The odd thing is that IIRC Boeing and Lockheed were among the first to design machines (airplanes in their case) entirely in CAD with 3D modeling of the entire plane, including part fitting, wiring, ducting, etc. I would have thought that they would have provided that capability as part of the outsourcing agreements. This problem need not have happened even with the outsourcers doing the part design, if they could also test fit the parts into the 3D design. Perhaps there were proprietary and/or security interests involved that prevented Boeing from allowing that access.
IANA A+P mechanic, but I think the differences are not that simple. Space-qualified equipment has to handle much higher acceleration and shock and IIRC wider temperature range and atmospheric environment. FAA may require more paperwork, and probably a longer testing regime? But aside from the weight, especially since the various Shuttle problems, I suspect NASA requirements have become much stricter, even taking into account the weight considerations. Weight is a factor in aviation as well, although not as much as space. But I dunno, really.
SpaceX batteries are used in the Dragon, which is now man-rated, which means it has to pass NASA standards and inspections.
Having said all that, I am befuddled as to why Boeing would go for Lithium Cobalt instead of LiFePh. LiCo is always one glitch short of catching fire, and requires lots of control systems to keep it from doing so. LiFePh is heavier and larger, and takes longer to charge, but that's a reasonable price for the difference in safety. Interestingly, the weight consideration goes against your argument - weight is a factor in aviation as well as in space.
In any case yesterday I believe Japanese investigators announced that no fault whatsoever was found with the battery, and instead they were looking into the electronics.
I would take this with a grain of salt. Japanese investigators have been found to whitewash problems in other situations - Fukushima, for example. The culture is apparently so attuned to avoiding loss of face that it's hard to actually criticize one's own, in this case the maker of the batteries. IMHO the conclusion that the batteries were not at fault was remarkably quick.
It's the ladies, man. Most ladies just don't like beards. Also my beard went grey 10 years before my head (which is just starting). I wasn't ready to look that old quite yet so I cut it off.
The interesting thing is that, if predictions pan out, it will be difficult for any one organization to establish a monopoly (of the sort now maintained by DeBeers), with regard to any particular resource. As such, your plan won't work for long. It would be too easy for someone to go out there and find another 1000-ton asteroid filled with 1% platinum, or whatever, and no reason for them to participate in a cartel.
Caveat: the real monopoly may be various resources required for those wanting to get out to the asteroids, mining them, and delivering them back to near-earth. I expect that the early players are going to work very hard to establish monopoly power by lobbying for exclusivity with the UN, and proceed with rent-seeking. The most likely argument will be the need to limit vehicle re-entry to licensed paths, and 'volunteering' to provide that traffic control for free (and optimizing for one organization's traffic). I hope that they fail in that.
Therefore I hope that an internationally-chartered body is established (perhaps descended or merged from the various national satellite tracking organizations, and/or from the national air traffic control organizations) to provide near-earth orbital traffic control, without favoritism to particular entities.
Shameless plug, which is relevant: Support the National Space Society's Kickstarter project! Our Future in Space to produce several videos that demonstrate the opportunities and the need for space development, with award-winning production team.
I think there's at least two standard ounces: the Troy ounce (used for gold and other precious metals, = 31.1034768 g) and the Avoirdupois ounce (the 'common' ounce, = 28.349523125 g). Also there is a liquid measure, the fluid ounce, but that's another topic. And TIL that avoirupois is from Old French, meaning "goods of weight".
There are also less-used ounces, including the Apothecaries' ounce, the Maria Theresa ounce, the Spanish ounce, and a couple of different metric ounces. And the ounce-force, and the areal density ounce for fabric ("8 oz. denim"),... fun with Wikipedia!:D
How about fixing the general case, not giving special perks to those with lobbyists?
While I agree with this sentiment in general, I'm not sure it applies strongly here. Private commercial space development is a new industry, and as such many things having to do with the legal structure are poorly defined or not defined at all. One of the areas that must be filled in is how to handle liability related to activities on the way to space, and in space (outside the gravity well of Earth, let's say for the purposes of argument). Some of this is certainly covered by existing US law and regulations regarding commercial satellite launches, etc. But just as the rise of the Internet has required a substantial body of new law to cover things not previously anticipated, space development is going to require a similar effort.
As one example, there is presently no legal basis for private ownership of objects such as asteroids. There is a treaty (The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, IIRC - see Wikipedia) that no governments (that are signatories of the treaty) can assert sovereign rights. This theoretically would prevent a repeat of the European colonial process 'put a flag on it and you own it, at least until somebody bigger comes along' for nations. But depending on interpretation, this may or may not have anything to say about a private entity.
At present most everyone concerned appears to be trying to work within the existing body of international and national laws, treaties and precedent, making analogies from, for instance, the historical maritime traditions. Those analogies will eventually be embodied in new law by new precedent and/or legislation.
