The ratio is rather miserable if you want to reach even LEO. Tricks (like White Knight - SpaceShipOne or using scramjets) may help, but they add complexity too. We're not there yet, and won't be any time soon.
No, we're not there yet. Nor will we ever be by not flying reusables because we aren't there yet. You don't make progress by throwing the baby out with the bathwater, nor do you make progress by sitting around waiting for magic to happen.
For the same reason they spam in the first place - the cost to spam is virtually zero, so any result provides profit way out of proportion to the effort.
Those two cover some of it, but it'll take you a few weeks to get through it. The rest comes from decades of actually studying the issues and processes.
I understand the believe it would be economically better. But I also believe the pace the transition was made from never-functional X-level planes (such as the X-20) and full fledged fleet of planes was too much fast, in my point of view.
You'll find we are in agreement on this point - the leap from the X-15 and the lifting body programs to Shuttle was too fast, too far.
I disagree that you need a high flight rate for getting engineering data. Although I never worked on a manned project (and, also, never in north american projects) a lot of designs in the aerospace industry is one-of-a-kind and has never flown before. A few flights is a lot of data for review and, for sure, will wield better designs.
Sure, some are one-of-a-kind, others are built in small numbers. It depends on the craft, the program, and the goals - there isn't an absolute. Having a small series has the advantage that you can have (for example) one in flight test, one in the hangar being modified as a result of the flight tests, and one backup - and you rotate the craft as needed.
My personal opinion is that we often review a lot of data because we can capture a lot of data - a self reinforcing and toxic circle that creates a lot of paperwork but doesn't materially aid progress. The build-fly-modify cycle doesn't work if you never fly.
Magnificent debating style. Such useful and valuable comments. Bravo.
This is a matter of fact, not debate. And on the facts, you are wrong. Period.
"Well, we've got those materials."
I guess that's why they use delicate and finicky tiles on the shuttle, some of which always have to be replaced after each flight.
Well, yeah, that is why we have the delicate tiles on the Shuttle. Duh. Your original claim was that we "needed to find the materials", and having been shown to be wrong on that fact too - now you're trying to move the goalposts. (Most clumsily I might add.)
Spy satellite are great things and can photograph pretty much anything given a long enough period of time; the problem is they're only going to be over the exact patch of dirt you're interested in perhaps once a week
Actually, in a near circumpolar sun synchronous orbit it, flies over the exact patch of dirt you're interested in once every twenty four hours.
Enter the spy plane. The U-2 and SR-71 (and A-12, but that was discontinued in the 60's) are designed to get "now" pics without having to wait.
Actually, exit the spy plane once the satellites gained the capability to send back high resolution pictures as digital data. It doesn't take but a handful of birds to image a particular patch of dirt every eight hours or so and send the pictures back.
Now imagine you combine the two. The availability and speed of a spy plane, but the international benefit of staying out of of your enemy's airspace. Plus, due to the momentum it has, it stays in orbit for weeks, so after you buzz Moscow, you can do a course correction to your flying twinkie and hit up St. Petersburg, Beijing, Pyongyang, or Tehran to see where the weapons shipments are headed.
You only need to change the orbit if the bird isn't the near standard near circumpolar sun synchronous orbit, I.E. only in the case of a very few birds in the constellation.
You have to figure out how to build a reusable space vehicle first.
Which you'll never do unless you build and fly something so you can learn what works and what doesn't, which of your assumptions were wrong, etc... etc... You don't make progress by waiting for progress.
The shuttles have to be pretty much rebuilt before being used again, so they're not really anymore reusable than a capsule.
Wrong.
Reentry from orbital velocity seems to be the problem. If you can find materials that can do that over and over again and still be light enough to fly, then you've got something.
Well, we've got those materials. So I don't see what your point is.
I've never understood why building identical shuttles instead of getting more data and building ever improving designs.
Because building and maintaining a series of identical (or nearly so) vehicles maximizes your economies of scale, and minimizes your engineering, training, maintenance, and operational costs. The other reason is that you need a minimum sized fleet to maintain any kind of a flight rate, and you need them fairly early on so you order them early on. Also without a decent number of units to maintain that flight rate, it is very hard to build the required experience to gain the data required.
