The SRBs were added because of weight and feature growth that they were unable to spend their way out of in general. A Titanium frame instead of Aluminum frame is only one part of the problem. Things like the larger cargo bay, larger wings for crossrange, etc. also contributed.
Furthermore, there's some general bad decisions. Some folks feel that the aerodynamic costs and development difficulties of having a HUGE hydrogen tank weren't worth it and we should have gone for using Kerosine instead. And they kept tweaking the same design without examining if it would have been better to scrap the whole design they had and start over with a better idea of what they needed.
Nice. So how do they enforce comprimise in a "motion to split" system? Or is that one of the better features -- because you can't trade favors, people are more careful about what they pass?
I like that far better than a line-item veto. Mostly because I figure that if the broadcast flag came in front of Bush attatched to a bill, it wouldn't be line-item vetoed.:/
That's what Dyson was talking about... The whole huge-sphere-with-gravity-generators-to-keep-people -from-falling-into-the-sun thing is just a science fiction writer abstraction of things and would probably not work in real life.
You can gather up enough metal into a rough chunk, set it rotating, heat it up with a solar mirror, and then wait till it's nice and evenly molten and blow it up like a baloon.
Then you spin it for gravity.
With mirrors and a few glass plugs (none of which require special materials, just silicates and iron ore) you've got plenty of light.
Once you reach a large enough size to overcome the nasty effects of the corrilis effect, it's probably better than any random planet.
Consider... We're built for 1g..5g is still going to screw us up.... except we know even less about the long-term effects of.5g on humans. For all we know, women who get pregnant in.5g will have badly deformed babies.
Really, the most efficent use of our resources is to not have planets anymore but to break all of the asteroids and all of the rocky planets into 5-10km bubbles and then put them all in orbit until they cover up the sun completely. Much more efficent than a few pidly little planets. We don't really need those planetary cores to do much of anything.
... that the whole mars terraforming thing was mostly a way for scientists to get people to pay for missions to mars, to answer basic questions about the universe, because it's easier for people to grasp.
Much the same way "doing research in space to cure cancer" was a great way to pay for a space station, at least until it became something to keep the Russians busy with so they wouldn't make ICBMs for North Korea or something.
There's a LOT of ways we could solve the electricity problem... The problem is you can't "plug in" the electric car into the existing architecture; you need to make social changes.
1) Encourage people to have ONE biodisesl car and one or more electric cars 2) Put overhead wires along the interstates. 3) Build better mass-transit inside of populated areas. 4) Offer a battery-rental-and-exchange service at gas stations. The battery pack is accessible from outside of the car. Your existing pack is removed and a freshly charged one replaces it. The DoT may need to create standard mandatory charging agreements to make everything work.
The big problem with all of this Hydrogen crap is that it runs the risk of destroying the natural economic effect of peak oil. If the crazy Russians who think that crude oil is more renewable than we think are wrong, what will merely happen is that oil prices will keep going up, until it starts to make economic sense to start looking for alternatives.
The problem is that if the equivelent energy of a barrel of crude oil is subsidized to cost $50, it ruins that effect.
No, but tape drives and disk packs were mounted and unmounted by the operator, not by some random joe who yanks the power plug out whenever he gets somewhere he doesn't understand.
Ah, but the government *does* try to tax-support artists and filmmakers. All of the scare-stories about what the NEA was paying for, anybody? Much much better than government-supported boy bands.
No, there's no new business model, only changing what parts are free, what parts are pay, and what level of advertising you can get away with before people start removing it. Because people WILL watch trailers. They WILL watch that one really silly advertisement. Stuff like that.
But if the sellers-of-crap wake up tomorrow and realize that no matter how much they advertise, they aren't drumming up a market for their crap, they won't bother with advertisements anymore. Say you pay $20/month less on crap because said crap-merchants aren't advertising. That doesn't mean that broadcast media has to spend $20/month/person less. It just means that they have to figure out another way to get that $20 out of you. Or maybe nobody cares about broadcast media anymore and they'll scale back and the average consumer will spend that $20/month on other things.
Doesn't work. You broadcast halfassed ideas to the rest of the world, sounding like an idiot, and the pathway between mouth and brain is very different than the pathway between mouth and fingers. Typing on a keyboard is private, unobtrusive, and a lot of folks are far more articulate when they type things instead of say things.
Then there's now a T41 to replace it. Which has a whole new set of problems, like how the VGA port has a noise problem, the DVI port will only do 1280x1024 (apparently mostly because they didn't enable anything higher in the drivers), the docking station's USB ports simply don't work, and stuff.
I'm not sure if it's just that the alternatives suck even more or that I just keep getting lemon machines.
Not entirely true, and most certainly temporarily true.
Often times, it's better to do an experiment in space and ship the results down to earth for better analysis. Stuff like scanning tunneling microsocopes, x-ray machines, MRI machines, etc. are all too heavy for space.
