It wasn't cheap for Columbus to find a path to the Indies or for the mission to be successful at all. But yet it was done. And even in his failure to find the East; Columbus paved the way for future generations.
The discovery of the new world turned a net profit within less time than the current 'space age' has already existed. Manned space exploration is a crushing disappointment in comparison (unless you were one of those genocided native americans.)
The problem now is if we do not see immediate gains then the project should be scrapped.
I could not disagree more. In reality, it's just about impossible to make plans in science or technology more than about five years into the future -- things change too quickly and your plans become irrelevant. Projects that last longer than that develop institutional inertia; their purpose becomes their own preservation.
NASA is stuck in an obsolete vision of the future. Their problems all have the root cause of trying to make real a fantasy that no longer connects to reality.
What exactly don't you like about the shuttle? Why is it a piece of shit? Is there something wrong with it? Is it not meeting our needs?
The shuttle has utterly failed to achieve its primary raison d'etre: to lower the cost of launching material into orbit. It is extremely expensive, takes far too long to turn around, and constrains payloads unnecessarily.
The better thing for NASA to have done in the 1980s was admit that the shuttle was a terminally screwed up idea and ask for funds for a replacement. But they didn't -- NASA (and its shills and dupes) is incapable of admitting its star vehicle is a lemon. Instead, they had the idea of a make-work project to give their mistake something to do. The chickens have come home to roost on this bit of dishonesty.
The science being done on the station is almost universally viewed as boring and not with the money compared to research done on the ground. Scientific societies in the US have always been at best lukewarm in support of the station; at best they've said that if the station is built, science should be done on it.
The sad truth is that scientific research on the station has always been a fig leaf, a rationalization for building it, not a real justification. None of the scientific questions addressed on the station are of fundamental importance. Indeed, they are so unimportant that they do not justify spending a few billion dollars more to bring the station up to full capacity.
The space station is an enormously expensive boondoggle. The country would be best served by abandoning it immediately, rather than wasting additional billions of dollars for no useful purpose. The station's only real achievement will have been to make the space shuttle look, in comparison, like a model of proper policy.
Now really, don't you think that it would be more sensible to conduct the main launch for the Mars Mission from a space station such as the ISS?
Not from ISS -- it's in the wrong orbit for assembling things to go to Mars. You really want a lower inclination orbit to reduce the launch cost. And it's not really clear what you buy having a space station for that in any case.
The peak radiation danger takes into account the fraction that is projected to escape the repository. OF COURSE this is after the 10000 years -- none is projected to escape before then!
The absolute quantity of radioactivity inside the repository is continuously declining with time; it doesn't increase to a peak at 400,000 years.
The waste doesn't have to be contained until it is presents zero hazard (after all, the U238 in the spent fuel has a halflife of more than 4 BILLION years), it just has to be contained until it has decayed 'enough'. The 10,000 year figure was determined to yield an acceptably low integrated population exposure.
One thing I've found invaluable is to compile your program with a translator that inserts code to detect when branches have been followed. Then run the test suite and see that all the code was executed. Any code that was not executed has not been tested.
It's amazing how poor coverage can be with a naively written set of tests. Ideally you want to write the tests so that the coverage comes out good, but in practice you may have to patch the tests with more tests to cover the parts you missed. You may also have to change the code to make it easier to cover.
Rare error cases (like malloc failures) can be hard to cover.
You are talking about the Thor Power Tools case, which made books in a warehouse subject to inventory taxes.
I've been told that publishers found easy workarounds for this, though. It only applies to completed products, not incomplete assemblies. So one thing they did was store covers and pages separately, and do the final binding only as demand requires.
Energy is not cheap on the moon. Energy conversion requires equipment, and equipment is very expensive to get to (or build) on the moon. If we need to build a 100 MW powerplant on the moon to produce enough 3He to supply a 1 GW powerplant on Earth, the economics will be completely impractical.
Becayse that's where all the customers are located. 'Making space exploration easier' can't be the primary reason for doing it -- you need something that returns tangible value to justify the initial investment.
Actually, no. You'd have to invest a significant fraction (5-10%) of the ultimate impact energy of the rock just to get it off the moon. The machinery to do this for rocks equivalent even to small nukes would be very expensive.
It's a whole lot cheaper just to use nuclear weapons. The bang-per-buck of a thermonuclear warhead is really hard to beat.
Re:It was done with 1960s technology once...
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Fool. The space program wasn't intended to turn a profit.
However, saving money was the primary justification for building the Shuttle. The best thing you can say about the shuttle is that it's not as big a disaster as the ISS.
Think of all the innovations and other benefits from the space program over the years...
Plenty from the unmanned program. From the manned program, not as many (although lots of false claims are made like integrated circuits, Tang, Teflon, Velcro, etc.) From the Shuttle...? Close to nothing.
