You don't need manned space flight to do any of those things. In-fact manned space flight is a terrible way to do those things. We're already doing awesome things and producing great science using robots. Why on earth would you want to do it with humans?
Because what the Rovers have accomplished in [roughly] 4000 rover days could have been done in [roughly] 20 man days and probably done better to boot.
The risk of failure is much higher. If a human life is lost then it's a huge tragedy and setback. If a robot is lost it's a financial setback and you sit down and work out what went wrong and then have another go. No huge political or moral setback.
That's the theory. In practice, the missions are almost always one shots, if a probe is lost it's game over for that mission. (The sole exception on Mars to date is the Phoenix lander, a cobbled together low budget 'replacement' for the lost Mars Polar Lander.)
Reading comprehension - get some. That article is about the Isreali army. Or, in other words, as the grandparent implied - you're pulling stuff out of your ass.
The military doesn't give a rat fuck about your attitude...
I would gather that you have not been in the military. In my experience, they're confident enough of their service and their statements about it to not resort to terms like "rat fuck". As well, if they honestly do have a problem with someone, it's solved quickly and quietly so they can go back to their drinks.
Well, like the rest of your stereotyping - you're dead wrong. (Again, no surprise.) I was in the USN Submarine service from 81-91. On top of that, the area I live in is a Navy town so I count a large number of active duty, discharged, and retired military among my friends and acquaintances and the same for DoD civilians.
(And you also seem to be ignorant of the fact that the military does hire civilians in special cases, and even assigns them to operational and deployed units.)
I didn't mention any of that in my original post, nor do I see it's relevance.
No, you didn't mention it. (But given your general ignorance, I'm not surprised.) It is relevant because you seem to be under the misapprehension that the only way for the military to obtain personnel with special skills is to induct them into uniform.
You are attempting to muddy the waters with irrelevant commentary to detract from the fact that you don't like me personally and are throwing irrational argument after irrational argument.
Translation: My mind is made up, don't bother me with facts.
And even so, you're still wrong. The military has long waived the age requirements for narrow and specialized fields where civilian experience is desirable and not available among younger people.
Citation aaaand... citation. Care to revise your statement, sir?
I'll go you one better - and cite the actual law of the land rather than some third party website.
In my experience, people who handle nuclear weapons are told not to publicize that fact. They also don't swear on a public forum just to prove a point, they tend to be very cool and reserved. So, I'm thinking you should sue your face for slander.
Well, again, your 'experience' (read: stereotypes) are utterly and completely wrong. Which should come as no surprise.
Heck, here's an public form organized for and by USAF missile types. Here's a public site and organization for USN nuclear weaponeers.
For example, playing LARP, or liking the original Star Trek (TNG is apparently okay) is a mark against you for some security clearances.
Having done both those things, *and* having a high security clearance while doing them, *and* working with nuclear weapons - I can comfortably say, like everything else you've posted in this thread, you haven't a fucking clue what you are talking about.
Most people in IT aren't anti-authoritarian just to be an ass -- they are because they have a low tolerance for people who try to order them around that they have no respect for or feel are less capable of doing the job than they are. That's readily cured with training -- but that's an up-front cost that I don't think the military is willing to absorb because skimming off the top is cheaper. They haven't had to dig into the labor pool. Maybe they don't need to, I don't know -- but the whole point of basic is to change attitudes, which is all that is. It's an artificial barrier.
Well, your stereotype of basic training, like all your stereotypes is flat out wrong. The point of basic is to instill discipline and modify behavior. The military doesn't give a rat fuck about your attitude so long as it doesn't affect your discipline, behavior, or work. (And you also seem to be ignorant of the fact that the military does hire civilians in special cases, and even assigns them to operational and deployed units.)
I made a general statement that holds true for the general case.
Except, like each and every one of your other general statements and stereotypes, you are flat out wrong. I quoted one specific case, but that does not invalidate my other statement.
Care to point me in the direction of any women who have managed to make General, in any branch of service? Last I checked, there were none.
