Carmack is the only one who I have any confidence in that will be able to go to orbit cheaply.
Why? Let's face it - he's piddled away most of what he has spent to date on dead ends. (Or more accurately, on things he's given up on when the going gets tough.) He's a dilettante who talks a great game - bur jumps from plan to scheme to gizmo like a frog in a frying pan. (And he's not an engineer - so far as costing etc... goes his comments you quote above are about as valid as those of the average slashdot poster. I.E. not very.)
The sad thing is that for 20 mill a pop, you can contract Energia to fly soyuz/progress.
No. For 20 million you can rent a single seat (out of three) to go to someplace the Soyuz was going anyhow.
Much cheaper, safer and reliable.
Sure, it's cheaper - but a skateboard is always cheaper than a minivan. But a skateboard can't replace a minivan. So far as safety goes - Soyuz is right in the same ballpark as Shuttle. (The difference is mathematically insignificant.)
NASA already has an extremely well-tested and effective vehicle. The Space Shuttle is a weak and complex design that replaced a great and simple design.
Apollo wasn't well tested, nor effective (for LEO work), nor simple. Apollo flew only around 20 flights - not even remotely enough for any reasonable testing program. Apollo is far too heavy for LEO work, as it's heatshield and engines are sized for cislunar work. Lastly, even by today's standards, the Apollo CSM is an extremely complicated beast with hundreds of subsystems and hundreds of thousands of components.
For less than $500 million NASA could replace the Apollo program 1960's computers (on board and ground control) and develop a new hatch to allow the Apollo command module to connect to the Space Station.
And what about the guidance systems? The heatshield? The electronics? The dozens of other components and systems that are either no longer manufactured or not safe by modern standards? The best estimates by people who know the field (and aren't in NASA's employ) is that it would cost more to rebuild Apollo/Saturn than it would be to start with a blank sheet.
Beyond that, just mass produce Saturn 5's and Command/Lander modules.
Mass production won't reduce the per unit price much - because the real expense is in the man hours needed to build them and then prepare them for launch. (I.E. 'mass production' isn't a spell you can just intone - it takes real work, a lot of it, to make something as large and complex as Apollo/Saturn mass producible.) You'd need to redesign them for automated manufacture and reduced man hours in both production and preperation. Your $500 million dollar budget would cover about the first year of this five to ten year effort.
Frickin' finally. This is possibly the best possibly future for the public space agencies - fund research and development through a combination of grants and prizes, and not actually work on the problems themselves.
Actually - this is the worst possible future. Prizes tend to generate point solutions to winning the prize - rather than general solutions.[1] Grants tend to generate solutions that go precisely to the bounds of the RFP - and no further.
[1] The X-Prize is a perfect example of this - it was originally intended to provide technologies to jumpstart LEO acess. Instead, we got a craft utterly incapable of being scaled up to provide LEO acess - a craft that's a point solution.
500 million isn't enough to develop a long term, repeatable, economical vehicle for launches. 500 million gets you one vehicle that MAY launch successfully...once.
The X-Prize folks seem to be doing just fine so far with a much smaller budget.
Let's put it this way: The X-Prize vehicles are skateboards. What NASA needs is a minivan.
Which do you think will be cheaper?
(And the technology gap between the two vehicles is just about that large too...)
Europeans practice Confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church.
Sorry, missed this in my earlier reply;
This is so laughably wrong.. Roman Catholics celebrate confirmation - regardless of their national origin. Not all Europeans are Roman Catholic (which is a minority in Europe), and not all Roman Catholics are European (which is a minority within the Roman Catholic church).
Europeans practice Confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church.
So what? Confirmation marks you as an adult in the church. It never has had anything to do with ones status as an adult in society at large. (No matter what that website states).
There are other rituals in other Western cultures.
That's just the thing - there aren't, outside of some minorities.
What does "pop psychology" have to do with this documented history?
Pop psychology insists that one of the causes of social decay in modern western society is the lack of these ceremonies, ceremonies that have 'disappeared without being replaced'. The problem with this theory is that within Western culture - these ceremonies never existed in the first place. There is no 'documented history' of such ceremonies.
Becoming an adult used to take an explicit ceremony, with months or more of preparation, which every adult completed. Encoding cultural history as well as the expectations of adult behavior.
