The New Mexico National Labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, the universities (NMSU, UNM, etc) and others came together in a rather awesome program about 13 years ago. The Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge Program gives high school students access to modern supercomputers to do scientific programming projects. They are given mentoring and instruction by volunteers as well as volunteered CPU time and access. Schools lacking net access are provided it by the participants, etc. After all their work, there is a competition based on how much was learned, presentations, science done, and final reports. It is a lot of fun. It's really hard.
I was originally a student in it waaaay back when it was getting underway (1990 & 1991) and then acted as a mentor for the next 5 years. I had a first place team and a third place team in those five years. I worked with kids that were often C students because they were bored as h*ll in class and often after seeing what they could do would go on to work harder to improve their grades to get into some very good universities.
Kids often rose to the challenge far and above what I would have thought they'd do. If the kids needed to learn the necessary math for the scienc they wanted to do we'd crash course it. I had kids that had been doing second year algebra doing partial differential equations by the end of the six months of work and able to understand it, frex. They always learned the science and programming that was required as well. This was their work, not mine. I could give guidance and knowledge, but couldn't do the work for them. Some of the science done was thermodynamics, astrophysics, environmental science, and fluid dyanmics, frex.
Now you may not be able to donate supercomputing time, but you might want keep this in mind when you go to think about what HS kids are interested in. Kids are often interested in a lot. You just have to be willing to teach them in a way that they'll remember, show them its useful, and make it interesting.
Really? What exactly is the state of the X System at VTech? Last I heard is that they'd disassembled the original and were not yet in production with the replacement. It's not even on the Top500 anymore. Rumors here are that VTech bit off more than they could chew...
I have been reading and finding your books interesting. However, I was wondering if there was a prediction that you felt was going to happen, but didn't...and this surprised you to no end. Was there such a prediction and what was it?
Thank you for your time. Recently in San Francisco, Matt Gonzalez, a popular local Green Party politico, has been pushing for the ability for noncitizens to vote in some of the local elections. While there are other places that offer this long before SF, it seems as though this erodes the differences between having citizenship or not. Rather than expanding the franchise this way, why not work to streamline the process for getting citizenship and encourage people to seek it?
Can you expound and explain a bit on your stance on this?
It just seems that there are some spots that might be a little warmer than others, or so goes the hypothesis as I understand it, from geothermal sources. It seems like a little bit of a stretch to link it directly with life on Mars. Perhaps this gives some ideas where to look for life on Mars, but the article itself doesn't seem to make much in the way for claims about Martian life.
Am I reading this wrong?
If I am not, does every discovery about Mars need to really be linked to life for it to be fascinating? Or does the press feel that's the need these days?
Right now there are a lot of file systems that do somehing not all that different than what Sun is proposing. The project I am on is evaluating them as we speak for a center wide filesystem. I've had the fun (no sarcasm, honestly) of setting up a number of different onces and helping to run benchmarks and tests against each. All of them have strengths. Every single one of them has some nasty weaknesses.
If you are looking for an open source based cluster file system, Lustre is what you want. It's supported by LLNL, PNNL, and the main writers at ClusterFS Inc. It's a network based cluster FS. We've been using it over GigE. However, we've found that there needs to be a ratio of 3:1 for data server:clients for a ratio. Wehave only used one metadata server. Failover isn't the greatest. Quotas don't exist. it also makes kernel mods (some good and bad) to do a mild fork of the linux kernel (they put them into the newer kernels every so often). It only runs on Linux. Getting it to run on anything else looks...scary.
GPFS runs on AIX and Linux. Even sharing the same storage. It runs and is pretty stable. it has the option to run in a SAN mode or network based FS. In the latter form, it even does local discovery of disks via labels so that if a client can see the disks locally it will read and write to them via FC rather than to the server. It, however, is a balkanized mess. It requires a lot more work to bring up and run: there is an awful lot of software to configure to get it to run (re: RSCT. If you haven't had the joys of HATS and HAGS, count yourself very, very lucky).
