The US track record for aerobraking on Mars (counting both landers and orbiters which used it to lower their apoapse) is 10 successes, 1 failure (Mars Polar Lander). I'm not counting several spacecraft which performed, I guess you'd call it accidental aerobraking. The US track record for aerobraking human spacecraft on Earth is 161 successes and 1 failure.
As for bouncing, quit it with the straw men. Nobody's talking about an airbag landing for humans: "aerobraking" only means using air friction to slow down near a planet, it says nothing about how you actually touch down.
How does that work with winter, mud and all the other junk that will cover the camera? Do I get a ticket if it's obscured?
I've driven a Prius with a backup camera for three years now. The view is generally good in all conditions. The only real problem is when it rains heavily, you can get a single raindrop hanging from the lens (the lens is tiny) and blocking much of the view.
I would rather have (minor) damage to the environment than to continue to pay Hundreds of Billions of dollars a year to people who hate our guts
Yeah, but can you blame 'em for hating us? We keep making fun of the way they pronounce "about", winning the Stanley Cup, and calling them "America's Hat".
(Less than a quarter of the oil we import comes from the Middle East.)
I think we have different goals. I'm interested in exploration: you're trying to find a planet that pays cash money. So you care only about planet -> earth fuel costs, whereas I'm interested in round trips. I agree that the Moon is a bit cheaper on your terms -- but only if you can make a successful aluminum+oxygen rocket without sandblasting your rocket nozzle into scrap metal.
But I'd argue that even if your goal is only rare mineral mining, Mars may come out ahead. On Earth, the average crustal abundance of these metals is way too low to mine profitably: you have to find areas where they've been concentrated into ore deposits. This typically happens when you've got groundwater interacting with geothermal heat. Mars has had a lot of that kind of thing: the Moon has not. Hell, you might even be able to do placer mining on Mars's river valleys.
That's odd, every spacecraft mission to Mars has had a heat shield and a parachute. Are they just for show?
Mars missions use heat shields and parachutes to slow the spacecraft down from 5,000 m/s to 100 m/s. You do need airbags, retrorockets, or whatever to slow down the last 2% to a stop, but 98% of the job is done by the atmosphere.
Except that the Moon has a lot of valuable material and close proximity to the most valuable real estate in the Solar System. Also, without an atmosphere, a smaller gravity well, and that close proximity, it's a lot easier to move materials to Earth and Earth orbit from the Moon than anywhere other than near Earth asteroids.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. To make a round trip to the Moon, you need to burn fuel to get there, burn fuel to slow down and land, burn fuel to launch back. You don't need to burn fuel to land on Earth, because you can use atmospheric drag to slow down.
Mars has an atmosphere, where the moon does not. So you don't have to bring fuel to land: you can just aerobrake. And as with all rocket voyages, this has exponential leverage: when you launch less fuel, you don't have to launch the fuel to launch the fuel to launch the fuel to....
If you get extra clever, you can make rocket fuel out of Mars's atmosphere, saving even more fuel, with even stronger exponential leverage. You can't do that on the Moon, unless you use a rocket whose exhaust is sand. (Seriously, it's been considered.)
From a fuel and energy perspective, because Mars has an atmosphere, it's *closer* to the Earth than the moon. Robert Zubrin said it best: "even if the Moon had tanks full of rocket fuel sitting on the surface waiting for us, it wouldn't be worth it to land and pick them up."
The environmental risks are worth talking about, but there's something even worse that isn't getting attention: the lifetime of a fracked well.
Fracking is far more expensive than traditional drilling, but once a well is fracked, its gas output drops off *very* rapidly. The best sources I've found show it drops off exponentially with a half-life of around a *year*, two at the most.
The wells are petering out almost as soon as the drillers move to the next drill site, but they're drilling exponentially more wells to hide the exponential decay of output per well.
Natural gas looks cheap now, but I think we're in the middle of a classic speculation boom, and if we go "all in" on natural gas, 10 years down the road we may have nothing left but rusted-out wells and a national energy policy built around a resource that no longer exists.
What's not mentioned in the article is that the plan is to save Mars exploration by gutting outer planets research. If you wanted to know more about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Europa, Io, Titan, Enceladus, Triton, the Kuiper belt, or anything else, forget it. Because of the long travel time, scrapping the projects currently being planned may mean you won't hear anything new about those places for decades.
Hell no. Mars has the ingredients to make your own food. Mars has the ingredients to make your own rocket fuel. Mars has the ingredients to make your own rockets. Mars has an amazing geological history. Mars has weather. Mars has ice caps. Mars tells us something about Earth's past. Going to Mars would be a new achievement.
