You should submit this as a letter to the editor of a national paper (NYT or LA Times). The only way to get newspaper people to read it is to get it in a newspaper... and they should read it. This is the sort of good advice they need, and they're lucky to get it for free without having to pay for it....but then again, maybe you should offer a consulting service and charge them a hundred grand for the same opinions as in this article, then maybe they'd listen.
As I've argued, that's there to keep the scientists behind the mission from getting screwed for their efforts.
my point is that the current system lets some scientists screw others. The data should be free because it is taxpayer financed and any grad student should be able to use it in their research without having to sign up with one of the scientists of the project. Many of the scientists are not that competent and many are downright lazy... but they have a lock on the data anyway and use that lock to enslave their underlings. Freeing the data to the public in a timely manner (a week or even a month is fine) would help get rid of the deadwood. As it stands now, data isn't even released after a year... (where's the SOI data? Ta data? hell the Jupiter flyby data?) It should be out there and easy to get to so that kids can do science fair projects with it, and amateurs can process it and have fun with it. It's downright shameful the way Cassini scientists hoard their data.
I have never screwed a scientist with bad work on my part... and don't intend to.... And I have _one_ underling and I make sure he gets credit for his work even when others try to take credit for it. But I do intend to get out of JPL at the soonest opportunity and to do my work someplace with stronger scientific ethics.
ISS is one of the worst in playing political games of any of the Cassini teams by far. Part of this politics is an edict that nav cannot produce ephemerides for the rocks: Janus, Epimetheus, Pan, Pandora, Methone,...i.e. the small moons. The data from the nav team is sent to a representative of ISS who then produces the ephemerides that are degraded as per the instructions of the ISS team lead. This then makes it harder to plan observations of these rocks for everyone except for ISS.
If you've experienced bad treatment by JPL'ers is because of years of stupid political games like this being played by the ISS team lead. (but all of the instrument teams do this, RADAR is just as bad as ISS, maybe worse.) The engineers trying to fly the spacecraft are often caught in the middle of the teams petty feuds and political plots.
Well I've done work that directly led to several discoveries used without acknowledgment.. hell I've even had my own figures from internal presentations used without permission let alone acknowledgment. Beyond lack of acknowledgment, I haven't even be able to see the final results before they're published (hell I haven't even been told after they're published). This is why I'm going to get the fsck out of JPL at the earliest opportunity and seek a university job in my field where I can get credit for my own work.
JPL is dominated by a scientist caste that views everyone else as support staff (i.e. some sort of grad student). Saying that we don't deserve to be acknowledged for substantive contributions because we wouldn't get a career boost is BS. If I bust ass and work overtime to make a difficult observation possible, I don't want to see some lazy asshole who was on vacation when I did the work take all of the credit just because they processed the data after it was downlinked.
Anyway I'm going to shut up now because if you (or others) figure out who I am from my posts, I'd be in for a smack down from on high. And although I hate my job, I have a family to care for and I can't loose my job just yet.
ISS degrades the accuracy of the rock satellite ephemerides before releasing them to the project, i.e. mission planning, science planning, navigation, etc.
The time and effort spent to design, build, and manage an instrument (let alone a mission) is HUGE. That's time out of a sciensist's productive time. If you let just anyone grab the data the instant that they're on the ground, the people who put the work in are not only doing more work than their collegues, they're actually at a disadvantage since they are usually still busy running the instrument so that they don't have as much time to devote to science.
The vast majority of the work done to get this data is done by people who don't even get acknowledged in the papers written by the instrument teams. Why do the instrument teams get special treatment not afforded to the members of the other teams?
I know first hand that ISS was degrading the ephemerides for the rocky moons (which is odd that they are able to since the data for generating these ephemerides only partially comes from ISS). Maybe the policy has changed, but this was true as of last year.
Then were are the results from Radar, Vims, etc? And ISS hoards their data releasing only the minimal trickle needed to keep NASA HQ off of their backs (to the point of degrading the official satellite ephemerides). The one year proprietary period you site is BS, if you read the Space Act that formed NASA, such a proprietary period is forbidden... and the instrument teams didn't pay for the spacecraft, in fact they were paid for their instruments and are paid to operate them, so they should release their (unobfuscated) data to the public in a timely manner.
