It's easy to be cheap and simple and to breezily handwave when all you have to do is type on your keyboard. It's not easy out in the real world with real money.
Otherwise, why aren't you out there doing it? Why isn't anyone?
Big Pharma has zero experience in how to contend with this -- cell culture vats are made sterile before every growth.
The same is true of breweries, sourdough bakeries, cheese production, and pretty much any other industrial scale fermentation process - great efforts are made to ensure the fermentation takes place in closed sterile environments inoculated with (and only with) known cultures.
Then there is the process of extraction. Big Pharma's methods may or may not be viable - there is (exaggerating only a bit) literally no ceiling to the prices they can charge, and they aren't handling millions of gallons a day. Big Algae on the other hand, must sell at a price reasonably close to petroleum based fuel and will handle millions of gallons (and the resulting waste products) a day. Scale matters, scale matters a great deal.
This research is decades old, started by the Dept. of Energy in the mid-70's in the wake of the '74 Arab oil embargo. Then there's this group who told me they had most of the hard problems solved and already had successful pilot tests. That was two years ago. So how can scale commercial still be 10 years off?
Because things always look easy and solved when all you have to is produce a lab bench version and then sit back and make claims you'll never be called on to prove. Those with real world experience know full well that making the numbers, as well as the production system, work on an industrial scale is a difficult problem... regardless of what you're producing.
"Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a new game called Star Guard, a Flash-based platformer for Mac and PC that's a throwback to the early days of computer gaming
It does certainly get tricky, requiring the platformer standbys of carefully timed jumps and learning enemy patterns -- there's something of a Metroid vibe to it.
And people wonder why Hollywood keeps going back to same ol' same ol'.
I read those newspapers, and watched that TV. It just happens that I'm not drug addled enough to delude myself into believing they represented 'backsliding' on the disarmament front. But then, I'm a realist and prefer facts to ignorance and bias.
Oh, I agree. We're never likely to achieve full disarmament, but things are a lot better now than in decades past. You can't put the genii back in the bottle, but you can chain him to it.
I cannot imagine anyone worrying about verification in today's climate. If it is a good story, it is going to make it out on the Internet. Period. If the "newstainment" on TV wants to pick it up, they will do so.
Implying (correctly) that the 'net is no more interested in verification (and thus no better than) than the "newstainment" channels.
Until that happens any visits to a comet or a Legrange point, or anywhere else further away than the ISS are going to remain a pipe dream, unless if you happen to be Chinese.
At their current rate of achievement - China will reach a comet or one of the Legrange points somewhere in the 2050's or 60's.
Seriously. All those folks invoking China as a reason for doing pointless* dick sizing contests seem to have missed that China isn't exactly in a hurry to accomplish anything. Calling their progress 'glacial' is an insult to glaciers, as it implies precisely the sort of stolid immobility that glaciers aren't exactly known for.
* I can't think of many things more pointless to do in space than a manned visit to either a comet (vastly difficult and dangerous for a short and pointless stay time) or to a Lagrange point (which is kinda like sailing to S4 24 48 E1 24 22, there's not a goddamn thing there).
Not to mention that at best he's following in the footsteps of a long series of US Presidents (of both parties) who've made WMD reduction an article of national policy - and accomplished vast strides towards it. Obama has been celebrated for working with Senator Lugar in this respect, who himself was just following in that groove.
Not that WMD reduction isn't a worthy goal, but lets not confuse being just one person on the bus for being the driver of the bus.
This is quite transparently a proclamation of how sick much of the world was of the Bush administration, and simultaneously an endorsement of Obama's plans.
Which is a blatant demonstration of how fucked up this Prize committee is. The Prize is for accomplishing things, not for 'not being someone' and emphatically not for plans to hopefully accomplish things in the future.
I mean the guy hasn't even been in office for a year yet. He hasn't been able to get anything peace-prize-worthy done.
Worse yet, the nomination closed two weeks after he was inaugurated. Technically, 90% of the stuff period he's been President (not that he's accomplished anything relevant and noteworthy) isn't even eligible for consideration.
