The real thing that limits space exploration is pretty much cost per pound to orbit. Because it's so damn expensive, you have to make all kinds of nasty comprimizes.
The problem is that the shuttle never lived up to its promise. It takes far too many people to keep it going and far too expensive.
The best solution is to retire the shuttle sooner rather than later, stop spaceflight for a few years, and develop something new. However, in doing so, you run the decided risk of being a budget cut target in Congress (And Congressional budget issues is what made the shuttle suck in the first place) and the entire manned space program shut down.
It doesn't help that the Russians can't keep the ISS going forever with just Soyuz and Progress capsules and that they are, in general, not the best of partners. So if the shuttle is out for another few years, it's highly likely that the ISS will end up like Skylab, which ends up with another hunk of money wasted.
The problem is, NASA wasn't paid to do things *right* it was paid to do things *fast* and *cheap*. So most of the chances to make the space program more of a long-term thing were passed up, even when they were properly funded and run by the guys with sliderules.
We know a lot more about it because of the manned landings than we did because of all of the *unmanned* probes. When's the last time you heard about any real results from anybody *but* the apollo astronauts and the folks who analized the stuff they brought back.
Although I'd definately agree it wasn't especially good space policy.
I'm not surprised about the whole slide rule thing, really. Longer calculations mean that you get it 85% right and robust instead of trying to get it 100% right.
But think about stuff 200-300 years in the future. What happens if a freak explosion, huricane, earthquake, etc. shreads through KSC or MSC and ruins one of the Saturn Vs? Over 10 years, not too likely, but over hundreds? Would you really want the one at JSC to be the only one that escaped destruction, yet somebody melted it down to cut costs?
The 60s/70s are definately the infancy of humanity in space. They hopefully are *not* the only golden age of humanity in space.
They may, however, be the golden age of NASA, when NASA could do no wrong.
It all depends on the next 20 years, I'd say. Will NASA continue to be the only road to space, or will National Geographic or the Discovery Channel be able to mount their own space missions? I mean, the last space IMAX film made 50 million. That doesn't buy you much now, but if launch costs are down, you might be able to fund a mission just for the IMAX film.
It's really an open question for me if the government, academia, or private industry is best suited to really explore space. Each one has their drawbacks, but so far the government has been in the driver's seat.
So yeah, there's probably room for a even-more-golden age in the future (call it the palladium age;) ) but it may not be at NASA's behest.
Our current Babylon-5-esque best hope for space is probably the garage hacking of Scaled COmposites and Armadillo Aerospace.
MS would do OK if they were to give away the stuff necessary to run Longhorn apps on older versions of Windows.
The problem is that when Longhorn is out, you will *still* need to wait for several years before you can actually write apps that use it.
MS *could* have provided Longhorn-API functionality for older versions of Windows, but that really ruins any incentive to move up to Longhorn, so their hands are tied.
*sigh* The problem is that Linux needs to figure out how to make a good desktop environment. Given how piss-poor people who *try* to create a good desktop environment do, I've not got much hope there.
Actually, the OpenBSD folks held off on SMP support for a while for a good reason.
Why? Simple. It's a new avenue for bugs and exploits because it makes race conditions more likely to occur. Remember, OpenBSD has a reputation to uphold.;)
But, ask yourself, why are construction costs in space so high? Because it costs so damn much to get *anything* up there at all.
Most of the major parts of a mars expedition are not especially big, especially when you start using developed-but-never-tested-in-space technologies (Of course, the Ion drive did pretty well after 30 years of moldering on the shelves) like inflatables. Really, you need tanks of fuel (can be segmented easily), engines (can use a bunch of smaller ones, which also gives you redundancy. You also don't need that much thrust to go places anyway), solar panels (Mars is still close enough for that, and they can be easily segmented), repair parts, supplies (mostly preserved food), and some structural girders (assembled in space like tinker toys) and an inflatable habitat.
