No chance of the UN getting a program like this off the ground. And if they did they'd need several billion dollars to fund it.
The ICAO already manages the global manned aircraft registry, with appropriate standardization and requirements for national regulators, it works quite well.
The IMO manages a standardized way of dealing with ship registrations, globally. There's also a global registry of MMSI data as part of the SOLAS treaty, which I think is also administered through the IMO.
Might as well register all guns, vehicles, and computers with a central, global agency.
I'm not going to touch your comments about firearms or computers, but in terms of vehicles, there are a number of registries that already exist and work reasonably effectively.
The most obvious one, in this case, is aircraft registration. All civil, manned aircraft (not quite sure about ultralights etc...) all have a nationally assigned registration. The registration number must be shown in a prominent location on the aircraft, and can be used by pretty much anyone to look up the ownership of the aircraft.
Another example is in the maritime world. Nearly all vessels beyond a canoe or row boat now carry a VHF radio with DSC capabilities. This includes an MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identifier) which is a globally unique registration number for that vessel/owner. The various national authorities collect that data, and maintain it, and then upload it into the global systems. No matter where a person goes in the world, if they punch the distress button, the responsible rescue center is able to retrieve vessel information, contact information, and other bits that are useful as part of a rescue situation. In the commercial world, every commercial vessel is assigned an IMO number that stays with a ship from when it comes off the ways until it ends its service at a ship breaker. With it, you can retrieve the full history of that ship... Names, flags, ownership.
So, does registering your 2lb drone that can carry an itty bitty camera, make sense? no, it doesn't. But does a standardized way of handling registration for larger autonomous aircraft (Amazon's drones, etc...) make sense? I think so. The trick is finding an appropriate threshold.
I could be wrong, but isn't the large majority of the SR-71 fuel and engines? I don't think the recon pod takes up all that much room because there isn't all that much room to begin with.
Yes, but it was flying a lot closer to the ground than the X-37B is orbiting. Yes, the SR-71 is one of the highest flying air-breathing aircraft ever built, but its service ceiling is only 85,000 feet. The karman line is defined as 100km, so roughly 330,000 feet, roughly 4 times that distance, and being that low isn't a very stable orbit at all (certainly not suitable for something staying up for 6+ months).
Why is this important? Well, the further away you are, the higher the angular resolution you need to see the same level of detail. The optics of your observation platform is limited by a) atmospheric distortion and b) the diffraction limit of your camera. Basically, to see the same level of detail from orbit, you would need a (much) larger optical system than you need when at 85,000'.
The Hubble telescope was built with lens polishing techniques that the NRO taught NASA from its experience with spy satellites.
Well, not to nitpick too much, but Hubble's mirror (not lens), was manufactured by Perkins-Elmer, the same company that produces the mirrors for the NRO. Other than the fact that the figure on the mirror was incorrect, and that the test plans/QA process failed to detect this, going with PE was a sensible choice. They had significant experience building space qualified, lightweight, large diameter parabolic mirrors.
The real reason why things stopped after Apollo 17 is that it was pretty much a big political dick waving exercise, to prove that the US was better than the Soviet Union. It was enormously expensive, had less support at home than most people remember, and once the race was won, people really did question why should it continue? That said, once humans set foot on the moon, it meant (really good) science got done, but don't kid yourself. Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon due to world politics, not scientific curiosity.
Their mission may be officially secret, but I'm pretty convinced that they are actually a replacement for the SR-71.
It's not big enough to carry the cameras/optical systems needed for a mission like that, nor the power systems to power it. Also, the NRO is responsible for the intelligence birds, so your theory is pretty unlikely. A more likely scenario is that the system is used to test various technologies in orbit for future Airforce missions (say updated Bhangmeters, atomic clock designs for GPS, guidance systems, etc... ) and then return them to earth so they can be torn down and examined.
There's no such thing as a secret orbit, national actors will have the orbit nailed down within hours, amateur observers within a week or two.
