A shocking exposé about/. editors conspiring to drive traffic to Roland Piquepaille's pointless blog.
Are they getting kickbacks? Did Roland save them from a bear attack in the woods?
Seriously, this is two Roland Piquepaille posts in LESS THAN 24 HOURS. Why don't you guys just drop that pretense that he's a regular submitter like the rest of us.
your right, next time they build a new bleeding edge revolutionary space vehicle thats is nothing like anything that had ever been tried before they should just do it perfect the first time and not add anything that will be under utilized because of the geopolitical situation 30 years later, but make sure to add everything they're gonna find out that they need after its built.
This is obvious flamebait, but I'll answer it anyway.
My comment about the shuttle hamstringing NASA for decades isn't a shot at the engineering teams or the assembly and operational staff. They've shown time and again that they're the cream of the cream in terms of ability and ingenuity.
My problem is with the whole space shuttle religion that encircled the project and led to a lot of needless waste and bad ideas.
The shuttle can perform many tasks, to be sure. But it does them at tremendous cost and adds human handlers to operations that can generally be done without human assistance or from remote operators. Think about how things were done before the shuttle; Saturn series boosters were able to deliver extremely heavy payloads to orbit without need for 2-7 humans onboard in a pressurized and man-rated environment. As soon as shuttle development began, all Saturn production facilities were dismantled, in order to give NASA incentive on the new project. This is one of the biggest mistakes of the project, not made by engineers, but by politicians. (Congress was unwilling to fund Saturn production concurrently with shuttle production)
Think about this logically. Why would you throw away such a tremendous launch capability when there are so many uncertainties about your new vehicle? The principle uncertainties being "when will we be able to use it?", "how much will it cost to use it?", and "what can we actually do with it?" As the old saying goes, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
By limiting NASA to the unbuilt shuttle they set the tone for the next three decades. Here's another fact: the shuttle was built primarily as a service vehicle for the american space station. This eventually meant that not only would it ferry crews and supplies to and from the station, but it would also be the sole launch capability for all of the station parts and modules. What does this mean for the station? Well, the modules are limited to the volume of the shuttle's cargo bay. Compare the size of that cargo bay with the size of the modules on SkyLab. SkyLab was a modified S-IVB booster (modified to live in). Much larger diameter, not the thin hotdog-shaped tube of the cargo bay.
"What I don't understand is why you spend so much money in fuel and oxidiser to get the external tank nearly into orbit, then for the additional cost of presumably not very much (in the scheme of things), let the thing fall back to earth and burn up?
Would it not make more sense to take the tank into orbit and use it for something? It's got to be (at least nearly!) air-tight, why not add it to the Space Station as another module for something? Use it for spare parts - got a leak, hack a suitable sized bit off the old tank and stick it over the hole. Just stack them up in orbit somewhere for raw material to build a interplanetary space ship?"
You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, a lot of factors and events have stopped any of these things from happening.
The ET itself is completely space-worthy. It was designed to operate in space long after reaching orbit. Early plans for space stations and platforms included the ETs since they remain completely useable. What's more, the tanks still have a lot of H2 and O2 left after a launch. So in reality, the shuttle could reach much higher orbits if it _kept_ the ET attached on orbit. This was purposely designed-in, since the original plans for what's now the ISS called for a higher orbit than usual. So any visit to the space station would require one to keep the ET. Even if it was just hanging around LEO, the H2 and O2 in the tank are extremely valuable and are worth leaving in orbit.
So why don't they do this? Well, they just don't have a reason to anymore...
First, the shuttle no longer needs access to the higher orbit, since the ISS we have is in a much lower orbit. This was done to accomodate the Russian launch sites. This has crippled a lot of the usefulness of the ISS compared to it's original goals, but that's a whole other post.
Second, managing the ETs and their contents are more trouble than they're worth. What I mean is that the only immediate usefulness of the H2 and O2 would be for the ISS, but it's just less of a planning headache to have the supplies sent up by Progres than mapping out astronaut time to transfer stuff from the ET through the shuttle to the station (and having to manoeuver with the ET attached). We can say that making orbital warehouses of the tanks and their contents for future missions and projects is a great idea, but it brings up the question of where and how. Do you store them at the ISS, or at some designated point out of the way? If the ISS, you've just added another headache to the crew. If at some other point in space, you have to have station-keeping thrusters to maintain orbit and attitude. NASA has no need for any of these headaches currently.
Thirdly, the whole idea is moot since the shuttle's death warrant has already been signed. Well, it was signed a long time ago, but suffice it to say that the shuttle isn't going to be around much longer. There's no incentive to change their operations now, so they'll just keep chucking everything away until the program is over.