Actually, it is difficult to toss big rocks from the moon. Heinlein's scheme required impractically powerful electromagnetic accelerators (and cheated because the waste heat from said accelerators and their power supplies would have been impossible to hide; in the story the Earth forces would have quickly found and nuked them.)
The schemes for launching lunar materials into space for space manufacturing have typically used very small payloads (say, a kilogram of regolith) launched at very high rep rate. This keeps the peak power down to something reasonable. Remember, the mass (and cost) the power handling electronics scales with peak power.
However, helium 3 occurs at the stunning concentration of ~10 ppb in the lunar regolith. Getting it out is nontrivial. You need to heat the regolith by several hundred degrees C, and you need to efficiently recycle the heat. Even so, a substantial fraction of the potential fusion energy content of the 3He needs to be produced on the moon. This will not be cheap.
I've never seen a study done on the economics of asteroid mining, but there's a couple of things to remember. They're further out, which means lots more fuel, and they have negligable gravity, which makes working them harder.
This is wrong. The difficulty of getting somewhere in space comes from the needed velocity change (delta-V), not the distance. One needs a large delta-V to land on the moon, and another large delta-V to get back off the moon and onto a trajectory reaching earth.
Some earth-crossing asteroids are actually easier to get to than the moon, and much easier to return material from. The delta-V to get to an earth-intersecting trajectory can be as low as 100 meters/second.
And you wouldn't return a whole asteroid to earth orbit -- you'd extract the platinum/etc. at the asteroid and only return it (or a concentrate containing a much enhanced concentration of the platinum group elements).
Halon does not work by sucking out the oxygen. It works by neutralizing the free radicals that propagate the chemical chain reaction in a flame. I believe carbon tet would have the same effect.
BTW, if you have any of these around, get them disposed of properly. Carbon tet production is banned due to its high ozone depletion potential.
The notion that the semiconductor industry owes its existence to NASA is a gross exaggeration. Integrated circuits were not invented by NASA, nor were they first used by NASA. At best, NASA during one period in the 1960s bought a significant fraction of the (then tiny) production, helping to support the industry. But those days are long gone. Today, the flow is almost entirely 'spin ons' from industry back to NASA.
Of course they sell faster : with 5 games to choose from instead of 200, every x-box owner will buy every game. There just aren't many owners, so the total sell remains small.
In fact, they are selling an average of less than two games per machine.
And If people are buying the X-box just to play Halo, why isn't it the killer app you're talking about?
Microsoft needs to have consumers buy an average of 8 to 9 games per Xbox in order to make up the hardware subsidy. Or -- it needs the consumers to pay for an online game subscription (but that isn't available yet).
Someone who buys an Xbox just to play a single non-online game is a net loss to Microsoft.
The japanese amidoxime adsorbent technology is likely to make uranium from seawater available at a price that would be affordable in advanced thermal reactors.
The oceans contain 4 billion tons of dissolved uranium.
Slashdot Mirror
The discovery of the new world turned a net profit within less time than the current 'space age' has already existed. Manned space exploration is a crushing disappointment in comparison (unless you were one of those genocided native americans.)
I could not disagree more. In reality, it's just about impossible to make plans in science or technology more than about five years into the future -- things change too quickly and your plans become irrelevant.
Projects that last longer than that develop institutional inertia; their purpose becomes their own preservation.
NASA is stuck in an obsolete vision of the future. Their problems all have the root cause of trying to make real a fantasy that no longer connects to reality.
The shuttle has utterly failed to achieve its primary raison d'etre: to lower the cost of launching material into orbit. It is extremely expensive, takes far too long to turn around, and constrains payloads unnecessarily.
The better thing for NASA to have done in the 1980s was admit that the shuttle was a terminally screwed up idea and ask for funds for a replacement. But they didn't -- NASA (and its shills and dupes) is incapable of admitting its star vehicle is a lemon. Instead, they had the idea of a make-work project to give their mistake something to do. The chickens have come home to roost on this bit of dishonesty.
The science being done on the station is almost universally viewed as boring and not with the money compared to research done on the ground. Scientific societies in the US have always been at best lukewarm in support of the station; at best they've said that if the station is built, science should be done on it.
The sad truth is that scientific research on the station has always been a fig leaf, a rationalization for building it, not a real justification. None of the scientific questions addressed on the station are of fundamental importance. Indeed, they are so unimportant that they do not justify spending a few billion dollars more to bring the station up to full capacity.
The space station is an enormously expensive boondoggle. The country would be best served by abandoning it immediately, rather than wasting additional billions of dollars for no useful purpose. The station's only real achievement will have been to make the space shuttle look, in comparison, like a model of proper policy.
Not from ISS -- it's in the wrong orbit for assembling things to go to Mars. You really want a lower inclination orbit to reduce the launch cost. And it's not really clear what you buy having a space station for that in any case.
The peak radiation danger takes into account the fraction that is projected to escape the repository. OF COURSE this is after the 10000 years -- none is projected to escape before then!
The absolute quantity of radioactivity inside the repository is continuously declining with time; it doesn't increase to a peak at 400,000 years.
