But if you launch... say 500 lbs to space at $100/lb and compare that to 50,000 lbs to space at $10,000/lb.... that changes a lot of scales of econonomy as well. Likewise, SS2 is supposed to go up higher, therefore narrowing the gap to orbit.
You don't need to do everything the shuttle does to revolutionize space travel. In fact, it's probably easier if you don't try to.
No, they'd still need a fleet if they had a one week turnaround.
If they were able to do a one week turnaround, they might have been able to keep the cost per pound for an orbital launch down, which would have created more demand for shuttle launches, which would have made it make sense to build more shuttles.
Also, it was sold with an operational lifetime of 100 flights. Think about how long a fleet of four would last with one flight a week with each hull only doing 100 flights. The intention was that they could then create a second series of shuttles once the first flight was out of lifespan with the lessons learned and, in general, jump-start the whole process of exploring space.
The problem is that the shuttle program was never able to get up to a good enough flight rate to lower costs to start any sort of chain reaction.
One of my fellow artists made a tube exactly like the article describes. He just got some after-glow powder, dusted the inside of a neon tube with it, and filled it with neon.
There's not much of an intuitive leap involved in this. Once you say "Well, I wonder what I can coat the inside of a neon tube with other than a normal phosphor" there's not many answers that come to you.
I liked that idea signifigantly better, because the Saturn V stage would have been useful for other things...
The shuttle was initially supposed to be all-reusable. Two shuttle-vehicles would launch together and one would go all the way to orbit and the other would go back to the ground. They could do it, but not in the budget given with the performance required. They could have made it smaller but fully reusable and in budget, or use a drop tank and make it bigger and stay in budget.
The X-33 was over-budget, late, and suffering major development problems. The performance was getting worse and worse. And then you would have had to hope that Lockheed-Martin was willing to put up their portion of the funds to build the production booster.....
And, at the same time, Iridium was bankrupt, "Dark Fiber" was eating into comsat requirements, etc.
And worst of all the Skunk Works had said, "Hey, we've been building all kinds of classified stuff all these years. I know that nobody in the public field can make a multi-lobed composite hydrogen tank, but we can pull one off, winkwinknudgenudge" So when it was shown that they couldn't, people lost faith. Especially because the only actually novel, testable parts of it was that multi-lobed composite hydrogen tank and the linear aerospike... everything else wasn't going to be getting a proper workout because it wasn't going to have enough speed to really properly test the metal skinned TPS or much else.
The problem was the X-33 was the riskiest design of the three contenders. So it was mostly doomed from the start....
No, they'll probably figure out how to dust off the shuttle yet again and fly it. Remember, it's just the PAL ramp that's the problem, so they might just be able to change it to using a metal cover.
Ah, the problem is that we can't build any more shuttles right now and don't have a replacement ready.... So losing one more shuttle would be a major inconvenience.
Otherwise.... 1-2% chance of being a martyr vs. 98-99% chance of being a genuine hero...
Oh, when they were building the Endeavour, there was serious talk about building a Mark-2 program of 2 shuttles instead of just one. NASA turned them down.
The open question, of course, is if they could have actually done the shuttle mark 2, would it have been good enough to save the program. I suspect that it would be so different as to be an entirely new vehicle from the ground up, or subject to the same undesirable features as the first series.
Even though we're currently not building any nuclear power plants, there's still plenty of money spent on designing even better fission power plants, and on building hydrogen-powered vehicles that only really start to make sense if you have nuclear power plants of some sort.
I guess if suggesting that the scientists were in collusion to not invent fusion power is what it takes to buy into your mental model, that's fine, but I doubt that any of the scientists are that dumb..
And meltdowns? Once you discount clearly broken designs like Chenobryl, you need to realize how incredibly wrong even the advocates have been over the years. Three Mile Island was the worst-case scenerio. And they didn't even crack the reactor vessel with that one... once the fuel melted, it settled to the bottom and stopped heating up further, ending the chain-reaction.
