> I don't understand why EA works their employees to death.
It's called "false economy". EA believes that they'll get more work out of employees for less money by making them put in a rediculous number of hours. The problem is that EA fails to take note of how that impacts inidividual performance, team relationships, and overall morale. Not to mention the amount of experience they lose everytime they pitch out a burned-out programmer.
Unfortunately, false economy is a fairly common issue in businesses these days. Too many managers think in a linear fashion (more of this == $$$), and fail to take the hidden costs into account. That's why we have hundreds of junior programmers employed in places where there should only be a handful of midlevel to senior developers, windows machines in high reliability situations, and gamer programers working rediculous hours.
Before anyone runs off half-cocked, this article is NOT about the poor employee treatment at development houses such as EA. This article is about one man (Can make a difference? Whoops, wrong show.) stating that Indie developers can carve a market, and that we don't really need the big boys to make good games. He agrees to the fact that most "Hollywood" style games do need big development houses, but he also points out that the Indie can create games with far more depth and interesting gameplay.
His end point is that we should be creating games for the love of creating games. And while he doesn't say it in so many words, that's what gave us such classics as Commander Keen, Duke Nukem', Wing Commander, Ultima, Wolf3D, and Doom. That vision has been lost, and now game creating is all about making money. Why create games when the same money could be better spent on creating a blockbuster movie or a market investment? i.e. Games != money. Have to agree with him there.
So? Real programmer don't need direct acceess to pointers.
nothing above 1D arrays
You keep repeating this, but I don't think you know what it means. Java supports 1-nth dimension arrays. However, its method for creating arrays is different from C. Instead of having int[10][5] map into an int[50] space, each level of the array is merely a container for a child array. i.e. int[10][5] is equivalent to:
Object[10] array = new Object[10];
for(int i=0; i<array.length; i++) {
array[i] = new int[5]; }
If you really need a true 1D array, then it probably won't kill you to compute (y*width+x).
also allows no freedom for the programmer
Funny, freedom is the reason I switched from C/C++ to Java. While the lack of pointers was mildly annoying, I figured out pretty quickly that Object References work just fine as a replacement. For example, you can construct a BSP tree using node classes that have left and right class references instead of pointers to structures.
then again if you are good at C++ then you dont have memory problems associated with pointers for example and you can take advantage of C++'s power.
Free your mind, and the rest will follow. For example, your attitude might improve. (ducks);-)
does it support the opengl shading language like vertex and pixel shaders
Yes, the latest Java OpenGL libraries do.
i see it supports extensions for opengl 1.5 but to what extent?
Complete support. Including the extensions for NVidia, ATI, GLX, Windows, and Macs.
what about CG for Nvidia or Render Monkey code for ATI?
Yes on CG and OpenGL Shading Language, no on the RenderMonkey. At least, that is, I haven't heard that anyone has added support for it. Does anyone actually USE RenderMonkey? NVidia's having a hard enough time promoting CG with the OpenGL Shading Language out, without ATI pushing its cheap knockoff.
You can always ask the JOGL and LWJGL projects for RenderMonkey support if you simply can't live without it.
what about pointers that you need for A* pathfinding and artificial intelligence?
This makes no sense. AI and A* have both been successfully implemented in Java. I just wrote an A* implementation a month or two ago. Not sure what that has to do with OpenGL.
you cant be serious in considering that Java is a reputable alternative to writing robust recent good quality 3D openGL apps can you?
It's still a pretty immature market, but Wurm Online, Chrome, Xpand Rally, MegaCorps Online, Hockey Challenge and others would take issue with your statement.
I call bullshit. Tell us, oh grand master, what OpenGL API are you using? GL4Java maybe? (Actually, that could very well be your problem. You do know that GL4Java is several years out of date and has been deprecated, don't you?)
Java3D is also deprecated, but that was never intended as a gaming API in the first place.
I realize the shuttle technically qualifies as a do-it-all craft, but it was badly planned and horridly underfunded in that role....
We need ships that have large crews and contain enough tools and resources to stay self-contained for periods of time.
FWIW, there's a big difference between the Space Shuttle and a starship. Real ships of the sea have had fabrication abilities going back to the carpenters who could practically rebuild a ship out at sea. That tradition lives on with modern machine shops that can cut, mold, weld, and lathe anything you could possibly need. But these facilities are only on actual ships at sea. Landing craft would never be so wasteful as to carry the same capacities as their larger brethern. Their only purpose is to get from the shore to the boat and visca-versa.
The problem with the Space Shuttle is that it never had a true ship of space to take anyone to. So instead it tried to be both the landing craft and the mother ship itself. Except that it really couldn't go anywhere because it was just pretending.
(Disclaimer: The engineers who built the shuttle did an amazing job. It is truely a marvel of engineering. However, it defies economics by trying to do too much too fast and thus never actually found a real purpose.)
Why can't this technology turn off the parts of the screen that are black (like text and fields) and dim the darker ones for programs that aren't using raster images?
Contrast. Unless you can modify the backlight at a per-pixel level, dimming a text area would actually decrease the readability.:-)
We agree completely about nuclear engines making human space transport more efficient.:)
=)
My point, however, is that most of the mass won't be human; it'll be inanimate scientific, base-related, or return-trip supplies, and thus be able to be transported by ion drives.
