Given that there were no western witnesses, nor videos nor pictures of Buran in the process of being launched, it is widely assumed that buran never achieved orbit & that the pictures being presented as the return from orbit are actually those of one of the atmospheric tests (like Enterprise).
Corrections welcome of course, but it's been 20 years & you'd have thought that someone would have turned up a picture if buran had really made it to orbit.
Hotjava was a web brower implemented in Java that Sun used to deliver on Solaris 2.6 (& 2.7?) It was sssllloooww, buggy & is no longer a current product to my knowledge.
The USG is unwilling to relinquish it's dominance in space for very good reasons. Unless any private company building a spacehook is entirely composed of non-USAans, the USG government can & most likely will prosecute these people -- unless the USG is also intimately involved in the project themselves. Currently this is under export controls on missle tech as weapons of mass destruction, but you can be sure that when skyhook tech progresses to the point that people start bending metal, that this will be the case there too.
The reason the USG must be involved is threefold:
1) There will be US citizens involved.
2) Skyhooks must be built from space.
3) The USG has determined that US law concerning the "export" of space technologies applies to all US citizens even if it takes place in another country.
.
So, unless there are no US citizens or the US citizens have decided to renounce their citizenship & never return to the USA, The USG will be involved.
Oh, puhlease. Does Occams razor mean anything to you? It's not ALWAYS big brother/black helicopters/aliens/Big corporations/...
What you're calling antibiotics, most people call poisins. Organisms evolved these poisons in order to achieve an ecological advantage, but the problem is that they almost always come with side effects. Extermely rare indeed are the toxins that kill off only bacteria without killing you.
The reason most pharmacutical companies concentrate on derivatives is because with relatively little effort they create modified versions of an effective antibiotic work with little side effects.
So, you've found a toxic molecule. Now figure out how it works & what possible use it can be. Remember that no drug comes on the market without mass testing. Hope you've got enough money to finance all that.
Searching through all the different poisins to find molecules is not only a massive undertaking, it also omits the production side of the equation. What good is it to find that miracle molecule if you cannot produce enough to help more than a few people because its source is some rare mushroom that cannot be cultivated. Look into Taxol for an example. It is touted as a miracle drug for cancer, but initially it could only be extacted (in very small quantities) from the bark of the english yew. Yew is not an extremely rare tree bur harvesting enough taxol to treat everyone in the USA for a year would have meant killing every tree on earth. Things have gotten better now that it is possible to create taxol from precursor molecules in the needles, but it is still a very rare and expensive drug. See here for more info.
I'm no doctor but I'm violently allergic to penecillin & most of it's derivatives, so I've looked into why most antibiotic drugs make me sick. I wish there were more choices for me incase of a serious infection, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go off half cocked on the basis of what a program on Discovery said...
Oh, go read the Bill of Rights, will you? The government also has personal information on you as well (credit rating, criminal record, health status, etc). In no manner is their refusal to give this data to whoever asks for it related to anyones freedom of speech. It's a false premise, give it up. Falsely crying wolf like this is more of a danger to the 1st amendment as people will become apathetic and not react should a real threat emerge.
The FOIA already includes exceptions for law enforcement & privacy issues. The current admin is trying to add Sat pictures to this list to avoid making Govt bought Sat pics available for the price of a FOIA query & thus helping potential terrorists. Anyone who needs the pics can still always go directly to SPOT & buy the pictures.
The 1st amendment & the FOIA have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
BZZZT! You're mistaken.The grandparent is correct, not truthorfiction. The origin of the phrase has been extensively debated on the usenet group sci.military.naval by people with extensive naval experience with references to 18th century texts using it. A website like Truthorfiction in comparison is NOT an authoritative source.
Whereas Coal plants spew C02, carcinogenic ash & radioactive waste into the environment & are somehow cleaner?
From what I've heard, (I'm from the other side of Lake Ontario) Ontario's problems are more along the line of: We cannot build a new reactor (even if it's cheaper) for political reasons, but we can rebuild existing reactors. Rebuilding a reactor in place while shoehorning more modern equipment & safeguards into an existing plant is of course much more difficult & expensive.
Ah, your post is clearer now with more context. I misinterpreted your message as saying water vapor & coal dust (from coal fired power plants) were cleaner than nucular waste. I do think that you were a bit disinguenous by not including the radioactive byproducts of both, though....
Sorry, you're wrong. Contrary to the anti-nuke propaganda popular with the general public, the emissions of coal fueled powered plants include silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small quantities of uranium and thorium. As has been pointed out for decades, Nuclear plants actually emit less radioactivity into the environment than do Coal plants. Google for coal radioactive emissions to get an education or just click here if you're too lazy.
