The comparison with the Soyuz safety record is hilarious since their system is so matured and the kinks worked out decades ago. The Soyuz and its launch methods are dumb, stupid, and EXTREMELY reliable.
Except - the kinks haven't been worked out. Three of the last ten flights have suffered loss of the main computer during re-entry.
While I agree with you that both have about a 2% chance of ending in tears (or flames) per flight, both failures of Soyuz craft happened very early in the vehicle history
Both failures? The Soyuz has a long history of significant failures - from the fatal accident on the first mission, to the computer failure on the most recent mission.
Soyuz are much simpler machines and this makes them easier to understand and remove design flaws.
Soyuz spacecraft share many components with the Progress family and both systems end up helping work out the bugs from each other.
So claims the theory. But there are two problems when you compare the theory to the reality:
Soyuz has an ongoing history of failures leading to near fatal accidents, significant incidents, and loss-of-mission incidents. The learning effect everyone keeps handwaving about simply does not show any evidence of occurring.
Sure, Progress has many systems in common with Soyuz - but there are several critical systems that are not common. And virtually all of the systems not common have experienced failures leading to accidents. (Fatal or not.)
Shuttles, on the other hand, are devilishly complex machines. The fact the two fatal failures happened late in the life of the vehicles and both resulted from the underestimation of poorly understood risks can be explained by the sheer complexity of the system. Far too many things can go wrong. And twice they did.
One accident occurred early in the program, and one late. Both happened due to well understood risks - the odds of which happening were incorrectly estimated. This has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity of the system.
Soyuz are expendable. Any damage suffered in one trip ends with it.
Shuttles accumulate damage during their lifetimes, much of it is poorly understood and may lead to unpredicted failure modes in the future.
In rational engineering, an expendable device is considered a poor device - because it is impossible to test it under realistic conditions. Each flight is the first flight. On the other hand, reusable vehicles can be overhauled and repaired in the event of minor failures. (And thus do not 'accumulate' damage.)
One can only wonder how many times the thermal insulation of the shuttles suffered nearly fatal damage that was repaired and the machine flown (successfully) again.
Roughly (IIRC) zero times across the life of the program.
but we need to understand reusable craft a whole lot better before we can call them safe.
Which is an odd thing to say - since we haven't demonstrated a clear understanding of expendables either.
OTH, Falcon will have no more than 100 ppl at kennedy, and 50 is likely closer around 2010. In addition, virgin is expected to come on-line around 2011 with their LEO space system, with less than 50.
On the gripping hand - those two vehicles are currently powerpointware. (Falcon I in particular is years behind schedule.)
I find it unlikely Soyuz had the same number of flights as the shuttles. they have flown since about 68, from the original models to the TMA variant currently in use.
You are correct - including all the manned variants, the Soyuz has flow about 85 times. The Shuttle has flown nearly 120 times.
I am not sure exactly how many flights were done, but I am quite sure that, being in service for about a decade longer than the shuttle makes it quite sure it had flown more missions.
It's not the length in service that matters, but the flight rate.
Also, the last failure with loss of crew (during re-entry) happened long ago, a couple design iterations back. I think it's safe to assume Soyouz-class vehicles are a very mature design and, quite probably, safer that shuttles.
Here's the things - you can't have it both ways. You can either:
Claim the Soyuz is 'safe' based on it's long history. (Which includes not only the two fatal accidents but about four near fatal accidents and a long string of significant incidents.)
-or-
Claim the latest mark 'must be' safe because of the legacy behind it. (But with only 10 odd flights, it's hard to justify that claim - especially when it includes two major failures and a handful of significant incidents).
You can't claim both, as they are mutually exclusive.
There is no dishonor in having a less safe space vehicle.
There is no reasonable metric by which the difference in safety between the two vehicles is statistically significant.
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be. Do they want it to be an encyclopedia or does it want to be the source of all knowledge.
The maintainers want Wikipedia to be both, not understanding that they are not the same thing.
Personally I think it should aim to be the best encyclopedia going as I suspect being the one source of all knowledge is probably impossible and there is a danger the real worth of the site will be swamped by too much detail.
