I don't think the ISS was designed to protect against the radiation levels in the Van Allen belts. The Soyuz capsule, on the other hand, was designed for keeping things alive to and from the moon. Also, the ISS is a very heavy piece of equipment and the amount of fuel necessary to boost it into a trans-lunar orbit would be restrictive, to say the least.
One major reason that I can guess is detla-V requirements. Getting into a lunar orbit requires one helluva hard burn for your spacecraft. As you are returning from lunar orbit, you would have to repeat the same hard burn to drop from lunar transfer orbit back into LEO to rendezvous a second time with the ISS. These fuel costs could be constraining. If, instead, you decide to plunge back into the Earth atmosphere directly, you can just slap a much heavier-duty heat shield on your spacecraft and allow the atmosphere to do some braking for you, thus lowering the delta-v requirements for that second "slow-down" burn. That's why this mission would require an extra heat-shield be added to the Soyuz, if that's the craft they are talking about taking.
Well at least they are talking about it now, rather than proselytizing about some super-heavy-mega-lifter rocket like Congress has been for the last decade or so. It may have taken 30 years too long to get here, but at least it got here (or, it might, based on the article). I, for one, was (and still am, to some degree) afraid that mankind's crowning space achievement would be walking on his own moon and ending it at that. Developing the infrastructure for, and demonstrating the ability to use, on-orbit resources as a staging ground for missions into deep space would be a very important step in getting further from Earth than the moon.
One other big difference in this case is that they are talking about using an on-orbit space station as a staging ground for a mission. That is a huge step in terms of mission cycle and design. There is a very large difference between using big rockets to get from Earth to a destination, and using smaller rockets to get from Earth, to an intermittent way point, to your final destination. If a mission like this was executed well, and yielded good, reliable, cheap results, there could be a movement to develop on-orbit assembly infrastructure and on-orbit mission staging resources to a large degree. Such a paradigm shift in mission architecture would definitely represent a historic landmark in mankind's endeavors into space.
Despite what you and some others want everyone to believe, there are quite a few people in this world that do stuff for things other than profit. One of the (maybe) advantages of the increasing poverty-wealth gap is that some individuals who are able to accumulate an enormous amount of money (think Musk, Branson) are able to do things for reasons other than profit. These things may include (if all goes according to Musk's plan) space exploration. It wouldn't surprise me, in the least that some Billionaires out there do things just for the hell of it. This isn't exactly a first in history. Look at the pyramids in Egypt, or most of the ancient wonders of the world. The extraordinarily rich dumped their life savings into what was, essentially, a giant penis waving contest. The only difference today is that big building's don't suffice for bragging rights anymore. So Musk and Branson and Bigelow said they want to up the bar and start a penis-waving competition over getting to various places in space first. One way or another, such adventures will spin off technologies and knowledge that, unless it is lost entirely, will benefit mankind overall. Personally, I'm okay with that.
moderation and neutrality is of paramount importance to mass media
I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but if you honestly believe this about the mass media I have to wonder if your definition of mass media is different from mine. So far as I can tell, mass media, including everything from cable, to radio, to newspapers, and so on is anything but moderate. It seems like, recently, media makes all of it's ad revenue by generating controversy, spinning up stories to be inflammatory, and generally trying to get people to rant in a spittle-laced frenzy about how terrible/fucked-up/doomed everything is. I'll grant that there are some milder voices in some of these shenanigans, such as NPR, local news stations, a few choice newspapers, and so on. However, the general trend that I have been noticing in just about all media nowadays (including places like/. and the intratubes) is that moderation is thrown under the bus, consistently, in favor of scandal, controversy, and scare. Moderation seems to have little to no place in modern media, of any form.
Yeah, but the difference is Asimov didn't believe that the robots in his stories were actually running around the world having moral dilemmas and growing as sentient beings during his lifetime.
Sounds like the Pope criticized places like Slashdot (amongst others), and Slashdot responded in kind by flaming the Pope's message and trolling it's own board with an inflammatory summary. In other words, par for the course on a typical/. day!
=)
I only worry about what 4chan's response to such comments might involve.../shudder.
The F*Bomb makes everything better....especially the Bible. (For added bonus points quote your favorite Bible verse with a few intermittently dispersed F*bombs in a Samuel Jackson voice).
"Let he who is without sin, throw the first fucking stone!"
