As I recall, the US economy got a boost from reduction in arms spending post-Communism, in the Clinton era.
Yeah, tens of thousands of people from service members to engineers at defense contractors to the guys who mopped up on the mid shift lost their jobs. Some economic boost. Seriously, if there was an economic boost it was lost in the noise and then further obscured by the rise that accompanied the Dot-Bomb era. There was a lot of talk of what the "Peace Dividend" would do for the country, but in the end it was just talk and hot air.
I remember discussions in the UK before that on how Japan benefited commercially from not having a significant military, meaning that not only did they not have to pay for it out of taxes, but engineers who might be making missiles could work on things like better cars.
Except - they did pay for it out of their taxes, and many engineers worked both on producing licensed versions of foreign designs and on domestic designs.
Private investment in space flight seemed so likely in the 1990s. I remember science fiction author Michael Flynn's future history starting with Firestar suggesting that FedEx would be a major force behind space flight because deliveries could be made anywhere on Earth in much less time than with airplanes.
Knowledgeable observers knew even then that such a scenario was nonsense - the capital costs required were immense, and the likelihood of losing it all hovered around "near certainty".
Nowadays, however, no company is going to want to spend that much money on courier services, and with the present economic crisis there's not much investment in anything.
Even then no company was going to spend that much money on courier services, because it would provide so little return to for such a great expense.
It's a real shame that companies presently developing private space vehicles are more concerned with just getting people far up enough to enjoy freefall (for dumb prices) instead of really looking towards space.
Companies gravitate towards what it likely to make the most money for the least investment and incur the least liability, instead of chasing fanboy fantasies.
Managers actually making a smart decision about not pushing a shuttle out the door before it was ready?
Which actually, post-Challenger has happened more often than not. Which is why, post-Columbia, knowledgeable observers debated intensely seeking the reasons why NASA had been soft on pushing the foam issues when in the decade previous they had shown little reluctance to delay flights, swap orbiters around on the schedule, perform specialized maintenance/repairs, and on two occasions - ground the fleet entirely.
Strategic missile defense is a waste of money and effort, equivalent to airport metal detectors. They're security theater - if successful, they may prevent an attack from that vector, but their real value lies in making the citizens feel safer and deterring attempts along that one vector.
Which is a good thing - because the greatest threat lies along that vector.
What, you don't think there's a reason why Iran is chasing both nuclear and rocketry capability? You don't think it's the same reason North Korea is doing the same? Not to mention Pakistan and India.
Problem is, there are so many other vectors that are easier - millions if not billions of shipping containers enter the US each year entirely uninspected. Why mess with a launch and guidance system able to withstand launch and reentry stresses when you could just build a Fat Man and put it in the back of a van?
The problem is, that solution is only of value to terrorists - its has no deterrent effect and provides zero political or diplomatic value. No country is going to spend billions of dollars on a program with essentially zero return, especially since the potential political, diplomatic, and economic costs of such a program are so high.
It would be nice if your article supported your claim. But it not only fails to support it, it utterly and completely fails to address IT needs at all. (Here's a hint for you: The number of people watching has zip point zero to do with the IT infrastructure required - the same networks, newspapers, magazines, etc... are at both.)
Doesn't change the facts, no matter how you spin it. He takes two years, MLB does it multiple times in the span of six weeks. No matter how many people watch it, there's still the same number of networks, newspapers, etc... etc...
The point is that the buoyancy allowed it to float up a bit, causing water to flow over the propulsion surfaces. That flow, however slight, moved the sub forward.
And while that sounds impressive - it's meaningless and trivial to accomplish. Nor is it a breakthrough, as diving/gliding submarines like this are rediscovered every couple of years for a couple of decades now. They turn out not to work in practice because they either take a lot of energy to submerge against the buoyancy required, or they require an incredible amount of (very heavy but still limited in life) compressed air tankage to generate the buoyancy at the bottom of the cycle while venting at the top.