Since Cassini is so slow in releasing results to the general public, you may be interested in this discussion (including some neat image processing) by amateur astronomers: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showt opic=1729 This site usually get a jump on the official Cassini channels of about a week.
We have waterless urinals at work (overall they are very common in southern california), and yes they smell because the urine builds up on the sides and stinks.
I spoke to the janitor once about them, because they seemed like they would be very hard to clean... and he said that they were very difficult and very unpleasant to clean. He also said that they break all of the time and the oil cartridges need to be replaced every few months (even though the manufacturer claims otherwise) or the urinals will overflow with a very nasty mixture of urine and oil.... and the cartridges are very expensive.
Diamonds mostly come from lawless regions of the world and a s a result criminals control the means of production. Drugs are the same way, the drug trade originates in countries with week governments who will be unable to control drug lords after legalization... during prohibition alcohol was supplied by domestic producers and producers in Canada and Europe... Just look at history and see what the opium trade did to China when it was legal. Poppies and Cocaine will do more damage if they are legalized. Marijuana probably wouldn't cause problems because it can be grown domestically like tobacco.
Stuff like E and Meth could be legalized, but the illegal trade would continue because the legal versions would likely be more expensive as companies charge more to protect themselves from lawsuits. Such producers couldn't be protected from lawsuits like tobacco companies because such a move would essentially destroy the FDA.
diamonds are legal and look how well that works out. I doubt legitimate businesses will have a chance to compete with the drug lords, who are very well established.
murders and rapists just do evil in onsies and twosies... drug dealers ruin whole neighborhoods and sometimes whole countries (Columbia, Afghanistan, North Korea).
It's also possible to be too paranoid about things to you own detriment !!
Right on! If someone is broadcasting a signal, I should have a right to track it or record it or whatever. If they care about their privacy, they shouldn't be broadcasting a beacon! Making it illegal to track signals from cell phones smacks as a DMCA-like restriction to protect bad technology by making scientific curiosity illegal.
Or this is like making it illegal to sniff packets just because people are too lazy to encrypt stuff.
Let the gubberment track cell phones! It could put a hell of a lot more drug dealers in jail. And they won't be able to track me, because I'll just turn off my phone or use alternative means of communication.
p.s. I'm not being sarcastic or trolling... I really think the right to receive radio signals is more important than the right to be lazy.
The word is "cross-range", and yes, winged vehicles excel at this.
Don't be an ass, cross-range means the same thing as cross-track. Where I work we usually refer to it as cross-track because we also refer to along-track and out-of-plane. And yes, I do this stuff for a living.
Anway range usually means distance from the barycentre or from a tracking station. And cross-range could technically be any direction in the plane of sky.... cross-track is more specific if you think about it that way.
You might want to think about that again. In a capsule, you are going upward during ascent and downward during descent. During both manuvers, your nose is pointed up. (An oversimplification, but you get the idea.)
It doesn't matter what direction you're going, but the direction of the acceleration. The thrust during ascent is in the same direction as the drag during descent. So the force on the capsule occupants should be in the same direction.
During a winged landing, your descent is more gentle, and the nose of the craft follows the gentle slope.
You can have a capsule descend as gently as a winged vehicle... but since capsules can take a greater heat loading, you can also have them descend more steeply. There are no physics to stop a capsule from descending slowly.
This is where the cross-range ability comes in. Cross-range means that you can put your ship anywhere within thousands of miles of the intended landing zone.
No. You don't want to land within a thousand miles of the landing zone, you want to land at the landing zone:). What 'cross-range' allows you to do is to land when your orbits groundtrack is further away from the landing site. A capsule can still land anywhere a lifting body can, but it may have to stay in orbit longer as you wait for your groundtrack to move over the landing site... this requires more life support in the capsule and limits the time you have to do useful things in orbit.
If you have a space station, it becomes harder to justify the need for greater cross-track against the lower cost and greater safety of a capsule. (and yes capsules are safer because of more benign heating during entry and just because they are simpler to construct and operate)
The sort of fusion for rocket engines is different... you don't contain the reaction, you expel it out of the back -- mixing the products of the reaction with a hydrogen (hydrogen is the working fluid which gives most of your thrust). This means you can't fuse radioactive things because they will get into the atmosphere.