That being said, the current Shuttle is considerably improved over what it was when it first rolled off the line. The ET is lighter, the Orbiter is lighter, the SRB's and SSME's higher performing, virtually all the electronics vastly upgraded, etc... etc... Sure, we could almost certainly do better starting over, but the belief that the Shuttle has stood still is false.
Moderate it as a Troll if you will - but it's the truth. Yeah, it clashes with what 'everyone knows' about the Shuttle - buts that because most people know roughly nothing about the Shuttle beyond a haphazard collection of rumors, myths, and urban legends.
The original version would have had a titanium body rather than ceramic shingles...but our only source of titanium was in a country that was then considered likely to go communist. So the engineers were told to come up with another design. Some other changes were made to make it cheaper to build (rather than maintain). Etc.
Wrong on every count.
There is no 'original' version of the Shuttle - but there were a couple of dozen competing designs and concepts, some of which used ceramic tiles while others used titanium or other exotic metals in the form of shingles. However shingles were not only very (very) expensive and considerably heavier than tiles, the engineering work required to develop the shingles would have been considerably greater. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that the thin shingles and their complex system of attachment to the structure (to deal with both thermal expansion of the tiles and thermal expansion of the structure, ditto with vibration) would have been any cheaper to build or operate than the ceramic tiles.
To the extent that NASA was discouraged from using titanium, that was because of the increasing and projected to further increase demand for titanium by the USAF and USN. In the end the superbombers and deep divers that would have used all that titanium were all cancelled in the late 60's and early 70's because of their expense.
Oh wait, wasn't the Shuttle budget sharply limited at the same time? Shit, it was. So much for your bean counter theory - the whole budget was being sharply trimmed around then. Sorry to introduce another fact showing how even more wrong you are, but I like completeness and accuracy.
If you want to draw a lesson, it should probably be that you don't want bean-counters to design your equipment. Possibly it's reasonable to give them a veto on building it (as in "We can't afford that, sorry."), but no input on the design level.
Duh, that's exactly what happened. The engineers offered a design and the bean counters (or more correctly the engineers responsible for cost estimation) said "no way Jose", and the rest of the engineers went back to the drawing board.
OTOH, if that had been the case, the shuttle wouldn't have been built. Would that have been better? Perhaps. In that case Saturn would have been kept viable.
Well, seeing as you're wrong about the bean counters and the Shuttle, it's only symmetrical that you're wrong about the Saturn being viable. It's one of only two launch systems that make the Shuttle look like a bargain. (The other being the late and unlamented Titan IV.)
One that wasn't an orbital craft, and one that never flew at all. So, no, they aren't first generation craft in any useful sense.
Yes, reusable have proven to be the way to go, but other forms of transport aren't going 17,500 miles an hour, getting up to 5,000 degrees and going millions of miles.
Ok, so what? The shuttle goes fast and far, doesn't mean there cannot be a reusable orbital craft. Not to mention that 99.99999% of the 'far' is spent in almost no stress drifting around. It's nearly meaningless, even though it sounds impressive to the uneducated.
Also is folks listened to the MIT lectures on building the shuttle, they mentioned that the engines in the shuttle wouldn't have to be torn down and rebuilt between flights if the electronics were built onto the engine such the engines could be tested without removing them.
That's relevant to the things that electronics can test for. (A very small subset of the things that are tested/inspected on and SSME.) Not to mention that if such things were truly practical (electronics substituting for inspection and/or teardown), commercial aviation would be using it for jet engines.
Not to mention that they haven't removed the engines after every flight for over fifteen years, and haven't rebuilt them every time they're removed for over a decade.
I'm sure there are other what if style improvements that the shuttle built from blueprints could benefit from in the age of CAD that would aid in the rapid turnaround of any new vehicle designed with the Twinkie's test data.