It's really quite sad to look back at the past thirty years* of the shuttle and ISS programs and realize how poorly they've been executed and how many opportunities and resources have been squandered needlessly. I have the utmost respect for the engineering teams and all the people who put the shuttles together and made them fly, but the shuttle program really has ruined NASA for decades.
Blah.
* - the shuttle fleet has only been flying since '81, but the design work began in the early 70's
And yes, I know I'm being extremely anal about this, but if we don't actively correct our mistakes we'll end up watching Survivor reruns and joining Oprah's book club.
I have little to no respect for people who toil away at UML diagrams. They're nothing more than busywork for coders and eye candy for higher-ups.
Honestly, if you're asked to make such a diagram, you're the only one who's going to understand it.
Not to say that I'm against sketching-out behaviour on a napkin at the pizza parlour, but why would anyone spend time connecting diamonds and rectangles when they could be making demonstrative code?
I've gotten a lot more mileage out of primitive code with meaningful outputs* than I have from tracing my way through a UML tree.
* ie. skeleton code that tells you what it's doing at each step ("I just made BankAccount 'steve'", "fetched 'steve's info", "incremented 'BankAccounts'")
I'm not sure how radioactive the reactors themselves might be; the article didn't give much information on this side of the problem. If anyone is familiar with Soviet spaceborne reactor design, please speak up! My strong suspicion is, however, that even in the likelihood they are thermoelectric reactors with short-lived isotopes, there would still be enough residual radiation to make them unpleasant devices to have land on you patio."
As I mentioned a few posts above this one, they are not RTGs. They are honest-to-goodness reactors, with all the nasty daughter-products we've grown to love. It's just like a reactor on the ground: you go in pure, you come out perverted. The daughter products are much more of a worry than the remaining pure fuel. You can expect uranium and plutonium to stay in a certain state; preferably in large solid pieces. But the decay products will have much different chemical and structural makeup, more likely to pulverize or turn gaseous within our atmosphere.
At least with an RTG you can be assured that it'll come back in one piece 99.9% of the time. It's small, completely solid, no moving parts. They rely solely on passive cooling. But a reactor produces so much heat that it must use an active heat transfer system, meaning larger size and moving parts (pumps, compressors, lots and lots of thin heat-conducting pipes). Here we're dealing with a design that is inherently more breakable and failure-prone. It's kinda like the old saying "Why don't they just make the planes like they make the Black Box?" The RTG is small and compact, very very hard to break. The reactor's weakness is its size. You can only armour it so much before it becomes prohibitively heavy.
Today's Lesson: if you have to drop either an RTG or a reactor back to the earth's surface, CHOOSE THE RTG.
For those satellites they used fully operational reactors, not just RTGs. A big bone of contention was that a lot of them were launched with an ACTIVE reactor. Prudence dictates that you should launch with a non-critical reactor, since an explosion during launch phase would have some bad effects. But early flight-rated reactors didn't have the capability to be launched cold and made critical in orbit - the precise adjustments just couldn't be handled remotely.
Really, though, their plan wasn't all that bad. When the satellite was taken offline, the reactor package would be boosted to a high orbit. In the 60's they would never have guessed that their space program (or the americans') would be so emaciated in the decades to come. They would certainly have expected some sort of orbital tug to be available in the 80s-90s.
And let's not forget how much worse things could have been... The Soviets very seriously considered leaving nuclear warheads permanently in orbit, rather than launching them all from the ground. When the time came, the orbiting warheads would be directed to re-enter en masse, which would severely reduce the available reaction time for the west. These systems were actually tested. A number of Kosmos satellites were dummy warheads that were launched, left in orbit for a time, and then directed to re-enter at a target zone. Imagine if a constellation of THESE had been left to decay over the past 4 decades.
if he put some imagination into it and spent some of the Huge Wads of Cash on a few lcd projectors and fashioned some curved projection screens...
I mean, come on... It's hard to get excited about a field of vision one foot tall and 8 or 9 feet wide, plastic monitor edges chopping it up every so often.
Slashdot Mirror
A shocking exposé about /. editors conspiring to drive traffic to Roland Piquepaille's pointless blog.
Are they getting kickbacks? Did Roland save them from a bear attack in the woods?
Seriously, this is two Roland Piquepaille posts in LESS THAN 24 HOURS. Why don't you guys just drop that pretense that he's a regular submitter like the rest of us.
The truth shall set you free.
This is obvious flamebait, but I'll answer it anyway.
My comment about the shuttle hamstringing NASA for decades isn't a shot at the engineering teams or the assembly and operational staff. They've shown time and again that they're the cream of the cream in terms of ability and ingenuity.
My problem is with the whole space shuttle religion that encircled the project and led to a lot of needless waste and bad ideas.