However, fusion engines can give off neutrons while they are running, which will require shielding and may make the engine itself radioactive.
I thought the main reason for using lifting bodies to to have greater crosstrack.. i.e., you can have a landing sight further away from your orbit's groundtrack which means you don' t have to sit around in your orbit waiting for the groundtrack to go over your landing site.
1. Fewer reverse Gs.
The deceleration from a capsule landing should be in the same direction as the acceleration during launch.... but for a lifting body the directions are different... which, to me, implies more problems with reverse g's for lifting bodies.
2. Gentle touchdown. (Apparently, Cosmonauts often receive injuries when the capsule hits the ground.)
The X-38 lifting body used a parafoil for its (gentle) landing... I see no reason why you can't use a similar system for a capsule.
3. The ability to control the flight.
You do have the ability to control the flight with capsules (Apollo did this)
4. Aerobraking manuvers become possible.
You can use capsules for aerobraking maneuvers (they should be better than lifting bodies even because of the higher heat loads.)
and from the grandparent:
the main reason for having a winged vehicle is that is the only way to get a capability to bring significant mass down from orbit
this isn't true... you should be able to bring more payload mass down from orbit with a capsule of a given weight because of less structural mass and less TPS.
Again, I'm pretty sure that the only reason to use a lifting body for entry is for the greater crosstrack.
I agree... this has all of the hallmarks of a troll... I wish moderators had to undergo some sort of training before being set free on the world. "troll" doesn't mean someone you disagree with, troll means posts like this one that are crafted to incite arguement... 'astrology' bait and all.
The research and development of Nuclear Fusion, for spaceflight applications and clean alternative energy on Earth;
Why do we need space for this? Realistically, fusion is being sought after by many organizations. The dilemma is that radioactive materials are so closely regulated and guarded, there isn't a lot of room for private individuals and companies to see better solutions.
1) Fusion doesn't require any radioactive materials. 2) Fusion engines are very efficient and would allow not just single stage to orbit vehicles, but single stage to Mars surface and back to Earth without refueling and taking only a couple of months for the round trip.
The technology is very exciting, but it will take a tremendous breakthrough for it to be practical. Even beyond the technology needed for fusion power stations on Earth... you'll need lightweight, compact fusion reactors for space.
An object is a planet if it has enough gravity to form into a sphere but not large enough to ever had fusion start in its interior and has cleared its orbit of debris left over from its formation.
but then Jupiter isn't a planet (it has some fusion in its core)
While software development has become a fairly mature industry, its near-instantaneous economies of scale demand that any organization be fast enough to tackle the Next Big Thing. This is why very large software companies are doomed to lose at least a few battles, and why there will always be room in the marketplace for start-ups.. as well as for refugees from the mothership to staff them. IBM couldn't be all things to all people, Oracle won't be (no matter who they acquire), and now we're finding that Microsoft is tripping over itself.
Apple won't be all things to all people... S.J. just says to go fuck yourself, you have no taste and don't understand the market, until he's proven proven wrong. Then he changes course, trying to save as much face as possible.
For years he's been criticized for his stubbornness and his mercurial nature... but look, he's built Apple and Pixar both into large companies that still innovate years after their IPO.
I think the lesson is 1) keep focused on a vision, and don't try to do everything for everyone 2) don't listen to too many ideas from outside... if their ideas are so good, why aren't they starting their own companies? 3) don't be afraid to be an asshole, if someone is truly convinced your wrong treating them like a jerk will give them more motivation to prove you wrong.
Being nice to people, hearing them out, etc, etc... just inevitably leads to an ass-kissing bureaucratic culture where stepping on another's toes is the biggest sin of all... And stuff that falls between the responsibilities of existing divisions just get dropped over and over again until a re-org makes a new division to catch those dropped balls..... and the process repeats until the whole organization is too crufted with bureaucracy to survive.
without noble assholes, there is no hope from death by bureaucracy.
for a long time, I've wanted a search engine to find all of the dilberts on a given topic. I'd actually be more than willing to pay a subscription for such a service... just imagine, I could have a dilbert cartoon in any given powerpoint presentation:)
Slashdot Mirror
to print on a decent grade of TP would be quite a feat...
