Um, NASA's 2002 budget = $14.5Billion, so you would actually need 750 popstars at $20mil a pop. Perhaps we should be glad that there aren't that many N'SYNC members.
Seems that the C-21 is the Russian Entry to the X-Prize. Also, they have built two of the M-55 carrier craft. They are a updated 'research' version of the M-17, which was the Russian version of America's U2 spy plane. This page on HTOL TSTO (Horizontal take off & landing, two stage to orbit) has a few pictures of various launch systems. There is a nice picture of the M-17 in flight at the end of that page. (The M-55 in this picutre seems to have additional wing mounted engines. According to the cutaway model, the cabin is relativly roomy, but there dosn't seem much room for fuel. Most of the equipment at the rear of the craft seems to be life support and other equipment, not presurised fuel tanks. Perhaps they are using solid rocket motors (aka Big Firework), but russians tend to prefer, and endeed excell, at liquid fueled rockets. Besides, this schematic seems to show a rather different type of spacecraft. (note the wings, and overall length) Therefore, I suspect that this is a plywood mockup, for the benifit of potential investors, in the tradition of most space enterprises over the past 5 years.
Due to orbital mechanics, it would take about 15tons of gas to move this 3.5 ton spacecraft into geosync orbit. Any when you get it there, it becomes like all those 5.25" floppy drives in your closet - i.e. obsolete, worn out and useless. i.e, the wrong sort of stuff. 3.5 tons of rocket propellent in GEO would be worth more than than the metal - many communication satellites up there eventually are retired due to running out of gas, even though the electronics has a few years life left in it. Remember, commsats are the only thing really making decent $$$ in space.
Check the small print - if its a HO-2 or HO-3 policy you are covered for 'falling objects', so a satellite (or meteor impact) would be covered. However, if the satellite is Nuclear Powered, you are not - anything atomic is a standard exclusion.
Also if you are hit with a military satellite, that could be a grey area also - acts of war are not covered.
True, the russians did use pencils, but only for the first few short space flights. You dont really want lots of conductive graphite dust floating around your spacecraft and getting into the electronics, do you?
Eek! It would probably not be possible to enter and land through mars atmosphere 'perpendicularly'. For 'entry' purposes, assume mars atmosphere to be 125Km high. The spacecraft is travelling at interplanetery velocity, say 7.5Km per sec. If we decide not to slow down, we will hit the surface in 17 seconds with a *big* bang.
The time is too short to run the entry sequence (jetesson heatshield, deploy parachutes, fire retros etc)
The deceleration G forces required to slow down in the limited time would be massive, (>100 Gs, causing structural engineering design issues)
The total integrated heat load on the heatshield would be the same, but the peak loads would be much higher (up to half a gigawatt. Thats a lot of asbestos)
And since you are going 'straight down', once you jetesson your heat shield (and its stored thermal energy), you will probably land on it a few seconds later and melt.
The ideal solution (as demonstrated by mars pathfinder) is to come in at an shallow angle of about 15 degrees, and in this case the whole entry sequence takes a good few minutes, the peak deceleration is about 20Gs and the peak heat load is about 100Megawatts.
See the Mars PathfinderEntry Descent and Landing website for more details.
Using aerobraking to rid yourself of 'all your velocity' (interplanetery velocity, relative to the orbital motion of the target planet) is called aerocapture. This has never been attempted before, and would require prescise atmospheric targetting (to within a few kms), precise details of the atmospheric density parameters, and perfect understanding of the spacecraft's atmospheric behaviour, all on the first, and only 'deep' pass through the atmosphere. Since we are 'burning off' all our interplanetery velocity in one go, the heat load would be quite extreme, probably needing a dedicated heat shield, which could be discarded after the aerocapture pass. Of course, the spacecraft wouldn't need an Mars orbital insertion (MOI) rocket engine, and the ton or so of fuel that would go with it. (A smaller rocket burn however would be required 1/2 an orbit after the 'deep' aerocapture pass, to raise the spacecraft enough so it wouldn't pass through the atmosphere a second time). Once aerocapture has been achieved, and the spacecraft had been checked out (and allowed to cool down!), a gentler aerobraking phase can then be used over time to reduce the orbital velocity of the space craft, and lower the resulting eliptical capture orbit into a circular one suitable for science studies.
It has been proposed to use areocapture for some of the later mars orbiter missions, but it was deemed too risky, particularly after Mars Surveyor98's areobraking phase showed how unpredictable the Martian upper atmosphere really is.
If you remember the film 2010 (I think), the Russian exploration ship used areocapture at Jupiter, by inflating huge baluttes (balloons) around the craft and plowing through Jupiter's atmosphere.
