This is another testament to Soyuz robustness - still the safest spacecraft around.
In some alternate reality in which Soyuz was ever the safest space craft in the first place... sure. Here in the real world, it's safety is statistically indistinguishable from the Shuttle's.
The Russian bureaucracy in particular is quick to attempt to shift blame away from themselves. The first computer failure of this type (the current one is something like the fifth out of fourteen flights) was also blamed on the crew. It was only months later that they admitted it was a hardware problem - and that a fix was in the works. Quite a few years have passed by, yet here we are again.
The last fatality was in 1971 with a much older version of the spacecraft.
That's an emotional argument, not an engineering argument.
Saying that Soyuz is no good is like saying that Linux is no good because the 2.2 kernel sucked.
I'm saying Soyuz isn't as good as those who rely on rumor and urban legend for their space information believe - because version after version it suffers significant and ongoing problems. (Nor is the Shuttle as bad as those who rely on rumor and urban legend for their space information believe.)
I'm not interested in playing semantics games with the several posters here who claim otherwise.
Yet, that is exactly what you are doing by claiming that a failure of a major system during reentry isn't a reentry failure.
In my book, that makes the reentry successful no matter how many systems failed on the way down.
In my book, when you have a major system fail routinely... you have a serious problem. After all, fifteen crews landed safely despite O-ring failure and dozens of crews landed safely despite tile damage.
The fact that they survived the experience is amazing. Say what you want about Soviet technology, this was a very, very neat trick.
When it comes to Soviet technology only one thing needs to be pointed out: This brings the re-entry failure rate of the current mark of Soyuz to 20% and trending upwards. (This report on Soyuz landing safety with the older marks is sobering reading.)
Likewise, spacex is the company who was pushing out rockets that will take only a handful of ppl to run it
They may be 'pushing them out', but they sure as heck aren't flying them. Two (much delayed) launches to date - two failures. No announced date for the third launch.
L-Mart has NO incentive to do this.
Other than NASA's COTS initiative, which involves not only SpaceX but OSC and a half a dozen others. Said COTS initiative just a _big_ boost as NASA announced today that they will not be asking Congress for money to purchase Progress launches, but instead wishes to apply the money to commercial/COTS programs. Then there is Bigelow on the horizon, and Virgin Aerospace too... Then there is EADS and a couple of Russian companies pushing low cost access too. Then there is Northrup Grumman who just bought out Scaled Composites... LockMart has a lot of reasons to do this, and SpaceX is just one of them.
For proof, simply read entering space by zubrin who was told by top executives that they would never willingly walk away from their rockets; far too much money.
Need I point out that Entering Space is nearly a decade old? The aerospace industry has changed radically in that time, especially in the last five years. (And anyone whose spent any time around the space industry knows Zubrin says many thing. Some of them even have a passing resemblance to reality.)
Your windmill will be rusted junk long before it replaces the energy needed to create its components.
That is obviously wrong. If you can buy the parts for $300-400 then they can not be anywhere near as energy expensive as you are making out. No, it's not 'obviously wrong' because unless you have a very large windmill or it runs a very high percentage of the time, it isn't putting out very much energy.
So what? He still isn't independent in any useful sense, if the grid goes down - so does the industrial infrastructure he require to be 'independent' of the grid.
Why wouldn't they try a plant that grows in extremely low nutrient soil? There are plenty of plants that grow in sand along beaches and generate their own food through photosynthesis (all plants do, but some rely on it more than others).
Because the plants that grow in those marginal areas, by and large, produce barely enough food for themselves - and they don't produce an excess of fruiting bodies, seeds, leaves, etc... (I.E. the parts people eat.)
Garden flowers are probably the worst type of plant to try to grow in nutrient-free dirt.
When doing research of this nature, scientists usually use well understood and easy to cultivate plants before upping the ante. And, as I point out above, if the environment can't support the growth of flowers... it's not going to support the much greater demands imposed by a vegetable.
Heinlein was either able to accurately predict the future of the military, or he directly inspired it.
Or maybe he just paid attention to developments around him - the Army was researching exoskeletons years before Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers.
In fact, a Marine Corps general stated that the corps' future equipment and organization needed to emulate the Mobile Infantry from Starship Troopers.
Again, back to the history books... The USMC (as a combat arm and as opposed to what is now the FMF) was a lightweight fast moving infantry force - until it got bloated by WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War in general. Heinlein, a keen student of history and warfare, was undoubtedly aware of this.
I did find it amusing that the first uses are hoped to cause "fewer injuries when soldiers need to lift heavy weights or move objects around repeatedly". Not much of a combat objective!
Well, the Army does do things other than combat - like move mountains of supplies, perform maintenance on a variety of vehicles, etc... etc...