None of these things are especially heavy or large and, if it was suddenly possible to get a few thousand pounds per flight up with an excellent $/lb rate, people would change how they design things with that in mind.
Remember, with inflatables, you don't even need spacesuits, you can just assemble your major components or perhaps the entire vehicle inside of a large inflatable bay.
Actually, what SS1 brings to the table over the the shuttle is that it's far far cheaper to build and fly than *anything* else. Millions instead of billions.
The big thing is not the winner of the prize. It's what happens *after* the prize. Most of the other plans for reusable boosters (Roton, Phoenix, etc) never got to suborbit.
The big potential here is that most of the big issues to make a pretty cheap booster for at least microsats have been solved and there's signifigant *new* engineering expertise in a bunch of people who are used to building stuff in new ways. Even if some of the leading contenders don't make the X-prize in time but does manage to get some flying in, it's much more likely that they will be able to attract investers and/or throw some more money at the problem, and start making products.
True, you'd have to replace current standards with a more Iridium-like standard, but it's better than you'd think, assuming that you can work around a few limits, which is entirely feasable. All you really need is more power on the satelite and a good antenna. (which really is just a function of launch costs more than anything else) In fact, already, digital cellular signals, most notably CDMA signals, are pretty damn low-powered simply by being spread-spectrum.
Also remember that the signal dynamics change. Now you are overhead (which is absolutely great for non-city sorts of areas, although not so nice for cities) and most of the signal path is through the atmosphere. You don't have the pesky earth surface and trees and stuff getting in the way.
The big win here is that with 60-120 satelites, you can cover easily just about everything but the cities pretty well. The reason why Iridium has so few capabilities is because it was limited by how much weight per satelite you can get away with. If you didn't need to wory so much about launch weight, signal power would be the last of your problems. So it's really more of a chicken-and-egg problem -- if launch costs were cheaper, it would be more competitive with things like cellular, but it won't get cheaper unless people really start to launch a lot of heavy stuff up to space, which won't happen until launch costs get cheaper.
But seriously, there's plenty to do, assuming that you've got a cheap way to get stuff up there. Part of the reason why com sats, mapping sats, etc. are so expensive is because they need to be incredibly lightweight to economize on launch costs. Remember, a cellular phone satelite doesn't have people complaining about it being in their back yard.
Not really. Linux never had any Minix code. I think you are confusing how Linux 0.1 had no real userland, which meant that you needed to install it over an existing Minix install.
Prof. Tanenbaum made MINIX, which predates Linux and provided some inspiration, but no actual code. MINIX initially hosted the Linux environment until it was able to exist on its own. Prof. Tanenbaum and Linus had a massive flamefest early in the days of Linux over microkernel vs. monolithic kernel.
Ken Brown works for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, who is basicly in the business of writing "impartial" reports for people with money. It's public knowlege that they've taken money from Microsoft in the past for reports. He is writing a book accusing Linus of not writing Linux.
Actually, I think it's mostly the case that IBM's interests are aligning with the geeks here. So it's a strategic move.
IBM makes most of their money off of consulting, not hardware. Linux is letting them reach markets that they couldn't with AIX, OS/400, OS/390, etc.
With Linux, they are beholden to nobody. AMD and Intel share the x86 market now, Linux runs on the IBM-controlled PPC/POWER architecture, etc. Everything is either in a market with healthy competition or a product manufactured by IBM.
Plus, crushing SCO is *very* good for IBM's business because it will prevent others from trying similar schemes.
So being nice to geeks has very little to do with it.
Well, that's why you should be doing confirmed opt-in, not just mailing folks who "should" get mail. Back in "the day", this wasn't such a problem, and I do sympathize with you. This is really the spammers ruining things for everybody else. So you want to make the user give you a response with a unique token to confirm that they want on.
The problem is, there's nothing you can do to assure legitimacy that spammers don't abuse. A good chunk of spam assures you at the bottom of the message that you really did subscribe to their list, so people just don't believe it. And people will forget astonishingly fast that they gave you their address.
