Even if I do count the scientists, she still stand separate because she did no significant work while on the station. (She was a test subject for other peoples experiments, and a low level tech that collected samples for other peoples experiments, but no work of her own. Scientifically she was nothing more than a lab rat)
She, and the rest of the tourists were passengers, period. Deal with it.
(Protip: Even in the early days of aviation they made the distinction between passengers and crew.)
I propose we keep one in space. Send it up unmanned, remotely piloted (or send up a single pilot, who's return flight will be provided by the Russians), and keep it docked to the ISS.
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong.
There are two huge problems here:
The ISS isn't designed to stay in the attitude required to keep the Shuttle shielded from orbital debris and excessive solar heating for any length of time.
Which attitude also interferes with the ability to dock/undock Soyuz and Progress and berth/deberth ATV and HTV
It could be both an escape pod and an extra shelter. We know that seven people can fit on the shuttle's living quarters and you can bet the folks up there would appreciate the extra space.
If you're living in the Shuttle, you're consuming it's life support supplies - which cannot be replenished on orbit.
To determine the airworthiness of the shuttles. Then the real question would be whether or not the FAA could possibly gather the balls to issue airworthiness and pilot certificates.
Probably what would happen is NASA would take the ball away from the FAA by declaring the private Shuttle to be a Public Aircraft - and thus not under the FAA's jurisdiction. (NASA has done this before, with the Guppy family of aircraft for example.)
The big problem with the shuttle is that they had to give it a huge payload in order to get the military to sign on and get the necessary funding.
They'd have ended up with a huge cargo capacity anyhow - as the original plan with the Shuttle as the people carrier and a separate heavy lift booster as the cargo carrier never came to fruition. NASA was already moving in that direction when the DoD came onboard.
If they were to start again using modern technologies, they should be able to create something smaller for human launches that is both safer and cheaper.
Safer? Probably not. (The Shuttle is pretty much as safe any capsule.)
Cheaper? Almost certainly, but you get what you pay for. A compact car is a lot cheaper than a pickup truck, but it's also much less capable and less flexible.
DoD launch requirements are the reason we have robust and fairly reliable EELV services, which are great for NASA as they insulate NASA's unmanned programs from the drama associated with the shuttle program, and give the manned program a good option for the future of the manned program. However, they're also responsible for the huge wings on the shuttle (USAF wanted cross-track landing capability for military operations), and the continued use of solid rocket motors for the shuttle (since this subsidizes military missile production).
With regards to the DoD and the Shuttle - you're absolutely wrong on both points, you're doing nothing but repeating urban legends.
If actually go back and study the evolution of the Shuttle - you'll find that wing steadily grew across the entire period. Why? Because wings allow greater cross track which allows for more re-entry and landing opportunities and greater abort margins. I.E. increased safety. Yeah, the DoD determined the final size and performance, but the difference between the DoD specs and NASA specs is much less than urban legend would have you believe.
Same thing for the SRB's. Liquid boosters were taken off the table long before the DoD came onboard because of their great expense and fragility.
The big problem with rockets is that the fuel has to travel with the vessel. I haven't done the math but I have heard roughly half of the fuel is spent accelerating the other half to the speed of sound.
Correct for the first part, wrong for the second. (It's more like.05-.10 or so.)
Imagine if you had a railgun that accelerates a ram-jet past the speed of sound, the ram-jet burns oxygen from the air and accelerates to nearly orbital velocity, finally a rocket takes over to reach orbit.
The least of the (multiple) problems with your scheme is that ramjets can't achieve more than a fairly small faction of orbital velocity, and does that at a fairly small fraction of the altitude required. (Car analogy time: This is like using another car to tow your car a mile while accelerating it to 5mph - and the using your own car to accelerate to 55mph and complete your seventy mile commute.) The end result is you spend billions in R&D and upfront costs and few hundreds of thousands of dollars in assorted operational costs to save a few hundreds of thousands of dollars in first stage fuel.
It is worth noting Burt Rutan uses a mother ship to launch his space craft. The mother ship gets up to speed by burning oxygen from the air in standard jet engines. The spacecraft then drops off and launches with a substantial head start.
It's worth noting that this is pretty much irrelevant to the matter of orbital flight as the energies and speeds involved in suborbital flight are vanishingly small fraction of those involved in orbital flight. Rutan's solution doesn't scale well.
It's a neat article, as usual with Neal, but the ending is odd. He says the current state of rocketry is at a local maximum, it's not going to get appreciably better
Well, that portion of the article is mostly bunk because the information based it on come from someone with a vested interest in replacing the current system with his own pet system. (I.E. the article is heavily biased out of the gate).
there may be other ways of putting stuff in orbit that are better, and then he says he doesn't know why we aren't trying those other better things.