See, doesn't that make it sound like Jesus is about to bust a cap in someone's ass? Epic! Now we just need to add some T-Rex's and we'll have Mel Gibson's latest Hollywood blockbuster.
I think the argument that Pojust was trying to put forward goes something along the lines of this:
Axiom 1: Assume an all-knowing God. (All knowing implies knowledge of that which has not yet come to pass).
Axiom 2: Assume a God that is always right. (Follows somewhat from Axiom 1).
Axiom 3: Define "free-will" as the ability to make an independent choice.
Question 1: Can free-will exist?
Suppose an individual is presented with the choice between X and Y. If God is all knowing, then God will know that the individual will 'choose' X. If God always knows this, and God must be, and is always right, then the individual must choose X. If the individual chooses Y, then God was wrong, and, therefore, God did not know the outcome. Thus, the individual must always choose X, and, therefore, there is no choice being made at all. For there to be an all-knowing God, all choices must be predetermined, and no choices actually exist.
Now, personally, I have seen folks try to route around this logic by saying, "Well God actually knows all-possible outcomes. That's what all-knowing means."
This is logically inconsistent. If God knows all-possible outcomes, but does not know the outcome that will actually be chosen, then God is not all-knowing. God simply knows all possible permutations of reality, not which permutation will actually occur. If God knows all possible outcomes, and knows which outcome of any given choice will follow a decision, then we fall back to the original logical demonstration that free will cannot exist in a reality with an all-knowing being. It is merely an illusion hosted by lesser beings.
Now, mind you, this is not necessarily an argument that there is no God or anything like that. It is merely an argument that a reality in which there is an all-knowing being as well as individual free will is a logically inconsistent reality. Now, whether or not reality is logically consistent, or, for that matter, an all-knowing being would have to be logically consistent is an entirely different argument. This argument merely holds that, in a logically consistent reality, free-will and an all-knowing being are logically inconsistent.
For the record, scientists have evidence that the reason for Branson and Rutan's combined success involves their combined badass-hair coefficient. Many analysts are hesitant to invest hope in SpaceX's technologies due to Musk's distinct lack of facial follicles.
...the cost of a single seat would take the entire after-tax income of a median US family for 5 years...
Sounds like it would take less time to pay off than a mortgage loan then. For those of us who prefer renting anyways, it doesn't sound like such a big deal and/or sacrifice. And with regards to "giving up the family," it may just be that some folk prefer to delay the starting of a family, or, for that matter, keep their family very small (1 spouse, or 1 spouse + 1 kid). Those folks would still probably be able to afford such a seat in their lifetime while raising a healthy child and having a middle class standard of living.
I read TFA. It's kind of funny this type of story is posted as news at all. The types of things that NASA and the ESA are describing in their interviews are more complex flight control software algorithms. It used to be that very simple feedback loops were used in combination with various controller chips (like PIDs) in order to give a spacecraft a few modes of operation. Activation and deactivation of these modes of operation were performed manually by ground controllers. However, as tech has progressed and onboard computing power has gotten cheaper, engineers have been able to design control software that activates and deactivates various modes of operation itself. In other words, it forms the same basic feedback loops that you might find on a Roomba, or some other terrestrial robot. It reads some input from a set of sensors. It uses those inputs to formulate a series of commands, be it rates and velocities, or mode-change commands. It then performs the commands in an expected manner.
What I find funny is that this is being touted as some sort of new AI revolution in space. Since our very first probes into LEO, we have been upgrading and complicating the controller software on every mission, be it Hubble, an Atlas V rocket, the mars rovers, or anything. Each new generation of spacecraft tends to have more complex, more robust flight software as the natural evolution of technology progresses. That said, I am not really sure why the ESA or NASA are talking about AI control software. This software isn't anymore AI oriented than the typical control software of any autonomous or semi-autonomous robot on the ground. It's only AI in the most liberal sense of the word. All that is happening is that, as missions and technology progress in maturity, engineers are capable of designing more robust control techniques using methods like Kalman filtering, direct adaptive control algorithms, state estimators, and so on. The only news here is that today missions are being designed with the capability to process more complex instructions set than they could 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That doesn't strike me as very newsish...but hey, I guess something had to fill the columns today.
I don't. I'm an American. Given my government's current track record, I think such efficiency and attention to detail would only cause the destruction of American civil liberties and rights to come that much sooner. Personally, I like government inefficiency. It is one of the only things that helps keep my government from going on a totally batshit-insane, effective power trip. Just imagine if all those tomes of laws, at both the federal and state level, were actually enforceable on a wide scale. We citizens would be royally fracked.