You should submit this as a letter to the editor of a national paper (NYT or LA Times). The only way to get newspaper people to read it is to get it in a newspaper... and they should read it. This is the sort of good advice they need, and they're lucky to get it for free without having to pay for it. ...but then again, maybe you should offer a consulting service and charge them a hundred grand for the same opinions as in this article, then maybe they'd listen.
As I've argued, that's there to keep the scientists behind the mission from getting screwed for their efforts.
my point is that the current system lets some scientists screw others. The data should be free because it is taxpayer financed and any grad student should be able to use it in their research without having to sign up with one of the scientists of the project. Many of the scientists are not that competent and many are downright lazy... but they have a lock on the data anyway and use that lock to enslave their underlings. Freeing the data to the public in a timely manner (a week or even a month is fine) would help get rid of the deadwood. As it stands now, data isn't even released after a year... (where's the SOI data? Ta data? hell the Jupiter flyby data?) It should be out there and easy to get to so that kids can do science fair projects with it, and amateurs can process it and have fun with it. It's downright shameful the way Cassini scientists hoard their data.
I have never screwed a scientist with bad work on my part... and don't intend to.... And I have _one_ underling and I make sure he gets credit for his work even when others try to take credit for it. But I do intend to get out of JPL at the soonest opportunity and to do my work someplace with stronger scientific ethics.
ISS is one of the worst in playing political games of any of the Cassini teams by far. Part of this politics is an edict that nav cannot produce ephemerides for the rocks: Janus, Epimetheus, Pan, Pandora, Methone, ...i.e. the small moons. The data from the nav team is sent to a representative of ISS who then produces the ephemerides that are degraded as per the instructions of the ISS team lead. This then makes it harder to plan observations of these rocks for everyone except for ISS.
If you've experienced bad treatment by JPL'ers is because of years of stupid political games like this being played by the ISS team lead. (but all of the instrument teams do this, RADAR is just as bad as ISS, maybe worse.) The engineers trying to fly the spacecraft are often caught in the middle of the teams petty feuds and political plots.
Well I've done work that directly led to several discoveries used without acknowledgment.. hell I've even had my own figures from internal presentations used without permission let alone acknowledgment. Beyond lack of acknowledgment, I haven't even be able to see the final results before they're published (hell I haven't even been told after they're published). This is why I'm going to get the fsck out of JPL at the earliest opportunity and seek a university job in my field where I can get credit for my own work.
JPL is dominated by a scientist caste that views everyone else as support staff (i.e. some sort of grad student). Saying that we don't deserve to be acknowledged for substantive contributions because we wouldn't get a career boost is BS. If I bust ass and work overtime to make a difficult observation possible, I don't want to see some lazy asshole who was on vacation when I did the work take all of the credit just because they processed the data after it was downlinked.
Anyway I'm going to shut up now because if you (or others) figure out who I am from my posts, I'd be in for a smack down from on high. And although I hate my job, I have a family to care for and I can't loose my job just yet.
ISS degrades the accuracy of the rock satellite ephemerides before releasing them to the project, i.e. mission planning, science planning, navigation, etc.
ISS produces SPK files for the rocky satellites for the whole project
The time and effort spent to design, build, and manage an instrument (let alone a mission) is HUGE. That's time out of a sciensist's productive time. If you let just anyone grab the data the instant that they're on the ground, the people who put the work in are not only doing more work than their collegues, they're actually at a disadvantage since they are usually still busy running the instrument so that they don't have as much time to devote to science.
The vast majority of the work done to get this data is done by people who don't even get acknowledged in the papers written by the instrument teams. Why do the instrument teams get special treatment not afforded to the members of the other teams?
I know first hand that ISS was degrading the ephemerides for the rocky moons (which is odd that they are able to since the data for generating these ephemerides only partially comes from ISS). Maybe the policy has changed, but this was true as of last year.
Then were are the results from Radar, Vims, etc? And ISS hoards their data releasing only the minimal trickle needed to keep NASA HQ off of their backs (to the point of degrading the official satellite ephemerides). The one year proprietary period you site is BS, if you read the Space Act that formed NASA, such a proprietary period is forbidden... and the instrument teams didn't pay for the spacecraft, in fact they were paid for their instruments and are paid to operate them, so they should release their (unobfuscated) data to the public in a timely manner.