And I'm certainly not disagreeing with you. In fact, I'd say that Ion drives are such a successful technology at the moment, that they are almost considered a given for cargo hauling. The only place where I think they could use improvement is in deriving power from a nuclear power plant. (e.g. Prometheus) That would allow those engines to haul more mass at higher rates of acceleration. Potentially to the point where metric tons of mass could be cheaply shunted around the solar system!
OTOH, nothing quite beats the efficiency of the Interplanetary Superhighway, so you'll probably start seeing a combination of the two technologies.;-)
You already need a >Mach 15 airframe for craft reentry - look at the shuttle.
Not quite. The thermal load may be similar, but the overall stresses would differ considerably. The shuttle reenters in much thinner atmosphere, and has no thrust to warp its airframe. In addition, the shuttle doesn't actually fly. It drops like a refrigerator, but with enough horizontal velocity to provide for a decent touchdown (at over 200 mph!!!).
Scramjets have such great potential if the development hurdles can be overcome, it's a shame to see their development pushed back, with the scientists stating that it was due to the vision.
Indeed. It *should* have been developed in the 90's instead of sinking money into the X-33. The X-33 was a nice idea, but it had far too many "what if?" technologies in it.
About what? We seem to be saying the same thing.:-)
Bulk payload (which will comprise most of the mass) can (and likely will) be taken to Mars ahead of time via ion drives, which make even NERVA look inefficient.
Agreed. But that's not the point of Nuclear Engines. Nuclear Engines are for the craft that have to carry humans who don't have months or years to get to their destination.
Let's use a moonshot as an example. I did this cost estimate a little while ago to try to find how cost effective it would be to use the shuttle as a lunar vehicle. The problem was less the issue of getting the vehicle bulk into the air, and more of an issue of flying the refueling tanks. The shuttle had so much mass, that it needed a LOT more fuel. However, these figures are also useful for testing better engines. The current figures assume state of the art LHOx engines (similar to those used on the Saturn V). By changing the exhaust velocity to be consistent with nuclear engines, you will find that the number of Delta II flights drop drastically as the fuel requirements drop.
In other words, nuclear engines make human space transport cheaper by requiring less mass to be boosted into orbit.:-)
You gain a lot more by reducing surface to LEO costs, because all of your ion-propelled cargo benefits, plus your habicraft gets a lot more bang for its buck than it would by working on improving that 4.7 km/s.
Which is exactly what I'm saying. Only NASA is trying to reduce the cost of flying via the economies of staging and scale. (Weren't you the one arguing that more small boosters is cheaper than super-boosters?)
Furthermore, scramjets are not a very expensive new technology. It's hard to find an official estimate, but I ran into a French page which stated that the entire X-43 project was expected to run 230 million dollars.
The engine is not the issue. As you say, it's pretty darn simple. The issue is the Mach 15 airframe (no such thing yet exists!), the Jet Takeoff System, and the Orbital Approach Boosters. Not to mention the issue of packing these systems into a working and well tested craft. This is very expensive! Certainly far more expensive than the 230 million you quoted.
Even if scramjets aren't the be-all, end-all of surface to LEO tech, there are a lot of things that have the potential to make major improvements. First off, just building out of better alloys alone would be an incredibly nice shift if you're going for a reusable craft.:) There are lower maintenance engine designs, simplified types of TPS, simplified actuators (self-contained hydraulic and pure electric), and dozens of other things to come out in the past couple decades - and a number of things are on the horizon as well.
Agreed. But don't you think that these technologies will get far more funding once there is a market?;-)
The whole vision seems to have focused NASA on Big Projects(tm), at the expense of the smaller (and more useful, in my opinion) projects.
Yes and no. Most of the money is coming out of the Space Shuttle funds. Part of it is coming out of a 2 point something billion dollar increase in budget. The rest does impact other projects, but I believe that there was supposed to be money enough to fund most of the more important projects. I think a lot of the threats toward projects such as Voyager stem more from internal beaurocrats and less from what Congress did to their budget. (Which isn't to say that a lot of projects didn't get delayed, canned, or rethought.)
You mention the revival of NERVA as a sign that they're working to reduce costs.
Actually, I mentioned it as a sign of their willingness to use existing technology to meet their space exploration goals rather than building unknown and untested technologies.
Nuclear propulsion, however, is unlikely to ever be used to lift payloads from the surface to space (the most expensive task).
That's not the purpose of the nuclear engines. Such engines would be far more useful in making inexpensive and reusable orbit -> moon and orbit -> Mars craft. This allows the launch craft to be smaller, cheaper, and more compact. i.e. In the 60's they had more money than time, so they built skyscrapers that delivered a measly ton or two to the destination. Now we have more time than money, so we're appropriately staging everything and making craft less expensive and overall more reusable.
What you need are breakthroughs on surface to space technology.
No, you don't. At least not in the short term. In the long term we need space flight to be competitive with today's airline flights. But in the short term we only need something that can lift a couple of *humans* (say, 4-8) for 50-100 million per shot. A reusable capsule solution such as a scaled down Big Gemini would meet those goals far better than a very expensive new technology like Scramjets. Looks like the government has learned from the "all in one" Space Shuttle debacle. It's just too bad they hadn't listened to NASA the first time.:-)
Yes, it's a bad thing. You're talking about forcing an agency to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to ensure the employment of some of her constituents.