"Call the MPAA thought police!:P NASA is technically in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act!
According to this site, NASA paid a region-hacking company in the UK for two hacked Sony FX-1 DVD players. This is technically illegal under the terms of the DMCA, as it thwarts a content-restriction scheme.
It could be argued that the ISS is an international zone beyond the reach of US law and therefore DMCA doesn't apply. But NASA is a United States government agency and is bound by the DMCA.
I look forward to what may happen if the MPAA decides to play hardball with NASA. This sounds like a terrific case to test the (un)constitutionality of the DMCA...bwahahaha!!! "
There are/(were?) a number of space related tax reform bills currently before congress, i.e.
1) Invest in space now (of 2001)
2) Spaceport equality act (of 2001)
3) Zero gravity, zero tax act (of 2001)
4) Space tourism promotion act (of 2001)
5) The commercial spacepartnership act (inactive)
Read all about it here
There is an interesting article here that describes recent work in analysing electrical patterns in the brains of people to determine what they are looking at. Success rates were very good, at least in being able to tell what type of object the subjects were looking at.
Re:(OT) Something I've always had a problem with..
on
Quake3 v1.30 Final Is Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hi DarkEdgeX
The usual suggestions in this case are:
try the latest drivers, ease off on the overclocking (if you are!), and if that's a VIA chipset motherboard, download the latest via4in1 drivers from 'just about anywhere' (don't have link handy)
You could also try some of the various rage tweakers and fiddle around with the texture settings. Lastly, check the agp settings in your BIOS, and try a slower spead (1x instead of 2x).
Happy fragging,
zardor
For those who are interested in the capital (equipment) cost of rolling out a DSL service, the current basic cost is down to about $50 for a USB modem, and $100 for the DSLAM port. (assuming you want 10,000 of them).
Of course, you have to add in the warm bodies in the call center, and the backbone bandwidth, but these are telcos, and are supposed(!) to have a good ATM backbone already. (Besides, moving surfers from dial-up to DSL saves a *HUGE* volume of voice capacity on the backbone anyhow).
Source for the above figures is the latest news report from DSL Prime.
They provide a good free (as in beer) report on the DSL industry.
There are 4 payloads on this rocket. The following descriptions are from the spaceflightnow website
The NASA-sponsored, student-built Starshine 3 satellite is covered with 1,500 aluminum mirrors, the highly reflective sphere will be seen flying overhead with the naked eye, allowing schoolchildren around the world to track the satellite.
The three Department of Defense Space Test Program payloads are PICOSat, PCSat and Sapphire.
PICOSat, built by Surrey Satellite Technology in the U.K., features four onboard experiments including tests of a flexible polymer battery, using GPS to study the ionospheric impacts to communications and navigation signals and vibration control for satellite sensors.
The Prototype Communications Satellite, or PCSat, is the first in a planned series of small spacecraft designed, built and tested by midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. The craft will be used to relay position data from amateur radio operators to ground stations.
Sapphire, built by Stanford University, carries a couple of experiments and a voice synthesizer microchip designed to convert text messages into a human voice for transmission over amateur radio frequencies.
Check out this status report on the spaceflightnow website for more detailed updates on the attempt to get this bird off the ground over the past week or so.
This runs the risk of drifting even more offtopic, but what the hell.
Some researchers have found that a neural net can indeed, in some circumstances dream.
Basically, you train it up to recognise faces or tin cans on a production line or whatever, and then you disconnect its inputs. This is equivilent to a human going to sleep. Then the middle layers of the network will drift from state to state, lingering for a time on the various memories it has stored as well as random stuff. This can be read out and displayed by the controling computer or program.
See this link for some more info.
Researchers are indeed working on long distance quantum cryptography. See this economist article from June this year.
Basically, a team at Los Alamos in New Mexicio are hoping to send quantum photons accross 10 Km of dessert. If that works, it shouldn't be much more difficult to send secure data to and from a satellite in orbit (since most of the 'thick air' is below 10Km, if you can get it that far, the rest of the way is fairly easy)
All this was discussed in an old slashdot thread
This site also gives a good report on solar activity. (Its from the Radio DX-Listeners' Club in Norway. They keep an eye on this type of thing because it effects their radio communications quite severely, especially since they are at quite a northern lattitude.)
Slashdot Mirror
Another good link, with more engineering info that is generally available from the dumbed down nasa PAO press releases:
Space Truss, Civil Engineering Magazine, April 2000
Um, NASA's 2002 budget = $14.5Billion, so you would actually need 750 popstars at $20mil a pop. Perhaps we should be glad that there aren't that many N'SYNC members.