You're either trolling or misinformed & pushing the luddite position "Anything Nukular is EEEVVIIILLL".
The only plutonium powered powersource Nasa has ever used have been RTGs. RTGs were designed to survive reentry from orbit + landing on a hard granite surface without rupturing their containment package and exposing the plutonium. RTG's used in a launch that exploded & crashed into the ocean have been recovered _and_reused_!!!
The plutonium in RTGs is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles are very nocive if inside the body, but are easily shielded by anything as flimsy as a piece of paper. Thus the only way for the plutonium to poison anyone would be for it to enter the foodchain or as an extremely fine (breathable) powder. However, the plutonium used is in bricks of ceramic plutonium oxide in which form it is almost impossible to do either.
Your Nasa/Chernobyl/Promethieus claims, while colorful, have no basis in fact either, otherwise you would have responded to Yunzil's post.
Heating up fissile elements does not alter the rate at which fission occurs, so your claim that reentry of a reactor would be "heating up enough to get fission going" is another pile of steaming crap in a post already full of it.
Anyone interested in the facts instead of Melantha's BS can start off here: http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/cassini/rtg.html
As a dual national having lived in a number of contries & met them while on vacation, I'd extend your comments somewhat. When on vacation in faraway lands EVERYBODY tends to be louder/ruder/less discreet than they are at home. exceptions to this rule are more the exception than the norm whatever the nationality.
Our major difference is that you think skyhooks are so cheap & easy to build that a functional skyhook can&will be built in under 10 years. Please note that we agree that John Carmack, et al have been willing to lay out 10-25 Million for the X prize.
Let's break down the sequence of posts: - My initial post stated that "SS1 was far from giving us access to the orbital space needed for a hotel". - You objected with "100km is enough for a Skyhook" - I said "in your dreams" - You said "No, really! See, here's a REALLY STRONG SPIDEY THREAD that'll work. Besides, look at these neat numbers I drew on the back of an envelope that PROVE it's possible." - I said "In your dreams, it hasn't been tested in that application, it's not in space & no private enterprise has the means (financial or otherwise) & will to invest the billions it would take to build it in under 10 years". - You told me to "get real" (I get it, that was a joke...) then, "all it needs is time & money" (Sounds like we agree, finally).
Re: "55 tons is the total mass" So, the skyhook design has been finalized & machinery has already been built, giving you concrete numbers for the neccesary mass, right? Oh I'm sorry, your BOTE fudge factor takes into account all the possible variables and unforseen problems needed to construct the skyhook. How could I have ever doubted you...
Re: "There are open braided designs" Using your spidey thread? Or something else that has flown successfully?, No, huh.
Re: "Aluminum and gold coatings" Applied during construction by the hardware you included in your fudge factor, of course.
Re: "Others have already researched this". Must be hot where you are. I mean the only other possible reason for all that hand waving would be if your claims for flight ready hardware for the construction of a skyhook were once again mere conjecture on your part.
Re: "Of course, you could always fly a sub-scale test mission to see how the stuff works. OSC is still selling Pegasus launches for a few million bucks, isn't it?" GREAT IDEA!!! Here we really DO agree! That way, the practical use of tethers can be proven to be mastered & interest can be built for followups. I sincerely wish you luck in convincing someone to burn 30 Mil to work the bugs out.
Re: "Did anything I said say otherwise?" Well looking back at the sequence of posts, you have been systematically confusing what is desirable with what has been proven to work & is available. I'd call that otherwise.
Re: "subject of TFA" I am not impressed with TFA. TFA confused the X prize with access to orbital space. Monumental egregarious errors do not impress me. Bigelow is a hotel manager. Bigelow wants to make hotels in space. Bigelow does NOT have & is NOT developping a launch capability for himself. Bigelow is pursuing the inflatable habitats that Ames recommended loooong ago for Freedom. More power to him. Where has he stated that he is going to finance the development of a skyhook? Oh, nowhere. You just thought it would be a better use of his money & decided for him. Good of you to do so. Besides, I have my doubts that cozying up to Nasa is the path to cheaper access to space (to major profit through PORK, certainly). Care to conjecture why Bigelow is interested?