Indeed. People claim that Wikipedia cannot grow too 'thick', I.E. have too many pages in the manner a printed book does. By one common measure it cannot - a single page takes up little storage. (But in reality the problem isn't a single page - it is the accumulated number of pages stored and the bandwidth to acess them.) By a less common measure, information density - it can.
To take an example - I own a seven volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, with a total of some 4500 printed pages. Even taking out the material that Wikipedia places on linked pages, I estimate the balance (connecting the topics in the linked pages and explaining why they are relevant to Mr Jefferson) will still run hundreds to thousands of (printed) pages - thousands to tens of thousands of screens of information.
One could extend the current Wikipedia practice of shrinking top level articles while linking to an a growing list of more detailed sub-articles, that approach is itself not without problems - indexing the related material so that the reader can rapidly locate relevant material becomes increasingly unwieldy. This problem is one that Wikipedia hasn't even tried to adress yet.
There's a reason why biographies of Thomas Jefferson range from one chapter in a book covering all of the Founding Fathers to a seven volume standalone work. (Plus dozens of specialized volumes on gardening, architecture, literary and intellectual pursuits, the University of Virginia, etc... etc...) That reason isn't just cost or the physical limitations of the printed book. The reason is that no one source can answer to all purposes. (Even my seven volume set refers to thousands of other books, some of them multivolume, on more specialized topics.)
It's been something like six weeks now since the search giant offered up it's open-source social media initiative... but where have been the usual swift victories?
Huh? What swift victories? It took Google Search years to reach the top. Google Mail still isn't dominant, not even close, etc... etc... Googles only real victories are AdWords, Search, and Maps. Their other 'victories' come from buying existing lines of business (Blogger, YouTube) or from having no real competitors (Docs).
Fact is, when it comes to social networking, Google blew it with Orkut - and then waited far too long to fix the problems there, or to try again elsewhere. But that isn't really untypical of Google - they seem awfully unfocused. For as many people as they hire, updates seem to come pretty far apart and scattershot.
Doesn't matter where or how the propellant portion gets mated up with the manned portion - the propellant has to be first boosted into orbit and then boosted to the moon. Period. This will be extraordinarily expensive and complicated. (On the order of 1000 or more times more expensive.)
Seriously, why not just do the moon mission, then pick up the landing bags as the ISS on the way home.
Because that would actually _increase_ the mass boosted towards the moon by a factor of a thousand of more. (It takes a lot of fuel to brake into Earth orbit, and yet more to change orbital planes to match up with the ISS.)
The next poster posited simply leaving the required module in a convenient orbit not at the ISS. This is a little better as it only requires increasing the mass boosted towards the moon by a factor of seven hundred or so.
No, what you forgot is that there isn't any such thing as an Energiya booster. The Energiya was scrapped years and years ago - and never was fully operational in the first place.
If it had been a Boeing supersonic jet, I'm sure all Americans would have come out of their houses to listen proudly and patriotically to their sonic booms.
We never got the chance to find out - because, not having two goverments to pull their fat out of the fire[1], Boeing did the sums and realized the economic insanity (see below) of SST's and cancelled their program.
Economic insanity? Oh yes. SST's are freakishly expensive to build and hellishly expensive to operate. (They are incredible fuel hogs - keep in mind that the great era of SST developement was before the sharp rise in oil prices in the early 70's.) On top of that, given the time it takes to get to and from the airport and delays in the takeoff and landing patterns, it turned out the average transcontinental passenger wouldn't save as much time across the total trip as one might think. (And thus, due to its high ticket price it wasn't as competitive as it would appear at first blush.) The shortest route on which a SST makes sense is trans Atlantic - which is also pretty close to the maximum range of a commercial SST. The market there was too limited to pay for the aircraft...
And thus the SST died in America - because despite the adulation of generations of fanboys, the economics simply don't work. Even the Russians (well known for continuing projects beyond the point of sanity) eventually gave up after a relatively small number of token flights and a crash.
[1] The French and British goverments paid for the development and construction of Concorde - otherwise the airlines could not have afforded to buy them.
On an average computer they would probably not be playing with the educational software or talking to kids in a third word country.
Why wouldn't they? As I indicated, and you snipped, such things have been reported before.
