The point he is making is that Space Flight needs a face in order for people to stay interested. If people aren't interested, then it gets cut.
While I agree this is a consideration, it doesn't appear to be true.
TV viewership was MUCH higher for the Mars rover landings than anything the Shuttle has done other than exploding. People appear to be interested in the exploration part, not so much the manned part exclusively.
The manufacturing techniques, systems design, and fab development we now use was all created to meet NASA's needs.
Not one part of that statement is true. You don't know your computer history, and are making yourself look foolish.
There are several push-forward points that can easily be discerned as having major input into the shape of the current computer market. They include Whirlwind/SAGE (IBM, online systems, digital telecoms, core memory, Digital Equipment Corp), Nike-X (IC manufacturing, rope memory, distributed processing) and the VLSI program (RISC, most modern fabbing).
NASA's role was simply more visible, which isn't surprising as most of those other projects were secret for some or much of their lifetime. Much of the actual technology being used came from Air Force projects.
Are millions of people donating to private space foundations to make up for the government slack? (IMHO: not that I'm aware of.)
Really, if anyone other than the porkbarrel politicians really cared about this, where's the money? People gave lots of money to help earthquake victims, which they through was a good cause. No outpouring of money to the Mars Society though, which suggests they don't think *its* a good cause.
It's not just that. It's also a question of getting something for your money.
So yes, maybe the space program is a waste of money. But I'd rather have my tax money go to people working at NASA pushing the envelope of space and engineering, than have people paid to do nothing productive (unemployed, bureaucracy, lawyers...).
NASA doesn't operate in a vacuum. All those same skill sets would be highly utilized by building a national power grid, for instance.
To put this in perspective: the Canadian taxpayer has dumped BILLIONS of dollars into a national nuclear power program over the last 40 years. It is increasingly clear that no one is going to buy our designs, and all of that money has been wasted.
When you talk about nuclear power no-one gets upset that the program will wind down. Say the same for NASA and you're written off as a technophobe. The basic set of underlying fact is identical in both cases, however.
What I find so surprising is the fact that they're scrapping a mostly-completed shuttle replacement program
Uhhh, the replacement was not even remotely competed. You did read the reports on it right? They would have been buying Soyuz for the better part of a decade anyway. There is a real possibility that canceling it will result in US astronauts flying on US rockets sooner than Constellation.
But I still can't agree with his arguments (yes, I read them). I think killing NASA's booster programs HAD to happen.
Let's not forget how this was supposed to work: NASA was supposed to build a manned program on the backs of the military's hardware. If there was going to be a major space program beyond that, it would be those same aerospace contractors who would be designing, building and supplying the systems.
One of those military groups was the US Army at Huntsville. They were proposing to build a new booster called the Jupiter V that used several existing boosters to build a single rocket with a total of 1 million pound thrust. Meanwhile the Air Force was starting research on a 1 million pound thrust engine, which the Army was hoping to use to replace their cluster of smaller engines if that program went well. To further differentiate the new design from the older Jupiters, they re-named it Saturn, "the one after Jupiter".
The Air Force would have nothing of it. They had already limited the Army to short range _weapons_, which is why the Saturn was a "launcher", not a "missile" (although there was TABS, look it up). As soon as Saturn was being floated the AF was all over it, trying to get it cancelled. Yet the newly-formed ARPA saw merit, and overrode their objections, causing a major hissy-fit in the Pentagon.
So when NASA came along, everyone saw a way out -- hand Saturn to NASA. Now the Army would be out of the missile game, which would make the Air Force happy. ARPA would still get the spy-sat launcher they wanted, just built from a different budget. The rest is history.
The problem is that NASA was suddenly in the launcher business, for no reason other than political expediency. And they've tried to hold onto that business since then, in spite of the major problems it's caused for everyone involved. If all went well I wouldn't say this, but it hasn't, so I think the evidence is clear that they need to get out of the launcher biz.
> Dark matter is necessary to explain why galaxies form. > In other words the "missing" matter is in each and every galaxy. > Discovering more galaxies doesn't affect that issue.
That is almost entirely incorrect.