For some societies, yes. But, contrary to pop psychology, this hasn't been common in the Western/First World for hundreds - if not thousands of years.
As more traditional culture is lost, more people go through life without the benefits of it, or a "new version" that can update it to work in modern society.
There's not an 'old version' to replace with a 'new version' to start with.
I beleive this was busted by Mythbusters all ready. They have done several "lighining related" tests.. going by some of the tests they have done.. a cell phone is NOT going to increase your chances of being struck my lightning.
Not to put too fine a point on it... But the Mythbusters testing is about as scientific and reliable as say, Spongebob Squarepants.
In fact.. to get the lighning to always strike a head with a piercing on it they had to have about 5lbs worth of metal on or in the head target, and rarely did it actually HIT the metal in the head (untill they added the 5lbs or so.. the big metal door knob in the head finally did it).
That's just fine for ballistics gel heads mounted on poles. But ballistics gel is know for it's simulation of the ballistics properties of human flesh - not it's electrical properties. (Not to mention the mass of the head-on-a-pole and it's capacitive potential is different than a human body.)
Statisticly.. the metal you wear or a phone is not going to make you more of a lightning magnet than no metal / cell phone.
Even if the Mythbusters testing was scientifically valid (which it isn't), it takes hundreds or thousands of tests to accurately gauge that statistical validity of given scenario - not a handful.
Citizens of the United States of America, you do realize you live in a fascist state, don't you?
Things are getting a bit dodgy - but it's currently far from a fascist state. In fact, I suggest you learn the definition of fascism - as you lack any clue as to it's meaning.
And despite what you seem to believe, committing large errors of fact regarding the police to the paper are a quick way to get your ass fired.
On which planet would that be? I've seen large errors of fact regarding the police be routinely committed to paper - with no harm coming to the reporter.
newspapers are extremely sensitive to reporters who "don't let the facts get in the way of the story".
Again, you must live on a different planet - because newspapers who distort, overlook, or fabricate facts are as common as dirt here.
Well, I'd say there is *some* practical use - it's now known that a vehicle capable of carrying a person can get 3000 MPG, albeit under very specific conditions. Granted that the specific conditions are virtually worthless in the real world, it has been achieved, and maybe, just maybe, *some* of the principals can be adapted to the real world to improve gas milage of a regular 4-door sedan.
Maybe, just maybe you should have bothered to actually read and understand my message and/or TFA - because I adressed just that concern. Here is the relevant part: The students took extremely well known and well proven principles and 'turned them up to 11'. We are already building aerodynamic cars - and have been doing so since the 70's. We are already making cars lighter in weight - and have been doing so since the 70's. We are already improving the effiency of the engine - and have been doing so since the 70's. etc... etc...
In short - with the exception of the coasting technique (an artifact of the competition rules), we have 'adapting' and applying those principles for three decades.
While an interesting study for academia, how does this help an automobile industry where the average car is a four door sedan? What technologies used in this exercise translate to real cars? Building the body out of light weight materials definitely cuts down on fuel usage, but is it impact resistant in a crash? If contests are going to be sponsored for improving fuel efficiency, they should be targeted towards the cars that most of us drive, not theoretical, completely impractical academic-mobiles that will have absolutely no use on the road.
But theoretical science often *does* lead to science with more practical applications.
If this [competition] was in fact 'theoretical science' - you have a point. But it's not.
[rant] Every time an article like this is posted to slashdot, somebody asks what are the practical applications? And, invariably, a karma whore will drag out the tired old chestnut quoted above, knowing he'll get modded up. But sometimes, it's a valid question and deserves a real answer - not a chestnut. [/rant]
This competition wasn't an experiment to see what can be done to raise gas mileage. From a scientific point of view, it's the equivalent of the guys who attach jet engines to their cars. It's cool and all - but it isn't research and it doesn't prove anything. The scientific method is all but uninvolved. The students took extremely well known and well proven principles and 'turned them up to 11'. The result, given the years this competition has taken place and years of concept cars, was utterly unsurprising. It's the high tech equivalent of mixing baking powder and vinegar together - it'll work every time.
The original poster is correct, this is an ivory tower exercise - not a practical one. The results of this competition tell us nothing that wasn't already known, and contributes zip point to the development of real world vehicles.