For the most part, however, I think the OLPC in the hands of this child is wasted.
Ah, yes. Using educational software and communicating is wasted. (Unless you are a poor child - in which case you get your greatest benefit from using the machine not to learn and explore, but only in the Manner Approved by Higher Authority.)
NASA didn't just back away because of cost overruns in the Shuttle program, but because the estimates of the costs of the sample return took off like a rocket. Partially because they kept finding new areas to gold plate, partially because they kept making it more complicated, and partially because it is freakishly complicated even when unadorned.
JPL is no better than the rest of NASA at estimating and controlling costs - they've frequently come under fire from both NASA administrations and Congress because of this.
No surprises in the article - in fact it sounds like a typical experience of a small child given any computer and allowed to just play with it. (Especially a child, like Rufus, who already has some experience around computers.) Jim Lileks has reported much the same thing with his daughter and the Mac she was given. I've heard similiar reports from friends who've let a child loose on a machine prepared for them.
So far as the length of his fascination - let's hear back in another week or two, or another month, or next year. From late November to now is a matter of three weeks, tops. Even for a nine year old this isn't particularly long.
Something seems a bit funny here - particles that small should slow down pretty quickly (a few hundred yards), even if they come from some kind of an explosion.
Customizing is good - when we went into the trainer, the first day was spent running canned scenarios mandated by COMSUBGOD to check us against deficiences recently noted in the fleet. The second was spent running custom scenarios to investigate weak spots we knew we had (like a new man at a given station).
No, because once they become a majority... the formerly cool thing is now treated as pedestrian, while they enage in a desperate search for the next cool thing.
Fire is a huge problem in general, because in the winter they have no choice but to fight and extinguish. Relocation isn't an option. Very interesting article.
Which is why, back when the DoD provided uniformed support personell (they contract out to civilians mostly now) - a high proportion of them were Navy, and a large fraction of those were submariners. (Sailors went mostly to the South Pole station, McMurdo was virtually an Army base.)
I wanted to go - but never applied because it was almost certain my application would be denied out-of-hand. My job was treated as 'critically undermanned', regardless of actual manning, by administrative fiat. (Except for re-enlistment bonuses of course!) As a result of this, applications to go do things outside of our normal jobs were routinely denied without review.
Though to be fair, my job field usually only had about 1000 people in it, including the 30-40 kids in the school at any given time, and it took about 1000 to man all our billets. If about 5-10 more guys got out in a given year than predicted, or 5-10 less than predicted per year made it through the school, it could and did cause problems. (Our school was second in difficulty (at the time) only to the nukes - routinely 30-40% of a class flunked out, with spikes much higher.)
It's very hard to compare multiple books. (As I commonly do when doing recipe or redaction research, or comparing recipies.)
It's very hard to use images in the book for reference. (As I do when doing a wide variety of research and craft activities.)
E-books are great for light fiction and lightweight non fiction - but that covers only a small portion of all the possible uses for a book. (Not to mention avoiding lock in - all I'll ever need to read my books is my eyes and lightbulb.) Announcing that the dead tree version is dead just because it satisfies your [extremely] limited needs is just stupid.
The basic problem Zack has is lack of discipline. (I.E. not bothering to create a simple shelving and organizing system [1], not shelving books where they belong [2], and not shelving books when not in use[3].)
$440 dollars later - and precisely none of those problems have been solved. A high tech catalog system is worthless if you don't put the books back where they belong when not in use.
[1] "There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs."
[2] "The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were"
[3] "We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there"
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is trolling is it?
According to their schedule, Falcon I (the necessary precursor to Falcon 9) should have been flying three years ago.
Except - the kinks haven't been worked out. Three of the last ten flights have suffered loss of the main computer during re-entry.
Both failures? The Soyuz has a long history of significant failures - from the fatal accident on the first mission, to the computer failure on the most recent mission.
So claims the theory. But there are two problems when you compare the theory to the reality:
One accident occurred early in the program, and one late. Both happened due to well understood risks - the odds of which happening were incorrectly estimated. This has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity of the system.
In rational engineering, an expendable device is considered a poor device - because it is impossible to test it under realistic conditions. Each flight is the first flight. On the other hand, reusable vehicles can be overhauled and repaired in the event of minor failures. (And thus do not 'accumulate' damage.)