Re: "Russian & Chinese launchers == private access to space". Ah, moving the goal posts, I see. By that measure we have had private access to space since the 60's when the first private communication sats were lofted. You should post in sci.space.tech. You'll meet another guy namd William Mook. He's just like you. He likes scribbling on the backs of envelopes & telling everyone that "of course it's possible see, here's my calculus" & "You don't need to test it. I did the calculus". Of course, you'll also meet the likes of Henry Spencer who'll tell you that you're full of shit (& why). Hopefully you'll learn & become a productive member of society.
To be blunt, what you think is immaterial unless you are able to finance the construction of a skyhook.
Your calculus can be perfect yet until the engineering is worked out & it is built, it remains pie in the sky dreaming as far as using it + SS1 to achieve orbit. You have no idea how much mass would be needed to construct your 55 ton skyhook, no idea what structure the skyhook itself should take, no idea how spectra behaves in the presence of monatomic oxygen, no idea how vunerable it is to micrometeorite impact, no idea how much mass needs to be added to make it conduct electricity (so that you can boost it as you proposed eatlier), et caetera, and so forth, on and on.
And now to finance your private enterprise access to space you propose bringing in the russians. I suppose you have a solid quote on how much they are asking to loft your 55 tons of spectra (+ XXX tons needed to actually build the skyhook & render it functional) into orbit. I suppose the billions needed are all accounted for, right?
TSS's failure showed that there is a world of difference between what is theoretically possible & what is practical. To go from one to the other takes time & money. In my initial post I said that the the people who thought that "SS1's success meant that we were on the brink of having private sector acces to space" were dreaming. You popped up & said "Not so! All we beed is a skyhook". In my last post I asked you: "Do you honestly think that we will have a functional skyhook before private access to orbital space becomes reality?" You never answered.
Reading from your other posts, we have a number of opinions in common (Nuclear power vs coal, terrorist motivation). Misgivings about your/. login name aside, I don't think that you're a troll, just muuuch too optimistic on what ressources are needed for a working skyhook. There is just too much to do, to many unknowns
I don't deny that the problems confronting the construction of a skyhook can be worked out given enough time & money, however I think that (if it happens) it will be long after Xcor or Armadillo or someone else puts the first truly private astronaut into orbit. Why? Because rockets are relatively simple & we have worked the bugs out of enough of them to know that there are no insuperable problems in their use. DC was my personal hope for cheaper access to space until Nasa coopted & turned it into that lockheed abortion. What we need is a reusable which flies often & does not need the thousands-strong Nasa/social-security flunkies to "refurbish" it.
You seem to have missed my points: - Until a functional skyhook is built, 100KM gives no more access to orbital space than does living on a mountain. - So, I suppose you think that Dupont is able to deliver wherever you specify? How about in orbit? No, huh. The question "where do you propose to get the building blocks for building a rotating skyhook" was intended to make you realize that even though there are theoretically suitable materials for building one here on earth, this does absolutely no good until: A: We can loft the gigatonnes neccesary into orbit, or B: We develop the means to develop it in space (which is a chicken/egg conundrum -- once we have one the other is easy & having none, both are, ahem, difficult). - Tethers _May_ be able to reboost using electricity. We do not know yet if it is really feasable as every experiment in doing so has failed. We can hope that the problems can be worked out but so far we're very close to the beginning of the learning slope & unforseen difficulties may yet render it unfeasible. Another point you're glossing over is where the electricity for the boost is coming from, while taking into account for the chicken/egg problem once again (No powersats until you can explain where THEY came from).
Until these questions are anwered & problems solved, SS1's ability to theoretically connect to a rotating tether is just an irrelevant factoid.
All is forgiven Jess, just two comments if you will: First off, while you may be sitting in the USA, the nature of the internet is such that the people you converse with may not be. English is used around the world and grammar rules are not set by wizened old farts in some dusty corner (as they are in France, BTW). Polite corrections on grammar, OK. Insults not OK.
Secondly, you may want to click on "No Karma Bonus" when posting OT. Your posts will not get the +1 karma bonus, but when posting OT why force people to waste mod points? Slashdot penalizes your karma more when you get modded down as Offtopic when you (ab)used your karma.
True, but until a rotating skyhook is built, SS1's ability to theoretically connect to it is just an irrelevant factoid, right? Do you honestly think that we will have a functional skyhook before private access to orbital space becomes reality? Where do you propose that the materials for the skyhook come from?
A perennial problem for rotating skyhooks is that the up/down traffic neeeds to be balanced. Every cargo lifted into orbit needs to be counterbalanced by an equivalent mass decended into Earth's gravity well or the skyhook will deorbit. Until a robust economy is bootstrapped into space (a presence on Luna or Near Earth Asteroids) the great majority of the traffic will be going up.