They've essentially used him to make a political statement, and it's just going to cause problems at a time when he's got more than enough to deal with. It'll get the conservatives all bristly and the libs all full of themselves, and then it becomes even harder to get anything done.
Yep, I've seen at least one news report where the head of the Prize committee pretty much openly stated the award was nothing more than a "nod of approval and support" for Obama and his policies.
As to the latter, there's fault on both sides - because the liberals will now wave the 'Nobel Prize' magic wand every chance they get. But then, they'd do the same if he was awarded the Medal of Honor. They wouldn't notice he shouldn't be eligible for that either.
Mother Teresa rarely stepped into politics and her work was about charity towards the poor. What's your basis for calling her "about as far right as they come"? Especially since if you read the official Catholic Catechism (the teachings and stated opinions of the Catholic Church, which she held as her guide for morality) they actually come down left-of-center as well.
Probably because the OP, like many people, confuse 'Catholic' with 'Christian Fundamentalist'. Yeah, I'll be the first to agree that in some areas the Roman Catholic church is stuck in the Dark Ages, but huge slabs of it's policy are very socially progressive. (Especially in the European Church.)
Except Obama HAS accomplished an incredible amount considering the short time he has been on the public scene. [...] No there is no lovely little list of all of his accomplishments how about you look at some facts instead and do some research.
[Lengthy list of money he's spent snipped]
(It would be interesting to find where you cut and pasted that from...)
How exactly is spending buckets of money we don't have an 'accomplishment'? Other than from the POV of himself and political handlers - they've pandered to a lot of their political base and hopefully converted a few of those who voted for him primarily because he wasn't Republican. Not to mention the vast bulk of those 'accomplishments' are domestic, not the international effects the Prize is supposed to recognize.
My lord, the man has already started nuclear disarment, which is GREAT by the way
I'd laugh if it weren't so sad. US national policy has been promoting nuclear disarmament since the 70's, and by and large practicing what it preaches. At best, he's done nothing but following the course already set.
The difference of course being that the device that you list have abundant uses *other* criminally liable copyright infringing behavior. While P2P software reminds me of the brick of grape solids and sugars sold during prohibition with the label "warning, do not ferment, bottle, and age the product resulting from dissolving this item in water. Doing so will result in producing an illegal alcoholic beverage". ("Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" comes along decades later, but the manufacturers of the product would surely have understood the concept. As surely as the developers of P2P software do.)
True, but you're off by three orders of magnitude on the the thrust figure. The article says 200kW, not 200mW.
Had I been using thrust, that would be true. My calculations were based on the power requirement (200MW) compared to the RTG power output (55KW).
On the other hand, there's the SAFE-400. Looks like NASA actually still produces some great feats of engineering - this reactor puts out 100kWe and weighs in at a mere 1,200 kilograms.
It's also a laboratory prototype, not an operational space and long duration rated reactor. There's a difference.
I didn't say it was insurmountable - I said it was unsolved. Actually it's worse than unsolved - there isn't anyone actually working on solving the issues.
NASA is. The Russians are - their TOPAZ reactors were/are pretty damn good.
Did I miss something? Oh, wait - I didn't. TOPAZ-I has flown only twice, twenty years ago, for a bare fraction of the lifetime required to power a VASMIR craft. TOPAZ-II seems to have never been tested fully fueled, let alone flown. It's also been canceled.
As for that kind of weight not being negligible... I don't see it as an issue.
Many people look at things they don't understand and go "eh, I don't see what the problem is". A 10 tonne reactor won't put out the power required to propel a vehicle heavy enough that it's weight is negligible at reasonable accelerations any more than a lawnmower engine will do so for an SUV.
To respond to your actual point, then: a compact nuclear reactor would do the job just fine. In the 1960's the US was producing 260lb units producing 55kw.
They were producing RTG's in that weight/power range - not reactors AFAIK.