Why not just check Google? (I imagine you haven't bothered to check Google in a couple of decades because stereotypes are easy and you're lazy.)
And given the number of chiefs and senior offices I knew and know that are over thirty... Well, like the rest of your stereotypes, you're simply wrong.
I was referring to recruitment, and I am not wrong.
Well, other than your general laziness, why didn't you say recruiting? And even so, you're still wrong. The military has long waived the age requirements for narrow and specialized fields where civilian experience is desirable and not available among younger people. If they don't want to put them in uniform for some reason, they hire 'em as DoD civilians.
They never did come up with a good answer to how they can recruit the necessary talent when the aforementioned is generally anti-authoritarian.
The same way they recruit very bright people for other specialized fields - they recruit the people who aren't anti-authoritarian, or who are anti-authoritarian but can submerge that enough to get along and do their jobs properly. (The Submarine Service and the various special forces are well stocked with the latter.) It may not appeal to stereotypical 'average Slashdotter', but then that is a fairly small demographic even within the IT world.
Everything about this theatre is contrary to conventional military discipline.
Or so goes the meme/stereotype outside the military... In reality, the military knows very well how to handle a wide variety of personality types. Half the guys on my crew (including me) would have been in the brig had we been in the surface Navy rather than the Submarine Force. But our chain-of-command knew well the demands of dealing with the energy of guys in their early to mid twenties with above average intelligence - so long as we did our jobs, didn't endanger ships safety, and didn't cause physical harm... almost the sky was the limit.
This is an organization that still believes that only men should be in their little club, gays are bad, and if you're over 30 you're too old. Maybe that works well when you're comparing gun sizes, but in this theatre the groups they're excluding have exactly the human resources such an operation needs: Women are generally able to multitask and see the "big picture" easier than men, gays stereotypically gravitate towards creative endeavors (theatre, graphic design, etc.), and the over 30 crowd has exactly the kind of in-depth understanding of the technology and experience necessary to use it that a bunch of twenty-somethings just can't match, no matter how good the training.
Again with the stereotypes... First off, this is 2010 not 1910. There's been women in the service for decades now. The military 'officially' believes gays are bad because the law requires it, down at the working troop level it's not a problem. And given the number of chiefs and senior offices I knew and know that are over thirty... Well, like the rest of your stereotypes, you're simply wrong.
That's the secret Achilles heel of electric cars - and one that the electric car industry and their boosters have been steadfastly trying to pretend doesn't exist. Widespread usage of electric cars is going to require trillions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades and strain our existing generation and transport systems.
Mostly because of two factors: a) fetching Helium-3 from the moon is incredibly fucking difficult and expensive, and b) we don't actually have any current or near term need for it. Even with working fusion reactors, the advantages of Helium-3 are largely overstated.
Except that NOAA uses NOAA satellites to do NOAA's work. The checks and contracts are written by NOAA to build the birds to NOAA's specifications to be operated by NOAA personnel.
NASA is the trucking company that delivers them to orbit and the phone company that provides their communication - but that's the end of their involvement.
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
No, Kennedy needed a huge virtual penis in order to outsize the Russians. So he took the already damaged space exploration program he inherited from Eisenhower and destroyed it utterly by focusing it on a short term success-at-all-costs program.
Fifty years later, we're still paying dearly because a slow program based on incremental expansion from aircraft, through the X-15, and beyond into reusable aerospace craft was abandoned in favor of using huge virtual military penises to shoot man first into orbit and then to the moon.
Which, in the end, isn't so different from Obama - long term vision abandoned in favor of short term goals.
When Dick Cheney killed the Osprey in the early 90's, Congress funded it anyway and ordered DOD to buy more.
Of course, as with so much else in real life, it's not nearly as simple or black-and-white as you make it out to be. Cheney canceled Osprey, along with a whole slew of other projects, in order to create the promised 'peace dividend'. What Cheney didn't do was ask for funding any replacements for Osprey, which itself was supposed to replace a large number of aging and obsolescent aircraft. Not to mention the Service Chiefs badly wanted Osprey not only for the capabilities it provided, but because something needed to be in the pipeline to replace the aircraft that would be starting to reach their sell-by dates by the time of Osprey's IOC.
