The Spring 2002 issue of Artemis Magazine had an excellent article on this by Henry P. Cate, Jr., titled the "Junk Man's Ladder". The idea is to put up a tether (many kilometers long "rope") in a convenient orbit with electrodynamic lift capabilities and some thrust, move it around to "catch" space debris, and move the junk up to the center of mass of the tether, to give it greater stability. Tethers like this are form of "space elevator", able to lift move things from low to high orbit with high efficiency. More on orbital tethers can be found at Tethers Unlimited Inc., run by Robert L. Forward and Robert P. Hoyt (who I was fortunate to have dinner with a couple of months ago).
Since I'm involved in the project I guess I'll comment...
We would happily use TeX for everything, except for two fundamental problems, and a few more superficial ones. First the fundamental problems:
The standard TeX fonts are Computer Modern (Knuth's invention) - these are lighter and "looser" than the standard text typefaces (Adobe Times Roman in particular), and text becomes uglier and slightly harder to read when the two types of fonts are used together in the same document.
The standard Tex fonts are also missing a lot of special symbols that scientific publishers have, over the years, had to create for themselves. It's impossible to capture every special character that a mathematician or physicist may decide to invent for some particular purpose, but we've managed to include in the description of the font, and in the latest Unicode version (3.2) essentially all the special characters we could find that have received repeated use in scientific communications. If more appear later we'll get them added to the font. The idea is to be comprehensive.
The more superficial problems are, first that TeX distributions suffer from wild inconsistencies in what particular fonts are available - early experiences with making font-less PDF files (or even DVI files) that relied on users having a TeX font distribution available to them for display were essentially total failures. And second, TeX is unfortunately not all that widely used even by scientists and engineers... Another side problem is the way TeX is limited to a small number of 256-character font files (with further restrictions on tfm files) - what we're planning is to have all 8000 or so glyphs available in 4 OpenType fonts (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) - of course to use with TeX it will have to be broken out into a few dozen 256-character Type-1 font files.
The goal here is to be able to distribute scientific content in XML format, with the mathematical content marked up in a standard way such as MathML, and special characters treated properly as entities within Unicode, and then have essentially any conforming application (web browsers, Star Office, MSWord one hopes...) display the content correctly and reliably.
Well, there's no such thing as a stable orbit for anything in our solar system, period. The Moon itself is moving away from Earth gradually due to tidal effects, and none of the planetary orbits are predictable (including Earth's) for more than 100 million years or so due to chaotic instabilities in the equations of motion when you have more than 2 bodies involved...
But for orbits in the range 300 to 1000 km or so from the Moon's surface, orbital decay due to the various effects of Earth, Sun, and gravitational anomalies becomes small enough that you can expect to stay in orbit for a year or more without any extra orbital maneuvers. This isn't actually so different from Earth, where orbits close to the surface decay quickly due to the atmosphere. See a NASA technical report on the lifetimes of close orbits for more information...
How can any time standard be "universal" if it's based on Earth's day length (which is changing anyway). These metric time people don't have much vision of the future... We already have a perfectly good universal time that should apply equally well wherever we end up in the universe, and that is only marginaly related to Earth's day: POSIX time():
"man 2 time" gives me:
time_t time(time_t *t);
DESCRIPTION
time returns the time since the Epoch (00:00:00 UTC, Jan
uary 1, 1970), measured in seconds.
If t is non-NULL, the return value is also stored in the
memory pointed to by t.
(although it does have a little problem with leap seconds:)
NOTES
POSIX.1 defines seconds since the Epoch as a value to be
interpreted as the number of seconds between a specified
time and the Epoch, according to a formula for conversion
from UTC equivalent to conversion on the naïve basis that
leap seconds are ignored and all years divisible by 4 are
leap years. This value is not the same as the actual num
ber of seconds between the time and the Epoch, because of
leap seconds and because clocks are not required to be
synchronised to a standard reference. The intention is
that the interpretation of seconds since the Epoch values
be consistent; see POSIX.1 Annex B 2.2.2 for further
rationale.