Waste is not a problem, politicians are. Waste needs to be kept enclosed for a few thousand years, not millions of years. And at least it's all locked up in a small package, unlike the waste from coal plants, solar cell manufacturing, etc. And we'd be able to make it even smaller if people actually understood the difference between Pu239 and Pu240 -- reprocessed plutonium from a reprocessing plant is heavily tainted with Pu240, making it useless for use in a nuclear weapon. Uranium, enriched to reactor fuel standards, is more useful for nuclear weapon manufacturing.
You do realize that even He-3 based "aneutronic" fusion puts off a crapload of neutrons out, don't you? There's no way you are going to have a fusion-powered car.
No, if we do get fusion power plants online, they will be even bigger than fission power plants and just as dirty.
The problem is that people keep thinking that 5-10 years from now, there will be a feasable design for fusion power. And then 5-10 years later, we're still no closer. Wheras fission power works now.
Cars are one of the biggest problems we're facing. They revolutionized things last century, but they are nothing but trouble for this century. None of the "solutions" are any good. We need to adjust our lifestyles and stop using cars, not try to find ways to "fix" them.
Quite true. Mostly, the big appeal for me about space solar power is that it enhances our design diversity and ability to cope with problems with our ground-based nuclear power plants.... If I was running things, I'd probably keep some coal and natural gas fired plants going, too.
I like your argument about Mars, but I think that actually works better on the Moon. Why? Because we don't entirely know how to do a closed-loop lifecycle exactly right, forever. So the Moon has a chance of being sold as something other than a suicide mission.... because if they need ___ from Earth real quick on Mars, they are screwed.
The problem, of course, becomes trying to establish the safety of childbearing in low Gs. In that sense a space colony supplied from the moon is going to be much safer, although even that's an open question.
Mostly I figure that there's stuff up in space that's worth doing, but we won't realize it until we've actually been up there for a while. Much like buying Alaska didn't make sense for the US immediately.
Well, the problem is that they should have built the Columbia and Challenger, realized this wasn't going to work, and started work on series-2 of the shuttle. There's just too much to change at this point to do any sort of good, without starting over.
Or, more to the point, NASA should have been offering monetary assistance to competing outside engineering firms to make the Saturn IB + Apollo progressively more reusable and less expensive.
Bah. If you want to end our dependence on foreign oil, you need not wory about He-3.
Fission power works just fine. As does solar power. Except that fission power is currently looking like it's cheaper than solar power.
Either way, if you want to really take advantage of solar power, it's much better to build, in space, solar power arrays, and then beam them down to earth.
Wheras, we've been shoveling money down the gaping maw of fusion power for decades and all we've gotten so far is a big fscking bomb.
The biggest problem right now is getting stuff up cheaply. That's what is holding us back.
Because, if you think about it... If it wasn't so damn expensive.... National Geographic or the Discovery Channel would send out a mission to Pluto, no?
The problem is that NASA hasn't been doing so well working on the one big problem that we need to solve.
Mostly in terms of having lots of iron-rich rocks and soil under a much shallower gravity well than Earth with nobody to complain if a multi-km linear accelerator is built.
But that is kinda putting the cart before the horse.
Personally, I think we should mostly concentrate on building space industries, which makes the moon much more useful than Mars in the near-term. Of course, that may be part of the unspoken reasoning behind going to the moon......
No, it depends on what we do with our space program.
If we just do a quick jaunt to and from Mars, yeah it's not going to do much.
But if there is finally space industry, even if it's just solar power satelites and space-hotels, there will be much more opportunities for people to go up... although eventually they are going to just send up ironworkers instead of PhDs.
I don't think that the problem with the sciences is really a matter of getting rich. The problem with the sciences is that people aren't even assured a good chance of making a decent wage, which is why people don't get interested.
Because you could completely remove NASA from the budget and the little piece of the budget you'd get wouldn't do a damn bit of good for the health-care, education, and economic systems. NASA doesn't take up that much of the federal budget, and most of the problems there are not a matter of money, but of dreadful mismanagement.
And there's probably more that can be done with space technolgies, STILL, than trying to explore the oceans for new life that we'll probably make extinct anyways.
More than you'd think. It's for the main tank, which is only for getting up, of course... but it's still important. It all depends on how much thrust the SRBs put out that particular day -- despite all of the engineering, they still put out more or less power depending on the flight. And you could lose one of the three engines partway up. Or you could do an abort which may involve firing the engines until the tank is completely dry, as opposed to having a comfortable reserve. Things like that.