Hé Crétin, je vous remercie de la rappel sur l'usage de "its" vs "it's", mais cela ne vous donne pas de droit d'être insultant. Je ne suis pas né aux USA et cela fait plus de vingt ans que je n'y habite plus, alors en vingt ans on oublie un peu. Quel crétin...
Unable to follow that Jess? Sorry, as a typical Grammar Nazi, your knowledge & experience is quite limited isn't it? Thanks for the reminder on the usage of "it's" vs "its". Living in a non-anglophone country for 20+ years can make it hard to remember some of the finer points of the english language.
So, what's your excuse for being an insulting cretin?
Private sector access to space is nowhere NEAR ready! A "Space Hotel" needs to be placed in ORBIT, not just the 100km flea jump the X prize needs. Rutan's SS1 will almost certainly win the X prize in the near future, but it was designed SPECIFICALLY to win the X prize & is a dead end for access to orbit. Other entrants in the X prize such as Xcor & Armadillo may be beaten to the punch by SS1, but they have a much better chance of being adaptable to an orbital rocket.
SS1 reaches Mach 3 at maximum speed. Even if you could swap the rocket motor in SS1 with one which can reach orbit, neither SS1 nor it's mothership are big enough to carry it. In order to attain orbit Mach 25+ is needed and the difficulties (notably thermal protection issues) mount at the cube of the mach. Reentry heating is almost a non issue for SS1, but as the last shuttle flight showed is A MAJOR PROBLEM when returning from orbit.
I wish it was different but we'll need at least another decade & probably more before private access to space become a reality beyond the souped up sounding rockets that the X prize contestants represent.
Apple has had to overcome the bad reputation that they got back when tried to prevent anyone else from using the intellectual property they stole from Xerox (aka look&feel). Googling on "stallmann boycott apple" turned up the following: Boycott Apple - Some time before 1989, Apple Computer, Inc. started a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, claiming they had breached Apple's copyright on the look and feel of the Macintosh user interface. In December 1989, Xerox failed to sue Apple Computer, claiming that the software for Apple's Lisa computer and Macintosh Finder, both copyrighted in 1987, were derived from two Xerox programs: Smalltalk, developed in the mid-1970s and Star, copyrighted in 1981.
Apple wanted to stop people from writing any program that worked even vaguely like a Macintosh. If such look and feel lawsuits succeed they could put an end to free software that could substitute for commercial software.
In the weeks after the suit was filed, Usenet reverberated with condemnation for Apple. GNU supporters Richard Stallman, John Gilmore, and Paul Rubin decided to take action against Apple. Apple's reputation as a force for progress came from having made better computers; but The League for Programming Freedom believed that Apple wanted to make all non-Apple computers worse. They therefore campaigned to discourage people from using Apple products or working for Apple or any other company threatening similar obstructionist tactics (e.g. Lotus and Xerox).
Because of this boycott the Free Software Foundation for a long time didn't support Macintosh Unix in their software. In 1995, the LPF and the FSF decided to end the boycott.
I've seen better reasons for not implementing SPF but this is not one of them as there is an easy solution.
Push the ISP & your customer to implement SPF as well then include the ISP's mail servers in the customer's SPF record. They don't even need to change their sendmail setup, just add the relevant TXT records to their DNS records. For a minimal effort the problem is solved.
Calling this situation "nightmarish" is simply untrue.
The material tests were done using a higher concentration of peroxide, IIRC. John is on record in sci.space.tech saying that they have since gone to a lower concentration of peroxide combined mixed with alcohol. This was in part of this was due to the difficulties he had obtaining high concentrations of peroxide, but eliminating the risk of explosion & lowering the temperature of the reaction were also important considerations.
With the concentration of peroxide they use now, there is no chance of an explosion, so shrapnel is not a major risk.
Armadillo uses peroxide as a mono-propellant. Peroxide needs a catalyst to decompose fast enough to be a problem so if the rocket falls over and spills it's contents out onto the ground there will not be an enormous explosion. If the guidance goes haywire, then they are going to be at risk for a fair distance. They may have judged that it is actually safer being closer to the takeoff/landing as that way a rogue rockey would not have the time to build up any dangereous lateral speed...
Slashdot Mirror
Given that there were no western witnesses, nor videos nor pictures of Buran in the process of being launched, it is widely assumed that buran never achieved orbit & that the pictures being presented as the return from orbit are actually those of one of the atmospheric tests (like Enterprise).
