Huh, that's funny because there is a lot of on-land drilling along the 101 Highway stretch through Santa Barbara, California. When I drive through there at night, I can see bursts of flame (which I am pretty sure are controlled) pop up sporadically from the wells for the entire drive. So far as I know, they are also drilling crude oil. So...I would wager that there is something flammable involved in the process, even if it's not the crude oil itself.
Apparently Louisiana really pissed off Poseidon sometime in the last few years. Y'all might want to update your Kraken attack response drills just in case...
A) He is a kid.
B) His parent is involved in some sort of trial.
C) He wants to understand a bit more about what is going on with his parent.
D) He is intelligent enough to understand how to apply tools at his disposal (Facebook) in order to garner an ends that he desires (more information).
Seriously, Facebook stalking is not some sort of creepy, underground practice performed solely by child molesters and perverts anymore. If you learn or hear of someone new, it is pretty common to do a quick Google and Facebook search to see what the deal is. I can't count how many random people have tried to add me on Facebook because we bumped into each other at Starbucks or something trivial like that...
-things that I would think any self-respecting person....
Well that's the false assumption that is causing your surprise right there. I find that self-respect is quite lacking in many parts of modern society. Facebook social circles are no exception to this and, quite possibly, are much worse.
On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz
And the sky with no clouds
The heat was hot and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound
I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain
La, la...
I disagree. When it comes to arguing about theoretical fairy tales vs. evidenced science I think sitting out the arguments and watching some Futurama and Family Guy reruns is the best approach to the situation.
Some of us prefer the idea of spending an eternity burning in terror and pain to spending an eternity worshipping some faceless entity that demands our unbridled faith and devotion. The way I see it, the heaven hell proposition is nothing more than a false dichotomy between eternal servitude and eternal suffering. Frankly, both choices suck, but if I have to spend eternity in misery, I'd rather still have the freedom to keep my own mind and decisions.
Hey Snoop,
MC Lars, MC Chris, MC Frontalot, and a whole slew of other nerdcore, laptop, geek lyricists beat you to rapping about hacking a long time ago. The funny thing? They disagree with you. Acoording to them, Hack ain't whack but got them to the stop of the intellectual stack (okay, there's a reason I'm not a rapper). The point is, you're late to the tech. rap show.
The November Congressional Elections are just around the corner. If you are tired of the collective douchebaggery and antics of our elected politicians, then campaign, vigorously, in your local community to vote for anyone other than interest-sponsored Democrats and Republicans. Every time politics come up for discussion around my community, I flame both parties equally. Until we convince the rest of the voter base the both party's candidates are corrupt, pandering, unhelpful morons, these kinds of disingenuous shenanigans will continue to run our country.
We, the citizens of the United States, can't take back control of our government until we collectively declare, in a very clear manner, "Enough is enough!"
The fatal flaw of the X-15 design was that it was a government funded prototype. If Congressional budget hearings have taught me anything during my short time on this planet, it's that the federal government cannot be trusted to properly fund high-risk, high-gain ventures. The X-15 was a great vehicle, like many military and NASA vehicles before it. Nonetheless, it failed spectacularly because Congress controlled it's budget.
That said, the sooner space access can be liberated from the choke-hold of congressional funding, the sooner you and I will be able to take a vacation to Mars.
Well I suppose I expected them to be developed in parallel. After all, why are all the launch companies racing for orbit if nobody has anything to put on the top of their rockets? I've been talking to some of the smaller launch companies lately and they are all very excited about their own projects and what they are capable of. Quite a few of them, however, when presented with the question, "What kinds of business relationships/partnerships have you explored for utilization of your launch platform?" have little more to say than that they will look into that after they get flying. Or, at best, they have one sister company that they are working with closely. I'm not a business major, so I don't know the reason for that type of attitude. But that's why I said that I find it surprising there are fewer payload developers out there than launch vehicle developers. After all, you can already launch on something like the Dnepr or Minotaur, it's just not as cheap as most folks would like.
