Well, Super Bowl commercial expenses for 1999 were $92.8 million U.S. 1999 dollars. So about 258 Super Bowls to get $24 billion (ignoring inflation and viewership).
1.4 billion is 15 Super Bowls. But we're restricting our view here of how much money is available for projects. Just a glance at Yahoo Business News and I see $400 million in one aircraft sale deal.
You are assuming that solar cells are the only power source. There's also unfiltered sunlight which can be focused as a heat source to drive a turbine (generate electricity), heat lunar soil (releasing gases from the soil and refining metals), or crack water (high heat can break water into hydrogen and oxygen).
Imagine the kind of mirrors that can be built in 0.6 G...
Cute. But you could at least include one link. How about something about the monoliths or 2001 concepts or 2001 in Clarke's works or mention that the book explains a lot of things which a narrator in the movie would have mentioned.
Water is not essential, but it would be very convenient. It is easy to purify or separate and has many uses either as water or as hydrogen and oxygen. Having water there would be much easier than transporting or making more.
The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil.
Yes, the US can be improved if money is invested correctly. But the government rarely does so, as generally it just sucks up money and scatters it around without creating wealth. As the stock markets have been demonstrating, businesses have been doing a good job recently of creating wealth. [If wealth can not be created, all of your great-grandfather's descendants would be living in his log cabin.]
The last altitude-raising burn was hot. The actual last burn took place behind the moon just before impact. This last burn on the last orbit changed the orbit to a collision course, and this last burn was adjusted to compensate for the previous burn. Remember, this is rocket science performed by rocket scientists...
NASA/AMES news release extract says there was no plume, and analysis may require several days. Hitting the crater wall was more likely to kick up dust horizontally. The best result which could cause a dust plume would have been if the impact hit a buried chunk of ice, suddently converting the remaining energy into an underground steam explosion. I wouldn't mind if it hit a frozen lake, giving off nothing but an isolated thunderstorm with scattered solar panel flurries.
Amateurs with scopes up to 31 inches saw nothing, other than 3 reports of a brief flash nearby. Such flashes have been reported at other times when mountains are illuminated as the Moon rotates, or assorted rocks hit. Even now at lunar noon we're viewing the south pole area at a low angle which increases the chances of reflections. Whatever the flash was, it is unusual enough that it's interesting.
Fortunately businesses are starting to move toward space. We should have been using suborbital flights ten years ago for intercontinental travel. Our first trip to the Moon should have involved several landing craft. The Lunar missions should have been assembled next to the first space station thirty years ago. Maybe we'll do better when we don't funnel everything through governments.
Well, we're wandering off topic. Although humans probably are producing enough food, it is not evenly distributed. That might be easier if all humans were in one place. Did you know that all 6 billion people could fit in Texas with 1200 squar feet each? Multiply the 260,000 square miles by the number of square feet (5280*5280) and divide by 6,000,000,000. Grouping family square footage, installing roads, and space for business is left as an exercise for the developer. Bonus: Everyone becomes a Texan!
Yes, when it ran out of fuel Lunar Prospector probably would have crashed on the Moon. Another choice was to use the last fuel to put it in higher orbit to let the instruments run a little longer. But the Moon's attraction is weak enough that it would have been too easy to escape from the Moon, and then there would be a piece of debris wandering about that could have been tossed anywhere in the Solar system by the Earth-Moon gravity (although it probably would have simply incinerated above the Earth, it would be a shame if it hit something else we'd put in orbit).
This end of mission was a brilliant way of using that convenient package of kinetic energy to try to gather a little more data. And although this is within the mission's purpose of searching for water, I would not be surprised if future Lunar missions with different purposes will duplicate the experiment.
If plans are made for another manned mission, there certainly would be more unmanned missions to study the possible landing areas. Remember the many Surveyor crash landings before Apollo? Taking pictures down to impact...but the data rate was too slow back then to get good closeups just before impact.
This will not affect the Moon's orbit. It's like a car hitting it. If the impact point were in the center of the visible side of the Moon it would be too small to see. And with the naked eye you can see that there have been impacts a lot larger and the Moon is still in a reasonable orbit.
It often is not hard to convert from decimal to dotted quad form. Some of the tools which you mentioned will emit the dotted quad from when given a single decimal number.
Hmm. The web pages mention openness. The communication protocol is supposedly available, and the interface jack on the robot also carries the RF serial data so that other devices can use the RF link.
The web site also mentions a price of $700, not 800. I'm sure there will be a bunch of hardware hackers bolting various things to the basic unit.
I'm sure there will be a number of/. readers who will use this device as a platform. Assorted other sensors and programming will sprout from the original device.
Of course, if they publish the programming and communication specs then there will be Perl controllers in no time. And they'll sell more the cheaper it is.
The Lawless Internet has laws, but they are sometimes hard to enforce. The Lawless Wild West had laws, but the authorities were spread rather thin. Just because you don't get caught for a while does not mean there are not laws.
109. If conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper shall be put to death. Granted, Yahoo might consider that a little harsh.
Yes, IPs can be logged. It only takes a few bytes to log that "ID 849382 connected to 10.0.0.53". Or "Foxman98 posted this article". Storage is cheap now. We don't know what any one is recording.