You look for the unknown warm thing against the coldness of space, and measure its movement against background stars. Not exactly easy, but also not ridiculously hard either.
The reason why the orbit is secret, and there was no coverage of Stage 2, is that it's simply easier to just classify the whole thing, and have a clean breakpoint, than to pick and choose what parts of a mission are or are not classified.
Not if launched from Florida. Achieving polar orbit from KSC would require overflight of land, which isn't permitted. Polar orbit is why Vandenberg exists.
Well, not to be too snarky, but the push/pull signs are a sure sign of poor affordances on a door. Good affordances mean that you can look at it, and pretty instantly have an idea how it works.
The classic door example of good affordances is a horizontal push bar on the push side, and a vertical handle on the pull side. The vertical pull immediately shows you which side of the door to pull on, and if you have a larger, flat section on your push bar, that also tells you which side to push on. If you need to put in a sign, it means there's already something wrong with your design. If people get it wrong, that means it's a bad design.
A beautiful example of what not to do is the exterior doors on the new Salish Class ferries operated in British Columbia. If you want to go out on the outside decks, you need to press two separate buttons, one for each layer of door. God help you if you touch the slow moving door, or move into its sweep area, as the safety systems kick in and it stops moving. Just awful design.
I once had a fight with a UI designer telling him his 11-point/9-point font simply would not work on a mobile device, and he needed to bump it up to 17-point/14-point, minimum.
That's a failure of the rendering system then... since the origin of the computer revolution, a point has been 1/72nd of an inch, so 11 points should be the same size no matter whether it's on a 100dpi computer monitor, or a 300dpi phone screen. When you have higher resolution, it just renders the font more smoothly. Of course, I understand that in the real world it doesn't work that way, unfortunately...
Yes, but if you get rid of the people, that capital equipment is worth a whole lot less because you got rid of the knowledge and skills to work with it, and likely sent a lot of that expertise to potential competitors.
And this is how we wind up with society as it is today. IMNSHO, it's important for people to be informed about things, and events, even if they are outside their interests or something they disagree with. If you just listen to content that you want to listen to, you're going to miss the larger picture. There is more to the world than what we are interested in personally, and it's valuable to know at least something about it.
Religion has nothing a priori to do with ethics. Religion is like a virus that associates itself with the evolved ethical faculties in neurotypical humans in order to get reproduced. FWIW, the atheists and agnostics that I know tend to be at least as ethically advanced (in my opinion) than the typical god believer and often much more so.
I guess I wasn't clear enough in what I said. I wasn't trying to imply that ethics flow or derive from religion, or that religion is required to be an ethical person. Rather that for me personally, it's where the two realms intersect. My faith has no bearing, for example, on whether I accept veracity of the big bang theory, or evolution, or any other of these truths that we as a species have discovered. But it does affect what I choose to pursue with my talents and skills.
Some may bitch about it being a "progressive echo chamber" or whatever, but I've rarely heard something poorly researched, not not supported by appropriate evidence.
For me, the importance of radio is current affairs and news. But then, I might be an old fogey at this point, as my car's radio is pretty much stuck on CBC Radio One (I'm Canadian), or one of the local NPR affiliates when I'm south of the border.
Much of this is to reduce the load on the Astronauts and Cosmonauts on board the ISS. Mission controllers are constantly watching power systems, cooling systems, data systems, the various experiments, and so forth, so that the humans on board can spend as much time as possible on things that can't be done from the ground.
The commands likely range from requesting appropriate sensor data, to tweaking the cooling system, to starting and stopping experiments.
The ISS is an incredibly complex machine, in an extremely hostile environment. It's also a hugely expensive research outpost, with a limited crew. Experiments are booked years in advance, and are tightly scheduled. It's the job of the people on the ground to make sure they happen.