No, we're talking about a Senator outright telling an agency to get off their sorry behinds and deliver what ALL OF CONGRESS gave them money to do. Congress doesn't just budget money to budget money. They give money only for an explicit need that has been brought to their attention. If that money is not spent (and/or not spent as it was intended), then you can bet that congress is going to get hopping mad.
It's a bit like if the military proposed a billion dollar budget to congress to begin refurbishing a carrier with modern technology in order to provide for our defense. Congress agrees with the reasons and allocates the money. Then 10 months later, they find out that the military "decided not to that project" and instead decided to use the money to blow up and scuttle that carrier. I don't know about you, but Congress would certainly be mad as a hornet's nest about something like that.
Notice that all of this started happening after the "Mars Exploration Vision" was announced.
You're confused. There is no "Mars Exploration Vision". There isn't even a Mars plan beyond "that's what we do after we get to the moon". What there *was* was the "Orbital Space Plane" project. The OSP started as a shuttle replacement program, but was quickly killed when it was realized that a spaceplane wasn't the most useful, reliable, and reusable craft we could build with current technology.
As a result, Bush worked with NASA and redefined the OSP proposal into the Vision for Space Exploration plan. The VSE really wasn't anything new, it just took stock of where NASA has been screwing up for the past ten years, and aims to get them back on track with the plan that Reagan laid out so many years ago. Noticably absent from the plan is plans for massive spacestations and moonbases. Instead, everything has been scaled back, and made to fit into what's realistic for today's technology rather than planning for tommorrow's miracle technology.
Out of this plan comes the Crew Exploration Vehicle, a set of craft that will achieve humans to orbit, orbit to moon, and extended stays on the moon. The first craft will replace the space shuttle, while the other two craft will provide renewed access to the moon as well as testing for a Mars mission.
To develop these craft, NASA is (for the first time ever!) requiring a vehicle flyoff competition for choosing the craft to build. Entrants not only include Boeing and Lockheed, but any other space enterprise who wishes to compete. At one point, t/Space was formed from aerospace legends such as Burt Rutan to compete in the competition. Unfotunately, they recently dropped out of the race due to heavy paperwork requirements.:-/ (My guess is that they'll just work on their entry in private, then rejoin the competition at a later date.)
Beyond the moon craft, the VSE specifies Mars flyby and landing missions "at some point beyond 2020". No hard plans exist for the Mars mission, because it is felt that we don't have enough data yet. Not to mention that a lot will change in the next 15 years. However, NASA is starting to bootstrap some long forgotten projects such as Nuclear Engines. This is a sign that they are serious about the future, and know what it will take to actually accomplish their goals. For the first time ever, there will be no "magic technology" that will appear in the nick of time to complete their mission. NASA will design it simple, straightforward, and with existing tech.
It's worth remembering the Mikulski's motives aren't driven by pure science. Goddard and other Hubble-related facilities are in Maryland. This is a pork barrel and jobs issue for her.
And for those who argue that repairing Hubble now is no riskier than in the past, you're missing the point. Every Shuttle flight is risky and Hubble repair missions are even riskier because rendevousing with Hubble means no chance of taking reguge at the ISS and slim to zero chance of rescue by a second Shuttle.
The Shuttles were designed with hot-standby in mind. If the powers that be are THAT worried (which I'm not, we've done this several times before without incident) then get a second, unfueled shuttle on the pad. If something goes wrong, you have a day or two of turnaround. If everything goes fine, then the second shuttle will complete the next mission (probably IIS work). If possible, use the Endevour for servicing the Hubble. Not only is it newer and a bit sturdier, but it carries the extended mission, life support equipment just in case the astronauts have to cool their heels for a week or two while waiting for a rescue.
Loss of a Shuttle during a Hubble repair mission would have political repercussions that woujld likely kill the Shuttle program and, possibly, kill any further crewed spaceflight of any kind.
As sad as I am about it, the shuttle is dead. I see little chance that it will be flying for much longer. My only hope is that it hangs on long enough to push for the new launch technologies.
Space travel has always been dangerous, PERIOD. Astronauts have always known that everytime they strap themselves in, there's a reasonable chance that they won't be coming back. Apollo 1 made that point real clear, and the Challenger incident further punctuated the point. The only comfort the astronauts have is that we will do everything in our power to get them home if something goes wrong. (e.g. Apollo 13)
As I said, there's no shortage of volunteers who fully understand the risks they are taking. So fly the damn space shuttle for something USEFUL, and keep our bird in the air.
Good for Senator Mikulski! As far as I'm concerned, NASA has been putzing around on this issue for no reason WHAT-SO-EVER. The shuttles are no more dangerous now then they were for the earlier two decades they've been in service. If people were allowed to do their jobs, then NASA would have known about the shuttle damage *before* Columbia's reentry.
These mumblings about robotic repair sound like a whiny way of getting out of doing the job. If you'll pardon my French, "Just launch the damn space shuttle and fix the bloody thing!" It's not that hard, and I'm sure there's no shortage of qualified volunteers. Do I hear an Amen?!?
There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
Rediculous. There's plenty of oxygen, and plenty of hydrogen. Just add electricity to mine these core elements and you can create water. Radiation is less of an issue on any surface, and the natural bedrock can be used to form a base with a built-in radiation shield.