Still, this CEV's design awful, knowing that. If they really want to work on downmass without a seperate expendable capsule landing, they can probably launch it with a skeleton crew and land it with as much downmass as it can safely land with. And if they get the launch costs down, they'll probably end up with a new fleet of crewed vehicles anyway.
Really, the only shame about the X-33 is that we really ought to sit down and answer the question of if the whole mach-performance-problem in an aerospike engine is going to be a problem or not.
First, thanks to Titanium drivers for golfers and a wide variety of other relatively stupid "space age" products, as well as being used all kinds of aircraft parts, it's getting much cheaper. Economies of scale. All of the surprises that made the SR-71 such a pain in the butt to build are known about.
Second, the cost per pound for launch is going to mean that the reduced weight for titanium instead of aluminum is going to pay off.
Really, part of the shuttle's problem was that it was supposed to use Titanium, not Aluminum and therefore was much heavier, requiring design changes to save weight.
Really, it's probably composites or titanum. They are both hard to work with. Titanium just handles heat better.
The intention is that it be launchable on any man-rated expendable booster... either Atlas, Delta, Ariane, or maybe even one of the Russian boosters...
Which is really not the world's worst idea. Part of the problem with changing the shuttle is that you had to fly a manned mission with a quite irreplacable shuttle on top if you wanted to try something.
Nope, the Saturn V blueprints are still safely stored away.
It would just be dumb to make them, because it was built with 60s metallurgy, 60s electronics, etc. By the time you upgraded it to work with modern parts, you might as well start from scratch.
Helium-3 and, most probably, fusion power in general, is a red herring. It makes for a good excuse to get up to the moon to do things that ought to be done, but it's not our answer.
We don't need fusion any time soon to solve our energy problem.
The problem with fusion is that plasma dynamics are not as easy as we thought they were going to be in the seventies. We have yet to break even. And even the types of fusion that are supposed to be low-temperature and not produce neutrons still produce a lot of neutron radiation. It'll just get worse if we scale it up to power-generation levels.
We can solve our power problem right now, with fission power. The problem isn't that we don't know how to do a proper fuel cycle with reprocessing, stimulated rapid decay with a neutron bombarder, breeder reactors, etc. The problem is, people have been spending money that could be spent on progressivel better and more efficent reactors and an economy based on this... on generally stupid stuff that hasn't shown to be any better of an idea than old fision power.
They are primarily google spammers. So if I want to get needle valves or any other mechanical part, I'll always see their little site and one of their competitors, before I see any actual useful Google search results.
Because prosecutors already have a glut of information.
The problem is, you can now have a case with no smoking gun, no confession, but a LOT of circumstantial evidence, people WANT to believe that the person in question is guilty. At the very least, somebody's good name is ruined.
The ability to take random samples of available genetic material (the amount required goes down over time, of course) from a place doesn't help you solve a case, it just adds some cold cases.
It all goes down to the philosophy of "innocent until proven guilty", really. Saying that somebody shouldn't have a problem about it is to say that we should all walk around with TV cameras attatched to our bodies.
Information that shouldn't be kept... shouldn't be kept. Not protected by a law that can be changed later or stored based on the assurances of somebody who can't even be bothered to read it that there aren't any loopholes or reinterpreted by a court of law... stuff like that.
And it just increases the amount of available circumstantial evidence. Sure a semen sample or whatnot will be hard to argue... but if you are picking up skin cells and sequencing them, things can get a little dangerously circumstantial.
I always had a halfassed notion that they really just need to put in overhead wires somewhat like electric trains in the highways and let people connect their hybrids to them for a cost/mile that was decidedly less than the equivelent gas-engine-usage.
Remember, every time you see "hydrogen", it's a code word for "nuclear".
Sure, we may end up switching to hydrogen fuel cells in lots of places. But that's mostly because it's far more efficent than any other storage mechanism for power, even after the losses in electrolysis efficency to convert water to hydrogen and the losses in fuel cell efficency to convert it back to water again.
The thing is, if they said, "We need to research how to create the nuclear economy, for when the oil runs out," they'd get no money. But if they say, "We need to research the hydrogen economy, for when the oil runs out," and then figure that we'll eventually come to terms with there being no good alternatives to nuclear.
The problem with housing is that getting kicked out of your own home is the LAST thing you want to have happen. So you will cut out everything else first, leverage the crap out of your finances, etc. before you will default or accept an offer where you don't at least break even.
Slashdot Mirror
The SRBs were added because of weight and feature growth that they were unable to spend their way out of in general. A Titanium frame instead of Aluminum frame is only one part of the problem. Things like the larger cargo bay, larger wings for crossrange, etc. also contributed.
