I personally would advocate removal of monopoly rights on IP and go towards a percentage idea. Something like, the orginal inventor gets 5% of turnover or some such; and if there are more than one inventors then they split the 5% between them according to some scheme.
The current system of monoplies is way too powerful for my taste.
Either way, the tragedy of the commons is eventually fulfilled
No. It's not inevitable. Shared resources do not inevitably die. Besides, on the internet, ISPs tend to act as policemen; any user trying to abuse the net also abuse the ISP and give them a bad name, if it gets bad enough; the ISP itself loses its feeds.
Yeah it could work. But you need to borrow a lot of money to get it up, the payback is atleast 6 years, and the cost of the electricity was about 8c a unit from the figures I've seen.
Space Tourism has a gradual path it can take; just more and more people going, price gradually coming down and down.
SPS needs an antenna 100m across in space from the get-go or you get no energy. That's 10s of billions right there, at the most optimistic.
About the only thing that has a hope of cutting costs of reaching orbit is space tourism.
The problem at the moment is that space is too expensive; even the Russians charge thousands of dollars per pound, and they've got the cheapest launchers going.
The reason for the high cost? We don't launch enough. The point is that if you look at the technologies out there, this one might save you 20%, that one 10% etc. But each doubling of the number of launches typically saves you 15%; and it's a gift that carries on giving. The minimum cost for launching into space appears to be very low; comparable to the cost of a Concorde flight, the amount of fuel used per person is somewhat comparable.
Therefore we need a purpose for space that requires launching a lot. Space Tourism is likely to meet that niche.
Reliability is of course the second question after price. However, take the Shuttle; it's extremely likely that both crashes are caused by design flaws in the Shuttle; and that the number of flaws that remain undiscovered will decrease over time. Therefore the reliability of the Shuttle should increase, and there's no known limit to how reliable launch vehicles can be.
It seems from surveys that many people would like to go into space, so the interest is certainly there. If the low cost vehicles are available, then it permits travel to low earth orbit. Mars, the moon, the asteroids would then be possible, and it seems that LEO is more than halfway to these places.
Here's what I'd like to see in the future. Also, these are all things that may actually happen. Well, someday.
A new spaceplane, designed for crew. See the Orbital Space Plane [orbital.com].
Wings add greatly to the weight, and there are lots of tradeoffs, like high landing speeds. Arguably adding wings to the Shuttle killed Columbia, certainly it was a wing failed, and the tiles are necessary because of the aerodynamic shape required, and the slower reentry that wings impose/allows, leading to overall higher heat load (compared to Apollo, Shuttle has to cope with a somewhat lower temperature but for much longer).
A new technology, reusable launch vehicle. See the Space Launch Initiative [slinews.com].
The SLI has been cancelled.
Continuing with the Prometheus Project [space.com]. We fucked up when we stopped persuing NERVA/Rover [astronautix.com].
Prometheus is a development of a nuclear power plant for space use; it is for ion drives. NERVA will not be supported under this program.
Mars. Need I say more? [nw.net]
I'd also like to see a space elevator persued, but I don't know that we have the tech yet. Then again, I haven't looked into it that much either.
It seems doable with hardly much more technology than we have right now. Scaling up the production of carbon nanotubes to production of tonnes rather than milligrams is required, and a demonstration of a few percent more strength, and a reasonably large wodge of cash- about $15 billion;-)
The optimum reentry profile is a function of L/D ratio. If you have low L/D then you end up with a peak g-force of about 7-9; and very high peak heating, but reduced overall heating (i.e. it's short and sharp). If you have high L/D, then the g-force is reduced as well as the peak heating; but this means you end up with more heat in the vehicle because it goes on for a lot longer- which means you end up with more thermal issues; hence the highly insulating space shuttle tiles.
I mean sure, you could nose dive into the atmosphere with a winged vehicle, but then you get the worst of all worlds; high peak temperature, high surface area, high g-force as well as mechanical issues.
NASA don't want you launching people, because it would cut into their launch business. Hey: Carmack launches for 1/10 the cost why don't you? If NASA launched for 1/10 the cost, then they need 10x less people, which means they spend 10x less in the voting districts which means they get 10x less appropriations... which means they'd spend 10x less with FMC.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that FMC are worried about losing business to NASA, whether or not NASA are directly leaning on them.