We have created an open source hardware project that makes power. It'll cost me $300 - $400 to make something I think is cool, will pay for itself over time, help reduce my footprint on the planet in an almost measurable way and let me do something creative.
You got a problem with that?
Yeah, I do. Because "building a cheap windmill" != "reducing your footprint", especially if you are making your blades out of materials that are energy intensive to produce (fiberglass), which also produces toxic waste to boot. Your windmill will be rusted junk long before it replaces the energy needed to create its components.
It has nothing to do with buying things. It has nothing to do with keeping up with the neighbors.
You're right - it's about none of those things. Nor is it about actually reducing your footprint. It's all about being kewl and open source and giving you a warm fuzzy feeling that you are Doing Something.
You want to reduce your footprint measurably? Don't build a windmill - instead, reduce your consumption of electricity to match that the amount the windmill would have provided.
As I look at the 'machine', what hits me first is what a labor intensive nightmare it must be to keep clean... And for a coffee machine to produce quality coffee, cleanliness is extremely important.
There are things other than homes that demand electricity - ever heard of schools for example? Or shopping malls? Or hell, offices and businesses? There's a reason why power is cheaper at night.
Relying on the sun for power is not feasible for anything other than base load stuff. When usage starts peaking there is no way to get the sun to send down more energy. A 92 square mile station wouldn't be any more useful than a much smaller station. Solar could only feasibly be a supplement to the grid.
This of course assumes that there's no way to store energy during off-peak periods
When it comes to solar power - that's not just a valid assumption, it's practically a law of nature. Demand is highest during the day, which happens to be the only time solar (thermal or voltaic) can generate power.
store energy during off-peak periods as heat or hydrogen gas (new tech, great potential. You use the power generated to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen, and store the H2.).
Splitting H2O that way isn't a new tech - it's an old one that keeps being rediscovered after being discarded once reality sets in. After you figure in the energy needed to handle the hydrogen (mostly compressors and cooling systems) and the size of the tanks needed (think Hindenburg to power a few square blocks overnight) - it rapidly becomes less attractive. The same thing goes for storing heat - there really isn't (so far as we know to date) a really effective way to store and then extract the heat in the quantities required.
Where are you getting the 'base load' information?
The OP has it backwards, solar (thermal or voltaic) is best for peaking loads.
The Russian space program typically does things for millions that would cost the US billions..
No, the Russians typically do a fraction of what the US does and thus unsurprisingly pays a fraction of what the US does. Space fanboys don't realize this because they swallow propaganda rather than actually study the facts.
For example - I bet you don't realize that the US paid for almost a third of MIR, boosted almost 40% of it's final weight into orbit, carried almost 25% of the supplies delivered over it's life - and returned electronics modules salvages from Progress so the Russians could reuse them. Or for another example - to replace a single Shuttle flight requires 4 Soyuz flights, and 6 Progress flights... (Which at currently quoted prices runs about 80% of the cost of Shuttle mission.) Even so, it still falls short of what the Shuttle can do - because they can't deliver exterior cargo (like the recently delivered DEXTRE), and their ability to deliver interior cargo is hampered because the Russian APAS docking system/hatches are a quarter the size of the US/ESA CBM berthing system/hatches.
They do have a better way. Retro rockets to slow the descent to a crawl + springy legs because 1 to 2 m/s is still a hard landing. It comes down to cost. This solution is more expensive.
Um... Retro rockets and springy legs is exactly what Phoenix is equipped with.
I think we've all been disappointed that the flying cars and weekend trips to mars envisioned by TV and authors in our childhood have not materialized.
I'm not. Because I eventually outgrew childhood and learned to distinguish fantasy and fiction from reality.
A better way to do it is in the private sector. They're more tolerant of risk. The X-Prize has been phenomenally successful, and should be emulated.
They're more tolerable of risk - when there is a profit to be made. There isn't much profit in space exploration - and no company is going to spend the required billions.
But government over-regulation, and subsidized competitors has prevented the private sector from flourishing. For a sad read, go over to Beale Aerospace's page.
Yet SpaceX seems to be doing just fine, and so is Virgin Aerospace. The simple fact is, Beale was years behind schedule and far over budget - and when the government refused to give Beale welfare for vaporware and chose existing hardware instead, Beale threw in the towel. That's a piss poor business plan, not over regulation or subsidy.
NASA needs to refocus its effort on science by contracting launch services from the private sector.
90% of NASA's launches already come from the private sector - fat cat 'usual suspects' or not, Boeing and LockMart are about as private as it gets.
and a mobile phone company is hiding them in some cellphone boxes to catch thieves
Am I missing something here? Don't mobile phones already have GPS (at least here in the USA)? And unique ID numbers burnt into them?