You know, it's kind of funny. Lately with all the hub-ub regarding the closure of the shuttle program, the small launch companies have been getting a ton of publicity. We have companies like SpaceX and Orbital working their way into the medium and heavy lift rocket arenas. We have Blue Origin, Masten, Armadillo, and a half-dozen other small rocket/sounding rocket/propulsion companies developing launch platforms for low gravity environments (moon, Mars) and suborbital flights. One thing that I can't seem to find a lot of, however, is small, commercial payload companies. There are definitely a few. Companies like Clyde Space for instance are starting to offer available payloads on cubesat buses. There are also companies like Interorbital Sciences that are trying to push the small payload/tubesat architecture. And, of course, there are dozens of startups competing for the rover portion of the GLXP. Nonetheless, I would like to see more small satellite companies start cropping up. It seems like there would be a market for a company that could develop a common, reliable, small payload bus (about 250 - 500 kg) that could guarantee a mission life of XX many years and a power base of XX many kW that customers could mount scientific payloads on to test technologies, gather a bit of data, whatever.
I guess that I am surprised to see commercial launch companies getting so much publicity, while the market for commercial satellite buses remains so small. It would be cool to see a company do to satellites what SpaceX is trying to do the launch market. Surely some science communities out there would pay to gather 0 g data for some field or another...
Having something that can do all that with enough power to actually be useful, able to do it over and over again without running out of consumables, and do that on a sane budget-that's tricky.
Agreed. This is precisely what makes it an interesting and worthwhile engineering project to work on.
Oh, also, most of the things we've hit with lasers in space, today, are things whose relative position, velocity, flight path, and orientation are known. Recognizing an anonymous piece of cold debris, targeting it, and maintaining laser contact on it for any decent amount of time is a significantly different problem than targeting the next satellite in a known constellation and establishing a two-way communication protocol between hardware.
You know, I always wanted to talk to that guy for the exact reason you posted. I thought it would be a great university project for some aerospace engineering students to team up with this guy and build a small satellite (~500 kg) that used some combination of high-load capacitors, trickle charge electronics, solar cells, and his laser-tracking technology to basically float around Earth for awhile in a particularly polluted altitude band and just try zapping what ~10 cm pieces of space junk they could find. It would be a great effort for the students, and would act as a wonderful proof-of-concept demonstrator to the big players in the space industry.
It's not terribly hard, but it is expensive. Depending on what kind of deorbit profile you develop, you either have to carry extra fuel for the entire mission (accounting for things like boil-off and ablation) to burn your way back to a properly low orbit, or you carry a whole new deployment mechanism to drag you back down (solar sail, kite, whatever), which adds an entire subsystem that you have to track, design, and engineer throughout the development process (mind you, no current launch vehicles have this capability, so they have to rely on unspent fuel), or you use some exotic means of deorbit like the Earth's magnetic field to pull you back down into the atmosphere. Of course, that last one also requires an entire subsystem development team as well. So in the end, deorbiting becomes a very expensive effort that requires engineers and technology to achieve. Is it impossible? Nah. Is it cheap? Nah. Most companies/countries/entities won't bother about deorbiting because they are less concerned about the environment and more concerned about how modern their space program looks. Thus, they don't bother with deorbiting their spacecraft because they would rather spend their engineers and money doing impressive things like landing on asteroids, or blowing up other satellites in orbit.... (yes, I'm looking at you China, you short-sighted wankers).
That Discovery article was a total waste of time. It really had little to do with "9 ways of dealing with space junk," and was more along the lines of "9 things that are kind of related that we want to talk about." As you mentioned, a couple of its nine methods of dealing with space junk could really just be grouped into the general theme of, stop putting more up there (deorbit your crap at end of mission). There were only three methods that actually discussed getting rid of existing junk: lasers in space, balls of aerogel to capture stuff, blowing up large chunks of junk. For what it's worth, the exploding method that you mentioned discussed only conducitng such methods at low altitudes which actually does work really well. However, it still leaves a lot of unaddressed crud in the higher LEO bands (like the one the ISS is in). The aerogel glob discussion was also an interesting one, but as the article addressed, aerogel can only really handle tiny stuff like paint chips. The lasers in space is probably the most effective solution, but costs so much in terms of energy generation that it is still a ways off in any large scale deployment.