Serves me right for not RTFA.:) However I think your argument VSV the ski industry is backwards. The limitation of expectations there were first developed when skiing was much less predictable and the equipment was much less reliable - much like the private space industry now in a sense (though I suspect everything WRT space is so challenging that the reliability of individual parts is usually much better than ski parts.)
And I would agree with Burt Rutan on the auto parts. Auto manufacturers have to make stuff that handles just about everything that a space craft would throw at it except for the greater extremes of temperature and pressure, and make it last for 100,000+ miles. That stuff has gotten pretty d_mn reliable, and robust against heat, cold, vibration, dust, electrical weirdness, etc. But those parts are an order of magnitude cheaper than similar items on an airplane that are actually less reliable and less advanced, due to the cost of getting FAA and FCC approval, said cost being amortized over only a few thousand units. My case in point - without going into detail, in the early 1980s you could buy a $50 CB radio that was better in all ways than a $2500 airplane radio. The difference had a lot to do with the fact that if you changed the value of a single resistor in the airplane radio it could cost $1 million (in 1980 dollars) to get through both FCC and FAA approvals again. That cost was amortized over maybe 2000 units = $500 per unit.
In fact, that's an argument for allowing the space folks to bypass some types of FAA approval (they are also subject to NASA approvals), to allow faster development and improvement, and allow the market to establish the necessary level of reliability. None of these companies - Space-X, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc. - have any interest in failures due to poor quality parts, workmanship, design or engineering at this point. I'm not 100% convinced of this argument, but it's one worth making.
I stand corrected to some extent however civil suits regarding various aspects of flight still occur with regularity in both federal and state courts, and space flight is new so there are inevitably new aspects. If NM does not have some rules on this as well, the industry could still have state-level liability problems for external effects of the flights or failures thereof. If there is a way, some lawyer is going to find it. A vehicle working for NASA is in a quite different situation from a vehicle working for private entities. I would not be surprised if the very question of a private passenger space flight being somehow different from either an aviation flight or a federally-funded or freight-only space flight were to be litigated by some opportunistic lawyer.
I should say that when one needs a liability attorney, a good one can be a blessing! I'm involved in a case now regarding an injury received last year, and the lawyer is doing a great job!:)
It's not just the passengers - it's also the guy who sues for $1 million claiming that the rocket exhaust caused his asthma to flare up, necessitating a hospital stay and the loss of his job - even though he lives 200 miles upwind from the spaceport and the rocket launched the day after his asthma problem occurred. Virgin settles for $100,000 to avoid going to court and having an idiot jury award $1 million. Now multiply that times 2 million people in New Mexico.
California is also the state where a burglar climbed up to the roof of a two-story building, broke through a skylight, climbed down a rope, burgled the building (IIRC it was the LA School District Education Department or some such), and fell as he was climbing back up the rope, breaking his back. He successfully sued the District for (IIRC) $2 million for not making the skylight burglar proof. (This happened when I lived in Newport Beach in the early 1980s.)
Establishing the ground rules for what is reasonably considered grounds for and limits of liability for a new industry in the state such as space launches is not corporate welfare, it is an essential part of the state (NM) becoming a member of the community of states that support the industry. Without it, anyone who can conceive of some inane or insane grounds for asserting harm as a result of a space launch could bankrupt the company, and perhaps the insurer. It has happened in other industries. Proper ground rules mean that if a _real_ harm occurs, then something approximating a reasonable and fair payment can be determined.
When anyone in the state can say "I smelled the rocket exhaust, and now my asthma is bothering me, and I had to go to the hospital" even though they live 200 miles away and upwind of the facility, and Virgin has to settle for $100,000 to avoid even higher legal costs, it's not a question of corporate welfare. It's a question of infusing some sanity into the legal system.
Without the legislation, the cost of liability insurance might well be several times the retail price of the product.
Liability reform of this sort in other states and at the federal level has been essential to the US space industry. This will just bring NM into that arena. Without it, NM will not have a spaceport; they will have a fancy parking lot in the middle of nowhere.
As a physics professor once said, "Your thesis is not even wrong" - it's nonsense. Sorry, but you need to do some research. Because of the egregious nature of the present tort system, the liability is essentially unlimited, and would require insurance premiums many times larger than the total cost of the product.
Under present NM law, if a rocket causes a sonic boom then everyone in the state could sue Virgin, the Spaceport and every business that provides parts or fuel or services to them - whether they heard the boom or not! Settling at, say $100,000 per person times the 2 million people in NM is $200 billion - well outside the range of insurable amounts. Another example - "the exhaust of these infernal rockets caused my asthma to act up" - even though I live 200 miles away and upwind.
The above is not a joke - similarly ridiculous suits have been successful, and in fact such suits destroyed the US general aviation industry, where insurance premiums exceeded actual manufacturing costs, and were anticipated to exceed the actual sale price of parts. A similar legislative fix finally saved a small portion of the GA industry, after 90% of the makers had gone out of business or left the industry.