Apparently it's only useful in certain situations. But given the ribbings and spectacular explosions that NASA gets whenever they ignore safety.......
Because if the engine's are still running but there's no fuel left, the engines will tear themselves apart violently, potentially destorying the shuttle.
And it was a window cover, which was going to be removed anyways. So once they had removed the cover and repaired the tiles it dented, it's all good as new.
Well... no, there are advantages to learning from a computer...
But effectively... it's one big disadvantage.
If somebody went in and took all the stuff that's just obnoxious to try to explain but easy to show and did little video explanations of it all, instead of just giving people a PDF, there might be an advantage. And drill work might be a little more fun on the computer with fancy graphics.
But, really.... it's just plain dumb. Most of the teachers will just "assemble" a private textbook from the provided bits. I'd complain that the texbook publishers would be less likely to teach things incorrectly, but the textbook authors are pretty awful on their own accord.
Personally, I think that this is primarily a "let's make sure that NASA gets money by being nice to our friends"
Remember, the shuttle infrastructure is carefully distributed around the US so that enough congressfolk would fight against it being canceled.
This continues the process and lets NASA keep their people, while trying to have more up and down cargo mass than the shuttle and to be safer. If they write the t/Space folks a big fat check, most of the traditional contractors would put pressure on congress.
The SSME thing didn't make sense until I realized that it's probably mostly so that they can expend their SSME parts inventory and figure out what the SSME folks will work on next before they switch to proper expendable engines.
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Ah....
But if you launch... say 500 lbs to space at $100/lb and compare that to 50,000 lbs to space at $10,000/lb.... that changes a lot of scales of econonomy as well. Likewise, SS2 is supposed to go up higher, therefore narrowing the gap to orbit.
You don't need to do everything the shuttle does to revolutionize space travel. In fact, it's probably easier if you don't try to.
No, they'd still need a fleet if they had a one week turnaround.
If they were able to do a one week turnaround, they might have been able to keep the cost per pound for an orbital launch down, which would have created more demand for shuttle launches, which would have made it make sense to build more shuttles.
Also, it was sold with an operational lifetime of 100 flights. Think about how long a fleet of four would last with one flight a week with each hull only doing 100 flights. The intention was that they could then create a second series of shuttles once the first flight was out of lifespan with the lessons learned and, in general, jump-start the whole process of exploring space.
The problem is that the shuttle program was never able to get up to a good enough flight rate to lower costs to start any sort of chain reaction.
I wouldn't call it a new process.
One of my fellow artists made a tube exactly like the article describes. He just got some after-glow powder, dusted the inside of a neon tube with it, and filled it with neon.
There's not much of an intuitive leap involved in this. Once you say "Well, I wonder what I can coat the inside of a neon tube with other than a normal phosphor" there's not many answers that come to you.
Ah, no.
It's a S-1C, which was the first stage of the Saturn V rocket.
And once you start to consider the Stage-and-a-half S-1D and the Flyback F-1 designs, you start to realize just how much sense it made.
Because jet engines are heavy and crap out starting at 40,000 feet. Worked well to make SpaceShipOne fly, but not so well for orbital launch.
Close, but not quite.
The shuttle-as-the-second-stage-of-a-Apollo V was an alternative to the SRBs later in the design.
I liked that idea signifigantly better, because the Saturn V stage would have been useful for other things...
The shuttle was initially supposed to be all-reusable. Two shuttle-vehicles would launch together and one would go all the way to orbit and the other would go back to the ground. They could do it, but not in the budget given with the performance required. They could have made it smaller but fully reusable and in budget, or use a drop tank and make it bigger and stay in budget.
Not really.
The X-33 was over-budget, late, and suffering major development problems. The performance was getting worse and worse. And then you would have had to hope that Lockheed-Martin was willing to put up their portion of the funds to build the production booster.....
And, at the same time, Iridium was bankrupt, "Dark Fiber" was eating into comsat requirements, etc.