Mostly because those 'better things' almost universally aren't once you get past the the power points and down into the actual accounting and engineering. They either a) don't work* like their proponents think they do, or b) require billions upon billions of upfront investment to save the cost of a few hundred thousands of dollars worth of first stage fuel. (In many cases it's both.)** Hence the weak and odd ending - he's taken the bunk he's been fed and treated is as gospel truth. When he realizes that reality doesn't match the vision embodied in the input bunk, he treats reality as faulty rather than examining his input and assumptions. (I.E. GIGO.)
* When I say "don't work" I don't mean "requires a bit of R&D", I mean "requires magic pixie dust, unobtanium, and/or repealing the laws of physics".
** This is the infamous "chicken-and-egg" scenario well known to the intelligent space advocates, it's going to cost a mega bundle to get rockets up to airliner levels of reliability and cost where in theory the resulting demand will justify the investment - but currently the demand is so low there's no reason to make the investment in the first place. This is why so many advocate dubious schemes like subsidized fuel depots - as an artificial demand and an indirect subsidy for launch providers.
I don't think this is surprising. I would have figured a court order would make Facebook give up your data to the court.
And Google. And Yahoo. And... pretty much any other company subject to the US legal system.
The linked article is only news to someone whose head is in the sand or who has been living in a hole somewhere since basically forever. It's only linked to on Slashdot because it's been two whole days since the last Two Minutes Hate.
Maybe it really is libel? People can get pretty vicious in their blogs, because they think they are invincible internet supermen.
Return question, why would he? What does he have to gain from slandering a restaurant chain?
You must be new to the interent - around here people are vicious, vindictive, etc... etc.. quite routinely whether they stand to gain in return or not.
And the military are just look on, they are on the side of the protesters.
They're not so much on the side of the protesters as they are not on the side of Mubarik. (The military has been increasingly dissatisfied with him for some time now.)
By taking what appears to be the moral high ground by appearing to side with the protesters, they're setting themselves up as kingmakers as this continues to shake out. They're demonstrating that their loyalty is not to government or constitution - but to whoever displeases them the least.
I would not at all be surprised if a military revolution/junta emerges out of this.
but now, you wont allow a new one if its NEEDED and called for?
There's a difference between a revolution (which you seem to be advocating) which replaces the goverment, and enshrining circumvention of due process and political murder into an existing constitution.
how sad. you have learned nothing from our history.
People in glass houses should refrain from throwing stones.
I think the point is that Julia sets are compute-intensive, and they want to show off that "Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly"
Sure, if you're working at the top level (where it's not particulary compute intensive), but zoom down a few steps and it's suddenly as slow as molasses. (Slower than FRACTINT back on my old 386.)
They make it look fast by limiting the number of iterations and by using a calculation method that draws a 'draft' version first and then goes back in and repeats the calculations (increasing the detail level) while you're going "ooh shiny" over the not very detailed 'draft'. They've taken a page from FRACTINT for that - this method was included in the program specifically as a method of quickly creating a low fidelity rendering so the user could quickly search for interesting locations that would then be re-examined using methods that were computationally intensive.
I.E. it's a demo rigged to *look* spiffy and shiny, but if you have any actual under-the-hood knowledge you can see right through the smoke-and-mirrors.
Geeks identified themselves (or were identified by others) by their hobbies, interests, fictions, and humour, all of which were different from what the "mainstream" people occupied themselves with.
Well, mostly correct. 'Geeks' used to mean 'obsessively interested in a particular subject' - hence 'computer geek', 'history geek', 'chemistry geek' etc... That term was later pre-empted and perverted by the media and pop culture.
And surely that's what all (sane) geeks have always wanted? Every time you've frustratedly tried to explain some cunning new technology breakthrough to an acquaintance, and been baffled by how bored they seem- didn't you wish they found it as fascinating as you?
Nope. Because the definition of 'geek' solely as 'obsessively interested in computer technology' is one created by the mass media and pop culture in the 1980's. (See: "Sixteen Candles".)
Didn't you always want more people to tell jokes that you found funny, and your favourite directors/authors/publishers to have more money to spend on your favourite projects?
On the other hand, once the "geekdom" of the 20th century has become the mainstream of the 21st, undoubtedly new subcultures will crop up on the fringe.
The idea that 'geek' was a synonym for Otaku ('obsessive fanboy') is a *much* later development, roughly contemporary with the explosion of the 'net into pop culture in the mid/late 90's. (Giving rise to saying such as "you haven't seen/read/heard $MEDIA_PRODUCT? turn in your geek card!".) *That* form of geekdom never died and never went mainstream - it was mainstream and deeply embedded in pop culture from practically Day One of it's existence.