The moon is unbelievably boring, and has nothing worthwhile to offer.
The core idea of academia is the free flow of information. A university that cannot solve problems without discarding its principles has nothing useful to teach you.
Interesting. Half a billion people exercising free speech is indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack.
Our society and the way we structure our conversations, both on the Net and off it, aren't really equipped to deal with the problem of billions of people trying to have a conversation in the same room. We need a new way to think about mass communication in a way that doesn't cause information overload. I wonder if self-moderating systems like Slashcode are part of the answer...
My link doesn't count oil produced in federal offshore leases as being produced in any given state. You're right that Texas and Louisiana can cut the US off from this supply if they want to hurt us, but my point was about Texas's ability to go it alone. And no, Texas cannot count use that oil to become self-sufficient. Not without a half-dozen aircraft carriers.
My link doesn't count refining as consumption: Texas really does *burn* more oil at the consumer level than it produces.
I agree that losing Texas's refinery capacity would hurt the US, but it's a lot easier to build more refineries than it is to find more oil under a rock somewhere. My point is that severing ties would hurt Texas far more: Texas likes to believe it is self-sufficient: it is not, not even close, not even in oil, its signature commodity.
"even the most ardent states'-rightist would agree"
Slashdot trolling mission accomplished! I had a feeling I'd hook a few libertarians with my comment, but regardless of what *you* think, nobody with decision-making power agrees with you.
As I said above, TSA is performing "regulation of interstate commerce". Badly, and probably in violation of several articles of the Bill of Rights, but I don't think states can argue that airline security is not the feds' job.
In addition to the supremacy clause, even the most ardent states'-rightist would agree that this is "regulation of interstate commerce", so this definitely falls within the federal government's responsibility, not the states'.
Anybody able to find any internal clues to show that this info is real and not faked? It looks right, but I can't find any proof that this isn't a hoax.
"Still, like I said, it's nice to see what we've all already suspected confirmed in writing. These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit."
Yep. And the Interpol constitution has it right: when the special demands of religion collide with secular policy, it is better to refuse to grant special favors to any religion, than to try to appease them all. (The latter is both impossible and unfair to the non-religious.)
True for islamists vs blasphemers, true for catholic hospitals vs birth control.
Interpol's constitution states: "in order to ensure the widest possible cooperation between the police authorities of its member States, it is strictly forbidden for organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character." http://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Legal-materials/The-Constitution
How the hell did this get through Interpol's bureaucracy?
"Trying to make the internet non-communicable is like making water not wet."
Exactly what I came here to say. Use a closed-off intranet, physical media (formula sheets, textbooks, etc), or allow students to prepare their own short "cheat sheet" before class. Don't even bother trying to lock down or whitelist the public Internet: the public Internet is the opposite of what you want to do.
You can't change the past: the decision is important for how it affects the future.
Pardoning Turing puts a nice "The End" on the story, and allows people to put it in their little mental box of "things we used to do but don't anymore", like slavery and religious persecution, and forget about it. Leaving him unpardoned reminds us that his story belongs in the present, not the past, and that none of the things in that box have truly disappeared.
If the statement did anything but totally reject the bigotry that led to Turing's conviction, I'd feel differently.
The general public thinks of "hackers" as super geniuses. This gives actual smart people a bad reputation. We need more stories like this to show that the average computer cracker is at least as stupid as the average Joe.
Honestly, any janitor could tell you instantly why this plan is idiotic.
Can anyone comment on why the Supreme Court has historically allowed the Commerce clause to apply to absolutely anything that could be remotely, however ridiculously, be considered related to interstate commerce, and thus trample states' rights?
Because 250 years of technology and societal development have made treating the Constitution as a strict whitelist rather than a blacklist a hopelessly bad idea. The interstate commerce clause is broad enough to allow the government to regulate new technologies and social structures, so it gets invoked whenever strict constructionists start whining "but the Constitution doesn't mention cars, so you can't regulate auto safety!" and so on.
In the present case, I *absolutely* want the FDA to regulate stem cell medical procedures: the states aren't equipped to manage the oversight, and a patchwork of state regulations on the subject will be awkward at best, life-threatening at worst. This is something that should be the federal government's job, though the founding fathers could never have foreseen it.