Going into submarines "requires a lot more school, and after the academy a lot of people aren't looking to go to a high-paced environment for a long period," Ensign Shaughnessy said. "And some people also might see submarines as a less glamorous service assignment."
The glamour matters to some, but others it's a chance to join a proud and limited fraternity - those who wear the gold or silver Dolphins.
USN Submarine dolphins are unique in the US armed services - they are the only warfare specialty badge earned on the job and granted by a 'jury' of your peers-to-be. Every other such pin (the Wings of Gold, or the Budweiser pin, or the ice cream cone of the paratroopers, or even the Green Beret) is granted merely by graduating the appropiate school. Now, the school may be arbitrarily hard - but you can graduate the school, and you'll get the pin, even if you lose a leg and never serve a day in the branch. No matter how many schools you attend - you'll never be a submariner without actually going to sea and facing the challenges there.
There's a reason why NASA is trying their best to get their fingers on ancient CPUs.
NASA doesn't have to try particularly hard... They just order 'em from a catalog. Seriously. Motorola, Intel, etc... have whole production lines dedicated to providing rad hard and extreme eviroment qualified chips to NASA, the DoD, defense contractors, and specialty hardware manufacturers (for things like deep ocean ROVs).
Because of the time it takes to redesign the silicon and the expense involved in testing and qualification they tend to keep 'ancient' processors so modified in production for a fairly long time. Which is OK, because many of these CPU's are used in devices with optimized OS/application enviroments - beside which even Linux looks like bloated snailware.
...we need to get a working biosphere on Earth. The last one ran dangerously low on O2 and that problem needs to be understood, fixed and thoroughly tested before we even think about setting up a colony on the moon.
How to make a working biosphere is fairly well understood. The last one failed because it was designed and built by ecologists, philosophers, and wizards - not engineers and biologists.
A mistmatch [between reality and hype] so large that if anyone but Wikipedia or Google tried to get away with it, the slashdot hivemind and the geek community would treat it rightful scorn.
Rubbish, it's commonplace for companies to advertise with hype and figures, far more so than Wikipedia (or Google), as rightly or wrongly, that's what grabs attention from the average person.
Who cares what corporations do? Wikipedia isn't a corporation - it's a non profit foundation.
Nowhere did I "handwave" this away
As you say - rubbish. With each post you find excuses to explain why such a vast mismatch isn't a problem. You won't look at the issues full on. (See your words above - where you cheerfully compare apples to oranges rather than think through the implications.)
Since we don't currently have a reliable manned booster to rotate crew on and off the station...
Yeah we do; it's called the Soyuz. There's no reason why we can't just build a bunch of them instead of continuing to launch overgrown school buses at the thing!
Here in the real world, Soyuz safety and reliability is roughly on par with the Shuttle (to the limits of statistics with such small sample size).
Any replacement for the Shuttle doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the Shuttle. Freakin Apollo fits that description; they could just build some more of those!
Actually, Apollo (the CSM) had problems and faults of varying significance on nearly every flight - and it didn't fly nearly enough to state with confidence just how safe and reliable it would be over the long term. (Hell, the Soyuz (90 odd flights) and the Shuttle (117 flights) haven't even flown enough to be confident of their safety and reliability rates.)
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before.
Right. And the entire ocean has been gone over multiple times with research vessels - so we can scrap them all, there's nothing new to learn after all.
I look at old systems such as B-52s still flying missions and question whether the problem is *inherent*. How about, nobody has been asked to come up with a better solution.
They've been attempting to come up with better solutions since about.025 seconds after the B-52 contract was signed. The problem is, the better solutions are invariably quite expensive - so the problem is simply redefined such that cheaper upgrades to the B-52 are a temporarily acceptable solution. Then a contract is let to study new and better solutions... Lather, rinse, repeat.
Why not "peel the banana" and have a coating on the external tank that is *designed* to safely fall away?
Because you need the coating on the tank nearly to burnout - otherwise aerodynamic heating would boil the LOX and LH2, causing pressure problems, and raising the temperature of the same, causing engine problems.
The reason that Wikipedia should not fork is that we should only endorse one neutral truth which is formed by dialectic including the opinions and thoughts of as many participants as possible.
Very true - but the reality is that 'truth' on the Wikipedia is increasingly in control of a small group with broad powers and no checks and balances.
We've been having a discussion about it on the wikipedia mailing list and Jimbo himself wrote about it on his blog.