Corrections welcome of course, but it's been 20 years & you'd have thought that someone would have turned up a picture if buran had really made it to orbit.
Hotjava was a web brower implemented in Java that Sun used to deliver on Solaris 2.6 (& 2.7?) It was sssllloooww, buggy & is no longer a current product to my knowledge.
The USG is unwilling to relinquish it's dominance in space for very good reasons.
Unless any private company building a spacehook is entirely composed of non-USAans, the USG government can & most likely will prosecute these people -- unless the USG is also intimately involved in the project themselves. Currently this is under export controls on missle tech as weapons of mass destruction, but you can be sure that when skyhook tech progresses to the point that people start bending metal, that this will be the case there too.
1) There will be US citizens involved.
2) Skyhooks must be built from space.
3) The USG has determined that US law concerning the "export" of space technologies applies to all US citizens even if it takes place in another country.
. So, unless there are no US citizens or the US citizens have decided to renounce their citizenship & never return to the USA, The USG will be involved.
What you're calling antibiotics, most people call poisins. Organisms evolved these poisons in order to achieve an ecological advantage, but the problem is that they almost always come with side effects. Extermely rare indeed are the toxins that kill off only bacteria without killing you.
The reason most pharmacutical companies concentrate on derivatives is because with relatively little effort they create modified versions of an effective antibiotic work with little side effects.
So, you've found a toxic molecule. Now figure out how it works & what possible use it can be. Remember that no drug comes on the market without mass testing. Hope you've got enough money to finance all that.
Searching through all the different poisins to find molecules is not only a massive undertaking, it also omits the production side of the equation. What good is it to find that miracle molecule if you cannot produce enough to help more than a few people because its source is some rare mushroom that cannot be cultivated. Look into Taxol for an example. It is touted as a miracle drug for cancer, but initially it could only be extacted (in very small quantities) from the bark of the english yew. Yew is not an extremely rare tree bur harvesting enough taxol to treat everyone in the USA for a year would have meant killing every tree on earth. Things have gotten better now that it is possible to create taxol from precursor molecules in the needles, but it is still a very rare and expensive drug. See here for more info.
I'm no doctor but I'm violently allergic to penecillin & most of it's derivatives, so I've looked into why most antibiotic drugs make me sick. I wish there were more choices for me incase of a serious infection, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go off half cocked on the basis of what a program on Discovery said...
Oh, go read the Bill of Rights, will you? The government also has personal information on you as well (credit rating, criminal record, health status, etc). In no manner is their refusal to give this data to whoever asks for it related to anyones freedom of speech. It's a false premise, give it up. Falsely crying wolf like this is more of a danger to the 1st amendment as people will become apathetic and not react should a real threat emerge.
The only insightful sentance in the parent post is that there are way too many stupid people in the world. Among them are those who cannot distinguish between their first amendment rights & the FOIA.
... provides that any person has a right, enforceable in court, of access to federal agency records, except to the extent that such records (or portions thereof) are protected from disclosure by one of nine exemptions or by one of three special law enforcement record exclusions ... The basic purpose of [the] FOIA is to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.
The First amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The FOIA on the other hand:
The FOIA already includes exceptions for law enforcement & privacy issues. The current admin is trying to add Sat pictures to this list to avoid making Govt bought Sat pics available for the price of a FOIA query & thus helping potential terrorists. Anyone who needs the pics can still always go directly to SPOT & buy the pictures.
The 1st amendment & the FOIA have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Moderators, how is this Insightful?
BZZZT! You're mistaken.The grandparent is correct, not truthorfiction. The origin of the phrase has been extensively debated on the usenet group sci.military.naval by people with extensive naval experience with references to 18th century texts using it. A website like Truthorfiction in comparison is NOT an authoritative source.
Whereas Coal plants spew C02, carcinogenic ash & radioactive waste into the environment & are somehow cleaner?
From what I've heard, (I'm from the other side of Lake Ontario) Ontario's problems are more along the line of: We cannot build a new reactor (even if it's cheaper) for political reasons, but we can rebuild existing reactors. Rebuilding a reactor in place while shoehorning more modern equipment & safeguards into an existing plant is of course much more difficult & expensive.
Ah, your post is clearer now with more context. I misinterpreted your message as saying water vapor & coal dust (from coal fired power plants) were cleaner than nucular waste. I do think that you were a bit disinguenous by not including the radioactive byproducts of both, though....
