Re:Space programs
on
Volcano Futures
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Every time people ask why we fund the space agencies, here is your answer. The majority of the data we DO have in this situation is from downlooking satellites from ESA and NASA.
Were the US satellites NASA or NOAA? (Or somebody else?)
At least in the US, cutting funding for NASA will have less impact than you might think because they aren't sole [non military/intelligence] satellite operator the government has.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory was mothballed for almost a decade and yet it has sensors on it that could be helping significantly with measuring ash density
Certainly, if by 'help' you mean 'can say yes, there is ash, somewhere', sure. Triana's instruments are fairly low resolution in keeping with its vague and post facto 'science' goals. (This is compounded by it's extremely high orbit - far too high for useful science, excellent for it's original political goals.)
In a police state, without the 5th amendment, the police can very easily coerce confessions for crimes people didn't commit.
Whereas, with the 5th amendment, that's the District Attorney's job, and the process is called "plea bargain". Huge improvement.
Nope. When you enter a plea, you are [generally] required to plead guilty - which you can refuse to do by pleading the 5th. The District Attorney can only coerce you if you allow it.
I suspect much depends on how you define 'thing'. While the organist in your example may appear to be doing many 'things', in truth they are all closely related and may not be treated by the brain as more than two 'things'.
It may also be that organists are like air traffic controllers or NASA mission controllers - from the right hand side of the bell curve.
That's how NASA lost the space fans over the decades. Because it became painfully clear that this routine, work-a-day program didn't actually do useful work, but through its consumption of NASA funding actually prevent useful work from happening.
In other words, you admit I'm right, but haven't the wit or the balls to admit it. You define the Shuttle program a priori as 'not doing useful work', and thus declare your preference for stunts, spectaculars, etc...
Developing the first ICBMs was enormously complicated. Space research developed a lot of technology that would be used to wipe Moscow off the map.
On the contrary, by the time space flight was getting going, IRBM/ICBM technology was headed off in a different direction entirely. There was some minor cross pollination in electronics and guidance, but not much because of the radically different requirements.
Today, missiles are very well developed and the private aerospace industry can largely handle the research without the help of a government agency (though certainly not without government money).
Which really isn't all that different from yesterday - where the government would provide the money and the contractor would do the research. Sure, the government did quite a bit on its own, but they paid contractors for quite a bit too.
Nasa is no longer contributing (as much) technology to the military, and what it does is mainly things like GPS, which can be done with existing space technology or even private launches.
You do know that GPS is DoD project, and it was launched on private boosters purchased on the open market? NASA has roughly nothing to do with it.
To a Senator, the space program serves no purpose and aside from being a sweet deal for some states' economies, benefits no voter directly. And while the space program still has some fans, they aren't numerous enough to swing any election.
Which isn't actually a change from the past.
I think everyone is missing the point as to why the space program has faltered.
I read up on the subject since you mentioned it. And guess what? Those solids can't be turned off. Thrust termination doesn't stop the motor, it merely redirects the thrust so it's no longer producing net thrust.
And when you're trying to fire an escape system and get the hell away from the booster, the semantic difference matters little.
As it turns out, the Shuttle does practice thrust termination when it jettisons the SRBs (turning their residual thrust into net zero for the vehicle)
Um, no. There is no thrust termination of any form on the Shuttle.
Having said that, I have heard of a newish technology for solid motors where the propellant is almost a self-sustaining burn. They provide an electrical current to the burn region in order to keep the propellant burning. You cut the current and the motor eventually cuts out.
Sounds like a revamp of an old technology - except the one I saw thirty odd years ago used radiant heat from an electric element to the same end.
The sad thing is that what we did in a handful of years in the 1960s is going to take us a decade or more 50 years later.
It took a decade or more back in the 50's and 60's too. F1 engine development started in 1956. Nova/Saturn booster development in 1958. Apollo capsule development in 1950. They also had a near blank check budget during the critical years of development, even though it cut as they were moving into operations.
Solid fuels cannot be shut off in case of emergency.
[sigh] This urban myth again.
The US Navy would be surprised to learn that solids can't be shut off - after all, they only operated rockets using thrust termination (SUBROC, Polaris A-1, Polaris A-2, and Poseidon) for over thirty years. Solids *can* be shut off, and the technology is well known. NASA chose to omit thrust termination systems from the Shuttle because of weight and because the piggyback configuration meant that shutdown transients would shear the Orbiter off of the tank severely damaging it. A rocket with a tandem configuration (like Ares I or V) could use it with little problem.