All we really need to survive in space is nuclear power, good nitrogen mines (Nitrogen is the one key element to life that's hard to find in the solar system), and a bit of human ingenuity.:-)
Maybe down in Dane County folks are into the internet
Northern edge of Sauk County here. We've got DSL and Cable. That's not to say that most people don't still use dial-up (hard to convince them of the advantages of broadband), but they do "get" the whole Internet thing and do use it regularly. Not to mention that most public libraries provide free computer access to a T1 line.
A few years ago I overheard a dad telling his teenage kid to look up a car's VIN on the Internet before he purchased it. (He wanted to make sure the vehicle hadn't been in any accidents.) Considering that was before I had broadband at home, I realized that the world was-a-changing.:-)
I'm surprised that you're the only one in town with broadband. Still, broadband *is* available and people do use the Internet. It's a little weird the way that people integrate it into their lives yet remain technological savants, but you get used to it.:-)
Before we drop tens or hundreds of billions of dollars developing the technology to send men to Mars for (optimistically) a few weeks to explore a tiny area around their landing site, I think we should spend a few ones of billions of lots of probes that we can drop all over the heavenly bodies to spend months finding the more promising candidates.
If I understand you right, that's more or less NASA's Mars plan. i.e. Ship a satellite and equipment infrastructure to Mars using unmanned craft so that the Mars explorers will have an existing infrastructure to rely on.
The scientific instrumentation and experiments are pre-determined here on Earth. Sure, men can fix things that just stay broken on a machine probe, but it's not like men take up a machine shop to fabricate a spectral mumbleizer in transit because they realize that mumbleizing would be good to do.
That's exactly what they should do. Small machine shops are relatively light and inexpensive these days. I see no reason why explorers shouldn't bring one with them when their very lives and return trip may depend on their ability to fabricate a part replacement.
My understanding was that researchers licensed Hubble time. If that's incorrect, then NASA ought to be shot. The scope is extremely expensive to keep in working order. Any *normal* business (including non-profit) would simply charge back the time to the users.
It would cost less money to build a working fusion reactor than it would take to send a 6-man team to mars for 6 months.
Since when was making physics work a matter of money? There has never been a Fusion plant that produces more power than it uses. Not a single watt, not a single Joule. While scientists have ideas on getting around this, Fusion is perpetually "20 years away". I don't see that changing until we're already in space. Why? Because then you can build fusion plants that don't need so much destructable shielding.
Here is the basic idea a fusion reactor produces 1,000,000X the energy per unit mass than a chemical rocket does
Err... right. One million times, you say? Assuming you're correct (which you're not), you still need to translate that into work. Most nuclear rockets are 2-10x more powerful than their chemical counterparts, not some mythical "one million times". Oh, and I did I mention that the 10x rocket uses fusion? Fusion BOMBS that is.
It's also vary vary safe to build and transport so you build one ship in orbit using one of these and you can basically get to turn on the ION drive and leave it that way for years thus getting 100's or thousands of to mars from orbit cheaply.
After all why build a ship that can go there once when you can build one that can make the trip twice a year every year for 20 years.
I agree. That's why nuclear, interplantary starships are the right idea. Of course, to build those we need funding. So far, only the going and down part has been funded. And very wasteful methods have been funded, at that.
Yes I wan to get off this rock but we need to be really to do that by first building cheep craft to get to orbit
Agreed. Got any ideas? I've got a few. The simplest is to build a scaled down Big Gemini, and pop it on top of an inexpensive rocket. At 50 mil per launch, it would be far more cost effective than the Shuttle. If we have a reason to send people up constantly, then economies of scale could conceivably lower that to ~10 mil per launch.
That's one idea that could be investigated, but hasn't been. The dirty little secret is that the space program was wound down after Apollo, and hasn't been truely focused since then.
and then build ships than can move us around the solar system cheaply.
Indeed. NERVA and Orion are well understood concepts in starship propulsion. Early craft could use these engines while experiments and research is done on more exotic methods such as Nuclear Salt Water and Daedalus drives.
Until that point going to mars is little more than a publicity stunt that teaches us little and is so costly we will not repeat it for 50 years.
Well, we could use the first reusable ship to go to Mars. After all, we DO have to build a ship. Why would we bother making it disposable? After all, this isn't a moon shot from the bottom of the gravity well.
I would say the average Wisconsite is far more "Libertarian" than Republican
Ok, here's where you're getting confused. I used the terms "liberal" and "conservative". I did not use the terms "Democrat" and "Republican". The former is a general stance on life, while the other is a party association. In many areas the two categories line up, but not in Wisconsin. As a result you're arguing over a moot point. The average Wisconsinite is fairly conservative, while those in Dane county tend to be very liberal. Period, end of story.
And for what it's worth, I lived most my life around the Dells area. In that time, I was able to visit as far north as Superior (doesn't get much farther than that), as far west as the Mississippi, and as far East as Green Bay and Steven's Point. So yes, I'm well aware of the farmers. Hell, I WORKED for a livestock genetics company for two years!
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> I don't understand why EA works their employees to death.
It's called "false economy". EA believes that they'll get more work out of employees for less money by making them put in a rediculous number of hours. The problem is that EA fails to take note of how that impacts inidividual performance, team relationships, and overall morale. Not to mention the amount of experience they lose everytime they pitch out a burned-out programmer.
