Since you mention it, IAA (former) rocket scientist. My dad is a (retired) rocket scientist, and my brother-in-law still works for NASA.
But that's almost meaningless really, I've known lots of boneheaded rocket scientists as well as many gifted amateurs. Look at Carmack, who is something of both.
Anyway, we're both guessing on the relative costs. You think the equipment to build a useful, self-supporting moon base could be lifted for less expense than building and maintaining an orbital base. I strongly disagree. Some of the costs are completely indeterminate; your low-grav colonists would have completely different health issues than my spin-grav space-dwellers, for example. Others are estimable; it would cost far more to lift the initial habitat to the moon than to an earth/lunar trojan point, but eventually the lunarians could produce their own building bricks which the trojanites could never do.
We can't actually know until we try it. So let's do both, and I will bet you here and now $1000 my way is more efficient than yours for establishing a functional presence in space.
You hear that, NASA? Get on the damn stick, we got a bet here.
The winged spaceplane is a project that justifies itself in terms of itself. The wing features allow the Shuttle to be reusable. That's good, because the Shuttle is expensive. And the Shuttle is expensive because it has wings....
I wasn't trying to get into a reusable.vs. disposable argument... I will concede your point on the circular logic of the current shuttle program. Politics was the cause of most of the shuttle's many deficiencies, and the mission goals ended up being a mixture of unachievable and self-fullfilling.
But your comments about the relative saftey of Soyuz versus the Shuttle are complete bullshit. The Soyuz has killed all its passengers more times than the shuttle has - look it up. And while the Soyuz has a reasonable (in Soviet terms) record over its entire history, it has had many more accidents, including fatal and near-fatal accidents, and extreme failures to reach targeted landing sites, than any manned American spacecraft.
And where do you get that stuff about "wings being a drag on manuvering done in space"? DRAG is not the word you want. Try again.
Crap, I don't even like the Shuttle, I wanted to build the gigantic space plane that flew most of the way to LEO instead. How'd I end up defending the damn thing?
So, why bother with the Lunar Trojan points for a base? Nothing there at all. Better to build a station at geosynchronous orbit, if we aren't going to the moon.
Because they are dead stable - as evidenced by the fact that there is something there, crap's been collecting at the earth/lunar LaGrange points as well as the Earth/solar L4 and L5 for aeons. Not as much as Jupiter's L4 and L5s, obviously (Mars and Neptune have captured trojan asteroids too) but still it's a demonstrably stable place to be, that's incredibly easy to get in and out of compared to Luna.
Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, Soyuz, etc. didn't have wings, and managed to get down nicely.
Nicely? I don't think I've ever heard a Soyuz landing described that way. But in any case those are non-reusable craft, if you're going to compare them to the shuttle we shouldn't even be discussing wings at all. The argument you want is reuseable versus one-use craft. Disposable spacecraft can't perform the Shuttle's mission, because reusability is a mission goal.
The Shuttle's wings are an enormous waste, unless we are planning to bring large heavy things down from orbit. And they're not optimal even then.
Since we've used it to bring Westar and Palapa-B down already, it definitely works optimally enough. And the Shuttle's a pretty incredibly crappy design, incidentally; I preferred the designs with air-breathing engines that the USAF rejected... one of them was designed to carry a dozen people in shirtsleeve comfort.
Hmm, ~2.4Km/s deltaV to deliver lunar raw materials to Earth. ~5.5Km/s deltaV to deliver asteroidal material to Earth. So delivering asteroidal materials takes longer, and costs more deltaV. Great trade-off, don't you think?
Care to explain the derivation of those numbers? Seems awfully simplistic to me. What kind of trajectories are you limiting yourself to? What use are you making of other local masses for acceleration and deceleration?
Nonetheless, I will cheerfully concede that it takes much longer, and time ~= money. But the resources should be better, lots of nearly everything in the asteroid belt the astronomer boys tell me. And don't forget the trojan asteroids if you don't want to enter the belt proper.