ADIC's StorNext software is another option. This one is good if you are interested in ease of installation, maintanence, and very, very fast speeds (damn near line speed on Fibre channel). I have set this one up for sharing disks in less than two hours from first install to getting numerous assorted nodes of different OS's to play together (Solaris, AIX, Linux). It freakin on virtually everything from Crays to Linux to Windows. It's issues seem to be scaling (right now doesn't go past 256 clients) and it has some nontrivial locking issues (righting to the same block from multiple clients, and parallel I/O to the same file from multiple clients if you change the file size).
There are some others that are not as mature. Among them are Ibrix, Panasas, GFS, and IBM's SANFS. All of them are interesting or promising. Only SANF looks like it runs on more than Linux though at this point. Our requirements for the project I am on are to share the same FS and storage instance among disparate client OSes simultaneously. This might not be the same for others though and these might be worth a look. Lustre dodges this because its open source and they're interested in porting.
The FFRDCs can be good and bad. I work for one. I have worked for another. I'm lucky that I work for one run by a university with a rather good track record. However, ones run by private companies as contracts often get uber paranoid about the almighty dollar. The oversight of the contractor gets to be insane. The research in the end suffers.
I worked at a DOD equivalent of the DOE lab. Not so fun. At all. Defense contractors are evil to work for and the blood sucking that I saw to get as much money out of the contract made me sick.
If NASA can get past the problems associated with the privately run labs, then kewl, go for it.
However, wasn't there a problem with this legally? Something to do with the NASA employees being unable to do the same job when transitioning straight from being a government employee to a contractor (which technically they'd be if they worked for a FFRDC). IIRC, it had to do with this bill waaaay back: hence why teh bill died. I might be just misremembering though.
Saying the WETA render farm is the third largest machine in the world based on the number of processors is wrong. Just check the latest top 500 list and a quick skim points out that Lawrence Livermore National Lab's ASCI White (8192) and ASCI Blue Pacific (5808), Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/NERSC's seaborg (6656), Sandia National Lab's ASCI Red (9632), and Los Alamos National Lab's ASCI Blue Mountain (6144) all have more processors as well as the two already listed.
Also interesting that WETA Digital is listed as #44 on the list too, huh? They only listed a Xeon cluster though with 1080 processors.
(prolly not be the same machine, but...).
I love technical articles from the popular press about technical subjects. They do soooo much in depth research. I hope that they don't hurt themselves.
*Disgusted look*
Related story: A Conveyor Belt for the Nano-Age
on
Diamond Age Approaching?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has come up with a proof of concept nanotech conveyor belt. When an electrical current is applied, a carbon nanotube acts as a conveyor with Iridium atoms. They are moved up and down the tube without losing a single one. Read more here.
This answer is going to cost me an arm and a leg in karma, but what the heck. That's what it's for, right?
Show some employer loyalty.
I just did a hire about 4 months ago. We chewed through resumes for about 6 months before we found someone that we felt would fit. Something that we noticed and ended up using as a filter rule was whether or not a person would stick with a job for more than 6 months. Generally as a rule of thumb, you really want to stick out a job, unless its absolutely hellacious, for about three years. I'd really recommend five, to be honest. That way you're not viewed as someone contaminated with the so-called 'Dotcom Disease.'
We really wanted someone that once we've invested time, money, and training in to make a contribution to our projects for more than the time an intern would. Most !Dotcoms are similar in their opinions.
Actually, upon considering it, what this really ought to be relabeled as rather than 'employer loyalty' as 'resume care and feeding'. Your career will live and die by it. Take care of it and it will take care of you. Taking lots of short gigs to try to climb quickly scares off a lot of hiring folk.
I could go on ponticating, but I am sure that you're sick of it already.;)
I hope that they've made some vast improvements or they're gonna have some serious issues feeding that beast. Systems now, even the Opteron which is among the better mem controllers around for a commodity processor, still have issues with wait states. Uberthreading it and dumping more cores on the chip will only make the situation worse unless they do a serious upgrade of the memory controller.