Slashdot Mirror
The US track record for aerobraking on Mars (counting both landers and orbiters which used it to lower their apoapse) is 10 successes, 1 failure (Mars Polar Lander). I'm not counting several spacecraft which performed, I guess you'd call it accidental aerobraking. The US track record for aerobraking human spacecraft on Earth is 161 successes and 1 failure.
As for bouncing, quit it with the straw men. Nobody's talking about an airbag landing for humans: "aerobraking" only means using air friction to slow down near a planet, it says nothing about how you actually touch down.
I've driven a Prius with a backup camera for three years now. The view is generally good in all conditions. The only real problem is when it rains heavily, you can get a single raindrop hanging from the lens (the lens is tiny) and blocking much of the view.
But then, the rear-view mirror still works.
Yeah, but can you blame 'em for hating us? We keep making fun of the way they pronounce "about", winning the Stanley Cup, and calling them "America's Hat".
(Less than a quarter of the oil we import comes from the Middle East.)
I think we have different goals. I'm interested in exploration: you're trying to find a planet that pays cash money. So you care only about planet -> earth fuel costs, whereas I'm interested in round trips. I agree that the Moon is a bit cheaper on your terms -- but only if you can make a successful aluminum+oxygen rocket without sandblasting your rocket nozzle into scrap metal.
But I'd argue that even if your goal is only rare mineral mining, Mars may come out ahead. On Earth, the average crustal abundance of these metals is way too low to mine profitably: you have to find areas where they've been concentrated into ore deposits. This typically happens when you've got groundwater interacting with geothermal heat. Mars has had a lot of that kind of thing: the Moon has not. Hell, you might even be able to do placer mining on Mars's river valleys.
That's odd, every spacecraft mission to Mars has had a heat shield and a parachute. Are they just for show?
Mars missions use heat shields and parachutes to slow the spacecraft down from 5,000 m/s to 100 m/s. You do need airbags, retrorockets, or whatever to slow down the last 2% to a stop, but 98% of the job is done by the atmosphere.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. To make a round trip to the Moon, you need to burn fuel to get there, burn fuel to slow down and land, burn fuel to launch back. You don't need to burn fuel to land on Earth, because you can use atmospheric drag to slow down.
Mars has an atmosphere, where the moon does not. So you don't have to bring fuel to land: you can just aerobrake. And as with all rocket voyages, this has exponential leverage: when you launch less fuel, you don't have to launch the fuel to launch the fuel to launch the fuel to ....
If you get extra clever, you can make rocket fuel out of Mars's atmosphere, saving even more fuel, with even stronger exponential leverage. You can't do that on the Moon, unless you use a rocket whose exhaust is sand. (Seriously, it's been considered.)
From a fuel and energy perspective, because Mars has an atmosphere, it's *closer* to the Earth than the moon. Robert Zubrin said it best: "even if the Moon had tanks full of rocket fuel sitting on the surface waiting for us, it wouldn't be worth it to land and pick them up."
The Moon is boring, and the Moon is a trap.
http://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/145160811X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330464576&sr=8-1
The environmental risks are worth talking about, but there's something even worse that isn't getting attention: the lifetime of a fracked well.
Fracking is far more expensive than traditional drilling, but once a well is fracked, its gas output drops off *very* rapidly. The best sources I've found show it drops off exponentially with a half-life of around a *year*, two at the most.
The wells are petering out almost as soon as the drillers move to the next drill site, but they're drilling exponentially more wells to hide the exponential decay of output per well.
Natural gas looks cheap now, but I think we're in the middle of a classic speculation boom, and if we go "all in" on natural gas, 10 years down the road we may have nothing left but rusted-out wells and a national energy policy built around a resource that no longer exists.
What's not mentioned in the article is that the plan is to save Mars exploration by gutting outer planets research. If you wanted to know more about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Europa, Io, Titan, Enceladus, Triton, the Kuiper belt, or anything else, forget it. Because of the long travel time, scrapping the projects currently being planned may mean you won't hear anything new about those places for decades.
Hell no. Mars has the ingredients to make your own food. Mars has the ingredients to make your own rocket fuel. Mars has the ingredients to make your own rockets. Mars has an amazing geological history. Mars has weather. Mars has ice caps. Mars tells us something about Earth's past. Going to Mars would be a new achievement.
The moon is unbelievably boring, and has nothing worthwhile to offer.
Find a better university.
The core idea of academia is the free flow of information. A university that cannot solve problems without discarding its principles has nothing useful to teach you.
Make sure you tell 'em why you're leaving.
Interesting. Half a billion people exercising free speech is indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack.
