Maybe the blog author missed the 1980's... The decade where those of us who grew up with the orignal G.I. Joe had our memories and childhood pissed on by Hollywood and it's politically correct and multicultural cartoon.
The issue at hand isn't people getting fussy - it's people who believe they deserved it and that the folks who killed them have an unlimited right to do so. Once you start blaming the victim, where do you stop? Why is it OK to blame the victim in game, but you recoil from doing so in real life? The difference is less (in principle) than you think.
Sure, caution is needed, but many people are finding love online, and if it works for them, can't we be happy for them? It's hard to meet people in today's society. It's not like we have town dances or whatever the devil they did 100 years ago.
Nonsense. I met my wife because, while visiting a friend, I said 'hi' over the fence to his neighbor while out having a smoke on the porch. (I knew her well enough to chat with as I'd been over to my friends multiple times.) The neighbor introduced me (just by way of being friendly and polite) to her best friend who was over visiting... Well, eighteen years the best friend has been my wife for seventeen years.
My best friend met his wife because she was the cashier at the hardware store where he bought supplies to build scenery for the theatre group he volunteered for. I know of dozens of couples who met through the SCA. I know of at least two couples who met at Geocaching parties...
The moral is, there is plenty of places to meet people - but all of them require you to get up from your computer and venture out into the real world. (I.E. pretty much the same way they did it 100 years ago.) It's lame and lazy to blame it on a vauge 'somebody' who doesn't provide a structured way to do what you won't get off your ass and do yourself. ('You' being generic, not the OP, whose circumstances I do not know.)
the real reason they were upset is because they couldn't impose their sense of gravitas, their way of enjoying the game, on the other people playing.
I don't know whether to find this amusing or sad, that you can (seemingly with a straight face) claim the victim is at fault. I bet you look at rape victims and think "oooh, she is hot! she was probably asking for it".
Good Luck trying to get NASA to effect such a change. Maybe this publicity will help.
Why would NASA be involved? This change is for the geosync commo birds, which are commercial/private not NASA.
In other words, NASA didn't want to deal with new ideas, and have to deal with the work associated with it, or overseeing the work in others. Everything is risky when you don't want to bother.
It's much more likely that NASA knew what is immediately obvious to me, and that you seem to have missed. You can't use the antennae as a solar sail for any noticeable length of time, as the TDRSS birds are *very* heavily tasked and antennae pointing must perforce be driven by operational scheduling with few (if any) windows for 'solar sailing'. NASA (quite reasonably) was probably reluctant to spend money on developing a system that will see little if any use.
If you *increase* the chance of a failure happening (which you do by adding the fuel transfer hardware, controls, etc...), then you are *worse* off than the current situation. That's the catch.
But pipes can fail, so can pumps and so can fuel measuring devices (and all the associated power and control hardware). Thus the choice in the past has been to limit possible points of failure at a potential cost in satellite life.
It's not a rocket science!
Actually, yeah it is. Real world engineering is rarely as simple and black and white as the armchair variety.
If you look at the best ASCII art, you find that it uses character density to express brightness and mass- not characters to define lines. Which makes sense, as that is how the human eye percieves reality.
Over two decades ago, I noticed a second set of jaws in a moray eel on display at a local pet store.
If I had known that such an observation was newsworthy, I'd have shown it to more than just my brother and father.
Both the summary and part of the article are written to erroneously imply that the jaws were just discovered... But what was actually discovered (and is newsworthy) is the function of those jaws.
Did it never occur to you that we routinely have multiple nukes in close proximity to each other? (In bomb bays and under the nose fairings of ICBMs and SLBMs.) As a former SLBM crewman, I assure that popcorn (to use the technical term) was indeed considered and measures taken against it.
That's true - when the missile/launcher is configured for operational use. In this instance it was configured for transport, the missiles would not have been hooked up to the plane's systems. (This is a safety measure to prevent accidents.)
Different kinds of impossible - among other things arming a nuclear weapon requires entering a code not held locally. (While a conventional bomb doesn't require any code.)
OTOH, I can see how this accident could have ocurred via a simple mistake compounded by a failure to follow procedures. (I am familiar with the general procedures, having been a nuclear weaponeer.)
Certainly - that's what makes this a serious situation. But the key point to note is that they didn't *stay* lost, the mistake was caught as soon (or very shortly after) the aircraft landed. Even it if hadn't been caught then, there are quadruple checks, quintuple checks, hextuple checks, septuple checks, and octuple checks... just for the aircraft, missiles, and weapons once they were at Barksdale. There's a whole seperate chain of redundant checks at Minot.