And worst of all the Skunk Works had said, "Hey, we've been building all kinds of classified stuff all these years. I know that nobody in the public field can make a multi-lobed composite hydrogen tank, but we can pull one off, winkwinknudgenudge" So when it was shown that they couldn't, people lost faith. Especially because the only actually novel, testable parts of it was that multi-lobed composite hydrogen tank and the linear aerospike... everything else wasn't going to be getting a proper workout because it wasn't going to have enough speed to really properly test the metal skinned TPS or much else.
The problem was the X-33 was the riskiest design of the three contenders. So it was mostly doomed from the start....
No, they'll probably figure out how to dust off the shuttle yet again and fly it. Remember, it's just the PAL ramp that's the problem, so they might just be able to change it to using a metal cover.
Ah, the problem is that we can't build any more shuttles right now and don't have a replacement ready.... So losing one more shuttle would be a major inconvenience.
Otherwise.... 1-2% chance of being a martyr vs. 98-99% chance of being a genuine hero...
True.
I believe the biggest complaint, however, is not the ability to remove the tags, but that people are not aware of the tags in the first place.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "Screw you" strategy of releasing your software as open source upon losing to Microsoft.
Although the investors tend to not.
Oh, when they were building the Endeavour, there was serious talk about building a Mark-2 program of 2 shuttles instead of just one. NASA turned them down.
The open question, of course, is if they could have actually done the shuttle mark 2, would it have been good enough to save the program. I suspect that it would be so different as to be an entirely new vehicle from the ground up, or subject to the same undesirable features as the first series.
Huh?
Even though we're currently not building any nuclear power plants, there's still plenty of money spent on designing even better fission power plants, and on building hydrogen-powered vehicles that only really start to make sense if you have nuclear power plants of some sort.
I guess if suggesting that the scientists were in collusion to not invent fusion power is what it takes to buy into your mental model, that's fine, but I doubt that any of the scientists are that dumb..
And meltdowns? Once you discount clearly broken designs like Chenobryl, you need to realize how incredibly wrong even the advocates have been over the years. Three Mile Island was the worst-case scenerio. And they didn't even crack the reactor vessel with that one... once the fuel melted, it settled to the bottom and stopped heating up further, ending the chain-reaction.
Waste is not a problem, politicians are. Waste needs to be kept enclosed for a few thousand years, not millions of years. And at least it's all locked up in a small package, unlike the waste from coal plants, solar cell manufacturing, etc. And we'd be able to make it even smaller if people actually understood the difference between Pu239 and Pu240 -- reprocessed plutonium from a reprocessing plant is heavily tainted with Pu240, making it useless for use in a nuclear weapon. Uranium, enriched to reactor fuel standards, is more useful for nuclear weapon manufacturing.
Huh?
You do realize that even He-3 based "aneutronic" fusion puts off a crapload of neutrons out, don't you? There's no way you are going to have a fusion-powered car.
No, if we do get fusion power plants online, they will be even bigger than fission power plants and just as dirty.
The problem is that people keep thinking that 5-10 years from now, there will be a feasable design for fusion power. And then 5-10 years later, we're still no closer. Wheras fission power works now.
Cars are one of the biggest problems we're facing. They revolutionized things last century, but they are nothing but trouble for this century. None of the "solutions" are any good. We need to adjust our lifestyles and stop using cars, not try to find ways to "fix" them.
Quite true. Mostly, the big appeal for me about space solar power is that it enhances our design diversity and ability to cope with problems with our ground-based nuclear power plants.... If I was running things, I'd probably keep some coal and natural gas fired plants going, too.
I like your argument about Mars, but I think that actually works better on the Moon. Why? Because we don't entirely know how to do a closed-loop lifecycle exactly right, forever. So the Moon has a chance of being sold as something other than a suicide mission.... because if they need ___ from Earth real quick on Mars, they are screwed.
The problem, of course, becomes trying to establish the safety of childbearing in low Gs. In that sense a space colony supplied from the moon is going to be much safer, although even that's an open question.
Mostly I figure that there's stuff up in space that's worth doing, but we won't realize it until we've actually been up there for a while. Much like buying Alaska didn't make sense for the US immediately.
