I would argue that code is expressive because it is the result of scientific research and creativity which cannot be adequately expressed in alternative fashon. While the Department of Defense has at times been given the authority to surpress research for the sake of 'national security', that right is not customarily granted in other contexts, except perhaps in extremely specific cases. The validity of the study of encryption and decryption as a scientific enterprise is very clear; they have journals devoted to them, professorships granted, all that.
Indeed- it is perhaps worth noing that any artist (or for that matter any movie producer, in the context of a review) would be horrified by an inferior-quality version of his work being reviewed or presented in the context of a review! Many a painter, for instance, has been more than a little frustrated by the quality of reporductions in a newspaper or magazine review; and in the context of academic study, universities go to significant expense (screening rooms, astoundingly priced art textbooks, whatever) to present the highest-quality versions they possibly can.
I certainly don't qualify as a LISP zealot, but for anything involving work with strings (an HTML-writer would be a pretty good example), many kinds of artificial intelligence and logic, databasing, what-all- any sort of more high-level task- LISP can be extremely straightforward. Often the logic of what you are doing is made extremely transparent, which can both make maintaining it easy, and reveal possible efficiencies that might otherwise be missed.
While there are more libraries and better compilers for LISP than is commonly realized, it is relatively rarely used for anything directly touching hardware or demanding high performance. But it is very easy to tie in C or assembler code to deal with such things.
Mars probes have indeed been FBC- in fact they were the impetus. But over NASA's history the failure rate of unmanned missions HAS NOT CHANGED. See Ranger, Viking, whatever. The causes of failure have shifted, as old problems have been dealt with but missions have grown more complex. But the idea behind FBC was that if you're going to have one failure in three, you're better off doing lots of smaller missions...
Good point. Look, any IP lawyer will tell you that intellectual property isn't treated as some sort of fundamental right; it's a social construction with the purpose of encouraging creativity and innovation. If it were merely a fundamental right, it wouldn't take so many pages of laws and court cases to just try to figure out what it is.
IP is a slippery slope. For one example: Suppose (taking a large leap here, believe me) I'm Mozart, and I'm alive today. Now, presumably I have the right to listen to music. So I hear some music. For the sake of argument, it's a new piano concerto. Both the music and the performance are protected by copyright. Being Mozart, I've got the whole score to the piece figured out, in my head, instantly- unconciously, even. Well, can't prosecute me for my brain, right?
Now I go home, and for my convenience and amusement I write the thing out on paper. Well, nothing's really changed for me, right? I have the same access to it, whether it's in my head or on paper. So I should be OK. Now I duplicate the performance on my piano. I'm just playing what's in my head. Am I okay? What if I record my duplication so I can play it to myself later? I could just replay the song in my mind and have the same sensations- remember, I'm Mozart- so what has changed?
And one night I have a few friends over for coffee, and - 'You won't believe this John Cage piece I just heard' - I bang it out on my piano again. Or play that recording I made. Have I crossed over into illegally distributing music? Suppose one of my friends is Salieri, and despite not being quite my musical equal, he can go and do the same thing. Upshot is, even an ordinary brain and mouth is a pretty good recording and disseminating technology. To what extent do we become limited in what would seem our awfully natural right to use them?
Those who stand to profit big, in the short term, from copyright law try to cast it as an intrinsic right, as old as the hills. But my ownership of an idea can never be as secure as my ownership of a car. Owning an idea isn't a profound right, it's a social structure we set up for a purpose, and it must exist in harmony with both our other social structures, and our more profound rights, which to my mind certainly include limits on government scrutiny and court-mandated behavior.
Re:Borders in the Stellar Theme Park??
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Tito In Space
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Station Alpha actually *WAS* designed with science in mind, as well as being a stepping stone to future misisons... [snip] I suppose it never occurs to many that a great many of the research projects in Alpha are related to human
physiology, and how it reacts in space. Such as finding how to reduce or eliminate the loss of bone density while in space, microgravity orientation, heart and nervous system changes-
While the various things that are being studied on ISS are beyond question important, it is not clear that it is an efficient way to study them.
Argument by historical analogy is dangerous, but up to and in the Apollo era, NASA would devote major resources to an experiment in technology only if it was critical to moving forward with NASA's larger goals, or in the context of another mission. The problem with ISS is that we're spinning our wheels gathering more data on a set of questions that, while important, do not warrant stopping the manned space program in its tracks to answer. Thus a lot of other stuff is on hold.
We can test (I should attribute this point to Bob Zubrin, by the way) the effects of long-term weightlessness, for instance, in the context of a mission to Mars, as opposed to prior to that mission, since we already have enough data to confirm that it is not a showstopper for the mission. Similarly, we know that we can build life support systems well enough. Rather than spending 10 years and $60 billion running some life support experiments in orbit, we can do more work on the ground and then improve as we go while accomplishing other missions.