Yeah, within the range of time given. So I imagine if you had too many parts and they were too hard to reburbish, you'd never be able to make the 2 week time crunch.
It's a miracle of Scaled Composites design that the aircraft is actually able to be hand-flown the entire course.
So the pilot had a pair, but Burt Rutan's ability to make the most bizare looking aircraft be easier to fly than the equivelent normal-looking aircraft is just inhuman.
It needs to launch again 2 weeks later with no more than some arbitrarily set percentage of mass (ablative shielding, fuel, etc) replaced. So they need a minimum amount of refurbishment between flights.
If IBM wanted this over, they'd have paid off SCO at the start and never let this hit the public media.
No, IBM's business at this point relies upon their ability to ship commercially-supported army-of-consultants software on free operating systems (i.e. Linux). This, more than anything else, is why IBM has helped out Linux. Good feeling among geeks doesn't pay the bills, but competitive advantages do.
If IBM wins, they won't have to worry about anybody else trying to pull a similar stunt in the future. If IBM were to have settled, others might try to do the same sort of racket with them down the road. It also wouldn't prevent SCO from suing other Linux vendors, which also hurts IBM's chances in the Linux market.
Slashdot Mirror
Astronaut ice cream, of course.
;) )
(which, incidentally, I've never heard of anybody in space actually eating.
The problem is, it's harder than you think.
The real thing that limits space exploration is pretty much cost per pound to orbit. Because it's so damn expensive, you have to make all kinds of nasty comprimizes.
The problem is that the shuttle never lived up to its promise. It takes far too many people to keep it going and far too expensive.
The best solution is to retire the shuttle sooner rather than later, stop spaceflight for a few years, and develop something new. However, in doing so, you run the decided risk of being a budget cut target in Congress (And Congressional budget issues is what made the shuttle suck in the first place) and the entire manned space program shut down.
It doesn't help that the Russians can't keep the ISS going forever with just Soyuz and Progress capsules and that they are, in general, not the best of partners. So if the shuttle is out for another few years, it's highly likely that the ISS will end up like Skylab, which ends up with another hunk of money wasted.
The problem is, NASA wasn't paid to do things *right* it was paid to do things *fast* and *cheap*. So most of the chances to make the space program more of a long-term thing were passed up, even when they were properly funded and run by the guys with sliderules.
I'd beg to differ about the science thing.
We know a lot more about it because of the manned landings than we did because of all of the *unmanned* probes. When's the last time you heard about any real results from anybody *but* the apollo astronauts and the folks who analized the stuff they brought back.
Although I'd definately agree it wasn't especially good space policy.
I'm not surprised about the whole slide rule thing, really. Longer calculations mean that you get it 85% right and robust instead of trying to get it 100% right.
Perhaps.
But think about stuff 200-300 years in the future. What happens if a freak explosion, huricane, earthquake, etc. shreads through KSC or MSC and ruins one of the Saturn Vs? Over 10 years, not too likely, but over hundreds? Would you really want the one at JSC to be the only one that escaped destruction, yet somebody melted it down to cut costs?
It all depends.
;) ) but it may not be at NASA's behest.
The 60s/70s are definately the infancy of humanity in space. They hopefully are *not* the only golden age of humanity in space.
They may, however, be the golden age of NASA, when NASA could do no wrong.
It all depends on the next 20 years, I'd say. Will NASA continue to be the only road to space, or will National Geographic or the Discovery Channel be able to mount their own space missions? I mean, the last space IMAX film made 50 million. That doesn't buy you much now, but if launch costs are down, you might be able to fund a mission just for the IMAX film.
It's really an open question for me if the government, academia, or private industry is best suited to really explore space. Each one has their drawbacks, but so far the government has been in the driver's seat.
