And so should your house computer. This upgrade path of every three years is silly, and is only perpetrated by the constant changes in PC hardware. Unix hardware and mainframes easily live on for a decade, sometimes longer.
The way a Shuttle launches is an unavoidable result of the return method. They can't be separated.
Umm... no. Take the Dynasoar for example. It was simply a winged craft mounted on a traditional rocket. There was no need for a massive fuel take weaving through the ship. Nor was there a need for solid rocket boosters. In fact, the Dynasoar would have given us all the return advantages of the shuttle with less complexity and fewer points of failure.
The reason why the shuttle is so complex, is that it carries cargo on the same craft that carries humans. If we used cargo rockets for cargo, we could boost more up because we don't need to get it back down. If we used a craft focused on getting humans up and down, we'd be able to strap them to smaller and cheaper vehicles. Hell, ONE of the shuttle's SRBs should do the trick!
Do you see where I'm going with this? The shuttle tried to be all things to all people. What we need are multiple vehicles designed for focused purposes.
I hate seeing that argument. Translated: "My sponsors are irrational. Therefore I've got to do stupid, wasteful things to keep the money coming"
Welcome to the way government and big business spending works.
The reason private industry isn't in space is that there's no money in it. Until that changes, we'll do nothing but probes - and no one ever comes up with an idea for making it profitable.
Actually, it's not that there's no money in space. It's that there's a chicken and egg issue. Why would anyone invest in space before there's an economic incentive? But who's going to create an economic incentive if there's no money in it?
That's where NASA comes in. NASA should be using large (and comparatively cheap) boosters to send hundreds of metrics tons of space station and workshop equipment into orbit. Once they have the ability to build many things in space (and launch from a decent orbit *grumble*), then the possibility of mining becomes a reality. I don't know of a single investor who wouldn't jump at the chance of bringing back precious metals at a high profit margin.
No, you don't need the level of industry we have here on Earth. (At least not initially.) More than enough can be done with standard workshop equipment. Drills, laser cutters, PCB printers, plastic molding, etc. all exist in fairly small machines. The tradeoff is that your production wouldn't be very high until better factories are built.
Now imagine this. On Earth, 3D printing is a very difficult and expensive process. Gravity ensures that stability is a key problem during the printing process. But what if we were to 3D print in freefall? With no forces acting upon the object, many more materials and shapes could be printed. Imagine if robots could be used to "print" an entire space ship! You just can't do that on Earth.
Two words. Breeder reactor.
Two words: Doesn't matter. A breeder reactor increases the amount of energy you get out of a given amount of materials. It does not, however, magically create materials out of non-nuclear fuels. It really amounts to further enriching existing fuels. Yes, it will extend the time. No, it will not extend it indefinitely.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. Even if we could magically tap huge amounts of solar power, where do you put the antimatter once you've created it? And once you have it, so what?
There's no "magic" to tapping the sun. You need heat on one side, and cooling on the other. That's how thermal generators work. My original plan was to put a station at about 0.1 au. Speaking with engineers about the issue, they explained that using mylar mirrors would provide you with the same amount of thermal energy at a much greater distance. There's an interesting discussion on this here.
BTW, you may find this, this, and this very interesting. Yes, that's right. NASA plans to launch an antimatter powered space craft!
Thank you for responding. I think the important thing to understand is that space doesn't have to be as dangerous as it is today. When the Dyson and Taylor said "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970", they weren't kidding. We have the technology for space craft that are simpler, safer, and more powerful. The problem comes in at cost. The Saturn V program was built around the idea that we must beat the USSR at any cost. That cost was tremendous. Billions of dollars to send men to the moon! And the hardware recovery was nil. The only way the Saturn V did it, was by shedding very large and expensive pieces of hardware at every step of the process.
After the moon race, Nixon's solution was to kill every "heavy lifter" and focus on "cheap and reusable" craft. The only problem is that he also wanted a fully reusable heavy lifter that was rated for both men and cargo. That's just silly. You can make the cost of sending materials into orbit cheap. Alternatively, you can make the cost of sending humans into space and back cheap. We don't yet have the technology to do both at the same time. So the Shuttle was overly ambitious by trying to be all things to all people. An amazing piece of engineering, but all without a purpose in the end.
As a result, the shuttle has cost tremendous amounts of money for the purpose of sending up and down 104 metric tons. It's also been used to send up wonderful things like the Hubble Telescope, but the shuttle need not be the one to carry that cargo.
We could have spent that same money (probably less) on developing a two pronged approach. Develop a Dynasoar type craft, and launch it with existing Deltas or Titans. That takes care of humans to LEO. Then develop one of the heavy lifter solutions such as Sea Dragon, or purchase the Energia from the Russians. Now you have an unmanned heavy lifter. For about the cost of a few shuttle flights, you could send the entire space station up, then send a construction crew up to build it.
If we can launch that much tonnage, it also means that we can assemble nuclear spacecraft and probes in space. Assembling probes in space, obviously brings down their cost as there's no need to allocate a 30 million dollar, ground launched rocket for a $100,000 probe. Use nuclear space craft (Orion, NERVA, NSWR, etc.) to reach nearby asteroids for mining, and you can further reduce the amount of materials needed from earth Once you're mining, you can actually start returning valuable ores at a profit!