Anyway, if you want metric time, use seconds, not days, as the starting point.
1 mminute = 100 seconds,
1 mhour = 100 mminutes (almost 3 hours)
1 mday = 10 mhours (about 28 hours).
1 mweek = 10 mdays (about 11.5 days),
1 mmonth = 10 mweeks (115 days)
1 myear = 10 mmonths (3.2 years)
Earth's current year ends up about geometrically midway between the mmonth and myear. I wouldn't mind getting the 28 hours in a mday to work in though...!
Actually, the lifetime for an O2/N2 atmosphere on the Moon similar to that on Earth is about 10 million years - you'd need a lot of energy to extract all that oxygen, but terraforming the Moon as far as atmosphere goes is actually almost practical. The big problem is that month-long day/night cycle...
Actually, a lunar geologist is called a "lunar geologist". US Geological Survey employed one of the best, Eugene Shoemaker, and had a large group of geologists in the 1960's and 1970's working on the geology of the Moon. And the American Geophysical Union publishes a lot of lunar and planetary geophysical papers. The prefix "geo" in this case has lost its original meaning.
I met one of the lunar base workshop organizers, Paul van Susante, in Denver about a month back - he was contributing to the National Space Society'sInternational Space Development Conference as a speaker in the Moon track, which I'd helped organize. Paul had some really nifty designs for south polar telescopes; one small one that could be deployed robotically, and a larger one (1000 sq meter) that would require human labor to put together.
The South Pole region of the Moon has emerged recently as an ideal base location; temperatures are always moderate, a selection of areas close by can be found with continuous sunlight and also continuous line-of-sight communications with Earth, and there are craters that apparently never see sunlight and are believed to contain cometary ice (water is hard to find on the Moon), and also would be ideal for telescopes.
Lunar base designs can be found going back to Army and Air Force ideas back in the 1950's, so the idea is nothing particularly new; obviously what we'd really like is to have a plan that includes ways to get the funding to actually build the things! Science, tourism, and possibly space-based energy and materials supply seem to be the main candidates... Now if NASA wasn't spending 100 times as much on Mars as on the Moon we might get somewhere...
Re:So who whill be first?
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2
Uh, what's your point exactly here?
There are a lot of different cars on the market. For a given level of safety and other features that we were looking for, the two cars we as a family have purchased over the last 8 years were selected for their high fuel economy. Unfortunately, our most recent purchase (last fall) had significantly LOWER economy than any car we had purchased before - why? Because, with Congress wimping out on CAFE standards, cars sold today have WORSE mpg ratings than they have had for years. Look at any model you like, and compare fuel economy for the 2001 or 2002 model year with 2000 or earlier and you'll see what I'm talking about! Fortunately at least the Japanese makes are coming out with some hybrids that look pretty good.
All the slug-like do-nothings typical of/. and the global climate change naysayers translate into dominance of our politics by the do-nothing naysayers of the energy and automotive industries - inaction, and worse. And it's not like our local politicians have any interest in providing safe bike-routes to help out...
Oh well, time to move back to Canada... Toronto will be real nice when it's as warm as NYC.
This is the first I've heard of hydrino's, but the quantum states of hydrogen were solved a long time ago, and there's no room in there for any kind of "shrunk" atom if it is to consist of a proton and an electron.
The longest-running program in space law I believe is at Canada's McGill University which has been around for something like 50 years. U. of Colorado has a Center for Space Law and Policy. Then there's the National Remote Sensing and Space Law Center at U. Mississippi, established in 2000.