This vehicle's (single flight) test data is roughly meaningless compared to the thirty years of flight experience for the Shuttle itself. Seriously, the Shuttle's problems don't stem from lack of CAD. CAD is just a fancy version of Microsoft Paint - you still need the engineering information behind the design. Without that information it doesn't matter if you use chisels on stone tablets or the latest engineering workstation.
There lies the key problem with the Shuttle, lack of funding, lack of basic technology research, lack of engineering development, and a healthy helping of excess ambition on the part of NASA and successive Congresses and Administrations. The Shuttle went wrong when those three collectively decided not to expand on the groundwork laid by the X-15 and the various lifting body projects in favor of Buck Rogers stunts.
Yet reusables have proven to be the way to go with every other form of transport. Or, to put it another way, it's a really bad idea to draw sweeping universal conclusions based on a first generation system.
I would think just eliminating an unknown latency and replacing it with a known one (radio waves generally travel at a consistent rate) would get you a pretty accurate time.
While radio waves do travel a constant speed, what they don't do is travel a consistent path between the satellite and the receiver. Some of this is due to the satellite's orbital motion, and the timing errors resulting from that can be eliminated. However, the path is also altered by changing ionospheric conditions which are difficult to model and predict. (Which is why WAAS and other workarounds have been implemented.)
That being said, we're going to see a lot more nasty overruns over the next few years because of massive price increases over the last few years. NASA has been badly bitten by this once before, during the early/mid 70's when inflation soared - during the critical early years of Shuttle R&D.
The IP is the lone piece of evidence they use against alleged file sharers
Yeah, that and the presence of file sharing software on the computers, and the open admission on the part of the defendant that he was sharing the files 'because he believed it was fair use to do so'.
verybody who knows anything about computers knows that the IP as an evidence is, practically, no evidence
Practically no evidence isn't the same a not being evidence. Not to mention that neither the school nor John Doe deny that the IP address is (at least in this instance) a unique identifier.
How in the hell is a trial 'fair' when you get fined 2 million dollars for 20 songs?
That a penalty is unjust has no bearing on whether or not the proceedings are unfair.
If I bought a device, I have every right to disassemble it, break it and use it in another way; including breaking whatever protection put on the device; it's my device after all.
If we were talking about a device, you'd have a point. Instead, it's just more smokescreen on your part.
It's a right in every frakkin country in the world except the US and the countries affected by its policies!
I see. Do you rape 12 year old children because it's a legal in some countries? Do you stone adulterers in your neighborhood because it's legal in some countries? If not, then you seem awfully selective in who you choose to use as a precedent.
hould I remind you of the Patriot Act? Have fun being spied upon for no reason whatsoever.
Ah yes, and here we see the final act of the play - as predictable as sunrise. After creating 'rights' which don't exist, ranting against the corporations, and gratuitous anti-US blather, comes the completely unrelated preference to the Patriot Act. Not only are you completely disconnected from reality, you're an utter loon without the ability to frame a coherent argument. Instead you substitute slinging everything little bit of dogma you can think of because you can't actually think.
Was he super good at spatial relationships and packing because he was a Tetris champ? Or was he a Tetris champ because he was a savant at spatial relationships and packing?
He may as well have said, literally, "I don't want them to have my name because I don't want to be sued and I don't think I did anything wrong."
Every time one uses either or both of these arguments, you look like a selfish, childish asshole.
And really, that's my problem with the pirates and why they get so little sympathy from the general public - their argument ultimately boils down "I don't want to respect anyone's rights and want everyone else to be forced to give up their rights". Then this guys comes along and claims "and while I shouldn't be forced to respect the rights of others, they should be forced to respect the rights I've created for myself out of whole cloth".
Except - I don't see any examples here of any 'loss of freedom'. John Doe was sharing copyrighted material, which has been illegal for a very long time, so being prosecuted for it hardly represents anything new.
The right to share, the right for a fair trial, the right to use what you bought in whatever way you want; and consequently the right of privacy; are the first forts of freedom to fall.
We've never had the unlimited right to share what does not belong to us. There's nothing here preventing the defendant(s) from getting a fair trial. The unlimited 'right' to use what bought in whatever way you want has never been a right - it's strictly a creation of pirates to justify their actions. And you've never been able to claim anonymity to avoid prosecution except in the limited case of whistle blowers.