So what else did the article discuss? Well it mentioned the Kessler effect, which has nothing to do with dealing with space junk, but is just a model used to describe space junk. It mentioned that NASA is now putting more efforts into tracking space junk. This is important, of course, but doesn't qualify as a method for removing it or handling it (excepting the very indirect means of simply avoiding it). Then it talks about shielding spacecraft from space junk. This, of course, is necessary and current practice, but no amount of shielding (presently) will protect you from detached thermal blankets or burnt out Delta stages.
All in all, this article just seemed like a disorganized, loosely-themed, terse ramble. I usually expect better from Discover but was severely disappointed in this particular release.
You want my honest opinion? Our society grew to value money more than exploration. Look at how many posts, on this thread alone, by fellow nerds, talk about how the economically viable mission involves robots and not people. Hell, look at the topic of the story. Is the headline, "Wouldn't it be cool if NASA offered diving vacations on Europa by 2025?" Nah, the headline is, "What can make us money in space!"
Back during the Apollo days, the country had other things on its mind than simply turning a profit margin (namely, an ego derived from making the USSR look weaker by comparison). These days, America's ego is full up. We don't have anything to prove anymore. Our society just wants more stuff, more shiny things, more toys, more bling, more money. So you want to know what happened to NASA? We grew into a nation that values material greed above silly "romantic" notions like exploration and adventure. Thus, our public entities get valued accordingly. An entity like NASA, whose creed is exploration and discovery doesn't have a helluva lot to do in a society so obsessed with greed.
/shrug
Oh, on a more positive note, NASA does still do a lot of really cool shit. Take a look at Kepler, Cassini, JUNO, the JWST, Curiosity and the MSL, LISA, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer that is scheduled for installation on the ISS, and, hell, even though it's not NASA, the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. Oh, also, the NASA Centennial Challenge is pretty sweet.
Not everywhere in space. Don't get me wrong, up until about the asteroid belt (what we are talking here) then yeah, solar energy is concentrated enough to make it a viable energy source. Once you start pushing those distances, though, you hit some diminishing returns problems. Also note that you have to account for any time spent in partial eclipse of other orbital bodies during transit (these can be minimized, but it's an important design consideration).
Well the first couple might be a pain in the ass, but if you've actually mined a few asteroid 'husks' empty in Earth orbit, then it would be much easier to attach some low, steady delta V thrusters to a husk and use that body as the famed gravity tractor. Of course, for the first few asteroids, it probably would be best just to attach a few low, steady delta V thrusters (as in electric propulsion) using a robotic probe or two....
In general, local politicians (not really the right term for a judge, I know) tend to be a bit easier to work with than the higher ups. I know a lot of the judges in local courts that I've visited/juried in/etc. tend to be very shrewd people who take their role as an arbiter of the law very seriously. Similarly, most city-council politicians I know tend to work very hard to keep in touch with their voter base and to enact seemingly sane policies. Politics and law at the local level tend to be pretty mild and generally accessible. It's when you start dealing with folks who work on the State level and above that you run into the real D-bags.
You know, I'm all for going digital and keeping electronic backups of things, but one big problem with selling digital-only of anything is that some form or specialized reader (in this case, a computer) is necessary to access the information contained within the document. Having the entire Oxford dictionary in paper form means that future generations and cultures can simply pick up the text and start reading/translating it based on context. Having the next edition in purely digital form means that some future generation or culture will have to develop some means of reading our digital records to have access to the lexicon that is the Oxford dictionary. Mind you, I am not advocating that decisions for the present be made regarding ease of access in some theoretical future, I am just noting that everything stored in a purely digital format today may not be accessible sometime down the road.
It sort of makes you wonder if some of the more obscure artifacts we have found from ancient cultures needed some form of a reader or another to properly understand. I don't know enough about archaeology to make any claims that is the case, but it is an interesting thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, that's funny because there is a lot of on-land drilling along the 101 Highway stretch through Santa Barbara, California. When I drive through there at night, I can see bursts of flame (which I am pretty sure are controlled) pop up sporadically from the wells for the entire drive. So far as I know, they are also drilling crude oil. So...I would wager that there is something flammable involved in the process, even if it's not the crude oil itself.