Seriously. We need the lunar base, as a construction point for more ships, if nothing else. Build the structures on the moon, add rocket engines and control systems made on Earth, add lunar oxygen and terrestrial hydrogen for lifesupport, water, and fuel (don't want to take lunar water for this - Moon is a Harsh Mistress, remember? Using lunar water for fuel/reaction mass would be disastrous in the long term).
Hands down, RAH's best book. But, anyway, I still disagree. It could be a close call (because it would be easier to construct spaceships in low gravity than floating in space) but I think the light flimsy ships that you could quickly spew out of a trojan factory would get more done for far less investment than building an industrial base on the moon capable of using the local resources.
After we have the moon base, we move along to Mars and the outer system. Venus can wait, unless we choose to terraform the place. Mercury would be nice, but requires too much deltaV to reach easily.
I think you like gravity too much... why bother with planets at all? Leave Mars and Venus to the BEMs and live in rotating space habitats constructed from moonlets, asteroids and eventually comets.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You, my man, are a bona-fide American patriot! Damn, I didn't think there were any of us left since the religious fanatics and Randites redefined the word "conservative".
Why would a sphere with a parachute need more fuel than a shuttle with wings?
Personally, I prefer having some attitudinal control during re-entry.
Your "parachute" might not resemble a normal parachute much... unless you plan to do like the Soyuz, and just bail out the pilot and flight computer while the majority of the spacecraft smashes into the earth like a hypersonic missile. A parachute that could decelerate something of the mass of a wingless shuttle doing a ballistic re-entry might be pretty gigantic, and would have to have some amazing strength and heat-resistance.
But you may be right - I haven't figured out the weight penalty for a sphere with a parachute. Your sphere would need to be much, much stronger than a glider (unless you use the Soyuz hard"landing" approach) so it might be heavier, thus requiring more fuel to boost initially.
Hmm... needs more maths. I suspect gliding re-entry is still going to win, though.
You complain about hauling wings in and out of orbit and yet you want to descend the moon's gravity well to make a base? That's insane! Why waste fuel hauling your stuff up and down when there are perfectly good trojan points... the moon's resources are lame and not worth the fuel costs.
The shuttle's wings allow a glide re-entry, which saves fuel. The tanks and various systems required for the additional fuel would mass more than the wings. RTFM.
The next stop after L5 is the asteroid belt. Resources galore, easily shoved into new trajectories for slow delivery nearly anywhere in the system.
Somebody show George Bush this post. Oh, wait, I forgot, the Bush Administration are the ones destroying the space program... first Hubble, now this moon base nonsense.
I wouldn't trade better broadband......For communism, sorry.
OK, how about this: Two red herrings, a stalking horse, a straw man, and a 100 mbps connection on Manhattan Island for a 1911 Ty Cobb and some egalitarianism.
Word's only killer feature is 100% Word compatibility.
Um, dude, you obviously haven't been using Word very long. I probably have dozens of ancient Word documents that won't load clean in recent versions of Word.
My WAG is Word has about 90% Word compatibility. I could be wrong, it could actually be worse.
Howard Carter smashed his way through a few priceless historical artifacts, too. Battering rams were easier to obtain and safer to use than black powder charges (dynamite not having been invented yet, black powder was the explosive most commonly used by European treasure hunters).
I'm not trying to defend Belzoni, just making a minor correction on your post. Belzoni was responsible for the loss of many irreplaceable artifacts, and like most treasure hunters of his time he was no different from a grave robber.
If you want all the life, all the juice, all the individuality sucked out of your prose, there's no better way to do it than with a grammar checker.
For example, this post doesn't grammar check. Why? Because it sounds like a human being might have written it, and not some soulless insect from the marketing department.
First thing you do any time ANY cop tells you to do something you don't agree with is get their badge number and commanding officers name. It's amazing how much of an affect just asking for this information has on them.
Yes, if there are no rich white people around it's amazing how bloody they will beat you just for asking. And if you start winning the tussle, it's amazing how fast they will put 9mm holes in your chest.