For one, galactic formation is best explained by ripples in spacetime cause by sound waves during inflation (if you believe any of those things actually exist). Dark Matter is needed to keep them together after that, although it would of course been present and part of the initial formation.
For another, entirely different issue, Dark Matter is also required to flatten spacetime at a universal level. That is, if spacetime is as flat as it seems to be, the vast majority of the mass in the universe is not seen. There are other measurements, like baryonic oscillations and the CMB that also argue for this.
It has long been assumed that this "universal dark matter" and the "galactic dark matter" holding galaxies together are one and the same. However, this suffers from a major problem: the former requires three to ten times the mass of the later.
What's interesting about this particular study is its conclusion: we've been missing 90% of the luminosity of _deep sky objects_. That obviously has nothing to say about galactic dark matter, but it's the wrong order of magnitude anyway. On the other hand, it may have something to say about universal Dark Matter. If there's enough mass in these newly discovered galaxies then perhaps the need goes away entirely. Much more likely, however, would be that it would bring the required amount in-line with galactic formation requirements, thereby cementing the idea that there is a single source of Dark Matter that is used evenly in both cases. That would make a lot of people happy.
McGinn’s proposal would also introduced further delays. Which is what MS is complaining about.
I'll bet they don't give a hoot one way or the other about the LRT lanes. But if that bridge goes down for even one day, no matter what it looks like, they lose millions.
One is tempted to divide the flash world in two -- the majority of the flash apps are advertising plug-ins, while a minority are useful applications like games and such.
The former should simply not be used on mobile devices. Most web pages are too filled with crud as it is, flashing ads that I don't ever look at are nothing more than a waste of space, time and power. On a mobile device this moves from annoying to a real problem.
The games, on the other hand, I'd love to have. Sadly, in this case I agree fully with Jobs - Flash is a buggy pile of shod. Something close to 100% of the crashes I have on my Macs are Flash related.
Adobe has a long history of doing nothing and then complaining when someone else gets fed up and does it for them -- TrueType, Color PS, PDF and other examples come to mind. When this happens, they get scared and fix whatever the problems were. So the good news is that I expect Flash will get a whole lot better in the near future. The bad news is that I still don't want it in most cases.
They're literally trying to understand what creates mass
No no no, they've already figured that out. Decades ago. You even know the name, "Higgs". We also roughly know the mass. There's very little we don't claim to know, and discovering that doesn't teach us anything.
The only success we should hope for at LHC is that they *don't* find the Higgs. Then the HEP world will have to face the fact that everyone knows but won't publicly admit, that the SM is almost certainly incomplete. But since we have no idea what would replace it, few are willing to come out and say so. Because then wouldn't be able to get the billions to build these devices, and people might have to get real jobs.
I'm sure if the US cuts the funding, those scientists will get job offers elsewhere, and the United States will be well on the way to becoming a main provider of cheap labor for Mexico and Canada.
But the same could be said of any science that's no longer fruitful. Yet the US continues to be the world leader.
Would you spend a billion dollars trying to measure another decimal place of the Stefan–Boltzmann constant? Probably not. However, Tevatron spent well over a decade, and hundreds of millions of dollars, trying to get extra decimal places on the top quark mass.
This number is basically useless, but they didn't have anything else to do. That's because HEP, at least the Standard Model, is mined out. It's a dead science. All that's been done since the 1980s is bookkeeping. LHC doesn't change that, unless it finds something new and interesting. The jury's out on how likely that is. So the justification, from the start, has been to find the Higgs. And if we do, so what? We already agree that we know what it is, what it does, and about how massive it is. Yet if LHC detects it, the HEP world will circle its wagons, grant some nobels, and talk about what a great job they're doing.
Of course we know that it's wrong. None of our current theories can *really* account for most of the interesting things we see in our telescopes (contrary to protestations on Ars) so even if we find something like the photino we're still not any closer to understanding the real universe. Dark Energy? Good luck.
I think there's a lot more physics, both theoretical and practical, in B-E's than LHC. There's still a lot of basic quantum theory to do while everyone got distracted by the big budgets an accelerator commands.
In my mind, proving some esoteric point that we already know is both (a) considered to be well understood already, and (b) known to tell us nothing about the real universe, does not really equate to "useful".
