One interesting thing mentioned in the article is that they can already produce oxygen from lunar minerals. The sun is sending a nice stream of hydrogen via the solar winds. This can be combined to produce potable water without having to process any ice whatsoever.
Keep in mind that the "steady stream of hydrogen" amounts to a few pounds a year scattered across the entire lunar surface. Worse yet, AIUI, it doesn't stay on the surface long - it out gasses.
Yeah, a website dedicated to promoting copper is a real reliable source on the longevity of copper. Meanwhile, the architect and the guy who lives in Alaska (where these systems are common) up thread tell a different tale.
Google searches and regurgitating the first link are no substitute for knowing what the hell you are talking about.
I know it was a joke, so WHOOOSH me if you must, but in the interest of pedantry I feel the burning need to correct you. Space is only cold and dark when you are in the shadow of some other body (planet, asteroid, whatever).
Even when you are in the shadow of another body - you may not be cold if that body itself is warm (radiating heat). One such example is LEO - the Apollo CSM's for Skylab couldn't use 'rotisserie mode' to control temperature as the moon bound ones did, and thus their skins had to be redone to prevent the Earth facing side from overheating. (This is also why the ISS would have to be seriously redone to survive in Lunar orbit, not only does the Moon fill less of the sky, there's a vast contrast in radiated heat between the sunlit and shadowed sides.)
f you happen to be outside the shadow of a body, then you can forget cold, and you can forget dark.
Even when out of the shadow of a body, the shadowed side of your spacecraft will be awfully cold, unless it's facing another body and heated by radiant heat from it. Even so, the Sun is essentially a point source and your space craft is 'seeing' an awful lot of cold dark space.
Keeping electronics functioning on satellites when there is blistering, unfiltered solar radiation hitting your spacecraft is no easy task. In other words, 'cold and dark' only describes a very small number of relative orientations an object may have to the sun.
Not only is not an easy task, it is a very complex one depending on the total thermal environment.
Who is more racist, the person who decided the black guy should be photoshopped out? Or the person who think a black guy must be included because of the color of his skin?
Growing up in the 20th century the mission to mars was always just around the corner when presented in science books and media in general.
Actually, it could have been, it was within our grasp and we let it go.
Only if by 'within our grasp' you mean 'after a few tens, possibly hundreds, of billions of dollars and a decade or more', sure.
Seriously, one thing we have learned from MIR and the ISS is that keeping equipment running that long is hard. Launching to Mars in the 1970's with 1990's era Russian O2 generators... the mission would have had to carry essentially either four complete spares, or a set of body bags for the crew to zip themselves into. (And that's just *one* subsystem, out of hundreds.) Nothing short of Classical Orion would have been able to boost the resulting spacecraft to Mars.
Personally, I've always figured the day the US jumped the shark as a nation was 12/19/1972 - the day Apollo 17 returned to earth, and we never went back.
The belief that the US 'jumped the shark' is based on the mistaken belief that the Apollo program was something other than what it was - a Cold War pissing contest.
I never understood that. I can understand the purple-colored dye fading if it's exposed to light (same as a rug or painting fades), but if it's stored inside a dark Caselogic notebook, why would it fade? It should be just fine.
Because the chemicals in the dye are not inert and not stable. They do degrade over time regardless of where you store them, all you can do is slow the degradation down.
IE grew up in friendly benign corporate environment. It needs very good filters and blocks. Unix cut its teeth in multiuser, college enviornment. So its derivatives Linux and its cultural progeny Firefox and other OSS have immunity built into them deep down.
In other words... "IE has defenses, Firefox and other OSS has defenses, but I'm going to spin it such that Firefox and OSS sound like they are better at it". The only real difference between wearing a bulletproof vest under a tailored suit and wearing the same over just a concert t-shirt is... well, there isn't actually a difference is there?
And how exactly is "get an account and wait for a while" a secret "inner circle"? Because that's all you'll have to do to be able to edit (and presumably approve) - just as is currently the case for editing protected articles.
That's the (now) current situation - the top of the slippery slope Wikipedia now stands on. It's plainly clear to anyone who can read, and who actually reads the quoted text and my reply, that I'm not talking about the current situation.
But hey, don't let known facts stop your wild speculation.
Sure, just as you don't seem to let reading comprehension stop you from making idiotic statements.
For one, this "control freak" measure can be used, for example, to prevent mad scientologists from removing negative remarks on their current leaders, or right-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite political candidate.
Yes, of course - because we all know there's no such thing as left-wing zealot.
Yes, yes it is - towards a day when the inner circle no longer has to use secret mailing lists, sock puppets, WP:CONFUSING, and the ol' boy network... They'll be the Law. And there will be no appeal.
Oddly enough, NASA already has contracts (plural) with two different contractors to deliver supplies to the ISS.
