It's obvious that Bush is grandstanding for the election. Everyone in his administration knows that announcing an intention to explore the Moon and Mars will not make much happen before a possible second term as President is over.
Nearly simultaneous grandstanding, throwing Hispanics a bone by proposing to semi-legalize some illegal immigrant workers.
All in all, the beginnings of a great election package of hot air, lies, false hopes, and marketing which will mostly go out the window if Bush is elected. Just like in 2000.
It won't be long before Scaled Composites is flying to 100km and the X-Prize is theirs.
Meanwhile, NASA/Boeing have just announced that the X-37, part of the Orbital Space Plane program, will "deemphasize" actual space operations. Story at www.aviationnow.com. Great timing! Really highlights the differences between the good ol' government contractor way of doing things. Get the billions of dollars, build something that looks good for propaganda purposes, forget about flying into space.
I hope civilian space efforts wake everyone up to the pathetic reality of NASA before they have a chance to kill another batch of astronauts.
Big deal, all you are seeing is the same stuff the US government has been seeing for forty years, except at way lower resolution.
Once the French created SPOT, the imagery was available in the commercial world, and the government finally had to let NASA show it to the masses.
Scrap the Shuttle!
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't usually agree with politicians, but this guy is right. I am a big fan of the space program, but the Shuttles should be put in museums, never to fly again.
It is astonishing that so many people want to keep the Shuttles flying when they are so obviously a fundamentally flawed, dangerous, ridiculously bad system, which has killed 14 people and will kill more if it stays in operation.
I attribute it to national pride. People are blinded by the associations created between the Shuttle and the national image. There is also the lingering competiveness of the Space Race, which leads people to insist that the Shuttles are "better" and "technologically superior" than Soyuz, when it is statistically obvious that the Shuttle is far less reliable, astronomically more expensive, and much more likely to kill the crew.
The Shuttle is a first-generation product and we could do much better! It is apparent that a far safer, more efficient, cheaper system could be built without too much effort. Why can't NASA and the rest of the country forget the flying dinosaur from the 70's and move on?
When you have to keep applying band-aid after band-aid to a system to get it to work, and it comes nowhere near fulfilling its original goals, it is time to go back to the drawing board. Stop wasting effort trying to patch up a bad design.
NASA itself, if it wasn't a stagnant bureaucracy, should be able to realize the many advantages of a new vehicle, including more frequent, faster launches, more flexibility and reliability, the elimination of lots of antiquated infrastructure, the elimination of lots of effort on maintenance, the glamour of a new, flashy, romantic vehicle, and most importantly, no more PR nightmares from killing astronauts in large groups! A new vehicle could revitalize NASA by making it easy to launch all kinds of missions. NASA needs to wake up to the untenable position of supporting this piece of junk. They are foolish to stake their reputation on it. It is yet more proof that NASA no longer innovates or embraces change; it merely tries to continue doing business as usual.
It is sickening that we will be sending up more astronauts on this death machine. They deserve to have more value placed on their lives by NASA and the rest of the nation. The astronauts are brave and dedicated, and they know the risks, but that is no reason to keep allowing them to face a extremely high probability of catastrophic death.
Even if it weren't prone to exploding, the absurdly high costs of operating the Shuttles should be reason enough to get rid of them. It would be far cheaper and easier to use expendable rockets for everything the Shuttles do now. NASA could buy a hundred Soyuz, launch a massive wave of new space missions, and still save money over trying to continue operating the Shuttles.
Hopefully, Burt Rutan's new civilian spacecraft will succeed, helping to make everyone realize that getting into space can be cheap and easy, and just what a stupid waste of time keeping the Shuttles going really is.
These objects in the Hubble photos are millions of light-years away... so the light took millions of years to reach us... so you are looking at a picture of something millions of years in the past.
I spent my first year out of college at a large defense contractor on a project where everyone had a top secret clearance. We worked in a featureless shiny black cube of a building with no windows. The thing that sums the whole experience up for me is this: On the huge monitor of an expensive new RS/6000 workstation, someone had circled something on the screen. In a permanent blue marker. Which would be there forever. Aaaaarrgh.
