that are collaborations between industry and academia. NASA has been singularly unsuccessful in helping "commercialize" space, and most experts today would prefer that they stick to science and long-term R&D.
I congratulate NASA and the government for the foresight they are showing here. It is vital that the USA get a good place in the biggest resource bonanza of the 21st century. Vital for our future.
Again, you don't seem to have a grasp of the relevance of this mission. We don't need a probe to tell us there are resources out there. What we do need is cheap access to space, and the right economic conditions. For instance, resource substitution remains a much more economical approach than asteroid mining for the forseeable future.
My only quibble is with them making the results of this mission public, and the data available to all. Would the Chinese do it? No. The Japanese? No. Only the idealistic Americans. We need to close the lid on this, for it is needed for our future in the face of our competitors.
Ridiculous. YOu don't have the slightest understanding of how the scientific community works, which casts into doubt everythign else you've said. Japanese research by their space agency is made public. A lot of Chinese research is made public as well. We have an excellent history of scientific cooperation with the Japanese; your xenophobia seems to have bounced through a time warp from 1979 or something, and is very prejudiced as well. Do Americans have a monopoly on idealism? Do the Chinese have a monopoly on secrecy? Good grief.
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Chairboy wrote:
3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.
4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.
I wrote:
Hydrazine replacement is being considered for Phase III of the ongoing Shuttle Upgrades program. It should be noted that the decision tree NASA uses for Shuttle upgrades places safety first, supportability second, reliability and maintainability third, and cost-reduction last.
That last remains true, but I was wrong about the upgrade status. The $1.6 billion upgrades program that Congress approved last fall includes $224M to eliminate hyrdrazine in the Shuttle APU and $208M for the SRB, though the OMS will apparently continue to use it.
Look for these upgrades to be incorporated into flying orbiters late in the coming decade.
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Chairboy wrote:
The problem with these technologies is the amount of money it takes to develop them to working examples. The solution? Make it _worth_ investing the large sums of money.
You can't "make" it worth it. It either is, or it isn't. At this point, it isn't. It almost was, but it really wasn't. So it isn't again.
The current launching market is too small to support large R&D efforts. The rate of commercial launches is dropping steadilly with the dissolution of market drivers like Iridium. To make it worth the while of companies like Lockmart to spend big bucks on space you need to make space appealing to the industries that would purchase cheap access to space.
I'm baffled by what you could mean here. Either industries have investments in space they want to make, or they don't. We can't change that. What we can change is the expense.
The first step is not to spend $10 billion for a Venturestar (which will never get congressional approval). The real step is to make the Space Shuttle as cheap as possible in the short term so that business in space can get started. Here's how:
I'm with you in principle. VentureStar is LockMart's bid for a gravy-train-to-the-future. They have a vested interest in promoting big, bloated government space programs.
1. Remove government restrictions on using the shuttle fleet for commercial operations. This reactionary restriction that came in the wake of the Challenger incident hurts our future in space and forces companies to use expensive ELVs.
Expensive? Expensive?! Most ELVs are a mere fraction of the cost of a shuttle flight, by a factor of at least three and probably closer to five-to-twenty, depending on how costs are amortized. The ban on commercial launches was not reactionary. What was reactionary was the original policy to concentrate all US launch capability in Shuttle, simply in order to protect the Shuttle program's political viability. As Challenger demonstrated, that had enormous risks, both for the commercial and military applications.
The ban on commercial launches aboard Shuttle allowed the revival of a true private launch business, with Delta, Pegasus, and Titan all available now. Pegasus costs as little as $15M, compared with the out-of-the-gate Shuttle costs of $300M. How would Shuttle compete for that business?
2. Give NASA the chance to profit. Any commercial money NASA ever makes is funneled straight back into a general slush fund. If they had a direct incentive to operate more like a business, they would start innovating.
First of all, NASA is a government agency. It is not a quasi-private business like Amtrak or the Post Office. The lesson of Challenger was that human spaceflight is still too risky to be subject to a business-style imperative on schedule.
Second, Shuttle operations are being privatized in the form of the United Space Alliance. USA at this point is only acting as a contractor for NASA launch requirements, though they do occasionally entertain the fantasy of bringing Shuttle costs low enough to be competitive, as you've suggested. USA would like to be a profitable entity.