One of my professors at the time noted that there would have been no O-ring to fail if the thing had been built in one piece. And it could have been built in one piece if built local to the launch site. Which it could have been. But it had to come by train because the bid was won by someone who did not manufacture locally. And since train cars aren't big enough for a whole fuel tank, they had to make the tank in pieces.
Well, as usual, it's not nearly so simple as that.
The reality, that when the hardware decisions were being made - we had exactly zero flight experience with big monolithic solids and considerable flight experience with segmented solids. There's also the near impossibility of pouring the grain of a monolithic solid with sufficient consistency in performance, let alone matching two of them to required level of consistency. Then there's near impossibility of handling a million plus pounds worth of monolithic grain without flexing it and damaging the grain or the bond between the grain and the case.
So in reality, there was many reasons to prefer segmented boosters and no particular reason to prefer monolithic ones. (Which is why of the three bids submitted - only one was monolithic.)
You're also making the mistake of generalizing from the specific instance of the Shuttle to all segmented booster. The cause of the Challenger accident wasn't because the booster was segmented (we've flown many with zero problems), but because that particular joint design had a serious flaw in that it could not fully compensate for joint rotation.
Slashdot Mirror
So am I. Having to deal with your ignorance on a daily basis would be difficult.
That's pretty much the point - you don't *need* to do a hold down test. If it lights, it's working.
Even if I do count the scientists, she still stand separate because she did no significant work while on the station. (She was a test subject for other peoples experiments, and a low level tech that collected samples for other peoples experiments, but no work of her own. Scientifically she was nothing more than a lab rat)
She, and the rest of the tourists were passengers, period. Deal with it.
(Protip: Even in the early days of aviation they made the distinction between passengers and crew.)
There are two huge problems here:
If you're living in the Shuttle, you're consuming it's life support supplies - which cannot be replenished on orbit.
Etc... etc...
It's just not a feasible idea.
Probably what would happen is NASA would take the ball away from the FAA by declaring the private Shuttle to be a Public Aircraft - and thus not under the FAA's jurisdiction. (NASA has done this before, with the Guppy family of aircraft for example.)
They'd have ended up with a huge cargo capacity anyhow - as the original plan with the Shuttle as the people carrier and a separate heavy lift booster as the cargo carrier never came to fruition. NASA was already moving in that direction when the DoD came onboard.
Safer? Probably not. (The Shuttle is pretty much as safe any capsule.)
Cheaper? Almost certainly, but you get what you pay for. A compact car is a lot cheaper than a pickup truck, but it's also much less capable and less flexible.
She wasn't an astronaut, she was a passenger.
Well, if you actually bother to read TFA - you'll note the date is prior to the start of the season. So you're scenario is basically impossible.
With regards to the DoD and the Shuttle - you're absolutely wrong on both points, you're doing nothing but repeating urban legends.
If actually go back and study the evolution of the Shuttle - you'll find that wing steadily grew across the entire period. Why? Because wings allow greater cross track which allows for more re-entry and landing opportunities and greater abort margins. I.E. increased safety. Yeah, the DoD determined the final size and performance, but the difference between the DoD specs and NASA specs is much less than urban legend would have you believe.
Same thing for the SRB's. Liquid boosters were taken off the table long before the DoD came onboard because of their great expense and fragility.
Correct for the first part, wrong for the second. (It's more like .05-.10 or so.)
The least of the (multiple) problems with your scheme is that ramjets can't achieve more than a fairly small faction of orbital velocity, and does that at a fairly small fraction of the altitude required. (Car analogy time: This is like using another car to tow your car a mile while accelerating it to 5mph - and the using your own car to accelerate to 55mph and complete your seventy mile commute.) The end result is you spend billions in R&D and upfront costs and few hundreds of thousands of dollars in assorted operational costs to save a few hundreds of thousands of dollars in first stage fuel.
It's worth noting that this is pretty much irrelevant to the matter of orbital flight as the energies and speeds involved in suborbital flight are vanishingly small fraction of those involved in orbital flight. Rutan's solution doesn't scale well.
You Sir (or Madam) win the prize for "most sensible post on the topic". I wrote one myself, but it pales next to yours.
Which means that, like him, you're an idiot.
Um, any of us who are idiots, yes. Those of us smart enough not to make the many idiotic mistakes he did, no.
Well, that portion of the article is mostly bunk because the information based it on come from someone with a vested interest in replacing the current system with his own pet system. (I.E. the article is heavily biased out of the gate).