Unfortunately, false economy is a fairly common issue in businesses these days. Too many managers think in a linear fashion (more of this == $$$), and fail to take the hidden costs into account. That's why we have hundreds of junior programmers employed in places where there should only be a handful of midlevel to senior developers, windows machines in high reliability situations, and gamer programers working rediculous hours.
Before anyone runs off half-cocked, this article is NOT about the poor employee treatment at development houses such as EA. This article is about one man (Can make a difference? Whoops, wrong show.) stating that Indie developers can carve a market, and that we don't really need the big boys to make good games. He agrees to the fact that most "Hollywood" style games do need big development houses, but he also points out that the Indie can create games with far more depth and interesting gameplay.
His end point is that we should be creating games for the love of creating games. And while he doesn't say it in so many words, that's what gave us such classics as Commander Keen, Duke Nukem', Wing Commander, Ultima, Wolf3D, and Doom. That vision has been lost, and now game creating is all about making money. Why create games when the same money could be better spent on creating a blockbuster movie or a market investment? i.e. Games != money. Have to agree with him there.
So? Real programmer don't need direct acceess to pointers.
nothing above 1D arrays
You keep repeating this, but I don't think you know what it means. Java supports 1-nth dimension arrays. However, its method for creating arrays is different from C. Instead of having int[10][5] map into an int[50] space, each level of the array is merely a container for a child array. i.e. int[10][5] is equivalent to:If you really need a true 1D array, then it probably won't kill you to compute (y*width+x).
also allows no freedom for the programmer
Funny, freedom is the reason I switched from C/C++ to Java. While the lack of pointers was mildly annoying, I figured out pretty quickly that Object References work just fine as a replacement. For example, you can construct a BSP tree using node classes that have left and right class references instead of pointers to structures.
then again if you are good at C++ then you dont have memory problems associated with pointers for example and you can take advantage of C++'s power.
Free your mind, and the rest will follow. For example, your attitude might improve. (ducks)
does it support the opengl shading language like vertex and pixel shaders
Yes, the latest Java OpenGL libraries do.
i see it supports extensions for opengl 1.5 but to what extent?
Complete support. Including the extensions for NVidia, ATI, GLX, Windows, and Macs.
what about CG for Nvidia or Render Monkey code for ATI?
Yes on CG and OpenGL Shading Language, no on the RenderMonkey. At least, that is, I haven't heard that anyone has added support for it. Does anyone actually USE RenderMonkey? NVidia's having a hard enough time promoting CG with the OpenGL Shading Language out, without ATI pushing its cheap knockoff.
You can always ask the JOGL and LWJGL projects for RenderMonkey support if you simply can't live without it.
what about pointers that you need for A* pathfinding and artificial intelligence?
This makes no sense. AI and A* have both been successfully implemented in Java. I just wrote an A* implementation a month or two ago. Not sure what that has to do with OpenGL.
you cant be serious in considering that Java is a reputable alternative to writing robust recent good quality 3D openGL apps can you?
It's still a pretty immature market, but Wurm Online, Chrome, Xpand Rally, MegaCorps Online, Hockey Challenge and others would take issue with your statement.
But don't take my word for it. See for yourself.
I call bullshit. Tell us, oh grand master, what OpenGL API are you using? GL4Java maybe? (Actually, that could very well be your problem. You do know that GL4Java is several years out of date and has been deprecated, don't you?)
Java3D is also deprecated, but that was never intended as a gaming API in the first place.
I realize the shuttle technically qualifies as a do-it-all craft, but it was badly planned and horridly underfunded in that role. ...
We need ships that have large crews and contain enough tools and resources to stay self-contained for periods of time.
FWIW, there's a big difference between the Space Shuttle and a starship. Real ships of the sea have had fabrication abilities going back to the carpenters who could practically rebuild a ship out at sea. That tradition lives on with modern machine shops that can cut, mold, weld, and lathe anything you could possibly need. But these facilities are only on actual ships at sea. Landing craft would never be so wasteful as to carry the same capacities as their larger brethern. Their only purpose is to get from the shore to the boat and visca-versa.
The problem with the Space Shuttle is that it never had a true ship of space to take anyone to. So instead it tried to be both the landing craft and the mother ship itself. Except that it really couldn't go anywhere because it was just pretending.
(Disclaimer: The engineers who built the shuttle did an amazing job. It is truely a marvel of engineering. However, it defies economics by trying to do too much too fast and thus never actually found a real purpose.)
Hold on here, whats the problem with maximizing all your windows?
:-)
Nothing. Except that it keeps the entire screen in use, thus defeating this new wonder technology. That's all.
Why can't this technology turn off the parts of the screen that are black (like text and fields) and dim the darker ones for programs that aren't using raster images?
:-)
Contrast. Unless you can modify the backlight at a per-pixel level, dimming a text area would actually decrease the readability.
Watch a typical Windows user sometime. What's the first thing they do to whatever application they open?
:-/
If you said "Maximize it!", then you're right! Sadly, this ends up being self-defeating.
We agree completely about nuclear engines making human space transport more efficient. :)
;-)
=)
My point, however, is that most of the mass won't be human; it'll be inanimate scientific, base-related, or return-trip supplies, and thus be able to be transported by ion drives.
And I'm certainly not disagreeing with you. In fact, I'd say that Ion drives are such a successful technology at the moment, that they are almost considered a given for cargo hauling. The only place where I think they could use improvement is in deriving power from a nuclear power plant. (e.g. Prometheus) That would allow those engines to haul more mass at higher rates of acceleration. Potentially to the point where metric tons of mass could be cheaply shunted around the solar system!