From there, building a sun powered generators would solve the worlds power problems. Period. (Well, at least for a few billion years, anyway.) The development that comes out of improving those generators could one day allow us to create the technology necessary to create sufficient quantities of antimatter. With enough antimatter, we can send a probe to Alpha Centauri at a constant 1G of acceleration. Total travel time? 5 years. The best travel time with current technologies is 100 years.
These things can't exist without manned space flight.
What raw materials are we going to run out of in less than a century: oil, natural gas, and coal maybe (it's debateable but that isn't my point).
You forgot Uranium-235. It's been testified before congress that a complete switch over to nuclear power would use up our nuclear fuel within a century. Personally, I don't believe it because there are actually a lot more nuclear fuels than just Uranium. Yet I do realize that we will run out in a few hundred years. With our demand for energy increasing, it's quite likely that a century or two could be realistic.
What we need is a power surplus. The Sun can provide that.
And, FYI, I haven't seen a big ball of bright flame in some time; feel free to look up the definition of the word flame
From the dictionary definition of flame, "Something resembling a flame in motion, brilliance, intensity, or shape." I'd say that the solar activi
Well, we've got large Uranium deposits in space, for one. For another, you've got the Sun. Use mirrors to focus the energy at a multi-gigawatt, closed cycle generator, and you've got a few billion years of all the energy you need. Carbon fuels are dirty, dangerous, and limited. The sooner we can break our reliance on them, the better.
Not as cheap as China. Chinese launch costs are 1/3 to 1/2 of US launch costs, and slightly cheaper than Russian launch costs.
False economy. If it's not what we need, why spend the money on it? And the only reason it's cheaper is the same reason that a China made DVD player is cheaper: exchange rate. If China develops the technology we need, they'll also have a stronger currency.
You know, they attempted to build a scaled down version of Sea Dragon, called SEALAR. It was a complete failure. It turns out that when you try and build a rocket like you build a ship, it doesn't work well.
Sea Dragon, Excalibur, and SEALAR all attempted the same goal. I have never heard that any of them were "a complete failure". They simply didn't get much funding because the US didn't want heavy lift vehicles. Without the heavy lift abilities, the concept is pointless. The very core of Sea Dragon, was that the cost of the rocket is not dependent on how large it is. Thus the idea is to build a Really Big Rocket(TM) that could take advantage of those economics.
But what could we do with 500 metric tons to orbit? It's an extreme overkill for manned flight. So it wasn't funded. Fast forward to the twenty first century, and we find that dozens of shuttle flights have been made to put up a space station that weighs 1/3 the cargo capacity of the Dragon.
Energia's launch costs weren't even theoretically that cheap compared to what's out there.
Bullocks. More mass in one launch means that it's cheaper getting tonnage to space. Energia Inc. also had plans on the board for a reusable version of the rocket. (more info) The Energia Zenit boosters still live on as the Boeing Sea Launch system. Seems they were pretty well designed.:-)
The market for heavy lifters has been steadily on the decline; that's why the ESA cancelled plans to increase Ariane's payload.
The moment we consider doing anything more than sending a person into orbit is the moment that the need for heavy boosters increases. As I mentioned about the space station, we could have sent it up in ONE launch if we had a heavy lifter. But the heavy lifter abilities were killed with the Saturn V, only to be revived as a weird space dump truck configuration (i.e. the space shuttle). The Shuttle has amazing booster technology capable of putting massive amounts of tonnage into space. Most of which it wastes on putting itself into space. Is this making any sense to anyone else?
Meanwhile, China's rocket payloads are on the increase.
The largest payload I've heard is 5 metric tons. In comparison the space shuttle can lift ~29 metric tons of cargo, plus another 104 metric tons for its own orbiter weight. This gives a grand total of 133 metric tons to orbit. China is nowhere close.
the space shuttle is 100% useless for anything but Low orbital object insertion and a little bit of work. it is 100% useless to space exploration.
It's not 100% useless, but I do agree that it's not a tremendously useful craft. But how will we build a new craft if congress completely cuts the funding for the manned space program? It WILL happen if the orbiters are damaged or destroyed.
Let me put it this way: China has nothing we need for a space program. We still have the rockets for the Gemini program. We could still build tiny capsules. We could even revive the Dynasoar. Pretty much all of them would be cheap, but they'd be pretty useless.
Our problem is building craft that are *useful* in space. We need to split the heavy lifter and manned craft into two. The Energia Vulkan or Sea Dragon would both be excellent choices for cargo craft. Using these craft, we could quickly put inexpensive stations and shipyards in space. With those yards, we could build nuclear spacecraft. With nuclear spacecraft, we can reach asteroids for mining. From what we mine, we can build more spacecraft and probes.
Do you follow my logic? China doesn't have heavy lifters. They put a man into space. Whoop-de-do. I could buy a Delta or Titan and accomplish the same thing. But that's a step backward instead of forward. Humans are a small portion of the equation. It's really about the raw tonnage.
My gut tells me you are a troll but none the less...
Your gut is wrong.
Actually unmanned probes will continue to become more capable and cheaper as time goes on. They don't need bulky and expensive life-support systems and can go into very hostile environments.
I wasn't talking about manned probes. I was talking about an infrastructure to make unmanned probes cheaper. You can't build an energy collection station in space without a human there to mine the materials and build it. And you can't collect the energy for an AC probe without that energy.
The key to the problem is antimatter. We're nowhere near close to being able to produce enough for an interstellar mission, but the Sun provides enough energy to make it possible.
Run out of raw materials in less than a century? HUH? Were do you live, an asteroid?