The whole rise of 'kit' airplanes was a response - if an airplane was over 50% manufactured by the hobbyist, all the liability rested with him/her. This meant that a kit manufacturer was mostly home free on liability, and the cost of the plane would be between 1/4 and 1/2 what a manufactured plane would cost.
(Recognize that at present, between up to 2/3 of your total medical bills are purely going to liability insurance, and that is a very predictable product liability-wise. A heart surgeon pays between 1/3 and 1/2 their gross income as insurance. Then there is the built-in cost of insurance on every facility, every part, every sterile package, etc.)
At present, my understanding is that every state with any significant space-related industry has some form of limitation on liability to force some sense into the system and prevent novel new interpretations of the law from biting the industry. If NM wants to become a space-related state, it will have to do the same.
Because, without the legislation being offered, the potential liability is essentially unlimited, and forever. The general aviation industry was plagued and almost destroyed by excessive liability. This was partially fixed by a law in the late 1990s (IIRC) removing the 'long tail' liability.
As an example from when I was living in CA back in the 1980s, a pilot forgot to put gas in his 35 year old Cessna, took off and crashed into a house about a mile from the airport. The homeowner was killed (along with the pilot). In addition to the pilot's estate, the homeowner's estate sued the manufacturer of every part in the airplane for negligence. One company, a builder of starters or generators (I forget which) spent $2 million in 1980s money in legal fees, proving that their generator was not even on the plane! That company then ceased building any parts for airplanes, as their gross sales for those parts was only a few $million per year and insurance costs would have been higher than the manufacturing cost.
Not much later Cessna ceased building general aviation planes (except for the Citation jets), and said that they would start again once the liability laws were fixed.
The 'long tail' law basically put a cap of (IIRC) 20 years on defective part liability for manufacturers. The basic idea is that if a part has lasted 20 years, it's probably not defective in any rational sense. Once this law passed, I think Cessna did in fact resume low levels of production.
Rockets are going to be considered 'fun rides for elite snobs with too much money' even more than airplanes. So, bottom line - without some legislation, in the event of a crash, a falling part, or a loud noise as it flies over, the trial lawyers would be able to sue the Spaceport and Virgin Galactic and everyone who ever mentioned the word 'rocket', on behalf of every individual in the state, whether or not they had even heard or seen anything or even knew something was flying that day. There are already federal and state laws (for the states that do a lot of space activities) limiting liability for commercial space launches. This legislation would do the same for New Mexico. Without it, NM will not ever be a space-business state.
Of all the comments I've read so far, yours is the closest to what I would consider the case. Most commenters seem to be taking the same discrete statistical analysis approach that has been common for many years, and point out correctly that it's too difficult to follow and 'score' all those players' actions. But they are ignoring the progress of the last 20 years in probabilistic statistics such as Bayesian analysis (as opposed to 'frequentist' statistics, the traditional form), and machine learning methods such as neural networks, support vector machines, etc. The machine learning methods have the potential to work out the optima in the N-dimensional state space, where N is some product of the (players on the field + the coaches and maybe even the support staff), times the possible scorable actions or inactions of each. Add in factors such as lighting, announceming, noise level, and the color distribution of the crowd's clothing if you want.
In many ways, the problem is akin to the back propagation process in perceptron neural networks. As a related example, in the brain, a neuron whose outputs are continuously weighted low by the vast majority of its receiving neurons eventually just dies. Similarly, think of a player whose actions make little difference to the game - probably time to retire.
This method may not tell you what the player is doing wrong (a typical problem with neural networks is you often can not say _how_ it came to the conclusion even though it is recognizably optimal), just that the player's actions don't have a useful result.
Finally, from my recollection of a review of the Moneyball book, the success of the system was in finding good talent that fit into the team, that was being overlooked by other teams and/or being paid less than their abilities (as scored by the system) would justify - so the method here may also be more for scouting and trading than for evaluating their own players.
I know, shades of the past and all that. I haven't seen a Beowulf comment for what seems like years.
But in this case it could actually be interesting!:)
So, take one big-a$$ USB hub, plug a whole bunch of the Android dongles into it. Use a Raspberry Pi as the USB router and another one or two Pi as I/O and scheduling processors. Run Beowulf.
Let me just say IANA HW guy...:P I may have some details missing or wrong... But if I get thing correctly, you can have 127 dongles on one controller. I don't know (didn't do any research) about whether the cited dongles can be used as controllers (hence using the Pi). You can have, on one small board, one Pi and 127 dongles (handle power to the dongles directly rather than through the controller's USB connection). Use ethernet between boards - this also helps with the problem of USB bandwidth. Stack boards as 'high' as might be interesting, useful and feasible.