The argument that we will be forced to lower launch costs to use ISS effectively is true of any other, more vaulable space mission; further, it's really an argument against ISS, since NASA has essentially no current plan to lower launch costs!
'ISS is not political': the primary motivator, at least as presented to Congress, for including and then funding the Russians in the program, was political. That's not necessarily such a bad thing, but let's keep ourselves honest.
'US owned modules': this is not the basis under which the deals governing ISS were constructed. If it were, it would get awfully awkward to do anything on the station, after all.
'NASA's concern was the timescale'- not six months ago when they barred Tito from their training facilities, it wasn't. NASA has had ample opportunity to set whatever training, safety and scheduling requirements they wanted on Tito's flight. Tito would obviously have been willing to comply, and the Russians had no reason to care. They have instead remained absolutely opposed to his flight under any circumstances, from the beginning.
Russian safety attitudes: Well, they've killed rather fewer than we have. Russia's problems with Soyuz were a pretty good parallel to ours with Apollo- we were probably the stupider ones there- and their Mir troubles (which have endangered the crew exactly TWICE, that I can think of, in the course of a great many more man-hours than we've ever logged) are pretty similar to Challenger (they were probably a bit stupider there) in that both unnecessarily pushed envelopes that people thought they could get away with. The mistakes are quite well-understood. Mir's problems got some bad press in the US; they were always rather specific and limited, having to do with some bad choices by controllers, an aging air-fixing system, some ergonomic and noise level stuff, and a bunch of garbage on board from when the Progress flights started running short. It's been played up as an orbiting scrap heap because it makes a better joke.
Re:The article is misleading
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Tito In Space
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This may be misleading, but the Russians at least claim that they don't have a launch window again until 3 May or something, which would start pushing pretty close to the date the escape-Soyuz is required to be swapped- I think that's 11 May.
Re:Tourists in space- serious thoughts
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Tito In Space
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I stand corrected- I think I picked up a bit of bad info off an article somewhere, and didn't stop to think. Much obliged.
Re:It's not just memories he's buying
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Tito In Space
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On the other hand, the Russians haven't been too nice either, presenting all their partners with a fait accompli, totally
disregarding those of NASA arguments which were valid (Canadarm2 testing is not exactly the best time for a tourist visit), not
to speak of their attitude before the Service Module launch...
Well, the Russians have something of an axe to grind; NASA, caught between the fact that the Russians just don't have the money to fulfill their ISS obligations, and the refusal of Congress to keep handing out more money for the (*cough* nearly useless *cough) station, has been trying to run the whole russian space program for years, and sometimes succeeding. So they've gotten rather prickly about their independence. Classic bad diplomacy on all parts.
Tourists in space- serious thoughts
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Tito In Space
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There have been a few misguided statements here, so hey-
Astronauts, regardless of NASA's instructions, should have no need to babysit Mr. Tito. Tito was a spaceflight engineer during the salad days of the sixties before turning to business, and has undergone nine months of Russian training. It is possible, of course, that this is insufficient. But NASA's current stand appears to be that no set of qualifications to board the station, other than being a 'professional', exists- a haphazard and arrogant approach that won't serve for an international station. So three years from now, the Italians want to fly a scientist who NASA thinks is underqualified- are we back in the same debacle? Standards would be quite easy to determine.
NASA doesn't have unilateral authority to control who goes on the station. We don't have sole ownership, you see. The rather poorly defined treaty structure and the act of including a cash-strapped, aging Russian space program on the critical path to the station were probably bad ideas- but at any rate, we made the deals; they read 'do such and such, you get so many crew members for so much time.' If we wanted dictatorial control over the thing, we should have build it ourselves. Congress wasn't prepared to pay for that and various parts of the government wanted to make the station a tool of international diplomacy. That's fine- but then you don't get everything you want.
The Russians are giving up a substantial chance to do science and engineering research; the operation of the station isn't expected to be delayed despite being a crewman short, as it were, for months... Doesn't this suggest something? The one objection NASA hasn't been able to raise is that the station is being put to much waste, because the station has so little utility in the first place!
The sad truth is that the station is a debacle, a plan first drafted in the early 1980's that has gotten progressively less and less useful ever since. We've built an enormous, expensive platform to conduct rather vaguely defined research that could have been accomplished much more easily in any number of ways- because the goal, really, that NASA set themselves was to build a station, regardless of what use it was. To my mind, low-earth-orbit station building and tourist launches are essentially ready to be a commercial enterprise; but the entire space industry is tied up in a NASA-oriented mindset, and alternative ventures can't find the capital to get off the ground, as it were. NASA's role for the US isn't control-of-all-activities-in-space; it's groundbreaking research to enable the use of space by others.