Or, in short, while your statement is essentially the 'perfect storm' of karmawhoring - it bears very little connection with reality.
Well, if you actually read the Wikipedia article you link to - you'll find he was originally trained as an electrical engineer. So I'd say he may have contributed quite a bit.
The moon is absolutely positivly not a prerequsite for Mars. You certainly can (and should!) design hardware that simultaniously serves dual roles on both the Moon and Mars, in order to save expenses, but there is no "study" or "experimentation" that needs to be done on the moon to prepare us for Mars.
That's true of the hardware. That's not even remotely true of operating experience, engineering experience, etc... etc... The Moon isn't a required prerequisite, no. But to imply that going there first is without value is a major error.
We had comprehensive, workable, plans based on existing (not future) hardware and technology to get to Mars since at least the mid 90s.
For certain handwaving values of the words "comprehensive" and "workable", and with only fairly minor parts actually using existing hardware and technology... sure. In reality, no so much. Nobody has actually fielded the hardware required to keep the propellants at cryogenic temperatures for years on end for example. Nor have we figured how to actually land on Mars. (The atmosphere is too thin for parachutes only for any significant payload, and the gravity well too deep to rely on a propulsive landing for any significant payload.) We've only had one re-entry at anything resembling interplanetary speeds. Etc... etc...
We didn't do it because of internal NASA bickering and politics.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. In the first place, no Administration has placed space as a priority. Ever. In the second place, Congress was for most of the 70's to the 90's openly hostile to funding anything having to do with Mars exploration. (Hint: There's a reason why there were no Mars missions between Viking (1976) and Mars Pathfinder (1996).) The funding didn't start flowing significantly until NASA announced the discover of evidence of Martian life inside the ALH 84001 meteorite.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're not there yet. Nor will we ever be by not flying reusables because we aren't there yet. You don't make progress by throwing the baby out with the bathwater, nor do you make progress by sitting around waiting for magic to happen.
If 'Rods from God' weren't a ludicrous comic book weapons system that many mistakenly believe to be practical, that might be a useful role.
If 'Rods from God' weren't a ludicrous comic book weapons system that many mistakenly believe to be practical, that might be a useful role.
For the same reason they spam in the first place - the cost to spam is virtually zero, so any result provides profit way out of proportion to the effort.
Jenkins, 2001 - Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System The First 100 Missions, 3rd Edition.
Heppenheimer 1999 - The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA's Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle.
Those two cover some of it, but it'll take you a few weeks to get through it. The rest comes from decades of actually studying the issues and processes.
You'll find we are in agreement on this point - the leap from the X-15 and the lifting body programs to Shuttle was too fast, too far.
Sure, some are one-of-a-kind, others are built in small numbers. It depends on the craft, the program, and the goals - there isn't an absolute. Having a small series has the advantage that you can have (for example) one in flight test, one in the hangar being modified as a result of the flight tests, and one backup - and you rotate the craft as needed.
My personal opinion is that we often review a lot of data because we can capture a lot of data - a self reinforcing and toxic circle that creates a lot of paperwork but doesn't materially aid progress. The build-fly-modify cycle doesn't work if you never fly.
This is a matter of fact, not debate. And on the facts, you are wrong. Period.
Well, yeah, that is why we have the delicate tiles on the Shuttle. Duh. Your original claim was that we "needed to find the materials", and having been shown to be wrong on that fact too - now you're trying to move the goalposts. (Most clumsily I might add.)
Actually, in a near circumpolar sun synchronous orbit it, flies over the exact patch of dirt you're interested in once every twenty four hours.
Actually, exit the spy plane once the satellites gained the capability to send back high resolution pictures as digital data. It doesn't take but a handful of birds to image a particular patch of dirt every eight hours or so and send the pictures back.
You only need to change the orbit if the bird isn't the near standard near circumpolar sun synchronous orbit, I.E. only in the case of a very few birds in the constellation.