Earth. It takes energy to create the things we use. That energy comes from oil, coal, and uranium. It takes energy to obtain those materials. We already are feeling pressure on the first two, and the third one would begin to dry up as soon as we use it in earnest. Honestly, I do believe that nuclear power could last longer than a century, but people have testified before congress that the opposite is true. Fine. Then lets go get more materials, shall we?
Are you saying that in less than 100 yrs we can develop a manned space program that can return enough minerals to support the entire earth's industries? If you think we have energy concerns now just wait until you start that project.
Well, yes. For valuable materials anyway. Consider a cargo container that's nothing more than a drum with a heat shield. It would be a cheap reentry method that would splash down in the ocean, then get retrieved by cargo vessels.
Putting all of your efforts into manned missions will almost guarantee that you'll never reach another star.
You're going to have to quantify that statement, because I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Thanks for that pointless statement. If we have the ability to capture the sun's entire output I'd say that our space program had advanced well beyond needing shuttles.
We don't need the entire Sun's output. I'm sure you're bright enough to realize that tapping even a tenth of a percent of that would be a HUGE amount of power. With that sort of power, we could support civilization throughout the solar system, not just Earth!
You REALLY need to stop reading so much sci-fi.
And you REALLY need to learn more science fact. NERVA, Orion, Nuclear Salt Water, Sea Dragon, Project Pluto, Dynasoar, Energia Vulkan, the list goes on and on. We've got tech for space travel coming out of our wazoo! You know what we do with it? We sit on it. That's right my friend, we sit on it. Why do you think my sig says "Saturn by 1970 or bust!" We could have done it! Even if we'd used the Saturn V launch method, we could have done it! But we didn't. Nixon wanted an end to the space program. Well, he got it.
Yeah, when they put an astronaut in orbit, they must have *really* been waving their arms hard.;-) I'm not saying that China has done nothing. But think of it this way: The US and Russia did that 40 years ago. That's a lot of tech to catch up on. And even if they do put a lot of R&D money into it, they still don't have the nuclear and aerospace tech base of the US and former USSR to pull from.
China cancelled their space program. They can claim it was money all they want. But if they didn't have the money, why start? That's right. They were waving their arms and yelling, "Hey, look at us!"
Do we really have the infrastructure for a manned space program now?
Yes, we do. If we let the shuttles die, Congress will be sure to pull the rest of the funding for the manned space program. Once that happens, how do you propose we get them to pay for a new program?
The shuttle is not economically feasible. It bucks the standard economic trend of focused products early in development. Instead, the shuttle tries to be a jack of all trades and is a master of none. But it's all we got. I don't think congress will be letting us launch an Orion any time soon.
The fact is that while space travel will always be dangerous, right now it is far too dangerous to the point where it's unnecessary.
It doesn't have to be. We have tons of better propulsion methods that are ready or nearly ready for production use. The problem is that most of them involve the scary "nuclear" word. Even then, "nuclear" is not the real problem. The real problem is that Nixon decided to end our massive space program. The shuttle was created so that we'd have our space program as a "national treasure", as it were. NASA and the government have only recently gotten serious about this again, and now the program may end before it truly begins.
I guess basically my argument is that we should pretty much be blowing off manned missions until we manage to put the space elevator together.
The risk is simply too high on a space elevator. You're talking about developing something for which the materials do not currently exist, nor have been tested! Even if we were ready to build a space elevator, it would still be a major international effort. How will that effort ever happen if manned space travel has been wiped off the face of the planet?
If we ARE going to keep putting people in space, let's get rid of the orbiter and just use rockets.
Now there's something I agree on. It seems so wasteful to use standard rockets, but the truth is that we aren't far enough along in development of space travel to make the shuttle economic. Thus we've stagnated space travel for 20+ years because simple rockets aren't sexy. Well, too bad. The Shuttle's return method is fine, we just need a normal rocket launch. Not to mention that the SRBs are really standard rockets in disguise.
I'm not blaming anyone. My point is exactly what your point is. That these things take time. The time they take is simply too long. By the time the program reaches completion, the politicians could have already cut the funding.
Actually, I think the cost of sending manned probes would be higher than unmanned. An unmanned probe does not require all of the life support systems and all.
I'm not necessarily referring to manned probes. I'm referring to the materials, energy, launching platforms, and other resources that can be obtained in space. To paraphrase, "There's gold in them there asteroids!" And Platinum, Uranium, Tungsten, water, Helium, etc. All very easy to come by, most very pure.
And the Sun! Have you every heard of such a powerful fusion reactor!? Why, with simple mylar mirrors and a closed cycle generator, we could inexpensively produce hundreds to thousands of gigawatts of usable energy! Not kilowatts, not megawatts, GIGAWATTS! And that's nowhere near the upper bounds! We could go right into the Petawatt range and keep going!
Slippery slope? Besides, worst case scenario, we can outsource our manned space flights to China. They've been making leaps and bounds in that area lately.
China has just been doing a lot of arm-waving. If we were smart, we'd outsource to Russia while they still have trained aerospace engineers. Energia Vulkan? Oh yeah! Now THERE'S a rocket!
Run out of resources in less than 100 years? Please.
You can maintain the current level of resources by recycling the ones we're pulling from the ground. Recycling takes energy. Mining new materials takes energy. Processing materials takes energy. Where does our energy come from? A combination of oil, coal, and nuclear power. All of those materials are limited on this rock we're on. If we stay here, we'll have fewer and fewer resources in the years to come.