Somebody ought to write an exploit for Chinese iPhones and Android based phones that autotexts the name "Liu Xiaobo" to everyone in a person's contact list, then goes on to force their phone to do the same thing. Within a matter of days the entire population of the two most popular smartphone platforms in China would have their favorite toys censored. I am pretty sure that could cause an effective public outrage.
Hopefully Facebook will fix this. In the meantime, or if they don't, I suggest someone start a group for, "Obnoxious Friends that Add Their Friends to Controversial Groups," group. Then, every time someone adds you to a stupid group, you add them to that group. Recursion and drama ensues. Nobody can take Facebook groups seriously ever again...Of course, the fact that they did in the first place is just too bad.
And by their record so far, SpaceX has been perfectly anal-retentive with respect to their launch vehicles and launch operations. Yes, they screwed up with the hazardous waste thing and they were lucky that they did not screw up with something more critical. But as it stands now, they have quite a few successful launches, and, thus, flight tested vehicles under their belt. That is a hell of a lot more than NASA can say for their most recent launch vehicle development program (Constellation and Ares I ring a bell).
I am not saying that SpaceX should encourage or even tolerate such an oversight, but I am saying that that particular issue was actually a non-issue and trying to wave it around as evidence that Space X is incapable of doing their goal of developing launch vehicles is complete and utter bullshit. And that is coming from an aerospace engineer and launch vehicle analyst that is currently working in the industry.
The polish is nice. I still wish it was easier to connect my network card to a WPA protected wireless network without having to manually configure WPA_Supplicant. I haven't piddled around with the network managers after 9.04 so maybe they are better now, but for awhile there, it was a pain in the ass to configure your computer to connect to a static IP address on a WPA2 protected network without hacking the configuration files manually.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the ISS was designed to protect against the radiation levels in the Van Allen belts. The Soyuz capsule, on the other hand, was designed for keeping things alive to and from the moon. Also, the ISS is a very heavy piece of equipment and the amount of fuel necessary to boost it into a trans-lunar orbit would be restrictive, to say the least.
One major reason that I can guess is detla-V requirements. Getting into a lunar orbit requires one helluva hard burn for your spacecraft. As you are returning from lunar orbit, you would have to repeat the same hard burn to drop from lunar transfer orbit back into LEO to rendezvous a second time with the ISS. These fuel costs could be constraining. If, instead, you decide to plunge back into the Earth atmosphere directly, you can just slap a much heavier-duty heat shield on your spacecraft and allow the atmosphere to do some braking for you, thus lowering the delta-v requirements for that second "slow-down" burn. That's why this mission would require an extra heat-shield be added to the Soyuz, if that's the craft they are talking about taking.
Well at least they are talking about it now, rather than proselytizing about some super-heavy-mega-lifter rocket like Congress has been for the last decade or so. It may have taken 30 years too long to get here, but at least it got here (or, it might, based on the article). I, for one, was (and still am, to some degree) afraid that mankind's crowning space achievement would be walking on his own moon and ending it at that. Developing the infrastructure for, and demonstrating the ability to use, on-orbit resources as a staging ground for missions into deep space would be a very important step in getting further from Earth than the moon.
One other big difference in this case is that they are talking about using an on-orbit space station as a staging ground for a mission. That is a huge step in terms of mission cycle and design. There is a very large difference between using big rockets to get from Earth to a destination, and using smaller rockets to get from Earth, to an intermittent way point, to your final destination. If a mission like this was executed well, and yielded good, reliable, cheap results, there could be a movement to develop on-orbit assembly infrastructure and on-orbit mission staging resources to a large degree. Such a paradigm shift in mission architecture would definitely represent a historic landmark in mankind's endeavors into space.