So Congress had to do something - fund Osprey, fund existing production lines as well as service life extensions, or fund a new startup program or programs.
What better way to learn how to live with dwindling resources here on earth than learning to live in a place with NO RESOURCES!
Living in a place with no resources is trivially easy and long solved - ship the resources in from someplace else. (Which is pretty much what they planned for the lunar outpost.) As a research laboratory for learning how to live on Earth, such an expedition is pretty much useless. (Doubly so since the research programs you propose won't actually solve any of the problems the Earth is facing.)
But I am not doubting the intent. In fact, it is refreshing to see a nation not simply looking at short term but thinking in terms of long term goals but in a concrete way.
Are they looking at concrete goals in a long term way - or is this just India's latest entry in the regional and global dick size contest they been pursuing so intensely? I see no reason to assume they they are, unlike any other spacefaring nation, pursuing the former rather than, like every other spacefaring nation, the latter.
I doesn't matter how many B2's or F22's there are - they are in the real world, and were decades before bicycles. No matter how you spin it, and you try mighty hard, you can't change that fact.
And you really, honestly, think that odd crashes and weird user configurations amount to things only tested by bicycles and the equivalent are not and cannot be tested in the lab?
I started out thinking you were merely misinformed, now I can conclude nothing but that you are ignorant and deluded.
And these parts are in real world, high cycle, applications. And they are in hostile environments
So far, just like aerospace - only decades later.
This varied usage, and real world testing is not something that can be done by testing in a lab, and real world testing on multi million dollar test units.
Maybe you missed the part of my post describing composites in aerospace in the real world.
I realize my post made is seem as if I was stating that the bicycle industry is devoping carbon fibre faster than the aerospace industry. The point I was trying to put out was the number of generations, and wildly varied usage in the bicycle industry are notes that NASA, and really aerospace can use.
That was the same point you tried to make in your first post, and that I showed to be incorrect in my first reply.
And well the materials used in the bicycle industry are basically the high tech materials that are starting to be put into the aerospace industyr (due to safety and devolpment periods bikes tend to put out new materials first).
Starting to be put in the aerospace industry? The skin of the B2 bomber (designed late 1980's) is fiber composite. The main structural frame of the Hubble Space Telescope (designed/built in the early 1980's) is fibre composite. Honeycomb composite control surfaces (ailerons, rudders, elevators) have been common in military aircraft since the 1970's, and in carbon fiber composites in civilian aircraft since the late 1980's.
Heck, NASA built a major structural component of the Saturn V booster (the SLA) out of honeycomb composite.
When Carbon Fibre started to become omnipresent in road cycling it was only sparing used in mountain biking. This was due to precieved, and real, issues dealing with durability. Rocks and branches hitting Carbon Fibre frames and causing small failures that normal use would increase and cause catastropic failure. But now carbon is everywhere because design and testing have overcome these problems, and the aerospace industry, with actual and good engineers will be able to do the same.
Carbon fiber has been around in the aerospace industry for quite a while now. I suspect the bucket loads of cash the aerospace industry has spent on R&D on composite materials over the last fifty years has had a lot more impact than the comparative eye dropper loads of the bicycle industry.
My only concern is how well the honeycomb material handles impacts (everything from birds to micrometeorites...).
[...]
But I'm sure NASA knows what they're doing...
Since NASA has been flying honeycomb as structural material since the 60's, I'm pretty sure they do. Among other things, the skin of the SLA (the Saturn Launch Adapter, the conical 'garage' between a Saturn Ib or V booster and the Apollo CSM) was structural honeycomb.
Orbiting Fuel Depots, 'bout time. Use of the LaGrange points, asteroids, yes! Scifi has known this for years, 'bout time that NASA caught up and went for long term development of space instead of quick one-shot missions.
This. Not everybody realizes that the vast majority of mass you need for space missions (particularly those beyond Earth orbit) is fuel. Fuel itself is cheap, and nobody cares if you lose it, so you can just launch it up to a fuel depot to whoever the lowest bidder is (making it a great catalyst for commercial space startups).