Roughly (IIRC) zero times across the life of the program.
Which is an odd thing to say - since we haven't demonstrated a clear understanding of expendables either.
On the gripping hand - those two vehicles are currently powerpointware. (Falcon I in particular is years behind schedule.)
You are correct - including all the manned variants, the Soyuz has flow about 85 times. The Shuttle has flown nearly 120 times.
It's not the length in service that matters, but the flight rate.
Here's the things - you can't have it both ways. You can either:
- Claim the Soyuz is 'safe' based on it's long history. (Which includes not only the two fatal accidents but about four near fatal accidents and a long string of significant incidents.)
-or-- Claim the latest mark 'must be' safe because of the legacy behind it. (But with only 10 odd flights, it's hard to justify that claim - especially when it includes two major failures and a handful of significant incidents).
You can't claim both, as they are mutually exclusive.There is no reasonable metric by which the difference in safety between the two vehicles is statistically significant.
The maintainers want Wikipedia to be both, not understanding that they are not the same thing.
Indeed. People claim that Wikipedia cannot grow too 'thick', I.E. have too many pages in the manner a printed book does. By one common measure it cannot - a single page takes up little storage. (But in reality the problem isn't a single page - it is the accumulated number of pages stored and the bandwidth to acess them.) By a less common measure, information density - it can.
To take an example - I own a seven volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, with a total of some 4500 printed pages. Even taking out the material that Wikipedia places on linked pages, I estimate the balance (connecting the topics in the linked pages and explaining why they are relevant to Mr Jefferson) will still run hundreds to thousands of (printed) pages - thousands to tens of thousands of screens of information.
One could extend the current Wikipedia practice of shrinking top level articles while linking to an a growing list of more detailed sub-articles, that approach is itself not without problems - indexing the related material so that the reader can rapidly locate relevant material becomes increasingly unwieldy. This problem is one that Wikipedia hasn't even tried to adress yet.
There's a reason why biographies of Thomas Jefferson range from one chapter in a book covering all of the Founding Fathers to a seven volume standalone work. (Plus dozens of specialized volumes on gardening, architecture, literary and intellectual pursuits, the University of Virginia, etc... etc...) That reason isn't just cost or the physical limitations of the printed book. The reason is that no one source can answer to all purposes. (Even my seven volume set refers to thousands of other books, some of them multivolume, on more specialized topics.)
Huh? What swift victories? It took Google Search years to reach the top. Google Mail still isn't dominant, not even close, etc... etc... Googles only real victories are AdWords, Search, and Maps. Their other 'victories' come from buying existing lines of business (Blogger, YouTube) or from having no real competitors (Docs).
Fact is, when it comes to social networking, Google blew it with Orkut - and then waited far too long to fix the problems there, or to try again elsewhere. But that isn't really untypical of Google - they seem awfully unfocused. For as many people as they hire, updates seem to come pretty far apart and scattershot.
Doesn't matter where or how the propellant portion gets mated up with the manned portion - the propellant has to be first boosted into orbit and then boosted to the moon. Period. This will be extraordinarily expensive and complicated. (On the order of 1000 or more times more expensive.)
Because that would actually _increase_ the mass boosted towards the moon by a factor of a thousand of more. (It takes a lot of fuel to brake into Earth orbit, and yet more to change orbital planes to match up with the ISS.)
The next poster posited simply leaving the required module in a convenient orbit not at the ISS. This is a little better as it only requires increasing the mass boosted towards the moon by a factor of seven hundred or so.
No, what you forgot is that there isn't any such thing as an Energiya booster. The Energiya was scrapped years and years ago - and never was fully operational in the first place.
Yes, I do realize it. And no, the Concordes never flew at a profit.
We never got the chance to find out - because, not having two goverments to pull their fat out of the fire[1], Boeing did the sums and realized the economic insanity (see below) of SST's and cancelled their program.