Don't get me wrong, it is very bad things got so far as they did - but the system didn't fail entirely.
Uh, you're conflating two statements of mine. One was about 2 hour delivery around the world. If current delivery was proof of demand, then you have an analogous situation today. So by your own statement, there's proven demand there.
Sure there's a proven demand - but space acess prices would have to shrink to a degree well beyond even those most fevered dreams of the average space advocate to become even remotely possible. Thus the FedEx precedent is irrelevant, because he used existing markets and existing technologies.
My second statement was about the costs of the satellites. The reliability requirements are no longer ironclad. If you can have a cheap commodity backup already in place, then you do not need it! (Example: Google servers.)
In some fantasy universe where cheap commodity backups have any chance of existing, sure. In the real world - it's not happening. There are too many diverse types of birds performing too many diverse tasks. (Hint: Google servers were only possible because they can tap a miniscule fraction of a huge existing stream of existing commercial products produced to meet other demands. A situation utterly unlike satellites, where there isn't such a stream to tap and is extraordinarily low chance of one ever existing.)
For your example of undersea cables, you need to show analogous factors. Namely, has the technology for laying (launching) undersea cables advanced? Is there demand to drive the price of the better cable laying technology? Has the price of the better cable laying technology reached a threshold where cheap redundant cables can be in place? And finally, are there other technologies that make cables less valuable, which would confound your analogy?
Yes, yes, no, no.
Also, your logic is partly circular. Reliability requirements are ironclad, in part because those birds are expensive, and they are expensive in part because the reliability requirements are ironclad.
Wrong. Reliability requirements are ironclad because the costs of loss of service are so high. (As I've said at least twice before.)
What if reliability is not ironclad? What if you can have arrays of redundant independent satellites?
Because nobody is going to build such an array. As I explained before (like so much else), you don't keep your spares in hazardous enviroments. (Not to mention the fact that launch costs in the medium-to-long term isn't going to drop anywhere near enough. The low hanging fruit will lower them considerably - but beyond that is a steep and expensive technology curve.) Not to mention the fact that in the real world, spare capacity doesn't stay spare very long. It tends to get placed into service.
(Apparently the Chinese are looking at COTS components for space. Radiation hardness is a problem, but not one that seems insurmountable for economies of scale.
First, learn the difference between an academic study (which this is) and a serious plan with the intent to attempt to implement something (which your link isn't). Second, folks have been trying to build various forms of 'hard' circuits since the first can transistors - and they have been doing so at the 'economies of scale' level. They've invariably been more expensive than their commercial counterparts - because the demand is not as high. Economy of scale isn't a magic wand, it won't automagically reduce costs and produce something cheaply absent a very significant demand. Simple real world economics.
What in particular about the space environment is *so* insurmountable that economies of scale can never apply to communications equipment? What in particular about the deep undersea environment makes cables inheren
"The problem isn't technology" only from the point of view of certain components we already have. However, a lot of engineering needs to be done to get entirely new types of launch up and running.
We don't need new types of launch vehicles either. The current high costs are driven by managerial issues and inertia - not technology.
But until the technological tools that can change the rules are proven, people will keep playing by the old economic rules.
What minimal technology changes are needed are already in existence and long proven. (I.E. adapting existing vehicles to mass production and minimizing production and operations man hours.)
We don't need new technologies. The idiotic insistence that we must have new shinies to lower cost of acess and that we have no need to pay attention to long established and well proven engineering, management, accounting, economic and logistics principles holds us back from progress more than any other factor. (Mostly because new shinies are sexy and the other stuff isn't.)
And they have a name for it not because it happens often - but because it could happen, the military has a plan in place for handling it and that plan has a name.
As a side note: Many of these plans aren't checklists or plans in the conventional sense, you can't just pull 'em out of a folder and execute them. What they generally are is a collection of scenarios and analysis along with a broad overview checklist/plan. This is useful because the guy in charge and his staff don't have to start from scratch - all the basic work has been done.
http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2007/09/flying_nucle ar _bombs.php
"If the B-52 incident tells us that the military's command and control system cannot ensure with 100% certainty which weapons are nuclear and which ones are not, imagine the implications of the wrong weapon being used in a crisis or war. 'Sorry Mr. President, we thought it was conventional.'"
Sorry - but that's utter bullshit. A nuclear weapon requires a very specific (and complex) preparation and arming sequence - part of which is done onboard the aircraft by the pilot. It's absolutely impossible to not know the difference. (And if the bomb is dropped without those sequences being performed correctly - it's inert. It won't detonate.)
As for the official story about transporting these weapons by air for decommissioning, that's fishy.