OTOH, nothing quite beats the efficiency of the Interplanetary Superhighway, so you'll probably start seeing a combination of the two technologies.
You already need a >Mach 15 airframe for craft reentry - look at the shuttle.
Not quite. The thermal load may be similar, but the overall stresses would differ considerably. The shuttle reenters in much thinner atmosphere, and has no thrust to warp its airframe. In addition, the shuttle doesn't actually fly. It drops like a refrigerator, but with enough horizontal velocity to provide for a decent touchdown (at over 200 mph!!!).
Scramjets have such great potential if the development hurdles can be overcome, it's a shame to see their development pushed back, with the scientists stating that it was due to the vision.
Indeed. It *should* have been developed in the 90's instead of sinking money into the X-33. The X-33 was a nice idea, but it had far too many "what if?" technologies in it.
I disagree
:-)
:-)
:) There are lower maintenance engine designs, simplified types of TPS, simplified actuators (self-contained hydraulic and pure electric), and dozens of other things to come out in the past couple decades - and a number of things are on the horizon as well.
;-)
About what? We seem to be saying the same thing.
Bulk payload (which will comprise most of the mass) can (and likely will) be taken to Mars ahead of time via ion drives, which make even NERVA look inefficient.
Agreed. But that's not the point of Nuclear Engines. Nuclear Engines are for the craft that have to carry humans who don't have months or years to get to their destination.
Let's use a moonshot as an example. I did this cost estimate a little while ago to try to find how cost effective it would be to use the shuttle as a lunar vehicle. The problem was less the issue of getting the vehicle bulk into the air, and more of an issue of flying the refueling tanks. The shuttle had so much mass, that it needed a LOT more fuel. However, these figures are also useful for testing better engines. The current figures assume state of the art LHOx engines (similar to those used on the Saturn V). By changing the exhaust velocity to be consistent with nuclear engines, you will find that the number of Delta II flights drop drastically as the fuel requirements drop.
In other words, nuclear engines make human space transport cheaper by requiring less mass to be boosted into orbit.
You gain a lot more by reducing surface to LEO costs, because all of your ion-propelled cargo benefits, plus your habicraft gets a lot more bang for its buck than it would by working on improving that 4.7 km/s.
Which is exactly what I'm saying. Only NASA is trying to reduce the cost of flying via the economies of staging and scale. (Weren't you the one arguing that more small boosters is cheaper than super-boosters?)
Furthermore, scramjets are not a very expensive new technology. It's hard to find an official estimate, but I ran into a French page which stated that the entire X-43 project was expected to run 230 million dollars.
The engine is not the issue. As you say, it's pretty darn simple. The issue is the Mach 15 airframe (no such thing yet exists!), the Jet Takeoff System, and the Orbital Approach Boosters. Not to mention the issue of packing these systems into a working and well tested craft. This is very expensive! Certainly far more expensive than the 230 million you quoted.
Even if scramjets aren't the be-all, end-all of surface to LEO tech, there are a lot of things that have the potential to make major improvements. First off, just building out of better alloys alone would be an incredibly nice shift if you're going for a reusable craft.
Agreed. But don't you think that these technologies will get far more funding once there is a market?
Thanks for correcting the vision name :)
:-)
:-)
No problem.
The whole vision seems to have focused NASA on Big Projects(tm), at the expense of the smaller (and more useful, in my opinion) projects.
Yes and no. Most of the money is coming out of the Space Shuttle funds. Part of it is coming out of a 2 point something billion dollar increase in budget. The rest does impact other projects, but I believe that there was supposed to be money enough to fund most of the more important projects. I think a lot of the threats toward projects such as Voyager stem more from internal beaurocrats and less from what Congress did to their budget. (Which isn't to say that a lot of projects didn't get delayed, canned, or rethought.)
You mention the revival of NERVA as a sign that they're working to reduce costs.
Actually, I mentioned it as a sign of their willingness to use existing technology to meet their space exploration goals rather than building unknown and untested technologies.
Nuclear propulsion, however, is unlikely to ever be used to lift payloads from the surface to space (the most expensive task).
That's not the purpose of the nuclear engines. Such engines would be far more useful in making inexpensive and reusable orbit -> moon and orbit -> Mars craft. This allows the launch craft to be smaller, cheaper, and more compact. i.e. In the 60's they had more money than time, so they built skyscrapers that delivered a measly ton or two to the destination. Now we have more time than money, so we're appropriately staging everything and making craft less expensive and overall more reusable.
What you need are breakthroughs on surface to space technology.
No, you don't. At least not in the short term. In the long term we need space flight to be competitive with today's airline flights. But in the short term we only need something that can lift a couple of *humans* (say, 4-8) for 50-100 million per shot. A reusable capsule solution such as a scaled down Big Gemini would meet those goals far better than a very expensive new technology like Scramjets. Looks like the government has learned from the "all in one" Space Shuttle debacle. It's just too bad they hadn't listened to NASA the first time.
Yes, it's a bad thing. You're talking about forcing an agency to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to ensure the employment of some of her constituents.