Sorry, you're wrong. Contrary to the anti-nuke propaganda popular with the general public, the emissions of coal fueled powered plants include silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small quantities of uranium and thorium. As has been pointed out for decades, Nuclear plants actually emit less radioactivity into the environment than do Coal plants. Google for coal radioactive emissions to get an education or just click here if you're too lazy.
You're either trolling or misinformed & pushing the luddite position "Anything Nukular is EEEVVIIILLL".
The only plutonium powered powersource Nasa has ever used have been RTGs. RTGs were designed to survive reentry from orbit + landing on a hard granite surface without rupturing their containment package and exposing the plutonium. RTG's used in a launch that exploded & crashed into the ocean have been recovered _and_reused_!!!
The plutonium in RTGs is an alpha emitter. Alpha particles are very nocive if inside the body, but are easily shielded by anything as flimsy as a piece of paper. Thus the only way for the plutonium to poison anyone would be for it to enter the foodchain or as an extremely fine (breathable) powder. However, the plutonium used is in bricks of ceramic plutonium oxide in which form it is almost impossible to do either.
Your Nasa/Chernobyl/Promethieus claims, while colorful, have no basis in fact either, otherwise you would have responded to Yunzil's post.
Heating up fissile elements does not alter the rate at which fission occurs, so your claim that reentry of a reactor would be "heating up enough to get fission going" is another pile of steaming crap in a post already full of it.
Anyone interested in the facts instead of Melantha's BS can start off here: http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/cassini/rtg.html
As a dual national having lived in a number of contries & met them while on vacation, I'd extend your comments somewhat. When on vacation in faraway lands EVERYBODY tends to be louder/ruder/less discreet than they are at home. exceptions to this rule are more the exception than the norm whatever the nationality.
Our major difference is that you think skyhooks are so cheap & easy to build that a functional skyhook can&will be built in under 10 years. Please note that we agree that John Carmack, et al have been willing to lay out 10-25 Million for the X prize.
Let's break down the sequence of posts:
- My initial post stated that "SS1 was far from giving us access to the orbital space needed for a hotel".
- You objected with "100km is enough for a Skyhook"
- I said "in your dreams"
- You said "No, really! See, here's a REALLY STRONG SPIDEY THREAD that'll work. Besides, look at these neat numbers I drew on the back of an envelope that PROVE it's possible."
- I said "In your dreams, it hasn't been tested in that application, it's not in space & no private enterprise has the means (financial or otherwise) & will to invest the billions it would take to build it in under 10 years".
- You told me to "get real" (I get it, that was a joke...) then, "all it needs is time & money" (Sounds like we agree, finally).
Re: "55 tons is the total mass"
So, the skyhook design has been finalized & machinery has already been built, giving you concrete numbers for the neccesary mass, right? Oh I'm sorry, your BOTE fudge factor takes into account all the possible variables and unforseen problems needed to construct the skyhook. How could I have ever doubted you...
Re: "There are open braided designs"
Using your spidey thread? Or something else that has flown successfully?, No, huh.
Re: "Aluminum and gold coatings"
Applied during construction by the hardware you included in your fudge factor, of course.
Re: "Others have already researched this".
Must be hot where you are. I mean the only other possible reason for all that hand waving would be if your claims for flight ready hardware for the construction of a skyhook were once again mere conjecture on your part.
Re: "Of course, you could always fly a sub-scale test mission to see how the stuff works. OSC is still selling Pegasus launches for a few million bucks, isn't it?"
GREAT IDEA!!! Here we really DO agree! That way, the practical use of tethers can be proven to be mastered & interest can be built for followups. I sincerely wish you luck in convincing someone to burn 30 Mil to work the bugs out.
Re: "Did anything I said say otherwise?"
Well looking back at the sequence of posts, you have been systematically confusing what is desirable with what has been proven to work & is available. I'd call that otherwise.
Re: "subject of TFA"
I am not impressed with TFA. TFA confused the X prize with access to orbital space. Monumental egregarious errors do not impress me.
Bigelow is a hotel manager. Bigelow wants to make hotels in space. Bigelow does NOT have & is NOT developping a launch capability for himself. Bigelow is pursuing the inflatable habitats that Ames recommended loooong ago for Freedom. More power to him. Where has he stated that he is going to finance the development of a skyhook? Oh, nowhere. You just thought it would be a better use of his money & decided for him. Good of you to do so. Besides, I have my doubts that cozying up to Nasa is the path to cheaper access to space (to major profit through PORK, certainly). Care to conjecture why Bigelow is interested?
Re: "Russian & Chinese launchers == private access to space".