Actually, that portion of the job is, I believe, primarily done by the Russians. The primary propulsion on the ISS comes from visiting Progress supply ships, which are Russian. Every progress mission boosts the ISS orbit. Zvezda also has its own set of engines, but I believe those have only been used once since it docked with Zarya. Prior to the retirement of the Shuttle, it was also used to boost the orbit.
Yes. When conducting spacewalks out of the Russian segment of the station, mission control in Moscow is the prime. Additionally, primary life support and other functions are based out of the Russian Zvezda module.
When you're in transit, you generally don't have access to all the information you would otherwise, nor do you have access to the same communications networks and facilities. Yes, I've pulled off feats of networking from my phone while on my boat, but that doesn't change the fact that if you have an expert in transit, in bad conditions, things can go pear shaped very easily.
That's always what I fall back two when people compare science to a religion: religion relies on faith - sticking to your beliefs no matter the evidence presented. Science will readily toss out everything they know and start over if something is proven to be wrong.
That's a pretty narrow definition of religion. For a significant, but less vocal part of religious folk, faith and science are more or less orthogonal. Scientific exploration and explanation doesn't eliminate faith, and religion doesn't deny science.
For me, the main intersection between Faith and Science is in the realm of ethics. It's not whether a certain piece of research is good or bad, but whether does it help to achieve what we're commanded to do... Help the poor, feed the hungry, be good stewards of creation.
The main issue with moving the operation is maintaining continuity, and training. Someone can't just drop into the job and become a flight controller, and we don't have Star Trek transporters. So lets say they establish a backup control center in, say, South Dakota. When switching to that backup, you need to be absolutely sure that it's going to work, and you have to move your team lock stock and barrel there to be ready for a seamless cutover.
Unfortunately I can't remember the exact mission, but I think it was during project Gemini. At that time, the Engineers who worked on the spacecraft would be at Florida for the launch, then would travel to Houston for the rest of the mission. An incident happened during the flight, and there was no way to contact the person who knew the information because he was in transit. After that incident, they made sure everyone was at Houston for the entire duration of the flight.
The reality with these kinds of missions is they often do depend on specific people, and what is contained between their ears. Everything is documented to the hilt, but it's hard to replace the knowledge, instant recall, and the knowledge of quirks and systems that isn't exactly documented fully. Moving the people around is risky.
Most of the communications with the ISS are done through the TDRSS system, which is up in geosynchronous orbit. That is what gives MCC near continuous communications capabilities to the ISS, no matter where it is in orbit. To make that work, there are a set of ground stations at various points around the globe that have dishes aimed at the (stationary) TDRSS birds. These are then networked back to MCC in Houston.
There is a backup, the russion control centre near Moscow. However, given the construction of the building in Houston, its buttressing against flooding, and the overall situation, camping out in that building was likely the safest place for the controllers to be during the storm and its aftermath.
To me, it's a testament to the design and quality that they were able to maintain connectivity throughout the situation. From that room they are reaching out globally, and were able to do so.
The main backup is likely to be the Russian control room at RKK Energia. I don't recall whether it has access to the TDRSS system that provides continuous coverage to the ISS, but they can certainly communicate and manage the station from there.
And this is why the last mile infrastructure should be a public utility. The PUD, or similar local authority, owns, installs, and maintains the last mile infrastructure. The residents then have the choice of picking any number of ISPs, Television providers, and phone providers that then run over that infrastructure.
I've done a fair bit of work in both Douglas and Chelan counties. In both counties, their PUD provides FTTP to virtually every residential and business address in the county. The residents then have a choice of half a dozen ISPs, and a similar number of TV and phone providers. I don't recall what the cost is, but I think something along the lines of $10/mo of the fee goes to the PUD to maintain that infrastructure. And before people go on about that being a socialist evil or whatever, this is in two of the most right-wing counties in the state. Yet, it works... it's reliable, cheap, and offers the most choice to the residents.
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No chance of the UN getting a program like this off the ground. And if they did they'd need several billion dollars to fund it.