There are no nice oxidisers suitable for rocketry. Hydrogen Peroxide is about the best of a bad bunch. Even LOX tends to detonate in contact with hydrocarbons (soak into tarmac=contact explosive), freezes moisture from the air to block valves, and hang on the outside of the rocket- rockets have been lost due to the properties of LOX.
In contrast peroxide is storable for years, and is essentially non toxic, although you wouldn't want to drink it.
Still, when I handled it, traces of the peroxide burned my skin. Very nasty, very painful.
Yes. However you're still alive and probably unscarred. If you'd have done the same thing with the Space Shuttle's OMS oxidiser, you would not still be with us I fear.
Actually the Australians say that keeping the scramjet lit is fairly trivial- by the time the air has been compressed by the inlet, the temperature is so high it lights the hydrogen with no problem.
The true problem is stopping the whole lot flipping lot melting; and that's hard.
NASA is a government organisation, their equipment is too expensive to open the high frontier fully.
NASA has done a ton of research, and the results of that will allow companies to open it up further.
Compare NASA's costs to the Russian costs (Russian equipment is atleast 20x cheaper, but their wages are no less than 1/10 of the US wages), so it looks like the Space Shuttle is atleast twice as expensive as it strictly ought to be, and you start to see what can be achieved in making Space more cost effective.
Truthfully, the frontier has moved on; NASA needs to explore the new frontiers, and leave launching to other organisations; and that's not because of Challenger nor Columbia, it's just the way it is.
I think George W. Bush's move to go for nuclear interplanetary propulsion is a smart one; NASA need to look at tethers, Mars, lunar and asteroid exploration.
It's theoretically possible that they might have been able to send supplies up to the Shuttle to last till they could send the next Shuttle up.
However, the Progress is designed to go to the orbital plane of the ISS, not the Shuttle, and it is unclear whether enough supplies could have provided to last till the next Shuttle could have been sent up.
The Progress has no heat shield, and is not manrated.
But there didn't seem to be any significant problem, no measures could be taken.
With public support of NASA and space exploration in general on the deline for decades now I hope this isn't the end of the line for NASA as a useful organization.
NASA is not really that beneficial to human spaceflight- if nothing else, the Space Shuttle is ridiculously expensive, and tragically, not terribly reliable.
I guess the Europeans and the Japanese are now our hope for space expoloration, but I doubt they have the means without the US supporting their programs.
Yeah? Well, the Ruskies are european, and:
a) have been in space longer than America
b) launch people cheaper than NASA (by a factor of 10)
c) seem to have a more reliable launch system than the Shuttle (no failures in 25 years).
Maybe the USAF will get back it's leading role in space as a platform for new weapons.
There would be worst things. USAF seem to be more pragmatic than NASA if nothing else.
The Shuttle is designed to reenter at a particular angle (plus or minus some), and can survive no other trajectory or angle.
If they had spent longer at high altitude, then although the peak heating is lower, if you do the maths, the overall heat soaking into the vehicle would be higher, as it would take longer to slow down, so more heat would have time to enter. So the vehicle would melt.
If the vehicle were to reenter at a steeper angle then the peak heating rate is higher, but the overall heating would be less; but then the aerodynamic forces would be higher, and the wings would snap off.
About the only thing the orbiter could have seriously done to try to save itself would have been to jetison the science module whilst on orbit, but I doubt that they had the tools for that onboard, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyway- the orbiter itself weighs a lot more than the cargo, and they didn't know that they were in trouble prior to reentry anyway.
I'm not too sure about the laughing part; my rail gun could have caught fire and burned me in a complete failure and it still would be a lot better than any effort I've seen from anyone else on the board, since I actually BOTHERED to try it out. You see, it is very easy to sit on your ass while I put a couple thousand dollars and 120 hours on a machine shop and than say my project sucks, but when it comes down to it I'm still the one who is doing the research, and as the popular saying goes, "everyone is a critic".
Yup, doesn't make them wrong either though. Good luck with improving the rail gun Sam, or whatever you do next.
In a related note, I would venture a guess that this is the end of the Bush administration's attempt to revive nuclear tech in space with project prometheus.