The shuttle can perform many tasks, to be sure. But it does them at tremendous cost and adds human handlers to operations that can generally be done without human assistance or from remote operators. Think about how things were done before the shuttle; Saturn series boosters were able to deliver extremely heavy payloads to orbit without need for 2-7 humans onboard in a pressurized and man-rated environment. As soon as shuttle development began, all Saturn production facilities were dismantled, in order to give NASA incentive on the new project. This is one of the biggest mistakes of the project, not made by engineers, but by politicians. (Congress was unwilling to fund Saturn production concurrently with shuttle production)
Think about this logically. Why would you throw away such a tremendous launch capability when there are so many uncertainties about your new vehicle? The principle uncertainties being "when will we be able to use it?", "how much will it cost to use it?", and "what can we actually do with it?" As the old saying goes, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
By limiting NASA to the unbuilt shuttle they set the tone for the next three decades. Here's another fact: the shuttle was built primarily as a service vehicle for the american space station. This eventually meant that not only would it ferry crews and supplies to and from the station, but it would also be the sole launch capability for all of the station parts and modules. What does this mean for the station? Well, the modules are limited to the volume of the shuttle's cargo bay. Compare the size of that cargo bay with the size of the modules on SkyLab. SkyLab was a modified S-IVB booster (modified to live in). Much larger diameter, not the thin hotdog-shaped tube of the cargo bay.
I think I'll stop here for now.
"What I don't understand is why you spend so much money in fuel and oxidiser to get the external tank nearly into orbit, then for the additional cost of presumably not very much (in the scheme of things), let the thing fall back to earth and burn up?
Would it not make more sense to take the tank into orbit and use it for something? It's got to be (at least nearly!) air-tight, why not add it to the Space Station as another module for something? Use it for spare parts - got a leak, hack a suitable sized bit off the old tank and stick it over the hole. Just stack them up in orbit somewhere for raw material to build a interplanetary space ship?"
You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, a lot of factors and events have stopped any of these things from happening.
The ET itself is completely space-worthy. It was designed to operate in space long after reaching orbit. Early plans for space stations and platforms included the ETs since they remain completely useable. What's more, the tanks still have a lot of H2 and O2 left after a launch. So in reality, the shuttle could reach much higher orbits if it _kept_ the ET attached on orbit. This was purposely designed-in, since the original plans for what's now the ISS called for a higher orbit than usual. So any visit to the space station would require one to keep the ET. Even if it was just hanging around LEO, the H2 and O2 in the tank are extremely valuable and are worth leaving in orbit.
So why don't they do this? Well, they just don't have a reason to anymore...
First, the shuttle no longer needs access to the higher orbit, since the ISS we have is in a much lower orbit. This was done to accomodate the Russian launch sites. This has crippled a lot of the usefulness of the ISS compared to it's original goals, but that's a whole other post.
Second, managing the ETs and their contents are more trouble than they're worth. What I mean is that the only immediate usefulness of the H2 and O2 would be for the ISS, but it's just less of a planning headache to have the supplies sent up by Progres than mapping out astronaut time to transfer stuff from the ET through the shuttle to the station (and having to manoeuver with the ET attached). We can say that making orbital warehouses of the tanks and their contents for future missions and projects is a great idea, but it brings up the question of where and how. Do you store them at the ISS, or at some designated point out of the way? If the ISS, you've just added another headache to the crew. If at some other point in space, you have to have station-keeping thrusters to maintain orbit and attitude. NASA has no need for any of these headaches currently.
Thirdly, the whole idea is moot since the shuttle's death warrant has already been signed. Well, it was signed a long time ago, but suffice it to say that the shuttle isn't going to be around much longer. There's no incentive to change their operations now, so they'll just keep chucking everything away until the program is over.
It's really quite sad to look back at the past thirty years* of the shuttle and ISS programs and realize how poorly they've been executed and how many opportunities and resources have been squandered needlessly. I have the utmost respect for the engineering teams and all the people who put the shuttles together and made them fly, but the shuttle program really has ruined NASA for decades.
Blah.
* - the shuttle fleet has only been flying since '81, but the design work began in the early 70's
Alright. Make all the intruders wear neon-pink thongs. Easily detected, very repulsive.
Problem Solved.
(waits for the -5000 flamebait)
It's "TANGIER" not "TANGIERS".
It's an old city, not a mobbed-up casino.
And yes, I know I'm being extremely anal about this, but if we don't actively correct our mistakes we'll end up watching Survivor reruns and joining Oprah's book club.
For shame!
...police find Scott Richter's body in a shallow grave with a single can of spiced ham?
I'm certainly not suggesting anyone should initiate such action.... but if you already have, how much longer do we have to wait?
Sincerely,
- The General Public, xoxo
I have little to no respect for people who toil away at UML diagrams. They're nothing more than busywork for coders and eye candy for higher-ups.