NASA has contracts to develop the capability to deliver cargo, not contracts to deliver cargo. Unless Congress exempts them from the normal rules, one of them is going to get thrown under the bus eventually. (Especially when Congress discovers how much it costs and how little save to maintain duplicate efforts.)
Or Congress might, as they do with SSN procurement, explicitly allow this duplication to continue as thinly disguised corporate welfare.
Note, by the by, that Falcon 9 is capable of lofting a Soyuz as soon as someone cares enough to design and build an adapter to fit a 2.25m diameter Soyuz onto a 3.6m diameter Falcon 9.
If only it were as simple as designing and building an adapter - sure. But it isn't.
Which means that even if Dragon is a complete flop, they can still get into the manned launch business by buying Soyuz capsules from whatever Russian company makes them.
Assuming the Russians are willing to sell, which I find a considerable stretch.
I think the linked 'story' can be usefully be summarized thusly:
waaaaah James Cameron is making yet another SF movie! waaaaah And it's designed to be [shudder] enjoyed by normal people. waaaaah Normal people aren't geeks! Normal people don't deserve sci-fi. waaaaah James Cameron is a traitor to the geek world! waaaaah James Cameron isn't fulfilling the expectations I projected onto the film! waaaaah
Isn't it how the (pre-ULA, at least) EELV program worked, and the Joint Strike Fighter (X-32 vs X-35) program worked?
Did you notice any significant cost savings? No. Because those were traditional competitive contracts.
I see no reason why NASA can't do something similar, particularly since commercial off-the-shelf rockets already exist which are perfectly capable of delivering payloads to LEO.
NASA already buys commercial rockets off the shelf - and they are expensive as hell. Adding a few manned commercial flights to the mix won't significantly lower the costs.
The point is - that's *not* how government contracting works.
Even if NASA does this, it won't reduce costs because of the low flight rates involved per vendor. "Competitive" isn't a buzzword that magically reduces costs - there has to be elasticity, and it is far from clear that there is any.
If there's one thing worse than the government doing something, it's the government giving someone a de-facto monopoly to do it in the form of a government contract.
You're missing the point. The whole reason they're doing this is so they have multiple competing vendors for services, instead of just a single monopolistic contractor.
No, you're missing the point - because you are repeating theory, and the OP is stating facts. The government isn't going to hand out half a dozen contracts for space launch service, exactly in the same way it doesn't for any other service it purchases. The government isn't going to buy half a dozen boosters with near identical performance the same way it doesn't buy anything else from half a dozen companies.
In both cases it hands out *one* contract to *one* vendor or contractor - who then has the government by the balls. Exceptions to this are rare.
Are you just a poorly designed AI that spits out buzzwords more or less at random? Because your posts get steadily more confused and less connected with reality.
Thank you for being at least one person who has a clue in this discussion.
I swear, if Google supported something and Microsoft protested it - it wouldn't matter what that something was, Slashdot would fall all over themselves to explain how it was a Good Thing and Microsoft was By Definition Wrong.
Others have the chance after all to step up their game if they're able.
Which is why the Alliance is protesting! Because the court decision renders them unable to compete - as it assigns rights to solely to Google in perpetuity.
Jesus fucking Christ, if Google proposed killing puppies, and Microsoft complained, Slashdot would be up in arms explaining how killing puppies was a good thing. It *must* be a good thing, as Microsoft is against it after all.
It is not the exclusive right to make out of print books that is a problem, you can't claim ownership of publishing writes unless you created the content or those rights were assigned by the person who created that content.
In an ideal world that's true. In the real world, the court ruling being protested by the Alliance assigns the rights to out of print books, in perpetuity, to Google.
Now add to that non-exclusivity and you can see why authors, especially publisher and, even retail sales are bitching.
You have utterly no fucking clue what the situation is.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that the "steady stream of hydrogen" amounts to a few pounds a year scattered across the entire lunar surface. Worse yet, AIUI, it doesn't stay on the surface long - it out gasses.
Yeah, a website dedicated to promoting copper is a real reliable source on the longevity of copper. Meanwhile, the architect and the guy who lives in Alaska (where these systems are common) up thread tell a different tale.
Google searches and regurgitating the first link are no substitute for knowing what the hell you are talking about.
Even when you are in the shadow of another body - you may not be cold if that body itself is warm (radiating heat). One such example is LEO - the Apollo CSM's for Skylab couldn't use 'rotisserie mode' to control temperature as the moon bound ones did, and thus their skins had to be redone to prevent the Earth facing side from overheating. (This is also why the ISS would have to be seriously redone to survive in Lunar orbit, not only does the Moon fill less of the sky, there's a vast contrast in radiated heat between the sunlit and shadowed sides.)
Even when out of the shadow of a body, the shadowed side of your spacecraft will be awfully cold, unless it's facing another body and heated by radiant heat from it. Even so, the Sun is essentially a point source and your space craft is 'seeing' an awful lot of cold dark space.
Not only is not an easy task, it is a very complex one depending on the total thermal environment.
