Think about it like this. To make a project that is 90% sure to work it costs X dollars. To make the project 99% sure to work it costs 2*X dollars or more! As the levels of redundancy and robustness of the equipment increases the price increasess exponentially. The 99th percent costs more than the 98th percent and so on.
The problem is that most NASA missions go to the 99th percent no matter what. The reality is that sometimes they could do the same mission 10 times over at 90% reliability for less money than doing the mission ones for 99% reliability. So one out of 10 missions would blow up, but 9 out of 10 would rock the house.
The reality is, NASA tried something like that, and faced a massive outcry over their 'incompetence' when they started losing missions.
No, those facts don't directly support the argument.
Then produce some that do... Because while I'm producing facts, you are producing handwaving.
The space race was a lot more than just the rocket engines. Just launching a rocket doesn't get it to its destination. And just manufacturing some rockets doesn't make an industry.
Utterly meaningless handwaving.
The space race was part of the R&D for the rest of the program.
A completely false claim. The launchers used in the space race were either a) developed from ICBM's (I.E. the R&D was already done) or b) down a different evolutionary path than ICBM's took (I.E. the R&D doesn't feed back). On path 'b' the motors were completely different, the structures utterly different, the guidance systems derived from path 'a', etc...
And even more important, the space race was propaganda for Americans to accept the $billions spent on building a Federal rocket/aerospace industry, most of which was going into ICBMs and other Cold War tech to be used in a hot war.
The problem is - chronology doesn't support this. By the time the space race geared up the rocket/aerospace industry was already running full steam. It was already accepted by the public as being needed to 'defeat the godless commies', no additional propoganda needed.
I'm all for space development. I want to see its benefits in all those things pursued. But the truth is that the US and Soviet Union raced to space as a way to develop Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads.
The problem is - the facts don't support that argument. We 'raced' to space on converted ICBM's and derived technology that was already being phased out from ICBM usage. We built no liquid fueled ICBM's after Titan II - which reached service in 1962.
Isn't the real question - Why was it banned in the first place?
Reading the handwaving of the other posters has been fascinating - but not one of them has gotten it right, or even close.
The UK Goverment refused to pay for human spaceflight for the same reason it dismantled it's unmanned spaceflight program at the same time and emasculated it's military - in the 1960's the UK needed every penny it could get to fund various and sundry social programs.
More importantly, it comes out not long after ESA reached an agreement with the Russians concerning the development of the Kliper spacecraft. Looks like the successor to Soyuz will be largely paid for by ESA and flown from French Guyana.
That's extremely unlikely. First off, the ESA and Russia haven't reached an agreement to do anything. The ESA is proposing to study if it's worth anything to the ESA to propose to the Russians to cooperate. Secondly, the ESA charter requires that each member state get a proportion of the ESA budget equal to it's proportional contribution to the ESA. (Thus if say, Germany, contributes x% of the ESA's budget, then the ESA has to spend x% of it's budget in Germany - whether it makes sense to or not.) Unless they amend the charter (unlikely), then a considerable amount of Kliper hardware will have to be built outside of Russia, something most informed observers find unlikely.
Have you ever wondered why we don't find time capsules from two thousand years ago with messages for the future? It, apparently, simply didn't occur to anyone that they might be able to, by leaving a durable message, communicate in a one sided way with the future.
Until fairly recently (the last couple of centuries or so) pretty much everyone knew the past had been much like today, so it seemed a safe assumption that tommorow would be as well. There was no need to send such message. (Other than the odd royal tomb or religious monument - both of which are time capsules of a sort.)
Certainly, but not in the form they were built. The mud brick ones are badly worn, and the stone ones have been vandalized by having their marble outer surface torn off.
Stonehenge is too.
Most of it. But parts of it aren't. (Several lintel stones fell to the ground centuries ago, and were placed in their current position in the 1800's.)
The bigger problem to my eyes is they're planning on tucking it hell and gone inside a mountain so no one will steal or vandalize it. For a monument that is intended as a statement of hope for the future, that strikes me as counter productive. "Umm, we built this thing for you kids whom we've never met but we figure you're not trustworthy enough to let you know where it is."