Ah, moving the goal posts, I see. By that measure we have had private access to space since the 60's when the first private communication sats were lofted. You should post in sci.space.tech. You'll meet another guy namd William Mook. He's just like you. He likes scribbling on the backs of envelopes & telling everyone that "of course it's possible see, here's my calculus" & "You don't need to test it. I did the calculus". Of course, you'll also meet the likes of Henry Spencer who'll tell you that you're full of shit (& why). Hopefully you'll learn & become a productive member of society.
Re: your log
To be blunt, what you think is immaterial unless you are able to finance the construction of a skyhook.
/. login name aside, I don't think that you're a troll, just muuuch too optimistic on what ressources are needed for a working skyhook. There is just too much to do, to many unknowns
Your calculus can be perfect yet until the engineering is worked out & it is built, it remains pie in the sky dreaming as far as using it + SS1 to achieve orbit. You have no idea how much mass would be needed to construct your 55 ton skyhook, no idea what structure the skyhook itself should take, no idea how spectra behaves in the presence of monatomic oxygen, no idea how vunerable it is to micrometeorite impact, no idea how much mass needs to be added to make it conduct electricity (so that you can boost it as you proposed eatlier), et caetera, and so forth, on and on.
And now to finance your private enterprise access to space you propose bringing in the russians. I suppose you have a solid quote on how much they are asking to loft your 55 tons of spectra (+ XXX tons needed to actually build the skyhook & render it functional) into orbit. I suppose the billions needed are all accounted for, right?
TSS's failure showed that there is a world of difference between what is theoretically possible & what is practical. To go from one to the other takes time & money. In my initial post I said that the the people who thought that "SS1's success meant that we were on the brink of having private sector acces to space" were dreaming. You popped up & said "Not so! All we beed is a skyhook". In my last post I asked you: "Do you honestly think that we will have a functional skyhook before private access to orbital space becomes reality?" You never answered.
Reading from your other posts, we have a number of opinions in common (Nuclear power vs coal, terrorist motivation). Misgivings about your
I don't deny that the problems confronting the construction of a skyhook can be worked out given enough time & money, however I think that (if it happens) it will be long after Xcor or Armadillo or someone else puts the first truly private astronaut into orbit. Why? Because rockets are relatively simple & we have worked the bugs out of enough of them to know that there are no insuperable problems in their use. DC was my personal hope for cheaper access to space until Nasa coopted & turned it into that lockheed abortion. What we need is a reusable which flies often & does not need the thousands-strong Nasa/social-security flunkies to "refurbish" it.
I think we're done here, no?
You seem to have missed my points:
- Until a functional skyhook is built, 100KM gives no more access to orbital space than does living on a mountain.
- So, I suppose you think that Dupont is able to deliver wherever you specify? How about in orbit? No, huh. The question "where do you propose to get the building blocks for building a rotating skyhook" was intended to make you realize that even though there are theoretically suitable materials for building one here on earth, this does absolutely no good until: A: We can loft the gigatonnes neccesary into orbit, or B: We develop the means to develop it in space (which is a chicken/egg conundrum -- once we have one the other is easy & having none, both are, ahem, difficult).
- Tethers _May_ be able to reboost using electricity. We do not know yet if it is really feasable as every experiment in doing so has failed. We can hope that the problems can be worked out but so far we're very close to the beginning of the learning slope & unforseen difficulties may yet render it unfeasible. Another point you're glossing over is where the electricity for the boost is coming from, while taking into account for the chicken/egg problem once again (No powersats until you can explain where THEY came from).
Until these questions are anwered & problems solved, SS1's ability to theoretically connect to a rotating tether is just an irrelevant factoid.
All is forgiven Jess, just two comments if you will: First off, while you may be sitting in the USA, the nature of the internet is such that the people you converse with may not be. English is used around the world and grammar rules are not set by wizened old farts in some dusty corner (as they are in France, BTW). Polite corrections on grammar, OK. Insults not OK.
Secondly, you may want to click on "No Karma Bonus" when posting OT. Your posts will not get the +1 karma bonus, but when posting OT why force people to waste mod points? Slashdot penalizes your karma more when you get modded down as Offtopic when you (ab)used your karma.
True, but until a rotating skyhook is built, SS1's ability to theoretically connect to it is just an irrelevant factoid, right? Do you honestly think that we will have a functional skyhook before private access to orbital space becomes reality? Where do you propose that the materials for the skyhook come from?
