In fact, the Buran design was superior - it had no lift engines of its own and could ride on top of the real rocket.
Have you ever actually looked at a picture of a Buran on the launch pad? Try this one.
Of course the Soviets noticed this was a bad idea (it would be smarter to send the cargo on top of the Energia rocket and not carry Buran's dead weight)
Actually, Buran first flew in 1988 and wasn't cancelled until 1993 - with the intervening five years spent building what was intended to be the operational craft (four of them).
Buran, and Energia, were cancelled because the country that built them (the Soviet Union) collapsed - and the country that replaced it (Russia/CIS) was broke.
For example, by the time the shuttle engines are on the launch pad, they've been rebuilt pretty much from scratch and retested, which takes up almost 90% of their rated lifetime.
Is this still true?
No, it isn't, and hasn't been for years. IIRC current generation SSME's are removed for inspection and testing (without dissasembly) every second flight and are removed for overhaul (IOW, dissasembly) every fourth flight.
Launch cargo(like satellites) on cargo rockets. Life people in capsules designed for people.
Why? If you can't trust a rocket with billion dollar one-of-a-kind payloads, why should you trust it with people? Conversely, if you can't trust a rocket with people - why would you trust it with billion dollar one-of-a-kind payloads?
[The following is in reference to duplicating a Hubble delivery or servicing mission.]
That means we can duplicate the shuttle for about three launches - 2 soyuz(a shuttle can hold more people) $100M total, and a Delta IV for $250M. This totals $350M, leaving me 150M off the launch costs alone to use for other purposes. Like building a space station that's actually useful.
It also means you triple the launch risk[1], since you are now launching three vehicles rather than one. You also double the re-entry risk[2], since you are now landing two space craft rather than one.
Then you run into another problem - a stock Soyuz cannot support spacewalks, which means a hypothetical servicing mission now requires a launch just for a servicing support mission module, which will wipe out your savings - and more. Then there is the problem of Soyuz's severely limited on-orbit duration, something a little over 100 odd hours (compared to 400 odd for Shuttle) - as Soyuz is a highly specialized space station taxi. With a space station to go to and to provide power and life support, you'll need to either modify the Soyuz or buy an additional launch (and module) for each and every non-station mission you use it for. (And niether will be cheap - either will wipe out your 'savings' and more.[3])
As others have pointed out, there are a number of rockets capable of lifting a similar payload as the shuttle - for half the launch cost of the shuttle.
But there is no single vehicle capable of duplicating the capabilities of the Shuttle - at any price. And, as demonstrated above, you'll be hard pressed to do it cheaper with any existing vehicles.
I cannot claim that Shuttle is without problems - but your analysis of replacing the Shuttle with Soyuz fails when you actually compare capabilities directly rather than simplistically and naively compating raw costs.
You can't compare apples to oranges on price alone.
Notes: ------ [1] Soyuz (the capsule) has had two non fatal complete loss-of-mission accidents during launch, and (IIRC) five non-fatal complete loss-of-mission incidents on orbit. Soyuz (the booster) has had several dozen launch failures. The capsule and the booster, separately or together, have a reliability level that is roughly the same as the Shuttle. Delta IV doesn't have enough of a record to evaluate it's reliability, but one of the six flights to date had serious problems - which is not very promising.
[2] Soyuz (the capsule), if you will recall, has had not one but _two_ fatal re-entry accidents. It also has a long string of near fatal accidents (like jettisioning a module early, or jettisioning a module late), and a long string of serious landing incidents (like landing significantly off trajectory or off target), plus the loss-of-mission accidents and incidents mentioned in note 1, . The amazing part is that the Soyuz capsule has accomplished all this in thirty fewer flights than the shuttle - which has accumulated two fatal accidents and no complete loss-of-mission incidents. (IIRC the Shuttle has had three partial loss-of-mission incidents, all of which were later reflown. None of the Soyuz loss-of-mission incidents were.)
[3] No, its not as simple and easy as adding tankage to Soyuz. (Actually, even adding tankage isn't easy and simple, or cheap, in it's right.)