So yeah, there's probably room for a even-more-golden age in the future (call it the palladium age
Our current Babylon-5-esque best hope for space is probably the garage hacking of Scaled COmposites and Armadillo Aerospace.
It's also the case that your eye tends to like about 10-15 words per line, so it's not entirely a good thing to have a wide browser window.
;)
Props for using square pixels (1280x960 instead of 1280x1024)
Not quite.
MS would do OK if they were to give away the stuff necessary to run Longhorn apps on older versions of Windows.
The problem is that when Longhorn is out, you will *still* need to wait for several years before you can actually write apps that use it.
MS *could* have provided Longhorn-API functionality for older versions of Windows, but that really ruins any incentive to move up to Longhorn, so their hands are tied.
*sigh* The problem is that Linux needs to figure out how to make a good desktop environment. Given how piss-poor people who *try* to create a good desktop environment do, I've not got much hope there.
All of the props and whatnot for 2001 were destroyed, upon orders from Kubrick, who didn't want to see any sequels made, ever.
Didn't stop 2010 from happening, mind you.
Actually, the OpenBSD folks held off on SMP support for a while for a good reason.
;)
Why? Simple. It's a new avenue for bugs and exploits because it makes race conditions more likely to occur. Remember, OpenBSD has a reputation to uphold.
But, ask yourself, why are construction costs in space so high? Because it costs so damn much to get *anything* up there at all.
Most of the major parts of a mars expedition are not especially big, especially when you start using developed-but-never-tested-in-space technologies (Of course, the Ion drive did pretty well after 30 years of moldering on the shelves) like inflatables. Really, you need tanks of fuel (can be segmented easily), engines (can use a bunch of smaller ones, which also gives you redundancy. You also don't need that much thrust to go places anyway), solar panels (Mars is still close enough for that, and they can be easily segmented), repair parts, supplies (mostly preserved food), and some structural girders (assembled in space like tinker toys) and an inflatable habitat.
None of these things are especially heavy or large and, if it was suddenly possible to get a few thousand pounds per flight up with an excellent $/lb rate, people would change how they design things with that in mind.
Remember, with inflatables, you don't even need spacesuits, you can just assemble your major components or perhaps the entire vehicle inside of a large inflatable bay.
Actually, what SS1 brings to the table over the the shuttle is that it's far far cheaper to build and fly than *anything* else. Millions instead of billions.
The big thing is not the winner of the prize. It's what happens *after* the prize. Most of the other plans for reusable boosters (Roton, Phoenix, etc) never got to suborbit.
The big potential here is that most of the big issues to make a pretty cheap booster for at least microsats have been solved and there's signifigant *new* engineering expertise in a bunch of people who are used to building stuff in new ways. Even if some of the leading contenders don't make the X-prize in time but does manage to get some flying in, it's much more likely that they will be able to attract investers and/or throw some more money at the problem, and start making products.
I wouldn't view it as that.
I'd view it as being present for something like the launch of the origional Mac or the Model T or the HMS Dreadnaught or other such things.
One of those cases where history changed but it wasn't entirely evident at the time.
The problem is that it's still an open question as to the energy efficency of vegetable oil production.
Like, depending on who you believe, it may require more energy to produce a gallon of biodesel than you'd get from burning the biodesel.
Not necessarily.
True, you'd have to replace current standards with a more Iridium-like standard, but it's better than you'd think, assuming that you can work around a few limits, which is entirely feasable. All you really need is more power on the satelite and a good antenna. (which really is just a function of launch costs more than anything else) In fact, already, digital cellular signals, most notably CDMA signals, are pretty damn low-powered simply by being spread-spectrum.
Also remember that the signal dynamics change. Now you are overhead (which is absolutely great for non-city sorts of areas, although not so nice for cities) and most of the signal path is through the atmosphere. You don't have the pesky earth surface and trees and stuff getting in the way.