As for the Alpha Centauri thing, I'm not worried about survival. I'm worried about pure exploration. Scientists would salivate at the prospect of sending a probe to AC, but are too short sighted to notice that they'll never do it without a manned space program.
+5 insightful mods? Good lord, its time to move on.
Because no other country has done anything about it since the advent of manned space travel forty years ago. Only the USSR had the resources necessary to run a manned space program, and they simply couldn't keep pace with even our "inexpensive" efforts (i.e. The space shuttle.) Russia didn't even build the Buran until the 90's, and then the design was a rip-off and improvement to our shuttle design.
Even worse, the U.S. alone has the technologies necessary to make space travel economical. We have the Orion plans, we have the Nuclear Thermal Engines, we have the Sea Dragon and Excalibur plans, etc, etc, etc. The US is easily fifty years ahead of the rest of the world in both aerospace and nuclear technologies. BOTH are required for any real form of manned space travel.
With the US feeling the international pressure to conform, they might just decide to ditch the manned space program if the Shuttles are destroyed. As long as they exist, there's pressure on the government to allow us to replace them with something cheaper, better, and more advanced.
That's why they're worried. They only built their facilities to withstand common hurricanes with less power. e.g. The article states that the shuttle hangar can withstand winds of 110 mph. This hurricane could be a LOT worse.
Dammit, dammit, dammit! Right now, Bush's ideas for a new space program are simply a pipe dream with some funding. If we lose our infrastructure for a manned space program, we may lose the space program all together! While I know of several people who would be happy about that, I wouldn't. Cutting off manned travel is short-sighted. Without manned travel, we're guaranteeing that the cost of sending probes will always be high. We're guaranteeing that we'll run out of raw materials in less than a century. We're guaranteeing that we will not have enough energy to sustain our civilization. And most importantly, we're guaranteeing that we will NEVER reach another star system.
Look up at the sky! You see that big ball of bright flame? That's a fusion reactor that generates at least 8e23 watts. That's enough power to send a five year Alpha Centauri mission every second. You know how you can do the same by staying on Earth? It's simple: YOU CAN'T. To those of you who think a manned space program is a waste of resources because exploration happens more effectively with robots: You are a selfish bastard planning your own demise.
'Tis true. Every time I try to speak Mandarin for "Thank you", they just look at me without the slightest clue what I'm saying. That's despite the fact that it sounds exactly the same to me when they say it.:-(
Someone mod this guy up. He's hit the nail on the head before I could. I hear of VERY few people in populated areas that don't have broadband available. Even many rural Midwest areas have broadband. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the US has a higher overall coverage than all of Asia combined. After all, the Chinese aren't crowded. They just don't use 90% of their land.
The original series specfically addressed Vulcan "logic" as more of an unemotional state. Their idea is to make a decision based on rational thinking, utilizing the facts at their disposal. The Vulcans/Surak felt they must follow such a course because their powerful emotions were destroying their society.
Furthermore, I'd wager that in cases where one doesn't have enough information to make a "logical" decision, it's usually much wiser to follow one's emotions.
Actually, that was sort of the point of Kirk and Spock's relationship. Spock tempered Kirk's impulses, while Kirk showed Spock that emotions can be a valuable asset when making decisions.
Since the Vulcans are too dumb to figure this stuff out and follow a philosophy we abandoned that hit its peak and quickly declined about two thousand years ago, I'd say that they are too dumb to have actually created warp technology on their own and they must have just stolen the technology from another civilization.
Have you been watching Enterprise? Those aren't Vulcans! They're dumbasses in robes and bowl cuts POSING as Vulcans! I'm willing to bet that they're really aliens created by future guy to slow down human development! The real Vulcans were shang-hied by future guy before they met Cochrane! Or maybe Enterprise just sucks. Hmm... ===/GEEK ALERT===
Putting the technobabble aside for a moment, the Vulcans were a plot device that Roddenbery used to explore the human condition. It's quite common in writing to take a human trait to an extreme or remove it so as to use the contrast to better explore the attribute. In the case of Star Trek, the "emotional" vs. "unemotional" contrast allowed the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to become obvious.
Like your water heater, your power main, your sewage drain, etc.? Houses are full of single points of failure, because the cost of redundancy isn't worth the reward.
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
on
Hardening Apache
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· Score: 4, Informative
Its configuration is unusually complex for a webserver.
Really? I never found it all that hard. Most of the complex stuff is inserted in the default file, but is not insecure in of itself. You just have to think about everything you do after that.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of its so-called "security holes" actually came about because of misconfiguration by an administrator who was confused by the layout of the documentation or config files.
In my experience, most Apache security issues are related to giving access to files that shouldn't be on the web. Doing things like symlinking directories is very powerful, but it's also very dangerous. Also keep in mind that if an attacker can upload a script, he already has access to your system. These sorts of problems (as well as undiscovered buffer overflow issues) can be mitigated by the use of Jails. When you jail Apache, you ensure that any attacker that does gain access, will only have access to Apache files.
A typical Apache security problem would be something like an FTP server that has an anonymous account with access to a web-sharable directory. An attacker uploads a PHP script to the web-share, and it's game over for your machine/network.
Slashdot Mirror
And so should your house computer. This upgrade path of every three years is silly, and is only perpetrated by the constant changes in PC hardware. Unix hardware and mainframes easily live on for a decade, sometimes longer.