The architects in the middle ages trusted their offspring to finish and maintain the cathedrals that the architects laid the foundations for. Seems that turned out ok - most of the cathedrals are still here and don't show signs of being stolen or vandalized.
That's because the kids of those architects had something that kids today and for the near future don't. Standards, morals, ethics, faith...
So why haven't they put that tether experiment on the ISS that the shuttle ran a number of years ago.
Because that experiment was a failure - as have all tether experiments to date. Despite great theoretical promise and fanboi handwaving, nobody has been able to actually make a useful one work.
Basically it was able to turn orbital motion into electricity or electicity to motion.
Basically the it developed an unexpected electrical potential and burned through.
Next trip take them up a tether and a bunch of solar cell and Fagetaboutit.
At the cost of putting an electric charge on the station it wasn't meant to take and placing restrictions on attitude it wasn't meant to have.
This stuff isn't as easy as armchair space cadets think.
This isn't a good situation, but barring future disasters I'm confident that they'll get a ship up there to boost the ISS to a level where it can be saved for many more decades.
I'm confident that no such thing will be done ever. The altitude at which the ISS will be safe for 'decades' is well above the altitude at which the Shuttle or the Soyuz (launcher) can reach.
Reading the summary makes me think either the PR firm who wrote it doesn't understand acceleration, or expects us to be unable to.
More accurately - you don't quite have a grasp of the situation.
The orbit could currently be decaying at 1km/wk, but that is less useful than saying the paperclip I just dropped is currently traveling at 15m/s.
Of course, because the 1km/wk is an average figure. The loss of altitude per week varies with the density of the atmosphere at the stations current alitude, the attitude of the station in relation to the velocity vector, etc... etc... (The atmosphere is almost non-existent at that altitude - but it is there.)
In order to convey the predicament of the ISS the article should mention altitude, downward velocity, and acceleration.
It can't mention downward velocity - because there isn't any. The station is losing height because atmospheric drag is slowing it's orbital velocity. (Ditto for acceleration - there isn't any.) This is orbital mechanics, not a paperclip being dropped.
I make wine and my wife makes beer in our home. The current sterilization procedure for bacteria prevention involves the following:
Unless your house is an absolute sewage pit - you are *way* overdoing it. (I've never seen any homebrewing material advocate such a lengthy procedure.)
So far, it's killed of the order of 100 people with a target population of two billion (yep, billion). So two things occur to me. Firstly, if a tenth of the effort that appears to have gone into avian flu had gone into TB, Cholera, Typhoid and Malaria over the past few months, a lot more than a hundred people would have been saved.
Care to provide proof of that?
Consider this; billions of dollars and man hours *have* been spent on those four diseases over the past century. Fighting them is a current and ongoing process - how will a few drops change the level in an already large budget. Consider also that none of those four are likely to flash into a large scale epidemic or pandemic.
I won't even start on the numbers who died from AIDS because US Christians have a thing about condoms (which handily kills a lot of blacks: two bigotries for the price of one).
Of course you won't start - there's nothing to start *from*. Condoms are not illegal - and in the western world are widely and freely available. In the African nations their goverments are quite able to purchase and distribute them if they wish. The bigot is you.
However, given there's almost no evidence, and numbers like 50 thousand to 1 million in the UK alone are being bandied around,
No evidence? Have you had your head buried in the sand?
I wonder what Ladbrokes would take on spread bets? My prediction: based on the BSE ``scientists talk nonsense to secure research funding'' debacle, the actual deaths will be about 1% of the lowest estimate.
I bet you are one of those people who claim that since there was no widespread Y2k problems - that's proof that all the work done to prevent them was not needed.
So it's killed 60 people in the last few months. Passive smoking kills 30 a day. Why the big deal over the bird flu?
Passive smoking is *assumed* to kill 30 people a day - based on statistical sampling and meausurement. (I.E. there is no way to conduct an autopsy and with 100% percent accurracy state that the cause of death was passive smoking.)
Bird flu, unlike passive smoking, can be transmitted from individual to individual.
If you encounter my wife (I'm a smoker), my smoke poses a statistically insignificant risk to you. If I have the bird flu, she has a high chance of becoming a carrier, and you have a non trivial chance of becoming infectd.