Given that the space economy is somewhere around the $100 billion/year mark these days (mostly communications satellites of course) there's plenty of room for lawyers to step in and help out. Who gets sued when a half-billion dollar satellite is blown up on the launch pad? Or when a rocket goes astray and destroys a warehouse or two? Who argues on your behalf with international bodies like the ITU, or helps you get your export permits to launch through the State Department's tough regulations? Even NASA has a bunch of lawyers on staff! Law is part of the world we live in, as much as science or technology. Just doesn't get much coverage on/.:-)
Property rights encompass a lot more than just claiming ownership of a region: mining for materials, proximity to relevant features or facilities - some rights will obviously be worth a lot more than others. Right now the ITU regulates geosynchronous orbital slots with internationally agreed-upon "property" rules - obviously geosynchronous orbit is closely tied to Earth itself, but similar issues would be there for any set of orbital parameters in high demand. Something like this is needed for the surfaces of the Moon and Mars, and for asteroids in their bulk in the relatively near term (well before 2050).
At least initially, any such settlement will have VERY close ties to Earth, since there's a big need for initial funding (think private investors) and any complex supplies (computers, advanced materials, medicines) will NOT be locally manufactured for a long time. Enforcement of off-Earth issues relevant to Earth parties (such as returning investment dollars, settling property disputes) will be as easy as preventing the next supply ship from launching. It'll be a long time before any off-Earth settlement will be able to be fully self-sufficient; and it may never really happen.
Having just returned from the National Space Society's 2002 ISDC meeting in Denver, I've had a crash course in space law... The conference chair this year, Wayne White, is assistant director of the space law and remote sensing institute in Mississippi, and an entire day of the conference was devoted to these issues.
From what I learned, there is a large body of national and international law about space that rests on this treaty and a few others (space liability, rescue and return, etc.) and throwing this one out is unlikely. But, these treaties do have a fundamental problem in not providing any mechanism for private property rights in space, nor particularly envisioning any sort of settlement process. There are a large number of ideas for how to fix this - Alan Wasser's proposals mentioned in the article are one of them. There's also Declan O'Donnell's United Societies in Space that advocates extending common law rules to outer space, and of course there's the Lunar Embassy that's taking advantage of the current ambiguities to sell property on the Moon and other bodies.
What's needed is a push from the US State Department to get these things resolved - there are apparently individuals there who would know what to do to get a new treaty worked out or current treaties amended, but there's been absolutely no support from higher up for it. Write your congressmen or directly to the State Dept. to express your views if you feel a legal property regime for outer space is important!
Developing software means creating something new, that has never existed before. Something that is often cobbled together out of parts from both the living and the carcases of the recently or not-so-recently deceased. Something that, when we first try to bring it to life, often fails, badly at times. Something that we, acting as gods, mold and shape into an active entity worthy of respect from our peers and customers. The range to which software can be applied is vast, encompassing the entire spectrum of human endeavor. The consequences when we make mistakes can be devastating. Be careful out there, ok?
Here's a link to the actual article which you can read in full if you're somewhere with a subscription (most colleges) - there's also a summary article on the Phys. Rev. Focus site.
The basic idea is that energy and entropy are related to the fundamental limits of computation, so if you know the energy and entropy density of the universe, and the size of the observable bit, you can figure out the relevant number of bits and computations...
The number of options for contacting a deep-space spacecraft (which includes anything beyond geo-synchronous orbit) are surprisingly limited - basically NASA's Deep Space Network, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay satellites, and then whatever time can be purchased on the various radio telescopes and ground stations around the world. For a spacecraft at Mars the signal is weakened by an inverse square factor of billions relative to near-Earth satellites, so you need highly directed large and sensitive receivers to hear anything. NASA has been upgrading the TDRS satellites but they aren't much use for really deep space missions because of their limited size. Except for commandeering Arecibo, the 70-meter DSN antennas are about all that's available right now...