It may be. However if it is, that would be for political rather than technical issues.
Technically, the nuclear material is straightforward to protect against this particular failure, and other similar failures (such as vehicle disintegration during ascent, moments before it makes a stable orbit.)
Basically, launching the nuclear material 'cold', i.e. insignificantly radioactive; and/or encased in any case in its own reentry shield; that would reduce the chances of material dispersal to arbitrarily low levels.
The reentry shield can consist of multiple layers of thick copper plate. That strategy is known to work from ICBM reentry vehicles; the chances of an accident being sufficiently large to damage the copper plate enough to impede reentry, IF the carrying vehicle failed is really small.
Politics is entirely a different thing. Every clueless simpleton politician in America is going to point at the Shuttle and say: "you want to launch nuclear material in that" ; when in fact, any nuclear material would have landed safely after a Challenger or a Columbia.
Furthermore, I claim unless you are trading off things, you are not engineering.
For example, you could use a commercial SQL package, or MySQL for the database; and you should weigh up and have a conscious reason for choosing one or the other, for that particular application.
Clearly a commercial package will be more expensive, but may well be faster, but if you don't need the speed, then...
Trading off is not a sufficient condition for engineering going on, you can be trading off without doing engineering, but it is a good sign.
Actually, secretly, he rather overdesigned it; and it works, but doesn't work so well.
I think out of the hundred meter per second or whatever that the projectile leaves the breech, about 90+% of the speed is due to the gas injector he uses to avoid spot welding.
The problem is that the pulse of current happens way too early in the gun, and he skids off a lot of his power in arcing.
He used to run a forum on his website (it seems to be still there, although it doesn't work right now). There was a lot of people, more or less as knowledgeable as him on his forum really interested in trying to help him design it; but he ran roughshod over the lot of them. And they told him about the pulse length issue. So basically they all got majorly pissed off and went off elsewhere in a huff, and they laughed when it didn't go supersonic; well it was Sam Barros's rail gun, but they were trying to help, and he ignored them, and he suffered. Sam had spent too much time going for 'oxygen free copper' to try to improve the current flow, but it didn't help, because but didn't get the fundamentals right.
But that wasn't the reason they left; it was just the proverbial straw; the problem is that Sam has a few ego problems, atleast online, he may well be more personable in the flesh; but he enjoyed telling people how stupid they were online. Mostly they were too, but few people came back to the site after that kind of treatment; and sometimes Sam was wrong, so he treated them unjustly for no reason.
So, basically, the powerlabs forum has basically died, all the contributors went elsewhere.
His basic technical skills are exceptional, although nothing he has done is actually original, so it remains to be seen whether he can achieve his potential, and as anyone can see from the site- he is good.
Yes, the funding is now secure. They'd raised part of the money, but couldn't raise enough to cover the whole prize.
Instead the organisers cut a deal, essentially insuring with the money they had already, against somebody winning before 2005. If the prize isn't won then the insurers pocket the money they already have and walk. Otherwise the insurers have to pay out the full 10 mil.
Slashdot Mirror
The current system of monoplies is way too powerful for my taste.
No. It's not inevitable. Shared resources do not inevitably die. Besides, on the internet, ISPs tend to act as policemen; any user trying to abuse the net also abuse the ISP and give them a bad name, if it gets bad enough; the ISP itself loses its feeds.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand base Pi, and those that think this joke makes sense.
Actually, you're the one that... oh never mind.
95 ;-)
You don't get a species any more endangered than the woolly mammoth!
Space Tourism has a gradual path it can take; just more and more people going, price gradually coming down and down.
SPS needs an antenna 100m across in space from the get-go or you get no energy. That's 10s of billions right there, at the most optimistic.
The problem at the moment is that space is too expensive; even the Russians charge thousands of dollars per pound, and they've got the cheapest launchers going.
The reason for the high cost? We don't launch enough. The point is that if you look at the technologies out there, this one might save you 20%, that one 10% etc. But each doubling of the number of launches typically saves you 15%; and it's a gift that carries on giving. The minimum cost for launching into space appears to be very low; comparable to the cost of a Concorde flight, the amount of fuel used per person is somewhat comparable.