And the nation that's kept the ISS behind for practically all its existence is Russia, underfunding, underachieving, undercaring about the project.
Which is why all the Russian critical path equipment is on orbit - and has been for years.
While they launch their own solar sails and other projects, like commercial launches (which often crash), using the American ISS subsidy money, instead of fulfilling their ISS committments.
Which is why the equipment is on orbit, and Progress and Soyuz flights have occured on schedule. Meanwhile the Americans are years behind on their carge delivery and passenger exchange flights (and were even before STS-113) and have all but cancelled what equipment (CRV) they haven't delayed (for reasons other than the grounding) or scaled back (HAB, LAB).
If you're going to claim contrary to the steady reports about Russia's ISS lameness, let's see some citations.
Citations? I wouldn't even know where to begin - this stuff runs back over a decade as is well known to anyone actually following the program.
I'd be happy to learn that the Russian failure and American successes were not Russia scamming us.
What Russian failure? What American sucesses? I see Russian hardware on orbit, and American hardware years behind the promised delivery date. (ISS was supposed to be at Core Complete in 2000 - two years *before* Columbia. Remember?)
Because I don't like getting scammed, and American failures in supporting a useful ISS are much easier for me to possibly fix, as a voting active American. So let's get some backup on your claims, please.
Go back about 10 years and read the ISS assembly plans from there forward. Read about the fate of the CRV. Read about the delays and dithering about the HAB. Read about the cost overruns in the late 90's that came within a hair of station getting cancelled...
I don't know what or where you've been reading, but it doesn't correspond to reality at all - the problems with ISS have been well known to anyone following the program for years. Drop by sci.space.station and you'll be in for an eye opener.
Re:Fly me to the Moon...
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Space Tourism?
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· Score: 2, Informative
A lot of the Russian money for the ISS has been siphoned out by Moscow bureaucrats, and the Russians are begging the US for extra funding.
Partially true. The extra funding they are currently asking for is because the 'free' Soyuz flights (carrying US personell) are coming to an end as per existing agreements.
I don't think the US is that behind in its commitments - the articles I have read suggest that the Russians are behind.
Hmm.. Where then is the CRV? (Essentially cancelled. Which keeps the crew size down because they are limited by Soyuz.) Where is the full fit of equipment for the LAB? (Sitting on the ground because the Shuttle is grounded.) The HAB? (Ditto. And it's because the HAB is grounded that they are having life support problems - because it's the backup to the Russian hardware.)
My guess is (based on plenty of direct experience of Russian industry and project management) that the Russian manufacturers have not seen any of the money allocated for the project, because it's been diverted to various consultancy companies and agencies.
Your guess would be pretty much wrong since all the critical path Russian equipment is on orbit - whereas almost none of the American hardware is.
So the Russians can't deliver, because they can't buy material and parts, and the money has disappeared, so they are looking for other funding sources.
A conclusions that only follows if you start from the premise that the Russians are to blame rather than bothering to actually be aware of the full facts.
Re:Fly me to the Moon...
on
Space Tourism?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The exciting news is that we've reached a stage of space industry development where we have enough "discretionary resources" and minimized risks that we have the flexibility to engage in substantial nonessential mission components.
Not even remotely. The spare seats are available because the US is late in delivering our full commitments to the ISS and the Russians are desperately strapped for cash and good PR.
Very cool. However, there's one little problem --- how the hell do you turn it? If the sensor's got to be 50'000km away from the lens, then to turn it 90 degrees (why does Slashdot block Unicode?) you're going to have to move the sensor some 70'000km, which means a lot of hydrazine.
Not true at all.
Imagine a sunshade that's in Earth's orbit (not in orbit around Earth, but in the same orbit) with the sensor craft coorbital but trailing. In the course of a year, your field of view will traverse 360 degrees without ever once manuvering either craft.
In practice, they plan to have the two craft in seperate orbits around L2 - as described in this PDF, but the basic principle is as described above.
Here's an overview of the topics I'm covering this semester in an OSS course I'm co-teaching.
