The knowledge discovery and datamining cup challenge this year was looking at the arxiv.org papers for this sort of analysis - some very interesting results. The Task 4 winnder looked at the structure of the papers as a sort of relational database and uncovered a lot of statistical patterns and metrics that could be quite useful for scientists.
The original story was remiss in not mentioning DP. I posted my comment within about 30 seconds of seeing the article - obviously there were a LOT of us with the same issue.
First, congratulations to China, and best wishes to Yang Liwei for a safe landing!
tuxlove writes:
Perhaps this will kick the US space program back into gear?
Maybe. While the shuttles are likely down for yet another year, coincidentally enough the House Science committee is meeting this Thursday to discuss The Future of Human Spaceflight. And, apparently at the request of the White House, the National Space Society has just realized a short position paper on next steps for human space exploration. NSS recommends a general revitalization beyond NASA, a focus on lowering the cost to get into space, planning beyond the space station for a base on the moon, and funding "planetary defense" against asteroids and comets.
Buzz Aldrin has some comments on how we ought to behave in this article. Also note a new position paper on human spaceflight from the National Space Society, and Congres is meeting this Thursday morning (session to be webcast!) to discuss The Future of Human Spaceflight. Should be an interesting week...
See this sciscoop article on a new proposal for the future of US human spaceflight - I'm told this was prepared at the request of the White House, so both the administration and Congress are looking seriously at what to do next.
Thanks slashdot - how's Dean's campaign supposed to raise that last minute cash now that you've brought their site down! Couldn't the story have waited till tomorrow?:-)
If you're launching vertically, the wings give you no extra lift capability. While you're in space, the wings are just dead weight. When you aero-brake in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the wing edges are where the bulk of the orbital energy gets dumped and has to be dissipated - Columbia's problem obviously was with a wing edge. The only time wings have any advantage is in the final descent stages, where you get much greater maneuverability and a gentler approach and landing - and it looks cool too. But parachutes and retro rockets as used by Soyuz, or just parachutes as used by all the US manned flights before the shuttle, seem to work well enough.
Mass estimates come in at about 3 times higher for a winged vehicle than a capsule; that's from experience with the Shuttle and European, Japanese, and Russian winged vehicle designs. Is the maneuverability advantage and slightly lower G-forces on re-entry sufficient justification for the vastly greater expense?
It should be noted that the world has sent only a tiny set of probes to the Moon in the last 30 years - and only one of them (Lunar Prospector) was a NASA mission. The other US mission (Clementine) was also a very small and inexpensive mission, so basically since Apollo ended our spending on actual lunar missions has been maybe 2% what we've spent on Mars. Does that make sense to anybody here?
NASA still seems very reluctant to send anything, but they are being forced to by a recent review of solar system priorities - also several private firms and a bunch of other countries seem to be getting in on the Moon mission act - see the mission list from the Moon Society.
Uh... a satellite in geosnych orbit can handle the geometry easily, and there are a number of other proposed orbital configurations that could work (2 hours battery is a lot cheaper than 12-16!). This has been studied by PhD physicists (of which I happen to be one), engineers, economists, and even twice by the National Research Council. The barriers are clear, and are 2-fold: the cost of photovoltaics (which is an even worse problem for terrestrial solar) and the cost of launch. Energy transmission losses may be as high as 40%, but every utility-scale power source has to worry about transmission losses - it's not a new problem, or a show-stopper here.
If solar cells are not cost effective even on the ground, do you really believe that the slight increase in efficiency of space over a cloudless desert climate is going to make up for the gigantic cost of launching them into space and then keeping people up there to actually contruct this space power plant of yours.
It's not a "slight increase in efficiency" - it's a factor of 5 to 8 because the sun is NOT straight overhead all day (and night) long. And that makes all the difference.
Yes, space launch is expensive, but not inherently so. The cost of fuel is orders of magnitude less than total launch costs these days - that's the big problem with space that we really need to solve. Maybe a space elevator will do the trick, maybe a new reusable launch vehicle, maybe manufacturing components from lunar materials rather than launching from Earth; however it's done, the "gigantic cost of launching them into space" only needs to drop by a factor of 5-10 to make space solar power cost effective: see this article for more discusison of all this.
But you can help actually make it happen by working with existing space advocacy groups - the National Space Society for example will likely be working to drum up support for this or something like it.