Apparently Louisiana really pissed off Poseidon sometime in the last few years. Y'all might want to update your Kraken attack response drills just in case...
The most likely reasons are
A) He is a kid.
B) His parent is involved in some sort of trial.
C) He wants to understand a bit more about what is going on with his parent.
D) He is intelligent enough to understand how to apply tools at his disposal (Facebook) in order to garner an ends that he desires (more information).
Seriously, Facebook stalking is not some sort of creepy, underground practice performed solely by child molesters and perverts anymore. If you learn or hear of someone new, it is pretty common to do a quick Google and Facebook search to see what the deal is. I can't count how many random people have tried to add me on Facebook because we bumped into each other at Starbucks or something trivial like that...
-things that I would think any self-respecting person ....
Well that's the false assumption that is causing your surprise right there. I find that self-respect is quite lacking in many parts of modern society. Facebook social circles are no exception to this and, quite possibly, are much worse.
And suffering begets strength. Strength begets accomplishment. Accomplishment begets peace of mind. Thus, life begets peace of mind.
;)
We can play these trite-theory games all day long.
On the first part of the journey
...
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz
And the sky with no clouds
The heat was hot and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound
I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain
La, la
Horse with No Name - America
Best explanation ever.
I disagree. When it comes to arguing about theoretical fairy tales vs. evidenced science I think sitting out the arguments and watching some Futurama and Family Guy reruns is the best approach to the situation.
Some of us prefer the idea of spending an eternity burning in terror and pain to spending an eternity worshipping some faceless entity that demands our unbridled faith and devotion. The way I see it, the heaven hell proposition is nothing more than a false dichotomy between eternal servitude and eternal suffering. Frankly, both choices suck, but if I have to spend eternity in misery, I'd rather still have the freedom to keep my own mind and decisions.
Hey Snoop, MC Lars, MC Chris, MC Frontalot, and a whole slew of other nerdcore, laptop, geek lyricists beat you to rapping about hacking a long time ago. The funny thing? They disagree with you. Acoording to them, Hack ain't whack but got them to the stop of the intellectual stack (okay, there's a reason I'm not a rapper). The point is, you're late to the tech. rap show.
This reminds me of MC Lars' "We've Arrived."
The November Congressional Elections are just around the corner. If you are tired of the collective douchebaggery and antics of our elected politicians, then campaign, vigorously, in your local community to vote for anyone other than interest-sponsored Democrats and Republicans. Every time politics come up for discussion around my community, I flame both parties equally. Until we convince the rest of the voter base the both party's candidates are corrupt, pandering, unhelpful morons, these kinds of disingenuous shenanigans will continue to run our country.
We, the citizens of the United States, can't take back control of our government until we collectively declare, in a very clear manner, "Enough is enough!"
....like the X-15 managed .... 40 years ago.
The fatal flaw of the X-15 design was that it was a government funded prototype. If Congressional budget hearings have taught me anything during my short time on this planet, it's that the federal government cannot be trusted to properly fund high-risk, high-gain ventures. The X-15 was a great vehicle, like many military and NASA vehicles before it. Nonetheless, it failed spectacularly because Congress controlled it's budget.
That said, the sooner space access can be liberated from the choke-hold of congressional funding, the sooner you and I will be able to take a vacation to Mars.
Well I suppose I expected them to be developed in parallel. After all, why are all the launch companies racing for orbit if nobody has anything to put on the top of their rockets? I've been talking to some of the smaller launch companies lately and they are all very excited about their own projects and what they are capable of. Quite a few of them, however, when presented with the question, "What kinds of business relationships/partnerships have you explored for utilization of your launch platform?" have little more to say than that they will look into that after they get flying. Or, at best, they have one sister company that they are working with closely. I'm not a business major, so I don't know the reason for that type of attitude. But that's why I said that I find it surprising there are fewer payload developers out there than launch vehicle developers. After all, you can already launch on something like the Dnepr or Minotaur, it's just not as cheap as most folks would like.