For example, Deja.com is known to be recording much of Usenet. Usenet has always been generating large amounts of bytes per day. When Deja began recording Usenet it was not expected that anyone could store so much stuff for long periods, so for a while people expected that what they were posting was going to vanish within days (except for scattered file copies by interested individuals). Now we know that Deja is likely to have old utterings.
Obviously, time travel has been invented and a time machine constructed.
But every time someone defines a time travel theory which can be developed into a time machine, eventually someone working with time machines gets angry about their work and kills the inventor's grandfater.
That is why we don't see any workable time travel theories. When they are created they are eventually destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
Artemis estimates $1.4 billion for commercial moon trip and points out that computers make engineering much cheaper than in Apollo days.
1.4 billion is 15 Super Bowls. But we're restricting our view here of how much money is available for projects. Just a glance at Yahoo Business News and I see $400 million in one aircraft sale deal.
Imagine the kind of mirrors that can be built in 0.6 G...
Cute. But you could at least include one link. How about something about the monoliths or 2001 concepts or 2001 in Clarke's works or mention that the book explains a lot of things which a narrator in the movie would have mentioned.
The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil.
There is 10 billion tons of hydrogen in the surface rocks due to volatiles in the solar wind, which is 96 percent hydrogen. I don't know if we could collect H directly from solar wind.
Yes, the US can be improved if money is invested correctly. But the government rarely does so, as generally it just sucks up money and scatters it around without creating wealth. As the stock markets have been demonstrating, businesses have been doing a good job recently of creating wealth. [If wealth can not be created, all of your great-grandfather's descendants would be living in his log cabin.]
The last altitude-raising burn was hot. The actual last burn took place behind the moon just before impact. This last burn on the last orbit changed the orbit to a collision course, and this last burn was adjusted to compensate for the previous burn.
Remember, this is rocket science performed by rocket scientists...
Amateurs with scopes up to 31 inches saw nothing, other than 3 reports of a brief flash nearby. Such flashes have been reported at other times when mountains are illuminated as the Moon rotates, or assorted rocks hit. Even now at lunar noon we're viewing the south pole area at a low angle which increases the chances of reflections. Whatever the flash was, it is unusual enough that it's interesting.
No dust plume is good. It did not hit the crater wall. 21 observatories are analyzing their photos/instruments to figure out if water vapor is there.
This BBC article suggests that the first unmanned launch of China's manned rocket may happen in October, on the nation's anniversary. They've also been refitting space tracking ships.
Or they could go get $20,000 Billion in precious metals from a single near-earth asteroid.
Fortunately businesses are starting to move toward space. We should have been using suborbital flights ten years ago for intercontinental travel. Our first trip to the Moon should have involved several landing craft. The Lunar missions should have been assembled next to the first space station thirty years ago. Maybe we'll do better when we don't funnel everything through governments.
Well, we're wandering off topic. Although humans probably are producing enough food, it is not evenly distributed. That might be easier if all humans were in one place. Did you know that all 6 billion people could fit in Texas with 1200 squar feet each? Multiply the 260,000 square miles by the number of square feet (5280*5280) and divide by 6,000,000,000. Grouping family square footage, installing roads, and space for business is left as an exercise for the developer. Bonus: Everyone becomes a Texan!
This end of mission was a brilliant way of using that convenient package of kinetic energy to try to gather a little more data. And although this is within the mission's purpose of searching for water, I would not be surprised if future Lunar missions with different purposes will duplicate the experiment.
Several people are trying to put rovers on the Moon. Long-lived devices which people might pay to drive remotely for a few minutes.
Deep Space 1 flew by asteroid Braille on Thursday. 15 miles above asteroid at 35,000 MPH (KPH in above link).
If plans are made for another manned mission, there certainly would be more unmanned missions to study the possible landing areas. Remember the many Surveyor crash landings before Apollo? Taking pictures down to impact...but the data rate was too slow back then to get good closeups just before impact.
This will not affect the Moon's orbit. It's like a car hitting it. If the impact point were in the center of the visible side of the Moon it would be too small to see. And with the naked eye you can see that there have been impacts a lot larger and the Moon is still in a reasonable orbit.
It often is not hard to convert from decimal to dotted quad form. Some of the tools which you mentioned will emit the dotted quad from when given a single decimal number.
The web site also mentions a price of $700, not 800. I'm sure there will be a bunch of hardware hackers bolting various things to the basic unit.
Of course, if they publish the programming and communication specs then there will be Perl controllers in no time. And they'll sell more the cheaper it is.
Did you notice the TV camera in the lobby of the library? At the gasoline station across the street?
The Lawless Wild West had laws, but the authorities were spread rather thin.
Just because you don't get caught for a while does not mean there are not laws.
Or we can go a little further back to one of the foundations behind many laws. The Code of Hammurabi, its full text in English, or its foundations, Babylonian law.
109. If conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.
Granted, Yahoo might consider that a little harsh.
For example, Deja.com is known to be recording much of Usenet. Usenet has always been generating large amounts of bytes per day. When Deja began recording Usenet it was not expected that anyone could store so much stuff for long periods, so for a while people expected that what they were posting was going to vanish within days (except for scattered file copies by interested individuals). Now we know that Deja is likely to have old utterings.
But every time someone defines a time travel theory which can be developed into a time machine, eventually someone working with time machines gets angry about their work and kills the inventor's grandfater.
That is why we don't see any workable time travel theories. When they are created they are eventually destroyed.