That's actually rather impressive, considering most subs sink like a freaking rock or bob like a log (depending on their buoyancy) instead of moving forward while bobbing slightly.
What other subs do is utterly meaningless - as other subs aren't designed to be aero/hydrodynamic.
But as amusing as it is most of the time, it has been dangerous and frustrating at other times. I was once refused admission to an urgent care on the grounds that my medical card had the right name on it, but the wrong gender.
And how long had you been carrying around that card meaning to someday get around to getting ready to get it fixed?
Short answer: You have no idea what you are talking about.
Long answer:
Dunno about Progress, or the Soyuz for that matter, being low performance... They are dependable workhorses that do the job 10x cheaper and more reliably than the Shuttle.
Performance is independent of reliability or cost. And though Soyuz and Progress may be cheaper per launch - when you compare the costs of the multiple launches required to replace a single Shuttle flight, all the sudden they aren't a bargain anymore. The last numbers I saw indicated it would take nearly 18 launches of Soyuz and Progress to partially replace a single Shuttle flight. I say partially because Soyuz/Progress cannot support spacewalks, cannot return cargo/tools/handling equipment, and cannot deliver equipment much larger than a medium sized suitcase.
You want to compare Soyuz and Shuttle reliability? Let's do, let's compare 95 odd Soyuz flights to 120 odd Shuttle flights...
Fatal Accidents
Soyuz - 2, Shuttle - 2
Non fatal accidents
LOM (loss of mission) caused by booster failure. Soyuz-2 (booster fire on pad, failure of the 2nd stage to separate), Shuttle-0
LOM accidents caused by spacecraft failure. Soyuz-3 (all unable to dock before batteries exhausted), Shuttle-0.
Partial LOM accidents. Soyuz-0, Shuttle-1 (Shuttle executed ATO resulting in an orbit too low for some tasks, mission completed otherwise normally and approximately 75% of the affected tasks were later reflown - which Soyuz cannot do at all.)
Significant (life threatening) on orbit failures. Soyuz-1 (jettisoned orbital module, which contains virtually all life support, and then subsequently was unable to reenter on schedule but reentered before life support was completely exhausted), Shuttle-0
Significant (life threatening) reentry accidents Soyuz-2 (both a failure of the service module to seperate on schedule resulting in a nose reentry until the service module burned away, one of these on the most recent flight!), Shuttle-0
Landing accidents (life threatening) Soyuz-3 (landed on a frozen lake and ended up submerged under the ice, bounced down a mountainside ending up just inches from a drop off, landed off target in subzero weather), Shuttle-0
Significant but non life threatening landing accidents. Soyuz-7 (all off target high G reentries, four of these in the last eight years, all four cause by complete computer failure), Shuttle-0
It's not a pretty picture - and it gets worse when you consider the Progress collision with MIR, something Shuttle has never done...
Ares will have to be a poor performer indeed to even approach the Soyuz record.
Your notion of Progress being obsolete, but European or US alternatesd being better is a bunch of crap.
I didn't say it was currently obsolete, I said it will be obsolete. Currently it is obsolescent.
For a start the Eupoean ATV's most critical component, the docking procedure, is based on the Soviet design
So what? That doesn't change the fact that ATV's performance (cargo capacity) is far higher.
more importantly Progress does the job reliably.
Being reliable doesn't mean it isn't obsolescent and approaching obsolescence.
The US seems incapable of utilizing the incremental improvement approach of the Japanese or Russia - it's always a matter of redesigning from scratch every time
Care to cite a Japanese spacecraft design exhibiting this characteristic? Meanwhile, we can discuss how Soyuz has steadily lost capability in its evolution from general purpose orbiter to hyper specialized space station taxi. Then there is Progress, which has made some progress. Then there is Shuttle - which has new computers, a new flight control system, a new display system, new solid rocket motors, new SSME's (increasing thrust), a new external tank that increases payload to orbit by many tons.