The research is for *affordable* heavy lift. If you can't make heavy lift affordable (or as the codeword goes "sustainable") you have to do without it.. which is where the propellant depots and in-situ resource utilization comes in.
Except that propellant depots and in-situ resource utilization have precisely to do with heavy lift. (Other than being one of Jeff Greason's pet solutions to every problem.)
The same goes for the idiot notion of 'affordable' heavy lift - NASA's budget is not a law of nature, it's set by Congress and heavy lift is expensive because it flies once in a blue moon.
And really, Obama's program is something of a bust - a modest amount of money, a booster with no mission (I smell pork)
You're kidding right? That's why the Congress critters are complaining, Obama is cutting out the pork. He's saying no to the jobs program.
Clue: Cutting pork in some places is not inconsistent with serving more in other places.
and a capsule that might be adapted to have a mission at some date in the misty future. No clear goals, no timetables, no roadmaps nothing but warm fuzzy rhetoric.
And your complaints are out of date.. go watch the speech, there's your goals and dates..
I've watched the speech, and there were no clear goals, and no dates, just hand waving fuzziness about "sometime in the 2020's" and the like.
the timetables and roadmaps and milestones will come when the FY11 budget passes.
Where Bush had a space program that made him look good but would never accomplish anything, Obama has one that has folks scratching their heads but which might just take space travel out of its 40-year coma.
Had space travel been in a coma, you'd have a point. But it hasn't. Instead we've actually had what all the space fans claim to have wanted for years - a routine workaday program. Turns out they were lying, what they want is stunts and spectaculars and big penile substitutes.
And really, Obama's program is something of a bust - a modest amount of money, a booster with no mission (I smell pork), and a capsule that might be adapted to have a mission at some date in the misty future. No clear goals, no timetables, no roadmaps nothing but warm fuzzy rhetoric.
And no, I'm not blaming W for the mess that is NASA. Every President since JFK has put politics over real accomplishments in this area, though Bush was just a little more cold-blooded about it.
I hope you're not referring to the Apollo program, because that was pure politics through and through.
Well, look into the very same history books and check how attempts to push a change from outside normally end. Wars, civil wars and puppet states are often bring more misery to the people in the long run.
Which has roughly zip point shit to do with my point.
And I personally find the slavery to be a good example in the case. Because in most states slavery was ended by the force of the slaves themselves. Even civil war in US was a civil war, purely internal affair.
They are paid what the market will bear in that region, these people choose to work there for a reason, they aren't forced to. In fact it's a very good thing because it provides jobs and income to people who would otherwise have none. The USA and Britain have gone through this same period of the industrial revolution. A change in labor laws or working conditions can not be forced upon them, it must come from within China by the Chinese people themselves.
Having studied more than a little history, I've encountered rhetoric like this before: by slavers all through history.
Seriously, "they aren't forced to work there" but "otherwise they wouldn't have jobs and income"? That's an insane justification.
In other words, you made a confused and incoherent statement, got called on it, and are now moving the goalposts in order to avoid facing the painful truth.
Is NASA now just one more bullshit agency providing Roman Circus to the plebes?
Have you been hiding in a cave or something? That's what NASA has been practically since the day it was born. That space 'geeks' spend their lives denying this simple fact doesn't change reality.
When NASA was first planning their moon shots they were looking at the Saturn C-3 as being large enough to carry the needed payload. There was a good margin of safety. Going with the C-3 would have saved them LOTS of money. But they decided to go for the more expensive C-5 because they didn't know if their capsule estimates were solid.
They weren't. As the weight of everything started going up, that margin of safety was eroded, then eliminated. If they had stayed with the C-3 they wouldn't have made it to the moon until the 1970s, if ever.
Actually, the original C-5 design (which had 4 F1 engines in the first stage) would have been too small as well. Fairly late in the design process they added a fifth F1 - and even so they still had to struggle to both increase the boosters performance and decrease its weight and to decrease the weight of the payload right up through the end of the program.
The lesson here has been repeated since with practically every launcher program, ESPECIALLY the Shuttle.
Oh, it's not just launchers. Back in the 1920's and 30's, when heavy warship displacement was limited by treaty, practically every class ended up overweight as it came off the slipway as compared to it's design weight. US, UK, France, pretty much everyone building heavy cruisers and battlewagons had the same problem. (The nations listed at least made a token effort to reduce weight, Germany and Japan just lied outright.)