The ICAO already manages the global manned aircraft registry, with appropriate standardization and requirements for national regulators, it works quite well.
The IMO manages a standardized way of dealing with ship registrations, globally. There's also a global registry of MMSI data as part of the SOLAS treaty, which I think is also administered through the IMO.
Might as well register all guns, vehicles, and computers with a central, global agency.
I'm not going to touch your comments about firearms or computers, but in terms of vehicles, there are a number of registries that already exist and work reasonably effectively.
The most obvious one, in this case, is aircraft registration. All civil, manned aircraft (not quite sure about ultralights etc...) all have a nationally assigned registration. The registration number must be shown in a prominent location on the aircraft, and can be used by pretty much anyone to look up the ownership of the aircraft.
Another example is in the maritime world. Nearly all vessels beyond a canoe or row boat now carry a VHF radio with DSC capabilities. This includes an MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identifier) which is a globally unique registration number for that vessel/owner. The various national authorities collect that data, and maintain it, and then upload it into the global systems. No matter where a person goes in the world, if they punch the distress button, the responsible rescue center is able to retrieve vessel information, contact information, and other bits that are useful as part of a rescue situation. In the commercial world, every commercial vessel is assigned an IMO number that stays with a ship from when it comes off the ways until it ends its service at a ship breaker. With it, you can retrieve the full history of that ship... Names, flags, ownership.
So, does registering your 2lb drone that can carry an itty bitty camera, make sense? no, it doesn't. But does a standardized way of handling registration for larger autonomous aircraft (Amazon's drones, etc...) make sense? I think so. The trick is finding an appropriate threshold.
I could be wrong, but isn't the large majority of the SR-71 fuel and engines? I don't think the recon pod takes up all that much room because there isn't all that much room to begin with.
Yes, but it was flying a lot closer to the ground than the X-37B is orbiting. Yes, the SR-71 is one of the highest flying air-breathing aircraft ever built, but its service ceiling is only 85,000 feet. The karman line is defined as 100km, so roughly 330,000 feet, roughly 4 times that distance, and being that low isn't a very stable orbit at all (certainly not suitable for something staying up for 6+ months).
Why is this important? Well, the further away you are, the higher the angular resolution you need to see the same level of detail. The optics of your observation platform is limited by a) atmospheric distortion and b) the diffraction limit of your camera. Basically, to see the same level of detail from orbit, you would need a (much) larger optical system than you need when at 85,000'.
The Hubble telescope was built with lens polishing techniques that the NRO taught NASA from its experience with spy satellites.
Well, not to nitpick too much, but Hubble's mirror (not lens), was manufactured by Perkins-Elmer, the same company that produces the mirrors for the NRO. Other than the fact that the figure on the mirror was incorrect, and that the test plans/QA process failed to detect this, going with PE was a sensible choice. They had significant experience building space qualified, lightweight, large diameter parabolic mirrors.
The real reason why things stopped after Apollo 17 is that it was pretty much a big political dick waving exercise, to prove that the US was better than the Soviet Union. It was enormously expensive, had less support at home than most people remember, and once the race was won, people really did question why should it continue? That said, once humans set foot on the moon, it meant (really good) science got done, but don't kid yourself. Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon due to world politics, not scientific curiosity.
Their mission may be officially secret, but I'm pretty convinced that they are actually a replacement for the SR-71.
It's not big enough to carry the cameras/optical systems needed for a mission like that, nor the power systems to power it. Also, the NRO is responsible for the intelligence birds, so your theory is pretty unlikely. A more likely scenario is that the system is used to test various technologies in orbit for future Airforce missions (say updated Bhangmeters, atomic clock designs for GPS, guidance systems, etc... ) and then return them to earth so they can be torn down and examined.
There's no such thing as a secret orbit, national actors will have the orbit nailed down within hours, amateur observers within a week or two.