Furthermore, there's some general bad decisions. Some folks feel that the aerodynamic costs and development difficulties of having a HUGE hydrogen tank weren't worth it and we should have gone for using Kerosine instead. And they kept tweaking the same design without examining if it would have been better to scrap the whole design they had and start over with a better idea of what they needed.
Nice. So how do they enforce comprimise in a "motion to split" system? Or is that one of the better features -- because you can't trade favors, people are more careful about what they pass?
:/
I like that far better than a line-item veto. Mostly because I figure that if the broadcast flag came in front of Bush attatched to a bill, it wouldn't be line-item vetoed.
That's what Dyson was talking about... The whole huge-sphere-with-gravity-generators-to-keep-people -from-falling-into-the-sun thing is just a science fiction writer abstraction of things and would probably not work in real life.
Easier than that.
.5g is still going to screw us up.... except we know even less about the long-term effects of .5g on humans. For all we know, women who get pregnant in .5g will have badly deformed babies.
Ever read Islands In Space?
You can gather up enough metal into a rough chunk, set it rotating, heat it up with a solar mirror, and then wait till it's nice and evenly molten and blow it up like a baloon.
Then you spin it for gravity.
With mirrors and a few glass plugs (none of which require special materials, just silicates and iron ore) you've got plenty of light.
Once you reach a large enough size to overcome the nasty effects of the corrilis effect, it's probably better than any random planet.
Consider... We're built for 1g.
Really, the most efficent use of our resources is to not have planets anymore but to break all of the asteroids and all of the rocky planets into 5-10km bubbles and then put them all in orbit until they cover up the sun completely. Much more efficent than a few pidly little planets. We don't really need those planetary cores to do much of anything.
... that the whole mars terraforming thing was mostly a way for scientists to get people to pay for missions to mars, to answer basic questions about the universe, because it's easier for people to grasp.
Much the same way "doing research in space to cure cancer" was a great way to pay for a space station, at least until it became something to keep the Russians busy with so they wouldn't make ICBMs for North Korea or something.
There's a LOT of ways we could solve the electricity problem... The problem is you can't "plug in" the electric car into the existing architecture; you need to make social changes.
1) Encourage people to have ONE biodisesl car and one or more electric cars
2) Put overhead wires along the interstates.
3) Build better mass-transit inside of populated areas.
4) Offer a battery-rental-and-exchange service at gas stations. The battery pack is accessible from outside of the car. Your existing pack is removed and a freshly charged one replaces it. The DoT may need to create standard mandatory charging agreements to make everything work.
The big problem with all of this Hydrogen crap is that it runs the risk of destroying the natural economic effect of peak oil. If the crazy Russians who think that crude oil is more renewable than we think are wrong, what will merely happen is that oil prices will keep going up, until it starts to make economic sense to start looking for alternatives.
The problem is that if the equivelent energy of a barrel of crude oil is subsidized to cost $50, it ruins that effect.
No, but tape drives and disk packs were mounted and unmounted by the operator, not by some random joe who yanks the power plug out whenever he gets somewhere he doesn't understand.
Ah, but the government *does* try to tax-support artists and filmmakers. All of the scare-stories about what the NEA was paying for, anybody? Much much better than government-supported boy bands.
No, there's no new business model, only changing what parts are free, what parts are pay, and what level of advertising you can get away with before people start removing it. Because people WILL watch trailers. They WILL watch that one really silly advertisement. Stuff like that.
But if the sellers-of-crap wake up tomorrow and realize that no matter how much they advertise, they aren't drumming up a market for their crap, they won't bother with advertisements anymore. Say you pay $20/month less on crap because said crap-merchants aren't advertising. That doesn't mean that broadcast media has to spend $20/month/person less. It just means that they have to figure out another way to get that $20 out of you. Or maybe nobody cares about broadcast media anymore and they'll scale back and the average consumer will spend that $20/month on other things.
Doesn't work. You broadcast halfassed ideas to the rest of the world, sounding like an idiot, and the pathway between mouth and brain is very different than the pathway between mouth and fingers. Typing on a keyboard is private, unobtrusive, and a lot of folks are far more articulate when they type things instead of say things.
I work at a company that standardized on T-series IBMs.
First I had a T30. which sucked for a variety of reasons.
Then there's now a T41 to replace it. Which has a whole new set of problems, like how the VGA port has a noise problem, the DVI port will only do 1280x1024 (apparently mostly because they didn't enable anything higher in the drivers), the docking station's USB ports simply don't work, and stuff.
I'm not sure if it's just that the alternatives suck even more or that I just keep getting lemon machines.
Not entirely true, and most certainly temporarily true.
Often times, it's better to do an experiment in space and ship the results down to earth for better analysis. Stuff like scanning tunneling microsocopes, x-ray machines, MRI machines, etc. are all too heavy for space.