Here is an old (April 2000) article from Civil Engineering Magazine about the Space Truss ("railroad")
Check out this site for a detailed history of the Soviet N1 development effort.
See here for a 'interesting' lunar meteor impact report, caught on video.
Seems that the C-21 is the Russian Entry to the X-Prize.
Also, they have built two of the M-55 carrier craft. They are a updated 'research' version of the M-17, which was the Russian version of America's U2 spy plane.
This page on HTOL TSTO (Horizontal take off & landing, two stage to orbit) has a few pictures of various launch systems. There is a nice picture of the M-17 in flight at the end of that page. (The M-55 in this picutre seems to have additional wing mounted engines.
According to the cutaway model, the cabin is relativly roomy, but there dosn't seem much room for fuel. Most of the equipment at the rear of the craft seems to be life support and other equipment, not presurised fuel tanks. Perhaps they are using solid rocket motors (aka Big Firework), but russians tend to prefer, and endeed excell, at liquid fueled rockets. Besides, this schematic seems to show a rather different type of spacecraft. (note the wings, and overall length) Therefore, I suspect that this is a plywood mockup, for the benifit of potential investors, in the tradition of most space enterprises over the past 5 years.
Due to orbital mechanics, it would take about 15tons of gas to move this 3.5 ton spacecraft into geosync orbit. Any when you get it there, it becomes like all those 5.25" floppy drives in your closet - i.e. obsolete, worn out and useless. i.e, the wrong sort of stuff. 3.5 tons of rocket propellent in GEO would be worth more than than the metal - many communication satellites up there eventually are retired due to running out of gas, even though the electronics has a few years life left in it. Remember, commsats are the only thing really making decent $$$ in space.
Check the small print - if its a HO-2 or HO-3 policy you are covered for 'falling objects', so a satellite (or meteor impact) would be covered. However, if the satellite is Nuclear Powered, you are not - anything atomic is a standard exclusion.
Also if you are hit with a military satellite, that could be a grey area also - acts of war are not covered.
True, the russians did use pencils, but only for the first few short space flights. You dont really want lots of conductive graphite dust floating around your spacecraft and getting into the electronics, do you?
Eek! It would probably not be possible to enter and land through mars atmosphere 'perpendicularly'. For 'entry' purposes, assume mars atmosphere to be 125Km high. The spacecraft is travelling at interplanetery velocity, say 7.5Km per sec. If we decide not to slow down, we will hit the surface in 17 seconds with a *big* bang.
The time is too short to run the entry sequence (jetesson heatshield, deploy parachutes, fire retros etc)
The deceleration G forces required to slow down in the limited time would be massive, (>100 Gs, causing structural engineering design issues)
The total integrated heat load on the heatshield would be the same, but the peak loads would be much higher (up to half a gigawatt. Thats a lot of asbestos)
And since you are going 'straight down', once you jetesson your heat shield (and its stored thermal energy), you will probably land on it a few seconds later and melt.
The ideal solution (as demonstrated by mars pathfinder) is to come in at an shallow angle of about 15 degrees, and in this case the whole entry sequence takes a good few minutes, the peak deceleration is about 20Gs and the peak heat load is about 100Megawatts.
See the Mars PathfinderEntry Descent and Landing website for more details.
Using aerobraking to rid yourself of 'all your velocity' (interplanetery velocity, relative to the orbital motion of the target planet) is called aerocapture. This has never been attempted before, and would require prescise atmospheric targetting (to within a few kms), precise details of the atmospheric density parameters, and perfect understanding of the spacecraft's atmospheric behaviour, all on the first, and only 'deep' pass through the atmosphere. Since we are 'burning off' all our interplanetery velocity in one go, the heat load would be quite extreme, probably needing a dedicated heat shield, which could be discarded after the aerocapture pass. Of course, the spacecraft wouldn't need an Mars orbital insertion (MOI) rocket engine, and the ton or so of fuel that would go with it. (A smaller rocket burn however would be required 1/2 an orbit after the 'deep' aerocapture pass, to raise the spacecraft enough so it wouldn't pass through the atmosphere a second time). Once aerocapture has been achieved, and the spacecraft had been checked out (and allowed to cool down!), a gentler aerobraking phase can then be used over time to reduce the orbital velocity of the space craft, and lower the resulting eliptical capture orbit into a circular one suitable for science studies.
It has been proposed to use areocapture for some of the later mars orbiter missions, but it was deemed too risky, particularly after Mars Surveyor98's areobraking phase showed how unpredictable the Martian upper atmosphere really is.
If you remember the film 2010 (I think), the Russian exploration ship used areocapture at Jupiter, by inflating huge baluttes (balloons) around the craft and plowing through Jupiter's atmosphere.