Third, government agencies do not need the profit motive to incentivize them. They have all the motivation they need. Ask anybody at NASA, off-campus, whether they want to go to Mars, and they'll say Hell yeah.
Fourth, a profit-based incentive can skew and damage the overall purpose of what should be a pure R&D oriented program. Goodbye planetary missions! No ROI, you see. I don't want to see NASA playing the carnival hawker and dropping important activities that just can't produce income.
3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.
4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.
Hydrazine replacement is being considered for Phase III of the ongoing Shuttle Upgrades program. It should be noted that the decision tree NASA uses for Shuttle upgrades places safety first, supportability second, reliability and maintainability third, and cost-reduction last.
5. Convert the Enterprise into an unmanned cargo launcher. Removing the life support, crew cabin insides and so on and automating it would drop the between flight costs and increase payload significantly. Use this to deliver things that don't need human interaction to orbit.
Anything the Enterprise (equipped with Buran-like automated systems) can do, the Titan can do just as well. There are few applications for large payloads in LEO outside of Station. The orbiter cannot deliver beyond LEO without modifications.
6. Re-activate the Centaur upper stage project and install the plumbing in at least two of the OV fleet. Cryogenic upper stages increase your payload to geosynchronous orbit and let you build things like transfer vehicles to the moon. The shuttle uses IUS solid upper stages that have a fraction of the performance.
Centaur, of course, was cancelled for crew safety reasons.
7. Last and more importantly, commission the development and construction of LFBB (Liquid FlyBack Boosters) to replace the dangerous and low performance SRBs. Liquid fueled boosters would increase the payload to orbit, offer abort modes during the first 2.5 minutes that the SRBs don't (see the Challenger disaster for an example of where this would have helped) and could be a lot cheaper then dragging the solid steel SRBs out of the ocean and rebuilding them. Boeing wants to make LFBBs. They would land themselves on a runway and be ready for launch shortly afterwards. LFBBs could lower costs for other boosters like the Titan V, the EELV, Ariane 5 and more.
Being floated as a possibility for Phase III or beyond. NASA, of course, would have preferred flyback boosters 30 years ago, but 1970s budgets forced them to the SRBs.
Once companies can afford to get stuff to orbit,
They already can.
the market will exist to develop the new space craft that will drop costs to where we want.
That's a very disingenuous statement. Not only is it a completely unwarranted assumption, it ignores the likelihood that having Shuttle in place as the default launch capability will eliminate any market incentive for cheaper, nimbler vehicles to be developed. That is a Bad Thing.
Until then, it will be entirely dependent on how much pork a congressman will get.
No, it really hasn't depended on that for some time. The rise and fall of the commercial launch business the last ten years was entirely due to factors outside government funding, as you noted earlier. Without Iridium, Globalstar, etc. requiring 60-odd satellites launched every five years, there is no need for cheaper launch vehicles. The existing commercial satellite business is stable and relatively healthy.
You sound like you get it -- you want a sustainable business model for space. But you can't create business where there isn't demand. This is exactly the lesson that the dot-com venture capitalists had to learn. We're watching lots of companies who've spent a lot of money giving away services the last couple of years. Sure, as long as it's free, they get customers. The moment they have to make it pay, though -- see Yahoo auctions, who implemented a modest fee, pennies really, and saw their business drop 90% in January -- everything collapses.
You want NASA to be in the business of creating these markets. It really can't, and when it's in anything like that position, its priorities get screwed up. NASA is better off NOT being in this loop at all. They are putting money into pure R&D for things like X-33 and hypersonic transport and scramjets. But only in the most arcane laboratory conditions, with payoff expectations measured in decades.
What I wanted to see happen was one of the startups -- Rotary being my favorite -- succeed in getting just enough funding to reach the next step, a second prototype, a third prototype, a test launch. Whoever was there first was destined to be in the best position to win this market. But the market fizzled away, and there's nobody to pay for that. That still could happen, e.g. the new Kelly-Boeing alliance, but on a much more extended timeline.