Let's not also forget that they've got things like the unmanned Progress ISS supply ship that we're totally dependent on - something that neither the US, Europe nor anywhere else has to offer.
Yeah, the Progress is a wonderful low performance thirty year old design. But the Shuttle still flying, we have the European ATV ready to enter service and the Japanese HTV ready to start testing this year. Then there is the Commercial Resupply Program contract that NASA recently signed with SpaceX.
Or, in short, not only are we not totally dependent on Progress... Within a few years its obsolescent ass will be redundant and it will be obsolete not long after.
The educational goals of the project were explicitly based on shipping a device built entirely on Free Software. There was going to be a view source button (that would show the easily-readable Python source of the current app), and there were discussions about how to allow the users to modify all the software on the device without bothering tech-illiterate adults when they ran into trouble.
Which plan ignored the inconvenient fact that the users would be tech-illiterate too.
The apparent potential of such a plan was huge. Every potential programmer in that population would certainly learn how to program as they grew up with this device. And every non-programmer would think of computer programs as something you could get your friends to write or modify.
Ignoring the inconvenient fact that it takes considerable skill and experience to make such modifications without crashing or corruption. Skill and experience tech-illiterate children in a country scrambling to make a living don't have and are extremely unlikely to obtain.
In short, both the OLPC and the FOSS community deluded themselves. OLPC realized their error, while the FOSS community continues to be blinded.
That was a good chunk of the educational promise of the OLPC project. A generic laptop - even one running normal desktop Linux - doesn't offer the same potential; one running Windows certainly doesn't. That promise was the reason that the OLPC project was worthy of charitable donations.
In other words, once the OLPC realized that the most important goal was educating children rather than performing missionary work, the FOSS community showed their true colors. They aren't interested in helping people, unless those people were to be forcibly baptized into their religion.
Without it, donors might as well donate money to Asus to subsidize the Eee PC.
If somebody starts up the appropriate non- or not for- profit organization, I'll be there in a heartbeat. Because I place humanity over religion.
Bible thumpers and their indistinguishable brethren the FOSS community selfishly reverse that order.
The fact that the second G1G1 failed despite significant marketing to the public-at-large, whereas the first G1G1 succeeded using only word-of-mouth and grass-roots marketing is quite telling. I'm sure there are many reasons (including the economy), but I believe the shift in values of the OLPC organization was a significant effect.
I'm sure those things were part of it - but you can't ignore two other significant factors; First, by the time of the second G1G1 there was considerable competition in that market. Second, by the time of the second G1G1 word had spread about how badly they'd bungled the first and their refusal to acknowledge the problems.
But then I felt let-down by the changes in OLPC. The switch in emphasis (including the shift to Windows) meant that many enthusiasts and volunteers lost interest.
Which is in itself telling - that you placed your religious (OS/software) beliefs over your desire to support the goals of the project. (Which was primarily educational, and only secondarily political.)
Obviously 1st-world enthusiasts and hackers are not the target audience for the XO. And yet I believe they were quite important in building and supporting the platform ($37 million from the first G1G1 is quite impressive), and that by neglecting that community OLPC has lost some of its most useful supporters.
Which tells me that in the end the 1st world enthusiasts and hackers weren't as liberal as they insist they are, and really aren't any different from Joe Sixpack Biblethumper. So long as they are being catered to, they talk the talk - but when the OLPC refused to adhere to their religious beliefs.... they took a walk.
The problem is this - only your first point of failure is a failure of their own goals. The remaining two are only failures by the lights of a community that projected their politics and biases onto the OLPC project.
Not only was it invented accidentally in 1938 - it became cheap after WWII because of the huge surplus in manufacturing capacity that became available after the Manhattan Engineer District stopped buying by the ton.
I bet if you looked equally hard, you'd find example where the competing companies developed more effective and more efficient workarounds.
Point is, with no patent system, people will still always be trying to build the better mousetrap, the more effective and more efficient workarounds.