If they do not, why pay bazillion bucks for a processor that is idle for most of the time?
If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did
If I may extract something I read from a post on Usenet a few years ago by a real astronomer (Frank Crary) about Galileo:
JPL and NASA say that Galileo accomplished 80% of its science goals, and they got that number (as I understand it) by going through the list of science goals, giving each a yes/no value, and dividing the number of yes's by the number of items. Usually, it isn't that simple. There is, ``yes, but not as well as we wanted'',``definitely yes, but we could have done better'', ``no but we still got some good data along those lines'', etc. Nor were all the goals of equal value, although you could argue endlessly about which were worth more than others. Then you get into the never-never land of things that were not on that list. I'm fairly sure that magnetometer data on the existence of an ocean on Europa wasn't on the list, and I'm quite sure that similar data on an ocean within Callisto definitely wasn't (just to use one example I'm familiar with.) Often, when you observe something, you discover something you did not expect to find. In several cases, Galileo has done that. Would there have been more unexpected discoveries if the high gain antenna had opened? Yes, definitely. But how many and how important? How can you attach a number to something like that? I would say that Galileo is a success, but not a complete success, and that the sum total of the scientific results is between 50 and 100% of what it might have achieved. I don't know, and I don't even know how to figure out, where between 50 and 100% the ``real'' value is.
First being that Galileo didn't provide more science than we hoped for. In many ways, it provided a lot less than we hoped for. I'm not calling it a failure, BTW.
Secondly, be careful whatcha say online...it might come back to haunt ya years down the line.;)
sleep: false. The Mars Exploration Rovers shutdown each night. Go read the MER website. Each day, they have wake up music that they play when they get the rovers going again.
age: false. The MERs (and other probes) degrade once at Mars at rates far faster than people do. The MERs were expected to last 90 days, but may last longer. Additionally, if the probes don't "age" then where are Viking 1, Viking 2, and Pathfinder?
necessarily have to invest many unproductive months in a return trip to Earth: they do if you want a sample return! Otherwise mostly true. There are plenty of people that are willing to go one way. I'm sure that you could recruit right here on/. if you provided a net connection and didn't mind the whining: "I'm last post again!"
require air or water or food: This is true. However, a person requires ~5 kg of food, water, O2, etc. per day. IIRC, it's something on the order of $100k/lbs to Mars (assuming that the EELV isn't less expensive than the Shuttle per pound). That means $1.1 million per day per person. With 10 people, that puts it at $11 million per day. With a mission time of 2 1/2 years, that gives us $10 billion. Assuming we get economies of scale out of this at all, it will be much less. It's also a trivial fraction of your $900 billion.
miss their families (or vice versa): this is completely true. However, betcha there are still people willing to make the trip.
suffer from nervous breakdowns: could have sworn Spirit had something not unlike this.;)
become crippled from years of low-G: Do believe that galileo, the probe, had a mild problem here too with its antenna. Generally though, you are more correct than not.
inspire public outcry when they are casually abandoned in deep space after a particuarly nasty technical glitch: personally, I think this is more the media declaring something an outcry than really is. The people that do make the outcry then are often the people that bemoan the spending in the first place. Note, the families of the Columbia astronauts are fully supportive of going forward with more missions, iirc.
Now, pay close attention to the difference between $820 million and $900 billion. That's the difference between the (known) cost of two unmanned Mars missions and the (estimated) cost of Bush's manned one. It implies that, to get a better "ROI" from manned flight, your Young Pioneers with their rock hammers and their can-do attitudes will have to be one thousand times more productive than robots,
Let's assume that $900 billion is an accurate measurement of the cost and break it down.
Generally, the Mars mission profiles have had about 10 people on them. That means, per person, we're down to $90 billion each. Still 200 times the cost of one of the MERs.