The way a Shuttle launches is an unavoidable result of the return method. They can't be separated.
Umm... no. Take the Dynasoar for example. It was simply a winged craft mounted on a traditional rocket. There was no need for a massive fuel take weaving through the ship. Nor was there a need for solid rocket boosters. In fact, the Dynasoar would have given us all the return advantages of the shuttle with less complexity and fewer points of failure.
The reason why the shuttle is so complex, is that it carries cargo on the same craft that carries humans. If we used cargo rockets for cargo, we could boost more up because we don't need to get it back down. If we used a craft focused on getting humans up and down, we'd be able to strap them to smaller and cheaper vehicles. Hell, ONE of the shuttle's SRBs should do the trick!
Do you see where I'm going with this? The shuttle tried to be all things to all people. What we need are multiple vehicles designed for focused purposes.
I hate seeing that argument. Translated: "My sponsors are irrational. Therefore I've got to do stupid, wasteful things to keep the money coming"
Welcome to the way government and big business spending works.
The reason private industry isn't in space is that there's no money in it. Until that changes, we'll do nothing but probes - and no one ever comes up with an idea for making it profitable.
Actually, it's not that there's no money in space. It's that there's a chicken and egg issue. Why would anyone invest in space before there's an economic incentive? But who's going to create an economic incentive if there's no money in it?
That's where NASA comes in. NASA should be using large (and comparatively cheap) boosters to send hundreds of metrics tons of space station and workshop equipment into orbit. Once they have the ability to build many things in space (and launch from a decent orbit *grumble*), then the possibility of mining becomes a reality. I don't know of a single investor who wouldn't jump at the chance of bringing back precious metals at a high profit margin.
No, you don't need the level of industry we have here on Earth. (At least not initially.) More than enough can be done with standard workshop equipment. Drills, laser cutters, PCB printers, plastic molding, etc. all exist in fairly small machines. The tradeoff is that your production wouldn't be very high until better factories are built.
Now imagine this. On Earth, 3D printing is a very difficult and expensive process. Gravity ensures that stability is a key problem during the printing process. But what if we were to 3D print in freefall? With no forces acting upon the object, many more materials and shapes could be printed. Imagine if robots could be used to "print" an entire space ship! You just can't do that on Earth.
Two words. Breeder reactor.
Two words: Doesn't matter. A breeder reactor increases the amount of energy you get out of a given amount of materials. It does not, however, magically create materials out of non-nuclear fuels. It really amounts to further enriching existing fuels. Yes, it will extend the time. No, it will not extend it indefinitely.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. Even if we could magically tap huge amounts of solar power, where do you put the antimatter once you've created it? And once you have it, so what?
There's no "magic" to tapping the sun. You need heat on one side, and cooling on the other. That's how thermal generators work. My original plan was to put a station at about 0.1 au. Speaking with engineers about the issue, they explained that using mylar mirrors would provide you with the same amount of thermal energy at a much greater distance. There's an interesting discussion on this here.
BTW, you may find this, this, and this very interesting. Yes, that's right. NASA plans to launch an antimatter powered space craft!
Thank you for responding. I think the important thing to understand is that space doesn't have to be as dangerous as it is today. When the Dyson and Taylor said "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970", they weren't kidding. We have the technology for space craft that are simpler, safer, and more powerful. The problem comes in at cost. The Saturn V program was built around the idea that we must beat the USSR at any cost. That cost was tremendous. Billions of dollars to send men to the moon! And the hardware recovery was nil. The only way the Saturn V did it, was by shedding very large and expensive pieces of hardware at every step of the process.
After the moon race, Nixon's solution was to kill every "heavy lifter" and focus on "cheap and reusable" craft. The only problem is that he also wanted a fully reusable heavy lifter that was rated for both men and cargo. That's just silly. You can make the cost of sending materials into orbit cheap. Alternatively, you can make the cost of sending humans into space and back cheap. We don't yet have the technology to do both at the same time. So the Shuttle was overly ambitious by trying to be all things to all people. An amazing piece of engineering, but all without a purpose in the end.
As a result, the shuttle has cost tremendous amounts of money for the purpose of sending up and down 104 metric tons. It's also been used to send up wonderful things like the Hubble Telescope, but the shuttle need not be the one to carry that cargo.
We could have spent that same money (probably less) on developing a two pronged approach. Develop a Dynasoar type craft, and launch it with existing Deltas or Titans. That takes care of humans to LEO. Then develop one of the heavy lifter solutions such as Sea Dragon, or purchase the Energia from the Russians. Now you have an unmanned heavy lifter. For about the cost of a few shuttle flights, you could send the entire space station up, then send a construction crew up to build it.
If we can launch that much tonnage, it also means that we can assemble nuclear spacecraft and probes in space. Assembling probes in space, obviously brings down their cost as there's no need to allocate a 30 million dollar, ground launched rocket for a $100,000 probe. Use nuclear space craft (Orion, NERVA, NSWR, etc.) to reach nearby asteroids for mining, and you can further reduce the amount of materials needed from earth Once you're mining, you can actually start returning valuable ores at a profit!
From there, building a sun powered generators would solve the worlds power problems. Period. (Well, at least for a few billion years, anyway.) The development that comes out of improving those generators could one day allow us to create the technology necessary to create sufficient quantities of antimatter. With enough antimatter, we can send a probe to Alpha Centauri at a constant 1G of acceleration. Total travel time? 5 years. The best travel time with current technologies is 100 years.