What he did was handwave away the issues that the Times raised.
You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.
Other than a minor error about the timing of the introduction of these policies - the article got it exactly right. But the reality doesn't match the kool-aid, and thus Jimbo and his acolytes simply dismiss it.
Which is exactly why I quit contributing to the Wikipedia in the wake of the Siegenthaler affair.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Let's face it - he's piddled away most of what he has spent to date on dead ends. (Or more accurately, on things he's given up on when the going gets tough.) He's a dilettante who talks a great game - bur jumps from plan to scheme to gizmo like a frog in a frying pan. (And he's not an engineer - so far as costing etc... goes his comments you quote above are about as valid as those of the average slashdot poster. I.E. not very.)
No. For 20 million you can rent a single seat (out of three) to go to someplace the Soyuz was going anyhow.
Sure, it's cheaper - but a skateboard is always cheaper than a minivan. But a skateboard can't replace a minivan. So far as safety goes - Soyuz is right in the same ballpark as Shuttle. (The difference is mathematically insignificant.)
Apollo wasn't well tested, nor effective (for LEO work), nor simple. Apollo flew only around 20 flights - not even remotely enough for any reasonable testing program. Apollo is far too heavy for LEO work, as it's heatshield and engines are sized for cislunar work. Lastly, even by today's standards, the Apollo CSM is an extremely complicated beast with hundreds of subsystems and hundreds of thousands of components.
And what about the guidance systems? The heatshield? The electronics? The dozens of other components and systems that are either no longer manufactured or not safe by modern standards? The best estimates by people who know the field (and aren't in NASA's employ) is that it would cost more to rebuild Apollo/Saturn than it would be to start with a blank sheet.
Mass production won't reduce the per unit price much - because the real expense is in the man hours needed to build them and then prepare them for launch. (I.E. 'mass production' isn't a spell you can just intone - it takes real work, a lot of it, to make something as large and complex as Apollo/Saturn mass producible.) You'd need to redesign them for automated manufacture and reduced man hours in both production and preperation. Your $500 million dollar budget would cover about the first year of this five to ten year effort.
Actually - this is the worst possible future. Prizes tend to generate point solutions to winning the prize - rather than general solutions.[1] Grants tend to generate solutions that go precisely to the bounds of the RFP - and no further.
[1] The X-Prize is a perfect example of this - it was originally intended to provide technologies to jumpstart LEO acess. Instead, we got a craft utterly incapable of being scaled up to provide LEO acess - a craft that's a point solution.
Let's put it this way: The X-Prize vehicles are skateboards. What NASA needs is a minivan.
Which do you think will be cheaper?
(And the technology gap between the two vehicles is just about that large too...)
Sorry, missed this in my earlier reply;
This is so laughably wrong.. Roman Catholics celebrate confirmation - regardless of their national origin. Not all Europeans are Roman Catholic (which is a minority in Europe), and not all Roman Catholics are European (which is a minority within the Roman Catholic church).
That's just the thing - there aren't, outside of some minorities.
Pop psychology insists that one of the causes of social decay in modern western society is the lack of these ceremonies, ceremonies that have 'disappeared without being replaced'. The problem with this theory is that within Western culture - these ceremonies never existed in the first place. There is no 'documented history' of such ceremonies.
For some societies, yes. But, contrary to pop psychology, this hasn't been common in the Western/First World for hundreds - if not thousands of years.
There's not an 'old version' to replace with a 'new version' to start with.
Not to put too fine a point on it... But the Mythbusters testing is about as scientific and reliable as say, Spongebob Squarepants.
That's just fine for ballistics gel heads mounted on poles. But ballistics gel is know for it's simulation of the ballistics properties of human flesh - not it's electrical properties. (Not to mention the mass of the head-on-a-pole and it's capacitive potential is different than a human body.)
Even if the Mythbusters testing was scientifically valid (which it isn't), it takes hundreds or thousands of tests to accurately gauge that statistical validity of given scenario - not a handful.
Things are getting a bit dodgy - but it's currently far from a fascist state. In fact, I suggest you learn the definition of fascism - as you lack any clue as to it's meaning.
On which planet would that be? I've seen large errors of fact regarding the police be routinely committed to paper - with no harm coming to the reporter.
Again, you must live on a different planet - because newspapers who distort, overlook, or fabricate facts are as common as dirt here.