The weight will be negligible, and you'll have enough fuel to cruise around for 20-30 years.
(200Mw/55kw)*260lb=4.5 tons. Not negligible by any stretch. (Not for any vehicle a VASMIR in that power range is going to be propelling around the solar system.) Not to mention that RTG's don't work like that - they're batteries which produce peak output at manufacture and decline continuously across their lifetime. (Working or standing, they decline at the same rate.) This means that to have sufficient power to cruise for 20-20 years, you're talking about starting with twenty+ times as many RTG's as calculated above. If you're talking reactors, you aren't getting 20-30 years of life in a core that size. (I know they do in submarines. These aren't submarine reactors, the principles don't scale directly.)
Maybe the problem isn't easy to solve, but it's far from insurmountable.
I didn't say it was insurmountable - I said it was unsolved. Actually it's worse than unsolved - there isn't anyone actually working on solving the issues. There's a mountain of paper studies, and a handful of prototypes, but nothing in the range(s) needed actually under development.
Assuming that somebody figures out how to power a VASMIR engine.
Ever hear of batteries?
Consider how large a battery bank will have to be to power a VASMIR engine around the solar system as specified by the poster I replied to. (Think: roughly the size of a six pack of aircraft carriers.)
Really? That must be a hell of a box, considering they've already run full-power tests. What kind of magic does it use?
Really? They've run a VASMIR at full power around the solar system as specified by the poster I replied to?
No shit Sherlock. You win the Captain Obvious Award for noticing that something that requires electrical power can be powered by anything the produces electrical power.
But RTG's don't have sufficient power density, solar cells will be too heavy and too large, an no suitable fission plant (I.E. reliable and safe) exists.
Ir can be done - in theory. In practice the engineering challenges to deploying and recovering a simple tether (let alone a much more complicated sail) are formidable, and no promising approaches have emerged to date.
If you measure distance in terms of transit times, the sustainable thrust potential of this technology would make the Solar System the same size to travelers as the Earth was during the Age of Sail.
Assuming that somebody figures out how to power a VASMIR engine. The only power source Chang Diaz & Co. has to date is a black box on the diagram marked 'and magic happens here'.
It's twice the size of what they've managed to build for ISS (half of which the US paid for). Of the balance of what they originally intended to build for ISS, half has been cancelled, the remainder repeatedly delayed. So yes, compared to what they have accomplished or claimed they would do, it's extremely ambitious.
They seek to consolidate their position as a cheap and reliable launcher of commercial satellites in the same way, with the advent of the Angara rocket family.
An ambitious and much delayed chunk of vaporware. With their record to date, don't hold your breath.
This section of Wikipedia is a interesting read for those who are interested in Roskosmos.
Interesting for exactly how much of that impressive list has been delayed or simply not accomplished.
Saving lives and reducing injuries: energy absorbing car bumpers derived from needing the lunar lander to touch down (go from fast to stopped) while keeping the occupants alive. Now you know where that honeycomb design came from.
I shouldn't have to point out that crushable energy absorption was a proven technology long before the LEM was designed - to the point that the honeycomb material used in the LEM landing gear came from a company in North Carolina whose sole business was manufacturing honeycomb material for industrial use.
As with Velcro and Tang - NASA has been associated, via the tireless work of it's PAO, with all manner of innovations and advancements that they aren't actually responsible for.
The Russians have, in the last twenty years, produced hundreds of gigabytes of powerpoints detailing advanced and ambitious schemes in space. Precisely none of which have amounted to anything beyond consuming untold kilowatts of electricity to store and view.
Slashdot Mirror
All handwaving bullshit amounting to - 'even though I haven't tried it, it must be easy, just believe me, it must be easy'.
It's easy to be cheap and simple and to breezily handwave when all you have to do is type on your keyboard. It's not easy out in the real world with real money.
Otherwise, why aren't you out there doing it? Why isn't anyone?