Would you consider building one fuel station for the entire United States in a Bangor Maine a good idea? No? Well, that's exactly what an orbital fuel depot is - a single gas stations that's only useful for those in the near vicinity. The other 99.9999999% of us are fucked because now we have to pay someone to ship the fuel from Maine to wherever we happen to be.
The real reason Jon Goff supports orbiting fuel depots is hidden at the end of the quote above - it's a smokescreen to hide subsidies for commercial space businesses. In reality, without complex bidding rules and mechanisms to raise the cost of the fuel by spreading the flights across multiple bidders, you are going to end up with a sole provider.
Then you can launch the much-lighter unfueled spacecraft up by itself (or construct it in orbit), allowing you to launch much more elaborate spacecraft using smaller rockets.
And considerably increasing the real costs of those 'more elaborate spacecraft' because of the need for an increased number of launches and the hidden costs of the orbital fuel depot subsidy.
One of the old arguments against propellant depots is that the technology is untested, although ULA just reported on the results of their in-space tests this month
That's *one* argument against depots. (I outline others above.) And if you read the comments, you see them obliquely admit to another problem - the amount of cryogens that must be expended to keep the remaining amount cool during the months or years long storage period... another hidden cost of depots.
believe the general argument from this point would be: Copyright isn't property or a contract
Except, under the law, it is treated exactly like property or a contract - it can sold, inherited, leased, transferred, voided, abandoned, etc... etc...
It's the right to restrict use of your works for a set period of time. In a very loose sense, it's a contract with the government, one which should have a clause that makes it null and void with your death.
A belief that comes from people who believes their desires to not have to respect other peoples legal rights trumps those rights. This belief isn't based on any principle in law, only a selfish disregard and complete lack of respect for other people's property and rights.
I take it you have just arrived on this planet and are utterly unaware of how our legal system works?
No, it doesn't. USC 17 is the law. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. Two parties can enter into a contract if they want to, it doesn't change the law for those not party to that contract.
Here on planet Earth we have this thing called case law - which can and does alter how black letter law is interpreted.
Under the terms of the current settlement - she has lost her legal right to sue over copyright infringement
What settlement? She's not party to any settlement. You can I can't enter into a settlement that remove's the RIAA's right to sue over copyright infringement, Google and a group of authors can't enter into a settlement that removes the right of other authors to sue for copyright infringement.
Now you have the first faint glimmerings of why so many people are upset over the settlement. When you've spent a few more weeks on this planet and have had a chance to catch up on the issue you'll find that this settlement does alter her legal rights in a way completely contrary to the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Because what the Rovers have accomplished in [roughly] 4000 rover days could have been done in [roughly] 20 man days and probably done better to boot.
That's the theory. In practice, the missions are almost always one shots, if a probe is lost it's game over for that mission. (The sole exception on Mars to date is the Phoenix lander, a cobbled together low budget 'replacement' for the lost Mars Polar Lander.)
Reading comprehension - get some. That article is about the Isreali army.
Or, in other words, as the grandparent implied - you're pulling stuff out of your ass.
Well, like the rest of your stereotyping - you're dead wrong. (Again, no surprise.) I was in the USN Submarine service from 81-91. On top of that, the area I live in is a Navy town so I count a large number of active duty, discharged, and retired military among my friends and acquaintances and the same for DoD civilians.
No, you didn't mention it. (But given your general ignorance, I'm not surprised.) It is relevant because you seem to be under the misapprehension that the only way for the military to obtain personnel with special skills is to induct them into uniform.
Translation: My mind is made up, don't bother me with facts.
I'll go you one better - and cite the actual law of the land rather than some third party website.
Well, again, your 'experience' (read: stereotypes) are utterly and completely wrong. Which should come as no surprise.
Heck, here's an public form organized for and by USAF missile types. Here's a public site and organization for USN nuclear weaponeers.