The last thing we want is to go back to the 80s when Shuttle's very existence meant that our launch needs were theoretically covered. Getting NASA out of that market was the smartest thing Congress has ever done with Shuttle.
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After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...
[Spider Robinson story about space pen replacing switch snipped; read it at the Official Space Pen website. For the record, there's no mention of this incident in the exemplary resource Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.]
In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.
But the Space Pen was developed entirely by private enterprise. Fisher does claim that they spent $2 million (in 1960s dollars? doesn't say) to develop the pen, but we can assume those development costs have been repaid many times over.
Also, many Russian cosmonauts now use the Space Pen; and American astronauts have used a variety of writing implements, generally chosen by the astronauts themselves. The ALSJ does relate one mention of the Space Pen: Aldrin says he had a felt-tip pen that put out more ink than the Fisher pen.
The space pen is neither an example of government procurement gone mad, nor an example of return on investment, except for the Fisher company.
The original Spider Robinson article. Despite the attribution to Aldrin, I believe we have to take this one with a grain of salt. The Apollo 11 mission has been very closely studied for a generation.
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Because they couldn't make up the data fast enough.
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Somewhere, there must be a geek with some source code secreted on some media or another--I find it hard to believe that no one swiped a copy, or conveniently forgot to erase a copy he installed at home for debugging. Somewhere, somehow, it'll show up.
Of course, how could I have been so blind. The FBI used 19-year-old wAr3z d00dz to write Carnivore!
The boss came by one day. "Oh, boys. By the way. This is important, secret stuff, so don't take a copy or anything. Oh, is that a cupholder?"
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But if you think this was great, just wait till you see what other missions JHUAPL has in store.
A number of these are excellent examples of the great, focussed science experiments that can be done under the faster-better-cheaper paradigm, and they're even competing for slots in the slightly more expensive Mid-Explorer program.
*It should be noted in fairness that NEAR itself had a glitch; in December 1998 they failed to make their planned orbit insertion, and had to circle the sun 14 months before another approach could be made. (At that time I'm sure many
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It's an hour later, and I got into the site just fine. So there was a spike.
You're suggesting that Slashdot post this story when people don't want to talk about it? Like the guy looking for a quarter he dropped, only under the streetlight, "where the light's better"?
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smitty asks:
NEAR successfully landed, which is really cool, but since NASA's budget is spent on this thing, what will it be doing now that it's sitting on Eros? I'm assumming it is able to charge its batteries using its solar panels, which should allow it to keep transmitting, correct? Is there anyway that amatures could set up some device so that we can listen to what it has to say?
Well, you've hit on the problem.
First, NASA's budget was well-spent. The NEAR mission completed all of its objectives (despite a "near-miss" on the first approach to the asteroid -- so even this mission wasn't perfect!). The funding runs out on Feb. 14, so this is the last opportunity to do anything. The impact objective seemed the best way to make use of that time.
Second, the real constraint on the various probes we have traversing the solar system is money -- both for control teams, and for the Deep Space Network. The control team for NEAR will disband and go on to other projects, some together, some separately. (I can't wait to see what Johns Hopkins does next.) For quick check-ins with "defunct" probes like Pioneer, the teams are long dispersed and are assembled ad-hoc from veterans and current controllers. Somebody has to pay these people, though some of them would clearly work for free, and support the control center and connectivity.
Third, the Deep Space Network is pretty much always maxed out. It's a limited resource, and projects get time on it in a sort of auction. Time spent collecting data from a dormant, completed project like NEAR is time taken away from active, valuable projects like Cassini and Mars Global Surveyor.
Could amateurs build their own alt-DSN? Technically I imagine it would be possible -- buy up a couple of sold-off Cold War dish stations on the cheap -- but the problem is that the NEAR spacecraft is designed to broadcast at certain frequencies, and those would still interfere with existing DSN communications. Thus the spacecraft, if it continues to survive, will be commanded to suspend communications. I don't know if NEAR has any capability to change its communications parameters enough for an alternate station network to talk to it.
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viadd wrote:
... which may have at last gone quiet ... were kept alive because they could still do science just by reporting their position.) Last year a team studied Galileo's options, based on a collision with Jupiter or one of her four major satellites, with consideration of UN Outer Space Treaty prohibitions against accidental transfer of Earth organisms to those bodies. So far, though, they apparently haven't decided what to do.