You know, it's kind of funny. Lately with all the hub-ub regarding the closure of the shuttle program, the small launch companies have been getting a ton of publicity. We have companies like SpaceX and Orbital working their way into the medium and heavy lift rocket arenas. We have Blue Origin, Masten, Armadillo, and a half-dozen other small rocket/sounding rocket/propulsion companies developing launch platforms for low gravity environments (moon, Mars) and suborbital flights. One thing that I can't seem to find a lot of, however, is small, commercial payload companies. There are definitely a few. Companies like Clyde Space for instance are starting to offer available payloads on cubesat buses. There are also companies like Interorbital Sciences that are trying to push the small payload/tubesat architecture. And, of course, there are dozens of startups competing for the rover portion of the GLXP. Nonetheless, I would like to see more small satellite companies start cropping up. It seems like there would be a market for a company that could develop a common, reliable, small payload bus (about 250 - 500 kg) that could guarantee a mission life of XX many years and a power base of XX many kW that customers could mount scientific payloads on to test technologies, gather a bit of data, whatever.
I guess that I am surprised to see commercial launch companies getting so much publicity, while the market for commercial satellite buses remains so small. It would be cool to see a company do to satellites what SpaceX is trying to do the launch market. Surely some science communities out there would pay to gather 0 g data for some field or another...
Having something that can do all that with enough power to actually be useful, able to do it over and over again without running out of consumables, and do that on a sane budget-that's tricky.
Agreed. This is precisely what makes it an interesting and worthwhile engineering project to work on.
Oh, also, most of the things we've hit with lasers in space, today, are things whose relative position, velocity, flight path, and orientation are known. Recognizing an anonymous piece of cold debris, targeting it, and maintaining laser contact on it for any decent amount of time is a significantly different problem than targeting the next satellite in a known constellation and establishing a two-way communication protocol between hardware.
Something along the lines of: "hitting stuff with a laser, in space, on a shoestring (university) budget, on a small, COTs-derived, simple vehicle."
That's a very different proof than "hitting something with a laser in space."
You know, I always wanted to talk to that guy for the exact reason you posted. I thought it would be a great university project for some aerospace engineering students to team up with this guy and build a small satellite (~500 kg) that used some combination of high-load capacitors, trickle charge electronics, solar cells, and his laser-tracking technology to basically float around Earth for awhile in a particularly polluted altitude band and just try zapping what ~10 cm pieces of space junk they could find. It would be a great effort for the students, and would act as a wonderful proof-of-concept demonstrator to the big players in the space industry.
It's not terribly hard, but it is expensive. Depending on what kind of deorbit profile you develop, you either have to carry extra fuel for the entire mission (accounting for things like boil-off and ablation) to burn your way back to a properly low orbit, or you carry a whole new deployment mechanism to drag you back down (solar sail, kite, whatever), which adds an entire subsystem that you have to track, design, and engineer throughout the development process (mind you, no current launch vehicles have this capability, so they have to rely on unspent fuel), or you use some exotic means of deorbit like the Earth's magnetic field to pull you back down into the atmosphere. Of course, that last one also requires an entire subsystem development team as well. So in the end, deorbiting becomes a very expensive effort that requires engineers and technology to achieve. Is it impossible? Nah. Is it cheap? Nah. Most companies/countries/entities won't bother about deorbiting because they are less concerned about the environment and more concerned about how modern their space program looks. Thus, they don't bother with deorbiting their spacecraft because they would rather spend their engineers and money doing impressive things like landing on asteroids, or blowing up other satellites in orbit.... (yes, I'm looking at you China, you short-sighted wankers).
That Discovery article was a total waste of time. It really had little to do with "9 ways of dealing with space junk," and was more along the lines of "9 things that are kind of related that we want to talk about." As you mentioned, a couple of its nine methods of dealing with space junk could really just be grouped into the general theme of, stop putting more up there (deorbit your crap at end of mission). There were only three methods that actually discussed getting rid of existing junk: lasers in space, balls of aerogel to capture stuff, blowing up large chunks of junk. For what it's worth, the exploding method that you mentioned discussed only conducitng such methods at low altitudes which actually does work really well. However, it still leaves a lot of unaddressed crud in the higher LEO bands (like the one the ISS is in). The aerogel glob discussion was also an interesting one, but as the article addressed, aerogel can only really handle tiny stuff like paint chips. The lasers in space is probably the most effective solution, but costs so much in terms of energy generation that it is still a ways off in any large scale deployment.