Those untold billions would buy a WHOLE LOT of REALLY GOOD telescopes, which will generate orders of magnitude more knowledge. Better yet, the public loves telescopes, especially their pretty pictures.
> spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, > flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it
If you start off roughly equal, things aren't going well. Everything else is the small end of the stick.
> Looks like you forgot to take into account transmission loss
Transmission losses on 768 kVDC lines are about 2% per 1000 km. About 10% losses across the Atlantic. Transmission losses from space are 20% in the best case, and 50% in the common case.
So no, I didn't forget to take this into account. I deliberately ignored it, because it makes things worse for space power.
Any other things you think I've forgot to mention? I'm sure they make the economics worse as well.
> Not that I'm really disagreeing with you, but you'll actually get around 8+ times the power capacity
Bzzzt, wrong. Power density is about 15% greater in space. You get 2 times the hours of sunlight (day, night). You get about 20% more "clear sky" (Sites in Nevada have over 80% clear weather).
So it's more like 4 times, ignoring the 50% conversion and shipping costs, and the fact that the panels last only 12 years instead of 20+. If you consider those alone, a panel on the ground will generate some significant fraction of the power of the same panel in space.
Which might be a good argument (but isn't) if you're comparing a solar panel in space with a coal plant on Earth. But I'm comparing a solar panel in space with a solar panel on Earth. There's no hidden cost to hide behind.
Besides, have you ever seen a rocket? Not exactly green power!
> Part of the reasoning is that if you place it in the right orbit you can get on your panels for 24 hours a day
Which is twice what you get on Earth (think about it, night, day). Now factor in that the panels last about 1/2 the lifetime that they do on Earth. The math isn't looking good, is it?
So maybe you don't know much about the real world of power supplies, and think that the arguments about "base load" aren't the total load of rubbish that they are. In that case, I 100% guarantee you that you can built two panels and the wire all the way across the ocean for less money than it costs to launch one set into space.
The panels I use are 20 kg for 200 to 220 watts. That's 10 watts per kg, or 5 watts per pound.
In Toronto, you get 1250 kWh per year 1000 kW installed. So about 1.2 wh per w.
So that's about 6 wh per pound.
I get paid the utterly ridiculous price of 80 cents a kWh for this power. That's 0.08 cents per wh.
So that's just under 50 cents a year per pound.
With me so far? Ok, let's keep going...
On Earth I have an expected lifetime of at least 20 years, and 25 is more common. So each pound of panel will generate 10 dollars over its lifetime.
In space I get about 5 times the power, but losses are higher, and panel lifetime is about 12 years. I use 4 times as much power as an Earth based panel as a good estimate. So that means that same pound of panels will generate a whopping 25 dollars over its lifetime.
Sooo, does 25 dollars pay off the 250 dollar launch costs?
> Seems to me like you're going to have the same parasitic losses.
Some wavelengths get through clouds better. Microwaves are best. Given that it's warmer on cloudy nights due to IR reflection, the IR doesn't strike me as a good selection - perhaps there's a few holes in there they want to use.
Not that it makes a difference. For the price of the rocket you need to launch one panel, you can buy hundreds of panels. That will generate hundreds of times the power. It's an utterly stupid concept.
Just do the math, it doesn't work. The cost of launch utterly WIPES OUT any hope of income. Look, rockets are expensive, electricity isn't. That's all there is to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The point he is making is that Space Flight needs a face in order for people to stay interested. If people aren't interested, then it gets cut.
While I agree this is a consideration, it doesn't appear to be true.
TV viewership was MUCH higher for the Mars rover landings than anything the Shuttle has done other than exploding. People appear to be interested in the exploration part, not so much the manned part exclusively.
Maury
The manufacturing techniques, systems design, and fab development we now use was all created to meet NASA's needs.
Not one part of that statement is true. You don't know your computer history, and are making yourself look foolish.
There are several push-forward points that can easily be discerned as having major input into the shape of the current computer market. They include Whirlwind/SAGE (IBM, online systems, digital telecoms, core memory, Digital Equipment Corp), Nike-X (IC manufacturing, rope memory, distributed processing) and the VLSI program (RISC, most modern fabbing).