You look for the unknown warm thing against the coldness of space, and measure its movement against background stars. Not exactly easy, but also not ridiculously hard either.
The reason why the orbit is secret, and there was no coverage of Stage 2, is that it's simply easier to just classify the whole thing, and have a clean breakpoint, than to pick and choose what parts of a mission are or are not classified.
Not if launched from Florida. Achieving polar orbit from KSC would require overflight of land, which isn't permitted. Polar orbit is why Vandenberg exists.
Well, not to be too snarky, but the push/pull signs are a sure sign of poor affordances on a door. Good affordances mean that you can look at it, and pretty instantly have an idea how it works.
The classic door example of good affordances is a horizontal push bar on the push side, and a vertical handle on the pull side. The vertical pull immediately shows you which side of the door to pull on, and if you have a larger, flat section on your push bar, that also tells you which side to push on. If you need to put in a sign, it means there's already something wrong with your design. If people get it wrong, that means it's a bad design.
A beautiful example of what not to do is the exterior doors on the new Salish Class ferries operated in British Columbia. If you want to go out on the outside decks, you need to press two separate buttons, one for each layer of door. God help you if you touch the slow moving door, or move into its sweep area, as the safety systems kick in and it stops moving. Just awful design.
I once had a fight with a UI designer telling him his 11-point/9-point font simply would not work on a mobile device, and he needed to bump it up to 17-point/14-point, minimum.
That's a failure of the rendering system then... since the origin of the computer revolution, a point has been 1/72nd of an inch, so 11 points should be the same size no matter whether it's on a 100dpi computer monitor, or a 300dpi phone screen. When you have higher resolution, it just renders the font more smoothly. Of course, I understand that in the real world it doesn't work that way, unfortunately...
Yes, but if you get rid of the people, that capital equipment is worth a whole lot less because you got rid of the knowledge and skills to work with it, and likely sent a lot of that expertise to potential competitors.
And this is how we wind up with society as it is today. IMNSHO, it's important for people to be informed about things, and events, even if they are outside their interests or something they disagree with. If you just listen to content that you want to listen to, you're going to miss the larger picture. There is more to the world than what we are interested in personally, and it's valuable to know at least something about it.
Last I checked, radio 3 doesn't have any on-air transmitters. Due to the shitty mobile data plans in Canada, I'm not about to stream it while driving.
Religion has nothing a priori to do with ethics. Religion is like a virus that associates itself with the evolved ethical faculties in neurotypical humans in order to get reproduced. FWIW, the atheists and agnostics that I know tend to be at least as ethically advanced (in my opinion) than the typical god believer and often much more so.
I guess I wasn't clear enough in what I said. I wasn't trying to imply that ethics flow or derive from religion, or that religion is required to be an ethical person. Rather that for me personally, it's where the two realms intersect. My faith has no bearing, for example, on whether I accept veracity of the big bang theory, or evolution, or any other of these truths that we as a species have discovered. But it does affect what I choose to pursue with my talents and skills.
Hear, hear.
Some may bitch about it being a "progressive echo chamber" or whatever, but I've rarely heard something poorly researched, not not supported by appropriate evidence.
For me, the importance of radio is current affairs and news. But then, I might be an old fogey at this point, as my car's radio is pretty much stuck on CBC Radio One (I'm Canadian), or one of the local NPR affiliates when I'm south of the border.
Much of this is to reduce the load on the Astronauts and Cosmonauts on board the ISS. Mission controllers are constantly watching power systems, cooling systems, data systems, the various experiments, and so forth, so that the humans on board can spend as much time as possible on things that can't be done from the ground.
The commands likely range from requesting appropriate sensor data, to tweaking the cooling system, to starting and stopping experiments.
The ISS is an incredibly complex machine, in an extremely hostile environment. It's also a hugely expensive research outpost, with a limited crew. Experiments are booked years in advance, and are tightly scheduled. It's the job of the people on the ground to make sure they happen.