Taken from a msgeek article:
:P NASA is technically in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act!
"Call the MPAA thought police!
According to this site, NASA paid a region-hacking company in the UK for two hacked Sony FX-1 DVD players. This is technically illegal under the terms of the DMCA, as it thwarts a content-restriction scheme.
It could be argued that the ISS is an international zone beyond the reach of US law and therefore DMCA doesn't apply. But NASA is a United States government agency and is bound by the DMCA.
I look forward to what may happen if the MPAA decides to play hardball with NASA. This sounds like a terrific case to test the (un)constitutionality of the DMCA...bwahahaha!!! "
There are/(were?) a number of space related tax reform bills currently before congress, i.e.
1) Invest in space now (of 2001)
2) Spaceport equality act (of 2001)
3) Zero gravity, zero tax act (of 2001)
4) Space tourism promotion act (of 2001)
5) The commercial spacepartnership act (inactive)
Read all about it here
There is an interesting article here that describes recent work in analysing electrical patterns in the brains of people to determine what they are looking at. Success rates were very good, at least in being able to tell what type of object the subjects were looking at.
Hi DarkEdgeX
The usual suggestions in this case are:
try the latest drivers, ease off on the overclocking (if you are!), and if that's a VIA chipset motherboard, download the latest via4in1 drivers from 'just about anywhere' (don't have link handy)
You could also try some of the various rage tweakers and fiddle around with the texture settings. Lastly, check the agp settings in your BIOS, and try a slower spead (1x instead of 2x).
Happy fragging,
zardor
For those who are interested in the capital (equipment) cost of rolling out a DSL service, the current basic cost is down to about $50 for a USB modem, and $100 for the DSLAM port. (assuming you want 10,000 of them).
Of course, you have to add in the warm bodies in the call center, and the backbone bandwidth, but these are telcos, and are supposed(!) to have a good ATM backbone already. (Besides, moving surfers from dial-up to DSL saves a *HUGE* volume of voice capacity on the backbone anyhow).
Source for the above figures is the latest news report from DSL Prime.
They provide a good free (as in beer) report on the DSL industry.
Don't you realise that Babel Fish are now illegal under the terms of the DCMA?
There are 4 payloads on this rocket. The following descriptions are from the spaceflightnow website
The NASA-sponsored, student-built Starshine 3 satellite is covered with 1,500 aluminum mirrors, the highly reflective sphere will be seen flying overhead with the naked eye, allowing schoolchildren around the world to track the satellite.
The three Department of Defense Space Test Program payloads are PICOSat, PCSat and Sapphire.
PICOSat, built by Surrey Satellite Technology in the U.K., features four onboard experiments including tests of a flexible polymer battery, using GPS to study the ionospheric impacts to communications and navigation signals and vibration control for satellite sensors.
The Prototype Communications Satellite, or PCSat, is the first in a planned series of small spacecraft designed, built and tested by midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. The craft will be used to relay position data from amateur radio operators to ground stations.
Sapphire, built by Stanford University, carries a couple of experiments and a voice synthesizer microchip designed to convert text messages into a human voice for transmission over amateur radio frequencies.
Check out this status report on the spaceflightnow website for more detailed updates on the attempt to get this bird off the ground over the past week or so.
fp
This runs the risk of drifting even more offtopic, but what the hell.
Some researchers have found that a neural net can indeed, in some circumstances dream.
Basically, you train it up to recognise faces or tin cans on a production line or whatever, and then you disconnect its inputs. This is equivilent to a human going to sleep. Then the middle layers of the network will drift from state to state, lingering for a time on the various memories it has stored as well as random stuff. This can be read out and displayed by the controling computer or program.
See this link for some more info.
What would a mass production chicken farm need with a quantum computing semiconductor?
Probably to solve the chicken and egg problem.
Researchers are indeed working on long distance quantum cryptography. See this economist article from June this year.
Basically, a team at Los Alamos in New Mexicio are hoping to send quantum photons accross 10 Km of dessert. If that works, it shouldn't be much more difficult to send secure data to and from a satellite in orbit (since most of the 'thick air' is below 10Km, if you can get it that far, the rest of the way is fairly easy)
All this was discussed in an old slashdot thread
This site also gives a good report on solar activity. (Its from the Radio DX-Listeners' Club in Norway. They keep an eye on this type of thing because it effects their radio communications quite severely, especially since they are at quite a northern lattitude.)
Seems that there is a huge market for XP in Malaysia already, discounted at $1.50 a pop.
Hmm, in order to see him from the earth's surface, you would probably need to send a BIG Tux