Mostly because those 'better things' almost universally aren't once you get past the the power points and down into the actual accounting and engineering. They either a) don't work* like their proponents think they do, or b) require billions upon billions of upfront investment to save the cost of a few hundred thousands of dollars worth of first stage fuel. (In many cases it's both.)**
Hence the weak and odd ending - he's taken the bunk he's been fed and treated is as gospel truth. When he realizes that reality doesn't match the vision embodied in the input bunk, he treats reality as faulty rather than examining his input and assumptions. (I.E. GIGO.)
* When I say "don't work" I don't mean "requires a bit of R&D", I mean "requires magic pixie dust, unobtanium, and/or repealing the laws of physics".
** This is the infamous "chicken-and-egg" scenario well known to the intelligent space advocates, it's going to cost a mega bundle to get rockets up to airliner levels of reliability and cost where in theory the resulting demand will justify the investment - but currently the demand is so low there's no reason to make the investment in the first place. This is why so many advocate dubious schemes like subsidized fuel depots - as an artificial demand and an indirect subsidy for launch providers.
And Google. And Yahoo. And... pretty much any other company subject to the US legal system.
The linked article is only news to someone whose head is in the sand or who has been living in a hole somewhere since basically forever. It's only linked to on Slashdot because it's been two whole days since the last Two Minutes Hate.
You must be new to the interent - around here people are vicious, vindictive, etc... etc.. quite routinely whether they stand to gain in return or not.
They're not so much on the side of the protesters as they are not on the side of Mubarik. (The military has been increasingly dissatisfied with him for some time now.)
By taking what appears to be the moral high ground by appearing to side with the protesters, they're setting themselves up as kingmakers as this continues to shake out. They're demonstrating that their loyalty is not to government or constitution - but to whoever displeases them the least.
I would not at all be surprised if a military revolution/junta emerges out of this.
There's a difference between a revolution (which you seem to be advocating) which replaces the goverment, and enshrining circumvention of due process and political murder into an existing constitution.
People in glass houses should refrain from throwing stones.
Sure, if you're working at the top level (where it's not particulary compute intensive), but zoom down a few steps and it's suddenly as slow as molasses. (Slower than FRACTINT back on my old 386.)
They make it look fast by limiting the number of iterations and by using a calculation method that draws a 'draft' version first and then goes back in and repeats the calculations (increasing the detail level) while you're going "ooh shiny" over the not very detailed 'draft'. They've taken a page from FRACTINT for that - this method was included in the program specifically as a method of quickly creating a low fidelity rendering so the user could quickly search for interesting locations that would then be re-examined using methods that were computationally intensive.
I.E. it's a demo rigged to *look* spiffy and shiny, but if you have any actual under-the-hood knowledge you can see right through the smoke-and-mirrors.
Well, that too... :)
Well, mostly correct. 'Geeks' used to mean 'obsessively interested in a particular subject' - hence 'computer geek', 'history geek', 'chemistry geek' etc... That term was later pre-empted and perverted by the media and pop culture.
Nope. Because the definition of 'geek' solely as 'obsessively interested in computer technology' is one created by the mass media and pop culture in the 1980's. (See: "Sixteen Candles".)
The idea that 'geek' was a synonym for Otaku ('obsessive fanboy') is a *much* later development, roughly contemporary with the explosion of the 'net into pop culture in the mid/late 90's. (Giving rise to saying such as "you haven't seen/read/heard $MEDIA_PRODUCT? turn in your geek card!".) *That* form of geekdom never died and never went mainstream - it was mainstream and deeply embedded in pop culture from practically Day One of it's existence.
Dahmer was a cannibal.
Since Dahmer did not do so, you obviously have no clue what I was talking about, and are too fucking lazy to even look it up.
The parents of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims might have a different perspective on that.
Because the a gram is defined as 1/1000 of a Kilogram. Your definition would be circular.
Well, as usual, it's not nearly so simple as that.
The reality, that when the hardware decisions were being made - we had exactly zero flight experience with big monolithic solids and considerable flight experience with segmented solids. There's also the near impossibility of pouring the grain of a monolithic solid with sufficient consistency in performance, let alone matching two of them to required level of consistency. Then there's near impossibility of handling a million plus pounds worth of monolithic grain without flexing it and damaging the grain or the bond between the grain and the case.
So in reality, there was many reasons to prefer segmented boosters and no particular reason to prefer monolithic ones. (Which is why of the three bids submitted - only one was monolithic.)
You're also making the mistake of generalizing from the specific instance of the Shuttle to all segmented booster. The cause of the Challenger accident wasn't because the booster was segmented (we've flown many with zero problems), but because that particular joint design had a serious flaw in that it could not fully compensate for joint rotation.