No, we're talking about a Senator outright telling an agency to get off their sorry behinds and deliver what ALL OF CONGRESS gave them money to do. Congress doesn't just budget money to budget money. They give money only for an explicit need that has been brought to their attention. If that money is not spent (and/or not spent as it was intended), then you can bet that congress is going to get hopping mad.
It's a bit like if the military proposed a billion dollar budget to congress to begin refurbishing a carrier with modern technology in order to provide for our defense. Congress agrees with the reasons and allocates the money. Then 10 months later, they find out that the military "decided not to that project" and instead decided to use the money to blow up and scuttle that carrier. I don't know about you, but Congress would certainly be mad as a hornet's nest about something like that.
Notice that all of this started happening after the "Mars Exploration Vision" was announced.
:-/ (My guess is that they'll just work on their entry in private, then rejoin the competition at a later date.)
:-)
You're confused. There is no "Mars Exploration Vision". There isn't even a Mars plan beyond "that's what we do after we get to the moon". What there *was* was the "Orbital Space Plane" project. The OSP started as a shuttle replacement program, but was quickly killed when it was realized that a spaceplane wasn't the most useful, reliable, and reusable craft we could build with current technology.
As a result, Bush worked with NASA and redefined the OSP proposal into the Vision for Space Exploration plan. The VSE really wasn't anything new, it just took stock of where NASA has been screwing up for the past ten years, and aims to get them back on track with the plan that Reagan laid out so many years ago. Noticably absent from the plan is plans for massive spacestations and moonbases. Instead, everything has been scaled back, and made to fit into what's realistic for today's technology rather than planning for tommorrow's miracle technology.
Out of this plan comes the Crew Exploration Vehicle, a set of craft that will achieve humans to orbit, orbit to moon, and extended stays on the moon. The first craft will replace the space shuttle, while the other two craft will provide renewed access to the moon as well as testing for a Mars mission.
To develop these craft, NASA is (for the first time ever!) requiring a vehicle flyoff competition for choosing the craft to build. Entrants not only include Boeing and Lockheed, but any other space enterprise who wishes to compete. At one point, t/Space was formed from aerospace legends such as Burt Rutan to compete in the competition. Unfotunately, they recently dropped out of the race due to heavy paperwork requirements.
Beyond the moon craft, the VSE specifies Mars flyby and landing missions "at some point beyond 2020". No hard plans exist for the Mars mission, because it is felt that we don't have enough data yet. Not to mention that a lot will change in the next 15 years. However, NASA is starting to bootstrap some long forgotten projects such as Nuclear Engines. This is a sign that they are serious about the future, and know what it will take to actually accomplish their goals. For the first time ever, there will be no "magic technology" that will appear in the nick of time to complete their mission. NASA will design it simple, straightforward, and with existing tech.
Feel better now?
It's worth remembering the Mikulski's motives aren't driven by pure science. Goddard and other Hubble-related facilities are in Maryland. This is a pork barrel and jobs issue for her.
Another poster addressed that point here.
And for those who argue that repairing Hubble now is no riskier than in the past, you're missing the point. Every Shuttle flight is risky and Hubble repair missions are even riskier because rendevousing with Hubble means no chance of taking reguge at the ISS and slim to zero chance of rescue by a second Shuttle.
The Shuttles were designed with hot-standby in mind. If the powers that be are THAT worried (which I'm not, we've done this several times before without incident) then get a second, unfueled shuttle on the pad. If something goes wrong, you have a day or two of turnaround. If everything goes fine, then the second shuttle will complete the next mission (probably IIS work). If possible, use the Endevour for servicing the Hubble. Not only is it newer and a bit sturdier, but it carries the extended mission, life support equipment just in case the astronauts have to cool their heels for a week or two while waiting for a rescue.
Loss of a Shuttle during a Hubble repair mission would have political repercussions that woujld likely kill the Shuttle program and, possibly, kill any further crewed spaceflight of any kind.
As sad as I am about it, the shuttle is dead. I see little chance that it will be flying for much longer. My only hope is that it hangs on long enough to push for the new launch technologies.
Space travel has always been dangerous, PERIOD. Astronauts have always known that everytime they strap themselves in, there's a reasonable chance that they won't be coming back. Apollo 1 made that point real clear, and the Challenger incident further punctuated the point. The only comfort the astronauts have is that we will do everything in our power to get them home if something goes wrong. (e.g. Apollo 13)
As I said, there's no shortage of volunteers who fully understand the risks they are taking. So fly the damn space shuttle for something USEFUL, and keep our bird in the air.
You can't take the sky from me...
Good for Senator Mikulski! As far as I'm concerned, NASA has been putzing around on this issue for no reason WHAT-SO-EVER. The shuttles are no more dangerous now then they were for the earlier two decades they've been in service. If people were allowed to do their jobs, then NASA would have known about the shuttle damage *before* Columbia's reentry.
These mumblings about robotic repair sound like a whiny way of getting out of doing the job. If you'll pardon my French, "Just launch the damn space shuttle and fix the bloody thing!" It's not that hard, and I'm sure there's no shortage of qualified volunteers. Do I hear an Amen?!?
Seems like not all that long ago Madison was considered by many to be the Number 1 city to live in.
Tommy, please come back!
There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
:-)
Rediculous. There's plenty of oxygen, and plenty of hydrogen. Just add electricity to mine these core elements and you can create water. Radiation is less of an issue on any surface, and the natural bedrock can be used to form a base with a built-in radiation shield.