The same is true of breweries, sourdough bakeries, cheese production, and pretty much any other industrial scale fermentation process - great efforts are made to ensure the fermentation takes place in closed sterile environments inoculated with (and only with) known cultures.
Then there is the process of extraction. Big Pharma's methods may or may not be viable - there is (exaggerating only a bit) literally no ceiling to the prices they can charge, and they aren't handling millions of gallons a day. Big Algae on the other hand, must sell at a price reasonably close to petroleum based fuel and will handle millions of gallons (and the resulting waste products) a day. Scale matters, scale matters a great deal.
Because things always look easy and solved when all you have to is produce a lab bench version and then sit back and make claims you'll never be called on to prove. Those with real world experience know full well that making the numbers, as well as the production system, work on an industrial scale is a difficult problem... regardless of what you're producing.
And people wonder why Hollywood keeps going back to same ol' same ol'.
I read those newspapers, and watched that TV. It just happens that I'm not drug addled enough to delude myself into believing they represented 'backsliding' on the disarmament front. But then, I'm a realist and prefer facts to ignorance and bias.
Not on this planet they weren't. Or possibly you missed, among other things, the removal of four SSBN's from service.
Oh, I agree. We're never likely to achieve full disarmament, but things are a lot better now than in decades past. You can't put the genii back in the bottle, but you can chain him to it.
Implying (correctly) that the 'net is no more interested in verification (and thus no better than) than the "newstainment" channels.
At their current rate of achievement - China will reach a comet or one of the Legrange points somewhere in the 2050's or 60's.
Seriously. All those folks invoking China as a reason for doing pointless* dick sizing contests seem to have missed that China isn't exactly in a hurry to accomplish anything. Calling their progress 'glacial' is an insult to glaciers, as it implies precisely the sort of stolid immobility that glaciers aren't exactly known for.
* I can't think of many things more pointless to do in space than a manned visit to either a comet (vastly difficult and dangerous for a short and pointless stay time) or to a Lagrange point (which is kinda like sailing to S4 24 48 E1 24 22, there's not a goddamn thing there).
Not to mention that at best he's following in the footsteps of a long series of US Presidents (of both parties) who've made WMD reduction an article of national policy - and accomplished vast strides towards it. Obama has been celebrated for working with Senator Lugar in this respect, who himself was just following in that groove.
Not that WMD reduction isn't a worthy goal, but lets not confuse being just one person on the bus for being the driver of the bus.
Which is a blatant demonstration of how fucked up this Prize committee is. The Prize is for accomplishing things, not for 'not being someone' and emphatically not for plans to hopefully accomplish things in the future.
Worse yet, the nomination closed two weeks after he was inaugurated. Technically, 90% of the stuff period he's been President (not that he's accomplished anything relevant and noteworthy) isn't even eligible for consideration.
Yep, I've seen at least one news report where the head of the Prize committee pretty much openly stated the award was nothing more than a "nod of approval and support" for Obama and his policies.
As to the latter, there's fault on both sides - because the liberals will now wave the 'Nobel Prize' magic wand every chance they get. But then, they'd do the same if he was awarded the Medal of Honor. They wouldn't notice he shouldn't be eligible for that either.
Probably because the OP, like many people, confuse 'Catholic' with 'Christian Fundamentalist'. Yeah, I'll be the first to agree that in some areas the Roman Catholic church is stuck in the Dark Ages, but huge slabs of it's policy are very socially progressive. (Especially in the European Church.)
(It would be interesting to find where you cut and pasted that from...)
How exactly is spending buckets of money we don't have an 'accomplishment'? Other than from the POV of himself and political handlers - they've pandered to a lot of their political base and hopefully converted a few of those who voted for him primarily because he wasn't Republican. Not to mention the vast bulk of those 'accomplishments' are domestic, not the international effects the Prize is supposed to recognize.
I'd laugh if it weren't so sad. US national policy has been promoting nuclear disarmament since the 70's, and by and large practicing what it preaches. At best, he's done nothing but following the course already set.