One might add that space flights have been sold to civilians previously, by both NASA and the Soviets, John Glenn being only the most recent example; up until Sharon Christa McAuliffe and Challenger, it was an almost common practice. [And understand, I mean to cast no aspersions whatsoever on her memory.] It's just that they were sold for political influence or publicity or other such prices, and so could be semi-concealed.
Enough rant already. For more along these lines, visit the Space Frontier Foundation. I don't always agree with the SFF- I think they have too much faith in the virtues of capitalism- but they understand very well which businesses NASA should and shouldn't be in.
Re:Crashed computers don't use Windows
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Space Station BSOD
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For gods' sakes, someone with some karma mod this thing up./.'s reaction to this story, in the complete absence of the relevant facts, was kind of distressing- so many instant Windoze bashers popping up, the usual modding-separating-wheat-from-chaff system failed completely. The only systems aboard ISS running Windows that I am aware of are some of the laptops, which are not the sole interfaces to any critical system, and servers for some relatively minor tasks, like e-mail I believe.
I assume this choice was made for the sake of simplicity. I don't agree with running windows at all, but so far as I know they're being fairly sensible about it. Those referring to NASA decisions that 'everything would run windows', or massive M$ marketing campaigns, please provide some sort of reference if at all possible...
Side note: there are other means of communication with ground, even if Endeavor weren't parked there. They just switched to the shuttle as the simplest thing. If all else fails, amateur radio should always be usable...
Repeat of question I posed in an earlier article: Apart from simple answers like 'More testing' and 'be more careful', do any of you have suggestions for how NASA's software might be made more robust? Of late software problems have caused more trouble than hardware, which seems odd.
ObSlashdot: America-bashing aside, it is interesting (for you lot) that a great many problems in the space program can now be blamed on software, while the hardware has gotten fairly robust. Most recently before this, we have some of the Mars problems. Do slashdot readers have recommendations? Bear in mind this code is already reviewed and tested pretty thoroughly- so how can we stop mucking it up?
Well, Energia sort of is the Russian space program. They produce and own all the Russian hardware and do a lot of the ops work, and they don't do anything much else commercially; the government agency just hires the cosmonauts and tells Energia what to build and when to launch. They aren't a normal independent corporation.
Its rather ironically sad it has to be sold, and you have to wonder if Russia is that desperate for money.
Why? The Russians have launched- I don't know the exact number offhand, but a good hundred of these things- enough even for the old soviet obsession with museums. They aren't reusable. Why not sell it? At least it will go to someone who wants it- there are some old Apollo leftovers, including an unflown capsule, that are mouldering out in the rain outside obscure museums because NASA wasn't allowed to sell them and couldn't find a public organization that wanted them.
The Americans were the ones who spent millions developing a ball-point pen that
wrote in zero gravity (no gravity, no capillary action). The cosmonauts wrote in pencil...
While there are a lot of things that are terrific about Russian space technology, this is something of an urban legend. The American active-pressure pen didn't cost 'millions', and the Russians had to invent the wax pencil to use in space- graphite dust being problematic. Wax pencils, though, leave shavings, which turned out to be a major pain in the ass, so now the Russians use our pens...
Re:Is Hubble So useful? Adaptive optics is cheaper
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Happy Birthday Hubble
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Hubble is in space, right. it is also only at an altitude of only 200 kms (or a bit more, I don't know)... so half of its
sky is still blocked by the earth. so though it does observe 24 hours a day, it can only look at half the sky at once;
I stand semi-corrected. The reason for Hubble's low orbit was so that it would be Shuttle-serviceable (the Shuttle has a rather limited range); potentially, future space telescopes could be put in higher orbits, if we don't need them to be maintained or if we ever replace the shuttle (a dubious proposition these days.) Images like the Deep Field were created by combining the data from several days of observations; this is pretty easy with Hubble since the only thing required is accurate pointing. I am not sure whether AO on Earth is good enough to do things like this, or not.
Um, often the colors on Hubble are produced by combining different wavelength-filters. They can't be made by 'temperature' because a telescope isn't reading temperatures. Of course, different temperatures do give different spectra of light, so temperatures can be inferred from the different filter results and hence from, but it's not like these are infrared weather map images.
Now, the color balances produced by the way different filters are combined, and what filter is mapped to what color, and so on, are choices made that do not necessarily match what our eyes would experience. But, just like the telescope, our eyes are just functioning with some response curves and some color mappings. These are not less arbitrary; the images that we see with our eyes, are no more or less 'real' than the ones produced from Hubble. It's easy to imagine living eyes that would see exactly what a given Hubble image does. The colors are chosen, not usually to be pretty, but to give the maximum possible clarity of information in the image; usually (and unsurprisingly) that turns out to be pretty too.