You've heard the jokes about blondes putting whiteout on the screen? Try defense contractors writing on the screen with a marker.
Yes, I did see a lot of people there who did very little, just sat at their desks, collected their pay, and hoped not to get laid off. They knew that the money that had been spent to get their security clearances meant job security. If the contractor fired them, the government client would get mad about the time and money wasted in obtaining their clearance, not to mention the undesirable departure of one of the top secret anointed into the scary, unmonitored public world.
The work was a ridiculous farce of government waste as well: mostly writing endless bureaucratic requirements documents. It was very difficult to get anyone to explain what it was we were supposed to be doing. Why? It was a secret! I am still not sure what the big picture was.
There was an office filled with dozens of people waiting to get their clearances. They got full pay to sit there for months with NOTHING to do.
No doubt there are many people who like the idea of making a decent salary in a stable job with extremely low demands... but anyone who wants to accomplish something in their work would be driven insane by the boredom.
I left as soon as my contractually mandated year was up. I have never seen such SNAFUs in the commercial corporate world.
This discussion of space mining is pure sci-fi dreaming.
The world can barely muster up enough political will and economic support to maintain one space station with three people on it. Even the space station plan has been cut way back from its original scope. You can forget about seeing extensive space mining or any other other kind of major escalation of space efforts as long as the current economics and attitudes prevail.
IMHO, extensive exploration of space will only start happening when it's no longer the governments of the world that are paying for it.
It is clear from what is being reported in the media that something occured just after takeoff causing mechanical damage including the complete seperation of one engine, and a very quick subsequent loss of control and crash.
There are two general possibilities for the cause:
1. Accident
The flight encountered some unexpected mechanical problem not caused by the intentional action of any person. For example, the engine could have had a catastrophic mechanical failure of its fan, causing loss of the engine and possibly additional damage to the body or wing which made the plane uncontrollable. Similar incidents have caused other jet planes to crash.
2. Intentional act
Someone intentionally caused the damage to the plane. This could happen numerous ways, but the most likely possibility is that of a bomb going off inside the body of the plane, producing enough debris to take out one engine.
Only the detailed technical forensic analysis of the wreckage will conclusively point to one possibility or the other.
If the crash of a fully-fueled jumbo jet onto a residential area of New York City was not an intentional act by the 9/11 terrorists, then they are unbelievably lucky that fate has caused an incident which perfectly matches what they would have liked to accomplish themselves. So unbelievable, that I can't believe it was just an accident.
Occam's Razor says that this crash too was a terrorist attack, caused by some freak carrying plastic explosive in his suitcase. What are the chances that a fully-fueled American Airlines jumbo jet would just happen to crash into a residential area of New York City at a time like this? What's the most likely explanation?
But it doesn't matter what the cause was, either way the terror of flying will multiply.
We have been given us a new freedom: freedom from security.
Earlier this year I was working for a small startup company in Colorado. We had recently hired this guy named Tom who was always coming in late or not at all. One day he showed up in the early afternoon, and started looking around to realize that all the cubes were empty! Everyone had simply vanished without a trace!
Eventually he found the VP of Engineering who explained that the entire company had been laid off that morning...
Guru: one who leads a seeker from
darkness to light, a master teacher
(from http://www.bible.ca/tongues-dictionary-hindu-yoga. htm )
A true guru is the one who you go ask for advice when your algorithm isn't working, when the code is twice as slow as it needs to be, when you can't figure out why the design is the way it is.
A guru has the big picture and, in a few minutes of explanation, causes the glow of geek enlightenment to fill your brain and show you the path to success. The guru is accessible, easy to talk to, and communicates in your language.
If your tech lead/CTO/manager/VP also happens to be the guru, you have achieved organizational nirvana. Though true gurus are often too techie to be very good at politics, so more often they are in some senior position of informal leadership.
Sure, many organizations have lone geniuses who do great work... but they're not gurus.