Freeman Dyson was here a couple of weeks ago to give some lectures, one of which was on where we might expect to find life in the universe. On the question of what are the chances life exists anywhere besides on Earth, he claimed that we have essentially no real knowledge relevant to answering that question, and any scientist claiming a specific number or probability was blowing smoke (paraphrasing here...) - the best one could guess at this point given our current knowledge was 50% likelihood for any particular question on the subject. Is Earth the only planet in the universe with life? 50/50. If there's life out there, would it necessarily be carbon-based or something else? 50/50. Etc. Until we actually find something living out there, we're so in the dark it's worthless to make these sorts of claims and predictions.
We design, fabricate, test, launch, recover, and relaunch the "Excalibur" family of low cost space launch vehicles with the capability to place payloads ranging from 200 to 1,000,000 lbs to LEO and other space orbits.
The 1 million lb payload rocket is the Sea Dragon. This is the archetypal "Big Dumb Booster". It's never flown, though...
I believe the fundamental problem here is not that consumers are stupid, or that the government is making bad choices, but that they simply have not had enough information to make intelligent choices between competing products. Big corporations go out of their way to hide less-than-positive facts about themselves, and spend giga-bucks on giving themselves a good image in the public mind (advertising + influence on the media) so that alternatives like the local diner, the local independent gas station, the "unknown" music band, and of course OSS software, are never considered seriously by the general public.
But this is the information age, right? Shouldn't the internet provide us mechanisms to get the information we need to make intelligent choices about such things? I don't think we are inevitably doomed to be dominated by a small number of very powerful corporations, but we have to find models (Napster and company? Ebay?) for a new way of finding more options than the familiar names we are bombarded with through the media.
Unfortunately space.com's "universal viewer" didn't work too well with Konqueror (javascript problems?) - but that tadpole galaxy picture is amazing! And 10 times faster than the old camera, so they can do one of these every day?!
The Industrial Physicist
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Somehow nobody has yet linked to Criswell's original article, which was published in the current issue of the Industrial Physicist, put out by the American Institute of Physics, a highly respected research physics organization in the US.
In other words, Criswell is no crackpot; this is a realistic plan. Read the article. I don't entirely agree with him - I think lunar materials could more effectively be used to construct orbiting solar power satellites - launch from the lunar surface can be very cheap using electromagnetic railgun technology, and in orbit you can get sunlight 100% of the time, not 50% (with solar incidence angle effects to worry about too). But Criswell's scheme is one of the most promising options, and should be considered seriously.
How soon could this be done? Essentially all the technology is in place - the scheme could benefit from some further developments of robotics, but a first launch date of 2010 is not unrealistic, and we could have power from the Moon before we would see anything from ANWR:-)
The 35 TFLOPS is a BENCHMARK number on the LINPACK standard (from Jack Dongarra, who rates the worlds 500 top supercomputers). LINPACK does matrix manipulations, and this particular benchmark allows optimization of the matrix size - for this machine the optimal size was about 1 million X 1 million.
So, it's not a hype number, it's a real benchmark number, comparable to similar numbers from other machines. That said, of course not every application is going to achieve that level of performance.
Slashdot Mirror
The Spring 2002 issue of Artemis Magazine had an excellent article on this by Henry P. Cate, Jr., titled the "Junk Man's Ladder". The idea is to put up a tether (many kilometers long "rope") in a convenient orbit with electrodynamic lift capabilities and some thrust, move it around to "catch" space debris, and move the junk up to the center of mass of the tether, to give it greater stability. Tethers like this are form of "space elevator", able to lift move things from low to high orbit with high efficiency. More on orbital tethers can be found at Tethers Unlimited Inc., run by Robert L. Forward and Robert P. Hoyt (who I was fortunate to have dinner with a couple of months ago).
Sounds like you haven't been reading any scientific journals lately :-)
We would happily use TeX for everything, except for two fundamental problems, and a few more superficial ones. First the fundamental problems:
- The standard TeX fonts are Computer Modern (Knuth's invention) - these are lighter and "looser" than the standard text typefaces (Adobe Times Roman in particular), and text becomes uglier and slightly harder to read when the two types of fonts are used together in the same document.