NEAR is a 'faster better cheaper' mission. The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade. NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid.
I fully agree with this. faster-better-cheaper means more missions for the bucks. (Now, if they'd only have a little more flexibility on the budget, we could keep Pluto-Kuiper Express.)
And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
This, however, isn't true. Indeed, they'd rather do an "orderly disposal" of a probe like Galileo than just shut it off, because at least a controlled disposal allows the opportunity for some science to be done. (The solar-system-exiting vehicles like Pioneer
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ivi asks:
So, who's laws apply in Space?
(Whose.)
Legally, under Article VIII of the 1967 UN Space Treaty, the laws of the owner of the vehicle. Outer space itself is subject to international law and may not be claimed. On the Space Shuttle, US law applies. On Soyuz, Russian law. On the ISS, sovereignty still rests with the owner of a particular vehicle: Zarya and Zvezda are Russian, Node 1 and Destiny are American. In theory, Russia could remove its equipment and give us the hand-in-elbow gesture, or we could remove ours and give them the finger. In practice, most of this stuff is decided on the ground beforehand (as with the recent ESA announcement against permitting the Russians to bring Dennis Tito to ISS). In practice, there's a complicated usage formula based on assumptions about how much various groups (NASA, NASDA, ESA, CSA, RSA) contributed to the station.
If one astronaut were to murder another there might be some trouble deciding who had criminal jurisdiction. This has been studied for some time but won't be completely sorted out until we have more experience.
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evilone wrote:
I am aware that CDs and DVDs have very little mass compared with the rest of the station, but what effect would these discs have on the station when they start and stop spinning? Could the usage of discs onboard the station require thrusters to compensate for them?
Good novice question. Anything spinning acts as a kind of gyroscope, but you should realize that for the most part that gyroscope works to conserve angular momentum. Pick up a spinning box fan and turn it, you'll see what I mean. There are actually many small fans aboard the ISS, not to mention computer disc drives, so that gives you an idea of how serious an issue this is.
For comparison, check out the Control Moment Gyroscopes that are installed on the ISS and used for stabilization and attitude control. They're huge and will dwarf any effects of something like a DVD player. They'll be activated after the Destiny lab goes online. In the meantime, the Zvezda and Zarya modules each have their own smaller gyroscopes.
Incidentally, the gyroscopes are more important for attitude control than thrusters. Rather than constantly firing in different directions, where you're fighting your own efforts, the gyroscope stabilizes the station and makes it harder for it to get out of control where thrusters would be required.
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The quote is from Steve Nesbitt, a NASA spokesman responsible for updates to the television link. Nesbitt was neither a Flight Controller, nor a CapCom -- almost always another astronaut. Call him the NASA TV anchor.
Nesbitt was based in Houston and did not have a monitor in front of him showing the plumes, just data monitors showing telemetry.
At that point they only knew something was awry with the launch and vehicle communications. There are limited abort capabilities at 73 seconds -- realistically, probably none. But until the Range Safety Officer reported they had destroyed the SRBs ahead of schedule, even after that, it was still possible that the orbiter vehicle was in some kind of abort mode.
Nesbitt's words were for the public, interpreting things that are said and seen, and as far as I know were not heard by the people at Mission Control.
I agree, it was a tremendously professional moment among many others that day. Hundreds of people, all of them unable to sit and stare, all of them required to be working their post and determining what happened and what options may be left, if any.
transcript/timeline
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the Morton Thiokol manager who overruled his own engineers earlier that morning.
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The URL you posted had a space in it. Here's a live link: Rogers Commission Report
I'm of two minds on this.
Technically, you're correct. The vehicle did not explode. The SRB plume burned through the strut connecting it to the External Tank, the SRB swung on the remaining strut, and the vehicle was then being pushed in different directions at once at supersonic speeds. The tank was ripped open, and the fuel inside ejected in yet a third direction, causing thrust against the orbiter that it was never designed to withstand. The vehicle broke up at that point.
I don't think Peter Jennings has been lying to us, either. Explosion is a simple way to put what happened, and those with a desire for more knowledge can easily find it. There is no conspiracy to conceal this fact.