No, not that you had different food from everyone else, but that your memory from forty years ago might not be quite accurate. A wide variety of external sources disagree with your memory.
I had it good WRT that. My father was an airline pilot so we got to fly free.
I think the latter quote explains the former. By the mid-to-late 60's airline food was already staple fodder for stand up comedians. Arthur Hailey's 1968 novel Airport touches upon the low quality of airline meals, and what passengers can do to increase their chances of getting a good meal.
We need to educate the investor that making $1 this quarter by selling vital assets, screwing customers, and weaseling out of agreed to pensions is no match for the $10,000 you could make in 10 years by treating customers like customers, standing behind your employees and keeping equipment well-maintained.
Yes, it would be useful to educate the investors so. In whichever fantasy world the ratio is that high. Or even measurable in the first place.
I've gotten pretty good at getting through the security gauntlet without an orifice probe -- playing dumb and cheerful seems to be the ticket
I don't even believe half the stories I hear. I've flown eight times this year for work, and other than it being slow, I've yet to see anyone even taken to the side. There's nothing to get get good at. Hell, I was hand carrying a box of A/D converter chips in an ESD bag and it was no problem.
Yah. I've flown many times before and after 9/11, and there really isn't a difference in crowding, etc... The only real difference is a few minutes longer wait to get through the security line. I travel with a ton of electronics in my carry on, and ton of wall warts and cables for them in my checked bags - and never a problem, even after 9/11.
There's no need to 'play' anything, just wait your turn and go through the line. No biggie.
Hearing plenty about them does not mean they weren't/aren't routine, the media is untrustworthy in that respect. Also, you've probably heard a great deal about them, and not about Magellan, mostly because they produce tons of sexy pictures - and Magellan didn't.
It would be more advantageous to have such a rover - it would also cost at least an order of magnitude more (and probably a great deal more than that), and may or may not work. Also, you have to keep in mind that when they built this set, they only expected them to last a couple of weeks because of dust on the solar panels. They've been lucky in that respect, very lucky.
You also have to keep in mind that topography isn't the issue, geology is. In that respect, even with the small distances they've traveled, the science results have been astounding - they've encountered numerous different types of rocks already. Insofar as groundbreaking results go, we are back to the Mythbusters again. In the real world of science, groundbreaking comes from painstaking data collection and analysis. It doesn't come from Eureka! moments mostly, and it especially doesn't come from scattershot observations.
A friend of mine who is a retired field geologist pointed out to me that he spent nearly a decade in an area a little over five miles on a side - and his entire career working on the same general type of topography and geology. (He also points out that it's taken nearly two centuries and a metric buttload of man hours just to get a working handle on the geology of the continental US alone.)
I think maglev-accelerated rockets has more potential than the space elevator. Whatever happened to that research at NASA?
Somebody finally did the math and figured out that the scheme really doesn't work (for space launches). More weight is required in structural reinforcement than is saved in unneeded fuel.
i'm really surprised we haven't seen advertisements on TV for the companies and subcontractors that helped make all the components. talk about some serious bragging rights!
Mostly because they are very small and very specialized companies that don't market to the general public in the first place. A prime example is Honeybee Robotics who built the rock grinding tools for the rovers.
The thing is that the engineers predicted that they would fail years ago.
That's the fun part of being an engineer - you get booed when things fail short of their predicted lifetime. But when you screw up your predictions the other way and underestimate the lifetime... suddenly, you are a hero. No wonder engineers are inclined to be conservative.
I'm a bit curious if the rovers are actually doing anything all that useful at the moment... after all, they move at a painfully slow rate, and the landscape isn't all that varied in the areas they're in.
Welcome to the world of real science - where data collection takes years, and data analysis takes decades. It's also a world most activities are painfully slow and/or boring and things don't happen at any great rate, and that simply isn't very exciting.
This isn't Mythbusters where everything is dumbed down, sexed up, and edited to a pace suitable for the short attention span of the post-MTV generation.
One thing I really don't get about steganography is why hiding a message *in* a picture is preferable to sending the picture as a message.