IIRC, the number of days on Mars for the astronauts is about a Martian year (687 earth days or 670 martian sols). That gives us a per day cost of productive $134 million per person. The MERs projected cost per day is $5 million if it were to only last 90 days or half that if they last 180. That means that an astronaut would be 27-54 times as costly. That means that they would have to be that much more productive, ja?
Now that brings us to productivity. An astronaut would be able to do what the MERs have done in 80 days in at most a single day! Go back and read EXACTLY what the MERS have done. Read exactly how far they've traveled. For robots, its an extremely impressive accomplishment. For a human being, I'd have his or her ass canned if that's all they'd done in a day! Good field geologists are enormously productive and on Mars they'd have easily collected said rocks, examined them in the same
The advocates of purely unmanned space exploration often claim that the same accomplishments that can be done with people can be done with unmanned probes of various varieties. To a point, they are right. Frex, Spirit and Opportunity are doing some of the things that a human being would have done.
However! For as long as Spirit and Opportunity have been working though - something on the order of 80 days - would have taken a person less than a week, if not even a day to do. Additionally, a lot more would have been done. A trained human geologist with a spade, rock hammer, and camera are far, far more flexible than any robotic mission can be for many, many decades.
I suspect that when you look at it from the POV of ROI based on science collected, that the manned-unmanned argument gets even more interesting. Before using the Apollo missions as a strawman, keep in mind that there would be massive differences between the Apollo missions and whatever US, other national or international missions to Mars: almost everyone on the new missions would be a trained scientist and do far, far more scientific work.
Yes and no. The West has repeatedly offered to build replacements of a safe design: not just the US, but France and others. However, the West wants to keep control of the money and construction: Kuchma et al aren't exactly known for being good, honest men with the dinero, ya know?
Hell, Kuchma's government isn't exactly known for being good at anything other than lining their own pockets and killing journalists.
I've been to Ukraine 3 times in the past 2 years: my gf is of Ukrainian extraction. Chernobyl is a name to conjure demons with there. Even more so than in the West. What's even scarier is that the Ukrainian government's denial over the state that it is in. They still are running at least a couple of the reactors and they are not being terribly maintained. The Russians came out stating that the buildings that the reactors are in are about to collapse...yet the Ukrainian government is unwilling to shut the place down.
Expect a sequel there, folks, and it's gonna be just as ugly if not worse. To make matters even more horrifying, based on the behavior of the Ukrainian government, the people are going to be informed through western sources long before, but far too late even so, that anything wrong is happening there when it does.
For some reason I remember back in the late 1980s the University of Arizona students considered doing something like this. Rather than simply having the wind roll it around, they thought about using pumping fluids. (iirc). They decided against the ball design for fear that it might get stuck somewhere and couldn't get out.
Instead they came up with 'rover' that had two wheels that were inflated in pie sections. It looked like a giant axel with no car attached. It had a nonrotating middle where the instruments, etc, were supposed to be placed. IIRC, they actually tested it out in the desert.
A quick google doesn't turn up anything. IIRC, it was called the 'Mars Ball' and I read about it in Discovery magazine circa 1988, but I might be off +/- a couple years. At the time, I loved it. It was simple, yet seemed rather well thought out and flexible.
NASA Watch only had a short quip that funding was a fantasy.
While the Russian economy is growing, it still seems less than likely that they'll be able to afford this. They have a PPP GDP smaller than France, Italy, or Brazil right now.
For the immediate future, I agree with you. A 17 yo with a rifle is the one thing we cannot replace. On the other hand, it might just be that with the advances in communications, robotics, etc. that we may both be wrong.
Consider the military tech in Joe Haldeman's _Forever Peace_. It's an okay work, and I question some of the assumptions - especially the big physics one and the massive handwave to save the world - but the remotely control infantry robots were definitely worth a thought or two.