Which you'll never do unless you build and fly something so you can learn what works and what doesn't, which of your assumptions were wrong, etc... etc... You don't make progress by waiting for progress.
Wrong.
Well, we've got those materials. So I don't see what your point is.
Because building and maintaining a series of identical (or nearly so) vehicles maximizes your economies of scale, and minimizes your engineering, training, maintenance, and operational costs. The other reason is that you need a minimum sized fleet to maintain any kind of a flight rate, and you need them fairly early on so you order them early on. Also without a decent number of units to maintain that flight rate, it is very hard to build the required experience to gain the data required.
That being said, the current Shuttle is considerably improved over what it was when it first rolled off the line. The ET is lighter, the Orbiter is lighter, the SRB's and SSME's higher performing, virtually all the electronics vastly upgraded, etc... etc... Sure, we could almost certainly do better starting over, but the belief that the Shuttle has stood still is false.
Moderate it as a Troll if you will - but it's the truth. Yeah, it clashes with what 'everyone knows' about the Shuttle - buts that because most people know roughly nothing about the Shuttle beyond a haphazard collection of rumors, myths, and urban legends.
Wrong on every count.
There is no 'original' version of the Shuttle - but there were a couple of dozen competing designs and concepts, some of which used ceramic tiles while others used titanium or other exotic metals in the form of shingles. However shingles were not only very (very) expensive and considerably heavier than tiles, the engineering work required to develop the shingles would have been considerably greater. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that the thin shingles and their complex system of attachment to the structure (to deal with both thermal expansion of the tiles and thermal expansion of the structure, ditto with vibration) would have been any cheaper to build or operate than the ceramic tiles.
To the extent that NASA was discouraged from using titanium, that was because of the increasing and projected to further increase demand for titanium by the USAF and USN. In the end the superbombers and deep divers that would have used all that titanium were all cancelled in the late 60's and early 70's because of their expense.
Oh wait, wasn't the Shuttle budget sharply limited at the same time? Shit, it was. So much for your bean counter theory - the whole budget was being sharply trimmed around then. Sorry to introduce another fact showing how even more wrong you are, but I like completeness and accuracy.
Duh, that's exactly what happened. The engineers offered a design and the bean counters (or more correctly the engineers responsible for cost estimation) said "no way Jose", and the rest of the engineers went back to the drawing board.
Well, seeing as you're wrong about the bean counters and the Shuttle, it's only symmetrical that you're wrong about the Saturn being viable. It's one of only two launch systems that make the Shuttle look like a bargain. (The other being the late and unlamented Titan IV.)
One that wasn't an orbital craft, and one that never flew at all. So, no, they aren't first generation craft in any useful sense.
Ok, so what? The shuttle goes fast and far, doesn't mean there cannot be a reusable orbital craft. Not to mention that 99.99999% of the 'far' is spent in almost no stress drifting around. It's nearly meaningless, even though it sounds impressive to the uneducated.
That's relevant to the things that electronics can test for. (A very small subset of the things that are tested/inspected on and SSME.) Not to mention that if such things were truly practical (electronics substituting for inspection and/or teardown), commercial aviation would be using it for jet engines.
Not to mention that they haven't removed the engines after every flight for over fifteen years, and haven't rebuilt them every time they're removed for over a decade.
This vehicle's (single flight) test data is roughly meaningless compared to the thirty years of flight experience for the Shuttle itself. Seriously, the Shuttle's problems don't stem from lack of CAD. CAD is just a fancy version of Microsoft Paint - you still need the engineering information behind the design. Without that information it doesn't matter if you use chisels on stone tablets or the latest engineering workstation.
There lies the key problem with the Shuttle, lack of funding, lack of basic technology research, lack of engineering development, and a healthy helping of excess ambition on the part of NASA and successive Congresses and Administrations. The Shuttle went wrong when those three collectively decided not to expand on the groundwork laid by the X-15 and the various lifting body projects in favor of Buck Rogers stunts.
Yet reusables have proven to be the way to go with every other form of transport. Or, to put it another way, it's a really bad idea to draw sweeping universal conclusions based on a first generation system.