Who is more racist, the person who decided the black guy should be photoshopped out? Or the person who think a black guy must be included because of the color of his skin?
Only if by 'within our grasp' you mean 'after a few tens, possibly hundreds, of billions of dollars and a decade or more', sure.
Seriously, one thing we have learned from MIR and the ISS is that keeping equipment running that long is hard. Launching to Mars in the 1970's with 1990's era Russian O2 generators... the mission would have had to carry essentially either four complete spares, or a set of body bags for the crew to zip themselves into. (And that's just *one* subsystem, out of hundreds.) Nothing short of Classical Orion would have been able to boost the resulting spacecraft to Mars.
The belief that the US 'jumped the shark' is based on the mistaken belief that the Apollo program was something other than what it was - a Cold War pissing contest.
Because the chemicals in the dye are not inert and not stable. They do degrade over time regardless of where you store them, all you can do is slow the degradation down.
In other words... "IE has defenses, Firefox and other OSS has defenses, but I'm going to spin it such that Firefox and OSS sound like they are better at it". The only real difference between wearing a bulletproof vest under a tailored suit and wearing the same over just a concert t-shirt is... well, there isn't actually a difference is there?
That's the (now) current situation - the top of the slippery slope Wikipedia now stands on. It's plainly clear to anyone who can read, and who actually reads the quoted text and my reply, that I'm not talking about the current situation.
Sure, just as you don't seem to let reading comprehension stop you from making idiotic statements.
Still going to be various nasty nitrogen compounds from the heat of the exhaust interacting with the atmosphere I bet.
Yes, of course - because we all know there's no such thing as left-wing zealot.
Yes, yes it is - towards a day when the inner circle no longer has to use secret mailing lists, sock puppets, WP:CONFUSING, and the ol' boy network... They'll be the Law. And there will be no appeal.
No, you get high marks because you spout the right buzzwords - even if the context makes no sense.
Or you can do like a friend of mine did - retire at 35 to a beach house in a little town on the Gulf coast.
NASA has contracts to develop the capability to deliver cargo, not contracts to deliver cargo. Unless Congress exempts them from the normal rules, one of them is going to get thrown under the bus eventually. (Especially when Congress discovers how much it costs and how little save to maintain duplicate efforts.)
Or Congress might, as they do with SSN procurement, explicitly allow this duplication to continue as thinly disguised corporate welfare.
If only it were as simple as designing and building an adapter - sure. But it isn't.
Assuming the Russians are willing to sell, which I find a considerable stretch.
I think the linked 'story' can be usefully be summarized thusly:
waaaaah James Cameron is making yet another SF movie! waaaaah And it's designed to be [shudder] enjoyed by normal people. waaaaah Normal people aren't geeks! Normal people don't deserve sci-fi. waaaaah James Cameron is a traitor to the geek world! waaaaah James Cameron isn't fulfilling the expectations I projected onto the film! waaaaah
Did you notice any significant cost savings? No. Because those were traditional competitive contracts.
NASA already buys commercial rockets off the shelf - and they are expensive as hell. Adding a few manned commercial flights to the mix won't significantly lower the costs.
The point is - that's *not* how government contracting works.
Even if NASA does this, it won't reduce costs because of the low flight rates involved per vendor. "Competitive" isn't a buzzword that magically reduces costs - there has to be elasticity, and it is far from clear that there is any.
No, you're missing the point - because you are repeating theory, and the OP is stating facts. The government isn't going to hand out half a dozen contracts for space launch service, exactly in the same way it doesn't for any other service it purchases. The government isn't going to buy half a dozen boosters with near identical performance the same way it doesn't buy anything else from half a dozen companies.
In both cases it hands out *one* contract to *one* vendor or contractor - who then has the government by the balls. Exceptions to this are rare.
Are you just a poorly designed AI that spits out buzzwords more or less at random? Because your posts get steadily more confused and less connected with reality.
I guess all my middle class friends and neighbors and family are figments of someone's imagination.
Seriously, your posts are long on hype and completely disconnected from reality.
Thank you for being at least one person who has a clue in this discussion.
I swear, if Google supported something and Microsoft protested it - it wouldn't matter what that something was, Slashdot would fall all over themselves to explain how it was a Good Thing and Microsoft was By Definition Wrong.
Hello? McFly?
Amazon has been operating a marketplace for used and out of print books for over a fucking decade.
Which is why the Alliance is protesting! Because the court decision renders them unable to compete - as it assigns rights to solely to Google in perpetuity.
Jesus fucking Christ, if Google proposed killing puppies, and Microsoft complained, Slashdot would be up in arms explaining how killing puppies was a good thing. It *must* be a good thing, as Microsoft is against it after all.
In an ideal world that's true. In the real world, the court ruling being protested by the Alliance assigns the rights to out of print books, in perpetuity, to Google.
You have utterly no fucking clue what the situation is.
Three paragraphs - three completely incorrect statements.