The second annual Space Elevator Conference actually happens to be going on right now, in Santa Fe. Expect to hear more on this next week... By the way, this bill doesn't talk about getting from Earth to Orbit - Space Elevator may be the solution that makes all this possible and much less expensive.
By the way, Dennis Kucinich, one of the Democratic presidential contenders this year, is one of the bills co-sponsors. Think maybe this will come up in the debates?
And yet there is one, that requires far less R&D effort than has been wasted on nuclear energy over the past few decades - Space Solar Power. Read up on it - the economics are ALREADY better than for nuclear energy, and will catch up to traditional coal and oil for utility-scale power over the next 10 to 15 years.
While nuclear power is fascinating to those physicists and engineers who have studied it for all these years, the promise of cheap energy from nuclear power has never materialized. All nuclear installations are subsidized; in a couple of countries (France and Japan) the limited range of other energy options has made nuclear a significant player, but for the rest of the world it is just not cost-competitive against oil, coal, hydro-electric, and now wind power.
What about the decline in fossil fuels and green-house emissions? If just a tiny fraction of the effort that has been wasted on nuclear energy had been put toward space-based solar power systems, we'd have a ready-to-go solution that has no adverse environmental consequences. There's still time to make it happen though...
Clark Lindsey at HobbySpace has some detailed suggestions for how NASA's shuttle budget could be re-tooled to promote the growth of private space industry, and still accomplish NASA"s human spaceflight goals. He advocates sending the remaining shuttles to museums, purchasing launch services first from the Russians, at least through 2004 when new commercial launchers should be available, and investing in the suborbital RLV industry mentioned in this space review article.
All your points are well taken - though I think it would be cheap enough to keep ISS in orbit while we figure out what we really want to do with it; I wouldn't junk that just yet.
But who is the "us" in your final "Let's do it over"? The biggest obstacle to an economic boom in space right now (tourism, solar power satellites, bigger comm sats, etc.) is the cost of reliable launch (and return for human travel). The overriding goal of our space efforts should be to enable those costs to be reduced, however possible. Reducing the cost of routine access to orbit was a primary original goal for the shuttle (reusable after all) - but NASA has, basically, failed. Billions of dollars have been spent since then by NASA and the DoD on other attempts to reduce space access costs, without much to show for it.
Meanwhile there are dozens of private entrepreneurs with space companies dying to compete with new ideas and new technologies, but they don't fit into the NASA/DoD government-controlled requirement/specification process, and have horrible troubling coming up with deep pockets to finance their ideas. The X prize is making some difference there, but it's clearly not enough to overcome the hurdles these companies face.
We could save a lot of money by continuing to use the Russians and other non-US launch vendors, but NASA is generally forbidding (by Congress) from doing so. And the ITAR regulations act as yet more protectionist trade barriers for the US space industry, reducing international competition in the area and keeping the monopolistic costs high.
Here's what I believe the US government should do:
Clarify NASA's mission - if it is to be pure R&D, then get NASA out of the routine space launch market. Scrap or sell off the remaining shuttles, and contract for routine launch services from private companies as a regular customer, not in "cost plus" defense-contractor mode.
Lift the protectionist restrictions that prevent NASA from using foreign launch services that are far more cost effective.
Fix the onerous "ITAR" regulations that hobble US companies trying to manufacture space components and sell them overseas, and equally hobble US companies trying to use cost-effective overseas launch services.
Have the commerce department, energy department, NSF, and other government agencies work with NASA to focus R&D on things that can become important economic engines in the coming space age: space tourism, space solar power, space industrialization.
I saw Hickam had written something, but hadn't been able to read it (WSJ subscription required blah blah). He's right, though I think the CAIB report is a little harsher than he suggests - right up front it critizes the process that led to the creation of the shuttle. On the other hand, the recommendations in the report are really rather mild...
For utility installation, you need capitalizations of at most $2000/kW (comparable to hydro and nuclear power plant capital investment requirements) - wind is there now, but solar has some distance to go to be usable as a utility power source. Currently solar photovoltaic systems go for about $2.00/PEAK Watt at best; given night time, solar angle, weather effects etc. and costs beyond the PV cells themselves, that translates to a $8000 to $10,000/kW capitalization requirement right now. PV systems have been dropping in price by about a factor of 2 every decade lately, so we have likely 30 years more development before they will be competitive at the utility installation level.