Who knows? With enough of these processing boards combined, one might achieve the same performance as a high-end Intel chip!:P
Yes, but when they want to order space-qualified repair parts that are only available from US, UK or Russia the embargoes kick in. So if those nations pass laws preventing delivery of those parts to companies that don't follow their rules, such a company would be 'grounded' in the worst possible way - running out of air, and needing a critical valve replacement just for example. IOW, there are ways, if there is a political will.
Note that, assuming the events you describe (which I haven't heard of but don't deny could be), Exxon could be prosecuted in Bermuda. And some of the new laws and regulations in the US make the parent corporations liable for the acts of subsidiaries in increasingly broad ways, at least for civil action and often for criminal action. The real problem is visibility - it can be hard to get actionable evidence in the middle of a jungle. Space activities are going to be very visible for a long time, for reasons I can't take the time to elaborate just now.
I'll just add that the 'corporate psychopaths' are even now a small minority of people running companies, and I think probably smaller than was historically true (vis. the Robber Barons). And the percentage of psychopaths is roughly the same for any type of organization, whether corporation, government, NGO, or union - the scale of the organization is the determining factor. Power seekers will use whatever medium suits them. One might say that the Constitutional separation of powers is a mechanism to prevent psychopaths from taking over government - as is also the right to bear arms and the right to revolution. And, in corporate world, the right to vote a new board of directors and kick out the CEO - an unfortunately rarely used tool.
I don't think we are disagreeing - I was thinking back to folks like Pizarro (who I would put in the 'high grade crazy' category, and was certainly European. But looking at your list makes me less confident! I was more or less comforting myself in the relatively uncrazy last few decades - there are some crazy dictators still hanging on in various places but that scene does seem to gradually be fading out. But then we do see apparently civilized places going completely nuts (Nagorno Karabach, for example), so maybe our 'progress' toward the modern world is just a veneer.
I did mention to a friend just recently how glad I was that there was a large ocean between me and the one big supercontinent where land armies can run essentially unimpeded from the far reaches of Asia to Europe and South Africa. But getting over here requires additional effort. This is because, if the economic system continues to fall apart on Earth or the food system fails to continue its growth to match demand, things could get ugly real fast. (Though it's worth noting that this year, like most of the previous recent years, is actually the best in history - lowest poverty, lowest starvation, best mean standard of living, lowest death rate, etc.)
One of the reasons I'm an advocate of rapid space development is that, like the New World in the 1500s, space offers both technological advances and increased availability of essential resources (in the longer run), which I believe will make life on Earth easier, and may help to prevent the kind of catastrophe that a couple of bad crop years could generate. (Econ 101: the only way to improve the standard of living in a mature economy is technological advance.) I think a thriving space economy and community will in the long term tend to encourage a more stable Earth culture as well - it's hard to explain, I just think so.
Also, for at least the next few decades and perhaps centuries, possibly long enough for things to have matured, every activity in space will continue to be to some extent dependent on traffic with Earth - components and foods that are not yet made in space, minerals that are hard to find or produce, and not least, the financial transaction network. It's going to be a while before the Bank of Tycho Brache opens for business (hopefully by an organization I'm involved with, but that's another story). So embargoes will continue to be an effective tool for 'encouraging' acceptable behavior.
Even after Earth support is not strictly essential I don't think most sizable organizations in space are going to be interested in going crazy. There will likely be a few loners, and maybe a few gamblers who set up dens of iniquity, but I can't see that ever being more than a side show. Survival and success in space are going to require a lot of cooperation for a long time. You screw your neighbor, or screw up and injure your neighbor, and nobody is going to come to your aid when you need it. That's almost always been the de facto code of exploration and life in dangerous places.
I guess I think that we as a civilization have largely outgrown the ways of the past (despite some counter examples that exist today - but those are almost entirely in 3rd world cultures). Maybe I'm whistling in the dark, but I think it's going to be a long time before anyone who is really outside the bounds of modern corporate and financial norms will be able to get together the money to do anything big in space. I don't see the House of Harkonnen arising any time soon - at least until we have interstellar colonization.
But maybe I'm an optimist. I like to think we've made progress since the 1500s.
Actually I don't need drugs any more. I have this thing where I just type on a keyboard, look at cat pictures, and every time I click the mouse I get a Dopamine rush. It's kind of addictive as a result of all those D hits though.
Sorry, I was mistaken about which treaty. I looked it up, and the relevant treaty is the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by US, UK and USSR and since then by over 100 other countries. I already posted a quote from the Wikipedia article in another reply so I'll defer this time.
Think of it as one Tesla Roadster. I'm sure some people have two. I'm also sure that you (or most people on this discussion) could, if they really wanted to, scrounge that much money from friends, relatives and whatnot for a good cause. Compared to the historical expectation of cost, modest is a pretty good word - three orders of magnitude less than the cost of most satellite launches you read about in the paper.