These things can't exist without manned space flight.
What raw materials are we going to run out of in less than a century: oil, natural gas, and coal maybe (it's debateable but that isn't my point).
You forgot Uranium-235. It's been testified before congress that a complete switch over to nuclear power would use up our nuclear fuel within a century. Personally, I don't believe it because there are actually a lot more nuclear fuels than just Uranium. Yet I do realize that we will run out in a few hundred years. With our demand for energy increasing, it's quite likely that a century or two could be realistic.
What we need is a power surplus. The Sun can provide that.
And, FYI, I haven't seen a big ball of bright flame in some time; feel free to look up the definition of the word flame
From the dictionary definition of flame, "Something resembling a flame in motion, brilliance, intensity, or shape." I'd say that the solar activi
Well, we've got large Uranium deposits in space, for one. For another, you've got the Sun. Use mirrors to focus the energy at a multi-gigawatt, closed cycle generator, and you've got a few billion years of all the energy you need. Carbon fuels are dirty, dangerous, and limited. The sooner we can break our reliance on them, the better.
Not as cheap as China. Chinese launch costs are 1/3 to 1/2 of US launch costs, and slightly cheaper than Russian launch costs.
:-)
False economy. If it's not what we need, why spend the money on it? And the only reason it's cheaper is the same reason that a China made DVD player is cheaper: exchange rate. If China develops the technology we need, they'll also have a stronger currency.
You know, they attempted to build a scaled down version of Sea Dragon, called SEALAR. It was a complete failure. It turns out that when you try and build a rocket like you build a ship, it doesn't work well.
Sea Dragon, Excalibur, and SEALAR all attempted the same goal. I have never heard that any of them were "a complete failure". They simply didn't get much funding because the US didn't want heavy lift vehicles. Without the heavy lift abilities, the concept is pointless. The very core of Sea Dragon, was that the cost of the rocket is not dependent on how large it is. Thus the idea is to build a Really Big Rocket(TM) that could take advantage of those economics.
But what could we do with 500 metric tons to orbit? It's an extreme overkill for manned flight. So it wasn't funded. Fast forward to the twenty first century, and we find that dozens of shuttle flights have been made to put up a space station that weighs 1/3 the cargo capacity of the Dragon.
Energia's launch costs weren't even theoretically that cheap compared to what's out there.
Bullocks. More mass in one launch means that it's cheaper getting tonnage to space. Energia Inc. also had plans on the board for a reusable version of the rocket. (more info) The Energia Zenit boosters still live on as the Boeing Sea Launch system. Seems they were pretty well designed.
The market for heavy lifters has been steadily on the decline; that's why the ESA cancelled plans to increase Ariane's payload.
The moment we consider doing anything more than sending a person into orbit is the moment that the need for heavy boosters increases. As I mentioned about the space station, we could have sent it up in ONE launch if we had a heavy lifter. But the heavy lifter abilities were killed with the Saturn V, only to be revived as a weird space dump truck configuration (i.e. the space shuttle). The Shuttle has amazing booster technology capable of putting massive amounts of tonnage into space. Most of which it wastes on putting itself into space. Is this making any sense to anyone else?
Meanwhile, China's rocket payloads are on the increase.
The largest payload I've heard is 5 metric tons. In comparison the space shuttle can lift ~29 metric tons of cargo, plus another 104 metric tons for its own orbiter weight. This gives a grand total of 133 metric tons to orbit. China is nowhere close.
the space shuttle is 100% useless for anything but Low orbital object insertion and a little bit of work. it is 100% useless to space exploration.
It's not 100% useless, but I do agree that it's not a tremendously useful craft. But how will we build a new craft if congress completely cuts the funding for the manned space program? It WILL happen if the orbiters are damaged or destroyed.
Let me put it this way: China has nothing we need for a space program. We still have the rockets for the Gemini program. We could still build tiny capsules. We could even revive the Dynasoar. Pretty much all of them would be cheap, but they'd be pretty useless.
Our problem is building craft that are *useful* in space. We need to split the heavy lifter and manned craft into two. The Energia Vulkan or Sea Dragon would both be excellent choices for cargo craft. Using these craft, we could quickly put inexpensive stations and shipyards in space. With those yards, we could build nuclear spacecraft. With nuclear spacecraft, we can reach asteroids for mining. From what we mine, we can build more spacecraft and probes.
Do you follow my logic? China doesn't have heavy lifters. They put a man into space. Whoop-de-do. I could buy a Delta or Titan and accomplish the same thing. But that's a step backward instead of forward. Humans are a small portion of the equation. It's really about the raw tonnage.
My gut tells me you are a troll but none the less...
Your gut is wrong.
Actually unmanned probes will continue to become more capable and cheaper as time goes on. They don't need bulky and expensive life-support systems and can go into very hostile environments.
I wasn't talking about manned probes. I was talking about an infrastructure to make unmanned probes cheaper. You can't build an energy collection station in space without a human there to mine the materials and build it. And you can't collect the energy for an AC probe without that energy.
The key to the problem is antimatter. We're nowhere near close to being able to produce enough for an interstellar mission, but the Sun provides enough energy to make it possible.
Run out of raw materials in less than a century? HUH? Were do you live, an asteroid?