Well, the problem is that they should have built the Columbia and Challenger, realized this wasn't going to work, and started work on series-2 of the shuttle. There's just too much to change at this point to do any sort of good, without starting over.
Or, more to the point, NASA should have been offering monetary assistance to competing outside engineering firms to make the Saturn IB + Apollo progressively more reusable and less expensive.
Bah. If you want to end our dependence on foreign oil, you need not wory about He-3.
Fission power works just fine. As does solar power. Except that fission power is currently looking like it's cheaper than solar power.
Either way, if you want to really take advantage of solar power, it's much better to build, in space, solar power arrays, and then beam them down to earth.
Wheras, we've been shoveling money down the gaping maw of fusion power for decades and all we've gotten so far is a big fscking bomb.
Not quite yet.
But soon.
The biggest problem right now is getting stuff up cheaply. That's what is holding us back.
Because, if you think about it... If it wasn't so damn expensive.... National Geographic or the Discovery Channel would send out a mission to Pluto, no?
The problem is that NASA hasn't been doing so well working on the one big problem that we need to solve.
It's still useful.
Mostly in terms of having lots of iron-rich rocks and soil under a much shallower gravity well than Earth with nobody to complain if a multi-km linear accelerator is built.
But that is kinda putting the cart before the horse.
Personally, I think we should mostly concentrate on building space industries, which makes the moon much more useful than Mars in the near-term. Of course, that may be part of the unspoken reasoning behind going to the moon......
No, it depends on what we do with our space program.
If we just do a quick jaunt to and from Mars, yeah it's not going to do much.
But if there is finally space industry, even if it's just solar power satelites and space-hotels, there will be much more opportunities for people to go up... although eventually they are going to just send up ironworkers instead of PhDs.
I don't think that the problem with the sciences is really a matter of getting rich. The problem with the sciences is that people aren't even assured a good chance of making a decent wage, which is why people don't get interested.
Because you could completely remove NASA from the budget and the little piece of the budget you'd get wouldn't do a damn bit of good for the health-care, education, and economic systems. NASA doesn't take up that much of the federal budget, and most of the problems there are not a matter of money, but of dreadful mismanagement.
And there's probably more that can be done with space technolgies, STILL, than trying to explore the oceans for new life that we'll probably make extinct anyways.
Funny. That's exactly how I discovered the novel by Gibson. :)
More than you'd think. It's for the main tank, which is only for getting up, of course... but it's still important. It all depends on how much thrust the SRBs put out that particular day -- despite all of the engineering, they still put out more or less power depending on the flight. And you could lose one of the three engines partway up. Or you could do an abort which may involve firing the engines until the tank is completely dry, as opposed to having a comfortable reserve. Things like that.
Apparently it's only useful in certain situations. But given the ribbings and spectacular explosions that NASA gets whenever they ignore safety.......
Yeah.
Because if the engine's are still running but there's no fuel left, the engines will tear themselves apart violently, potentially destorying the shuttle.
And it was a window cover, which was going to be removed anyways. So once they had removed the cover and repaired the tiles it dented, it's all good as new.
Well... no, there are advantages to learning from a computer...
But effectively... it's one big disadvantage.
If somebody went in and took all the stuff that's just obnoxious to try to explain but easy to show and did little video explanations of it all, instead of just giving people a PDF, there might be an advantage. And drill work might be a little more fun on the computer with fancy graphics.
But, really.... it's just plain dumb. Most of the teachers will just "assemble" a private textbook from the provided bits. I'd complain that the texbook publishers would be less likely to teach things incorrectly, but the textbook authors are pretty awful on their own accord.
Personally, I think that this is primarily a "let's make sure that NASA gets money by being nice to our friends"
Remember, the shuttle infrastructure is carefully distributed around the US so that enough congressfolk would fight against it being canceled.
This continues the process and lets NASA keep their people, while trying to have more up and down cargo mass than the shuttle and to be safer. If they write the t/Space folks a big fat check, most of the traditional contractors would put pressure on congress.
The SSME thing didn't make sense until I realized that it's probably mostly so that they can expend their SSME parts inventory and figure out what the SSME folks will work on next before they switch to proper expendable engines.