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The odd thing is that IIRC Boeing and Lockheed were among the first to design machines (airplanes in their case) entirely in CAD with 3D modeling of the entire plane, including part fitting, wiring, ducting, etc. I would have thought that they would have provided that capability as part of the outsourcing agreements. This problem need not have happened even with the outsourcers doing the part design, if they could also test fit the parts into the 3D design. Perhaps there were proprietary and/or security interests involved that prevented Boeing from allowing that access.
Open up your laptop battery. What you'll find is probably a bunch of AA cells wired together with a controller.
IANA A+P mechanic, but I think the differences are not that simple. Space-qualified equipment has to handle much higher acceleration and shock and IIRC wider temperature range and atmospheric environment. FAA may require more paperwork, and probably a longer testing regime? But aside from the weight, especially since the various Shuttle problems, I suspect NASA requirements have become much stricter, even taking into account the weight considerations. Weight is a factor in aviation as well, although not as much as space. But I dunno, really.
SpaceX batteries are used in the Dragon, which is now man-rated, which means it has to pass NASA standards and inspections.
Having said all that, I am befuddled as to why Boeing would go for Lithium Cobalt instead of LiFePh. LiCo is always one glitch short of catching fire, and requires lots of control systems to keep it from doing so. LiFePh is heavier and larger, and takes longer to charge, but that's a reasonable price for the difference in safety. Interestingly, the weight consideration goes against your argument - weight is a factor in aviation as well as in space.
In any case yesterday I believe Japanese investigators announced that no fault whatsoever was found with the battery, and instead they were looking into the electronics.
I would take this with a grain of salt. Japanese investigators have been found to whitewash problems in other situations - Fukushima, for example. The culture is apparently so attuned to avoiding loss of face that it's hard to actually criticize one's own, in this case the maker of the batteries. IMHO the conclusion that the batteries were not at fault was remarkably quick.
I think that's just one battery, and that there are several of them on the plane - I don't know how many.
It's the ladies, man. Most ladies just don't like beards. Also my beard went grey 10 years before my head (which is just starting). I wasn't ready to look that old quite yet so I cut it off.
The interesting thing is that, if predictions pan out, it will be difficult for any one organization to establish a monopoly (of the sort now maintained by DeBeers), with regard to any particular resource. As such, your plan won't work for long. It would be too easy for someone to go out there and find another 1000-ton asteroid filled with 1% platinum, or whatever, and no reason for them to participate in a cartel.
Caveat: the real monopoly may be various resources required for those wanting to get out to the asteroids, mining them, and delivering them back to near-earth. I expect that the early players are going to work very hard to establish monopoly power by lobbying for exclusivity with the UN, and proceed with rent-seeking. The most likely argument will be the need to limit vehicle re-entry to licensed paths, and 'volunteering' to provide that traffic control for free (and optimizing for one organization's traffic). I hope that they fail in that.
Therefore I hope that an internationally-chartered body is established (perhaps descended or merged from the various national satellite tracking organizations, and/or from the national air traffic control organizations) to provide near-earth orbital traffic control, without favoritism to particular entities.
Shameless plug, which is relevant: Support the National Space Society's Kickstarter project! Our Future in Space to produce several videos that demonstrate the opportunities and the need for space development, with award-winning production team.
I think there's at least two standard ounces: the Troy ounce (used for gold and other precious metals, = 31.1034768 g) and the Avoirdupois ounce (the 'common' ounce, = 28.349523125 g). Also there is a liquid measure, the fluid ounce, but that's another topic. And TIL that avoirupois is from Old French, meaning "goods of weight".
There are also less-used ounces, including the Apothecaries' ounce, the Maria Theresa ounce, the Spanish ounce, and a couple of different metric ounces. And the ounce-force, and the areal density ounce for fabric ("8 oz. denim"), ... fun with Wikipedia! :D
How about fixing the general case, not giving special perks to those with lobbyists?
While I agree with this sentiment in general, I'm not sure it applies strongly here. Private commercial space development is a new industry, and as such many things having to do with the legal structure are poorly defined or not defined at all. One of the areas that must be filled in is how to handle liability related to activities on the way to space, and in space (outside the gravity well of Earth, let's say for the purposes of argument). Some of this is certainly covered by existing US law and regulations regarding commercial satellite launches, etc. But just as the rise of the Internet has required a substantial body of new law to cover things not previously anticipated, space development is going to require a similar effort.
As one example, there is presently no legal basis for private ownership of objects such as asteroids. There is a treaty (The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, IIRC - see Wikipedia) that no governments (that are signatories of the treaty) can assert sovereign rights. This theoretically would prevent a repeat of the European colonial process 'put a flag on it and you own it, at least until somebody bigger comes along' for nations. But depending on interpretation, this may or may not have anything to say about a private entity.
At present most everyone concerned appears to be trying to work within the existing body of international and national laws, treaties and precedent, making analogies from, for instance, the historical maritime traditions. Those analogies will eventually be embodied in new law by new precedent and/or legislation.