Earth. It takes energy to create the things we use. That energy comes from oil, coal, and uranium. It takes energy to obtain those materials. We already are feeling pressure on the first two, and the third one would begin to dry up as soon as we use it in earnest. Honestly, I do believe that nuclear power could last longer than a century, but people have testified before congress that the opposite is true. Fine. Then lets go get more materials, shall we?
Are you saying that in less than 100 yrs we can develop a manned space program that can return enough minerals to support the entire earth's industries? If you think we have energy concerns now just wait until you start that project.
Well, yes. For valuable materials anyway. Consider a cargo container that's nothing more than a drum with a heat shield. It would be a cheap reentry method that would splash down in the ocean, then get retrieved by cargo vessels.
Putting all of your efforts into manned missions will almost guarantee that you'll never reach another star.
You're going to have to quantify that statement, because I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Thanks for that pointless statement. If we have the ability to capture the sun's entire output I'd say that our space program had advanced well beyond needing shuttles.
We don't need the entire Sun's output. I'm sure you're bright enough to realize that tapping even a tenth of a percent of that would be a HUGE amount of power. With that sort of power, we could support civilization throughout the solar system, not just Earth!
You REALLY need to stop reading so much sci-fi.
And you REALLY need to learn more science fact. NERVA, Orion, Nuclear Salt Water, Sea Dragon, Project Pluto, Dynasoar, Energia Vulkan, the list goes on and on. We've got tech for space travel coming out of our wazoo! You know what we do with it? We sit on it. That's right my friend, we sit on it. Why do you think my sig says "Saturn by 1970 or bust!" We could have done it! Even if we'd used the Saturn V launch method, we could have done it! But we didn't. Nixon wanted an end to the space program. Well, he got it.
Yeah, when they put an astronaut in orbit, they must have *really* been waving their arms hard. ;-) I'm not saying that China has done nothing. But think of it this way: The US and Russia did that 40 years ago. That's a lot of tech to catch up on. And even if they do put a lot of R&D money into it, they still don't have the nuclear and aerospace tech base of the US and former USSR to pull from.
China cancelled their space program. They can claim it was money all they want. But if they didn't have the money, why start? That's right. They were waving their arms and yelling, "Hey, look at us!"
Hi DP!
Do we really have the infrastructure for a manned space program now?
Yes, we do. If we let the shuttles die, Congress will be sure to pull the rest of the funding for the manned space program. Once that happens, how do you propose we get them to pay for a new program?
The shuttle is not economically feasible. It bucks the standard economic trend of focused products early in development. Instead, the shuttle tries to be a jack of all trades and is a master of none. But it's all we got. I don't think congress will be letting us launch an Orion any time soon.
The fact is that while space travel will always be dangerous, right now it is far too dangerous to the point where it's unnecessary.
It doesn't have to be. We have tons of better propulsion methods that are ready or nearly ready for production use. The problem is that most of them involve the scary "nuclear" word. Even then, "nuclear" is not the real problem. The real problem is that Nixon decided to end our massive space program. The shuttle was created so that we'd have our space program as a "national treasure", as it were. NASA and the government have only recently gotten serious about this again, and now the program may end before it truly begins.
I guess basically my argument is that we should pretty much be blowing off manned missions until we manage to put the space elevator together.
The risk is simply too high on a space elevator. You're talking about developing something for which the materials do not currently exist, nor have been tested! Even if we were ready to build a space elevator, it would still be a major international effort. How will that effort ever happen if manned space travel has been wiped off the face of the planet?
If we ARE going to keep putting people in space, let's get rid of the orbiter and just use rockets.
Now there's something I agree on. It seems so wasteful to use standard rockets, but the truth is that we aren't far enough along in development of space travel to make the shuttle economic. Thus we've stagnated space travel for 20+ years because simple rockets aren't sexy. Well, too bad. The Shuttle's return method is fine, we just need a normal rocket launch. Not to mention that the SRBs are really standard rockets in disguise.
I'm not blaming anyone. My point is exactly what your point is. That these things take time. The time they take is simply too long. By the time the program reaches completion, the politicians could have already cut the funding.
Actually, I think the cost of sending manned probes would be higher than unmanned. An unmanned probe does not require all of the life support systems and all.
I'm not necessarily referring to manned probes. I'm referring to the materials, energy, launching platforms, and other resources that can be obtained in space. To paraphrase, "There's gold in them there asteroids!" And Platinum, Uranium, Tungsten, water, Helium, etc. All very easy to come by, most very pure.
And the Sun! Have you every heard of such a powerful fusion reactor!? Why, with simple mylar mirrors and a closed cycle generator, we could inexpensively produce hundreds to thousands of gigawatts of usable energy! Not kilowatts, not megawatts, GIGAWATTS! And that's nowhere near the upper bounds! We could go right into the Petawatt range and keep going!
Slippery slope? Besides, worst case scenario, we can outsource our manned space flights to China. They've been making leaps and bounds in that area lately.
China has just been doing a lot of arm-waving. If we were smart, we'd outsource to Russia while they still have trained aerospace engineers. Energia Vulkan? Oh yeah! Now THERE'S a rocket!
Run out of resources in less than 100 years? Please.
You can maintain the current level of resources by recycling the ones we're pulling from the ground. Recycling takes energy. Mining new materials takes energy. Processing materials takes energy. Where does our energy come from? A combination of oil, coal, and nuclear power. All of those materials are limited on this rock we're on. If we stay here, we'll have fewer and fewer resources in the years to come.