Honestly, if you're asked to make such a diagram, you're the only one who's going to understand it.
Not to say that I'm against sketching-out behaviour on a napkin at the pizza parlour, but why would anyone spend time connecting diamonds and rectangles when they could be making demonstrative code?
I've gotten a lot more mileage out of primitive code with meaningful outputs* than I have from tracing my way through a UML tree.
* ie. skeleton code that tells you what it's doing at each step ("I just made BankAccount 'steve'", "fetched 'steve's info", "incremented 'BankAccounts'")
That was, without a doubt, the most hilarious thing I've heard all day. Thank you, thank you :)
As I mentioned a few posts above this one, they are not RTGs. They are honest-to-goodness reactors, with all the nasty daughter-products we've grown to love. It's just like a reactor on the ground: you go in pure, you come out perverted. The daughter products are much more of a worry than the remaining pure fuel. You can expect uranium and plutonium to stay in a certain state; preferably in large solid pieces. But the decay products will have much different chemical and structural makeup, more likely to pulverize or turn gaseous within our atmosphere.
At least with an RTG you can be assured that it'll come back in one piece 99.9% of the time. It's small, completely solid, no moving parts. They rely solely on passive cooling. But a reactor produces so much heat that it must use an active heat transfer system, meaning larger size and moving parts (pumps, compressors, lots and lots of thin heat-conducting pipes). Here we're dealing with a design that is inherently more breakable and failure-prone. It's kinda like the old saying "Why don't they just make the planes like they make the Black Box?" The RTG is small and compact, very very hard to break. The reactor's weakness is its size. You can only armour it so much before it becomes prohibitively heavy.
Today's Lesson: if you have to drop either an RTG or a reactor back to the earth's surface, CHOOSE THE RTG.
Or Superman, at the very least...
For those satellites they used fully operational reactors, not just RTGs. A big bone of contention was that a lot of them were launched with an ACTIVE reactor. Prudence dictates that you should launch with a non-critical reactor, since an explosion during launch phase would have some bad effects. But early flight-rated reactors didn't have the capability to be launched cold and made critical in orbit - the precise adjustments just couldn't be handled remotely.
Really, though, their plan wasn't all that bad. When the satellite was taken offline, the reactor package would be boosted to a high orbit. In the 60's they would never have guessed that their space program (or the americans') would be so emaciated in the decades to come. They would certainly have expected some sort of orbital tug to be available in the 80s-90s.
And let's not forget how much worse things could have been... The Soviets very seriously considered leaving nuclear warheads permanently in orbit, rather than launching them all from the ground. When the time came, the orbiting warheads would be directed to re-enter en masse, which would severely reduce the available reaction time for the west. These systems were actually tested. A number of Kosmos satellites were dummy warheads that were launched, left in orbit for a time, and then directed to re-enter at a target zone. Imagine if a constellation of THESE had been left to decay over the past 4 decades.
That's all well and good, but how many people will get your Chauncey Gardner reference? How many slashdotters even know who Peter Sellers was?
How come I can't get no Tang 'round here?
Call me a stickler, but it's "Pons" and "Fleischman."
My work here is done.
Nevermind that laser tag uses infrared for the actual hit-sensing...
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Backups backups backups backups
We love to back up and backup the backups
Back back back back UPS
(refrain)
What odd timing... someone just gave me an IPC 4/40 that used to belong to MITEL.
What the hell should I do with it?
The speed of technology transfer is amazing!
It only took one communist state 35 years to copy the designs of another communist state.
Does this mean Cuba is close behind in the space race?
"metal-metablozing bacteria"
Science has changed so much since my last biology class... I can hardly recognize any of the terminology anymore!
Unlike most people here, I actually got the reference.
I read your book you magnificent science-fiction-writing bastard!
In other news, it has been suggested that eating fast food will make you gain weight and that watching Real TV will make you sterile.
if he put some imagination into it and spent some of the Huge Wads of Cash on a few lcd projectors and fashioned some curved projection screens...
I mean, come on... It's hard to get excited about a field of vision one foot tall and 8 or 9 feet wide, plastic monitor edges chopping it up every so often.
although it does invoke some nogstolgia.
I hear you can clear that up with some antibiotics.
Dupe of Earl
Dupe dupe
Dupe of Earl
Dupe dupe dupe...
I can see it now!
Two NSA techs sitting in their underground puzzle palace listening to phone conversations about Al Qaeda's superbowl picks.
"Hey Smith, seems a bit warm, doesn't it?"
Meanwhile, 10000 miles away in a dry cave, Mr. bin Laden revels in victory,
"AHAHAHAHA, DIE FUCKERS, ALLAH OWNS YOUR BITS"