Consider what the world might be like if America could go to war and never have a soldier fall in combat. Exciting, interesting, and scary as hell all come to mind. All at once.
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The New Mexico National Labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, the universities (NMSU, UNM, etc) and others came together in a rather awesome program about 13 years ago. The Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge Program gives high school students access to modern supercomputers to do scientific programming projects. They are given mentoring and instruction by volunteers as well as volunteered CPU time and access. Schools lacking net access are provided it by the participants, etc. After all their work, there is a competition based on how much was learned, presentations, science done, and final reports. It is a lot of fun. It's really hard.
I was originally a student in it waaaay back when it was getting underway (1990 & 1991) and then acted as a mentor for the next 5 years. I had a first place team and a third place team in those five years. I worked with kids that were often C students because they were bored as h*ll in class and often after seeing what they could do would go on to work harder to improve their grades to get into some very good universities.
Kids often rose to the challenge far and above what I would have thought they'd do. If the kids needed to learn the necessary math for the scienc they wanted to do we'd crash course it. I had kids that had been doing second year algebra doing partial differential equations by the end of the six months of work and able to understand it, frex. They always learned the science and programming that was required as well. This was their work, not mine. I could give guidance and knowledge, but couldn't do the work for them. Some of the science done was thermodynamics, astrophysics, environmental science, and fluid dyanmics, frex.
Now you may not be able to donate supercomputing time, but you might want keep this in mind when you go to think about what HS kids are interested in. Kids are often interested in a lot. You just have to be willing to teach them in a way that they'll remember, show them its useful, and make it interesting.
Really? What exactly is the state of the X System at VTech? Last I heard is that they'd disassembled the original and were not yet in production with the replacement. It's not even on the Top500 anymore. Rumors here are that VTech bit off more than they could chew...
Geese aren't a problem, but flies on the other hand...
Mr. Stephenson,
I have been reading and finding your books interesting. However, I was wondering if there was a prediction that you felt was going to happen, but didn't...and this surprised you to no end. Was there such a prediction and what was it?
Thank you.
Ahem.
This wasn't an ad on /. for yet another stoooopid low budget Stephen King car-comes-to-life movie was it?
Well, auf deutch. ;)
That, folks, is someone milking it for all its worth.
Lucas has always done that, but gaaaaaah...New. Levels. Of. Yanking. That. Teet.
Oh well, I guess I just pity the poor cow...
Thank you for your time. Recently in San Francisco, Matt Gonzalez, a popular local Green Party politico, has been pushing for the ability for noncitizens to vote in some of the local elections. While there are other places that offer this long before SF, it seems as though this erodes the differences between having citizenship or not. Rather than expanding the franchise this way, why not work to streamline the process for getting citizenship and encourage people to seek it?
Can you expound and explain a bit on your stance on this?
It just seems that there are some spots that might be a little warmer than others, or so goes the hypothesis as I understand it, from geothermal sources. It seems like a little bit of a stretch to link it directly with life on Mars. Perhaps this gives some ideas where to look for life on Mars, but the article itself doesn't seem to make much in the way for claims about Martian life.
Am I reading this wrong?
If I am not, does every discovery about Mars need to really be linked to life for it to be fascinating? Or does the press feel that's the need these days?
Right now there are a lot of file systems that do somehing not all that different than what Sun is proposing. The project I am on is evaluating them as we speak for a center wide filesystem. I've had the fun (no sarcasm, honestly) of setting up a number of different onces and helping to run benchmarks and tests against each. All of them have strengths. Every single one of them has some nasty weaknesses.
If you are looking for an open source based cluster file system, Lustre is what you want. It's supported by LLNL, PNNL, and the main writers at ClusterFS Inc. It's a network based cluster FS. We've been using it over GigE. However, we've found that there needs to be a ratio of 3:1 for data server:clients for a ratio. Wehave only used one metadata server. Failover isn't the greatest. Quotas don't exist. it also makes kernel mods (some good and bad) to do a mild fork of the linux kernel (they put them into the newer kernels every so often). It only runs on Linux. Getting it to run on anything else looks...scary.