Except - it's not really an OSS course, it's a UNIX course with a little OSS wrapping. This does a vast disservice to your students by implying that the two are equivalent. (They aren't.)
Note that we were also trying to improve the general technical literacy of some of the CS students.
A false goal, but one that explains why you've diverged from teaching what you claim to teaching something else entirely.
Right now we've just passed #4 and have settled on a simple project (a Web app) that the class can work together on in Python. That way, we can use it to demonstrate how to use the tools we talk about in topics 5-9.
In other words, you are teaching programming rather than OSS.
Insightful my foot. At supersonic altitudes a sonic boom isn't an issue.
Pfft. There's no such thing as 'supersonic altitudes'. It's quite possible to go supersonic right on the deck.
Way back when, U.S. aircraft manufactuers hammered Congrees with exaggerated horror stories of constant sonic booms shaking the pictures off the walls... while the real issue lay in the fact that nothing they had on the drawing boards would compete with Concorde.
They had plenty on the drawing boards that could match the Concorde's performance - they couldn't compete because they (the US companies) had to pay for their own R&D (which would have to be reflected in the amortized costs they sold them for), while Concorde was almost fully subsidized. (The Concordes that entered service were essentially given to the airlines free.)
So they legislated away almost all of the profitiable routes and left the SST with nothing but transoceanic flights.
For supersonic flights, the profitable routes *were* (at that time) the transoceanic routes. (The need for NY-LA departures every 30 mins was growing, but not there yet in the time frame in question.) Even so, the airlines could not make the Concorde pay.
Somehow I doubt the figures quoted. I've been running a journal at http://sumdog.com/ since 2001 (before everyone called them blogs) and have been running google ads since January and have made $29 so far.
Frankly I'm surprised it's made as much as $29. Your site is ugly, poorly designed, poorly laid out, and utterly without a reason to exist other than to masturbate your own ego. If I'd found it on a web search (unlikely as vanity sites rarely rank highly) I'd have thought to myself "heres another loser who has AdWords on his site because they lowered the barriers".
In short comparing your little site with even a semi-professionaly run site is about as accurate as comparing an Estes rocket with the Saturn V.
(And considering Blogger.com was founded in 1999... You have a little to learn about the history of blogging.)
Ads aren't worth a whole lot. If you choose to do your own advertising and not use services like google ad words, you can probably do much better, but they're still not worth much. I suspect many of these people are selling merchandise, promoting certain businesses and have several forms of revenue.
Ad revenue per blog is tiny - but across thousands or tens of thousands of blogs, those numbers add up significantly.
On the other hand - when you look at the two blogs featured in the Slashot summary, you find highly targeted sites aimed at a specific audience - and those can make significant money from targeted ads. (Thats why you find ads for fishing rods in Field and Stream and ads for Corning Ware in Good Housekeeping.) An extremely narrowly targeted website I built in 1997 brought about $10/mo from Amazon links until I took it down in 2004 - even though I never updated, changed, or even publicized the site after about the first month.
Looking at cartoon sites, the Brothers Chap who run homestarrunner.com current make enough money off all their merchandise to fully support themselves. Hell I even own a StrongBad poster.
You miss an important point - they couldn't support themselves, with ads or merchandise, if they didn't provide the content that drew the eyeballs. The same is true when you examine the two blogs in the Slashdot summary
You can support yourself off a blog, but it's rare. It requires the type of site status as homestarrunner, the onion or maddox...or possibly Wifey's World or Heather's I Deep Throat.
-5 Excessively Obvious.
Pretty much anyone whose been savvy about the web since, oh, 1995 or so knows this well. That's why many of us were not surprised when the Bubble burst - as we'd predicting it for years.
Why isn't the current president ordering vaccinations for everyone? The technology of making flu vaccines is pretty routine, even if the flue is alleged to be unusually lethal. Instead, President Bush is talking about imposing martial law and using the military to quarantine those portions of the country where the bird flu strikes.
You could try something difficult like actually reading a transcript of the Presidents remarks - which answers your questions. Additionally, a little thought on the speed of modern transport versus the lethality of the virus leads one to understand why quarantine is being considered.
But that requires thought and work. It's easier to repeat the fear mongering of the left wing blogs than to think for oneself.
