My guess is that the MIT student, if they existed at all, came up with some math that proved that the abort/return approach simply wasn't going to work for some reason (unable to achieve a viable angle for a sucessful reentry, perhaps) and that at least with the slingshot there was a chance.
NASA analyzed the hell out of every inch of the trajectory pre-flight, *and* had a Mission Control position (RETRO) with a dedicated back room staff who spent the entire flight doing so in real time. If find it not only highly unlikely that NASA wouldn't know that at 'x' position along the trajectory they couldn't execute an abort - but even more unlikely that a MIT student would have the requisite deep understanding of the trajectory and the available computational resources to perform the required calculations within a few hours of the accident.
It is true that MIT was involved in trajectory design and analysis, so it sounds like someone has taken that and expanded it into what amounts as an urban legend. (Also note the individual spreading the story was a junior staffer in NASA's PR department at the time of the accident - not connected with Mission Control at all.)
You've got some mighty twisted logic there... if they're mocking the stereotypes, and those stereotypes are "sluts and poofs"... How are they *not* mocking women and homosexuals? That's like painting a target on a window and claiming that it's OK to heave rocks at it because "you were aiming at the target, not the window".
I did head something curious "we would steer Curiosity if..." which is impossible, they can't steer, curiosity steers itself mainly because of the delay.
You probably caught someone thinking out loud about what something like Curiosity itself could do with further development. As flown it's limited mostly to controlling range and can't actually do much steering. This is partly because it's limited in how much cross range velocity it can develop and partly because it has only a very short time for that velocity to propagate into distance.
This idea that there has to be 24/7 engagement of drop-jawed rapture to indicate a high level of public interest seems to be trotted out ONLY for Space explorations.
Um, no. That's a ludicrous strawman of your own creation. The idea is that there has to be *some* significant indication of ongoing interest, not just passing interest when something exciting or interesting happens. And the blunt truth is, there are no such indications. Even the lunar landings couldn't hold the public's interest after the first one - until astronauts nearly died. (And then tapered off rapidly after that.)
even if the mainstream media can't be bothered to mention it.
The main stream media isn't stupid. If people were interested, they'd watch. They'd complain about lack of coverage. They'd write to their congresscritters. They'd endlessly forward, in email and on Facebook, bitches and complaints about NASA funding... You'd see NASA press releases on Facebook, and in email, and on other than fanboi websites, etc..., etc... but the cold hard fact is that they do none of these things. The public simply isn't interested enough to take more than a minimal interest - and all the publicity in the world won't change that.
Politically, if these methods of passive involvement were more widely publicized, funding the space program would be a no-brainer for any American -- just for the excitement involved, if nothing else, of accomplishing such a difficult task.
No, they wouldn't. Because by tomorrow morning, when the hard work of commissioning begins, and next when the hard and boring work of actual science begins, interest would drop to essentially zero, (Except among the most hard of hard core geeks.)
If I'm writing, I'm not paying attention, I'm just a passive conduit for words going in my ears and out my fingers. If I do take notes, I generally find myself wondering what the hell I meant.
Translation: I'm a crappy note-taker, and never learned to do it right - therefore notes suck.
You just nailed the greatest problem with political discourse in this country. Most of the major news organizations have decided that impartiality requires they provide an equal platform to both sides of any issue regardless of the fact that my side consists of angels and the other side consists of devils who kick puppies and eat babies.
A large part of the cost may be due to accounting.
They use an existing rocket; zero development cost there. While Nasa would probably either develop a new rocket just for that mission, and put all the cost of development on the Mars mission, so they could re-use the rocket later at much lower cost for projects they don't have budget for.
This drivel is modded insightful? It's utter bullshit. For NASA, the money for developing a new booster and for running a planetary probe mission come out of two different pots of money managed by two different centers on opposite sides of the continent. NASA has only developed a new booster specifically for a single mission [NAICT] just once in it's history - the Saturn V. (Note to the pedants - the Juno I doesn't count, it was developed by ABMA and predates NASA.) Other than that, it has either adapted/modified existing boosters (and counted that cost within the cost of the program) or used stock boosters.
No, the Indian probe is most likely cheap because it's low capability and low chance of success. (q.v. Beagle 2.)
Added to that, he tossed out war, but war will have an extremely powerful influence on this pattern -- it probably won't distort it too much in the long-term, but it will definitely affect the surrounding periods of incidence.
Indeed - as his 1970 peak or political was driven partly by the Vietnam war. Nor, as he claims, was WWII quiescent... his own graph shows an increase of political violence across the war years.
The pirate bay is accessible from any geographical zone. No legal provider is. Piracy is my only way to get the US-centric references on Slashdot and Reddit.