"Although nuclear weapons are not flown on combat aircraft under normal circumstances, they are routinely flown on selected C-17 and C-130 transport aircraft, which as the Primary Nuclear Airlift Force (PNAF) are used to airlift Air Force nuclear warheads between operational bases and central service and storage facilities in the United States and in Europe (see overview here)."
Which is a very misleading quote - because the weapons were not supposed to have been on the bomber in the first place, it was supposed to be carrying missiles without warheads.
I dearly hope that's crazyhead speculation. But even if this is just an accident, this is fucking scary.
That's one of those stories that sounds great if your only contact with the military and its operations is Tom Clancy or James Bond. But once you get a few facts under your belt...
The story fails however on several key points however - there's no need to 'stage' the ALCM's to the Middle East, as the BUFFs would take off from the US. Nor is there a need to stage them to a particular base in the US, as the BUFF can't reach the Middle East from anywhere in CONUS without air-to-air refueling. On top of which, Barksdale is also one of designated storage sites for both ALCM's and their warheads, and thus there is no need to stage them there - as they already are there.
So, how's that rigorous nuclear oversight working out for you?
Pretty damm good actually - you note the problem was caught did you not? The system isn't designed to be 100% perfect with never a mistake, the system is designed to be 100% certain that mistakes are caught before they become Very Very Serious.
Yeah, this should not have happened without some pretty serious bungling somewhere, and it is pretty serious - but ultimately the system worked as designed and the triple check caught what the double check missed.
I didn't suggest they should be given a free pass. I'm challenging the idea that Scientology is an evil cult. It's not. It's a young religion, acting just like pretty much every other religion ever has.
That would be fine if this were the middle ages. It isn't.
Although, now that you mention it, there's a certain priests molesting children scandal that the catholic church used it's significant influence to cover up for years. They weren't particularly roughly handled at any point. Sure, they finally decided on a payout, but in proportion to the crime it's more like a slap on the hand with a pillow.
Tons and tons of bad PR and a couple of dioceses going nearly bankrupt (which hurts the parishoners badly) isn't roughly handled?
Not to pick on the catholic church, the more old school mormons get up to some nasty tricks too. Like forcing barely teenage (sometimes younger) girls into polygamous marriages and abandoning superfluous teenage boys on city streets so they don't compete with older men for wives.
Again, something not accepted today. In case you haven't noticed, the leader of that sect is up on trial for that (and other things).
In short, you are an (possibly inadverdant) apologist for the Scientologits because you haven't much of clue or have a great deal of bias.
Hm. The Catholic church is one of the richest and most powerful organizations in the world. They used to (and other churches still do) skim off a percentage of their members' wages. That tithe used to be law in many places.
Who cares what they used to do. The fact of the matter is they don't it today - and they'd be quite roughly handled if they tried. So why should Scientology be given a free pass to behave as no other religion does today?
I'm not a Christian myself, but I am interested in the truth
Then why did you make the false implication US Christians believe mostly one way - and the rest of the world mostly another? (Hint: The majority of US Christians and Catholics aren't fundamentalist either. Like you most, you confuse noise and activity with size.)
What you are saying is that those birds cost that much precisely because it's so difficult to launch them. So you have to amortize the large launch cost over as long an operational period as possible in an extreme environment. If launch costs were much lower, then you could make satellites much cheaper.
Absolutely incorrect.
Even if launch costs were zero, the costs (I.E. lost revenue) of losing a bird are still quite large and the enviroment still as harsh. I.E. high reliability is still an ironclad requirement, and once under that requirement prices come down slowly if at all. (In fact, the prices for components for undersea cables haven't varied noticeably precisely because of this effect.)
With regards to the FedEx launch, the problem isn't precisely what was said but the incorrect context you used it in. No matter what was said, he could point to the existing and proven markets as proof of demand. With low cost space acess, there are no proven and existing markets. None.
And note that I said "launch technologies" not "launch vehicles." We may be flying newer improved birds, but we are still doing things like we did in the 1970s.
Well, I'll simply repeat what I said earlier, possibly it will sink in this time: The problem isn't technology. Period. Full stop.
The record shows that doing it the way we are doing it now is not going to catalyze growth in space.
Correct. But the problem with what we are doing now has nothing to do with the technologies used. Period. Full Stop.
I suspect that it has to be a new way, otherwise the price point will remain too high for things to get started.
How, precisely, is spending billions of dollars upfront going to reduce the price point? Economics simply doesn't work that way.
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Maybe the blog author missed the 1980's... The decade where those of us who grew up with the orignal G.I. Joe had our memories and childhood pissed on by Hollywood and it's politically correct and multicultural cartoon.