On the other hand, if the cost of putting stuff in space was low enough, you would get peak watts all the time with a solar power satellite, so in principle that could be a feasible utility option in the near future.
Thomas Gold has a long history of fringe stuff, but this is the first time I've seen so directly how he can get something so obviously wrong. Did he even run this by anybody knowledgable before posting it?
Aside from the steady-state cosmology somebody mentioned earlier, Gold was the one who predicted in the 1960's that the Moon was covered with a thick layer of dust that would doom the Apollo missions - he wasn't entirely wrong, but the dust layer (regolith) turned out to be compacted and very strong, and not exactly a problem. And since then Gold has been the big proponent of primordial hydrocarbons (or at least carbon) in the Earth's deep interior, and the interior of other planets and the Moon too. Most recently he's been pushing his Deep Hot Biosphere proposal.
I haven't looked closely at his other stuff, but if it's as poorly thought out as this one, no wonder almost nobody believes him!
I read this op-ed piece and thought much the same as others have stated here - the author is pretty much right-on, and I hope NASA gets the message. There has been far to much "science uber alles" at NASA the last couple of decades, when in reality the reason for humans in space in the small numbers we have done up to now is so we can prepare for humans in space in much larger numbers in the future.
Somewhat incoherent comments there (though I agree with some of your points) - but just on the moon-mining business:
I don't want any country mining the moon. It's far too close to the earth. We could end up exploding the moon.
uh... do you have any idea how big the Moon is? It doesn't look that big in the night sky, but that's because it's very far away: the distance is 30 times Earth's diameter. Total mass is about 1% of Earth's - do you think we're anywhere close to having mining/explosives technology that could effect anything on that order? The biggest mountains on Earth are maybe 100,000 times smaller, and even our biggest nukes and our mightiest construction techniques could barely scratch them. If we ever do get powerful enough to do the sort of damage you're suggesting on the Moon, I'd much rather have it put to peaceful use there than to the more likely war-mongering here on Earth... but it's not going to happen for 1000's of years, and personally I find mining the Moon to be the most likely way for us now to ensure our descendants of that era can survive stupidity of that magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
The knowledge discovery and datamining cup challenge this year was looking at the arxiv.org papers for this sort of analysis - some very interesting results. The Task 4 winnder looked at the structure of the papers as a sort of relational database and uncovered a lot of statistical patterns and metrics that could be quite useful for scientists.
Being one of the redundant ones :-)
The original story was remiss in not mentioning DP. I posted my comment within about 30 seconds of seeing the article - obviously there were a LOT of us with the same issue.
Now why was my story on this rejected earlier today? Oh well...
Go to Distributed Proofreaders if you'd like to help out!
tuxlove writes:
Maybe. While the shuttles are likely down for yet another year, coincidentally enough the House Science committee is meeting this Thursday to discuss The Future of Human Spaceflight. And, apparently at the request of the White House, the National Space Society has just realized a short position paper on next steps for human space exploration. NSS recommends a general revitalization beyond NASA, a focus on lowering the cost to get into space, planning beyond the space station for a base on the moon, and funding "planetary defense" against asteroids and comets.
Buzz Aldrin has some comments on how we ought to behave in this article. Also note a new position paper on human spaceflight from the National Space Society, and Congres is meeting this Thursday morning (session to be webcast!) to discuss The Future of Human Spaceflight. Should be an interesting week...
See this sciscoop article on a new proposal for the future of US human spaceflight - I'm told this was prepared at the request of the White House, so both the administration and Congress are looking seriously at what to do next.
Just a little plug - over at sciscoop we had this up last night.
Thanks slashdot - how's Dean's campaign supposed to raise that last minute cash now that you've brought their site down! Couldn't the story have waited till tomorrow? :-)
If you're launching vertically, the wings give you no extra lift capability. While you're in space, the wings are just dead weight. When you aero-brake in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the wing edges are where the bulk of the orbital energy gets dumped and has to be dissipated - Columbia's problem obviously was with a wing edge. The only time wings have any advantage is in the final descent stages, where you get much greater maneuverability and a gentler approach and landing - and it looks cool too. But parachutes and retro rockets as used by Soyuz, or just parachutes as used by all the US manned flights before the shuttle, seem to work well enough.