Because hiding a message in a picture can be done on-the-fly, which is much harder with picture as message. Also, because a code (like picture as message) is fairly limited in the number, type, and complexity of messages that can be sent. (And assembling the dictionary is a fair bit of work, keeping it secure even moreso.) OTOH a message hidden in the picture can be anything. Text, audio, video, another picture...
I could go on, but the Reader's Digest version is that message-in-picture is far more flexible and versatile than picture-as-message.
I was soooo wrong. Comcast's is worse. Try to set a series recording for "Top Chef" on Bravo and you get every episode... sort of like the Microsoft DVR, but with one major difference. Microsoft put the recordings in the to do list well in advance so you could remove them. With the new Comcast DVR software, it doesn't add these things until the last minute, so the next time you look at your recorded programs list, there's a bunch of crap you didn't expect and don't want.
So, let me see if I understand this right... Your chief complaint is that when you ask the DVR to record a show it does so until you tell it to stop?
Ah, yes - in your world innocent people will die (along with more than a few law enforcement officers) when SWAT teams don't arrive in a timely fashion, because SWAT should be intentionally delayed to protect the lives of innocent people. How logical.
Oh my god. Seriously, what you're saying is that a worn VHS is better than a remastered DVD.
Actually, sometimes it is. A while back I saw a restored church - where the worn stone steps were replaced with new ones, and the worn and discolored pews treated similarly. The aged floor was carefully sanded down, covered with polyurethane and polished. etc... etc...
It truly is a beautiful building - but today it looks like it never did historically, except maybe on the day it was completed. All historical context and evidence that it wasn't built yesterday - gone. Forever.
The degradation, I'll have you know, is what causes the loss of historical context.
The degradation also creates historical context. A few years ago I visited a restored colonial (America) era kitchen - and despite the great pains to make the new parts match the old in color, the new stood out glaringly to my eyes. Why? Because the old parts showed wear - you could see where people stood and worked because the evidence was preserved in brick and stone. The new looked like what it was, a museum piece rather than part of a living structure.
Conservation and restoration to to fix building etc... in a single idealized state.
People think that old stone churches were always gray and foreboding buildings, when historically they were colorful, but that context was lost through erosion of the pigments.
Then why, historically, have they been illustrated as being nearly monochrome? That alone suggest that they weren't historically colorful, and that if they were it was for a brief time only.
It's the same math it's always been - there is nothing magical about it being on the 'net. If you are unknown, you aren't going to make money. Period.
It doesn't matter if the beginning indie artist can make a $1.00/download, rather than $.04/CD - because there aren't going to be twenty five times as much downloads as CD purchases. They'll be lucky as hell if anyone beyond their family, significant others, and a handful of drunks from last nights gig down at the local watering hole ever pay anything. Meanwhile, the beginning indie artist has had to pay cash money for the website (and design), promotion, marketing, etc... Costs paid for the beginning corporate artist by the label.
If you haven't got the demand - you aren't going to make any money, regardless of the percentage of sales you take home.
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Have you ever actually looked at a picture of a Buran on the launch pad? Try this one.
Oh? Check out this picture of Energia configured to carry cargo.
Actually, Buran first flew in 1988 and wasn't cancelled until 1993 - with the intervening five years spent building what was intended to be the operational craft (four of them).
Buran, and Energia, were cancelled because the country that built them (the Soviet Union) collapsed - and the country that replaced it (Russia/CIS) was broke.
Or, to put it simply you are zero for three.
No, it isn't, and hasn't been for years. IIRC current generation SSME's are removed for inspection and testing (without dissasembly) every second flight and are removed for overhaul (IOW, dissasembly) every fourth flight.
Why would you use the only vehicle ever built that makes Shuttle look like a bargain?
Why? If you can't trust a rocket with billion dollar one-of-a-kind payloads, why should you trust it with people? Conversely, if you can't trust a rocket with people - why would you trust it with billion dollar one-of-a-kind payloads?
[The following is in reference to duplicating a Hubble delivery or servicing mission.]
It also means you triple the launch risk[1], since you are now launching three vehicles rather than one. You also double the re-entry risk[2], since you are now landing two space craft rather than one.