GPFS runs on AIX and Linux. Even sharing the same storage. It runs and is pretty stable. it has the option to run in a SAN mode or network based FS. In the latter form, it even does local discovery of disks via labels so that if a client can see the disks locally it will read and write to them via FC rather than to the server. It, however, is a balkanized mess. It requires a lot more work to bring up and run: there is an awful lot of software to configure to get it to run (re: RSCT. If you haven't had the joys of HATS and HAGS, count yourself very, very lucky).
ADIC's StorNext software is another option. This one is good if you are interested in ease of installation, maintanence, and very, very fast speeds (damn near line speed on Fibre channel). I have set this one up for sharing disks in less than two hours from first install to getting numerous assorted nodes of different OS's to play together (Solaris, AIX, Linux). It freakin on virtually everything from Crays to Linux to Windows. It's issues seem to be scaling (right now doesn't go past 256 clients) and it has some nontrivial locking issues (righting to the same block from multiple clients, and parallel I/O to the same file from multiple clients if you change the file size).
There are some others that are not as mature. Among them are Ibrix, Panasas, GFS, and IBM's SANFS. All of them are interesting or promising. Only SANF looks like it runs on more than Linux though at this point. Our requirements for the project I am on are to share the same FS and storage instance among disparate client OSes simultaneously. This might not be the same for others though and these might be worth a look. Lustre dodges this because its open source and they're interested in porting.
The FFRDCs can be good and bad. I work for one. I have worked for another. I'm lucky that I work for one run by a university with a rather good track record. However, ones run by private companies as contracts often get uber paranoid about the almighty dollar. The oversight of the contractor gets to be insane. The research in the end suffers.
I worked at a DOD equivalent of the DOE lab. Not so fun. At all. Defense contractors are evil to work for and the blood sucking that I saw to get as much money out of the contract made me sick.
If NASA can get past the problems associated with the privately run labs, then kewl, go for it.
However, wasn't there a problem with this legally? Something to do with the NASA employees being unable to do the same job when transitioning straight from being a government employee to a contractor (which technically they'd be if they worked for a FFRDC). IIRC, it had to do with this bill waaaay back: hence why teh bill died. I might be just misremembering though.
Saying the WETA render farm is the third largest machine in the world based on the number of processors is wrong. Just check the latest top 500 list and a quick skim points out that Lawrence Livermore National Lab's ASCI White (8192) and ASCI Blue Pacific (5808), Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/NERSC's seaborg (6656), Sandia National Lab's ASCI Red (9632), and Los Alamos National Lab's ASCI Blue Mountain (6144) all have more processors as well as the two already listed.
Also interesting that WETA Digital is listed as #44 on the list too, huh? They only listed a Xeon cluster though with 1080 processors. (prolly not be the same machine, but...).
I love technical articles from the popular press about technical subjects. They do soooo much in depth research. I hope that they don't hurt themselves.
*Disgusted look*
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has come up with a proof of concept nanotech conveyor belt. When an electrical current is applied, a carbon nanotube acts as a conveyor with Iridium atoms. They are moved up and down the tube without losing a single one. Read more here.
A step closure to that assembler. :D
This answer is going to cost me an arm and a leg in karma, but what the heck. That's what it's for, right?
Show some employer loyalty.
I just did a hire about 4 months ago. We chewed through resumes for about 6 months before we found someone that we felt would fit. Something that we noticed and ended up using as a filter rule was whether or not a person would stick with a job for more than 6 months. Generally as a rule of thumb, you really want to stick out a job, unless its absolutely hellacious, for about three years. I'd really recommend five, to be honest. That way you're not viewed as someone contaminated with the so-called 'Dotcom Disease.'
We really wanted someone that once we've invested time, money, and training in to make a contribution to our projects for more than the time an intern would. Most !Dotcoms are similar in their opinions.