Since Cassini is so slow in releasing results to the general public, you may be interested in this discussion (including some neat image processing) by amateur astronomers: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showt opic=1729 This site usually get a jump on the official Cassini channels of about a week.
We have waterless urinals at work (overall they are very common in southern california), and yes they smell because the urine builds up on the sides and stinks.
I spoke to the janitor once about them, because they seemed like they would be very hard to clean... and he said that they were very difficult and very unpleasant to clean. He also said that they break all of the time and the oil cartridges need to be replaced every few months (even though the manufacturer claims otherwise) or the urinals will overflow with a very nasty mixture of urine and oil.... and the cartridges are very expensive.
Diamonds mostly come from lawless regions of the world and a s a result criminals control the means of production. Drugs are the same way, the drug trade originates in countries with week governments who will be unable to control drug lords after legalization... during prohibition alcohol was supplied by domestic producers and producers in Canada and Europe...
Just look at history and see what the opium trade did to China when it was legal. Poppies and Cocaine will do more damage if they are legalized. Marijuana probably wouldn't cause problems because it can be grown domestically like tobacco.
Stuff like E and Meth could be legalized, but the illegal trade would continue because the legal versions would likely be more expensive as companies charge more to protect themselves from lawsuits. Such producers couldn't be protected from lawsuits like tobacco companies because such a move would essentially destroy the FDA.
diamonds are legal and look how well that works out. I doubt legitimate businesses will have a chance to compete with the drug lords, who are very well established.
murders and rapists just do evil in onsies and twosies... drug dealers ruin whole neighborhoods and sometimes whole countries (Columbia, Afghanistan, North Korea).
It's also possible to be too paranoid about things to you own detriment !!
Right on! If someone is broadcasting a signal, I should have a right to track it or record it or whatever. If they care about their privacy, they shouldn't be broadcasting a beacon! Making it illegal to track signals from cell phones smacks as a DMCA-like restriction to protect bad technology by making scientific curiosity illegal.
Or this is like making it illegal to sniff packets just because people are too lazy to encrypt stuff.
Let the gubberment track cell phones! It could put a hell of a lot more drug dealers in jail. And they won't be able to track me, because I'll just turn off my phone or use alternative means of communication.
p.s. I'm not being sarcastic or trolling... I really think the right to receive radio signals is more important than the right to be lazy.
The word is "cross-range", and yes, winged vehicles excel at this.
:). What 'cross-range' allows you to do is to land when your orbits groundtrack is further away from the landing site. A capsule can still land anywhere a lifting body can, but it may have to stay in orbit longer as you wait for your groundtrack to move over the landing site... this requires more life support in the capsule and limits the time you have to do useful things in orbit.
Don't be an ass, cross-range means the same thing as cross-track. Where I work we usually refer to it as cross-track because we also refer to along-track and out-of-plane. And yes, I do this stuff for a living.
Anway range usually means distance from the barycentre or from a tracking station. And cross-range could technically be any direction in the plane of sky.... cross-track is more specific if you think about it that way.
You might want to think about that again. In a capsule, you are going upward during ascent and downward during descent. During both manuvers, your nose is pointed up. (An oversimplification, but you get the idea.)
It doesn't matter what direction you're going, but the direction of the acceleration. The thrust during ascent is in the same direction as the drag during descent. So the force on the capsule occupants should be in the same direction.
During a winged landing, your descent is more gentle, and the nose of the craft follows the gentle slope.
You can have a capsule descend as gently as a winged vehicle... but since capsules can take a greater heat loading, you can also have them descend more steeply. There are no physics to stop a capsule from descending slowly.
This is where the cross-range ability comes in. Cross-range means that you can put your ship anywhere within thousands of miles of the intended landing zone.
No. You don't want to land within a thousand miles of the landing zone, you want to land at the landing zone
If you have a space station, it becomes harder to justify the need for greater cross-track against the lower cost and greater safety of a capsule. (and yes capsules are safer because of more benign heating during entry and just because they are simpler to construct and operate)
The sort of fusion for rocket engines is different... you don't contain the reaction, you expel it out of the back -- mixing the products of the reaction with a hydrogen (hydrogen is the working fluid which gives most of your thrust). This means you can't fuse radioactive things because they will get into the atmosphere.