Then you run into another problem - a stock Soyuz cannot support spacewalks, which means a hypothetical servicing mission now requires a launch just for a servicing support mission module, which will wipe out your savings - and more. Then there is the problem of Soyuz's severely limited on-orbit duration, something a little over 100 odd hours (compared to 400 odd for Shuttle) - as Soyuz is a highly specialized space station taxi. With a space station to go to and to provide power and life support, you'll need to either modify the Soyuz or buy an additional launch (and module) for each and every non-station mission you use it for. (And niether will be cheap - either will wipe out your 'savings' and more.[3])
But there is no single vehicle capable of duplicating the capabilities of the Shuttle - at any price. And, as demonstrated above, you'll be hard pressed to do it cheaper with any existing vehicles.
I cannot claim that Shuttle is without problems - but your analysis of replacing the Shuttle with Soyuz fails when you actually compare capabilities directly rather than simplistically and naively compating raw costs.
You can't compare apples to oranges on price alone.
Notes:
------
[1] Soyuz (the capsule) has had two non fatal complete loss-of-mission accidents during launch, and (IIRC) five non-fatal complete loss-of-mission incidents on orbit. Soyuz (the booster) has had several dozen launch failures. The capsule and the booster, separately or together, have a reliability level that is roughly the same as the Shuttle. Delta IV doesn't have enough of a record to evaluate it's reliability, but one of the six flights to date had serious problems - which is not very promising.
[2] Soyuz (the capsule), if you will recall, has had not one but _two_ fatal re-entry accidents. It also has a long string of near fatal accidents (like jettisioning a module early, or jettisioning a module late), and a long string of serious landing incidents (like landing significantly off trajectory or off target), plus the loss-of-mission accidents and incidents mentioned in note 1, . The amazing part is that the Soyuz capsule has accomplished all this in thirty fewer flights than the shuttle - which has accumulated two fatal accidents and no complete loss-of-mission incidents. (IIRC the Shuttle has had three partial loss-of-mission incidents, all of which were later reflown. None of the Soyuz loss-of-mission incidents were.)
[3] No, its not as simple and easy as adding tankage to Soyuz. (Actually, even adding tankage isn't easy and simple, or cheap, in it's right.)
Sure. If all we were sending were cargo in 50lb chunks or people, that would make sense.
The perspective is simple - your 'analysis' concerns itself only with costs. It utterly ignore capabilities. Which makes it irrelevant.
No, not that you had different food from everyone else, but that your memory from forty years ago might not be quite accurate. A wide variety of external sources disagree with your memory.
I think the latter quote explains the former. By the mid-to-late 60's airline food was already staple fodder for stand up comedians. Arthur Hailey's 1968 novel Airport touches upon the low quality of airline meals, and what passengers can do to increase their chances of getting a good meal.
Yes, it would be useful to educate the investors so. In whichever fantasy world the ratio is that high. Or even measurable in the first place.
Yah. I've flown many times before and after 9/11, and there really isn't a difference in crowding, etc... The only real difference is a few minutes longer wait to get through the security line. I travel with a ton of electronics in my carry on, and ton of wall warts and cables for them in my checked bags - and never a problem, even after 9/11.
There's no need to 'play' anything, just wait your turn and go through the line. No biggie.
Even by that standard, Cassini and Galileo still stand out because they've been niether.
Hearing plenty about them does not mean they weren't/aren't routine, the media is untrustworthy in that respect. Also, you've probably heard a great deal about them, and not about Magellan, mostly because they produce tons of sexy pictures - and Magellan didn't.
It would be more advantageous to have such a rover - it would also cost at least an order of magnitude more (and probably a great deal more than that), and may or may not work. Also, you have to keep in mind that when they built this set, they only expected them to last a couple of weeks because of dust on the solar panels. They've been lucky in that respect, very lucky.
You also have to keep in mind that topography isn't the issue, geology is. In that respect, even with the small distances they've traveled, the science results have been astounding - they've encountered numerous different types of rocks already. Insofar as groundbreaking results go, we are back to the Mythbusters again. In the real world of science, groundbreaking comes from painstaking data collection and analysis. It doesn't come from Eureka! moments mostly, and it especially doesn't come from scattershot observations.