NASA's role was simply more visible, which isn't surprising as most of those other projects were secret for some or much of their lifetime. Much of the actual technology being used came from Air Force projects.
Maury
Are millions of people donating to private space foundations to make up for the government slack? (IMHO: not that I'm aware of.)
Really, if anyone other than the porkbarrel politicians really cared about this, where's the money? People gave lots of money to help earthquake victims, which they through was a good cause. No outpouring of money to the Mars Society though, which suggests they don't think *its* a good cause.
Maury
It's not just that. It's also a question of getting something for your money.
So yes, maybe the space program is a waste of money. But I'd rather have my tax money go to people working at NASA pushing the envelope of space and engineering, than have people paid to do nothing productive (unemployed, bureaucracy, lawyers...).
NASA doesn't operate in a vacuum. All those same skill sets would be highly utilized by building a national power grid, for instance.
To put this in perspective: the Canadian taxpayer has dumped BILLIONS of dollars into a national nuclear power program over the last 40 years. It is increasingly clear that no one is going to buy our designs, and all of that money has been wasted.
When you talk about nuclear power no-one gets upset that the program will wind down. Say the same for NASA and you're written off as a technophobe. The basic set of underlying fact is identical in both cases, however.
Maury
What I find so surprising is the fact that they're scrapping a mostly-completed shuttle replacement program
Uhhh, the replacement was not even remotely competed. You did read the reports on it right? They would have been buying Soyuz for the better part of a decade anyway. There is a real possibility that canceling it will result in US astronauts flying on US rockets sooner than Constellation.
Maury
That is a very salient point.
But I still can't agree with his arguments (yes, I read them). I think killing NASA's booster programs HAD to happen.
Let's not forget how this was supposed to work: NASA was supposed to build a manned program on the backs of the military's hardware. If there was going to be a major space program beyond that, it would be those same aerospace contractors who would be designing, building and supplying the systems.
One of those military groups was the US Army at Huntsville. They were proposing to build a new booster called the Jupiter V that used several existing boosters to build a single rocket with a total of 1 million pound thrust. Meanwhile the Air Force was starting research on a 1 million pound thrust engine, which the Army was hoping to use to replace their cluster of smaller engines if that program went well. To further differentiate the new design from the older Jupiters, they re-named it Saturn, "the one after Jupiter".
The Air Force would have nothing of it. They had already limited the Army to short range _weapons_, which is why the Saturn was a "launcher", not a "missile" (although there was TABS, look it up). As soon as Saturn was being floated the AF was all over it, trying to get it cancelled. Yet the newly-formed ARPA saw merit, and overrode their objections, causing a major hissy-fit in the Pentagon.
So when NASA came along, everyone saw a way out -- hand Saturn to NASA. Now the Army would be out of the missile game, which would make the Air Force happy. ARPA would still get the spy-sat launcher they wanted, just built from a different budget. The rest is history.
The problem is that NASA was suddenly in the launcher business, for no reason other than political expediency. And they've tried to hold onto that business since then, in spite of the major problems it's caused for everyone involved. If all went well I wouldn't say this, but it hasn't, so I think the evidence is clear that they need to get out of the launcher biz.
Maury
> Dark matter is necessary to explain why galaxies form.
> In other words the "missing" matter is in each and every galaxy.
> Discovering more galaxies doesn't affect that issue.
That is almost entirely incorrect.
For one, galactic formation is best explained by ripples in spacetime cause by sound waves during inflation (if you believe any of those things actually exist). Dark Matter is needed to keep them together after that, although it would of course been present and part of the initial formation.
For another, entirely different issue, Dark Matter is also required to flatten spacetime at a universal level. That is, if spacetime is as flat as it seems to be, the vast majority of the mass in the universe is not seen. There are other measurements, like baryonic oscillations and the CMB that also argue for this.
It has long been assumed that this "universal dark matter" and the "galactic dark matter" holding galaxies together are one and the same. However, this suffers from a major problem: the former requires three to ten times the mass of the later.