This is a very insightful view of what is a real problem with the current practice of medicine . There are many 'syndromes' that are considered to be triggered by lifestyle when actually there are deeper root causes.
Do you have a cite to support this? I.E. where is the research that shows that there are deeper root causes?
(And I should point out that the 'lifestyle syndrome' here (ulcers) turned out to have a *simple* root cause, not a deep one.)
Why do I need anyone to "approve" a drug for me. The FDA has no business telling me what I can and cannot put into my body. If I thought the guy had a point, why should the government tell me I can't take his medicine.
You might try reading the history of the Pure Food and Drug Act - then you'll understand why the FDA exists.
Oh, thats right, I need a perscription, so someone else (a doctor) can tell me what I can and cannot put into my body.
Absolutely incorrect - you are completely free to put whatever you want into your body.
The (original) purpose of Nobel Prize was to encourage young gifted scientists, to give them recognition necessary to get funding for research. Obviously now it's just a sort of a medal for past achievement and adds absolutely nothing to science TODAY.
Umm... No. It's always been a medal for achievement, to quote from Alfred Nobel's will;
The whole of my remaining realisable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK Goverment refused to pay for human spaceflight for the same reason it dismantled it's unmanned spaceflight program at the same time and emasculated it's military - in the 1960's the UK needed every penny it could get to fund various and sundry social programs.
This stuff isn't as easy as armchair space cadets think.
Consider this; billions of dollars and man hours *have* been spent on those four diseases over the past century. Fighting them is a current and ongoing process - how will a few drops change the level in an already large budget. Consider also that none of those four are likely to flash into a large scale epidemic or pandemic.
Of course you won't start - there's nothing to start *from*. Condoms are not illegal - and in the western world are widely and freely available. In the African nations their goverments are quite able to purchase and distribute them if they wish. The bigot is you.No evidence? Have you had your head buried in the sand?I bet you are one of those people who claim that since there was no widespread Y2k problems - that's proof that all the work done to prevent them was not needed.Bird flu, unlike passive smoking, can be transmitted from individual to individual.
If you encounter my wife (I'm a smoker), my smoke poses a statistically insignificant risk to you. If I have the bird flu, she has a high chance of becoming a carrier, and you have a non trivial chance of becoming infectd.
I don't know what or where you've been reading, but it doesn't correspond to reality at all - the problems with ISS have been well known to anyone following the program for years. Drop by sci.space.station and you'll be in for an eye opener.
Imagine a sunshade that's in Earth's orbit (not in orbit around Earth, but in the same orbit) with the sensor craft coorbital but trailing. In the course of a year, your field of view will traverse 360 degrees without ever once manuvering either craft.
In practice, they plan to have the two craft in seperate orbits around L2 - as described in this PDF, but the basic principle is as described above.
No wonder CS graduates are so useless.
In short comparing your little site with even a semi-professionaly run site is about as accurate as comparing an Estes rocket with the Saturn V.
(And considering Blogger.com was founded in 1999... You have a little to learn about the history of blogging.)
Ad revenue per blog is tiny - but across thousands or tens of thousands of blogs, those numbers add up significantly.On the other hand - when you look at the two blogs featured in the Slashot summary, you find highly targeted sites aimed at a specific audience - and those can make significant money from targeted ads. (Thats why you find ads for fishing rods in Field and Stream and ads for Corning Ware in Good Housekeeping.) An extremely narrowly targeted website I built in 1997 brought about $10/mo from Amazon links until I took it down in 2004 - even though I never updated, changed, or even publicized the site after about the first month.
You miss an important point - they couldn't support themselves, with ads or merchandise, if they didn't provide the content that drew the eyeballs. The same is true when you examine the two blogs in the Slashdot summary-5 Excessively Obvious.Pretty much anyone whose been savvy about the web since, oh, 1995 or so knows this well. That's why many of us were not surprised when the Bubble burst - as we'd predicting it for years.
But that requires thought and work. It's easier to repeat the fear mongering of the left wing blogs than to think for oneself.
(And I should point out that the 'lifestyle syndrome' here (ulcers) turned out to have a *simple* root cause, not a deep one.)