A friend of mine who is a retired field geologist pointed out to me that he spent nearly a decade in an area a little over five miles on a side - and his entire career working on the same general type of topography and geology. (He also points out that it's taken nearly two centuries and a metric buttload of man hours just to get a working handle on the geology of the continental US alone.)
Somebody finally did the math and figured out that the scheme really doesn't work (for space launches). More weight is required in structural reinforcement than is saved in unneeded fuel.
You can see the word 'Robitics', not the logo. On the other hand, the American flag that once adorned the cable shield is now faded beyond visibility.
Mostly because they are very small and very specialized companies that don't market to the general public in the first place. A prime example is Honeybee Robotics who built the rock grinding tools for the rovers.
That's the fun part of being an engineer - you get booed when things fail short of their predicted lifetime. But when you screw up your predictions the other way and underestimate the lifetime... suddenly, you are a hero. No wonder engineers are inclined to be conservative.
Welcome to the world of real science - where data collection takes years, and data analysis takes decades. It's also a world most activities are painfully slow and/or boring and things don't happen at any great rate, and that simply isn't very exciting.
This isn't Mythbusters where everything is dumbed down, sexed up, and edited to a pace suitable for the short attention span of the post-MTV generation.
Cassini (to date), Magellan, Galileo... If you want to go back into history, you can add in practically the entire Mariner series...
Only a fool believes that Murphy can be circumvented - in the long run he always wins.
You spend a lot of money overdesigning and overtesting every individual component - then you get lucky.
Because hiding a message in a picture can be done on-the-fly, which is much harder with picture as message. Also, because a code (like picture as message) is fairly limited in the number, type, and complexity of messages that can be sent. (And assembling the dictionary is a fair bit of work, keeping it secure even moreso.) OTOH a message hidden in the picture can be anything. Text, audio, video, another picture...
I could go on, but the Reader's Digest version is that message-in-picture is far more flexible and versatile than picture-as-message.
And that's a problem. The little old lady should be in Gitmo too.
So, let me see if I understand this right... Your chief complaint is that when you ask the DVR to record a show it does so until you tell it to stop?
Ah, yes - in your world innocent people will die (along with more than a few law enforcement officers) when SWAT teams don't arrive in a timely fashion, because SWAT should be intentionally delayed to protect the lives of innocent people. How logical.
Actually, sometimes it is. A while back I saw a restored church - where the worn stone steps were replaced with new ones, and the worn and discolored pews treated similarly. The aged floor was carefully sanded down, covered with polyurethane and polished. etc... etc...
It truly is a beautiful building - but today it looks like it never did historically, except maybe on the day it was completed. All historical context and evidence that it wasn't built yesterday - gone. Forever.
The degradation also creates historical context. A few years ago I visited a restored colonial (America) era kitchen - and despite the great pains to make the new parts match the old in color, the new stood out glaringly to my eyes. Why? Because the old parts showed wear - you could see where people stood and worked because the evidence was preserved in brick and stone. The new looked like what it was, a museum piece rather than part of a living structure.
Conservation and restoration to to fix building etc... in a single idealized state.
Then why, historically, have they been illustrated as being nearly monochrome? That alone suggest that they weren't historically colorful, and that if they were it was for a brief time only.
It's the same math it's always been - there is nothing magical about it being on the 'net. If you are unknown, you aren't going to make money. Period.
It doesn't matter if the beginning indie artist can make a $1.00/download, rather than $.04/CD - because there aren't going to be twenty five times as much downloads as CD purchases. They'll be lucky as hell if anyone beyond their family, significant others, and a handful of drunks from last nights gig down at the local watering hole ever pay anything. Meanwhile, the beginning indie artist has had to pay cash money for the website (and design), promotion, marketing, etc... Costs paid for the beginning corporate artist by the label.
If you haven't got the demand - you aren't going to make any money, regardless of the percentage of sales you take home.