Having done both those things, *and* having a high security clearance while doing them, *and* working with nuclear weapons - I can comfortably say, like everything else you've posted in this thread, you haven't a fucking clue what you are talking about.
Well, your stereotype of basic training, like all your stereotypes is flat out wrong. The point of basic is to instill discipline and modify behavior. The military doesn't give a rat fuck about your attitude so long as it doesn't affect your discipline, behavior, or work. (And you also seem to be ignorant of the fact that the military does hire civilians in special cases, and even assigns them to operational and deployed units.)
Except, like each and every one of your other general statements and stereotypes, you are flat out wrong. I quoted one specific case, but that does not invalidate my other statement.
Why not just check Google? (I imagine you haven't bothered to check Google in a couple of decades because stereotypes are easy and you're lazy.)
Well, other than your general laziness, why didn't you say recruiting? And even so, you're still wrong. The military has long waived the age requirements for narrow and specialized fields where civilian experience is desirable and not available among younger people. If they don't want to put them in uniform for some reason, they hire 'em as DoD civilians.
The same way they recruit very bright people for other specialized fields - they recruit the people who aren't anti-authoritarian, or who are anti-authoritarian but can submerge that enough to get along and do their jobs properly. (The Submarine Service and the various special forces are well stocked with the latter.) It may not appeal to stereotypical 'average Slashdotter', but then that is a fairly small demographic even within the IT world.
Or so goes the meme/stereotype outside the military... In reality, the military knows very well how to handle a wide variety of personality types. Half the guys on my crew (including me) would have been in the brig had we been in the surface Navy rather than the Submarine Force. But our chain-of-command knew well the demands of dealing with the energy of guys in their early to mid twenties with above average intelligence - so long as we did our jobs, didn't endanger ships safety, and didn't cause physical harm... almost the sky was the limit.
Again with the stereotypes... First off, this is 2010 not 1910. There's been women in the service for decades now. The military 'officially' believes gays are bad because the law requires it, down at the working troop level it's not a problem. And given the number of chiefs and senior offices I knew and know that are over thirty... Well, like the rest of your stereotypes, you're simply wrong.
More likely it took a year for the prosecutors to get around to submitting the drive for analysis.
In other words, he wasn't convicted of having pornographic images - he was convicted of being convicted and having pornographic images.
That's the secret Achilles heel of electric cars - and one that the electric car industry and their boosters have been steadfastly trying to pretend doesn't exist. Widespread usage of electric cars is going to require trillions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades and strain our existing generation and transport systems.
Mostly because of two factors: a) fetching Helium-3 from the moon is incredibly fucking difficult and expensive, and b) we don't actually have any current or near term need for it. Even with working fusion reactors, the advantages of Helium-3 are largely overstated.
Except that NOAA uses NOAA satellites to do NOAA's work. The checks and contracts are written by NOAA to build the birds to NOAA's specifications to be operated by NOAA personnel.
NASA is the trucking company that delivers them to orbit and the phone company that provides their communication - but that's the end of their involvement.
No, Kennedy needed a huge virtual penis in order to outsize the Russians. So he took the already damaged space exploration program he inherited from Eisenhower and destroyed it utterly by focusing it on a short term success-at-all-costs program.
Fifty years later, we're still paying dearly because a slow program based on incremental expansion from aircraft, through the X-15, and beyond into reusable aerospace craft was abandoned in favor of using huge virtual military penises to shoot man first into orbit and then to the moon.
Which, in the end, isn't so different from Obama - long term vision abandoned in favor of short term goals.
Yeah, it's not like there are any potential aggressors or unstable regimes in Europe or Asia.
Of course, as with so much else in real life, it's not nearly as simple or black-and-white as you make it out to be. Cheney canceled Osprey, along with a whole slew of other projects, in order to create the promised 'peace dividend'. What Cheney didn't do was ask for funding any replacements for Osprey, which itself was supposed to replace a large number of aging and obsolescent aircraft. Not to mention the Service Chiefs badly wanted Osprey not only for the capabilities it provided, but because something needed to be in the pipeline to replace the aircraft that would be starting to reach their sell-by dates by the time of Osprey's IOC.