So, we know we can build a space vessel in which people can live for months (the ISS). Let's build another one, slap some engines on it (the new ion drives should do nicely), load it with crew and supplies, and send it on a loop around Mars. When it gets back, resupply it and send it to Venus. Then the asteroids...
It is obvious that the US and UK have already deployed special forces on the ground and soon will be sending a lot more.
Guerilla tactics are pretty much the only way to take out guerillas. The Soviets proved that controlling the cities and highways with a lot of heavy armor just makes you a static target.
So, don't expect this to be bloodless for the US/UK. All this government rhetoric about how this will be a hard effort means "we're gonna take casualties."
The US ground troops will have far more technological assistance than the Taliban: GPS, helicopters, night vision, personal radios, satellite imagery, powerful individual weapons, artillery and air strikes on call. But the Taliban are on their home turf, and they are ready to die for the cause.
Internet access is not a legal right. The way the reporter in question gets access, it is a commercial service provided by a corporation. The corporation can shut off the service for any reason at all; even without providing a reason.
It isn't meaningful to talk about legal terms like "conviction" and "trial" here. Nobody was convicted of any crime. The ISP simply shut off their service.
If anyone is going to successfully build a privately funded space plane, it's Dick Rutan.
He continously accomplishes amazing things in the aerospace world... and without government megabuck$. The first non-stop around the world flight is just one of them.
Isn't it ironic that the supposedly open-minded, entrepreneur-friendly NASA is insisting that only government-trained technocrats can fly, while the supposedly backwards Russian space agency is the one trying to change the unwritten rules about spaceflight access?
Maybe what's really going on here is that the big government space agencies are fighting to protect their privileges to control access to space. If a private individual can buy their way into orbit, NASA loses its monopoly power. The whole politics- and privilege-based astronaut system starts to crumble. NASA is blind to the potential of space tourism; they're just looking to preserve their budget and the status quo.
What is so dangerous or difficult about being present on the ISS? Is NASA worried that Tito will open the airlock or get sucked into the toilet? Maybe they should consider designing a space station which doesn't require months of training to visit.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious that Bush is grandstanding for the election. Everyone in his administration knows that announcing an intention to explore the Moon and Mars will not make much happen before a possible second term as President is over.
Nearly simultaneous grandstanding, throwing Hispanics a bone by proposing to semi-legalize some illegal immigrant workers.
All in all, the beginnings of a great election package of hot air, lies, false hopes, and marketing which will mostly go out the window if Bush is elected. Just like in 2000.
It won't be long before Scaled Composites is flying to 100km and the X-Prize is theirs.
Meanwhile, NASA/Boeing have just announced that the X-37, part of the Orbital Space Plane program, will "deemphasize" actual space operations. Story at www.aviationnow.com. Great timing! Really highlights the differences between the good ol' government contractor way of doing things. Get the billions of dollars, build something that looks good for propaganda purposes, forget about flying into space.
I hope civilian space efforts wake everyone up to the pathetic reality of NASA before they have a chance to kill another batch of astronauts.
Big deal, all you are seeing is the same stuff the US government has been seeing for forty years, except at way lower resolution.
Once the French created SPOT, the imagery was available in the commercial world, and the government finally had to let NASA show it to the masses.
I don't usually agree with politicians, but this guy is right. I am a big fan of the space program, but the Shuttles should be put in museums, never to fly again.
It is astonishing that so many people want to keep the Shuttles flying when they are so obviously a fundamentally flawed, dangerous, ridiculously bad system, which has killed 14 people and will kill more if it stays in operation.
I attribute it to national pride. People are blinded by the associations created between the Shuttle and the national image. There is also the lingering competiveness of the Space Race, which leads people to insist that the Shuttles are "better" and "technologically superior" than Soyuz, when it is statistically obvious that the Shuttle is far less reliable, astronomically more expensive, and much more likely to kill the crew.
The Shuttle is a first-generation product and we could do much better! It is apparent that a far safer, more efficient, cheaper system could be built without too much effort. Why can't NASA and the rest of the country forget the flying dinosaur from the 70's and move on?