Yes, mobile phones (some of them) have GPS. Yes, mobile phones have unique ID numbers. What you are missing is that "mobile phones" are not the same as "mobile phones in boxes" - as the former (generally) have their battery charged and installed and are powered up, while the latter are inert and those fancy functions don't work.
it would seem that most mobile phone thefts that could be caught with this GPS bug would be caught and tracked down as soon as the thief or buyer of the stolen property tried to use the phone anyway
Using the phones built in features allows you to catch a single end user - once the phone has trickled from thief to fence to dealer to end user. Using a GPS bug you can track the phone through the entire chain and catch the guys at the start of the chain rather than catching the guys at the end and working up. From a LEO and a Loss Prevention point of view, this is much more efficient and effective.
Just because economics makes certain absurd assumptions about real costs does not make these real costs any less real.
Equally, just because the greens treat them as real doesn't make them any more real.
Natural resources are assumed to be unlimited, and their loss, use, or destruction is not counted as a cost in accounting.
Because there isn't a rational way to do so - the belief that there is so is one example of the wishful thinking and bias I referred to in my original post.
Claiming these are all just made up, wishful thinking by 'greens' is itself wishful thinking.
I never claimed they were made up. I merely point out that there isn't a rational and equitable way of accounting for them, and that the belief that such a method exists is wishful thinking. There is a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
In some alternate reality in which Soyuz was ever the safest space craft in the first place... sure. Here in the real world, it's safety is statistically indistinguishable from the Shuttle's.
Except - the Soyuz does no such thing. As the grandparent states, they use thrusters to alter the attitude which alters the lift vector.
The Russian bureaucracy in particular is quick to attempt to shift blame away from themselves. The first computer failure of this type (the current one is something like the fifth out of fourteen flights) was also blamed on the crew. It was only months later that they admitted it was a hardware problem - and that a fix was in the works. Quite a few years have passed by, yet here we are again.
That's an emotional argument, not an engineering argument.
I'm saying Soyuz isn't as good as those who rely on rumor and urban legend for their space information believe - because version after version it suffers significant and ongoing problems. (Nor is the Shuttle as bad as those who rely on rumor and urban legend for their space information believe.)
Up until the day it doesn't. Fifteen crews landed safely despite major O-ring damage. Dozens of crews landed safely despite significant tile damage.
So what? A subcompact is cheaper than a full size truck too, but only a fool or an idiot would confuse the two.
That's what folks who haven't actually studied the space shuttle believe.
Yet, that is exactly what you are doing by claiming that a failure of a major system during reentry isn't a reentry failure.
In my book, when you have a major system fail routinely... you have a serious problem. After all, fifteen crews landed safely despite O-ring failure and dozens of crews landed safely despite tile damage.
When it comes to Soviet technology only one thing needs to be pointed out: This brings the re-entry failure rate of the current mark of Soyuz to 20% and trending upwards. (This report on Soyuz landing safety with the older marks is sobering reading.)
They may be 'pushing them out', but they sure as heck aren't flying them. Two (much delayed) launches to date - two failures. No announced date for the third launch.
Other than NASA's COTS initiative, which involves not only SpaceX but OSC and a half a dozen others. Said COTS initiative just a _big_ boost as NASA announced today that they will not be asking Congress for money to purchase Progress launches, but instead wishes to apply the money to commercial/COTS programs. Then there is Bigelow on the horizon, and Virgin Aerospace too... Then there is EADS and a couple of Russian companies pushing low cost access too. Then there is Northrup Grumman who just bought out Scaled Composites... LockMart has a lot of reasons to do this, and SpaceX is just one of them.
Need I point out that Entering Space is nearly a decade old? The aerospace industry has changed radically in that time, especially in the last five years. (And anyone whose spent any time around the space industry knows Zubrin says many thing. Some of them even have a passing resemblance to reality.)
The mass of the fuel and the mass of the engine are pretty much meaningless - what kills ion engines is generally the mass of the power supply.
That is obviously wrong. If you can buy the parts for $300-400 then they can not be anywhere near as energy expensive as you are making out.
No, it's not 'obviously wrong' because unless you have a very large windmill or it runs a very high percentage of the time, it isn't putting out very much energy.
So what? He still isn't independent in any useful sense, if the grid goes down - so does the industrial infrastructure he require to be 'independent' of the grid.
Because the plants that grow in those marginal areas, by and large, produce barely enough food for themselves - and they don't produce an excess of fruiting bodies, seeds, leaves, etc... (I.E. the parts people eat.)