However, fusion engines can give off neutrons while they are running, which will require shielding and may make the engine itself radioactive.
I thought the main reason for using lifting bodies to to have greater crosstrack.. i.e., you can have a landing sight further away from your orbit's groundtrack which means you don' t have to sit around in your orbit waiting for the groundtrack to go over your landing site.
1. Fewer reverse Gs.
The deceleration from a capsule landing should be in the same direction as the acceleration during launch.... but for a lifting body the directions are different... which, to me, implies more problems with reverse g's for lifting bodies.
2. Gentle touchdown. (Apparently, Cosmonauts often receive injuries when the capsule hits the ground.)
The X-38 lifting body used a parafoil for its (gentle) landing... I see no reason why you can't use a similar system for a capsule.
3. The ability to control the flight.
You do have the ability to control the flight with capsules (Apollo did this)
4. Aerobraking manuvers become possible.
You can use capsules for aerobraking maneuvers (they should be better than lifting bodies even because of the higher heat loads.)
and from the grandparent:
the main reason for having a winged vehicle is that is the only way to get a capability to bring significant mass down from orbit
this isn't true... you should be able to bring more payload mass down from orbit with a capsule of a given weight because of less structural mass and less TPS.
Again, I'm pretty sure that the only reason to use a lifting body for entry is for the greater crosstrack.
I agree... this has all of the hallmarks of a troll... I wish moderators had to undergo some sort of training before being set free on the world. "troll" doesn't mean someone you disagree with, troll means posts like this one that are crafted to incite arguement... 'astrology' bait and all.
The research and development of Nuclear Fusion, for spaceflight applications and clean alternative energy on Earth;
Why do we need space for this? Realistically, fusion is being sought after by many organizations. The dilemma is that radioactive materials are so closely regulated and guarded, there isn't a lot of room for private individuals and companies to see better solutions.
1) Fusion doesn't require any radioactive materials. 2) Fusion engines are very efficient and would allow not just single stage to orbit vehicles, but single stage to Mars surface and back to Earth without refueling and taking only a couple of months for the round trip.
The technology is very exciting, but it will take a tremendous breakthrough for it to be practical. Even beyond the technology needed for fusion power stations on Earth... you'll need lightweight, compact fusion reactors for space.
An object is a planet if it has enough gravity to form into a sphere but not large enough to ever had fusion start in its interior and has cleared its orbit of debris left over from its formation.
but then Jupiter isn't a planet (it has some fusion in its core)
While software development has become a fairly mature industry, its near-instantaneous economies of scale demand that any organization be fast enough to tackle the Next Big Thing. This is why very large software companies are doomed to lose at least a few battles, and why there will always be room in the marketplace for start-ups.. as well as for refugees from the mothership to staff them. IBM couldn't be all things to all people, Oracle won't be (no matter who they acquire), and now we're finding that Microsoft is tripping over itself.
Apple won't be all things to all people... S.J. just says to go fuck yourself, you have no taste and don't understand the market, until he's proven proven wrong. Then he changes course, trying to save as much face as possible.
For years he's been criticized for his stubbornness and his mercurial nature... but look, he's built Apple and Pixar both into large companies that still innovate years after their IPO.
I think the lesson is 1) keep focused on a vision, and don't try to do everything for everyone 2) don't listen to too many ideas from outside... if their ideas are so good, why aren't they starting their own companies? 3) don't be afraid to be an asshole, if someone is truly convinced your wrong treating them like a jerk will give them more motivation to prove you wrong.
Being nice to people, hearing them out, etc, etc... just inevitably leads to an ass-kissing bureaucratic culture where stepping on another's toes is the biggest sin of all... And stuff that falls between the responsibilities of existing divisions just get dropped over and over again until a re-org makes a new division to catch those dropped balls..... and the process repeats until the whole organization is too crufted with bureaucracy to survive.
without noble assholes, there is no hope from death by bureaucracy.
for a long time, I've wanted a search engine to find all of the dilberts on a given topic. I'd actually be more than willing to pay a subscription for such a service... just imagine, I could have a dilbert cartoon in any given powerpoint presentation :)