Nobody ever became a cop because they wanted a life of peaceful noninterference. Plenty of cops would be muggers or serial killers if they hadn't found a socially acceptable way to satisfy their inner need to beat and shoot people.
Of course, "the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots... and of tyrants" so you go right ahead and antagonize the cops, I fully support your decision and applaud your ethical stance.
You mean similar to the whole "Walkman" thing? Did you ever notice that only Sony is allowed to call their walkman's a walkman?
Anybody can call their personal stereo a walkman, because Sony didn't defend the name vigorously enough - thus joining xerox, kleenex, and linoleum in the common lexicon.
Oh, and solving the "black tape electrical goo" problem mentioned in the parent post isn't that hard, it dissolves pretty well in lighter fluid.
As will many plastics, paints, and coatings. Use WD-40 instead, it's not quite so destructive on the appliances.
Um, spray WD-40 on a rag and wipe with the rag, don't spray it directly on your toys (I didn't think I'd have to mention that, but then I remembered the original question).
"...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying." --Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, page 134)
...it is at least slightly encouraging to hear that he owns a TiVo.
That's encouraging?
It would be praiseworthy for a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and without guile. Nevertheless experience shows that princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word... a wise lord cannot keep faith when such may be turned against him... A prince will always find reasons to excuse his non-observance. But it is necessary to know how to disguise this characteristic, and men are so simple, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone willing to be deceived. --Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince XVIII: OF THE WAY IN WHICH PRINCES SHOULD KEEP FAITH
...as a result if you accidently let two of them stick together, they can sometimes attract with such force that they shatter and send thousands of poisonous shards out at high speed.
Every single time we've done this (don't ask) the "thousands of poisonous shards" stuck together in a lumpy, magnetically attractive ball that vaguely resembles a spherical razor blade. Cuts the living crap out of you if you try to juggle it, but no pieces escape the collision, since obviously the rebound force is not going to exceed the attractive force of the other pieces.
I spent five years working with malacologists on the largest molluscan collection in the western hemisphere. I have seen many dead octopi floating in alcohol, and I have written many lines of code that dealt with octopuses.
You'd be suprised how often the snail doctors get asked this question. And they always answer it the same way: "We use octopuses, and fishermen use octopi, but either is correct".
Nobody ever even tries to bring up any nonsense about octopeet, and rarely is octopodes brought up, because that is Greek for all eight-legged creatures (cf. arachnids) and not just octopuses.
See this article about octopus hurling in the on-line Cephalopod Database.
Where I come from, "fighting back" means killing or beating the living s**t out of whoever's trying to harm you. But I guess we're kind of backwards around here, we haven't really got the hang of this new millenium yet.
I don't think we'll know for sure until at least eight years after the election.
OT: Sorry to hear that autopr0n is down (and stuff). It's a very interesting piece of code, and I've often recommended to web developers that they study it. Some of them probably don't study it in the way I meant, but I don't see myself as the guardian of other peoples' morals, so I don't care.
Maybe because it pretends that there is something 'normal' about homosexuality when in fact there is nothing 'normal' or natural about it.
Uh, newsflash Reverend Phelps, there is nothing 'normal' or 'natural' about posting your nazi drivel on Slashdot. In fact there's nothing 'normal' or 'natural' about interfacing with other creatures through machine interfaces, unless you're a robot.
It should be banned.
Of course, banning unpreventable activities is always such a great idea. You're going to prevent homosexuality exactly how? If your method relies on being able to find all of the fairies, you already lost this round.
Not because it represents some unacceptable ideas, but because it claims falsehood is truth.
I assume you are also in favor of banning the Christian holy book, then, since Leviticus claims bats are birds, and that rabbits chew cud (false, but I encourage you to check this out). Oh, and you're going to ban most everything any politician every said, too, right? Sure, that'll work.
And yes, the evidence that homosexuality is not natural or normal is rock-solid. Don't believe me? Do the research instead of believing all the bullshit the homosexual advocates preach.