The issue at hand isn't people getting fussy - it's people who believe they deserved it and that the folks who killed them have an unlimited right to do so. Once you start blaming the victim, where do you stop? Why is it OK to blame the victim in game, but you recoil from doing so in real life? The difference is less (in principle) than you think.
Nonsense. I met my wife because, while visiting a friend, I said 'hi' over the fence to his neighbor while out having a smoke on the porch. (I knew her well enough to chat with as I'd been over to my friends multiple times.) The neighbor introduced me (just by way of being friendly and polite) to her best friend who was over visiting... Well, eighteen years the best friend has been my wife for seventeen years.
My best friend met his wife because she was the cashier at the hardware store where he bought supplies to build scenery for the theatre group he volunteered for. I know of dozens of couples who met through the SCA. I know of at least two couples who met at Geocaching parties...
The moral is, there is plenty of places to meet people - but all of them require you to get up from your computer and venture out into the real world. (I.E. pretty much the same way they did it 100 years ago.) It's lame and lazy to blame it on a vauge 'somebody' who doesn't provide a structured way to do what you won't get off your ass and do yourself. ('You' being generic, not the OP, whose circumstances I do not know.)
I don't know whether to find this amusing or sad, that you can (seemingly with a straight face) claim the victim is at fault. I bet you look at rape victims and think "oooh, she is hot! she was probably asking for it".
Why would NASA be involved? This change is for the geosync commo birds, which are commercial/private not NASA.
It's much more likely that NASA knew what is immediately obvious to me, and that you seem to have missed. You can't use the antennae as a solar sail for any noticeable length of time, as the TDRSS birds are *very* heavily tasked and antennae pointing must perforce be driven by operational scheduling with few (if any) windows for 'solar sailing'. NASA (quite reasonably) was probably reluctant to spend money on developing a system that will see little if any use.
If you *increase* the chance of a failure happening (which you do by adding the fuel transfer hardware, controls, etc...), then you are *worse* off than the current situation. That's the catch.
Actually, yeah it is. Real world engineering is rarely as simple and black and white as the armchair variety.
If you look at the best ASCII art, you find that it uses character density to express brightness and mass- not characters to define lines. Which makes sense, as that is how the human eye percieves reality.
Both the summary and part of the article are written to erroneously imply that the jaws were just discovered... But what was actually discovered (and is newsworthy) is the function of those jaws.
Did it never occur to you that we routinely have multiple nukes in close proximity to each other? (In bomb bays and under the nose fairings of ICBMs and SLBMs.) As a former SLBM crewman, I assure that popcorn (to use the technical term) was indeed considered and measures taken against it.
That's true - when the missile/launcher is configured for operational use. In this instance it was configured for transport, the missiles would not have been hooked up to the plane's systems. (This is a safety measure to prevent accidents.)
Different kinds of impossible - among other things arming a nuclear weapon requires entering a code not held locally. (While a conventional bomb doesn't require any code.)
OTOH, I can see how this accident could have ocurred via a simple mistake compounded by a failure to follow procedures. (I am familiar with the general procedures, having been a nuclear weaponeer.)
Ack! You are correct in that.
Certainly - that's what makes this a serious situation. But the key point to note is that they didn't *stay* lost, the mistake was caught as soon (or very shortly after) the aircraft landed. Even it if hadn't been caught then, there are quadruple checks, quintuple checks, hextuple checks, septuple checks, and octuple checks... just for the aircraft, missiles, and weapons once they were at Barksdale. There's a whole seperate chain of redundant checks at Minot.
Don't get me wrong, it is very bad things got so far as they did - but the system didn't fail entirely.
Sure there's a proven demand - but space acess prices would have to shrink to a degree well beyond even those most fevered dreams of the average space advocate to become even remotely possible. Thus the FedEx precedent is irrelevant, because he used existing markets and existing technologies.
In some fantasy universe where cheap commodity backups have any chance of existing, sure. In the real world - it's not happening. There are too many diverse types of birds performing too many diverse tasks. (Hint: Google servers were only possible because they can tap a miniscule fraction of a huge existing stream of existing commercial products produced to meet other demands. A situation utterly unlike satellites, where there isn't such a stream to tap and is extraordinarily low chance of one ever existing.)
Yes, yes, no, no.
Wrong. Reliability requirements are ironclad because the costs of loss of service are so high. (As I've said at least twice before.)