Nor is it just government projects - nearly every aircraft has suffered from the same problem. The 747 was, late in its design and prototype phase, discovered to be overweight and could no longer meet is designed payload and range goals while being able to take off and land safely. (Pan Am, the biggest launch customer, held Boeing's toes to the fire and they had to go back and redesign the wing and control surfaces - and still they had to take heroic measures to reduce takeoff weight.)
Hell, I'm even discovering this in my current project of remodeling my workshop. My original plan simply didn't work, and I had to redesign on the fly to make it work.
This is the real world of engineering. I think many slashgeeks (working only with bits and bytes) don't realize that (unlike software where a few extra meg or a few extra cycles don't generally hurt much) in the real world estimates are just that - guesses. It's all too easy to get those guesses wrong, sometimes badly so. And that fixing those gaffes isn't just a matter of few lines of weightless and cheap code.
So what about Constellation? In this case they calculated that the SRBs could *just* do the job. If nothing started getting heavier then it had the power to get the module into orbit with a small margin of safety on the growth side. But then things started getting heavier. So then the upper stage grew along with it, eliminating the margin. Then it kept growing. Then they had to re-engineer the SRBs to get the power back to just enough. That cycle showed no signs of ending, and history suggests that it had a couple more iterations to go.
Realistically, that's as much a product of Congress dictating/micromanaging the basic design and the subcontractors that would do the work rather than leaving the details up to NASA as anything else. Both the capsule and booster sides of the house ended up in a positive feedback death spiral because they were thus hemmed in.
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very
But it was a colossal scientific failure. Nothing was learned that would not have been learned at a fraction of the cost using unmanned vehicles.
[[Citation Needed]]
Seriously, I don't see how anyone who has actually studied the lunar missions can come to that conclusion. Much of the area explored (in the later missions) was in rocky terrain where it would be difficult-to-impossible to plop down a stationary lander, let alone land and operate a rover. (Triply so considering the difference in technology between then and now.) Some of the most important samples, particularly the Genesis Rock, were collected because the astronaut was actively looking for and noting things that looked unusual. (The orange soil was discovered because the astronaut was idly scratching the ground while waiting on something else.)
Lastly, *all* of the important discoveries were made after the samples were analyzed in laboratories here on Earth. Many of them building on previous analysis's using different instrumentation. That means complex (and expensive) sample return missions would be required as no umanned probe can carry instruments more than a fraction as capable as a terrestrial one. And really, the sample return missions are what shatter your 'cheaper' argument. To get the same volume of science either requires a small number of very expensive and capable retrieval missions (almost certainly including a rover to obtain samples beyond the reach and potential contamination of landing rockets), or a large number of less expensive (individually, but expensive in total) and less capable missions.
I seriously doubt a significant unmanned exploration program could have been mounted prior to the late 80's or early 90's.
The one contribution it has made - fixing the Hubble - could have been finessed more cheaply and effectively simply by building and launching more Hubbles.
At a couple of billion dollars a copy, assuming Congress funded them, I don't see how that can possibly be true. Doubly so when you're spending that couple of billion to replace a quarter of a billion dollars worth of servicing mission and a few tens of millions of dollars worth of parts on several occasions.
So yes, the symbolic value of manned space flight is past (unless genuine new goals are set and adequately funded) and the Shuttle and ISS operations have been a pointless waste of money.
More accurately, too many people have come to believe that unless the space program is big and flashy and produces gigabytes of 'porn' to stiffen their virtual penises, it's just not worth doing. The reality is, space exploration has reached the same plateau that ocean exploration reached back in the thirties. Now it's just workaday science that rarely produces headlines or porn, but is valuable none the less.
And it's past time that we, as a nation, grew the fuck up and realized that.
Cash up front is the only way to get corporations to commit to this. The government is too likely to pull a "that costs to much" about turn and leave the company holding the debt. Imagine being a company and investing $20B and 10 years of real effort into something expecting a big payout of years of ferrying astronauts into space. Then someone else gets elected and NASA changes it plans. Kiss your $20B good bye.
Um, no. Typically contracts of this nature are 'pay as you go' and the government is responsible for paying penalties and closing out costs if they terminate prior to the contract running out.
See Northrop F20/F5G.
That's a bit more complicated than you make out. Northrup was paid upfront for the the development work - where they lost money was on their side project to sell the aircraft independently.
Yes, utterly irrelevant crap is so useful. You're a shining example of precisely why people are avoiding getting involved in Wikipedia in ever growing droves.