Despite what you and some others want everyone to believe, there are quite a few people in this world that do stuff for things other than profit. One of the (maybe) advantages of the increasing poverty-wealth gap is that some individuals who are able to accumulate an enormous amount of money (think Musk, Branson) are able to do things for reasons other than profit. These things may include (if all goes according to Musk's plan) space exploration. It wouldn't surprise me, in the least that some Billionaires out there do things just for the hell of it. This isn't exactly a first in history. Look at the pyramids in Egypt, or most of the ancient wonders of the world. The extraordinarily rich dumped their life savings into what was, essentially, a giant penis waving contest. The only difference today is that big building's don't suffice for bragging rights anymore. So Musk and Branson and Bigelow said they want to up the bar and start a penis-waving competition over getting to various places in space first. One way or another, such adventures will spin off technologies and knowledge that, unless it is lost entirely, will benefit mankind overall. Personally, I'm okay with that.
moderation and neutrality is of paramount importance to mass media
I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but if you honestly believe this about the mass media I have to wonder if your definition of mass media is different from mine. So far as I can tell, mass media, including everything from cable, to radio, to newspapers, and so on is anything but moderate. It seems like, recently, media makes all of it's ad revenue by generating controversy, spinning up stories to be inflammatory, and generally trying to get people to rant in a spittle-laced frenzy about how terrible/fucked-up/doomed everything is. I'll grant that there are some milder voices in some of these shenanigans, such as NPR, local news stations, a few choice newspapers, and so on. However, the general trend that I have been noticing in just about all media nowadays (including places like /. and the intratubes) is that moderation is thrown under the bus, consistently, in favor of scandal, controversy, and scare. Moderation seems to have little to no place in modern media, of any form.
Yeah, but the difference is Asimov didn't believe that the robots in his stories were actually running around the world having moral dilemmas and growing as sentient beings during his lifetime.
Sounds like the Pope criticized places like Slashdot (amongst others), and Slashdot responded in kind by flaming the Pope's message and trolling it's own board with an inflammatory summary. In other words, par for the course on a typical /. day!
/shudder.
=)
I only worry about what 4chan's response to such comments might involve...
The F*Bomb makes everything better....especially the Bible. (For added bonus points quote your favorite Bible verse with a few intermittently dispersed F*bombs in a Samuel Jackson voice).
"Let he who is without sin, throw the first fucking stone!"
See, doesn't that make it sound like Jesus is about to bust a cap in someone's ass? Epic! Now we just need to add some T-Rex's and we'll have Mel Gibson's latest Hollywood blockbuster.
I think the argument that Pojust was trying to put forward goes something along the lines of this:
Axiom 1: Assume an all-knowing God. (All knowing implies knowledge of that which has not yet come to pass).
Axiom 2: Assume a God that is always right. (Follows somewhat from Axiom 1).
Axiom 3: Define "free-will" as the ability to make an independent choice.
Question 1: Can free-will exist?
Suppose an individual is presented with the choice between X and Y. If God is all knowing, then God will know that the individual will 'choose' X. If God always knows this, and God must be, and is always right, then the individual must choose X. If the individual chooses Y, then God was wrong, and, therefore, God did not know the outcome. Thus, the individual must always choose X, and, therefore, there is no choice being made at all. For there to be an all-knowing God, all choices must be predetermined, and no choices actually exist.
Now, personally, I have seen folks try to route around this logic by saying, "Well God actually knows all-possible outcomes. That's what all-knowing means."
This is logically inconsistent. If God knows all-possible outcomes, but does not know the outcome that will actually be chosen, then God is not all-knowing. God simply knows all possible permutations of reality, not which permutation will actually occur. If God knows all possible outcomes, and knows which outcome of any given choice will follow a decision, then we fall back to the original logical demonstration that free will cannot exist in a reality with an all-knowing being. It is merely an illusion hosted by lesser beings.
Now, mind you, this is not necessarily an argument that there is no God or anything like that. It is merely an argument that a reality in which there is an all-knowing being as well as individual free will is a logically inconsistent reality. Now, whether or not reality is logically consistent, or, for that matter, an all-knowing being would have to be logically consistent is an entirely different argument. This argument merely holds that, in a logically consistent reality, free-will and an all-knowing being are logically inconsistent.
If I lost my hand to pure evil, I could cut it off and replace it with a chainsaw....
The elegance of verbosity in your argument is astounding....
At least, it has the attention span of one...
Let me be the first to /facepalm.
I know you're being sarcastic, but if it did nail a GEO sat, that would make the GEO orbit belt a lot messier and more dangerous...
But, unlike those pricey BMW's, those Toyotas will be able to survive 90% of those crashes and still be (mostly) drivable.
For the record, scientists have evidence that the reason for Branson and Rutan's combined success involves their combined badass-hair coefficient. Many analysts are hesitant to invest hope in SpaceX's technologies due to Musk's distinct lack of facial follicles.