What's interesting about this particular study is its conclusion: we've been missing 90% of the luminosity of _deep sky objects_. That obviously has nothing to say about galactic dark matter, but it's the wrong order of magnitude anyway. On the other hand, it may have something to say about universal Dark Matter. If there's enough mass in these newly discovered galaxies then perhaps the need goes away entirely. Much more likely, however, would be that it would bring the required amount in-line with galactic formation requirements, thereby cementing the idea that there is a single source of Dark Matter that is used evenly in both cases. That would make a lot of people happy.
Maury
McGinn’s proposal would also introduced further delays. Which is what MS is complaining about.
I'll bet they don't give a hoot one way or the other about the LRT lanes. But if that bridge goes down for even one day, no matter what it looks like, they lose millions.
One is tempted to divide the flash world in two -- the majority of the flash apps are advertising plug-ins, while a minority are useful applications like games and such.
The former should simply not be used on mobile devices. Most web pages are too filled with crud as it is, flashing ads that I don't ever look at are nothing more than a waste of space, time and power. On a mobile device this moves from annoying to a real problem.
The games, on the other hand, I'd love to have. Sadly, in this case I agree fully with Jobs - Flash is a buggy pile of shod. Something close to 100% of the crashes I have on my Macs are Flash related.
Adobe has a long history of doing nothing and then complaining when someone else gets fed up and does it for them -- TrueType, Color PS, PDF and other examples come to mind. When this happens, they get scared and fix whatever the problems were. So the good news is that I expect Flash will get a whole lot better in the near future. The bad news is that I still don't want it in most cases.
Maury
They're literally trying to understand what creates mass
No no no, they've already figured that out. Decades ago. You even know the name, "Higgs". We also roughly know the mass. There's very little we don't claim to know, and discovering that doesn't teach us anything.
The only success we should hope for at LHC is that they *don't* find the Higgs. Then the HEP world will have to face the fact that everyone knows but won't publicly admit, that the SM is almost certainly incomplete. But since we have no idea what would replace it, few are willing to come out and say so. Because then wouldn't be able to get the billions to build these devices, and people might have to get real jobs.
Maury
I'm sure if the US cuts the funding, those scientists will get job offers elsewhere, and the United States will be well on the way to becoming a main provider of cheap labor for Mexico and Canada.
But the same could be said of any science that's no longer fruitful. Yet the US continues to be the world leader.
Would you spend a billion dollars trying to measure another decimal place of the Stefan–Boltzmann constant? Probably not. However, Tevatron spent well over a decade, and hundreds of millions of dollars, trying to get extra decimal places on the top quark mass.
This number is basically useless, but they didn't have anything else to do. That's because HEP, at least the Standard Model, is mined out. It's a dead science. All that's been done since the 1980s is bookkeeping. LHC doesn't change that, unless it finds something new and interesting. The jury's out on how likely that is. So the justification, from the start, has been to find the Higgs. And if we do, so what? We already agree that we know what it is, what it does, and about how massive it is. Yet if LHC detects it, the HEP world will circle its wagons, grant some nobels, and talk about what a great job they're doing.
Of course we know that it's wrong. None of our current theories can *really* account for most of the interesting things we see in our telescopes (contrary to protestations on Ars) so even if we find something like the photino we're still not any closer to understanding the real universe. Dark Energy? Good luck.
I think there's a lot more physics, both theoretical and practical, in B-E's than LHC. There's still a lot of basic quantum theory to do while everyone got distracted by the big budgets an accelerator commands.
Maury
> doing something useful
Define "useful"?
In my mind, proving some esoteric point that we already know is both (a) considered to be well understood already, and (b) known to tell us nothing about the real universe, does not really equate to "useful".
Those untold billions would buy a WHOLE LOT of REALLY GOOD telescopes, which will generate orders of magnitude more knowledge. Better yet, the public loves telescopes, especially their pretty pictures.
Maury
> spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent,
> flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it
Which is EXACTLY what happened to the Concordski.
So now we'll only know the mass of the Higgs to the 14th decimal place?
Oh no, how shall we survive?
Maury
> much higher collision rate than the Tevatron
About 100 times. But remember that cross section goes down with E, so the effective collision rate at high energies is just about flat. See:
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/general/acphys.htm
TRIUMF still kicks in this regard.