Just when I think pirates can't come up with a lamer excuse to justify their actions... a new low comes along. Seriously? "I steal because otherwise can't get the cultural references"?
Currently, only "piracy" (it used to be called sharing) venues understand what internet is : a transnational network designed to transmit information without geographical discrimination. There seems to be no legal venue who understood that feature.
The reason only pirates understand that "feature", is because it's a definition they created.
I want to be able to download a drm-less version of any French, English, Japanese version of any movie that is available. I'll pay for that, but I won't pay for something that is of lower quality than what piracy can provide.
But here, the real truth comes out with all the excuses stripped away. Like a five year old you want what you want when you want it - but only on your own terms. And if those terms aren't met, you'll steal it while proclaiming "look what they forced me to do".
I've always wondered why we use cows to generate milk. Given that most of milk is relatively simple (water, sugars, chalk, oil), why can't we have bioreactor into which we put grass-clippings, and get out something roughly similar to milk?
For the same reason we can't do many things that ill educated think we should be able to do - those things aren't nearly as simple as they mistakenly believe.
So if we're willing to reduce the beef production by a factor of 3 from where we are now, we can probably avoid human management.
Well, no. The grasslands that once supported the bison aren't just used to grow corn for cows... They also grow corn, wheat, and a wide variety of other crops for human consumption.
There's only one place to view the Mars landing - Gale Crater, Mars.
Here on Earth, you're just going to be watching a bunch of talking heads looping the same animations we've all been watching for months and repeating the same breathless quotes about the difficulty of the landing. They could pre-record the thing in two versions (one for a successful landing, one for a failed landing) and you'd never know the difference.
Me, I have an event I'm organizing over the weekend... If I'm awake on Sunday night, I'll watch the talking heads. If not, no biggie.
I'm not worried about every loser being classified as frivolous, I'm worried about *any* loser potentially being classified as frivolous. Frivolous is a word open to very wide interpretation, and it's not something that can easily be defined in the law. One man's frivolous is another man's life-or-death, and the line between honest but wrong and dishonest but wrong is a matter of bias, not fact.
And whether or not they use it responsibly - the system will tend towards clogging because the losing party will almost invariably appeal. "Frivolous" and "likely to prevail" are both terms open to wide interpretation.
Allowing judges to force the plaintiffs to pay for an unsuccessful suit against the defendants in all cases would help limit spurious legal cases. If groups like RIAA had to pay when they lost the case against someone, it would go a long way to reduce these legal manoeuvres against people who cannot afford it.
It will also limit non-spurious cases, because it would tend to deter all who don't believe that they have a 100% solid and airtight case. It will also deter those without deep pockets from seeking justice against those that do, because they can't take the chance of losing and having to absorb the costs of those legions of lawyers.
You forget that not all suits are about damages and money, many are about getting a Court to rule on a particular point or interpretation of the law. Essentially, you'd tend towards limiting those sorts of suits and limiting access to the Courts to those with deep enough pockets to absorb the potential losses. This is a bad idea.
You haven't actually been in any political debates have you?
You can't have true religious debates: when people run out of argument, they pull the "faith" card and the discussion is over.
People do the same thing in political debates too. Whether the issue is "which god is the almightiest" or "do people have a right to free health care", it's all faith.
If you are an Anonymous member reading this, then know this, I am against you. I hold wrong what you do and how you do it, but what you are accomplishing... you have torn my ethical code.
Except - they haven't actually accomplished anything, nor are they the on track to accomplish anything. So, I call bullshit - you're not torn at all, you're heavily biased toward them. (And seriously, equating child porn with Sony? Your bias runs really deep.)
The B-52 didn't need stealth technology for two main reasons: First, in it's intended role is was accompanied by jammers and/or defensive drones, and cleared its path in by using stand off nuclear weapons or flew through a path cleared by earlier waves of bomber or ICBM's or SLBM's.* Second, in the roles it isn't intended for, it's either used when we have complete air superiority**, or when there's no threat to them in the first place, or when the target can be engaged with (non nuclear) stand off weapons. (And bombers *can* stand off, or go in only when we have absolute air superiority - fighters and strike aircraft aren't so lucky.)
The B-2, on the other hand, requires stealth because we aren't buying them by the gross lot, and thus cannot afford to use some of them in defense suppression roles to allow the remainder to get through. Nor do we have as many nuclear weapons as in the past (which is a good thing mind you), which means we can't allocate as many as we used to to defense suppression.
On top of that - stealth is designed for exactly the kind of war we've already fought and will fight again. It was used extensively in the early days of both air campaigns in Iraq because, like so many nations, they had a surprisingly capable anti-aircraft network. The electronics such things depend on have gotten cheaper, more capable, and more widely distributed.