Maybe, just maybe you should have bothered to actually read and understand my message and/or TFA - because I adressed just that concern. Here is the relevant part: The students took extremely well known and well proven principles and 'turned them up to 11'. We are already building aerodynamic cars - and have been doing so since the 70's. We are already making cars lighter in weight - and have been doing so since the 70's. We are already improving the effiency of the engine - and have been doing so since the 70's. etc... etc...
In short - with the exception of the coasting technique (an artifact of the competition rules), we have 'adapting' and applying those principles for three decades.
I have no doubt that it has educational value - I am merely adressing the OP's question of practical value.
If this [competition] was in fact 'theoretical science' - you have a point. But it's not.
[rant]
Every time an article like this is posted to slashdot, somebody asks what are the practical applications? And, invariably, a karma whore will drag out the tired old chestnut quoted above, knowing he'll get modded up. But sometimes, it's a valid question and deserves a real answer - not a chestnut.
[/rant]
This competition wasn't an experiment to see what can be done to raise gas mileage. From a scientific point of view, it's the equivalent of the guys who attach jet engines to their cars. It's cool and all - but it isn't research and it doesn't prove anything. The scientific method is all but uninvolved. The students took extremely well known and well proven principles and 'turned them up to 11'. The result, given the years this competition has taken place and years of concept cars, was utterly unsurprising. It's the high tech equivalent of mixing baking powder and vinegar together - it'll work every time.
The original poster is correct, this is an ivory tower exercise - not a practical one. The results of this competition tell us nothing that wasn't already known, and contributes zip point to the development of real world vehicles.
USN Submarine dolphins are unique in the US armed services - they are the only warfare specialty badge earned on the job and granted by a 'jury' of your peers-to-be. Every other such pin (the Wings of Gold, or the Budweiser pin, or the ice cream cone of the paratroopers, or even the Green Beret) is granted merely by graduating the appropiate school. Now, the school may be arbitrarily hard - but you can graduate the school, and you'll get the pin, even if you lose a leg and never serve a day in the branch. No matter how many schools you attend - you'll never be a submariner without actually going to sea and facing the challenges there.
Derek L. FTB2/SS
NASA doesn't have to try particularly hard... They just order 'em from a catalog. Seriously. Motorola, Intel, etc... have whole production lines dedicated to providing rad hard and extreme eviroment qualified chips to NASA, the DoD, defense contractors, and specialty hardware manufacturers (for things like deep ocean ROVs).
Because of the time it takes to redesign the silicon and the expense involved in testing and qualification they tend to keep 'ancient' processors so modified in production for a fairly long time. Which is OK, because many of these CPU's are used in devices with optimized OS/application enviroments - beside which even Linux looks like bloated snailware.
That treaty is a long dead issue - it's never been signed by the major nations of the world.
How to make a working biosphere is fairly well understood. The last one failed because it was designed and built by ecologists, philosophers, and wizards - not engineers and biologists.
Who cares what corporations do? Wikipedia isn't a corporation - it's a non profit foundation.
As you say - rubbish. With each post you find excuses to explain why such a vast mismatch isn't a problem. You won't look at the issues full on. (See your words above - where you cheerfully compare apples to oranges rather than think through the implications.)
Actually, Apollo (the CSM) had problems and faults of varying significance on nearly every flight - and it didn't fly nearly enough to state with confidence just how safe and reliable it would be over the long term. (Hell, the Soyuz (90 odd flights) and the Shuttle (117 flights) haven't even flown enough to be confident of their safety and reliability rates.)
Whenever I see a statement like this; I generally ask 'what kind of idiot expects anything from an facility which is under construction'.
They've been attempting to come up with better solutions since about
Because you need the coating on the tank nearly to burnout - otherwise aerodynamic heating would boil the LOX and LH2, causing pressure problems, and raising the temperature of the same, causing engine problems.
Very true - but the reality is that 'truth' on the Wikipedia is increasingly in control of a small group with broad powers and no checks and balances.
What he did was handwave away the issues that the Times raised.
Other than a minor error about the timing of the introduction of these policies - the article got it exactly right. But the reality doesn't match the kool-aid, and thus Jimbo and his acolytes simply dismiss it.
Which is exactly why I quit contributing to the Wikipedia in the wake of the Siegenthaler affair.