Serves me right for not RTFA. :) However I think your argument VSV the ski industry is backwards. The limitation of expectations there were first developed when skiing was much less predictable and the equipment was much less reliable - much like the private space industry now in a sense (though I suspect everything WRT space is so challenging that the reliability of individual parts is usually much better than ski parts.)
And I would agree with Burt Rutan on the auto parts. Auto manufacturers have to make stuff that handles just about everything that a space craft would throw at it except for the greater extremes of temperature and pressure, and make it last for 100,000+ miles. That stuff has gotten pretty d_mn reliable, and robust against heat, cold, vibration, dust, electrical weirdness, etc. But those parts are an order of magnitude cheaper than similar items on an airplane that are actually less reliable and less advanced, due to the cost of getting FAA and FCC approval, said cost being amortized over only a few thousand units. My case in point - without going into detail, in the early 1980s you could buy a $50 CB radio that was better in all ways than a $2500 airplane radio. The difference had a lot to do with the fact that if you changed the value of a single resistor in the airplane radio it could cost $1 million (in 1980 dollars) to get through both FCC and FAA approvals again. That cost was amortized over maybe 2000 units = $500 per unit.
In fact, that's an argument for allowing the space folks to bypass some types of FAA approval (they are also subject to NASA approvals), to allow faster development and improvement, and allow the market to establish the necessary level of reliability. None of these companies - Space-X, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc. - have any interest in failures due to poor quality parts, workmanship, design or engineering at this point. I'm not 100% convinced of this argument, but it's one worth making.
I stand corrected to some extent however civil suits regarding various aspects of flight still occur with regularity in both federal and state courts, and space flight is new so there are inevitably new aspects. If NM does not have some rules on this as well, the industry could still have state-level liability problems for external effects of the flights or failures thereof. If there is a way, some lawyer is going to find it. A vehicle working for NASA is in a quite different situation from a vehicle working for private entities. I would not be surprised if the very question of a private passenger space flight being somehow different from either an aviation flight or a federally-funded or freight-only space flight were to be litigated by some opportunistic lawyer.
I should say that when one needs a liability attorney, a good one can be a blessing! I'm involved in a case now regarding an injury received last year, and the lawyer is doing a great job! :)
It's not just the passengers - it's also the guy who sues for $1 million claiming that the rocket exhaust caused his asthma to flare up, necessitating a hospital stay and the loss of his job - even though he lives 200 miles upwind from the spaceport and the rocket launched the day after his asthma problem occurred. Virgin settles for $100,000 to avoid going to court and having an idiot jury award $1 million. Now multiply that times 2 million people in New Mexico.
California is also the state where a burglar climbed up to the roof of a two-story building, broke through a skylight, climbed down a rope, burgled the building (IIRC it was the LA School District Education Department or some such), and fell as he was climbing back up the rope, breaking his back. He successfully sued the District for (IIRC) $2 million for not making the skylight burglar proof. (This happened when I lived in Newport Beach in the early 1980s.)
Establishing the ground rules for what is reasonably considered grounds for and limits of liability for a new industry in the state such as space launches is not corporate welfare, it is an essential part of the state (NM) becoming a member of the community of states that support the industry. Without it, anyone who can conceive of some inane or insane grounds for asserting harm as a result of a space launch could bankrupt the company, and perhaps the insurer. It has happened in other industries. Proper ground rules mean that if a _real_ harm occurs, then something approximating a reasonable and fair payment can be determined.
When anyone in the state can say "I smelled the rocket exhaust, and now my asthma is bothering me, and I had to go to the hospital" even though they live 200 miles away and upwind of the facility, and Virgin has to settle for $100,000 to avoid even higher legal costs, it's not a question of corporate welfare. It's a question of infusing some sanity into the legal system.
Without the legislation, the cost of liability insurance might well be several times the retail price of the product.
Liability reform of this sort in other states and at the federal level has been essential to the US space industry. This will just bring NM into that arena. Without it, NM will not have a spaceport; they will have a fancy parking lot in the middle of nowhere.
As a physics professor once said, "Your thesis is not even wrong" - it's nonsense. Sorry, but you need to do some research. Because of the egregious nature of the present tort system, the liability is essentially unlimited, and would require insurance premiums many times larger than the total cost of the product.
Under present NM law, if a rocket causes a sonic boom then everyone in the state could sue Virgin, the Spaceport and every business that provides parts or fuel or services to them - whether they heard the boom or not! Settling at, say $100,000 per person times the 2 million people in NM is $200 billion - well outside the range of insurable amounts. Another example - "the exhaust of these infernal rockets caused my asthma to act up" - even though I live 200 miles away and upwind.
The above is not a joke - similarly ridiculous suits have been successful, and in fact such suits destroyed the US general aviation industry, where insurance premiums exceeded actual manufacturing costs, and were anticipated to exceed the actual sale price of parts. A similar legislative fix finally saved a small portion of the GA industry, after 90% of the makers had gone out of business or left the industry.