Mass estimates come in at about 3 times higher for a winged vehicle than a capsule; that's from experience with the Shuttle and European, Japanese, and Russian winged vehicle designs. Is the maneuverability advantage and slightly lower G-forces on re-entry sufficient justification for the vastly greater expense?
It should be noted that the world has sent only a tiny set of probes to the Moon in the last 30 years - and only one of them (Lunar Prospector) was a NASA mission. The other US mission (Clementine) was also a very small and inexpensive mission, so basically since Apollo ended our spending on actual lunar missions has been maybe 2% what we've spent on Mars. Does that make sense to anybody here?
NASA still seems very reluctant to send anything, but they are being forced to by a recent review of solar system priorities - also several private firms and a bunch of other countries seem to be getting in on the Moon mission act - see the mission list from the Moon Society.
Uh... a satellite in geosnych orbit can handle the geometry easily, and there are a number of other proposed orbital configurations that could work (2 hours battery is a lot cheaper than 12-16!). This has been studied by PhD physicists (of which I happen to be one), engineers, economists, and even twice by the National Research Council. The barriers are clear, and are 2-fold: the cost of photovoltaics (which is an even worse problem for terrestrial solar) and the cost of launch. Energy transmission losses may be as high as 40%, but every utility-scale power source has to worry about transmission losses - it's not a new problem, or a show-stopper here.
It's not a "slight increase in efficiency" - it's a factor of 5 to 8 because the sun is NOT straight overhead all day (and night) long. And that makes all the difference.
Yes, space launch is expensive, but not inherently so. The cost of fuel is orders of magnitude less than total launch costs these days - that's the big problem with space that we really need to solve. Maybe a space elevator will do the trick, maybe a new reusable launch vehicle, maybe manufacturing components from lunar materials rather than launching from Earth; however it's done, the "gigantic cost of launching them into space" only needs to drop by a factor of 5-10 to make space solar power cost effective: see this article for more discusison of all this.
If you figure it out, let me know :-)
But you can help actually make it happen by working with existing space advocacy groups - the National Space Society for example will likely be working to drum up support for this or something like it.
The second annual Space Elevator Conference actually happens to be going on right now, in Santa Fe. Expect to hear more on this next week... By the way, this bill doesn't talk about getting from Earth to Orbit - Space Elevator may be the solution that makes all this possible and much less expensive.
By the way, Dennis Kucinich, one of the Democratic presidential contenders this year, is one of the bills co-sponsors. Think maybe this will come up in the debates?
And yet there is one, that requires far less R&D effort than has been wasted on nuclear energy over the past few decades - Space Solar Power. Read up on it - the economics are ALREADY better than for nuclear energy, and will catch up to traditional coal and oil for utility-scale power over the next 10 to 15 years.
It's time for the nuclear fantasy to end.
While nuclear power is fascinating to those physicists and engineers who have studied it for all these years, the promise of cheap energy from nuclear power has never materialized. All nuclear installations are subsidized; in a couple of countries (France and Japan) the limited range of other energy options has made nuclear a significant player, but for the rest of the world it is just not cost-competitive against oil, coal, hydro-electric, and now wind power.
What about the decline in fossil fuels and green-house emissions? If just a tiny fraction of the effort that has been wasted on nuclear energy had been put toward space-based solar power systems, we'd have a ready-to-go solution that has no adverse environmental consequences. There's still time to make it happen though...
Clark Lindsey at HobbySpace has some detailed suggestions for how NASA's shuttle budget could be re-tooled to promote the growth of private space industry, and still accomplish NASA"s human spaceflight goals. He advocates sending the remaining shuttles to museums, purchasing launch services first from the Russians, at least through 2004 when new commercial launchers should be available, and investing in the suborbital RLV industry mentioned in this space review article.
Good ideas there... any chance of it happening?
But who is the "us" in your final "Let's do it over"? The biggest obstacle to an economic boom in space right now (tourism, solar power satellites, bigger comm sats, etc.) is the cost of reliable launch (and return for human travel). The overriding goal of our space efforts should be to enable those costs to be reduced, however possible. Reducing the cost of routine access to orbit was a primary original goal for the shuttle (reusable after all) - but NASA has, basically, failed. Billions of dollars have been spent since then by NASA and the DoD on other attempts to reduce space access costs, without much to show for it.