All we really need to survive in space is nuclear power, good nitrogen mines (Nitrogen is the one key element to life that's hard to find in the solar system), and a bit of human ingenuity.
Maybe down in Dane County folks are into the internet
:-)
:-)
Northern edge of Sauk County here. We've got DSL and Cable. That's not to say that most people don't still use dial-up (hard to convince them of the advantages of broadband), but they do "get" the whole Internet thing and do use it regularly. Not to mention that most public libraries provide free computer access to a T1 line.
A few years ago I overheard a dad telling his teenage kid to look up a car's VIN on the Internet before he purchased it. (He wanted to make sure the vehicle hadn't been in any accidents.) Considering that was before I had broadband at home, I realized that the world was-a-changing.
I'm surprised that you're the only one in town with broadband. Still, broadband *is* available and people do use the Internet. It's a little weird the way that people integrate it into their lives yet remain technological savants, but you get used to it.
Before we drop tens or hundreds of billions of dollars developing the technology to send men to Mars for (optimistically) a few weeks to explore a tiny area around their landing site, I think we should spend a few ones of billions of lots of probes that we can drop all over the heavenly bodies to spend months finding the more promising candidates.
If I understand you right, that's more or less NASA's Mars plan. i.e. Ship a satellite and equipment infrastructure to Mars using unmanned craft so that the Mars explorers will have an existing infrastructure to rely on.
The scientific instrumentation and experiments are pre-determined here on Earth. Sure, men can fix things that just stay broken on a machine probe, but it's not like men take up a machine shop to fabricate a spectral mumbleizer in transit because they realize that mumbleizing would be good to do.
That's exactly what they should do. Small machine shops are relatively light and inexpensive these days. I see no reason why explorers shouldn't bring one with them when their very lives and return trip may depend on their ability to fabricate a part replacement.
My understanding was that researchers licensed Hubble time. If that's incorrect, then NASA ought to be shot. The scope is extremely expensive to keep in working order. Any *normal* business (including non-profit) would simply charge back the time to the users.
Makes you wonder what NASA is thinking with...
It would cost less money to build a working fusion reactor than it would take to send a 6-man team to mars for 6 months.
Since when was making physics work a matter of money? There has never been a Fusion plant that produces more power than it uses. Not a single watt, not a single Joule. While scientists have ideas on getting around this, Fusion is perpetually "20 years away". I don't see that changing until we're already in space. Why? Because then you can build fusion plants that don't need so much destructable shielding.
Here is the basic idea a fusion reactor produces 1,000,000X the energy per unit mass than a chemical rocket does
Err... right. One million times, you say? Assuming you're correct (which you're not), you still need to translate that into work. Most nuclear rockets are 2-10x more powerful than their chemical counterparts, not some mythical "one million times". Oh, and I did I mention that the 10x rocket uses fusion? Fusion BOMBS that is.
It's also vary vary safe to build and transport so you build one ship in orbit using one of these and you can basically get to turn on the ION drive and leave it that way for years thus getting 100's or thousands of to mars from orbit cheaply.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Someone PLEASE stop the torture.
After all why build a ship that can go there once when you can build one that can make the trip twice a year every year for 20 years.
I agree. That's why nuclear, interplantary starships are the right idea. Of course, to build those we need funding. So far, only the going and down part has been funded. And very wasteful methods have been funded, at that.
Yes I wan to get off this rock but we need to be really to do that by first building cheep craft to get to orbit
Agreed. Got any ideas? I've got a few. The simplest is to build a scaled down Big Gemini, and pop it on top of an inexpensive rocket. At 50 mil per launch, it would be far more cost effective than the Shuttle. If we have a reason to send people up constantly, then economies of scale could conceivably lower that to ~10 mil per launch.
That's one idea that could be investigated, but hasn't been. The dirty little secret is that the space program was wound down after Apollo, and hasn't been truely focused since then.
and then build ships than can move us around the solar system cheaply.
Indeed. NERVA and Orion are well understood concepts in starship propulsion. Early craft could use these engines while experiments and research is done on more exotic methods such as Nuclear Salt Water and Daedalus drives.
Until that point going to mars is little more than a publicity stunt that teaches us little and is so costly we will not repeat it for 50 years.
Well, we could use the first reusable ship to go to Mars. After all, we DO have to build a ship. Why would we bother making it disposable? After all, this isn't a moon shot from the bottom of the gravity well.
I would say the average Wisconsite is far more "Libertarian" than Republican
Ok, here's where you're getting confused. I used the terms "liberal" and "conservative". I did not use the terms "Democrat" and "Republican". The former is a general stance on life, while the other is a party association. In many areas the two categories line up, but not in Wisconsin. As a result you're arguing over a moot point. The average Wisconsinite is fairly conservative, while those in Dane county tend to be very liberal. Period, end of story.
And for what it's worth, I lived most my life around the Dells area. In that time, I was able to visit as far north as Superior (doesn't get much farther than that), as far west as the Mississippi, and as far East as Green Bay and Steven's Point. So yes, I'm well aware of the farmers. Hell, I WORKED for a livestock genetics company for two years!
Underfunding NASA is a pretty clear message, for example.
Which, I repeat, is what Congress does. The President has almost no control over funding!
Unless, that is, your point is that Congress sent O'Keefe a message, and he caved.