Actually, upon considering it, what this really ought to be relabeled as rather than 'employer loyalty' as 'resume care and feeding'. Your career will live and die by it. Take care of it and it will take care of you. Taking lots of short gigs to try to climb quickly scares off a lot of hiring folk.
I could go on ponticating, but I am sure that you're sick of it already. ;)
I hope that they've made some vast improvements or they're gonna have some serious issues feeding that beast. Systems now, even the Opteron which is among the better mem controllers around for a commodity processor, still have issues with wait states. Uberthreading it and dumping more cores on the chip will only make the situation worse unless they do a serious upgrade of the memory controller.
If they do not, why pay bazillion bucks for a processor that is idle for most of the time?
If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did
If I may extract something I read from a post on Usenet a few years ago by a real astronomer (Frank Crary) about Galileo:
That's from here.
Two notes.
First being that Galileo didn't provide more science than we hoped for. In many ways, it provided a lot less than we hoped for. I'm not calling it a failure, BTW.
Secondly, be careful whatcha say online...it might come back to haunt ya years down the line. ;)
From Tom's Hardware: IBM's processor plans: Build your own microchip.
I'm going to reorder this a bit in the reply.
robots don't [do these things]:
sleep: false. The Mars Exploration Rovers shutdown each night. Go read the MER website. Each day, they have wake up music that they play when they get the rovers going again.
age: false. The MERs (and other probes) degrade once at Mars at rates far faster than people do. The MERs were expected to last 90 days, but may last longer. Additionally, if the probes don't "age" then where are Viking 1, Viking 2, and Pathfinder?
necessarily have to invest many unproductive months in a return trip to Earth: they do if you want a sample return! Otherwise mostly true. There are plenty of people that are willing to go one way. I'm sure that you could recruit right here on /. if you provided a net connection and didn't mind the whining: "I'm last post again!"
require air or water or food: This is true. However, a person requires ~5 kg of food, water, O2, etc. per day. IIRC, it's something on the order of $100k/lbs to Mars (assuming that the EELV isn't less expensive than the Shuttle per pound). That means $1.1 million per day per person. With 10 people, that puts it at $11 million per day. With a mission time of 2 1/2 years, that gives us $10 billion. Assuming we get economies of scale out of this at all, it will be much less. It's also a trivial fraction of your $900 billion.
miss their families (or vice versa): this is completely true. However, betcha there are still people willing to make the trip.
suffer from nervous breakdowns: could have sworn Spirit had something not unlike this. ;)
become crippled from years of low-G: Do believe that galileo, the probe, had a mild problem here too with its antenna. Generally though, you are more correct than not.
inspire public outcry when they are casually abandoned in deep space after a particuarly nasty technical glitch: personally, I think this is more the media declaring something an outcry than really is. The people that do make the outcry then are often the people that bemoan the spending in the first place. Note, the families of the Columbia astronauts are fully supportive of going forward with more missions, iirc.
Now, pay close attention to the difference between $820 million and $900 billion. That's the difference between the (known) cost of two unmanned Mars missions and the (estimated) cost of Bush's manned one. It implies that, to get a better "ROI" from manned flight, your Young Pioneers with their rock hammers and their can-do attitudes will have to be one thousand times more productive than robots,
Let's assume that $900 billion is an accurate measurement of the cost and break it down.
Generally, the Mars mission profiles have had about 10 people on them. That means, per person, we're down to $90 billion each. Still 200 times the cost of one of the MERs.
IIRC, the number of days on Mars for the astronauts is about a Martian year (687 earth days or 670 martian sols). That gives us a per day cost of productive $134 million per person. The MERs projected cost per day is $5 million if it were to only last 90 days or half that if they last 180. That means that an astronaut would be 27-54 times as costly. That means that they would have to be that much more productive, ja?