Meanwhile there are dozens of private entrepreneurs with space companies dying to compete with new ideas and new technologies, but they don't fit into the NASA/DoD government-controlled requirement/specification process, and have horrible troubling coming up with deep pockets to finance their ideas. The X prize is making some difference there, but it's clearly not enough to overcome the hurdles these companies face.
We could save a lot of money by continuing to use the Russians and other non-US launch vendors, but NASA is generally forbidding (by Congress) from doing so. And the ITAR regulations act as yet more protectionist trade barriers for the US space industry, reducing international competition in the area and keeping the monopolistic costs high.
Here's what I believe the US government should do:
get NASA out of the routine space launch market. Scrap or
sell off the remaining shuttles, and contract for routine launch services
from private companies as a regular customer, not in "cost plus"
defense-contractor mode.
foreign launch services that are far more cost effective.
to manufacture space components and sell them overseas, and equally hobble
US companies trying to use cost-effective overseas launch services.
agencies work with NASA to focus R&D on things that can become
important economic engines in the coming space age: space tourism,
space solar power, space industrialization.
I saw Hickam had written something, but hadn't been able to read it (WSJ subscription required blah blah). He's right, though I think the CAIB report is a little harsher than he suggests - right up front it critizes the process that led to the creation of the shuttle. On the other hand, the recommendations in the report are really rather mild...
For utility installation, you need capitalizations of at most $2000/kW (comparable to hydro and nuclear power plant capital investment requirements) - wind is there now, but solar has some distance to go to be usable as a utility power source. Currently solar photovoltaic systems go for about $2.00/PEAK Watt at best; given night time, solar angle, weather effects etc. and costs beyond the PV cells themselves, that translates to a $8000 to $10,000/kW capitalization requirement right now. PV systems have been dropping in price by about a factor of 2 every decade lately, so we have likely 30 years more development before they will be competitive at the utility installation level.
A lot of this information is available from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration.
On the other hand, if the cost of putting stuff in space was low enough, you would get peak watts all the time with a solar power satellite, so in principle that could be a feasible utility option in the near future.
RocketForge had a link to this posted 3 days ago! So I got to see the video before you guys slashdotted the server :-)
Thomas Gold has a long history of fringe stuff, but this is the first time I've seen so directly how he can get something so obviously wrong. Did he even run this by anybody knowledgable before posting it?
Aside from the steady-state cosmology somebody mentioned earlier, Gold was the one who predicted in the 1960's that the Moon was covered with a thick layer of dust that would doom the Apollo missions - he wasn't entirely wrong, but the dust layer (regolith) turned out to be compacted and very strong, and not exactly a problem. And since then Gold has been the big proponent of primordial hydrocarbons (or at least carbon) in the Earth's deep interior, and the interior of other planets and the Moon too. Most recently he's been pushing his Deep Hot Biosphere proposal.
I haven't looked closely at his other stuff, but if it's as poorly thought out as this one, no wonder almost nobody believes him!
I read this op-ed piece and thought much the same as others have stated here - the author is pretty much right-on, and I hope NASA gets the message. There has been far to much "science uber alles" at NASA the last couple of decades, when in reality the reason for humans in space in the small numbers we have done up to now is so we can prepare for humans in space in much larger numbers in the future.
Two recent statements I think are relevant to this discussion NASA must adopt an economic development mindset at SpaceDaily, and a new Space Transportation Policy from the Space Frontier Foundation. It's past time to shake some things up in the US space program...
uh... do you have any idea how big the Moon is? It doesn't look that big in the night sky, but that's because it's very far away: the distance is 30 times Earth's diameter. Total mass is about 1% of Earth's - do you think we're anywhere close to having mining/explosives technology that could effect anything on that order? The biggest mountains on Earth are maybe 100,000 times smaller, and even our biggest nukes and our mightiest construction techniques could barely scratch them. If we ever do get powerful enough to do the sort of damage you're suggesting on the Moon, I'd much rather have it put to peaceful use there than to the more likely war-mongering here on Earth... but it's not going to happen for 1000's of years, and personally I find mining the Moon to be the most likely way for us now to ensure our descendants of that era can survive stupidity of that magnitude.