So what else did the article discuss? Well it mentioned the Kessler effect, which has nothing to do with dealing with space junk, but is just a model used to describe space junk. It mentioned that NASA is now putting more efforts into tracking space junk. This is important, of course, but doesn't qualify as a method for removing it or handling it (excepting the very indirect means of simply avoiding it). Then it talks about shielding spacecraft from space junk. This, of course, is necessary and current practice, but no amount of shielding (presently) will protect you from detached thermal blankets or burnt out Delta stages.
All in all, this article just seemed like a disorganized, loosely-themed, terse ramble. I usually expect better from Discover but was severely disappointed in this particular release.
What happened?
You want my honest opinion? Our society grew to value money more than exploration. Look at how many posts, on this thread alone, by fellow nerds, talk about how the economically viable mission involves robots and not people. Hell, look at the topic of the story. Is the headline, "Wouldn't it be cool if NASA offered diving vacations on Europa by 2025?" Nah, the headline is, "What can make us money in space!"
/shrug
Back during the Apollo days, the country had other things on its mind than simply turning a profit margin (namely, an ego derived from making the USSR look weaker by comparison). These days, America's ego is full up. We don't have anything to prove anymore. Our society just wants more stuff, more shiny things, more toys, more bling, more money. So you want to know what happened to NASA? We grew into a nation that values material greed above silly "romantic" notions like exploration and adventure. Thus, our public entities get valued accordingly. An entity like NASA, whose creed is exploration and discovery doesn't have a helluva lot to do in a society so obsessed with greed.
Oh, on a more positive note, NASA does still do a lot of really cool shit. Take a look at Kepler, Cassini, JUNO, the JWST, Curiosity and the MSL, LISA, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer that is scheduled for installation on the ISS, and, hell, even though it's not NASA, the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. Oh, also, the NASA Centennial Challenge is pretty sweet.
Solar energy is cheap in space.
Not everywhere in space. Don't get me wrong, up until about the asteroid belt (what we are talking here) then yeah, solar energy is concentrated enough to make it a viable energy source. Once you start pushing those distances, though, you hit some diminishing returns problems. Also note that you have to account for any time spent in partial eclipse of other orbital bodies during transit (these can be minimized, but it's an important design consideration).
Well the first couple might be a pain in the ass, but if you've actually mined a few asteroid 'husks' empty in Earth orbit, then it would be much easier to attach some low, steady delta V thrusters to a husk and use that body as the famed gravity tractor. Of course, for the first few asteroids, it probably would be best just to attach a few low, steady delta V thrusters (as in electric propulsion) using a robotic probe or two....
In general, local politicians (not really the right term for a judge, I know) tend to be a bit easier to work with than the higher ups. I know a lot of the judges in local courts that I've visited/juried in/etc. tend to be very shrewd people who take their role as an arbiter of the law very seriously. Similarly, most city-council politicians I know tend to work very hard to keep in touch with their voter base and to enact seemingly sane policies. Politics and law at the local level tend to be pretty mild and generally accessible. It's when you start dealing with folks who work on the State level and above that you run into the real D-bags.
You know, I'm all for going digital and keeping electronic backups of things, but one big problem with selling digital-only of anything is that some form or specialized reader (in this case, a computer) is necessary to access the information contained within the document. Having the entire Oxford dictionary in paper form means that future generations and cultures can simply pick up the text and start reading/translating it based on context. Having the next edition in purely digital form means that some future generation or culture will have to develop some means of reading our digital records to have access to the lexicon that is the Oxford dictionary. Mind you, I am not advocating that decisions for the present be made regarding ease of access in some theoretical future, I am just noting that everything stored in a purely digital format today may not be accessible sometime down the road.
It sort of makes you wonder if some of the more obscure artifacts we have found from ancient cultures needed some form of a reader or another to properly understand. I don't know enough about archaeology to make any claims that is the case, but it is an interesting thought.