Now that brings us to productivity. An astronaut would be able to do what the MERs have done in 80 days in at most a single day ! Go back and read EXACTLY what the MERS have done. Read exactly how far they've traveled. For robots, its an extremely impressive accomplishment. For a human being, I'd have his or her ass canned if that's all they'd done in a day! Good field geologists are enormously productive and on Mars they'd have easily collected said rocks, examined them in the same
The advocates of purely unmanned space exploration often claim that the same accomplishments that can be done with people can be done with unmanned probes of various varieties. To a point, they are right. Frex, Spirit and Opportunity are doing some of the things that a human being would have done.
However! For as long as Spirit and Opportunity have been working though - something on the order of 80 days - would have taken a person less than a week, if not even a day to do. Additionally, a lot more would have been done. A trained human geologist with a spade, rock hammer, and camera are far, far more flexible than any robotic mission can be for many, many decades.
I suspect that when you look at it from the POV of ROI based on science collected, that the manned-unmanned argument gets even more interesting. Before using the Apollo missions as a strawman, keep in mind that there would be massive differences between the Apollo missions and whatever US, other national or international missions to Mars: almost everyone on the new missions would be a trained scientist and do far, far more scientific work.
The difference between Heinlein's Starship Troopers and the movie 'adaptation' will probably be the same in this instance.
Repeat after me. There was no Starship Troopers movie.
Yes and no. The West has repeatedly offered to build replacements of a safe design: not just the US, but France and others. However, the West wants to keep control of the money and construction: Kuchma et al aren't exactly known for being good, honest men with the dinero, ya know?
Hell, Kuchma's government isn't exactly known for being good at anything other than lining their own pockets and killing journalists.
I've been to Ukraine 3 times in the past 2 years: my gf is of Ukrainian extraction. Chernobyl is a name to conjure demons with there. Even more so than in the West. What's even scarier is that the Ukrainian government's denial over the state that it is in. They still are running at least a couple of the reactors and they are not being terribly maintained. The Russians came out stating that the buildings that the reactors are in are about to collapse...yet the Ukrainian government is unwilling to shut the place down.
Expect a sequel there, folks, and it's gonna be just as ugly if not worse. To make matters even more horrifying, based on the behavior of the Ukrainian government, the people are going to be informed through western sources long before, but far too late even so, that anything wrong is happening there when it does.
Note I say when, not if. I really mean it too.
Not exactly kosher to follow up to one's own posts, but...
Here's a PDF with the abstract for the Mars Ball. 1988 was the year in question.
For some reason I remember back in the late 1980s the University of Arizona students considered doing something like this. Rather than simply having the wind roll it around, they thought about using pumping fluids. (iirc). They decided against the ball design for fear that it might get stuck somewhere and couldn't get out.
Instead they came up with 'rover' that had two wheels that were inflated in pie sections. It looked like a giant axel with no car attached. It had a nonrotating middle where the instruments, etc, were supposed to be placed. IIRC, they actually tested it out in the desert.
A quick google doesn't turn up anything. IIRC, it was called the 'Mars Ball' and I read about it in Discovery magazine circa 1988, but I might be off +/- a couple years. At the time, I loved it. It was simple, yet seemed rather well thought out and flexible.
Anyone have any good pictures or articles online?
Do the Russians even have the money to do this?
NASA Watch only had a short quip that funding was a fantasy.
While the Russian economy is growing, it still seems less than likely that they'll be able to afford this. They have a PPP GDP smaller than France, Italy, or Brazil right now.
For the immediate future, I agree with you. A 17 yo with a rifle is the one thing we cannot replace. On the other hand, it might just be that with the advances in communications, robotics, etc. that we may both be wrong.
Consider the military tech in Joe Haldeman's _Forever Peace_. It's an okay work, and I question some of the assumptions - especially the big physics one and the massive handwave to save the world - but the remotely control infantry robots were definitely worth a thought or two.
Consider what the world might be like if America could go to war and never have a soldier fall in combat. Exciting, interesting, and scary as hell all come to mind. All at once.