When you have to keep applying band-aid after band-aid to a system to get it to work, and it comes nowhere near fulfilling its original goals, it is time to go back to the drawing board. Stop wasting effort trying to patch up a bad design.
NASA itself, if it wasn't a stagnant bureaucracy, should be able to realize the many advantages of a new vehicle, including more frequent, faster launches, more flexibility and reliability, the elimination of lots of antiquated infrastructure, the elimination of lots of effort on maintenance, the glamour of a new, flashy, romantic vehicle, and most importantly, no more PR nightmares from killing astronauts in large groups! A new vehicle could revitalize NASA by making it easy to launch all kinds of missions. NASA needs to wake up to the untenable position of supporting this piece of junk. They are foolish to stake their reputation on it. It is yet more proof that NASA no longer innovates or embraces change; it merely tries to continue doing business as usual.
It is sickening that we will be sending up more astronauts on this death machine. They deserve to have more value placed on their lives by NASA and the rest of the nation. The astronauts are brave and dedicated, and they know the risks, but that is no reason to keep allowing them to face a extremely high probability of catastrophic death.
Even if it weren't prone to exploding, the absurdly high costs of operating the Shuttles should be reason enough to get rid of them. It would be far cheaper and easier to use expendable rockets for everything the Shuttles do now. NASA could buy a hundred Soyuz, launch a massive wave of new space missions, and still save money over trying to continue operating the Shuttles.
Hopefully, Burt Rutan's new civilian spacecraft will succeed, helping to make everyone realize that getting into space can be cheap and easy, and just what a stupid waste of time keeping the Shuttles going really is.
What do you do with a computer with unlimited speed and an infinite amount of memory?
Ever heard of the speed of light?
These objects in the Hubble photos are millions of light-years away... so the light took millions of years to reach us... so you are looking at a picture of something millions of years in the past.
I spent my first year out of college at a large defense contractor on a project where everyone had a top secret clearance. We worked in a featureless shiny black cube of a building with no windows. The thing that sums the whole experience up for me is this: On the huge monitor of an expensive new RS/6000 workstation, someone had circled something on the screen. In a permanent blue marker. Which would be there forever. Aaaaarrgh.
You've heard the jokes about blondes putting whiteout on the screen? Try defense contractors writing on the screen with a marker.
Yes, I did see a lot of people there who did very little, just sat at their desks, collected their pay, and hoped not to get laid off. They knew that the money that had been spent to get their security clearances meant job security. If the contractor fired them, the government client would get mad about the time and money wasted in obtaining their clearance, not to mention the undesirable departure of one of the top secret anointed into the scary, unmonitored public world.
The work was a ridiculous farce of government waste as well: mostly writing endless bureaucratic requirements documents. It was very difficult to get anyone to explain what it was we were supposed to be doing. Why? It was a secret! I am still not sure what the big picture was.
There was an office filled with dozens of people waiting to get their clearances. They got full pay to sit there for months with NOTHING to do.
No doubt there are many people who like the idea of making a decent salary in a stable job with extremely low demands... but anyone who wants to accomplish something in their work would be driven insane by the boredom.
I left as soon as my contractually mandated year was up. I have never seen such SNAFUs in the commercial corporate world.
I want my shiny New Economy back!
This discussion of space mining is pure sci-fi dreaming.
The world can barely muster up enough political will and economic support to maintain one space station with three people on it. Even the space station plan has been cut way back from its original scope. You can forget about seeing extensive space mining or any other other kind of major escalation of space efforts as long as the current economics and attitudes prevail.
IMHO, extensive exploration of space will only start happening when it's no longer the governments of the world that are paying for it.
-- Spike
It is clear from what is being reported in the media that something occured just after takeoff causing mechanical damage including the complete seperation of one engine, and a very quick subsequent loss of control and crash.