So Congress had to do something - fund Osprey, fund existing production lines as well as service life extensions, or fund a new startup program or programs.
Living in a place with no resources is trivially easy and long solved - ship the resources in from someplace else. (Which is pretty much what they planned for the lunar outpost.) As a research laboratory for learning how to live on Earth, such an expedition is pretty much useless. (Doubly so since the research programs you propose won't actually solve any of the problems the Earth is facing.)
Are they looking at concrete goals in a long term way - or is this just India's latest entry in the regional and global dick size contest they been pursuing so intensely? I see no reason to assume they they are, unlike any other spacefaring nation, pursuing the former rather than, like every other spacefaring nation, the latter.
Nah, if I'd had mod points left by the time this article was published, I'd have modded it down to. Racism and sexism aren't funny.
I doesn't matter how many B2's or F22's there are - they are in the real world, and were decades before bicycles. No matter how you spin it, and you try mighty hard, you can't change that fact.
And you really, honestly, think that odd crashes and weird user configurations amount to things only tested by bicycles and the equivalent are not and cannot be tested in the lab?
I started out thinking you were merely misinformed, now I can conclude nothing but that you are ignorant and deluded.
So far, just like aerospace - only decades later.
Maybe you missed the part of my post describing composites in aerospace in the real world.
That was the same point you tried to make in your first post, and that I showed to be incorrect in my first reply.
Starting to be put in the aerospace industry? The skin of the B2 bomber (designed late 1980's) is fiber composite. The main structural frame of the Hubble Space Telescope (designed/built in the early 1980's) is fibre composite. Honeycomb composite control surfaces (ailerons, rudders, elevators) have been common in military aircraft since the 1970's, and in carbon fiber composites in civilian aircraft since the late 1980's.
Heck, NASA built a major structural component of the Saturn V booster (the SLA) out of honeycomb composite.
Carbon fiber has been around in the aerospace industry for quite a while now. I suspect the bucket loads of cash the aerospace industry has spent on R&D on composite materials over the last fifty years has had a lot more impact than the comparative eye dropper loads of the bicycle industry.
Since NASA has been flying honeycomb as structural material since the 60's, I'm pretty sure they do. Among other things, the skin of the SLA (the Saturn Launch Adapter, the conical 'garage' between a Saturn Ib or V booster and the Apollo CSM) was structural honeycomb.
Would you consider building one fuel station for the entire United States in a Bangor Maine a good idea? No? Well, that's exactly what an orbital fuel depot is - a single gas stations that's only useful for those in the near vicinity. The other 99.9999999% of us are fucked because now we have to pay someone to ship the fuel from Maine to wherever we happen to be.
The real reason Jon Goff supports orbiting fuel depots is hidden at the end of the quote above - it's a smokescreen to hide subsidies for commercial space businesses. In reality, without complex bidding rules and mechanisms to raise the cost of the fuel by spreading the flights across multiple bidders, you are going to end up with a sole provider.
And considerably increasing the real costs of those 'more elaborate spacecraft' because of the need for an increased number of launches and the hidden costs of the orbital fuel depot subsidy.
That's *one* argument against depots. (I outline others above.) And if you read the comments, you see them obliquely admit to another problem - the amount of cryogens that must be expended to keep the remaining amount cool during the months or years long storage period... another hidden cost of depots.
Except, under the law, it is treated exactly like property or a contract - it can sold, inherited, leased, transferred, voided, abandoned, etc... etc...
A belief that comes from people who believes their desires to not have to respect other peoples legal rights trumps those rights. This belief isn't based on any principle in law, only a selfish disregard and complete lack of respect for other people's property and rights.
I take it you have just arrived on this planet and are utterly unaware of how our legal system works?
Here on planet Earth we have this thing called case law - which can and does alter how black letter law is interpreted.
Now you have the first faint glimmerings of why so many people are upset over the settlement. When you've spent a few more weeks on this planet and have had a chance to catch up on the issue you'll find that this settlement does alter her legal rights in a way completely contrary to the law.