Economic insanity? Oh yes. SST's are freakishly expensive to build and hellishly expensive to operate. (They are incredible fuel hogs - keep in mind that the great era of SST developement was before the sharp rise in oil prices in the early 70's.) On top of that, given the time it takes to get to and from the airport and delays in the takeoff and landing patterns, it turned out the average transcontinental passenger wouldn't save as much time across the total trip as one might think. (And thus, due to its high ticket price it wasn't as competitive as it would appear at first blush.) The shortest route on which a SST makes sense is trans Atlantic - which is also pretty close to the maximum range of a commercial SST. The market there was too limited to pay for the aircraft...
And thus the SST died in America - because despite the adulation of generations of fanboys, the economics simply don't work. Even the Russians (well known for continuing projects beyond the point of sanity) eventually gave up after a relatively small number of token flights and a crash.
[1] The French and British goverments paid for the development and construction of Concorde - otherwise the airlines could not have afforded to buy them.
Why wouldn't they? As I indicated, and you snipped, such things have been reported before.
Ah, yes. Using educational software and communicating is wasted. (Unless you are a poor child - in which case you get your greatest benefit from using the machine not to learn and explore, but only in the Manner Approved by Higher Authority.)
NASA didn't just back away because of cost overruns in the Shuttle program, but because the estimates of the costs of the sample return took off like a rocket. Partially because they kept finding new areas to gold plate, partially because they kept making it more complicated, and partially because it is freakishly complicated even when unadorned.
JPL is no better than the rest of NASA at estimating and controlling costs - they've frequently come under fire from both NASA administrations and Congress because of this.
No surprises in the article - in fact it sounds like a typical experience of a small child given any computer and allowed to just play with it. (Especially a child, like Rufus, who already has some experience around computers.) Jim Lileks has reported much the same thing with his daughter and the Mac she was given. I've heard similiar reports from friends who've let a child loose on a machine prepared for them.
So far as the length of his fascination - let's hear back in another week or two, or another month, or next year. From late November to now is a matter of three weeks, tops. Even for a nine year old this isn't particularly long.
Something seems a bit funny here - particles that small should slow down pretty quickly (a few hundred yards), even if they come from some kind of an explosion.
You misunderstood my point entirely. (Among other things, I didn't call anything a fad.)
Customizing is good - when we went into the trainer, the first day was spent running canned scenarios mandated by COMSUBGOD to check us against deficiences recently noted in the fleet. The second was spent running custom scenarios to investigate weak spots we knew we had (like a new man at a given station).
Then the real training started.
No, because once they become a majority... the formerly cool thing is now treated as pedestrian, while they enage in a desperate search for the next cool thing.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Which is why, back when the DoD provided uniformed support personell (they contract out to civilians mostly now) - a high proportion of them were Navy, and a large fraction of those were submariners. (Sailors went mostly to the South Pole station, McMurdo was virtually an Army base.)
I wanted to go - but never applied because it was almost certain my application would be denied out-of-hand. My job was treated as 'critically undermanned', regardless of actual manning, by administrative fiat. (Except for re-enlistment bonuses of course!) As a result of this, applications to go do things outside of our normal jobs were routinely denied without review.
Though to be fair, my job field usually only had about 1000 people in it, including the 30-40 kids in the school at any given time, and it took about 1000 to man all our billets. If about 5-10 more guys got out in a given year than predicted, or 5-10 less than predicted per year made it through the school, it could and did cause problems. (Our school was second in difficulty (at the time) only to the nukes - routinely 30-40% of a class flunked out, with spikes much higher.)
Because it's Microsoft. There's always a way for /. to spin anything they do negatively.
E-books are great for light fiction and lightweight non fiction - but that covers only a small portion of all the possible uses for a book. (Not to mention avoiding lock in - all I'll ever need to read my books is my eyes and lightbulb.) Announcing that the dead tree version is dead just because it satisfies your [extremely] limited needs is just stupid.
The basic problem Zack has is lack of discipline. (I.E. not bothering to create a simple shelving and organizing system [1], not shelving books where they belong [2], and not shelving books when not in use[3].)
$440 dollars later - and precisely none of those problems have been solved. A high tech catalog system is worthless if you don't put the books back where they belong when not in use.
[1] "There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs."
[2] "The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were"
[3] "We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there"
As opposed to the minority who act all smug and self-righteous because they have the latest cool gadget?