Re:Is Hubble So useful? Adaptive optics is cheaper
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Happy Birthday Hubble
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Well, AO in optical wavelengths is still an immature technology, in the sense that every rigup is rather unique and experimental. It's only become really usable at all in the last year or so. And it's quite expensive too, though admittedly less so than Hubble.
It's a wonderful use of technology, and a terrific example of wholly separate fields of science aiding each other; but it's not the endall to telescopes, either. Space scopes have a number of advantages over even the best ground-based telescopes, like ESO and Keck-
You need to build a bigger scope on the ground to get the same amount of light, due to atmospheric lossage. Admittedly it's relatively easy to build big scopes on the ground.
Hubble can look at (almost) any target at any time, 24 hours a day, and it never rains up there. This means that in sheer amount of observing done, it needs to be compared to at least 3 telescopes, not just one.
Good sites for ground telescopes are in increasingly short supply, as cities spread around the world. Many, for instance, now take sites in the Chilean Andes that are about as hard to get to, and work from, as any place on Earth. That ends up costing quite a bit, too.
No ground-based scope can ever take an exposure lasting more than maybe eight hours. The Deep Field would be impossible to ever do on Earth. And the effectiveness of AO declines the longer your exposure, of course.
While, tragically, launch prices are not coming down much yet, we can at least imagine that eventually they will, and space telescopes will be cheaper.
It would be very hard, maybe impossible, to do long-baseline optical interferometry on Earth, because of things like ground tremors. It may be possible to use baselines miles long in space. This would utterly change the face of astronomy. The first test will be NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder, sometime this decade. For optical interferometry, see Keck's web site- here.
Hubble's successor, the NGST, will actually be a near-infrared telescope. Light from very distant objects is red-shifted all the way into the infrared, so NGST will be optimized for this kind of large-scale, cosomological research. This is hard to do from the ground, as the atmosphere is a tremendous source of infrared noise even at night in cold places.
So while AO is extremely valuable, I don't think any astronomer is prepared to say "Okay, let's ditch the space telescopes now." And if you can launch them working right the first time, and don't have to foot the bill for shuttle repair missions, they are not so expensive as most folks here seem to think.
Agreed. If a journal is being published by a not-for-profit entity, if its procedures and finances are public information, I think very few scientists (at least over here in physics-land) are unsympathetic to it charging what it needs to cover costs. Toward those journals, the boycott is just a way of saying, "No, really, on-line distribution is important to us." It's only a threat to the ones trying to make a profit.
[To those who say, 'They're entitled to make a profit', I would suggest that in the scientific community, not-for-profit has been found to work just fine, and scientists are equally entitled to prefer nonprofits as publishers.]
A possible point of interest- if the boycott is successful, it may make it substantially easier for researchers in more theoretical fields, like mathematics, say, to function independent of a university or other large research group. While they can pretty much walk into a university library and read journals today, access to electronic indices is often more tightly controlled...
I wonder how often a satelite gets hit by one of those suckers... and if they buy insurance to cover that possibility.
Just about never, and yes. These are rather small objects we're seeing in a meteor shower; they amount to little more than a high concentration of dust. So the problem for satellites is very rarely one of getting hit by a big rock- the sky would have to be a lot more crowded than it is for that to be more than a freak accident- but the gradual accumulation of microscopic hits. An old satellite has a pitted, dirty appearance. Usually the most important effect of this is a decrease in the effectiveness in the solar panels.
In 1960, a rocket launch could (maybe) be kept secret. Now, not a chance; every nation with a spysat is constantly watching for such things. It'll have to be announced.
In short, instead of building a super-heavy lifter (Saturn V, N1), they intend to launch the taikonauts and lunar landing equipment on two different rockets, to meet up together in orbit. Whether they can figure out docking in
orbit is another question entirely...
Well, they've basically been buying and modifying Russian designs. As far as one can guess, the Russians will keep selling, and they certainly know how to do orbital rendezvous. It's not profoundly difficult, after all; NASA very nearly went with a mission designed like this back in the Apollo days as well.
I do think the political effects of a Chinese moon landing would be very interesting, indeed... particularly in the almost rabid anti-China atmosphere that we in the US currently enjoy...
Okay. The name 'Aurora' comes off what was presumably an accidentally un-blacked-out line or two on some old Pentagon budget sheets. It seems a pretty safe bet that the military has some planes they're not telling us about; but ascribing capabilities to those planes, or associating them with photos of odd atmospheric phenomena, is a fairly sketchy enterprise. The atmosphere does quite a few odd things on its own, not all of them well understood. That's not to say these couldn't be caused by the plane, either.
Me, I'm not so sure there are a whole lot of military applications for hypersonic planes that aren't already fulfilled by missiles. Also, if you suppose the military has had hypersonic planes for a long time secretly, you have to explain the bother they went to to develop other ones publicly (and fail)- a very very expensive hoax, it would seem.