- The standard Tex fonts are also missing a lot of special symbols that scientific publishers have, over the years, had to create for themselves. It's impossible to capture every special character that a mathematician or physicist may decide to invent for some particular purpose, but we've managed to include in the description of the font, and in the latest Unicode version (3.2) essentially all the special characters we could find that have received repeated use in scientific communications. If more appear later we'll get them added to the font. The idea is to be comprehensive.
The more superficial problems are, first that TeX distributions suffer from wild inconsistencies in what particular fonts are available - early experiences with making font-less PDF files (or even DVI files) that relied on users having a TeX font distribution available to them for display were essentially total failures. And second, TeX is unfortunately not all that widely used even by scientists and engineers... Another side problem is the way TeX is limited to a small number of 256-character font files (with further restrictions on tfm files) - what we're planning is to have all 8000 or so glyphs available in 4 OpenType fonts (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) - of course to use with TeX it will have to be broken out into a few dozen 256-character Type-1 font files.The goal here is to be able to distribute scientific content in XML format, with the mathematical content marked up in a standard way such as MathML, and special characters treated properly as entities within Unicode, and then have essentially any conforming application (web browsers, Star Office, MSWord one hopes...) display the content correctly and reliably.
Well, there's no such thing as a stable orbit for anything in our solar system, period. The Moon itself is moving away from Earth gradually due to tidal effects, and none of the planetary orbits are predictable (including Earth's) for more than 100 million years or so due to chaotic instabilities in the equations of motion when you have more than 2 bodies involved...
But for orbits in the range 300 to 1000 km or so from the Moon's surface, orbital decay due to the various effects of Earth, Sun, and gravitational anomalies becomes small enough that you can expect to stay in orbit for a year or more without any extra orbital maneuvers. This isn't actually so different from Earth, where orbits close to the surface decay quickly due to the atmosphere. See a NASA technical report on the lifetimes of close orbits for more information...
"man 2 time" gives me: (although it does have a little problem with leap seconds:) Anyway, if you want metric time, use seconds, not days, as the starting point.
- 1 mminute = 100 seconds,
- 1 mhour = 100 mminutes (almost 3 hours)
- 1 mday = 10 mhours (about 28 hours).
- 1 mweek = 10 mdays (about 11.5 days),
- 1 mmonth = 10 mweeks (115 days)
- 1 myear = 10 mmonths (3.2 years)
Earth's current year ends up about geometrically midway between the mmonth and myear. I wouldn't mind getting the 28 hours in a mday to work in though...!Actually, the lifetime for an O2/N2 atmosphere on the Moon similar to that on Earth is about 10 million years - you'd need a lot of energy to extract all that oxygen, but terraforming the Moon as far as atmosphere goes is actually almost practical. The big problem is that month-long day/night cycle...
Actually, a lunar geologist is called a "lunar geologist". US Geological Survey employed one of the best, Eugene Shoemaker, and had a large group of geologists in the 1960's and 1970's working on the geology of the Moon. And the American Geophysical Union publishes a lot of lunar and planetary geophysical papers. The prefix "geo" in this case has lost its original meaning.
The South Pole region of the Moon has emerged recently as an ideal base location; temperatures are always moderate, a selection of areas close by can be found with continuous sunlight and also continuous line-of-sight communications with Earth, and there are craters that apparently never see sunlight and are believed to contain cometary ice (water is hard to find on the Moon), and also would be ideal for telescopes.
Lunar base designs can be found going back to Army and Air Force ideas back in the 1950's, so the idea is nothing particularly new; obviously what we'd really like is to have a plan that includes ways to get the funding to actually build the things! Science, tourism, and possibly space-based energy and materials supply seem to be the main candidates... Now if NASA wasn't spending 100 times as much on Mars as on the Moon we might get somewhere...