* And even so, across it's life span there's been ongoing efforts to use stand off weapons to attack primary targets too - you don't need stealth if you're attacking from a couple of hundred miles away.
** I.E. the Admiral, and you, conveniently forget the lessons learned from Rolling Thunder.
During WWII, they cranked planes out by the 1,000's if not 10's of 1,000's. Nowadays, the number of high performance jets is measured in the hundreds. If there were to be a conflict, due to the complexity of today's aircraft, there is no way to crank out new aircraft by the 1,000's or hundreds or even tens.
Apples and oranges. They were cranking aircraft out at that rate because they were facing an enemy that were cranking them out at that rate. Today, nobody is, so there's a level playing field.
There may certainly be a need for a much simpler aircraft that can be easily mass produced in significant quantities.
For what purpose? Anything that can easily be massed produced without breaking the bank will be taken out trivially by the higher performance aircraft. And where are we going to find the pilots?
Never at any point was there any training on what to do if we were really attacked by a real enemy.
It would be just like your tests - which was the whole point of doing the tests. The rest of the stuff was well above your pay grade, and it should be unsurprising you didn't get training on it.
my total experience was that it was a very big joke as I at no time felt I was defending this country from any enemy as I was given no training.
No, you were given plenty of training - it just didn't 'stick' with you because you chose to treat everything as a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA analyzed the hell out of every inch of the trajectory pre-flight, *and* had a Mission Control position (RETRO) with a dedicated back room staff who spent the entire flight doing so in real time. If find it not only highly unlikely that NASA wouldn't know that at 'x' position along the trajectory they couldn't execute an abort - but even more unlikely that a MIT student would have the requisite deep understanding of the trajectory and the available computational resources to perform the required calculations within a few hours of the accident.
It is true that MIT was involved in trajectory design and analysis, so it sounds like someone has taken that and expanded it into what amounts as an urban legend. (Also note the individual spreading the story was a junior staffer in NASA's PR department at the time of the accident - not connected with Mission Control at all.)
You've got some mighty twisted logic there... if they're mocking the stereotypes, and those stereotypes are "sluts and poofs"... How are they *not* mocking women and homosexuals? That's like painting a target on a window and claiming that it's OK to heave rocks at it because "you were aiming at the target, not the window".
You probably caught someone thinking out loud about what something like Curiosity itself could do with further development. As flown it's limited mostly to controlling range and can't actually do much steering. This is partly because it's limited in how much cross range velocity it can develop and partly because it has only a very short time for that velocity to propagate into distance.
Um, no. That's a ludicrous strawman of your own creation. The idea is that there has to be *some* significant indication of ongoing interest, not just passing interest when something exciting or interesting happens. And the blunt truth is, there are no such indications. Even the lunar landings couldn't hold the public's interest after the first one - until astronauts nearly died. (And then tapered off rapidly after that.)
The main stream media isn't stupid. If people were interested, they'd watch. They'd complain about lack of coverage. They'd write to their congresscritters. They'd endlessly forward, in email and on Facebook, bitches and complaints about NASA funding... You'd see NASA press releases on Facebook, and in email, and on other than fanboi websites, etc..., etc... but the cold hard fact is that they do none of these things. The public simply isn't interested enough to take more than a minimal interest - and all the publicity in the world won't change that.
No, they wouldn't. Because by tomorrow morning, when the hard work of commissioning begins, and next when the hard and boring work of actual science begins, interest would drop to essentially zero, (Except among the most hard of hard core geeks.)
Translation: I'm a crappy note-taker, and never learned to do it right - therefore notes suck.
There, fixed that for you.
This drivel is modded insightful? It's utter bullshit. For NASA, the money for developing a new booster and for running a planetary probe mission come out of two different pots of money managed by two different centers on opposite sides of the continent. NASA has only developed a new booster specifically for a single mission [NAICT] just once in it's history - the Saturn V. (Note to the pedants - the Juno I doesn't count, it was developed by ABMA and predates NASA.) Other than that, it has either adapted/modified existing boosters (and counted that cost within the cost of the program) or used stock boosters.
No, the Indian probe is most likely cheap because it's low capability and low chance of success. (q.v. Beagle 2.)
Indeed - as his 1970 peak or political was driven partly by the Vietnam war. Nor, as he claims, was WWII quiescent... his own graph shows an increase of political violence across the war years.
Just when I think pirates can't come up with a lamer excuse to justify their actions... a new low comes along. Seriously? "I steal because otherwise can't get the cultural references"?
The reason only pirates understand that "feature", is because it's a definition they created.