When doing research of this nature, scientists usually use well understood and easy to cultivate plants before upping the ante. And, as I point out above, if the environment can't support the growth of flowers... it's not going to support the much greater demands imposed by a vegetable.
Or maybe he just paid attention to developments around him - the Army was researching exoskeletons years before Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers.
Again, back to the history books... The USMC (as a combat arm and as opposed to what is now the FMF) was a lightweight fast moving infantry force - until it got bloated by WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War in general. Heinlein, a keen student of history and warfare, was undoubtedly aware of this.
Well, the Army does do things other than combat - like move mountains of supplies, perform maintenance on a variety of vehicles, etc... etc...
Except that you aren't independent from the grid - you still need parts and tools and supplies to maintain the turbine.
Yeah, I do. Because "building a cheap windmill" != "reducing your footprint", especially if you are making your blades out of materials that are energy intensive to produce (fiberglass), which also produces toxic waste to boot. Your windmill will be rusted junk long before it replaces the energy needed to create its components.
You're right - it's about none of those things. Nor is it about actually reducing your footprint. It's all about being kewl and open source and giving you a warm fuzzy feeling that you are Doing Something.
You want to reduce your footprint measurably? Don't build a windmill - instead, reduce your consumption of electricity to match that the amount the windmill would have provided.
As I look at the 'machine', what hits me first is what a labor intensive nightmare it must be to keep clean... And for a coffee machine to produce quality coffee, cleanliness is extremely important.
There are things other than homes that demand electricity - ever heard of schools for example? Or shopping malls? Or hell, offices and businesses? There's a reason why power is cheaper at night.
When it comes to solar power - that's not just a valid assumption, it's practically a law of nature. Demand is highest during the day, which happens to be the only time solar (thermal or voltaic) can generate power.
Splitting H2O that way isn't a new tech - it's an old one that keeps being rediscovered after being discarded once reality sets in. After you figure in the energy needed to handle the hydrogen (mostly compressors and cooling systems) and the size of the tanks needed (think Hindenburg to power a few square blocks overnight) - it rapidly becomes less attractive. The same thing goes for storing heat - there really isn't (so far as we know to date) a really effective way to store and then extract the heat in the quantities required.
The OP has it backwards, solar (thermal or voltaic) is best for peaking loads.
Why won't using a PC directly work?
No, the Russians typically do a fraction of what the US does and thus unsurprisingly pays a fraction of what the US does. Space fanboys don't realize this because they swallow propaganda rather than actually study the facts.
For example - I bet you don't realize that the US paid for almost a third of MIR, boosted almost 40% of it's final weight into orbit, carried almost 25% of the supplies delivered over it's life - and returned electronics modules salvages from Progress so the Russians could reuse them. Or for another example - to replace a single Shuttle flight requires 4 Soyuz flights, and 6 Progress flights... (Which at currently quoted prices runs about 80% of the cost of Shuttle mission.) Even so, it still falls short of what the Shuttle can do - because they can't deliver exterior cargo (like the recently delivered DEXTRE), and their ability to deliver interior cargo is hampered because the Russian APAS docking system/hatches are a quarter the size of the US/ESA CBM berthing system/hatches.
Um... Retro rockets and springy legs is exactly what Phoenix is equipped with.
I'm not. Because I eventually outgrew childhood and learned to distinguish fantasy and fiction from reality.
They're more tolerable of risk - when there is a profit to be made. There isn't much profit in space exploration - and no company is going to spend the required billions.
Yet SpaceX seems to be doing just fine, and so is Virgin Aerospace. The simple fact is, Beale was years behind schedule and far over budget - and when the government refused to give Beale welfare for vaporware and chose existing hardware instead, Beale threw in the towel. That's a piss poor business plan, not over regulation or subsidy.
90% of NASA's launches already come from the private sector - fat cat 'usual suspects' or not, Boeing and LockMart are about as private as it gets.
Yes, mobile phones (some of them) have GPS. Yes, mobile phones have unique ID numbers. What you are missing is that "mobile phones" are not the same as "mobile phones in boxes" - as the former (generally) have their battery charged and installed and are powered up, while the latter are inert and those fancy functions don't work.
Using the phones built in features allows you to catch a single end user - once the phone has trickled from thief to fence to dealer to end user. Using a GPS bug you can track the phone through the entire chain and catch the guys at the start of the chain rather than catching the guys at the end and working up. From a LEO and a Loss Prevention point of view, this is much more efficient and effective.
Equally, just because the greens treat them as real doesn't make them any more real.
Because there isn't a rational way to do so - the belief that there is so is one example of the wishful thinking and bias I referred to in my original post.
I never claimed they were made up. I merely point out that there isn't a rational and equitable way of accounting for them, and that the belief that such a method exists is wishful thinking. There is a difference.