Not directly, in the sense that it's not some precursor-to-SSTO design, in any sense. It does offer a very nice testbed for hypersonic airfoil designs, scramjets, and so on, which are part of NASA's Venturestar/X-33 design... which just got scrapped. Most other SSTO designs don't go hypersonic, really.
The other thing is, the primary motivator behind SSTO is simplicity, and a vehicle that needs to operate in atmosphere in regimes from 0 to Mach 6 is unlikely to be very simple. So...
Re:The last vestiges of irrational exuburance
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Mars Odyssey begins
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When looking back at the recent phase of NASA's better cheaper faster program that has now ended with this much more carefully managed expedition, I can't help but wonder if the cultural ramifications of the "new economy" were far more widespread than just the dot.com hysteria.
First off, your timing is off. FBC really predates the 'new economy'; it came out of the loss of Mars Observer in, what, something like 1990. The notion was really pretty simple; it was that missions were getting too large. Given the NASA budget and the rate of change of technology, not to mention the working lifespans of scientists and engineers, a $1B mission that took five years or more to prepare was not necessarily preferable to three $300M missions spaced two years apart. It was an eggs in one basket thing.
The part of more recent programs that was 'quick and dirty' was not really an element of the FBC idea; it was just the result of constant budget pressure on the unmanned probes. Most of that pressure can be blamed on major cost overruns on other programs, like ISS. (Or, if you prefer, on Congress' failure to increase the NASA budget.) You can certainly argue that FBC helped create an environment in which certain kinds of corner-cutting were deemed acceptable, but I think that's a pretty peripheral effect.
Also, what's forgotten is that NASA's failure rate for unmanned missions has actually been pretty constant since the earliest days. Not to excuse some really stupid mistakes, but the notion that we're getting sloppier is really just a sort of nostalgia thing.
It would be cool if they added movie cameras to the space probes, that way once a week we could see where it is going and what it is leaving behind. At least this way we should be able to see when something goes wrong.
The problem with this is not so much the weight of the cameras, which is pretty minimal, but the power systems and data bandwidth. Few pieces of space hardware have either to spare for anything not crucial, although NASA recieved a lot of criticism for cost cuts that led to the lack of telemetry from Mars Polar Lander during its last moments. At any rate, while a big launch vehicle can easily transmit the video from a camera back down a few miles, doing the same from a little probe a million miles away is just too hard, unless it's contributing to the science. For now, we pretty much settle for sensor data to find what went wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I would argue that code is expressive because it is the result of scientific research and creativity which cannot be adequately expressed in alternative fashon. While the Department of Defense has at times been given the authority to surpress research for the sake of 'national security', that right is not customarily granted in other contexts, except perhaps in extremely specific cases. The validity of the study of encryption and decryption as a scientific enterprise is very clear; they have journals devoted to them, professorships granted, all that.
Indeed- it is perhaps worth noing that any artist (or for that matter any movie producer, in the context of a review) would be horrified by an inferior-quality version of his work being reviewed or presented in the context of a review! Many a painter, for instance, has been more than a little frustrated by the quality of reporductions in a newspaper or magazine review; and in the context of academic study, universities go to significant expense (screening rooms, astoundingly priced art textbooks, whatever) to present the highest-quality versions they possibly can.
While there are more libraries and better compilers for LISP than is commonly realized, it is relatively rarely used for anything directly touching hardware or demanding high performance. But it is very easy to tie in C or assembler code to deal with such things.
Mars probes have indeed been FBC- in fact they were the impetus. But over NASA's history the failure rate of unmanned missions HAS NOT CHANGED. See Ranger, Viking, whatever. The causes of failure have shifted, as old problems have been dealt with but missions have grown more complex. But the idea behind FBC was that if you're going to have one failure in three, you're better off doing lots of smaller missions...
Good point. Look, any IP lawyer will tell you that intellectual property isn't treated as some sort of fundamental right; it's a social construction with the purpose of encouraging creativity and innovation. If it were merely a fundamental right, it wouldn't take so many pages of laws and court cases to just try to figure out what it is.
IP is a slippery slope. For one example: Suppose (taking a large leap here, believe me) I'm Mozart, and I'm alive today. Now, presumably I have the right to listen to music. So I hear some music. For the sake of argument, it's a new piano concerto. Both the music and the performance are protected by copyright. Being Mozart, I've got the whole score to the piece figured out, in my head, instantly- unconciously, even. Well, can't prosecute me for my brain, right?
Now I go home, and for my convenience and amusement I write the thing out on paper. Well, nothing's really changed for me, right? I have the same access to it, whether it's in my head or on paper. So I should be OK. Now I duplicate the performance on my piano. I'm just playing what's in my head. Am I okay? What if I record my duplication so I can play it to myself later? I could just replay the song in my mind and have the same sensations- remember, I'm Mozart- so what has changed?