The waste doesn't have to be contained until it is presents zero hazard (after all, the U238 in the spent fuel has a halflife of more than 4 BILLION years), it just has to be contained until it has decayed 'enough'. The 10,000 year figure was determined to yield an acceptably low integrated population exposure.
One thing I've found invaluable is to compile your program with a translator that inserts code to detect when branches have been followed. Then run the test suite and see that all the code was executed. Any code that was not executed has not been tested.
It's amazing how poor coverage can be with a naively written set of tests. Ideally you want to write the tests so that the coverage comes out good, but in practice you may have to patch the tests with more tests to cover the parts you missed. You may also have to change the code to make it easier to cover.
Rare error cases (like malloc failures) can be hard to cover.
You are talking about the Thor Power Tools case, which made books in a warehouse subject to inventory taxes.
I've been told that publishers found easy workarounds for this, though. It only applies to completed products, not incomplete assemblies. So one thing they did was store covers and pages separately, and do the final binding only as demand requires.
Energy is not cheap on the moon. Energy conversion requires equipment, and equipment is very expensive to get to (or build) on the moon. If we need to build a 100 MW powerplant on the moon to produce enough 3He to supply a 1 GW powerplant on Earth, the economics will be completely impractical.
Why drop it down a gravity well at all?
Becayse that's where all the customers are located. 'Making space exploration easier' can't be the primary reason for doing it -- you need something that returns tangible value to justify the initial investment.
Actually, no. You'd have to invest a significant fraction (5-10%) of the ultimate impact energy of the rock just to get it off the moon. The machinery to do this for rocks equivalent even to small nukes would be very expensive.
It's a whole lot cheaper just to use nuclear weapons. The bang-per-buck of a thermonuclear warhead is really hard to beat.
Actually, it is difficult to toss big rocks from the moon. Heinlein's scheme required impractically powerful electromagnetic accelerators (and cheated because the waste heat from said accelerators and their power supplies would have been impossible to hide; in the story the Earth forces would have quickly found and nuked them.)
The schemes for launching lunar materials into space for space manufacturing have typically used very small payloads (say, a kilogram of regolith) launched at very high rep rate. This keeps the peak power down to something reasonable. Remember, the mass (and cost) the power handling electronics scales with peak power.
However, helium 3 occurs at the stunning concentration of ~10 ppb in the lunar regolith. Getting it out is nontrivial. You need to heat the regolith by several hundred degrees C, and you need to efficiently recycle the heat. Even so, a substantial fraction of the potential fusion energy content of the 3He needs to be produced on the moon. This will not be cheap.
This is wrong. The difficulty of getting somewhere in space comes from the needed velocity change (delta-V), not the distance. One needs a large delta-V to land on the moon, and another large delta-V to get back off the moon and onto a trajectory reaching earth.
Some earth-crossing asteroids are actually easier to get to than the moon, and much easier to return material from. The delta-V to get to an earth-intersecting trajectory can be as low as 100 meters/second.
And you wouldn't return a whole asteroid to earth orbit -- you'd extract the platinum/etc. at the asteroid and only return it (or a concentrate containing a much enhanced concentration of the platinum group elements).
Halon does not work by sucking out the oxygen. It works by neutralizing the free radicals that propagate the chemical chain reaction in a flame. I believe carbon tet would have the same effect.
BTW, if you have any of these around, get them disposed of properly. Carbon tet production is banned due to its high ozone depletion potential.
No, we do not owe velcro, teflon, nylon, OR Tang to NASA. Not a one of them was invented for the space program.
Teflon was invented in the 1930s also.
Think 'urban legends'.
Low gravity manufacturing has been a complete bust.
And Tang was not a spinoff of the space program. Tang marketing was.
The notion that the semiconductor industry owes its existence to NASA is a gross exaggeration. Integrated circuits were not invented by NASA, nor were they first used by NASA. At best, NASA during one period in the 1960s bought a significant fraction of the (then tiny) production, helping to support the industry. But those days are long gone. Today, the flow is almost entirely 'spin ons' from industry back to NASA.
Of course they sell faster : with 5 games to choose from instead of 200, every x-box owner will buy every game. There just aren't many owners, so the total sell remains small.
In fact, they are selling an average of less than two games per machine.
And If people are buying the X-box just to play Halo, why isn't it the killer app you're talking about?
Microsoft needs to have consumers buy an average of 8 to 9 games per Xbox in order to make up the hardware subsidy. Or -- it needs the consumers to pay for an online game subscription (but that isn't available yet).
Someone who buys an Xbox just to play a single non-online game is a net loss to Microsoft.
The laser input energy per neutron is so high as to make this grossly impractical.
The japanese amidoxime adsorbent technology is likely to make uranium from seawater available at a price that would be affordable in advanced thermal reactors.
The oceans contain 4 billion tons of dissolved uranium.
Clarke's law is obviously nonsense though, since most things are impossible.