All the patent system does is remove choice -- and sometimes, the choice it removes is really the best choice.
Translation: "Don't bother me with facts. My mind is made up. No really, abundant evidence of ongoing innovation in the presence of the patent system proves my point - people aren't trying to build better mousetraps. The patent system is bad. No, really, believe me."
I'm sure someone less lazy than me will find the appropriate paper -- it discussed the development of the first steam engines, often used as an example of the patent system working -- but it illustrates just how clearly the patent system did not work here. Specifically, two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements, so they had to work out less effective, more wasteful workarounds just to avoid being sued.
Sure, if you look you can find instances like that where the patent system failed. I bet if you looked equally hard, you'd find example where the competing companies developed more effective and more efficient workarounds.
Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
Horseshit. The copyright holders can't removed the books from your shelves, or take your CD's and DVD's, or tear down the posters from your wall, or issue a recall for your collection of action figures...
Nonetheless, the point of the matter is that any terrorist organisation with the resources to get hold of sufficient fissile material has the resources to get hold of the necessary engineering talent to use it.
A point I've never debated. (Though it is debatable.) You fail to realize that there is a difference between engineering talent with a design to work from, and engineering talent that has to create everything from scratch. One has a much harder task than the other, and a higher chance of failure.
Which is why assembly speed matters - it's not just "simple geometry and physics". There's also the issue that your "simple geometry" makes for a somewhat more complicated and heavy design of the assembly system.
There's also the matter of multiple people who do know what they are talking about having actually done the calculations and shown the design, as published, will work as described.
No, I'm not kidding. But then, I've actually studied the topic and understand that it is far more than just a "cannon with a target and a projectile of nearly pure U-235". As always, the devil is in the details - and there are a lot of details. (Some are hinted at in TFA, others in Carey Sublette's work.)
But it you just want to make a big bang to make the political statement that you've joined the club, then its pretty easy, once you get the special stuff, and extreme engineering is not a good idea for the first bang.
Actually, that's completely incorrect. (And shows how little you've studied or thought about the topic.) A nuclear deterrent works if and only if you have a deliverable weapon - there's a reason why every nuclear weapons state and wannabe weapons state has developed or is also trying to develop IRBMs at a minimum, ICBMs if at all possible.
Here's the mandatory slashdot car analogy. You're saying that if the 2009 indy-500 car racing team A wants to prevent team B from winning, they should classify the design of the original ford model T car. Or maybe, if in 2009 we want to stop china from competing with ford, we should classify the model T blueprints.
If the model T had no chance of winning, it would be stupid to classify the design. But it does have a chance of winning as you yourself point out.
Stopping the knowledge of the design details is merely security theater.
Except your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
Even though it is difficult to obtain the fissile material needed, the engineering is not particularly easy. Keeping the engineering details classified makes the job of someone trying to recreate the bomb harder. This keeps the risks of proliferation down.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, tens of thousands of people from service members to engineers at defense contractors to the guys who mopped up on the mid shift lost their jobs. Some economic boost. Seriously, if there was an economic boost it was lost in the noise and then further obscured by the rise that accompanied the Dot-Bomb era. There was a lot of talk of what the "Peace Dividend" would do for the country, but in the end it was just talk and hot air.
Except - they did pay for it out of their taxes, and many engineers worked both on producing licensed versions of foreign designs and on domestic designs.
Knowledgeable observers knew even then that such a scenario was nonsense - the capital costs required were immense, and the likelihood of losing it all hovered around "near certainty".
Even then no company was going to spend that much money on courier services, because it would provide so little return to for such a great expense.
Companies gravitate towards what it likely to make the most money for the least investment and incur the least liability, instead of chasing fanboy fantasies.
You expected something else... Why?
Which actually, post-Challenger has happened more often than not. Which is why, post-Columbia, knowledgeable observers debated intensely seeking the reasons why NASA had been soft on pushing the foam issues when in the decade previous they had shown little reluctance to delay flights, swap orbiters around on the schedule, perform specialized maintenance/repairs, and on two occasions - ground the fleet entirely.