As for the Alpha Centauri thing, I'm not worried about survival. I'm worried about pure exploration. Scientists would salivate at the prospect of sending a probe to AC, but are too short sighted to notice that they'll never do it without a manned space program.
+5 insightful mods? Good lord, its time to move on.
+2 insightful? Did you even read the bloody post?
Because no other country has done anything about it since the advent of manned space travel forty years ago. Only the USSR had the resources necessary to run a manned space program, and they simply couldn't keep pace with even our "inexpensive" efforts (i.e. The space shuttle.) Russia didn't even build the Buran until the 90's, and then the design was a rip-off and improvement to our shuttle design.
Even worse, the U.S. alone has the technologies necessary to make space travel economical. We have the Orion plans, we have the Nuclear Thermal Engines, we have the Sea Dragon and Excalibur plans, etc, etc, etc. The US is easily fifty years ahead of the rest of the world in both aerospace and nuclear technologies. BOTH are required for any real form of manned space travel.
With the US feeling the international pressure to conform, they might just decide to ditch the manned space program if the Shuttles are destroyed. As long as they exist, there's pressure on the government to allow us to replace them with something cheaper, better, and more advanced.
This is supposedly the...
Worst
Hurricane
Ever
That's why they're worried. They only built their facilities to withstand common hurricanes with less power. e.g. The article states that the shuttle hangar can withstand winds of 110 mph. This hurricane could be a LOT worse.
Shuttle program != Space program
Shuttle Program == Manned Space Program
Dammit, dammit, dammit! Right now, Bush's ideas for a new space program are simply a pipe dream with some funding. If we lose our infrastructure for a manned space program, we may lose the space program all together! While I know of several people who would be happy about that, I wouldn't. Cutting off manned travel is short-sighted. Without manned travel, we're guaranteeing that the cost of sending probes will always be high. We're guaranteeing that we'll run out of raw materials in less than a century. We're guaranteeing that we will not have enough energy to sustain our civilization. And most importantly, we're guaranteeing that we will NEVER reach another star system.
Look up at the sky! You see that big ball of bright flame? That's a fusion reactor that generates at least 8e23 watts. That's enough power to send a five year Alpha Centauri mission every second. You know how you can do the same by staying on Earth? It's simple: YOU CAN'T. To those of you who think a manned space program is a waste of resources because exploration happens more effectively with robots: You are a selfish bastard planning your own demise.
There's more out there than what you see on your screen.
;-)
Poppycock! I've got Purple Mountains Majesty right here!
'Tis true. Every time I try to speak Mandarin for "Thank you", they just look at me without the slightest clue what I'm saying. That's despite the fact that it sounds exactly the same to me when they say it. :-(
Someone mod this guy up. He's hit the nail on the head before I could. I hear of VERY few people in populated areas that don't have broadband available. Even many rural Midwest areas have broadband. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the US has a higher overall coverage than all of Asia combined. After all, the Chinese aren't crowded. They just don't use 90% of their land.
===GEEK ALERT=== (You have been warned)
The original series specfically addressed Vulcan "logic" as more of an unemotional state. Their idea is to make a decision based on rational thinking, utilizing the facts at their disposal. The Vulcans/Surak felt they must follow such a course because their powerful emotions were destroying their society.
Furthermore, I'd wager that in cases where one doesn't have enough information to make a "logical" decision, it's usually much wiser to follow one's emotions.
Actually, that was sort of the point of Kirk and Spock's relationship. Spock tempered Kirk's impulses, while Kirk showed Spock that emotions can be a valuable asset when making decisions.
Since the Vulcans are too dumb to figure this stuff out and follow a philosophy we abandoned that hit its peak and quickly declined about two thousand years ago, I'd say that they are too dumb to have actually created warp technology on their own and they must have just stolen the technology from another civilization.
Have you been watching Enterprise? Those aren't Vulcans! They're dumbasses in robes and bowl cuts POSING as Vulcans! I'm willing to bet that they're really aliens created by future guy to slow down human development! The real Vulcans were shang-hied by future guy before they met Cochrane! Or maybe Enterprise just sucks. Hmm...
===/GEEK ALERT===
Putting the technobabble aside for a moment, the Vulcans were a plot device that Roddenbery used to explore the human condition. It's quite common in writing to take a human trait to an extreme or remove it so as to use the contrast to better explore the attribute. In the case of Star Trek, the "emotional" vs. "unemotional" contrast allowed the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to become obvious.
and 1 point of failure?
Like your water heater, your power main, your sewage drain, etc.? Houses are full of single points of failure, because the cost of redundancy isn't worth the reward.
Its configuration is unusually complex for a webserver.
Really? I never found it all that hard. Most of the complex stuff is inserted in the default file, but is not insecure in of itself. You just have to think about everything you do after that.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of its so-called "security holes" actually came about because of misconfiguration by an administrator who was confused by the layout of the documentation or config files.
In my experience, most Apache security issues are related to giving access to files that shouldn't be on the web. Doing things like symlinking directories is very powerful, but it's also very dangerous. Also keep in mind that if an attacker can upload a script, he already has access to your system. These sorts of problems (as well as undiscovered buffer overflow issues) can be mitigated by the use of Jails. When you jail Apache, you ensure that any attacker that does gain access, will only have access to Apache files.
A typical Apache security problem would be something like an FTP server that has an anonymous account with access to a web-sharable directory. An attacker uploads a PHP script to the web-share, and it's game over for your machine/network.
How about being able to run only three programs at a time?