While radio waves do travel a constant speed, what they don't do is travel a consistent path between the satellite and the receiver. Some of this is due to the satellite's orbital motion, and the timing errors resulting from that can be eliminated. However, the path is also altered by changing ionospheric conditions which are difficult to model and predict. (Which is why WAAS and other workarounds have been implemented.)
Yes, that's standard accounting.
That being said, we're going to see a lot more nasty overruns over the next few years because of massive price increases over the last few years. NASA has been badly bitten by this once before, during the early/mid 70's when inflation soared - during the critical early years of Shuttle R&D.
Yeah, that and the presence of file sharing software on the computers, and the open admission on the part of the defendant that he was sharing the files 'because he believed it was fair use to do so'.
Practically no evidence isn't the same a not being evidence. Not to mention that neither the school nor John Doe deny that the IP address is (at least in this instance) a unique identifier.
That a penalty is unjust has no bearing on whether or not the proceedings are unfair.
If we were talking about a device, you'd have a point. Instead, it's just more smokescreen on your part.
I see. Do you rape 12 year old children because it's a legal in some countries? Do you stone adulterers in your neighborhood because it's legal in some countries? If not, then you seem awfully selective in who you choose to use as a precedent.
Ah yes, and here we see the final act of the play - as predictable as sunrise. After creating 'rights' which don't exist, ranting against the corporations, and gratuitous anti-US blather, comes the completely unrelated preference to the Patriot Act. Not only are you completely disconnected from reality, you're an utter loon without the ability to frame a coherent argument. Instead you substitute slinging everything little bit of dogma you can think of because you can't actually think.
Was he super good at spatial relationships and packing because he was a Tetris champ? Or was he a Tetris champ because he was a savant at spatial relationships and packing?
Largely forgotten by the Slashdot demographic maybe - but that tiny and self selected slice of the demographic pie is hardly representative.
And really, that's my problem with the pirates and why they get so little sympathy from the general public - their argument ultimately boils down "I don't want to respect anyone's rights and want everyone else to be forced to give up their rights". Then this guys comes along and claims "and while I shouldn't be forced to respect the rights of others, they should be forced to respect the rights I've created for myself out of whole cloth".
Except - I don't see any examples here of any 'loss of freedom'. John Doe was sharing copyrighted material, which has been illegal for a very long time, so being prosecuted for it hardly represents anything new.
We've never had the unlimited right to share what does not belong to us. There's nothing here preventing the defendant(s) from getting a fair trial. The unlimited 'right' to use what bought in whatever way you want has never been a right - it's strictly a creation of pirates to justify their actions. And you've never been able to claim anonymity to avoid prosecution except in the limited case of whistle blowers.
Or, in short, while your statement is essentially the 'perfect storm' of karmawhoring - it bears very little connection with reality.
Well, if you actually read the Wikipedia article you link to - you'll find he was originally trained as an electrical engineer. So I'd say he may have contributed quite a bit.
I was about to say - because it looks not like ice, but like gelatin.
That's true of the hardware. That's not even remotely true of operating experience, engineering experience, etc... etc... The Moon isn't a required prerequisite, no. But to imply that going there first is without value is a major error.
For certain handwaving values of the words "comprehensive" and "workable", and with only fairly minor parts actually using existing hardware and technology... sure. In reality, no so much. Nobody has actually fielded the hardware required to keep the propellants at cryogenic temperatures for years on end for example. Nor have we figured how to actually land on Mars. (The atmosphere is too thin for parachutes only for any significant payload, and the gravity well too deep to rely on a propulsive landing for any significant payload.) We've only had one re-entry at anything resembling interplanetary speeds. Etc... etc...
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. In the first place, no Administration has placed space as a priority. Ever. In the second place, Congress was for most of the 70's to the 90's openly hostile to funding anything having to do with Mars exploration. (Hint: There's a reason why there were no Mars missions between Viking (1976) and Mars Pathfinder (1996).) The funding didn't start flowing significantly until NASA announced the discover of evidence of Martian life inside the ALH 84001 meteorite.