Actually, that portion of the job is, I believe, primarily done by the Russians. The primary propulsion on the ISS comes from visiting Progress supply ships, which are Russian. Every progress mission boosts the ISS orbit. Zvezda also has its own set of engines, but I believe those have only been used once since it docked with Zarya. Prior to the retirement of the Shuttle, it was also used to boost the orbit.
Yes. When conducting spacewalks out of the Russian segment of the station, mission control in Moscow is the prime. Additionally, primary life support and other functions are based out of the Russian Zvezda module.
When you're in transit, you generally don't have access to all the information you would otherwise, nor do you have access to the same communications networks and facilities. Yes, I've pulled off feats of networking from my phone while on my boat, but that doesn't change the fact that if you have an expert in transit, in bad conditions, things can go pear shaped very easily.
That's always what I fall back two when people compare science to a religion: religion relies on faith - sticking to your beliefs no matter the evidence presented. Science will readily toss out everything they know and start over if something is proven to be wrong.
That's a pretty narrow definition of religion. For a significant, but less vocal part of religious folk, faith and science are more or less orthogonal. Scientific exploration and explanation doesn't eliminate faith, and religion doesn't deny science.
For me, the main intersection between Faith and Science is in the realm of ethics. It's not whether a certain piece of research is good or bad, but whether does it help to achieve what we're commanded to do... Help the poor, feed the hungry, be good stewards of creation.
The main issue with moving the operation is maintaining continuity, and training. Someone can't just drop into the job and become a flight controller, and we don't have Star Trek transporters. So lets say they establish a backup control center in, say, South Dakota. When switching to that backup, you need to be absolutely sure that it's going to work, and you have to move your team lock stock and barrel there to be ready for a seamless cutover.
Unfortunately I can't remember the exact mission, but I think it was during project Gemini. At that time, the Engineers who worked on the spacecraft would be at Florida for the launch, then would travel to Houston for the rest of the mission. An incident happened during the flight, and there was no way to contact the person who knew the information because he was in transit. After that incident, they made sure everyone was at Houston for the entire duration of the flight.
The reality with these kinds of missions is they often do depend on specific people, and what is contained between their ears. Everything is documented to the hilt, but it's hard to replace the knowledge, instant recall, and the knowledge of quirks and systems that isn't exactly documented fully. Moving the people around is risky.
Most of the communications with the ISS are done through the TDRSS system, which is up in geosynchronous orbit. That is what gives MCC near continuous communications capabilities to the ISS, no matter where it is in orbit. To make that work, there are a set of ground stations at various points around the globe that have dishes aimed at the (stationary) TDRSS birds. These are then networked back to MCC in Houston.
There is a backup, the russion control centre near Moscow. However, given the construction of the building in Houston, its buttressing against flooding, and the overall situation, camping out in that building was likely the safest place for the controllers to be during the storm and its aftermath.
To me, it's a testament to the design and quality that they were able to maintain connectivity throughout the situation. From that room they are reaching out globally, and were able to do so.
The main backup is likely to be the Russian control room at RKK Energia. I don't recall whether it has access to the TDRSS system that provides continuous coverage to the ISS, but they can certainly communicate and manage the station from there.
And this is why the last mile infrastructure should be a public utility. The PUD, or similar local authority, owns, installs, and maintains the last mile infrastructure. The residents then have the choice of picking any number of ISPs, Television providers, and phone providers that then run over that infrastructure.
I've done a fair bit of work in both Douglas and Chelan counties. In both counties, their PUD provides FTTP to virtually every residential and business address in the county. The residents then have a choice of half a dozen ISPs, and a similar number of TV and phone providers. I don't recall what the cost is, but I think something along the lines of $10/mo of the fee goes to the PUD to maintain that infrastructure. And before people go on about that being a socialist evil or whatever, this is in two of the most right-wing counties in the state. Yet, it works... it's reliable, cheap, and offers the most choice to the residents.