Slashdot Mirror
Were the US satellites NASA or NOAA? (Or somebody else?)
At least in the US, cutting funding for NASA will have less impact than you might think because they aren't sole [non military/intelligence] satellite operator the government has.
Certainly, if by 'help' you mean 'can say yes, there is ash, somewhere', sure. Triana's instruments are fairly low resolution in keeping with its vague and post facto 'science' goals. (This is compounded by it's extremely high orbit - far too high for useful science, excellent for it's original political goals.)
And once again, Slashdot blames the victim.
Any larger maps? Will it be visible from the Seattle area on the first pass?
Nope. When you enter a plea, you are [generally] required to plead guilty - which you can refuse to do by pleading the 5th. The District Attorney can only coerce you if you allow it.
I suspect much depends on how you define 'thing'. While the organist in your example may appear to be doing many 'things', in truth they are all closely related and may not be treated by the brain as more than two 'things'.
It may also be that organists are like air traffic controllers or NASA mission controllers - from the right hand side of the bell curve.
In other words, you admit I'm right, but haven't the wit or the balls to admit it. You define the Shuttle program a priori as 'not doing useful work', and thus declare your preference for stunts, spectaculars, etc...
On the contrary, by the time space flight was getting going, IRBM/ICBM technology was headed off in a different direction entirely. There was some minor cross pollination in electronics and guidance, but not much because of the radically different requirements.
Which really isn't all that different from yesterday - where the government would provide the money and the contractor would do the research. Sure, the government did quite a bit on its own, but they paid contractors for quite a bit too.
You do know that GPS is DoD project, and it was launched on private boosters purchased on the open market? NASA has roughly nothing to do with it.
Which isn't actually a change from the past.
You haven't a clue what you are talking about.
And when you're trying to fire an escape system and get the hell away from the booster, the semantic difference matters little.
Um, no. There is no thrust termination of any form on the Shuttle.
Sounds like a revamp of an old technology - except the one I saw thirty odd years ago used radiant heat from an electric element to the same end.
It took a decade or more back in the 50's and 60's too. F1 engine development started in 1956. Nova/Saturn booster development in 1958. Apollo capsule development in 1950. They also had a near blank check budget during the critical years of development, even though it cut as they were moving into operations.
[sigh] This urban myth again.
The US Navy would be surprised to learn that solids can't be shut off - after all, they only operated rockets using thrust termination (SUBROC, Polaris A-1, Polaris A-2, and Poseidon) for over thirty years. Solids *can* be shut off, and the technology is well known. NASA chose to omit thrust termination systems from the Shuttle because of weight and because the piggyback configuration meant that shutdown transients would shear the Orbiter off of the tank severely damaging it. A rocket with a tandem configuration (like Ares I or V) could use it with little problem.
Except that propellant depots and in-situ resource utilization have precisely to do with heavy lift. (Other than being one of Jeff Greason's pet solutions to every problem.)
The same goes for the idiot notion of 'affordable' heavy lift - NASA's budget is not a law of nature, it's set by Congress and heavy lift is expensive because it flies once in a blue moon.
Clue: Cutting pork in some places is not inconsistent with serving more in other places.
I've watched the speech, and there were no clear goals, and no dates, just hand waving fuzziness about "sometime in the 2020's" and the like.
In other words, there aren't any.
Had space travel been in a coma, you'd have a point. But it hasn't. Instead we've actually had what all the space fans claim to have wanted for years - a routine workaday program. Turns out they were lying, what they want is stunts and spectaculars and big penile substitutes.
And really, Obama's program is something of a bust - a modest amount of money, a booster with no mission (I smell pork), and a capsule that might be adapted to have a mission at some date in the misty future. No clear goals, no timetables, no roadmaps nothing but warm fuzzy rhetoric.
I hope you're not referring to the Apollo program, because that was pure politics through and through.
Which has roughly zip point shit to do with my point.
Are you insane or just on serious drugs?
Having studied more than a little history, I've encountered rhetoric like this before: by slavers all through history.
Seriously, "they aren't forced to work there" but "otherwise they wouldn't have jobs and income"? That's an insane justification.
The same objection still holds - they wield power out of proportion to their numbers because the major parties need their votes to hold power.
In other words, you made a confused and incoherent statement, got called on it, and are now moving the goalposts in order to avoid facing the painful truth.
Gotcha.