Which is a good thing - because the greatest threat lies along that vector.
What, you don't think there's a reason why Iran is chasing both nuclear and rocketry capability? You don't think it's the same reason North Korea is doing the same? Not to mention Pakistan and India.
The problem is, that solution is only of value to terrorists - its has no deterrent effect and provides zero political or diplomatic value. No country is going to spend billions of dollars on a program with essentially zero return, especially since the potential political, diplomatic, and economic costs of such a program are so high.
"The Humber College seniors made contact with the International Space Station Monday with a radio system they designed and built themselves."
Ummm... so what? It's not like radios are hard to build, or the information to build them is hard to find, or the parts are hard to obtain.
It wouldn't really be readable at ordinary type sizes... Coffee isn't really all that dark in thin layers or in small amounts.
It would be nice if your article supported your claim. But it not only fails to support it, it utterly and completely fails to address IT needs at all. (Here's a hint for you: The number of people watching has zip point zero to do with the IT infrastructure required - the same networks, newspapers, magazines, etc... are at both.)
Doesn't change the facts, no matter how you spin it. He takes two years, MLB does it multiple times in the span of six weeks. No matter how many people watch it, there's still the same number of networks, newspapers, etc... etc...
It takes him two years? Wow. Not.
MLB does this with just a few days of notice for the Division and League playoffs and a week or so for the Series.
And while that sounds impressive - it's meaningless and trivial to accomplish. Nor is it a breakthrough, as diving/gliding submarines like this are rediscovered every couple of years for a couple of decades now. They turn out not to work in practice because they either take a lot of energy to submerge against the buoyancy required, or they require an incredible amount of (very heavy but still limited in life) compressed air tankage to generate the buoyancy at the bottom of the cycle while venting at the top.
What other subs do is utterly meaningless - as other subs aren't designed to be aero/hydrodynamic.
And how long had you been carrying around that card meaning to someday get around to getting ready to get it fixed?
Short answer: You have no idea what you are talking about.
Long answer:
Performance is independent of reliability or cost. And though Soyuz and Progress may be cheaper per launch - when you compare the costs of the multiple launches required to replace a single Shuttle flight, all the sudden they aren't a bargain anymore. The last numbers I saw indicated it would take nearly 18 launches of Soyuz and Progress to partially replace a single Shuttle flight. I say partially because Soyuz/Progress cannot support spacewalks, cannot return cargo/tools/handling equipment, and cannot deliver equipment much larger than a medium sized suitcase.
You want to compare Soyuz and Shuttle reliability? Let's do, let's compare 95 odd Soyuz flights to 120 odd Shuttle flights...
Fatal Accidents
Non fatal accidents
It's not a pretty picture - and it gets worse when you consider the Progress collision with MIR, something Shuttle has never done...
Ares will have to be a poor performer indeed to even approach the Soyuz record.
I didn't say it was currently obsolete, I said it will be obsolete. Currently it is obsolescent.
So what? That doesn't change the fact that ATV's performance (cargo capacity) is far higher.
Being reliable doesn't mean it isn't obsolescent and approaching obsolescence.
Care to cite a Japanese spacecraft design exhibiting this characteristic? Meanwhile, we can discuss how Soyuz has steadily lost capability in its evolution from general purpose orbiter to hyper specialized space station taxi. Then there is Progress, which has made some progress. Then there is Shuttle - which has new computers, a new flight control system, a new display system, new solid rocket motors, new SSME's (increasing thrust), a new external tank that increases payload to orbit by many tons.
Yeah, the Progress is a wonderful low performance thirty year old design. But the Shuttle still flying, we have the European ATV ready to enter service and the Japanese HTV ready to start testing this year. Then there is the Commercial Resupply Program contract that NASA recently signed with SpaceX.