Therefore we need a purpose for space that requires launching a lot. Space Tourism is likely to meet that niche.
Reliability is of course the second question after price. However, take the Shuttle; it's extremely likely that both crashes are caused by design flaws in the Shuttle; and that the number of flaws that remain undiscovered will decrease over time. Therefore the reliability of the Shuttle should increase, and there's no known limit to how reliable launch vehicles can be.
It seems from surveys that many people would like to go into space, so the interest is certainly there. If the low cost vehicles are available, then it permits travel to low earth orbit. Mars, the moon, the asteroids would then be possible, and it seems that LEO is more than halfway to these places.
- A new spaceplane, designed for crew. See the Orbital Space Plane [orbital.com].
Wings add greatly to the weight, and there are lots of tradeoffs, like high landing speeds. Arguably adding wings to the Shuttle killed Columbia, certainly it was a wing failed, and the tiles are necessary because of the aerodynamic shape required, and the slower reentry that wings impose/allows, leading to overall higher heat load (compared to Apollo, Shuttle has to cope with a somewhat lower temperature but for much longer).A new technology, reusable launch vehicle. See the Space Launch Initiative [slinews.com].
The SLI has been cancelled.
Continuing with the Prometheus Project [space.com]. We fucked up when we stopped persuing NERVA/Rover [astronautix.com].
Prometheus is a development of a nuclear power plant for space use; it is for ion drives. NERVA will not be supported under this program.
Mars. Need I say more? [nw.net] I'd also like to see a space elevator persued, but I don't know that we have the tech yet. Then again, I haven't looked into it that much either.
It seems doable with hardly much more technology than we have right now. Scaling up the production of carbon nanotubes to production of tonnes rather than milligrams is required, and a demonstration of a few percent more strength, and a reasonably large wodge of cash- about $15 billion ;-)
I mean sure, you could nose dive into the atmosphere with a winged vehicle, but then you get the worst of all worlds; high peak temperature, high surface area, high g-force as well as mechanical issues.
NASA don't want you launching people, because it would cut into their launch business. Hey: Carmack launches for 1/10 the cost why don't you? If NASA launched for 1/10 the cost, then they need 10x less people, which means they spend 10x less in the voting districts which means they get 10x less appropriations... which means they'd spend 10x less with FMC.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that FMC are worried about losing business to NASA, whether or not NASA are directly leaning on them.
There are no nice oxidisers suitable for rocketry. Hydrogen Peroxide is about the best of a bad bunch. Even LOX tends to detonate in contact with hydrocarbons (soak into tarmac=contact explosive), freezes moisture from the air to block valves, and hang on the outside of the rocket- rockets have been lost due to the properties of LOX.
In contrast peroxide is storable for years, and is essentially non toxic, although you wouldn't want to drink it.
Still, when I handled it, traces of the peroxide burned my skin. Very nasty, very painful.
Yes. However you're still alive and probably unscarred. If you'd have done the same thing with the Space Shuttle's OMS oxidiser, you would not still be with us I fear.
The true problem is stopping the whole lot flipping lot melting; and that's hard.
NASA has done a ton of research, and the results of that will allow companies to open it up further.
Compare NASA's costs to the Russian costs (Russian equipment is atleast 20x cheaper, but their wages are no less than 1/10 of the US wages), so it looks like the Space Shuttle is atleast twice as expensive as it strictly ought to be, and you start to see what can be achieved in making Space more cost effective.
Truthfully, the frontier has moved on; NASA needs to explore the new frontiers, and leave launching to other organisations; and that's not because of Challenger nor Columbia, it's just the way it is.
I think George W. Bush's move to go for nuclear interplanetary propulsion is a smart one; NASA need to look at tethers, Mars, lunar and asteroid exploration.
However, the Progress is designed to go to the orbital plane of the ISS, not the Shuttle, and it is unclear whether enough supplies could have provided to last till the next Shuttle could have been sent up.
The Progress has no heat shield, and is not manrated.
But there didn't seem to be any significant problem, no measures could be taken.
NASA is not really that beneficial to human spaceflight- if nothing else, the Space Shuttle is ridiculously expensive, and tragically, not terribly reliable.