And one night I have a few friends over for coffee, and - 'You won't believe this John Cage piece I just heard' - I bang it out on my piano again. Or play that recording I made. Have I crossed over into illegally distributing music? Suppose one of my friends is Salieri, and despite not being quite my musical equal, he can go and do the same thing. Upshot is, even an ordinary brain and mouth is a pretty good recording and disseminating technology. To what extent do we become limited in what would seem our awfully natural right to use them?
Those who stand to profit big, in the short term, from copyright law try to cast it as an intrinsic right, as old as the hills. But my ownership of an idea can never be as secure as my ownership of a car. Owning an idea isn't a profound right, it's a social structure we set up for a purpose, and it must exist in harmony with both our other social structures, and our more profound rights, which to my mind certainly include limits on government scrutiny and court-mandated behavior.
While the various things that are being studied on ISS are beyond question important, it is not clear that it is an efficient way to study them.
Argument by historical analogy is dangerous, but up to and in the Apollo era, NASA would devote major resources to an experiment in technology only if it was critical to moving forward with NASA's larger goals, or in the context of another mission. The problem with ISS is that we're spinning our wheels gathering more data on a set of questions that, while important, do not warrant stopping the manned space program in its tracks to answer. Thus a lot of other stuff is on hold.
We can test (I should attribute this point to Bob Zubrin, by the way) the effects of long-term weightlessness, for instance, in the context of a mission to Mars, as opposed to prior to that mission, since we already have enough data to confirm that it is not a showstopper for the mission. Similarly, we know that we can build life support systems well enough. Rather than spending 10 years and $60 billion running some life support experiments in orbit, we can do more work on the ground and then improve as we go while accomplishing other missions.
The argument that we will be forced to lower launch costs to use ISS effectively is true of any other, more vaulable space mission; further, it's really an argument against ISS, since NASA has essentially no current plan to lower launch costs!
'ISS is not political': the primary motivator, at least as presented to Congress, for including and then funding the Russians in the program, was political. That's not necessarily such a bad thing, but let's keep ourselves honest.
'US owned modules': this is not the basis under which the deals governing ISS were constructed. If it were, it would get awfully awkward to do anything on the station, after all.
'NASA's concern was the timescale'- not six months ago when they barred Tito from their training facilities, it wasn't. NASA has had ample opportunity to set whatever training, safety and scheduling requirements they wanted on Tito's flight. Tito would obviously have been willing to comply, and the Russians had no reason to care. They have instead remained absolutely opposed to his flight under any circumstances, from the beginning.
Russian safety attitudes: Well, they've killed rather fewer than we have. Russia's problems with Soyuz were a pretty good parallel to ours with Apollo- we were probably the stupider ones there- and their Mir troubles (which have endangered the crew exactly TWICE, that I can think of, in the course of a great many more man-hours than we've ever logged) are pretty similar to Challenger (they were probably a bit stupider there) in that both unnecessarily pushed envelopes that people thought they could get away with. The mistakes are quite well-understood. Mir's problems got some bad press in the US; they were always rather specific and limited, having to do with some bad choices by controllers, an aging air-fixing system, some ergonomic and noise level stuff, and a bunch of garbage on board from when the Progress flights started running short. It's been played up as an orbiting scrap heap because it makes a better joke.
This may be misleading, but the Russians at least claim that they don't have a launch window again until 3 May or something, which would start pushing pretty close to the date the escape-Soyuz is required to be swapped- I think that's 11 May.
I stand corrected- I think I picked up a bit of bad info off an article somewhere, and didn't stop to think. Much obliged.
Well, the Russians have something of an axe to grind; NASA, caught between the fact that the Russians just don't have the money to fulfill their ISS obligations, and the refusal of Congress to keep handing out more money for the (*cough* nearly useless *cough) station, has been trying to run the whole russian space program for years, and sometimes succeeding. So they've gotten rather prickly about their independence. Classic bad diplomacy on all parts.
There have been a few misguided statements here, so hey-
Astronauts, regardless of NASA's instructions, should have no need to babysit Mr. Tito. Tito was a spaceflight engineer during the salad days of the sixties before turning to business, and has undergone nine months of Russian training. It is possible, of course, that this is insufficient. But NASA's current stand appears to be that no set of qualifications to board the station, other than being a 'professional', exists- a haphazard and arrogant approach that won't serve for an international station. So three years from now, the Italians want to fly a scientist who NASA thinks is underqualified- are we back in the same debacle? Standards would be quite easy to determine.
NASA doesn't have unilateral authority to control who goes on the station. We don't have sole ownership, you see. The rather poorly defined treaty structure and the act of including a cash-strapped, aging Russian space program on the critical path to the station were probably bad ideas- but at any rate, we made the deals; they read 'do such and such, you get so many crew members for so much time.' If we wanted dictatorial control over the thing, we should have build it ourselves. Congress wasn't prepared to pay for that and various parts of the government wanted to make the station a tool of international diplomacy. That's fine- but then you don't get everything you want.