Or, in short, not only are we not totally dependent on Progress... Within a few years its obsolescent ass will be redundant and it will be obsolete not long after.
Which plan ignored the inconvenient fact that the users would be tech-illiterate too.
Ignoring the inconvenient fact that it takes considerable skill and experience to make such modifications without crashing or corruption. Skill and experience tech-illiterate children in a country scrambling to make a living don't have and are extremely unlikely to obtain.
In short, both the OLPC and the FOSS community deluded themselves. OLPC realized their error, while the FOSS community continues to be blinded.
In other words, once the OLPC realized that the most important goal was educating children rather than performing missionary work, the FOSS community showed their true colors. They aren't interested in helping people, unless those people were to be forcibly baptized into their religion.
If somebody starts up the appropriate non- or not for- profit organization, I'll be there in a heartbeat. Because I place humanity over religion.
Bible thumpers and their indistinguishable brethren the FOSS community selfishly reverse that order.
I'm sure those things were part of it - but you can't ignore two other significant factors; First, by the time of the second G1G1 there was considerable competition in that market. Second, by the time of the second G1G1 word had spread about how badly they'd bungled the first and their refusal to acknowledge the problems.
Which is in itself telling - that you placed your religious (OS/software) beliefs over your desire to support the goals of the project. (Which was primarily educational, and only secondarily political.)
Which tells me that in the end the 1st world enthusiasts and hackers weren't as liberal as they insist they are, and really aren't any different from Joe Sixpack Biblethumper. So long as they are being catered to, they talk the talk - but when the OLPC refused to adhere to their religious beliefs.... they took a walk.
The problem is this - only your first point of failure is a failure of their own goals. The remaining two are only failures by the lights of a community that projected their politics and biases onto the OLPC project.
Not only was it invented accidentally in 1938 - it became cheap after WWII because of the huge surplus in manufacturing capacity that became available after the Manhattan Engineer District stopped buying by the ton.
Translation: "Don't bother me with facts. My mind is made up. No really, abundant evidence of ongoing innovation in the presence of the patent system proves my point - people aren't trying to build better mousetraps. The patent system is bad. No, really, believe me."
Sure, if you look you can find instances like that where the patent system failed. I bet if you looked equally hard, you'd find example where the competing companies developed more effective and more efficient workarounds.
Horseshit. The copyright holders can't removed the books from your shelves, or take your CD's and DVD's, or tear down the posters from your wall, or issue a recall for your collection of action figures...
A point I've never debated. (Though it is debatable.) You fail to realize that there is a difference between engineering talent with a design to work from, and engineering talent that has to create everything from scratch. One has a much harder task than the other, and a higher chance of failure.
Which is why assembly speed matters - it's not just "simple geometry and physics". There's also the issue that your "simple geometry" makes for a somewhat more complicated and heavy design of the assembly system.
There's also the matter of multiple people who do know what they are talking about having actually done the calculations and shown the design, as published, will work as described.
No, I'm not kidding. But then, I've actually studied the topic and understand that it is far more than just a "cannon with a target and a projectile of nearly pure U-235". As always, the devil is in the details - and there are a lot of details. (Some are hinted at in TFA, others in Carey Sublette's work.)
Actually, that's completely incorrect. (And shows how little you've studied or thought about the topic.) A nuclear deterrent works if and only if you have a deliverable weapon - there's a reason why every nuclear weapons state and wannabe weapons state has developed or is also trying to develop IRBMs at a minimum, ICBMs if at all possible.
If the model T had no chance of winning, it would be stupid to classify the design. But it does have a chance of winning as you yourself point out.
Except your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
Even though it is difficult to obtain the fissile material needed, the engineering is not particularly easy. Keeping the engineering details classified makes the job of someone trying to recreate the bomb harder. This keeps the risks of proliferation down.
Given the high insertion and assembly speed - it certainly isn't a 'slow linear slide'.
Maybe you just don't know what you are talking about?