There are two general possibilities for the cause:
1. Accident
The flight encountered some unexpected mechanical problem not caused by the intentional action of any person. For example, the engine could have had a catastrophic mechanical failure of its fan, causing loss of the engine and possibly additional damage to the body or wing which made the plane uncontrollable. Similar incidents have caused other jet planes to crash.
2. Intentional act
Someone intentionally caused the damage to the plane. This could happen numerous ways, but the most likely possibility is that of a bomb going off inside the body of the plane, producing enough debris to take out one engine.
Only the detailed technical forensic analysis of the wreckage will conclusively point to one possibility or the other.
If the crash of a fully-fueled jumbo jet onto a residential area of New York City was not an intentional act by the 9/11 terrorists, then they are unbelievably lucky that fate has caused an incident which perfectly matches what they would have liked to accomplish themselves. So unbelievable, that I can't believe it was just an accident.
Occam's Razor says that this crash too was a terrorist attack, caused by some freak carrying plastic explosive in his suitcase. What are the chances that a fully-fueled American Airlines jumbo jet would just happen to crash into a residential area of New York City at a time like this? What's the most likely explanation?
But it doesn't matter what the cause was, either way the terror of flying will multiply.
We have been given us a new freedom: freedom from security.
Earlier this year I was working for a small startup company in Colorado. We had recently hired this guy named Tom who was always coming in late or not at all. One day he showed up in the early afternoon, and started looking around to realize that all the cubes were empty! Everyone had simply vanished without a trace!
Eventually he found the VP of Engineering who explained that the entire company had been laid off that morning...
Guru: one who leads a seeker from. htm )
darkness to light, a master teacher
(from http://www.bible.ca/tongues-dictionary-hindu-yoga
A true guru is the one who you go ask for advice when your algorithm isn't working, when the code is twice as slow as it needs to be, when you can't figure out why the design is the way it is.
A guru has the big picture and, in a few minutes of explanation, causes the glow of geek enlightenment to fill your brain and show you the path to success. The guru is accessible, easy to talk to, and communicates in your language.
If your tech lead/CTO/manager/VP also happens to be the guru, you have achieved organizational nirvana. Though true gurus are often too techie to be very good at politics, so more often they are in some senior position of informal leadership.
Sure, many organizations have lone geniuses who do great work... but they're not gurus.
So, we know we can build a space vessel in which people can live for months (the ISS). Let's build another one, slap some engines on it (the new ion drives should do nicely), load it with crew and supplies, and send it on a loop around Mars. When it gets back, resupply it and send it to Venus. Then the asteroids...
It is obvious that the US and UK have already deployed special forces on the ground and soon will be sending a lot more.
Guerilla tactics are pretty much the only way to take out guerillas. The Soviets proved that controlling the cities and highways with a lot of heavy armor just makes you a static target.
So, don't expect this to be bloodless for the US/UK. All this government rhetoric about how this will be a hard effort means "we're gonna take casualties."
The US ground troops will have far more technological assistance than the Taliban: GPS, helicopters, night vision, personal radios, satellite imagery, powerful individual weapons, artillery and air strikes on call. But the Taliban are on their home turf, and they are ready to die for the cause.
Internet access is not a legal right. The way the reporter in question gets access, it is a commercial service provided by a corporation. The corporation can shut off the service for any reason at all; even without providing a reason.
It isn't meaningful to talk about legal terms like "conviction" and "trial" here. Nobody was convicted of any crime. The ISP simply shut off their service.
If anyone is going to successfully build a privately funded space plane, it's Dick Rutan.
He continously accomplishes amazing things in the aerospace world... and without government megabuck$. The first non-stop around the world flight is just one of them.
Maybe what's really going on here is that the big government space agencies are fighting to protect their privileges to control access to space. If a private individual can buy their way into orbit, NASA loses its monopoly power. The whole politics- and privilege-based astronaut system starts to crumble. NASA is blind to the potential of space tourism; they're just looking to preserve their budget and the status quo.
What is so dangerous or difficult about being present on the ISS? Is NASA worried that Tito will open the airlock or get sucked into the toilet? Maybe they should consider designing a space station which doesn't require months of training to visit.