The Russians are giving up a substantial chance to do science and engineering research; the operation of the station isn't expected to be delayed despite being a crewman short, as it were, for months... Doesn't this suggest something? The one objection NASA hasn't been able to raise is that the station is being put to much waste, because the station has so little utility in the first place!
The sad truth is that the station is a debacle, a plan first drafted in the early 1980's that has gotten progressively less and less useful ever since. We've built an enormous, expensive platform to conduct rather vaguely defined research that could have been accomplished much more easily in any number of ways- because the goal, really, that NASA set themselves was to build a station, regardless of what use it was. To my mind, low-earth-orbit station building and tourist launches are essentially ready to be a commercial enterprise; but the entire space industry is tied up in a NASA-oriented mindset, and alternative ventures can't find the capital to get off the ground, as it were. NASA's role for the US isn't control-of-all-activities-in-space; it's groundbreaking research to enable the use of space by others.
One might add that space flights have been sold to civilians previously, by both NASA and the Soviets, John Glenn being only the most recent example; up until Sharon Christa McAuliffe and Challenger, it was an almost common practice. [And understand, I mean to cast no aspersions whatsoever on her memory.] It's just that they were sold for political influence or publicity or other such prices, and so could be semi-concealed.
Enough rant already. For more along these lines, visit the Space Frontier Foundation. I don't always agree with the SFF- I think they have too much faith in the virtues of capitalism- but they understand very well which businesses NASA should and shouldn't be in.
For gods' sakes, someone with some karma mod this thing up. /.'s reaction to this story, in the complete absence of the relevant facts, was kind of distressing- so many instant Windoze bashers popping up, the usual modding-separating-wheat-from-chaff system failed completely. The only systems aboard ISS running Windows that I am aware of are some of the laptops, which are not the sole interfaces to any critical system, and servers for some relatively minor tasks, like e-mail I believe.
I assume this choice was made for the sake of simplicity. I don't agree with running windows at all, but so far as I know they're being fairly sensible about it. Those referring to NASA decisions that 'everything would run windows', or massive M$ marketing campaigns, please provide some sort of reference if at all possible...
Side note: there are other means of communication with ground, even if Endeavor weren't parked there. They just switched to the shuttle as the simplest thing. If all else fails, amateur radio should always be usable...
Repeat of question I posed in an earlier article: Apart from simple answers like 'More testing' and 'be more careful', do any of you have suggestions for how NASA's software might be made more robust? Of late software problems have caused more trouble than hardware, which seems odd.
ObSlashdot: America-bashing aside, it is interesting (for you lot) that a great many problems in the space program can now be blamed on software, while the hardware has gotten fairly robust. Most recently before this, we have some of the Mars problems. Do slashdot readers have recommendations? Bear in mind this code is already reviewed and tested pretty thoroughly- so how can we stop mucking it up?
Well, Energia sort of is the Russian space program. They produce and own all the Russian hardware and do a lot of the ops work, and they don't do anything much else commercially; the government agency just hires the cosmonauts and tells Energia what to build and when to launch. They aren't a normal independent corporation.
Why? The Russians have launched- I don't know the exact number offhand, but a good hundred of these things- enough even for the old soviet obsession with museums. They aren't reusable. Why not sell it? At least it will go to someone who wants it- there are some old Apollo leftovers, including an unflown capsule, that are mouldering out in the rain outside obscure museums because NASA wasn't allowed to sell them and couldn't find a public organization that wanted them.
While there are a lot of things that are terrific about Russian space technology, this is something of an urban legend. The American active-pressure pen didn't cost 'millions', and the Russians had to invent the wax pencil to use in space- graphite dust being problematic. Wax pencils, though, leave shavings, which turned out to be a major pain in the ass, so now the Russians use our pens...
I stand semi-corrected. The reason for Hubble's low orbit was so that it would be Shuttle-serviceable (the Shuttle has a rather limited range); potentially, future space telescopes could be put in higher orbits, if we don't need them to be maintained or if we ever replace the shuttle (a dubious proposition these days.) Images like the Deep Field were created by combining the data from several days of observations; this is pretty easy with Hubble since the only thing required is accurate pointing. I am not sure whether AO on Earth is good enough to do things like this, or not.
Now, the color balances produced by the way different filters are combined, and what filter is mapped to what color, and so on, are choices made that do not necessarily match what our eyes would experience. But, just like the telescope, our eyes are just functioning with some response curves and some color mappings. These are not less arbitrary; the images that we see with our eyes, are no more or less 'real' than the ones produced from Hubble. It's easy to imagine living eyes that would see exactly what a given Hubble image does. The colors are chosen, not usually to be pretty, but to give the maximum possible clarity of information in the image; usually (and unsurprisingly) that turns out to be pretty too.
