Weapons on the moon, my favorate consipricy theory.
Tell me this, why would you put nuclear weapons on the moon when they would take at least a full day to reach any ground based target? We've got weapons on the earth that will reach any target on earth a a couple hours.
I disagree. Sure it costs more to send a human cause of all the food and air and all that but robots are left in the dust when it comes to doing the science. Take the Mars probes. They're great and all and their teams should be commended but a human could have done in 10 minutes what they've done in the past month or so. And it's not like there's a shortage of work to be done up there too. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound and minute for minute, humans are better able to do science in volume, speed and creativity than robots. If it costs 100 times the amount to send a human than a robot, I put to you that the science return will be 1,000 times that of a robot.
This may change in the future but we're not exactly able to send C3P0 out there just yet.
though putting a permanent presence on the moon is probably 10 years off at best and expanding that to a good astronomical telescope would probably stretch another 10 or 20 years
Um, we got to the Moon in 7 years last time and that was with vacuum tubes. Don't you think we could build the telescope during that ramp up time too?
Rather than hope that some small or large corporation agrees that a profit can be made off of Hubble research, the government should take a stand and finance basic science for its own sake, instead of ruminating about a massive aerospace industry welfare program under the cover of an exciting bunch of missions to the Moon and Mars.
Aerospace welfare is keeping the shuttle and space station fantasy of space exploration alive. NASA employed a small army just to keep the shuttles in working order and ISS is just too pathetic to contemplate. Manned missions to planetary bodies is the correct direction for space exploration. That's where the science can be done. All the astronomy that Hubble did could be dwarfed by a lunar telescope array.
NASA is finaly breaking out of 30 years of aerospace welfare. The new space push is finaly something done right. Let's just hope they stick to it and do it correctly.
I went to a presentation given by members of the rover design team and they specifically mentioned that not being "torque bound" was a specification of the rovers. Thus, they traded off speed for power.
As for how the distance affects the speed of the rover, it's true only to a certain extent. The fact that it's 10 light minutes away means that real-time operation is simply not an option. That being the case, the rover has to drive itself for the most part. It gets orders from Earth that just give it a destination. The rover takes care of the rest with some navigation AI. Since the AI isn't as good as a human at driving, it takes a long time for it to go where it is assigned. However, even if there were a human running it from 10 feet away, it would still be slow because of the mechanics of the wheel motors.
So in that sense, the distance mandates that the rover go slower but it's bound to going slowly no matter what.
This isn't because of proximity to the Earth or gravity or more solar power or anything. The Mars rovers move so slow because one of their mission parameters was that they would not be "torque bound". They wanted them to be able to roll over any obstacle. The motors are made with a power/speed tradeoff so while they are very slow, there's very little that they cannot climb.
New craft won't be ready for quite a few years. Hubble will degrade long before that. Besided, this is the same agancy that's saying that we'll finish building the doomed ISS. How is that any different than fixing hubble? by the way, the ISS is hardly a "safe haven". If they mess something up while building it, there goes your safe haven.
This is right on. Our tax money is paying for it and the overwhelming voice of everyone who knows about this is to save Hubble. Pro-Mars, Pro-Robot, Anti-nuclear, everyone who is into space stuff and millions who don't are calling for them to change their minds.
The astronauts who would repair Hubble are all chomping at the bit to get up there. It's NASA's mismanagement that is denying them the chance. This is mismanagement, not cowardliness. Well perhaps it is but it's all on the side of the administrators.
How does NASA expect us to take it seriously with the new Moon/Mars push when it says that the Hubble repare is to dangerous. I'm pro-Mars but I'm betting it will be a lot more dangerous to do those manned missions than to fix Hubble.
If saftey is an issue now, won't it stop them later from doing everything they're promissing for the next 20 years?
The Apollot program happened during one of the darkest wars in US history. They also launched their failed probe within the last couple of years and NK didn't freak out any more than usual.
I say Japan should go forward full force. Waiting for NK to get its act together could take centuries, seriously. No point waiting for those dolts to get it together while Japan could become one of the first multiplanet nations.
Ths ISS is a scandal partly because it was built by a committee, not a group focused on one clear definable goal ("let's build a space station" doesn't count). The last thing humanity needs is to unite and therefore bind at the feet, the world's space agencies.