But here, the real truth comes out with all the excuses stripped away. Like a five year old you want what you want when you want it - but only on your own terms. And if those terms aren't met, you'll steal it while proclaiming "look what they forced me to do".
For the same reason we can't do many things that ill educated think we should be able to do - those things aren't nearly as simple as they mistakenly believe.
Well, no. The grasslands that once supported the bison aren't just used to grow corn for cows... They also grow corn, wheat, and a wide variety of other crops for human consumption.
The conclusion is only logical if you accept the illogical assumptions of the religious beliefs that the conclusion is based on.
So taking breaks is good for productivity - unless you're a government employee?
There's only one place to view the Mars landing - Gale Crater, Mars.
Here on Earth, you're just going to be watching a bunch of talking heads looping the same animations we've all been watching for months and repeating the same breathless quotes about the difficulty of the landing. They could pre-record the thing in two versions (one for a successful landing, one for a failed landing) and you'd never know the difference.
Me, I have an event I'm organizing over the weekend... If I'm awake on Sunday night, I'll watch the talking heads. If not, no biggie.
I'm not worried about every loser being classified as frivolous, I'm worried about *any* loser potentially being classified as frivolous. Frivolous is a word open to very wide interpretation, and it's not something that can easily be defined in the law. One man's frivolous is another man's life-or-death, and the line between honest but wrong and dishonest but wrong is a matter of bias, not fact.
Precisely - outside of geek culture, pop culture, and the sciences... Wikipedia has some pretty severe quality problems.
Not to mention the traditional Slashdot lament "who is surprised that a study sponsored by Wikipedia finds Wikipedia is accurate?".
And whether or not they use it responsibly - the system will tend towards clogging because the losing party will almost invariably appeal. "Frivolous" and "likely to prevail" are both terms open to wide interpretation.
It will also limit non-spurious cases, because it would tend to deter all who don't believe that they have a 100% solid and airtight case. It will also deter those without deep pockets from seeking justice against those that do, because they can't take the chance of losing and having to absorb the costs of those legions of lawyers.
You forget that not all suits are about damages and money, many are about getting a Court to rule on a particular point or interpretation of the law. Essentially, you'd tend towards limiting those sorts of suits and limiting access to the Courts to those with deep enough pockets to absorb the potential losses. This is a bad idea.
You haven't actually been in any political debates have you?
People do the same thing in political debates too. Whether the issue is "which god is the almightiest" or "do people have a right to free health care", it's all faith.
Except - they haven't actually accomplished anything, nor are they the on track to accomplish anything. So, I call bullshit - you're not torn at all, you're heavily biased toward them. (And seriously, equating child porn with Sony? Your bias runs really deep.)
Then STFU. It's not QB's fault that your past or current company is using it for a purpose it's not intended for, and you're a jackass for blaming it.
The B-52 didn't need stealth technology for two main reasons: First, in it's intended role is was accompanied by jammers and/or defensive drones, and cleared its path in by using stand off nuclear weapons or flew through a path cleared by earlier waves of bomber or ICBM's or SLBM's.* Second, in the roles it isn't intended for, it's either used when we have complete air superiority**, or when there's no threat to them in the first place, or when the target can be engaged with (non nuclear) stand off weapons. (And bombers *can* stand off, or go in only when we have absolute air superiority - fighters and strike aircraft aren't so lucky.)
The B-2, on the other hand, requires stealth because we aren't buying them by the gross lot, and thus cannot afford to use some of them in defense suppression roles to allow the remainder to get through. Nor do we have as many nuclear weapons as in the past (which is a good thing mind you), which means we can't allocate as many as we used to to defense suppression.
On top of that - stealth is designed for exactly the kind of war we've already fought and will fight again. It was used extensively in the early days of both air campaigns in Iraq because, like so many nations, they had a surprisingly capable anti-aircraft network. The electronics such things depend on have gotten cheaper, more capable, and more widely distributed.
* And even so, across it's life span there's been ongoing efforts to use stand off weapons to attack primary targets too - you don't need stealth if you're attacking from a couple of hundred miles away.
** I.E. the Admiral, and you, conveniently forget the lessons learned from Rolling Thunder.
Apples and oranges. They were cranking aircraft out at that rate because they were facing an enemy that were cranking them out at that rate. Today, nobody is, so there's a level playing field.
For what purpose? Anything that can easily be massed produced without breaking the bank will be taken out trivially by the higher performance aircraft. And where are we going to find the pilots?
It would be just like your tests - which was the whole point of doing the tests. The rest of the stuff was well above your pay grade, and it should be unsurprising you didn't get training on it.
No, you were given plenty of training - it just didn't 'stick' with you because you chose to treat everything as a joke.