Well, AO in optical wavelengths is still an immature technology, in the sense that every rigup is rather unique and experimental. It's only become really usable at all in the last year or so. And it's quite expensive too, though admittedly less so than Hubble.
It's a wonderful use of technology, and a terrific example of wholly separate fields of science aiding each other; but it's not the endall to telescopes, either. Space scopes have a number of advantages over even the best ground-based telescopes, like ESO and Keck-
So while AO is extremely valuable, I don't think any astronomer is prepared to say "Okay, let's ditch the space telescopes now." And if you can launch them working right the first time, and don't have to foot the bill for shuttle repair missions, they are not so expensive as most folks here seem to think.
Agreed. If a journal is being published by a not-for-profit entity, if its procedures and finances are public information, I think very few scientists (at least over here in physics-land) are unsympathetic to it charging what it needs to cover costs. Toward those journals, the boycott is just a way of saying, "No, really, on-line distribution is important to us." It's only a threat to the ones trying to make a profit.
[To those who say, 'They're entitled to make a profit', I would suggest that in the scientific community, not-for-profit has been found to work just fine, and scientists are equally entitled to prefer nonprofits as publishers.]
A possible point of interest- if the boycott is successful, it may make it substantially easier for researchers in more theoretical fields, like mathematics, say, to function independent of a university or other large research group. While they can pretty much walk into a university library and read journals today, access to electronic indices is often more tightly controlled...
Just about never, and yes. These are rather small objects we're seeing in a meteor shower; they amount to little more than a high concentration of dust. So the problem for satellites is very rarely one of getting hit by a big rock- the sky would have to be a lot more crowded than it is for that to be more than a freak accident- but the gradual accumulation of microscopic hits. An old satellite has a pitted, dirty appearance. Usually the most important effect of this is a decrease in the effectiveness in the solar panels.
In 1960, a rocket launch could (maybe) be kept secret. Now, not a chance; every nation with a spysat is constantly watching for such things. It'll have to be announced.
In short, instead of building a super-heavy lifter (Saturn V, N1), they intend to launch the taikonauts and lunar landing equipment on two different rockets, to meet up together in orbit. Whether they can figure out docking in orbit is another question entirely...
Well, they've basically been buying and modifying Russian designs. As far as one can guess, the Russians will keep selling, and they certainly know how to do orbital rendezvous. It's not profoundly difficult, after all; NASA very nearly went with a mission designed like this back in the Apollo days as well.
I do think the political effects of a Chinese moon landing would be very interesting, indeed... particularly in the almost rabid anti-China atmosphere that we in the US currently enjoy...
Me, I'm not so sure there are a whole lot of military applications for hypersonic planes that aren't already fulfilled by missiles. Also, if you suppose the military has had hypersonic planes for a long time secretly, you have to explain the bother they went to to develop other ones publicly (and fail)- a very very expensive hoax, it would seem.
The other thing is, the primary motivator behind SSTO is simplicity, and a vehicle that needs to operate in atmosphere in regimes from 0 to Mach 6 is unlikely to be very simple. So...
First off, your timing is off. FBC really predates the 'new economy'; it came out of the loss of Mars Observer in, what, something like 1990. The notion was really pretty simple; it was that missions were getting too large. Given the NASA budget and the rate of change of technology, not to mention the working lifespans of scientists and engineers, a $1B mission that took five years or more to prepare was not necessarily preferable to three $300M missions spaced two years apart. It was an eggs in one basket thing.
The part of more recent programs that was 'quick and dirty' was not really an element of the FBC idea; it was just the result of constant budget pressure on the unmanned probes. Most of that pressure can be blamed on major cost overruns on other programs, like ISS. (Or, if you prefer, on Congress' failure to increase the NASA budget.) You can certainly argue that FBC helped create an environment in which certain kinds of corner-cutting were deemed acceptable, but I think that's a pretty peripheral effect.
Also, what's forgotten is that NASA's failure rate for unmanned missions has actually been pretty constant since the earliest days. Not to excuse some really stupid mistakes, but the notion that we're getting sloppier is really just a sort of nostalgia thing.
The problem with this is not so much the weight of the cameras, which is pretty minimal, but the power systems and data bandwidth. Few pieces of space hardware have either to spare for anything not crucial, although NASA recieved a lot of criticism for cost cuts that led to the lack of telemetry from Mars Polar Lander during its last moments. At any rate, while a big launch vehicle can easily transmit the video from a camera back down a few miles, doing the same from a little probe a million miles away is just too hard, unless it's contributing to the science. For now, we pretty much settle for sensor data to find what went wrong.