Almost everything great done in space was the result of competition. We need more of that, not less. If no one feels any pressure to work toward a goal harder, you will have engineers and administrators world-wide leaning on their shovels for decades to come as they we continue to be bound in low Earth orbit.
I keep hearing people saying that a new space race won't start because the cold war is over.
What this is shaping up to be is a land grab which should be healthy for Mars exploration. Here's hoping. There's a lot of land up there to grab. Now let's get those crazy space treaties rewritten by some people who aren't "citizen of the world" hippies.
perhaps I've been spoiled by my email programs but I've found that you have to do quite a few steps to execute an attachment. I've used outlook, pine and several web-based email services. In every case if a file is a zip or exe, I have to first save it to disk. Only then can I open it.
Is this virus spreading due to people going out of their way to open attachments in this fashon? If they know enough how to save to disk and then open it, wouldn't you think they would know damn well better?
At fault for what? This particular event? What do you have to back that up? Can you say with any certainty that human activity is responsible for this?
This is for all the people who are crying for action against this rise in sea level.
Without a better understanding of the full dynamics of the geology, climatology and biology involved in this thing, any attempts to reverse it might have unintended and unpredictable side effects.
Cut CO2 output? Sounds good but even though CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas, it's also one of the weakest. Lower levels of CO2 could also be problems for the plant biosphere being the CO2 breathing, carbon fixers that they are.
Cut CFC and PFC output? Also sounds nice since they are thousands of times more efficient at trapping heat. Is there any well agreed upon data that says that this melting is a result of man made greenhouse gasses and not something completely out of our control?
Rapid and drastic environmental changes can be caused by natural phenomena. Without a better understanding of the root cause of climate change, regulating our activity is at best a shot in the dark. At worst it could cause bigger problems.
Not just that, tax ths shit out of companies that outsource. If they're saving 50K per year, charge them 45K. Put it into a fund to generate domestic jobs via public works projects.
lots of details to work out but it would slow job leakage and what does still happen would feed domestic job growth.
If you can find a better way to distribute information for low cost, reasonably long range, low power, flexibility, small size and relatively simple design, I'd like to see it.
Streaming content on the web? Not without a computer and high speed connection.
XM radio? Big cost rampup to get a satellite constellation up and high cost of the receiver.
In that case be sure to write your congressman and senators soon. the budget for '05 is being debated and unless you make yourself heard, the ticks and the vamipres will both go to town. Without participation, complaint is useless.
That's a funny quote and all but I don't know if it's entirely true in this case. A lot of the cost involved was put towards getting the technology together and paying the people involved. Once one was built, the other one just required the same set of parts and a team to assemble and test it. No R&D costs were repeated.
While it's not exactly assembly line type savings, there is a reduced cost for building a duplicate of something that already has been built.
I don't think you're aware but you agree with me. What I meant was that if you are worried about government waste, read about where the money is going. It's pointless to latch on to stories about little bits of money going here and there while there are big expendures to worry about like the $400 billion defense budget and your aforementioned No Child and Social Security problems.
Don't worry about the ticks until you've gotten rid of the vampires.
This was a memo, not a $3 million case study. Don't overreact just because it has to do with the government. I'll bet you anything this cost about an hour of someone's time and the cost of emailing their workers and handing out some paper copies.
If you want to start bitching about where your tax money is going, do some research first.
I don't think dust and gas would cause much interference. Dust would just fall back to the ground in an arch. There's no air to suspend it or blow it around so it's doubtful that it would become something like smog. For the exhaust gases, energy will probably be fusion, fission, photogalvanic or solar furnace. No way will they be dumb enough to bring fossil fuels up to waste O2 burning. A settlement will need to collect and recycle whatever gases they have for air, food, water and industrial needs.
L4 or L5 would be alright since they are stable but there is a lot of particulate mater at those points which could cause problems. L1 and L2 are unstable and L3 is way the hell on the other side of the sun. Any radio telescopes at L4 or L5 would still have to deal with noise from earth that a lunar array wouldn't.
I think I've heard of the flexing thing you're talking about. Still though, you can compensate for atmospheric distortion with some fancy bendy mirror and laser system but the atmosphere still kills a lot of the starlight before it hits the ground. In orbit or on the Moon, it would be unfiltered so you see a lot more and there would be no need to dynamically bend the mirror to account for air pressure changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Weapons on the moon, my favorate consipricy theory.