The difference of course being that the device that you list have abundant uses *other* criminally liable copyright infringing behavior. While P2P software reminds me of the brick of grape solids and sugars sold during prohibition with the label "warning, do not ferment, bottle, and age the product resulting from dissolving this item in water. Doing so will result in producing an illegal alcoholic beverage". ("Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" comes along decades later, but the manufacturers of the product would surely have understood the concept. As surely as the developers of P2P software do.)
Had I been using thrust, that would be true. My calculations were based on the power requirement (200MW) compared to the RTG power output (55KW).
It's also a laboratory prototype, not an operational space and long duration rated reactor. There's a difference.
Did I miss something? Oh, wait - I didn't. TOPAZ-I has flown only twice, twenty years ago, for a bare fraction of the lifetime required to power a VASMIR craft. TOPAZ-II seems to have never been tested fully fueled, let alone flown. It's also been canceled.
Many people look at things they don't understand and go "eh, I don't see what the problem is". A 10 tonne reactor won't put out the power required to propel a vehicle heavy enough that it's weight is negligible at reasonable accelerations any more than a lawnmower engine will do so for an SUV.
You're in good company - a lot of people are wrapped up in the hype, few realize just how it is from reality.
They were producing RTG's in that weight/power range - not reactors AFAIK.
(200Mw/55kw)*260lb=4.5 tons. Not negligible by any stretch. (Not for any vehicle a VASMIR in that power range is going to be propelling around the solar system.) Not to mention that RTG's don't work like that - they're batteries which produce peak output at manufacture and decline continuously across their lifetime. (Working or standing, they decline at the same rate.) This means that to have sufficient power to cruise for 20-20 years, you're talking about starting with twenty+ times as many RTG's as calculated above. If you're talking reactors, you aren't getting 20-30 years of life in a core that size. (I know they do in submarines. These aren't submarine reactors, the principles don't scale directly.)
I didn't say it was insurmountable - I said it was unsolved. Actually it's worse than unsolved - there isn't anyone actually working on solving the issues. There's a mountain of paper studies, and a handful of prototypes, but nothing in the range(s) needed actually under development.
Consider how large a battery bank will have to be to power a VASMIR engine around the solar system as specified by the poster I replied to. (Think: roughly the size of a six pack of aircraft carriers.)
Really? They've run a VASMIR at full power around the solar system as specified by the poster I replied to?
Oh, wait... They haven't.
No shit Sherlock. You win the Captain Obvious Award for noticing that something that requires electrical power can be powered by anything the produces electrical power.
But RTG's don't have sufficient power density, solar cells will be too heavy and too large, an no suitable fission plant (I.E. reliable and safe) exists.
Ir can be done - in theory. In practice the engineering challenges to deploying and recovering a simple tether (let alone a much more complicated sail) are formidable, and no promising approaches have emerged to date.
Assuming that somebody figures out how to power a VASMIR engine. The only power source Chang Diaz & Co. has to date is a black box on the diagram marked 'and magic happens here'.
Fair or not, it's the truth.
It's twice the size of what they've managed to build for ISS (half of which the US paid for). Of the balance of what they originally intended to build for ISS, half has been cancelled, the remainder repeatedly delayed. So yes, compared to what they have accomplished or claimed they would do, it's extremely ambitious.
An ambitious and much delayed chunk of vaporware. With their record to date, don't hold your breath.
Interesting for exactly how much of that impressive list has been delayed or simply not accomplished.
I shouldn't have to point out that crushable energy absorption was a proven technology long before the LEM was designed - to the point that the honeycomb material used in the LEM landing gear came from a company in North Carolina whose sole business was manufacturing honeycomb material for industrial use.
As with Velcro and Tang - NASA has been associated, via the tireless work of it's PAO, with all manner of innovations and advancements that they aren't actually responsible for.
The Russians have, in the last twenty years, produced hundreds of gigabytes of powerpoints detailing advanced and ambitious schemes in space. Precisely none of which have amounted to anything beyond consuming untold kilowatts of electricity to store and view.