...the cost of a single seat would take the entire after-tax income of a median US family for 5 years...
Sounds like it would take less time to pay off than a mortgage loan then. For those of us who prefer renting anyways, it doesn't sound like such a big deal and/or sacrifice. And with regards to "giving up the family," it may just be that some folk prefer to delay the starting of a family, or, for that matter, keep their family very small (1 spouse, or 1 spouse + 1 kid). Those folks would still probably be able to afford such a seat in their lifetime while raising a healthy child and having a middle class standard of living.
I read TFA. It's kind of funny this type of story is posted as news at all. The types of things that NASA and the ESA are describing in their interviews are more complex flight control software algorithms. It used to be that very simple feedback loops were used in combination with various controller chips (like PIDs) in order to give a spacecraft a few modes of operation. Activation and deactivation of these modes of operation were performed manually by ground controllers. However, as tech has progressed and onboard computing power has gotten cheaper, engineers have been able to design control software that activates and deactivates various modes of operation itself. In other words, it forms the same basic feedback loops that you might find on a Roomba, or some other terrestrial robot. It reads some input from a set of sensors. It uses those inputs to formulate a series of commands, be it rates and velocities, or mode-change commands. It then performs the commands in an expected manner.
What I find funny is that this is being touted as some sort of new AI revolution in space. Since our very first probes into LEO, we have been upgrading and complicating the controller software on every mission, be it Hubble, an Atlas V rocket, the mars rovers, or anything. Each new generation of spacecraft tends to have more complex, more robust flight software as the natural evolution of technology progresses. That said, I am not really sure why the ESA or NASA are talking about AI control software. This software isn't anymore AI oriented than the typical control software of any autonomous or semi-autonomous robot on the ground. It's only AI in the most liberal sense of the word. All that is happening is that, as missions and technology progress in maturity, engineers are capable of designing more robust control techniques using methods like Kalman filtering, direct adaptive control algorithms, state estimators, and so on. The only news here is that today missions are being designed with the capability to process more complex instructions set than they could 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That doesn't strike me as very newsish...but hey, I guess something had to fill the columns today.
I don't. I'm an American. Given my government's current track record, I think such efficiency and attention to detail would only cause the destruction of American civil liberties and rights to come that much sooner. Personally, I like government inefficiency. It is one of the only things that helps keep my government from going on a totally batshit-insane, effective power trip. Just imagine if all those tomes of laws, at both the federal and state level, were actually enforceable on a wide scale. We citizens would be royally fracked.
Somebody ought to write an exploit for Chinese iPhones and Android based phones that autotexts the name "Liu Xiaobo" to everyone in a person's contact list, then goes on to force their phone to do the same thing. Within a matter of days the entire population of the two most popular smartphone platforms in China would have their favorite toys censored. I am pretty sure that could cause an effective public outrage.
Hopefully Facebook will fix this. In the meantime, or if they don't, I suggest someone start a group for, "Obnoxious Friends that Add Their Friends to Controversial Groups," group. Then, every time someone adds you to a stupid group, you add them to that group. Recursion and drama ensues. Nobody can take Facebook groups seriously ever again...Of course, the fact that they did in the first place is just too bad.
And by their record so far, SpaceX has been perfectly anal-retentive with respect to their launch vehicles and launch operations. Yes, they screwed up with the hazardous waste thing and they were lucky that they did not screw up with something more critical. But as it stands now, they have quite a few successful launches, and, thus, flight tested vehicles under their belt. That is a hell of a lot more than NASA can say for their most recent launch vehicle development program (Constellation and Ares I ring a bell).
I am not saying that SpaceX should encourage or even tolerate such an oversight, but I am saying that that particular issue was actually a non-issue and trying to wave it around as evidence that Space X is incapable of doing their goal of developing launch vehicles is complete and utter bullshit. And that is coming from an aerospace engineer and launch vehicle analyst that is currently working in the industry.
So....Flash will suck on my Ubuntu machines even more now? I'm going to go cry myself to sleep tonight.
The polish is nice. I still wish it was easier to connect my network card to a WPA protected wireless network without having to manually configure WPA_Supplicant. I haven't piddled around with the network managers after 9.04 so maybe they are better now, but for awhile there, it was a pain in the ass to configure your computer to connect to a static IP address on a WPA2 protected network without hacking the configuration files manually.