Tell me this, why would you put nuclear weapons on the moon when they would take at least a full day to reach any ground based target? We've got weapons on the earth that will reach any target on earth a a couple hours.
I disagree. Sure it costs more to send a human cause of all the food and air and all that but robots are left in the dust when it comes to doing the science. Take the Mars probes. They're great and all and their teams should be commended but a human could have done in 10 minutes what they've done in the past month or so. And it's not like there's a shortage of work to be done up there too. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound and minute for minute, humans are better able to do science in volume, speed and creativity than robots. If it costs 100 times the amount to send a human than a robot, I put to you that the science return will be 1,000 times that of a robot.
This may change in the future but we're not exactly able to send C3P0 out there just yet.
though putting a permanent presence on the moon is probably 10 years off at best and expanding that to a good astronomical telescope would probably stretch another 10 or 20 years
Um, we got to the Moon in 7 years last time and that was with vacuum tubes. Don't you think we could build the telescope during that ramp up time too?
Rather than hope that some small or large corporation agrees that a profit can be made off of Hubble research, the government should take a stand and finance basic science for its own sake, instead of ruminating about a massive aerospace industry welfare program under the cover of an exciting bunch of missions to the Moon and Mars.
Aerospace welfare is keeping the shuttle and space station fantasy of space exploration alive. NASA employed a small army just to keep the shuttles in working order and ISS is just too pathetic to contemplate. Manned missions to planetary bodies is the correct direction for space exploration. That's where the science can be done. All the astronomy that Hubble did could be dwarfed by a lunar telescope array.
NASA is finaly breaking out of 30 years of aerospace welfare. The new space push is finaly something done right. Let's just hope they stick to it and do it correctly.
I went to a presentation given by members of the rover design team and they specifically mentioned that not being "torque bound" was a specification of the rovers. Thus, they traded off speed for power.
As for how the distance affects the speed of the rover, it's true only to a certain extent. The fact that it's 10 light minutes away means that real-time operation is simply not an option. That being the case, the rover has to drive itself for the most part. It gets orders from Earth that just give it a destination. The rover takes care of the rest with some navigation AI. Since the AI isn't as good as a human at driving, it takes a long time for it to go where it is assigned. However, even if there were a human running it from 10 feet away, it would still be slow because of the mechanics of the wheel motors.
So in that sense, the distance mandates that the rover go slower but it's bound to going slowly no matter what.
This isn't because of proximity to the Earth or gravity or more solar power or anything. The Mars rovers move so slow because one of their mission parameters was that they would not be "torque bound". They wanted them to be able to roll over any obstacle. The motors are made with a power/speed tradeoff so while they are very slow, there's very little that they cannot climb.
New craft won't be ready for quite a few years. Hubble will degrade long before that. Besided, this is the same agancy that's saying that we'll finish building the doomed ISS. How is that any different than fixing hubble? by the way, the ISS is hardly a "safe haven". If they mess something up while building it, there goes your safe haven.
This is right on. Our tax money is paying for it and the overwhelming voice of everyone who knows about this is to save Hubble. Pro-Mars, Pro-Robot, Anti-nuclear, everyone who is into space stuff and millions who don't are calling for them to change their minds.
The astronauts who would repair Hubble are all chomping at the bit to get up there. It's NASA's mismanagement that is denying them the chance. This is mismanagement, not cowardliness. Well perhaps it is but it's all on the side of the administrators.
How does NASA expect us to take it seriously with the new Moon/Mars push when it says that the Hubble repare is to dangerous. I'm pro-Mars but I'm betting it will be a lot more dangerous to do those manned missions than to fix Hubble.
If saftey is an issue now, won't it stop them later from doing everything they're promissing for the next 20 years?
The Apollot program happened during one of the darkest wars in US history. They also launched their failed probe within the last couple of years and NK didn't freak out any more than usual.
I say Japan should go forward full force. Waiting for NK to get its act together could take centuries, seriously. No point waiting for those dolts to get it together while Japan could become one of the first multiplanet nations.
Let the land grab begin. The more, the merrier.
Ths ISS is a scandal partly because it was built by a committee, not a group focused on one clear definable goal ("let's build a space station" doesn't count). The last thing humanity needs is to unite and therefore bind at the feet, the world's space agencies.