The big win here is that with 60-120 satelites, you can cover easily just about everything but the cities pretty well. The reason why Iridium has so few capabilities is because it was limited by how much weight per satelite you can get away with. If you didn't need to wory so much about launch weight, signal power would be the last of your problems. So it's really more of a chicken-and-egg problem -- if launch costs were cheaper, it would be more competitive with things like cellular, but it won't get cheaper unless people really start to launch a lot of heavy stuff up to space, which won't happen until launch costs get cheaper.
Dude..... Zero-g sex...... nuff said....
But seriously, there's plenty to do, assuming that you've got a cheap way to get stuff up there. Part of the reason why com sats, mapping sats, etc. are so expensive is because they need to be incredibly lightweight to economize on launch costs. Remember, a cellular phone satelite doesn't have people complaining about it being in their back yard.
Not really. Linux never had any Minix code. I think you are confusing how Linux 0.1 had no real userland, which meant that you needed to install it over an existing Minix install.
Generally, you want either a gold-coated welding lens or an extra gold UV shielding glass to view this sort of phenomena...
h tm l
http://yarchive.net/metal/welding_filter_glass.
Prof. Tanenbaum made MINIX, which predates Linux and provided some inspiration, but no actual code. MINIX initially hosted the Linux environment until it was able to exist on its own. Prof. Tanenbaum and Linus had a massive flamefest early in the days of Linux over microkernel vs. monolithic kernel.
Ken Brown works for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, who is basicly in the business of writing "impartial" reports for people with money. It's public knowlege that they've taken money from Microsoft in the past for reports. He is writing a book accusing Linus of not writing Linux.
Actually, I think it's mostly the case that IBM's interests are aligning with the geeks here. So it's a strategic move.
IBM makes most of their money off of consulting, not hardware. Linux is letting them reach markets that they couldn't with AIX, OS/400, OS/390, etc.
With Linux, they are beholden to nobody. AMD and Intel share the x86 market now, Linux runs on the IBM-controlled PPC/POWER architecture, etc. Everything is either in a market with healthy competition or a product manufactured by IBM.
Plus, crushing SCO is *very* good for IBM's business because it will prevent others from trying similar schemes.
So being nice to geeks has very little to do with it.
Well, that's why you should be doing confirmed opt-in, not just mailing folks who "should" get mail. Back in "the day", this wasn't such a problem, and I do sympathize with you. This is really the spammers ruining things for everybody else. So you want to make the user give you a response with a unique token to confirm that they want on.
The problem is, there's nothing you can do to assure legitimacy that spammers don't abuse. A good chunk of spam assures you at the bottom of the message that you really did subscribe to their list, so people just don't believe it. And people will forget astonishingly fast that they gave you their address.
Nope. It was a fake-escrow transation not a fake-cashier's-check transaction.
Yeah, within the range of time given. So I imagine if you had too many parts and they were too hard to reburbish, you'd never be able to make the 2 week time crunch.
It's a miracle of Scaled Composites design that the aircraft is actually able to be hand-flown the entire course.
So the pilot had a pair, but Burt Rutan's ability to make the most bizare looking aircraft be easier to fly than the equivelent normal-looking aircraft is just inhuman.
It needs to launch again 2 weeks later with no more than some arbitrarily set percentage of mass (ablative shielding, fuel, etc) replaced. So they need a minimum amount of refurbishment between flights.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that.
If IBM wanted this over, they'd have paid off SCO at the start and never let this hit the public media.
No, IBM's business at this point relies upon their ability to ship commercially-supported army-of-consultants software on free operating systems (i.e. Linux). This, more than anything else, is why IBM has helped out Linux. Good feeling among geeks doesn't pay the bills, but competitive advantages do.
If IBM wins, they won't have to worry about anybody else trying to pull a similar stunt in the future. If IBM were to have settled, others might try to do the same sort of racket with them down the road. It also wouldn't prevent SCO from suing other Linux vendors, which also hurts IBM's chances in the Linux market.