Uh, what's your point exactly here?
/. and the global climate change naysayers translate into dominance of our politics by the do-nothing naysayers of the energy and automotive industries - inaction, and worse. And it's not like our local politicians have any interest in providing safe bike-routes to help out...
There are a lot of different cars on the market. For a given level of safety and other features that we were looking for, the two cars we as a family have purchased over the last 8 years were selected for their high fuel economy. Unfortunately, our most recent purchase (last fall) had significantly LOWER economy than any car we had purchased before - why? Because, with Congress wimping out on CAFE standards, cars sold today have WORSE mpg ratings than they have had for years. Look at any model you like, and compare fuel economy for the 2001 or 2002 model year with 2000 or earlier and you'll see what I'm talking about! Fortunately at least the Japanese makes are coming out with some hybrids that look pretty good.
All the slug-like do-nothings typical of
Oh well, time to move back to Canada... Toronto will be real nice when it's as warm as NYC.
This is the first I've heard of hydrino's, but the quantum states of hydrogen were solved a long time ago, and there's no room in there for any kind of "shrunk" atom if it is to consist of a proton and an electron.
The International Institute of Air and Space Law in Leiden has been around since 1986, and there are a number of others.
Given that the space economy is somewhere around the $100 billion/year mark these days (mostly communications satellites of course) there's plenty of room for lawyers to step in and help out. Who gets sued when a half-billion dollar satellite is blown up on the launch pad? Or when a rocket goes astray and destroys a warehouse or two? Who argues on your behalf with international bodies like the ITU, or helps you get your export permits to launch through the State Department's tough regulations? Even NASA has a bunch of lawyers on staff! Law is part of the world we live in, as much as science or technology. Just doesn't get much coverage on
Property rights encompass a lot more than just claiming ownership of a region: mining for materials, proximity to relevant features or facilities - some rights will obviously be worth a lot more than others. Right now the ITU regulates geosynchronous orbital slots with internationally agreed-upon "property" rules - obviously geosynchronous orbit is closely tied to Earth itself, but similar issues would be there for any set of orbital parameters in high demand. Something like this is needed for the surfaces of the Moon and Mars, and for asteroids in their bulk in the relatively near term (well before 2050).
At least initially, any such settlement will have VERY close ties to Earth, since there's a big need for initial funding (think private investors) and any complex supplies (computers, advanced materials, medicines) will NOT be locally manufactured for a long time. Enforcement of off-Earth issues relevant to Earth parties (such as returning investment dollars, settling property disputes) will be as easy as preventing the next supply ship from launching. It'll be a long time before any off-Earth settlement will be able to be fully self-sufficient; and it may never really happen.
From what I learned, there is a large body of national and international law about space that rests on this treaty and a few others (space liability, rescue and return, etc.) and throwing this one out is unlikely. But, these treaties do have a fundamental problem in not providing any mechanism for private property rights in space, nor particularly envisioning any sort of settlement process. There are a large number of ideas for how to fix this - Alan Wasser's proposals mentioned in the article are one of them. There's also Declan O'Donnell's United Societies in Space that advocates extending common law rules to outer space, and of course there's the Lunar Embassy that's taking advantage of the current ambiguities to sell property on the Moon and other bodies.
What's needed is a push from the US State Department to get these things resolved - there are apparently individuals there who would know what to do to get a new treaty worked out or current treaties amended, but there's been absolutely no support from higher up for it. Write your congressmen or directly to the State Dept. to express your views if you feel a legal property regime for outer space is important!
Developing software means creating something new, that has never existed before. Something that is often cobbled together out of parts from both the living and the carcases of the recently or not-so-recently deceased. Something that, when we first try to bring it to life, often fails, badly at times. Something that we, acting as gods, mold and shape into an active entity worthy of respect from our peers and customers. The range to which software can be applied is vast, encompassing the entire spectrum of human endeavor. The consequences when we make mistakes can be devastating. Be careful out there, ok?