The whole rise of 'kit' airplanes was a response - if an airplane was over 50% manufactured by the hobbyist, all the liability rested with him/her. This meant that a kit manufacturer was mostly home free on liability, and the cost of the plane would be between 1/4 and 1/2 what a manufactured plane would cost.
(Recognize that at present, between up to 2/3 of your total medical bills are purely going to liability insurance, and that is a very predictable product liability-wise. A heart surgeon pays between 1/3 and 1/2 their gross income as insurance. Then there is the built-in cost of insurance on every facility, every part, every sterile package, etc.)
At present, my understanding is that every state with any significant space-related industry has some form of limitation on liability to force some sense into the system and prevent novel new interpretations of the law from biting the industry. If NM wants to become a space-related state, it will have to do the same.
Because, without the legislation being offered, the potential liability is essentially unlimited, and forever. The general aviation industry was plagued and almost destroyed by excessive liability. This was partially fixed by a law in the late 1990s (IIRC) removing the 'long tail' liability.
As an example from when I was living in CA back in the 1980s, a pilot forgot to put gas in his 35 year old Cessna, took off and crashed into a house about a mile from the airport. The homeowner was killed (along with the pilot). In addition to the pilot's estate, the homeowner's estate sued the manufacturer of every part in the airplane for negligence. One company, a builder of starters or generators (I forget which) spent $2 million in 1980s money in legal fees, proving that their generator was not even on the plane! That company then ceased building any parts for airplanes, as their gross sales for those parts was only a few $million per year and insurance costs would have been higher than the manufacturing cost.
Not much later Cessna ceased building general aviation planes (except for the Citation jets), and said that they would start again once the liability laws were fixed.
The 'long tail' law basically put a cap of (IIRC) 20 years on defective part liability for manufacturers. The basic idea is that if a part has lasted 20 years, it's probably not defective in any rational sense. Once this law passed, I think Cessna did in fact resume low levels of production.
Rockets are going to be considered 'fun rides for elite snobs with too much money' even more than airplanes. So, bottom line - without some legislation, in the event of a crash, a falling part, or a loud noise as it flies over, the trial lawyers would be able to sue the Spaceport and Virgin Galactic and everyone who ever mentioned the word 'rocket', on behalf of every individual in the state, whether or not they had even heard or seen anything or even knew something was flying that day. There are already federal and state laws (for the states that do a lot of space activities) limiting liability for commercial space launches. This legislation would do the same for New Mexico. Without it, NM will not ever be a space-business state.
Didn't they bomb this year?
Of all the comments I've read so far, yours is the closest to what I would consider the case. Most commenters seem to be taking the same discrete statistical analysis approach that has been common for many years, and point out correctly that it's too difficult to follow and 'score' all those players' actions. But they are ignoring the progress of the last 20 years in probabilistic statistics such as Bayesian analysis (as opposed to 'frequentist' statistics, the traditional form), and machine learning methods such as neural networks, support vector machines, etc. The machine learning methods have the potential to work out the optima in the N-dimensional state space, where N is some product of the (players on the field + the coaches and maybe even the support staff), times the possible scorable actions or inactions of each. Add in factors such as lighting, announceming, noise level, and the color distribution of the crowd's clothing if you want.
In many ways, the problem is akin to the back propagation process in perceptron neural networks. As a related example, in the brain, a neuron whose outputs are continuously weighted low by the vast majority of its receiving neurons eventually just dies. Similarly, think of a player whose actions make little difference to the game - probably time to retire.
This method may not tell you what the player is doing wrong (a typical problem with neural networks is you often can not say _how_ it came to the conclusion even though it is recognizably optimal), just that the player's actions don't have a useful result.
Finally, from my recollection of a review of the Moneyball book, the success of the system was in finding good talent that fit into the team, that was being overlooked by other teams and/or being paid less than their abilities (as scored by the system) would justify - so the method here may also be more for scouting and trading than for evaluating their own players.
I know, shades of the past and all that. I haven't seen a Beowulf comment for what seems like years.
But in this case it could actually be interesting! :)
So, take one big-a$$ USB hub, plug a whole bunch of the Android dongles into it. Use a Raspberry Pi as the USB router and another one or two Pi as I/O and scheduling processors. Run Beowulf.
Let me just say IANA HW guy... :P I may have some details missing or wrong... But if I get thing correctly, you can have 127 dongles on one controller. I don't know (didn't do any research) about whether the cited dongles can be used as controllers (hence using the Pi). You can have, on one small board, one Pi and 127 dongles (handle power to the dongles directly rather than through the controller's USB connection). Use ethernet between boards - this also helps with the problem of USB bandwidth. Stack boards as 'high' as might be interesting, useful and feasible.