Have you been hiding in a cave or something? That's what NASA has been practically since the day it was born. That space 'geeks' spend their lives denying this simple fact doesn't change reality.
Actually, the original C-5 design (which had 4 F1 engines in the first stage) would have been too small as well. Fairly late in the design process they added a fifth F1 - and even so they still had to struggle to both increase the boosters performance and decrease its weight and to decrease the weight of the payload right up through the end of the program.
Oh, it's not just launchers. Back in the 1920's and 30's, when heavy warship displacement was limited by treaty, practically every class ended up overweight as it came off the slipway as compared to it's design weight. US, UK, France, pretty much everyone building heavy cruisers and battlewagons had the same problem. (The nations listed at least made a token effort to reduce weight, Germany and Japan just lied outright.)
Nor is it just government projects - nearly every aircraft has suffered from the same problem. The 747 was, late in its design and prototype phase, discovered to be overweight and could no longer meet is designed payload and range goals while being able to take off and land safely. (Pan Am, the biggest launch customer, held Boeing's toes to the fire and they had to go back and redesign the wing and control surfaces - and still they had to take heroic measures to reduce takeoff weight.)
Hell, I'm even discovering this in my current project of remodeling my workshop. My original plan simply didn't work, and I had to redesign on the fly to make it work.
This is the real world of engineering. I think many slashgeeks (working only with bits and bytes) don't realize that (unlike software where a few extra meg or a few extra cycles don't generally hurt much) in the real world estimates are just that - guesses. It's all too easy to get those guesses wrong, sometimes badly so. And that fixing those gaffes isn't just a matter of few lines of weightless and cheap code.
Realistically, that's as much a product of Congress dictating/micromanaging the basic design and the subcontractors that would do the work rather than leaving the details up to NASA as anything else. Both the capsule and booster sides of the house ended up in a positive feedback death spiral because they were thus hemmed in.
I'm always reminded of Rickover's saying on the difference between real and paper reactors:
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very
When I read the summary, I thought they meant the real Avengers and all I could think was how bad he'd mangle it.
[[Citation Needed]]
Seriously, I don't see how anyone who has actually studied the lunar missions can come to that conclusion. Much of the area explored (in the later missions) was in rocky terrain where it would be difficult-to-impossible to plop down a stationary lander, let alone land and operate a rover. (Triply so considering the difference in technology between then and now.)
Some of the most important samples, particularly the Genesis Rock, were collected because the astronaut was actively looking for and noting things that looked unusual. (The orange soil was discovered because the astronaut was idly scratching the ground while waiting on something else.)
Lastly, *all* of the important discoveries were made after the samples were analyzed in laboratories here on Earth. Many of them building on previous analysis's using different instrumentation. That means complex (and expensive) sample return missions would be required as no umanned probe can carry instruments more than a fraction as capable as a terrestrial one. And really, the sample return missions are what shatter your 'cheaper' argument. To get the same volume of science either requires a small number of very expensive and capable retrieval missions (almost certainly including a rover to obtain samples beyond the reach and potential contamination of landing rockets), or a large number of less expensive (individually, but expensive in total) and less capable missions.
I seriously doubt a significant unmanned exploration program could have been mounted prior to the late 80's or early 90's.
At a couple of billion dollars a copy, assuming Congress funded them, I don't see how that can possibly be true. Doubly so when you're spending that couple of billion to replace a quarter of a billion dollars worth of servicing mission and a few tens of millions of dollars worth of parts on several occasions.
More accurately, too many people have come to believe that unless the space program is big and flashy and produces gigabytes of 'porn' to stiffen their virtual penises, it's just not worth doing. The reality is, space exploration has reached the same plateau that ocean exploration reached back in the thirties. Now it's just workaday science that rarely produces headlines or porn, but is valuable none the less.
And it's past time that we, as a nation, grew the fuck up and realized that.
There's a subtle flaw in the design of this 'simulator' however - no simulated opponents or hostages on the second floors or on the roof.
Yep. One of my buddies became an engineer because that was a sure and fast route far away from working a ranch and mucking horse stalls in Montana.
Um, no. Typically contracts of this nature are 'pay as you go' and the government is responsible for paying penalties and closing out costs if they terminate prior to the contract running out.
That's a bit more complicated than you make out. Northrup was paid upfront for the the development work - where they lost money was on their side project to sell the aircraft independently.
Yes, utterly irrelevant crap is so useful. You're a shining example of precisely why people are avoiding getting involved in Wikipedia in ever growing droves.