The basic idea is that energy and entropy are related to the fundamental limits of computation, so if you know the energy and entropy density of the universe, and the size of the observable bit, you can figure out the relevant number of bits and computations...
If you're really interested...
The Lunar Embassy is the place you're looking for. If you want to actually be involved in getting there, you might consider joining the Moon Society
The number of options for contacting a deep-space spacecraft (which includes anything beyond geo-synchronous orbit) are surprisingly limited - basically NASA's Deep Space Network, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay satellites, and then whatever time can be purchased on the various radio telescopes and ground stations around the world. For a spacecraft at Mars the signal is weakened by an inverse square factor of billions relative to near-Earth satellites, so you need highly directed large and sensitive receivers to hear anything. NASA has been upgrading the TDRS satellites but they aren't much use for really deep space missions because of their limited size. Except for commandeering Arecibo, the 70-meter DSN antennas are about all that's available right now...
Freeman Dyson was here a couple of weeks ago to give some lectures, one of which was on where we might expect to find life in the universe. On the question of what are the chances life exists anywhere besides on Earth, he claimed that we have essentially no real knowledge relevant to answering that question, and any scientist claiming a specific number or probability was blowing smoke (paraphrasing here...) - the best one could guess at this point given our current knowledge was 50% likelihood for any particular question on the subject. Is Earth the only planet in the universe with life? 50/50. If there's life out there, would it necessarily be carbon-based or something else? 50/50. Etc. Until we actually find something living out there, we're so in the dark it's worthless to make these sorts of claims and predictions.
The 1 million lb payload rocket is the Sea Dragon. This is the archetypal "Big Dumb Booster". It's never flown, though...
I believe the fundamental problem here is not that consumers are stupid, or that the government is making bad choices, but that they simply have not had enough information to make intelligent choices between competing products. Big corporations go out of their way to hide less-than-positive facts about themselves, and spend giga-bucks on giving themselves a good image in the public mind (advertising + influence on the media) so that alternatives like the local diner, the local independent gas station, the "unknown" music band, and of course OSS software, are never considered seriously by the general public.
But this is the information age, right? Shouldn't the internet provide us mechanisms to get the information we need to make intelligent choices about such things? I don't think we are inevitably doomed to be dominated by a small number of very powerful corporations, but we have to find models (Napster and company? Ebay?) for a new way of finding more options than the familiar names we are bombarded with through the media.
Unfortunately space.com's "universal viewer" didn't work too well with Konqueror (javascript problems?) - but that tadpole galaxy picture is amazing! And 10 times
faster than the old camera, so they can do one of these every day?!
Somehow nobody has yet linked to Criswell's original article, which was published in the current issue of the Industrial Physicist, put out by the American Institute of Physics, a highly respected research physics organization in the US.
:-)
In other words, Criswell is no crackpot; this is a realistic plan. Read the article. I don't entirely agree with him - I think lunar materials could more effectively be used to construct orbiting solar power satellites - launch from the lunar surface can be very cheap using electromagnetic railgun technology, and in orbit you can get sunlight 100% of the time, not 50% (with solar incidence angle effects to worry about too). But Criswell's scheme is one of the most promising options, and should be considered seriously.
How soon could this be done? Essentially all the technology is in place - the scheme could benefit from some further developments of robotics, but a first launch date of 2010 is not unrealistic, and we could have power from the Moon before we would see anything from ANWR
The 35 TFLOPS is a BENCHMARK number on the LINPACK standard (from Jack Dongarra, who rates the worlds 500 top supercomputers). LINPACK does matrix manipulations, and this particular benchmark allows optimization of the matrix size - for this machine the optimal size was about 1 million X 1 million.
So, it's not a hype number, it's a real benchmark number, comparable to similar numbers from other machines. That said, of course not every application is going to achieve that level of performance.