I guess the Europeans and the Japanese are now our hope for space expoloration, but I doubt they have the means without the US supporting their programs.
Yeah? Well, the Ruskies are european, and:
a) have been in space longer than America
b) launch people cheaper than NASA (by a factor of 10)
c) seem to have a more reliable launch system than the Shuttle (no failures in 25 years).
Maybe the USAF will get back it's leading role in space as a platform for new weapons.
There would be worst things. USAF seem to be more pragmatic than NASA if nothing else.
If they had spent longer at high altitude, then although the peak heating is lower, if you do the maths, the overall heat soaking into the vehicle would be higher, as it would take longer to slow down, so more heat would have time to enter. So the vehicle would melt.
If the vehicle were to reenter at a steeper angle then the peak heating rate is higher, but the overall heating would be less; but then the aerodynamic forces would be higher, and the wings would snap off.
About the only thing the orbiter could have seriously done to try to save itself would have been to jetison the science module whilst on orbit, but I doubt that they had the tools for that onboard, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyway- the orbiter itself weighs a lot more than the cargo, and they didn't know that they were in trouble prior to reentry anyway.
Yup, doesn't make them wrong either though. Good luck with improving the rail gun Sam, or whatever you do next.
It may be. However if it is, that would be for political rather than technical issues.
Technically, the nuclear material is straightforward to protect against this particular failure, and other similar failures (such as vehicle disintegration during ascent, moments before it makes a stable orbit.)
Basically, launching the nuclear material 'cold', i.e. insignificantly radioactive; and/or encased in any case in its own reentry shield; that would reduce the chances of material dispersal to arbitrarily low levels.
The reentry shield can consist of multiple layers of thick copper plate. That strategy is known to work from ICBM reentry vehicles; the chances of an accident being sufficiently large to damage the copper plate enough to impede reentry, IF the carrying vehicle failed is really small.
Politics is entirely a different thing. Every clueless simpleton politician in America is going to point at the Shuttle and say: "you want to launch nuclear material in that" ; when in fact, any nuclear material would have landed safely after a Challenger or a Columbia.
For example, you could use a commercial SQL package, or MySQL for the database; and you should weigh up and have a conscious reason for choosing one or the other, for that particular application.
Clearly a commercial package will be more expensive, but may well be faster, but if you don't need the speed, then...
Trading off is not a sufficient condition for engineering going on, you can be trading off without doing engineering, but it is a good sign.
I think out of the hundred meter per second or whatever that the projectile leaves the breech, about 90+% of the speed is due to the gas injector he uses to avoid spot welding.
The problem is that the pulse of current happens way too early in the gun, and he skids off a lot of his power in arcing.
He used to run a forum on his website (it seems to be still there, although it doesn't work right now). There was a lot of people, more or less as knowledgeable as him on his forum really interested in trying to help him design it; but he ran roughshod over the lot of them. And they told him about the pulse length issue. So basically they all got majorly pissed off and went off elsewhere in a huff, and they laughed when it didn't go supersonic; well it was Sam Barros's rail gun, but they were trying to help, and he ignored them, and he suffered. Sam had spent too much time going for 'oxygen free copper' to try to improve the current flow, but it didn't help, because but didn't get the fundamentals right.
But that wasn't the reason they left; it was just the proverbial straw; the problem is that Sam has a few ego problems, atleast online, he may well be more personable in the flesh; but he enjoyed telling people how stupid they were online. Mostly they were too, but few people came back to the site after that kind of treatment; and sometimes Sam was wrong, so he treated them unjustly for no reason.
So, basically, the powerlabs forum has basically died, all the contributors went elsewhere.
His basic technical skills are exceptional, although nothing he has done is actually original, so it remains to be seen whether he can achieve his potential, and as anyone can see from the site- he is good.
The things you typically trade off are speed, manpower, memory, diskspace, cost, delivery, algorithms, complexity etc.
If you're not trading things off, then you are a technician, not an engineer.
Plasma armatures are apparently known to work in the literature.
Not even this one. Because you had to go and post ;-)
Instead the organisers cut a deal, essentially insuring with the money they had already, against somebody winning before 2005. If the prize isn't won then the insurers pocket the money they already have and walk. Otherwise the insurers have to pay out the full 10 mil.