Although I have the aquaintance of dozens of homosexuals, including several openly gay couples who attend my church, I have never, ever, ever met a "homosexual advocate". Unless you are counting trolls like yourself, whose ignorance and bigotry make me want to join whatever group you oppose... too bad I'm so hopelessly hetero, or you'd convert me.
I run a few mailservers:). Every day the spammers and viruswriters come up with a new way to defeat whatever anti-spam and anti-virus measures I implement. It's a case of running as fast as we can to stay in the same place!
So maybe the spammers will decide who gets to be president this time, instead of the Supreme Court.
"WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things."
My first thought on reading this was "Huh? I use a pretty simple set of verbs to do these things; on linux, for example, I use ls, mv, cp." On other OSes I use less cryptic verbs that take longer to type. Windows, of course, has been moving away from the efficiency of verbs and often requires flailing about with a mouse (which takes even longer than typing MVS verbs, fer cryin' out loud).
But on re-reading this phrase, I see a key word I had overlooked... it's "richly". Gates is telling the absolute truth; let me paraphrase: "Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you... find, move around and replicate those things in a way that makes me rich!
Slashdot Mirror
Since you mention it, IAA (former) rocket scientist. My dad is a (retired) rocket scientist, and my brother-in-law still works for NASA.
But that's almost meaningless really, I've known lots of boneheaded rocket scientists as well as many gifted amateurs. Look at Carmack, who is something of both.
Anyway, we're both guessing on the relative costs. You think the equipment to build a useful, self-supporting moon base could be lifted for less expense than building and maintaining an orbital base. I strongly disagree. Some of the costs are completely indeterminate; your low-grav colonists would have completely different health issues than my spin-grav space-dwellers, for example. Others are estimable; it would cost far more to lift the initial habitat to the moon than to an earth/lunar trojan point, but eventually the lunarians could produce their own building bricks which the trojanites could never do.
We can't actually know until we try it. So let's do both, and I will bet you here and now $1000 my way is more efficient than yours for establishing a functional presence in space.
You hear that, NASA? Get on the damn stick, we got a bet here.
But your comments about the relative saftey of Soyuz versus the Shuttle are complete bullshit. The Soyuz has killed all its passengers more times than the shuttle has - look it up. And while the Soyuz has a reasonable (in Soviet terms) record over its entire history, it has had many more accidents, including fatal and near-fatal accidents, and extreme failures to reach targeted landing sites, than any manned American spacecraft.
And where do you get that stuff about "wings being a drag on manuvering done in space"? DRAG is not the word you want. Try again.
Crap, I don't even like the Shuttle, I wanted to build the gigantic space plane that flew most of the way to LEO instead. How'd I end up defending the damn thing?
Nicely? I don't think I've ever heard a Soyuz landing described that way. But in any case those are non-reusable craft, if you're going to compare them to the shuttle we shouldn't even be discussing wings at all. The argument you want is reuseable versus one-use craft. Disposable spacecraft can't perform the Shuttle's mission, because reusability is a mission goal. Since we've used it to bring Westar and Palapa-B down already, it definitely works optimally enough. And the Shuttle's a pretty incredibly crappy design, incidentally; I preferred the designs with air-breathing engines that the USAF rejected... one of them was designed to carry a dozen people in shirtsleeve comfort.
Care to explain the derivation of those numbers? Seems awfully simplistic to me. What kind of trajectories are you limiting yourself to? What use are you making of other local masses for acceleration and deceleration?
Nonetheless, I will cheerfully concede that it takes much longer, and time ~= money. But the resources should be better, lots of nearly everything in the asteroid belt the astronomer boys tell me. And don't forget the trojan asteroids if you don't want to enter the belt proper.
Hands down, RAH's best book. But, anyway, I still disagree. It could be a close call (because it would be easier to construct spaceships in low gravity than floating in space) but I think the light flimsy ships that you could quickly spew out of a trojan factory would get more done for far less investment than building an industrial base on the moon capable of using the local resources.
I think you like gravity too much... why bother with planets at all? Leave Mars and Venus to the BEMs and live in rotating space habitats constructed from moonlets, asteroids and eventually comets.