Who knows? With enough of these processing boards combined, one might achieve the same performance as a high-end Intel chip! :P
Yes, but when they want to order space-qualified repair parts that are only available from US, UK or Russia the embargoes kick in. So if those nations pass laws preventing delivery of those parts to companies that don't follow their rules, such a company would be 'grounded' in the worst possible way - running out of air, and needing a critical valve replacement just for example. IOW, there are ways, if there is a political will.
Note that, assuming the events you describe (which I haven't heard of but don't deny could be), Exxon could be prosecuted in Bermuda. And some of the new laws and regulations in the US make the parent corporations liable for the acts of subsidiaries in increasingly broad ways, at least for civil action and often for criminal action. The real problem is visibility - it can be hard to get actionable evidence in the middle of a jungle. Space activities are going to be very visible for a long time, for reasons I can't take the time to elaborate just now.
I'll just add that the 'corporate psychopaths' are even now a small minority of people running companies, and I think probably smaller than was historically true (vis. the Robber Barons). And the percentage of psychopaths is roughly the same for any type of organization, whether corporation, government, NGO, or union - the scale of the organization is the determining factor. Power seekers will use whatever medium suits them. One might say that the Constitutional separation of powers is a mechanism to prevent psychopaths from taking over government - as is also the right to bear arms and the right to revolution. And, in corporate world, the right to vote a new board of directors and kick out the CEO - an unfortunately rarely used tool.
I don't think we are disagreeing - I was thinking back to folks like Pizarro (who I would put in the 'high grade crazy' category, and was certainly European. But looking at your list makes me less confident! I was more or less comforting myself in the relatively uncrazy last few decades - there are some crazy dictators still hanging on in various places but that scene does seem to gradually be fading out. But then we do see apparently civilized places going completely nuts (Nagorno Karabach, for example), so maybe our 'progress' toward the modern world is just a veneer.
I did mention to a friend just recently how glad I was that there was a large ocean between me and the one big supercontinent where land armies can run essentially unimpeded from the far reaches of Asia to Europe and South Africa. But getting over here requires additional effort. This is because, if the economic system continues to fall apart on Earth or the food system fails to continue its growth to match demand, things could get ugly real fast. (Though it's worth noting that this year, like most of the previous recent years, is actually the best in history - lowest poverty, lowest starvation, best mean standard of living, lowest death rate, etc.)
One of the reasons I'm an advocate of rapid space development is that, like the New World in the 1500s, space offers both technological advances and increased availability of essential resources (in the longer run), which I believe will make life on Earth easier, and may help to prevent the kind of catastrophe that a couple of bad crop years could generate. (Econ 101: the only way to improve the standard of living in a mature economy is technological advance.) I think a thriving space economy and community will in the long term tend to encourage a more stable Earth culture as well - it's hard to explain, I just think so.
Also, for at least the next few decades and perhaps centuries, possibly long enough for things to have matured, every activity in space will continue to be to some extent dependent on traffic with Earth - components and foods that are not yet made in space, minerals that are hard to find or produce, and not least, the financial transaction network. It's going to be a while before the Bank of Tycho Brache opens for business (hopefully by an organization I'm involved with, but that's another story). So embargoes will continue to be an effective tool for 'encouraging' acceptable behavior.
Even after Earth support is not strictly essential I don't think most sizable organizations in space are going to be interested in going crazy. There will likely be a few loners, and maybe a few gamblers who set up dens of iniquity, but I can't see that ever being more than a side show. Survival and success in space are going to require a lot of cooperation for a long time. You screw your neighbor, or screw up and injure your neighbor, and nobody is going to come to your aid when you need it. That's almost always been the de facto code of exploration and life in dangerous places.
I guess I think that we as a civilization have largely outgrown the ways of the past (despite some counter examples that exist today - but those are almost entirely in 3rd world cultures). Maybe I'm whistling in the dark, but I think it's going to be a long time before anyone who is really outside the bounds of modern corporate and financial norms will be able to get together the money to do anything big in space. I don't see the House of Harkonnen arising any time soon - at least until we have interstellar colonization.
But maybe I'm an optimist. I like to think we've made progress since the 1500s.
Actually I don't need drugs any more. I have this thing where I just type on a keyboard, look at cat pictures, and every time I click the mouse I get a Dopamine rush. It's kind of addictive as a result of all those D hits though.
Sorry, I was mistaken about which treaty. I looked it up, and the relevant treaty is the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by US, UK and USSR and since then by over 100 other countries. I already posted a quote from the Wikipedia article in another reply so I'll defer this time.
Think of it as one Tesla Roadster. I'm sure some people have two. I'm also sure that you (or most people on this discussion) could, if they really wanted to, scrounge that much money from friends, relatives and whatnot for a good cause. Compared to the historical expectation of cost, modest is a pretty good word - three orders of magnitude less than the cost of most satellite launches you read about in the paper.