Maury
If you start off roughly equal, things aren't going well. Everything else is the small end of the stick.
> Looks like you forgot to take into account transmission loss
Transmission losses on 768 kVDC lines are about 2% per 1000 km. About 10% losses across the Atlantic. Transmission losses from space are 20% in the best case, and 50% in the common case.
So no, I didn't forget to take this into account. I deliberately ignored it, because it makes things worse for space power.
Any other things you think I've forgot to mention? I'm sure they make the economics worse as well.
Maury
> isn't the liquid hydrogen and oxygen
At huge PSI's and temperatures. The exhaust will rot out your lungs. Besides, every major launch platform also uses solids.
Maury
Space Garbage: Do we really need more junk in geosynchronous orbit? Launching satellites may create space junk.
I did this calculation too. For every 100 kWp you launch, you have a 40% chance of causing a Kessler Syndrome.
Maury
> Not that I'm really disagreeing with you, but you'll actually get around 8+ times the power capacity
Bzzzt, wrong. Power density is about 15% greater in space. You get 2 times the hours of sunlight (day, night). You get about 20% more "clear sky" (Sites in Nevada have over 80% clear weather).
So it's more like 4 times, ignoring the 50% conversion and shipping costs, and the fact that the panels last only 12 years instead of 20+. If you consider those alone, a panel on the ground will generate some significant fraction of the power of the same panel in space.
Maury
Well let's see:
1) 100% of our efforts to build large lightweight structures in space have failed. We have no idea how to do this successfully.
2) we have nowhere near the launch capacity needed to put one of these up in a time frame less than decades.
3) what capacity we do have is FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE too expensive.
Other than that though... yeah, it's nothing more than adding "from space" to the equation...
Maury
> don't account for the 'cost' of the CO2
Which might be a good argument (but isn't) if you're comparing a solar panel in space with a coal plant on Earth. But I'm comparing a solar panel in space with a solar panel on Earth. There's no hidden cost to hide behind.
Besides, have you ever seen a rocket? Not exactly green power!
Maury
> Part of the reasoning is that if you place it in the right orbit you can get on your panels for 24 hours a day
Which is twice what you get on Earth (think about it, night, day). Now factor in that the panels last about 1/2 the lifetime that they do on Earth. The math isn't looking good, is it?
So maybe you don't know much about the real world of power supplies, and think that the arguments about "base load" aren't the total load of rubbish that they are. In that case, I 100% guarantee you that you can built two panels and the wire all the way across the ocean for less money than it costs to launch one set into space.
Maury
> How about at $250 per pound?
DO THE MATH. Sheesh.
The panels I use are 20 kg for 200 to 220 watts. That's 10 watts per kg, or 5 watts per pound.
In Toronto, you get 1250 kWh per year 1000 kW installed. So about 1.2 wh per w.
So that's about 6 wh per pound.
I get paid the utterly ridiculous price of 80 cents a kWh for this power. That's 0.08 cents per wh.
So that's just under 50 cents a year per pound.
With me so far? Ok, let's keep going...
On Earth I have an expected lifetime of at least 20 years, and 25 is more common. So each pound of panel will generate 10 dollars over its lifetime.
In space I get about 5 times the power, but losses are higher, and panel lifetime is about 12 years. I use 4 times as much power as an Earth based panel as a good estimate. So that means that same pound of panels will generate a whopping 25 dollars over its lifetime.
Sooo, does 25 dollars pay off the 250 dollar launch costs?
Does that answer your question?
Maury
> Seems to me like you're going to have the same parasitic losses.
Some wavelengths get through clouds better. Microwaves are best. Given that it's warmer on cloudy nights due to IR reflection, the IR doesn't strike me as a good selection - perhaps there's a few holes in there they want to use.
Not that it makes a difference. For the price of the rocket you need to launch one panel, you can buy hundreds of panels. That will generate hundreds of times the power. It's an utterly stupid concept.
Maury
Just do the math, it doesn't work. The cost of launch utterly WIPES OUT any hope of income. Look, rockets are expensive, electricity isn't. That's all there is to it.
Want numbers? Fine:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/space-power/