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I agree with those calling that an irresponsible statement. The Challenger accident was a horrible tragedy, but in challenge, intelligent people see opportunity.
The standdown allowed for a redesign to not only the solid-rocket boosters, but a reassessment of NASA's entire approach. Congress was right to correct their earlier error of putting all our space launch needs on one vehicle, so the Air Force revived the Titan, Atlas, and Pegasus booster programs. The removal of the shuttle as a requirement for commercial launches reduced costs for the satellite industry, and allowed NASA to concentrate its resources on a successful manned science program in low Earth orbit. The tragic realization that the safety process had become tainted by what NASA calls "Go Fever" led to a reorganization of the people running the program and a safety-at-any-cost mentality.
Since Challenger, the realization set in that the limitations of the Shuttle as a launch platform, which had been a source of debate since the early 1970s, required a blunt approach with self-honesty.
If anyone believes that if it had not been for Challenger, we would today have wheel space stations and moon shuttles as in Kubrick's 2001, you're fooling yourselves in the same way that NASA was fooling itself right up to 51-L. That future was never going to happen. The only justification for massive spending as on Apollo was the Cold War. (It's little known that the infrastructure shown in the film was chiefly to support space-based nuclear weapons platforms. Science and exploration were incidental benefits.)The debacle of Viet Nam taught us that the Cold War could not continue, and led to the scaling back of space ambitions just as surely as it led to Nixon's opening to China.
The failure of the shuttle program itself to live up to program promises of early days (100 launches a year, cost to orbit approaching an expensive plane ride) taught us many lessons about our own capabilities, though it took Challenger to drive those lessons home.
The reason we don't have moon bases or Mars missions today is not that we lost our nerve in 1986. It's because those things cost a hell of a lot of money. Until recently, we were saddled by massive budget deficits and even more massive national debt. Today, we're paying those down; in a decade we'll be able to afford a budget 20% larger than today's with the same tax receipts, because we won't be paying all that interest. In a decade, maybe we can see our way to modest spending increases on space exploration.
We honor the Challenger Seven today by continuing our space program but with mature knowledge of what we can and cannot do.
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ASM wrote:
It was 7 years before the next manned launch.
Seven years? Hardly.
The Challenger accident occurred on Jan. 28, 1986. The Return to Flight, STS-26B, launched Sep. 29, 1988 -- two years and eight months later.
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Unfortunately, that DemoNews page is out of synch with the "Storerunner" download site (or wherever); when you follow the DemoNews link it gives you a page for some kind of calculator software.
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>>We thought we understood the mass ranges of planets of other stars.
>>We thought we understood
the full diversity of planets.
>What's frightening to me is if they really thought they understood these things.
I think you're overinterpreting. Do you see the statements you quoted as arrogant? Hardly. They are acknowledging that pre-existing theory was wrong. Instead they are doing the most exciting thing a scientist can do, which is Find New Stuff that doesn't fit known theories. When I read those words, instead, I hear a scientist speaking expansively using his hands and almost giddy with the new possibilities this opens up. Imagine him being interviewed for Nova.
Arrogant is not unheard of in science. But arrogance does not take the form of giddy excitement at finding something that doesn't fit the theory: it takes the form of outright dismissal of the results, the methods, the people doing the finding. For example, it took half a century for Wegener's theory of continental drift to become widely accepted; and a widely-heard saying among scientists is that the way to get your radical new theory accepted is to wait for your opponents to die!
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You're focussing on today's high crime situation. The whole point of a project like this is to develop the economy of Russia's far east so that there's less unemployment and crime, and so that the government has tax revenues to pay its soldiers. Will the same situation be true in 20 years? I don't think you can say so with true confidence.
The real problem is financing. Whether or not there are security fears, there just isn't enough existing trade to justify a project of this magnitude. Most major bridge or tunnel projects are privately financed based on paying off bonds through revenues like tolls. As someone pointed out, this project would face interest rates of $250M a *month*.
I think the Russians are to be credited for thinking big and thinking ahead. But they should concentrate on realistic projects first, like linking to Japan via Sakhalin Island.
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