You, my man, are a bona-fide American patriot! Damn, I didn't think there were any of us left since the religious fanatics and Randites redefined the word "conservative".
Your "parachute" might not resemble a normal parachute much... unless you plan to do like the Soyuz, and just bail out the pilot and flight computer while the majority of the spacecraft smashes into the earth like a hypersonic missile. A parachute that could decelerate something of the mass of a wingless shuttle doing a ballistic re-entry might be pretty gigantic, and would have to have some amazing strength and heat-resistance.
But you may be right - I haven't figured out the weight penalty for a sphere with a parachute. Your sphere would need to be much, much stronger than a glider (unless you use the Soyuz hard"landing" approach) so it might be heavier, thus requiring more fuel to boost initially.
Hmm... needs more maths. I suspect gliding re-entry is still going to win, though.
The shuttle's wings allow a glide re-entry, which saves fuel. The tanks and various systems required for the additional fuel would mass more than the wings. RTFM.
The next stop after L5 is the asteroid belt. Resources galore, easily shoved into new trajectories for slow delivery nearly anywhere in the system.
Somebody show George Bush this post. Oh, wait, I forgot, the Bush Administration are the ones destroying the space program... first Hubble, now this moon base nonsense.
Deal?
My WAG is Word has about 90% Word compatibility. I could be wrong, it could actually be worse.
Howard Carter smashed his way through a few priceless historical artifacts, too. Battering rams were easier to obtain and safer to use than black powder charges (dynamite not having been invented yet, black powder was the explosive most commonly used by European treasure hunters).
I'm not trying to defend Belzoni, just making a minor correction on your post. Belzoni was responsible for the loss of many irreplaceable artifacts, and like most treasure hunters of his time he was no different from a grave robber.
If you want all the life, all the juice, all the individuality sucked out of your prose, there's no better way to do it than with a grammar checker.
For example, this post doesn't grammar check. Why? Because it sounds like a human being might have written it, and not some soulless insect from the marketing department.
Nobody ever became a cop because they wanted a life of peaceful noninterference. Plenty of cops would be muggers or serial killers if they hadn't found a socially acceptable way to satisfy their inner need to beat and shoot people.
Of course, "the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots... and of tyrants" so you go right ahead and antagonize the cops, I fully support your decision and applaud your ethical stance.
Um, spray WD-40 on a rag and wipe with the rag, don't spray it directly on your toys (I didn't think I'd have to mention that, but then I remembered the original question).
I spent five years working with malacologists on the largest molluscan collection in the western hemisphere. I have seen many dead octopi floating in alcohol, and I have written many lines of code that dealt with octopuses.
You'd be suprised how often the snail doctors get asked this question. And they always answer it the same way: "We use octopuses, and fishermen use octopi, but either is correct".
Nobody ever even tries to bring up any nonsense about octopeet, and rarely is octopodes brought up, because that is Greek for all eight-legged creatures (cf. arachnids) and not just octopuses.
See this article about octopus hurling in the on-line Cephalopod Database.
Where I come from, "fighting back" means killing or beating the living s**t out of whoever's trying to harm you. But I guess we're kind of backwards around here, we haven't really got the hang of this new millenium yet.
I don't think we'll know for sure until at least eight years after the election.
OT: Sorry to hear that autopr0n is down (and stuff). It's a very interesting piece of code, and I've often recommended to web developers that they study it. Some of them probably don't study it in the way I meant, but I don't see myself as the guardian of other peoples' morals, so I don't care.
Last time I checked I am an animal.
I mean, I'm not a vegetable or a mineral or a blue-green algae, so by process of elimination I must be an animal, right?
I run a few mailservers :). Every day the spammers and viruswriters come up with a new way to defeat whatever anti-spam and anti-virus measures I implement. It's a case of running as fast as we can to stay in the same place!
So maybe the spammers will decide who gets to be president this time, instead of the Supreme Court.
But on re-reading this phrase, I see a key word I had overlooked... it's "richly". Gates is telling the absolute truth; let me paraphrase: "Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you