Still, this CEV's design awful, knowing that. If they really want to work on downmass without a seperate expendable capsule landing, they can probably launch it with a skeleton crew and land it with as much downmass as it can safely land with. And if they get the launch costs down, they'll probably end up with a new fleet of crewed vehicles anyway.
Indeed. I had to be reminded of this.
Really, the only shame about the X-33 is that we really ought to sit down and answer the question of if the whole mach-performance-problem in an aerospike engine is going to be a problem or not.
Ah, well do remember that the capsules were designed when it was frighteningly likely that the booster would blow up.
Stuff has gotten more reliable. Remember, airliners have no parachutes or ejection seats.
It's just that the shuttle isn't reliable enough to have made the transition right now....
No, still makes sense.
First, thanks to Titanium drivers for golfers and a wide variety of other relatively stupid "space age" products, as well as being used all kinds of aircraft parts, it's getting much cheaper. Economies of scale. All of the surprises that made the SR-71 such a pain in the butt to build are known about.
Second, the cost per pound for launch is going to mean that the reduced weight for titanium instead of aluminum is going to pay off.
Really, part of the shuttle's problem was that it was supposed to use Titanium, not Aluminum and therefore was much heavier, requiring design changes to save weight.
Really, it's probably composites or titanum. They are both hard to work with. Titanium just handles heat better.
The intention is that it be launchable on any man-rated expendable booster... either Atlas, Delta, Ariane, or maybe even one of the Russian boosters...
Which is really not the world's worst idea. Part of the problem with changing the shuttle is that you had to fly a manned mission with a quite irreplacable shuttle on top if you wanted to try something.
Nope, the Saturn V blueprints are still safely stored away.
It would just be dumb to make them, because it was built with 60s metallurgy, 60s electronics, etc. By the time you upgraded it to work with modern parts, you might as well start from scratch.
Helium-3 and, most probably, fusion power in general, is a red herring. It makes for a good excuse to get up to the moon to do things that ought to be done, but it's not our answer.
We don't need fusion any time soon to solve our energy problem.
The problem with fusion is that plasma dynamics are not as easy as we thought they were going to be in the seventies. We have yet to break even. And even the types of fusion that are supposed to be low-temperature and not produce neutrons still produce a lot of neutron radiation. It'll just get worse if we scale it up to power-generation levels.
We can solve our power problem right now, with fission power. The problem isn't that we don't know how to do a proper fuel cycle with reprocessing, stimulated rapid decay with a neutron bombarder, breeder reactors, etc. The problem is, people have been spending money that could be spent on progressivel better and more efficent reactors and an economy based on this... on generally stupid stuff that hasn't shown to be any better of an idea than old fision power.
You forgot the most basic lesson of all....
Heat the area to be joined first, then add solder (or welding rod)
Which every welding instructor teaches you right away.
They are primarily google spammers. So if I want to get needle valves or any other mechanical part, I'll always see their little site and one of their competitors, before I see any actual useful Google search results.
Because prosecutors already have a glut of information.
The problem is, you can now have a case with no smoking gun, no confession, but a LOT of circumstantial evidence, people WANT to believe that the person in question is guilty. At the very least, somebody's good name is ruined.
The ability to take random samples of available genetic material (the amount required goes down over time, of course) from a place doesn't help you solve a case, it just adds some cold cases.
It all goes down to the philosophy of "innocent until proven guilty", really. Saying that somebody shouldn't have a problem about it is to say that we should all walk around with TV cameras attatched to our bodies.
Because any law can be changed later.
Information that shouldn't be kept... shouldn't be kept. Not protected by a law that can be changed later or stored based on the assurances of somebody who can't even be bothered to read it that there aren't any loopholes or reinterpreted by a court of law... stuff like that.
And it just increases the amount of available circumstantial evidence. Sure a semen sample or whatnot will be hard to argue... but if you are picking up skin cells and sequencing them, things can get a little dangerously circumstantial.
No, I've never seen it before in my life.
I always had a halfassed notion that they really just need to put in overhead wires somewhat like electric trains in the highways and let people connect their hybrids to them for a cost/mile that was decidedly less than the equivelent gas-engine-usage.
Hey, it'll happen.
Remember, every time you see "hydrogen", it's a code word for "nuclear".
Sure, we may end up switching to hydrogen fuel cells in lots of places. But that's mostly because it's far more efficent than any other storage mechanism for power, even after the losses in electrolysis efficency to convert water to hydrogen and the losses in fuel cell efficency to convert it back to water again.
The thing is, if they said, "We need to research how to create the nuclear economy, for when the oil runs out," they'd get no money. But if they say, "We need to research the hydrogen economy, for when the oil runs out," and then figure that we'll eventually come to terms with there being no good alternatives to nuclear.
The problem with housing is that getting kicked out of your own home is the LAST thing you want to have happen. So you will cut out everything else first, leverage the crap out of your finances, etc. before you will default or accept an offer where you don't at least break even.