Our society and the way we structure our conversations, both on the Net and off it, aren't really equipped to deal with the problem of billions of people trying to have a conversation in the same room. We need a new way to think about mass communication in a way that doesn't cause information overload. I wonder if self-moderating systems like Slashcode are part of the answer...
My link doesn't count oil produced in federal offshore leases as being produced in any given state. You're right that Texas and Louisiana can cut the US off from this supply if they want to hurt us, but my point was about Texas's ability to go it alone. And no, Texas cannot count use that oil to become self-sufficient. Not without a half-dozen aircraft carriers.
My link doesn't count refining as consumption: Texas really does *burn* more oil at the consumer level than it produces.
I agree that losing Texas's refinery capacity would hurt the US, but it's a lot easier to build more refineries than it is to find more oil under a rock somewhere. My point is that severing ties would hurt Texas far more: Texas likes to believe it is self-sufficient: it is not, not even close, not even in oil, its signature commodity.
"even the most ardent states'-rightist would agree"
Slashdot trolling mission accomplished! I had a feeling I'd hook a few libertarians with my comment, but regardless of what *you* think, nobody with decision-making power agrees with you.
Oh, you think Texas is a net oil producing state? Welcome to the 21st century.
Texas oil production: 427 million barrels
Texas oil consumption: 1142 million barrels
http://205.254.135.7/state/state-energy-profiles-print.cfm?sid=TX
As I said above, TSA is performing "regulation of interstate commerce". Badly, and probably in violation of several articles of the Bill of Rights, but I don't think states can argue that airline security is not the feds' job.
In addition to the supremacy clause, even the most ardent states'-rightist would agree that this is "regulation of interstate commerce", so this definitely falls within the federal government's responsibility, not the states'.
Anybody able to find any internal clues to show that this info is real and not faked? It looks right, but I can't find any proof that this isn't a hoax.
"Still, like I said, it's nice to see what we've all already suspected confirmed in writing. These guys are in the same league as Big Tobacco with their bullshit."
Same league? They're on the same *team*!
"Heartland also continues to collect money from Philip Morris parent company Altria as well as from the tobacco giant Reynolds American, while maintaining ongoing advocacy against policies related to smoking and health."
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-and-strategy
Yep. And the Interpol constitution has it right: when the special demands of religion collide with secular policy, it is better to refuse to grant special favors to any religion, than to try to appease them all. (The latter is both impossible and unfair to the non-religious.)
True for islamists vs blasphemers, true for catholic hospitals vs birth control.
Interpol's constitution states:
"in order to ensure the widest possible cooperation between the police authorities of its member States, it is strictly forbidden for organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character."
http://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Legal-materials/The-Constitution
How the hell did this get through Interpol's bureaucracy?
"Trying to make the internet non-communicable is like making water not wet."
Exactly what I came here to say. Use a closed-off intranet, physical media (formula sheets, textbooks, etc), or allow students to prepare their own short "cheat sheet" before class. Don't even bother trying to lock down or whitelist the public Internet: the public Internet is the opposite of what you want to do.
You can't change the past: the decision is important for how it affects the future.
Pardoning Turing puts a nice "The End" on the story, and allows people to put it in their little mental box of "things we used to do but don't anymore", like slavery and religious persecution, and forget about it. Leaving him unpardoned reminds us that his story belongs in the present, not the past, and that none of the things in that box have truly disappeared.
If the statement did anything but totally reject the bigotry that led to Turing's conviction, I'd feel differently.
The general public thinks of "hackers" as super geniuses. This gives actual smart people a bad reputation. We need more stories like this to show that the average computer cracker is at least as stupid as the average Joe.
Honestly, any janitor could tell you instantly why this plan is idiotic.
Can anyone comment on why the Supreme Court has historically allowed the Commerce clause to apply to absolutely anything that could be remotely, however ridiculously, be considered related to interstate commerce, and thus trample states' rights?
Because 250 years of technology and societal development have made treating the Constitution as a strict whitelist rather than a blacklist a hopelessly bad idea. The interstate commerce clause is broad enough to allow the government to regulate new technologies and social structures, so it gets invoked whenever strict constructionists start whining "but the Constitution doesn't mention cars, so you can't regulate auto safety!" and so on.
In the present case, I *absolutely* want the FDA to regulate stem cell medical procedures: the states aren't equipped to manage the oversight, and a patchwork of state regulations on the subject will be awkward at best, life-threatening at worst. This is something that should be the federal government's job, though the founding fathers could never have foreseen it.
Incoming Libertarian hate barrage in 5...4...3...