Because nobody is going to build such an array. As I explained before (like so much else), you don't keep your spares in hazardous enviroments. (Not to mention the fact that launch costs in the medium-to-long term isn't going to drop anywhere near enough. The low hanging fruit will lower them considerably - but beyond that is a steep and expensive technology curve.) Not to mention the fact that in the real world, spare capacity doesn't stay spare very long. It tends to get placed into service.
First, learn the difference between an academic study (which this is) and a serious plan with the intent to attempt to implement something (which your link isn't). Second, folks have been trying to build various forms of 'hard' circuits since the first can transistors - and they have been doing so at the 'economies of scale' level. They've invariably been more expensive than their commercial counterparts - because the demand is not as high. Economy of scale isn't a magic wand, it won't automagically reduce costs and produce something cheaply absent a very significant demand. Simple real world economics.
We don't need new types of launch vehicles either. The current high costs are driven by managerial issues and inertia - not technology.
What minimal technology changes are needed are already in existence and long proven. (I.E. adapting existing vehicles to mass production and minimizing production and operations man hours.)
We don't need new technologies. The idiotic insistence that we must have new shinies to lower cost of acess and that we have no need to pay attention to long established and well proven engineering, management, accounting, economic and logistics principles holds us back from progress more than any other factor. (Mostly because new shinies are sexy and the other stuff isn't.)
And they have a name for it not because it happens often - but because it could happen, the military has a plan in place for handling it and that plan has a name.
As a side note: Many of these plans aren't checklists or plans in the conventional sense, you can't just pull 'em out of a folder and execute them. What they generally are is a collection of scenarios and analysis along with a broad overview checklist/plan. This is useful because the guy in charge and his staff don't have to start from scratch - all the basic work has been done.
Sorry - but that's utter bullshit. A nuclear weapon requires a very specific (and complex) preparation and arming sequence - part of which is done onboard the aircraft by the pilot. It's absolutely impossible to not know the difference. (And if the bomb is dropped without those sequences being performed correctly - it's inert. It won't detonate.)
Which is a very misleading quote - because the weapons were not supposed to have been on the bomber in the first place, it was supposed to be carrying missiles without warheads.
It is crazy speculation - see my post upthread.
That's one of those stories that sounds great if your only contact with the military and its operations is Tom Clancy or James Bond. But once you get a few facts under your belt...
The story fails however on several key points however - there's no need to 'stage' the ALCM's to the Middle East, as the BUFFs would take off from the US. Nor is there a need to stage them to a particular base in the US, as the BUFF can't reach the Middle East from anywhere in CONUS without air-to-air refueling. On top of which, Barksdale is also one of designated storage sites for both ALCM's and their warheads, and thus there is no need to stage them there - as they already are there.
Pretty damm good actually - you note the problem was caught did you not? The system isn't designed to be 100% perfect with never a mistake, the system is designed to be 100% certain that mistakes are caught before they become Very Very Serious.
Yeah, this should not have happened without some pretty serious bungling somewhere, and it is pretty serious - but ultimately the system worked as designed and the triple check caught what the double check missed.
(Yes, I am a former nuclear weaponeer.)
That would be fine if this were the middle ages. It isn't.
Tons and tons of bad PR and a couple of dioceses going nearly bankrupt (which hurts the parishoners badly) isn't roughly handled?
Again, something not accepted today. In case you haven't noticed, the leader of that sect is up on trial for that (and other things).
In short, you are an (possibly inadverdant) apologist for the Scientologits because you haven't much of clue or have a great deal of bias.
Who cares what they used to do. The fact of the matter is they don't it today - and they'd be quite roughly handled if they tried. So why should Scientology be given a free pass to behave as no other religion does today?
Then why did you make the false implication US Christians believe mostly one way - and the rest of the world mostly another? (Hint: The majority of US Christians and Catholics aren't fundamentalist either. Like you most, you confuse noise and activity with size.)
Absolutely incorrect.
Even if launch costs were zero, the costs (I.E. lost revenue) of losing a bird are still quite large and the enviroment still as harsh. I.E. high reliability is still an ironclad requirement, and once under that requirement prices come down slowly if at all. (In fact, the prices for components for undersea cables haven't varied noticeably precisely because of this effect.)
With regards to the FedEx launch, the problem isn't precisely what was said but the incorrect context you used it in. No matter what was said, he could point to the existing and proven markets as proof of demand. With low cost space acess, there are no proven and existing markets. None.
Well, I'll simply repeat what I said earlier, possibly it will sink in this time: The problem isn't technology. Period. Full stop.
Correct. But the problem with what we are doing now has nothing to do with the technologies used. Period. Full Stop.
How, precisely, is spending billions of dollars upfront going to reduce the price point? Economics simply doesn't work that way.