A perennial problem for rotating skyhooks is that the up/down traffic neeeds to be balanced. Every cargo lifted into orbit needs to be counterbalanced by an equivalent mass decended into Earth's gravity well or the skyhook will deorbit. Until a robust economy is bootstrapped into space (a presence on Luna or Near Earth Asteroids) the great majority of the traffic will be going up.
Hé Crétin, je vous remercie de la rappel sur l'usage de "its" vs "it's", mais cela ne vous donne pas de droit d'être insultant. Je ne suis pas né aux USA et cela fait plus de vingt ans que je n'y habite plus, alors en vingt ans on oublie un peu. Quel crétin...
Unable to follow that Jess? Sorry, as a typical Grammar Nazi, your knowledge & experience is quite limited isn't it? Thanks for the reminder on the usage of "it's" vs "its". Living in a non-anglophone country for 20+ years can make it hard to remember some of the finer points of the english language.
So, what's your excuse for being an insulting cretin?
Private sector access to space is nowhere NEAR ready! A "Space Hotel" needs to be placed in ORBIT, not just the 100km flea jump the X prize needs. Rutan's SS1 will almost certainly win the X prize in the near future, but it was designed SPECIFICALLY to win the X prize & is a dead end for access to orbit. Other entrants in the X prize such as Xcor & Armadillo may be beaten to the punch by SS1, but they have a much better chance of being adaptable to an orbital rocket.
SS1 reaches Mach 3 at maximum speed. Even if you could swap the rocket motor in SS1 with one which can reach orbit, neither SS1 nor it's mothership are big enough to carry it. In order to attain orbit Mach 25+ is needed and the difficulties (notably thermal protection issues) mount at the cube of the mach. Reentry heating is almost a non issue for SS1, but as the last shuttle flight showed is A MAJOR PROBLEM when returning from orbit.
I wish it was different but we'll need at least another decade & probably more before private access to space become a reality beyond the souped up sounding rockets that the X prize contestants represent.
Apple has had to overcome the bad reputation that they got back when tried to prevent anyone else from using the intellectual property they stole from Xerox (aka look&feel). Googling on "stallmann boycott apple" turned up the following:
Boycott Apple - Some time before 1989, Apple Computer, Inc. started a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, claiming they had breached Apple's copyright on the look and feel of the Macintosh user interface. In December 1989, Xerox failed to sue Apple Computer, claiming that the software for Apple's Lisa computer and Macintosh Finder, both copyrighted in 1987, were derived from two Xerox programs: Smalltalk, developed in the mid-1970s and Star, copyrighted in 1981.
Apple wanted to stop people from writing any program that worked even vaguely like a Macintosh. If such look and feel lawsuits succeed they could put an end to free software that could substitute for commercial software.
In the weeks after the suit was filed, Usenet reverberated with condemnation for Apple. GNU supporters Richard Stallman, John Gilmore, and Paul Rubin decided to take action against Apple. Apple's reputation as a force for progress came from having made better computers; but The League for Programming Freedom believed that Apple wanted to make all non-Apple computers worse. They therefore campaigned to discourage people from using Apple products or working for Apple or any other company threatening similar obstructionist tactics (e.g. Lotus and Xerox).
Because of this boycott the Free Software Foundation for a long time didn't support Macintosh Unix in their software. In 1995, the LPF and the FSF decided to end the boycott.
Your idea has already been taken.
In 1961 Piero Manzoni sold his own excrement in cans for more than it's weight in gold. If you want more info, google the old turd...
I've seen better reasons for not implementing SPF but this is not one of them as there is an easy solution.
Push the ISP & your customer to implement SPF as well then include the ISP's mail servers in the customer's SPF record. They don't even need to change their sendmail setup, just add the relevant TXT records to their DNS records. For a minimal effort the problem is solved.
Calling this situation "nightmarish" is simply untrue.
The material tests were done using a higher concentration of peroxide, IIRC. John is on record in sci.space.tech saying that they have since gone to a lower concentration of peroxide combined mixed with alcohol. This was in part of this was due to the difficulties he had obtaining high concentrations of peroxide, but eliminating the risk of explosion & lowering the temperature of the reaction were also important considerations.
With the concentration of peroxide they use now, there is no chance of an explosion, so shrapnel is not a major risk.
Armadillo uses peroxide as a mono-propellant. Peroxide needs a catalyst to decompose fast enough to be a problem so if the rocket falls over and spills it's contents out onto the ground there will not be an enormous explosion. If the guidance goes haywire, then they are going to be at risk for a fair distance. They may have judged that it is actually safer being closer to the takeoff/landing as that way a rogue rockey would not have the time to build up any dangereous lateral speed...