Almost everything great done in space was the result of competition. We need more of that, not less. If no one feels any pressure to work toward a goal harder, you will have engineers and administrators world-wide leaning on their shovels for decades to come as they we continue to be bound in low Earth orbit.
I keep hearing people saying that a new space race won't start because the cold war is over.
What this is shaping up to be is a land grab which should be healthy for Mars exploration. Here's hoping. There's a lot of land up there to grab. Now let's get those crazy space treaties rewritten by some people who aren't "citizen of the world" hippies.
perhaps I've been spoiled by my email programs but I've found that you have to do quite a few steps to execute an attachment. I've used outlook, pine and several web-based email services. In every case if a file is a zip or exe, I have to first save it to disk. Only then can I open it.
Is this virus spreading due to people going out of their way to open attachments in this fashon? If they know enough how to save to disk and then open it, wouldn't you think they would know damn well better?
At fault for what? This particular event? What do you have to back that up? Can you say with any certainty that human activity is responsible for this?
This is for all the people who are crying for action against this rise in sea level.
Without a better understanding of the full dynamics of the geology, climatology and biology involved in this thing, any attempts to reverse it might have unintended and unpredictable side effects.
Cut CO2 output? Sounds good but even though CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas, it's also one of the weakest. Lower levels of CO2 could also be problems for the plant biosphere being the CO2 breathing, carbon fixers that they are.
Cut CFC and PFC output? Also sounds nice since they are thousands of times more efficient at trapping heat. Is there any well agreed upon data that says that this melting is a result of man made greenhouse gasses and not something completely out of our control?
Rapid and drastic environmental changes can be caused by natural phenomena. Without a better understanding of the root cause of climate change, regulating our activity is at best a shot in the dark. At worst it could cause bigger problems.
Not just that, tax ths shit out of companies that outsource. If they're saving 50K per year, charge them 45K. Put it into a fund to generate domestic jobs via public works projects.
lots of details to work out but it would slow job leakage and what does still happen would feed domestic job growth.
If you can find a better way to distribute information for low cost, reasonably long range, low power, flexibility, small size and relatively simple design, I'd like to see it.
Streaming content on the web? Not without a computer and high speed connection.
XM radio? Big cost rampup to get a satellite constellation up and high cost of the receiver.
In that case be sure to write your congressman and senators soon. the budget for '05 is being debated and unless you make yourself heard, the ticks and the vamipres will both go to town. Without participation, complaint is useless.
That's a funny quote and all but I don't know if it's entirely true in this case. A lot of the cost involved was put towards getting the technology together and paying the people involved. Once one was built, the other one just required the same set of parts and a team to assemble and test it. No R&D costs were repeated.
While it's not exactly assembly line type savings, there is a reduced cost for building a duplicate of something that already has been built.
Actually, I should have linked to this.
You are wrong. That was the department of defense.
I don't think you're aware but you agree with me. What I meant was that if you are worried about government waste, read about where the money is going. It's pointless to latch on to stories about little bits of money going here and there while there are big expendures to worry about like the $400 billion defense budget and your aforementioned No Child and Social Security problems.
Don't worry about the ticks until you've gotten rid of the vampires.
This was a memo, not a $3 million case study. Don't overreact just because it has to do with the government. I'll bet you anything this cost about an hour of someone's time and the cost of emailing their workers and handing out some paper copies.
If you want to start bitching about where your tax money is going, do some research first.
I don't think dust and gas would cause much interference. Dust would just fall back to the ground in an arch. There's no air to suspend it or blow it around so it's doubtful that it would become something like smog. For the exhaust gases, energy will probably be fusion, fission, photogalvanic or solar furnace. No way will they be dumb enough to bring fossil fuels up to waste O2 burning. A settlement will need to collect and recycle whatever gases they have for air, food, water and industrial needs.
L4 or L5 would be alright since they are stable but there is a lot of particulate mater at those points which could cause problems. L1 and L2 are unstable and L3 is way the hell on the other side of the sun. Any radio telescopes at L4 or L5 would still have to deal with noise from earth that a lunar array wouldn't.
I think I've heard of the flexing thing you're talking about. Still though, you can compensate for atmospheric distortion with some fancy bendy mirror and laser system but the atmosphere still kills a lot of the starlight before it hits the ground. In orbit or on the Moon, it would be unfiltered so you see a lot more and there would be no need to dynamically bend the mirror to account for air pressure changes.